Category Archives: Continental philosophy

living life as a story

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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:

  1. Criminal guilt, which is attributable to individuals who have broken specific laws. It merits personal shame and punishment.
  2. 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.”
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

See also: Max Weber on institutional neutrality; don’t confuse bias and judgment; an international discussion of polarization; and in the Holocaust Museum (from 2006).

a vivid sense of the future

Leave a reply

My conception of the relatively distant future is almost empty. How things will be in 20 years, or 50–I have no idea. I am not motivated or inspired by any such vision.

Walter Benjamin would not approve. He concludes his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with these words:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

According to Benjamin, history was not linear for the ancient Hebrews. Studying the past revealed a future that could suddenly appear in the present. For them, the future was not empty. Nor were they like “soothsayers” who make predictions by studying current trends–like today’s pundits who project a magical, technological future based on what they observe today. The future for the ancient Jews was something radically different from the present yet foretold by the past, if you read it right.

Benjamin is thinking of the Hebrew prophets. For example, the Lord gives Amos a message to convey to the rich and powerful:

5:11Therefore because you trample on the poor
    and you exact taxes of grain from him,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
    but you shall not dwell in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
    but you shall not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your transgressions
    and how great are your sins—
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
    and turn aside the needy in the gate.

A bit later, the Lord adds a hortatory or imperative sentence:

24 But let justice roll down like waters,
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Such sentences from the Lord can have direct consequences, as in “God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” He then promises to shake the house of Israel, “as one shakes a sieve,” except that no pebble will make it through this shaking:

10 All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword,
    who say, ‘Disaster shall not overtake or meet us.’

This is not only a prediction (certain people will die) but also an instruction (stop denying your faults). Then comes a much more positive promise:

11 “In that day I will raise up
    the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
    and raise up its ruins
    and rebuild it as in the days of old …

This is a vivid vision of the future–the text goes on for many verses describing it– brought into the present to serve a purpose. Amos’ prophesy is both a prediction and an exhortation. It chastises the wicked and comforts the oppressed.

Here is a quote from another text which–like the Hebrew Bible–impressed Walter Benjamin. It is Das Kapital (from the afterward of the second German edition)

With me [in contrast to Hegel], the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. …

In its rational form [dialectics] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx is saying, on the one hand, that he simply studies “the existing state of things.” As a hard-headed scientist, he knows that the world is material and governed by laws. However, his analysis also reveals the “negation of that state,” an infinitely better future. This makes his text “critical and revolutionary.”

Benjamin begins his “Theses” with the famous story of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th-century automaton that appeared to be a machine capable of winning at chess. Actually, there was a man inside who pulled the strings. Benjamin says, “One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Marxism can be interpreted as historical materialism. As a rigid system, it is unfalsifiable–“it can win all the time.” It is also inert, because human agency isn’t needed to bring about the future. It works like a machine and assumes that history is mechanical. Benjamin suggests, however, that Marxism is really a religion–in a good way. Its power is prophesy. Like the Torah, it instructs people in remembrance, conjures a future into the present, and inspires us to act.

I take my own bearings neither from Amos nor from Marx, yet I appreciate Benjamin’s idea that historical time is not linear. By acting politically, we change the meaning of the past and bring an imagined future into the now (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit). When we lose the capacity to envision a radically better future, we abandon our agency to impersonal forces.

See also: Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time; Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life; nostalgia in the face of political crisis (posts about Benjamin)

Sadness is a Light Kindled in the Heart

Leave a reply

In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled “We Refugees” in a Jewish-oriented New York magazine, Menorah Journal. Here she observes that her fellow exiles act like optimists in public, for they want to banish their terrors and assimilate to an optimistic American society. The exceptions are the ones who can’t maintain the appearance and “turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.”

She says, “I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.”

Around the same time, she privately wrote a poem in her native tongue that I will translate–a little loosely–as follows:

Sadness is like a light that is lit in the heart,
Darkness, a glow that gives shape to our night.
We set the small lamp of sorrow alight
To find our way home through the night's darkest part.
It brightens the wood, city, street, and tree.
And one who has no home--blessed is he;
In his dreams, even so, he sees home right.

At first, I didn’t love “darkness is like a light” (Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein), because that just seems to be a contradiction. But I came to appreciate the idea that the darkness of a sad night brings a kind of illumination by revealing the past.

The original German is three rhymed couplets:

Die Traurigkeit ist wie ein Licht im Herzen angezündet, 
Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein, der unsere Nacht ergründet. 
Wir brauchen nur das kleine Licht der Trauer zu entzünden, 
Um durch die lange weite Nacht wie Schatten heimzufinden. 
Beleuchtet ist der Wald, die Stadt, die Strasse und der Baum. 
Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; phenomenology of nostalgia

how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking

Leave a reply

Mystics have often advised that by turning our minds inward, we may find freedom. For instance, Marcus Aurelius restates a Greco-Roman commonplace when he writes, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. …. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul” (2:8 and 4:3).

Roughly similar ideas can be found in classical Indian and Christian sources:

“In dependence on the ear and sounds … In dependence on the mind and mental phenomena, mind-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, feeling comes to be; with feeling as condition, craving. But with the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving comes cessation of clinging … cessation of existence … cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering. This, bhikkhus, is the passing away of the world.” (Buddha, in the Pali Canon, SN 12.44)

— “But, Sir, where is the silence and where the place in which the word is spoken?”
— “As I said just now, it is in the purest part of the soul, in the noblest, in her ground, aye in the very essence of the soul. There is the central silence, into which no creature may enter, nor any image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware of any image either of herself or any creature. Whatever the soul effects she effects with her powers.” (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)

The same general idea appealed to the young Hannah Arendt. Her turn away from it explains much about her mature thought.

At age 65, Arendt recalled her early encounters with Martin Heidegger. “The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again. … There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” She remembered that in Heidegger’s seminars, she and her fellow students experienced “thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive for cognition.” They found that thinking can “become a passion” that orders the rest of one’s life.

One of the ways that Heidegger and his students would “think” was by analyzing a mental phenomenon in great detail. Heidegger resists saying that he “observes” his own mental states, such as his anxiety or boredom. That would be psychological research. Instead, “Our fundamental task now consists in awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing.” He and his students would let their moods and other mental states reveal themselves, and they saw this as a path to truth and freedom.

Certainly, Heidegger’s method was not identical to the meditative exercises of Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, or Meister Eckhardt, but it resembled them in a very general way. And it drew Arendt to Heidegger.

In the winter of 1925-6, Arendt ended her romantic relationships with him and wrote a poem about her feelings: “Klage” (or “Lament”), which I have translated here. It is a teenager’s breakup lyric. It is also a very carefully constructed poem, rhymed and rhythmic, which means that it cannot be a literal report of its author’s mental state. Although she begins, “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly,” some of her hours must have been spent rhyming “Nieder” with “Lieder” and “wie Spiel” with “Qualenspiel”–and, I presume, enjoying the results.

Meanwhile, the poem is deeply Heideggerian, focusing on how time becomes evident when we are distressed and ending with a claim of authenticity: “Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away,” yet “Never will it make me give away / The bliss of lovely truth.”

Having read the mature work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, you would assume that she would not want to retreat into introspection, especially meditation on the highly abstract and general topics that interested Heidegger. You would assume that she would decry an inward turn as irresponsibly apolitical. She would advocate engagement with fellow citizens as the basis of a good (and free) life.

One way that she brought herself to this conclusion was by way of her encounter with Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1831). Soon after Arendt left Heidegger, she began to write a book about this Prussian-Jewish salon hostess of the Romantic period.

In Arendt’s account, Varnhagen (born Levin) turned to private introspection to find freedom. Varnhagen presumed that “self-thinking brings liberation from objects and their reality, creates a sphere of pure ideas and a world which is accessible to any rational being without benefit of knowledge or experience” (p. 54). Arendt explains: “If thinking rebounds back upon itself and finds its solitary object within the soul—if, that is, it becomes introspection—it distinctly produces … a semblance of unlimited power by the very act of isolation from the world; by ceasing to be interested in the world it also sets up a bastion in front of the one ‘interesting’ object: the inner self” (p. 55).

This practice of reflecting on one’s inner life (and writing some 6,000 letters about it) was particularly appealing to someone in Varnhagen’s circumstances. She experienced prejudice as a Jew yet lacked commitment to Judaism or to other aspects of her heritage, or even much knowledge of them. She never received a formal education, so she couldn’t investigate history, society, or nature in an advanced way. Since she was poor, female, and–in her own view–physically unattractive, she had limited social prospects. She was drawn to investigating herself as if she were purely an instance of the human condition:

She saw herself as blocked not by individual and therefore removable obstacles, but by everything, by the world. Out of her hopeless struggle with indefiniteness arose her “inclination to generalize.” Reason grasped conceptually what could not be specifically defined, thereby saving her …. By abstraction reason diverted attention from the concrete; it transformed the yearning to be happy into a “passion for truth”; it taught “pleasures” which had no connection with the personal self (p. 59)

But there were reasons that she was so frustrated, and they were not inevitable features of human existence. These reasons included sexism and antisemitism. They explained some of what Varnhagen found when she looked within: her own bitter memories.

While you introspect, Arendt says, everything can feel calm and free. “The one unpleasant feature is that memory itself perpetuates the present, which otherwise would only touch the soul fleetingly. As a consequence of memory, therefore, one subsequently discovers that outer events, have a degree of reality that is highly disturbing” (p. 55).

Arendt uses “world” in a Heideggerian sense, which I think she will retain throughout her life. The “world” is the web of relationships into which we are born as human beings:

Relationships and conventions, in their general aspects, are as irrevocable as nature. A person probably can defy a single fact by denying it, but not that totality of facts which we call the world. In the world one can live if one has a station, a place on which one stands, a position to which one belongs. … In the end the world always has the last word because one can introspect only into one’s own self, but not out of it again (p. 58)

Arendt argues that Varnhagen gradually realized that she had a specific place in a specific world. Supposedly, her dying words were: “What a history! —A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. … The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed” (p. 49). She had understood, in short, that had never been free in her inner life or in her conversations and correspondence with friends and lovers. But she had been a particular person in a specific place and time, and this had given her life meaning.

For Arendt, then, a good life must involve addressing the kinds of social injustices that made Varnhagen suffer–not simply to remedy or mitigate these injustices, but because an active and ethical engagement with the “world” is a better form of freedom than the one that is promised by introspection.

Sources: I quote Marcus Aurelius from Gregory Hays’ translation, and Heidegger from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude 1,1,16a., translated by McNeill and Walker. I quote Arendt’s own English version of her Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess from The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000).

See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; introspect to reenchant the inner life; The Art of Solitude; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; etc.