In the midst of darkness

07-23-2024

“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth-this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity” (Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York: 1968, p. IX-X).

Illumination and guidance: is this the salvation that we are waiting for now? In the 1968 preface of Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt invites us to explore the life of some extraordinary human beings that, with their unconventional lives, shed some light when darkness prevailed in history and freedom was not in sight. Seeking the exemplary dimension of deeds and actions of these non-ordinary individuals is a practice common to politics, philosophy, historiography, or poetry, but Arendt’s unique way of doing it has a strong appeal for the reader and it still has it for us now. It serves as an invitation to reflect on our current times, enabling us to detect and confront the darkness currently shrouding our eyes. Following the most recent European elections, the upcoming presidential vote in the United States, and the chaotic turmoil of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, our vision has become too accustomed to the obscurity of the authoritarian turn that is progressively silencing the pluralistic voices of our political domains while simultaneously eroding the foundations of our democracies that appear to have become fragile under such pressure. In this unwanted obscurity, searching for a different, well-lit path seems a complicated task to achieve.

While the desire for clearness, openness, and freedom should be a shared feeling stronger than ever before, in reality, this request is not just unheard, but it seems more like an effort that only few people are willing to make. Often as apatethic spectators (and certainly not as judgmental beings capable of assume a critical position in the Kantian sense), we find ourselves bereft into a public domain that suffers from being slowly emptied by ever-growing fascist passions, as Judith Butler might say, which obstruct any new attempt for acting and especially contribute to the general loss of plurality. The ‘black tide’ of alienation, hostility and rage – born out from the successful Right-wing governments of the West side of the world surrounding the spaces of our democracies – risks depriving us of, or perhaps has already severed, the relational dimension that creates power and, with it, the action of resistance against domination and violence. Left with no more than our ‘sad passions’ (to use Spinoza’s term), we remain as atomized beings, with nothing but our loneliness.

In the solipsistic position of being alone with our most dangerous emotions and in absence of illumination – seemingly not even a flickering one, which for Arendt would be more than enough – time seems also to have ceased being the battleground of the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet,’ and it is now at a standstill. In the midst of darkness, when the only thing that can be seen is literally what is in front of our eyes, we lose perspective. We are left with a way of being in time that cannot strive for a new ‘horizon of expectation’, since our space of experience is flattened out in a halt dominated by its own immediacy and acceleration.

The present is the lord of our times. Pushing from behind and in front, past and future are distant and abysmal rather than constitutive dimensions of our active lives. When everything needs to be up to speed and when even political action cannot dwell for more than its instantaneous being, the consequence is an undesired blindness towards what is ahead of us and the impossibility to search for new lights in the lost domain of our historical past. If we live in the perpetual violence of the nunc stans – of an eternal presentism – any prospectivity into both the future and the past cannot be restored; a frightening place to be when we already feel our world crumbling, left to face this apocalyptic feeling with no banister to grasp.

It seems hard to find in our daily life incredible political figures resembling the power of Lessing, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, or Walter Benjamin - just to mention some of Arendt’s ‘guides’; human beings that are so brilliantly bright that could give us not only a sense of direction into the unknown future and a compass for navigating into the perilous path of our unhinged past, but also create a different horizon of meaning in which our contingent and worldly experience of being together could be understood. This is not to point out or, worse, to lament about a moralistic forgetfulness of traditional values that framed our political life by dictating what we ought to do. This loss of light is a warning to not let our political sphere rot in the hands of warlords, capitalist exploiters, and, in a not too unrealistic or unforeseen worst-case scenario, in the destructive embrace of neo-fascist governments. Is it still true that “only salvation, and not ruin, depends upon the freedom of man and his capacity to change the world and its natural course”?

To answer this question positively, salvation from this individualistic and antidemocratic tendency towards an apocalyptic end of political times cannot appear like a miracle as Arendt expresses in her beautiful essay on Franz Kafka. It needs preparation; it needs to be informed with the memory of an ancient past that is full of examples of times in which, when darkness prevailed, yet light reappeared again in its total brightness. It needs the effort to find, in our dark times, what can be a source of enlightenment. In the manner of the revolutionary men of action that were able to ignite new powerful actions for establishing again political plurality and institutional orders by scavenging the archives of the past, in our current situation, we can try and see in those moments, when freedom was concretely acted into the world, the trembling light that could orient us again. The past, in this sense, can become the reservoir of a chain of actions on display, ready to be seen in their splendid clarity as an inspiration to disrupt the veil that clouds our position into the world and our way of thinking. In these terms, sudden salvation is still a new beginning, but an initium whose principle is empowered by the historical density that comes from the exercise of memory to recollect times when we were able to be free.

Still, is it possible to search for guidance in a temporal dimension that is difficult to see due to the total amnesia brought on by hatred, rage, envy, impotence, and other terrifying emotions dominating our minds? Do we have the strength and willingness to attempt retrieving from the debris of the past the crystallized and precious elements that might offer us a scenery of hope when facing what seems to be the end of our freedom? Perhaps it is still true, as Hannah Arendt said after the complete destruction brought by the totalitarian regimes, that “every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce.” A little, unexpected, and feeble light that, in its persistent resistance, is still worth searching and fighting for.
 
References:
Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, III, 12-26.
Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew, in Reflections in Literature and Culture, Stanford University Press, Redwood City: 2007.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Chicago University Press, 1992: Chicago.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harcourt & Brace, 1968: New York.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Classics, New York: 2006.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Classics, New York: 2017.
Judith Butler, Who is Afraid of Gender?, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2024: New York.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004: New York.

About the Author:
Gabriele Parrino is a Ph.D student in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa under the supervision of Prof. Simona Forti. He was a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities during March 2024. His doctoral project is focused on the configuration of Roman Political Thought within the theoretical framework of Hannah Arendt’s work. He is part of the research committee of the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Verona and member of the scientific committee of FUEL – Feminist and Queer Philosophy Lab at the University of Milan.