Beyond Authenticity: Hannah Arendt's final unfinished work | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Authenticity: Hannah Arendt's final unfinished work

aeon.co

82 pointsapollinaire30 comments

Th idea of "will", especially from the German side, got a bad rap for obvious reasons. But I like Arendt's picture of it as an uncomfortable inner tension when we simultaneously see what what we want to be (or should morally do), and an alternative path set out by habit and company.

To me, will is a very important component in security, it's that tense feeling you get just before you;

  - decide the video conference with your boss urging you to transfer
    $1m into a Swiss account might not be as it seems, and pull the
    plug (risking being fired)

  - walk out of the shop that stubbornly refused to take cash (risking
    social embarrassment)

  - refuse a significant discount in exchange for giving personal
    information (taking financial loss on principle)

  - tell someone in a more authoritative position, no you won't be
    joining them via Teams/Zoom because of its security risks (risking
    unpopularity)

What we find in cybersecurity incident autopsies is that people say "I knew X wasn't right. All my spidery feelings and heckles were on red alert, but I didn't act, and I don't know why."

So in another piece I wrote;

    Our culture is now about to split into two camps; the normative
    and the secure. Instead of "the haves and have-nots", there will
    be "the will, and the will-nots". Those who will compromise and
    those who will not compromise security. Those who choose security
    over convenience. Those who choose security against the nagging
    "advice" of corporations and governments to adopt a weaker
    position favourable to "markets".

Thanks! Seems your adjacent concept should be relabelled "moral insecurity".

"Ethics today means not being at home in one's house." --Adorno

So that, the choice of moral freedom can still be the (more) ethical tradeoff

Cheers, and +1 for the very fitting Adorno quote.

The problem with incorrect emphasis on "will" in our culture is that it takes you to voluntarism. The will is the appetite of the intellect, oriented toward the good (real or apparent), and so one cannot just will anything, but rather, only of the things that the intellect first apprehends. (Of course, the will can also turn the intellect away from things we'd rather not know or have due awareness of, and this is the essence of the evil act; an act of self-blinding in order to move the will toward what we know we should not choose.) So freedom is in choosing or willing the good, what one ought, and for that, as the article notes by way of Augustine, we need the right habits, and this is what we call virtue. Here, the virtue of being able to choose the good is prudence. And since freedom classically understood is found in the ability to will the good, only a virtuous person is free. Compare this with the liberal (as in Hobbes, Locke, Mill) notion of freedom as the absence of external limitation. It becomes apparent what lunacy that is, as choosing anything but the good is, again to draw from Augustine, nothing short of the worst kind of slavery, a slavery to passions and vice. Thus, this modern notion of "authenticity" is, frankly, total bullshit, and a completely destructive notion at that.

I also got the sense the way authentic self was presented was kind of morally nullifying, a variation that reduced to "do what thou wilt," where the animal chaos is the true self, instead of the active exercise of choosing good. What Arendt was clearly onto has been said elsewhere as something along the lines of, nothing short of indefatigable exertion can induce the habit of virtue, where she notes Augustine emphasized it was this regular exercise of virtue that would render the soul pure, where Heidegger appears to be taking it for granted as a base state we need to strip away our experiences to find.

I've been down both roads and have spent a lot of time alone in the woods at night to find the fears that only exist without others around, and really, it's dwelling on the past. The search for Heideggers authentic self is a substitute for engaging the present and the real. Worse, it's neutralizing. If you want prevail over hell, it's other people, and engagement the necessary condition.

What I like about Sartre is his tremendous life journey from 'hell is other people' to a belief that solidarity and engagement with others is the only proper path.

That doesn't necessarily take a journey (or even a returning?), if one were to start out by framing it as a project of terraforming hell?

G*d: So, Peter, I heard you were visiting The Other Place the other day; how's ol' Lucey doing?

St. Peter: It's amazing! Since I was last, they've really done a lot with the place... irrigation, orchards, pizza and community sings on the week-

G*d: (pounding fist on Heavenly Throne) Those Me-damned mormons!

So what was Saint Al's project :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_First_Circle

Although.. yeah it would be hard for Saint Al to depict Lucey as being as cooperative as the LDS (as you do.., but you didn't have to make the tradeoff for publication)

Project at Marfino (under "auspices" of KPSS), or project (in conjunction with ER) to cleanse the бессмертная русская душа?

(swimming in ice water and jumping over fires are said to be good for the soul, at least when properly timed, but I can't think of any equivalent atmospheric or chthonic rituals, and of course the chinese have a fifth element, so maybe we ought to be craving the strength and certainty of steel?)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApvM0RxcxPg

[EDIT re publication: A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists. — TWA]

Quick tips for curious onlookers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200725015745/http://summit.sfu...

P34 (his project "outline")

Also P2 for his responses to Sartre (as an apologist for Stalin)

P31 aside on hubris (note intrapartitional aspect)

You can also have a universe in which the Hays Office is partitioned from the world of its inmates

re:L was waiting for the kids to start using the diggers on each other heh. Good on them!

Given that that project was entered as evidence in his trial, it may even be available somewhere in full (in Moscow, if not on runet)?

[Aside: as an officer, S was, in 1984 terms, "outer party"; had he merely been a 1984-prole, would he also have wound up Grazhdanin S., a zek?]

As to S-partition: I was taken when reading about the Voodoo Iwa that its practitioners are said to state that there must be thousands of them, but humans are only aware of a hundred or so (and power laws being what they are, the common pantheon of these "saints" is much smaller); this seemed to me to be a much more reasonable prior than universal knowledge of the specifics of other partitions, especially when we have the finite minds and they the infinite.

There was a 60's joke in which the Pope has good news and bad news for his Cardinals: the good news — he had a 1:1 with God the other day; the bad news — she's Black. Given the relative distribution of life on this planet, I can easily imagine our religious leaders being contacted by a beetle-saint, who apologises that the Big Deity is of course a protist (having made all the rest of them in Its own image), but everyone up above (or would beetles put their Heaven away from birds, down in the safety of the earth?) figured humanity, being animals and all, would find it more comprehensible to be contacted by Coleoptera, so it agreed to intercede.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ee1eQ6Rbnk

(there is a bard song which should go here, about a gang of zeks who spot a cigarette butt which, judging by the lipstick, had been smoked by an actual woman... but everything past Б escapes me, and I am not too sure of even that)

[EDIT: oops, with Б I had been thinking of Okudzhava, who's the wrong bard]

> as an officer

So, comparing with the US UCMJ[0], what would Captain Solzhenitsyn have faced if he had been subject to the US DoD[1] instead of the tender mercies of SMERSH[2] and the NKVD?

Conspiracy to commit sedition (Arts. 81 & 94 UCMJ) would seem to be the equivalent charge.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/881

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/894

Under the principle that conspiracy conviction invites maximum sentencing, it looks to me[3] as though Art.94(b) calls for the death penalty.

He (or his coconspirator) would, of course, have had to commit an overt act for the purpose of bringing about the object of the conspiracy. However, for the purposes of the UCMJ this act need not be illegal in itself, and considering that the NKVD based their sentence of 8 years labour camp on his having founded a hostile organisation (SFSR Penal Code Art.58-11), I'd guess the charge would've also gone through had he been a US Officer making arguably concrete plans for revolution?

[0] not adopted until 1951, but that's a minor quibble in our counterfactuality

[1] again, I believe this was still named the War Department at the time

[2] military personnel in the US are aware that their correspondence is subject to censorship; surely their Red Army counterparts would also have known that censorship implies reading — even if some (at least 2) were too arrogant to foresee the consequences?

[3] IANAL, let alone a military lawyer

The giant pachyderm in the room of modernism (arguably the largest pachyderm):

any post-liberal program of self-moderation needs to account for the magic of intragenerational QoL improvements (even if we restrict ourselves to considering only the inner life).

We can all go Greek, Latin, Pali, or Classical Chinese in search of questions and answers, but those civilizations didn't have either mass literacy or tech.

Once upon a time (last century) we had to contend with the Eastern Bloc's moral positioning, but since the end of That no one who suggests putting personal growth (of the psychological kind) ahead of the economic one has been taken seriously.

(And this is why @nonrandomstring above gets upvoted, even though I like your post better)

> Compare this with the liberal (as in Hobbes, Locke, Mill) notion of freedom as the absence of external limitation

You put your finger methinks on one of the reasons for the slippage downhill of our society: Everybody wants to be the "wrong" kind of free. (Also: All rights. No duties ...)

Just to save people some time, since it’s halfway through: the article is about The Life of the Mind. It’s an incredible work - cannot recommend it enough! The completion of Kant’s project, in her own way.

Everyone who even vaguely cares about psychology should read Eichmann in Jerusaelm from her.

Could you elaborate on your recommendation?

I believe the consensus now is that her analysis of Eichmann was wrong, he had fooled her (and others). Personally I still think the concept of the “banality of evil” overall still has merit.

The non-appearance of "monstrous psychopaths" is only part of it. I don't know much about Eichmann but there's a rather good treatment of the Nuremberg trials in the Adam Curtis documentary The Living Dead [0], in which Hermann Göring is shown as setting a tone that later resurfaces with Eichmann and in the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of post-apartheid South Africa and many other trials of atrocities and war crimes - namely an intransigent adherence to the defence that "everything was done legally".

I don't think any culture has fully digested the implications or had the courage to approach the questions Nuremberg and subsequent trials posed 80 years ago; where does the law run out? When does it become not just okay but morally necessary to defect/rebel/rise-up against your own side, and its so-called "laws" when it's become degenerate and run by criminals ?

In this way I don't think the difficult issue is that evil is banal (as in C. R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" [2]) but that it's "everyday, procedural and institutionally backed". It's defended by social organisations held dear, right up until a point of collapse and pivot of history when those institutions themselves become seen as evil.

Eichmann and Göring went beyond "Kadavergehorsam" [1] and were indignant that anyone dare judge them. Göring tried to school the judges in moral philosophy.

I don't think anyone is comfortable revisiting this topic, especially as it's still relevant and playing out today in at least two theatres of war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Dead_(TV_series)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpse-like_obedience

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._Browning

Yeah she was a genius.

Arendt makes a compelling case, but unfortunately one that does not stand up to our advances in neuroscience. The will as described here does not exist. There is nothing beyond conditioning.

Not sure how you come to this conclusion, neuroscience is nowhere near advanced enough to have clarity on such a thing, it could well be an emergent property of neural activity.

I came to this conclusion by reading the book “Determined” by Sapolsky.

https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780525560975

Ok maybe I read it differently than you, but the will in the article doesn't sound like me like what is typically discussed as "free will"? It sounds more like what could also be called "drive" or "striving".

> but unfortunately

Says one who does not believe in will but believes in fortune.

One can believe in making fortune submit to the will :)

(Like Machiavelli & Napoleon I)

The compelling case, as you say, is simply that we can find ourselves for various reasons choosing to resist conditioning and conformity. And this resistance can be enlightening to the individual and to broader society.

The personal search (self-examination) can of course be beneficial. There's no need to slip into nebulous metaphysics to understand that any challenge to a power structure may have an enlightened outcome or a disastrous outcome.

The article is hagiographic and is reaching for something deep, but this passage is perhaps the essence:

    "But for Arendt, the will was the means to our freedom [...] The will is a space of tension inside the self where one actively feels the difference between where they are and where they would like to be. [...]

    "Willing is the mental activity that goes on between thinking and judgment. It has the power to shape us by drawing us into conflict with ourselves. Without inner conflict, there is no forward movement. These are the basic principles of willing:

    Willing is characterised by an inner state of disharmony.
    Willing is experienced as a felt sense of tension within the body where the mind is at war with itself.
    Willing makes one aware of possible decisions, which creates a feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once.
    Willing can feel very lonely. Decisions and choices are shaped by one’s environment, by the everydayness of being, but ultimately the responsibility for deciding is up to oneself.
    Willing makes one aware of the tension that exists between oneself as a part of the world, and oneself as an individual alone existing in relationship to the world.
    Willing is the principle of human individuation.
    Willing relates to the world through action.
    The will is the inner organ of freedom.
"

Changes nothing.

Thief: I’m not guilty. There is no free will, so I couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judge: I sentence you anyway. Because my actions, too, are predetermined.

Nasruddin is asked to judge a village dispute:

Accuser — tells a tale of woe

Nasruddin — "You're right!"

Accused — mounts a defense

Nasruddin — "You're right, too!"

Village elder — "But Mullah, they can't both be right..."

Nasruddin — "All three of you are right!"

Conditioning is a behavioral term from when the brain was treated as a black box, and they wanted to come up with general principles of behavior in the absence of good neurological models. Things have advanced a bit since the 1950s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com