Showing posts with label Heinrich Blücher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heinrich Blücher. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Balderdash or Hyperbole? Canovan's Arendt.

Cambridge U. Press Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought by Margaret Canovan opens with this gem:
Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political thought, at once strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox.
In fairness to Arendt I would like to say that much of her thesis on technique in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, need not be traced to her master and lover, Heidegger - it can be taken from Husserl's Krisis.  But some insist that this Husserl material itself came from Heidegger.  Some of the Husserl passages seem closer to the Arendt text, so I will get them up in Curl markup over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ along with links to browse the Canovan quote in Google Books (she wrote the preface to the posthumous second edition of The Human Condition.)

While I'm trying to be fair: the buffoonery of a Blücher lecture can be traced almost word-for-word to a paragraph in Max Scheler's Man's Place in the Cosmos.  Only Blücher did not see fit to tell his Bard undergrads that he was quoting Scheler - if his bombast can be termed 'quoting'. Call it 'playing the part' of the professor. So I will try to get around to posting that, as well.

Arendt and Blücher considered the Americans to be less than their intellectual equals - caveat emptor as ever. So few pronouncements are new under the sun - or any critical light.