Men in Dark Times
Hannah Arendt. (1968). NY: Harcourt, Brace & World.
"People remembered everything, but forgot what mattered," the author wrote somewhere in her essays about Rosa Luxemburg or Bretolt Brecht.
I also like a quote from Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), "I have a cursed longing for happiness and am ready to haggle for my daily portion of happiness with all the stubbornness of a mule," in a letter designated to Jogiches, her cursed husband, which shows her natural force of a temperament, according to Arendt. Luxemburg, non-orthodox Marxist, was not so dogmatic to see the world based upon the dialectic theory and saw torture of negros in South Africa, the author argues. Arendt differentiates Luxemburg from Bolsheviks in that she preferred an unsuccessful revolution to a deformed one, where the people hold neither power nor voice.
Arendt brings Sartre's shockingly precise description of after-WW II into the context where Bretolt Brecht (1898-1956), "gifted with a penetrating, non-theoretical, non-contemplative intelligence that went to the heart of the matter," fell in love with life after the WW I, where he served as a medical orderly: "When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is meaningless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, suspended trackless in a void."
Arendt's political perspective is more apparent in her essay about Karl Jaspers' world citizenship (pp.81-94). She holds that political concepts are based on plurality, diversity and mutual limitations, thus refuses a world government with centralized power, that excludes diversified histories among subunits. According to her, it is technology of the Western world that unites the world and mankind, and simultaneously disintegrates the traditions and beliefs, brings grandiose development and replace the nation-state over all the other forms of government. Thus, in our political epoch, "we are held responsible as citizens for everything that our government does in the name of the country," which makes unbearable the solidarity of mankind as global responsibility, she argues. In her interpretation, Jaspers means by world citizenship a 'universal relativity' instead of any absolute doctrine. In fact, in his notion of "limitless communication," Arendt asserts that truth and communication are the same within the existential realm, and it is through this communication that the national pasts will be brought into a new unity of mankind, where diversity reveals in the very sameness. Thus, the unity of mankind is "manifold," not consisting of a universal agreement upon one form of government. Astonishingly perspicacious is her point about federated police forces in the place of traditional armies: "Our experiences with modern police states and totalitarian governments, where the old power of the army is eclipsed b the rising omnipotence of the police, are not apt to make us overoptimistic about this prospect. All this, however, still lies in a far-distanct future." [Her political views strikingly resembles Hardt and Negri, who empasizes buidling multitude based on singularity through a distributed network. As they indicate, omnipresent police in lieu of army already brings about deep concerns in our political concepts. Then, can I think that an authoritarian unity of global world, which was of Arendt's concern, is already creeping into our reality? Did she foresee this phenomenon?]
In her essay about a short lived critique Walter Benjamin, she delineates her view about social and political realm--quite oppositional to each other. "No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political." Benjamine, who thought of language as an essentially poetic phenomenon, distinguishes a commentator and a critique. While the former, like a chemist, focuses on the materials that makes up a literary work, the latter, an alchemist, transmutes the futile real materials to shining gold of truth and watches its magical transfigurative process. [I am amazed with Arendt's metaphorical and sharp precision.]
The Pearl Diver
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, 2
Speaking of Benjamin's gift of thinking poetically, Arendt compares him with a pearl diver in the following way--it's strikingly visual as usual: "This thinking, fed by the present, works with the 'thought fragments' it can wrest from the past an gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry then to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past--but not in order to resuscitate the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same times a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things 'suffer a sea-change' and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living."
"People remembered everything, but forgot what mattered," the author wrote somewhere in her essays about Rosa Luxemburg or Bretolt Brecht.
I also like a quote from Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), "I have a cursed longing for happiness and am ready to haggle for my daily portion of happiness with all the stubbornness of a mule," in a letter designated to Jogiches, her cursed husband, which shows her natural force of a temperament, according to Arendt. Luxemburg, non-orthodox Marxist, was not so dogmatic to see the world based upon the dialectic theory and saw torture of negros in South Africa, the author argues. Arendt differentiates Luxemburg from Bolsheviks in that she preferred an unsuccessful revolution to a deformed one, where the people hold neither power nor voice.
Arendt brings Sartre's shockingly precise description of after-WW II into the context where Bretolt Brecht (1898-1956), "gifted with a penetrating, non-theoretical, non-contemplative intelligence that went to the heart of the matter," fell in love with life after the WW I, where he served as a medical orderly: "When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is meaningless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, suspended trackless in a void."
Arendt's political perspective is more apparent in her essay about Karl Jaspers' world citizenship (pp.81-94). She holds that political concepts are based on plurality, diversity and mutual limitations, thus refuses a world government with centralized power, that excludes diversified histories among subunits. According to her, it is technology of the Western world that unites the world and mankind, and simultaneously disintegrates the traditions and beliefs, brings grandiose development and replace the nation-state over all the other forms of government. Thus, in our political epoch, "we are held responsible as citizens for everything that our government does in the name of the country," which makes unbearable the solidarity of mankind as global responsibility, she argues. In her interpretation, Jaspers means by world citizenship a 'universal relativity' instead of any absolute doctrine. In fact, in his notion of "limitless communication," Arendt asserts that truth and communication are the same within the existential realm, and it is through this communication that the national pasts will be brought into a new unity of mankind, where diversity reveals in the very sameness. Thus, the unity of mankind is "manifold," not consisting of a universal agreement upon one form of government. Astonishingly perspicacious is her point about federated police forces in the place of traditional armies: "Our experiences with modern police states and totalitarian governments, where the old power of the army is eclipsed b the rising omnipotence of the police, are not apt to make us overoptimistic about this prospect. All this, however, still lies in a far-distanct future." [Her political views strikingly resembles Hardt and Negri, who empasizes buidling multitude based on singularity through a distributed network. As they indicate, omnipresent police in lieu of army already brings about deep concerns in our political concepts. Then, can I think that an authoritarian unity of global world, which was of Arendt's concern, is already creeping into our reality? Did she foresee this phenomenon?]
In her essay about a short lived critique Walter Benjamin, she delineates her view about social and political realm--quite oppositional to each other. "No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political." Benjamine, who thought of language as an essentially poetic phenomenon, distinguishes a commentator and a critique. While the former, like a chemist, focuses on the materials that makes up a literary work, the latter, an alchemist, transmutes the futile real materials to shining gold of truth and watches its magical transfigurative process. [I am amazed with Arendt's metaphorical and sharp precision.]
The Pearl Diver
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, 2
Speaking of Benjamin's gift of thinking poetically, Arendt compares him with a pearl diver in the following way--it's strikingly visual as usual: "This thinking, fed by the present, works with the 'thought fragments' it can wrest from the past an gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry then to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past--but not in order to resuscitate the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same times a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things 'suffer a sea-change' and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living."
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