Subject: RE: [arendt] I need help on my thesis
Sent: Thursday, September 7, 2006 10:49 AM
The biggest thing I have is CORRESPONDENCE 1926 - 1969 HANNAH ARENDT
KARL JASPERS. In the index for works by Hannah Arendt, hardly
anything seems directed at the concept of freedom, but where I have
been reading, letter 142, Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, New York, May
13, 1953, she seems to be lashing out at the nature of politics
driving intellectual pursuits into ineffectual directions. The power
to investigate individual beliefs was being used for

"... the disintegration of the governmental machinery and the
presumably quite conscious establishment of a kind of parallel
government, which, though with no legal power, possesses the real
power. And this takes in far more than just the civil service. The
whole entertainment industry and, to a lesser extent, the schools and
colleges and universities have been dragged into it." (p. 210).

On a personal level, she could name names: (The president of Brooklyn
College, known citywide as an idiot with an important big job and as
what people call a "reactionary" here, said to me in a public
discussion that he was born and raised in Iowa and therefore didn't
need to think or read anymore to know what was right. He, along with
Sidney Hook--a comical team--then told me that it was un-American to
quote Plato and that I, just like Tillich, suffered from being
Germanic. Sic!) (pp. 212-213). The army was informing Americans that
prisoners of war returning from Korea who had been "infected" (p. 214)
with Communism would be put in psychiatric clinics. In my own case, I
was sent to a Vet Center after Nam for being infected with a word that
Lenny Bruce had been arrested for saying back in the 1950s or 1960s.
The Rockefeller Foundation and even bigger bucks get blasted:

"The Ford Foundation is in a perpetual panic about how to get rid of
its money, ... Support for individual scholars, even if they belong to
a university, is out of the question, because the foundations could
never use up their money paying out such small sums. So everything
goes into organized research, and the ancillary institutions gobble up
the universities, which is to say, free research. This promotes ...
the incompetents, the ignoramuses, who put a staff of college boys to
work reading books for them. The whole business operates in a vacuum
and produces no results." (p. 214).

"I have heard from a reliable source that McCarthy let the Ford
Foundation know that he would find ways to sabotage sales of Ford cars
if the foundation stuck by its decision to give 15 million for the
study of civil rights." (p. 215).

"What is typical in this situation is that one can very well express
one's `opinion,' but editors will as a rule refuse to publish straight
facts and reports. So everything happens half in the dark." (p. 215).

"May I remind you of a statement of Nietzsche's (from the WILLE ZUR
MACHT)? `The evolution of learning dissolves "what is known" more and
more into an unknown. But it wants to do just the opposite and takes
as its point of departure the instinct to trace the unknown back to
what is known.'" (p. 216).




--- In arendt@yahoogroups.com, Joemar Turingan <christus_hodie@...>
wrote:
>
> Everyone, A blessed day! I'm in dire need of your help, could you
suggest any information, books, publications, comments and suggestions
or any academic resources about, Hannah Arendt's notion/concept of
freedom". Thank you very much! Gladly appreciate your contributions....
>
> joms
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo!
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> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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