On Loneliness
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)
“The true predicaments of our time.” Hannah Arendt wrote, “will assume their authentic form only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” The totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union were only symptoms of these true predicaments, of what Arendt early on calls the mass society characterized by “organized loneliness.” Later, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she would come to see that the bond between totalitarianism and loneliness is the phenomena of thoughtlessness.
in Amor Mundi (2024)
The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. Hannah Arendt focuses on loneliness in her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” Arendt argues, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.” Loneliness is the feeling of being “deserted by all human companionship”; it is “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As a modern phenomenon, loneliness is visible in what Robert Putnam calls the loss of social capital. Americans of all classes and all political persuasions report having fewer close friends than ever before; many say they have no one they can confide in or count upon in an emergency.
Social Media, Anxiety, and the Common World
in Amor Mundi (2024)
What is it about human beings that makes us so susceptible to the “like” button on social media, to doom scrolling, and to algorithms that feed our tribal anger? Why is it that soldiers and civilians both, in the aftermath of wars and catastrophes, can equally celebrate the end of the crisis and miss the connection and common purpose that comes with joining together with others in the common purpose to survive? Benjamin Franklin marveled at the fact that Native Americans who came to live with European settlers wanted to return to their tribes while European colonists who interacted with tribal societies nearly universally preferred to stay with the tribal lifestyles. In bomb shelters, amidst the danger and hardship, mental illness and anxiety generally disappear, while young people living in historically unprecedented ease and plenty are experiencing and epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Amidst the great beauty and openness and colorful plurality of liberal cosmopolitanism, there is clearly a sense of unease that many feel amidst the lack of deep emotional and tribal commitments. This tension between tribalism and cosmopolitanism is at the heart of the 2024 Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.
The Double Weaponization of Loneliness
in Amor Mundi (2023)
The existential crisis facing humanity is likely neither the devastation of the earth from global warming nor the destruction of humanity by a rogue AI. Indeed, artificial intelligence, in its promise of exponential technological advance, may change the calculus of the most apocalyptic climate change models. But what AI does threaten to do is to make ever increasing numbers of human beings economically superfluous. As AI does many of the jobs that humans do better, more cheaply, and more efficiently, masses of people will struggle to find jobs. With the loss of jobs come the more consequential loss of meaning and the experience of existential loneliness.
in Cahiers de L'Herne, Hannah Arendt (2021)
Longtemps tenue à l’écart du monde académique, l’œuvre de Hannah Arendt – désormais largement publiée et traduite – suscite aujourd’hui l’intérêt d’un nombre considérable de travaux, colloques et publications dans le monde entier. En revenant sur les principaux évènements de sa vie, ce Cahier dresse le portrait de cette « théoricienne de la politique » sans pour autant négliger les vives polémiques qui ont marqué sa carrière. Le volume rassemble des contributions qui évoquent notamment son travail majeur sur le totalitarisme, les catégories de sa pensée politique et la centralité de l’action, son insistance sur la responsabilité et le jugement ainsi que son analyse du monde moderne. Il revient sur son expérience historique et personnelle, les moments forts de sa vie et la réflexion qu’ils ont suscités en elle, en particulier sa judéité. Des extraits de correspondance (avec Judah Magnes, David Riesman, Hermann Broch, Hilde Frankel, Kurt et Helen Wolff) dévoilent par ailleurs des facettes moins connues de sa personnalité et de nombreux inédits, extraits de cours ou de conférences issus des archives de la bibliothèque du Congrès à Washington, viennent compléter l’ensemble.
Loneliness and the Loss of the Common World
in Amor Mundi (2020)
Until recently, I had not left my apartment for 33 days. I did not touch another human being—not even the members of my family with whom I live—for even longer. The virus has been mild in my case. It is nearly gone. Physically, I am fine. I am one of the lucky ones; I never had to make a decision whether to go to a hospital, alone, not knowing whether I would see family and friends ever again. And yet, I did isolate myself, as recommended by my doctor. I thus lived a bit of an semi-extreme version of the social distancing regime that has cut off so many of us from corporeal nearness. Such isolation has psychic consequences. Deprived of touch and presence, the world we share with family, friends, and strangers begins to waver. The feeling that we are losing the routines and presence that stabilize and enrich our common social and political being-together is now common to us all.
Loneliness and the Nuclear Family
in Amor Mundi (2020)
What are the great problems facing the country? If one follows the political theatrics these days, it is whether we should have Medicare for all or Medicare for all who want it. Add to that questions about how much to tax billionaires and the middle class, how many immigrants should be welcomed, and National Disclosure Agreements. Arguably, however, the greatest threat to our constitutional, democratic, and republican traditions comes from a threat much more silent and pervasive, the rise of mass loneliness.
Loneliness and Expansive Writing
in Amor Mundi (2014)
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt asks after the “elements” of totalitarianism, those fundamental building blocks that made possible an altogether new and horrific form of government. The two structural elements she locates are the emergence of a new ideological form of Antisemitism and the rise of transnational imperialist movements, which gives the structure to her book: Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) lead into Part Three (Totalitarianism). Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism is what Arendt calls metaphysical rootlessness and metaphysical loneliness.
Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film
in The Paris Review (2013)
In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self- hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar —for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.”
In the years since that fiery time, Eichmann in Jerusalem has remained something to condemn or defend rather than a book to be read and understood. I therefore had some fears when I heard that German director Margarethe von Trotta was making a film about Arendt’s coverage of the trial. But Hannah Arendt accomplishes something rare in any biopic and unheard of in a half century of critical hyperbole over all things Arendt: it actually brings Arendt’s work back into believable—and accessible—focus.
Lost in the Loneliness of Anti-Social Networks
in The Fortnightly Review, (2011). Review of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
THE UNMANNED DRONES DROPPING laser-guided bombs in Pakistan do what they are told. But now the military is pursuing ethically programmed robots that could make autonomous decisions about when and when not to fire. As roboethicist Ronald Arkin has argued, these robots might very well act more humanely than humans.