Thursday, October 16, 2025 – Friday, October 17, 2025
Olin Hall OCTOBER 16-17, 2025
The Hannah Arendt Center's 17th annual fall conference on JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times will offer a crucial lens for finding meaning and connection amidst today's fractured world. Bringing together notable speakers with diverse narratives and insights at Bard College in Annandale, the conference will be a timely exploration of joy as a powerful force, and a vital conversation around fostering resilience.
Joy is at once more visceral and more risky than happiness. What brings you joy? Joy can emerge in a lover's gaze, in the transcendence of Beethoven's late sonatas, in the embrace of a once-wayward child. Joy is not mere happiness; nor is it satisfied contentment. Joy is the lasting delight we feel when touched deeply by what matters most.
What distinguishes joy is that in its effervescent grip, we are tied not simply to the moment but to a higher vision or meaning. Spinoza understood joy as the power to move closer to an end that is ultimately unreachable. In joy, we come closer to our dream of being one with the cosmos. We will fail, but joy is the feeling of closeness to the whole. There is no joy without belief in something meaningful beyond ourselves, be that the faith in a religion, a belief in progress, our being touched by love, or when we are inspired by the muses. Joy elevates us, rockets us out of the mundane.
It was Bertolt Brecht who asked whether it was wrong to feel joy in dark times. In his poem “To Posterity,” Brecht worries that “A conversation about trees is almost a crime/ For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!” As democracies falter, the planet burns, and AI reshapes our world, Brecht's question lingers: “He who laughs/ Has not yet received/ The terrible news." Is joy in dark times a betrayal, or a necessary act of defiance?
On one level, the question of joy in dark times asks: Can we truly love a world filled with evil, pain, and injustice? Hannah Arendt, whose thinking is at the heart of the center I run, knew well the horrors of totalitarianism and genocide. And yet, Arendt insisted that we must still find ways to love the world. After being arrested, exiled, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and made stateless for 18 years, Hannah Arendt asked in her thinking diary: “Why is it so hard to love the world?” And in a letter written to Karl Jaspers in 1955, while she is writing the book that will become the Human Condition, Arendt writes: “I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory ‘Amor Mundi.’”
In another sense, the question of joy in dark times asks how, at a time of atomization and mass loneliness, can we find the light in the world that inspires us to love the world as it is. Arendt found in the joyous proclamation of the Christian Bible that “A child has been born unto us,” the affirmation that even in the darkest of times, the roots of a new light can emerge. In this sense, joy is rooted in the deepest vision of faith, the idea that the human world is ultimately good.
To love the world without recourse to consoling ideologies or fanciful stories is to find joy amidst the sorrow. Joy isn’t about denial; it’s a conscious decision to embrace life as it is, to see the full picture without succumbing to despair, to see the present horror of a world torn apart and celebrate with the knowledge that the mended world will be even more glorious. At a moment when there is so much pessimism and flight from reality into fantasy, it is time to ask: How can we experience joy in these dark times?
Our collective inquiry into Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times, will ask:
• What is Joy?
• Is Joy possible without a belief in God or some higher power?
• Are the humanities and the arts a meaningful pathway to joy?
• Is the cultivation of joyfulness in dark times an abdication of responsibility?
• Does joy offer an antidote to the loneliness and purposelessness of modern life?
Above all, we ask, where does joy touch us today and how can we nurture it?
The full conference will be available via Live Webcast.
JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times
A Common Inquiry hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard CollegeOlin Hall OCTOBER 16-17, 2025
The Hannah Arendt Center's 17th annual fall conference on JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times will offer a crucial lens for finding meaning and connection amidst today's fractured world. Bringing together notable speakers with diverse narratives and insights at Bard College in Annandale, the conference will be a timely exploration of joy as a powerful force, and a vital conversation around fostering resilience.
Joy is at once more visceral and more risky than happiness. What brings you joy? Joy can emerge in a lover's gaze, in the transcendence of Beethoven's late sonatas, in the embrace of a once-wayward child. Joy is not mere happiness; nor is it satisfied contentment. Joy is the lasting delight we feel when touched deeply by what matters most.
What distinguishes joy is that in its effervescent grip, we are tied not simply to the moment but to a higher vision or meaning. Spinoza understood joy as the power to move closer to an end that is ultimately unreachable. In joy, we come closer to our dream of being one with the cosmos. We will fail, but joy is the feeling of closeness to the whole. There is no joy without belief in something meaningful beyond ourselves, be that the faith in a religion, a belief in progress, our being touched by love, or when we are inspired by the muses. Joy elevates us, rockets us out of the mundane.
It was Bertolt Brecht who asked whether it was wrong to feel joy in dark times. In his poem “To Posterity,” Brecht worries that “A conversation about trees is almost a crime/ For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!” As democracies falter, the planet burns, and AI reshapes our world, Brecht's question lingers: “He who laughs/ Has not yet received/ The terrible news." Is joy in dark times a betrayal, or a necessary act of defiance?
On one level, the question of joy in dark times asks: Can we truly love a world filled with evil, pain, and injustice? Hannah Arendt, whose thinking is at the heart of the center I run, knew well the horrors of totalitarianism and genocide. And yet, Arendt insisted that we must still find ways to love the world. After being arrested, exiled, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and made stateless for 18 years, Hannah Arendt asked in her thinking diary: “Why is it so hard to love the world?” And in a letter written to Karl Jaspers in 1955, while she is writing the book that will become the Human Condition, Arendt writes: “I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory ‘Amor Mundi.’”
In another sense, the question of joy in dark times asks how, at a time of atomization and mass loneliness, can we find the light in the world that inspires us to love the world as it is. Arendt found in the joyous proclamation of the Christian Bible that “A child has been born unto us,” the affirmation that even in the darkest of times, the roots of a new light can emerge. In this sense, joy is rooted in the deepest vision of faith, the idea that the human world is ultimately good.
To love the world without recourse to consoling ideologies or fanciful stories is to find joy amidst the sorrow. Joy isn’t about denial; it’s a conscious decision to embrace life as it is, to see the full picture without succumbing to despair, to see the present horror of a world torn apart and celebrate with the knowledge that the mended world will be even more glorious. At a moment when there is so much pessimism and flight from reality into fantasy, it is time to ask: How can we experience joy in these dark times?
Our collective inquiry into Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times, will ask:
• What is Joy?
• Is Joy possible without a belief in God or some higher power?
• Are the humanities and the arts a meaningful pathway to joy?
• Is the cultivation of joyfulness in dark times an abdication of responsibility?
• Does joy offer an antidote to the loneliness and purposelessness of modern life?
Above all, we ask, where does joy touch us today and how can we nurture it?
The full conference will be available via Live Webcast.
The Annual Conference: What it's All About
Bold and Provocative Thinking.
Together.
Together.
Every year, students, thinkers, artists, writers gather at Bard College's Annandale campus for two days of exploration into a pressing contemporary issue. Our aim is to bring together speakers from diverse careers to think together - and often to disagree- in public.
Our Conferences
The Center's annual conferences are known for bringing together speakers from diverse careers to think in public about the most important issues of our time. Previous conferences have explored the economic crisis, education, surveillance, and privacy. In conjunction with the conference, the center sponsors an annual student competition and a student debate.
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View video playlists of past conferences on our YouTube channel.
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Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
took place at Bard College on
Thursday, Oct. 11 and Friday, Oct. 12, 2018
