Customer Reviews (3)

Great Detective Work and a Fine Introduction
It is hard to write a review on a book filled with so many good things, but this volume merits some encouraging comments despite the difficulties of easy encapsulation.Kampowski's book is a great introduction to both St. Augustine and Hannah Arendt's philosophy.It is also a primer for action theory and Christian ethics drawn from the Church's patristic tradition, and could provide the reader with many intellectual and historical insights as well as material for more personal reflection and spiritual growth. Certainly, a book to recommend.

Kampowski's book is largely a companion volume to the work by Joanna Vecchialrelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark entitled Love and Saint Augustine, and I would encourage reading both books together.While Kampowski's attitude to Scott and Stark is respectful, he questions whether they have proven thelife long and pervading influence of Augustine's thinking on Arendt's philosophy. His book is offered as a corrective to what he sees lacking in Scott and Stark. Kampowski's book does a fine bit of detective work on the book's publishing history and Arendt's efforts to edit late in her life the dissertation from her youth.He continues to trace Augustinian themes in her later works including the incomplete The Life of the Mind (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2) and The Human Condition (2nd Edition).Overall, I think Kampowski does a fine job making his point, and in the process, gives the reader a fine overview of Arendt's action theory leaving little doubt that Augustine shadowed Arendt throughout her career.

Kampowski makes an early reference to the Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel, whose tome Action (1893: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice should be on every educated Catholic's reading list, to help structure his book, though certainly he could have used more of him.Blondel's division of rational activity into intuitive and ontological direction and discursive praxis weave their way throughout Kampowski's analysis at every turn, but Kampowski seems reluctant to incorporate Blondel directly into the text or to use his insights to bolster his analysis.It is possible that such incorporation would have lead him away from his focus, and the omission justified for editorial reasons, but it left a lingering disappointment for me throughout my reading.Kampowski's book seems to suggest that Arendt's action theory is of a more discursive and moralistic variety; the book is heavily weighted to the temporal context.Blondel, at least as I see him, essentially sees action as an activity of spirit beyond mind and will, and while Arendt's thinking is not antithetical to the intuitive and mystical, the majority of Kampowski's work suggests a favoring on her part toward the pragmatic.Because Arendt wrote in the era of Nazism and holocaust, and Blondel within the more intellectual atmosphere of German Idealism, may have something to do with this.I wish Kampowski would have been more clear on this point.Volition as the locus for "new beginning," and a "natality" that draws from sempiternal truth should have been explored here.Is his accounting an adequate reflection of Arendt's action theory?Is there a certain sacrifice of the mystical to deal with the issues of how men treat each other?Kampowski does deal with the theme of "love of God and neighbor" and the relationship between them ( it is actually a very good part of the book), but I am left pondering Arendt's Blondelianism.

Despite this criticism, the book is filled with much good, especially if your thinking falls more into the volitionist perspective of Christian thought than the intellectual world usually driven by Thomism.It gets to the heart of many questions and issues relevant today.

Inspiring
Rigorous and scholarly research and approach. Thorough knowledge of st. Auqustine, too. I warmly recommend it!

Great Introduction to the Thought of Hannah Arendt
In a world that seems to be governed by the law of causality, is action, understood as free initiative, possible at all? What sense can we make of the mystery of evil, particularly as it was manifested in the times of the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia? How was it possible for people to commit outrageous crimes with an ease that is truly disconcerting? These were among the central questions raised by Hannah Arendt, one of the most intriguing political philosophers of the last century. This present book, which relates her mature work to her juvenile doctorate, actually holds much more than the title is promising. The author invites the reader to marvel, together with Hannah Arendt, at the wonderful human capacity of the new and unexpected. It is a great introduction to Arendt's ideas, making great reading also for people not yet familiar with her thought. The book is scholarly and well-researched. At the same time it is quite approachable even for non-academics. ... Read more

Product Description
Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most powerful political theorists. The purpose of this book is to make an innovative contribution to the newly emerging literature connecting Arendt to international political theory and debates surrounding globalization. In recent years the work of Arendt has gathered increasing interest from scholars in the field of international political theory because of its potential relevance for understanding international affairs. Focusing on the central theme of evil in Arendt's work, this book weaves together elements of Arendt's theory in order to engage with four major problems connected with contemporary globalization: genocide and crimes against humanity; global poverty and radical economic inequality; global refugees, displaced persons, and the 'stateless'; and the destructive domination of the public realm by predatory neoliberal economic globalization. Hayden shows that a key constellation of her concepts - the right to have rights, superfluousness, thoughtlessness, plurality, freedom, and power - can help us to understand and address some of the central problems involving political evil in our global age.In doing so, this book takes Arendtian scholarship and international political theory into provocative new directions. "Political Evil in a Global Age" will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of politics, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. ... Read more

Product Description
This book explores the influence of Hannah Arendt's and Leo Strauss' background in pre-World War II Germany on their perception of American democracy.The contributors analyze how their émigré experience both influenced their American work and also impacted on the formation of the discipline of political science in postwar Germany.Arendt's and Strauss' experiences thus aptly illustrate the transfer and transformation of political ideas in the World War II era. ... Read more

Product Description

Hannah Arendt's work offers a powerful critical engagement with the cultural and philosophical crises of mid-twentieth-century Europe. Her idea of the banality of evil, made famous after her report on the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, remains controversial to this day.

In the face of 9/11 and the 'war on terror', Arendt's work on the politics of freedom and the rights of man in a democratic state are especially relevant. Her impassioned plea for the creation of a public sphere through free, critical thinking and dialogue provides a significant resource for contemporary thought. 

Covering her key ideas from The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition as well as some of her less well-known texts, and focussing in detail on Arendt's idea of storytelling, this guide brings Arendt's work into the twenty-first century while helping students to understand its urgent relevance for the contemporary world.

Product Description

Product Description
This book is the first to tell in detail the story of the passionate and secret love affair between two of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.Drawing on their previously unknown correspondence, Elzbieta Ettinger describes a relationship that lasted for more than half a century, a relationship that sheds startling light on both individuals. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A sad and sordid tale.
This slim volume was a book I had chosen thinking that it contained actual correspondence between Arendt and Heidegger.Instead it is the interpretation of these letters along with biographical details to portray the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger.This relationship began as a love affair between Arendt and Heidegger when Arendt was Heidegger's student.

Ettinger's depiction of the interaction between Arendt and Heidegger is painful to read.According to Ettinger, Arendt was slavishly devoted to Heidegger and believed anything he said despite evidence to the contrary.She defended him despite his activities as a Nazi sympathizer.And she assisted Heidegger to restore his reputation after WWII.

Heidegger is presented as a narcissistic manipulator who uses his charisma to cover up his bad behavior, and appears to believe his own lies, becoming angry when people challenged him.Arendt is portrayed as a pathetically willing dupe who is so enthralled by the psychopathic Heidegger that she does not challenge him, and accepts his pretences as the necessary payment to be his friend.

The book is readable but shows little sympathy toward either character.It is a sordid and psychologically simplistic portrait of a relationship.It is to be hoped that there is more to the story than is portrayed here, however the pattern portayed here of emotional dominance and submission is not an uncommon one.

Identification with the aggressor
First let me sound completely old- fashioned. The Heidegger - Arendt affair is immoral from the beginning because it is an adulterous relationship.
Secondly, Herr Philosopher did use his power and position to enchant the very enchantable fledgling philosopheress.
Thirdly, however morally distasteful the relationship before the War its renewal afterwards represents a tremendous moral failing on Arendt's part.
Fourthly, Arendt showed in ' Eichmann in Jerusalem' a kind of contempt for her own Jewishness. Her willingness to slip over Heidegger's Nazi connection shows a moral failing at the deepest level. Heidegger is no ordinary person, and as person of stature much more , not much less, should have been expected with him. He identified with those who killed one third of Arendt's people.
Fifthly, Jaspers Arendt's other great mentor and friend was a truly noble person. He set an example in regard to Heidegger which Arendt unfortunately was unable to follow.
Sixthly, Arendt in this relationship from the beginning was the subordinate, the secondary, and in some way the ' slave'. The Jew subordinated to the superior Aryan Heidegger. She never overcame this, and this represents a tremendous moral stain. She was a great thinker and in some of her life actions a noble person but in this relationship she failed the moral test. Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer. For that reason I believe he deserves his own special place in a very low circle underground.

Arendt / Heidgger
The story of Arendt and Heidigger's love affair is an interesting one, and this book is interesting because it tells that story, but for no other reason. The author seems to have chosen this subject becuase she had access to the material in the archive, and not because she had anything to say about the subject. It left me feeling that, aside from a a few gossipy details, I knew no more about either person than before. Not only do Arendt and Heidigger remain elusive, Ettinger does not even seem to want to go after them! Their relationship is primerily of interest becuase of what they thought and wrote: Ettinger presents the few enough facts about their relationship in a readable style, but has no grasp of the thought of either one.

I find it impossible to agree with reviewer quoted on the back of the jacket, that this is "a most valuble book, an important record". It isn't: it's an evening's light reading. I can imagine a biographer of either figure (or a playwright or novelist, for that matter), immersed and *interested* in their work, who will really show us why their relartionship was important. (And why was a book that must of necessity include German names and words set in a typeface without umlauts? Bizarre!)

a day in the lives of...
Just to be fair: The book is not exhaustive but nor is it "tabloid" as one reviewer put it. And it is certainly not "soft porn". There is nothing "lurid" in these pages. The writing is, as the more fair-minded reviewer suggested, restrained in a respectful way, to all parties concerned.
This brief account does not set out to describe the impact the affair had on the two individuals' respective work. For anyone to demand such an account seems to me totally unreasonable: That a private passion of the heart always impacts one's intellectual work is by no means a given.
What this book shows you, regardless of the subjective tinge the author may have imposed on the characters in question, is the mystery of the workings of the heart. Ettinger sketches a portrait of a woman in love but not just any woman, but a woman of exceptional intelligence, expansive soul, and loyalty -- to her own ideals of friendship. Cloying speculations concerning the psychological causes -- childhood traumas, etc -- that may have led these two individuals to live and love the way they did are left out and the book is the more elegant and tactful for it.
To call Arendt a naif for the way she allowed herself to be "abused over and over again" would be to admit to total lack of understanding of the very nature of love. Arendt shows over and over her desire, need, psychosis -- choose your favorite term -- to forgive a man who in many ways was unforgiveable. Love does that.
In this double portrait of two people who happened to be academic thinkers, some 50 years is rendered as if it were a day. Heidegger comes off here as a man not above the sort of pettiness and calculation you and I lapse into occasionally, while Arendt is portrayed, without forcing any evidence to this purpose, as the kind of woman who could leave behind a legacy of not only of thinking but also of loving in the grand style. Great and important as Heidegger may be in the history of western philosophy, he may, alas, very well have been one of those gnomish professors we've all come across in our lives: brilliant and thus all the more annoying when they put their intelligence and intellect in the service of self-serving calculation. This book, written in clear prose and balance, confirms the disturbing (and disappointing) fact character and thought are not always equally winged.
Forget the names of the characters involved. Read it as a document of a love that would have made a great B&W movie as well, with the late Ingrid Bergman as Arendt, and Mickey Rooney as Heidegger.

I couldn't possibly be right about this.
The German tradition in philosophy has been so notoriously wrong about the nature of women so often that it is only fair that I, who usually appears as nobody in the world of philosophy as often as I am wrongly genedered in any attempt to belong to the world of women, have to read this book occasionally to remind myself how unfair this whole question must be in any context.That philosophy, as a love of wisdom, might be compared to a love of women, as the kind of passion that Mozart might attempt to display in operatic splendor in "Don Giovanni" (I think this is the most reasonable opera that I have ever heard) faces grave danger in a book in which the man who has embraced most totally the greatness of philosophy (who but Heidegger might want this distinction?), is slammed for having an unreasonable love life.For all I know, this might have been the story of a philosopher who might as well have thought that all was fair in love and war, but it is really the story of the woman.The perfection in this book, for me, was the idea that Heidegger might have been offended when Arendt triumphantly returned to Germany as the author of a book on totalitarianism in which the style of the Nazi regime, which Heidegger supported in certain official capacities, was treated like communism under Stalin, the kind of enemy of freedom that modern people ought to be able to understand in a negative light much better than anything positive that I could say at this point.I doubt if I would have had much interest in Hannah Arendt, if not for this book.It made me wish that I could be that smart. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A good small introduction to a major political thinker
Hannah Arendt was one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. Most notably her ' Origins of Totalitarianism' analyzed in depth the connections between the two great collective nightmares of the twentieth century , Nazism and Stalinism.
Arendt's unique thought however touched on the very fundaments of political life and discourse. And in her great work, ' The Human Condition' she presents an anthropology of her own, in which active man, fabricating world- building man, and contemplative man are placed in terms of historical development, and overall philosophical meaning.
This small work touches on some of the major themes of Arendt, including what is in my opinion, the great moral error of her life, the arrogance towards the victims she displayed in writing,'Eichmann in Jerusalem.'
It is a good small introduction. But Arendt is a writer of such power and depth that the reader would make a mistake not to sample her own works directly. ... Read more