Category Archives: Continental philosophy

the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial

In 1958, Hannah Arendt could see where were were headed:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. …

It would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company tor good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 3)

What is “human existence as it has been given”?

For most of our history, most human beings have lived with other people whose names they know. They have worked individually and collaboratively with materials in their context to make an environment that I will call a “world.”

A world has these features:

It is imbued with moral significance, because other people have made it, given it meaning, cared about it, and been affected by it. An individual cannot interact with a world without causing good or harm to other people.
It is real, not imaginary, and therefore it is stubborn. It rarely turns out the way we want, but we can learn from experience to work more effectively with it.
The other people involved in any world hold partially conflicting interests and goals and can be stubborn in their own way. Both the materials and the people resist any single will.
Each person has partial and even biased knowledge, beliefs, and feelings about the world. But their varied ideas can accumulate as they express them and record them. Each person can therefore explore not only a world but the accumulated human experience of that world.
Because we must act in the company of other people and learn by acting, our “thinking and speaking” are closely connected.
Because our deepest concerns (moral, spiritual, and otherwise) relate to the world that we shape with our minds and hands, our “thought” is also connected to our “know-how.”
Each world typically predates each human being and survives the person’s death, yet each person can affect it. In fact, the birth of any human being automatically changes the world, if for no other reason than a birth turns people into parents, siblings, and other kinds of relatives.
There is not one world but many human worlds. But worlds can interact to various degrees without becoming subsumed into one bigger world.

Why it is good to live in a world

It is not obvious that living in this kind of world is the best imaginable form of life. Most people have envisioned heaven or a political utopia differently. (For instance, in an ideal world, the other people usually become less stubborn!) But I could make three arguments in favor of living in a world like this.

First, it seems plausible that homo sapiens evolved for such a life. Our brains, senses, and bodies are equipped to navigate it.

For instance, newborn infants already recognize faces, which are designed to communicate information and emotions. And our languages and cultures have accumulated deep resources for sharing a world with finite other human beings. The Proto-Indo-European language already used first-, second-, and third-person verbs and indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods to make distinctions that are useful for group discussions about a common world. Thus a world is arguably our habitat.

Second, the combination of agency and humility seems morally compelling. It is fitting that we can affect our environment but not do just anything we individually want with it. And we should see our context as imbued with moral significance.

Third, navigating a world is a way for creatures like us to achieve comprehension, to make sense of matters. As Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the
singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (1958, p. 4).

Threats to human worlds

Each human world has always been fragile, subject to destruction if invaders arrive, a plague strikes, or the community breaks down.

In addition, tyrants threaten any shared world because they can turn individuals into means to their solo ends.

Mass society puts each world at risk by bringing us into relationships with millions of others, whose names we will never learn. And mass economic exploitation makes matters worse. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says, “loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, … is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. [It is] is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.”

When history seems to move quickly and beyond anyone’s control, humans cease to feel that they are agents in any recognizable world.

Ideology can be defined as any system of thought that substitutes core assumptions for actual engagement with other people in a common world.

Finally, although media can enrich any given world, it can also disrupt it. Imagine people sitting alone or in passive company before a TV screen that tells them about gruesome crimes. Their actual world may be safe, or less dangerous than it was in the past, but the mediated world is cruel.

New threats in the age of AI

This theoretical framework comes from Arendt, who drew on Heidegger’s fundamental insight that the human form of being (Dasein) is always “‘in’ the world in the sense that it deals with entities encountered within-the-world, and does so concernfully and with familiarity” (Being and Time, H105, trans. by Macquarrie & Robinson). Arendt makes Heidegger’s theory political and republican by emphasizing that people can talk and decide what to do with their worlds.

I have sketched this view to help make sense of a new phenomenon: intelligence that is artificial (AI). But Arendt already feared that we might “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

When a person expresses a view, the content of what they say helps us to understand the world that the person inhabits. Even when people are flat-out wrong, the fact that they err or lie is part of our reality. In addition, a human view comes from a creature that can suffer. As such, it makes a claim on our compassion. In short, we attend not only to the content of the statement but also to the person who expressed it.

In contrast, when a large language model (LLM) answers a query (typically in the first-person singular and with emotive language like “I will be glad to …”), it does not reflect any particular perspective, nor does it come from a body that is capable of suffering. It just pretends to be a fellow participant in our world. We can attend to the words but not to the speaker.

Walter Cronkite was not really a visitor to Americans’ living rooms in 1970. He just appeared on TV screens. But he was a real person who could be assessed as such. An LLM is qualitatively different.

An LLM can be just another tool or resource, like a Heidegger’s hammer or perhaps like a library. I have collaborated with teams of Tufts engineering students to build the Civic Helpdesk and other applications of AI that are not yet publicly available. Working with them to fine-tune instructions or to design a user interface feels very much like collaborative work in a shared world. Note that I naturally said we “built” these tools, because the work feels roughly like building a shed, or perhaps an organization.

I have also developed what I think is a fairly tight practice of asking Claude about the Sanskrit and Pali original words in texts that I can only read in translation. This feels like a modest expansion of my inner life, if not a contribution to any shared world. (By the way, Claude is probably pulling these definitions from a finite set of published lexicons that have human authors.)

On the other hand, as Pope Leo notes in Magnifica humanitas, “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.” This sounds more like Arendt’s nightmare of a time when our thoughts cannot grasp what we have done.

The deepest concern is that we have developed biologically and culturally to flourish in what Arendt would call a world, but an individual who uses AI is no longer there.

love of the world

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I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

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 from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Juergen Habermas (1929-2026)

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Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday. His death has been the occasion for several substantial and interesting obituaries. So far, I prefer Gal Beckerman’s in the New York Times.

I took a seminar on Habermas in 1988, when I was a college junior. Georgia Warnke was the professor, and I have kept her useful packet of readings to this day. Habermas crystallized my early thinking about politics and philosophy and has remained a pillar for me ever since. I discuss him in most of my books, with the most general and extensive presentation in chapter 5 of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (2022) The title of that book basically captures Habermas in a phrase. I have also recorded a 29-minute introductory lecture on him.

It is misleading to treat Habermas as a proponent of rational, civil discourse. (See “Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas,” 2018). I suspect that more Americans have read Iris Marion Young’s critique of Habermas (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, 2011) than have read Habermas itself. The late and lamented Iris Young caricatured him in that article. If Habermas wanted everyone to talk calmly all the time, then why did he conclude his two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, with a celebration of disruptive social movements?

Habermas lived so long and became famous so early that his public role is itself an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, Ronald Dworkin remarked that even Habermas’ fame is famous, and it is worth asking why someone who wrote such thorny theory occupied the position of (arguably) the most influential German thinker for half a century.

I took a whole semester course on Habermas–in English, on the other side of the Atlantic–when he still had 38 years ahead of him. That is an indication of his stature. But it does not mean that he shaped the course of history, or even of scholarship.

In Postwar, Tony Judt discusses “the demise of the continental intellectual.” On May 31, 2003, Habermas plus Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading thinkers published coordinated essays against the Iraq War in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came” (pp. 785-7).

I am not quoting Judt today to cast aspersions on Habermas, whose work was deep and broad. I suspect that changes in media and communications have reduced the influence of serious intellectuals. Besides, Habermas may never have wanted to be the new Jean-Paul Sartre. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Michel Foucault (born just three years before Habermas) deliberately shunned the role of the “universal intellectual”; and perhaps we are better off without such people. By all accounts, Habermas welcomed criticism and learned from a wide range of responses. He modeled what he advocated: listening and learning from others. I think his work will long outlive him.

living life as a story

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Thesis: It is better to live as if one’s life were a story, yet many people cannot live that way.

A conventional story has a finite number of named characters, many of whom know many of the rest. These characters have constraints and limitations, but they also face at least some consequential choices. The choices they make contribute to the plot. Their choices tend to be related to their inner lives: their beliefs, desires, and character traits. Although they may spend most of their time separately and quietly, the narrative emphasizes their interactions. In fact, dialogue occupies much of a conventional novel and all the text of a play or a screenplay. In biographies and narrative histories, quotations from speech may be shorter, but they are are often prominent. What the characters think, do, and say is noticed and preserved–at least by the narrator, and usually by some of their fellow characters.

We can feel that our lives are like this, and we can be correct about it. Or we can feel (rightly or wrongly) that this is not how we live. Here are some threats to living as if in a story:

Modern economies (capitalist or socialist) that organize masses of workers so that each one feels little agency, while many live so precariously that they cannot make consequential decisions.
State tyranny, which not only blocks consequential choices and suppresses frank discussion but also invades the private spaces in which people could develop independent beliefs and values.
Hypertrophied science and technology, which make human behavior appear mechanical and predictable, or which actually control human beings.
Bureaucracy, which minimizes individual agency by applying rules, metrics, and files.
Ideologies, in the pejorative sense of all-encompassing theories that explain individual choices away or that replace human characters with abstractions, such as classes or nations, as the major protagonists.
Loneliness or isolation, meaning the absence of the interactions that would constitute a conventional story.
A lack of solitude, an inner life that can be described in a narrative and connected to overt actions.
Catastrophes, which wipe out the memories of characters and their actions.

(On that last point, Jonathan Lear writes:

Not long ago, I listened to a lecture on climate change. The lecture went as one might expect. There was a warning of impending ecological catastrophe and talk of the “Anthropocene,” suggesting that our age—the age in which humans dominate the Earth—is coming to an end. At the end of the talk, there was a discussion period. At one point, a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.

Lear develops the idea that missing or mourning things is a distinctively human contribution; and it is ineffably sad that no one would miss homo sapiens, even if we cause our own extinction, and even if other species would be better off without us. It means that all the stories would be gone.)

I think many of us assume that our lives are like stories and that some other people notice and remember our roles in them. For us, the evaluative questions are: How is this story turning out? And what kind of a character am I? I would rather live in a comedy than in a tragedy, and I aspire to be the hero rather than the villain in my own little patch.

However, I think the main thrust of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy is that there is an antecedent question: Am I in a story at all? (See, e.g., The Human Condition, chapter v.) I believe she would say that it is better to be the villain in a tragedy than not to inhabit any kind of story, and that most modern people no longer do. The list of threats (above) comes directly from her work.

Note that this is a different ideal from the common one of authorship. For instance, Immanuel Kant defines ethical individuals as the authors of the rules that govern them:

The will is therefore not merely subjected to the law, but in such a way that it must also be regarded as self-legislating, and precisely for that reason must it be subject to the law (of which it can consider itself the author [als Urheber]).

In contrast, Arendt writes:

Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author (The Human Condition, p. 184)

For her, politics is the domain where people are characters but there is no author. This is a result of plurality: there are many of us, and no one (not even a dictator) can solely determine the outcomes.

Jürgen Habermas holds a generally similar view but presents all the citizens of a community as its authors (in the plural):

According to the republican view, the status of citizens is not determined by the model of negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claim as private persons. Rather, political rights—preeminently rights of political participation and communication—are positive liberties. They guarantee not freedom from external compulsion but the possibility of participation in a common praxis, through the exercise of which citizens can first make themselves into what they want to be—politically autonomous authors of a community of free and equal persons.

Authors and characters are metaphors, not literal descriptions. As such, they capture certain compelling ideas without fully describing reality. Here I want to suggest that the metaphor of characters draws our attention to urgent issues. We need social, political, and intellectual reforms to enable more people to live like characters in stories. These reforms require intentional action. We must be the authors of contexts in which people can be characters.

Sources: Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022, p. 1); Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (my trans.); Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton University Press, 1996). p. 22. See also: Hilary Mantel and Walter Benjamin; Kieran Setiya on midlife; a vivid sense of the future; the coincidences in Romola; and Freud on mourning the past.

Jaspers on collective responsibility and polarization

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Here is a scene that has certain resonances with the present, although the circumstances were certainly different. …

It was the winter of 1945-6 in Heidelberg, Germany. Karl Jaspers, a distinguished professor, offered a lecture to a room full of demobilized solders, women, displaced civilians, and a fair number of wounded.

Jaspers had been banned from teaching since 1933 because he didn’t endorse the Nazi regime (except to sign a loyalty oath in 1934) and because his spouse was Jewish. He and his wife had been listed for arrest–and presumably death–but they were saved when the US Army arrived the previous March. The US military trusted Jaspers, who been mediating between them and the university.

In the lecture, Jaspers notes that the Allied occupation is authoritarian; Germans have no say in their own governance. Later, he will insist that the fault for this situation lies with Germans alone. In the meantime, the occupation is not interfering with their freedom of speech.

Jaspers says that a university should never be a place for politics, in the narrow sense. “Dabbling in political actions and decisions of the day” is “never our business.” I suspect he is echoing Max Weber’s “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” a lecture from 1917. Jaspers says that he and his audience are free to do what they should always do in a university. But what is that?

Jaspers is giving a lecture. He acknowledges that it can become propaganda even if the theme is democracy or freedom. “Talk from the platform is necessarily one-sided. We do not converse here. Yet what I expound to you has grown out of the ‘talking with each other’ [Miteinandersprechen] which all of us do, each in his own circle” (p. 5). He adds, “We want to reflect together while, in fact, I expound unilaterally. But the point is not dogmatic communication, but investigation and tender for examination on your part” (p. 9).

Reflecting together is essential, Jaspers argues, because it can change “consciousness,” which is a “precedent for our judgment in politics.” To accomplish this transformation, “We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences” (p. 5). This “self-education” (Selbsterziehung) is not politics, but perhaps it’s a preparation for politics (p. 9).

The need for dialogue is especially acute because Germans have had radically different experiences. Most Germans have experienced tragic losses, but it matters greatly whether one’s loved-one was killed on the battlefield while invading the USSR, bombed at home, or executed by the regime. Because there was no free speech, Germans have been unable to discuss such profound differences. Jaspers says, “Now that we can talk freely again, we seem to each other as if we had come from different worlds” (p. 13).

He never mentions how he was treated by the government or by his fellow Germans. Some of the people in the lecture room had different experiences from him–in the specific sense that they were actively involved in killing people like his wife. The proportion who supported the regime was vastly larger than the proportion who resisted it. Nevertheless, Jaspers diagnoses the situation as what we would call “polarization” (a deep disagreement among people), and he validates everyone’s experiences while attributing guilt to himself.

The solution that he proposes for polarization is dialogue. He says, “We want to learn to talk with each other. That is to say, we do not just want to reiterate our opinions but to hear what the other thinks. We do not just want to assert but to reflect connectedly, listen to reasons, remain prepared for a new insight. We want to accept the other, to try to see things from the other’s point of view; in fact, we virtually want to seek out opposing views” (pp. 5-6).

Jaspers’ opening is a very strong statement in favor of pluralistic dialogue and institutional neutrality, as we might call those things today. I find it moving because he humanizes everyone despite having every reason to be furious at them. But I also think his stance is debatable. Should universities be as detached from politics as he advocates? (Would it have helped if they had been less detached in 1925 or 1930?) Was the problem really “division,” or was it Nazism?

Jaspers then offers an analysis of the question of German war guilt. Central to his analysis is a famous four-way distinction among:

Criminal guilt, which is attributable to individuals who have broken specific laws. It merits personal shame and punishment.
Political guilt, which belongs to all members of a polity (a democracy or otherwise), because “Everybody is responsible for the way he is governed.” However, political guilt does not imply criminal guilt or the need for an individual penalty or shame. Germany as a whole is rightly occupied because of political guilt, which is not the fault of individual Germans. Similarly, I might say, “I didn’t vote for George W. Bush or the Iraq war, but I have responsibility for Iraq as a US citizen. I needn’t feel bad about it personally, but I must accept the political consequences.”
Moral guilt: This is what one ought to feel as a result of being connected to an evil, even if one wasn’t personally responsible for what happened. It is what we would now call bad “moral luck.” For example, it is a matter of luck whether one was born a German or a Dane in 1905, but those who were born Germans have a form of guilt that is not due to their individual choices. Jaspers’ former student Hannah Arendt wrote (completely independently at about the same time): “That German refugees, who had the good fortune either to be Jews or to have been persecuted by the Gestapo early enough, have been saved from this guilt is of course not their merit.” If your conditions lead you to be good, you should reflect on your good fortune and not attribute your virtue to your self. If your conditions make you bad, you need penance and renewal.
Metaphysical guilt: “There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.” The outcome of accepting metaphysical guilt is what Jaspers calls “transformation before God.” Again, Arendt wrote something similar at about the same time: “It is many years now that we meet Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.” I would paraphrase their idea as follows (without invoking God): acts of evil remind us that we are flawed creatures, and we should be mindful of that fact.

Jaspers’ lecture must have given his audience much to wrestle with, but it’s not clear that it went over well. Much later, his student Harry Pross recalled:

No one would have dared interrupt the lecture. There was not supposed to be any conversation between the students and the professors in the old lecture hall. Then [at the end of the lecture] the philosopher left, somewhat stiffly, without casting a single glance left or right. The students sat tight, as they had always done. “Pretty meshuggener,” one murmured as he walked out. “At least you don’t have to say ‘Heil’ any more,” his friend replied.

Quoting Jaspers from E.N. Ashton’s translation: The Question of German Guilt (Fordham, 2000). The German words come from a 1971 German edition of Die Schuldfrage (note that Germany is not named in the original title), published by Joseph Buttinger. Pross is quoted in Antonia Grunenberg and Adrian Daub, “Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking Through the Breach in Tradition,” Social Research, vol. 74, no. 4, 2007, p. 1013.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

Category Archives: Continental philosophy

the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial

love of the world

Juergen Habermas (1929-2026)

living life as a story

Jaspers on collective responsibility and polarization