Anyone else notice that both Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss espouse the virtue of solitude? (Thread)
It seems like Arendt faults mass culture’s tendency to thoughtlessness for sewing the seeds for totalitarianism and mob mentality. Eg Eichmann didn’t know how to be alone with his own thoughts...to maintain a dialogue with himself.
Interestingly, Strauss defines the philosopher as a person apart from the times. The thinker has more in common with other thinkers than with his or her contemporary society.
To be a philosopher one must hold society at a distance, cultivating a sense of solitude and also of independent mindedness.
Where Arendt and Strauss seem to diverge is on this:
For Arendt, everyone must aspire to solitude. The absence of solitude as a cultural value is politically catastrophic.
For Arendt, everyone must aspire to solitude. The absence of solitude as a cultural value is politically catastrophic.
For Strauss, only philosophers need be solitary. And in fact Machiavellian statecraft may require “reading the room” more than “building the future”: we should expect only rare souls to be solitary and to see the value of solitude.
Basically, Arendt thinks that if we don’t all become philosophers we are doomed. While Strauss thinks that we are sort of doomed and sort of not, no matter what, but that we are more doomed when we try to make everyone a philosopher.
The role that religion or revelation or law play in Strauss—as the foil to Reason—is this: those things require conformity; if everyone became a philosopher the world would stop running. Philosophy is the second story that rests on a non philosophical foundation.
Thus even solitary philosophers must go along to get along. And the problem with modern philosophers is that they lack respect for the importance of the non philosophical in holding society together. (Fin)
PS—where they agree (and where I might walk Strauss back) is on the importance of liberal (arts) education. Ironically, Arendt was skeptical of the endeavor, bc reading great books guarantees little. Strauss, thought that “gentlemen” ie ruling class, would be well formed by it.
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