Faculty Writing: On the Language of American Transcendentalists, and on Arendt’s Critique of Authenticity
In The Point magazine, Jessie Kindig elaborates a theory of language from the writings of the American Transcendentalists. Why would Thoreau commit to writing, she asks, when the Transcendentalist imperative is to experience—would not the urge to publish distract from the sensation of walking in nature, or the pleasures of a wild apple on a November afternoon? For the American Transcendentalists, Kindig observes, “language was what sewed together inner and outer experience, what brought the objects of the world and the objects of the mind into one common cloth.”
Then, writing in Aeon magazine, Samantha Rose Hill explains Hannah Arendt’s critique of the concept of authenticity, as advanced by Arendt’s existentialist mentors: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. One does not possess an essential authentic self, Arendt asserts, contra her mentors, only an inner conflict of the will; one resolves the internal tension between thought and judgement by taking conscious action in the world, and this is what determines their individual character. Arendt accordingly came to “love the world of being with others,” as Hill would have it, when she determined that “loving the world…was a choice, and an act of willing.”