| Title | : | The Life of the Mind |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0156519925 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780156519922 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 521 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1971 |
The Life of the Mind Reviews
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A Really Unexpected Revelation
Hannah Arendt, most famous for her contention concerning the banality of evil in her writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, died in 1975. Remarkably, however, she provides an explanation in her Life of the Mind for the social as well as political situation in which we find ourselves in 2018.
Like many I am bewildered how a man like Trump - mendacious, corrupt, vulgar, misogynistic, and incompetent - can insinuate himself into a political system, like that in the United States, which is explicitly designed to avoid such an outcome. Arendt supplies some answers I find compelling; and in a strange way, comforting because they suggest that while the world is very strange indeed, it is not entirely without order.
Arendt’s fundamental distinction is that between truth and meaning. “Reason,” She says, contradicting an unstated axiom of both liberalism and science, “is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same thing.” The tendency of liberal thought is to “interpret meaning on the model of truth.” And then to evaluate the world, especially other people, in terms of their expression of truth. This she says is a fallacy, and I see her point.
Arendt takes Immanuel Kant seriously when she says, “No eliminating of errors or dispelling of illusions can arrive at a region beyond appearance.” At best, as the Pragmatist philosophers have demonstrated, we are engaged in an endless search for the truth about the world. What we have in the bag as it were is appearances. We are effectively stuck with things are they want to be seen. “The expressiveness of appearances expresses nothing but itself,” she says rather elliptically. Appearance is the surface that we skate on in daily life.
“Error is the price we pay for truth; and semblance is the price we pay for the wonders of appearance.” And most of us deal with the problem of semblance in a very routine way that doesn’t seem to attract the degree of interest that error does by social scientists or political commentators. “The reality of what we perceive,” Arendt says, quite accurately as well as succinctly, “is guaranteed by its worldly context, including others who perceive as I do.”
Thomas Aquinas called this in the 13th century the sensus communis, the feeling of a group, and used it as the ultimate mark of correct religious doctrine. So the idea has a long philosophical pedigree. In fact the biblical concept of the Logos, the Word, as it is used particularly in the Gospel of John and in prior Jewish philosophy, is one of coherent speech. It refers not to truth or falsehood but to meaning, the import of truth and falsehood. The real political phenomenon of significance is not Trump but the self-discovery, with the help of modern technology, of a group within which there is such shared meaning.
Meaning occurs not in the details but in an apprehension of a whole, a coherence which often can’t be arrived at through rational much less scientific methods. Once arrived at, meaning can be impervious to the truth or falsity of the elements through which it had been achieved. Such resistance to factual argument may appear as obdurate stupidity, emotional awkwardness, or lack of serious engagement. But it probably isn’t any of these things.
Trump has provided meaning for millions of Americans, many of who claim they do not care about the truth of his character or abilities. Such an attitude is incomprehensible to the liberal mind. But this is because we go on ad nauseam about the costs of error in trusting and electing a man like Trump. What we should be discussing is not the error of Trump but the semblance of Trump, what meaning he provides (not necessarily the meaning he wants to supply).
This meaning is likely to be peripheral to the political issues of immigration, elitism, race and religion. None of these individual issues really seem to matter that much to his supporters once he entered office. They know something that those who think about liberal truth don’t know; perhaps even something larger that the focus on error misses. The decision about what is worthwhile knowing is not one that liberal thought has paid much attention to. Perhaps it is this that is the core of the current ‘interruption’ in the American political system: making decisions about what’s really important is more important than being right about how the world works.
Appendix: The Aesthetic of the Idiot Savant
Since I posted the review above, I have received several messages saying essentially: OK so what is the aesthetic of Trump? These provoke me to, like Steve Brody, take a chance. I emphasize that the Trumpian aesthetic is not what he sells but the semblance that his supporters buy. My assessment of what they’re buying is in no way analytical since I don’t know many of them. But from the ones I see and hear on the news and tv commentaries I can make at least a guess.
I will use the phrase Idiot Savant to characterize the general Trump aesthetic. Both words can be interpreted negatively or positively depending on one’s political proclivities. ‘Idiot’ for example refers in the original Greek to a political loner, and since the 19th century to mental defectives. Savant, similarly, can denote both a learned person as well as an autistically challenged individual. I hope therefore that I have avoided bias in either direction.
The components of the Idiot Savant aesthetic are probably as numerous as Trump’s individual supporters. But I think there are some generally important memes that provide a common meaning. Here are some of the most striking:
- Intelligence is not a pre-requisite for success.
- We are all flawed; the only essential virtue is self-confidence.
- Celebrity is the real mark of integrity.
- Religion consists of conditional fealty to one’s tribe.
- The condition of fealty is that the tribe maintains its faithfulness through mutual encouragement and control among themselves.
- Disfavour shown towards individual members of the tribe is a sign of corrective regard and does not imply permanent exclusion.
- The only real evil in the world exists outside the tribe.
- Politics is a business that is inherently corrupt and diminishes the value of life the more it is engaged in.
Obviously there are any number of other elements that are consistent with these but I think they capture the totality of the Idiot Savant. The ‘precepts’ are both materialistic and spiritual. They evoke historical references to the astronaut, the cowboy, the Washingtonian revolutionary, even back to Paul of Tarsus and his single-minded, single-handed creation of a new religion. The allusions to the Old Testament divinity are not incidental.
Naturally the Idiot Savant has a target enemy aesthetic. For many the simple rejection of this target provides all the meaning necessary for the adoption of the Idiot Savant. I will characterize this enemy aesthetic as that of Liberal Meritocracy, which rejects semblance itself as an acceptable category. Liberal Meritocracy holds that there are valid socially derived standards of behaviour and advancement which are the same for everyone. The adherents of Liberal Meritocracy are professionals of most kinds, city-dwellers, and successful members of minority groups. These happen incidentally to include large numbers of Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, and immigrants, many of whom are Muslim.
I welcome all correction or extension of the aesthetic. -
I love an author who assumes the reader really wants to understand. In the end there is no more interesting topic than ‘Being’. There’s been a 2500 year conversation going on among incredibly smart people concerning Being, and Hannah Arendt summarizes and amplifies that conversation and this book allows people like me to peek in on what really smart people think about the topic.
Parmenides starts the conversation when he rejects ‘nothing’, makes the all the ‘one’, and equates Being as thinking. Heraclitus makes Being as becoming (he’s the one who says you never cross the same river once). Arendt leans towards Being as thinking and even states that she is not interested in Being as knowledge in the style of Titus Lucretius (he wrote my favorite book, ‘On the Nature of Things’).
Arendt will say she is not a philosopher. She does not want to interpret the world by thinking about it; she wants to experience the world and shape it. Overall, this book read like a series of Great Courses on Western Philosophy throughout the ages, but with a tight narrative provided by a brilliant explicator.
Most of my favorite authors are mentioned in this book: Kant, Wittgenstein, Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, Aquinas, Augustine, Spinoza, Plotinus, Lucretius, Thucydides, Herodotus, Bergson (she really likes Bergson and his ‘lived time’, I haven’t actually read Bergson, but I have read ‘The Physicist and the Philosopher’ available on Audible), Husserl and so on. For each of the authors mentioned Arendt provides the context, the relevance and the connections necessary for her explications. One does not need to have had read those authors in order to follow what she is saying because she always seems to respect the intelligence of her reader and gives them just enough for them to follow the discourse.
Her second volume in this set is on Will. What does ‘Will’ even mean? She’ll tell you. She’ll make all the connections. She’ll show how Schopenhauer makes Being as Will; after all, his book is titled ‘Will and Representation as Idea’ for a reason and Nietzsche will tweak it into ‘will to power’ and relate the last man standing and ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ into Being as Will too. She does mention Spinoza in the story but doesn’t explicitly state his ‘conatus’ (striving) as the Will immanent within everything as the ‘one’ substance of the universe making everything in the universe necessary but I think most readers will get the connection on their own.
She definitely favors the ‘faculty of choice’ for Will in the manner of Duns Scotus even at the price of contingency. A contingent world is not a necessary world; a necessary world is a world where time and chance determine ones fate through Grace alone. Gratitude and Socratic wonder give us our Will, at least Arendt says Scotus argues that contra Aquinas.
Augustine reworks St. Paul’s ‘salvation through faith not works’ and brings in the Pagan metaphysics of Plotinus and defines the middle ages until St. Thomas Aquinas comes along and gets enshrined within Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ while both leverage off of Aristotle who makes contemplation (thinking) of the divine the ultimate good and our ultimate purpose. Duns Scotus will politely disagree.
Arendt pointed out something to me that I had never connected previously by her quoting Jesus saying that we are not to be good since God is good alone, but rather we should think well (‘if you so much as look at a woman with lust in your heart you have committed adultery’) and behave properly (‘do unto others…’). All of this stuff is laid out in this book so that anyone can follow the multiple trains of thought as she lays them out.
She captures the essence of Nietzsche and Heidegger in relatively long sections of the book in such a way that any reader of this book who hasn’t read them will want to read them. She said that Heidegger did not mention Nietzsche in ‘Being and Time’ by name. As Arendt says, in B&T Heidegger makes ‘care’ (German: Sorge) and its reliance on the future as filtered through our understanding of the past through our now the ontological foundation for Being (btw, Arendt explains Nietzsche and his ‘Eternal Recurrence of the same’ with the same temporal formulation; after Heidegger makes his ‘turn’ between his volume I and II of ‘Nietzsche’ as Arendt correctly points out he’ll change ‘care’ to ‘will’ for the ontological foundation for Being, also his ‘turn’ involved changing the presumption inherent in the very fact that we are asking about the meaning of Being from Being as meaning since the posing of the question gives Being a foundation within itself (‘a hermeneutical circle’ of sorts).
At times, I felt that this book was as if I were listening to a great college professor who was giving a series of lectures that would stay with the student for life but all the while knowing I didn’t have to take a test, and besides who among us don’t love detailed explications of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ or Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’? I know I do, and if you do too you’ll find this book as extraordinary as I did, and I would recommend you listen to ‘The Bernstein Tapes’ of each book freely available off the net.
The best way to see this book is as a review and explication of a 2500 year old conversation that has been going in the background of most peoples’ lives involving some great thinkers and Arendt wants her readers to understanding why it is just as relevant today has it always has been. Our meaning and purpose are determined by what we believe to be true (Being=thinking) and how we believe we should act (Being=will), and this book will put each into understandable terms.
A bracketed aside: [I thought she was wrong when she said that Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato was a return to Plato. She says that because she really doesn’t like what she labels as nihilism and any part of Nietzsche or Heidegger that flirted with that she was going to be negative towards for obvious reasons (see her book ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ for clarification). I’ve been concurrently reading “Heidegger: Thought and Historicity’ by Christopher Fynsk and he seemed to think similarly as I did regarding Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato. He actually also footnoted this book and cited Arendt to be the first to notice the tonal difference between Vol I and II of Heidegger’s ‘Nietzsche’. I noticed Arendt generously gave credit to somebody else within this book while the footnote in his book did not]. -
A very interesting account of what do we do when we think. Where are we when we think? Why do we think at all? At times a complicated text, full of erudite references to Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche and other philosophers, but never boring. Arendt recognizes 3 basic mental activities – thinking, willing and judging. The first section, Thinking, is the best and the most stimulating read. It is a pity Arendt didn't have time to finish this work, she died, left it unfinished, and it was edited by her friend Mary McCarthy.
For those interested in thinking, its origins and explanations, I highly recommend it.
Quotes:
"For thinking, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only necessary precondition. In order to think about somebody, he has to be removed from our presence. Thinking always implies remembrance, every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought..."
"Thinking is a natural need of human life, not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty in everybody; by the same token, inability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an ever-present possibility for everybody – scientists, scholars and other specialists are not excluded … A life without thinking is quite possible … But then life is not fully alive – unthinking men are like sleepwalkers." -
Fascinating. But so difficult to read at times that I had to read it aloud to myself to keep from getting confused. I am not proud of that.
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"The wonder that is the starting-point of thinking is neither puzzlement nor surprise nor perplexity; it is an admiring wonder."
There is nothing inherent in being human that I relish, seek, ponder and want to understand more than the mind's capacity to wonder. It is from this starting point in my thinking that authors are chosen, books are read and other media is readily consumed. And it is the void of wonder that will mark my end.
THE LIFE OF THE MIND
THE GROUNDBREAKING INVESTIGATION ON HOW WE THINK
Hannah Arendt
Copyright 1971 -
"Everything that can see wants to be seen, everything that can hear cries out to be heard, everything that can touch presents itself to be touched."
-from book one, "Thinking" -
This book is a joy to read. Arendt freely and lively moves in the entire philosophical history of thinking and willing, and in doing so engages some of the famous thinkers – all men and all taking themselves too seriously. In the end, she sides with the action and political men, men who founded nations and did not worry too much about the perplexities of thinking and willing.
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Oh, with or without Hannah I'm never going to graduate.
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Estando presente na sessão de julgamento de Eichmann em Jerusalém, Arendt visualizou um homem comum, banal, que ainda assim fora capaz de atos monstruosos. Como passara a vida seguindo procedimento e condutas pré determinadas, ele se viu diante de uma situação que não havia procedimento de rotina, se tornando, consequentemente, indefeso.
Observando a retirada da conduta convencional e padronizada que nos protege da realidade, Arendt previu que estaríamos diante de um status de irreflexão, no qual a ausência de pensamento a levou ao seguinte questionamento: O que é pensar? Será que a consciência da maldade não é uma condição para realizar atos vis?
A ausência de pensamento de Eichmann não provinha do esquecimento ou mesmo de ignorância/estupidez, sendo assim, “seria possível que a atividade do pensamento estivesse dentre as condições que levam os homens a se absterem de fazer o mal?”
A partir de tal interesse, e do referido julgamento, Arendt se propôs a confrontar a questão atrelada ao ‘pensar’, pensamento esse, que com o surgimento da Era Moderna tornou-se servo da ciência, subdividindo-se entre o verdadeiro ser e a mera aparência.
Utilizando-se, comumente do pensamento kantiano, aproximando dos saberes de Locke, Platão, Descartes, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx e tantos mais, Arendt caminha para os questionamentos quanto à: o que nos faz pensar? Onde estamos quando pensamos? Assim, com o escopo de adentrar aos “temas assombrosos” — por ela mesma chamados — do: pensar, o querer e o julgar, a autora nos leva às questões quanto à tradição, consciência, invisibilidade, julgamento, e principalmente, sobre o pensar e agir.
Incapazes de evitar o mal — do totalitarismo — , insuficientes em compreender a incidência do mesmo, do pensar e do agir, fica a nós a necessidade de buscar lançar luz ao futuro, para que venhamos a sair da escuridão tão bem disposta por Platão.
Sendo este o fundamento da referida obra, compreender o funcionamento tanto do empirismo, como do racionalismo, para que possamos compreender finalmente a vida do espírito. Ademais, o leitor pode vislumbrar o amadurecimento da pensadora para seus próprios termos e pensamentos anteriormente divulgados. Ótima obra, por mais densa que seja. -
Originally conceived in three parts, Thinking, Willing and Judging, but not completed at the time of her death, this is perhaps Hannah Arendt's most difficult work. Cetainly the initial section on Thinking took a long time to read and a lot of reflection to follow all of her arguments. Willing the second section seemed easier, since the activities of the will have been much discussed by Nietzsche and Heidegger for example. The last section Judgement is the shortest and is based upon lecture notes on Kant.
Personally I find Hannah Arendt's work very satisfying to read. I appreciate that she was erudite in the classical European tradition and this adds a depth of erudition which is extremely satisfying, one finds it in Umberto Eco for example...
Probably want to read it again... -
$1.99 Kindle and Kobo sale, March 31, 2021.
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A philosophical analysis on the Life of the Mind ... a page turner?! Yes!
In The Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt sets out to express the interconnectedness between the three major faculties of the mind: Thinking, Willing, and Judging. What's extraordinary about her analysis is the systematic way in which she presents her arguments, weaving and culling a multitude of different philosophers -- admitting some limitations while reconstructing other arguments, shaping these contributions to foment a new and inspired idea. It sounds then that this analysis would be dense and a bit of a slog but it is not. Arendt's prose is captivating because every sentence is an invitation to the reader, her prose is casual even as she peppers her text with obscure quotations, you never feel that Arendt does not already assume you as equal and a necessary part of the conversation -- because that's what The Life of the Mind really is, a conversation.
Thinking: Her strongest section, is just stimulating. Her analysis is thorough, her references are many and interconnected in a way that was made obvious -- though no less inspiring -- through her presentation. Beginning with what seems obvious -- Thinking starts with the impact of appearances -- which balloons out to the mental activities that depend on appearances, as a platform that would eventually be answered in her Willing and Judging sections. An excellent start that analyses in minute detail what Thinking is whilst also leaving room to discover why it is.
Willing: While the section on Thinking is arguably a complete idea, Willing struggles quite a bit. There is just too much here for Arendt to tackle. The main issue has to do with the definition of Willing, which she herself admits to as she moves from the Ancients definition to the more faith-based definition of Augustine and Aquinas to German idealism. It's not without its own sense of foresight and inspiration, the section just begs to be its own book where Arendt could have separated each movement of human beings' re-definition of Willing as human beings' evolution and how it expanded their own perception of reality and their place in it.
Judgment: This section is merely the lecture notes from one of Arendt's lectures. She died prematurely but one can already see flavours of what she could have added to in this section and its relation, in particular, to Thinking section and how she might have flushed out her inconsistencies of her Willing section.
Definitely to be shelved on the Re-read section of the bookshelf. -
There is a moment in The Life of the Mind in which Arendt mentions if she does not acknowledge a certain philosophical theory, she would face death. This hyberbolic statement has some feeling of truth to it for anyone who has been (or has tried to be) an academic. Alan Watts once remarked that you can always throw someone off balance simply by asking them what they forgot. This is not something one would not do in real life; but which one would absolutely do in academia (I remember being in love with an academic, attending her thesis defense, and seeing the vigor in one of her adviser's statements that she should have read a particular book and used it; I had read the book he was referring to and realized then his game, to throw her off balance).
Academic writing, then, necessarily has some built in constructs and requirements; even a book like The life of the mind, meant more for a general reading public, has its author going to great lengths to keep academic structure and thoroughness. Many of us read texts that are academic in college and grad school, and then quickly abandon the practice in our post-graduate life; the only thing we stop doing with even more exuberance is the writing of academic papers, unless our careers depend on it.
This end to reading texts that look academic may scare someone away from reading this book, which clock in at around 600 pages. However, to run away from this book just from this impression may be a mistake. Yes, it goes to great lengths to make the moves of an academic work, but underlying all the citations and writing structure is nothing less than a celebration of philosophical thought, and a warning against what our society would be if we became unthoughtful. The argument made throughout the book, that a thinking society is the essential thing to keep authoritarianism at bay, and a non-thinking society is the essential thing that leads to it, seems particularly relevant today, as it did at the time of her writing. Arendt, in trying to understand Nazi Germany, makes the startling conclusion that not thinking leads to uncritical thinking in the face of any tyrant or despot who wants to take over: the tyrant need only to tell a story that appeals to emotion, by some reinvention of the past or redefinition of what a future should be. It's not hard, then, to draw connections (Make America Great Again, for one, starts to seem brilliant given the right context).
I will go for my own hyperbole, and conclude that reading this book is a revelation. You can't read this without feeling a sense both of your own individual importance and your own individual insignificance; how important it is to understand that before you were born there was no you, and after you die there is likewise no you, and this space where this you matters a great deal. In one passage Arendt remarks that, at least philosophically, we could see our lives as entirely a dream of our own making, only waking as our life ends. If this is true (and if we believed it why would it not be?), we are foolish not to make this dream beautiful.
I've long suspected that, given the state of affairs in the U.S. currently, there is no royal road to a new understanding. The comedy, the social media responses, it all seems to be free will, but how much of it can be predicted before it's even said? And how stupid it sometimes seems, when at the same time we seem to value the very things we say we detest (celebrity without accomplishment; wealth above morals or doing what is right). I don't like it much either, but it seems the true cultural change comes from reading authors like Arendt, and spreading the ideas around. I could be wrong, but its worth a shot; lord knows Twitter does us no good. As David Byrne once famously sang, "baby what did you expect staring at the TV set, fighting fire with fire". -
In a discussion of Duns Scotus, the esteemed 'subtle doctor' of medieval theology, Arendt here at some point quotes Pico della Mirandola, who was reputed to have remarked of himself: "Pledged to the doctrine of no man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy, investigated all the books, and come to know all the schools". Although cited in reference to Scotus, there is perhaps none better to whom the epithet applies than Arendt herself, who has, it's pretty clear, ranged, investigated and studied the Western canon to a depth of almost unbelievable proportion. But more than just erudition, it's her ease of expression which sets her apart, with her discussions of classical philosophy coming off as a conversation among friends, as though for all their distance in time, neither Kant nor Merleau-Ponty, Augustine nor Heidegger (among others), could be ignored except at the price of giving up on living thought itself.
And it's thus to this 'life', this vitality of Mind whose currents remain active today, that Arendt attends to, infusing it with a contemporary significance that goes far beyond any standard historical retelling. After all, as she writes in the introduction, it was her encounter with the thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann (who, to recall, was the logistics point-man for the Holocaust, and whose trial in Jerusalem Arendt famously reported on), that spawned these investigations: in the face of such 'thoughtlessness', do we not owe ourselves the necessity of properly grasping thought all the better? Such, at any rate, are the stakes involved in The Life of the Mind. As for its execution, well... I couldn’t be more torn. Almost precisely in two, in fact, given that of the two printed volumes here (the third, on 'judgement', was never written), the first, on 'thinking' is magnificent, while the second, on 'willing' is... not so much.
I say this though, with all due prejudice. Which is to say that it's not really Arendt's fault that the very idea of willing simply doesn't hold a candle to the force and the interest of thinking, even on Arendt's own terms. Around 'thinking', for instance, Arendt will construct (or rather 'extend', from her earlier writings) an entire phenomenology of 'appearance', of the way in which appearance is never just 'mere appearance', but is the very manner in which humans engage with the world around them; so too will she elaborate a theory of metaphor and the body, along with a brilliant and engaging philosophy of both truth and meaning (here crucially distinguished), all the while remaining attentive to the rich conceptual histories surrounding these various ideas (if you like your reading peppered with choice passages of Latin and Greek, Arendt's your lady).
As for 'willing', while Arendt does her utmost to sustain the same philosophical intensity, the constellation of ideas around it simply don't match up: while classic themes like necessity and contingency, intellect and desire, and even love all permeate the discussions of the will, when placed side by side, the entire second volume feels like a massive drag on the momentum of the first. On a purely personal note, it doesn't help too that Arendt's The Human Condition, which is perhaps one of my favorite books of all time (and to which this also constitutes a kind of sequel), is simply so much more interesting than The Life of the Mind as a whole. And it's by that contrast too that I really can't give this book the glowing praise that it might get - with all due legitimacy - from another reader. In any case there's lots here to learn from, which, in its own way, is the highest praise one can give (3.5 stars if I could). -
Philosophy books are often similar in one regard: while sometimes there are fantastically concise and yet precise descriptions, other times the sentences require multiple readings and the meaning is still unclear to a lay reader. This book is no different. I wouldn’t recommend audio book format. In fact, I’m very surprised this was made into an audiobook. It did pique my interest into reading some more introductory summary of Kant et al.
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Easy to read? Not so much, but if you enjoy summaries of major philosophies you may find it fulfilling. I wish Arendt had contributed more of her personal thoughts on the matter instead of just giving a history of philosophy.
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An excellent survey of the history of Western thought as told from one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.
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این دو جلد را هر کدام دو بار خوردم.
از جلد سوم هرچه مانده باید جست.
یادداشتی، دستنوشته یا پیشنویسی. -
The topic of thinking should be of natural interest to anyone who spends time in any organized intellectual activity. However, my first disappointment with this book is Hannah Arendt’s narrow focus only in the type of thinking done by professional philosophers. Had she lived a few hundred years ago then this bias was justifiable, because until the 18th century most serious questions were tackled by philosophers. Here I use the term “tackled” instead of “answered” because philosophy rarely gave any definite answers. By restricting itself to pure thought, it could not verify its conclusions against reality. That’s where science succeeded, and started coming up with explanations of the universe that is based not only on reason, but experiments and validations. The great benefit of this approach is that you cannot be wrong for too long as some evidence will correct your conclusions. This is why science tends to progress in fits and starts, while it is hard to find such a definite direction in philosophical thought. Since the advent of modern science, philosophy has been losing ground. What were once the domain of philosophy are being effectively tackled by different branches of science, from physics to psychology, from biology to neuroscience.
The author however is only interested in classical philosophy, and all her references come from the writings of well known philosophers. She brings in some references to modern physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, but her understanding of these sciences and the related scientists is pitifully shallow. She handpicks a few quotations out of context and tries to justify her essentially pro-classical and anti-modernist perspective. She is a strong disbeliever of the notion of “progress”, and believes our world would be better if we could return to more classical values. I also find it totally uninteresting when she tries to build philosophical arguments based on theological (essentially Judeo-Christian) philosophies of thought that tries to reconcile contemporary thinking with biblical texts.
The book does an amazing job of organizing the various schools of philosophies related to various aspects of thinking. It is mesmerizing to see the intellectual brilliance of these philosophers in their ability to ask deep questions and then form self-consistent structures within which such questions can be discussed. Undoubtably, these are some of the best examples of human ingenuity and scholarship. I would have remained poorer if I didn’t get a taste of such thinking and logic. Yet, standing today, I find most of these arguments mostly unhelpful for me to understand the universe or myself. For example, if I need to understand the role and reality of Will, then I’d rather look at psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience than expect to get any answers from philosophers who did not have access to these deeper mechanisms of our brain, and hence had to speculate. They did what they could within the limitations of their time, but it is time to move on.
I don’t believe philosophy is dead. It still is very relevant and important in raising the right questions. However, I would not look for answers there. Our best hope is to see a proper collaboration between these two disciplines. Science is better at answering questions, but philosophy is necessary to question our methods, and look for questions we haven’t yet asked or are just beyond the reach of today’s science. Above all, philosophy is necessary to decide which science we should do – to answer the question of value. -
Twenty-four years after I purchased it, I finally read the Life of the Mind, having gone on something of an Arendt binge this past year. As with all of Arendt’s works, The Life of the Mind is steeped in western Philosophy. The book, originally planned in three parts, consists of an historical interpretation of thinking and willing. Judging, the third part, was never started due to Arendt’s untimely death in 1974.
Thinking, for Arendt, always leads to a kind of twoness, a bifurcation between what appears to be as opposed to what is. Twoness takes places as an inner dialogue between the self and an other in the activity of thinking, but always comes back to the gap opened up between what was and what will be, as the mind attempts to secure what is in an eternal present.
Willing, on the other hand, takes up the question of whether the will exists at all, and if it does what does it mean for the concept of human freedom. Arendt runs through medieval and modern philosophers (Augustine, Duns Scotus, Nietzsche and Heidegger) before coming to terms with the assertion that because philosophers are uncomfortable with contingency, they are uncomfortable with the will. Scotus, she argues, is the only philosopher among these whose commitment to freedom leaves him open to the contingent and the new. In many ways, the section on willing is worth reading, simply for her treatment of Duns Scotus.
The book ends with an analysis of political freedom and action as an opportunity to ask the question of willing differently. Here she takes up the Roman and the Hebrew notions of founding political societies. In each, she finds similar problems exposed that she finds in the treatment of free will for philosophers: the tension between a new community and the old, the place of the new in time, and the effect of history on the present.
The Life of the Mind, like all of Arendt’s works, is fascinating and worth reading closely. Arendt’s command of philosophy and the western tradition lead to revelations of thought and freedom that few twentieth century philosophers can match. -
"Vom Leben des Geistes" is a very late work by Hannah Arendt - in fact, she died only a few days after completing the second part and before starting on the third. Therefore, she takes a very in-depth look only at "Das Denken" - our ability to think - and "das Wollen" - our innate ability to will. (Missing is "Das Urteilen" - our ability to judge)
Hannah Arendt was strongly influenced by specific themes throughout her life, and they show in this example of her writing: Greek and Latin philosophical texts, her experience with the totalitarian German regime and the question of what it means to lead a good life, a political life. Her close relationship with Heidegger and her appreciation of, distancing from and turning away from him and his philosophy become apparent, as does her vast knowledge of and experience with... well, a lot of things, to be honest.
She asks the big questions in this book, always flanked by a multitude of philosophers to show us changing answers and general problems: What does it mean to think? Can we do evil if we really do it? Where does thinking take place, and what do we need to be able to do it? Do we think? What is the relationship between thinking and acting? Her reflections on a viva contemplativa vs. a viva activa hardly begin here, and anyone who has read either "Eichmann in Jerusalem" or her book on totalitarianism will be able to follow the ideas and themes and see them bundled and discussed at the end of her life.
From there, she moves on to a different function of the human mind: The Will. Again, she draws on her extensive knowledge of philosophy to explain, systematically, why and when the Will becomes the subject of philosophical debate and why it does not happen sooner. Her exploration of the influence of different ideas of temporality here are very illuminating and point to changes in modern times. She traces the implications and repercussions of a free Will and places Will and the intellect (Das Denken) in different temporal spheres.
It is all very detailed and nuanced; at times, it can get tediously precise and a bit repetitive. However, this is a fascinating book by one of the best minds the 20th century has to offer, and it is well worth reading. -
This book is very important and worth careful study.
Arendt takes up where Kant's Critique of Pure Reason stops, showing how "reason" goes beyond conceptual knowledge. Knowing that Arendt was one of Heidegger's most important students, you can see places where she is pointing toward Heidegger's non-representational 'thought' as the path beyond knowledge and into the unknowable metaphysical realities.
She is at her best in the first section of this two volume work, where she deals with thinking per se, although I found her analysis of judgment quite interesting as well. In any event for those who wish to see through the veil to the other side, this last work of Arendt's is a valuable piece of the puzzle. She claims less than she accomplishes to the perceptive reader.
Most philosophers accept that Kant has limited knowledge and that the rest, the questions of metaphysics, cannot be known as scientific knowledge. But really Kant's delimitation of scientific knowledge frees our search to go beyond representational thought to a higher mind. Arendt doesn't always know this, but we can use her to reveal what she couldn't yet see in her time and world.
She lays out what she is doing pretty well in her Introduction, but rarely ties it all together again. -
Arendt suggests morality requires a free mind above truth and reason. The history is good, but, as she warns us, she’s no philosopher.
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January 4th, 2021 (4th reading!)
Wow, I'm surprised I've gone through this text four times.
This time I decided to read it because I was reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. And I asked myself, how is The Life of the Mind different from a Phenomenology of Spirit. Geist has been translated to Mind as well, so it seemed like this was a very similar project.
I'm still working through Hegel, which is a much more onerous task intellectually than reading Hannah Arendt is, who writes in a way that's much more approachable for the reader (at least in the Life of the Mind; not so much in the Human Condition). What I found surprised me very much...
So much of what's going on here is that she is actually doing Hegel without doing Hegel. At first I was kind of pissed off by that, because it in some ways is the same project. She also continually bashes Hegel and misreads him from my understanding! I may revise this in the future when I have completed my Hegelian readings. On the one hand, I got a little pissed, and than an another hand, I found the experience to add another prospective and way of speaking about the same things Hegel does.
Also it seems that everything Hegel does, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus did many years before him. And Arendt kind of shows how the whole era of German Idealism is just a reflection of this. It also made me see that even Lacan is just doing Hegel/Heidegger within Freud... because he is essentially offering a critique on the elements of observing reason that Freud couldn't see. Anyways, Arendt never mentions Freud once... so that's a different story.
What I am interested now, is to learn more about what makes Heidegger and Hegel so different. I gather it's something to do with Hegel discussing Being - and Heidegger tries to obliterate Being, but I am curious to find a book that does all the ground work for me...
Will I read the book again? I mean after four times, it's not like this was a puny academic effort. There's lots to gather, and in particular the Chapter on Willing is really insightful for reframing the Master/slave dialectic.
5/5 stars.
2018 Review:
I enjoyed this immensely again. I am not going to try to prove to you how much I absorbed from it. However, I will tell you this. Arendt is touching on space and time. I don't know how much deeper it gets than that. Enjoy your journey. -
There is a sense of the book not being finished as everyone comments on. It is very interesting how much can be said about the life of the mind from purely philosophical persectives. But what I would like to explore more is how Arendt uses Augustine and Paul. Theology is a very significant part of this book and it is often overlooked.
