Perhaps you have read her pieces on authoritarianism and revolution, which are certainly essential works for anyone studying political science. But have you heard of "The Life of the Mind"? Words cannot describe the chills that ran through my body, the transformations in my brain, and the awe that swallowed my worldview after as I read this brilliant piece from Hannah Arendt. I'll try my best to convey some of its most powerful messages in this post, but right from the get go I can already tell you that this weighty read is absolutely worth every word.
As you all may know, I am not a student of philosophy, it is simply an interest of mine. Jumping into this book, you do not need to be either. All that is required is some deep concentration and an openness to hear what Arendt has to say about almost every aspect of our existence. Filled to the brim with quotes and references to a myriad of philosophical works, Arendt traces the thoughts of history's most influential thinkers while adding her own contribution to this infinite dialogue.
By naming her work "The Life of the Mind," Arendt hits home right away because she makes it clear that all of the topics that she covers in her work— our perception of time, the Will, intellect, memory, emotions, acting vs thinking, etc— are products of the human brain which construct individual realities for each person they inhabit. As Arendt makes clear multiple times throughout her book, we are "thrown into" the world as humans with no choice from the beginning, which makes it so that an underlying, omnipresent part of our existence is always connected to "Being." With every action that is accomplished, our mind cannot help returning back to the idea of "Being" because we always have to confront the essential question of the meaning of our existence as a species which is inherently reflective. As we go about living our day to day lives, knowing that the end result is death for everyone, we hold an intense appreciation for our surroundings and our existence— no matter how frustrated or hopeless we can sometimes feel— because we have the privilege of being born into this perfect world (calling the world anything else but perfect is problematic because its perfection is what gives us the opportunity to make this statement and hold this opinion in the first place).
Arendt quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of existence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully it is! heedless, in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand;—without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast, indeed, attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder."
She follows up by connecting this soliloquy to Heidegger's essential question of "Why is there anything at all and not, rather nothing?" We are inevitably drawn to this question as humans because our Will automatically considers the void or the potential of non-existence when it seems something. "Why is it that this calculator is on the table?" it unconsciously asks itself. As humans, we continuously trace back existence in order to find the moment when everything started, which remains a mystery because we know that nothing comes out of nothing. The laws that govern our world state that, for example, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Like the question of "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?" we cannot trace the creation of the universe back to one event, since the Big Bang necessitated two entities which required some sort of creation for them to exist in the first place.
Arendt weighs Descartes' "je pense donc je suis" (I think therefore I am) and Valéry's "when we think, we are not" and agrees that the human brain is what introduces us into this world, but disagrees in that Descartes' philosophy is missing one key component: company. One person who thinks alone does not exist, because he has no one with whom he can share this existence through speaking, writing, physical signals, etc. A basic way of putting it: Why did God create this Earth? To have company of course. And this is why he did not content himself with just Adam— Eve inexorably needed to come next (this is if you believe in the Christian faith, which is one possible way of interpreting the world. Arendt does use the word God throughout her text, which is a bit concerning for me, but at the same time you can see God as just a word to replace that element of mystery which led to the creation of the universe in the first place. We need some sort of word to define it and the Christian religion chose the word 'God').
In addition, Arendt considers Hegel's idea of the "World Spirit" which I have always been very fond of (I like to call it "the collective brain" of humankind)— the concept that each generation of humans passes down a culture and a bank of knowledge to the next so that our existence as a species constitutes one encompassing brain that moves through the rectilinear structure of time.
Speaking of time, she quotes:
"Where there is no creature whose changing movement admits of succession, there cannot be time at all... time being impossible without the creature," which brings her back to the idea that the human is responsible for the creation of time, and thus the universe. "In order, he [Augustine] says, that there may be novelty, a beginning must exist; 'and this beginning never before existed,' that is, not before Man's creation." I could not agree more with this perspective, despite its inherent egocentric approach.
And finally, the last part of her work which I will talk about among the plethora of topics she covers touches once again on the idea of "in the beginning." She writes:
"that is, at some moment in time and for some reason a group of people must have come to think of themselves as a 'We.' No matter how this 'We' is first experienced and articulated, it seems that it always needs a beginning, and nothing seems so shrouded in darkness and mystery as that 'In the beginning,' not only of the human species as distinguished from other living organisms, but also of the enormous variety of indubitably human societies."
This, to me, is fascinating, and she goes into more depth in "The Life of the Mind."
I would absolutely recommend without a doubt that you dive into this book if you have the time— perhaps during the summer if you have some spare months? It really is a manual of the human existence and I feel as if I have been illuminated by Arendt's intelligent, all-encompassing approach of our condition as thoughtful, questioning, philosophic beings.
4/4/21