In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: Some of her reviewers said that she was claiming that the Holocaust was banal. You have to have a serious amount of ill will to read it [that way]. She neither says nor implies that. Also, she did mean something quite specific by ‘banality’ – she didn’t mean commonplace. She meant specifically that it wasn’t rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness. It was an absence.

  Besides, one of the reasons that evil was allowed to thrive, albeit in that banal form, in Arendt’s view, was the bureaucratisation of modern life. This is when we become alienated from a way to relate to one another and we start relating to each other through systems.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: One of the first things she did when she was a refugee in the States was to write two very good essays on Franz Kafka, and it is that world that Kafka could already see. When people have been reduced to jobholders, to identities, to names, [that] allows you to function without having that two-in-one conversation. She is saying that there is a context for radical thoughtlessness, and that context is everything to do with how we organise our social life together.

  Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally in 1933, the same year that Hannah Arendt escaped Nazi Germany.

  Arendt said this phenomenon was like a fungus, Melvyn recalled, a growth; you look like you are a bureaucrat sitting at your desk, but there is a fungus inside you that has taken over your brain.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: And it spreads. Rebecca West talked about a ‘yeasty darkness’ in that period. Yeast and fungus don’t have roots. This isn’t deep evil. This isn’t Richard III. This is evil without roots, it is on the surface, it is sticky, it gets everywhere. You can’t get rid of it.

  Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) followed The Origins of Totalitarianism and, in that, she took on the task of rethinking our established categories of political thought. One of the central strands of that work was an attempt to clarify the active life that was dethroned, for her, by Plato.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: She tries to analyse the three fundamental activities of the active life and to think about how they’ve been conceived differently in different periods. Those three fundamental activities in The Human Condition are labour, work and action. She assesses each of those activities in terms of the contribution they make to human self-realisation and freedom, and how they are able to meet certain conditions of our human life.

  She talks, in the chapter on action, about natality. Heidegger said that philosophy begins in our awareness that we are going to die, and that makes us think about ourselves. Arendt took that idea but turned it the other way around. She, Robert Eaglestone said, held that philosophy began at our birth, both our first birth and when we are born into society and take our role in the marketplace.

  There was a sense, Melvyn suggested, that, now and then, Arendt put her foot in it and was careless of the consequences. Robert Eaglestone mentioned a famous case about integration, an article or essay ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, where she was on the wrong side of history, while saying her tactlessness and mistakes came from deep engagement in her thought and in civic society.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: When she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, she wrote it in the ironic mode. This did not go down very well with the Jewish community. This is the first time some survivors got to speak of their trauma, and it was an extraordinary and emotional outpouring of grief, in Susan Sontag’s words. To miss this and to be ironic was seen as deeply wounding.

  Arendt also thought that the testimonial culture of the trial was getting in the way of inventing a new law that could cope with crimes against humanity and, if we were distracted from that, those crimes were going to keep on happening.

  Despite the darkness of her themes, Arendt in The Human Condition was optimistic that change could happen.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: She thought of calling the book Amor Mundi, love of the world. That brings out this sense that she was re-throning the political space, in contrast to the rejection of it that she saw in the Platonic and Christian tradition. It is the principle of natality here, that is the principle of optimism in the work, and she describes that with a quote from Augustine, ‘A beginning be made, Man was created.’

  Despite her optimism that change could happen, Arendt feared that totalitarianism might recur.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: Nazism had been defeated, Stalinism had gone, but all the conditions were continually moving around, continually about, and we should be constantly aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, particularly whenever human beings are made superfluous.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: And a stateless person.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: She said that elements of totalitarianism linger in the political culture: the idea of organised lying – she was very concerned about the Pentagon papers and Watergate. You can’t just think that totalitarianism is this big dark cloud that descends on other histories and other places. Potential elements of it are always there.

  STOICISM

  The philosophy of Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in the fourth century BC and flourished in Greece and then in Rome. Its ideals of inner solitude, forbearance in adversity and the acceptance of fate won many brilliant adherents and it became the dominant philosophy across the whole of the ancient world. The ex-slave Epictetus said, ‘Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them.’ Seneca, the politician philosopher, declared, ‘Life without the courage for death is slavery.’ The stoic thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, provided a rallying point for empire builders into the modern age. But what was Stoicism? How did its ideas of inner retreat come to influence the most powerful and public men of the classical era and does it still have a legacy for us today?

  Zeno of Citium.

  With Melvyn to discuss the philosophy of Stoicism were: David Sedley, former Laurence professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge; the philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée; and Angie Hobbs, professor of the public understanding of philosophy at the University of Sheffield.

  Stoicism took its name from the colonnade, or stoa, in Athens where Zeno of Citium and his followers discussed their ideas. Stoicism, Angie Hobbs explained, had a coherent system based on the integrated three pillars of logic, physics and ethics. Stoics argued for a materialistic and deterministic cosmos that was composed, at the conceptual level, of passive matter interpenetrated by active, divine reason. At the observable level, this passive matter took the form of earth and water, and the divine reason took the form of a mixture of fire and air known as pneuma.

  ANGIE HOBBS: The key point is that this divine reason organises everything for the best, this is the best of all possible worlds. As an organic entity, the cosmos has a set lifespan and, at the end of each cosmic cycle, all the matter is transmuted into pure, creative, rational fire, out of which the next perfect and absolutely identical cosmos is formed. It has to be identical, because it was perfect to begin with.

  Human reason is a spark of the divine fiery reason, Stoics would say, and so we are part of a greater whole. Our happiness lies in acknowledging that fact and accepting that whatever happens to us, even if at the time it seems to be terrible, is actually part of a greater providential plan. To understand this divine plan, we need to understand human reason, logos.

  Zeno was setting up the stoa in about 300 BC after Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon had, effectively, destroyed the Greek city state, the polis, as an independent political unit. It was a time when people were feeling far more powerless than their grandparents had.

  ANGIE HOBBS: This has two particular effects: on the one hand, people are starting to look inwards, and are thinking, ‘Well, I can’t control my immediate political environment, I can search for my inner peace of mind, I can practise philosophy as a therapy of the soul to give me stability and tranquillity.’ On the other hand, perhaps partly as a result of the barriers of the Greek world breaking down under the Macedonian Empire, we have people thinking of themselves as part of a greater unit than the old polis, and
starting to think of the way that human beings connect up.

  There were other schools of philosophy in the Greek world at this time, such as the Cynics and the Epicureans. Rather than being diametrically opposed, Jonathan Rée said, they were more like friendship networks, with Socrates the father of them all. Choosing between them was more like choosing between two high street coffee chains than choosing between rationalism and empiricism.

  JONATHAN RÉE: All of them promised to teach you how to lead a better life, how to lead the life of a philosopher, how to imitate Socrates, how to lead a life of virtue where virtue would lead you to happiness, where you would understand that being good and being happy were one and the same thing. This was true of Epicurus and the Epicureans, it was true of Diogenes and the Cynics. Despite their later reputations as diametrically opposed, they were all offering you the happy life of a philosopher.

  The Cynicism of Diogenes had nothing to do with the modern sense of the word cynicism. His Cynicism consisted of taking Platonism very seriously, so seriously that he absolutely despised the social world, he despised human convention, as reflected in later stories of his life.

  JONATHAN RÉE: He lived in a tub, he walked around naked, he masturbated in public to prove that he didn’t care what anybody thought. His pupil Crates, a rich man who carried on the tradition, gave away all his money and said that it was wonderful because he got in exchange a quart of lupins and the ability to say, ‘I care for nobody.’ That was the great prize.

  Crates became Zeno’s mentor when Zeno, aged thirty or so, arrived in Athens after a shipwreck and asked if there was anybody in Athens who carried on the tradition of Socrates. He was introduced to Crates, who was walking past.

  JONATHAN RÉE: Here’s how Crates teaches him: he tells him he has got to carry a pot of lentil soup around, something servile. Zeno is not happy about this; he tries to hide it under his cloak. Crates smashes the pot so that he has this brown stuff dribbling, like diarrhoea, down his legs, and Crates insists, ‘You must not feel ashamed of this.’ This is philosophy teaching through humiliation.

  Zeno never became as extravagantly exhibitionist about his contempt for the world as Crates. Stoicism, Jonathan Rée would say, was Cynicism for the shy.

  Socrates had made it top of his agenda to ask how we should live, David Sedley continued, but he had also raised some very difficult issues about what goods we should be pursuing in our lives. Socrates pointed out that wisdom is an unconditional good, and you cannot go wrong so long as you know what you are doing. All the other things that people value in their lives are neither good nor bad.

  DAVID SEDLEY: Everybody wants to be rich, everybody wants influence and reputation; but actually wealth is no more good than bad, because if you use it for good purposes it is good, but if you use it to commit genocide, for example, it is a greater bad. So, too, for all of these other supposed goods. The legacy of Socrates, to Zeno among others, is the question: in that case, should we be pursuing these things at all?

  Zeno was too conventional to go for the opt-out solution that the Cynics went for. His great breakthrough was to see there was a way in which you could adopt the same Socratic value system but, nevertheless, lead a very conventional life. The reason he gave was that, although it is true that things like wealth are not intrinsically good, nature has created us to pursue these things. It is our instinct from birth to pursue certain things and to avoid other things; and, as we grow up and become rational, we find increasingly that we are simply, by nature, pursuing rational goals.

  DAVID SEDLEY: The goal of life, according to Zeno, is actually to make your life totally in conformity with nature, and that doesn’t mean back to nature, it means a rational cosmic nature that has an overall plan of which you are just a tiny part. As you learn to conform your activities to nature’s rational plan, you discover that the things that, as a matter of course, are natural to pursue, such as good health, may have to be varied.

  In the end, if you succeed, you will understand what nature wants for you and you will go along with it willingly. Chrysippus, who was the most important of Zeno’s followers, remarked that, if he knew that he was fated to be ill, he would want to be ill.

  DAVID SEDLEY: One remark that Zeno and Chrysippus both made about this is you should think of yourself as like a dog tied to the back of the cart. You are going to have to follow anyway, you have got no choice, but either you can be dragged or you can go willingly. The aim of Stoicism is to find out where the cart is going and to follow willingly.

  The inheritors of Plato’s Academy said that, in this materialistic, deterministic universe, the Stoics had taken away human responsibility and made people lazy. Why call the doctor if you are fated to be ill? To that, the Stoics would say that they are fated to get better … but only if they call the doctor first.

  ANGIE HOBBS: In terms of human responsibility, they say, it is also up to you how you respond to fate, how you react to it. Are you the willing dog, or are you the reluctant dog? They likened fate to somebody pushing a cylinder down a hill and they said, yes, it is that push of fate that gets the cylinder rolling, but it is the fact that it is that cylindrical shape that keeps it rolling down the hill. Our characters are absolutely crucial, and things are up to us.

  Stoicism was an extremely prestigious philosophy in Athens by the middle of the second century BC, but other philosophies were competing with it. From this position, thanks to what became known as the Embassy of the Three Philosophers, it went on to become very influential in Rome.

  DAVID SEDLEY: The year 155 BC was the year in which philosophy arrived in Rome; the Athenians had been fined a huge sum of 500 talents for pillaging the city of Oropos. Because Greece was under Roman control at this time, if they wanted to appeal against the fine, they had to appeal to the Roman senate. They took the most extraordinary decision: they decided they would send the three heads of the three major philosophical schools as their ambassadors to Rome.

  That delegation included Diogenes of Babylon, who was then head of the Stoic school, along with the head of the Academy and the head of the Peripatetic school. When they arrived in Rome, these philosophers turned out to have the status of superstars (and they did get the fine reduced to 100 talents). They gathered crowds around them and gave demonstrations of their philosophical virtuosity and all of them made an impression.

  DAVID SEDLEY: The Romans were particularly impressed by Diogenes the Stoic, who was said to speak with great common sense and sobriety. I think the Roman love affair with Stoicism really did begin at that point.

  The Greek delegation was not received without opposition, and the older Cato was absolutely revolted by these Greek philosophers who were coming, as he thought, to corrupt the youth of Rome. Despite that, by the time of the civil war, 49–46 BC, the great figures Scipio, Pompey, Brutus and Cato the younger had a certain respect for this idea of philosophy. Cato even took his own life in a manner that was seen as consistent with Stoicism.

  JONATHAN RÉE: The story that was told, again and again, was that, after he had been defeated, he had retreated to Tunisia and spent a night reading Plato’s Phaedo over and over. He had Plato’s Phaedo in one hand and he had his sword in the other and, the next morning, he disembowelled himself.

  After his death, Cato was canonised as a great combination of philosopher, politician and warrior. Melvyn suggested that Cato was acting on the philosophy of Stoicism, and that brought the idea of Stoicism to the Roman army where it fitted with their ideas of toughness, and Jonathan Rée agreed.

  The Stoics’ attitude to life and death went back to their concept of the good and the indifferent, where the only thing good in itself was virtue.

  Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a practitioner of Stoicism.

  ANGIE HOBBS: Other things, such as life and death, in themselves are indifferent, although usually, under normal circumstances, [life is] to be preferred. They make this rather strange distinction between the good and the naturally preferred. However, there can
be exceptional circumstances when life is not actually to be naturally preferred, if you are being forced to do something that’s against your will, which would sully your inner purity and moral integrity and freedom.

  Cato had felt it was going to sully his integrity to accept the pardon of his arch-enemy Caesar, so killed himself in line with his philosophy.

  We tend to think of the Roman Stoics as obsessed with suicide, David Sedley said, but what they saw was what they called a rational departure from life. The point was that your happiness depended not on how you felt or behaved on any given day, but on the shape of your whole life.

  DAVID SEDLEY: No single feature of your life was more important than the way you ended it. Not only how you ended it but also choosing the time at which to end it. In the case of Socrates, that had required simply deciding to obey the law when he had the opportunity to escape from prison and escape the death penalty.

  Seneca, the playwright and Stoic philosopher, was employed by Nero’s mother when Nero was twelve as his tutor in rhetoric. He did exercise a strong influence on Nero and, when Nero became emperor at the age of seventeen, Seneca was kept on as his adviser. Stoics had always thought that being an adviser to a monarch was one of the ideal positions for a philosopher. Seneca was quite clear that the Republic could not be resuscitated, and that enlightened monarchy was the right way forwards, so initially it was not problematic for him to help Nero. Besides, the first five years of Nero’s reign, David Sedley said, were regarded by historians as one of the best periods of Roman rule.

  DAVID SEDLEY: It was only after five years into Nero’s reign, when he murdered his mother and went onto a whole string of other atrocities, that he really went off the rails. That was the point at which one might have wondered why Seneca didn’t get out. In fact, he did make a number of attempts to get out of the imperial service, but that was not easy because to resign would be taken as a sign of disloyalty.