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

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: 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 twentieth 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. And 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?

00:02:35 Roger Berkowitz: Yes. 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, you know, in the style of Socrates, called himself a stingray or, you know, like to provoke, like to sting, but not as a devil's advocate. I mean, 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 the— 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. And 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. And that's inconvenient because if you believe that everyone should think one way and people get up and say, you know, this is what I think and it's not that, that sort of blows your little effort to say we all agree. And so, yeah, she's quite an inconvenient thinker. And I think for all sides, as you rightly said, I mean, 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 Zionist and she's claimed by anti-Zionist. And, and it's not because she's— Doesn't have— Which— That she's wishy-washy. It's because she has her opinions, and they don't fit with any, they don't really fit with any movement or any school, and she is very comfortable with that.

00:04:27 Andrew Keen: 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 nineteen sixties and seventies who are now perhaps less fashionable. It's Arendt in some ways who has— 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. And I— 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?

00:05:15 Roger Berkowitz: 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, you know, if we, in a platonic way, step out of the cave and look up to the ideas or the sun, we're gonna be enlightened with the truth. Or in a Christian way, again, with, you know, with blind 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 postmodernism. I don't think so. She's not someone who believes that, you know, you know, that there is no truth. She thinks the truth is not universal and is not metaphysical. The truth is for her something, we build together through, through friendship, through politics, and through, a real conversation with other people. She believes the truth is absolutely important. There are facts for her. It's just that the facts don't tell you very much. Right? And we can list 20 facts about the environment. That doesn't tell us what we should do about environmentalism or global warming. We can list 20 facts about immigration and, you know, stipulate the facts. That's still not gonna tell us what we should do about immigration. And so she has very clear sense that the truth matters, the truth is important, but that the truth has very little power, and— To tell us what to do. And we have to make— And that we have to then build, through conversation, through friendship, through politics, a world that, based on those truths that we can share. And that's very difficult. It takes time, but I think it can be done. And that's what she was involved in.

00:07:24 Andrew Keen: She was in many ways, and please correct me, Roger, if I'm wrong, a refugee all her life. One of her classic essays, one of her early essays was We Refugees, which she wrote when she came to New York in the nineteen forties. She was always an outsider. Is that the core, ironically, of her theory, being an outsider, being a refugee, not belonging? And how does that connect with her love of friendship?

00:07:59 Roger Berkowitz: So just to be factually correct, she was a refugee from about 1933 till about— Till 1951, when she became an American citizen. And, she, very much celebrated that day, called her passport that beautiful book. But, she was also a refugee in another sense. She called herself das Mädchen aus der Fremde, the girl from afar. She was Jewish in a anti-Semitic world. She was also a preternaturally brilliant and intelligent in a world of not so many preternaturally brilliant and intelligent people.

00:08:44 Andrew Keen: And very beautiful as well. I mean—

00:08:46 Roger Berkowitz: And very beautiful.

00:08:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Very attractive. Yeah. Where— For people just listening, we're looking at a photo of Arendt in 1933. Well, this was probably just before or after She This was after her love affair with Martin Heidegger. Right?

00:09:04 Roger Berkowitz: Right. And just before she was arrested and then had to flee Germany. Yeah. She— But she really did see herself as an outsider, her whole life. And I think that's part of, her approach to truth. Right? She rejects subjectivism. Right? She says, like, you don't have a right to your own. Make up your own truths. But she also rejects objectivism, or objective truth. She doesn't think that there, at least in politics, right, there are no objective truths. There's no set truths. For her, she makes a distinction between objectivity and impartiality. And this is, I think, one of the parts of her work that's not given enough credit and not seen even by many of her friends. She really sees, Homer and people like Homer and also Herodotus as the beginnings of impartiality. The people who can tell both the story of Achilles and the story of Hector and make them both sympathetic. And what she says is this is not objectivity. Right? This is being able to see— Be impartial, to take both the partiality of the Trojans and of the Achaeans and make them both part of your perspective and widen your perspective to have a broader perspective on the world. That's how she starts to build what she calls a common world, a ground we stand on. And so, to do that, you have to, as much as possible, be an outsider. Not— You have to constantly question your partiality, your prejudices. She's very aware that she has prejudices. Right? She's a German Jewish woman from West— You know, who's very intelligent, part of certain classes. But what she means by thinking is both in real life talking to and in imagination bringing to view as many various opinions and criticisms as possible so that you can create what she calls this impartial view that allows you to widen your view. You then make your own judgment and you regain a partiality, but your partiality is one that is, that includes a broader perspective on the world. And that outsider status, she called it, a pariah consciousness. So the— You have to sort of, she called herself, an intentional pariah. You have to stand apart from all— If you wanna be a truth teller, she says, you have to stand apart from all different, you know, movements and partialities and try and create one that appeals to the widest public as you can.

00:11:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up Homer. Have you seen the new movie, The Odyssey?

00:11:49 Roger Berkowitz: I think I'm the only one left who hasn't seen it. I'm sorry.

00:11:51 Andrew Keen: You should see it in the sense that I think both its strength and its weakness is an attempt to turn, Odysseus into an intentional pariah Oh. Which may be quite noble. I'm not sure it's entirely successful, but maybe had Hannah Arendt been around, would have been a better film. How would you explain, Roger, the fact that she's become such a remarkably fashionable, for better or worse, thinker, writer these days. You— Your book is, certainly not the first or the last book on Arendt this year, and there'd been many last year. She's probably the most cited contemporary or certainly twentieth century political thinker around. You have this great quote on your, Hannah Arendt Center website. If totalitarianism is organized loneliness, the fundamental loneliness of modern life means that totalitarianism is hardly a phenomenon of the past. Of course, Arendt wrote in 1951 about the totalitarianism of, the of Stalin and Hitler, But she was writing about more than that, wasn't she? She was writing about the origins of totalitarianism as maybe the heart of modern political life. So as history caught up with Arendt, Roger, or is Arendt caught up with history?

00:13:24 Roger Berkowitz: Well, I think in both cases, you're right. I mean, I think the easy answer to your question is Arendt became popular in 2016 after the election of President Trump. I think that's not right. I mean, I think that there's obviously some truth to that when— After the election, the book sold and became a bestseller temporarily. But I think that her popularity, is much deeper than that, and it goes precisely to that quote you offered. She really did understand totalitarianism as organized loneliness. And she— Well, she didn't wanna— She's not a monocausal historian. She doesn't think there's one cause to anything. And the book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, you know, is really about how many different elements coalesce in the mid-twentieth century into something like totalitarianism. The fundamental experience that brought up— That made a new form of government like totalitarianism necessary, a government— A form of government that had never existed before based in logical, ideological certainty and terror and torture, she says, became about and was needed because suddenly this new phenomenon existed in the world of the lonely man. This man that has, you know, religion has largely lost its public meaningful significance. And to the extent it has it in small pockets, it doesn't gather, in very— Except in very rare cases, whole peoples together anymore. The family has broken down. Tradition, the western tradition, I mean, a huge part of her writing, what I call in the title of the book, a broken world, she calls the shattering of the western tradition, which— By which she means that, you know, for most of— You know, for humans can't think all the time. None of us can. We depend upon traditions, rules, guardrails, banisters to give us a sense of how we should act and things like that. And she says, these traditions are broken. They've shattered. We no longer can count on them. And in fact, when people count on rules and traditions, they often end up doing things like genocide or, you know, or in either both Russia or— And Germany or, you know, following, you know, a an illegal regime to do terrible things. And, you know, people are experiencing that around the world today. So we've lost these banisters, and yet we're these lonely, atomistic individuals. And so for her, the real problem, the fundamental political problem of our age is not, you know, housing or immigration or any of our environment even. It's meaningfulness. She's like, if you're going to fight the great difficulties and dangers of our time and which is movements and fascist and totalitarian movements which give people meaning, you're going to have to provide a way absent totalitarianism and fascism through plurality and democracy of giving people a sense that their lives are meaningful. And so what I think the reason you— For your— To answer your question, the reason she's so popular today, and not everyone gets it right, but still popular, is she does two things. She is merciless in tearing apart the, the way— And showing the brokenness and hypocrisies and problems of our world. But she is also adamant in her belief that we can build meaningful, just, plural, political lives and structures that can reimagine a new world, and make it a world that we love. And her word for this is Amor Mundi, which has sort of become a catchphrase to some people. But to love the world. And she's adamant that we can— We still have it within us as human beings, to create a world that we can love.

00:17:42 Andrew Keen: Roger, two of her closest friends and teachers, probably the two— Perhaps the two most dominant men in her life, her father died young, was the German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who was her teacher, and, of course, Martin Heidegger. The Heidegger, we've already mentioned him, very controversial philosopher, obviously, her, her great love in her life, or amongst her great loves in her life, both are thought of as existential philosophers. In your focus on Arendt's stress on meaningfulness or maybe the meaninglessness of modern life, does that make her— If we're trying to categorize her, I know she's uncategorizable. But if she's associated with any school at all, might it be the existential school? Certainly the German existential school.

00:18:38 Roger Berkowitz: So— Yes. I mean, she is an existential thinker, without doubt. You know, I'm not sure she— I'm not sure it makes sense or is helpful to associate her with a school because, as you said, she really is a unique thinker and very much, on her own. I don't think, I don't think she's someone who fits in any school. But, you know, if you think of existence as simply standing out, right, existing outside, it's very much related to transcendentalism or transcending to step out of or step across. Arendt is a transcendental thinker in the sense that she rejects metaphysics, she rejects religion as a transcendent to a higher truth. But she says very clearly in her work, The Human Condition, and I think it stands for all of her work, there is no politics without what she calls an earthly transcendence. For her, the whole work of politics of creating a meaningful world is how to step out of our own world, our own self, our solipsistic self, even our bourgeois self. Right? One of the great mistakes she thinks of liberal— Liberalism or at least the way it's practiced is that we wanna be free from politics to pursue our private lives or our work lives or whatever. For her to live as a human, you have to step outside of your solipsism into a common world, into a public world where you can speak and act with others, and you talk to each other, and you tell stories with each other. And it's those stories and tales and talkings that build a common world. So, yeah, she is absolutely, a transcendental thinker. You know, many ways, it's related to both Jaspers and Heidegger, as you rightly said. Her critique of Heidegger on this level is that for Heidegger, the existence, is a standing out in a clearing in which one confronts the fated Geschick. It's called the Geschick des Seins, the fate of being, and you have to, in a sense, be in conversation with being. And she said— You know, for her, that is way too solipsistic and philosophical. Right? She's not a philosopher. She rejects that. For her, it's just— It's not to stand out and be in this relation to being. It's to stand out and be in relation to others, to a plurality, to people. And it's in that standing out in a plural world of appearance that one talks and listens and fights in the sense of, you know, arguing and builds. And that's her idea of politics. So it is a transcendental politics, but it's not a— It's neither a metaphysical transcendence or a solipsistic transcendence.

00:21:46 Andrew Keen: I mentioned her essay, We Refugees, earlier. I wonder whether the irony of Arendt is on the one hand, as you know, she wrote about the meaninglessness of life and the need for us to have meaningfulness through community. And she associated that not just with totalitarianism, with modern life, maybe modern liberal life. And yet Arendt herself, maybe as a refugee, never suffered from this. If I was making a film about her, which I'm sure I never will, it would begin with her when she first came to America, I think, just after the war. You mentioned she was a refugee before the war, but she was a refugee in France and then Spain. And it would be her coming into New York carrying the work of her dear friend, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide during the war in terms of maintaining the tradition. And, of course, that's not just, a metaphor. It's literal. She brought that high end, highly sophisticated tradition of German thinking, of Jaspers, of Benjamin, even of Heidegger to New York, and she created that world. I think you wrote about it in your book as a phrase, and she surrounded herself with these people. So my question is if that's right, is she— Did she recognize in herself an example of the antidote to modern loneliness?

00:23:32 Roger Berkowitz: It's an interesting question. And I, you know, I don't know. I don't think she would have thought of herself as the antidote. I mean, it's a bit much.

00:23:42 Andrew Keen: But Well, I don't mean literally an antidote. Everyone takes a Hannah Arendt serum. But did she see that ironically, at— Because she'd been so persecuted and because she was a refugee Yeah. She'd somehow sidestepped much of what she wrote about.

00:24:05 Roger Berkowitz: You know, I don't think so, but I think what I'd say is this. She saw that she had a decision to make. I mean, Hannah Arendt's another one of her main— Her real interesting and important ideas is we have to make judgments. She could have turned bitter and internal. But she made a judgment to figure out how to love the world. Right? And I think— And so you could say that's where, you know, she is a model for other people, and I think she is. I'm not— You know, I don't think she ever— I don't know of her ever saying, I'm a model. Right? I— Look at how I'm doing it. You can follow me. I just don't think she thought that way. I think she was living her life, and she was trying to live her life in the best way possible. She did understand that, you know, she wrote that essay, We Refugees, which is a haunting— It's only five or six pages, but it's a haunting essay. And, you know, she talks about how so many of her friends are committing suicide and how profoundly, disorienting and, really, just existentially unsettling their lives are as refugees where they have to start over. And yet she was able to, and I think she would say that one of the main reasons she was able to is her circle of friends. She, I mean, she will go down as one of the last great letter writers in human history. I mean, because now no one writes letters. I mean, she has thousands of letters to, to her friends all over the world. And she says, you know, I'm a refugee. I'm not a German. I'm not an American. I'm not a Jew. I have nothing. I love no one but my friends. And her friends became her world. And it's through these friendships, often of which were very— You know, she disagreed with them about a lot of things, and they yelled and they argued. And she would often say, I'm not a very easy person to get along with. And it's very true. She's not. But she insisted that they hear her, and she heard them. And she built these incredibly strong bonds, what she called homelands. Right? She calls these little friendships her homelands. And I think that's— You know, I think the book really makes these two arguments. One is that as a human being in this world, we need these homelands. We need friends with whom we share a world to build a human world. That's how we build a world in which we find some meaning and place in the world. And then the second argument is that as you— That the same way we build friendships with other persons in one-to-one— You know, she says, it has to be through conversation. One to one, no screens, no feeds, one-to-one. And in that building a world, it takes time, and then it takes respect. I have to respect your opinions, and you have to respect mine. And she says then there's this thing called civic friendship. And, you know, you believe in abortion, and you vote for, you know, MAGA, and I vote for another someone, and I believe in no abortion. Whatever it is, we argue. We talk. And you know what? We disagree. But we're gonna agree about a lot more than we disagree about. And if we can hold on to what we agree on and build on that foundation, we can start to build a homeland, a world we share that's a political world. And so I think she did see herself, at least in her private friendships, as a model for that. I don't think she saw herself as a model for that politically because she wasn't a very political person. She didn't— She was a thinker. She thought about politics, but she was not really very active, in politics with really only, two or three exceptions in her life. In nineteen thirties in France, she got involved in the Zionist cause and helped bring Jewish kids to Palestine. And then she, was involved in the anti-McCarthy, movement in the United States in the nineteen fifties.

00:28:31 Andrew Keen: When she got swept— I mean, probably not out of choice. She got swept into politics through her Eichmann in Jerusalem book, but that's—

00:28:41 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. I mean, she didn't see that as politics. She said she went and covered a trial. She reported on it. She told the truth, and then people went crazy. That's how she saw it. But she didn't think of that as a political book.

00:28:53 Andrew Keen: In terms of being a refugee as well, Roger, she never had kids. She was married a couple of times. Her— She lost her father early, and she— And correct me if I'm wrong. My sense is she didn't have very good relations with her mother. Her mother came after the war to live with her in New York, then she left and died when she was in the UK. So do you think one of the reasons why friendship was so important was that for one reason or other family wasn't quite as central in her life as in some other people?

00:29:28 Roger Berkowitz: It's possible. Yeah. I mean, you're right. Her father died early. I think that was a big event in her life. I mean—

00:29:34 Andrew Keen: Tragically. Well, he had an unfortunate disease.

00:29:39 Roger Berkowitz: Yes. Yeah. One of those. Yeah. And I think her mother— I mean, I have the impression that she was close to her mother at times. I mean, she had a huge amount of respect from her mother. She talks about her in reverent tones in many, many instances. But I think, I think you're right. When her— After they got to United States, you know, I think it was hard for her mother to live with Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher. And, and they eventually, she did leave and go to England. You know, I wouldn't— I don't think it's— I don't usually psychoanalyze Arendt or in this way, and I'm not saying you are. I think she was someone who felt, that she had to build a world. Her world had been broken. She thinks the world is broken, and she built it through her friendships. Would it have been different if she had a very strong family life? Yeah. It probably would have. I mean, but Heinrich Blücher, right, her second husband, who along with Heidegger and Jaspers, I would say, are the three most important peep— Men in her lives. I mean, the fourth would be Hans Jonas. But, you know, these were all older men. Right? Blücher was also older. And by the way, Kurt Blumenfeld, who was also about twenty years older than her, was another one of her close friends. She had a lot of, as, you know, you might call father replacement figures, people who were older men who she was deeply, connected with in her life.

00:31:24 Andrew Keen: Although she pissed off, I mean, both Blumenfeld and Jonas weren't particularly happy with—

00:31:31 Roger Berkowitz: Her husband [unclear]. Happy with the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, although Jonas and she reconciled. He— And he gave the eulogy at her funeral. We still don't know. I mean, I write about this quite at length in the book. We still don't know if in the end she and Blumenfeld reconciled or not. It's a private conversation that— As far as we can tell, she never spoke to anyone about again. Or if Right. You know, no one Yep. You know?

00:31:57 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Blücher, her husband, the— One of the three dominant men in her life along with Jaspers and Heidegger. And, of course, the reason why the Arendt Center is at Bard is because he taught at Bard. He was a completely different character from Arendt, not well educated from a different part of Germany, an ex-communist, a big man, literally and metaphorically, I guess. What does her relationship with Blücher tell us about friendship, marriage, and the world that she was creating? I think she once wrote or she wrote— Maybe you mentioned it in the book that for her, Blücher was the world.

00:32:41 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. He— Yeah. I mean, Blücher was her four walls as she put it.

00:32:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The four walls. It's a lovely way of putting it. I mean, she was even though— I mean, I don't know whether she wrote that in German or English, but the fact that she wrote in English is another astonishing thing. Maybe we can talk about language later, but gone.

00:33:00 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. Well, we should come back to that. It's a great topic. Yeah. So Blücher was, not Jewish. He was, as you said, not educated. He was a strong Spartacist, communist street fighter at one point, and, you know, very quick to anger and very masculine.

00:33:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. They met in Paris. They were both exiles from Nazism.

00:33:25 Roger Berkowitz: Exactly. And, you know, so as a— As an example of her friendships, it's a good one, and I obviously write a lot about it in the book. They give each other a lot of space. First of all, they have an initial love affair, and there's this quick love. And Hannah, she makes this distinction in her writing between love and friendship, and she says love is not political. Love is— You know, when you're in love, it's like a blitz. It's like a lightning flash. We all know it. You know? Love at first sight. When two people are in love, they mold into one. They can't— The whole world fades away. And so— But that— I think she had that experience with him, but she also was married to him. And for her, marriage was something quite different. It was a friendship. It was— You know, he had affairs. She knew about the affairs.

00:34:25 Andrew Keen: Well, that didn't— I didn't think it thrilled her, did it?

00:34:27 Roger Berkowitz: It didn't thrill her, but it wasn't the deal— It wasn't a deal breaker. And for her, what mattered was that he loved her and supported her and respected her. She— You know, I have this chapter on her and her women friends as well, and all of her women friends have affairs. And—

00:34:49 Andrew Keen: But that's slightly different from your husband.

00:34:52 Roger Berkowitz: It is. But her approach to them all is, look, you have to— You know, your— A friendship means you talk to each other, you respect each other, you build a common world, but it doesn't mean for her that you, that you have to become one person, that you have to share a bank account, that you not— Never have secrets, that you— You know, everything is transparent. She doesn't— She's not of that sort of modern friendship school or love school where you have to tell everybody everything. And for her, and then this relates to her idea of friendship in politics. Right? Is— You can be a— You can— You know, in your home, you can practice Wicca, and you could— You can be a white nationalist or a, you know, a or a fundamentalist of some sort as long as if you are in public, you respect people, you treat people according to the laws, and you act as a good citizen. And so she has a much more, open, pluralistic idea of what it means to build a common world than I think we do today.

00:36:08 Andrew Keen: Although, is there a danger, Roger, that we're diluting her into this sort of centrist or listen to— To talk to people you don't agree with, and then at the end, you disagree, and then you hug Braver Angels. I don't know if you know that organization. We've done lots of shows on that, and I'm always— I— I'm— My sense is that Arendt wouldn't have joined Braver Angels.

00:36:35 Roger Berkowitz: No. I mean, well, I happen to like Braver Angels, but—

00:36:38 Andrew Keen: I mean, so do I, but I still don't see her as liking it very much.

00:36:42 Roger Berkowitz: No. I mean, one of the things I'm constantly trying to remind people is that my book is not a book about civility. It's a book about friendship. And I don't think friendship and civility are the same thing. I— You know, you can— She's not a centrist. You know? So— And by the way, there is a chapter at the— There's just two chapters at the end of the book, right, about the limits of friendship. Right? Who are the people you can't be friends with? And how do you make those decisions? And so she talks a lot about this. Right? You know, who are the people that can't be on your homeland that you have to just say, you know what? You wanna be friends with me, but, no, it's better a millstone be tied around your neck.

00:37:32 Andrew Keen: And exhibit a on that, my guess is, I think you may have noted this, would have been Eichmann. And that was his— That was her critique of Eichmann. That's what raised so much. And because she didn't present him as a monster, as just this sort of mindless, faceless, pathetic bureaucrat.

00:37:50 Roger Berkowitz: No. That's right. For her, the way she thinks about this is through what— Is through reconciliation. And what she says is, you know, Eichmann, you know, Eichmann was a normal guy. He— In a different age, he would have been your average civil servant, and no one would have known about him, and he would have done his thing. But he didn't live in a normal age. And he became a willing and obedient, servant and supporter of mass murder and bureaucratic genocide. And she's like, nothing against Eichmann, but I can't live in a world in which people who support and commit genocide, are just let back into the world and part of my homeland and part of the world. And so she says, I can't reconcile with that. I can't love a world in which someone like Eichmann is just forgive— You know, brought back into the world, and so he must die. You know, there are friends, someone like— Some people like Benno von Wiese [ed.: von Wiese was a literary scholar, not a lawyer] who'd been lawyers and who had been friends with her, studied with, Carl Jaspers, became lawyers, served in the Nazi party the whole time till 1945. And then after the war, wrote to her and said, you know, let's be friends. And she's like, no. You know? I mean—

00:39:10 Andrew Keen: Although she did. I mean, with Heidegger, the Heidegger stuff still to me is a little odd that after the war, she went back and they'd spent some time together. Is it that she just never really got over Heidegger emotionally?

00:39:23 Roger Berkowitz: So I so, I mean, I write a lot about this in the book, you know, and I think I write about it differently than other people, so I hope people will take a look. You know, I spent a large part of my life reading Heidegger. And before I was ever reading Arendt, I was reading Heidegger. You know, I think Arendt looks at Heidegger in a number of different ways. She looks at him as a coward. She looks at him as someone who, was politically, wildly naive. She thinks he had some bad ideas, and was cowardly. But as— You know, she writes in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she has two chapters in the imperialism section. One called "Race-Thinking Before Racism" and the other called "Race and Bureaucracy". And in the race thinking chapter, she looks at all these early eighteenth and nineteenth century racists. I mean, racial thinkers. People who thought, you know, Germans were better than French or French better than German or Aryans are better than, you know, whatever. And she looks at all of them, and she says, look. In these thinkers, if you actually read them, right, there's all sorts of interesting opinions. Some are stupid. Some are good. And they may have led later and may have helped lead into racism. And racism is when you actually think people who are of a different race should be killed or enslaved or discriminated against. But these people weren't racist in that sense. They were people who saw the word world racially, which was, you know, an opinion, different from racism. I think what she thinks of Heidegger is he had a lot of opinions. He had a lot of ideas, but he never, ever saw, embraced biological racism or biological Nazism and never certainly embraced, the kind of, you know, genocide or anything like that happen. He went— And on a personal relationship, when he first came to see her after the war, he got down on his knees and said, I'm turning myself in, and he apologized. You know, for her, reconciliation can only happen in a two-sided relationship. The person who's done the wrong has to admit they're wrong, and the person who was wronged has to be willing to say, even if I don't forgive you for what you did, I'm willing to love the world with you in it and reconcile to you being in my life.

00:41:56 Andrew Keen: It's forgiveness because I know Jaspers never forgave.

00:42:00 Roger Berkowitz: She makes a distinction between forgiveness. She says that all— She says that forgiveness suggests that I could've— You know, she thinks of forgiveness in a Christian way, right, which is, I could've done what— You know, don't throw stones because we could all— Could've done it. And she's like, no. I don't forgive you. You were— You— What you did was wrong. I wouldn't have done it, and I don't forgive you. I'm not forgiving you. She says, I can reconcile with the— What you've done in the world. It's a much more worldly idea than forgiveness, which is a more moral idea.

00:42:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I think Jaspers never forgave Heidegger because Heidegger went after— Was it Jaspers because he had a Jewish wife? So—

00:42:40 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. Jaspers never forgave Heidegger and never reconciled with Heidegger. And in fact, one of the, biggest fights Arendt and Jaspers ever had, was Arendt is visiting Jaspers in the nineteen fifties in Switzerland, and she writes to her husband and said, you know, he's on and he's on about the Heidegger thing again because Jaspers wants her to disown her relationship to Heidegger. And she's like, we'll see if we can get by it. And then she writes on the next one and says, we had the greatest conversation in the world. You know, we really had it out. We yelled at each other. And, you know, he accepts that I'm going to keep Heidegger in my world, and I accept that he's not. And that was, you know, her that was her way of friendship. Right? You have to respect me. And, you know, when she once sent, Gershom Scholem her essay on Zionism, Scholem's a big Zionist. Zionist write— You know, Scholem writes back and says you betrayed the Jewish people, and it's not a crazy view. I mean, it's 1946. It's not even in the state of Israel. You know, you just had a genocide. People are— The ashes are still warm as we say. And, you know, she's saying I— I'm no longer a Zionist in certain ways. And what she says to him is, you know, we can have the argument if you want, and I'm happy to have it. But in the end, we're friends. And a human being is worth more than his opinions. That's one of my favorite lines in all of Arendt's writing. It's in this letter to Scholem. And she says to him, look. You're a man. And I understand that a lot of men cannot abide by the fact that people disagree with them and won't be persuaded by them. But you have to decide if you're gonna be my friend or not. And if you're my friend, you have to let me have my opinions, and you can't act like a man. And, I think that's how she thought about all of these things.

00:44:34 Andrew Keen: Interesting. You keep on talking about men. Of course, you noted earlier she had female friends. Some of them had quite unusual lives in terms of their love lives. The woman who's perhaps most associated in terms of friendship is the American writer, Mary McCarthy. It's, again, a wonderful story that when they first met after the war, McCarthy made some joke about the Holocaust, which Arendt was furious about. And then maybe a few months or a few years later—

00:45:05 Roger Berkowitz: Few years. Yeah.

00:45:07 Andrew Keen: On a metro station in New York, Arendt went up to McCarthy. I wouldn't say apologize, but said something like, well, let's get over this. We need to be friends because we share so much. So what is that? I mean, that incident seems to say, on the one hand, she wasn't always arguing about existentialism with Jaspers or Heidegger. She had a female sensibility as well, but it also speaks of forgiveness and the ability to move on.

00:45:39 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. I mean, she has an ability to move on. I mean, I'm— Maybe I'm being too cute here. I've written a lot about the difference between reconciliation and forgiveness in Arendt's work, and so I'm resisting the word forgiveness. And I— And maybe I don't need to in this conversation.

00:45:58 Andrew Keen: Well, in that sense with McCarthy, she just made a joke about the Holocaust, which, is probably excusable.

00:46:05 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. No. I think in this point, Arendt was, you know Right.

00:46:08 Andrew Keen: It's different from Heidegger, who, actually, was a member of the party.

00:46:11 Roger Berkowitz: That's right. I mean, I think you have to remember Arendt, you know, comes to New York. She's a refugee. She doesn't have citizenship. And, you know, I mean, she's also still— She sees herself as a representative of Jews, and she's hanging out with all these very patrician, you know, WASPs, can I say? And she—

00:46:32 Andrew Keen: Feels allowed to say WASPs on my show.

00:46:34 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. And she feels the need to stand up and say, you guys have to, you know, understand what happened to us. Right? I mean, she's being— She's representing as we say today. And, I think she then realized that McCarthy was much more interesting than she had given her credit for, and she's like, we should be friends. We just share too much in common, and we agree on too much, and we like each other too much. So, yeah, then they become very close friends. And, I mean, the beauty of her relationship with McCarthy is— I mean, it's the only collection of letters published between Arendt and another figure who's not a man. And, the letters with McCarthy are both political and intellectual. They talk about politics. They talk about philosophy. They talk about the world of ideas, but they also talk about very, personal, you know, one could say girly stuff. And, and they also talk about all of McCarthy's affairs. And—

00:47:34 Andrew Keen: And there are a lot of them. Aren't there? There are a—

00:47:36 Roger Berkowitz: Lot of them and a lot of marriages and a lot of affairs. And you really do see Arendt, in this way of being a friend who has her own views, but really gives McCarthy the space to be who she is. And I think that's one of the things Mary McCarthy loved about Hannah Arendt.

00:47:56 Andrew Keen: Roger, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Turkish writer, Ece Temelkuran. She's an old friend of mine and of the show. Her latest book is, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century. She's a Turkish refugee living in Germany. She's lived in Croatia. And, actually, blurbing the book, Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek, economist, said, she— I'm quoting. He said, Ece Temelkuran with her beautiful elegiac new book on becoming unhomed is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt. I'm not sure anyone will be the new Hannah Arendt. But fast forwarding— Fast forwarding now, what's the value of her theory of friendship in our— In what you call our broken world? Is it an alternative? I mean, Temelkuran presents love, in her work as a kind of alternative political philosophy. Arendt wrote extensively on love. She, of course, her earliest, work was on Augustine and love. Is there a— I know Arendt eludes most categories, but what's the relevance of her theory of friendship in 2026?

00:49:16 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. No. I mean, that's what the— You know, the book is about really two things. One is about friendship, and the other is why it matters today both on a personal level, but also politically. And the answer is, and I know you've written and thought a lot about this in your work. You know, I think many people today think that the problem with our politics today is misinformation or, truthiness as Stephen Colbert once put it or the fact that we don't have truth. Arendt doesn't think that's the problem, and I don't either. And, you know, in many ways, this book began about twenty years ago when I, probably for the fourth or fifth time, but the first time I paid attention to it, read in her book— In her essay, "The Crisis in Culture". She's talking about humanism. And she says, what humanism is not specialized knowledge. You know? And the problem with too many humanists today is they're doing specialized jargonistic whatever. And she says, what humanism is a story told over time about what it means to be human. And so she then provides two Roman quotes. One is, that, you know, I— I'm friends with Plato, and I'm friends with Socrates, but I'm more of a friend to the truth. And she attributes this as a Roman commonplace, and she says this is just wrong. And the other one is from Cicero, and she says, I would rather go astray with Plato and my friends than be right with my enemies. And, you know, when I first really struggled with this quote, I was like, really? You'd rather be wrong with your friends and right— Than right with your enemies? What is she saying? And it's— It took me twenty years to write the book. I didn't— Not literally, but in a way, that's the— That was the germ. And what I think she's saying is that, we have come to the belief that what will give us a utopia, what will lead to a good politics is if we all agree. And she says the root of this is Plato in his rejection of, the verdict of Socrates. And when he sees how the many, put Socrates to death for his— For what he's done, Plato says we can't trust the many. And for Arendt, that means we can't trust politics. We can't trust the people to do politics. And so Plato says we need to invent the philosopher king who will know the truth and then go back to the cave and either teach the people or mislead the— You know, provide myths so that they'll follow him either way. And she says the entire history of political thought from Plato to Marx till today is largely about, a distrust of politics, a fear of politics. And, and the idea being that if we can just get people to know the facts, to know the truth, teach them well, they will do the right thing, and we will all live happily ever after. She just doesn't believe that. She believes that people are different. People are plural. There are fundamentally different approaches to the world. And even if you know all the right facts and you're as educated as you can be and you both go to Harvard and you learn everything, you could still be a Trump supporter and a not Trump supporter. And she really does believe that this is the way of the world and that it— And that therefore the entire premise of politics and fixing politics that we have to get better education, better knowledge, better facts is a fool's game. In her mind, the way that we build a better politics is through friendship, which she calls— You know, what she says is you have to learn to talk to people and broaden your perspective, and they broaden their perspective. And, yeah, you're gonna disagree. But she does believe, and this is her optimism, right, that we're gonna agree on more than we disagree. And as long as you don't do terrible things like Eichmann or, you know, we can talk about who we would exclude from politics today, As long as you don't, you can still build a world with them. And so—

00:53:45 Andrew Keen: Is friendship then—E. M. Forster famously made the remark that he hoped. Yeah. He— In What I Believe, he would, he values friendship over patriotism. He said, if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country is in a sense creating friendship as an alternative ideology, if that's the right word, to patriotism.

00:54:27 Roger Berkowitz: Well, it's not an ideology because, as you know, she's her whole—

00:54:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, an anti-ideology then.

00:54:33 Roger Berkowitz: Right. Well, I mean, I think friendship could become an ideology in a way that she would reject it. For her, friendship is a judgment. Right? I mentioned before that judgment is central to her way of thinking. You have to judge who your friends are. And, you know, it's very possible that you make a mistake and, you know, she's not an absolutist about this like maybe E. M. Forster hoped he would be. You know, she had been friends with Benno von Wiese, and then after the war, she said, Basta. Right? No. You know, if you can learn new things about your friends that maybe, make you, change your mind. But in general, she thinks— I mean, I think that the— One of the easiest ways I have to put her, the way I often put it to people is, you know, your uncle who thinks what you— The wrong opinion about bathrooms or athletes in swim meets or, ICE, or whatever is generally not Eichmann. We have a tendency to turn everyone we disagree with into an [unclear]. And I— Arendt— You know, her view is there's a lot bigger, there's a lot— A much bigger, realm of acceptable opinion than we usually, believe. Now there's a difference in opinion and action. And, you know, there are things— Once you start doing things and even supporting people who do things, there are— There's the potential that, you know, I will judge that I can't reconcile and love a world in which you're in it. But, at least on the level of opinion, she's pretty encompassing. And then it comes down to a matter of judgment. You know, have— If you're a— If you work for ICE and you wear a mask and you, you know, participate in these raids in which you're really dehumanizing people who've lived here for twenty and thirty years and have children here and have built a life here. In my view, you're simply acting in a way that is incompatible with what my vision of America. And I have a pretty expansive view of America. And I understand that America's done a lot of terrible things in its history, and we've had a lot of anti-immigrant times in our history and a lot of different, you know, racist and other things. But to me, there are limits, and those limits come in actions. So, yeah, I don't think it's an ideology. I think it's a matter of judgment. I try in the book to give what I consider to be the criteria for how one makes that judgment, you know, through this idea of reconciliation and exploring what I take her to mean by reconciliation. And I make some judgments with her, but I try and not make judgments about, people today simply because I wanna give people the freedom to make their own judgments.

00:57:42 Andrew Keen: Couple more questions, Roger. You've been very generous with your time. I wonder— You know, she wrote, of course, a book called The Human Condition. But I wonder if it's in The Human Condition that we can— Sorry. That it's in friendship that we can make sense of our human condition. There are people out now in Silicon Valley who think we can live forever, and, of course, we can't. I was always very intrigued by— When she was older, she became friendly with the British poet, W. H. Auden. But I think she made the remark that she could never be too close to him because they were too old to be intimate friends. Is in friendship, maybe we see, if not the tragedy of life, certainly, any argument against immortality that friendship reflects is the essential sort of component of our mortality.

00:58:35 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. I mean, she has a six pages at the beginning of The Human Condition distinguishing immortality, from eternity and, coming down on the side of immortality rather than eternity. But the Auden quote is great. Right? Because she says, look, Auden and I met too late in life to become friends. They don't— They knew each other for twelve years. And—

00:59:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And he even suggested they got married, and she— I think you have the story in your book of how she and McCarthy went over to his home to clean it out because it was so disgustingly dirty.

00:59:11 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. He— He was notoriously a complete slob, and he— Yeah. She and McCarthy showed up as maids to clean his house.

00:59:18 Andrew Keen: I hope they were dressed like maids too.

00:59:21 Roger Berkowitz: You know, I've heard this— The story is told to me by someone who knew them. It changes over time, so I don't know how reliable the dress story is. But I— I'm pretty confident in the story itself. You know, in the book, Arendt has— Arendt's not a theorist. Right? She doesn't have theories, but— So she doesn't have a theory of friendship. But I do identify what I call the three elements of friendship that she talks about. And one is I talked earlier about conversation and in conversation building a homeland. Another I talked about is respect. But the third is time, duration.

00:59:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah.

00:59:58 Roger Berkowitz: And she makes a big deal with this. She says over and over again, there's no such thing as a two-week-old friendship. And, you know, I think some people would take issue with that. She says about Auden, I only knew him for twelve years. It's not long enough. I think what she means, and I thought a lot about this in writing the book. I have a college-age child who, you know— And I've tried to explain to them why I think college is important even though I don't think intellectually it's that important. And, and, basically, I finally said to them, it's because the people who I've met, who become my friends and are friends in my life, most of them I met through college. And so my very precocious child said, you wanna pay $80,000 a year so I can make some friends? And I said, yeah. I mean, I do. And I think what— I thought a lot about it. You know, it's at that age when you're open and you're staying up late and you're drinking and maybe you commit a couple crimes here and there, you build the stories. You build a world in which for your whole life, you'll always be able to go back to that and build that homeland, that common world. You know, when you're older and you, you know, you're traveling around the world and you're, you know, you're busy and you've got jobs and you got kids and families or whatever it is, it's harder to do that. And I think it— I mean, I'm 58 years old. It becomes harder and harder to make good friends later in life. You really have to try. You know, I went through this about ten years ago where I live in New York City, and I just realized a lot of my closest friends had moved out of the city or had died. And I didn't have a lot of male friends that I could go to a baseball game with. And so I made a list, and I started calling people up. So let's go out once a month for six months, and let's just talk. And, you know, two of them became good friends. But you have to make an effort. You have to really try as you get later in life. And I think Arendt was referring to that in that conversation with Auden.

01:01:59 Andrew Keen: Final question, Roger. Being— As I said, very generous with your time. There's so much here to talk about. I have to get you back on, do another Arendt show. Her book, The Human Condition, is important, I think, or remains important because it write— The heart of the book, I think, is about labor and the value of labor, maybe the value of love or of work and action. In our age now where labor might be replaced by AI when we have this mechanized intelligence that supposedly will make, I don't know, intelligence maybe abundant one way or the other. Should we think of friendship as a kind of labor, as a consequence of labor, as we begin to figure out what we do in this jobless, workless future where machines do all the heavy lifting, could friendship again— I know we're— You— You're a bit cautious about creating Arendtian political theories, but could friendship have a particular significance in, in our AI age as we slip and slide into it? Some of us fear the worst. Others are excited.

01:03:26 Roger Berkowitz: I actually fully believe that. Yes. You know, I think that AI poses obviously great opportunity and great dangers. We can— I know you know all about this, and we can go into it. I've written a— You know, I had— I know you're a fan of Sherry Turkle as am I. I, Yeah.

01:03:43 Andrew Keen: Sherry was on the, show earlier this week.

01:03:46 Roger Berkowitz: Yeah. And I thought it was a great episode. I invited Sherry to a conference I did in 2010 called Human Being in an Inhuman Age. And we had Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle, and some other people. It was an amazing exploration of what's gonna be— What is it gonna mean to be human, well, now. And, and I think Sherry's work about the importance of human relationships, which non-artificial in— Intimacy, not being alone, I think her work is fantastic on this. I do think that, you know, Arendt says, for most of human history, for all of human history, three capabilities that all humans have done and needed to do to some extent were labor, work, and action. And, you know, but labor, you could always have other people labor for you. You could have slaves labor for you in a slave society. You could have, servants labor for you if you're inherited your money, and you can have now robots or chatbots labor for you. She doesn't think that will prevent us from being humans in human nature, but it is gonna change the human condition, because part of what it meant to be human was that we had to do some work. We had to toil in some way. That said, every generation from Greeks to the present of humans has wanted to free itself from labor. Labor was never considered to be, you know, the great thing, and yet Arendt thinks it's mixed. But I think, as labor recedes, in its importance, I think we're going to have to find other activities that provide deep meaning and, and give us a sense of value and importance in our lives. And to me, friendship, is absolutely, I think one of the most important human capacities. And I think, I've tried to argue in the book. It's important as both a personal intimate level, but also in politics. So, yes, that's very much what the book's about, and I've written a lot about AI in regard to friendship on— Exactly on those terms.

01:06:03 Andrew Keen: There you have it. A World We Share by Roger Berkowitz. Pretty interesting book about fascinating political thinker and a fascinating person, Hannah Arendt and the power of friendship in a broken world, enormously relevant today in our supposed epidemic of loneliness as we slip and slide into our smart machine future. Roger, thank you so much for your time. You've been very generous, and congratulations on the new book. It's a short book, and it's, I read it, I— And not Eichmann in Jerusalem. I read A World We Share very quickly. It's maybe not quite as controversial as Eichmann in Jerusalem, but, like Eichmann in Jerusalem, it's short and very readable. So thank you so much.

01:06:48 Roger Berkowitz: Thank you so much, Andrew. And I would love to come back on and talk about Arendt some more if that ever happens, but, I really enjoy the conversation.