The Problem of Evil
in Literature, Film, and Philosophy (FRENGEN 265) Class #6:
Reading assignments for today's seminar were Hans Jonas,
"Memoirs" (2008) on Hannah Arendt
(Brandeis University Press, pp. 178-183);
Paul van Dijk,
"The Core Thinking of Günther Anders" (2000), Chapter 3, pp. 27-79.
Professor Dupuy's class ran 40 minutes overtime and was still ongoing when I left at 6:45 pm for
the 7 pm Memorial Church lecture by George P. Schultz on
"The Power of the Ought" where the former
Secretary of State under President Reagan talked about the danger of nuclear holocaust.
It was almost a continuation of Dupuy's showing parts of the film Fog of War where
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara disclosed that we were 32 times close to the brink
of nuclear annihilation. Professor Dupuy was kind to download his May 11 PowerPoint presentation
from his laptop to my USB drive in his office after our Thursday class film screening (5-14-2009).
I've converted it below in HTML with my added commentaries and web links to share with others.
Slides from Professor Dupuy's PowerPoint Presentation:
(#123)
Thoughtlessness
On the Discrepancy Between Know-How and Thought
Hannah Arendt & Günther Anders
(#124)
Commentary:
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time (1927),
is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.
Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with Nazism.
Hans Jonas (1903-1993)
was a German-born philosopher who was, from 1955 to 1976, Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy
at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He studied philosophy and theology in Freiburg,
Berlin and Heidelberg, and finally achieved his Ph.D at Marburg where he studied under Edmund Husserl,
Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Bultmann. In Marburg he met Hannah Arendt who was also pursuing her Ph.D. there,
and the two of them were to remain friends for the rest of their lives. Jonas' writings were very influential
in different spheres. His The Gnostic Religion (1958) was for many years the standard work in English
on the subject of Gnosticism. The Imperative of Responsibility (German 1979, English 1984) centers
on social and ethical problems created by technology. Jonas insists that human survival depends on our efforts
to care for our planet and its future. He formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality:
"Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life".
Günther Anders (1902-1992)
was a Jewish philosopher and journalist who developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology,
focusing on such themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the nuclear threat,
the Shoah and the question of being a philosopher. In 1923 he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy with Edmund Husserl.
He also studied with Heidegger and married Hannah Arendt (1929-1937). Anders and his wife Hannah Arendt fled Nazi
Germany in 1933, first to France and then to the United States. His major work, never translated into English is
acknowledged to be Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956) ("The Outdatedness of Humankind"), which devotes a great
deal of attention to the nuclear threat, making him an early critic of this element of human technology as well.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
was an influential German-Jewish political theorist. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy
with Martin Heidegger, with whom she embarked on a long, stormy and romantic relationship for which she was
later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party while he was rector of Freiburg University.
In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept
of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers.
She married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders, in 1929 in Berlin (they divorced in 1937).
Arendt's theory of political action is extensively developed in her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958).
After Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), her friend Gershom Scholem,
a major scholar of Jewish Mysticism, broke off relations with her. She was criticized by many Jewish public figures,
who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah.
(#125)
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
Verum et factum convertuntur
"The True and the Made are convertible."
Scienza Nuova (1725)
Commentary: Vico was an Italian philospher and historian. His magnum opus
is Origins of New Science about the Common Nature of Nations. Vico is claimed
to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history. He is well-known for noting that
verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"),
a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology.
(#126)
When Knowing is Making
Hannah Arendt on Vico
"Despite his human limitations, the scientist nevertheless from the outset approached
nature from the standpoint of the One who made it."
[The Human Condition, p. 295.]
"The use of the experiment for the purpose of knowledge was already the consequence
of the conviction that one can know only what he has made himself, for this conviction
meant that one might learn about those things man did not make by figuring out and
imitating the processes through which they had come into being." [Ibid]
Loss or blurring of the distinctions between knowing and making,
the scientist and the engineer, discovery and invention.
(#127)
The Golem Tradition
Indeed, how can we know if the initiate has succeeded in
deciphering and properly understanding the laws of the
creation of the world, if not by verifying that his
knowledge is efficacious in that it makes it possible
for him to create a world too? How can we know that
his knowledge of human nature is correct, if not by
verifying that it makes it possible for him to create a man?
Henri Atlan, Les Etincelles de hasard, Paris (1999)
(#128)
The First Cybernetician
He was dedicated to knowing how the brain works in the way
that the creator of any machine knows its workings. The key
to such knowledge is not to analyze observation but to create
a model and then to compare it with observation by mapping.
But the poiesis must come first, and McCulloch would rather
have failed in trying to create a brain than to have succeeded
in describing an existing one more fully.
Neurophysiologist Jerome Lettvin,
about cybernetician Warren McCulloch, 1984
(#129)
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)
The trouble concerns the fact that the 'truths'
of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated
in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer
lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. [...]
It could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures
and have begun to act as though we were the dwellers of the universe,
will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about
the things which nevertheless we are able to do. [...]
lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. [...]
If it should turn out to be true that knowledge
(in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company
for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so
much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures
at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter
how murderous it is.
(#130)
"Science does not think."
Martin Heidegger (1976)
(#131)
Günther Anders,
Hiroshima Diary (1958)
Discrepancy between
herstellen and vorstellen:
our capacity to make, to fabricate things goes
well beyond our capacity to represent
to ourselves what we are doing.
"Technology has brought with it that
we can become guiltlessly guilty."
The invisibility of evil and
our blindness to the Apocalypse.
(#132)
Ivan Illich
and the Evil
of Absolute Goodness
(#133)
Ivan Illich (1926-2002)
Celebration of Awareness (1971)
Deschooling Society (1971)
Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Energy and Equity (1974)
Medical Nemesis (1976)
Toward a History of Needs (1978)
Shadow Work (1981)
Gender (1982)
Ivan Illich Archive, Energy and Equity
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html
(#134)
Ivan Illich on Counterproductivity
Beyond certain critical thresholds of development,
the more the leading institutions of our industrial
societies grow, the more they become an obstacle to
medicine undermines health, schools foster stupidity,
transportation immobilises, communications render
deaf and dumb, information flows destroy meaning,
fossil fuel energy revives the dynamism of past life
while threatening to wipe out all future life, and,
last but not least, industrial food turns into poison.
(#135)
Ivan Illich on Health
I do not believe that countries need a national 'health' policy, something
given to their citizens. Rather, the latter need the courageous virtue
to face certain truths:
we will never eliminate pain;
we will not cure all disorders;
we will certainly die.
Therefore, as sensible creatures, we must face the fact that the pursuit of health
may be a sickening disorder. There are no scientific, technological solutions.
There is the daily task of accepting the fragility and contingency of the human
situation. There are reasonable limits which must be placed on conventional
'health' care. We urgently need to define anew what duties belong to us as persons,
what pertains to our communities, what we relinquish to the state.
Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh,
celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we
recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the flattening-out of human experience.
I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying
about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today, with equal importance,
the art of suffering, the art of dying.
Ivan Illich, "Health as one's own responsibility? No, thank you!" (1990)
(#136)
A New Conception of Evilness
18th century
Faust to Mephisto:
Nun gut, wer bist du denn?
Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will,
und stets das Gute schafft.
[Alright, who are you then?
Part of the force that stood,
For always wanting Evil,
but still creates the Good.]
Today
Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Gute will,
und stets das Böse schafft
(#137)
Ivan Illich and the limitlessness of the modern world
"What Jesus calls the Kingdom of God stands
above and beyond any ethical rule and can
disrupt the everyday world in completely
unpredictable ways. But Illich also recognizes
in this declaration of freedom from limits an
extreme volatility. For should this freedom
ever itself become the subject of a rule,
then the limit-less would invade human
life in a truly terrifying way."
David Cayley (Ed.), The Rivers North of the Future:
The Testament of Ivan Illich (2005)
|
|
(#138)
A religious scholar of the Law tests Jesus by asking him
what is necessary to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks the lawyer
what the Mosaic Law says about it. When the lawyer quotes the
scripture, saying "Love your neighbor as yourself", Jesus says
that he has answered correctly "Do this and you will live,"
he tells him.
But the lawyer then asks Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is,
Jesus responds with a parable about a man who was attacked and
robbed and left to die by the side of a road. Later, a priest saw
the stricken figure and avoided him, presumably in order to maintain
ritual purity. Similarly, a Levite saw the man and ignored him as well.
Then a Samaritan passed by, and, despite the mutual antipathy between
Samaritans and the Jews, he immediately rendered assistance by giving
him first aid and taking him to an inn to recover while promising
to cover the expenses.
|
The Good Samaritan
At the conclusion of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, of the three
passers-by, who was the stricken man's neighbor? The lawyer responds,
"The one who helped him." Jesus responds with "Go and do the same."
Commentary: The Good Samaritan story is from
Gospel of Luke, X.25-37.
Jesus tells the lawyer ""Love your neighbor as yourself"
(Mark XII.31). This is the
Golden Rule which Confucius advised to his students: "Do not do to others what you would
not wish for yourself." (Analects, XV.24). Likewise, Buddha is compassionate to all
sentient beings because he is enlightened that he is the others as well as himself. Lao Tzu
said the sage is like an eyeball for he is sensitive to the sufferings of others.
|
|