A Common Humanity

by Raimond Gaita

The Holocaust and attempts to deny it, racism, murder, the case of Mary Bell. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a common humanity? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in his powerful new book, A Common Humanity.
Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch and Sigmund Freud, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[laura]

damn.

[Lilly Mary]

This book is more or less a series of essays which in and of themselves are not bad, and certainly important, but a good editor would have cut them back significantly and thereby rendered them far more readable.