Customer Reviews

Between Past and Future (Penguin Classics)

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Notice inside the parenthesis next to the title it says (20th century classics). That's because this work belongs to that rank. I first read this book back when I was in grad school, and have used it as a reference ever since. If a 'classic' -- if we may dare use such a term still -- is something akin to a great poem as Ezra Pound defined it, "News that stays new", then this work is a classic. Arendt must have been a great teacher as well as a thinker. These essays read like lectures: Lectures given by a caring professor who actually gives a damn about getting through to her audience. Yes, some Greek and Latin here and there, but with Arendt as your guide you cannot get lost if you pay attention. The subtitle of the book is Eight Exercises in Political Thought, and Arendt, in her grand style, deals with the big topics -- Freedom, Authority, Power, Tradition, etc -- that ground everything else in civic life. The sheer pleasure to be had in encountering the density of her scholarship is found not only in her crystal clear prose, but also in her mastery of the foundational concepts and experience, Roman and Greek, that shape, willy nilly, the warpature within the space of our civic and political discourse even today. However, in her presentation of the trajectory of tradition, she also shows exactly where and how the displacement of tradition occurred. In the opening lines of her essay 'What is Authority?', she asks whether we ought not instead be asking 'What WAS Authority?', making clear from the get go that the notion of Authority has undergone an irreversible transformation since the Roman conception. And then she goes on to explain how that change occurred and in what way, with what chain of consequences. This book is noteworthy not only for its content and inimitable delivery, but also as a model of intellectual "exercise". The calmness, the steady architectural build-up of the argument, attention to philological detail when it's called for, all make up Arendt's generous style of writing and thinking. But that generosity is especially evident in this collection of essays. This is one of those rare books that, if read well, will actually make you more thoughtful. And smarter. Besides, you get to pick up some Greek and Latin for free.

The last reviewer is correct in the sense that Arendt is an incredibly intelligent writer, it is wrong to judge the book on other works of Arendt. I believe this book demonstrates and explains the close, yet, strangely obscure ties between past occurences and ideas and those of the present. Arendt really puts the true meaning of historical study into place when she places it in all three tenses: past, present, and future. For those of you unacquainted with the writings of Hannah Arendt, I will gladly tell you that no one I have ever read has the observation and mental-leaps that Arendt gave us through her writings. The back of the book says something to the effect that Arendt exposed what is usually passed off as genius as a tired process still running its course. As cliche as remarks on the back of books go, this one so happens to describe her talent perfectly. Arendt shows us that there is very little that is original. Many things really depend on past observations and actions. She also shows us that little has changed since ancient times, in some of our most fundamental system of thinking. I am disappointed that the previous Arendt-reader was not impressed with the book. I have owned it for about five months now, and I still find myself picking back through the explanations and exercises that Arendt gave us. This really is a must have for anyone who reads Hannah Arendt, or anyone who finds themselves between past and future.

This along with ' Men in Dark Times' and ' The Human Condition' is my favorite Arendt work. Her analysis of fundamental concepts such as Authority, Truth, Freedom, Action are fundamental in that they go to the root morning of the term and trace the concepts transformations in reality. Her narratives are generally narratives of decline and loss, of concepts and experiences that somehow lose their meanings in the transformation of time. And this while she is always searching for some kind of redefinition of fundamental political activity and reality that will bring a new dignity to the human condition. Her writing is profound, and whether one agrees with her or not her analyses always ' educate' and make ' the life of the mind ' seem especially meaningful.
This is one of the best works of one of the great political thinkers of the modern world.

I have used both this book and _The Human Condition_ in both lower and upper-division philosophy courses. This book has the benefit of compressing Arendt's insights (especially insights into natality, power, and forgiveness) into a much more accessible prose than _The Human Condition_. I would therefore prefer to assign this selection of her work in most classes, especially classes in which one's guiding theme is the philosophy of education or the notion of a participatory democracy.

What I find most interesting in _Between Past and Future_ is the way that Arendt's individual sections on Authority, Freedom, and Education work together. Arendt's critique of authority and tradition--she claims both have ended with totalitarianism, at least in the political realm--is powerful. Her insistence that authority and tradition remain within the home and within education, however, must be read, understood, appreciated and criticized.

Basically, Arendt ties educational authority to a consciously accepted responsibility for the whole world, for the whole institution that one bears within one's stance as educator.

This is a difficult stance for most teachers to take--particularly those of us who teach regularly in college-level service courses. We can feel the stirrings of resentment, and we can sometimes wish to have our say and go home, without a further thought. However, Arendt's position is clear and demands a response: in order to become a full-fledged citizen of a democracy, it is absolutely necessary for students to have had the chance to see teachers and professors as authorities who bear this global responsibility, who teach as if democracy depended on them.

I might interpret her position thus: A college teacher who teaches as if research alone were success in her field is commiting herself (in the future) to something akin to tyranny. A high school or grade school teacher who leaves the children to their own devices, who substitutes doing for learning, who believes pedagogy is a method divorced from the content that is to be taught, encourages children to grow like weeds, without a view of the whole and without a clear sense of having had sufficient room made for their voices, insights, and participation.

I believe (and hope) that for Arendt to teach is not to pour content into heads. It is not to lob books from the outside into the mob. It is to acknowledge the difficulty and multiplicity of interpretations of history, literature, philosophy, etc.--so that one day those sitting before the teacher in the classroom can develop and reinterpret the past in unforeseen ways. Teaching is leaving open the possibility for greater integration, for greater humanity.

Hannah Arendt was the kind of deep thinker who is sorely needed in our world.

Santayana's quote that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" has long been one of my favorites. Arendt's book is worth reading as provocative food for thought about relating past to future.

The problem with political theory, politics and government is that deep thinking alone is not enough. There also has to be policy development and good execution which yield two large real-world disconnects--between thought and policy and policy and results.

Arendt's work offers important starting points.

Jim Namaste
[...]

Very few political theorists have the reach and thought of Hannah Arendt. I read her works first by requirement, then with joy. Between Past and Future articulates and solidifies my own thoughts on politics, particularly the observations in "What is Freedom?" on courage and action. A must read for anyone seriously thinking about political theory or a career in civil service.

Though Arendt is one of my favorite political theorists, this compilation left me dissapointed. Though her insights on Truth, Justice and Authority are well argued, she makes very few of the observations that made me love her works. The best chapter in the book is the 7th, a defense of her work Eichmann in Jeruselum (though she does not explicitly mention it) where she discusses the nature of Truth and its role it the telling of history. As usual of course, a knowledge of Greek and Latin is helpful with Arendt (which I don't have) as the text is full of foreign words.

I was reading a book by Hannah Arendt at the beginning of July, when I went to a Bo Diddley concert in which his song "Shut Up, Woman" ended with "You know I love you, and I would love you twice as much if you put that razor away." I was primarily interested in what Arendt could say about Nietzsche, but her observations also included Marx and Kierkegaard. Arendt was a member of the last generation that was well-read. Since then reading has become an individual hobby for some, but books are no longer a context within which meaning advances, and her observations shaved off the B.C. comic suggestion for males proving their superiority over females by scratching them with our beards.

Do we all remember this comic?
We're going to catch the women and prove the innate superiority of men over women.
Curls: How do you plan to do that?
Peter: We'll scratch them with our beards.

Hannah Arendt might be a good example of how modern exercises in political thought think very much like Nietzsche, but use Nietzsche as the philosopher most responsible for ending the authority which thought itself, as a superfluous product of human mental aspiration, assumes in her book, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE. Its index of names does not include George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80, dead now these 125 years), an English author that Nietzsche heard about from his friend, Helene Druscowicz, and mentioned in section 5 of the "Expeditions of an Untimely Man" in Nietzsche's book TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS with the disavowal, "let us not blame it on little bluestockings a la Eliot. In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one's position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic." People being what they are, morals ought to assume an awe-inspiring place in the expression of anyone's individuality. For Nietzsche to assume that "it possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the belief in God" applies religious presumptions to a matter that holds no water, "For the Englishman morality is not yet a problem . . ." I tried to find something about Marx in Nietzsche's books, and instead I found an English novelist who might be familiar to anyone who reads.

To let Hannah Arendt state the matter in her own way:

"Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche remained Hegelians insofar as they saw the history of past philosophy as one dialectically developed whole; their great merit was that they radicalized this new approach toward the past in the only way it could still be further developed, namely, in questioning the conceptual hierarchy which had ruled Western philosophy since Plato and which Hegel had still taken for granted."

George Eliot did not get mentioned when Hannah Arendt considered the way in which modern society functions:

"Values are social commodities that have no significance of their own but, like other commodities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and commerce. Through this relativization both the things which man produces for his use and the standards according to which he lives undergo a decisive change: they become entities of exchange, and the bearer of their `value' is society and not man, who produces and uses and judges."

Considering the common element of self-defeat in Nietzsche, Marx, and Kierkegaard, Arendt suggests, "In complete independence of one another--none of them ever knew of the others' existence--they arrive at the conclusion that this enterprise in terms of the tradition can be achieved only through a mental operation best described in the images and similes of leaps, inversions, and turning concepts upside down: Kierkegaard speaks of his leap from doubt into belief; Marx turns Hegel, or rather `Plato and the whole Platonic tradition' (Sidney Hook), `right side up again,' leaping `from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom'; and Nietzsche understands his philosophy as `inverted Platonism' and `transformation of all values.'"

Freedom is a neat theme because it allows everyone to participate as liberators. Even the CIA is still looking for a slam dunk way to make it happen, but the future is never a cakewalk. Education has been trying to produce people who can reach some consensus on things that have to be done, but the methods which lead in that direction are incredibly boring to anyone who has access to the feelings of those who produce and perform art. As Bo Diddley would say, "Sit down and shut up."