(Page 9 of 16) - Hannah Arendt and the Problem of War, Hypocrisy and Wars on Hypocrisy authored by Owens, Patricia.

To gain political relevance, that is, to speak and act in the public realm is to wear a mask ‘as
the rules of the political game demand, as a sounding board for the truth’ (OR, 103). The
bourgeois hypocrites so hated by Rousseau, Lawrence, the front generation, and Fanon, did
not follow this rule, but used the mask ‘as a contraption for deception’ (OR, 103). But the
anti-hypocrites each also failed to understand that in the hunt for innermost motives, in
seeking to tear away the mask of hypocrisy to reveal some other truer, more honest face,
risked destroying the sense in which politics is itself an artificially constructed ‘space of
appearances’ (HC, 199).

Arendt shared with Machiavelli the view that in the political realm

it was impossible to judge anything but appearances, the words and deeds of political actors,
not their innermost motives. For Machiavelli, it famously mattered only that the actor
appeared outwardly good to others; only God, who was ‘beyond the realm of appearance’,
could judge the goodness of a human heart. There was a necessary gap between how the actor
appeared to others and to any ‘transcendent Being’. This is not a defence of hypocrisy, as
some have suggested (Grant, 1997: Ch.2). It is a statement about the possibilities of
knowledge and what constitutes the political realm.

Machiavelli taught, in Arendt’s words, ‘“Appear as you may wish to be”, by which he meant:
“Never mind how you [really] are [on the inside], this is of no relevance in the world and in
politics, where only appearances, not “true” being, count; if you can manage to appear to
others as you would wish to be, that is all that can possibly be required’ (OR, 97). To think
through the political relevance of this idea with Arendt does not leave us without grounds for
condemning hypocrisy. On the contrary, it provides a stronger basis from which to condemn
the gap between words and actions so indicative in contemporary politics. The real problem
is that in a perversion of Socrates belief that we must be true to ourselves, the hypocrite
behaves as though there is a unity between the public presentation of the self and the
innermost motives of the heart.

This is the essence of the conviction politics so prevalent in the current political scene, which
seeks support for political action based on the good intentions of morally-inspired leaders
(Runciman, 2006). For the sake of authenticity, such a leader must pretend that the public and
private self is totally at one. It is also why the charge of hypocrisy is so easy to make against
those who wear their moral convictions on their sleeve. ‘The test applying to the hypocrite’,
Arendt wrote, ‘is indeed the old Socratic “Be as you wish to appear”, which means appear
always as you wish to appear to others even if it happens that you are alone and appear to no
one but yourself’ (LM, 37). To be sure, as Arendt suggested, Socrates possessed an
‘unquestioned belief in the truth of appearance and taught “Appear to yourself as you would
wish to appear to others”’ (OR, 97). But as Andrea Nye has usefully suggested, the hypocrite
‘no longer engages in the inner self-questioning which Arendt identifies with [Socratic]
thought. To be “true to oneself” is not to appear to be someone identical with a real inner self.
It is to think, to engage in a constant questioning of words and actions that results in a degree
of consistency in words and actions’ (1994: 146; LM, 36-40).

Arendt critiqued both hypocrisy and wars on hypocrisy for failing to respect or understand
the importance of the politically constructed persona, the mask that was necessary to provide
the artificial built spaces in which each actors voice is ‘able to sound through’ (OR, 102) and
for breaking a promise. In her words,

It has been said that hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, but this is not
quite true. All virtue begins with a compliment paid to it, by which I express my
being pleased with it. The compliment implies a promise to the world, to those to
whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure, and it is the breaking of the
implied promise that characterizes the hypocrite (LM, 36).

The exception here may be T.E. Lawrence who did not direct his disgust at hypocrisy into a

deliberate political project to unmask it. In fact, Lawrence appeared to undertake something of a
desperate effort to try on as many different masks as he could.