Eugénisme, crime contre l’humanité et droits universels : Leçons exemplaires de la pensée d’Hannah Arendt à Jérusalem

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“The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind’s submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men”.After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt makes an extension to this first essential lesson expressed at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, by the deep analysis of “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome – word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”. The questions she asks in this Report on the Banality of Evil “were apt to renew in me certain doubts that had been plaguing me”, she says in her last work, The Life of the Mind : “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought ?”Considering the historical relation between medicine and culture, analyzed by Sigerist in his important work published in 1932, Introduction to Medicine, these lessons of Hannah Arendt help enlighten us on tragic links developed between eugenics, ideology and crimes against humanity in the Third Reich. They also help us to point out our present need of adapted training in order to understand how we can stand up against these crimes by our personal contribution to a humanized medical field, both in theory and in practice, towards new medical institutions that will be based on universal human rights.