Shortly before he died just over a year ago, Jerry Kohn called me up to discuss how we should mark the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s passing. As Arendt’s good friend, her last research assistant, and curator and editor of many of her books, Jerry was always concerned about preserving the honor and seriousness of Arendt’s legacy as a thinker. He worried that some groups would try to hijack the anniversary of her death for their own economic or political agendas. We agreed her death should be marked by events in which her brave and provocative thinking about the world was exemplified.
I believe Jerry would have been happy with what actually happened. On Thursday, December 4th, fifty years after Hannah Arendt died in her home with the opening page of the third volume of her last book The Life of the Mind in her typewriter, institutions around the world hosted talks, discussions, and memorials dedicated to keeping alive the spirit of her work. The commemorations this past week unfolded in unexpected corners of the world, placing Arendt’s questions in contexts she herself would have found startling.
I spent December 4th in, of all places, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where I presented a paper on “Truth and Power: How Philosophy Ruined Politics.” At the end of my talk, my Saudi commentator Dr. Hani al-Mulhim asked me to summarize my paper in a few sentences. I made four core points.
First, the core of the human condition for Arendt is to live a meaningful life, and a central part of a meaningful life is politics — the life of the polis in which we build a collective life together with others. We are, as Aristotle knew, political beings, gifted with language and capable of talking with others to compose a shared and meaningful world.
Second, Plato was the beginning of the philosophical antipathy to politics. Traumatized by the death of his teacher Socrates, Plato came to distrust politics governed by persuasion. What was needed was the philosopher king, someone who could leave the cave of the world of appearance and ascend to the supersensible world of ideas, a true world. Plato replaces the traditional Greek word for truth aletheia with orthos, the root of our English word orthodoxy. His conviction that truth known by the few should govern rather than the opinions of the many is the philosophical foundation for our modern belief in expert rule and technocratic government.
Third, the crisis in expertise and the loss of truth mean that in our post-truth moment we no longer have faith in experts to know the truth and govern accordingly. While some writers aim to restore the authority of experts and the foundations of expert-driven truth, Arendt does not believe such truths are possible in politics. She does insist on the importance of facts. But facts do not compel us. One can know the facts about rising temperatures around the world, and still disagree on the causes and best responses. One can know the facts of a contested election, and still disagree about whether the election was legitimate and who has won. Facts are necessary building blocks of a common world, but they are powerless and tell us very little.
Finally, Arendt’s politics seeks a new beginning, one that leaves behind our 2000 year history of a politics based on truth. Against Plato’s conviction that we should build our politics based on expert-driven knowledge, Arendt resurrects Aristotle’s forgotten view that the right bond of the polis is not truth but friendship. Building on arguments in my forthcoming book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, I argued that friendship — the practice of talking respectfully and honestly with people one fundamentally disagrees with — is what allows a pluralistic society to build the common sense and trust that underlies a shared political world.
There was a great, although too brief, discussion after my talk, but one question in particular stood out. It was a question I don’t think I would have received if I had been giving my talk to traditional audiences in the United States or Europe. A Saudi scholar — sadly I don’t know his name — asked, in essence: ‘But politics is about domination. How is it that politics can be founded on Friendship?’
It is the kind of question we all crave: honest, unexpected, and hard to answer. It made me happy that I had decided to travel around the world to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to present my thoughts on why Arendt’s thinking matters today. I was only given one minute to answer the question at the conference. But I have been thinking about it for two days. My answer, still in process, goes something like this.
The idea that politics is about domination actually goes back to Plato’s elevation of truth over opinion. It leads both to technocracy and also, in extremis, to totalitarianism. And it is an idea that Arendt spent her life trying to escape. In her Denktagebuch or book of thoughts, she famously asks: “Is there a way of thinking which is not tyrannical?” What would it mean to think freely, without submission to an orthodoxy or even to the idea of orthodoxy itself, the idea that we must submit to truth.
In her last book, The Life of the Mind, Arendt argues that thinking is not about the pursuit of truth, but is rather a quest for meaning. Philosophy, in the Platonic tradition, sees thinking as a way station to truth. The demand for truth leads to theories and concepts that make sense of the infinite complexity and plurality of life. The simplifications inherent in scientific laws are powerful, but they also require an overlooking of the particular, a focus on the general rule at the expense of the vibrant uniqueness of the particular. When human thinking is reduced to knowledge there is a necessary simplification of experience. We prefer the security of truth over the unpredictable and ungovernable meaning found in our unique perspective on the real confrontation with plurality.
It is true that we need truth and we need authority. But Arendt is searching for an understanding of truth that is neither orthodox nor exclusive. It is built on conversation and dialogue with others — a world held together not by correctness but by talking and listening, the willingness to let another’s perspective unsettle your own.
Arendt ends her essay “Truth and Politics” with the insight that while truth is out of place in politics, we still need truths. We need non-political spaces where truth is preserved. But such non-political institutions such as courts, newspapers, and scientific labs can only do so much. They can secure facts, but the facts do not build a common world. It is through politics that we build on the common world of facts to compose a meaningful world. In this sense, truth — metaphorically understood, is the ground we walk on and the sky above us. Truth may be a fable, but it is a fable without which we cannot live.
Arendt’s point is simple: if truth cannot rule and power cannot give us a world, friendship might. Friendship teaches us to see each other as more than our opinions, to stay in relation even when arguments fail, and to preserve the trust without which no common world can survive. Without friendship, even courts, newspapers, and universities become instruments of suspicion and struggle. With friendship, the world regains its coherence.
What Arendt finally offers is neither a new theory of truth nor a new technique of power, but a different starting point altogether. Politics cannot be founded on truth, because truth cannot compel a plural people; and it cannot be founded on power, because power without a world destroys the ground on which politics stands.
Friendship is Arendt’s wager that a common world can be built not through domination but through the ongoing work of speaking, listening, and staying in relation. It is an austere hope: that among people who disagree, the world can still appear, and appear in common. In a time when truth has lost its authority and power has lost its shame, that hope may be the most radical political idea we have left.
