I'm currently reading Hannah Arendt. She is difficult reading, and I've read parts of her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" before, so this time it is a matter of really studying her ideas and absorbing them. And since I've read parts of her before I started with the middle, the chapter "The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie" because that chapter resonates with the present times....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
Gandhi would say:
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Hannah Arendt was a great philosopher. But right now I'm seeing her as prophet and journalist. She saw the big picture of how societies are influenced by their ambitions, their greed, and convenient ideas. And yet she saw past this enough to still have some optimism that things can change. Wikipedia says of her:
'Her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind (1978/edited by Mary McCarthy), was incomplete when she died, but is still widely read in its current form. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures in University of Aberdeen, this book focuses on the mental faculties of thinking and willing (in a sense moving beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa). In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between me and myself."
Like a good architect, She chose Socrates as her allegory to illustrate a vision of conscience and morality that reflected her life-experience:
"This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self)."
However, after talking about thinking, she talks about "willing:"
"In her volume on Willing, Arendt, relying heavily on Augustine's notion of the will, discusses the will as an absolutely free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible."
St. Augustine reinvented Christianity by turning the literal concept of a "city on the hill" and the Messiah as a figurative one. Like the Free-Masons, the true concept of will is about envisioning a new beginning; a "shining city on the hill" and most importantly engineering that future. Contrary to the "triumph of the will" the vision of a peaceful world requires rebuilding, reconstructing and preserving what is important.
"In the third volume, Arendt was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment, however she never lived to write it. Nevertheless, although we will never fully understand her notion of judging, Arendt did leave us with manuscripts ("Thinking and Moral Considerations," "Some Questions on Moral Philosophy," and lectures (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy ) concerning her thoughts on this mental faculty. First two articles were edited and published by Jerome Kohn, who was an assistant of Arendt and is a director of Hannah Arendt Library, and last one was edited and published by Ronald Beiner, who was taught by Arendt and is a professor of University of Toronto."
She did exert an influence on history. I hope to engage her advanced works, but first I have to absorb this book I'm reading now.
Chris
Posted by cholte at October 10, 2007 10:25 PM