Paul Thelakat

“If we want to know what absolute goodness would signify for the course of human affairs we had better turn to the poets,” advised Hannah Arendt. She remains a Jewish political thinker of the holocaust era. She found in literature what was perhaps unexpected: absolute goodness. This was fully consonant with her study of Immanuel Kant, the great Continental thinker for whom philosophy was simply ethical thinking, which he synthesis with aesthetic thought of the sublime. In 1945 the United Nations was established to fulfil the dream of the prophet Isaiah: “beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (2:4). We could also quote Goethe’s “dictum: ‘Germany is nothing, but the Germans are much, they should be dispersed all over the globe, like the Jews’ to bring out the good in them.” He nevertheless pleaded that for Jews and Germans alike “peace is vitally important—for both, even though at present the Germans do not want to hear of it. … Moreover, both essentially share the task of achieving peace”… in such a feeling of a missionary job, in the final purpose of this mission, there is an accord between Germans and Jews was realized in the Germany that arose from the ashes after 1945, today a strong ally of Israel. It should be an inspiration to all warring and spiteful nations today.

The hypothetical agreement about the idea of India and its modernity has been accompanied by a constant, ever widening and deepening crisis of authority. The idea of India is being deconstructed. Based on what is the question. As in all crises, this means that we can no longer fall back upon authentic and indisputable experiences common to us all and that the term itself has become clouded by controversy and confusion. The corona crisis is indeed a testing case of the new system which has exposed the sorry absence of belief in rationality as the basis of humanism and a sense of community in the ruling party. It is a failure, betraying the whole nation into a tragedy of death and untold suffering. It was callous negligence and irresponsibility in spite of the fact Indian scientists produced the much expected vaccine. The Government failed to get it to the people. It is my contention, that we are entitled to raise this question: what is the authority of the state?

“People can exist in a society as cog in a machine, shameless Promethean pride of complacency. These individuals pretend to live outside the human family. It is only a convenient pretension of exploiting the society they live in. The banality of evil takes pandemic dimensions.”

The ruling party goes by the Hindutva ideology, which is not the Hindu cultural idealism but a high caste supremacy of an ancient Indian period of history deemed by some as the ideal. But such is a fully predetermined ideology of caste system entails outdated religious and cultural sentiments and practises which are unscientific and even superstitious if not brazenly fundamentalist. There is no scientific tenure of mind, nor heeding to the common sense of the public. The result is degradation of rationality. The traditional yardsticks for understanding and judging phenomena and events no longer apply in the aftermath of a fundamentalist uprising. The ‘thread of tradition is broken’, by which we can no longer take recourse to general rules handed down by, in our case, the tradition. The originality of any totalitarian system is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment. In this situation, judging is like counting without the notion of numbers. It is, as it were, lawless, that is, not guided by general or absolute rules, nor derived from any ground or foundation, because of the contingency of facts. The particular issue at hand is the effort at understanding a phenomenon that, is without precedent, a novel phenomenon in human history, namely fundamentalism.

Public debate or Public Domination

We as a country are showing enough signs that we are not on the path of a robust democracy but of a mobocracy masterminded by shrewd politicians and religious fanatical feelings. We are a country among countries which are so interdepended and globalised and cannot runs its interior rule without democracy and cosmopolitan outlook. India’s image has suffered grave setback with the loss of more than three lakhs of its citizens and the opportunity of becoming a model for the world facing the virus epidemic.

This don’t-care attitude seeks to diminish public debate by making it a criminal act to criticize the regime. We are expected to fall in line with this unprecedented form of government, and to defend public debate against threats to its existence. Without public debate, the ruling regime is free to construct a false narrative about “reality,” perpetuate that narrative, and maintain power, because there is nothing there to compete with it. Our distinctness provides us with a perspective that cannot be fully understood by anyone else, yet our equality means that, as a presupposition of communication, we assume the capacity for speech and reason in each other. Based on plurality, politics then is the place and activity of shared communication based on the distinct perspectives of equal human beings. When we engage in political life, we seek to communicate how things look from our distinct perspectives. The activity of publicly addressing one another about how things appear from our distinct perspectives is the lifeblood of politics. Sharing our perspectives with others is done in the public space, which must be preserved if democratic politics is to remain a viable possibility. This public space is being destroyed. Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse. So, when a group of human beings decides to act for a specific political purpose, power exists between them as they collaborate together to achieve a political aim: we might say that it is power that “holds them together” as a group and not just a collection of disparate individuals. The public space is preserved through power that “springs up” among citizens when they gather together. Public space refers to the activity of shared debate among plural human beings; this space and activity are maintained as long as opportunities exist for the gathering of citizens. Political thought is existential in attempting to understand how a meaningful space for politics and public debate can be lost and how that space might be re-enlivened through political action.

The political can be described as a human activity that has plurality as its condition, in which actors interact to create, shape and change the shared world. It is possible only where there is a public space within which men and women can appear before each other. Politics is intersubjective. Only when men and women are equally free to interact with each other can an intersubjective reality be constituted from the plurality of perspectives that each individual brings to bear on the world that they share in common. If politics arises out of the plurality of perspectives that individuals bring to bear on the world, the political refers to the disclosure of this world as common to them.

Thoughtless Evil Increasing

Freedom is intimately connected to man’s ability to act. Arendt wrote, “Men are free … as long as they act, neither before, nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In making this statement, Arendt departs from a tradition of understanding human freedom as dependent upon notions of free will.” It is this thinking that avoided atrocities and brutalities. But thoughtless people can become as Arendt says, “feeling like Pontius Pilate, [Eichmann believed] this was the way things were…based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, … he not only obeyed orders, he obeyed the law…. [And] he declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to the Kantian definition of duty. This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience.” People can exist in a society as cog in a machine, shameless Promethean pride of complacency. These individuals pretend to live outside the human family. It is only a convenient pretension of exploiting the society they live in. The banality of evil takes pandemic dimensions.

Thought Defying Culture

There can culture be created where individual responsibility is not a matter of solitude and solidarity. The person has become questionable through being collectivized. Primacy is ascribed to a collectivity. Man is no more the singular but the plural.The collectivity becomes what really exists, the individual become derivatory. Thereby the immeasurable value which constitutes man is imperilled. The truth of our intersubjective agreement has become questionable and politicized. In The Human Condition Arendt explains ‘public’ as follows: “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance– something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves–constitutes reality.” The political turn is not the ethical turn but ideological turn. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. Arendt argued that the instability was, in fact, the point and purpose of the purges: the power of the regime depended not so much on eliminating particular men at particular moments but on the ability to eliminate any man at any moment. Survival depended on one’s sensitivity to the ever-changing stories and one’s ability to mould oneself to them. In the aftermath of the ethical turn, we have become accustomed to assuming that through detailed descriptions, literary representation can nurture our imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers and instil compassionate responses to acts of injury. The ethical turn has drawn attention to the experience of otherness, and has led to a certain ethics: a self-dispossession in favour another voice in the room. Aesthetic representation is not only a way of entering another’s standpoint, but also an escape from the demands of a home and the everyday world of practical and into political time. We can only become political in the moment we move beyond the rule of transcendent authorities which are ideological hegemony.

By emphasizing the collective nature of freedom, the fact that it can never appear in human solitude. The absence of an authoritarian state tells us how to live and what to believe. It creates a climate of thoughtless activity which is capable of all atrocities possible. “It is “thought-defying,” because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality”. It creates people like Eichmann who butchered six million Jews without thought. “When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was no Iago and no Macbeth, and nothing would have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all…He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” Crowd smashing individuals to death in the name the sacred cow is clear example of thoughtless evil in the name of irrational religious fervour with the clear connivance of the political leaders of the Hindutva movement

Narrow and Enlarged Minds

Can the public appearance be believed? Is the state committed to veracity and factuality? George Orwell wrote, “The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” It is indeed a negative picture which exists in the minds of many in this country. The party is missing their golden opportunity to rise above fundamentalist and totalitarian temptations and move to rich culture of pluralism and rationality of the modern India. We sadly lack the Kantian understanding of judgment as the faculty of “enlarged thought” or “representative thinking.” On the one hand, Arendt’s defence of judgment as the quintessential political virtue seems to lead to an Aristotelian conception of politics as a branch of practical reason. On the other hand, her appeal to Kant as the source of her ideas about judgment appeals to a very different conception of politics, in which political action has to be grounded, not in the practical arts, but in universal moral principles. Her departure from Kant in these matters is primarily that in Kant’s discovery of the “enlarged mentality,” Arendt saw the model for the kind of intersubjective validity we could hope to attain in the public realm. This is what John Rawls reformulates in his theory of justice as the fundamental principles of justice that are to govern the basic institutions of societies. Between a “republic of terror” and a “republic of virtue,” we might say, lies the conception of a “well-ordered and just society,” embodying basic moral principles in its macro-political and economic institutions. Are we rising as great nation where we have to see that “to think from the standpoint of everyone else” entails sharing a public culture such that everyone else can articulate indeed what they think and what their perspectives are? The cultivation of one’s moral imagination flourishes in such a culture in which the self-centred perspective of the individual is constantly challenged by the multiplicity and diversity of perspectives that constitute public life. “Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought? Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?” My final reflections have attempted to mediate between this perspective of enlarged thought and its political embodiment in a public culture of democratic ethos. In Indian culture, all these possibilities of plurality rich cultures and religions, can exist with harmony and solidarity. There is the danger that we are fabricating a nation of myopic thinking of fundamentalist aspirations of cultural and religious disintegration.