Sometimes, what you remember best, is that what keeps posing
a challenge to your habitual understanding. It can be a scene from real life, a
picture, or a passage from a book. Something you would not have told or shared
or jotted down, because it never really managed to settle down in precise syntactical
thought. But silently it keeps haunting you – an unfinished business of
understanding, always popping up again whenever another situation, another sentence
seems to evoke the initial perplexity.
So these days, while I’m mutely watching the pitiful
spectacle of politics (local, European,
world) – while all I want is to withdraw in contemplation and art, the nagging sentence that keeps popping up,
kindling again and again my wonderment, is “The
Promise of Politics”.
Having lived through the darkest times of the 20th century,
Hannah Arendt did not withdraw from the world, did not settle in a
philosophical misanthropy, but relentlessly analysed the human condition, the origins
of totalitarianism, and, amongst others, wrote an introduction to politics “The
Promise of Politics”.
I keep reading the book, savouring her philosophical-poetical
reflections and I keep marking those sentences which are most philosophical
& contemplative, and, in my mind, maybe most at variance with a faith in human
politics.
“All thinking activity
that is not simply the calculation of means to obtain an intended or willed
end, but is concerned with meaning in the most general sense, came to play the role
of ‘afterthought’, that is after action had decided and determined reality.”
a passage which, in my mind, turns into a lament for the loss of reflective
thinking (what remains is either calculating thinking or mere opinion).
Or take the following beautiful passage, on the dignity of
our words even when we perish. How to circumvent my reflective interpretation of
this passage as a wistful consolation for the vanquished, how to see in it a recipe for
successful politics via a thoughtful balance between action and speech?
“Man cannot defend
himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he
can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes
nothing, neither turning ill fortune aside nor prompting good fortune, such
words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event,
if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer and requite “great blows struck from on high”,
then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame.
Speech in this sense is a form of action, and
our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish.
Greek tragedy – its drama, its enacted events – is based on this fundamental
conviction.”
On the back cover of my copy of “The Promise of Politics” Adam
Kirsch writes “By insisting that politics
remain a promise rather than a threat, Arendt offers a hope that history has
yet to justify”
