Review of the essay by Bérénice Levet, Thinking about what is happening to us with Hannah Arendt published by Éditions de l'Observatoire in September 2024.
Who better than Bérénice Levet could provide us with an introduction to Hannah Arendt's thought? Since her philosophy thesis on Hannah Arendt's Imaginary Museum twenty-five years ago, she never stopped walking alongside him, letting herself be instructed by the author of The condition of modern man. With her verve and energetic language, where the sentence follows the rhythm of the conversation and never leaves the reader in peace, Bérénice Levet provides us with a thread of Ariadne to orient ourselves in the rich and scattered thought of Hannah Arendt, and it is not her least merit to make us discover lesser-known, even unpublished, texts. But even more, she masterfully demonstrates the relevance of this thought: while writing between the 1930s and 1970s, Hannah Arendt described with prophetic lucidity the great evils that afflict our society. In the last chapter, entitled "Arendtian lights on some of our crises", Bérénice Levet shows the interest of calling on Arendt to shed light on contemporary crises, she who said: "A crisis only becomes catastrophic if we respond to it with ready-made ideas", in other words, if we refuse to think. However, it is the whole work that deserves this title, so many parallels with the contemporary situation emerge on each page.
Indeed, the German philosopher diagnosed all crises: of authority, of school, of culture, but also the offensive against language and against our history. In her eyes, the decline of the West is linked to the decline of three great principles: religion, tradition, and authority, three pillars of Roman civilization that connected the present to the past. Faced with the paradigm of liquid life and the constant injunction to "reinvent" oneself, she recalls the fundamental needs of human beings: stability and sustainability. By becoming modern, we have lost all foundation, all foundation; to be modern is to be in motion, in a universe of permanent acceleration where passage abrogates being—and yet, Arendt knew neither the TGV, nor email, nor 24-hour news channels. Without claiming to exhaust the themes addressed in this book, let us simply highlight the main lines of force of this thought – which Bérénice Levet sums up in two words: freedom and attachment – by attempting to explain the way in which it sheds light on today's world.
La fidelity to reality, ou truthfulness
Arendt has a passion for reality, whether beautiful or ugly, vile or noble. She has these magnificent words: "Thought remains tied to reality like the circle to its center," and sees lived events as the only sure guides. Conversely, the totalitarian phenomenon reveals to her how the denial of reality leads to the worst. With Brecht, she describes as "dark times" those periods when public speech masks reality. Do we not also experience the totalitarianism of words, summoned at every turn to "keep the most striking truths at a distance" (Marcel Aymé, quoted by BL) and "immunize us against the harsh truth" (BL)? From pregnant men to systemic racism, the radical nominalism of current doxa functions well as a screen modestly—and sometimes immodestly—thrown over reality.
Welcoming what is given and accepting limits
This denial of reality has a corollary, the refusal of the given, inherent in the movement of modernity: if the individual of the Renaissance still conceived himself under the gaze of God and natural law, the French Revolution practiced emancipation as a tearing away. In 1789, the new dignity of man consisted in emancipating himself from divine command and from his own history, in a utopia of regeneration of humanity. Fatal consequence: "modern man has ended up resenting everything that is given to him, even his own existence - resenting the fact that he is not his creator nor that of the universe" (codicil to the Origins of totalitarianism written in 1951, which remained unpublished and entitled "By Way of Conclusion"). This resentment towards everything of which man is not the author constitutes the psychological basis of nihilism: natural law or God's law, language, civilizational legacies, moral or social prescriptions. Modern man rebels, declares war on the givens of existence. He trades the task of arranging his earthly stay for that of transforming it, of reinventing it. After Tocqueville, Arendt sees in the Revolution "the coronation of the unbound individual and the absolutization of emancipation." She places us before a decisive alternative: slide down the slope of resentment or reconcile ourselves with the unchosen part of existence. Alas, we know the rest of the story: the transactivist and transhumanist utopias, with the promise of killing death. The vow of earthly immortality is blasphemous "not because it seeks to abolish death, but because it denies birth." In contrast to modern Prometheanism, Arendt finds in Christian thinkers an anthropology of limits: Péguy, Bernanos, Maritain, Chesterton, meditated on in Christianity and Revolution (1945), all these authors found in religion more than the denunciation of capitalist greed: an "acute perception of the inhumanity inherent in all modern attempts - psychological, technical, biological - to change man into a monstrous superman."
Science versus reality
The third issue analyzed by Arendt: the divorce of science and reality, consummated in stages since Galileo, whose telescope established "the little reality of reality." According to the Florentine astrologer, man was mistaken in thinking that the real and the true would reveal themselves to his reason and his senses. From now on, he can only access reality with a microscope, an astronomical telescope—or an Excel spreadsheet. The Galilean revolution marking the entry into the modern world disqualified reality as a gift, an epiphany, to leave only the relationship of exploitation and mastery—as Pierre Hadot shows in Le Voile d'Isis, and Olivier Rey in several of his essays. The true is no longer given, acknowledging the end of philosophical wonder, of thaumazein. Under the influence of science, we doubt truth as "the brilliance of truth" and have dismissed the idea of truth as revelation. For for Arendt, "Truth is revelation," according to the etymology of the Greek word a-letheia – and as Chantal Delsol reminds us, the idea of truth is the daughter of Parmenides as much as of Abraham. By invalidating truth as gift and revelation, science has revealed itself to be the most formidable enemy of religion, much more so than the most rationalist philosophies.
Transmission in danger
Transmission is a central theme in Arendt's thought, which constantly emphasizes the importance of rootedness in time and space. Although she does not use the term "rootedness," Arendt shares Simone Weil's idea: we have attributed all the virtues to liquid life (to use Zygmunt Bauman's term), to disaffiliation and unbinding, and sacrificed all the mechanisms of transmission that allowed the individual to insert himself into the chain of generations. The world becomes inhuman, unfit for human needs. Humans, because they are changeable and ephemeral, need to confront a world of objects and works of art that precedes them and guarantees them that the world will not disappear; they need solid and stable realities: language, laws, customs, landscapes... The agnostic Arendt does not sweep away all transcendence; in place of God, it establishes a reality that precedes him and is called to survive him, first and foremost in works of art, "the non-mortal homeland of mortal beings." "The disappearance of transmission endangers the entire dimension of the past," which deprives us of a fundamental dimension: the depth of human existence. By claiming to establish a new man and a new world, the revolutionaries thought they were performing a supreme act of freedom, because they did not measure the long-term consequences of this ideology. Non-transmission locks us in the prison of the present and makes us "spiritual stateless," "shadows without substance" (Kundera quoted by BL). Because the human child is born into a world that precedes him, he must be educated to take care of the heritage, instead of destroying it. At the heart of the transmission lies the educational question, which the philosopher took up in the 1950s, faced with the emergence of new educational theories 70 years later, her prescience seems striking to note the decline and denial to which it is subjected by political leaders. Education entails an obligation for adult society, that of accompanying newcomers and not throwing them into the world: "Woe to us if we were thrown into the world!" (journal, 1955). In The Education Crisis (1958), Arendt denounces the abandonment of authority by adults, who refuse to take responsibility for the world and wash their hands of the fate of children. "Conservatism, taken in the sense of conservation, is the very essence of education." School gives the product of nature that is the child, riveted to the present, living on the surface of himself, a thickness and a depth. But school is contaminated by the idea that one can only understand and learn what one has done oneself: Arendt anticipates Jean Piaget's pedagogy of "the child as actor of his learning." And this injunction to do it oneself has replaced the transmission of knowledge: "Precisely what should prepare the child for the adult world, the habit acquired little by little of working instead of playing, is suppressed in favor of the autonomy of the child's world." » However, this insistence on transmission does not confine Arendt to the conservative camp; she regrets that conservatism and progressivism have become antinomic and warns us against ready-made thoughts: "Nothing compromises more seriously the understanding and the fruitful debate around political problems than these intellectual reflexes conditioned by the beaten paths of all the ideologies born in the wake and in the aftermath of the Revolution." Arendt allows us in any case to grasp the link between the obsession with presentism and the collapse of the school in the West - and particularly in France.
The crisis of culture
The crisis of culture accompanies that of transmission. When Arendt took up the question of culture in 1960, the threat came from the cultural industry. With incomparable lucidity, she predicted that the insatiable cultural industry, after having manufactured its own products, would seize cultural works to transform them into easily ingestible consumer products – one need only think of the "derivative products" attached to any cultural manifestation. Bérénice Levet highlights the obsession with novelty reflected in the injunction to "reinvent" everything and to season everything to suit the tastes of the day, as if the works of the past were outdated. Museum directors are multiplying temporary exhibitions, installing contemporary art to "converse" with permanent collections, organizing performances by rappers and slam poets, transforming the Louvre's galleries into yoga rooms—not to mention immersive exhibitions, "the final stage of the liquefaction and therefore the liquidation of works" (BL). Hector Obalk offers playful lectures that "desacralize masterpieces," ignoring or profaning the aura of sacredness that surrounds the works. According to Bérénice Levet, we enslave art to the present when its virtue was precisely to remove us from it and free us from ourselves to make us available to realities higher than our own.
The vital importance of memory
To live according to the human is to be weighed down by the weight of the past. Of the three faculties of Saint Augustine, Memory, Intellect, Will, we have lost memory, the most Roman of the three, which connected man to the past. Never again will this faculty regain its status in the philosophical tradition, while losing ground in the concrete lives of men. But with memory is lost "the dimension of the depth of existence." The man who loses memory loses not only the past, but temporality as a whole: he lives only in the present, is only a conatus, a force that moves. Meditating on the lessons of Herder, Arendt contrasts the abstraction of the Enlightenment with the importance of history for men and for peoples. We have gone even further: not content with rejecting the lessons of the past, we constantly summon it to the tribunal of the present, looking at our ancestors with irritated condescension. For Arendt, history is the storybook of mankind, because it reveals to us what men are capable of. And the past remains the critical instance par excellence.
Freedom and responsibility
In the nineteenthe century, History becomes a Great March towards progress that nothing should hinder; and man a passive agent in the realization of Good, according to a vision contrary to any idea of freedom and responsibility. Thus Eichmann can argue that he was only a cog in the system: but he consented to it, replies Arendt, already worried about seeing the social sciences explain all action by social, psychological or other determinism. What future for justice in a society that legitimizes the discourse of the social sciences and opens the door to the courts for them? asks Arendt. No legal procedure can be based on these foundations. Yet our era sees the triumph of "systemic" explanations: what is the "theory of social justice" if not the substitution of patriarchy, racism, sexism and other phobias for individual responsibility?
Moral conscience
Totalitarian experience has shown that neither natural light, nor reason, nor divine command have prevented men from committing absolute evil, under the pretext of obeying the law: when the crime is legal, "Thou shalt kill" becomes a categorical imperative. In the introduction to Thought (1961), Arendt highlights the link between the possibility of evil and the absence of thought, which she had perceived during the Eichmann trial. Eichmann blocked all avenues through which the question of meaning could intrude. He does not lack logic, but the ability to converse with oneself. The Nazi criminal is totally devoid of imagination, a faculty indispensable to moral conscience. The precept of gorgias, "It is better to suffer evil than to commit it" is the starting point of all Arendtian moral reflection. Since you have to live with yourself, she asks, how will you bear living with a murderer? To commit evil is to condemn oneself to this intolerable intimacy with a criminal. Our moral disposition is thus based on our reflective capacity. Conversely, "to ask someone who does not think to behave morally is pure nonsense." Arendt studies the phenomenon of "passive" resistance: the few people in Germany who were free of all guilt never experienced moral conflict, nor doubted that crimes were crimes. They did not say to themselves: I must not do thisMore I can't do that, otherwise I will no longer be able to bear living with myself. In 1953, Arendt read the Trials Montaigne in the original version and, among the quotes she copies, notes the importance of preserving a "back room of our own", a soul that "can keep itself company". She also meditates on the scene of Richard III where the two assassins of the Duke of Clarence, certified scoundrels, are itched by their conscience, feel "a dregs of conscience".
For Arendt, moral conscience is a device that presupposes the ability to dialogue with oneself. It is necessary to abandon the Rousseauist idea of an original goodness perverted by society and reconnect with the anthropology of original sin.
The banality of evil—such a controversial phrase—only reflects the superficiality of the criminal: the latter has no depth, lives on the surface of himself, incapable of the reflexive process that defines moral disposition. This banality does not mean that we are all Eichmanns, as Arendt is sometimes said to say. “Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty when one has done nothing as it is to feel innocent when one is truly guilty.” The idea of collective guilt might seem attractive, but it has only served to exonerate the truly guilty. Arendt already denounces the attitude of certain progressive Americans, quick to beat their breasts: “To say that ‘all whites are guilty’ is not only a dangerous absurdity, but the manifestation of reverse racism” and the best way to stir up hostility between communities. “Guilt is the work of an individual; it is strictly individual.” It refers to an act, not to intentions or potentialities" (Collective Responsibility, 1968, cited p. 178). Let us transpose this lesson to the present situation: how can we not see that the discourses of guilt (colonial, sexist, racist, etc.) only serve to absolve those who hold them of guilt and to spare them any examination of conscience? For these ideologues, the West should not only look its past faults in the face (which is salutary), but also consider itself as eternally guilty and forever unforgivable.
Arendt would have hated these ideologies, first and foremost for their seriousness, their rejection of all humor, as evidenced today by the difficulties of press cartoons. "One has the impression that these people have forgotten what it is to laugh. That things can be funny never crosses their minds." But this laughter is not only a pleasant disposition, but a moral imperative: it is "the only way to reconcile oneself with the world without selling oneself to it."
As we will have understood from Bérénice Levet's excellent presentation, Hannah Arendt's thought is a wealth of resources for considering the causes of our decline and taking a step back from the delusions of our time—particularly woke delusions. She invites us to show ourselves worthy of our heritage and to joyfully accept responsibility for the world, without waiting for it to become perfect before committing ourselves.
