The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of "Between Past and Future" by Hannah Arendt

When we say history is written by the victors, we are assuming or accusing the historians of writing propaganda.  But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in the 2nd chapter of Between Past and Future history began with Homer's impartial view--writing about greatness and courage on both sides of the tragic war that lead to the founding of Rome by the defeated.  

Here is Arendt on impartiality in history in Ancient Greece:

Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and so to praise the glory of Hector no less than the greatness of Achilles. This Homeric impartiality as it is echoed by Herodotus who set out to prevent “the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's own side and one's own people, which up to our own days characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat which moderns have felt expresses the “objective” judgment of history itself and does not permit it to interfere with what is judged to be worthy of immortalizing praise. Somewhat later, and most magnificently expressed in Thucydides, there appears in Greek historiography still another powerful element that contributes to historical objectivity. It could come to the foreground only after long experience in polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk, the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond to the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—in the way the world appeared and opened up to him δοκει μοι, “it appears to me,” from which comes δοξα, or “opinion”—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learn to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. The speeches in which Thucydides makes articulate the standpoints and interests of the warring parties, are still a living testimony to the extraordinary degree of this object activity.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, pg. 51-2

I wrote about the Preface of Between Past and Future here.

Quoting Hannah Arendt: Not Easy, but No Excuse for Fake Quotes

On Friday, 6 September, the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will begin the discussion of "Between Past and Future" first published in 1961. 

Recently, Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic direct of the HAC, wrote an excellent essay about the problem of made up quotes of Hannah Arendt and by extension all authors.  He is right. Read it here. 

Last month an insightful essay on this book was published on the HAC site.  It begins with a quote from Arendt's preface to the work that I marked as "theme" in the margin.  Here is the essay by Mark Aloysius, S.J.

The opening quote on the essay shows why quoting Arendt can be so difficult.  The 70-word sentence has three independent clauses, with three dependent clauses. Reading this sentence made me glad I am old enough to have diagrammed sentences in elementary school. The quote is an entirely appropriate opening for an essay on the HAC web site, but not the kind of thing that would get likes on TikTok or Snapchat. 

Here is the quote:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

One of my many reasons for being a member of the HAC is the discussions that guide the reading of Arendt's complex thought.  After reading Arendt's preface, I transcribed the paragraph that the above quote is in. The 263-word paragraph has just five sentences. One is a simple16-word sentence quoting William Faulkner.  The other four have 60, 36, 70 and 81 words.  

The relatively snappy 36-word sentence has two dependent clauses.  The closing 81-word sentence has two independent clauses and four dependent clauses.  Arendt was not writing for social media.  

In a decade and a half of reading Arendt, the former ad writer in me has never found her quotable, but I have been able to discuss with enthusiasm what she has said with people who care about the human condition (to make a pun) in all of its complexity.

Here is the paragraph I transcribed:

"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid of in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.  Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a  continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it's broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.  Only because man is inserted into time, and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it in Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle of the body which gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes."

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011.  Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries.  The book was much more vivid in this reading. 

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts.  Later in the year the essays were published as a book.

Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust.  She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.  

The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the  cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.  

In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war.  In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better.  More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.  

Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year.  Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.  

The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil.  The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann.  Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).

The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Breakout Sessions at the Hannah Arendt Conference 2023: Friendship & Politics

In addition to the general sessions at the 2023 Hannah Arendt Conference, I enjoyed the breakout sessions. I wrote about some of the general sessions at the conference here.

Jana Mader

The first was a session titled: Is Reading a Poem an Act of Friendship? led by Ann Lauterbach and Jana Mader.

Ann Lauterbach

The session began with Ann Lauterbach talking about her work, particularly her eleventh collection of poetry Door published this year.  She also read from her work. 

Jana Mader, Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center, guided the discussion on poetry as an act of friendship. I chose this breakout session because of the group I formed on Camp Adder in Iraq 2009 to read Inferno and Aeneid.  

Mader is also the host of the new podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz. 

After the breakout session, I talked with Stephanie Frampton, a literature professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research area is Ancient literature so she was delighted to talk about soldiers reading Virgil and Dante. 

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

I went to a second breakout session titled: Friendships and Federations of Care: Forms, Alliances, and Multiverses led by Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director and director.  During a discussion about spaces we learn and teach in someone asked about unusual places in which we have taught classes.  

I was the only one in the room who had taught a class inside a tank turret.  

My classroom in 1976 an M60A1 Patton tank on 

the south gunnery range, Fort Carson, Colorado.

Friendship & Politics: 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College

Two of my favorite subjects in life and in philosophy are Friendship and Politics. 

So I was delighted to attend the 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. This year’s title was: 

Friendship & Politics.

Roger Berkowitz

The opening talk was by Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center. He talked about Arendt's view of friendship as the center of a good life and critical to functioning politics.  

Esther Perel

There were so many good discussions, all in person and available on Zoom.  The one that most filled Olin Hall was on Friday morning.  Psychotherapist, international best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter Esther Perel discussed the Power of Friendship with psychologist and professor Marisa Franco, also a best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter.  Several groups of students filed in just before the Perel and Franco spoke.  

Marisa Franco

Franco talked about her recent book Platonic. She talked about the importance of friendship then Esther Perel asked the audience questions about their relationships and the importance of friendship in their lives.  

Niobe Way

Niobe Way made another high-energy presentation about her work on the crisis of connection in modern life and the crisis of masculinity.  She Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. 

Earlier this year I attended the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center. 

I went to two of the several breakout sessions.  More about those in the next post. 

Hannah Arendt Center Summer Social: Preview of Fall Conference on Friendship and Politics

This week I went to the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center on the campus of Bard College.  The campus is set in rolling wooded hills on the east bank of the Hudson River between Albany and New York City. I arrived just after a short downpour so the weather was cool and cloudy. Tables had been set up for dinner outside, but the wet tables meant the event was indoors.

Christine Gonzalez Stanton, 

Executive Director, Hannah Arendt Center

As soon as I entered the large old dwelling that houses the HAC I was greeted by Christine Gonzalez Stanton, Executive Director of the HAC and the kind of enthusiastic person every organization would love to have in charge of operations.  She signed me up for the book raffle and pointed me toward the appetizers and drinks in the kitchen. 

As soon as I entered the kitchen I met Ken Landauer in person.  We had been in one of the smaller Zoom groups discussing Hannah Arendt's lectures on Kant.  Ken makes zero-waste furniture in a nearby town.  The website of his company FN Furniture lists Ken as "Chairperson" of the business noted for making things to sit on. In person he is even more dryly funny as he is on Zoom.

Ken Landauer in one of his chairs

I have been a member of the HAC for several years and attended three annual conferences in person. Since 2018, I have joined weekly meetings of the Virtual Reading Group of the HAC.  As many as 200 people participate in these 90-minute calls on Friday afternoons year-round with seasonal breaks.  At the the Summer Social and the Annual Conference I have met many people who were only faces on Zoom.  

The VRG format is a 20-30 minute introduction of the reading followed by a discussion. The discussion leader is the Founder and Academic Director of the HAC Roger Berkowitz.  I sometimes stay on line for the discussions, but I always listen to Roger's introductions of the reading.  Here is a short clip of Roger welcoming us to the social:

After the introduction, we walked through the woods up a small hill to the Bard College Cemetery. Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher are buried there and have small markers next to each other.  

Hannah Arendt's grave in the Bard College Cemetery. 

We all placed stones on Arendt's grave. As with so many things in Arendt's life and work, her death was controversial. She wanted to be cremated, not a usual practice in 1975 for Jews. Her wishes were carried despite resistance from a relative. Her ashes are interred in the Bard Cemetery.  

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After the walk to the cemetery, we went to the library. Arendt's personal library is in a special collection in the Bard Library.  Four scholars connected to the Bard and the HAC made short presentations about their work.  

Jana Mader, with some of the books 

from Arendt's library.

First was Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. She will present at the HAC fall conference on the friendship between Arendt and the poet W.H. Auden.  Arendt credits Auden with teaching her English and helping to edit the works she wrote in English. The poet Robert Lowell was also a friend of Arendt. Mader put books with inscriptions to greetings to her by the poets on display. 

Born in Germany, Mader teaches literature at Bard and is a writer and artist.  She just had a book published that made me wish (again) that I could read German fluently. Her book Natur und Nation cooperatively analyzes 19th century literature inspired by the Hudson River with texts inspired by the Rhine River. In October her curated walks to women's history in New York City will be published, this one in English.

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Next Nicholas Dunn spoke about Hannah Arendt's lectures and writing about Emmauel Kant.  He talked about a conference he is hosting on June 20 with the author of the book Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner.  

Nicholas Dunn, postdoctoral fellow at HAC

Dunn talked about the way unique Arendt looked at Kant's thought and some of the response to her views.  Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative. 

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Jana Bacevic is a visiting scholar at the HAC. She led a conference at the HAC earlier this month on the Social Life of the Mind.  She explained Arendt's reading of and view of the The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Dilas, a Yugoslav intellectual. As with the Kant volume, Arendt had a unique perspective on Dilas and his work.  Dilas was jailed when the book was published in 1958 because he sent it to western countries for review.  Foreign Affairs magazine published a one-paragraph review of the book in 1958 that said: 

The manuscript of this book was sent abroad for publication and the author is now in prison as a consequence. It is important both for the quality of its thought and for the fact that it is a root-and-branch criticism of Communism, including Titoism, from within the Party itself. Since he was formerly one of the ranking Party leaders in Jugoslavia, his picture of the Communist monopoly of power is particularly telling, and the indictment is made with a typically Montenegrin lack of restraint. 

 ------

Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in Humanities, was the final speaker.  He announced that his volume in the series Hannah Arendt--Complete Works. Critical Edition will be published this year. He was so happy about the firm publication date that he had the audience chant a call and response of 

"When?"  
"This year!"

He told us each volume of the critical edition includes images of works in Arendt's library that she used for reference in her works.  Underlines, notes, starred items, are all included in the published book along with the text itself. His volume is on Arendt's The Life of the Mind, her last and uncompleted work. She died on the week she was to begin the third volume on judgement.   

Bartscherer talked about some of the complexities of finding and compiling annotations.  Arendt had five copies of Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics: two in Greek, two in English, one in German. She made notes and underlined passages in all of them, on different passages in each book.

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After the library we went back to the HAC building and ate dinner together, a buffet meal set up in the kitchen.  During the dinner I met more people who read and admire Hannah Arendt.  I am very much looking forward to returning for the conference on Friendship and Politics in the fall and possibly the event on Kants lectures next month.  

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt: Book 26 of 2022

Hannah Arendt was very much a public intellectual. She was willing to speak and be interviewed on radio and TV and in public settings.  The interviews collected in this book are from the last decade of her life.  

The first interview occurred on October 28, 1964, with the German TV personality Gunter Gaus. World War II and the Holocaust ended with German Surrender just 19 years before the interview.  Twelve years before that, Hannah Arendt fled to France when persecution of Jews began with Hitler's rise to power.  

The interview covers Arendt's life in Germany, life as a refugee, and as an American scholar.  Arendt and Gaus also talk about the Eichmann trial and Arendt's very controversial reporting on the trial.  

On the rise of Hitler to power she said, 

People often think today that German Jews were shocked in 1933 because Hitler assumed power. As far as I and the people of my generation are concerned, I can say that is a curious misunderstanding. Naturally, Hitler's rise to power was very bad. But it was political. It wasn't personal. We didn't need Hitler's assumption of power to know the Nazis were our enemies! That had been completely evident for at least four years to anyone who wasn't feebleminded. We also knew a large number of the German people were behind them. That could not shock or surprise us in 1933.

Gaus then asks,  

You mean that the shock in 1933 came from the fact that events went from the generally political to the personal?

Arendt responds,

Not even that. Or that too. First of all, the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated. Second...friends "coordinated" or got in line. The problem, the personal problem was not what our enemies did but what our friends did.

Arendt describes an "empty space" that formed around her and other Jews as "friends" followed the Nazi Party and abandoned her and other Jews. 

In an interview in October 1973, shortly before Arendt's death in 1975, she was interviewed by Roger Errera or ORTF TV, France.  In the interview, which covered many topics and was filmed over several sessions, Errera made a comment that Arendt answered and I could see why I was so taken with Arendt's thinking and felt compelled to read all of her major works.

Errera:  

Our century seems to me dominated by a mode of thinking based on historical determinism.

Arendt:  

We don't know the future, everybody acts into the future, and nobody knows what he is doing, because the future is being done. ... Action is a "we" not an I...Now this makes it look as though what actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all of history. Nobody knows what is going to happen simply because so much depends upon an enormous amount of variables; in other words on simple hasard.  On the other hand, if you look back through history retrospectively, then you can--even though all this was contingent--you can tell the story makes sense. How is that possible? How is it possible in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn't have happened otherwise? All the variables have disappeared, and reality has such an overwhelming impact upon us that we cannot be bothered with what is actually an infinite variety of possibilities.

There is much more in these interviews.  If you have already read one or more of her books, these interviews will give you more perspective.   

I first read Hannah Arendt after I returned from deployment to Iraq in 2010. A new friend Sara Rouhi who was studying philosophy said, "You have to read Arendt." I did. Became obsessed and read all of her major works.  Sara was one of the people I was thinking about when I recommended making friends of all ages.

I wrote about her here.  

Books 8 and 20 in the list below are by Arendt. 

I brought up Arendt at a conference I attended in June on the subject of claiming territory in space.

Just before COVID, I went to my first conference at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

First 25 books of 2022:

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

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

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

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

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 8 of 2022: The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

The Life of the Mind is the last of more than a dozen books written by Hannah Arendt in her life.  This book consists of two book published in a single volume, the first part on Thinking, the second on Willing.  She finished Willing on a Sunday and died the following Thursday.  In her typewriter was the first page of the third volume which would have been titled: Judging.

We finished a months-long discussion of the book with a review session. I have been part of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College since 2018 when I attended a conference on anti-Semitism.  The group meets weekly on Zoom with upwards of one hundred participants each week.  

In Thinking Arendt describes the activity of thinking as an inner dialogue. When thinking we withdraw from the world. She opens the book talking about how in our ordinary lives we are in the world of appearances.  We present ourselves to others in what we say, what we wear and what we do. These appearances, to the extent they are within our control, are the way we present ourselves to the world. These appearances may or may not represent reality, either what we believe to be our true selves or what we others believe. 

Arendt talks about how the age of scientific discovery ended the Common Sense people had. In the 16th and 17th Centuries, an avalanche of scientific discoveries overthrew previous understandings of the world.  I read a book last year titled Being Wrong  that has a lovely description of how we can't trust how the world appears.  And the rest of Being Wrong is about how hard we will fight to be right.

Thinking allows us to withdraw from the unreliable world of appearances into a place where we can consider possibilities.  Thinking always involves language, even when we consider images: thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

She contrasts thinking with action: persuading through speech. When we speak, when our goal is clear, there is no inner dialogue. We say the words that will express our thoughts.  

In Willing Arendt shows acts of will to be the opposite of thinking. When we think, we deal with what has happened, with the past. In willing, we decide to project ourselves into the future.  There is an inner dialogue of urging, especially when there is hesitation, but the dialogue is toward an action in the future.  

Arendt shows the development of the concept of will in western thought using those she considers the philosophers of the will.  In her view, the Ancient Greeks never developed a concept of the will.  She credits the Apostle Paul with making clear the function of the will in the life of the mind.  She moves from Paul to Epictetus to Augustine to Aquinas, then has a chapter on Duns Scotus.  A contemporary of Aquinas, Arendt describes the philosophy of Scotus as the "primacy of the will." She credits him as being the most clear philosopher of the will among all those she introduces. I have read nothing of Duns Scotus and found this chapter fascinating.

The best philosophy brings clarity to life. I know so much more about thinking and willing than I did before reading and discussing this book. If you are interested in the Virtual Reading Group, contact the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. 

First seven books of 2022:

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book Report 2020, Book Groups In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing

In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing, I am part of more book groups than ever in my life. Most of the discussions are on Zoom, but also on the phone. Zoom is not as much fun as talking in person, but distance does not matter, so I can connect with people in Germany as easily as here in Lancaster. 

ESL Book Group 

Four years ago, I volunteered with a local ESL (English as a Second Language) group run by Andrea Bailey. While volunteering I met Sarah Gingrich and Emily Burgett. We talked about books sometimes and asked each other about books we read or wanted to read. We ended up reading the same books, then getting together to talk about them. We became with a book about a Russian Holy Fool. The book is a novel titled Lazarus. 

From there we have read books about faith, the plague, and many other topics. Other people have joined depending on the book. In the past two years, Andrea moved to Wisconsin and Emily moved to Massachusetts then joined the Army, but with Zoom we can still meet. This summer, in the midst of the pandemic, we discussed Decameron.  For that discussion, we were joined by Chelsea Pomponio, a professor whose research is in Medieval Italian Literature focusing on Boccaccio. After Decameron our book was Love in the Time of Cholera.  As part of that discussion, Sarah Reisert gave us an impassioned critique of that book as beautifully written sexism, racism, child molesting and promotion of patriarchy.  It was delightful. I love a negative review. In October we talked about Free Will by Mark Balaguer.  The next book is Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. It is not a book about sharing Avacado Toast with Zombies. 

The World Conquest Book Club 

This summer I talked with a former co-worker who returned to the library and museum where we both worked as a director. We were talking about leadership and decided to start a monthly book group to prepare Michelle to go from director of the library to ruling the entire world. We settled on six books that would be the basis of world domination. Naturally, the first was The Prince by Machiavelli. Next was The Art of War by Sun Tzu, followed by Plato’s Republic and a critique of Republic by Karl Popper called The Open Society and its Enemies. In November we will read Lioness a biography of Golda Meir. I have been promised a cabinet position in the Michelle World Government. 

Writers in Residences 

This is a monthly book group organized by the Jewish Community Alliance in Lancaster in cooperation between local Synagogues. This month we are reading Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger. It will be the first time I am participating in this new format. We will discuss each book with the author. So Ariel Burger will be on the Zoom call. In February I will be introducing the author Raffi Berg as we discuss his book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Diving Resort. 

Pre-COVID, the Hillel group on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College had book discussion group during the normal academic year that I would attend when I could. 

The Evolution Roundtable 

This group has met Monday’s at Noon on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College since the early 1990s. Most regular attendees are retired professors, along with some current professors, and members of the community like me. I joined about a decade ago. Each semester the group reads a book about some aspect of evolution. The current book is The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Consciousness. In past years we have read books on many aspects of evolution including The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and, of course, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the late 90s Stephen Jay Gould joined the group for one of its meetings. 

Virtual Reading Group: The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Like the Evolution Roundtable, this group meets weekly to discuss books by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We are currently finishing Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism 1930-1954. The 90-minute discussions have a lot of context and background and different interpretations. The group will start again in January looking at The Promise of Politics followed by the book I most admire of all Arendt’s works The Human Condition. I have written on every page of the copy I read in 2012. 

Torah Study 

Each Saturday morning my Synagogue has Torah Study. The book each week is The Torah. We go through in a cycle determined by the Hebrew calendar. This group is very different on Zoom than in person. In the Synagogue, Rabbi Jack Paskoff clarifies points in the Torah using his white board and explaining often ambiguous Hebrew. On Zoom the Rabbi has to manage the discussion much more than in person. 

The New York CS Lewis Society 

I joined the NYCSL Society in 1979. Since 1980 I have been able to go to monthly meetings once or twice a year to the meetings in NYC. Last year I went to the 50th anniversary celebration on Long Island. I have not been to a meeting this year but hope to join the Zoom meeting this month. It will be a discussion of books by Lewis and G.K.Chesterton written in wartime.

 

Books with Friends

I am also reading books with friends on topics we agree and disagree about. A very sincere friend from Greece who is living in Germany asked me to read a book with him about Trump: Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?

I like Dmitri, so I read the book. I hated the book but discussed why with Dmitri and with our mutual friend Cliff. Following that book, Cliff and I are reading a book on abortion titled Beyond the Binaries by Thomas Horrocks. We will be discussing it next week.     

Another friend, Christina Hu, and I are talking about creating a podcast. This summer we discussed basing the podcast on books about America, its place in the world, and its effect on the world.  We read Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Band of Brothers.  We are now talking about something different than a book-centered podcast.  But the books led to some really good discussions.

                   

SPQR and America

Senatus Populusque Romanus

The Senate and People of Rome

Some of the soldiers I served with in Iraq talked about getting an SPQR tattoo.  "The Senate and People of Rome" was the motto of the Army of the greatest and longest lived empire in the ancient world. Although it's demise can be dated around 472 A.D. it arguably continued through the Roman Church and the empire in Constantinople through the present day.  The Roman form of government had a revival in the high regard our Founding Fathers had for Rome and its government.  The founders of America were sophisticated, multi-lingual men who thought Paris the center of civilization. They were men of the Enlightenment who thought theocracy and fundamentalism just as misguided as we think it is today.

I thought about the tattoo as I started yet another book by Hannah Arendt, a collection of her essays titled Between Past and Future. The introductory essay begins by saying the title is a description of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings.

Janus, the god of beginnings looking forward and back

Janus is the god of the daybreak, of the first day of every month and the first month of the year: JANU-ary.  The doors of the temple of Janus (the "Gates of Janus") were closed in times of peace and open in times of war.

The essay reminded me that the early leaders of Rome, as well as emperors as late as Vespasian,  closed the doors of the temple of Janus with a great celebration marking victory.  The gates were, of course, opened when the Roman army marched to war.

The soldiers in Iraq who thought of getting the SPQR tattoo saw the American Army in Iraq and Afghanistan as a revival of the Roman Army, making us the modern legions of that Army.  With armies, ships, aircraft and space vehicles circling the globe, America is a more global army than Rome could ever have dreamed of.

The soldiers did not know, nor did I at the time, that the SPQR tattoo was not for native Roman soldiers, but for mercenaries, slaves and gladiators.  Tattoos were not for citizens and were considered something for the low classes. 

The Roman government brought the idea of justice for all citizens of an empire into practice for the first time in human history.  That government relied on both law and tradition to continue and thrive for most of a millennia.  It thrived with men like Marcus Aurelius, for me the best of all the emperors, and survived horrors like Nero.

America has not closed the Gates of Janus since August 1945 with the defeat of Imperial Japan shortly after defeating Nazi Germany. With the Cold War beginning in 1947 followed by the Gulf War and the War on Terror, we may never close The Gates of Janus again.