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

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree: Book 19 of 2022

For more than a year, I have read this little book a page or two at a time.  It is a review of Ancient Greek grammar for Francophone students.  Each page I read had me looking up a dozen words in French.  The Greek was easier because every grammar in every language uses common words with regular declensions as examples.   

So it was easy to puzzle out the noun being declined or the verb being conjugated.  

I occasionally read books like this because if I read a French Grammar or an Ancient Greek Grammar written in English, I would be thinking in English.  Reading about Greek in French keeps me from reverting to English meanings.  I can look at French in terms of Greek and vice versa.  

Is this method effective?  I don't know.  But it presents me with linguistic puzzles I would not see any other way.  

First eighteen books of 2022:

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

A Veteran Talks About His Family at the Dick Winters Leadership Memorial

Dick Winters Leadership Memorial, Ephrata, Pennsylvania

On Memorial Day I visit the grave and the memorial statue of Major Dick Winters who commanded Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from D-Day to the end of World War II.  I wear my Army Dress Blue Uniform, one of two days each year I wear it--the other is Veterans Day.

This year, a couple about my age were walking by and took a picture of me in front of the statue. We talked for a while about the draft, national service, and  what an amazing guy Dick Winters was.  As we spoke another veteran showed up. He wore a hat indicating he served in Korea during the Cold War.  As it turned out from 1962-64.  When the couple left, the veteran, Don Kitchen, said he wanted to tell me a story, but he needed to sit.  

Donald Kitchen

There are commemorative bricks in front of the statue. Don pointed at the row of bricks near where I was standing.  Four were men with the name Kitchen:

Don talked briefly about his Dad the WWI veteran and a little more about his brothers who fought in WWII. One was a paratrooper, the other flew 35 missions in a B-24 Liberator bomber.

But he really wanted to tell me about going to the 50th anniversary of the landing at Normandy on June 6.  He went as a member of the Pocket Testament League, a group based in Lititz, Pa., that distributes the Gospel of John and other Bible books to soldiers and students and others around the world.  

As he talked about the ceremony, he mentioned the many world leaders were at the ceremony, including the American President at the time, whom he referred to only as "Clinton." 

In 1994, a chorus of Conservatives and Evangelicals said President Clinton was unfit for office. Character was all that mattered and Bill Clinton was a draft dodger and had paramours.  The Falwells, the Grahams, Dobson, Robertson and lesser lights of Christendom condemned Clinton incessantly. 

The Perfect Moral Relativist

In 1994, the conservatives, Don Kitchen among them, were right about character. When Edmund Burke defined conservatism the character of the leader was at the center of what was necessary for a well-run city, state or country.  

So I asked Don about Trump and utter lack of character he demonstrated by cheating in business, paying off porn stars, saying on camera he was entitled to grab women wherever and whenever he wanted to, and then he bragged on TV about dodging the draft: according to Trump, Don and I and all who served during the draft were idiots. 

Don responded that Trump did "have some problems" (the same problems as Clinton, plus more, with the amplifier turned up to 11), "but his policies are pure gold."

Fifty years ago, I heard from Evangelicals I served with that Moral Relativism was the poison that caused the wars in Europe, the rise of the Nazis and the Commies, and that those who follow the Gospel believed in an absolute standard of righteousness.  

My first roommate on active duty, Don Brandt, told me that.  I would have sworn on a stack of his Bibles that he believed what he said.  But like Don Kitchen, when we talked in 2020, Don Brandt supported Trump completely. His immorality was not an issue. 

The moral relativism that was the greatest danger to America in the last century according to conservative Christians, is the public position of Trump-worshipping Americans who call themselves Christians.