A New Concept of Freedom

Roger Berkowitz

The 2024 Alpine Fellowship took place last weekend in Tuscany. The last three years the Hannah Arendt Center has had the opportunity to co-sponsor The Alpine Fellowship, a themed gathering of inquisitive people from all across the world. Very much like Arendt Center Conferences, The Alpine Fellowship picks a topic (this year it was “language”) and curates a series of discussions, talks, performances and workshops around that theme. Both these gatherings incorporate poetry, literature, philosophy, and the humanities to think deeply about our world. But the Alpine Fellowship also emphasizes a holistic approach to character, offering workshops in Yoga, Cranial Sacral healing, breathing work, the power of silence, and more. And the Alpine Fellowship brings its participants into nature, taking hikes and embracing early morning plunges into mountain lakes and rambling rivers. At the root of the Alpine Fellowship is the idea that any meaningful community depends on a strong and grounded sense of self. There is no political freedom without individuals capable of exercising freedom. 

How one teaches character, and if it can be taught, are important questions. Arendt herself connected character with the practice of thinking. It is thinking, she imagines, that might inspire a person to see the world from multiple perspectives and thus could free one from parochial prejudices and the lure of ideology, thus liberating man to embrace a broader common sense. It is in thinking that we let ourselves go wandering and think from the perspectives of many others—only then can modern men ground themselves in a common sense world that we share with others. For Arendt, character is something that emerges with the thinking person. Most often, Arendt argues, thinking is something that is only taught by example. But it is also possible to “exercise” our capacity for thought. Arendt’s essays in her book Between Past and Future are imagined as exercises in thinking. And it may be that engaging in thoughtful encounters with other persons and with oneself can also offers such exercises in thinking. 

Character, today, is sought in ways beyond thinking. One way to expand our minds and connect with a world beyond ourselves is through mindfulness and attention to the natural and spiritual worlds around us. By steeling our selves through silence, attentiveness, and awareness, the hope is that we ground ourselves in ways that make true community possible.

The reason the Alpine Fellowship’s mix of intellectual and holistic learning strikes me as important is because of what N.S. Lyons calls the “paradox of individual autonomy.” The paradox is simple. The more we live within large, bureaucratic, and increasingly automated systems of government, media, and social life, the more desperately we crave a kind of rebellious individualism that protects us from the rising uniformity and conformity of what Hannah Arendt called “the social.” But the reactive individualism that bureaucracy inspires leads, in turn, to the kind of loneliness and atomism that is attracted to mass totalitarian movements. 

The great German writer Ernst Jünger worried that “Man has immersed himself too deeply in [his] constructions,” that he has “lost contact with the ground. This brings him close to catastrophe, to great danger, toward destruction.” As I participated in the Alpine Fellowship this year, I thought of Ernst Jünger’s recognition that we are, today, confronted with a new kind of power that demands that we call forth a new experience of freedom. Jünger writes: