Or: Life’s Not Short, It’s Long!
At this moment, I should be sailing through the skies between Dublin and New York, about to enjoy my long-awaited homecoming and see my girflriend and cats. I am, instead, in Munich, sitting on a chair emblazoned with car rental ads and designed for discomfort because I’m not yet allowed into the actual waiting area. The depths of despair into which I have sunk are kind of new to me, so I thought I would strike while the iron was hot and write about it.
The story is this: There were two legs to my flight, one from Munich to Dublin, another from Dublin to New York. Unbeknownst to me, the first flight was cancelled some weeks ago and I was booked onto a later flight to Dublin. This had me missing my connection to the second leg by six hours. This second leg of the flight was not rebooked, and per my official Orbitz page, my time to make the connection was, thus, “-6 hours”. As in, negative six hours. This would have been quite a feat even I had been aware of the change, but I was not, having received no notification and, in fact, the Orbitz page still showed me as confirmed on the morning flight, in addition to the evening flight, which discrepancy I did not note when I checked it this morning. Orbitz and Aer Lingus blame this debacle on one another, but primarily on me, for reasons that remain unclear.
The upshot is that I have been in the Munich airport for nine hours, and am looking forward to a night spent in the Dublin airport because hotel accommodation is not forthcoming, either from Aer Lingus or from Orbitz. This depite numerous fabulously expensive calls to Orbitz from a public phone, during which conversations I spun a tale of woe, Dante-esque in ingenuity, false in details but true in spirit (pennilessness, the missed wedding of a dear friend, and so on). The numerous voices on the other end were less than interested. To add insult to injury: whenever I called, I had to navigate the complex voice menu before I could be granted a live voice. I mashed “0” and asked for customer service at every opportunity, which did not perturb the pre-recorded voice. And the recorded sample that says, “Oh, you want customer service?” is actually recorded in an incredulous voice and, I swear to God, begins with a little snort of disbelief; this leads to another array of electronic options before I’m granted the opportunity to speak to the least empathetic people in the world. They had me longing for the human touch of the pre-recorded messages.
Like everyone else, I have had my share of run-ins with flight mishaps and delays, although none as serious as this or as inexplicable: this was COMPLETELY avoidable, if someone had just thought to tell me the problem, or if either Orbitz or Aer Lingus had some kind of automation that would flag obviously impossible flights that require time travel. Also my desire to come home is, this time, immense, and my time in New York was already truncated as it was.
The first few hours I think I was actually in shock (I was also tired, having woken up very early to catch a flight that did not exist). I had a desparate desire to commit some sort of violence, but all I could think to do was commit an act of violence against my own body. So I ate the biggest and most disgusting McDonal’s meal that I could find. This is the only way I can justify it in retrospect: I actually walked quite a ways, lugging all of my bags, past numerous healthy restaurants because I knew that a McDonald’s was in the distance. This made me feel better in some twisted way. Since then I have been roaming the halls of the airport, unable to concentrate enough to read. I just watched a bunch of children ice skating at a little rink outside the airport and found myself hoping (a) that the children in said rink belong to officials of Aer Lingus and Orbitz, and (b) that said rink would be struck by a comet.
It’s not so much the pragmatics of the situation: it’s the feeling of being caught, completely helplessly, in the wheels of a bureaucratic machine that seems hellbent on blaming and hurting me. That is: It’s not so much that the people don’t care: the bureaucrats to which I’ve been entrusted are surely nice people, just doing their job, and right know they’re probably listening to some poor sap whose insulin, or father’s ashes, or whatever, was dropped into the ocean. And I know, rationally, that this is simply The Way We Live Now. But, as a child of privilege, I have seldom had to face this humiliating objectification myself. Diabolically, capitalist society builds a web of goodwill and warm relations—even institutionally—around the privileged. This is especially true of academics, those with the ability and the access to discursively protest: although not financially compensated, we are protected from the ravages of institutions by well-placed phone calls and the vestiges of aristocracy that cling to the university system. I don’t really know what it’s like to have problems with health care, with visas, with the police and neither, I propose, do most people who produce the cultural capital that remains (maybe for not much longer?) necessary to prop all this up. But the airlines are different: I really am, to them, an entry in an accounts ledger and no more. I have never laid eyes on an Orbitz employee, perhaps because they only come out at night, or live in a lair at the center of the earth. But for just this reason, the airline industry is the most perfectly democratic institution that we have. It’s only here that I am actually equal: that egalité triumphs especially obviously over its brothers, liberté and fraternité.
What does this say about democracy, about our place within it?
Well that was a cathartic thirty minutes. In only three more hours I’ll be on my way to sleep in an airport!
[update: I am now in a somewhat better mood, as I’m ensconced in the Carlton Hotel, overlooking the beautiful Dublin Airport, courtesy of Aer Lingus. Against the odds, they came through in the end. I will leave the above untouched, as evidence for future generations of the despair to which modern American man will sink when faced with relatively routine airline mishaps]
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
twinsies
Every day at the library I walk by an exhibit in a glass case with a bunch of pictures. I never really paid it any heed, but thought in the back of my mind, "How strange that a German library would have an exhibit dedicated to Sean Connery!" For some reason, today I actually looked at it, and the exhibit is in fact about Thomas Mann. He is much more dapper than one would think!
Friday, November 13, 2009
Micky von Maus
I came across an amazing article today in a reactionary Viennese Catholic journal from 1932 (never thought I would type a sentence like that!). This was right when Walt Disney announced that he was going to make Mickey into the star of some of Grimm's fairy tales. Predictably, German nationalists were furious about this. This makes perfect sense, given the role of these fairy tales in the development of 19th-cent. German nationalism, although I'd never thought about it before. Anyway, here's my translation of (most of) a short article about Mickey.
Note: In the part that I didn't translate the author suggests that Mickey star in the Book of Job, or that Marlene Dietrich play Joan of Arc. It is probably a sign of decadence that these parodic suggestions seem perfectly reasonable and profitable. And now, on to the Kulturkritik!
"Every moviegoer knows Mickey Mouse, the creation of the artist Walt Disney. We often see this grotesque image of soulless buffoonery between the news and the film, and every time we become furious that the German public has fallen for this un-German idiocy with such zest. But Mickey Mouse achieved national fame. There are Mickey Mouse brooches, Mickey Mouse tie pins, in short, Mickey Mouse ornaments of every variety; in a place of pilgrimage near Vienna, we even saw Mickey in a devotional shrine between the crucifix and the rosary beads! A hideous heresy. But the soullessness of American filmmakers has become uncontroversial to such a degree that nobody senses any more the the miserable forsakenness of this mouse-creation, completely abandoned by God. It has nothing of the spirit of German fairy tales or ancient myths. Mickey Mouse is a product of cold virtuosity; only idiots can laugh at the adventures of this black and white forgery."
[for those of you in cultural studies who might happen onto this through Google and want the citation, it is: Anonymous [probably Joseph Eberle], "Micky-Maus entdeckt die Grimmschen Märchen." Schönere Zukunft 8, 43 (23 July 1933), 1037)
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Heidegger, again
Two posts in one day. I would only do this if it were an extreme emergency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/books/09philosophy.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
I can't believe that this was printed. In the New York Times, of all places. This article does nothing other than mention the same three pieces I discussed, throw in a quotation from Richard Wolin that says essentially nothing, and then end with a bizarre stream-of-consciousness section about Heidegger's thought, and then the concluding one-two punch here:
"A verbal brawl over Heidegger’s theories should not be surprising, though. After all, the classic American position on how liberal societies should treat dangerous ideas is worth more discussion.
But Faye's book is beside the point. Is this a book review, or what? Cohen seems to have not read Faye's book—she doesn't quote from it or anything. This "article" is based on online articles, and the comment section of one of those articles, and two e-mails that she sent. But it's also not an essay in the sense that it has any discernible argument or point. Bah! The weird thing is that I don't even care about the Heidegger debate that much. It's just maddening to see complex philosophical texts turn into warring and senseless screeds, which then turns into a mushy bland article in the NYT that reads like an extended Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/books/09philosophy.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
I can't believe that this was printed. In the New York Times, of all places. This article does nothing other than mention the same three pieces I discussed, throw in a quotation from Richard Wolin that says essentially nothing, and then end with a bizarre stream-of-consciousness section about Heidegger's thought, and then the concluding one-two punch here:
"A verbal brawl over Heidegger’s theories should not be surprising, though. After all, the classic American position on how liberal societies should treat dangerous ideas is worth more discussion.
That is precisely what Mr. Faye says he wants. In his view teaching Heidegger’s ideas without disclosing his deep Nazi sympathies is like showing a child a brilliant fireworks display without warning that an ignited rocket can also blow up in someone’s face."
What precisely is the classic American position? What does its worthiness for discussion have to do with this article? Mr. Faye says he wants to discuss the classic American position about dangerous ideas? Why is she calling him Mr. Faye? And the last sentence is kind of uncontroversial, although the image is unnecessarily grisly—of course the Nazism should at least be mentioned—but Faye, according to her own account, goes much further than that ("classing as hate speech" is different from a "warning").But Faye's book is beside the point. Is this a book review, or what? Cohen seems to have not read Faye's book—she doesn't quote from it or anything. This "article" is based on online articles, and the comment section of one of those articles, and two e-mails that she sent. But it's also not an essay in the sense that it has any discernible argument or point. Bah! The weird thing is that I don't even care about the Heidegger debate that much. It's just maddening to see complex philosophical texts turn into warring and senseless screeds, which then turns into a mushy bland article in the NYT that reads like an extended Twitter.
Author! Author!
[This turned out even more long and boring than the last one! I will write about my trip to the hospital, and my adventure changing a bike tire with an anti-papist Hungarian, eventually]
About 30 minutes ago, I sprayed deodorant into my eyes. A whole series of missteps led to this, the first of which is the apparent unavailability of normal deodorant in this country. Also my shampoo had exploded in my bag, and it was very slippery. But as I was wincing in a public shower, I thought to myself, "Do all authors go through this? Behind every book, every article, is there some poor sap fruitlessly trying to wash deodorant out of his eyes?"
Of course, the answer is yes. It's kind of counter-intuitive though, at least to me. I never really thought about the authorship process of a book/dissertation in any serious way before this trip. I guess I still kind of imagined the author as a magical, wizard-like figure, from whose head chapters spring, fully-armed. This made me think about the whole "Death of the author" thing. "Death of the author" is one of those phrases, like "the end of history" or "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte", that is much more interesting for the hysteria it's created than for what it actually meant to begin with.
This is a tangent, but I am sick to death of the phrase "trendy post-modernists" or some version thereof. Almost all of those Heidegger articles contain something like that, and I really don't think the word "post-modernist" or even the word "theorist" really appears anymore without the addition of that word. The word "trend" means, "The general direction in which something tends to move." I challenge anyone to prove that academia is moving towards anything that might be called post-modernism. I have been in academia for ages and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about post-modernism, or the figures who apparently represent it (Derrida/Baudrillart/Lyotard/whatever). This includes classes in English, philosophy, and history (presumably the three most po-mo disciplines) at two northeastern universities that are presumably the target of all these attacks. Even at Columbia, which should be ground zero for this stuff, every student reads essentially the same "great books" curriculum that people read at finishing school 50 years ago. In graduate-level English classes, invocation of any theory was met with collective eye rolls. Am I missing something? Are students across the land forced to read de Man and told that there is no such thing as truth? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. And if it's not, everybody who wastes so much energy lampooning post-modernism needs to think of a different, and better, reason why nobody cares about the humanities.
(See this for instance: what is the point of this? Nobody talks like this in the universe. So what psychological need is it fulfilling? The same thing for those post-modernism sentence generators: what is BEHIND this animosity? The ideas themselves are irrelevant, something else is going on)
Anyway, so the "Death of the author" is one of those things, like "postmodernism," that is only really talked about by people who hate it. The critique of the idea (not the idea itself) has filtered into the general culture, too: I heard a non-academic the other day dismiss the thesis, apropos of nothing. My point with all of this is not to prop back up the death of the author thesis, or to add to the avalanche of critiques by saying in some facile way that "the author's intentions matter" or "context matters" or whatever. I mean: the debate about, "Is the location of meaning the author or the reader?" is stupid. Or at least seems to miss the point, because it misses everything that comes between the author and the reader, which seems way more important than the input of those two suckers.
So little of my time has been spent sending thoughts out of my brain and onto a page that it's changed the way I think about "writing" as an activity. It seems like the best way to think of an "author" is not as a "source of meaning" or even as a "function" of a text, but as himself an institution. The amount of resources necessary to write is enormous: Library cards, special access, visas, grants, university affiliations, police registration, and on and on. This is not just ancillary stuff, but is constitutive of the whole project. What the finished product "means" seems kind of beside the point. The function it serves—the FORM, which is always more important than the content—is structured by all of these institutions. It is a piece of a job application, and a necessary hurdle to the PhD, first and foremost. And isn't all writing kind of like this? I'm looking through the papers of all these interwar writers, and they never say, "I have serious meaning I wish to impart!" They say, "Oh man, I am out of money so I need to sell this article."
The author can't be dead, because someone is applying for grant money.
But I do, of course, have something I want to say. The pages will not be blank in the finished product. But why do I want to say it, and to whom? When I examine my motives, it is not really, "I want more people to know about this part of European history." What do I care? People can get on perfectly fine without knowing about my topic. If I really cared about that, wouldn't I post all of my writing online for free and spam the whole internet with the address? I'm writing this because it is necessary; it is part of my job description, the way joy buzzers are in the job description of clowns. It actually helps me to think of it in this way. It's easier to get up in the morning to complete a job you've been assigned than it is to serve the interests of civilization.
About 30 minutes ago, I sprayed deodorant into my eyes. A whole series of missteps led to this, the first of which is the apparent unavailability of normal deodorant in this country. Also my shampoo had exploded in my bag, and it was very slippery. But as I was wincing in a public shower, I thought to myself, "Do all authors go through this? Behind every book, every article, is there some poor sap fruitlessly trying to wash deodorant out of his eyes?"
Of course, the answer is yes. It's kind of counter-intuitive though, at least to me. I never really thought about the authorship process of a book/dissertation in any serious way before this trip. I guess I still kind of imagined the author as a magical, wizard-like figure, from whose head chapters spring, fully-armed. This made me think about the whole "Death of the author" thing. "Death of the author" is one of those phrases, like "the end of history" or "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte", that is much more interesting for the hysteria it's created than for what it actually meant to begin with.
This is a tangent, but I am sick to death of the phrase "trendy post-modernists" or some version thereof. Almost all of those Heidegger articles contain something like that, and I really don't think the word "post-modernist" or even the word "theorist" really appears anymore without the addition of that word. The word "trend" means, "The general direction in which something tends to move." I challenge anyone to prove that academia is moving towards anything that might be called post-modernism. I have been in academia for ages and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about post-modernism, or the figures who apparently represent it (Derrida/Baudrillart/Lyotard/whatever). This includes classes in English, philosophy, and history (presumably the three most po-mo disciplines) at two northeastern universities that are presumably the target of all these attacks. Even at Columbia, which should be ground zero for this stuff, every student reads essentially the same "great books" curriculum that people read at finishing school 50 years ago. In graduate-level English classes, invocation of any theory was met with collective eye rolls. Am I missing something? Are students across the land forced to read de Man and told that there is no such thing as truth? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. And if it's not, everybody who wastes so much energy lampooning post-modernism needs to think of a different, and better, reason why nobody cares about the humanities.
(See this for instance: what is the point of this? Nobody talks like this in the universe. So what psychological need is it fulfilling? The same thing for those post-modernism sentence generators: what is BEHIND this animosity? The ideas themselves are irrelevant, something else is going on)
Anyway, so the "Death of the author" is one of those things, like "postmodernism," that is only really talked about by people who hate it. The critique of the idea (not the idea itself) has filtered into the general culture, too: I heard a non-academic the other day dismiss the thesis, apropos of nothing. My point with all of this is not to prop back up the death of the author thesis, or to add to the avalanche of critiques by saying in some facile way that "the author's intentions matter" or "context matters" or whatever. I mean: the debate about, "Is the location of meaning the author or the reader?" is stupid. Or at least seems to miss the point, because it misses everything that comes between the author and the reader, which seems way more important than the input of those two suckers.
So little of my time has been spent sending thoughts out of my brain and onto a page that it's changed the way I think about "writing" as an activity. It seems like the best way to think of an "author" is not as a "source of meaning" or even as a "function" of a text, but as himself an institution. The amount of resources necessary to write is enormous: Library cards, special access, visas, grants, university affiliations, police registration, and on and on. This is not just ancillary stuff, but is constitutive of the whole project. What the finished product "means" seems kind of beside the point. The function it serves—the FORM, which is always more important than the content—is structured by all of these institutions. It is a piece of a job application, and a necessary hurdle to the PhD, first and foremost. And isn't all writing kind of like this? I'm looking through the papers of all these interwar writers, and they never say, "I have serious meaning I wish to impart!" They say, "Oh man, I am out of money so I need to sell this article."
The author can't be dead, because someone is applying for grant money.
But I do, of course, have something I want to say. The pages will not be blank in the finished product. But why do I want to say it, and to whom? When I examine my motives, it is not really, "I want more people to know about this part of European history." What do I care? People can get on perfectly fine without knowing about my topic. If I really cared about that, wouldn't I post all of my writing online for free and spam the whole internet with the address? I'm writing this because it is necessary; it is part of my job description, the way joy buzzers are in the job description of clowns. It actually helps me to think of it in this way. It's easier to get up in the morning to complete a job you've been assigned than it is to serve the interests of civilization.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Rosenbaum on Arendt/Heidegger
[Caveat lecteur: this got kind of long and boring]
For whatever reason, the Heidegger controversy is happening again. There was that article in the Chronicle for Higher Education by Carlin Romano. That wasn't and shouldn't be taken seriously, as Romano is a known hack. The response in the New Republic was pretty weak, I thought. Linker accepts the basic principle of Romano's essay ("Heidegger was fundamentally a political thinker, and an evil one at that") and Romano's basic stance ("I am not a Nazi, but rather a liberal democrat"). He just changes it a little bit, by saying that we should read Heidegger because it is an intellectually exhilarating challenge to our liberal democratic principles, but of course we will not change anything because Linker is "not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more 'primordial' encounter with Being." Not inclined! This from the guy who's supposed to be defending philosophy!
This article is the most infuriating of the bunch, I think. Sloppy thinking is not in itself infuriating. We're all guilty of it. But this is published in a pretty high-profile online journal, and will be read by lots of people who don't know any better. That's what's so maddening about it. It's also evidence of a horrible but very common way of reading philosophical texts. According to this strategy, there is one obviously correct way to think. This correct way can be found by observing my gut instincts. Philosophers are to be judged to the extent that they meet this criteria or not. This hermeneutic is not even just a denial, it's a negation of the whole principle of philosophy. ALSO it goes beyond the standard Heidegger polemic by trying to drag in Hannah Arendt.
Here is Rosenbaum's argument: there have been lots of recent revelations about Arendt and Heidegger, which demonstrate that the latter was a horrible Nazi and the former was deeply influenced by anti-Semitic sources, including Heidegger. This should lead us to question the phrase, "the banality of evil," and see what hokum it is.
The non sequitur is tremendous, no? It's not any more sensible in the actual article. There are two unrelated claims: (1) Hannah Arendt was a bad person. (2) "The banality of evil" is a bad idea. There is no connection between these things. The attempt to connect them in the second to last paragraph makes no sense, either logically or historically. Both points are overstated. The part about Heidegger bears no relation to either of these points, although I guess it helps his ad hominem case against Arendt. It does give him a chance to demonstrate that he is deeply philosophically illiterate (again, there's nothing wrong with that. I know nothing about botany. But I don't publish muckraking articles in botanical journals).
Point (1) There are no new revelations about Heidegger or Arendt. That's his hook for the whole article, but I don't see anything that isn't blindly obvious, or known for 20 years already. I like Wasserstein, and haven't read his article, but I certainly hope it's more nuanced than RR says. Arendt used anti-Semitic sources, RR reports, when writing "Origins". He focuses primarily on J.A. Hobson, which is ridiculous: Hobson said a few nasty things about Jews (this was c. 1900 after all), but he was in no way a proto-Nazi. He had far worse things to say about Englishmen. The greatest inheritor of Hobson's ideas was Lenin, not Hitler. He's still taken seriously by prominent and probably non-Nazi scholars of imperialism (Cain/Hopkins). RR lists a few genuine Nazi or anti-Semitic sources that Arendt used, but his arguments are purely ad hominem. He quotes Arendt saying that these sources are useful, and then we're supposed to assume that they are not because these people were Nazis. This is not an argument. This is the same as those fliers you get in the mail saying, "Adolf Hitler supported gun control," and you're supposed to conclude, "Therefore gun control is bad."
Point (2) The critique of "banality of evil." Sure, this idea can be criticized, but not by saying, "Hannah Arendt is bad." RR's argument seems to rely on a gut emotional instinct but he gives it a facade of logic:
"To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase [...] Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."
Only the best of arguments requires the phrase, "Come on, people." Also that "of course" is a red flag for a missing logical step. His whole argument is: "Evil is not banal." That's not an argument, it's just a counter-assertion. How is "banality of evil" linguistically or metaphorically "wrong"? That doesn't even make sense. RR's argument at the end rests on the belief that Eichmann knew that what he was doing was evil. First off, this commits him to a Kantian ethics that is not shared by Arendt, but RR is not interested in philosophical niceties. Second, he has no evidence for this, and I don't see what kind of evidence is possible. All evidence points to the contrary, it seems to me. The final sentence is a blanket assertion, based on nothing and so meaningless that it is neither true nor false.
But he's not through yet. He has an alternative: "Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, 'radical evil.'" Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it." You know it when you see it! Now that's what I call slam-dunk argumentation. I actually don't know it when I see it. RR should give everyone updates on this. Maybe RR should be kept in a secret lair, like the diviners in "Minority Report," and he can watch things and tell us whether they are evil or not, using his special spider-sense to detect radical evil.
He has some praise, though, for "The Origins of Totalitarianism" because it allows him to call states fascist, which is a very productive thing to do. Here's RR: Totalitarianism is "a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called 'fascist.' Duh! It's because they're totalitarian." Duh! The whole point of Arendt's book is that fascism and totalitarianism are not the same thing. Duh! She actually thought that Fascism proper (i.e. in Italy) was not totalitarian.
Man, that was cathartic.
For whatever reason, the Heidegger controversy is happening again. There was that article in the Chronicle for Higher Education by Carlin Romano. That wasn't and shouldn't be taken seriously, as Romano is a known hack. The response in the New Republic was pretty weak, I thought. Linker accepts the basic principle of Romano's essay ("Heidegger was fundamentally a political thinker, and an evil one at that") and Romano's basic stance ("I am not a Nazi, but rather a liberal democrat"). He just changes it a little bit, by saying that we should read Heidegger because it is an intellectually exhilarating challenge to our liberal democratic principles, but of course we will not change anything because Linker is "not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more 'primordial' encounter with Being." Not inclined! This from the guy who's supposed to be defending philosophy!
This article is the most infuriating of the bunch, I think. Sloppy thinking is not in itself infuriating. We're all guilty of it. But this is published in a pretty high-profile online journal, and will be read by lots of people who don't know any better. That's what's so maddening about it. It's also evidence of a horrible but very common way of reading philosophical texts. According to this strategy, there is one obviously correct way to think. This correct way can be found by observing my gut instincts. Philosophers are to be judged to the extent that they meet this criteria or not. This hermeneutic is not even just a denial, it's a negation of the whole principle of philosophy. ALSO it goes beyond the standard Heidegger polemic by trying to drag in Hannah Arendt.
Here is Rosenbaum's argument: there have been lots of recent revelations about Arendt and Heidegger, which demonstrate that the latter was a horrible Nazi and the former was deeply influenced by anti-Semitic sources, including Heidegger. This should lead us to question the phrase, "the banality of evil," and see what hokum it is.
The non sequitur is tremendous, no? It's not any more sensible in the actual article. There are two unrelated claims: (1) Hannah Arendt was a bad person. (2) "The banality of evil" is a bad idea. There is no connection between these things. The attempt to connect them in the second to last paragraph makes no sense, either logically or historically. Both points are overstated. The part about Heidegger bears no relation to either of these points, although I guess it helps his ad hominem case against Arendt. It does give him a chance to demonstrate that he is deeply philosophically illiterate (again, there's nothing wrong with that. I know nothing about botany. But I don't publish muckraking articles in botanical journals).
Point (1) There are no new revelations about Heidegger or Arendt. That's his hook for the whole article, but I don't see anything that isn't blindly obvious, or known for 20 years already. I like Wasserstein, and haven't read his article, but I certainly hope it's more nuanced than RR says. Arendt used anti-Semitic sources, RR reports, when writing "Origins". He focuses primarily on J.A. Hobson, which is ridiculous: Hobson said a few nasty things about Jews (this was c. 1900 after all), but he was in no way a proto-Nazi. He had far worse things to say about Englishmen. The greatest inheritor of Hobson's ideas was Lenin, not Hitler. He's still taken seriously by prominent and probably non-Nazi scholars of imperialism (Cain/Hopkins). RR lists a few genuine Nazi or anti-Semitic sources that Arendt used, but his arguments are purely ad hominem. He quotes Arendt saying that these sources are useful, and then we're supposed to assume that they are not because these people were Nazis. This is not an argument. This is the same as those fliers you get in the mail saying, "Adolf Hitler supported gun control," and you're supposed to conclude, "Therefore gun control is bad."
Point (2) The critique of "banality of evil." Sure, this idea can be criticized, but not by saying, "Hannah Arendt is bad." RR's argument seems to rely on a gut emotional instinct but he gives it a facade of logic:
"To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase [...] Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."
Only the best of arguments requires the phrase, "Come on, people." Also that "of course" is a red flag for a missing logical step. His whole argument is: "Evil is not banal." That's not an argument, it's just a counter-assertion. How is "banality of evil" linguistically or metaphorically "wrong"? That doesn't even make sense. RR's argument at the end rests on the belief that Eichmann knew that what he was doing was evil. First off, this commits him to a Kantian ethics that is not shared by Arendt, but RR is not interested in philosophical niceties. Second, he has no evidence for this, and I don't see what kind of evidence is possible. All evidence points to the contrary, it seems to me. The final sentence is a blanket assertion, based on nothing and so meaningless that it is neither true nor false.
But he's not through yet. He has an alternative: "Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, 'radical evil.'" Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it." You know it when you see it! Now that's what I call slam-dunk argumentation. I actually don't know it when I see it. RR should give everyone updates on this. Maybe RR should be kept in a secret lair, like the diviners in "Minority Report," and he can watch things and tell us whether they are evil or not, using his special spider-sense to detect radical evil.
He has some praise, though, for "The Origins of Totalitarianism" because it allows him to call states fascist, which is a very productive thing to do. Here's RR: Totalitarianism is "a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called 'fascist.' Duh! It's because they're totalitarian." Duh! The whole point of Arendt's book is that fascism and totalitarianism are not the same thing. Duh! She actually thought that Fascism proper (i.e. in Italy) was not totalitarian.
Man, that was cathartic.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
A Very German Weekend, I
Ask anyone, or look in Lonely Planet. The two most characteristic things to do in Germany are
(1) Go to Neuschwanstein, a castle a few hours from Munich
(2) Experience socialized medicine in an authentic German emergency room
This weekend, I did both of these things. I'll only describe the first, as the second is not fully over (i.e. I have to go today to get my bill, about which I am very curious). Neuschwanstein looks like this:
Even though this is the most tourist-y thing in the whole country, I had a strong desire to go for some reason. I can't think of what the equivalent would be in America: probably colonial Williamsburg. The real Germans that I know in Munich, even those that are from here, have never even been. The Germans that go are, I think, Bavarian patriots. I was talking in the train, in English, about my dissertation topic, and expounding on how closely the early Nazi party was linked to Bavarian Catholicism. This is true, by the way, which I've only recently learned about: Hitler portrayed himself as a practicing Catholic until at least 1923, and found lots of his early allies and funds from Munich Catholics. Anyway, this stern German man next to me, who I later noticed was wearing a button depicting King Ludwig II (of Bavaria), very ostentatiously got up in a huff and moved to a different row.
The weird, and kind of amazing, thing about Neuschwanstein is that it's not (like Versailles, or the Tower of London, or the Forbidden City, or whatever) a tourist-y veneer over what was once a functioning set of buildings. This castle was ALWAYS a tourist attraction, and never really a castle at all. The reason it looks more like a stereotypical castle than any castle you've ever seen is that it was designed with that stereotype in mind. The castle is very new: it was completed in 1886, which is the year that Coca-Cola was invented, and obviously never had any military significance or anything. The gift shop, founded in 1926, is nearly as old as the castle itself. Also: Ludwig II died in 1886, under mysterious circumstances (many Bavarians obsess about this), before the castle could be actually completed. It was turned immediately into a museum, and he only lived there for a few months. So it's not the case that Disney copied Cinderella's castle from a real life European castle. It was always already Cinderella's castle.
The coolest part is this room in the middle that is designed to look like a cave, which looks just like something you'd find in Disney world. When asked the very reasonable question, "Why is there a fake cave in the castle, right next to the bedroom?", the tour-guide explained, "It's a scene from Wagner's Tannhäuser." This is not an explanation at all, and only makes things more mysterious. In general, the tour guides were the most uncharismatic lot I've ever seen (you have no choice but to take a tour; it's the only way inside). This is probably because they have to give the exact same tour about 20 times every day. This had the biggest impact on their humor. Tour guides are generally not funny. But when you add the fact that they were speaking in English, not their native language, and that they delivered the same jokes 20x/day, the jokes just came across as very sad. One of them involved the phrase "hanky panky."
One more remarkable thing. The two images below represent both sides of the same sign.
The sign on the left says, "Souvenirs for sale. Everything for 1/3 price." So Germans were getting a better deal, by 1/6! The pain this caused was somewhat assuaged by the fact that the only souvenirs remaining were Neuschwanstein vanity plates for people with extremely uncommon names like "Adelheid."
(1) Go to Neuschwanstein, a castle a few hours from Munich
(2) Experience socialized medicine in an authentic German emergency room
This weekend, I did both of these things. I'll only describe the first, as the second is not fully over (i.e. I have to go today to get my bill, about which I am very curious). Neuschwanstein looks like this:
Even though this is the most tourist-y thing in the whole country, I had a strong desire to go for some reason. I can't think of what the equivalent would be in America: probably colonial Williamsburg. The real Germans that I know in Munich, even those that are from here, have never even been. The Germans that go are, I think, Bavarian patriots. I was talking in the train, in English, about my dissertation topic, and expounding on how closely the early Nazi party was linked to Bavarian Catholicism. This is true, by the way, which I've only recently learned about: Hitler portrayed himself as a practicing Catholic until at least 1923, and found lots of his early allies and funds from Munich Catholics. Anyway, this stern German man next to me, who I later noticed was wearing a button depicting King Ludwig II (of Bavaria), very ostentatiously got up in a huff and moved to a different row.The weird, and kind of amazing, thing about Neuschwanstein is that it's not (like Versailles, or the Tower of London, or the Forbidden City, or whatever) a tourist-y veneer over what was once a functioning set of buildings. This castle was ALWAYS a tourist attraction, and never really a castle at all. The reason it looks more like a stereotypical castle than any castle you've ever seen is that it was designed with that stereotype in mind. The castle is very new: it was completed in 1886, which is the year that Coca-Cola was invented, and obviously never had any military significance or anything. The gift shop, founded in 1926, is nearly as old as the castle itself. Also: Ludwig II died in 1886, under mysterious circumstances (many Bavarians obsess about this), before the castle could be actually completed. It was turned immediately into a museum, and he only lived there for a few months. So it's not the case that Disney copied Cinderella's castle from a real life European castle. It was always already Cinderella's castle.
The coolest part is this room in the middle that is designed to look like a cave, which looks just like something you'd find in Disney world. When asked the very reasonable question, "Why is there a fake cave in the castle, right next to the bedroom?", the tour-guide explained, "It's a scene from Wagner's Tannhäuser." This is not an explanation at all, and only makes things more mysterious. In general, the tour guides were the most uncharismatic lot I've ever seen (you have no choice but to take a tour; it's the only way inside). This is probably because they have to give the exact same tour about 20 times every day. This had the biggest impact on their humor. Tour guides are generally not funny. But when you add the fact that they were speaking in English, not their native language, and that they delivered the same jokes 20x/day, the jokes just came across as very sad. One of them involved the phrase "hanky panky."
One more remarkable thing. The two images below represent both sides of the same sign.
The sign on the left says, "Souvenirs for sale. Everything for 1/3 price." So Germans were getting a better deal, by 1/6! The pain this caused was somewhat assuaged by the fact that the only souvenirs remaining were Neuschwanstein vanity plates for people with extremely uncommon names like "Adelheid."
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