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. 

The Netanyahus: A Funny Novel About A Job Interview Gone Very Wrong. Book 18 of 2022

 A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an interview of American novelist  Joshua Cohen on the Ha'aretz Weekly podcast. Host Allison Kaplan Sommer talked to Cohen about receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton for his novel, and learning about the award while he was in Israel.  

Of that coincidence, Cohen said, “If I thought that I was going to win the Pulitzer for a book called ‘The Netanyahus’ I would have to be crazy to want to be in Israel when that happened.” The interview occurred shortly after Cohen arrived in Israel for the Jerusalem International Book Forum and Writers Festival. 

Cohen said he was still in shock that he had won the biggest literary prize in the United States for a novel “that has characters in it that most Americans can't pronounce their names.”  

Its main character is the brilliant but embittered Professor Benzion Netanyahu, best-known today as the father of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Benzion Netanyahu in the book (and in life) was a demanding, pushy, malcontent.  Cohen said that as he was writing he “kept on thinking of the line in ‘The Big Lebowski’ where the Dude says to Walter: ‘You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.’ And that was Benzion Netanyahu."

The other main character, Bezion's opposite and foil, is Ruben Blum, the only Jewish faculty member in the fictional college in upstate New York where Netanyahu comes for a job talk.  Blum is a too-willing-to-please stereotype of a Jewish professor. Cohen insists Blum is in no way based on the brilliant Harold Bloom whom Cohen was able to spend a lot of time with before he died in 2019. But it was Bloom's meeting Benzion and his family in the late 1950s that inspired the book.

Two of my favorite chapters are the letters Blum receives about Benzion Netanyahu.  One is glowing to the point of radiance. The other is from an Israeli colleague and is the scathing letter we have all fantasized writing about a thoroughly terrible colleague.

The ending is lovely--the comedy reaches its slapstick peak, then the novel ends. The afterword explains the genesis of the novel and talks about the lives of all of the Netanyahus.  

I read the novel in a few days. It is so much fun.

----------

By the way, the long title of the novel has an 18th Century length and feel:

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (20 words) 

An actual title of an18th Century novel:  

Love And Madness. A Story Too True. In A Series Of Letters Between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned Were They Less Well Known Or Less Lamented. (27 words)

First seventeen books of 2022:

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

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis: Book 17 of 2022

I loved Perelandra by C.S. Lewis when I first read it almost forty years ago. I re-read it in the 90s, but have not re-read it in this century till now.  It certainly confirmed for me that one of the delights of re-reading in late life is finding so much of the book new and surprising.  From the moment the hero confronts the villain, all the action was new to me. 

The occasion for re-reading the book was the publication of a new book by my friend Jim Como about Perelandra titled:

Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis and His Favorite Book. 

As the subtitle asserts, Perelandra was Lewis' favorite book among the 39 published during his lifetime--several more were published posthumously.  

My friend Cliff and I are driving from Darmstadt, Germany, to Copenhagen next month and plan to read Jim's book on the trip. We also agreed to re-read Perelandra before the trip.

In the book, Lewis imagines Venus as a beautiful world of floating islands.  The hero of the novel is Elwin Ransom, a philologist. He is sent to the world by angels to save the world, but not exactly knowing what to do.  For much of the beginning of the novel, Ransom swims the towering seas of Perelandra, then eats the beautiful and wildly varied fruit on the floating islands.

It is a world that is just beginning with its own green-skinned Adam and Eve.  At the opening of the novel there is no sin in the world.  Sin appears in the form of the physicist Edwin Rolles Weston. He invents a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel and flies to the unspoiled world with his soul already taken over by Satan.  By the middle of the novel the soul Weston is mostly gone from his body. Ransom starts referring to Weston as the Un-man. 

The end of the novel is a fist fight on land and in the sea that ends in an underground cavern with a bottomless pit of fire! It is a fun story that finally ends with the crowning of the King and Queen of the new world. After fifty pages of fast-paced fights and action, the final scene is stillness and formality.  

Although Perelandra  is a re-telling of the temptation story from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the book is definitely not a Jewish story.  All of its theology is deeply and explicitly Christian.  

If you Google search Perelandra, the first and third links have nothing to do with the book.  The first is Perelandra Natural Food Center in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Ltd. The unspoiled world of floating islands makes a much more vivid picture of natural perfection than the vague description in Genesis.  I emailed the store in Brooklyn to ask about the name and got the following reply:

Hi Neil,

Yes it is! The founder of the store was a big fan of that book.

Best,

Allison

First sixteen books of 2022:

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

Flying to Kyiv from New York on February 24--The Flight Ended in Warsaw

Today at #RazomforUkriane, I worked with a Nikita.  He is a 36-year-old project manager for a U.S.-based utility company. As we assembled IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) he told me that on February 24 (The day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine) he was on a flight from New York to Kyiv. As the plane neared Ukraine it was diverted and landed in Warsaw.

"I was going to Kiev on Feb 24 to see Louis CK stand up concert which was supposed to be on February 25," he said. "I also do stand up comedy when I get a chance in my personal life and since war started we had a charity concert to raise funds which we sent to Ukraine." He has I also donated funds directly to people I know in Ukraine and other organizations.

Nikita spent the next week in Poland helping the refugees who began crossing the border into Poland within hours of the start of the war.  At one point he rented a car and drove refugees from the border to where they knew someone or wherever they wanted to go.  He helped with food and supplies, then returned to America and his job. 

He is 36 years old.  He emigrated to America from the Russian Federation in 2000 with his family when he was 14. "I am from Russia, but my heart is with Ukraine," he said.  "I have lots of friends in Ukraine and I love that country with all my heart and I don't support Russia in any way and I am 100% with the Ukraine."

Nikita makes Instagram videos in English and in Russian under the name: forced2disagree.  

"The videos are titled "Less is More" and are they are about people around the world," he said. "I tell a short story about a person that I personally met or know. And I can't wait to go to Ukraine and document many stories there and help in other ways as well."

 

Talking Musicals, Radio, War Movies and Tanks at #RazomforUkraine

 

I arrived late for my shift at Razom today. PA Route 222 stopped for miles outside of Ephrata.  I slithered off the highway in the breakdown lane and got to the PA Turnpike by a half-dozen back roads I know.  

Today was a small group, just eight of us in the afternoon.  Together with the morning crew we made many hundreds of Individual First Aid Kits (IFAKs). 

I spent most of the afternoon stuffing Halo chest seals into the kit at the beginning of the line. It's sad to think of the need for these bandages, but good to be able to help get them where they are needed.  

Toward the end of the day, I worked opposite Joey (in the foreground of the lower picture).  He works in radio doing voice overs and running several radio-related businesses.  We talked about working in radio, then in theater, then he told me he had performed at the Fulton Theater in Lancaster when he was going to Temple University.  

We joked a lot about "Footloose." I said it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen, but with the best soundtrack.  Joey had been to an annual festival in Payson, Utah, the town where the movie was filmed. The town is called Bomont in the movie. I told Joey I had seen the musical version of "Footloose" in the Fulton Theater and really liked it--the musical was much better than the movie and the songs were even better live.

We then talked about war movies, which ones we liked and which ones we didn't.  We are both fans of the HBO Series "Band of Brothers"and "The Pacific."   

Several of us will be back tomorrow. Part of a larger crew.  The biggest crew is always on Saturday.