Hannah Arendt
Ed.Mimesis, 2023
pp. 293
But in the Dark Times – translated into Italian with Humanity in dark times – was published way back in 1968; it is a text that has had numerous Italian translations by various publishers, translators and curators. In our case the work, published by the Mimesis publishing house in Milan, is translated and introduced by Beatrice Magni and is presented as a collection of essays on writers and philosophers (among them: Erich Lessing, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch and Isak Dinesen, that is the Danish baroness Karen Christentze Dinesen, known by the pseudonym of Karen blixen).
In a period like this that we have been experiencing for some years now, and that seems to expand beyond the current year, 2024, this collection of essays on human existence and the darkness that can permeate it seems particularly timely.
From conflict to conflict, from war to war, we can recall a quote from an essay by M. Kesting that the author proposes in her commentary on Bertolt Brecht: “Great Carthage fought two wars: it was even stronger after the first, still habitable after the second. After the third it could not even be found anymore” (p.251).
Hannah Arendt is certainly very well known for her wide and profound reflections on power, on totalitarian regimes, on the thousand faces of politics and its mechanisms, themes that have been addressed from a philosophical point of view and that have a profound impact on many concrete aspects of the human condition and life: it is enough to remember the analysis of the fragility and complexity of the person, be it oppressor or oppressed, in the face of the destructiveness and barbarity that are unleashed in the worst times, in dark times, in communities. After all, the concept of banality of evil has become a beacon that illuminates every situation in which the dimension of humanity and human dignity seem to completely vanish (the text by Hannah Arendt, from which the expression the banality of evil, is from 1963: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil).
In contrast, or in association, with the critical remarks of the contemporary era, the author exalts the possibility of the human being to actively participate in the associated life of his own community: that participation policy which offers citizens the opportunity to make their voices heard but which, too often, can be limited and blocked by the mechanisms of central power management, by the meanders of bureaucracies and by the precariousness of democracies, always threatened by totalitarianism or by those less evident forms of progressive restriction of democratic freedoms which today appear so widespread in the world.
These notes are also particularly timely at a time when conflicts between nations are played out on the terrain of hybrid wars which have within them the psychological warfare (or cognitive warfare) also fought on the multifaceted tables of misinformation.
Here, then, emerges the criticism of modernity – “what matters is that in society everyone must answer the question of what he is – as opposed to the question of who he is – what his role and function are” (p. 177) and, together, the analysis of the limits that living together imposes on reciprocal freedoms which, however, in turn can be blocked (or at least threatened) by contextual situations which end up silencing them or limiting their explicit expression.
In times and situations where the complexity of the world increases and the individual's ability to decipher reality decreases, it is at search for meaning and significance that we should address, recovering, I would say, the fundamental bases of living and life, considering that we are all in/on this world and that… we have no others.
The central question that the author asked herself starting from the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the final solution, returns, therefore, on the banality of evil, that is, on what a person who, in other respects, appears to be a person like others, a person apparently normal, to commit atrocities and inhumane acts. And this is not a question to be relegated to history: just think of the accounts that are emerging these days from those who were imprisoned in the prisons of the Syrian dictator, President Bashar Hafez al-Assad.
“Dark times…are not only not new, but, in fact, they are not even exceptional in history” (p.23).
By broadening our gaze on the messages that this collection of essays sends to the reader, we can highlight the many disharmonies, complexities and paradoxes of history as well as of the individual, always balanced between giving in - assigning one's own conscience to others - and resisting in order to pursue one's own path of critical thinking and responsible action.
Men in Dark Times (as the title of Arendt's text, published in English in 1968, has been translated by other publishers) is therefore a work worth reading today, as are many other texts that Hannah Arendt (Hannover, 14 October 1906 – New York, 4 December 1975) published during her life.
Andrea Castiello d'Antonio