In today’s international political arena, the ideal of human rights is nearly always painted as an altruistic, selfless goal for leaders and nations to pursue; a righteous undertaking to join the fight for all human beings’ freedom and dignity. Dr. Serena Parekh turned this seemingly indestructible assumption on its head last Thursday afternoon at the first “Pizza and Profundity” guest lecture of the year, presented by the philosophy department and titled, “Living With Ourselves: Arendt on Conscience and Morality.”
Dr. Parekh, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University, argued that the most salient reason to protect and preserve human rights has little to do with other people; rather, choosing to ignore the urgings of one’s conscience will surely destroy the relationship a person has with himself.
To support this rather counterintuitive conclusion, Prof. Parekh examined the writings of Hannah Arendt, the twentieth-century German political theorist and philosopher. According to Prof. Parekh, Arendt believed that there are three modes of internal contemplation, or of “being with oneself.”
The first is isolation, which she defined as a time spent neither with one’s self nor with others, but instead focused purely on the accomplishment of a particular task. Loneliness, in contrast, is “one of the most radical and desperate experiences of man,” a state in which the relationship with the self has been temporarily severed. This, Prof. Parekh suggested, is the mental circumstance that plays host to some people’s most horrible deeds.
But it was the third mental mode, solitude, to which Prof. Parekh gave the most emphasis. The Arendtian description of solitude as silent dialogue with the self gave rise to one of Parekh’s central arguments: namely, that conscience provides the venue through which each of us has to live with ourselves and what we have done to other people. While conscience itself is neither arbitrary nor universal, its influence can explain why a few inhabitants of Nazi Germany resisted the pressures of the Third Reich, while the vast majority caved to the overwhelming social pressures of that society.
According to Parekh, “The only morally reliable people, when the chips are down, are those who say, ‘I can’t do this.’” With their consciences already formed, those people throughout history who have supported human rights, even against the tide of peer coercion, simply decided that they could not live with the guilt of having committed a crime against humanity — that they could not exist with, as Socrates put it, the anguish of being out of tune with one’s self.
Thus, Prof. Parekh concluded her statements, the pizza arrived, and audience members began their lively counterarguments. A unanimous question that left the audience at a puzzling stalemate was: how do you really know what you can or can’t do? After all, people’s behavior can be influenced by all manner of irrational factors and invisible circumstances. In response, Prof. Parekh acknowledged this apparent gap in reasoning, but reiterated that Arendt understood character and morality to be fairly fixed qualities: when it comes down to it, people will do whatever seems to align most closely with their core beliefs and standards.
From there, conversation turned to a contemporary application of Arendt’s theories—the seemingly unsolvable moral dilemmas that soldiers face on a daily basis. Parekh pointed out that, as a combatant, you’re “supposed to do what you’re told, but also to know right from wrong,” which puts these men and women in an impossibly difficult position.
After exploration of that issue, along with other questions that arose from the lecture — cognition versus instinct in morality, how an evildoer decides to ignore his unsettling past — the fully engaged audience’s attention moved on to other matters. After all, these are conundrums far too complex to be resolved in one afternoon… and there was plenty of leftover pizza to be eaten.
