Take Hannah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Revolution”

in Philosophy, Politics | May 5th, 2020

After her analy­sis of total­i­tar­i­an­ism in Nazi Ger­many and Stalin’s Sovi­et Union, Han­nah Arendt turned her schol­ar­ly atten­tion to the sub­ject of revolution—namely, to the French and Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tions. How­ev­er, the first chap­ter of her 1963 book On Rev­o­lu­tion opens with a para­phrase of Lenin about her own time: “Wars and rev­o­lu­tions… have thus far deter­mined the phys­iog­no­my of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.”

Arendt wrote the book on the thresh­old of many wars and rev­o­lu­tions yet to come, but she was not par­tic­u­lar­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the left­ist turn of the 1960s. On Rev­o­lu­tion favors the Amer­i­can Colonists over the French Sans Culottes and Jacobins. The book is in part an intel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tion to anti-Com­mu­nism, one of many ide­olo­gies, Arendt writes, that “have lost con­tact with the major real­i­ties of our world”?

What are those real­i­ties? “War and rev­o­lu­tion,” she argues, “have out­lived all their ide­o­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions… no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the begin­ning of our his­to­ry has deter­mined the very exis­tence of pol­i­tics, the cause of free­dom ver­sus tyran­ny.” This sounds like pam­phle­teer­ing, but Arendt did not use such abstrac­tions light­ly. As one of the fore­most schol­ars of ancient Greek and mod­ern Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy, she was emi­nent­ly qual­i­fied to define her terms.

Her stu­dents, on the oth­er hand, might have strug­gled with such weighty con­cepts as “rev­o­lu­tion,” “rights, “free­dom,” etc. which can so eas­i­ly become mean­ing­less slo­gans with­out sub­stan­tive elab­o­ra­tion and “con­tact with real­i­ty.” Arendt was a thor­ough teacher. Once her stu­dents left her class, they sure­ly had a bet­ter grasp on the intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy. Such under­stand­ing con­sti­tut­ed Arendt’s life’s work, and it was through teach­ing that she devel­oped and refined the ideas that became On Rev­o­lu­tion.

Arendt began research for the book at Prince­ton, where she was appoint­ed the first woman to serve as a full pro­fes­sor in 1953. Through­out the 50s and ear­ly 60s, she taught at Berke­ley, Colum­bia, Cor­nell, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, and North­west­ern before join­ing the fac­ul­ty of the New School. In 1961, she taught a North­west­ern sem­i­nar called “On Rev­o­lu­tion.” Just above, you can see the course’s final exam. (View it in a larg­er for­mat here.) If you’re won­der­ing why she gave the test in March, per­haps it’s because the fol­low­ing month, she board­ed a plane to cov­er the Adolf Eich­mann tri­al for The New York­er.

What did Arendt want to make sure that her stu­dents under­stood before she left? See a tran­scrip­tion of the exam ques­tions below. We see the two poles of her lat­er argu­ment com­ing into focus, the French and the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas. The lat­ter exam­ple has been seen by many crit­i­cal philoso­phers as hard­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary at all, giv­en that it was pri­mar­i­ly waged in the inter­ests of mer­chants and slave-own­ing plan­ta­tion own­ers. It was, as one his­to­ri­an puts it, “a rev­o­lu­tion in favor of gov­ern­ment.”

This crit­i­cism is like­ly the basis of Arendt’s final ques­tion on the test. But in her eru­dite argu­ment, the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion is foun­da­tion­al to use of “rev­o­lu­tion” as a polit­i­cal term of art. As Arendt writes in a late 60s lec­ture, re-dis­cov­ered in 2017, “pri­or to the two great rev­o­lu­tions at the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry and the spe­cif­ic sense it then acquired, the word ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ was hard­ly promi­nent in the vocab­u­lary of polit­i­cal thought or prac­tice.” Rather, it main­ly had astro­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

Arendt saw all sub­se­quent world rev­o­lu­tions as par­tak­ing of the twinned log­ics of the 18th cen­tu­ry. “Its polit­i­cal usage was metaphor­i­cal,” she says, “describ­ing a move­ment back into some pre-estab­lished point, and hence a motion, a swing­ing back to a pre-ordained order.” Gen­er­al­ly, that order has been pre-ordained by the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies them­selves. See if your under­stand­ing of rev­o­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry is up to Arendt’s ped­a­gog­i­cal stan­dards, below, and get a more com­pre­hen­sive his­to­ry of rev­o­lu­tion from the read­ings on recent course syl­labus­es here, here, and here.

 

Answer at least five of the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

  1. What is the ori­gin of the word “rev­o­lu­tion”?

How was the word orig­i­nal­ly used in polit­i­cal lan­guage?

  1. Iden­ti­fy the fol­low­ing dates:

The 14th of July

The 9th of Ther­mi­dore

The 18th of Bru­maire

  1. Who wrote The Rights of Man?

Who wrote Reflec­tions on the French Rev­o­lu­tion?

What was the con­nec­tion between the two books?

  1. Who was Creve­coeur? Give title of his book.
  2. Enu­mer­ate some authors and books that played a role in the rev­o­lu­tions?
  3. What is the dif­fer­ence between abso­lutism and a “lim­it­ed monar­chy”?
  4. Who is the author of The Spir­it of the Laws?
  5. Which author had the great­est influ­ence on the men of the French Rev­o­lu­tion?
  6. What is meant by the phrase “state of nature”?
  7. The fol­low­ing words are of Greek ori­gin; give their Eng­lish equiv­a­lent: monarchy—oligarchy—aristocracy—democracy.

Write a short essay of no more than four pages on one of the fol­low­ing top­ics:

  1. It is a main the­sis of R.R. Palmer’s The Age of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rev­o­lu­tion that “the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion was an event with­in an Atlantic civ­i­liza­tion as a whole.” Explain and dis­cuss.

  2. Clin­ton Rossiter asserts that “America’s debt to the idea of social con­tract is so huge as to defy mea­sure­ment.” Explain and dis­cuss.

  3. Dif­fer­ences and sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Amer­i­can and the French Rev­o­lu­tion.

  4. Con­nect on pos­si­ble mean­ings of the phrase: Pur­suit of hap­pi­ness.

  5. Describe Melville’s atti­tude to the French Rev­o­lu­tion in Bil­ly Budd.

  6. The Amer­i­can Revolution—was there any?

via Saman­tha Hill

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Large Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Read Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bertrand Russell Remembers His Face-to-Face Encounter with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

in History, Philosophy | April 30th, 2020

When the Bol­she­viks seized con­trol of Rus­sia in the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, Bertrand Rus­sell saw it as “one of the great hero­ic events of the world’s his­to­ry.”

A renowned philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian, Rus­sell was also a com­mit­ted social­ist. As he would write in his 1920 book The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism:

By far the most impor­tant aspect of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion is as an attempt to real­ize Com­mu­nism. I believe that Com­mu­nism is nec­es­sary to the world, and I believe that the hero­ism of Rus­sia has fired men’s hopes in a way which was essen­tial to the real­iza­tion of Com­mu­nism in the future. Regard­ed as a splen­did attempt, with­out which ulti­mate suc­cess would have been very improb­a­ble, Bol­she­vism deserves the grat­i­tude and admi­ra­tion of all the pro­gres­sive part of mankind.

But despite his ear­ly admi­ra­tion for the “splen­did attempt,” Rus­sell found much in Sovi­et Rus­sia to be con­cerned about. Specif­i­cal­ly, he was appalled by the rigid­ly doc­tri­naire mind­set of the Bol­she­viks — their zeal for quot­ing Marx like it was Holy gospel — and the cru­el tyran­ny they were will­ing to impose.

In May of 1920, a few months before fin­ish­ing The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism, Rus­sell vis­it­ed Pet­ro­grad (Saint Peters­burg) and Moscow with a British Labour del­e­ga­tion. As he says in the book:

I went to Rus­sia a Com­mu­nist; but con­tact with those who have no doubts has inten­si­fied a thou­sand­fold my own doubts, not as to Com­mu­nism in itself, but as to the wis­dom of hold­ing a creed so firm­ly that for its sake men are will­ing to inflict wide­spread mis­ery.

As Rus­sell would lat­er write in the sec­ond vol­ume of his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, his time in Sovi­et Rus­sia was one of “con­tin­u­al­ly increas­ing night­mare:”

Cru­el­ty, pover­ty, sus­pi­cion, per­se­cu­tion, formed the very air we breathed. Our con­ver­sa­tions were con­tin­u­al­ly spied upon. In the mid­dle of the night one would hear shots, and know that ide­al­ists were being killed in prison. There was a hyp­o­crit­i­cal pre­tence of equal­i­ty, and every­body was called ‘tovarisch’ [com­rade], but it was amaz­ing how dif­fer­ent­ly this word could be pro­nounced accord­ing as the per­son who was addressed was Lenin or a lazy ser­vant.

Soon after arriv­ing in Moscow, Rus­sell had a one-hour talk with Sovi­et leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his spar­tan office in the Krem­lin. “Lenin’s room is very bare,” writes Rus­sell in The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism; “it con­tains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cas­es, and one com­fort­able chair for vis­i­tors in addi­tion to two or three hard chairs. It is obvi­ous that he has no love of lux­u­ry or even com­fort.”

In the audio clip above, tak­en from a 1961 inter­view by John Chan­dos at Rus­sel­l’s home in north Wales, the old philoso­pher relates a pair of obser­va­tions of what he saw as Lenin’s two defin­ing traits: his rigid ortho­doxy, and what Rus­sell would lat­er call his “dis­tinct vein of imp­ish cru­el­ty.”

By the time of the inter­view, Rus­sel­l’s ear­ly ambiva­lence toward Sovi­et com­mu­nism had hard­ened into antipa­thy. “Marx’s doc­trine was bad enough, but the devel­op­ments which it under­went under Lenin and Stal­in made it much worse,” he writes in his 1956 essay “Why I am Not a Com­mu­nist.” “I am com­plete­ly at a loss to under­stand how it came about that some peo­ple who are both humane and intel­li­gent could find some­thing to admire in the vast slave camp pro­duced by Stal­in.”

Lenin died on Jan­u­ary 21, 1924 — less than four years after his meet­ing with Rus­sell. A few days lat­er, Rus­sell pub­lished an essay, “Lenin: An Impres­sion,” in The New Leader. And although Rus­sell once again men­tions the man’s nar­row ortho­doxy and ruth­less­ness, he paints a rather glow­ing pic­ture of Lenin as a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure:

The death of Lenin makes the world poor­er by the loss of one of the real­ly great men pro­duced by the war [World War I]. It seems prob­a­ble that our age will go down to his­to­ry as that of Lenin and Ein­stein — the two men who have suc­ceed­ed in a great work of syn­the­sis in an ana­lyt­ic age, one in thought, the oth­er in action. Lenin appeared to the out­raged bour­geoisie of the world as a destroy­er, but it was not the work of destruc­tion that made him pre-emi­nent. Oth­ers could have destroyed, but I doubt whether any oth­er liv­ing man could have built so well on the new foun­da­tions. His mind was order­ly and cre­ative: he was a philo­soph­ic sys­tem-mak­er in the sphere of prac­tice.… States­men of his cal­iber do not appear in the world more than about once in a cen­tu­ry, and few of us are like­ly to live to see his equal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekov, the Romanovs & More

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What is Albert Camus’ The Plague About? An Introduction

in Books, Literature, Philosophy | April 6th, 2020

Top­ping lists of plague nov­els cir­cu­lat­ing these days, Albert Camus’ 1947 The Plague (La Peste), as many have been quick to point out, is about more than its blunt title would sug­gest. The book incor­po­rates Camus’ expe­ri­ence as edi­tor-in-chief of Com­bat, a French Resis­tance news­pa­per, and serves as an alle­go­ry for the spread of fas­cism and the Nazi occu­pa­tion of France. It also illus­trates the evo­lu­tion of his philo­soph­i­cal thought: a grad­ual turn toward the pri­ma­cy of the absurd, and away from asso­ci­a­tions with Sartre’s Exis­ten­tial­ism.

But The Plague’s pri­ma­ry sub­ject is, of course, a plague—a fic­tion­al out­break in the Alger­ian “French pre­fec­ture” of Oran. Here, Camus relo­cates a 19th cen­tu­ry cholera out­break to some­time in the 1940s and turns it into the rat-borne epi­dem­ic that killed tens of mil­lions in cen­turies past. As Daniel Defoe had done 175 years before in A Jour­nal of the Plague Year—draw­ing on his own expe­ri­ences as a journalist—Camus “immersed him­self in the his­to­ry of plagues,” notes the School of Life. Camus even quotes Defoe in the nov­el­’s epi­graph: “It is as rea­son­able to rep­re­sent one kind of impris­on­ment by anoth­er, as it is to rep­re­sent any­thing that real­ly exists by that which exists not.”

Camus “read books on the Black Death that killed 50 mil­lion peo­ple in Europe in the 14th cen­tu­ry; the Ital­ian plague of 1629 that killed 280,000 peo­ple across the plains of Lom­bardy and the Vene­to, the great plague of Lon­don of 1665 as well as plagues that rav­aged cities on China’s east­ern seaboard dur­ing the 18th and 19th cen­turies.” Per­haps more time­ly now than in its time, The Plague puts Camus’ his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge in the mind of its pro­tag­o­nist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, who remem­bers in his grow­ing alarm “the plague at Con­stan­tino­ple that, accord­ing to Pro­copius, caused ten thou­sand deaths in a sin­gle day.”

Rieux embod­ies anoth­er theme in the novel—the seem­ing­ly end­less human capac­i­ty for denial, even among well-mean­ing, knowl­edge­able experts. Despite his read­ing of his­to­ry and up-close obser­va­tion of the out­break, Rieux fails—or refuses—to acknowl­edge the dis­ease for what it is. That is, until an old­er col­league says to him, “Nat­u­ral­ly, you know what this is.” Forced to say the word “plague” aloud, Rieux allows the spread­ing epi­dem­ic to become real for the first time.

[L]ike our fel­low cit­i­zens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should under­stand his hes­i­ta­tions in the light of this fact; and sim­i­lar­ly under­stand how he was torn between con­flict­ing fears and con­fi­dence. When a war breaks out, peo­ple say: “It’s too stu­pid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stu­pid,” that does­n’t pre­vent its last­ing. Stu­pid­i­ty has a knack of get­ting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in our­selves.

In this respect our towns­folk were like every­body else, wrapped up in them­selves; in oth­er words they were human­ists: they dis­be­lieved in pesti­lences.

Per­pet­u­al­ly busy with mer­can­tile projects and ideas about progress, the town, like “human­ists,” ignores the reap­pear­ance of his­to­ry and believe plagues to belong to the dis­tant past. Camus writes that such peo­ple “pass away… first of all, because they haven’t tak­en their pre­cau­tions.”

Every­body knows that pesti­lences have a way of recur­ring in the world; yet some­how we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in his­to­ry; yet always plagues and wars take peo­ple equal­ly by sur­prise.

Whether we are pre­pared for them or not, plagues and wars will come upon us, aid­ed by the brute force of human idio­cy and irra­tional­i­ty. This ter­ri­ble truth flies in the face of the unteth­ered free­dom of Sartre­an exis­ten­tial­ism. “They fan­cied them­selves free,” Camus’ nar­ra­tor says of Oran’s towns­peo­ple, “and no one will ever be free so long as there are pesti­lences.” The nov­el pro­ceeds to illus­trate just how dev­as­tat­ing a dead­ly epi­dem­ic can be to our most cher­ished notions.

In Camus’ phi­los­o­phy, “our lives,” the School of Life points out, “are fun­da­men­tal­ly on the edge of what he termed ‘the absurd.’” But this “should not lead us to despair pure and sim­ple,” though the feel­ing may be a stage along the way to “a redemp­tive tra­gi-com­ic per­spec­tive.” The recog­ni­tion of fini­tude, of fail­ure, igno­rance, and repetition—what philoso­pher Miguel de Una­muno called “the trag­ic sense of life”—can instead cure us of the “behav­iors Camus abhorred: a hard­ness of heart, an obses­sion with sta­tus, a refusal of joy and grat­i­tude, a ten­den­cy to mor­al­ize and judge.” What­ev­er else The Plague is about, Camus shows that in a strug­gle for sur­vival, these atti­tudes can prove worse than use­less and can be the first to go.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Nov­el the Coro­n­avirus Has Made a Best­seller Again

Pan­dem­ic Lit­er­a­ture: A Meta-List of the Books You Should Read in Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine

Sartre Writes a Trib­ute to Camus After His Friend-Turned-Rival Dies in a Trag­ic Car Crash: “There Is an Unbear­able Absur­di­ty in His Death”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How to Teach and Learn Philosophy During the Pandemic: A Collection of 450+ Philosophy Videos Free Online

in Online Courses, Philosophy | March 26th, 2020

The term phi­los­o­phy, as every intro­duc­to­ry course first explains, means the love of wis­dom. And as the old­est intel­lec­tu­al dis­ci­pline, phi­los­o­phy has proven that the love of wis­dom can with­stand the worst human his­to­ry can throw at it. Civ­i­liza­tions may rise and fall, but soon­er or lat­er we always find ways to get back to phi­los­o­phiz­ing. The cur­rent coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, the most fright­en­ing glob­al event most of us have seen in our life­times, does­n’t quite look like a civ­i­liza­tion-ender, though it has forced many of us to change the way we live and learn. In short, we’re doing much more of it online, and a new col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tion­al videos free online is keep­ing phi­los­o­phy in the mix.

“In order to aid phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors dur­ing the pan­dem­ic as they tran­si­tion from in-per­son to online teach­ing, Liz Jack­son (ANU) and Tyron Gold­schmidt (Rochester) cre­at­ed a spread­sheet of vide­o­record­ed phi­los­o­phy class­es and lec­tures,” writes Dai­ly Nous’ Justin Wein­berg. At the time of Wein­berg’s post on Mon­day, the spread­sheet, avail­able as an open Google doc­u­ment, con­tained more than 200 videos, a num­ber that has since more than dou­bled to 457 and count­ing.

You’ll find an abun­dance of intro­duc­to­ry cours­es to the entire sub­ject of phi­los­o­phy as well as to sub­fields like log­ic and ethics, and also spe­cial­ized lec­ture series on every­thing from Hume and Niet­zsche to Sto­icism and meta­physics to death and the prob­lem of evil.

Wein­berg adds that “any­one can add their own videos or ones that they know about,” so if you’re aware of any video phi­los­o­phy cours­es that haven’t appeared on the spread­sheet yet, you can con­tribute to this ongo­ing effort in at-home phi­los­o­phy by insert­ing them your­self. Even as it is, Jack­son and Gold­sh­midt’s course col­lec­tion offers more than enough to give your­self a rich philo­soph­i­cal edu­ca­tion in this time of iso­la­tion — or, if you’re a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor your­self, a way to enrich any remote teach­ing you have to do right now. Putting as it does so close at hand lec­tures by such fig­ures pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture as Nigel War­bur­ton, Michael Sandel, Peter Adam­son, and the inim­itable Rick Rod­er­ick, it reminds us that the love of wis­dom is best expressed in a vari­ety of voic­es.

In addi­tion to the spread­sheet, can find many more phi­los­o­phy videos in our col­lec­tion, Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Phi­los­o­phy with a Wealth of Free Cours­es, Pod­casts and YouTube Videos

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

350 Ani­mat­ed Videos That Will Teach You Phi­los­o­phy, from Ancient to Post-Mod­ern

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Nov­el the Coro­n­avirus Has Made a Best­seller Again

Use Your Time in Iso­la­tion to Learn Every­thing You’ve Always Want­ed To: Free Online Cours­es, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Col­or­ing Books & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Meaning of Life According to Simone de Beauvoir

in Philosophy | March 12th, 2020

When some­one pre­sumes to explain the mean­ing of life, they usu­al­ly draw, how­ev­er vague­ly, on reli­gion. Many a philoso­pher has ven­tured a sec­u­lar answer, but it’s hard to com­pete with the ancient sto­ries of the world’s major faiths. The rich­ness of their metaphors sur­pass­es his­tor­i­cal truth; humans, it seems, real­ly “can­not bear very much real­i­ty,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quar­tets. Maybe we need sto­ries to keep us going, which is why we love Pla­to, whose myth of the ori­gins of love in his novel­la, the Sym­po­sium, remains one of the most mov­ing in the West­ern philo­soph­i­cal canon.

Pla­to’s philo­soph­i­cal project was a sto­ry that exis­ten­tial­ists like Simone de Beau­voir were eager to be rid of, along with the hoary old myths of reli­gion. The Athe­ni­an’s pious ide­al­ism “dis­missed the phys­i­cal world as a flawed reflec­tion of high­er truth and unchang­ing ideals,” says Iseult Gille­spie in the TED-Ed video above. “But for de Beau­voir, ear­ly life was enthralling, sen­su­al, and any­thing but sta­t­ic.” Mate­r­i­al real­i­ty is not an imper­fect copy, but the medi­um into which we are thrown, to exer­cise free­dom and respon­si­bil­i­ty and deter­mine our own pur­pos­es, as de Beau­voir argued in The Ethics of Ambi­gu­i­ty.

For de Beau­voir, as for her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre, the “eth­i­cal imper­a­tive to cre­ate our own life’s mean­ing,” pre­cedes any pre-exist­ing mean­ing to which we might attach our­selves, and which might lead us to deny free­dom to oth­ers. “A free­dom which is inter­est­ed only in deny­ing free­dom,” she wrote, “must be denied.” We might think of such a state­ment in terms of Karl Popper’s para­dox of intol­er­ance, but the idea led de Beau­voir in a dif­fer­ent direction—away from the lib­er­al­ism Pop­per defend­ed and in a more rad­i­cal philo­soph­i­cal direc­tion.

De Beauvoir’s exis­ten­tial­ist fem­i­nism asked fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about the giv­en cat­e­gories of social iden­ti­ty that lock us into pre­fig­ured roles and shape our lives with­out our con­sent or con­trol. She real­ized that social con­struc­tions of womanhood—not a Pla­ton­ic ide­al but a his­tor­i­cal production—restricted her from ful­ly real­iz­ing her cho­sen life’s mean­ing. “Despite her pro­lif­ic writ­ing, teach­ing, and activism, de Beau­voir strug­gled to be tak­en seri­ous­ly by her male peers.” This was not only a polit­i­cal prob­lem, it was also an exis­ten­tial one.

As de Beau­voir would argue in The Sec­ond Sex, cat­e­gories of gen­der turned women into “others”—imperfect copies of men, who are con­strued as the ide­al. Lat­er the­o­rists took up the cri­tique to show how race, sex­u­al­i­ty, class, and oth­er sto­ries about human iden­ti­ty restrict the abil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als to deter­mine their lives’ mean­ing. Instead, we find our­selves pre­sent­ed with social nar­ra­tives that explain our exis­tence to us and tell us what we can hope to accom­plish and what we can­not.

De Beau­voir was also a sto­ry­teller. Her per­son­al expe­ri­ences fig­ured cen­tral­ly in her phi­los­o­phy; she pub­lished sev­er­al acclaimed nov­els, and along with Nobel-win­ning nov­el­ists and play­wrights Sartre and Albert Camus, made Exis­ten­tial­ism the most lit­er­ary of philo­soph­i­cal move­ments. But when it came to grand abstrac­tions like the “mean­ing of life,” the answer all of them gave in their philo­soph­i­cal work was that such things aren’t hov­er­ing above us like Pla­to’s ide­al forms. Each of us must fig­ure it out our­selves with­in our flawed, imper­fect, indi­vid­ual lives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Simone de Beau­voir Defends Exis­ten­tial­ism & Her Fem­i­nist Mas­ter­piece, The Sec­ond Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Inter­view

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and a Fem­i­nist (1960)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Jeremy Bentham’s Mummified Body Is Still on Display–Much Like Other Aging British Rock Stars

in Philosophy, Random | March 9th, 2020

Plato’s ide­al of philoso­pher-kings seems more unlike­ly by the day, but most mod­ern read­ers of The Repub­lic don’t see his state as an improve­ment, with its rigid caste sys­tem and state con­trol over child­bear­ing and rear­ing. Plato’s Socrates did not love democ­ra­cy, though he did argue that men and women (those of the guardian class, at least) should receive an equal edu­ca­tion. So too did many promi­nent Euro­pean polit­i­cal philoso­phers of the 18th and 19th cen­turies, who had at least as much influ­ence on world affairs as Pla­to did on Athens, for bet­ter and worse.

One such thinker, Jere­my Ben­tham, is often remem­bered as the inven­tor of the panop­ti­con, a dystopi­an prison design that makes inmates inter­nal­ize their own sur­veil­lance, believ­ing they could be watched at any time by unseen eyes. Made infa­mous by Michel Fou­cault in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the pro­pos­al was first intend­ed as humane reform, con­sis­tent with the tenets of Bentham’s philo­soph­i­cal inno­va­tion, Util­i­tar­i­an­ism, often asso­ci­at­ed with his most famous dis­ci­ple, John Stu­art Mill.

Ben­tham may also have been one of the most pro­gres­sive sec­u­lar philoso­phers of any age—espousing full polit­i­cal rights for everyone—by which he actu­al­ly meant every­one, not only Euro­pean landown­ing men. “In his own time,” writes Faramerz Dab­hoi­wala at The Guardian, Ben­tham “was cel­e­brat­ed around the globe. Count­less prac­ti­cal efforts at social and polit­i­cal reform drew inspi­ra­tion from him. […] He was made an hon­orary cit­i­zen of rev­o­lu­tion­ary France, while the Guatemalan leader José del Valle acclaimed him as ‘the leg­is­la­tor of the world.’ Nev­er before or since has the Eng­lish-speak­ing world pro­duced a more polit­i­cal­ly engaged and inter­na­tion­al­ly influ­en­tial thinker across such a broad range of sub­jects.”

Ben­tham took the role seri­ous­ly, though there may be the seeds of a mor­bid prac­ti­cal joke in his last philo­soph­i­cal act.

As he lay dying in the spring of 1832, the great philoso­pher Jere­my Ben­tham left detailed direc­tions for the preser­va­tion of his corpse. First, it was to be pub­licly dis­sect­ed in front of an invit­ed audi­ence. Then, the pre­served head and skele­ton were to be reassem­bled, clothed, and dis­played ‘in the atti­tude in which I am sit­ting when engaged in thought and writ­ing.’ His desire to be pre­served for­ev­er was a polit­i­cal state­ment. As the fore­most sec­u­lar thinker of his time, he want­ed to use his body, as he had his mind, to defy reli­gious super­sti­tions and advance real, sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge. Almost 200 years lat­er, Ben­tham’s ‘auto-icon’ still sits, star­ing off into space, in the clois­ters of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don.

His full-body par­o­dy of saints’ relics doesn’t just sit in Lon­don, in the “appro­pri­ate box or case” he spec­i­fied in his instruc­tions. It has also sat in its box in cities across Eng­land, Ger­many, and New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. “Not unlike an aging British rock star,” writes Isaac Schultz at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the old­er he gets, the more tours he seems to go on. Some­times Bentham’s sev­ered, mum­mi­fied head,” with its ter­ri­fy­ing, unblink­ing glass eyes, “accom­pa­nies the rest of him.” Some­times it doesn’t.

The head, which was sup­posed to have been kept atop the ful­ly dressed skele­ton, was mis­han­dled and dam­aged in the cre­ation of the “auto-icon” and replaced by a wax repli­ca (sure­ly an acci­dent and not a way to mit­i­gate the creepi­ness). What did Ben­tham mean by all of this? And what is an “auto-icon”? Though it sounds like the sort of inscrutable prank Sal­vador Dali might have played at the end, Ben­tham described the idea straight­for­ward­ly in his pam­phlet Auto-Icon; or, Far­ther Uses of the Dead to the Liv­ing. The philoso­pher, says Han­nah Cor­nish, sci­ence cura­tor at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, gen­uine­ly “thought it’d catch on.”

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In his short, final work of moral phi­los­o­phy, Ben­tham shows that, like Pla­to, he didn’t quite get the point of mak­ing art, advanc­ing a the­o­ry that becom­ing one’s own icon would elim­i­nate the need for paint­ings, stat­ues, and the like, since “iden­ti­ty is prefer­able to simil­i­tude” (to the extent that a mum­mi­fied corpse is iden­ti­cal to a liv­ing per­son). Oth­er util­i­tar­i­an rea­sons include ben­e­fits to sci­ence, reduced pub­lic health risks, and cre­at­ing “agree­able asso­ci­a­tions with death.”

Also, in what must have been intend­ed with at least some under­cur­rent of humor, he asked that his remains “occa­sion­al­ly be brought into meet­ings involv­ing his still-liv­ing friends,” writes Schultz, “so that what’s left of Ben­tham might enjoy their com­pa­ny.”

Learn more about Bentham’s “auto-icon” in the Atlas Obscu­ra videos here, includ­ing the video fur­ther up show­ing how a team of pro­fes­sion­als packed up and moved the whole macabre assem­blage to its new home across the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don cam­pus. And read an even more detailed descrip­tion, with sev­er­al pho­tographs, of how the old­est par­tial­ly mum­mi­fied British rock star philoso­pher trav­els, here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

97-Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

An Ani­mat­ed Leonard Cohen Offers Reflec­tions on Death: Thought-Pro­vok­ing Excerpts from His Final Inter­view

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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10 Rules of Self Discipline from the 1930 Self Help/Business Guru Napoleon Hill

in Books, Business, Life, Philosophy | March 2nd, 2020

It seems ridicu­lous to refer to the Gold­en Rule as a “weapon,” but that is just what it is—a weapon that no resis­tance on earth can with­stand! —Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill—whose ear­ly books The Law of Suc­cess (1928), The Mag­ic Lad­der To Suc­cess (1930), and Think and Grow Rich (1937) helped estab­lish the self-help genre—would be con­sid­ered a life coach or moti­va­tion­al speak­er in today’s par­lance.

And were he alive today, he’d like­ly he’d be fac­ing charges, or at the very least, can­celled for some of the behav­iors, schemes, and whop­pers Matt Novak details in an exhaus­tive­ly researched essay for Gizmodo’s Pale­o­fu­ture blog.

We think it’s impor­tant to tip you off to that shady side, because Hill’s “10 Rules for Prof­itable Self Dis­ci­pline,” above, are so sun­ny, they could spur you to dis­sem­i­nate them imme­di­ate­ly, leav­ing you vul­ner­a­ble to harsh words from bet­ter informed friends and, more cru­cial­ly, social media fol­low­ers, who are already het up about any num­ber of things in this elec­tion year, and who enjoy the cathar­sis a good call out affords.

Ergo, if you’re inclined to share, inves­ti­gate the well from which they sprung, and then decide whether or not you want to pro­ceed.

Why did we pro­ceed?

Because prac­ticed with the purest of inten­tions, these rules con­sti­tute extreme­ly human­is­tic advice from a man whose out­ward phi­los­o­phy con­tin­ues to be a touch­stone for many in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty.

And as evi­denced by the com­ments left by grate­ful YouTube view­ers, many of whom stum­bled across his words by acci­dent, peo­ple are thirsty for such explic­it­ly pos­i­tive guide­posts to inter­per­son­al deal­ings.

(A good num­ber also seem quite tak­en with the Vir­ginia native’s old timey speech pat­terns and vin­tage lin­go.)

If noth­ing else, apply­ing these rules could sweet­en your next argu­ment with some­one you love, or serve as inspi­ra­tion if you’re ever called upon to give a com­mence­ment speech:

Napoleon Hill’s 10 Rules for Prof­itable Self Dis­ci­pline

  1. Keep a cool head around hot heads. Rage doesn’t have to be con­ta­gious,.
  2. Believe that there are three sides to every argu­ment. If you’re in a dust-up, don’t assume that the fault lays with the oth­er per­son, but rather that you both shoul­der a por­tion of the blame. This is a pret­ty com­pas­sion­ate way of ensur­ing that everyone’s ass will be par­tial­ly cov­ered for both bet­ter and worse.
  3. Nev­er give direc­tives to a sub­or­di­nate when you are angry. Giv­en that swift and deci­sive action is often required of those in lead­er­ship posi­tions, you’ll have to learn to ice your own hot head pret­ty quick­ly to put this one into con­sis­tent play.
  4. Treat every­one as if they were a rich rel­a­tive who might leave you a siz­able inher­i­tance. Which is kind of a gross way of putting it, but oth­er­wise, we agree with Napoleon Hill that treat­ing oth­ers with respect and lov­ing atten­tion is a real “hon­ey” of a con­cept, espe­cial­ly if the oth­er per­son can offer lit­tle beyond their friend­ship.
  5. When you find your­self in an unpleas­ant cir­cum­stance, imme­di­ate­ly start search­ing for the seed of an equiv­a­lent ben­e­fit with­in the expe­ri­ence. If Novak’s Giz­mo­do essay is any indi­ca­tion, Hill prob­a­bly had a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty to put this one into prac­tice, squeez­ing lemon­ade from lemons of his own mak­ing.
  6. Ask ques­tions and lis­ten to the answer. If you find your­self inclined to dis­agree with a state­ment, employ the phrase, “How do you know?” to get the speak­er to do all the heavy lift­ing. For exam­ple, Napoleon Hill might say to Matt Novak, “How do you know?” which would be Matt Novak’s cue to pro­duce a moun­tain of doc­u­men­ta­tion.
  7. Nev­er say or do any­thing before think­ing if it will ben­e­fit some­one or hurt them. The goal is to refrain from hurt­ing oth­ers. Let those of us are with­out sin cast the first stone here. Hill’s karmic spin on this rule is that any injuries you cause that don’t imme­di­ate­ly come around to bite you in the ass, will bite you in the ass much hard­er at some future point, a la com­pound inter­est.
  8. Learn the dif­fer­ence between friend­ly analy­sis and unfriend­ly crit­i­cisms. His not entire­ly fool­proof method for dis­tin­guish­ing intent is to con­sid­er the nature of your rela­tion­ship with the one offer­ing the obser­va­tions, their tone of voice, man­ner of deliv­ery, and some­what quaint­ly, whether or not they throw in any epi­thets. If it’s friend­ly, you can set some store by it. Oth­er­wise, dis­re­gard.
  9. A good leader knows how to take orders cheer­ful­ly. This pairs nice­ly with Rule Num­ber 3, don’t you think?
  10. Be tol­er­ant of your fel­low humans. Always.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

How Much Mon­ey Do You Need to Be Hap­py? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Fig­ures

Har­vard Course on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: Watch 30 Lec­tures from the University’s Extreme­ly Pop­u­lar Course

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City  for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY (March 5 — 28) Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Judith Butler on Nonviolence and Gender: Hear Conversation with The Partially Examined Life

in Philosophy, Podcasts | February 26th, 2020

A new Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life inter­view with Judith But­ler, Max­ine Elliot Pro­fes­sor of Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at UC Berke­ley, dis­cuss­es the ethics and psy­chol­o­gy of non­vi­o­lence. This fol­lows a three-part treat­ment on the pod­cast of her ear­li­er work.

For a first-hand account of her new book, you can watch two 2016 lec­tures that she gave at UC Berke­ley on ear­ly ver­sions of the text:

Watch on YouTube. Watch the sec­ond lec­ture.

But­ler has been a tremen­dous­ly influ­en­tial (and con­tro­ver­sial) fig­ure in ongo­ing intel­lec­tu­al debates about gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty. Her 1990 book Gen­der Trou­ble argues that gen­der is a “per­for­mance,” i.e. a habit­u­al group of behav­iors that reflect and rein­force social gen­der norms. Prac­tices such as dress­ing in drag sat­i­rize this per­for­mance, show­ing how even in “nor­mal” sit­u­a­tions, “act­ing fem­i­nine” is not a reflec­tion of one’s inner essence but is a mat­ter of putting on a dis­play of cul­tur­al­ly expect­ed man­ner­isms. The drag per­former (on But­ler’s analy­sis) may con­vey an absur­di­ty that decon­structs the expect­ed accord of bio­log­i­cal sex, sex­u­al pref­er­ence, and gen­der iden­ti­ty: “I’m dress­ing like a woman but am real­ly a man; also, in my every­day life, I dress like a man but am real­ly (in the way I actu­al­ly feel about myself) am a woman.” Most con­tro­ver­sial­ly, as a post-struc­tural­ist, But­ler argues that it’s not the case that there is an uncon­tro­ver­sial bio­log­i­cal fact of sex that then cul­ture con­nects gen­der behav­iors to. Instead, all of our under­stand­ing of the so-called bio­log­i­cal fact comes through the cul­tur­al lens of gen­der; we lit­er­al­ly can’t under­stand any such raw, bio­log­i­cal fact apart from its cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. In oth­er words, it’s not just gen­der that’s a social con­struc­tion, but bio­log­i­cal sex itself.

This posi­tion has been attacked both from the posi­tion of naive, com­mon-sense sci­en­tism (of course bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences result­ing in babies isn’t just a mat­ter of what con­cepts a par­tic­u­lar soci­ety has hap­pened to devel­op) and as a moral haz­ard and exis­ten­tial threat: In 2017 while at a con­fer­ence in Brazil, far-right Chris­t­ian groups protest­ed her pres­ence and even burned her in effi­gy.

It should also be not­ed that But­ler’s take on gen­der departs from cur­rent, intu­itive expla­na­tions of the phe­nom­e­na of trans­gen­derism, i.e. that one might feel their “true gen­der” to be dif­fer­ent from what soci­ety has assigned them. For But­ler, there is no inner gen­der essence that may or may not be dis­played authen­ti­cal­ly. Instead, the “inner” is a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, itself built out of our exter­nal per­for­mances and the dynam­ics of our psy­chic life, which she dis­cuss­es with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic tra­di­tion.

This use of psy­cho­analy­sis to explain our cul­tur­al life per­sists in new­ly released book, The Force of Non­vi­o­lence: An Ethico-Polit­i­cal Bind. Though the the­o­ry of non­vi­o­lent polit­i­cal protest may seem a far-flung top­ic from gen­der stud­ies, both involve the process of defin­ing an iden­ti­ty. In the case of gen­der, one defines one­self as a par­tic­u­lar gen­der or as being of a par­tic­u­lar sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion (as opposed to leav­ing these attrib­ut­es ambigu­ous and flu­id) by grasp­ing onto a strict social divi­sion between the avail­able sex­u­al options and declar­ing that one of them is “not me.” In But­ler’s dis­cus­sion of non­vi­o­lence, she instead focus­es on what counts as “self” in the usu­al­ly excused excep­tion to non­vi­o­lence, self-defense. She’s crit­i­ciz­ing a posi­tion where most of us claim to be non­vi­o­lent (and claim that our gov­ern­ment is non­vi­o­lent) because we are not the aggres­sors: We will fight only when we are attacked or threat­ened.

It’s not that But­ler is cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly against using vio­lence to defend one­self, one’s loved ones, one’s coun­try, or any­one else who is in dan­ger of being seri­ous­ly harmed. She is, how­ev­er, argu­ing for an eth­ic of non­vi­o­lence that clear­ly under­stands our inter­re­lat­ed­ness with every­one else in the world, even and espe­cial­ly those that we might think out­side our cir­cle of con­cern. It’s too easy for us to define “self” as “peo­ple like us,” which then leaves out the rest of the pop­u­lace (and the non-human pop­u­la­tion, and the envi­ron­ment more gen­er­al­ly) from inclu­sion in our “self-defense” cal­cu­la­tions of when vio­lence might be jus­ti­fied. But­ler ana­lyzes the fear of immi­grants, for instance, as a “phan­tas­mat­ic trans­mu­ta­tion” that projects the poten­tial for vio­lence that always exists with­in our imme­di­ate social rela­tions (and even our own rage against our­selves) onto an invad­ing Oth­er. As in the case of gen­der, she wants us instead to under­stand the dynam­ics of these self-and-oth­er attri­bu­tions, to behave more ratio­nal­ly and humane­ly, and to chan­nel our unavoid­able rage con­struc­tive­ly into force­ful non-vio­lence, or what Gand­hi calls Satya­gra­ha, “polite insis­tence on the truth.” The goal of this type of polit­i­cal action is con­ver­sion, not coer­cion, and it’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect­ing even a hat­ed oth­er as a griev­able equal that pro­vides a real con­trast to vio­lence. She wants us to rec­og­nize the poten­tial for vio­lence with­in each rela­tion­ship, at each moment, and to choose oth­er­wise.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast began a dis­cus­sion of the gen­er­al con­cept of social con­struc­tion back with in Oco­to­ber with episode 227, fol­low­ing this up with appli­ca­tions of this con­cept to race (dis­cussing Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Charles Mills with in episode 228 with guest Cole­man Hugh­es), to the devel­op­ment of sci­ence (con­sid­er­ing Bruno Latour on episode 230 with guest Pro­fes­sor Lyn­da Olman), and to gen­der (con­sid­er­ing Simone de Beau­voir’s The Sec­ond Sex for episode 232 with Pro­fes­sor Jen­nifer Hansen. Pro­fes­sor Hansen then con­tin­ued with hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, and Dylan Casey to dis­cuss But­ler’s Gen­der Trou­ble. For fur­ther expla­na­tion of The Force of Non­vi­o­lence, see episode 236 at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

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