Arendt on the Activity of Thinking
Wout Cornelissen
Introduction
Arendt’s reflections on thinking occupy a central role in her work. Yet they are layered and complex, and remain, to some degree, fragmentary. A suitable way to reconstruct her thoughts on thinking is by considering her account of the phenomenon of thinking in its relation to reality, or to what she calls “the world of appearances.” More concretely, we will start with two concepts with which thinking is often contrasted in her work, each of which points, in Arendt’s view, to a particular form of separation between thought and reality, between the mind and the world. The first contrasting concept is “thoughtlessness,” sometimes also called a “lack of thought,” or the “absence of thinking.” The second is “philosophy,” or, rather, the tradition of Western metaphysical thinking as it manifested itself in the vita contemplativa, a life directed toward the beholding of eternal truth.
An analysis of both will lead us toward an understanding of Arendt’s account of the activity of thinking in its various aspects, and of its relation to the world in which we appear to others, and speak and act together. The fundamental challenge Arendt finds herself confronted with is to do justice, on the one hand, to the fact that thought necessarily withdraws itself from the visible world into the invisible realm of the mind, and, on the other hand, to thought’s need to establish a meaningful relation to the phenomenal world. I will start with Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness, and then proceed with her critique of the tradition of philosophy.
Thoughtlessness
The need to reflect on the problem of thinking arose for Arendt because she saw herself confronted with the phenomenon of totalitarian rule. In the first place, its unprecedented character confronted her with “the difficulties of understanding” the shortcomings of the traditional concepts of political thought when fulfilling the task of comprehending it. In her view, the very phenomenon of totalitarian rule has “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.”1 In the second place, under totalitarian rule, the very capacity to think and to exercise moral judgment is compromised.
The latter phenomenon is analyzed by Arendt in “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” (1953),2 which was included as Chapter 13 in the third edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The driving force of totalitarian rule is “ideological thinking,” which Arendt describes as the logical deduction of an idea, whether it be the idea of the extinction of inferior races, in Hitler’s national socialism, or of inferior classes, in Stalin’s communism.3 In both cases, the idea serves as a premise that is thought to the extreme: “You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet.”4 Out of a fear of contradicting oneself, one’s thought follows an iron logic, thereby emancipating itself from reality, from common sense, from experience, and from contact with fellow human beings: the “capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.”5 Arendt contrasts the compulsory force of logical deduction with the freedom inherent in the activity of thinking as a soundless dialogue between me and myself, which “does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”6
Arendt’s best-known account of thoughtlessness, however, is to be found in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where she uses the term to refer to Adolf Eichmann’s “inability to think,” that is, his inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”7 She notes how his thoughtlessness manifests itself in his “empty talk,” that is, his use of “stock phrases and self-invented clichés,” which safeguarded him against “the words and presence of others and, hence, against reality as such.”8 In addition, Arendt points to the lack of a proper functioning of Eichmann’s conscience, for which Kant’s categorical imperative perversely came to mean: “Act in such a way, that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”9
Finally, Arendt’s emphasis on the intrinsic connection between thought and language is also apparent in her critique of the concepts we use in order to understand events, experiences, and phenomena in our political world. For instance, in its Prologue, she presents her book The Human Condition (1958) as “a re-consideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears,” an attempt “to think what we are doing,” while noting that “thoughtlessness,” now described as “the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ that have become trivial and empty,” seems “among the outstanding characteristics of our time.”10 In a similar vein, she states in the preface to Between Past and Future (1961/1968) that “the very key words of political language” have left behind “empty shells” “with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality.”11 Moreover, in On Revolution (1963), she laments the “lack of conceptual clarity and precision with respect to existing realities and experiences” ever since “the men of action and the men of thought parted company and thinking began to emancipate itself from reality, and especially from political factuality and experience.”12
In The Human Condition, she notes that “the men of thought and the men of action began to take different paths,”13 since the rise of political thought in “the Socratic school.”14 The break with tradition, which entered the political stage with the advent of totalitarian rule, led Arendt to an investigation of the roots of that tradition, beginning in the Greek polis of Athens with the trial of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis.15
The Philosophical Tradition
It is with “the Socratic school”—in particular Plato and Aristotle, while the position of Socrates himself, as we will see further, is ambiguous—that the experiences of thinking and acting are turned into separate ways of life, the bios theōrētikos and the bios politikos, and eventually, after the disappearance of the ancient city-state, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. The latter came to comprehend not only the bios politikos—the life of political speech and action of the “men of action”—but also the activity of work or fabrication of the homo faber and the activity of labor of the animal laborans. From the perspective of the vita contemplativa, all activity is a disturbance of the quiet beholding of eternal truth. As a result, all distinctions and articulations within the vita activa became blurred, including of the activity of thinking itself, which Arendt calls “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable.”16 Indeed, she concludes The Human Condition by saying that “if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity was to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all,”17 which she illustrates with the following words from Cato: “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.”18
Arendt’s rehabilitation of the activity of thinking is tied up with her critique of the Western philosophical tradition, which has modeled thought on contemplation, that is, on passivity rather than activity. The activity of thinking has been reduced to a mere means by which to reach the end of beholding the truth, of experiencing the eternal: “the activity of thought, which goes on within one’s self by means of words, is obviously not only inadequate to render it but would interrupt and ruin the experience itself.”19 In the modern age, as the vita contemplativa lost its relevance, thinking came once more to be used as a handmaiden, but this time in the service of doing, that is, of changing the world by means of science and technology.20
Arendt contends that Plato modeled thinking as the contemplation of ideas after the experience of the craftsman, who uses ideas as blueprints that “survive both the fabrication process and the fabricated object and can serve as model again and again, thus taking on an everlastingness that fits it for eternity in the sky of ideas.”21 Thus, a form of instrumental thinking has crept into our understanding of the activity of thinking—ideas can serve as standards by which to measure the world—just as it crept into our understanding of acting; acting and speaking in concert having been substituted by the rule of the few who know and command the many who do not know and obey.
In Arendt’s view, however, thinking—again, like acting—is an energeia, a free activity that carries its end in itself. Thus, she distinguishes thought, which “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not . . . produce results” and is “as relentless and repetitive as life itself,”22 from cognition, which “always pursues a definite aim,” and “once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end.”23 Moreover, she distinguishes it from logical reasoning, that is, “deductions from axiomatic or self-evident statements, subsumption of particular occurrences under general rules, or the techniques of spinning out consistent chains of conclusions,”24 processes generated by the exercise of our brain power.
Mental Activity
Arendt’s most exhaustive and most systematic treatment of thinking is to be found in Part I of her last and unfinished book, The Life of the Mind.25 In its introduction, she provides two reasons for her return to the problem of thinking. First, she attempts to answer, in the wake of the controversy following the publication of her book on Eichmann, the question whether, if thoughtlessness can cause evil, the activity of thinking can prevent us from doing evil. Second, she wishes to further pursue her attempt, already hinted at in The Human Condition, to think the activity of thinking after the end of the metaphysical tradition, without the self-proclaimed superior perspective of the vita contemplativa, by asking the following questions: “What are we doing when we do nothing but think?” and “Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?”26
In response, Arendt develops what may be called a “phenomenology” of thought. As she emphasizes the primacy of the world of appearances, this may sound paradoxical, since thought is invisible and deals with invisibles, and, to that extent, does not seem to “appear.” She needs to do justice, on the one hand, to the fact that all thinking implies a withdrawal from the world—it seems “a living death”—while showing, on the other hand, how the mind’s own activity—the life of the mind—manifests itself and is able to retain and establish a meaningful relation to the world.
Thinking as such is “out of order,”27 in Arendt’s view, for it requires one to stop whatever one is doing and to make what is actually present, absent, and what is actually absent, present. The faculty of imagination turns sense-objects into images, which are stored by our memory or remembrance, and which thinking, in its turn, transforms into “thought-objects.” Of the latter, concepts, ideas, or categories, that is, “universals” like justice, courage, and happiness, are the proper object of thinking in the sense of “understanding.” Thinking in this specific sense is distinguished by Arendt from the other two mental activities, willing and judging, which both focus on particulars—a project to be realized in the future and a past event to be judged, respectively—rather than on universals. Insofar as all mental activities imply reflection and representation, thinking in its generic sense has a certain priority over the other two. Yet Arendt emphasizes that all three mental faculties, although they have certain common characteristics, are autonomous; each obeys its own laws. Moreover, they are not necessitated or conditioned by either life or the world: mentally, human beings can transcend their conditions.
In addition, Arendt draws a distinction between thought and common sense, which she presents as a “sixth sense.”28 In combining the impressions of the five individual senses, common sense provides us with a guarantee of the reality of the object perceived, which is in turn confirmed by others who perceive the same object. Thus, common sense generates a “sensation of reality.”29 The loss of this common sense, and, thereby, of the feeling of realness, is natural to everyone who engages in thinking, and it accounts for the proverbial “absent-mindedness” of the thinking individual.
Mental activity as such requires a withdrawal from the sensible world of appearances, the concrete, tangible “thereness” of which the mind will never be able to reach. This withdrawal from the world is inherent to the thinking experience as such, and, Arendt argues, it accounts for many of the metaphysical fallacies of the philosophical tradition, which universalize certain aspects that are peculiar for the experience of thinking only. What occurs, in fact, is that “the intramural warfare between thought and common sense” is projected onto the world: “Both the philosopher’s hostility toward politics, ‘the petty affairs of men,’ and his hostility toward the body have little to do with individual conviction and beliefs, they are inherent in the [thinking] experience itself.”30
The Activity of Thinking: Three Aspects
The distinction between thought and cognition, introduced in The Human Condition in terms of the difference between cognition which has a clear end and thinking which is endless, continuously undoing itself, is deepened in The Life of the Mind. While knowledge (including scientific knowledge) strives for truth—it asks “what something is and whether it exists at all”—thinking strives for meaning—it asks “what it means for it to be.”31 While truth is located in the evidence of the senses,32 meaning manifests itself in speech. The need of reason is “to come to terms with whatever may be given to the senses in everyday experience”; it is “to give account,”33 that is, “to justify in words,”34 and this need is prompted not by the thirst for knowledge but by the quest for meaning.
Arendt claims that the basic metaphysical fallacy has been to interpret thought on the model of knowledge, and meaning on the model of truth. They are incompatible insofar as intuition, regarded by her as the guiding metaphor for truth, “always presents us with a co-temporaneous manifold,” whereas speech “necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences.”35 Discourse can never match the simple, unquestionable certainty of visible evidence, the model of the adaequatio rei et intellectus, and the agreement of knowledge with its object.
Yet Arendt shows us how the activity of thinking is capable of bridging the gap between thought and reality, mind and world, in alternative ways. Therefore, we will now turn to three distinct positive characteristics of the thinking activity, all three of which were already hinted at in her three accounts of thoughtlessness, or of nonthinking.
First, Arendt posits that all thinking is discursive in the sense that it is conducted in speech, and that language is essentially metaphorical. In her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt points to his gift of “thinking poetically,” which refers to his acknowledgment that “metaphor is the greatest gift of language.”36 This idea is elaborated in chapters 12 and 13 of The Life of the Mind, on metaphor. The Greek verb metapherein refers to the “carrying-over” of meaning derived from our experience of the external, visible world of appearances, into the internal, invisible concepts of the mind. A metaphor establishes “a perfect resemblance of two relations between totally dissimilar things.”37 Indeed, “all philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve them into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it.”38 One of the examples Arendt gives is Plato’s carrying-over of the notion of an “idea” as blueprint, already mentioned earlier, from the experience of the craftsman into the experience of the philosopher contemplating an “idea.” Hence, metaphors are “the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it,”39 and through metaphor, the world of appearances inserts itself into the mind.
Second, throughout her entire oeuvre, and from an early stage on, Arendt consistently describes thinking as “the soundless dialogue between me and myself.”40 It is the actualization of the duality of myself with myself that makes thinking a true activity. The critical element of thinking consists in a going back and forth between me and myself. What is crucial in this case is that the plurality of the world of appearances is reflected in the duality of the inner two-in-one: “As the metaphor bridges the gap between the world of appearances and the mental activities going on within it, so the Socratic two-in-one heals the solitariness of thought; its inherent duality points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth.”41
Third, thinking enables us to place ourselves in the standpoints of others. In her essays “The Crisis in Culture” (1960) and “Truth and Politics” (1967), Arendt develops an account of “representative thinking,” that is, of the ability to represent the standpoints of one’s fellow citizens, not by blindly adopting their actual views, but by “being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.”42 Arendt’s main source for this form of thinking is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the specifically political importance of which she discovered in the late 1950s. She adopts his notion of an “enlarged mentality,”43 which anticipates agreement not between me and myself, but with others, thereby constituting the form of thinking that prepares judgment.
Socrates as “Ideal Type”: Thinking, Morality, Politics
Now that we have reconstructed three different ways in which, on Arendt’s account, the activity of thinking is able to establish a form of correspondence between itself and the world different from philosophy’s adaequatio rei et intellectus, we will focus on the remaining question of the relation between thinking and morality, and between the thinker and the polis. To this end, we will take our cue from Arendt’s reconstruction of Socrates as the “ideal type” of the thinker,44 and we will go through the three aspects of the thinking activity in the order mentioned earlier.
First, Socrates asks what we mean when we use a certain concept, such as happiness, courage, or justice. Arendt characterizes a concept as a “frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find its original meaning.”45 Socrates, unlike Plato and Aristotle, did not have a teaching. His “unfreezing of frozen concepts” does not produce any positive results. Rather, it has a negative effect on established criteria and values. What one is left with are perplexities, and the best one can do is to share them with others. It seems, Arendt contends, that Socrates “felt the urge to check with his fellow-men to learn whether his perplexities were shared by them.”46 Thinking is not without dangers: by subverting conventional values, it may l ead to nihilism, a denial of all values. Yet, Arendt believes, nonthinking had its dangers too: “What people . . . get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars.”47 The examples she gives are Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, where traditional commandments “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” respectively, were reversed.48
Second, in Arendt’s view, Socrates did not believe that it is the object of thought that could prevent us from doing evil—keeping the mind’s eye focused on the idea of the good—but rather some property inherent in the activity of thinking. For he said, “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.”49 There is an ethical implication to this conviction, a turning of the consciousness of the thinker into “conscience,” which tells him “not to do anything that would make it impossible for the two-in-one to be friends and live in harmony.”50 The criterion of conscience is “whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words.”51 The partners of one’s inner two-in-one ought to be friends and to live in harmony. In the end, Arendt claims, Kant’s categorical imperative rests on this principle as well. All of this only works, however, if one chooses to engage in thinking at all. Moreover, even if one does, this activity only becomes politically meaningful in emergency situations: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a sort of action.”52
Third, it is precisely the destructive, purging effect of thinking that may liberate another faculty, that of judgment: “If thinking—the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue—actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances.”53 Judging itself, however, “the faculty that judged particulars without subsuming them under general rules,” “the most political of man’s mental abilities,”54 is identified by Arendt with the exercise of the “enlarged mentality” mentioned earlier.55
Thinking after the Break with Tradition
Both in the Preface to Between Past and Future and in The Life of the Mind, Arendt notes that it has become more difficult to move in “the realm of the invisible,”56 to settle down in “the gap between past and future,”57 since the breakdown of tradition. In both texts, she uses a parable of Kafka in order to illustrate that thinking starts in the here and now, but in attempting to grasp the meaning of events, phenomena, and experiences, it opens up a “gap” between past and future, a “small non-time-space in the very heart of time,” which,
unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.58
Arendt thus articulates the possibility of overcoming the alternative of a form of thinking that considers itself to be either entirely timeless—that is, eternal—as in the case of traditional metaphysics, or entirely time-bound, as in the case of historicist forms of thinking (Hegel and Marx).
Moreover, she accounts for her own approach of contributing to the dismantling of metaphysics by wresting thought fragments from the past, which, “after their sea-change,”59 she uses in order to illuminate the present. Tentatively, we might say that Arendt herself answers the quaestio facti—“How did I come in possession of a particular concept?”—by going back to the original experience for which the concept in question was used, that is, by “unfreezing” the “frozen concept,” which is a “frozen analogy,” in order then to answer the quaestio juris—“Is my possession and use of a particular concept justified?”—by judging by which concept, that is, by analogy to which originating experience, to understand the event, phenomenon, or experience in question.60 It is to this exercise of the activity of thinking that Arendt’s own writing on thinking attests its fragmentary character is a manifestation of the discursive and, hence, self-destructive character of the activity of thinking itself.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 310.
2 Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” The Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (1953): 303–27.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 469, 471–72.
4 Ibid., 472.
5 Ibid., 477.
6 Ibid., 476.
7 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 49.
8 Ibid., 49.
9 Ibid., 136.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition ( Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5.
11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1968), 15.
12 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 177.
13 Arendt, The Human Condition, 17. Arendt takes this notion from F. M. Cornford, “Plato’s Commonwealth,” in Unwritten Philosophy, ed. W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 54.
14 Arendt, The Human Condition, 16–18.
15 Ibid., 12.
16 Ibid., 5. See also Arendt, Origins, 473.
17 Ibid., 325.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 20.
20 Ibid., 291–92.
21 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 104. Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, 302–4.
22 Arendt, The Human Condition, 170–71.
23 Ibid., 170.
24 Ibid., 172.
25 When Arendt died, her book manuscript of The Life of the Mind remained unfinished. Its first two parts, on Thinking and Willing respectively, were posthumously edited and published by her close friend and literary executor, Mary McCarthy. All quotations and citations from The Life of the Mind included in this chapter are from the McCarthy edition.
26 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 8.
27 Ibid., 78, 85, 109. Arendt takes this notion from Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 12.
28 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 50.
29 Ibid., 49, 50.
30 Ibid., 84–85.
31 Ibid., 57.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 101.
34 Ibid., 102.
35 Ibid., 118.
36 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 166.
37 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 104.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 109.
40 Ibid., 185; Arendt, The Human Condition, 76; cf. Plato, Gorgias, 482c; Plato, Sophist, 263e, among other sources.
41 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 187.
42 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.
43 Ibid., 220; 241.
44 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, section 17, “The Answer of Socrates,” and section 18, “The Two-in-One.” Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 417–66.
45 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 171.
46 Ibid., 172.
47 Ibid., 177.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 181.
50 Ibid., 191.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 192.
53 Ibid., 193.
54 Ibid., 192.
55 Ibid., 94.
56 Ibid., 12.
57 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 13.
58 Ibid.
59 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 212; cf. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 206.
60 See Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch (München: Piper, 2002), 754, entry no. 5, in which Arendt quotes Immanuel Kant, AA XVIII, 5636: “Quaestio facti ist, auf welche Art man sich zuerst in den Besitz eines Begriffs gesetzt habe; quaestio juris, mit welchem Recht man denselben besitze und ihn brauche.” Cf. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 419.