Arendt's dangerous thoughts
A note on the politics of solitude, isolation, and loneliness
As a follow up related to last week’s thoughts on The Zone of Interest, I promised to sketch out how Hannah Arendt distinguished between three very different conditions: solitude, isolation, and loneliness. (Let me note here that I am partly drawing on the excellent 2020 New Yorker article on this topic by Masha Gessen.)
It will quickly become apparent here how Arendt’s idea of loneliness makes it a much profounder—and even dangerous—thing than most of the current discussions of this topic imagine. She did not, however, offer political prescriptions and was famously a non-joiner of any ideologies or movements, her own experience having inoculated her to avoid such allegiances which usually worked to stop us from thinking—which is how so many modern atrocities were allowed to happen.
Interestingly, Arendt drew attention to the element of danger in the activity of thinking:
The notion that there exist dangerous thoughts is mistaken for the simple reason that thinking itself is dangerous to all creeds, convictions, and opinions.
Thinking—which should mean coming to truly understand the world—may work to unsettle everything we thought we believed. It may also lead us in the direction of Arendt’s own amor mundi—a love of the world.
Solitude: Where the silent dialogue of thinking happens.
The words resonates with a kind of relief that comes from having the privilege of self-isolation found in the stroll through the neighborhood, the comfortable reading chairs at the library, or a walk in nature. As the wonderfully philosophical poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Sometimes the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.”
Arendt notes that it is when we think in solitude that we can hear our internal conversation with ourselves—the “two-in-one”, as she called “the silent dialogue between me and myself.” This is the marvelous, irreplaceable condition in which we come to know our own identities which are confirmed in community by “the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.” We may be withdrawn temporarily from the world but we have a confidence in the world (in Arendt’s definition, a shared sense of reality) and in our ability to return to it in order to act together.
Isolation: The inability to act together with others.
This condition is related to solitude but is distinctly different because of its relation to our need to collaborate and cooperate in the world. In isolation, we are cut off from each other and therefore from any ability to act politically. We are rendered impotent, whether because are locked in a jail cell or because we have so few public spaces in which to gather and to do the real work of politics.
This impotence, as Arendt notes, may be the beginning of terror and is certainly its more fertile ground. It is always its result, given the way we know terror atomizes human society through a pandemic of fear and suspicion. With no connection to others, we can have no voice. Any sense of time and place is lost, any hope of being heard or seen.
Loneliness: The inability to act altogether, either with others or alone.
Near the end of her magisterial Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes that “loneliness is the defining condition of totalitarianism”. She links this mass condition to the modern world’s maladies of uprootedness (which she knew as a refugee—see her powerful essay “We Refugees”) and superfluousness (which she felt as a condition of refugees which no state wanted).
Loneliness is the condition in which we have no place in the world and nothing to give the world. It is also the condition in which we yearn to join a world in which we can be a member of something, ideally something much bigger than ourselves, such as a mass movement with a world-historical vision. Arendt’s describes Bolshevik and Nazi ideologies as examples of such a vision, the former reducing all reality to violent class struggle, the latter reducing it to a deadly quest for racial purity.
The connection between this analysis and the non-thinking of Nazi bureaucrats like Eichmann lies in Arendt’s idea that the state of loneliness robs our minds of the ability to perform anything beyond the merest self-evident, logical reasoning—i.e., the relentless logic of totalitarian thinking.
Eichmann’s self-professed concern for Jews being over-crowded in the box cars did not mean he was capable of questioning the very extermination process itself. Such ideas were almost literally “unthinkable” for those who now belonged to a cause which promised to cure their disconnectedness through membership in something greater than human life itself.
Thus “fixing loneliness” means nothing less than restoring the social, the world of human reciprocity and sharing. More than anodyne recommendations about hosting more Red State/Blue State conversations, it means addressing what people once referred to as root causes—such as the way we have allowed the economy to disembed itself from society over the last half-century, with results which are plain for all to see. This is the great work which lies in front of us.
[Note: If you’re embarking on reading any of Arendt’s works, an excellent resource is the video channel from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. You’ll find a series of hour-long webinars on each of her works, recorded at sessions of the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group.]
See you next time—peace.