Category Archives: Continental philosophy

living life as a story

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Thesis: It is better to live as if one’s life were a story, yet many people cannot live that way.

A conventional story has a finite number of named characters, many of whom know many of the rest. These characters have constraints and limitations, but they also face at least some consequential choices. The choices they make contribute to the plot. Their choices tend to be related to their inner lives: their beliefs, desires, and character traits. Although they may spend most of their time separately and quietly, the narrative emphasizes their interactions. In fact, dialogue occupies much of a conventional novel and all the text of a play or a screenplay. In biographies and narrative histories, quotations from speech may be shorter, but they are are often prominent. What the characters think, do, and say is noticed and preserved–at least by the narrator, and usually by some of their fellow characters.

We can feel that our lives are like this, and we can be correct about it. Or we can feel (rightly or wrongly) that this is not how we live. Here are some threats to living as if in a story:

  • Modern economies (capitalist or socialist) that organize masses of workers so that each one feels little agency, while many live so precariously that they cannot make consequential decisions.
  • State tyranny, which not only blocks consequential choices and suppresses frank discussion but also invades the private spaces in which people could develop independent beliefs and values.
  • Hypertrophied science and technology, which make human behavior appear mechanical and predictable, or which actually control human beings.
  • Bureaucracy, which minimizes individual agency by applying rules, metrics, and files.
  • Ideologies, in the pejorative sense of all-encompassing theories that explain individual choices away or that replace human characters with abstractions, such as classes or nations, as the major protagonists.
  • Loneliness or isolation, meaning the absence of the interactions that would constitute a conventional story.
  • A lack of solitude, an inner life that can be described in a narrative and connected to overt actions.
  • Catastrophes, which wipe out the memories of characters and their actions.

(On that last point, Jonathan Lear writes:

Not long ago, I listened to a lecture on climate change. The lecture went as one might expect. There was a warning of impending ecological catastrophe and talk of the “Anthropocene,” suggesting that our age—the age in which humans dominate the Earth—is coming to an end. At the end of the talk, there was a discussion period. At one point, a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.

Lear develops the idea that missing or mourning things is a distinctively human contribution; and it is ineffably sad that no one would miss homo sapiens, even if we cause our own extinction, and even if other species would be better off without us. It means that all the stories would be gone.)

I think many of us assume that our lives are like stories and that some other people notice and remember our roles in them. For us, the evaluative questions are: How is this story turning out? And what kind of a character am I? I would rather live in a comedy than in a tragedy, and I aspire to be the hero rather than the villain in my own little patch.

However, I think the main thrust of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy is that there is an antecedent question: Am I in a story at all? (See, e.g., The Human Condition, p. 97.) I believe she would say that it is better to be the villain in a tragedy than not to inhabit any kind of story, and that most modern people no longer do. The list of threats (above) comes directly from her work.

Note that this is a different ideal from the common one of authorship. For instance, Immanuel Kant defines ethical individuals as the authors of the rules that govern them:

The will is therefore not merely subjected to the law, but in such a way that it must also be regarded as self-legislating, and precisely for that reason must it be subject to the law (of which it can consider itself the author [als Urheber]).

And Jürgen Habermas invokes the ideal of citizens as authors (plural) of their common community:

According to the republican view, the status of citizens is not determined by the model of negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claim as private persons. Rather, political rights—preeminently rights of political participation and communication—are positive liberties. They guarantee not freedom from external compulsion but the possibility of participation in a common praxis, through the exercise of which citizens can first make themselves into what they want to be—politically autonomous authors of a community of free and equal persons.

Authors and characters are metaphors, not literal descriptions. As such, they capture certain compelling ideas without fully describing reality. Here I want to suggest that the metaphor of characters draws our attention to urgent issues. We need social, political, and intellectual reforms to enable more people to live like characters in stories. These reforms require intentional action. We must be the authors of contexts in which people can be characters.

Sources: Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022, p. 1); Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (my trans.); Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton University Press, 1996). p. 22. See also: Hilary Mantel and Walter Benjamin; Kieran Setiya on midlife; a vivid sense of the future; the coincidences in Romola; and Freud on mourning the past.

Jaspers on collective responsibility and polarization

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Here is a scene that has certain resonances with the present, although the circumstances were certainly different. …

It was the winter of 1945-6 in Heidelberg, Germany. Karl Jaspers, a distinguished professor, offered a lecture to a room full of demobilized solders, women, displaced civilians, and a fair number of wounded.

Jaspers had been banned from teaching since 1933 because he didn’t endorse the Nazi regime (except to sign a loyalty oath in 1934) and because his spouse was Jewish. He and his wife had been listed for arrest–and presumably death–but they were saved when the US Army arrived the previous March. The US military trusted Jaspers, who been mediating between them and the university.

In the lecture, Jaspers notes that the Allied occupation is authoritarian; Germans have no say in their own governance. Later, he will insist that the fault for this situation lies with Germans alone. In the meantime, the occupation is not interfering with their freedom of speech.

Jaspers says that a university should never be a place for politics, in the narrow sense. “Dabbling in political actions and decisions of the day” is “never our business.” I suspect he is echoing Max Weber’s “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” a lecture from 1917. Jaspers says that he and his audience are free to do what they should always do in a university. But what is that?

Jaspers is giving a lecture. He acknowledges that it can become propaganda even if the theme is democracy or freedom. “Talk from the platform is necessarily one-sided. We do not converse here. Yet what I expound to you has grown out of the ‘talking with each other’ [Miteinandersprechen] which all of us do, each in his own circle” (p. 5). He adds, “We want to reflect together while, in fact, I expound unilaterally. But the point is not dogmatic communication, but investigation and tender for examination on your part” (p. 9).

Reflecting together is essential, Jaspers argues, because it can change “consciousness,” which is a “precedent for our judgment in politics.” To accomplish this transformation, “We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences” (p. 5). This “self-education” (Selbsterziehung) is not politics, but perhaps it’s a preparation for politics (p. 9).

The need for dialogue is especially acute because Germans have had radically different experiences. Most Germans have experienced tragic losses, but it matters greatly whether one’s loved-one was killed on the battlefield while invading the USSR, bombed at home, or executed by the regime. Because there was no free speech, Germans have been unable to discuss such profound differences. Jaspers says, “Now that we can talk freely again, we seem to each other as if we had come from different worlds” (p. 13).

He never mentions how he was treated by the government or by his fellow Germans. Some of the people in the lecture room had different experiences from him–in the specific sense that they were actively involved in killing people like his wife. The proportion who supported the regime was vastly larger than the proportion who resisted it. Nevertheless, Jaspers diagnoses the situation as what we would call “polarization” (a deep disagreement among people), and he validates everyone’s experiences while attributing guilt to himself.

The solution that he proposes for polarization is dialogue. He says, “We want to learn to talk with each other. That is to say, we do not just want to reiterate our opinions but to hear what the other thinks. We do not just want to assert but to reflect connectedly, listen to reasons, remain prepared for a new insight. We want to accept the other, to try to see things from the other’s point of view; in fact, we virtually want to seek out opposing views” (pp. 5-6).

Jaspers’ opening is a very strong statement in favor of pluralistic dialogue and institutional neutrality, as we might call those things today. I find it moving because he humanizes everyone despite having every reason to be furious at them. But I also think his stance is debatable. Should universities be as detached from politics as he advocates? (Would it have helped if they had been less detached in 1925 or 1930?) Was the problem really “division,” or was it Nazism?

Jaspers then offers an analysis of the question of German war guilt. Central to his analysis is a famous four-way distinction among:

  1. Criminal guilt, which is attributable to individuals who have broken specific laws. It merits personal shame and punishment.
  2. Political guilt, which belongs to all members of a polity (a democracy or otherwise), because “Everybody is responsible for the way he is governed.” However, political guilt does not imply criminal guilt or the need for an individual penalty or shame. Germany as a whole is rightly occupied because of political guilt, which is not the fault of individual Germans. Similarly, I might say, “I didn’t vote for George W. Bush or the Iraq war, but I have responsibility for Iraq as a US citizen. I needn’t feel bad about it personally, but I must accept the political consequences.”
  3. Moral guilt: This is what one ought to feel as a result of being connected to an evil, even if one wasn’t personally responsible for what happened. It is what we would now call bad “moral luck.” For example, it is a matter of luck whether one was born a German or a Dane in 1905, but those who were born Germans have a form of guilt that is not due to their individual choices. Jaspers’ former student Hannah Arendt wrote (completely independently at about the same time): “That German refugees, who had the good fortune either to be Jews or to have been persecuted by the Gestapo early enough, have been saved from this guilt is of course not their merit.” If your conditions lead you to be good, you should reflect on your good fortune and not attribute your virtue to your self. If your conditions make you bad, you need penance and renewal.
  4. Metaphysical guilt: “There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.” The outcome of accepting metaphysical guilt is what Jaspers calls “transformation before God.” Again, Arendt wrote something similar at about the same time: “It is many years now that we meet Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.” I would paraphrase their idea as follows (without invoking God): acts of evil remind us that we are flawed creatures, and we should be mindful of that fact.

Jaspers’ lecture must have given his audience much to wrestle with, but it’s not clear that it went over well. Much later, his student Harry Pross recalled:

No one would have dared interrupt the lecture. There was not supposed to be any conversation between the students and the professors in the old lecture hall. Then [at the end of the lecture] the philosopher left, somewhat stiffly, without casting a single glance left or right. The students sat tight, as they had always done. “Pretty meshuggener,” one murmured as he walked out. “At least you don’t have to say ‘Heil’ any more,” his friend replied.

Quoting Jaspers from E.N. Ashton’s translation: The Question of German Guilt (Fordham, 2000). The German words come from a 1971 German edition of Die Schuldfrage (note that Germany is not named in the original title), published by Joseph Buttinger. Pross is quoted in Antonia Grunenberg and Adrian Daub, “Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking Through the Breach in Tradition,” Social Research, vol. 74, no. 4, 2007, p. 1013.

See also: Max Weber on institutional neutrality; don’t confuse bias and judgment; an international discussion of polarization; and in the Holocaust Museum (from 2006).

a vivid sense of the future

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My conception of the relatively distant future is almost empty. How things will be in 20 years, or 50–I have no idea. I am not motivated or inspired by any such vision.

Walter Benjamin would not approve. He concludes his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with these words:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

According to Benjamin, history was not linear for the ancient Hebrews. Studying the past revealed a future that could suddenly appear in the present. For them, the future was not empty. Nor were they like “soothsayers” who make predictions by studying current trends–like today’s pundits who project a magical, technological future based on what they observe today. The future for the ancient Jews was something radically different from the present yet foretold by the past, if you read it right.

Benjamin is thinking of the Hebrew prophets. For example, the Lord gives Amos a message to convey to the rich and powerful:

5:11Therefore because you trample on the poor
    and you exact taxes of grain from him,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
    but you shall not dwell in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
    but you shall not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your transgressions
    and how great are your sins—
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
    and turn aside the needy in the gate.

A bit later, the Lord adds a hortatory or imperative sentence:

24 But let justice roll down like waters,
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Such sentences from the Lord can have direct consequences, as in “God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” He then promises to shake the house of Israel, “as one shakes a sieve,” except that no pebble will make it through this shaking:

10 All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword,
    who say, ‘Disaster shall not overtake or meet us.’

This is not only a prediction (certain people will die) but also an instruction (stop denying your faults). Then comes a much more positive promise:

11 “In that day I will raise up
    the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
    and raise up its ruins
    and rebuild it as in the days of old …

This is a vivid vision of the future–the text goes on for many verses describing it– brought into the present to serve a purpose. Amos’ prophesy is both a prediction and an exhortation. It chastises the wicked and comforts the oppressed.

Here is a quote from another text which–like the Hebrew Bible–impressed Walter Benjamin. It is Das Kapital (from the afterward of the second German edition)

With me [in contrast to Hegel], the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. …

In its rational form [dialectics] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx is saying, on the one hand, that he simply studies “the existing state of things.” As a hard-headed scientist, he knows that the world is material and governed by laws. However, his analysis also reveals the “negation of that state,” an infinitely better future. This makes his text “critical and revolutionary.”

Benjamin begins his “Theses” with the famous story of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th-century automaton that appeared to be a machine capable of winning at chess. Actually, there was a man inside who pulled the strings. Benjamin says, “One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Marxism can be interpreted as historical materialism. As a rigid system, it is unfalsifiable–“it can win all the time.” It is also inert, because human agency isn’t needed to bring about the future. It works like a machine and assumes that history is mechanical. Benjamin suggests, however, that Marxism is really a religion–in a good way. Its power is prophesy. Like the Torah, it instructs people in remembrance, conjures a future into the present, and inspires us to act.

I take my own bearings neither from Amos nor from Marx, yet I appreciate Benjamin’s idea that historical time is not linear. By acting politically, we change the meaning of the past and bring an imagined future into the now (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit). When we lose the capacity to envision a radically better future, we abandon our agency to impersonal forces.

See also: Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time; Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life; nostalgia in the face of political crisis (posts about Benjamin)

Sadness is a Light Kindled in the Heart

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In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled “We Refugees” in a Jewish-oriented New York magazine, Menorah Journal. Here she observes that her fellow exiles act like optimists in public, for they want to banish their terrors and assimilate to an optimistic American society. The exceptions are the ones who can’t maintain the appearance and “turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.”

She says, “I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.”

Around the same time, she privately wrote a poem in her native tongue that I will translate–a little loosely–as follows:

Sadness is like a light that is lit in the heart,
Darkness, a glow that gives shape to our night.
We set the small lamp of sorrow alight
To find our way home through the night's darkest part.
It brightens the wood, city, street, and tree.
And one who has no home--blessed is he;
In his dreams, even so, he sees home right.

At first, I didn’t love “darkness is like a light” (Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein), because that just seems to be a contradiction. But I came to appreciate the idea that the darkness of a sad night brings a kind of illumination by revealing the past.

The original German is three rhymed couplets:

Die Traurigkeit ist wie ein Licht im Herzen angezündet, 
Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein, der unsere Nacht ergründet. 
Wir brauchen nur das kleine Licht der Trauer zu entzünden, 
Um durch die lange weite Nacht wie Schatten heimzufinden. 
Beleuchtet ist der Wald, die Stadt, die Strasse und der Baum. 
Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; phenomenology of nostalgia

how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking

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Mystics have often advised that by turning our minds inward, we may find freedom. For instance, Marcus Aurelius restates a Greco-Roman commonplace when he writes, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. …. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul” (2:8 and 4:3).

Roughly similar ideas can be found in classical Indian and Christian sources:

“In dependence on the ear and sounds … In dependence on the mind and mental phenomena, mind-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, feeling comes to be; with feeling as condition, craving. But with the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving comes cessation of clinging … cessation of existence … cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering. This, bhikkhus, is the passing away of the world.” (Buddha, in the Pali Canon, SN 12.44)

— “But, Sir, where is the silence and where the place in which the word is spoken?”
— “As I said just now, it is in the purest part of the soul, in the noblest, in her ground, aye in the very essence of the soul. There is the central silence, into which no creature may enter, nor any image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware of any image either of herself or any creature. Whatever the soul effects she effects with her powers.” (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)

The same general idea appealed to the young Hannah Arendt. Her turn away from it explains much about her mature thought.

At age 65, Arendt recalled her early encounters with Martin Heidegger. “The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again. … There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” She remembered that in Heidegger’s seminars, she and her fellow students experienced “thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive for cognition.” They found that thinking can “become a passion” that orders the rest of one’s life.

One of the ways that Heidegger and his students would “think” was by analyzing a mental phenomenon in great detail. Heidegger resists saying that he “observes” his own mental states, such as his anxiety or boredom. That would be psychological research. Instead, “Our fundamental task now consists in awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing.” He and his students would let their moods and other mental states reveal themselves, and they saw this as a path to truth and freedom.

Certainly, Heidegger’s method was not identical to the meditative exercises of Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, or Meister Eckhardt, but it resembled them in a very general way. And it drew Arendt to Heidegger.

In the winter of 1925-6, Arendt ended her romantic relationships with him and wrote a poem about her feelings: “Klage” (or “Lament”), which I have translated here. It is a teenager’s breakup lyric. It is also a very carefully constructed poem, rhymed and rhythmic, which means that it cannot be a literal report of its author’s mental state. Although she begins, “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly,” some of her hours must have been spent rhyming “Nieder” with “Lieder” and “wie Spiel” with “Qualenspiel”–and, I presume, enjoying the results.

Meanwhile, the poem is deeply Heideggerian, focusing on how time becomes evident when we are distressed and ending with a claim of authenticity: “Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away,” yet “Never will it make me give away / The bliss of lovely truth.”

Having read the mature work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, you would assume that she would not want to retreat into introspection, especially meditation on the highly abstract and general topics that interested Heidegger. You would assume that she would decry an inward turn as irresponsibly apolitical. She would advocate engagement with fellow citizens as the basis of a good (and free) life.

One way that she brought herself to this conclusion was by way of her encounter with Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1831). Soon after Arendt left Heidegger, she began to write a book about this Prussian-Jewish salon hostess of the Romantic period.

In Arendt’s account, Varnhagen (born Levin) turned to private introspection to find freedom. Varnhagen presumed that “self-thinking brings liberation from objects and their reality, creates a sphere of pure ideas and a world which is accessible to any rational being without benefit of knowledge or experience” (p. 54). Arendt explains: “If thinking rebounds back upon itself and finds its solitary object within the soul—if, that is, it becomes introspection—it distinctly produces … a semblance of unlimited power by the very act of isolation from the world; by ceasing to be interested in the world it also sets up a bastion in front of the one ‘interesting’ object: the inner self” (p. 55).

This practice of reflecting on one’s inner life (and writing some 6,000 letters about it) was particularly appealing to someone in Varnhagen’s circumstances. She experienced prejudice as a Jew yet lacked commitment to Judaism or to other aspects of her heritage, or even much knowledge of them. She never received a formal education, so she couldn’t investigate history, society, or nature in an advanced way. Since she was poor, female, and–in her own view–physically unattractive, she had limited social prospects. She was drawn to investigating herself as if she were purely an instance of the human condition:

She saw herself as blocked not by individual and therefore removable obstacles, but by everything, by the world. Out of her hopeless struggle with indefiniteness arose her “inclination to generalize.” Reason grasped conceptually what could not be specifically defined, thereby saving her …. By abstraction reason diverted attention from the concrete; it transformed the yearning to be happy into a “passion for truth”; it taught “pleasures” which had no connection with the personal self (p. 59)

But there were reasons that she was so frustrated, and they were not inevitable features of human existence. These reasons included sexism and antisemitism. They explained some of what Varnhagen found when she looked within: her own bitter memories.

While you introspect, Arendt says, everything can feel calm and free. “The one unpleasant feature is that memory itself perpetuates the present, which otherwise would only touch the soul fleetingly. As a consequence of memory, therefore, one subsequently discovers that outer events, have a degree of reality that is highly disturbing” (p. 55).

Arendt uses “world” in a Heideggerian sense, which I think she will retain throughout her life. The “world” is the web of relationships into which we are born as human beings:

Relationships and conventions, in their general aspects, are as irrevocable as nature. A person probably can defy a single fact by denying it, but not that totality of facts which we call the world. In the world one can live if one has a station, a place on which one stands, a position to which one belongs. … In the end the world always has the last word because one can introspect only into one’s own self, but not out of it again (p. 58)

Arendt argues that Varnhagen gradually realized that she had a specific place in a specific world. Supposedly, her dying words were: “What a history! —A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. … The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed” (p. 49). She had understood, in short, that had never been free in her inner life or in her conversations and correspondence with friends and lovers. But she had been a particular person in a specific place and time, and this had given her life meaning.

For Arendt, then, a good life must involve addressing the kinds of social injustices that made Varnhagen suffer–not simply to remedy or mitigate these injustices, but because an active and ethical engagement with the “world” is a better form of freedom than the one that is promised by introspection.

Sources: I quote Marcus Aurelius from Gregory Hays’ translation, and Heidegger from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude 1,1,16a., translated by McNeill and Walker. I quote Arendt’s own English version of her Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess from The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000).

See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; introspect to reenchant the inner life; The Art of Solitude; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; etc.

Hannah Arendt seminar

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Below is the syllabus of the seminar on Hannah Arendt that I will teach this semester. (I’d still accept suggestions!) I’ve removed all the practical information except for my policy on AI, just in case that’s useful for other teachers.

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) personally experienced some of the great events of the 20th century, interacted with many famous contemporaries, and offered challenging arguments about totalitarianism and democracy, migration and human rights, Jewishness and Israel, modernity and science, feminism, activism, and the role of intellectuals. We will critically discuss her texts, her life, and her context and relate her ideas to other thinkers and issues of the present.

Objectives: To build an understanding of Arendt’s own thought in its context; To analyze and evaluate conflicting arguments about the major philosophical, historical, and strategic issues that confronted her; To learn to make stronger normative and interpretive arguments in writing and discussion.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy: This is a humanities seminar, and the entire rationale is that we can learn by intensively reading complex texts, discussing them with peers, and producing our own writing in response. Extensive research shows that “deep reading” has educational and spiritual benefits, while substituting AI summaries for reading causes substantial brain decay. I am not sure whether instructors can currently detect the use of AI or penalize it. It is your responsibility to learn in college, and you will not learn if you substitute AI tools for reading and writing. That said, I do not object to querying large language models (LLMs) for additional information and insights about the assigned texts and topics; using AI tools to translate texts that would otherwise be inaccessible to you; or even writing papers in your native language and using an AI tool to translate your work into English. Further discussion of whether and how to use AI is welcome.

Thursday, Jan 15: Introduction

During class, we will watch portions of a 1963 German television interview of Hannah Arendt to get a feel for her personality. And we will read and discuss Arendt’s “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”), an early poem.

Tuesday, Jan 20: Martin Heidegger

  • Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review, October 21, 1971. (Note that Arendt writes this when she is 65.)
  • Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1930), trans. W. McNeil & N. Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), §16-17, §18c, §19-36

(Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Heidegger and Arendt: Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and the politics of remembrance,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.2 (2002): 171-182.

Thursday, Jan 22: Being Jewish, being a woman

  • Watch the PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.
  • Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, excerpts, and a letter from Arendt to Jaspers dated 9/7/1952, both in The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000), pp. 49-72
  • Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale 1982), pp. 56-59 (a portion of chapter 2)

Tuesday, Jan 27: Statelessness, migration, and human rights

  • Arendt, “We Refugees.” (1943)
  • Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”). You can skim or skip the historical detail from the bottom of p. 269 the last line on p. 276.

Not assigned, but useful if you want to focus on this topic: Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? Download Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 297–310

Thursday, Jan 29: Nazism and Stalinism I

  • Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapters 11 and 12

Tuesday, Feb 3: Nazism and Stalinism II

  • Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 13

Thursday, Feb 5: How she uses history

  • Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 
  • Arendt, “The Modern Concept of Histor., The Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 570–90. You may read only pp. 585-590 (from “It has frequently been asserted that modern science was born when attention shifted from the search after the ‘What’ to the investigation of ‘How …” to the end).
  • David Luban, “Hannah Arendt and the Primacy of Narrative,” in Luban, Legal Modernism (University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp, 179-206
  • Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin, The Review of Politics, Jan., 1953, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1953), pp. 76-84 

[Additional recommended reading for anyone who wants to write about Arendt on historical narrative: Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative.” Social Research (1990): 167-196]

Tuesday, Feb 10: German war guilt

Thursday, Feb 12: From Europe to America

  • Arendt to Jaspers, letter dated 1/29/1946
  • Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021), pp. 97-117
  • Watch the 1963 interview and/or read it in Baehr, pp. 3-22. Note pp. 20-21 on coming to the USA.

Tuesday, Feb 17: Modernity 1: Public and Private

  • Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 7-11, 17-21, 22-78

 [Additional recommended article for anyone who wants to write about the public/private distinction in Arendt: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice on relating private and public,” in Amy Allen (ed) Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2017) 89-114.]

Thursday, Feb 19 : no class (substituting Monday schedule)

Tuesday, Feb 24: Modernity 2: Action

 Thursday, Feb 26: Modernity 2: Political Freedom

  • Arendt, The Human Condition, 305-325
  • Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power,” translated by Thomas McCarthy, Social Research (1977): 3-24.

Tuesday, March 3: Israel

  • Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time” Commentary. (1948)
  • Young-Bruehl, pp. 137-9, 173-81 (portions of chapter 4 and chapter 5)

Thursday, March 5: The Adolf Eichmann case I

  • Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3-67 (chapters I-V), 90–95

Tuesday, March 10: Adolf Eichmann II

  • Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 112-150 (VII and VIII). 

Thursday, March 12: Adolf Eichmann III

  • Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 274-279 (chapter XV and epilogue)
  • Letters to Mary McCarthy, 9/20/1963 and Gershom Scholem 7/24/1963

[Additional recommended texts for anyone writing about Eichmann:

  • Sandra K. Hinchman, “Common Sense & Political Barbarism in the Theory of Hannah Arendt.” Polity 17.2 (1984): 317-339.
  • Peg Birmingham, “Holes of oblivion: The banality of radical evil.” Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 80-103.]

(March 14-22 = Spring Break)

Tuesday, March 24: The importance of truth (in the wake of the Eichmann controversy)

  • Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, pp. 227-264

Thursday, March 26: Republicanism and revolution I

  • Arendt, On Revolution, 1963 (excerpts)
  • Counterpoint: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 1-50 (or less)

 Tuesday, March 31: Republicanism and revolution II

  • Arendt, On Revolution (excerpts)
  • Counterpoint: Christopher H. Achen, and Larry M. Bartels, “Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government” (2017)

 Thursday, April 2: Feminism and the public/private distinction

  • Amy Allen, “Solidarity after identity politics: Hannah Arendt and the power of feminist theory.” Philosophy & Social Criticism1 (1999): 97-118.
  • [Consider:] Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations?: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics. Routledge, 2002, excerpts (hard copy in Tisch Library, not online)

Tuesday, April 7:  The Civil Rights Movement

  • Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), in Baehr, pp. 231-246
  • Young-Bruehl, pp. 308-18 (a portion of chapter 8)
  • The response from Ralph Ellison, discussion in Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers

Thursday, April 9: Violence in the 1960s

  • Arendt, On Violence (1970) excerpts
  • Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Robert B. Silvers, Mitchell Goodman and Susan Sontag (debate), “The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?(1967) 
  • Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 173-5 (on Denmark), and 230-33 (on German resistance)
  • Chad Kautzer, “Political Violence and Race: A Critique of Hannah Arendt.Links to an external site.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture3 (2019)

 Tuesday, April 14: Education

[Peter Levine is away]

  • Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Between Past and Future, pp. 173-96
  • The final exam. for Hannah Arendt’s 1961 course]

 Tuesday, April 21: Science

  • Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space.” The American Scholar (1963): 527-540.
  • Arendt, “Prologue,” The Human Condition (pp. 1-6)

Thursday, April 23: Final discussion

The Way of Skepticism

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Here is a pitch for a book that I have finished drafting, with the title The Way of Skepticism:

In 2025, I was invited to give philosophy lectures in Kyiv, Ukraine (on the day of the third-worst bombardment in the war so far) and then at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank. In both settings, I spoke as a philosopher and essentially made the following argument:

There are no answers to questions that have sometimes been thought to provide a basis for overall happiness, such as “What is the purpose of human life?”

You might expect that someone who teaches or writes about philosophy will offer ideas that you should believe. Famous philosophers and religious traditions have recommended various beliefs as the foundations of a happy life.

But beliefs are easily overrated, especially when we use them to assess a person’s authority or character. A strong attachment to beliefs can distort judgment, inhibit listening, and substitute for action. Disagreement about beliefs produces unnecessary distress and hostility. On the other hand, suspending the search for such truths can bring valuable relief if we renounce the pursuit in a wise way.

We can experience good things, such as pleasure and justice. These experiences are real enough, but there is no reason to presume that they fit neatly together, so that (for example) being fair to others will surely bring inner peace.

Paying close attention to particular people and animals, both oneself and others, reinforces skepticism about general matters, such as the purpose or the nature of life, by reminding us how different everything must seem to creatures who have different bodies and who experience different circumstances.

A focus on individual people and animals also encourages compassion for them. Genuine compassion spurs action on their behalf. And a life infused with compassion and beneficial action is better than one without those things, although it does not guarantee happiness.

There is an important difference between fact and error. Valuable information can be discovered, stored, shared, and revised collectively and can guide action. The problem is not knowledge (a social good) but individuals’ adherence to beliefs.

Skepticism does not imply that reality is only what can be empirically observed. Human understanding is limited, and reality exceeds what our minds can grasp. Skepticism can coexist with religious faith. It is not a theory of reality but a practical way for finite, fallible beings to navigate a world of suffering.

Skepticism about beliefs does not imply moral relativism. We make good and bad decisions. Ethical responsibility arises most powerfully in face-to-face encounters with other people. Being present with others creates moral demands. Decisions to act or to be present should arise from invitations and relationships. We should be committed to people (and animals), not to beliefs.

My lectures had mixed success, for reasons that I discuss in the manuscript. In neither setting would it have been appropriate for me to share a much longer argument. In the book, I offer more detail.

First, I ground the general points summarized above in a rich intellectual tradition. This tradition begins with the ancient Skeptical School (represented by Pyrrho of Ellis and Sextus Empiricus). Their arguments were intriguingly similar to portions of the classical Buddhist Pali Canon, which I also interpret and discuss.

Renaissance authors rediscovered Sextus’ work, and Michel de Montaigne developed a version of Greek Skepticism while drawing on other sources and adding his own insights. Montaigne did not know anything about Buddhism, but his commitment to compassion made his form of Skepticism resemble the Pali Canon as much as it resembled Sextus. Montaigne’s Essays suggested Skeptical themes to Shakespeare, which echo in John Keats and several modern authors for whom either Montaigne or Shakespeare have been touchstones.

I believe that my position benefits from close readings of Montaigne and some of his predecessors and influences, because these thinkers are complex and persuasive.

Second, the ancient Skeptics did not simply offer arguments in favor of Skepticism. (In fact, as they acknowledged, an argument against belief would risk self-contradiction). More usefully, they practiced and taught methods or meditative exercises that could reduce our level of belief in beneficial ways. Sextus offers several lists of these “modes” (the standard translation of his word for such methods), reaching a maximum of 10 in one text. Montaigne practices some of Sextus’ modes and discusses other ways that he has pursued equanimity.

In modern European authors and in some Mahayana Buddhist texts, I have found mental exercises that are fundamentally consistent with ancient Skepticism but more appropriate for our period. The bulk of my manuscript presents ten such modern Skeptical “modes”:

  1. Don’t strive to be original but think vividly. This method involves acknowledging that our best beliefs are often clichés (which is a specifically modern complaint). Seeing a belief as a cliché reduces our attachment to it without making us negate it.
  2. Adjust your relationship with the past and the future. This method involves identifying problematic mental states, such as dread and nostalgia, that depend on beliefs about time that we can challenge.
  3. Learn from shifting moods. Sextus and Montaigne try to shake our commitment to beliefs by showing that they depend on the mood that we happen to be in. Science offers methods that are supposed to combat all form of subjective bias, including moods; however, science cannot reveal what is good or right. Drawing on Heidegger, I argue that we can derive specific insights from each mood (because it is one way for us to be in the world), while also loosening our commitment to the beliefs associated with any given mood.
  4. Appreciate being oneself. Montaigne is a great student of his own experience, a phenomenologist before that word was coined. He gains happiness from this exploration. (“There is no description so hard, nor so profitable, as the description of a man’s own self.”) The goal of Do-It-Yourself phenomenology is not to discover general truths that will make us happy or better once we believe in them. Instead, DIY phenomenology can reveal complexities, mysteries, and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.
  5. Consider the boundaries of experience. Sextus and Montaigne emphasize that the world that we consider objective is actually contingent on whatever senses, values, and reasoning powers we happen to have. A different creature must inhabit a different world. The Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), William Blake, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein derived consolation from realizing that the world infinitely exceeds our capacity to know it; and we can learn from them.
  6. Don’t try to be perfect but appreciate the turn toward it. Let’s define a “sublime” experience as something far better than our usual life. From a classical Skeptical perspective, sublime experiences are neither true (revealing that the world is really better than it seems) nor false (as if we merely imposed our wishes on reality). Sublime experiences are simply experiences among others, but they are much more enjoyable. Therefore, we should seek them out.
  7. Recognize others in sublime experiences:Many modern views of the sublime are highly individualistic. They assume that anything of spiritual value must be timeless and can be appreciated by a lone individual who is in the right frame of mind. But we always learn what to value from other people, both living and dead. A sublime experience depends on the particular people who have influenced its creator and its audiences. This is a Skeptical point, suggesting that we would find different things beautiful and moving if we had different backgrounds. But it also gives us an opportunity to be grateful to the people who have shaped our values, and this gratitude can deepen our sublime experiences.
  8. Do things for their own sake. Many authors and even whole traditions offer the same valid advice: focus on doing the right thing, not on whether it has the intended outcomes. Derive satisfaction from the act, not its goal. I justify this advice in a Skeptical way and turn it into a “mode.” First try to identify morally good actions and then view them as intrinsically valuable ways of being, not as means to any end.
  9. Be compassionate (not sympathetic). Montaigne is a great proponent and exemplar of compassion. Properly understood, compassion is not a mirroring of someone else’s emotions, so that if they are angry, we must also feel anger. It is a specific emotion that can be positive (or at least calm) and must result in action. I draw on Buddhist texts and Emmanuel Levinas to present a view of compassion that is compatible with Skepticism.
  10. Decide what to do in conversation. Perhaps the most serious criticism of Skepticism is that it may discourage action. If we have no beliefs, then why should we do anything? Yet many people suffer, and we should help them. As Sextus and Montaigne emphasize, we have limited intellectual capacities and unreliable motives. Besides, as individuals, we cannot accomplish much. To put it bluntly, we are both stupid and weak. But we do have other people around us. By listening, talking, and working with others and reflecting on the results, we can make ourselves at least a bit wiser and stronger. Even when a group errs, we are at least in solidarity with the other members.

We live in a period of polarization and conflict, including several cruel wars. These challenges have political causes and require political solutions. Becoming a Skeptic is not a solution to such problems, but it is a way for an individual to navigate our current world with a dose of sanity and responsibility.

This book is also an argument for practicing the humanities–the disciplines that interpret human culture–to improve one’s inner life and one’s relationships with other human beings and animals. Reading for pleasure is in decline. The academic humanities are under political attack for being (allegedly) leftwing and economically unprofitable. And reading and writing risk being replaced by artificial intelligence. This book argues that engagement with texts can improve the inner life, but it also justifies other modes, including ones that require no texts.

(Revised for clarity on 1/7.) See also: three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; consider the octopus; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; notes from the West Bank; etc.

the ham actor and the psychopath: Adorno on Trump and Musk

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It is not my style to apply psychoanalytic categories to political phenomena. I generally want to take explicit political claims at face value, whether I find them appealing or awful. I see this as a way of treating other people as fellow citizens. Besides, I have little background in psychoanalysis and sometimes doubt whether it can make falsifiable claims about politics.

However, if you want a critical Freudian interpretation of people like Trump and Musk (or Putin, or Modi) and their supporters, I can recommend a classic text: Theodor Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).

Adorno claims that many people in capitalist societies have “a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency.” I think this means that people have been taught to form personal desires and to strive to get what they want. But they also experience “the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.” In short, they are not as successful as they expect to be. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object” (p. 126).

This object is a leader. “Only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father. This is the ultimate root of the otherwise enigmatic personalization of fascist propaganda, its incessant plugging of names and supposedly great men, instead of discussing objective causes” (124).

Three features enable a leader to draw support:

First, the leader presents himself as similar to his followers. “While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person” (127). He even demonstrates “startling symptoms of inferiority,” such as a “resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths.” (I thought about Trump and Musk, respectively, when I read that sentence.)

Adorno explains why people tolerate–or even prefer–their leader to have such flaws: it makes it easier to identify with him. “He resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority” (132). “The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” In short, the leader aims to be a “great little man” (127).

Second, people gain pleasure from loving a leader who demonstrates little or no love. “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches, namely the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give,’ as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial, is thus being accounted for: the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love.” This combination is compelling because the followers identify with the leader and thereby feel liberated from having to give or care.

Or perhaps the leader vaguely expresses love for his followers (without being accountable to them), while denouncing more general love. Adorno quotes Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922): “Even today, the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent” (127)

Third, the leader enables the followers to identify with each other by expressing hatred for weak outsiders. The followers do not deeply believe the premises of the hatred but gain pleasure from participating together in ritualistic expressions of it. “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance” (136-7).

There is more to Adorno’s account. For example, the mass’s desire is libidinal and erotic, but this truth must be concealed because it would be embarrassing. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends” (123).

Also, the decline of serious religious belief helps fascist leaders, because actual religions teach demanding ideas, including self-sacrificial love. But once religion becomes an identity label, religious ideas no longer stand in the way of politics.

the division between the believers and nonbelievers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the “sheep and goat” device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages (129).

Finally, Adorno denies that fascism has caused these outcomes or that a fascist leader is ultimately responsible for them. “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue” (135). Rather, for Adorno, a fascist demagogue is a tool by which capitalist interests control the masses.

(I am not committed to either the Freudianism or the Marxism of Adorno’s account, but it rings lots of bells today.)

Source: Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’”[1951] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982). See also: the troubling implications of factor analysis for democracy (with notes on Adorno); philosophy of boredom; what if the people don’t want to rule?;

20th-century political philosophy syllabus

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I will be teaching 20th-century political philosophy as a new course this spring. One could choose many different readings for such a course. My list reflects my own interests, to some extent, plus some advocacy by the prospective students. Just as an example, Tufts’ political theory students tend to study Nietzsche intensively, so I have omitted Nietzsche from the “background” part of this syllabus.

Jan. 16: Introduction to the course (we’ll look together at “W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”)

Part I: Background

(A review of five major schools of thought that were already well developed before 1914 and that most subsequent authors knew and addressed.)

Jan. 21: Liberalism

  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 1 and 2

Jan. 23: Liberalism

  • Mill (1859), chapters 3-5

Jan. 28: Marxism

Jan. 30: Psychoanalysis

  • A dream from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). [It is the dream about Count Thun, discussed by Carl Schorske, and I provide a version with my own explanatory notes.]
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), chapters 3, 7 and 8. (The rest is recommended but not required.)

Feb. 4: Modernity

  • Max Weber, Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittic. New York: Bedminster Press, 1922/1968, excerpts from around pp. 223 and pp. 956ff.
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (1930), pp. 13-38, 102-125
  • [Not required, but an interesting take: Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity (2001)]

Feb 6: Faith and/or nation

PART II: Responses

Feb. 11: Friedrich Hayek 

  • The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 1, pp. 11-21, chapter  4, pp. 54-71and postscript, “Why I am not a conservative”
  • Chapter 2, Creative Powers of a Free Civilization, 18 pages
  • “Errors of Constructivism,” from The Market and Other Orders, 19 pages 
  • “Engineers and Planners,” from Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, 13 pages

Feb. 13: Isaiah Berlin

  • “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Feb. 18: Marxism after Marx

Feb. 25: Fascism

  • Benito Mussolini (1883-1945): The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
  • Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 19-22, 25-52, 53-58, 78-79

Feb. 27: Pragmatism I: John Dewey

March. 4:  Pragmatism II: other authors

  • Sidney Hook, “The Democratic Way of Life” 
  • Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994), Chapter 7: Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic

March 6: W.E.B. DuBois

  • Black Reconstruction in America (1935), pp. 55-83, 182-202, 210-219, 711-731

March 11: The Frankfurt School

March 25: Hannah Arendt

  • Excerpts from On Revolution  (1963)

March 27: Hannah Arendt

  • The Human Condition, chapters II and V

March April 1: Simone de Beauvoir

  • The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (1949/2011), pp. 23-39, 83-5, 330-360, 848-863

April 3: Frantz Fanon

  • The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox (1961/2004), the preface by J.-P. Sartre and Parts I-IV and the Conclusion.

April 8: Michel Foucault

  • Excerpts from History of Sexuality and/or Discipline and Punish [To be selected]

April 10: late Foucault

  • “What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth 
  • “What Is Critique?” in James Schmidt, From What Is Enlightenment?
  • Course Descriptions from the Collège de France 
  • “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”
  • “Technologies of the Self (pp. 145-169) in The Essential Foucault
  • “The Subject and Power” (pp. 126-144 in The Essential Foucault
  • “Truth and Power” (1976) in The Essential Foucault   pp. 300-18

April 15: Jürgen Habermas

  • “The Public Sphere” 
  • “Legitimation Crisis”

April 17:  Habermas

  • Between Facts and Norms, pp. 17-23  and 38-41 and pp. 359-379 

April 22: Left open to pursue gaps we have identified (or else texts from the Habermas-Foucault debate]

April 24: Concluding discussion

“Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.

Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:

Complaint

Oh, the days they pass by uselessly
Like a never settled game,
The hours pressing ruthlessly,
Each play of pain the same. 

Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away. 
And I sing the old songs’ first lines—
Not whatever else they say. 

And no child in a dream could move
In a more predetermined way. 
No old one could more surely prove
That a life is long and gray. 

But never will sorrow soothe away
Old dreams, nor the insight of youth. 
Never will it make me give away 
The bliss of lovely truth.

 -- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)

This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.

For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.

Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.

Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.

Source: P. Levine, “Boredom at the Border of Philosophy: Conceptual and Ethical Issues.” Frontiers in Sociology, July 2023 See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; on the moral dangers of cliché (partly about Arendt); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; Philip, Hannah, and Heinrich: a Play; don’t confuse bias and judgment; etc.

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