I apologize for sending a mass email but we haven't come to a concrete decision about a discussion forum. So until we do I would like to be able to communicate to everyone in this format.
I don't say much in the seminar because I'm more of a listener and I process things slower. So I would like to be able to take part in conversations even if it's after the fact.
I heard Joy say that it feels good and it's a right to take vengeance. Having had a horrendous experience in my own life which put the perpetrator in jail nearly for life, I have never thought about vengeance. I have always wanted to go back face-to-face with that person much like the truth and reconciliation commission and have closure. And not feeling vengeance had baffled my mind.
In Beauvoir's reading I read, "In dying he slips out of the world; he shrugs off his punishment." I wondered if Beauvoir was against capital punishment yet she didn't sign the petition to let Brasillach off death row. I wonder what vengeance gives us. And it made me think of non-violent resisters who decide not to hurt the perpetrator for a moral high ground. I wonder how this and religion fits into the conversation. Doesn't religion guide us not to take vengeance? Or I could be wrong.
In regards to the appropriateness of neo-Nazis rallying in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, I think that on the one hand, in a democracy, we don't have a right to suppress speech yet look at what hate speech has brought about.
Well, thanks for allowing me to contribute to the conversation.
From Mark:
ReplyDeleteThanks, Nina, for your comments. From where I sit, I cannot keep up with all the conversational vitality so I trail behind your lead with some of my responses....
Beauvoir writes that for "the life of a man to have a meaning, he must be held responsible for evil as well as for good, and, by definition, evil is that which one refuses in the name of the good, with no compromise possible" (257). I thought it interesting that Camus signed the petition because he was against the death penalty and not because he supported Brasillach's conviction. I sense that Arendt is closer to Beauvoir in these trials than Camus. This morning I had to shut OT and set it down after reading this--and it may be why I cannot jar my tongue loose: "The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world" (564). I cannot speak for the group but for me, hearing the discussion of the reactions against EiJ with all the miscues about why and how Arendt got the trial wrong shows that we all need to read MORE of Arendt in order to interpret Arendt. Judging Arendt's (mis?)reporting of the trial shows to me that many, including me, have no idea what it is like to live inside a totalitarian regime--victim or perp--so my reactions will always be from the outside, the nontotal. viewpoint. How can I know the ethical choice the Jewish leaders made in giving names and contacts to the SS when my own cognitive dissonance cannot see victims as perps, as two sides to the same coin in this horrific event? Arendt adds later on the same page (564), "we do not know the extent of character transformation under a totalitarian regime." I don't have the right lens to see these things. "We know even less how many of the normal people around us [read Eichmann here] would be willing to accept the totalitarian way of life--that is, to pay the price of a considerably short life for the assured fulfillment of all their career dreams" (564). I have sat in a courtroom and "won" the case in which a perp violated my immediate family and I cannot say that vengeance heals anything. But I have learned that to carry animosity against that perp harms me more than it harms him since I do not know if he feels remorse anyway. Has anyone read the short story by Andre DuBos called, "Killings"? In fiction, it deals with these concepts and questions. In poetry, see Leslie Marmon Silko's poem, "Long Time Ago," and see that these things, this story cannot be called back: http://inequalityinamerica.voices.wooster.edu/files/2012/02/Ceremony-excerpt.pdf
Sorry to write such a long, Arendt-ian paragraph. It is not Nina's fault.
See you all tomorrow,
Mark
Arendt herself was subjected to a "how dare you judge when you weren't in their shoes" in relation to Jewish leadership, in particular. And she responded to it in the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem. See pp. 295-297 in particular. "The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible." But is this sufficient to the question Mark poses about judgment and experience?
ReplyDeleteThe matter is tied up with what Arendt says in another context about aesthetic judgment, which she takes to be rooted in "common sense." And she, following Kant, saw common sense as the sense which fits us into community with others, enables us to communicate to others what we otherwise perceive with our five private senses. This kind of judgment, aesthetic judgment, is implicitly the kind that takes others into consideration and aesthetic judgment is a field in which "we judge without having general rules to go by." ("Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," p. 142 in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. J.Kohn.) In judging this way, I don't arrive at conclusions that have only to do with myself, about what is right for me and my life, but for the community of which I am a part.