Solidarity: Roger Berkowitz Opens the 20th Hannah Arendt Forum

 

Roger Berkowitz opened the 20th annual Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College with a deceptively simple question: “What are we fighting for?” The theme of this year's gathering, Solidarity, grew directly from last year's exploration of joy. Berkowitz argued that joy cannot remain a private experience. Loving the world means accepting responsibility for the people with whom we share it.

We live in an age when solidarity is proclaimed everywhere—with Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, immigrants, workers, and victims of injustice. Yet our common world seems increasingly fractured. Berkowitz asked whether our declarations of solidarity actually bring people together or simply reinforce the divisions between them.

His answer, drawn from Hannah Arendt, was that genuine political solidarity requires friendship. Not friendship understood as intimacy or agreement, but the willingness to share a world with people who think differently, challenge us, and sometimes disappoint us.

Berkowitz distinguished three responses to human suffering: pity, compassion, and friendship.

Pity, he argued, looks down upon suffering from above. Drawing on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, he described the Grand Inquisitor, who claims to love humanity while denying people their freedom. The Inquisitor offers bread and security in exchange for obedience. His pity becomes an instrument of domination.

Compassion is different. Dostoevsky's Jesus stands silently before the Inquisitor, offering unconditional love rather than judgment or coercion. Berkowitz quoted Augustine: Volo ut sis—“I want you to be.” Compassion recognizes another person's humanity without demanding that the person change.

But compassion alone cannot create political solidarity. It remains personal and largely silent. Politics requires speech, action, and participation in a common world.

Berkowitz turned to Arendt's experiences helping Jewish refugees in Paris during the 1930s. She discovered that refugees needed more than charitable assistance. They needed work, education, games, singing, reading, and discussion—activities through which people could recover their dignity, freedom, and joy.

He also drew on Arendt's On Revolution, contrasting the French Revolution's emphasis on relieving suffering with the American founders' effort to establish institutions of political freedom. Pity for the poor could justify coercion, while republican institutions offered citizens opportunities to speak and act together.

Friendship provides another possibility. Arendt believed that genuine political friendship emerges through conversation, particularly between people who disagree. Friends do not necessarily share opinions. They share a world and try to understand how that world appears to one another.

This does not mean overlooking evil. Berkowitz emphasized Arendt's insistence upon judgment rather than automatic forgiveness or moral condemnation. Some actions make reconciliation impossible. But judgment considers individuals and circumstances rather than dividing humanity into permanent categories of good and evil.

The forum's program of discussion, music, dancing, and shared experiences was intended to demonstrate this understanding of solidarity.

Berkowitz concluded by returning to Augustine, extending “I want you to be” into a political affirmation: “I want us to share a world.”

Solidarity, he argued, is not simply standing against injustice. It is the patient, difficult, and sometimes joyful work of building a common world with people who are different from ourselves.

Last week Berkowitz published A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, a fascinating exploration of Arendt's view of friendship and a life devoted to friendship and her friends.  I reviewed the book here.

A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.