Valéry and distance: the absence of Weil and Noether in Arendt

Given the curious role of Antigone in Heidegger, I thought a note on Valéry was in order.

Arendt in Chapter VI of The human Condition makes a great deal of distance and size.  Like Arendt in Heidegger and Heidegger in Arendt, Antigone in Heidegger is notable for her absence.

In Valéry's "On Speaking Verse" you will find a remark on distance and theatre.

At what point does a huan figure appear insignificant?  Imagine a small boat on a river with the boatman poling along.  Imagine the boat seen arriving at a small pier in the morning - and later that afternoon you look down on the river from a great height at such a distance that you even wonder - could that be the boat on its way yet again?  You take out your spyglass.

If you view a man beating a donkey from a distance, is it less vile and wrong than if you are there within reach of his arm?  Fallacious notions that the size of the universe or the age of the planet or the size of the population affect human values have been popular among journalists for some time.

A murder occurs at a country fair.  A murder occurs in the crowded stands of a great stadium.  A murder occurs yesterday.  Or we discover the body of a victim a week later or a year later.  Suppose for a moment  that lack of regard for the value of human life can be seen as a characteristic of the Eastern Front of World War II.  It may have bearing on the need to revise and enforce international law, but it is not clear that mass slaughter affects our pursuit of a single heinous murderer in an otherwise civil setting.  No more than if the murderer be tall or short or the victom slight or heavy.

If we  had learned that the sun was twice as large and that we are four-times as far away - or if the earth were twice as large or twice as old - would any recent single act of deliberate murder be the less or the more wrong?

What Arendt may not have understood was that although we do not add Kilograms to Meters we can multiply Kilograms by Meters.  One way to approach this - if the issue arouse your wonder - is to start with recent Category Theory.  And here again is a connection missing in Arendt: to Emmy Noether.  Structure-preserving functions might have been off-putting to Arendt as she held to Heidegger's opinion of what happened to geometry in a collision with algebra.  Was the 1950's work of René Thom in any way accessible to Arendt? Yes: André Weil, who, like Arendt, was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation (see my page on the Acknowledgements in The Human Condition at aule-browser.com)

For the poverty of Arendt on wrong doing, see Heidegger on Heraclitus and her Gifford Lectures.

note: this copy of The Art of Poetry was loaned to me by Walter Bruce Sinclair in 74 or 75 at a time when he was preoccupied with Wheeler on Gravitation and other matters. Mea culpa.
note: I was in a small room with Thom in 1980: Arthur Fine was in discussion with Abner Shimony, but I do not now recall Thom's remarks.  Weil was no less accessible to Arendt.  I, for one, had the good fortune to sit and chat with 3 affable persons active in Category Theory by the time I was age 30 - and not even in New York or Chicago - and with no great effort on my part.