Episteme

So as I'm plodding through day-to-day existence my mind is weighed down: should sheets match the comforter? did I just hit that person with my car? sugar or splenda? But today I made room in my tin-trap brain for something else, a small space, but something else: "Only man is capable of engaging in a bloody battle for the sole purpose of demonstrating that he has contempt for his own life, that he is something more than a complicated machine or a 'slave to his passion,' in short, that he has a specifically human dignity because he is free."

How I can get my work done when this is what I think about? (This definitely helps....)

Continue reading "Just Like Fish " »

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This story in the March issue of The Believer (yes, I'm about a month behind in everything, thank you), reveals to me much of the intent of this blog. It isn't always clear to me because knowledge is hard thing to quantify, and a bit of a process at that, but this manifesto, the "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" by David Shields, quantifies succinctly all these works of literature that fall under different ways of thinking. What's most impressive is what this guy has actually read: a lot of long, complicated books, but good ones at that, few of which I've managed to eyeball.

Continue reading "Art at the Intersection of Life " »

Posted by Dawn at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jane Jacobs died this week while I was in the middle of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I saw her give a lecture at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco little more than a year ago. If I had read her book(s) at the time, I probably would remember more of what she said, but I do remember is how she got into writing, urban planning and journalism: all by accident. She loved New York City, what made it New York City, at a time when the great experiment of suburbanism was getting underway and people were evacuating cities as though to escape pestilence.

Continue reading "Death of Cities, Death of Jane " »

Posted by Dawn at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What intrigues me about the October essay I mention here is how the Jewish intellectual scene was taken aback by her book because it talked so openly about the Holocaust, something Rabinback writes most Jews didn't talk about in public.

But I think of our attitude now toward the Holocaust, the movies that are made, the books that are written, the cartoons and how one historian established his career on the idea the Holocaust didn't exist, and it's not sacred in the way it was when Arendt was writing about it. I guess when I say sacred I mean taboo, because genocide, mass slaughter, something uniquely 20th century, shouldn't be sacred.

Continue reading "Banality and Evil Continued" »

Posted by Dawn at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy by Anson Rabinback (OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111.), Rabinback has this to say about Arendt's account and the backlash of her work among New York Jewih intellectuals:

“In this regard, Arendt’s report, precisely because it did not sanctify the Holocaust, because it continued to warn of the vulnerability of the pariah, and because it so manifestly seemed to question the virtue of victimhood, gave offense, and not merely because of its intemperate judgments and irreverent tone. Her account simultaneously enabled and violated the terms of the newly emerging public perception of the Holocaust.”

Continue reading "The Problem With Hannah" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and Jerusalem calls evil banal. She questions the intelligence of Eichmann, who the prosecution claim was a mastermind behind the Final Solution, and even looks at his way of speaking as an indication that he is not only a dullard but too unimaginative, too perfectly suited to the bureaucracy to even truly understand what he was doing.

Continue reading "Something Like Hope" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What I was alluding to yesterday with Reinhold Niebuhr is his book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. I had never thought of WWII in terms of original sin and the implications it has had on human behavior throughout history. So Niebhur is writing this in 1944, when things in Europe are bad, to say the least (makes me think of Europe Central), and Neibuhr being a Protestant scholar and preacher, looks at what is engulfing Europe in terms of "universal good" and "universal law."

Continue reading "Children of Light and Darkness" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)