Amor Mundi 9/21/14

09-22-2014

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Anxiety and Writing

John Jeremiah Sullivan tells a tale of the anxieties and rare talents of Donald Antrim. At one point he recounts the story of Antrim's battles with mental illness and Antrim's decision to check himself into a psychiatric hospital. His doctors said: "'You're very sick, and you're very psychotic, and we can take care of you.' They told him they wanted him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. He could take time to think about it. A nurse led him back into the hallway and down to his room. The news destroyed him. Not because he didn't believe them, that it was the best thing for him, nor even because he feared the procedure itself (though naturally it terrified him to face it), but because he believed it would mean the end of him as a writer. That his talent would be scattered. His brains scrambled. The mechanism disassembled. Not to write? A living death. What would it even mean to go about your day? Also he felt that it was, he said, 'a confirmation that I would never leave hospitals.' He sat down on a chair. 'Not 20 minutes later,' he said, 'a patient called out, "Mr. Antrim,­ there's a phone call for you."' He shuffled down to the phones near the medication dispensary. He picked up. 'Donald,' a voice said, 'this is Dave Wallace. I heard you were in bad shape....' Wallace, who had undergone the procedure himself, spent at least an hour telling Antrim that he shouldn't be afraid, that he would still be there when it was over, that it would still be there."

What Kind of Nazi Was He?

We live in a time dominated by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the idea that one aspect of a person's life dominates the whole. Thus someone who has strong faith in God is dismissed as a fundamentalist just as someone who opposes the wearing of Burqas in public is labeled an Islamophobe and those who oppose Israel are called antisemites. In each of these instances, one opinion or quality of the person is used to devalue the entirety of their persona, as if to hold an offensive opinion makes one offensive. There are few opinions that are considered to disqualify one for good society more than to be a Nazi, which is why the publication of Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks has unleashed a frenzy of self-satisfied accusation. In two recent reviews, Gregory Fried in the LA Review of Books and Peter Gordon in the New York Review of Books each make obligatory statements that the Notebooks prove Heidegger was a Nazi. But each also makes the effort then to ask what that means, to understand Heidegger's fully atypical and metaphysical Nazism. Here is Fried: "For one thing, the Notebooks show that the Nazi revolution was only an opportunity for Heidegger, a moment when the overturning might be possible, not guaranteed. He was proud enough to think he could become the leader in spirit of this movement, as Marx was to Communism, but the movement failed him and the historical rupture it should have served, not the other way around. Furthermore, Communism itself was, for Heidegger, just another form of Platonism. Much like the Christian end-times and apocalypse, Communism promises an end of history, a complete fulfillment of human destiny. Platonism in all its forms, according to Heidegger, explains what it means to be human as something grounded in a timeless realm beyond history that applies universally to all human beings, whether as created in God's image, or as bearers of human rights that apply to 'all men' - as the American Declaration would have it - or as participants in Communism's world revolution that would put an end to the question of what humanity has been and will become. To all such movements Heidegger applies the name 'liberalism,' not in the parochial, contemporary sense of modern welfare liberalism, but rather in a sense that reaches back to Plato and that defines human 'liberty' on the basis of an appeal to timeless and universal truths. In the Nazis, Heidegger thought he had found a movement that would reject universalistic liberalism in all its forms - Christianity, the secular Enlightenment, Communism - in favor of a politics that would root human history in the communal belonging of a finite historical people. By the end, though, the Notebooks show Heidegger accusing Nazism itself of falling prey to liberalism through its metaphysical reduction of all human differences to race, its treating the Volk as kind of super-subject akin to conventional liberalism's subjective individual, and its capitulation to the idols of machination and gigantism.... The promise of the Nazi revolution had devolved, for Heidegger, into a kitschy mish-mash of blood-and-soil myth-making, its followers qualified only by their willingness not to think or to question the meaning of modernity." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.

A Metaphysical Nazi

Peter Gordon also makes an effort to explore the depths and not simply the fact of Heidegger's Nazism: "As rector he tried to resist 'vulgar National Socialism.' He knew that Nazism was a concatenation of competing ideologies, and he expressed both resentment at his rivals and fear that the ascendant language of allegedly scientific racism would mislead the German people from its true historical mission. Although he grasped at the official jargon of 'blood and soil,' he eschewed 'dull biologism' because he felt it wrongly applied the schema of the natural sciences to human existence, as if the entire 'intellectual-historical world' grew in a 'plantlike' fashion from the body of the Volk. In April 1934, Heidegger tendered his resignation as rector. The details of his career have received ample documentation, notably in the scrupulous historical study by Hugo Ott. But the notebooks give us a fuller picture of Heidegger's personal disappointment. On April 28 he made sketches for a farewell address, desperately seeking a higher significance for the 'wrecked year.' The failure was not his alone, he wrote, and perhaps it was not a failure at all, since wreckage itself was 'the highest form of human experience, in which we meet with the effective world-powers in their merciless efficacy.' Failure or not, from this point onward the notebooks assume a tone of marked bitterness. Everywhere he saw only 'rushers and alarmists, makers and strivers.' By the summer of 1936 Heidegger was under surveillance, and although he continued to nourish hopes for Germany's political future, his own chances for a career as a public official of the Third Reich began to dwindle." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.

The Stamp of Disapproval

Robert Darnton wonders at the relationship between author and censor: "When exiles from the Soviet system invoked 'freedom' and 'truth,' they were not appealing to the protection of the First Amendment or speaking as philosophers. They were using words to describe their experience of censorship as a force operating in specific circumstances, a force that determined the nature of literature in an oppressive political system. 'Freedom of speech' served as a standard against which to measure the oppression. It did not apply to constraints of all kinds, although many kinds had weighed on the lives of the writers. Freedom for them was a principle made meaningful by the experience of its violation. Experiences varied, of course, and the variations make it hopeless to search for a general proposition that would encompass all of them, including some that have been studied up close, such as censorship under apartheid in South Africa. They also understood that literature in what Westerners called the 'free world' suffered from constraints. Does their experience argue for a relativistic notion of freedom?"

Revision is Joy

In an interview, Richard Rodriguez describes his writing life: "My own writing life is as predictable as the old priest preparing to say the dawn mass. The pleasant cold, the mild pain of being alive. I have the same breakfast every day-cold cereal, yogurt, coffee. I read the newspapers. I take a fistful of vitamins. I shower. I linger at my bookshelf or at the window. I read a chapter or a poem from a shelf I keep above my desk of former lovers and seducers, impossible rivals-Nabokov or Lawrence, Larkin. Woolf. Sitting down at the computer is as daunting as the altar boy's first genuflection. Aquinas described writing as a form of prayer. Writing is for me dishearteningly hermetic. Revision is writing. Revision is humiliation-Tuesday saying something less well than Monday. Revision is open to noticing connections. Revision is joy at precisely that moment when the sentence no longer seems mine but speaks back to me and haughtily resists further revision. I read in the afternoons. I take long walks. I watch TV in the evening. I write letters at all times." Richard Rodriguez gave the keynote lecture at the 2013 Hannah Arendt Center Conference. Revisit it here.

How Easy It Is to Distort Reality

Jake Flanagan offers a cautionary tale of internet deception on Facebook. "Zilla van der Born, a Dutch national, spent five weeks traveling through Southeast Asia and documented the trip in photos on Facebook. She posed for pictures while dining on dumplings, snorkeling among colorful fish in azure waters and visiting ornately decorated Buddhist temples - compiling the lot into a series of videos for her Vimeo account. All in all, Ms. van der Born seemed to have enjoyed a busy, albeit conventional, trip to Phuket, Luang Prabang or some other regional tourist hub. Or so it would appear. In reality, Ms. van der Born never left her home city, Amsterdam. Each photograph was expertly contrived.... The ultimate goal was to 'prove how easy it is to distort reality,' she said. 'Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.'"

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