On Literature
“The Romance of the Self: Marilynne Robinson’s Existential Humanism.”
in A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (University of Kentucky Press, 2016)
In articulating her vision of humanism, Robinson also emphasizes the distinctly aesthetic dimension of humanism, the way in which such a sensibility is grounded in an appreciation of the arts of civilization––an appreciation which is gradually being superseded by a sense of the humanities as either useless or elitist. She writes in the introduction to The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thoughtthat “what used to be meant by ‘humanism,’ that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with the human spirit, has ended. It is the imagining of a human self—a thinking, reflecting, and transcendent person—that Robinson’s humanism works to preserve.
In this essay, we argue that Robinson’s writing manifests a humanist alternative to the new humanism of the New Atheists. In both her fiction and her nonfiction, Robinson opposes the scientific reduction of humanism to a destructive and dogmatic philosophy. She worries that scientific humanism confines human beings to a narrow reality, one that can be exhaustively described and explained.
in Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2014)
Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian writer best known for his philosophical novels Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). With his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Dostoevsky was one of the first excavators of nihilism. His work explores how utilitarian and rationalist thinking deprived humanity of spiritual enlightenment, an ultimate reason for existence that could justify the fact of human suffering.
in The Good Society (2014)
Bettina Stangneth's “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer,” offers an exhaustive history of the life of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth concludes that as brilliant as Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial is, Arendt herself was mistaken in her characterization of Eichmann as banal: “one of the most significant insights to be gained from studying Adolf Eichmann is reflected in Arendt: even someone of average intelligence can induce a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon: her desire to see her expectations fulfilled.” In other words, Arendt expected Eichmann to be thoughtless; in concluding that he was banal, she was fooled by him. This paper argues that we need first to ask what it is Arendt means by thinking, something Stangneth doesn't do. When Arendt says he was thoughtless, she means that Eichmann could not and did not think from the perspectives of others. Locked in the logical coherence of his own simplified view of the world, Eichmann held fast to the truths that gave meaning to his fantastic version of the world. In short, Eichmann was a dedicated Nazi. He sought and worked for a Nazi victory, and was willing to do anything and everything within his power to contribute to the cause. He did not think hard or at all about that cause; Arendt wonders if he really understood it. But Arendt understands that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness names his willingness to do anything for a cause.
Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch
(Fordham University Press, 2017)
Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s “Denktagebuch” offers a path through Hannah Arendt’s recently published Denktagebuch, or “Book of Thoughts.” In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt’s published writing and broader political thinking.
Unique in its form, the Denktagebuch offers brilliant insights into Arendt’s practice of thinking and writing. Artifacts of Thinking provides an introduction to the Denktagebuch as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt’s understanding of “the life of the mind” but her true lived experience of it.
Approaching Infinity: Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon
in Philosophy and Literature (2009)
Human dignity underlies human rights and is a pillar of liberal politics. Yet what is dignity? And what is the place of dignity in politics? Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a searing inquiry into the conflict between dignity and reason as opposing grounds of politics. Koestler shows how a rationalist politics corrodes dignity. In response, he imagines dignity as a countermeasure to reason. Political action, he suggests, must be informed by a non-rational and non-religious appeal to the infinite that is the one guarantee of a human politics. There is no justice, Koestler argues, divorced from infinite justice.
The Accusers: Law, Justice, and the Image of Prosecutors in Hollywood
in Griffith Faculty Law Review v. 13, #2 (2005)
This essay begins with the observation that the American culture industry is nearly incapable of presenting state prosecutors in a positive light. Through readings of three apparent exceptions to this rule, the essay argues that prosecutors can only be heroically and positively conceived on screen when they abandon their traditional association with law and seek to do justice beyond the laws. To the extent that prosecutors can be seen as a proxy for the image of the ideal of legal justice itself, this essay argues that the imagining of prosecutorial justice in Hollywood shows that law has lost its once-assumed connection with justice.
Parables of Revenge and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River
in Law, Culture, and the Humanities v. 1, #3 (2005) (With Drucilla Cornell). Reprinted in Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity, Drucilla Cornell (Fordham University Press, 2009).
This paper offers a reading of Clint Eastwood's film Mystic River. Mystic River differs from archetypal Hollywood revenge movies in one important way: the act of revenge kills the wrong man. Moreover, instead of abandoning its wayward avenger, the movie strives to defend or at least to understand the act of wrongful vengeance as the loving act of a kingly father. To explore the connection between trauma, masculinity, and revenge, the paper follows the stories of the film's three male protagonists. Dave is defeated by his boyhood trauma and never recovers. Jimmy, the film's avenger, forcefully resists the dehumanizing power of the loss of his daughter by taking revenge. Sean neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean –when confronted by his wife's silent departure and with the fact of Jimmy's vengeance –responds by admitting his vulnerability. An upright man struggling to balance his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, Sean's willingness to accept his human finitude is set against Jimmy's rebellious insistence on his superhuman justice based on the prerogative of vengeance.
Melville's War Poetry and the Human Form
in A Political Companion to Herman Melville (2013)
Crossing the Warrior Path (Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon)
in Rechtshistorisches Journal, Volume 16 (1998)
“‘It goes back,’” Thomas Pynchon invites us to imagine, “‘ to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the waters which were above the Frimament,’ -- thus the first boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.’”
In the beginning was sub-division, which is to say: In the beginning was the lawsuit. And how different is that from the Word? Are not theology and jurisprudence sister sciences, dedicated to the proper -- or must we today say authoritative? -- interpretation of manifested truths -- or must we say desires? If theology endeavors to rightly discipline the expression of desire, the functional essence of the lawsuit is instead the authoritative resolution of conflicting desires. The traditional bridge between theology and jurisprudence consists, of course, in the latter’s purported subsumption to the former.