MUST THOUGHT RE MERELY POIGNANT?
Harrington, Michael
BOOKS MUST THOUGHT BE MERELY POIGNANT? MICHAELHARRINGTON The Life of the Mind: Vol. !: Thinking Vol. U: Willing HANNAH ARENDT Harcourt, Brace, $12.50 ea. Vol. !: [258...
...Fichte delivered his enormously popular Speeches to the German Nation and wanted to give patriotic talks to the troops fighting the French...
...Thought is tl~t vital core..It "permits the mind to withdraw from the worldwithoutever beingableto leave it or transcend it...
...and Ph.D...
...This criticism even has its ironic aspect...
...Kant very carefully summarized the complexities of the Critique o/ Pure Reason in the Prolegomena, precisely in order to win a wider audience...
...For her, the modern experience is conditioned primarily, almost exclusively, by the sense of contingency Commonweal:567 inherent in capitalist industrialization...
...Themost radical answer was given by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over insilence...
...As Hegel so brilliantly understood, all serious falsehoodsarepartialtruths,and Arendt is concerned to preserve what is vital in that metaphysical tradition whose death she records...
...And, she continues in another striking passage, "in the proverbial absentmindedness of the philosopher, everthing present is absent because something actually absent is present to his mind, and among the things absent are the philosopher's body...
...But the Marxists then go on to analyze that interpenetration historically, in terms of human activity, and they suggest that the world can be transformed by an activism which understands and an understanding which is active...
...But there is practically no mention of thecontraryexperiencewhichhas played at least as important a role in our culture: the impact of the increasing human control of external nature, an ambiguous but unmistakable part of our lives...
...Enterthatquintessentialpostmodern of the last century, Frederich Nietzche...
...Will, Arendt argues, is a hculty discovered by the Christians ('the Incarnation having shattered the ancient cyclic inevitabil,ities...
...More specifically, wheredoesit leavea culture...
...On this count, both the Marxists andthephenomenologists, like Arendt,derive from Hegel's understanding that "essence" and "appearance" interpenetrate one another, that they do not form two separate realms...
...This does not, however, mean that Arendt believes the "two world" myth is simply to be forgotten...
...He embarked on a construction of the given world that wouldmake sense, be a fitting abode for a creature whose "strer~gth of w~il [is great enough] to do without meaning in things . . . [who] can endure to live in a meaningless world.' Eternal Recurrence ,is the term for this final redeemingthoughtinasmuchasit proclaims the 'Innocence of all beaimlessnessandpcrposelessness,its freedom from guilt and responsibility...
...That said, I am bothered by a certain passivity, an excessively contemplativeandremovedmood,in Arendt's books...
...Psichari, whomMaritainlaterdescribedto Fowlie as "a pure example of God's entrance into a human being," became the subject of Fowlie's doctoral thesis at Harvard and through him and his experience of conversion, Fowlie himself was to find his way to Catholicism...
...Indeed, it was one of Arendt's greatscholarly limitationsthatshe was systematically unfair to Marx (the discussion of his concept of work in The Human Condition bordered on the scandalous...
...When she makes them in the area of my own specialization, I am often uneasy ---as areotherspecialists in other fields with whom I have talked...
...258 pp.] Vol...
...Fowlie has been at Duke since 1965, but during two earlier periods of his life, from 1935 to 1941, and from 1950 to 1962, he taught at Bennington College, and it was during one of theseperiodshedoesnotspecify which one--that he w.as baptized in 1 September 1978:568...
...BorninBrooldine,Massachusetts and educated at BrooHine High School and at Harvard, where he took his B.A., M.A...
...She turnsto Heidegger-who was as important to her as Kant-and sees life as "the lingering between two absences and a sojourn in the realm of errancy...
...That distinction has, of course, a long history...
...But such publications tend to be somewhat uneven, and often quite boring, since the contributions usually have only one thing in common-the relationship of the contributors to the remembered teacher and scholar.Theircurrentinterestsare usually quite disparate and thus the Festschrift (American professors seem to have a special fondness for the word, its frequency of use varying inversely with one's knowledge of German) is usually of interest and valueto an individual subscriber solely for the bibliography it contains...
...The professional thinkers, she holds, "have been unwilling to pay ~e price of contingency for the ques'tionable gift ofspontaneity...
...And yet ~ereare sentences, paragraphs, insights and quotations which are so exciting that if I am unsatisfied with the whole, if I disagree on some rather basic issues, I nonetheless leave these books with the sense of having encountered a challenging intellect...
...candidates...
...How do these .reflections on thinking relate ,to Arenctt's second major theme, willing...
...That notion, Arendt says, corresponds to a profound human experience, e.g., when we know that our show of courage masks the reality of the fear we feel and thus distinguish the outer and inauthentic from the inner and authentic...
...Thought is self-destructive, turning on its own results...
...JohnStuartMill arguedthat suchmatters were the sphere of the "moral sciences" and the Germans translated thatphrase,ratherpoetically,as "GeistesveissenschaRen," thesciences of the spirit...
...Over the years, teaching at Harvard, Bennington, Chicago, Yale and Duke, he has made many friends and trained what must be a rather larger number of Ph.D...
...The appearance of Hannah Arendt's The Li/e o/ the Mind is a most welcome and significantevent.In a society which is increasingly uncertain--and often unconcerned--about basic values, it is good that fundamental questions are posed before a non-specialist public...
...On the one hand, .both activities are implicated in the same crisis...
...This is one reason why ,it is important to think ~bout thinking, for it is precisely that very real and important activity which the two world view mythologized...
...Therefore ,the understood world was identicalwiththeun-understood world...
...But how be precise about somethingso imprecise...
...Thinking and Willing were delivered as Gifford lectures and the analysis of judgment exists only as excerpts from courses Arendt taught...
...In this progressive shift from being tonothingness,"Arendtcomments, "caused not by the loss of wonder or perplexity but by the loss of admirationandwillingnesstoaiFarm in thought, it would be very tempting to see the end of philosophy, at least of that philosophy whose beginning Plato had fixed...
...For this reason,DukeUniversityPresshas wisely decided to honor Wallace Fowlie in a special way on his retirement bypublishinghisintellectualautobiography.JournalofRehearsals, gleaned from his daily writings over almost fifty years, records for us the pilgrimage through time and space of a leading academic intellectual who is also a Christian...
...JourNal of Rehearsals WALLACE FOWLIE Duke, $12.75 [219 pp.] DAVID O'CONNELL WallaceFowlie,JamesB.Duke Professor of French at Duke University, is nearing the age of seventy and will soon retire...
...More to the point, they make me think, they provoke the life of my mind...
...But where does that leave us...
...From Kant, through Fichte, HegelandMarxto Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and then to Husserl and Heidegger, there was a remarkable flowering of human thought...
...More fundamentally, I think it unfortunate that Arendt in Thinking dismisses the concept of praxis--of actiontochangetheworldbased upon theory and valuesmin an inaccurate aside...
...In so far as Arendt answers that question it is by way of a kind of stoicism...
...There is, however, a problem when one tries to evaluate these books...
...And she quotes a marvelous line of Heidegger's...
...Arendt,like thelater Wittgenstein, does not go that far...
...Arendt's point of departure is the crisis in philosophy...
...Arendt, it seems ~o me, does not...
...degrees, Fowlie has written over twenty books and scores of articles on French literary subjects, and has published at least a dozenbook-lengthtranslationsof worksrangingfromMoli~reto Claudel, Mauriac and Saint-John Perse...
...It is, as I remarked at the outset, most welcome to have such matters discussed before the general public...
...Indeed, it was precisely the tremendousaccomplishments of theGermanClassicalPhilosophy which made the rise of a barbarian anti-intellectual, Adolph Hitler, even more shattering than it would have ordinarily been...
...For Fowlie, raised a Baptist, but converted to Catholicism, the road to Rome seems in retrospect, to this reader at least, to have been clearly marked out for him through the people he met...
...These, in briefest outline, are some of the major concerns of Thinking and Willing...
...Indeed it is quite significant that her philosophic geneology omits the activist tradition which arose within the German Classical Philosophy with Marx...
...Hannah Arendt had a dangerous and daring habit of the most sweeping generalizations...
...At a time when standards of scholarly performance have dropped, and with hundredsoffullprofessorshipsat major universities occupied by nonscholars, this is an especially impressive achievement...
...U: Willing HANNAH ARENDT Harcourt, Brace, $12.50 ea...
...Moreover the phenomenon was not confined r the professional thinkers but had its impact upon the entire educated class...
...But as a theory, the myth of "two worlds," of appearance and essence, is only a myth...
...It would, of course, be foolish even to intimate that there is some easy plan for human salvation whichonly hasto bewilled into existence...
...and Schelling's lectures in Berlin were attended by, among others, Soren Kierkegaard, Jacob Burckhardt, Bakunin and Frederich Engels...
...The critical reviewer, then, has a problem: Are the faults in Arendt's work inherent in her approach or the consequence of its unfinished character...
...Is there at least the possibility~fallible, battered, but better than any other----of changing,as well as understanding,the world...
...Indeed, Engels called those lectures "the battlefield where domination over German public opinion in religion and politics, which is to say over Germany itself" was being settled.And later, Engel's political descendents were to debate the dialectic in a struggle over tactics within the workers' movement...
...Yet this ~s not said sadly, and indeed it' contains an affirmative strain,a Greeksense of "wonder" in the presence of being...
...9 the novelty of our contemporary position in philosophy lies in the conviction, which no era had before us, that we do not possess the truth...
...But it is heartening that a daughter of that tradition has published two volumes of serious intellectual analysis which were partly published in the New Yorker and have found a wide readership...
...I think so...
...Which was Arendt's ultimate, laudable point...
...Hegel, too, said that being and appearing, essence and accidents,wereulehnatelythesame...
...So it was that Marx accused the great idealist of being a "falsepositivist...
...For this reason, the inevitable Festschrift, i.e., the memorial volume of essays dedicated to a great scholar's memory, usually including an analytical bibliography of his life's work, will most likely be appearing before too long...
...Hannah Arendt died when her project-which dared to survey the immense territorycoveredbyKant'sthree critiques: thinking, willing and judging --was unfinished...
...It is quite possible that philosophy will never again reach the stature /t thus achieved in Middle Europe between Kant and Heidegger...
...I do not raise this point out of the sectarian concern of a democratic Marxist...
...An extraordinary genius like N,ietzscbe mightbe abletodwell heroically in the midst of a chaotic imminence, but what of you and me...
...But must thought be merely poignant and will merely personal...
...Arendtsharesin that positivism...
...Ever since philosophers in theNineteenthcenturyrealized that natural scientists were crowding them out of much of their traditiona;l turf,theyhaveinsisted--rightly,I thinklthat there is a significant area of human experience which cannot be reduced to equations or dear with interms ofempiricaluniformities...
...Precisely because a science-dominated culture has given up metaphysics, the invisible is in "bad repute" and ,the richness of our past is in danger of being treated as obsolete...
...H: [277 pp.] In the second half of the Eighteenth century in Germany, philosophy began one of its richest and most intense periods--somewouldsay,itsfinal period...
...It was that tradition of broad-based philosophic discussion which permeated the Vienna which later produced Freud, Wittgenstein and a regiment of lesser geniuses...
...Moreover, and here Arendt obviously turns back ,to Kant, thought is often concerned with meaning, which is much more difficult to categorize than truth...
...But for Sartre--inthis case, Sartre, the novelist--the most fundamental of intuitions is a sense of nausea in the presence of "the naked thereness of the factually given...
...For the Greeks,philosophy began with a sense of wonder at the very existence, the complex harmony, of the cosmos...
...Given that perspective, it isnoaccidentthatshetalksof Schopenhauer and Nietzsche but not Marx...
...Being andAppearingcoincide,"Arendt writes and then concludes, in a man1 September 1978:566 ner reminiscent of Fichte, that "nothing and nobody exists in this world whose being does not presuppose a spectator...
...MICHAELHARRINGTON The Life of the Mind: Vol...
...That superficial messianism has no place in any serious discussion...
...Recent serious developments of Marx's ideas--Karel Kosik's, for instance--make a united front with the phenomenologists in rejecting the "two world" theory of essence and accidents...
...Troth is factual, the domain of science, the product of the intellect (.which is how ArendttranslatesKant'sVerstand...
...So one must recognize the "phenomenal nature of the world," the "value of the sucface...
...And i~ might seem, particularly at the outset of Thinking, that Aeendt has indeed surrendered Io the naysaying which she describes.She dismisses all theories in which "mere" appearance is the emanation or projection orcreature of aninvisible ground (God, Matter, Spirit...
...While in Paris in the early thirties to begin writing his doctoral dissertation on an arcane subject, he made the acquaintance by chance of a Mine Faure, the widow of the little-known novelist, Ernest Psichari, who had been converted to Catholicism shortly before World War I and who died on the battlefield during the first weeks of the war...
...It troubles many philosophersbecauseitsalternative ppssibil,itiesburstall neatschemas...
...On two occasions, Arendt quotes a marvelous remark of Einstein's: "The eternal mystery of the world i.e., the universe is ks comprehensi,bility...
...All previous generations 'possessed the truth,' even the skeptics...
...But this remaxkable power is also problematic...
...I do not want to end on such a negative note...
...Arendt cuts herself off from this rich concept of the relation be-tween thinking and willing, which is a pity and an irony since many of its analyses border on her own...
...and it ,is evanescent...
...For Schelling, whose personal career was to refract the modern crisis in a particularly dramatic way, God was the only answer to the question, Why is there not nothing...
...BOOKS MUST THOUGHT BE MERELY POIGNANT...
...the only change took place in our mind...
...but she does necessarily circle around her subject matter, insisting upon the importance of metaphor, analogy and emblems--the techniques of literature and i.ntuitioo rather than .those of natural science...
...Andyet,the modern age, with its ,restless futurism, madeit impossible to ignore those contingencies...
...So where I am negative in what follows I will adopt that stance provisionally, tentatively...
...So it is, for instance, that neither of these volumes really returns to the question which, the author tells us, was the inspiration for the whole enterprise: Could Eichmann's thoughtlessness, his banality, have had something to do with the evil he worked...
...meaning is the goal of reason and it concerns ideas and values whioh cannot be demonstrated empirically...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
