"Let each man say what he deems truth,
and let truth itself be commended unto God!"
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Written over the course of twelve years, Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times is a collection of essays and articles exploring a few influential persons and "how they lived their lives, how they moved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time". I will play with each person profiled by Arendt over the course of the coming weeks because it involves what I consider to be "fun".
The "dark times" she describes can be traced to the Cold War period, the rise of the New Left, and the swing towards existentialism in European leftist circles. In Arendt's dark times, the word and the image, seductively packaged by propaganda and rhetoric, engender a crisis of meaning at social, cultural, and individual levels-- "the public realm has been obscured and the world becomes so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of politics than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty."
In her address on accepting the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg, Arendt delves into the life and character of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a Enlightened German writer, art critic, dramatist, and philosopher. She begins with the moral obligations imposed by honor:
In awards, the world speaks out..... But the honor not only reminds us emphatically of the gratitude we owe the world; it also, to a very high degree, obligates us to it. Since we cannot always reject the honor, by accepting it we are not only strengthened in our position within the world but are accepting a kind of commitment to it.
This commitment brought Arendt back to the public sphere many times when she would have preferred to forsake its ugliness and spite altogether. In dark times, however, honor retreats from the public square and takes up residence in the personal, spiritual, and individual.
Arendt observes that Lessings "radically critical" approach to the world and the history in which he participated allowed him to formulate his famous Selbstdenken, "independent thinking for oneself". This "self-thinking" was not a search for final results or absolute truth so much as it was an exploration which left him free in the realm of action. Consider the context of 19th century ideologies and their impetus to action. Lessing preferred to keep his options and answers open for revision.
Rather than argue over the "truth" of Christianity, Lessing preferred to focus on the position of Christianity in the world.
Lessing was being remarkably farsighted when he saw that the enlightenment theology of his time "under the pretext of making us rational Christians is making us extremely irrational philosophers." That insight sprang not only from partisanship in favor of reason. Lessing's primary concern in this whole debate was freedom, which was far more endangered by those who wanted "to compel faith by proofs" than by those who regarded faith as a gift of divine grace.
Lessing's love for humanity actually kept him from customary liberal attachment to Rousseau. On Rousseau's view, "the human nature common to all men was manifested not in reason, but in compassion, in an innate repugnance to see a fellow human being suffering". While Lessing agreed that "the best person is the most compassionate", he was bothered by what Arendt describes as "the egalitarian character of compassion", or, in his words, the fact that we feel "something akin to compassion" for the evildoer as well as the humane. Arendt shares his skepticism of the whitewashing powers of compassion:
We cannot discuss here the mischief that compassion has introduced into modern revolutions by attempts to improve the lot of the unfortunate rather than to establish justice for all.
She pits Rousseau against the ancients:
Because they so clearly recognized the affective nature of compassion, which can overcome us like fear without our being able to fend it off, the ancients regarded the most compassionate person as no more entitled to be called the best than the most fearful. Both emotions, because they are purely passive, make action impossible. This is the reason Aristotle treated compassion and fear together.
On a different note, one must wonder how her compassion for Heidegger affected her defense of his infantile irresponsibility. Was Arendt's disdain for compassion engendered by events in her personal life? How does the idea of "collective guilt" facilitate or prevent us from understanding a lack of compassion as public policy? How do the stories we tell ourselves about the past become the life we lead in various forms?
Arendt digresses:
In reification by the poet or historian, the narration of history has achieved permanence and persistence. Thus the narrative has been given its place in the world, where it will survive us. There it can live on-- one story among many. There is no meaning to these stories that is entirely separable from them-- and this, too, we know from our own, non-poetic experience. No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.
But this digression brings us back to Lessing's skepticism of final creeds and absolutes-- a skepticism of all-encompassing ideologies which subsume the meaning of individual stories for the purpose of propaganda. As she remarks:
Lessing, however, rejoiced in the very thing that has ever-- or at least since Parmenides and Plato-- distressed philosophers; that the truth, as soon as it is uttered, is immediately transformed into one opinion among many, is contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others.
She has revealed Lessing as a precursory pluralist, a progenitor of modern liberalism. And now she must bring down the house with a profound determination of how fleshing out the truth is complicated by modernity. Hannah at her best:
Nowadays, moreover, it is rare to meet people who believe they posses the truth; instead, we are constantly confronted by those who are sure that they are right. The distinction is plain; the question of truth was in Lessing's time still a question of philosophy and of religion, whereas our problem of being right arises within the framework of science and it always decided by a mode of thought oriented toward science.....
In spite of the difference between the notions of possessing the truth and being right, these two points of view have one thing in common: those who take one or the other are generally not prepared to sacrifice their view to humanity or friendship in case a conflict should arise. They actually believe that to do so would be to violate a higher duty, the duty of "objectivity"; so that even if they occasionally make such a sacrifice they do not feel they are acting out of conscience but are even ashamed of their humanity and often feel guilty about it.
To follow these small cabooses of thought down divergent tracks:
- "Enlightenment Against Fundamentalism: The Example of Lessing" by Agnes Heller
- "Introduction to the Arendt-Kazin Correspondence" by Helgard Mahrdt in PDF format
- "The Education of the Human Race" by Gotthold Lessing in 1778
- Minna von Barnhelm, a play by Gotthold Lessing
- Nathan der Weise, a dramatic poem by Lessing
- "Laoccoon: An essay on the limits of painting and poetry" by Lessing
- Lessing's Theological Writings: Selections in Translation by Lessing
- Lessing bio and biblio
- Lessing's theatre career