“We converse of 4 basic forces,” a physicist not too long ago mentioned to me, “however I consider there are solely two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the delicate recognition that it’s exactly as a result of free will is so uncomfortably at odds with all the things we all know concerning the nature of the universe that the expertise of freedom — which is totally different from the actual fact of freedom — is key to our humanity; it’s exactly as a result of we had been cast by these neutral forces, these handmaidens of probability, that our selections — which all the time have an ethical valence — give that means to actuality.
Whether or not our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us relies upon largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of company. “The smallest act in probably the most restricted circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, as a result of one deed, and typically one phrase, suffices to alter each constellation.”
Arendt’s rigorously reasoned, boundlessly mobilizing defiance of helplessness and “the cussed humanity of her fierce and sophisticated creativity” come abloom in We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (public library) — Lyndsey Stonebridge’s erudite and passionate celebration of what Arendt modeled for generations and goes on modeling for us: “decided and splendid goodwill, refusing to simply accept the compromised phrases upon which fashionable freedom is obtainable and holding out for one thing new.”
Stonebridge, who has been finding out Arendt for 3 a long time, writes:
Hannah Arendt is a inventive and sophisticated thinker; she writes about energy and terror, battle and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Studying her is rarely simply an mental train, it’s an expertise.
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She liked the human situation for what it was: horrible, lovely, perplexing, superb, and above all, exquisitely valuable. And he or she by no means stopped believing in a politics that could be true to that situation. Her writing has a lot to inform us about how we acquired so far in our historical past, concerning the insanity of recent politics and concerning the terrible, empty thoughtlessness of latest political violence. However she additionally teaches that it’s when the expertise of powerlessness is at its most acute, when historical past appears at its most bleak, that the willpower to suppose like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, issues probably the most.
She too lived in a “post-truth period,” she too watched the fragmentation of actuality in a shared world, and he or she noticed with unusual lucidity that the one path to freedom is the free thoughts. Whether or not she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was all the time educating her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to suppose however the right way to suppose — a credo culminating in her parting present to the world: The Life of the Mind.
In consonance with George Saunders’s lovely case for the courage of uncertainty and his insistence that risk is a matter of attempting to “remain permanently confused,” Stonebridge writes:
Having a free thoughts in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical consolation zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means studying as an alternative to domesticate the artwork of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of actuality, as a result of finally that’s our greatest probability of remaining human.
Having “escaped from the black coronary heart of fascist Europe and its crumbling nation states,” having witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and the rise of totalitarian regimes world wide, Arendt by no means stopped pondering and writing about what it means to be human — an instance of what she thought of the “unanswerable questions” feeding our “capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
Celebrating Arendt as a “conservationist” who “traveled again into the traditions of political and philosophical thought in quest of new inventive pathways to the current,” Stonebridge displays:
Basic questions concerning the human situation will not be irrelevant in dire political occasions; they’re the purpose. How can we expect straight amidst cynicism and lying? What’s there left to like, to cherish, to struggle for? How can we act to finest safe it? What fences and bridges do we have to construct to guard freedom and which partitions do we have to destroy?
In my very own longtime immersion in Arendt’s world, I’ve typically shuddered at how completely her indictment of political oppression applies to the tyranny of consumerist society, though Arendt didn’t overtly tackle that. On this passage from Stonebridge, one might simply exchange “Nazism,” “totalitarianism,” and “the Holocaust” with “late-stage capitalism” and really feel the identical sting of reality:
Nazism was undoubtedly tyrannical, and self-evidently fascist in its gray-black glamour, racist mythology, and disrespect for the rule of legislation. Nevertheless, Arendt argued that fashionable dictatorship had an necessary new function. Its energy reached in every single place: not an individual, an establishment, a thoughts, or a personal dream was left untouched. It squeezed individuals collectively, crushing out areas for thought, spontaneity, creativity — defiance. Totalitarianism was not only a new system of oppression, it appeared to have altered the feel of human expertise itself.
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The ethical obscenity of the Holocaust needed to be acknowledged, placed on trial, grieved, and addressed. Nevertheless it couldn’t be made proper with present strategies and ideologies… You can’t merely will this evil off the face of the earth with just a few good concepts, not to mention with the outdated ones that allowed it to flourish within the first place. It’s a must to begin anew.
This perception that “we’re free to alter the world and to begin one thing new in it” animated Arendt’s life — a freedom she positioned not in what she termed reckless optimism (the divested shadow aspect of Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope as an act of defiance), however in action as the crux of the pursuit of happiness — what Stonebridge so astutely perceives as “the willpower to exist as a totally residing and pondering individual in a world amongst others.” She writes:
Freedom can’t be compelled; it will probably solely be skilled on the planet and alongside others. It’s on this situation that we’re free to alter the world and begin one thing new in it.
Echoing Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” she provides:
Studying to like the world implies that you can’t be pleasantly detached about its future. However there’s a knowledge in realizing that change has come earlier than and, what’s extra, that it’ll carry on coming, typically if you least anticipate it; unplanned, spontaneous, and typically, even simply in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human situation.
Couple We Are Free to Change the World — an outstanding learn in its entirety — with James Baldwin on the paradox of freedom, John O’Donohue on the transcendent terror of new beginnings, and Bertrand Russell on the key to a free mind, then revisit Arendt on how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world, the power of being an outsider, and what forgiveness really means.
