"Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive."
— Zadie Smith
“THEODORE,” THE BIG MAN SAID, eschewing boyish nicknames, “you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”
We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.
The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs—only, and this is decisive, Kant’s spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy. Hegel’s spectator exists strictly in the singular: the philosopher becomes the organ of the Absolute Spirit, and the philosopher is Hegel himself. But even Kant, more aware than any other philosopher of human plurality, could conveniently forget that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it.
1 comment:
Arendt's criticism of Kant seems justified by a passage from the Critique of Pure Reason (B x-xi) that is of some significance to me:
"I believe that mathematics was left groping about for a long time (chiefly among the Egyptians), and that its transformation is to be ascribed to a revolution, brought about by the happy inspiration of a single man [Thales] in an attempt from which the road to be taken onward could no longer be missed, and the secure course of a science was entered on and prescribed for all time and to an infinite extent."
No, people can get off the course of a science!
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