Veteran AF: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt: Book 20 of 2022

Friday, June 3, 2022

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt: Book 20 of 2022

This book is on my list because it was the subject of the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center for politics and Humanities at Bard College. I had tried reading Kant's philosophy and made the 200-year-old joke, "I just Kant......."

But Hannah Arendt writing about Kant is a lot more interesting, at least to me, than the writings of the reclusive German philosopher himself. This book is a sort of stand in for what should have been Book 3 of The Life of the Mind, which the VRG read earlier this year.

Arendt wrote Book 1, Thinking, and Book 2, Willing, in the years preceding her death on Thursday, 4 December 1975. On the preceding Sunday, 30 November, she put a sheet of paper in her typewriter and wrote Judging. She also wrote two epigraphs.

The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1977. Since her death, Arendt scholars have wondered what would be in the final book. Judging was clearly very important to Arendt, especially in the context of politics. I would love to have read Book 3. The things she wrote about judging were lucid and delightful. In a 1971 lecture she discussed the difference between thinking and judging:

The faculty of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, "this is wrong," "this is beautiful," etc.,is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated in a way similar to the way consciousness and conscience are interconnected. If thinking, the two-in-one soundless dialogue, actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think. the manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And indeed this may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.

The third book of The Life of the Mind would have been brilliant.

First nineteen books of 2022:

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen