On Solitude

01-07-2018

On Solitude

Jennifer Sitt turns to Hannah Arendt to think through the importance of solitude in modern life.

“In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think. In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder. Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil. ‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.”

Form more information visit: https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone

Decadence and Democracy

James Traub argues that democracies are decadent in a specific way: when the people lose their republican values and stop speaking of “we” and instead talk only of “I.” The recent Republican-sponsored tax bill is Traub’s prime exhibit for democratic decadence. Along with, of course, the choice of our current President. For Traub, we need to see ourselves in the gold-plated mirror of Trumpism.

“Perhaps in a democracy the distinctive feature of decadence is not debauchery but terminal self-absorption

— the loss of the capacity for collective action, the belief in common purpose, even the acceptance of a common form of reasoning. We listen to necromancers who prophesy great things while they lead us into disaster. We sneer at the idea of a “public” and hold our fellow citizens in contempt. We think anyone who doesn’t pursue self-interest is a fool.

We cannot blame everything on Donald Trump, much though we might want to. In the decadent stage of the Roman Empire, or of Louis XVI’s France, or the dying days of the Habsburg Empire so brilliantly captured in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, decadence seeped downward from the rulers to the ruled. But in a democracy, the process operates reciprocally. A decadent elite licenses degraded behavior, and a debased public chooses its worst leaders. Then our Nero panders to our worst attributes — and we reward him for doing so. “Decadence,” in short, describes a cultural, moral, and spiritual disorder — the Donald Trump in us. It is the right, of course, that first introduced the language of civilizational decay to American political discourse. A quarter of a century ago, Patrick Buchanan bellowed at the Republican National Convention that the two parties were fighting “a religious war … for the soul of America.” Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) accused the Democrats of practicing “multicultural nihilistic hedonism,” of despising the values of ordinary Americans, of corruption, and of illegitimacy. That all-accusing voice became the voice of the Republican Party. Today it is not the nihilistic hedonism of imperial Rome that threatens American civilization but the furies unleashed by Gingrich and his kin. The 2016 Republican primary was a bidding war in which the relatively calm voices — Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — dropped out in the early rounds, while the consummately nasty Ted Cruz duked it out with the consummately cynical Donald Trump. A year’s worth of Trump’s cynicism, selfishness, and rage has only stoked the appetite of his supporters. The nation dodged a bullet last week when a colossal effort pushed Democratic nominee Doug Jones over the top in Alabama’s Senate special election. Nevertheless, the church-going folk of Alabama were perfectly prepared to choose a racist and a pedophile over a Democrat. Republican nominee Roy Moore almost became a senator by orchestrating a hatred of the other that was practically dehumanizing.”

Form more information visit: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/19/the-united-states-of-america-is-decadent-and-depraved/

Mass Movements

[caption id="attachment_19457" align="alignright" width="235"] By Keffieh67 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Hannah Arendt warned against mass movements. Movements are built on ideological convictions and must assert and defend those ‘truths’ even against the facts. Which is why movements are so adept at creating and mobilizing coherent fictional realities. For Arendt, movements are one of the essential elements of totalitarian rule. It may be surprising, therefore, that one of the leading political thinkers of our times is calling for the resurgence of mass political movements. Alain Badiou, interviewed by Darko Vujica, attributes the continued victory of capitalism to the weakness of the alternatives. But that doesn’t mean that Badiou is giving up on communism. What communism needs, in Badiou’s telling, are better organized mass movements, better slogans, and the submission of politics to the will of movements.

“The weakness of the communism of the 20th century was primarily political. Centralised and militarised communist parties were good instruments for seizing power. But they were not good instruments for organising communist society. They were too attached to state power and did not develop a true internationalism. We now have to organise communist power around three things: mass movements, organisations that continuously forge the slogans and wills of the movements, and, what will remain for a long time states, which must be under the constant supervision of the movements and organisations. The great failure of the 20th century was the fusion of the Party with the State, the creation of Party-States, gradually cut off from the masses. The political dialectic has to comprise three terms: (movement, organisations, states) and not two (masses and state), or even one  (Party-State).”

Form more information visit: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/alain-badiou-of-its-opponent/