------- VersaTerm-Link Mail Archive ------- X-Date: Wed, 9 Mar 94 22:44:09 EST X-User: "Lance Fletcher" X-Mbox: Mailbox [arendt] ------------------------------------------- Date: 02 Feb 1994 20:31:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: ROWEW1@JAGUAR.UOFS.EDU I look forward to participating in the Arendt list. I have admired Arendt for some years. I have come to know her in connection with the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and am especially interested in how her views are to be understood vis-a-vis these two influences. It is not my assumption that Arendt merely reflects these two other philosophers, however. I regard her as an original thinker, and I hope this list will help to spread appreciation for this fact about her work. William V. Rowe Philosophy University of Scranton ROWEW1@JAGUAR.UOFS.EDU ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 94 13:42:36 +0000 Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: "Lance Fletcher" >I look forward to participating in the Arendt list. You are very welcome. I look forward to your participation. I have admired Arendt >for some years. I have come to know her in connection with the >philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and am especially interested in >how her views are to be understood vis-a-vis these two influences. >It is not my assumption that Arendt merely reflects these two other >philosophers, however. I regard her as an original thinker, and I >hope this list will help to spread appreciation for this fact about >her work. That is certainly my intention. I personally regard her as the most interesting and original political thinker of our century. And it may even be too much of a limitation to speak of her only as a political thinker. In my opinion, Arendt is also one of the finest essayists since Montaigne. She has a very unusual writing style, and that is one of the reasons why I thought she would be an appropriate subject for slow reading. I would suggest that we start with a reading of the first chapter (at least) of The Human Condition. Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 03 Feb 94 11:30:16 EST Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: "Beth Rosdatter" Hi. I'm a graduate student (well, actually I'm between MA and PhD degrees now, but will probably be an oficial grad student again in the fall.) in philosophy. I've come to academia relatively late, after years of social activism and living in intentional community. l am mother of three children. My primary interest in Arendt is the useful conceptual framework she gives us for theorizing community that accounts for its role in constituting the person, while at the same time avoiding the tendency some communitarian theorie s have to devalue individual particularity and freedom. (Gaak what a sentence!) I'm interested in the role of narrative in the relation between person and community, the role of action, and the relationship between them. For starters. I feel the need to learn more of her background and context (Heidegger, et al.) so I'm glad William Rowe is on the list. I'm a shitty typist. Beth Rosdatter Philosophy University of Kentucky ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 1994 13:27:02 EST Subject: hello From: "Craig Howley" A few books have changed my outlook on life. THE HUMAN CONDITION is one among that handful. The treatment of _homo faber_, the public versus the private realm, and especially the nature of action (its ontology?) are the themes that struck me most forcefully. When I read the book, I had just finished making a table, a simple work, in ash, and was making another, smaller version, for my daughter, whom my spouse (Aimee) and I will invite to join the discussion here. The book helped me understand, and maybe tolerate better, the indeterminacy of action, partly through and Arendt's interpretation of the importance of forgiveness in the _vita activa_. (I'm an atheist so I need to be told these things.) I confess also to being a maker of things with a certain hesitance to act, in the Arendtian sense, where labor, work, and action constitute separate realms in the _vita activa_. There is a passage in THE HUMAN CONDITION, then, that intrigues because I fail to understand it well. It deals with ends and means (as dominated by _homo faber-, who, of course, comes in for a good deal of critique from Arendt): Only the modern age's conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making" (p. 228). We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end.... ***for to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means***; and paradoxes always indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never convincing. As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody's using all means to pursue recognized ends (p. 229). The marked passage is wonderful! And I don't fully understand it, though I have cited it a couple of times in my work already and pondered it often (that helps, some). The idea relates, obviously, to a great many other passages about the disregard for the world that "modern" (?--at least Arendt denies humankind a fixed nature) homo faber has so widely instituted. My job [there is wonderful stuff about the society of jobholders in THE HUMAN CONDITION] and some of my work deals with education--more particularly as regards my work, the violence that schooling (in the line of homo faber) does to education. And this business of the definition of an end being precisely that which justifies ALL means is so salient to the flood of grand draconian schemes proposed to "reform" schooling--standards, roped-off canon, accountability, choice (of product!) and all the rest of it. The idea behind such "reforms" is certainly: Whatever it takes to make the US the most effective society of jobholders ever. Education, care for the intellect--they get lost at homo faber's doorstep (shades of Dante). Making furniture pleases me; I claim it as a calling; and I do like to think it will be around when I have ceased. What most pleases me most--aside from the making, which can often seem laborious--is that it enters the daily usage of those I love. Arendt understood all of this and I don't know how; mostly, I just sense it. This is a long message, composed off-line; my online participation will be much more terse--speech being akin to action. ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 94 21:23:07 +0000 Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: "Lance Fletcher" This is a resend of a message I sent earlier today. Since I never received a copy of it, I am sending this again to see if the list is functioning properly. >I look forward to participating in the Arendt list. You are very welcome. I look forward to your participation. I have admired Arendt >for some years. I have come to know her in connection with the >philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and am especially interested in >how her views are to be understood vis-a-vis these two influences. >It is not my assumption that Arendt merely reflects these two other >philosophers, however. I regard her as an original thinker, and I >hope this list will help to spread appreciation for this fact about >her work. That is certainly my intention. I personally regard her as the most interesting and original political thinker of our century. And it may even be too much of a limitation to speak of her only as a political thinker. In my opinion, Arendt is also one of the finest essayists since Montaigne. She has a very unusual writing style, and that is one of the reasons why I thought she would be an appropriate subject for slow reading. I would suggest that we start with a reading of the first chapter (at least) of The Human Condition. Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Feb 1994 01:10:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: Hands on From: "KEVIN MURRAY" I am curating an exhibition titled: `Symmetry: Craft Meets Kindred Trades and Professions'. I've asked ten craftspersons to make work that responds to the relationship between craft and a designated partner _techne_ (e.g., surgery and woodwork). Much of the theory at the back of this comes from Arendt's _The Human Condition_. Clearly, she gives a central place to the manufactured object (esp. table) in the maintenance of social life. This link seems to underpin more contemporary (see Agnes Heller, Richard Sennett) notions of the loss of social bonds due to a consumer world based around disposability. This lists emerges when I'm working on the exhibition catalogue essay and reading Arendt's biography by Elizabeth Young-Bruell. The issue that I am grappling with in particular is the identification between hand and human subjectivity. Once manual labour has become outmoded, is there a valid symbolic role left for the hand in modern forms of _techne_ (e.g., electronic communication)? The two following passages have been the focus of my reading: Locke's distinction between working hands and a laboring body is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Greek distinction between the _cheirotechnes_, the craftsman to whom the German _Handwerker_ corresponds, and those who, like `slave and tame animals with their bodies minister to the necessities of life' [Aristotle, Politics, 1254b25] p.80 It seems that the distinction between labor and work, which our theorists have so obstinately neglected and our languages so stubbornly preserved, indeed becomes merely a difference in degree if the worldly character of the produced thing -- its location, function, and length of stay in the world -- is not taken into account. The distinction between a bread, whose `life expectancy' in the world is hardly more than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations of men, is certainly much more obvious and decisive than the difference between a baker and a carpenter. p.94 I am planning another exhibition in the future that includes work by fictional artists, which relates to the concern in Arendt for the role of story in life. That would be another area of interest. Kevin Murray kmurray@pitvax.xx.rmit.edu.au Dept Visual Communication R.M.I.T. Australia || ||| ||||||| || | ||| || | ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Feb 94 09:09:26 +0000 Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: "Lance Fletcher" >Hi. I'm a graduate student (well, actually I'm between MA and PhD degrees now, >but will probably be an oficial grad student again in the fall.) in philosophy. > I've come to academia relatively late, after years of social activism and > living in intentional community. l am mother of three children. Beth, A very warm welcome to you. As one who has spent most of his adult life outside the academic world, engaged in practical affairs, I acknowledge your background as something of value in this conversation. As you probably know, Arendt herself did not have a particularly high regard for the university environment, and it has been my observation that the discomfort is often mutual. At least it seems to me that Arendt's writing does not yield its best fruits to an approach that looks to find a "system" there. NOTE: I have a concern that this mailing list is not working properly. The reason is that I have not been receiving copies of my own messages. If you receive this message, please send an acknowledgement, so that I can test the list. Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Feb 94 5:36:33 PST Subject: Re: test From: "Lancelot F. Fletcher" message received by lancelot@holonet.net > > This is a test message. I think there may be something wrong with this > channel. > > Lance Fletcher > The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 > for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net > or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance > ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Feb 1994 10:25:30 EST Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: "Craig Howley" A colleague whom I thought might be interested in following this discussion-- a reader, a thinker, a player with ideas--surprised me by disclosing that she'd never heard of Arendt! She was a chemistry major before being bounced out of school for anti-war stuff back when. She dropped intro to philosophy and never went back. "Philosophy," she said, "everything could be said so much more simply. Our first assignment was a long passage in a long book, and the project was to 'expand on it'. That's not what it needed." My reply was that Arendt was lucid. No luck. But one of the lovely things about Arendt IS her sense of style. I wonder how many people with limited experience of philosophical discourse would agree. Do die-hard positivists ever read Arendt? First chapter of Human Condition sounds good to me. --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Feb 94 23:17:24 EST Subject: Re: Welcome to arendt list From: ROSDATTE@UKCC.uky.edu Lance, I got the message, It's late, I'll write more tomorrow, just want to let you know that it seems to be working. Beth ------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 5 Feb 1994 23:27:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: Hello, here's a bit about me. From: MCDONALDS@CSUSYS.CTSTATEU.EDU Hello, My name is Steve McDonald. I'm a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. I study Political Theory. I'm somewhat (nay, very) uncomfortable being in the university setting, yet I press on hoping that someday I can devote more time to activism (and perhaps some subversion as well). In any case, I am currently engaging the HUMAN CONDITION inthe context of a seminar on Classical Political Philosophy. We'll be spending a mere week on the work, but I hope to be able to spend far more time with this book an this list. Honestly, I'm nervous to discuss philosophy with other people as interested in philosophy as many of you likely are. I hope to overcome some of my fears of inadequacy in this forum. I look forward to this discussion. I have signed off from nearly all the other lists I have been involved with in hopes of devoting some time to these readings of Arendt. I am excited to get to meet and learn from all of you. I will do my best to give as much to the discussion as I receive. Warmly, Steve McDonald ---------------------------------------------------- Steve McDonald mcdonalds@ecsuc.ctstateu.edu or mcdonalds@csusys.ctstateu.edu Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear. --A. Cesaire ------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 08:42:51 EST Subject: Re: Hello, here's a bit about me. From: "Craig Howley" Steve McDonald and colleagues: Maybe we should all admit that we know very little; I keep forgetting what little I am "supposed" (others, principally, do the supposing) to know. I just get sick and tired of the official "knowledge" purveyed as so bloody important by politicians, bureaucrats, and business people, that an alternative seemed like a good idea. Anybody do the reading yet? Any passages to discuss? Can we get on with it? --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 14:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: From: MCDONALDS@CSUSYS.CTSTATEU.EDU I am into Part II (chapter 5) and am ready to begin the discussion as soon as we have everyone aboard (or for whatever else we are waiting). I am reading a bit faster than I'd like, but that is because I have to be ready to discuss the whole work for this week's seminar. My point: ready when you (y'all) are. --Steve ---------------------------------------------------- Steve McDonald mcdonalds@ecsuc.ctstateu.edu Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear. --A. Cesaire ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Feb 94 14:52:37 +0000 Subject: List host sneaks in From: "Lance Fletcher" One year, during my brief career as a college teacher, I had an early morning class of undergraduate engineers to which I sometimes arrived late. The class was held in a windowless auditorium, and sometimes I would open the classroom door to find the lights out, and then, when I flipped on the lightswitch, there was the whole class, sitting patiently in total darkness, awaiting my arrival. (This really happened--more than once!) So, welcome to the arendt list. Thanks for waiting for me to show up. In case you were wondering, at last count there were about twenty of us here--a nice size for building small-scale community; something Arendt was very much interested in. Hannah Arendt is a person about whom some people have very passionate feelings. I am one of those people. What Craig Howley has already said is true for me too. My encounter with "The Human Condition" altered my life. It was quite distinct even at the time, that my life would never be the same. This was love at first sight. I said to myself (and to whoever else would listen) "This is the book I've been waiting for all my life! I just wish I had read it sooner." I grew up, like most of us I suppose, in a world of taken-for-granted utilitarianism, where what was later called "possessive individualism" was simply taken to be the obvious truth. I spent my philosophical infancy trying to reason my way from the ego-centered assumptions of utilitarianism to some sense of real obligation to others, to community. But at best it was an arid occupation, an example of what F.H. Bradley said of philosophy in general, namely that for the most part it is a matter of finding bad reasons for what we believe on instinct. There was something claustrophobic about the moral conversations of that time, and utterly without any sense of human dignity. Then comes Hannah Arendt, writing in a strange vocabulary simply brimming over with the sense of human possibility. It was like suddenly inhabiting the landscape of an epic poem -- after spending a lifetime in a Dickensian orphanage. She did not argue for the possibility of human excellence against those for whom that possibility was not apparent. She took her stand in that possibility and from that place inquired into the course of privation that could make the possibility of human excellence and human action seem to vanish. For the first time in my life I felt I could stand erect, that I had been led out of the cave of the anti-hero, not into the soundless outer space of Platonic forms, but into the possibility of a public space, filled with the sound of public conversation. Now I know that praise and celebration are not the same thing as understanding. On the other hand, I believe that Arendt's writing particularly rewards those who are willing to read it with a certain generosity of spirit. By the same token, Arendt's writing is easily diminished and turned to waste when approached with a view to finding its system and fitting it into academic categories. That may help to explain why Arendt has not been well-served on the whole by her academic readers and commentators, while her greatest impact, steadily growing it seems, has been on readers outside the academic world (one of the most impressive examples being "The Republic of Fear", a horrifying study of the Baath regime in Iraq). Arendt might have called herself a storyteller. Certainly she had a highly developed sense of the role of narrative among the genres of public speech. Some of her best "stories" were about other storytellers, like Isak Dinesen and Hermann Broch. Her first book, "Rahel Varnhagen," can be read as a powerful psychological novel -- or perhaps as a displaced autobiography. Yet I think it might be more instructive to view her as an essayist in the precise sense, a kind of modern Montaigne. (Montaigne was also, of course, a masterful storyteller.) I first dicovered this quality of Arendt almost by accident. I had assigned "On Revolution" in a course I was teaching, and when I began preparing my lectures I found that I was having difficulty saying exactly what she was getting at, so I began to outline the argument of the first chapter and discovered that it was not at all linear, but filled with meandering curves, which, however, were clearly purposeful and not at all a sign of disorganized or unclear thinking. So I propose we use that quality to suggest our approach to the present reading of Arendt. We must be prepared, I suggest, to let ourselves drift on the current of HER thought if we want to see the intellectual landscape that she saw. But we should drift with our eyes open and our minds awake. Let's start by reading the prologue and the first chapter of "The Human Condition". For those who have not read widely in Arendt's work, let me suggest some other things that I think are helpful in getting a sense of Arendt. As I mentioned, "Rahel Varnhagen" is extremely interesting for its psychological insight (the first chapter is a bit dry, however, so don't get discouraged too soon). In "Men in Dark Times" the essay on Walter Benjamin is particularly instructive, I believe. And I recommend reading, in "Between Past and Future," the preface and the fifth and sixth chapters: "The Crisis in Education" and "The Crisis in Culture." Elizabeth Young-Bruel's biography of Arendt is not bad, but it will be much more useful if you come to it after reading a fair amount of Arendt's own writing. Please let me know if these proposals are agreeable, and don't hesitate to make other suggestions. Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Feb 94 14:53:56 +0000 Subject: List owner's Intro From: "Lance Fletcher" List Owner finally makes an appearance: [This same message is being posted to all the slow reading lists. For those who are subscribing to more than one list, I apologize for the duplication that will result.] I want to introduce myself here in such a way that you will understand how these slow reading lists are, for me at least, a direct expression of who I am. Who I am is a philosopher. A free lance philosopher, as I said in the welcome message for this list, meaning in part that, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza, I never received a PhD and have spent little of my life in the employ of educational institutions. But what does a philosopher do if he's not employed as a professor of philosophy or engaged in studies preparing to be a professor of philosophy? Maybe he can be a self-employed philosopher. And what is that? Severn Darden, one of the original members of the Second City Company, and also a college friend of my teachers Seth Benardete and Allan Bloom, had a comic routine about "The Metaphysician" that I heard once on a record. For this skit Darden had created a persona called something like "Jacob Von der Vogelfeinder," who had a ridiculous German accent and an exaggerated Germanic academic manner. At some point in this skit he spoke about "unemployed philosophers", and he explained, parenthetically, that an unemployed philosopher is a philosopher who happens not to be thinking about anything at the moment. On that principle, a *self*-employed philosopher must be one who thinks for himself. And, by that standard, would any self-respecting philosopher take employment as a philosopher for somebody else? In any event, that is what I am: a self-employed philosopher. Among my teachers, the ones who had the greatest impact on my thinking were F.S.C Northrop, Allan Bloom, Seth Benardete and Hannah Arendt. Northrop is not read much these days, but about 40 years ago reading his "The Meeting of East and West" is what made me conscious of my philosophical vocation. I read the Republic with Bloom when he had just completed his translation, and when I finished I realized that I had not known how to read before. If Bloom taught me to read, Benardete taught me to read slowly. It was in his classes that I first experienced the possibility of thinking with a text, of using the reading of a text to think about the questions that the author was thinking about. Although I took some classes with Hannah Arendt, her impact on me was primarily through her writing. My encounter with "The Human Condition" in 1962 was a life-altering experience. What had first driven up the philosophical calling in me was my discomfort with the so-called "fact-value" dichotomy and the then-prevalent ego-centrism of modern thought which viewed politics as merely peripheral and instrumental to the wishes and appetites of the individual. Hannah Arendt was the first writer I encountered who wrote in a vocabulary that did not presuppose that atomistic point of view, and the experience was like falling in love, like discovering at last that I was no longer alone in the world. Nearly twenty years ago, after a few years as a college teacher, I began to reflect on whether the university was the appropriate place for me to express the philosophical vocation. At the time the early works of Marx were much in vogue, and many people were in the habit of quoting the "11th thesis against Feuerbach," which read, "Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it." Most of the academic philosophers I knew, although they may have disputed what Marx said was "the point," pretty much agreed with his characterization of philosophers. But I began to ask myself, Is this accurate? Can we truthfully describe people like Plato and Aristotle and St. Thomas and Spinoza and Kant by saying that they devoted their lives merely to "interpreting the world," without wishing or working to change it? Not so, I thought. It seemed clear to me that all those thinkers were as much committed to transforming the world as to interpreting it. Indeed, they saw no fundamental distinction, since they thought that it was through understanding the world that it would be transformed. And that made me think, Perhaps the academic interpreters of these thinkers, those who failed to dispute Marx's characterization of their field, were actually engaged in a work of sabotage, subverting the transformational intent of the great philosophers and converting their works into a set of mere opinions. It seemed, and still seems, pretty clear to me that philosophy is not a body of doctrines or opinions. What philosophy is, of course, is itself a major subject of philosophical inquiry, but I find it helpful to say that philosophy is a conversation that empowers us to escape from the prison of circumstance in which we confine ourselves. In other words, philosophy is what gives us access to our native capacity for self-determined action. That, at any rate, is what I am committed to, and in such writers as Plato and Spinoza I recognize my greater ancestors and leaders in that endeavor. And so the upshot of this period of reflection was that I turned my back on the university, not to abandon philosophy, but to pursue it more authentically in another place. I had two objectives: One was to change the world by engaging in politics, particularly the politics of urban economic development. The other was to create a structure for inquiry of a sort that seemed more consistent with the intentions of the great philosophers than most of what I had myself experienced in universities. For most of the last twenty years I have been engaged in public and practical affairs, working at various times as a law enforcement officer, social worker, economic development consultant, legislative aide, politician, civic activist and as a businessman developing housing for low-income families. About a year ago I realized that I was in a position to stop working for money, and I decided that it was time to turn my attention at last to the second objective, the present shape of which is this venture of creating vehicles for free lance philosophy, contexts for philosophical self-employment. So that is who I am. Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher to: lance.jvnc.net or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 08:51:09 EST Subject: Re: List host sneaks in From: "Craig Howley" The book? I had that sense too; it made me a bit uncomfortable, but perhaps enhanced my pleasure. We're working on a book manuscript on anti-intellectual- ism in US schooling, and reading Lance's comments brings back just how appropr- iate Arendt's notions of community and action, and her distaste for the instrumentalism of the modernist period, was for helping me inform our work. I've not by any means read Arendt widely; but I'm going to take a look at those chapters in _Between Past and Present_. Hopefully one of my proximate colleagues who reads this post and plans on a trip to the library anyhow will feel inspired to a random act of kindness.... Where (aside from a discussion of the _polis_)does Arendt consider small-scale community? One of my interests (both job- and work-related) is the life and times of rural places; I'd be delighted to find that Arendt spoke to this issue in terms of contemporary existence. CRAIG HOWLEY, ERIC/CRESS, P.O. BOX 1348, CHARLESTON, WV 25325 1-800/624-9120 ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 09:08:31 EST Subject: Re: List owner's Intro From: "Craig Howley" Sounds like you got to the point, Lance, without the premise. I always figured Marx was complaining about academic philosoph-ossifiers (what does Robt Pirsig call them?) since he'd had a nigh lethal dose of German academia. One of the things I do admire in Arendt is her appreciation-- an authentic critical appreciation--of Marx. Some of the other folks I like --Barzun and Bell and Lasch, for instance--have this unfortunate auto-immune reaction to Marx, such that they have to dismiss the thinker along with the communo-fascists who have claimed allegiance through the years. It seems so unworthy, and they never examine the disorder, not recognizing it as one. You can tell when I went to school. Never did find a teacher. Socrates, I reckon, would say I was lucky. --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 20:28:58 +0500 Subject: A quick intro from another newcomer! From: "SWIFT" Hello: It has taken me awhile to introduce myself to this list, but here I finally am. My name is Stacey Swift. I am finishing up my last year of undergraduate study at the University of Hartford. Next year I will be entering a masters program for political theory. I have had very limited experience reading Hannah Arendt's work. I have read the Human Condition through once on my own, and very quickly. I studied her ideas of civil disobedience and public action for a political theory paper I did on civil disobedience. I hope that this list will help me gain a better grasp on Arendt's writing. I admire her equally as must as some of you have stated. I look forward to our discussion. Most of the time I may remain a silent member, as I may be spending a lot of my time learning and listening since this is my first serious encounter with this work. I hope to gain a lot of knowledge from all of you! I will do my best to contribute what I can. I very much look forward to this opportunity. Smiles, Stacey Swift ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stacey Swift | "It may be those that do most, InterNet: swift@uhavax.hartford.edu | dream most." BITNet: swift@hartford | BellNet: (203) 643-4940 | -Stephen Leacock | (Canadian humorist) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 09:49:36 EST Subject: education and "socialization" From: "Craig Howley" For many years we have, as parents and teachers, doubted the value of school for "socializing" children. Our view horrifies many people, sometimes those with whom we have much else in common. In sociology, however, James Coleman was able, like Arendt, to see the same problem, in 1961 in adolescent society (which he correctly identified as a construction of the adult world) and today in the much-heralded notion of "social capital" (i.e., intergenerational links in a community). The socialization of schooling is a kind of terrorism let loose on children (and not only those who become its most ostensible victims, but every one of them). Here's what Arendt says in "The Crisis in Education" (1968, pp. 186-187): Everything that lives...needs the security of darkness to grow at all. This may indeed be the reason that children of famous parents so often turn out badly.... But exactly the same destruction of the real living space occurs wherever the attempt is made to turn the children themselves into a kind of world. Among these peer groups then arises public of a sort and, quite apart from thefact that it is not a real one and that the whole attempt is a sort of fraud, the damaging fact remains that children --that is, human beings in process of becoming but not yet complete--are thereby forced to expose themselves to the light of public existence. In Arendt's view, children require **protection** from the public world; and, notably, it from them. Earlier she describes the tyranny of this fradulent public world of children: If one looks at it from the standppoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil. He no longer finds himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind.... The result is that children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them.(181-182) The dreadful upshot of such a construction--again, one of adults--is that childhood is perpetuated beyond reason. Narcissism and ignorance flourish. Arendt, the original text was written in 1954, however, seems more optimistic about the character of the American experience than I tend to be. All of this has gone on far too long--and become more ugly--for it to be considered a crisis; and it is only a disaster for the many. --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 21:35:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: Frog and Toad From: MCDONALDS@CSUSYS.CTSTATEU.EDU Hello all. The other day, in discussing Arendt's _Human Condition_ in seminar, my professor (Chris Rocco) brought up a children;s story that speaks to Arendt's ideas. I thought I would share with the list the story of Frog and Toad. (I do not know who wrote the stories of Frog and Toad, as I would like to give the author(s) credit.) This is not a quote, but simply a synopsis: On an atumn day, Frog decided to go rake the leaves in Toad's yard. Unbeknownst to Toad, Frog wandered over to her house to clean up her lawn. Meanwhile: Toad had come to the same decision, and she was already on her way to Frog's house to rake Frog's leaves. The two friends raked each other's leaves without any knowledge that their own leaves were being raked. They happened to finish at the same time, and as they headed back to their own houses, a gust of wind redistributed leaves all over the lawns. Returning home, Frog looked at his yard and thought "Whew, I will rake these leaves when I wake up in the morning. But wow, won't Toad be excited when she sees her lawn and how clean it is." Toad returned home and had the same thought, and they both went to sleep happily beliveing that they had done a great deed. ------------------ Does anyone see the implications? And how Arendt could have written this herself? I see some implications, but it is a fun story to play with. I am suggesting that maybe the story of Frog and Toad is a good place to start reading the Human COndition, unless anyone else has any ideas. Yours, Steve McDonald ---------------------------------------------------- Steve McDonald mcdonalds@ecsuc.ctstateu.edu Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a [person] who wails is not a dancing bear. --A. Cesaire ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 10:04:43 EST Subject: Re: Frog and Toad From: "Craig Howley" Steve-- I read your message very late last night with the reaction: how lovely (but I can't keep my eyes propped up so as to see why). We read Frog and Toad to our kids (and never though of frog as female) and loved the stories (but we were always too tired to know why). It's morning, and eureka. The point of course concerns the indeterminacy of action. In my appreciation the indeterminate character of action--it begins a chain of events without end--is central in the Condition, which concerns the vita activa, the life of action, as against the viat contemplativa, life of the mind. In Frog and Toad, each is left with the satisfaction of good intentions, but I think that Arendt would have seen this circumstance as tragic, that is, to be contented with nothing but good intentions. Good intentions are, one might suppose, obscure matters--literally and legitimately--with Arendt. They are private, and hence, in her scheme NOT relevant to action. One of the things that puzzles me about Arendt is how dark the private realm really is, the legitimate private realm and not the private realm made inappropriately and dangerously public (exploitive images of sex, jobholding become labor, and so forth). In Arendt, this darkness seems to be an ontological necessity--the world is thus, end of argument. Most Americans, so vigorously sentimental (pornography a variety of sentimentality), could not agree with Arendt. As we consume the world, we can apologize: Our good intentions remain. I rather agree with Arendt. However, I have difficulty acceptin that the virtue of great action consists not of the virtue of ideas that infom it, but of something like the scope of the will of the polis (that particular and figurative walled area enclosing "the public thing"). This I have difficult accepting, and so I'm led also to difficulty with the ontology of private obscurity. What happens in the private realm may well, on occasion, inform action in the public realm. --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 7:57:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: RE: Frog & Toad. From: MCDONALDS@CSUSYS.CTSTATEU.EDU From: "Craig Howley" However, I have difficulty acceptin that the virtue of great action consists not of the virtue of ideas that infom it, but of something like the scope of the will of the polis (that particular and figurative walled area enclosing "the public thing"). This I have difficult accepting, and so I'm led also to difficulty with the ontology of private obscurity. What happens in the private realm may well, on occasion, inform action in the public realm. --Craig My reply: Craig: I agree with how you view this situation of Frog and Toad (I did elect to feminize Toad, just because), and I too see the wind as a metaphor for the indeterminacy of action. Arendt reminds us that we cannot write our own stories. However, we should note that while the intentions of Frog&Toad were lost, their story *was* told (passed on by me to you) so *someone* saw it so the activities were in some sense public (I would argue). The intentiions may have certainly been lost *on Frog & Toad*, but not on us. About your last paragraph (quoted above), I have the sense that perhpaps you attribute too much to Arendt's view of the public and too little to her concept of the private. As I read Arendt, the public realm is the visible realm, in which activities become actions (or can be actions) if done in view of the polis. I don't find in Arendt any notio of public 'will' which you seem to allude to by "the scope of the will of the polis." Action is action by virtues of its 'performance' in the polis, and so it seems to me that Arendt did not ascribe much more to action. And the private realm, while secondary to the polis, is still vital in the sense that the public can not exist without a private, and the conditions of one's private influence one's ability to act publicly (or to participate in the public realm). I don't think Arendt finds the private as 'obscure' as the private, especially since we work and labor in the private (both very important aspects of vita activa). Maybe now is a good time to begin going through the book chapter by chapter? If no one else wants to, I could try to find time (yeah right!) in the next days to write a bit about chapter 1, though I'd vastly prefer not to go first. Any takers? --Steve (Thanks, Craig, for responding!) ---------------------------------------------------- Steve McDonald mcdonalds@csusys.ctstateu.edu Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a [person] who wails is not a dancing bear. --A. Cesaire ------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 12:56:32 EST Subject: RE: Frog & Toad. From: "Craig Howley" It seems to me that Arendt takes a classical view of virtue, namely that the good life is realized in the public realm. I'd really like some clue about how the qualities of the private realm inform public action (in HA). Arendt really did say (as I recall) that the Greeks did not ascribe great actions to great ideas. Perhaps it's a mistake to view the remark as approval. Isn't part the point in the Condition that the private realm has dramatically displaced the public realm? This insistence from Arendt makes it difficult to understand the legitimate role of the private realm. Is there any clue in chapter one? --Craig ------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 14:56:49 EST Subject: Prologue and Chapter 1 From: U56D7@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU I just finished reading the Prologue and Chapter 1, and feel ready to stop lurking and start talking. First, though, let me introduce myself to the group. My name is Pat Cahape. I am the mother of two daughters (12 and 14), a graduate student in sociology, and the editor of a small publications program at an ERIC clearinghouse. I am interested in this discussion group because I struggled with Hannah Arendt when I read _The Human Condition_ a couple of years ago, feeling at times that her whole classic schtick was exasperatingly erudite. You might not have guessed this, but my childhood was shaped by plain-talking folks and I have not up to this point been a student of the classics. Despite my initial reservations, I could not stop thinking about _The Human Condition_. By the end of the book I realized I had read something great, but that I needed to go through it again, this time with more patience and trust. So Lance's suggestion that we read with the idea that the author is God sounds like the right approach to me. I am glad that Steve suggested that we go back and start discussing the book chapter by chapter. As much as I enjoyed Craig's and his discussion of Frog and Toad, I'm not ready to think about private vs. public yet. Reading the Prologue was like looking at an old picture album in the way it conjured memories of what we thought was going to happen as the result of the miracles of scientific progress. Of course, we have not achieved near what people thought we might by this point in the 20th century. We are still earthbound. We still labor. In fact we seem to labor more and think less about what we are doing than we did even when Arendt wrote the Prologue. She wrote, "What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse." I wonder if the reason we have not found a way to labor less (despite the relentless progress of efficiency) is because we have attempted to address our lack of meaningful activity by piling up an ever more exotic collection of artifacts. The collection of artifacts becomes what makes life meaningful; thus to get what one needs to have a good life, one has to labor long. If we felt we needed less in our artificial environment, maybe the work could be spread around, employing more people and reducing inequality. Anyway, reading the Prologue made me feel sad, in the way I always feel when I remember naive hopes. On the heels of that thought came Arendt's statement, "The objectivity of the world--its object- or thing-character--and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence."(p. 9) While I get what she is driving at in that sentence, there was something about it that kind of made me cringe. You know, my dog might not agree! Somebody straighten me out on this, because that seemed like human arrogance and I am truly invested in maintaining an attitude of reverence. But back to the central place of things in the human condition, I wonder if there is something about our own _inventiveness_ in creating the artifice that keeps us continuously distracted from contemplation. We seem to be endlessly fascinated by what we and others can make. There is an element of fun in it that keeps most of us going for a long time. Like trudging back up the snow-covered hill again and again to ride the sled back down. What do you all think? PAT CAHAPE ERIC CLEARINGHOUSE ON RURAL EDUCATION AND SMALL SCHOOLS TELEPHONE: 800/624-9120 PO BOX 1348, CHARLESTON, WV 25325-1348 ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 13:15:45 EST Subject: Re: Public/Private Sphere From: "Craig Howley" Robert Kibler asks about HA's assertion that the private sphere has displaced the public. Wish I had more time to take this question on. Part of the answer lies in the socialization of labor and the nature of a "society of job- holders," a rich phrase for me. The home is no longer the unit of production, the locus of labor, which was previously (before the rise of society, or, one might say, "the general corporation," i.e., societas sui generis). Things get underway in this regard with the modern(ist) era and the hiring of hands by the droves. Gotta run, danmit. --Craig Howley ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 16:11:57 EST Subject: Re: Prologue and Chapter 1 From: "Craig Howley" Re: Pat Cahape's comments I'm a little less hectic, at least for a few minutes, and there is a connection between Pat's query about the human artifact and Bob's query about the private displacing the public sphere. The connection is the overthrough of practice by process, which comes from the "socialization" of labor. As the general corporation (society) began to be realized effectively with the rise of industry, what had been the **practice** of the craftsperson became the process of the manufactory, increasingly automated, and increasingly simulating the (real) processes of nature. The change from practice (the human exercise of craft) to process (practices reified and let loose as autonomous forces--the cyborg theme) is responsible for the profusion of things so widely believed to be essential for the "good(s) life." In truth, we loose the human artifact by converting it into items of consumption. Arendt attaches great importance to the value that the artifact (artifacts) acquire through long and familiar use. That is why she distinguishes between food and tables. The processes of society--which one might call "socialization"--turn everything into a consumable. Familiar with the expression "throw-away kids"? It's the end result. And observe how frequently ordinary bureaucratic rhetoric describes practice AS process: the "peace process"; the "school improvement process"; the "service-delivery process." What DOES food become in the end? Let us, therefore, hope for a fertile future. --Craig Howley ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 10:28:21 EST Subject: Prologue From: U56D7@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU Still related to the issue of the conditioned existence of humanity that Arendt refers to in the Prologue to The Human Condition--that is how we are formed by the both the natural and artificial aspects of the world--I ran across a passage in Proverbs that seems to fit this whole discussion. Especially the part (page 9) where Arendt says, "The objectivity of the world--its object- or thing-character--and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence."(p. 9) This passage from Proverbs 8: 22-31 reflects the reverence with which Arendt makes her statement, I think. In this passage, Wisdom (which could be thought of as that part of us that learns how to live life well in this world) is telling the creation story. Wisdom speaks: "The Lord created me first of all, the first of his works, long ago. I was made in the very beginning, at the first, before the world began. I was born before the oceans, when there were no springs of water. I was born before the mountains, before the hills were set in place, before God made the earth and its fields or even the first handful of soil. I was there when he set the sky in place, when he stretched the horizon across the ocean, when he placed the clouds in the sky, when he opened the springs of the ocean and ordered the waters of the sea to rise no further than he said. I was there when he laid the earth's foundations. I was beside him like an architect, I was his daily source of joy, always happy in his presence-- happy with the world and pleased with the human race." I'm not sure how this fits with the public/private question, but I saw it and thought you might enjoy it. PAT CAHAPE ERIC CLEARINGHOUSE ON RURAL EDUCATION AND SMALL SCHOOLS TELEPHONE: 800/624-9120 PO BOX 1348, CHARLESTON, WV 25325-1348 ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 15:35:51 -0800 Subject: Prologue and First Chapter From: harrawoo@violet.berkeley.edu Pat. Thanks for the beautiful post. I sent you an email last week, which I thought I was posting on the list -- but I'm a real clod in unix and I sent it to your private address instead of to the list. I'm still trying to get my feet set for jumping into this list, and your selection from Proverbs might be a cool start. What touches me about the passage is the sense I get of there being Mind in the World before the World is made. I mean wisdom, properly part of the Human Condition, but existing in the world, as it were, without us. The passage you cite from the Prologue emphasizes the co-dependency of Human Being and the World in which that Being finds itself; the idea of the Proverb seems to be that there is something of us in Creation which precedes us (Wisdom) but that something is not something that IS us or that we can posess or control. Both passages gesture toward a threshold in which mind and the world can come together to form a particular kind of Truth. I'm still interested in the Spacemen, which seem to orbit around Arendts most powerful and driving emblem for the modern Human Condition, and would really like to hear what other readers here think Arendt is using that motif for in the P and First Chapter. I'm struck by how in the most intense moment of the Big New Event for mankind, something really ancient turns up -- we're prisoners of our condition. I'd like to find a way to bring the Old/New question to the Mind/World reflections in Pat's post. And I also think that is the way to get into the public/private theme. Thanks Michael Harrawood ------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Mar 1994 12:54:18 EST Subject: Re: Prologue and First Chapter From: U56D7@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU Lance--Please accept my heartfelt condolences and thanks in response to your tribute to your father. He must have been a remarkable man and I am glad I got to read about him and to read Auden's tribute to Yeats. Thank you. Pat ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 8 Mar 1994 21:52:17 -0800 Subject: Prologue, etc. From: harrawoo@violet.berkeley.edu So, uh. . . I asked this question a week or so ago about the Spacemen. Was this a mistake? Is there anybody here? Do we want to continue? I'm just confused because Pat's cite made me think we had a good way into The Human Condition, and suddenly the list has gone dead. Where is everybody? What do we do now? Michael Harrawood ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 9 Mar 94 03:37:53 EST Subject: Re: Prologue, etc. From: "Lance Fletcher" > >So, uh. . . I asked this question a week or so ago about the Spacemen. Was >this a mistake? Is there anybody here? Do we want to continue? > >I'm just confused because Pat's cite made me think we had a good way into >The Human Condition, and suddenly the list has gone dead. Where is everybody? > >What do we do now? Michael, et al., I'm getting ready to post some start a real slow reading of The Human Condition. I just finished rereading the last chapter, and I have started working on the Prologue. Let me share a couple of thoughts now, which I may repeat later when I have something more organized to post: Title: The first word of a book is its title, so that is where I usually start with a slow reading. According to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (Arendt's biographer), The Human Condition was not the title that Arendt wanted, nor was Vita Activa, which is the title of the German edition of the book. Arendt wanted to call it "Amor Mundi" -- love of the world -- possibly to signify her rejection of the philosophical and ascetic religious tradition of "contemptus mundi." I think that knowing this fact may help us to understand what she is getting at in the prologue. In any case, I am asking myself, What does it mean to love the world? Origins: It may be helpful to know that the writing of The Human Condition developed out of another project which was never completed, but which was in a way subsumed within this book. Arendt's first published book, and the one which established her reputation, was The Origins of Totalitarianism. Many readers of that book were disturbed by the fact that Arendt treats Stalinist Bolshevism as a form of totalitarianism more or less on the same footing as Nazism. In 1952 Arendt wrote a grant proposal requesting support for the writing of a book to be entitled, Totalitarian Elements of Marxism, in which she said, "The most serious gap in The Origins of Totalitarianism is the lack of an adequate historical and conceptual analysis of the ideological background of Bolshevism. This omission was deliberate....Racism and imperialism, the tribal nationalism of the pan-movements and anti-Semitism, have no connection with the great political and philosophical traditions of the West. The shocking originality of totalitarianism....is easily overlooked if one lays too much stress on the only element which has behind it a respectable tradition and whose critical discussion requires a criticism of some of the chief tenets of Western political philosophy -- Marxism." This book was never completed, but three of Arendt's books, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, and On Revolution, developed out of the thinking that Arendt did when she sat down to write "a little study of Marx." It seems that she first started working on the distinction between labor and work. From that she gained a view of action and of the vita activa as a whole. My reason for mentioning this now is that I think it may be helpful to know (a) that Arendt began this book with the critique of Marx and of his concept of labor that now forms the third chapter of the book, and (b) that the Human Condition also began as an effort to conclude some unfinished business about Totalitarianism. Lance Fletcher [lance@freelance.com] The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------- VersaTerm-Link Mail Archive ------- X-Date: Wed, 30 Mar 94 00:54:54 EST X-User: "Lance Fletcher" X-Mbox: Mailbox [arendt] ------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 09 Mar 94 20:00:02 EST Subject: new subscriber From: "joe leduc" Hello, my name is Joe Leduc and I have just subscribed to this list. I'm a student at the University of Rhode Island in political science and philosophy. Although I do not have a great deal of familiarity with Arendt's work (I've only read parts of the Human Condition, her intro to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, and stuff about her in works on Mary McCarthy and by Alfred Kazin) I have been greatly intrigued by it. I don't have any particular agenda in subscribing, just a general interest. I look forward to reading the archive of messages and joining everyone in reading and discussing her work. Joe Leduc clk115@uriacc.uri.edu ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 10 Mar 1994 09:44:47 -0800 Subject: Prologue From: harrawoo@violet.berkeley.edu Lance. Thanks a lot for the informative note. In my unix ineptitude, I've managed to lose it or send it into orbit with Sputnik, and am hoping you have it handy and can repost it to me either privately or through the list. I've opened a file on my computer in which I'm keeping the notes on The Human Condition we all generate on this list. If you don't have it, I'll try to pull the information from For Love of the World. I was surprised to learn that Arendt took so much heat for this book. I know her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem brought a lot of criticism, and it makes sense that The Human Condition would have as well. This makes Arendt all the more compelling a figure. The edition of The Human Condition I'm reading is the 1958 first edition, still inked up with notes and annotations made in that year by my old pal Judson Allen, who was like a father to me until his death in 1985. Judson sent me the book because I was reading Flannery O'Connor, and he thought it would help me with her work. I read it the first time outside Royan, on the French Atlantic Coast, where I was working as ring master for a small French Circus, and my experience of the book was exactly like the one Pat described in her post a week or so ago: I didn't really understand it, but knew I had just read something extremely important. I was thrilled by Arendt's compassion and her sense of the importance of daily human life, and was infuriated at her erudition and her magisterial command of the intellectual traditions which governed, or "conditioned," that dail daily life. Since then, I've never been able to get away from Arendt or from philosophy, although I can't exactly say what calls me back. In part, I think Arendt is trying adumbrate a new form of evil in the world. In this, I'm in part taking my lead from your post, Lance. In the Eichmann book, she calls it, in her subtitle, the "banality of evil," and I'd like to propose that as we read through The Human Condition, especially the parts on Labor and Work, we keep forward in our minds the image of Eichmann defending himself saying he was just doing his job. I hope somebody else will post to the list soon. Thanks. Michael Harrawood ------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Mar 94 14:34:19 EST Subject: Title & Prologue From: "Lance Fletcher" Let's now begin our slow reading of The Human Condition. Of course, we have already begun. That is the nature of slow reading. It begins, not with reading, but with slowing. When we begin slow reading, we have already been reading. We are like travelers who have been barreling down the highway when we realize that we have not completely understood a roadsign that we have already passed and it suddenly occurs to us that we may be going in the wrong direction. In reading over the messages that have already been posted on this list, including my own, I was reminded of what I wrote in the little essay on slow reading that I distributed with the original announcement of these lists: "The first lesson in slow reading is to develop the capacity to simply be present to the words on the page; to allow the words to simply BE there, and to take note of the fact that they ARE there -- before deciding what they mean. This is something that most students are completely unaccustomed to doing. If you doubt this, make the following test: Read a sentence of eight or ten words to a group of students -- to anybody -- and ask them to reproduce the sentence word for word. My experience has been that almost everybody responds by telling what they thought the sentence meant -- in different words, not the same -- and in the process, anything incongruous, perplexing or ambiguous -- anything, in short, which might be an opening for learning to occur -- tends to be disregarded. Obviously this is not a lesson that any of us can claim to have learned sufficiently. We are so preoccupied with deciding what the sentences we read and hear MEAN, and especially with deciding whether WE agree or disagree, whether WE approve or disapprove, that we generally do not pause to take note of what the sentences SAY. This rush to interpretation and judgment is strongly encouraged by most of our educational practices." It is extraordinarily hard to do what I just described, isn't it? That is, "to simply be present to the words on the page; to allow the words to simply BE there, and to take note of the fact that they ARE there -- before deciding what they mean." Why is that? Well, perhaps because it seems that that is not DOING anything. The words, we feel, are perfectly capable of being there on the page without any help from us. They don't need any permission from us to BE there, so we feel pretty silly pretending that WE are LETTING them BE there on the page. And, of course, some of us feel silly standing in front of a painting, looking at it without trying to say what it means. But just think what it is to read. Nowadays most of us have learned to suppress vocalization as we read, and some of us can even read without moving our lips, but I am willing to bet that, for each one of us, when we first learned how to read, reading meant reading out loud. That is, speaking, reproducing, the words exactly as they are on the page. In the first moment of reading, the reader is an actor who unavoidably becomes the voice of the author. So that is where we begin. Letting the words BE there is not, it seems, something entirely passive. It is on our part an act of reproduction. Now, you may ask, What are you doing now? My answer is contained on page 5 of The Human Condition, where Arendt writes: "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. "What we are doing" is indeed the central theme of this book." In this preliminary reflection, my intention has been first of all to reproduce Arendt's intention: to think what WE are doing -- We, the slow readers of this text. I sometimes think about the advantages for learning possessed by those who lived long ago. No, I do not regret that I live in the age of the xerox machine and the computer and, above all, I cannot bear to think how much poorer my life would be without recorded music. And yet think how much easier it was for those who had fewer books to read. And before the advent of printing, when there was only one copy of the text for an entire class, the study of it had to begin with somebody actually reading a passage of it aloud, which the others no doubt copied down. To this day, even though I buy most of the books I read and, therefore, have them completely at my disposal, when I get stuck in the interpretation of some passage, my practice is to copy out the passage, word for word, and then to paraphrase it very closely in my own words. Invariably, as I do that, the questions begin to stir, and I begin to be free. So let us return and "copy out" the title of this book. As I have already said, if we can believe Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, the title page in this particular case represents primarily the voice of Arendt's publisher. Arendt's own title for the book would have been "Amor Mundi." Love of the World. What in the world (if I may put it that way) did Arendt mean by "Love of the World?" The first book that Arendt wrote (although not the first she published) was entitled "Rahel Varnhagen." Now that's pretty easy. The book is clearly ABOUT Rahel Varnhagen. One might add to that and say that it was about some other things as well, but nobody is likely to dispute that the title of the book names its principal subject. And the same is more or less true for the titles of all of Arendt's other books. And perhaps that is why her publishers objected to "Amor Mundi" and chose "The Human Condition" for the American edition and "Vita Activa" for the European editions. Those titles may not be adequate in describing the contents of the book, but undeniably they do refer to a big part of its subject matter. But "Amor Mundi?" Who could honestly say that this book is ABOUT love of the world? It seems clear that Arendt did not intend "Amor Mundi" as a descriptive title, unless, perhaps, it was to describe the nature of her own action as its author. But we don't know. Let us say that this is the question with which the book begins. Offstage, in a muffled voice, we think we hear the author say "Amor Mundi." With that question in our minds, we listen as she comes on stage and begins to speak: [Here I recite. If you are reading with a speech synthesizer, turn on the female voice with the German accent.] In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies -- the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company. That's the first paragraph. What is there here for us to be present to? Writing in 1958, she is speaking about a comparatively recent event. Let us take note of the words that dominate this passage: "Earth-born," "celestial," "heavenly," "mortals," "earthly," "eternity," "sublime." Now let me paraphrase: In 1957 an artificial object was launched into orbit around the earth. Its orbital motion was governed by the same physical laws that govern the motion of the more-or-less permanent astronomical objects which we observe in the sky, even though this object was non-natural and not especially permananent. Yet, until its orbit decayed, this artificial object behaved, with respect to its form of motion, as if it were more like an astronomical object than like the other things we are familiar with on the surface of the earth. Did I leave anything out? Nothing -- and everything. The intention of my paraphrase was to retain every physical detail in Arendt's description, while omitting all of her poetic, evocative or religious language. And the purpose of doing that was to show that most of Arendt's meaning in this passage is contained, not in the physical description, but in the connotations of these poetic, vaguely theological words that seem at first so out of place in a discussion of the first Sputnik. What IS this strangely "out of place" vocabulary that Arendt uses here? Is this just the way she ordinarily talks? That each of us can judge by reading elsewhere in her work. For me, having read most of her writings and listened to her speak in person, the answer is pretty clearly, No. So we may well use the vernacular and ask, "Where is she coming from?" although the real question is, "WHEN is she coming from?" For what Arendt signifies by her use of strangely old-fashioned words to describe a very new-fashioned occurrence is that she is _intentionally_ putting on the accents of the pre-Copernican, pre-Galilean, pre-Newtonian era. She speaks to us from the time when the sun, the moon and all the stars revolved around the earth. How can I assert that she does this intentionally? Let me explain my reasoning. Start by rereading the second half of the first sentence: "for some weeks it circled the earth according to THE SAME LAWS OF GRAVITATION that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies -- the sun, the moon, and the stars." What does she mean by the phrase that I have stressed? "The same laws of gravitation?" Why does she say that? Who would think otherwise? Who would think that there is more than one law of gravitation, or that this universal law of gravitation does not apply equally to all bodies, large and small, terrestrial and celestial alike? The answer is, almost everybody who lived prior to the time of Galileo. The point that Arendt is calling attention to with the word "same" here, the point that would be surprising from the standpoint of the pre-Newtonian worldview, is that in the case of Sputnik, a piece of terrestrial matter was joined in the same pattern of motion as the moon and the other heavenly bodies. In the physics that prevailed in European thought prior to Galileo and Newton, a sharp distinction was drawn between things that exist below the orbit of the moon and those that reside above. For us, the distinction is preserved mainly in the Elizabethan term "sublunary" (which most of us know only from John Donne's "Valediction forbidding Mourning"), meaning having the character of mutable matter such as exists below the moon. Sublunary matter was understood to be of a different kind or essence from celestial matter. It was changeable, and things made of it were subject to decay, while celestial matter, on the other hand, was thought to be perfect and immutable. Each type of matter was understood to have a proper place and a proper or characteristic type of motion. Matter composed of earth was understood to have a natural tendency to move in a more or less linear trajectory -- downward, toward the earth. Celestial matter, on the other hand, was endowed with a natural tendency toward motion in perfect circles. To us there is absolutely no surprise in the idea that a terrestrial body, if accelerated sufficiently, will rise above the earth's atmosphere and that in extraplanetary space it will move in accordance with exactly the same laws that govern the motion of the moon, the sun and the stars. The fact that WE are not surprised by this is the result of a profound transformation of intellectual outlook that is closely associated with the work of Galileo and Newton, and which is in any case inseparably bound up with the course of intellectual development which we call "Modernity." The reason that I feel confident in asserting that Arendt's affectation of pre-Newtonian "surprise" in the first paragraph of the Prologue is intentional is that Arendt herself, in the last chapter of the book, devotes considerable attention to precisely this intellectual transformation. Indeed, it appears likely to me that the major purpose Arendt had for invoking this recent event, the Sputnik launch, was to establish a narrative frame that would embrace the entire episode of modernity, and it is worth noting that, for her, the event which seems to parallel the Sputnik launch in its significance is not Newton's discovery of the universal law of gravitation, but Galileo's act of looking through a telescope and seeing spots on the sun and moons revolving around Jupiter. Before going back to the question of what Arendt had in mind when she proposed to entitle this book "Amor Mundi," let me pause to take note of some dates and other information that Arendt supplies in the Acknowledgements section on p. 327. Arendt writes there, "The present study owes its origin to a series of lectures, delivered under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation in April, 1956, at the University of Chicago, under the title, "Vita Activa." The Sputnik launch that Arendt comments on in the first paragraph of her Prologue occurred in October of 1957, more than a year after the completion of the Walgreen lectures. Since the book was published in 1958, it is altogether probable that almost all of it had already been written BEFORE the Sputnik launch. It is practically inconceivable, therefore, that the writing of the body of the book was significantly affected by the announcement of this event. Instead, it seems likely that Arendt, like most authors, wrote her Prologue after she had finished the book. But, with that distinctive sense of narrative drama that sets her apart from most other philosophical authors, Arendt seized upon an event which was very much in the consciousness of her audience at the time of publication, to give narrative power and immediacy to the theme which occupies the concluding chapter, the loss of the world, "world alienation," in the modern age. That, we may suppose, is what she was thinking about when she learned of the first Sputnik launch and when she proposed to name the book "Amor Mundi." Lance Fletcher [lance@freelance.com] The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 for Internet access: gopher or anonymous ftp to: world.std.com /ftp/pub/freelance ------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Mar 1994 11:26:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Title & Prologue From: "KEVIN MURRAY" I wonder how Arendt would have chosen to open her book if it were to be written today. Where is the focus of `world alienation' today? Perhaps the human genome project might serve to introduce the transgressive power of modernity. Strange how every new technological innovation makes the previous steps forward seem quite tame: what's sending a bit of metal into space compared to the tinkering with the deep codes of human biological identity. Kevin Murray kmurray@pitvax.xx.rmit.edu.au Dept Visual Communication R.M.I.T. Australia || ||| ||||||| || | ||| || | ------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 20:56:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: What we are doing From: EPHESUS@delphi.com I was inspired by Lance Fletcher's recent post to go out and purchase _The Human Condition_. From what I have read thus far I can say that I am eager to see a slow reading proceed. My background is that of history teacher in a small school in the Hudson Valley of New York. Reading the prologue prompts me to make the following historical connections. Please indulge me in this for this one time; I promise to stick more closely to the text in the future. The theme of _The Human Condition_, we are told, is "What we are doing"; the time period is the "the modern age," by which she means, interestingly enough, the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. In those two opening paragraphs on Sputnik we are made aware of the remarkable gulf between one form of human consciousness and another. As Arendt points out, the desire to flee the earth is not a new one; nor does it necessarily stand opposed to a veneration for the sublime rhythms of the heavenly spheres above us. But this urge to wrap ourselves in a metal cocoon, with oxygen tanks and freeze-dried food packets, and to hurl our earthly bodies into this newly "materialized" cosmos, is indeed a new departure. I am reminded of an early expression of "the modern age", ten words which in their bluntness must have shocked their first readers: "I was born in 1632, in the city of York..." As Robinson Crusoe tells us, "...I would be satisfied with nothing but going to the sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will--nay, the commands--of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me." Such is the lament of "the modern age." As the heavens ultimately reject Sputnik, the sea seems to reject Crusoe almost from the moment his ship leaves the harbor. The terror of his near shipwreck sends him scurrying back home, only to head out again. When he is finally cast up on that famous island, he does something most characteristic. Remote as he is from all civilization, his first act is to build a fortress, a wooden palisade inside which he can find refuge, a fortress with no door, whose only means of entry is a ladder he can pull up behind him. Lance Fletcher's intriguing paraphrase of Arendt's opening paragraph reveals the degree to which our consciousness has been stripped clean of those spiritual connections that had for so long given sustenance and root to man's inner world. Again I am reminded of that first Yuri Gagarin: to walk inside Robinson Crusoe's mind is to experience the full force of this new world. As he tells us in a chapter entitled, appropriately enough, "I recover stores from the wreck": "I had, alas! no divine knowledge; what I had received by the good instruction of my father was then worn out by an uninterruped series, for 8 years, of seafaring wickedness...I do not remember that I had in all that time one thought that so much as tended either to looking upwards toward God, or inwards towards a reflection upon my own ways; but a certain stupidity of soul, without desire of good or conscience of evil, had entirely overwhelmed me, and I was all that the most hardened, unthinking, wicked creature among our common sailers can be supposed to be, not having the least sense, either of the fear of God in danger, or of thankfulness to God in deliverance." The modern age did indeed begin with, as Arendt writes, "a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven..." But the "even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures of all living creatures under the sky...": can not this not already be seen somewhat in the gesture of Crusoe on his island, as he isolates himself before then setting out to rebuild his own world in his own image? These are some initial thoughts on reading the Prologue. I hope we will continue our slow reading and, again, I promise in the future to stay more closely to the text itself. One last point: I would be most interested to understand better what she means on the second page, where she states: "The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition..." How is she using the word "condition" here? There are, in fact, a number of (to me) unusual phrases in the first two sentences of this paragraph. Comments? Karl Fredrickson Rockland County, New York ------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 26 Mar 94 21:32:13 est Subject: _Human Condition_, Prologue From: "John Ransom" I have a question/comment in response to some posts that were made a while ago to this list. First, I wonder if anyone else shares with Arendt her reaction to the 1957 launching of a satellite. The importance of this exceeds, she says, the splitting of the atom. More importantly, however, she argues that the "joy" felt over this achievement "was not triumphal." As she puts it, The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first "step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth." It seems that Arendt is "projecting" here. Or at least that's how I read it. Though I existed at the time (hah!), I was not cognitively aware of the '57 launch. I was however cognitvely aware (hah hah!) of the moon landingt, and I remember a fairly generalized feeling of awe about mankind's accomplishment. So a question, then, perhaps for the future of our reading. What role does this reading of extra-terrestrial activity play in Arendt's account? On p. 2, Arendt equates this attitude toward the first man-built satellite to the "mass sentiments and mass desires" that science fiction literature acts as a vehicle for. So a question: does Arendt have these sentiments and desires right?