Thinking the unthinkable

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.

The Königsberg bridge problem

Photo by Kosmogenez

Arendt had the good fortune to be brought up in Königsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant, whom she took very seriously indeed. Königsberg might look like a backwater, but in the 18th century it was incredibly cosmopolitan. It had seven bridges, and there’s this wonderful game you can play which is to try to work out how you can get through the town while crossing each of those seven bridges but not crossing any one twice. This is where Kant, who used to cross those bridges, comes in.

What Kant and his generation worked out is that you didn’t actually have to spend all your life running around the bridges. You can use mathematical reason. You can use pure reason to work out that, in fact, you can’t cross each bridge only once; you have to cross one twice.

Kant was terribly important because he was the first person who said that how we think, and how our mind works, is absolutely constitutive about how we manage to be in the world.

So think about Kant – the great thinker; the great reasoner; the great theorist of mind – walking through Königsberg. Then fast forward to the early part of last century and imagine the young Hannah Arendt walking through those streets, crossing the same bridges. Thinking. She was from the start a thinker, a walker, a doer. She started reading Kant when she was only 16 and he taught her two things that she never, ever forgot: one, that we think; and two, that how we think has moral consequences in the world.

A philosophical waif and stray

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.

Running on thin air

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.

Rising anti-semitism in Nazi Germany

Photo by Timothy R. Nichols

Arendt took from Kant the idea that thinking has moral considerations; from Heidegger, she took the concept of thinking as being. But how does this help us with the idea of comprehending the unprecedented? One of the tensions in Arendt’s thought is always between thinking and acting; between being a philosopher and being a political person in the world. This tension started for her in the 1930s, when she was in her 20s, writing her thesis on Rahel Varnhagen, in Berlin.

At that time, anti-semitism was rising with violence, up until 1933 with the Reichstag fire and the first slew of laws that drove leftists and Jews from Germany. Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in this period for researching anti-semitic propaganda in the State libraries. She was looking for evidence of sustained anti-semitism not only in government reports but also in non-governmental agencies and charities. She wanted to use this information to persuade people that anti-semitism was real, institutional and systemic.

Demonstrating the obvious

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.

Thinking like Hannah Arendt

Photograph of Hannah Arendt in 1933. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth Yale University Press. Wikimedia Commons.

One of the terrific things Arendt teaches us about thinking is that it’s an everyday activity. We all do it. Thinking is radically democratic.

She didn’t have much time for the idea of the intellectual or the great philosopher locked inside his tower proclaiming on the rest of the world. She pointed out something that we all know: that very clever people can be completely thoughtless and that people with brain power who can grasp complex ideas can also do real damage through their thoughtlessness. What she liked about thinking – and she was quite Socratic in this – is that that two-in-one conversation you have in your head isn’t going anywhere. It’s not trying to work something out. We don’t wake up in the morning and think, how do I work out how to get breakfast or how am I going to cope with the culture wars this morning? We wake up and just have that conversation in our heads.

This leads us to why she wanted thinking to be such a critical part of education. She said that when you’re really thinking, you start to “defrost” ideas. During that conversation in your head, you start to think, what does the word “house” mean? What does the word “migrant” mean? What does the word “unprecedented” mean? What does it mean when people say “moving forward”? Do they mean they want to ignore things? This mode of thinking, which is really a kind of speculative perplexity about the world, is what she wanted us to grasp.

Discover more about

Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of thinking

Bragg, M. (Host). (2017, February 2). Hannah Arendt [Audio podcast episode]. In In Our Time. BBC.

Stonebridge, L. (2021, April 10). The flight's lost moment. Arendt Studies.

Stonebridge, L. (2020, December 10). What Hannah Arendt can teach us about work in the time of Covid-19. New Statesman.

Stonebridge, L. (2014). Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill-Tidings, Statelessness, Rights and Speech. In A. Rowland, & J. Kilby (Eds.), The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing (pp. 113–128). Routledge.

Preparing for the impossible: Hannah Arendt's legacy