Horner's Corner

Archive for August 17th, 2009

Hannah Arendt: The Burden of Our Time.

by on Aug.17, 2009, under history, philosophy, politics

 

 

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Hannah Arendt

I’m trying to write my book about Arendt. My general line is that its natality, the capacity for humans to begin something new, that is the important concept in her work; anyway, its the one I’m interested in. I’m working on a chapter on The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s an odd work, and its original title for the British edition The Burden of Our Time seems to me to point more directly to its intent. The book is anything but a cold war  ‘political science’ attack on Stalin and Hitler as somehow equivalent. In fact, like much of her work,  it is an attack on bourgeois, liberal modernity, with its emphasis on private life and personal advancement at the expense of the general good, of the res publica.

 

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Arendt in the 1930s


It narrates and analyses for us a possible modernity – one in which the Enlightenment promise is replaced by the destruction of public, political life and which ends in the moral, civic, political and physical death of millions. As such it is itself a quest for meaning in very dark times. Arendt believed in being objective, but not impartial and her account includes a long running, utterly devastating critique of the class Arendt held responsible for the debasement of modern politics: the bourgeoisie. Two thirds of the book are concerned with the racism and imperialism of bourgeois Europe: they emerge from it as the main culprits, if we can imagine that a whole class can be a culpable.

Since this class is very much still with us, so Arendt’s critique remains relevant. The book shows us why we need to return to the question and practice of politics; if more of her critics would  read her carefully on this she’d be seen more widely for what she is – a critic of liberal bourgeois modernity, not its defender.

Images of Arendt:

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Hannah when young


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On Knowledge without Wisdom

by on Aug.17, 2009, under philosophy

On Knowledge Without Wisdom

By Namit Arora

Pic1 The Greeks understood ‘philosophy’ as the love of wisdom. They valued theoretical knowledge to the extent it contributed to practical wisdom. Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato’s Academy contained a grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. But philosophy today, at least as pursued by much of the Anglo-American academy, is markedly different. For the most part, its concerns have shrunk to sub-disciplines in epistemology, paving the way for the acquisition of theoretical knowledge as an end in itself. The pursuit of wisdom seems to have left the academy and alighted on the stormy shores of self-help aisles.

More at 3quarksdaily.

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