Imagination and Poltics

 My notes on John Plotz's Arendt Speaks of Oases (Public Books).

The thesis, as it seems to me:

Those who oppose Trump’s new ethnonationalist vision of America and its standing in the world order are increasingly realizing our shared public life, ringfenced as it is by a warped media ecosystem, is arid as a desert: a place you can’t quench your thirst and where, ultimately, you can’t breathe. We have demonstrations, we have counterpublics, we even have off-years elections signaling Republican weakness. Yet many have come to doubt the efficacy of this traditional array of standard forms of political resistance in a democracy: just look at the forms that despairing protest took in Minneapolis in January 2026. We are entering a year when many of us will have to find out what it means to live a life on the ropes, thrown back on our own resources as grounds for outward action slip and slide away. I am no fan either of meek submission nor anticipatory despair, both easily spawned by the blunt indifference to any signals we are sending. How then do we cut a new path toward meaningful and effective acts of resistance?

That question, Arendt realized seven decades ago, had to be answered not just in terms of what we do collectively, but also, crucially, what we accomplish alone. The great advocate of knowing ourselves in public is also the little-known champion of a surprising and moving defense of what we might think of as solitary solidarity. Seeing this means attending to her account of the imagination, which reassures us that what we do in the shadows may live on in the daylight.

But listening to the guys in my group sessions, there is no sense of belonging to a public, and often that politics are about elections - not power, not about living together. 

 Imagination comes into view in these paragraphs:

 In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt asks a seemingly simple question: What allows us to be imaginative enough to inhabit another’s perspective even in solitude? The key political insight for Arendt is that learning how others think and experience the world, we gain access to their thoughts in their unique and distinctive individuality; we create an intellectual space within our own thoughts to comprehend what a different response would look and even feel like.

***

Rather, “Truth and Politics” allows us to see the alternative pathway Arendt charts for seeing as others see. In praising our imaginative capacity to think ourselves into others’ shoes, Arendt sidesteps empathy, not to argue for the cold clear light of reason but to animate imagination, with its dual commitment to attachment and detachment. Imagination may stop short of love, but it is loyal to the existence of others and offers a way to conjure up their concerns even when (in fact especially when) we are spending time alone.

***

The real danger is that we grow tempted to imagine that politics could take place without representative thinking, and without imagination. “Never am I less alone than when I am by myself,” wrote the ancient stoic philosopher Cato; it’s the epigraph for Arendt’s final book, The Life of the Mind. To Arendt, that non-solitude of the thoughtful person is proof of thought’s truly dialogic, truly solidaristic nature. Without representation, we have “thoughtlessness,” the prelude to totalitarianism and other abdications of political responsibility, or ruptures of public life. But how is this solitary and solidaristic imagination to be nourished? 

I also found something here that applies to my writing: the questions that I have discussed here about the difference between first- and third-person perspectives. It seems to me that the third-person imagines the lives of others; the first-person has the chance of solipism. Or is it autofiction that runs that risk? I can see a first-person narrated who tries to imagine the life of another.

Nourishment is solitude, making me think of Thoreau and Walden.

That is where Arendt’s notion of the oasis comes into play. Representative thinking aims to offer an imaginative, cognitive expansion that offers up solidarity as an alternative to sympathy. But representative thinking turns into something quite different when paired with a surprisingly capacious metaphor for finding hope and rejuvenation while living in an ominous authoritarian or totalitarian world that she calls desert. That metaphor is the keystone of the final lecture of “The History of Political Theory,” a class given at UC Berkeley in spring 1955.

In a world from which truth is rapidly departing, Arendt sees us as tempted to hear only what we want to; which means we often choose not to check what we are told against actuality. This, she calls worldlessness. 

This seems very much like our world today wherein information is siloed. It also smacks of the days when my depression ran rampant.

However, loneliness also arises the moment we see solitude as the only alternative. The effect of that is to throw us back on our own narrow psychological resources. That sort of retreat, which she thinks of as the fallacy of “adjustment,” leaves us short of real resources to counter the BS from above... Psychology teaches head-duckers and get-alongers to conform. No wonder that it is the logical complement to another mode of thinking that also succeeds in a desert of worldlessness: totalitarianism, which thrives on its arid certainties, its violent simplifications: “totalitarian movements … are extremely well-adjusted to the conditions of the desert … false or pseudo-action suddenly bursts forth from deathlike quiet.”

That started me seeing why I am in the group session and clarifies a sense of the purposes for which it is being led.

For Arendt, though, there do remain spaces apart where solitude and the imaginative space it opens up turns from a danger into a strength. That is what makes the all-important act of judgment both a cause of suffering (because representative thinking puts us in the place of those we judge) and a source of strength. Strength because despite our capacity to imagine the world otherwise, we retain assurance in our own capacity to decide and act according to what our reason tells us.

***

Wordlessness is not worldlessness, but you can understand why the two categories might seem to run together. My own preference for her praise for “pariah politics” means that I am inclined to think Arendt sought solitude as a way out of the endlessly intrusive world that we can see modeled today in the impulse toward social mediation, toward the likes and upvoting that reassures us we are seen and approved. By that reading, the problem, and the breeding ground of totalitarian thought, the desert space that Arendt warns about, is common, social, and corrosive. This danger aligns with that warning about the way that psychology can preach adjustment so persuasively that even alone, I catch myself striving to get synchronized to what I imagine will be a successful form of common thought.

I am not in the social media world. Nor am I any longer trying to compete with others for clients and income that did have me once on Facebook and Twitter.  The stress of all that fed my depression; now I am gunshy of it. Moreover, I reread Thoreau. We are social creatures, but we are also singular persons. I am leery once again of joining common thought. I am responsible for my thoughts and the actions derived therefrom. I went wrong, trying to force myself into agreeing with too much and finding myself agreeing to what seemed like madness. Standing outside is not always insanity; madness can breed in the herd. Walden Pond was an oasis.

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