Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: arendt

• Mini-Syllabus: Introduction to Introductory Philosophy

  Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 11, 2016

  Every so often I put together what I call a “mini-syllabus”; roughly, I pull together several books that speak to a common theme that I think would be either fun or instructive to read together. Sometimes the lists are highly academic and focused, and sometimes the starting text is more of a springboard for further exploration, but they’re never as broad and diverse as traditional syllabi. Today, I’m going to break that trend with a miniature syllabus on my favorite topic: philosophy.

  However, this won’t be a full introduction to the subject, but rather an introduction to some of my favorite introductory texts, meaning that this list won’t get into the nitty-gritty details of epistemological, political, metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, or critical questions that make up the discipline, but instead will acquaint you with a variety of welcoming overtures to the field. Rather than diving into bell hooks’ incredible work on race and gender, or Russell’s clarifying take on the philosophy of language, you will instead get to see how they approach approaching the work they do, and how they invite others to join in the conversation.

  My reason for building this list is because, in a lot of ways, this really is the heart of philosophy. The work that philosophers do – answering questions, analyzing possibilities, critiquing assumptions, and more – comes from a core desire that transcends the specifics of any given sub-field. There is, in all specializations of philosophy, a deep and abiding commitment to continue seeking truth and digging for new problems to solve, even when the topic seems to be settled. I’ve written my own exhortations to philosophical inquiry here, here, and here.

  —–

  Without further ado, I give you my list of favorite invitations to philosophy:

  1. bell hooks’ essay on “Critical Thinking“, from the third book in her series on teaching, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom: This is chapter one of hooks’ third book on the topic, and in it she uncovers the main goal – and primary challenge – of every educator I’ve ever met: guiding students to be self-motivated, critical learners and generators of knowledge. While her focus in this essay is on the classroom, the same lessons can be applied to the independent scholar encountering philosophical arguments on their own time. Rather than simply reading to be instructed, everyone can read critically, and everyone can treat that reading experience as a conversation.

  2. Richard Feynman’s commencement speech at CalTech in 1974, “Cargo Cult Science“: This speech takes the same theme as bell hooks’ essay, but looks outside the classroom to see where so many of our barriers to critical thinking come from. While his main focus is eliminating barriers to honest and authentic science, his advice is applicable to any form of intellectual inquiry; it is just as easy to be duped by prose rationalization as it is the manipulation of scientific studies. Just because an argument sounds reasonable does not mean that it is.

  3. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic: While the entire text is rich and wonderful, the famous allegory is famous for a reason – it frames philosophy as a process guided by an elusive truth, along a difficult path that will force you question everything you hold certain, after which you may never view the world the same way again. The allegory functions very differently in context of the whole work, but as a stand alone piece, it’s still very effective.

  4. Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate Book 11: The Teacher, especially Article I: Can a man or only God teach and be called teacher?: In this text, Aquinas speaks of both self-guided and traditionally instructed learning as an activity of discovery, rather than as the passive reception of knowledge. In essence, we can acquire knowledge by means of discovery (guided by our own natural reason), or by means of following the discoveries of another. This means that a good teacher will not simply tell you what you need to know, but guide you by demonstrating how they discovered it (which is often much speedier, allowing our community knowledge base to grow and benefit from new discoveries). This is very dry reading (sorry Thomas), but the ideas are exciting. If you are not religious, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to an understanding of truth as natural, rather than super natural (though perhaps not the article about angels).

  5. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins” from the collection Labrynths: A play on the theories of idealism and surrealism, this story begins to complicate the task of philosophy, identity, and teaching in a way that is also entertaining and engaging. It will make you want to explore idealism, existentialism, and more.

  6. Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, especially chapter I “Appearance and Reality” and chapter XV “The Value of Philosophy”: This is Russell’s introductory text, written for brand new students of philosophy. In it, he writes about the difficulties of giving simple answers to what seem like simple questions, and also situates the role of philosophy among other disciplines. For more of my thoughts on these two chapters, see my Philosopher Fridays entry on Russell.

  7. Maria Lugones’ “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception“, published in 1987 (published online in 2009) in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy: This essay reads to me as a simultaneous extension of and challenge to Russell’s call to “enlargen ourselves” so that we can see things objectively. Lugones explores what makes that so difficult, and describes an alternative that allows us the philosophical benefits Russell seeks while also honoring the reality of life in the complicated context of identity. Her approach includes personal narrative, and then builds through the essay into a view of philosophy as an act of imaginative play that speaks much more practically to the way we can apply the critical thinking skills encouraged in the readings above in our daily experience.

  8. Nils Ch. Rauhut’s Ultimate Questions: Thinking about Philosophy: In philosophy, it is often difficult to find an introductory textbook that works for anyone but the scholar who wrote it (there are so many ways to approach the topic), but this one is excellent. While it does at times oversimplify complex topics, it does so in a way that invites the kinds of conversations hooks and Feynman in particular encourage above. I have a couple of minor quibbles with the presentation of some ideas (for example, including Descartes in the section on skepticism based on Meditation 1 is understandable, but perhaps a bit misleading for those who do not continue to read his resolution in Meditations 2-6 into rationalism), but overall it’s a textbook I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning the vocabulary and range of philosophical inquiry.

  9. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, especially Chapter 1: No work more comprehensively lays out the history of philosophical development with such instructive generality; instead of looking in a detailed way at different philosophers, or different philosophical fields, Arendt captures the conversations between competing ideologies, and the effect of that conversation on philosophy, religion, science, literature, economics, and politics in a way that is both descriptive and itself philosophical. Her aim in this text is to shift the conversation of philosophy away from a focus on the quiet eternity of contemplative death to the noisy, complicated, needy, mortal world of the living.

  —–

  I was going for an even ten items, but I think that should be quite enough to get anyone started – actually, any one of them could easily send a reader off on a path of intellectual discovery. If you do read something here and would like recommendations of where to go next, or have suggestions for other great introductory texts, please don’t hesitate to comment.

  5/12 Correction: Lugones’ article was printed in Hypatia in 1987, and was then published online in 2009. 

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  Posted in Series | 6 Comments | Tagged academia, aquinas, arendt, bell hooks, borges, feynman, learning, lugones, mini-syllabus, philosophy, Plato, reading, russell, teaching

• Philosopher Fridays: Arendt on the Public, the Private, and Blogging

  Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on January 9, 2015

  Welcome to Philosopher Fridays! This series is designed to allow me to explore what I find interesting, inspiring, or even just thought-provoking about the philosophers I read. While I hope these entries can serve as an introduction to their star thinker, they are by no means meant to be comprehensive or representative of current scholarly opinion. Parts of this entry are drawn from one section of a paper I submitted for a graduate course on Ecofeminism.

  ARENDT: Hannah Arendt is a familiar figure on this blog, as I’ve covered her early on in this series. In brief, Arendt follows the Periclean view that our life sustaining activities fall into three categories: Labor, Work, and Action, the goals of each to keep us alive in some way: when we labor, we protect our biological lives and preserve our species; when we work, we create semi-permanent objects beyond what nature provides, extending our influence beyond ourselves; and through action we create lasting impressions and memories that grant us a kind of immortality through fame. All of these activities depend on creation, life, change, and natality – the opposite of the still death of philosophical contemplation.

  They also engender and require a sharp distinction between the public realm and the private home. As I’ve been reflecting on my past year of blogging, the issue of privacy has come up more than once, and I thought it time to devote a post to the topic. I often think about how much I should share here on this blog, and how much I learn about other bloggers in what they write. Sometimes, personal details can be helpful. Other times, they distract from the writer’s mission.

  What was once a question reserved for celebrities and public figures is now an everyday question for anyone with regular access to an internet connection: How much of my life should I make public, and how much should I keep private?

  And there’s no one better suited for this topic than Hannah Arendt.

  In Arendt’s The Human Condition, there can be no politics without a public audience of some kind, a backdrop of plurality in front of which an individual can stand out qua individual – the polis, or the public sphere.

  No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presences of other human beings. (Arendt, 22)

  In order to do something truly political requires a deed that stands out amongst the crowd of deeds, and leaves a lasting impression that will be remembered in its individual difference. The public realm is thus the locus of speech, of equality, and of freedom.

  In contrast, the domestic sphere is, for Arendt, meant to be strictly private and internal. The private sphere is the world of labor – effectively, the home, where we eat, sleep, raise our children, and sustain ourselves. This is where humans, no matter how individual or free they may be, care for their animal selves through common life-sustaining labor. But those living solely in the private realm, having no access to the world outside of it, are merely possessions with no political efficacy of their own:

  What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a pre political phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity – for instance, but ruling over slaves – and to become free. (Arendt, 31)

  Further:

  The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only ‘equals’ whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality. (Arendt, 32)

  And to the point:

        …To have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human. (Arendt, 64)

  While Arendt writes poetically of the private realm as the only place where we can encounter true goodness (“Only goodness must go into absolute hiding and flee all appearance if it is not to be destroyed” (Arendt, 75), there is nothing unique to be accomplished in this realm, and as such there are no individuals to stand out amongst the crowd. The home is a space of biological urgency, respite, and life sustaining labor, while:

  the realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society…. (Arendt, 30, 31).

  Without the private home, we cannot be political agents out in the world, but neither can we be political if we dwell too deeply within it. It is axiomatically apolitical, and yet it sets the condition for political life. If we dissolve the two into each other, we lose both.

  Blogging dissolves these lines.

  WordPress is, in its own way, a polis where individuals can meet and exchange ideas, standing out, earning notoriety or fame or infamy by their contributions to the blogosphere. Some stand out more than others, some offer more personal information than other, but all of them allow us to simultaneously join the polis and stay in the safety of our own private homes. I write a lot about books and ideas and education and generally join into the public WordPress discourse more often than not, but I’ve also dipped into personal fare, talking about my writing habits, my collection of teapots, my frustrations, my goals, and more. I think a lot about how much detail I should share, considering both the integrity of my blog, and the integrity of my private space – my place of restoration. If I share too much, do I desacralize my private sphere? If I share too much, do I risk trivializing my writing?

  I don’t personally have any answers to these questions, so I’ll turn back to Arendt. Her answer to both of my questions would likely be a resounding “yes.”

  What we get when we dissolve these lines is, at best, the “enlargement of the private” (Arendt 52), better known as the Social realm, “…That curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call ‘society’” (Arendt 35).

  This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant (Arendt 52).

  In the Social realm, there is neither political Action nor the respite of privacy. In blending what Arendt says ought to be separate, we effectively create the worst of both worlds: a Society of Laborers, where everything we do, in public and private, becomes centered around the activities required for sustaining life. All of our Work and even what think of as political Action becomes subjugated to our natural necessity (Arendt 46). When we make these necessities public, we lose the privacy needed to hide ubiquitous and repetitive life sustaining tasks, and we effectively become little more than our animal species. Says Arendt:

  In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human (Arendt 38)

  And further, this makes it impossible to do or say anything truly meaningful, as all activities, both unique and ubiquitous become blended into idle curiosities, entertainments, and our “fifteen minutes of fame”. The unintentionally hilarious trailer for American Blogger – a documentary about fashion, beauty, and motherhood bloggers – exemplifies both the extreme trivialization of discourse and the utter dissolution of privacy Arendt fears. One of the women featured in the trailer says, with a straight face, ”If we’re not sharing it and we’re just keeping it private, why are we experiencing it?” As if there is no value to experiencing things privately. As if there is no difference between true political discourse and the ubiquitous everyday activities of life.

  I don’t completely agree with Arendt here; I think there’s definitely a way to politicize the private sphere without necessarily degrading either, and I think there is a way to cultivate a social sphere without necessarily trivializing the political and desacralizing the private. I’ve seen plenty of blogs that accomplish both of these tasks with ease. But I do think that Arendt’s fears are worthy of consideration. Just because it isn’t a necessity doesn’t mean it isn’t a danger.
  Posted in Series | 4 Comments | Tagged american blogger, arendt, blogging, home, human condition, philosopher fridays, philosophy, polis, politics, privacy

• Philosopher Fridays: Arendt, Part Two

  Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 14, 2014

  Last week, I posted Part One of my Philosopher Friday installment on Hannah Arendt. Part One focused on laying the groundwork for Arendt’s theory of The Human Condition. For Part Two this week, I will be looking at Arendt’s conclusions about life, death, and contemplation and explaining why I keep returning to Arendt again and again.

  A brief recap: Arendt’s understanding of the human condition breaks down into three activities: Labor, which consists of repetitive tasks done by everyone in order to survive, Work, wherein humans create semi-permanent objects in order to break out of the cyclicality of labor, and Action, wherein individual humans can transcend mortality by being remembered.

  But this remembrance isn’t necessarily satisfying. It depends upon work, and it depends upon labor. When it comes down to it, immortality of this kind is bound to earthly constraints, to bodies, to those things which come to be and pass away. For some, this isn’t enough – it’s too limiting, too dependent, and ultimately, just too materially confining. And so, those seeking freedom from this cyclic futility sought something higher, and found it in Contemplation.

  Contemplation happens in the mind; it means turning inward, away from the noise and change and material limitations of the world outside. It’s a place for ideas, simplicity, timelessness, metaphysics, and most of all – the eternal. Immortality, for Arendt, means that we come to be and last in the world of the living. The Eternal is the realm of God, of Plato’s Forms, and of things which always are, never changing, never starting, never ending: being itself. Those who live the Vita Contempliva leave behind their sensations, their appetites, their biases, and even their individuality. Contemplation is transcendence.

  And for Arendt, Contemplation is death. It is solitary. It means leaving the world of humanity. To enter into Contemplation is to “cease to be among men”. This happens in three ways:

  1. It is, quite literally, a temporary death, into which one enters willingly, purposefully, delightedly.
  2. To focus on contemplation as a highest priority is to devalue not just the body in favor of the mind, but life itself, in favor of death.
  3. And this causes us to actually make decisions in life that reflect this devaluation, in extreme cases actually causing political oppression and death.

  This is the part I can’t stop thinking about. The devaluation of labor and the body is, I think, the source of intersectional oppression, discrimination, colonialism, bias. It’s the reason we pay white collar workers more than blue, why we say that everyone must go to college, devalue the merits of nurturing, dismiss personal experience, and look down on people who focus on sensuous pleasures. Enlightenment means transcending the body, conquering nature, and turning your focus to “higher” things. It’s no accident that a major component of Enlightenment Colonialism, best known for its attempts to build trade infrastructure and create Imperial power, was Missionary. The focus was on death, on saving the immaterial soul, on bending the material world to our will, on stepping outside of the lived experience and taking up a God’s-Eye view. It’s why the act of bringing “civilization” so often involves violence and genocide – one need only look to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for a more thorough explanation.

  It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way – you can disappear into the contemplative realm, and return with the intent to implement your actions. But for many, such a return counts as pandering. You’re not a serious thinker if you look for applicability. You’re not truly civilized if you step down from the realm of contemplation to do work or labor. Here’s where the issue arises for Arendt – when you value the immaterial promise of death for its own sake, you lose respect for life.

  I could go on in this direction, but this isn’t a political blog. What matters for me here is the impact this has on writing, creativity, and philosophy. Arendt offers us a powerful critique of metaphysics that devalues lived experience, images, and essentially, that which is common.

  It inspires me to focus on life and natality in my philosophical work and my fiction writing as well, looking for wisdom not just in pure logic (though I certainly don’t reject it) but in common, sensory experience as well. To be trite, it helps me appreciate the little things – not just greatness. When I read, I try not to elevate authors and philosophers to the level of deities, but see them in their context, and see their works in conversation. Arendt helps me see both materiality and the metaphysical differently.

  While I would hesitate to attribute this to Arendt (though I wouldn’t rule it out), I think there are some significant similarities between the activity of labor and that of contemplation. Mainly, both are depersonalized in some way, humbling the individual to something greater. In labor, we are subsumed by a life-cycle that exceeds us. We’re all bound to its rhythms, no matter how we might try to distance ourselves from them. It is ubiquitous, repetitive, and cyclical, never moving forward, but always starting again.

  In contemplation, we are subsumed by eternity, losing our individual selves as we leave behind the materiality by which we become individuated. Ideas, in their purest forms, are simple, meaning not that they are easy, but that they are not bound into complex parts or defined in any particular way. In the timelessness of the contemplative realm there is no forward motion, only discovery of that which has always been and always will be. Contemplation and Labor are two sides of the same coin, and the one that matters most is the one that keeps us alive.

  Posted in Series | 0 Comments | Tagged arendt, contemplation, philosopher fridays, philosophy

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