A World We Share: Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. A few days ago, we did a show about the American dissident thinker, critic of Jim Crow America, Lillian Smith.

With an author, Keri Leigh Merritt, who has her biography. The new book is called An Inconvenient Woman. And she was indeed a very inconvenient woman for the American South, for the system of Jim Crow. And we're talking about another inconvenient woman today, perhaps even more inconvenient than Lillian Smith. Hannah Arendt is one of the most distinguished, controversial, problematic and inspiring political thinkers of the 20th century. She was particularly inconvenient for the totalitarians, both of the left and the right. Her book, The Origins Of Totalitarianism, her first major work in 1951, turned her into almost a global celebrity. She was also very inconvenient for a certain Adolf Eichmann, who went on trial in Jerusalem. She wrote a very famous book about it, Eichmann in Jerusalem, but also made her rather inconvenient for some Zionists, some Jews around the world. But for all her inconvenience, there was a convenience to Hannah Arendt too. If there was a heart of a philosophy or a values, it was her love of friendship. There's a new book out on that by my guest today, Roger Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. So he knows a thing or two about Arendt. His new book is called A World We Share, Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. Roger is joining us from New York City. Roger, congratulations on the new book. It's out this week. I don't wanna steal other people's book titles, but there was a certain inconvenience about Arendt, wasn't there? Yes.

Roger Berkowitz (2:34)

Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be here. Yes.

I like your introduction. I like the inconvenient woman aspect. I think of her as a provocative woman. She very much in the style of Socrates called herself a stingray or like to provoke, like to sting, but not as a devil's advocate. I think that's an important distinction. She did it because she spoke her truth and she believed deeply in the importance of everybody speaking their truth.

She really did believe that people are different. She believed fundamentally, I think one of her deepest beliefs is in plurality, that all of us see the world from different perspectives. Every one of us is prejudiced. She didn't think of prejudice as a bad word. We just all have our prejudgments. She believed that we had to create a world in which each of us had the courage and ability to say what we think and what we believe. That's inconvenient, because if you believe that everyone should think one way and people get up and say, this is what I think and it's not that, that sort of blows your little effort to say we all agree. So yeah, she's quite an inconvenient thinker. I think for all sides, as you rightly said, she's claimed by the right and she's claimed by the left, and she's also says many things that both the right and the left don't like. She's claimed by Zionists and she's claimed by anti-Zionists.

It's not because she's wishy-washy, it's because she has her opinions and they don't really fit with any movement or any school and she is very comfortable with that.

Andrew Keen (4:26)

She's also in an odd way, she's got a very odd relationship with the postmodernists or with the very fashionable generation of French thinkers that emerged in the 1960s and 70s who are now perhaps less fashionable. It's Arendt in some ways who have replaced them.

How should she be thought of in terms of postmodernism and this disappearance, at least in some people's sense of the idea of truth? As you note, one of her remarkable qualities was her ability to differ in opinion. In your book, you talk about her having arguments with very close friends and then at the end saying, look, we have to disagree, we'll agree to disagree. Does that make her a postmodernist?

Roger Berkowitz (5:13)

Well, there's always the question of what a postmodernist is.

No, I don't think it does.

Arendt was a post-metaphysical thinker in the very clear sense that she did not believe that there was a universal or metaphysical truth that permeates the universe and that we all, if we in a platonic way step out of the cave and look up to the ideas or the sun, we're going to be enlightened with the truth or in a Christian way again with, you know, with divine enlightenment. She was not a metaphysical thinker. She didn't think that reason would get us to the truth. So, you know, in that way, you could say she was a post-metaphysical thinker. Some people might say, oh, that's post-modernism. I don't think so. She's not someone who believes that, you know, you know, that there is no truth.