Hannah Arendt's An Essay On Man

While studying war criminals who took part in cruelties committed by Nazi during the World War 2, Hannah Arendt discovered that Eichmann, who was rightfully sentenced to death for planning and devising egregious gas chambers to massively execute the Jews, was in fact a “normal” bureaucrat and a passive receptor of orders that unknowingly blurred his concept of morality. She proclaimed the concept of “banality of evil”, noting that: “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking in itself is dangerous.” Such bemused, fickle, and potentially even dangerous orientation of mankind is well depicted in An Essay on Man, where Alexander Pope depicts the constantly errant and confused nature of human by elaborately explicating certain conflicting characters

For one, explaining men’s state by stating that they are “placed on this isthmus of middle state” (Pope, L3), he illustrates how men were involuntarily “placed“(Pope, L3) between divine and beastly characters. Failing to belong in neither of the spectrum, man has an innately indistinct identity which keeps them in confusion. Moreover, Pope elaborates on how men constantly commit countless deviations and errors while reasoning. According to Pope, men are “Alike in ignorance, his reason such, whether he thinks too little or too much”(Pope, L11-12) and caught in “Chaos of thought and passion, all confused”(Pope, L13); We pride ourselves as the only creature able to reason, but we almost invariably go awry in this vast, mysterious world full of qualities unknown to us. Lastly, men are ultimately left “still by himself, abused or disabused” (Pope, L14). In other words, there are no guidelines that can salvage men amid this eternal confusion. Pope revisits this idea of solitude by pointing out that men are “sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled”: our errant self is still the only standard that we can depend on to determine whether we were right or wrong to do