Being human among humans
Reviewed by Shelley Walia

Hannah Arendt’s Political Humanism
by Horst Mewes. Peter Lang, New York. Pages 226. $58.95.

You look at a person and he appears to be human, polite and peace-loving. Who knows underneath his amicability lies a despicable monster! Hitler is a vivid example of a family man who cuddled infants and listened to Bach and still was responsible for annihilating the very identity of the Jews he sent to the gas chambers. Nevertheless, the nature of evil is comprehensible, and if it was not, the world would not be a very congenial place to live in. We are therefore not inherently flawed as human beings and we could save ourselves if we worked on it.

Within the ambit of one’s duty lies the question of behaviour according to the demands of the job in hand even if it means death for some. This, according to the German American theorist Hannah Arendt, is the central paradox of any discussion on the philosophical issue of ethics and duty. Seen in terms of the sense of duty, the crime begins to take on another shade of the responsibility of action.

If we were to examine the notion of public performance, Arendt has said it all in her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem. All his life, Eichmann, the main organiser of the deportation of Jews to the ghettos and the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, had always shown an acute sense of law and morality that dominated his every action. But when it came to organising the deportation, he single-mindedly saw to it that the job in hand reached its conclusion. To him, what mattered was the work assigned to him, not the nature of the work, even if it amounted to genocide. This, according to Arendt, is the "banality of evil".

In a deeply regimented totalitarian state, individualism amounts to inconsequential actions. What if one does revolt? One’s removal will not mean the arrival of another rebel. It would end in a more controlled autonomy under a harsher bureaucratic system that co-opts more pliable recruits to the system. And in such a system one confronts two kinds of people, the intellectuals who have the conviction and the mind to rebel, and the others who consider themselves as "normal" and value conformism and obedience to the rules of the state. On the human level, the choices we make determine our destiny and define our ideological stance. Rules are too conventional and narrow in scope to cover the paradoxes and ironies of our existence. This is one way of looking at Eichmann and the pressures of bureaucracy people live under, always legitimising the actions of the state.

As argued rigorously by Horst Mewes in his recent book Hannah Arendt’s Political Humanism, Arendt’s philosophy stresses the defence of human dignity in the face of totalitarian evil. In each one of us, she argues, there is the urge towards public self-promotion, but our freedom really lies in our "inability to disclose who we are". This is paradoxically a trait that dictates a certain invisibility for the purpose of gaining power. In other words, it is a negative trait that has a complexion of ineffability that compels us from fully revealing our true self.

From her most important writings, particularly The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution and Between Past and Present, it can be surmised that Arendt’s desire throughout had been to urge politics towards humanism in the context of totalitarianism in the last century. You cannot possibly annihilate an individual’s identity and constitute it according to an overwhelming programme of ideological engineering that only manufactures subservient social beings. Stress on active political freedom within a free public life gave to her work a sense of democratic liberalism that had unfortunately been overrun by an antiparliamentarian predatory politics.

This opinion of her work, Horst says, is supported by scholars who disagree with the view that her report on Eichmann’s crime gave the impression that she was supporting the Nazi programme. Diametrically opposed views have brought in heated polemics, especially when her insistence on activism and anti-utilitarian politics is used to club her with "20th century European pre-fascist thought." It is clear that she did reject all norms of the market society which has been interpreted as a return to aristocratic republican elitism.

What really needs to be understood is Arendt’s "disturbingly unorthodox" stance, a kind of deep-seated opposition to "all regimes of the normal", as maintained by Mark Reinhardt in his book The Art of being Free. It is this enigma about her writings and their enticing quality that make Arendt one of the most influential thinker of the 20th century.

Whatever the polemics, it is clear that her "paramount purpose is to clarify and defend political action in its essential freedom, and to reassert politics’ meaning in terms of its essential greatness and dignity’. Politics is indeed a public activity and the greatness of political action lies in being "human among humans". In this lies the dignity of any political action where individual excellence without the element of self-aggrandisement becomes the sine qua non of clean politics. However, the element of competitiveness which is inherent in human nature often nullifies the altruistic basis of selfless politics.

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