Thinking, meaning, and truth

Few topics in Arendt's corpus have garnered more attention than her analysis of the dangers inherent in Adolf Eichmann's inability to think. Eichmann revealed what Arendt describes as the banality of evil, a new kind of evil born not of monstrous or demonic motives but of thoughtlessness (Arendt, 2006, p. 54).11 Hereafter EJ. Yet, while Eichmann made clear the urgent need we have to think, scholars remain at odds as to whether Arendt succeeds in demonstrating that thinking itself has a role to play in preventing evildoing (Bernstein, 2000; Biser, 2014; Formosa, 2016). My aim is to give new orientation to these debates by reconsidering Arendt's critical reception of Martin Heidegger in The Life of the Mind in relation to her claim that thinking must be understood terms of the quest for meaning rather than truth (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 15).22 Hereafter LM with a corresponding roman numeral to indicate the volume number. By developing Arendt's emphasis on meaning this way, I argue that she introduces to thinking a distinctive capacity for critique, one that she takes to be absent in Heidegger and that helps to distinguish her conception of thinking in its ability to intervene in the dangers of thoughtlessness. While recent commentators have highlighted this capacity for critique in Arendt's notion of thinking, it has yet to be developed in relation to her critical reception of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind (Minnich, 2017; Shuster, 2018; Snir, 2020). Arendt is typically portrayed in her later writings as distancing herself from Heidegger by adding to thinking a worldly or political dimension that prepares the way for judgment (Fine, 2008; Koishikawa, 2018; Maslin, 2020; Taylor, 2002; Zerilli, 2005). Yet, in his well-known and largely unanswered criticism of Arendt, Richard Bernstein argues that this is not enough to show that she has distinguished adequately between the kinds of thinking that can prevent moral and political catastrophe and the kinds that cannot (Bernstein, 2000, p. 291). Afterall, Heidegger's thinking remains close to the world, rooted in concepts like aletheia and Gelassensheit that bring thinking back to earth for the sake of contravening the reductive and dominating will of modern technoscientific rationality. Bernstein thus identifies a decisive problem for Arendt, arguing that while she may demonstrate the moral and political dangers of Eichmann's thoughtlessness, she seems unable to answer the question of why Heidegger's thinking could not condition him against similar vulnerabilities. My aim is to provide a new basis to answer this question by considering the critical distance thinking achieves from the world in its quest for meaning rather than truth, a distance that she suggests Heidegger collapses in his analysis of thinking. There is much to be said about Heidegger's notions of thinking and truth no less than the many ways in which Arendt is influenced by him in her own discourse on thinking. The goal of this inquiry is simply to highlight the precise point in Heidegger's argument that Arendt challenges, as it is this point, particularly as she develops it in The Life of the Mind, that has yet to be considered in response to Bernstein's objection. To this end, I argue that Arendt criticizes Heidegger not by focusing on whether his thinking is worldly or political enough; instead, she is concerned with the way in which he draws thinking into a dangerously submissive relation to the world by locating its end in the event of truth or disclosure. While Arendt gestures toward this criticism in the second volume of The Life of the Mind on willing, I maintain that her argument for it comes into view in her analysis of thinking in the first volume of this text.33 While some may wonder why I do not start with Arendt's discussion of Gelassenheit and the "will-not-to-will" in LM II, my analysis suggests that her criticism in LM II is buttressed by a less appreciated argument regarding the critical capacity inherent in thinking's quest for meaning in the first volume of this text. While I will return to LM II at the end of this essay, the bulk of my analysis will focus on reconstructing her argument in LM I. Turning first to Arendt's criticism of Heidegger's claim that "Meaning of Being and Truth of Being say the same," I argue that she positions her conception of thinking in response to a peril that she suggests arises when the distinction between truth and meaning collapses (LM I, p. 15).44 This quotation appears in "Introduction to 'What is Metaphysics?'" (Heidegger, 1998, p. 286). I then consider how she develops this distinction and its relation to thinking's critical capacity in her analysis of the confusion in the modern sciences between the task of thinking and the demands of commonsense. Though Arendt follows Heidegger in criticizing the sciences for distorting the thinking activity, she formulates this distortion and the danger it poses differently. Heidegger's thinking answers principally to the threat that technoscientific rationality poses to our ability to stand in a more original relation to the truth (Heidegger, 1977b, p. 314).55 Hereafter QCT. Arendt, by contrast, problematizes the sciences for indexing thinking to the truth at all, which, in her view, renders it subservient to the demands of commonsense. As subtle as this difference may seem, Arendt's divergence from Heidegger on this point is significant. Arendt explains that the pursuit of truth is not first and foremost a function of thinking, as the modern sciences assume; instead, it is a compulsion of commonsense. Whereas commonsense needs to verify the sensation of realness we have with respect to the world of appearances, Arendt maintains that thinking is an altogether different activity. It harbors a freedom with respect to the world that is manifest above all in its ability to ask about the meaning of things rather than merely submitting to their truth. In its quest for meaning, thinking thus has the capacity to take pause and intervene in the impulse of commonsense to verify the reality that is given to us by the senses. When thinking is reduced to the quest for truth, this capacity for intervention dissolves, a capacity that is indispensable for resisting rather than acquiescing to a reality in which moral and political catastrophes like totalitarianism are possible.66 Martin Shuster (2018) has drawn a similar connection between Arendt's notion of thinking and this capacity for resistance. Whereas I develop this in the context Arendt's critique of Heidegger and the distinction she draws between truth and meaning in The Life of the Mind, Shuster offers a compelling and resonant account of the other side of this problem in Eichmann, connecting it to Arendt's conception of personhood. As I will suggest, the possibility for critique that Arendt locates in the thinking activity arises in its ability to intervene, not directly in worldly affairs, but rather in this compulsion of commonsense to acquiesce to the world. Upon considering Arendt's concern for the way in which scientific modes of thought endanger this possibility, I argue that Arendt identifies an analogous peril in Heidegger. While Heidegger may free thinking from the reductive and dominating notions of truth in the sciences, he does not liberate it from truth itself, leaving unquestioned the presumption that thinking reaches its ultimate end in the event of truth or disclosure. As such, he risks rendering thinking impotent to intervene in the native compulsion we have to go along with the world by virtue of our faculty of commonsense. Whereas Heidegger's thinking risks obedience to the world, Arendt's emphasis on meaning rather than truth liberates thinking from the worldly constraints of commonsense and the compulsion it creates to acquiesce. I therefore argue that Arendt does not neglect the problem that Heidegger's thinking poses in the face of Eichmann's thoughtlessness. On the contrary, she develops a conception of thinking that answers to it by recovering the freedom and critical capacity inherent in its ability to make meaningful propositions. While Arendt's diagnosis of the banality of evil is among her most enduring contributions, discerning how her own notion of thinking addresses this problem has proven notoriously difficult.77 These interpretive difficulties arise in part from the fact that at the time of her death, Arendt had only completed the first volume of The Life of the Mind, "Thinking," but not the other two volumes, "Willing" and "Judging." For more on the relation of the three parts of this text, see Fine (2008). For more on the interpretive challenges posed by its posthumous publication, see Hahn et al. (2019). As Arendt announces in her introductory remarks to The Life of the Mind, the immediate impulse for her investigation into thinking came from her observation of Eichmann's 1961 trail in Jerusalem (LM I, p. 3). She maintains that despite being responsible for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, Eichmann's disposition throughout his trial suggested that he was not a maniacal evil genius, but rather that his crime consisted most fundamentally in the fact that he was thoughtless (EJ, p. 54). As she explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem, "That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts...inherent in man—that was, in fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem" (pp. 287−288). The question of how we might respond to such a problem thus becomes paramount for Arendt after Eichmann's trial, shaping the trajectory of much of her later work, and especially her final inquiry in The Life of the Mind. Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil doing or actually 'condition' them against it? (LM I, p. 5) Though we might expect the answer to this question to be yes, Arendt turns in the epigraph of this text to a passage from Heidegger's What is Called Thinking? to illuminate the definitive problem that thinking poses. Thinking, Heidegger says, does not yield knowledge like the sciences, nor does it solve the riddles of the universe. Perhaps most notably, it does not directly empower us to act (LM I, epigraph). Hence, while Eichmann's thoughtlessness appeared to reveal the necessity of thinking, it also raised the question of whether thinking—an activity of sheer quietness that is meditative and withdrawn—has any power to intervene in the moral and political crises of the world. The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities that they had been presumed to say. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think. (Arendt, 1971, para. 11) Though Arendt engages critically Heidegger's project throughout her corpus, she nevertheless seems to hold in high regard the model of thinking that he introduces.88 Arendt explicitly praises Heidegger's philosophical discourse on thinking in such works as What is Called Thinking. As she says, "For an acquaintance with Heidegger's thought, What is Called Thinking? is as important as Being and Time. It is the only systematic presentation of his later philosophy and...it is perhaps the most exciting of his books" (Arendt, 1964). Yet, while Heidegger might have been a thinker of unparalleled significance, Arendt also recognizes that this did not prevent him from joining the Nazi Party in 1933 nor did it prompt him to intervene in the subsequent catastrophes of this period.99 For more on Heidegger involvement with the Nazi Party, see Wollin (2016) and Mitchell and Trawny (2017). Hence, the question that Eichmann's thoughtlessness imposed—of whether thinking can condition human beings to abstain from evil doing—becomes exceedingly difficult to answer when considered in light of Heidegger. In consequence of this, scholars have struggled to identify the source of Arendt's critique of Heidegger's notion of thinking in her effort to answer this question. Some have interpreted this critique as centering not on Heidegger's failure as a thinker but on his failure of judgment (Bernstein, 2000; Minnich, 2003; Sjöholm, 2021). Others have simply set Heidegger to the side in order to derive a positive account of Arendt's notion of thinking that is responsive to the banality of evil (Kateb, 2007). In nearly every case, scholars have turned to writings that precede The Life of the Mind, such as "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" and "Thinking and Moral Considerations," to distinguish Heidegger's notion of thinking from the model of thinking that Arendt associates with Socrates in these texts, contrasting him rather than Heidegger with Eichmann's thoughtlessness (Arendt, 2003a, 2003b).1010 While these two texts are perhaps the most commonly cited, there are others that should not be overlooked such as "Truth and Politics" (1967) and "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" (1963). Both offer important early iterations of Arendt's notions of truth and her critique of the sciences that anticipate her argument in LM I. Richard Bernstein offers perhaps the clearest articulation of the problem that Heidegger poses for Arendt in his seminal critique of her effort to establish a relationship between thinking and moral life. As Bernstein (2000) says, "Arendt's most novel and striking thesis—that there is an intrinsic connection between our ability or inability to think and evil—depends on discriminating the thinking that may prevent catastrophes from the thinking that does not. And I do not think that Arendt ever gave a satisfactory answer to this" (p. 291). In Bernstein's view, Arendt is unable to account, in particular, for the difference between the thinking of Heidegger and the thinking of Socrates. Though Arendt claims to locate this difference in Socrates' willingness to enter the marketplace in order to liberate thinking for the faculty of judgment, Bernstein suggests that Arendt does not account for why Heidegger's thinking could not do the same. Bernstein argues that Heidegger himself did not stay "at home" in the permanent abode of "pure thinking" but instead "[got] involved in the world of human affairs" (p. 290). Yet, unlike Socrates, Bernstein says, "It certainly cannot be said of Heidegger that at the moment of crisis, when things fell apart, his thinking liberated his faculty of judgment...For he failed to exercise the type of judgment that Arendt describes—the judgment that enables us to discriminate good and evil and which can prevent catastrophes" (p. 290). Bernstein thus maintains that while it is necessary to account for the differences between the thinking of Heidegger and the thinking of Socrates, "Arendt, who excelled in drawing distinctions, never turned her attention to an explicit analysis of the differences that really make a difference" (p. 290). In consequence of this, he argues that Arendt does not leave us with an answer to the question of whether thinking can condition human beings to abstain from evil doing, but rather with a paradox of thinking that she is unable to resolve. Ashley Biser (2014) takes up Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger in an effort to address Bernstein's concern that Arendt fails to distinguish adequately between Heidegger and Socrates (p. 522). Biser maintains that we can preserve this distinction by considering how Arendt's notion of thinking, in contrast to Heidegger's, enables us to gain our bearings in the world (p. 520). Biser argues that whereas Heidegger's notion of thinking in such texts as "Conversations on a Country Path about Thinking" is pure and, in this way, always keyed to an experience of disorientation with respect to the world, Arendt distinguishes pure thinking from representative thinking, positing the latter as that which enables us to orient ourselves toward the world. Drawing together the role that disorientation plays in Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Biser thus argues that Arendt adequately distinguishes between Heidegger and Socrates by emphasizing the orienting force of thinking that is missing in Heidegger's account.1111 See also Arendt (1976, p. 477). Biser maintains, too, that capturing this difference depends on theorizing thinking's capacity for orientation in its own right without collapsing it into Arendt's notion of judgment so that we can see the dangers in Heidegger's notion of thinking without reducing these dangers to a failure of judgment (p. 521).1212 In addition to Biser, Roger Berkwoitz has also pointed to the importance of interpreting Arendt's account of thinking in its own right, developing this with reference to the related concept of solitude. See Berkowitz (2010). I follow Biser, both in her claim that Arendt's conception of thinking is not aporetic, as Bernstein suggests, as well as in her concern for resisting the tendency to absorb Arendt's discourse on thinking into her account of judgment. Yet, I wish to take a different angle of approach to developing Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger. Rather than continuing to focus on whether Arendt has adequately distinguished between Heidegger and Socrates, it is perhaps more fruitful to consider what Heidegger's thinking shares with Eichmann's thoughtlessness. This can be brought into view by reformulating Arendt's critical reception of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind in light of her concern for conceiving of thinking in terms of the quest for meaning rather than truth. In so doing, it becomes possible to illuminate a point of contact between Heidegger and Eichmann that turns on that way in which each, albeit in distinct ways, distorts the relation between thinking and meaning. Afterall, Eichmann exhibited his thoughtlessness during his trial not by failing to tell the truth, but by failing to grasp the meaning of his deeds in his inability to speak about them in anything other than stock phrases and clichés (EJ, p. 41).1313 For more on this interpretation of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and his inability to speak meaningfully, see Shuster (2018), Cassin (2016), and Gaffney (2015). As Arendt suggests in The Life of the Mind, it is not that Heidegger's thinking is too pure, but rather that he locates its end in the event of truth or disclosure, thereby dissolving the freedom and critical capacity inherent in its quest for meaning. While recent scholars such as Itay Snir (2020) and Martin Shuster (2018) have drawn attention to the importance of this critical capacity, it has yet to be considered in relation to Arendt's critical reception of Heidegger as this takes shape in her distinction between truth and meaning in The Life of the Mind. By developing thinking's critical capacity in light of this distinction, it thus becomes possible to reconstruct the response that Arendt's notion of thinking offers not just to Eichmann but also to Heidegger. While Eichmann was thoughtless and Heidegger a thinker, it is perhaps in virtue of their common distortion of the relation between thinking and meaning that both could be accomplices to totalitarianism. Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger in her later writings tends to be framed in terms of her concern for adding to thinking a worldly or political dimension that prepares the way for judgment. Kimberly Maslin (2020) offers such an interpretation, arguing that the "two-in-one" that Arendt associates with self-reflection is fundamentally other oriented. It thus constitutes the condition under which it becomes possible to care (fürsorge) for the world and others in the right way (p. 125). In addition to Eichmann, Maslin suggests that Heidegger lacked this capacity for other-oriented self-reflection, which prevented him from being in the world in a way that enabled him to care properly for others. She says, "Engaging the other in self-reflective thinking might have enabled Eichmann (or Heidegger) to connect his actions to world events, render judgment and imagine a course of action either heroic (Anton Schmidt) or creative (Danish dockworkers)" (p. 128).1414 See also Sjöholm (2021) and Koishikawa (2018) who similarly emphasize this dimension of Arendt's thinking. To be sure, Maslin highlights an integral feature of Arendt's conception of thinking, particularly as it concerns enlarged mentality and political judgment. It is also consistent with Arendt's earlier critiques of Heidegger, which center on what she perceives as his inability to realize fully the worldly, communal, and political potential of his early formulation of the project of fundamental ontology (Villa, 1995, p. 232; Taminiaux, 1997, pp. 4–5).1515 Villa and Taminiaux offer the most classic interpretations of Arendt's critical reception of Heidegger in this respect. More recent interpretations include Tchir (2017), Yeatman (2018), and Maslin (2020). Yet, in the first volume of The Life of the Mind, where Arendt isolates and addresses the thinking activity most directly, the focal point of this critique seems to shift. Though much has been said about the movement of Arendt's thought from the question of political life to the question of contemplative life in the wake of her encounter with Eichmann, far less has been done to consider how her critical reception of Heidegger evolves in response to these developments. In consequence of this, Arendt's earlier critiques of Heidegger tend to be imposed on her later writings concerning thinking, leading to an emphasis on the question of the marketplace and the paradox of thinking that Bernstein and others identify. Arendt's concern for conceiving of thinking in terms of the quest for meaning rather than truth in the first volume of The Life of the Mind, however, suggests that this critique unfolds along different lines. Rather than problematizing Heidegger's thinking for not being worldly or political enough, Arendt's emphasis on meaning indicates instead that she is concerned with the way in which he draws thinking into a dangerously submissive relation to the world by locating its end in the event of truth or disclosure. That this shift has been overlooked is unsurprising given that Arendt agrees with so many aspects of Heidegger's conception of thinking. Arendt appears, for instance, to be sympathetic to Heidegger's claim that "most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking" (Heidegger, 1964, p. 5).1616 Hereafter WCT. She agrees that addressing this problem depends on distinguishing thinking from opinion, logical reasoning, and systematic metaphysics, following his suggestion that thinking must instead be associated with our capacity to question and be receptive to something that is irreducible to calculative procedure. She also finds compelling his assertion that poetry is far closer to thinking than philosophers like to admit and is inclined toward his view that thinking is not a part of everyday life, repeating his claim throughout The Life of the Mind that such an assumption is "out of order" with regard to the question of thinking (LM I, p. 78). Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, she follows Heidegger in maintaining that thinking does not produce results or knowledge like the sciences and suggests, in much the same way as he does, that "science does not think" (Heidegger, 1964, p. 8). The latest and in some respects most striking instance of this interpretation occurs in Heidegger's Being and Time, which sets out with 'raising anew the question of the meaning of Being.' Heidegger himself, in a later self-interpretation of this initial question, says explicitly: "'Meaning of Being' and 'Truth of Being' say the same.'" (LM I, p. 15) In this passage, Arendt problematizes Heidegger for collapsing the distinction between truth and meaning, suggesting that he has implicated himself in the metaphysical tendency to interpret thinking according to the model of truth. Yet, as provocative as this claim might be, Arendt does not develop the stakes of these remarks in direct reference to Heidegger here, reserving this for the second volume of The Life of the Mind on willing (LM II, pp. 188−193).1717 As important and understudied as this aspect of LM II is, Arendt's concerns here do not answer the question of why Heidegger's thinking cannot prevent moral and political catastrophe. Her critique of Heidegger's inability to distinguish truth from meaning in LM I, by contrast, does offer a ground to answer this question. For this reason, determining what these claims entail for her conception of thinking requires a more indirect interpretive approach. This can be done by drawing together her remarks on Heidegger with her own emphasis on thinking's quest for meaning as this takes shape in her critique of modern scientific modes of thought. Whereas Heidegger's thinking answers to the way in which the reductive and controlling power of technoscientific rationality threatens the possibility of a more original relation to the truth, Arendt is concerned with the way in which the sciences, in reducing thinking to the quest for truth, render it a passive and compulsory mechanism for satisfying the demands of commonsense. By considering how Arendt repositions this danger, it thus becomes possible to bring into focus an analogous peril to which Heidegger's thinking may remain vulnerable. To clarify how Arendt repositions the danger of the modern sciences, it is necessary to consider briefly Heidegger's account of the "supreme danger" that he associates with technoscientific rationality and the response that his conception of thinking offers to it (QCT, p. 314). While there is much to be said about the enduringly important and complex themes of thinking and truth in Heidegger, it is beyond the scope of the present inquiry to offer an exhaustive analysis of research on these topics. By focusing on Heidegger's response to the dangers he perceives in scientific thinking, this brief account is meant only to highlight the decisive point in his argument with which Arendt diverges in her own discourse on thinking. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, 'get' technology 'spiritually in hand.' We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control. (QTC, p. 289) Yet, he argues that this presumption of mastery is an illusion that not only obscures the essence of technology but that also covers over its true danger for the modern age. Technology, Heidegger argues, is not merely an instrument or tool at our disposal, nor is it something that we can opt in and out of at will. Instead, he says, "Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens" (QCT, p. 295). While human beings may participate in this mode of unconcealment, they do not control it. Rather, as a mode of disclosure, modern technology prefigures them and every effort they make to pursue nature and undertake scientific inquiry (QCT, p. 301). Heidegger takes the mode of disclosure that characterizes modern technology to be dangerous because it reveals beings not as what they are in their essence but rather as "ordered to standby, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered in this way has its own standing. We call it the "standing-reserve" [Bestand]" (QCT, p. 296). Modern technology thus structures experience in such a way that all beings, including human beings, are only able to appear in their reality as having already been reduced, dominated, and ordered to just stand by. Heidegger describes this way of seeing and appearing as enframing [Ge-stell] and says, "Where enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense" (QCT, p. 296). Able only to appear under this reductive and controlling rubric, Heidegger argues that modern individuals thus find themselves "continually...pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all [their] standards on this basis" (QCT, p. 307). This, Heidegger argues, has led to "the very brink of a precipitous fall...where [modern individuals] will have to be taken as standing reserve" (QCT, p. 307). In response to having their existence threatened in this way, human beings in the modern age thus deploy technical and calculative modes of thought to reassert the illusion of their dominance. In other words, Heidegger says, it is in virtue of having already been reduced and ordered as standing reserve that modern individuals cannot help but "exalt [themselves] to the posture of lord of the earth...In this way, the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his to construct" (QCT, p. 307). Insofar as these modes of thought only amplify and reinforce the reductive and controlling power that characterizes the essence of modern technology, Heidegger argues that it is necessary to develop "a way of thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power" (Blitz, 2014, p. 63). Significantly, what he perceives as most dangerous about this controlling power is that it risks denying human beings the possibility of "[entering] into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth" (QCT, p. 314). Heidegger thus responds by conceiving of thinking in terms of what he describes as Gelassenheit or releasement, understood as a receptiveness to the cal

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

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