Thinking with Hannah Arendt

The importance of thinking: what do we think about all this?

Hannah Arendt has really helped me think through the last 10 years, when so many things have happened that are difficult to think with. At the back of my mind, there’s this brilliant quotation from the introduction to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s master text. Talking about comprehension, she asks how we can think through the unprecedented and unbelievable.

She says three things. First, it’s really important not to look away just because something is outrageous. Quite often we find ourselves saying, ‘This is unbelievable! I can’t believe this is happening!’ But just because something is outrageous doesn’t mean you can’t think about it.

Second, you can’t just use the habits of reason and history. You’re not necessarily going to work out what it is about your present – your unprecedented present – by working out what happened before.

Finally, she says – and this is the bit that has really stuck with me over the last few years – really thinking means both an attentive facing up to and a resisting of reality, whatever that might be.

Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, but she started thinking about it when she was a refugee herself, on the run from the Nazis. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish middle-class girl. She was born in Hanover but brought up in Königsberg, right up in the north of what was then Prussia. She left Germany in 1933. She had had an awful lot of reality to attend to, to think about and to face up to.

Armed with this knowledge of Kant, Arendt was also reading early existentialists like Kierkegaard. From a young age, she was very interested in how thinking and being worked together.

She enrolled at the University of Marburg, in the south of Germany, just outside Frankfurt, which was the home of the neo-Kantians. Arendt got involved in theology and philosophy, with the idea of becoming a neo-Kantian and working on her philosophy career. Then comes another piece of reality that she’d have to work with and resist: the philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of the most important existentialists of the 20th century.

Heidegger was in his 30s and, at that time, he was giving his extraordinary lectures on Plato: particularly on Plato’s Sophist and the importance of language. It’s difficult to underestimate the effect that Heidegger had on that generation. Arendt thought of her generation of philosophy students as “waifs and strays” who didn’t want to have straightforward, strict philosophy. They were hungry for something else. Heidegger taught Arendt a really key lesson, which was that thinking wasn’t just important: thinking was being. That’s all there is.

This was Heidegger’s famous deconstruction of Western philosophy. It’s not that we can think our way into being, or that we can reason our place in the world. It’s just that we’re thrown into the world, thrown into time and all we have are our thoughts. I often think of this as the Wile E. Coyote moment in the history of philosophy, when people realised they were running on thin air, looking down with no theoretical groundwork to support us; just our being and our thoughts.

Unfortunately, Heidegger taught Arendt another lesson, which is that thinking is not only being, but passionate being. Before the end of her first year at university, the two had begun an affair. We can talk a lot about what that did to Arendt’s life and what it did to her reputation. Heidegger went on to become the rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party. He gave a very famous address where he committed learning in the German university to Nazi ideals. Arendt took from Heidegger that idea of thinking as being and she ran with it. She took the sense that thinking introduces an otherness into our way of being. Thinking, she said, is really the two-in-one conversation that we have in our heads all the time. It’s the chatter. It’s the otherness. It’s the person we have in our heads.

I first read about this when I was a graduate student and it always bothered me. Why on Earth did it need to be demonstrated to anyone that Nazi Germany was anti-semitic? This is so self-evidently a fact. The idea was to use this information to persuade other Jewish and Zionist groups in Europe and the United States that there really was an issue. Looking back, as a historian, I said, of course it was an issue. Everyone knew. But recently I realised that we’re actually doing the same thing now. A lot of human rights workers, writers, intellectuals and lawyers spend an awful lot of time gathering evidence of what is also self-evident.

Think about what’s happening to migrants in the Mediterranean or on the border, or about other crimes against humanity that are happening now. We spend a lot of time demonstrating the obvious.

This is something that Arendt understood very early – that you can’t just have a world in which reason is self-evident. One of the features of modernity is that those things are not self-evident, and that’s why the work of comprehension becomes more difficult and why thinking yet again becomes very important.