Walter Benjamin's Rules for Writing

'Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity.'

— Hannah Arendt, 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism

'Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.'

— Hannah Arendt

'If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.'

― George Orwell

“Lies by their very nature have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.”

— Hannah Arendt, 1974

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century, taught in 1965

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for a seminar on Hegel, taught in 1967

Kant: Totality takes three forms
Hegel: Only the whole is true
Adorno: Totality is untruth
Wittgenstein: The world is the totality of facts not things
Levinas: A particular being can take itself to be a totality only if it's thoughtless
Lukacs: It's one's relationship to totality

Walter Benjamin in the sun

A small pleasure I get teaching Brooklyn Institute is writing subject lines, such as:

Welcome to Dreams
Welcome to Boredom
Welcome to Silence
Welcome to Convalescence
Welcome to Loneliness
Welcome to the Life of the Mind
Welcome to the Human Condition
Welcome to the Problem of Evil

Hannah Arendt mapping Hegel’s dialectic

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for Basic Moral Propositions, taught in 1966

The beautiful Korean translation, which I’ve still never held!

'Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.'

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for 'Thinking,' taught in 1974

My first glimpse of the beautiful Chinese translation of Hannah Arendt!

Hannah Arendt mapping out Kant's Critique of Judgment

Hannah Arendt's final exam for Introduction Into Politics taught at the University of Chicago in 1963

Finished reading Samantha Rose Hill ‘s brilliant biography of Hannah Arendt, a thinker whose work has inspired so much of what I attempt in my life.

Hannah Arendt's final exam for a course she taught on Kant's Political Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1964