Friday, December 11, 2020

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).


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

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

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.