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Philosophers’ Love

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Clarissa

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I found a book that explores the depths of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, and I’m dead to the world, my friends, because it’s so interesting.

Arendt is the only female philosopher who is actually a philosopher, meaning, she didn’t write solely about being female. Heidegger was her teacher, and pretty much everybody else’s because his is the most influential 20th-century thought. Byung-Chul Han, for example, is a Heideggerian.

Heidegger initially supported the Nazi party because he thought that Jewish thought was too intellectualizing and globalistic. Then, the Nazis accused his ideas of being too Jewish, intellectualizing, and globalistic. None of this prevented Arendt from resuming their relationship after the war, which is fascinating in and of itself.

My interest in Heidegger began back in Ukraine when I skipped a whole semester of philosophy classes and decided to mollify the professor by explaining, in simple words, the work of some particularly complex philosopher. Nobody is more complicated than Heidegger, and the professor was duly stunned.

17 responses to “Philosophers’ Love”

  1. mitchellporter Avatar
    mitchellporter

    ” Arendt is the only female philosopher who is actually a philosopher “

    Even if I just focus on “Ukrainian women philosophers”, Wikipedia lists eight under this category…?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Wikipedia is an ideological project, so, you know.

      But around here we don’t have to be coy. There’s no female Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger. There isn’t even a female Bauman or Byung-Chul Han.

      Why be one when you can marry one and get access to all the fruits without all the toil?

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      1. mitchellporter Avatar
        mitchellporter

        If you’re looking for imperious figures who started their own school of thought, how about Ayn Rand?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          She’s a writer, and a very original one, if not aesthetically gifted, but that’s philosophy only in the sense that Dale Carnegie, for example, is a philosopher.

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        2. ed Avatar
          ed

          Ayn Rand is not considered a serious philosopher by any means.

          Maybe an influential political writer or social critic, but never a philosopher. There is nothing unique or novel about what she wrote about.

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      2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        “Why be one when you can marry one and get access to all the fruits without all the toil?”

        The problem is feminism is not so much a parasite as a parasitoid, the host, Western civilization, may well not long survive the infection.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          The position I described is as distant from feminism as I am from the Moon.

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          1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            Well, we will have to agree to disagree on that term, and communism as well. By nature and training, I tend to measure actions and consequences, the results, rather than more politically correct terms.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              That’s exactly what the wokes say regarding the definition of men and women.

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              1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
                oldcowboy3

                Really, the last time I paid any attention to the woke they were still unsuccessfully trying to figure out what a woman was ;-D

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  2. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    Are you reading Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger by Elzbieta Ettinger by any chance?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      No, I’m reading the one by Antonia Grunenberg. It looks more nuanced, at least so far.

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  3. mosckerr Avatar
    mosckerr

    Heidegger an early supporter of Hitler.

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  4. mitchellporter Avatar
    mitchellporter

    Pardon me for pursuing this small matter while the fates of nations are being decided. But I find this opinion (Arendt is the only female philosopher) to be an odd one.

    I once spent a year at the University of Arizona, and I spent some time around the philosophy department. I got to know Jenann Ismael (a Canadian), an analytic philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of physics. She was as ambitious and rigorous as you might hope for a philosopher to be.

    Or recently I learned more about the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, a quite well-known student of Wittgenstein who probably also belongs in the analytic tradition.

    I can even insist that Ayn Rand is a philosopher. She didn’t just write novels, she wrote essays describing her system. If we put aside her theories of ethics, aesthetics, and politics, and just focus on metaphysics and epistemology, she has an analysis of the basic structure of consciousness, and its epistemological implications, which I think is superior to the Cartesian cogito.

    Just now I asked myself, can I think of a “continental” philosopher who is a woman, and not Arendt, and not focused on women’s issues. Simone Weil came to mind.

    I could go on. I’ve skipped over at least two female philosophers who have been very important for me.

    Overall, your statement is like if someone said of the chess grandmaster Judit Polgar, not that she is the strongest female chess player of all time, but that she is the only real female chess player. Maybe such a statement would be defensible if a “real chess player” meant someone who had reached into the depths of the game, in some way that only the most elite players do. Are you claiming an analogous status for Arendt, with respect to philosophy?

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  5. mitchellporter Avatar
    mitchellporter

    Made a long comment that didn’t show up, but don’t know if it vanished or just got stuck in the spam filter. I saved a copy, let me know if I should repost it…

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is so weird. I found your comment in Trash and pressed “Restore” because it’s a great comment. But it seems to have disappeared completely. Please try to repost.

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      1. mitchellporter Avatar
        mitchellporter

        I was ready to repost, but I see it’s there now!

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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