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Amor Mundi

What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

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Featured Article

Making Distinctions in Thinking About Racism

Roger Berkowitz 
Hannah Arendt is a thinker who insists that we make distinctions. One of Arendt’s most controversial distinctions is that between racism and what she alternatively will call “race thinking” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and then "prejudice" in many of her later essays. In the wake of the shooting in Buffalo last week, John McWhorter made his own distinctions while trying to understand the place of racism in U.S. society. McWhorter argues that we use the word racism today to mean too many things. He states that we need to distinguish between different aspects of what we call racism in order to think more clearly about the problems and prevent such tragedies as the shooting in Buffalo.
05-22-2022

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What We're Reading

Seyla Benhabib on “Tradition and the Modern Age”

As part of the “On Hannah Arendt” year-long art exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Seyla Benhabib joined Roger Berkowitz in a discussion of Arendt’s essay “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Moving from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Benhabib shed light on Arendt’s claim that Karl Marx represents the end of the western tradition of political thought.
02-11-2021
Featured

Play

Roger Berkowitz
Susanna Crossman reflects on the power of play. “Play is a powerful motor.” Play involves a “leap in the dark” and requires trust. Play, the thinker Eugen Fink writes, “unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’.” Play is thus deeply connected to the very human way of being alive, something we can hear in its etymologies, many of which go back to the Latin ludere. “Ludere in Latin refers to leaping fishes and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon lâcan means to move like a ship on the waves, or to tremble like a flame.
02-11-2021
Article

Firings and Prosecutions This Week

Roger Berkowitz
In what seems a fairly usual occurrence, two journalists and two professors were fired or prosecuted this week for running afoul of mainstream opinions or, in Poland, legally prohibited opinions. John McWhorter argues that firing a New York Times reporter for using the N-word to refer to the N-word and not as a slur obfuscates the difference between a slur and a taboo. Ben Cohen reports on the prosecution of Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in Poland.
02-11-2021
What We're Reading

Arendt, Brecht, and Bowie

Last week Roger Berkowitz inaugurated the reading of The Human Condition in the Virtual Reading Group (amidst a record 185 attendees) with a short lecture about Arendt’s addition of an epigraph by Bertolt Brecht to the Prologue of the German edition of the Vita Activa. The epigraph consists of the first and last paragraphs of Brecht’s opening hymn to his play Baal.
02-11-2021
Article

Old Letters From Loved Ones

Jacob Rivers
The latest issue of Poetry Magazine, guested edited by poets Tara Betts and Joshua Bennett, focuses on work written by currently and formerly incarcerated poets, bringing a systematically suppressed chorus of voices to the forefront of the poetry community’s publishing landscape. Editor Tara Betts writes in her introduction to the issue, “The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human.
02-04-2021
What We're Reading

The QAnon Conspiracy is Still Here

Politics is about opinion not truth. This is one of Hannah Arendt’s central insights. At the same time, however, every political community must have some truths that it shares, that it holds in common, that unites it as a collective political body. These truths are not “objective,” but they are shared stories and ideals that form, in Arendt’s words, “the ground on which we stand and teh sky that stretches above us.”
02-04-2021
What We're Reading

Seeing the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province

Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter report on first hand accounts coming out of the horrific camps where Uighur’s are being tortured, raped, and dehumanized in China. We need to stop calling the camps run by the Chinese government in Zinjiang province internment, concentration, or re-education camps. They are rather genocidal camps for torture and rape.
02-04-2021
Featured

Can Moral Life Survive Dictatorship?

Roger Berkowitz
Peter Baehr asks: “Can moral life survive dictatorship?” It is a question that many in politics think secondary. The rise of dictatorship—not to mention fascism—is said to justify resistance at all costs. The message of groups like Antifa is that in the fight against dictatorship and fascism, all means are acceptable and even necessary.
02-04-2021
Article

We All Should Have Something to Hide

Roger Berkowitz
One repeated argument against apps that allow for encryption and privacy is that those who have nothing to hide should not worry about the loss of privacy. But who is it that has nothing to hide? The human heart and mind is a factory of fantasies that remind each of us of the darkness that lurks within us.
01-29-2021
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