The World in A Cathedral
10-16-2019“The cathedrals were built ad maiorem gloriam Dei; while they as building certainly served the needs of the community, their elaborate beauty can never be explained by these needs, which could have been served quite as well by any nondescript building. Their beauty transcended all needs and made them last through the centuries; but while beauty, the beauty of a cathedral like the beauty of any secular building, transcends needs and functions, it never transcends the world” [1]. — Hannah Arendt
In May 2019, a fire destroyed a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. In the two days that followed, individuals and corporations pledged just under a billion Euros toward its repair.
This incident hearkened quite directly to Arendt’s invocation of cathedrals as the archetypical example of worldliness, of creating a lasting world that endures beyond the cycles of human need and consumption. As in much of Arendt’s work, however, the contrast between the lasting world and the presence of urgent needs was a source of controversy in the case of Notre Dame.
Almost immediately after this fundraising milestone came dismayed reactions in the press and social media. The ready availability of money to rebuild a grand monument of the Western world seemed jarring to many observes when contrasted with the persistence of poverty, and the lack of clean water in Flint, Michigan, for example. Surely these pledges to rebuild Notre Dame could not be said to fulfill the etymological promise of the word “philanthropy” — love of humanity — if they were accumulated at the expense of, and redistributed without regard for, people’s access to the basic means of survival.
In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt notes that “only when survival is assured do we speak of culture,”[2] acknowledges the fundamental need for bodily security and well-being. Here we can make room for the importance of clean water and other necessities for survival, though with the caveat that issues such as Flint’s water supply are so fundamental that are best addressed as political demands, rather than opportunities for private benevolence. To what extent, though, can Notre Dame’s rebuilding signal a mentality that would support greater material justice and secure welfare, rather than occur at its expense?
Arendt’s concern is that without cultural infrastructure, the very possibility of transcending the cycle of need and use will fall away. The cycle of need and fulfillment-of-need is relentless. The demands of cyclical, consuming life can be all-powerful, and the enduring structures of the world are threatened by the demand to serve an immediate function, or collapse through destruction or neglect:
Arendt’s pivot to the term culture, rather than only art, allows for the possibility that everyone can perform worldliness without necessarily creating works of art. Culture is both noun and verb, according to its Roman origins: “from colere, which means ‘to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve.’”[4] There is appearance, and there is the caring for those appearances, as a continuation of the worldly mentality, a “common sense of individuals to attend to the things of the world.”[5] This definition of culture provides a proto-political orientation, one where the world’s continuity attains significance and continuously encourages people to look beyond immediate instrumentality. If we allow that certain things exist for intrinsic value, might we not learn that people do so as well?
The aspiration to worldly immortality, that is, immortality that manifests as appearing before generations of other human beings, underscores the value of remaining in the presence of others, even without living in their present. There is no use-value in those interactions across time; one of the parties cannot perform or receive any functional contribution. Rather, they exist to signpost continuity, and in so doing to elevate human relationships themselves above the calculations of functional benefit.
To return briefly to the matter of Notre Dame: the fire and the rush to rebuild also expanded worldliness and culture to less visible and materially privileged spaces. A series of historically black churches in Louisiana suffered massive fires, attributed to arson, around the same time as Notre Dame’s disaster. [6] The story of Notre Dame’s rebuilding campaign surfaced the Louisiana churches as a corollary, and their crowdfunding campaign, which might have easily struggled in obscurity instead surpassed its $1.8 million goal. Arendt might view these churches as equally if not more worldly expressions of culture than Notre Dame, making as they did a claim that all people require spaces that exist beyond utility, that remind human beings of our greatest capacities and fondest dreams.
Caring for beautiful places and objects is a way of nurturing solidarity with others and love for our shared world. And in this caring, its important to be attuned to the ways in which politics directs our attention.
This incident hearkened quite directly to Arendt’s invocation of cathedrals as the archetypical example of worldliness, of creating a lasting world that endures beyond the cycles of human need and consumption. As in much of Arendt’s work, however, the contrast between the lasting world and the presence of urgent needs was a source of controversy in the case of Notre Dame.
Almost immediately after this fundraising milestone came dismayed reactions in the press and social media. The ready availability of money to rebuild a grand monument of the Western world seemed jarring to many observes when contrasted with the persistence of poverty, and the lack of clean water in Flint, Michigan, for example. Surely these pledges to rebuild Notre Dame could not be said to fulfill the etymological promise of the word “philanthropy” — love of humanity — if they were accumulated at the expense of, and redistributed without regard for, people’s access to the basic means of survival.
In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt notes that “only when survival is assured do we speak of culture,”[2] acknowledges the fundamental need for bodily security and well-being. Here we can make room for the importance of clean water and other necessities for survival, though with the caveat that issues such as Flint’s water supply are so fundamental that are best addressed as political demands, rather than opportunities for private benevolence. To what extent, though, can Notre Dame’s rebuilding signal a mentality that would support greater material justice and secure welfare, rather than occur at its expense?
Arendt’s concern is that without cultural infrastructure, the very possibility of transcending the cycle of need and use will fall away. The cycle of need and fulfillment-of-need is relentless. The demands of cyclical, consuming life can be all-powerful, and the enduring structures of the world are threatened by the demand to serve an immediate function, or collapse through destruction or neglect:
Life is indifferent to the thingness of an object; it insists that every thing must be functional, fulfill some needs. Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society.[3]Without markers that distinguish things-for-use and things-with-intrinsic-value, we might reduce everything to usefulness, which stamps things and people alike with an expiration date once their respective functions are fulfilled. Arendt’s understanding of the work of art is that it signals an expansion beyond utility, and that this provides a praxis for relating to other human beings in ways that encompass more than their species function.
Arendt’s pivot to the term culture, rather than only art, allows for the possibility that everyone can perform worldliness without necessarily creating works of art. Culture is both noun and verb, according to its Roman origins: “from colere, which means ‘to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve.’”[4] There is appearance, and there is the caring for those appearances, as a continuation of the worldly mentality, a “common sense of individuals to attend to the things of the world.”[5] This definition of culture provides a proto-political orientation, one where the world’s continuity attains significance and continuously encourages people to look beyond immediate instrumentality. If we allow that certain things exist for intrinsic value, might we not learn that people do so as well?
The aspiration to worldly immortality, that is, immortality that manifests as appearing before generations of other human beings, underscores the value of remaining in the presence of others, even without living in their present. There is no use-value in those interactions across time; one of the parties cannot perform or receive any functional contribution. Rather, they exist to signpost continuity, and in so doing to elevate human relationships themselves above the calculations of functional benefit.
To return briefly to the matter of Notre Dame: the fire and the rush to rebuild also expanded worldliness and culture to less visible and materially privileged spaces. A series of historically black churches in Louisiana suffered massive fires, attributed to arson, around the same time as Notre Dame’s disaster. [6] The story of Notre Dame’s rebuilding campaign surfaced the Louisiana churches as a corollary, and their crowdfunding campaign, which might have easily struggled in obscurity instead surpassed its $1.8 million goal. Arendt might view these churches as equally if not more worldly expressions of culture than Notre Dame, making as they did a claim that all people require spaces that exist beyond utility, that remind human beings of our greatest capacities and fondest dreams.
Caring for beautiful places and objects is a way of nurturing solidarity with others and love for our shared world. And in this caring, its important to be attuned to the ways in which politics directs our attention.
[1] Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Past and Future, 204.
[2] Arendt, Past and Future, 206.
[3] Arendt, Between Past and Future, 204.
[4] Arendt, Past and Future, 211.
[5] Arendt, Past and Future, 211.
[6] Notable for its colonial relationship to France, Catholicism, and the French colonial presence in the Black Atlantic more generally.
Amy Schiller is currently an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Her research applies Hannah Arendt and other theorists to contemporary philanthropic practices and discourses to uncover ways in which philanthropy creates and destroys the common world. Alongside her philanthropy commentary, Dr. Schiller’s teaching and her writing for The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, and The Daily Beast have addressed matters of race, gender, popular culture, and electoral politics. She holds a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center and has taught at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
[2] Arendt, Past and Future, 206.
[3] Arendt, Between Past and Future, 204.
[4] Arendt, Past and Future, 211.
[5] Arendt, Past and Future, 211.
[6] Notable for its colonial relationship to France, Catholicism, and the French colonial presence in the Black Atlantic more generally.
Amy Schiller is currently an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Her research applies Hannah Arendt and other theorists to contemporary philanthropic practices and discourses to uncover ways in which philanthropy creates and destroys the common world. Alongside her philanthropy commentary, Dr. Schiller’s teaching and her writing for The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, and The Daily Beast have addressed matters of race, gender, popular culture, and electoral politics. She holds a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center and has taught at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.