Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 27 April 2021

"Hannah Arendt Cheat Sheet" by Samantha Rose Hill

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

And since thinking, the silent dialogue of me with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body—“never am I more active than when I do nothing” (Cato)—the difficulties created by metaphors drawn from the sense of hearing would be as great as the difficulties created by the metaphor of vision. (Bergson, still so firmly attached to the metaphor of intuition for the ideal of truth, speaks of the “essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition” without being aware of the contradiction between the quiet of contemplation and any activity, let alone a violent one.

"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." — Hannah Arendt

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Along with this “will to the now,” there is a kind of hoarding of the past, an “archive mania” which, paradoxically, denies the past its true character. In its hands the past becomes a mere source of “information.” Unlike true historical scholarship, there is no discrimination between what is worthy of being saved and what is not, what tells a story and what does not. Like Jorge Luis Borges's unfortunate character Funes the Memorius, today's “information junkies” are either unable or unwilling to forget anything.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Evolution has a broad and general tendency to move in the direction of: increasing complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos.

Book by Book

Michael Dirda

Benedict Spinoza: “Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.”—“I have laboured carefully, when faced with human actions, not to mock, not to lament, not to execrate, but to understand.”

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 1 February 2021

 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Insofar as ideological thinking is independent of existing reality, it looks upon all factuality as fabricated, and therefore no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it.

--Hannah Arendt

What is most difficult is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it.

--Hannah Arendt

(HT to @Samantha RoseHill for sharing the above two quotes.)

The Future of History

John Lukacs

Multa stultitia regnat mundus—how much stupidity now hangs over the world.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Thus the New York Times expends its editorial might promoting transgender rights, the concern of a tiny minority, while Fox News rants in opposition to them. So climate change and other vital concerns for the society as a whole get pushed to the media margins.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

It comes back, then, to the question of the self-image. Miseries, humiliations, embarrassments, accidents, have the effect of creating partial self-images—self-images which, since they present themselves as complete, are bound to be false. Consciousness narrows, and my self-image becomes as false and distorted as if I was seeing myself in a trick mirror at a fairground. But a trick mirror at least shows you your whole self, from head to foot; the partial self-image is a pocket-size distorting mirror.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 11 December 2020

 

What is political imagination? If we say the other fellow’s point of view, the emphasis is first on point, on something spatial. Difference between understanding and imagination: I understand something or somebody directly, if I understand something, I always understand it within a wider horizon of things which I take for granted. I isolate the thing I understand and put myself into a direct relationship to it.

If I understand somebody, I understand him in a direct relationship, within the framework of the world, but still him directly isolated from all others. If I want to understand him, I first must know from which point of view he sees things, and that means where he is located in the world. I must imagine the world from his point of location. Example: the table between us.

Imagination is the prerequisite of understanding: You should imagine how the world looks from the different point of view where these people are located. The assumption is: It is the common world of us all and that what is between you and this other location like the table separates you and bind you to him at the same time. That is the meaning of ONE world.

--Hannah Arendt (lecture notes from a 1955 class she taught courtesy of Samantha Rose Hill @ her Illuminations site here (a must for any student of Arendt's work).

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel put it magnificently: “Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The American Republic is the only political body based on the great eighteenth-century revolutions that has survived 150 years of industrialization and capitalist development, that has been able to cope with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and that has withstood all temptations, despite strong and ugly racial prejudices in its society, to play the game of nationalist and imperialist politics.

Thoughts for the Day (with a New Feature!): Sunday 13 September 2020

 The proper meaning of a word … is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship’s stern. Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it and tie it there. The way to discover the proper meaning is to ask not, ‘What do we mean?’ but, ‘What are we trying to mean?’

--R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (hat-tip to David Pierce for the quote in his blog https://polytropy.com/2020/09/01/map-of-art/ (Pierce, a professional mathematician, is also a Collingwood . . . shall we say "enthusiast"? I'm not sure the right term for him or me regarding our attitude toward Collingwood, but we're both avid readers & proponents of Collingwood's thought.) 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Meaning perception is our ability to step back and see something as a whole, to see the forest, and not only the trees. Immediacy perception, as its name suggests, is our ability to focus on individual details, what is immediately before us. It is like a searchlight. It has a powerful beam, yet it has one problem: “it can only focus on one thing at a time,” hence Hume’s failure to see the connection between cause and effect.

SNG note: This is written about Colin Wilson discussing Whitehead and (in effect) anticipating McGilchrist.)

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Clearly, progress is not wholly concerned with resources, but how resources are distributed between individuals within one generation and between generations is a matter that no discussion of progress can ignore.

The Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman

If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle.

And in a new feature that I'll start today, I'll be quoting from Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954 (at the end of the post). I'll be starting with the essay "Understanding & Politics," which was originally published in Partisan Review in 1954. I'm reading this collection of essays as a part of my participation in the Virtual Reading Group of Arendt's works hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and led by its director, Professor Roger Berkowitz and assistant director Samantha Rose Hill. These quotes will sometimes be longer than a sentence, perhaps a paragraph or two--I want to capture complete thoughts. While normally I like to keep my quotes to bite-size morsels, sometimes you want to sink your teeth into something meatier, or at least I do. Arendt provides so many meaty quotes that I find compellingly relevant to our times that I want to share a bunch of them. And, apropos Arendt, I want to prompt you to think.

The quote for today (a short one):

"Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world."

--Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 2 September 2020

 Erich Fromm: Love is an art form.

Theodor Adorno: Fidelity to love is the only means we have to resistance. Walter Benjamin: We must love without hope. Hannah Arendt: Why is it so hard to love the world? W.H. Auden: We must love one another or die.

"...how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes..." Hannah Arendt

"Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever..." — Hannah Arendt

(All of the above from scholar Samantha Rose Hill via her Twitter feed: @Samantharhill)

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis

Honor mattered because character mattered. And character mattered because the fate of the American experiment with  republican government still required virtuous leaders to survive. Eventually, the United States might develop into a nation of laws and established institutions capable of surviving corrupt or incompetent public officials. But it was not there yet. It still required honorable and virtuous leaders to endure. Both Burr and Hamilton came to the interview because they wished to be regarded as part of such company.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the brightest light in that glittering constellation around the President, for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.”