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Living With Ourselves
The best description of integrity that I’ve ever come across is in Hannah Arendt’s searing account of the Holocaust, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” In it, she writes not of the Nazi regime’s unfathomable political failures but rather on the surprising personal failures to which most ordinary citizens gave in quite easily. They were living in the midst of “the total collapse of normal moral standards,” and they chose complicity with evil rather than rebellion against it. The bureaucracy of evil depended on ordinary citizens, and most were shockingly willing to step into line.
“Most” is not “all,” though, as there were some who refused collaboration, often at great cost to themselves (up to and including death itself). Though they did not rise up in successful rebellion, they refused to participate in the machinations of Nazism. What separated these people from the rest? Arendt’s speculation is worth reproducing in full:
“They asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.”
I find this to be a profound articulation of the role of integrity in a human life. It is not, in the end, a smug satisfaction with having meticulously followed the moral law, nor is it a judgment of one’s own moral praiseworthiness relative to others. It is about being able to look oneself in the mirror and not wither in shame. As Arendt puts it, it is “the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself.” To those for whom integrity is an essential part of a life worth living, it is preferable to die than to have to live out the rest of one’s days with a monster.
What, then, is involved in living together explicitly with oneself? And in what way is this form of integrity the bedrock of a meaningful life? Arendt describes it as “be[ing] engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.” This thinking is neither technical nor theoretical; indeed the “respectable” members of society are usually the first to go when the moral tides change. Rather, it is simply the activity of examining the choices in front of us and choosing the path which, when we get to the end, we will not be ashamed to have gone down. Integrity is a relationship we have to ourselves — it is the willingness to enter into such a relationship to begin with and then insist on a reflexive cohabitation that we can endorse, not because we fear the reproach of others but because we cannot escape ourselves.
Escaping ourselves is, to be sure, a tempting strategy. Who among us doesn’t wish to avoid the sacrifices that historical contingency foists upon us? I myself often feel the desire to protect my fantasized life path from the incursion of moral dilemmas not of my own making. Escape promises to solve the conundrum of these circumstances: we can both pursue the path of least resistance and preserve a sense of our own moral goodness. Escape is the illusion of never having to lose anything despite conditions that exact a toll from everyone. Escape allows us to be the exception.
The architecture of escape’s promise, though, relies on a collapse of the self-reflective stance that is a precondition to leading a life with integrity. When we do encounter our own gaze in the mirror, escape requires us to look away for fear of what we might discover if we dwell too long. It requires us to always gaze outward, always abandon self-reflection exactly at that moment when we might realize we don’t like who we see. As long as we are living in line with the moral norms of our day, we no longer have to worry about living with ourselves.
Many people who have continued to take Covid precautions the entire pandemic have experienced periodic waves of flagging commitment, when one more gathering as the sole person in a mask just feels like too much. “Would it be so wrong to forget about the pandemic just this once?” We find ourselves, from time to time, wondering what the point of continued precautions is in the midst of total abandonment.
I think Arendt’s conception of integrity is a helpful lens for remembering what the point of it all is. Of course, there are other reasons to continue taking precautions: we don’t want to pass on a debilitating infection to other people; we want to stand in solidarity with disabled people; we want to protect our own health, whatever it may be. These are all good reasons. But Arendt provides us with one more: we want to live together explicitly with ourselves. Importantly, this reason is not unrelated to the ones just listed — indeed it is what turns them from mere considerations into reasons for action. The fact that people infected with Covid usually pass that infection on to others, for example, is only a reason to wear a mask for the person who wants to look in the mirror and know they did all they could. When one is disposed to live explicitly with oneself, facts like these have practical salience; integrity transforms good reasons in general into good reasons for me.
It also explains why that initial list of reasons is not actually motivating for people who seemingly endorse them in the abstract. It can be baffling speaking to someone who ostensibly is in favor of disability justice, for example, but nevertheless refuses to wear a mask — many of us are left wondering what exactly is not clicking. Arendt’s conception of integrity answers this question: these are people who have chosen to escape themselves, to escape their own gaze. For someone living in the shadow of this choice, there is no tension between an espoused value and a failure to live up to that value, because there is never a moment to reflect on the lived contradiction. It’s not that they have somehow chosen to live with a monster; it’s that they have decided to stop wondering who they’re living with at all.
This kind of willful incuriosity about oneself is alien to me. We may not be able to know everything there is to know about ourselves, but what a joyful failure it can be trying. This is the silent dialogue of self-reflection, the constant evaluation and revision that constitutes moral life itself. When our choices originate not from the customs or moral norms of the day but from our own self-conscious deliberation, they take on a special significance in our lives. Self-conscious deliberation transforms an action from “one among many” into mine. It thus also transforms it into an action with meaning.
The philosopher Bernard Williams describes it as follows: “[The man of integrity] is identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about.” But when conditions are such that he is asked to abandon this deliberative tie to his own actions and merely carry out projects which satisfy others, “it is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions… It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.” In other words, preserving our integrity requires preserving the tether between ourselves and our actions; and if we are to do that, we must be willing to look at them as ours; we must be willing to face ourselves. Escapism and its many manifestations, including the mass denial we are living amidst, is antithetical to this self-reflexive disposition; if we are to lead a life worth living under conditions not of our own choosing, we must be willing to return our own gaze.