HANNAH ARENDT—THINKING ABOUT THINKING

We are living in a time of intense scientific scrutiny of the brain, mind, and their neuroscientific correlates. We wonder about the nature of mindfulness, about meditation, and all the neurotransmitters that are involved in the generation of emotions and, ultimately, human behavior. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Life of the Mind: Thinking, looks at the brain's most potent process through the lens of philosophy. Her book was published in 1971, years before the explosion in neuroscientific explorations. In thinking about thinking we have an inherent tendency to choose the results of scientific investigation and research over what a philosopher might say about the same process, a tendency, that is, to establish a duality of thought about the mind. But my own orientation is to see that both science and philosophy have something to offer in our understanding of how we think. In fact, the disciplines are complementary and support each other because both sides of the duality have as their mission to reach a deeper understanding of human behavior with the intention of making greater progress in how we understand ourselves and all other things and beings.

This mission of comprehensiveness and elucidation is a weighty one. The weight of understanding is greater for the philosopher because she must take into account many vectors and influences and tie them into a whole picture, whereas the scientist is focused on single particles of that same picture, not such a heavy task. I don't claim to see clearly what Arendt sees in her treatise on thinking. I am not well versed in the language of philosophy and its nuances. What I read from her book at the outset is an attempt to construct a platform upon which the elements of thinking can be separated and examined. She knows that these are the concerns of the “thinking ego,” referring to that part of all of us involved in the process of thinking, and that part that holds sway over how we think and, thus, what we think. She reserves for human thought the essential ability to choose what we think. So, my interpretation of her work may miss some very important philosophical points but there are some important ideas in it that inform my continuing understanding of the wonder of the human brain and thought.

Early on in her book Arendt stresses how thinking is different from the world of “appearances,” the activities of daily toil. It is this world that is dependent on what we perceive through our senses that feeds our intellect and through which we come to some understanding of a truth of the world around us (not the truth, a distinction she makes later on). Thinking, on the other hand, is generated by a process that is non-appearing, a process that involves a withdrawal from the world of activity and involves, too, a suspension of our perception of space/time, as well as a sense of our own corporality. This represents a detachment from the senses and sense-objects. This is the realm of philosophy. This realm of mind is invisible and controlled at will. It is active within the chamber in which a soundless dialogue (self-talk) between I and itself is ongoing in a continuous pattern. The thinking ego (in its withdrawn role as one who is being vs. doing) is the observer of sense objects and of the participants who are subject to the sense-objects of the world and the images they form (as in the realm of imagination). These are the distinctions she makes between the various layers of the amalgam of thinking and doing, the differences between vita contemplativa and vita activa, an ancient distinction.

One of her important points is to consider what she believes to be the ultimate aim of thinking and that is to make meaning. It is not, she says, to find the truth; an elusive, slippery, and inchoate property of thought. She implies that truth is contingent and not defined as a single universally accepted property. We are storytellers and meaning-makers and it is in this that we engage our thought processes. The way in which thinking joins doing is through the use of properties of the imagination. Here is how Arendt words this:

“Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.”

“If the language of thinking is essentially metaphorical, it follows that the world of appearances inserts intself into thought quite apart from the needs of our body and the claims of our fellow-men, which will draw us back into it in any case.”

“... truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition. We know from the Hebrew tradition what happens to truth if the guiding metaphor is not vision but hearing (in many respects more akin than sight to thinking because of its ability to follow sequences). The Hebrew God can be heard but not seen, and truth therefore becomes invisible....”

“The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive.”

In another interesting section of the book she explores a concept of the soul.

“The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer.... Its invisibility resembles that of our inner bodily organs of whose functioning or non-functioning we are also aware without being able to control them. The life of the mind, on the contrary, is sheer activity, and this activity, like other activities can be started and stopped at will.”

Once again she emphasizes how active choice in thinking is a property of our brains. While thinking, we are detached from the “real world” so long as we continue to think. We tend to trade perceptions of the world around us for the invisible properties of thought. I think this is a very interesting distinction she makes. It inserts a strong element of personal agency and choice into a process that we take for granted as an independently organizing and guiding ability.

It is this ability to dissociate thinking from the doing of the “chaotic welter” of everyday life that surrounds us that resonated with me as I reflect on my own experiences with daily events, especially now in times of what seem like political entropy. Arendt writes that one of philosophy's uses is to “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”The idea here is that we can choose thinking as an antidote to the chaos of human behavior expressed through “appearances” and “sense-objects.”

“Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”

The chaos and visible deficiencies of politics and other human pursuits raises the question, for me, of the nature of evil. I see much of what passes as acceptable behavior as arising from the seed from which evil blossoms. Arendt writes about this as well. Her position is that thought's quest is for meaning as a “kind of desirous love” and so the objects of thought can “only be lovable things—beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Ugliness and evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern.” This seems like a controversial position to take, given that we often see evil as an active participant in our thoughts and behavior. Arendt continues that evil for her is an absence, something missing altogether from the thinking process. In this way, evil is equivalent to thoughtlessness. Not converting evil to speech or action eliminates it from thinking. So thinking (and thus philosophy) represents a refuge from the dark and dirty force of evil. In 1961, Arendt covered the trial of Adolph Eichmann for The New Yorker. Eichmann was an official in the Nazi regime and Arendt, a Jew, was interested in the trial as an extension of her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her coverage of the trial resulted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It was her position on evil and evil intent that was reflected in the phrase she coined to describe Eichmann as a bland functionary, “the banality of evil.” It was a philosophical position that emerged from her considerations of evil and explored in Thinking. She was criticized and even vilified for reducing someone, like Eichmann, to the size of a common criminal and not for depicting the oversized and ugly monster the Israelis presented to the world. She did not excuse the crimes of the Nazi regime as much as treat the evils done as results of thoughtlessness. Whether one agrees, or not, this concept of evil as absent from thought might help explain how people educated and sophisticated in so many ways can support demagoguery and the tyrannies of a despot. I am not sure that Arendt's arguments make me more comfortable with evil pursuits, but the idea that evil is absent from thought and the process of thinking is as good an explanation as any other of how evil takes hold among us. A continuing dilemma I face is how to explain how good people can support evil intentions and actions. Perhaps I will always have this dilemma. In any case, if evil is absent from the ambitions of thinking, then what are we to do with those who perpetrate evil acts? Evil is part of our chaotic and noisy everyday life and so, in that way, can be segregated from the invisibility of thought. People aren't prosecuted for evil thoughts, just for how those thoughts translate into the behavior that describes our relationships with one another.

Evil is just one of Arendt's concerns in her book, but a concern that emerges from all that we see around us and absorb through our senses. Evil is a force that requires attention and tending in our relationships with one another. Some of us (and me, when I was younger) would like to believe in and depend upon the best in people and relegate evil to some category of theoretical possibility. But we must contend with what evil actions produce and know it for what it is in our wobbly world. Can we keep evil out of our “lovable” thoughts? Is evil, as with Arendt's conception of truth, contingent and relative in ways that allow it to prosper? If we believe in individual choice, then perhaps we can choose to reserve thinking for just those thoughts that move us toward greater understanding, clarity, and love and live in a world that is anything but thoughtless.