Hannah Arendt vs Grete Hermann

 Hannah Arendt was five years younger than Grete Hermann. But Hannah studied philosophy under Heidegger- a stupid, spoiled Catholic, shithead- whereas Grete studied mathematics under Emmy Noether & Edmund Landau. In 1935 she showed the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem. Hermann was also a student of Leonard Nelson and made a good neo-Kantian fist at accommodating Quantum Theory's new perspective on Causality. Hermann returned to Germany after Hitler's fall and contributed to the Bad Godesberg program which enabled the Socialists to take power in the Sixties. Hannah's Aunt went to America where she babbled hysterical, ignorant, nonsense in return for a little money.

Writing for Aeon, Samantha Rose Hill takes a different view. She believes that 'In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves'

This is nonsense. Hannah's true self was that of a charlatan who had studied garbage and who was pretending to be smart so as to earn some nice dollars. Grete had studied worthwhile, high IQ, stuff. She didn't get much international recognition till late in her life when savants pointed out the manner in which her work anticipated that of Bell. Grete's politics were consistently Socialist and though her resistance to Hitler was unavailing, her own hard work helped post-War Germany to rise. Hers was an authentic life because she genuinely was smart and had grappled with high IQ problems. Hannah played the Holocaust card when the fact that she'd fucked Heidegger wasn't enough. Still, she helped spread anti-Semitic canards and thus was more authentically Teutonic than Grete. 

Was Hannah always stupid? Could she have been a student of Emmy Noether? The answer is that Hannah had some literary talent but was as stupid as shit.

This is a poem she wrote when she was about 20. 

When I consider my hand
– A foreign thing related to me –
I stand in no country,
I am neither here nor there
I am not certain of anything.

For a German philosophy student, looking at one's hand reminds one of Kant's argument against Leibnizian relationism, in favor of Newtonian absolute Space and Time, based on the fact that hands are 'incongruent counterparts'. In other words, Hannah's hand, subjected to analysis situs, projects her into some Kantian transcendental realm.  But, this has the effect of deracinating her. She is no longer German. She needs someone to guide her via Fichte and Hamann, maybe Schopenhauer and Nietzsche etc. into something more Volkisch- if not Catholic coz maybe Catlicks had joined the Jews in stabbing the Army in the back. 

Samantha takes a more charitable view- 

The poem, titled ‘Lost in Myself’, reflects upon a feeling of self-alienation.

Back then, girls only went to Collidge so as to get alienated from their natural instinct to have babies and cook strudel.  

It is that feeling of self-alienation when one is unsure of anything, let alone themselves.

Nope. Hannah had just done a year of philosophy. She was referencing Kant's 'incongruent counterparts' argument which had a new salience because a cunning Jew, Einstein, was seeking to subvert Space, Time and the German duty to be as stupid as shit. What Kant wrote was -It is apparent from the ordinary example of the two hands that the shape of the one body may be perfectly similar to the shape of the other, and the magnitudes of their extensions may be exactly equal, and yet there may remain an inner difference between the two, this difference consisting in the fact, namely, that the surface which encloses the one cannot possibly enclose the other. Since the surface which limits the physical space of the one body cannot serve as a boundary to limit the other, no matter how that surface be twisted and turned, it follows that the difference must be one which rests on an inner ground. This inner ground cannot, however, depend on the difference of the manner in which the parts of the body are combined with each other. For as we have seen from our example, everything may in this respect be exactly the same. Nonetheless, imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That [hand] would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause in producing the counterpart.

By the time she was 14, she had read the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant,

which is why she thought her hand was 'foreign' to her because it revealed that things have 'orientation' in addition to any relational qualities or characteristics that we might observe. 

the writings of her future professor Karl Jaspers on the Psychology of Worldviews,

Kant is high IQ. Jaspers- not so much. 

and taught herself Greek and Latin

which is why she was a bit crap at both. But then so was Heidi.

What does it mean to discover one’s true, authentic self?

It is to find out your true nature or inclinations or capacity. Back in the Sixties, I was a member of Her Majesty's Secret Service with a license to kill. Also, I was married to Mary Poppins. Women to whom I mentioned this tended to be sympathetic. My wife, however, punched me quite hard any time I raised the subject. The consensus amongst the fair sex seems to be that I am a sad, fat, loser. Still, I am quite authentically useless for doing anything useful around the house or for getting a well paid job and so allowances should be made.  

To act from a place of authenticity?

Actions which are as good or useful as the actor suggests are authentic. What Heidi and Hannah were engaging in was fraud.  

Is there a truer self within the self that can be uncovered? What are we really talking about when we talk about authenticity?

Something which aint spurious, meretricious, fraudulent or pretentious. 

Authenticity emerged as a philosophical concept

a decade or two after people had begun to suspect that philosophy was fraudulent. Einstein had taken down Bergson's pants. Heidi could score over Husserl who had initially looked mathsy but clearly was barking up a particularly stupid, non-existent, tree. Since Heidi wasn't mathsy he didn't have to bother with debating smart peeps.  

from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), published in the aftermath of the Great War.

It was published a couple of years after Hindenburg was elected President. Heidi was moving from Catholicism to something more Prussian. Hannah too would have ended up converting if Hitler hadn't come to power and suddenly race trumped religion.  

Heidegger’s work attempted to recover Being from the ordinariness of everyday life in which people exist in the world with others.

This is because the Church didn't accept his vocation. He couldn't even get a Philosophy gig at a Catholic university. Thus he had to pretend to have a super spiritual inner life.  

For him, most of our everyday existence is inauthentic, because being in the world with others turns us away from being with our true selves, our true selves who are unaffected by the world.

Emmy Noether or Grete Hermann had a true self working on mathematical theorems which were indeed unaffected by fads and fashions or popular prejudices or political passions. They weren't pretending to be smart. They actually were smart. 

For Heidegger, there was a difference between what is translated as ‘Being’ (with a capital B) and ‘being’ (with a lower-case b)

So what? The bigger difference was between Heidi and Einstein. The latter could extract something useful from philosophy. The former had a paranoid theory about how philosophy took a wrong turn and the result was that the fucking Jews were busy stabbing all the nice Aryan people in the back.  

This distinction does not indicate a transcendent Being, the way capitalising the ‘g’ in God does, but rather the fact that one is not always merely a being among beings. Or, to put it another way, Being means that there is a truer version of the self, a more authentic version, that can be experienced only when one steps out of the flow of everyday life, what Heidegger called ‘everydayness’. And when we experience this Being, we do not just experience our common lives, we experience everything that being human means – including our own inevitable death, that part of ourselves – our nonexistence – that otherwise remains hidden from our consciousness.

Which is cool iff we gain super-powers. Otherwise it is still mundane. Nobody cares if a sad, fat, loser like me thinks he is Secret agent or whether he coincides with his own being as sad, fat, loser without even a satisfactory fantasy life. 

On the other hand, suppose I knew everything important about myself. Then, in a sense, I would have super powers because I could use my body with maximum efficiency. This is like the notion of an eigenform in second order cybernetics. The sky might well be the limit of a reflective system which can constantly keep improving itself recursively. 

The German word he uses for authenticity is Eigentlichkeit,

i.e. that which characterizes a thing. This is like the eigenvector or eigenform in math or cybernetics. 

which is defined as ‘really’ or ‘truly’. Eigen means ‘peculiar’, and ‘own’ or ‘of one’s own’. Literally, it might be translated as possessing the quality of being truly for oneself. Or, colloquially, today we might say something like ‘being true to oneself’.

If I knew my own capabilities and had achieved perfect control over my body, I might be able to Kung Fu you to death while making a moving speech and also farting melodiously 

In those moments of exception, when one fully experiences the truth of themselves, they are apart from the herd, alone in their Being.

Why? You can be part of a herd and play a leadership role, leading it, and yourself, to safety.  

And in this way, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is a very lonely concept. It is to allow oneself to experience for a moment the terrifying aloneness of nonexistence – one’s death – while still alive.

So, this is mystical shite rather than the gaining of a super-power. Why bother learning Kung Fu if all you get is 'satori' rather than the ability to fly through the air kicking the heads off evil Ninja assassins? Worse yet, it is one thing to pretend you experience mystical raptures in your garden shed and another thing entirely to have to give lectures and supervise PhD dissertations in stupid shite. 

In France, philosophy was taught at high school. A number of teachers of that shite dreamed of a better life as writers or journalists. A few- Sartre, Camus but even Beauvoir- were able to quit teaching by getting paid to write pompous or hysterical shite. Later, there was the option to become a pop-star and later yet, to get rich as a stand up comedian. 

In the midst of the Second World War,

which became inevitable once France permitted the remilitarization of the Rhineland 

French existentialism emerged out of German existentialism.

France had great mathematicians. Stupid people went in for a literary type of psilosophy.  

If authenticity was a question of being for Heidegger and a question of freedom for Jaspers,

but this would involve a 'leap of faith'. The problem is that people doing useful stuff don't have to jump at anything.  

for Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus it became a question of individual ethics.

What stupid shite I write can get me some money and a blessed release from having to teach shite?  

The underlying question shifted from ‘What is the meaning of Being?’ to ‘How should I be?’ The credo underpinning Sartre’s work – ‘existence precedes essence’ – meant that we are thrown into the world without any fixed substance, and this meant that we get to choose who we become.

Should we pretend to be Commies? That might be fun.  

While philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau tried to capture human nature by imagining what life was like before society, for Sartre, there is no human nature.

His people had no character. This was because after the re-militarization of the Rhineland, France had no offensive doctrine which meant its East European allies could place no reliance on them. But, once Mussolini went over to the dark side, this meant that the French could not rely even on themselves. I suppose a life without honor is but bare existence. But to maintain honor requires doing sensible things and telling philosophers to fuck the fuck off.  

We must always be imagining and reimagining who we are,

if we have shit for brains- sure.  

which is to say we are always in the process of becoming. For Beauvoir, becoming was a creative enterprise, a work of art.

Then she died and her oeuvre was preserved by the brain dead for the brain dead.