Modernity, civilisation, culture and "the war to end all wars"

or we begin and end in the mess

John Rundell

pp. 235-250

in: Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs, Jack Reynolds (eds), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

We are always in the circle of the present and everything depends on where we are in it, and if we wish to move around, or even impossibly, exit from it. In terms of our topic, we are in a history of bad mistakes and misjudgements. But we can make the past speak, ask questions of it that are self-consciously raised by the present. In this sense the past is turned into an interlocutor rather than either an object that can be dissected or re-assembled in the scientific manner of a forensic anthropologist or a corpse that can be picked over by crows. (Rundell 2014: 235.) These mistakes and misjudgements involve the problem of "leaping in' prematurely where there may be nowhere to leap to, of holding back too long where and when it was more prudent to act than not to. These are the questions of and for our present, as it was for the present of World War I. But questions always require creativity, interpretation and thinking in Arendt's use of the term. They require circumspection (Arendt 1978: 166–193).

Cited authors

Arendt Hannah