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Arendt on Wisdom and Goodness

23/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Love of wisdom and love of goodness, if they resolve themselves into the activities of philosophizing and doing good works, have in common that they come to an immediate end, cancel themselves, so to speak, whenever it is assumed that man can be wise or be good. Attempts to bring into being that which can never survive the fleeting moment of the deed itself have never been lacking and have always led into absurdity. The philosophers of late antiquity who demanded of themselves to be wise were absurd when they claimed to be happy when roasted alive in the famous Phaleric Bull. And no less absurd is the Christian demand to be good and to turn the other cheek, when not taken metaphorically but tried as a real way of life.

But the similarity between the activities springing from love of goodness and love of wisdom ends here. Both, it is true, stand in a certain opposition to the public realm, but the case of goodness is much more extreme in this respect and therefore of greater relevance in our context. Only goodness must go into absolute hiding and flee all appearance if it is not to be destroyed. The philosopher, even if he decides with Plato to leave the 'cave' of human affairs, does not have to hide from himself; on the contrary, under the sky of ideas he not only finds the true essences of everything that is, but also himself, in the dialogue between 'me and myself' (eme emautō) in which Plato apparently saw the essence of thought. To be in solitude means to be with one's self, and thinking, therefore, though it may be the most solitary of all activities, is never altogether without a partner and without company.

The man, however, who is in love with goodness can never afford to lead a solitary life, and yet his living with others and for others must remain essentially without testimony and lacks first of all the company of himself. He is not solitary, but lonely; when living with others he must hide from them and cannot even trust himself to witness what he is doing. The philosopher can always rely upon his thoughts to keep him company, whereas good deeds can never keep anybody company; they must be forgotten the moment they are done, because even memory will destroy their quality of being 'good.' Moreover, thinking because it can be remembered, can crystallize into thought, and thoughts, like all things that owe their existence to remembrance, can be transformed into tangible objects which, like the written page or the printed book, become part of the human artifice. Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.

It is this worldlessness inherent in good works that makes the lover of goodness an essentially religious figure and that makes goodness, like wisdom in antiquity, an essentially non-human, superhuman quality. And yet love of goodness, unlike love of wisdom, is not restricted to the experience of the few, just as loneliness, unlike solitude, is within the range of every man's experience. In a sense, therefore, goodness and loneliness are of much greater relevance to politics than wisdom and solitude; yet only solitude can become an authentic way of life in the figure of the philosopher, whereas the much more general experience of loneliness is so contradictory to the human condition of plurality that it is simply unbearable for any length of time and needs the company of God, the only imaginable witness of good works, if it is not to annihilate human existence altogether. The otherworldiness of religious experience, in so far as it is truly the experience of love in the sense of an activity, and not the much more frequent one of beholding passively a revealed truth, manifests itself within the world itself; this, like all other activities does not leave the world, but must be preformed within it. But this manifestation, though it appears in the space where other activities are performed and depends upon it, is of an actively negative nature; fleeing the world and hiding from its inhabitants, it negates the space the world offers to men, and most of all that public part of it where everything and everybody are seen and heard by others" (Arendt 1998:75-77).

Arendt, Hannah
1998[1958] The Human Condition, second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Habermas on Kant’s World Republic

20/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Hobbes interpreted the relationship between law and security in functionalist terms: the state accords the citizens, as the subjects of law, the guarantee of protection in exchange for their unconditional obedience. For Kant, by contrast, the pacifying function of law remains conceptually intertwined with the function of a legal condition that the citizens recognize as legitimate in promoting freedom. For the validity of law is based not only on the external threat of sanction by the state, but also on the internal reasons for the claim that it merits recognition by its addressees. Kant no longer operates with Hobbe's empiricist concept of law. However, with the idea of a transition from state-centered international law to cosmopolitan law, Kant also sets himself apart from Rousseau.

Kant breaks with the republican conception that popular sovereignty finds expression in the external sovereignty of the state — in other words, that the democratic self-determination of the people is internally linked to the collective self-assertion of a corresponding form of life, if necessary by military means. Kant recognizes that the democratic will has its roots in the ethos of a people. But that does not necessarily imply that the capacity of a democratic constitution to bind and rationalize political power must be restricted to a specific nation-state. For the universalistic thrust of the constitutional principles of a nation-state points beyond the limits of national traditions which are no doubt also reflected in the local features of a particular constitutional order.

These two operations — first, the linking of the idea of peace with a condition of legally guaranteed freedoms and, second, the separation between democratic self-determination in the domestic sphere and aggressive self-assertion toward other nations — clear the way for Kant to project the 'bürgeliche Verfassung' (i.e. the type of constitution which had recently emerged from the American and French revolutions) from the national onto the global level. This marks the birth of the idea of a constitutionalization of international law as a law of individuals. For individuals would no longer enjoy the status of legal subjects merely as citizens of a nation-state, but also as members of a politically constituted world society.

However, Kant could construe the constitutionalization of international law exclusively as a transformation of international into intrastate relations. To the very end, he advocated the idea of a world republic, even though he proposed the 'surrogate' of a league of nations [Völkerbundas] the first stage toward realizing such a commonwealth of nations [Völkerstaat]. This weak conception of a voluntary association of states that are willing to coexist peacefully while nevertheless retaining their sovereignty seemed to recommend itself as a transitional stage en route to a world republic. Many have wondered why he placed his hopes in such a conceptually flawed structure. From the vantage point of the legal and political networks of a pluralist, highly interdependent, yet functionally differentiated global society, it is easy to identify with the fortuitous hindsight of later generations the conceptual barriers that prevented Kant from overcoming this sterile alternative. Three reasons may have prevented him from conceiving the telos of the constitutionalization of international law; the 'cosmopolitan condition,' in sufficiently abstract terms to avoid assimilating it to the problematic model of a world republic and to prevent it from being dismissed as utopian" (Habermas 2009:313-315).

Habermas, Jürgen
2009[2005] Between Naturalism and Religion. Ciaran Cronin, trans. Cambridge, Polity Press.

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Truth and Money | Ricoeur and Socrates

18/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Everything turns on the intersection of the two problems of different origin. That of what is 'without price' is posed in our culture by the relation between truth—or at least the search for truth—and money. We are eternally indebted to Socrates for having opened this discussion. Socrates, Plato tells us, taught without requiring any salary in return. It was the sophists who expected to be paid. But Socrates would only accept gifts that honored him at the same time that they honored the gods. Thus begins the history of a long enmity between the intellectual and the commercial spheres. This enmity finds an echo even in the definition of the Athenian citizen: merchants were excluded from the society of free men. The merchants bought and sold for others. He belonged to the useful, not to discourse or to the sumptuary. Yet despite Socrates, the boundary between the inspired thinker and the useful expert continued to be blurred in the field of intellectual transactions. For its part, commerce was recognized for better or worse to be a technique, a dangerous one, it is true, but a necessary one. It was willingly left in the hands of foreigners, often of freed slaves. The Aristotelian theory of money, whose function of being an exchange between equals places it in the field of justice in book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics, does not redound to the benefit of the merchant's reputation. The medieval historian Jacques Le Goff has spoken of the competition during the Middle Ages between the negative judgments of clerics about the man devoted to gain and the esteem of the people for shopkeepers and artisans. As for the moneylender, he will remain indistinguishable from the usurer, who sells time that ought to belong to God. It is true that this battle was lost during the Renaissance and the Reformation, but the suspicion would remain about money that is used to purchase money and is transformed into merchandise. Flaubert and Baudelaire were no less indignant about such things than was Marx. Nevertheless, the victory of the the merchants, which is also that of the market, has not succeeded in blotting out Socrates' words and his behavior at the hour of his death, nor the question where there still exist noncommercial goods" (Ricoeur 2005:234-235).

Ricoeur, Paul
2005[2004] The Course of Recognition. David Pellauer, trans. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Gadamer on The Practice of the Artist and the Interpreter

14/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"There has long been a tension between the practice of the artist and that of the interpreter. From the artist’s point of view, interpretation appears arbitrary and capricious, if not actually superfluous. And this tension becomes all the greater when interpretation is attempted in the name and spirit of science. The creative artist finds it extremely difficult to believe that it is possible to overcome all the difficulties of interpretation by using a scientific approach. The problem of composition and interpretation actually represents a special case of the general relationship between the creative artist and the interpreter. As far as poetry and poetic composition are concerned, it is not uncommon to find the practice of interpretation and artistic creation united in one and the same individual. This suggests that poetic composition has a more intimate connection with the practice of interpretation than the other arts do. Even where we claim scientific status for our interpretation, this practice does not seem as questionable when applied to poetry as is generally believed. The scientific approach scarcely seems to go beyond what is involved in any thoughtful engagement with poetry. Nor is this surprising when we consider just how much philosophical reflection has penetrated the modern poetry of this century. The relationship between poetic composition and interpretation does not therefore simply arise within the context of science or philosophy alone. It also represents an internal problem of poetic composition itself, for poet and reader alike.

In discussing the question in this way, I do not wish to become involved in a dispute between the academic study of literature and the practice of writing about the claims of interpretation. I shall not attempt to rival the masterly expression of those who live by the word and know best how to use it. I should simply like to use my own craft of philosophical thinking to help people to see what they can all come to understand for themselves.

What explains this proximity between composition and interpretation? It is obvious that they have something in common. Both take place in the medium of language. And yet there is a difference and we know how profound it is. Paul Valéry pointed out this difference with great force: everyday language, as well as the language of science and philosophy, points to something beyond itself and disappears behind it. The language of poetry, on the other hand, shows itself even as it points, so that it comes to stand in its own right. Ordinary language resembles a coin that we pass around among ourselves in place of something else, whereas poetic language is like gold itself. Now to begin with, we must recognize that, despite this illuminating comparison, there are transitional cases that stand between poetically articulated language on the one hand and the purely intentional word on the other. And in this century we have become particularly familiar with the intimate fusion of both of these kinds of language.

Let us start with the extreme cases. On the one hand we have lyric poetry (which is no doubt what Valéry had in mind). In our own time we have witnessed a remarkable phenomenon: in Rilke or Gottfried Benn, for example, the language of science has actually invaded the language of poetry in a way that would have seemed quite inconceivable in great poetry only a few generations before. How has it come about that an obviously intentional word, a definition, or even a scientific concept can be integrated with the rhythmic flow of poetic language?

And now let us consider the other extreme of the novel, apparently the most flexible of art forms. Here the language of reflection that relates the things and events around us has always been at home, not merely in the speech of the fictional characters, but also in that of the narrator, whoever it may be. But do we not encounter something new here as well, even when compared with the bold innovations of the romantic novel? We have seen not only the disappearance of the narrative perspective, but the dissolution of the very concept of action itself, and the difference between the language of narration and the language of reflection collapses as a result" (Gadamer 2002:66-67).

Gadamer, Hans-Georg
2002(1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful: And Other Essays . Robert Bernasconi, ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Ricoeur, Speech-Act Theory, and the Gospels as History (Stiver, 2001)

09/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"With this general backdrop of Ricoeur’s approach to humans as thoroughly interpretive or hermeneutical beings, we can see the significance of Ricoeur's understanding both history and fiction in Time and Narrative as imaginative enterprises, both as acts of creative configuration and 'emplotment'. Rather than facing each other across a continental divide, the one representing positivistic fact and the other the flight of the imagination into the unreal, history and fiction are both fundamentally alike in being 'mimetic' of reality. They are both fundamentally hermeneutical projects. His first move, therefore, was to join together what modernity had cast asunder, which especially involved a transformation of the nature of historiography. It is now much more readily recognized that it was a century ago that historiography is itself a work of the productive imagination, representing a particular cast on a time and place. The surplus of meaning that Ricoeur emphasizes with respect to fiction is also at play in historiography, to which any dispute between historians attests. Ricoeur's hermeneutical 'principle of plenitude' applies to historiography — namely, a text or an event means all that it can mean!

Fiction and historiography both unfold, he believes, in terms of what he calls a threefold mimesis. Mimesis1 represents the prefigured way of being-in-the-world that we bring to any text. Mimesis2 is the creative configuration of a text. Mimesis3 is the appropriative refiguration of a text that involves what Gadamer calls a 'fusion of horizons'. Ricoeur's 'narrative arc', like his earlier hermeneutical arc, challenges the traditional hermeneutic conception that application is an optional third step beyond understanding and explanation. Rather, it is an integral aspect of any hermeneutical act. As he says, 'We are not allowed to exclude the final act of personal commitment from the whole of objective and explanatory procedures which mediate it.'

Ricoeur earlier distinguished the world of the text as the sense of the text and the application as the reference of the text. Although in Time and Narrative he has become uncomfortable with this language borrowed from quite a different domain, he retained the idea that the text has an inherent referential dimension. Regarding his preoccupation with structuralism in the 1970s, which he characteristically both affirmed and rejected, he argued that structural analysis has a place as a critical methodology, but its insistence on remaining within the field of meaning of the text itself means that 'it would be reduced to a sterile game, a divisive algebra'. Ricoeur's point may be understood utilizing Gadamer's notion of a fusion of horizons. Gadamer argued that it is not possible to distinguish wholly between our horizon and the horizon of the text. In the parlance of biblical studies, he rejected the sharp distinction between what a text meant and what it means. Rather, any act of understanding involves a creative fusion of horizons, whether we agree with the text or not. 'It is not enough,' Gadamer says, 'to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.' Even the understanding necessary to reject vehemently the meaning of a text involves a fusion of horizons. An aspect of bringing our horizon to the text is some nascent sense of what it might mean to appropriate the text in our horizon. We can of course distinguish relatively between the meaning of a text and our appropriation of it, but some sense of its significance is inherent in our understanding of it in the first place. Ricoeur thus posits a dynamic interrelationship between the world of the text and the world in front of the text — that is, the latter as the meaning of the text as I have appropriated it" (Stiver, 2001 p. 57-59).

Stiver, Dan R. Ricoeur (2001). Ricoeur, speech-act theory, and the gospels as history. In Bartholomew, C. G., Greene, C. J. D., & Möller, K. (Eds.), After Pentecost: Language and biblical interpretation. Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press.

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