Hidden Depths

Symposium ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-143
Author(s):  
Hannah Lagrand ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Throughout her work, Hannah Arendt continually insists on the importance of the division between public and private. However, while the value of the public is a clear theme in Arendt scholarship, the unique value of the private often goes overlooked. In this essay, I draw on Arendt’s work in The Life of the Mind, particularly her discussion of the thinking activity, in order to draw out the richness that the hiddenness of the private has to offer as well as to explore what it might look like to care for the private in a modern world.Dans son travail, Hannah Arendt insiste continuellement sur l’importance de la division entre le public et le privé. Cependant, bien que la valeur du public soit un thème évident aux oeuvres intellectuelle d’Arendt, la valeur unique du privé vient souvent négligée. Dans cette dissertation, je m’appuie sur les travaux d’Arendt dans The Life of the Mind (La Vie de l’Esprit), en particulier son débat sur l’activité mentale, afin de faire ressortir la richesse dissimulée que le privé a à offrir ainsi que d’explorer ce à quoi cela pourrait ressembler si on s’occupait du privé dans un monde moderne.

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

Coleridge the Talker

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Karen Swann
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Social World ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores Coleridge’s late career as a prodigious talker. An insistent strain in contemporary accounts of Coleridge’s talk suggests that his auditors recognized in his talking the dynamics of thinking itself: not a content that could be transported back from one’s encounter with him, but the rhythms of a mind in a state of radical non-relation to a social world with which it nonetheless “colludes,” in Thomas De Quincey’s words. Both Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, and William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, hold up this sort of thinking as a slender, rear-guard resistance that the purposelessness of thought can offer to an unthinking instrumentalism that functions to “reduce law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine,” in Hazlitt’s words. In his time, Coleridge became the figure of a thinking without limits, the bearer of a frail resistance to the modern social and political arrangements from which this thinking withdraws.

On thinking: Open letter to Hannah Arendt

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Agnes Heller ◽  
David Roberts ◽  
Peter Beilharz
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
New School ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Thesis Eleven is honoured to be able to publish this text by our late friend and mentor Agnes Heller. It was secured in the period before her recent death, and is published now posthumously in her memory. Echoing her earlier text written as an Imaginary Preface to Arendt’s Totalitarianism, it responds to themes in the later text, The Life of the Mind. These were among the most eminent of the minds referred to later as Women in Dark Times. Their connection was not only institutional, via the New School, but represented a deep and ongoing affinity and critical engagement in political and philosophical terms. The imaginary letter arcs around issues and questions indicated by Cicero, Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, including matters of republicanism, rhetoric and the question of thinking. Best of all, it shows Agnes Heller at work, at her best: it shows her thinking. Like Arendt, she offers inspiration, provocation, through thinking.

scholarly journals «Rom» som metafor i utviklingen av (kritisk) tenkning: En diskusjon av begrepene «kritisk tenkning» og «etisk bevissthet» i læreplanens overordnede del i lys av Hannah Arendt

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Marianne Hustvedt
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
National Curriculum ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Pedagogical Literature

This article aims to discuss the key notions ‘critical thinking’ and ‘ethical consciousness’ in the new national curriculum in the light of the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work The Life of the Mind. Much has been said about being critical, but not so much about thinking. It is the claim of the author that it is unclear in both the national curriculum and some of the pedagogical literature as to what characterizes thinking, and that this stems from a theoretical deficit for understanding the activity of thinking. The consequence is that concepts such as thinking and judgement are confused and thinking is instrumentalized. Hence the article proposes to see Arendt’s use of the metaphor ‘space’ and other spatial metaphors to determine hallmarks of the activity of thinking. A vital hallmark of Arendt’s work is the radical autonomy of thinking partly detached from judgment and instrumental purposes. The author thus attempts to give a critical but constructive contribution to the national curriculum’s description of thinking as ‘giving room for uncertainty and unpredictability’ which could be understood in light of Arendt’s thought.

Educational Thinking and the Conservation of the Revolutionary

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-508
Author(s):  
Eduardo Manuel Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Little Rock ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Educational Thinking

Background/Context Prior work on Hannah Arendt and education has focused on democratic education, multicultural education, and conservatism in education. Most of these studies have concentrated on her essay, “The Crisis in Education.” While this study extends that work, it does so by taking up the lesser studied but equally relevant piece, “Reflections on Little Rock.” Furthermore, sparse attention has been paid to Arendt's work on thinking in relation to work on education. This piece seeks to fill these gaps in the scholarship on Arendt and education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Following Arendt, my inquiry is concerned with what we might call “the life of the student mind.” Two central questions guide this inquiry: What are students qua students doing that prepares them in advance for renewing a common world? How, as students, are they engaged with the world without being asked to take responsibility for it? Research Design This study is a comparative exegesis of Arendt, reading her early essays, “Reflections on Little Rock” and “The Crisis in Education,” through the lens of Thinking, the first volume of her final and posthumously published work, The Life of the Mind. The study is heavily supported by research conducted in the Arendt digital archives. Conclusions/Recommendations This exegesis reveals new insights into Arendt's mapping of the educational sphere and the principal activity taking place therein, namely, educational thinking. The close comparative reading of Arendt's early and later work produces a philosophical construction of the educational sphere as a liminal zone between past and future, a gap between the private sphere of the home, and the political sphere of the public realm. In turn, the primary result of this study is the articulation of a distinctly Arendtian conception of educational thinking as occurring in an existential space of solitude where students, withdrawn from the continuity of everyday life, engage in an activity that enables them to reflect upon and critically reimagine the world and thereby prepare for world-caring.

scholarly journals A ontologia da singularidade e a educação em Hannah Arendt: Uma preparação para o mundo

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Danilo Arnaldo Briskievicz
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Value Differences ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Common ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
Vita Activa ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Common World

Investigamos no pensamento de Hannah Arendt a possibilidade de uma ontologia da singularidade relacionada diretamente com a educação, como protomomento da ontologia da pluralidade, iniciada com o nascimento e ampliada pela chegada ao mundo comum, ao espaço da ação. Destacamos alguns pontos de sua teoria política, inter-relacionando-os com apontamentos sobre a educação do texto A Crise da Educação, de 1958. Apresentamos a educação como espaço privilegiado de formação da vida do espírito, essencial, por ser inicial, em tempo e espaço para o exercício pleno da vita activa. A ontologia da singularidade é fundamentada a partir de seis pontos em que é preciso: acolher, preparar e incluir os singulares; fomentar espaços para o discursar, valorizar as diferenças e preservar a tradição. Apresentamos dois antimodelos para a ontologia da singularidade: na educação escolar, os campos de concentração, pela prerrogativa do uso da violência e da mudez; para os educandos, Adolf Eichmann, por causa de seu vazio de pensamento e incapacidade de agir criativamente no mundo. Propomos que a duração da educação é proporcional à criatividade narracional da tradição pela autoridade dos professores.Palavras-chave: Hannah Arendt; Ontologia da singularidade; Filosofia da educação; Vida do espírito ABSTRACTWe investigate in Hannah Arendt's thinking the possibility of an ontology of singularity directly related to education, as protomoment of the ontology of plurality, initiated with the birth and enlarged by the arrival to the common world, to the space of action. We highlight some points of her political theory interrelating them with notes on education of the text The Crisis of Education, 1958. We present education as a privileged space of formation of the life of the mind, essential, for being initial, in time and space for the full exercise of the vita activa. The ontology of the singularity is based on six points in which it is necessary: to welcome, to prepare and to include the singular ones; to create spaces to promote discourse, to value differences, and to preserve tradition. We present two antimodels for the ontology of singularity: in school education, the concentration camps, by the prerogative of the use of violence and dumbness; for the pupils, Adolf Eichmann, due to  his emptiness of thought and incapacity to act creatively in the world. We propose that the duration of education is proportional to the narrative creativity of tradition by the authority of teachers.Keywords: Hannah Arendt; Ontology of singularity; Philosophy of education; Life of the spirit

scholarly journals Prolegomenon for an ethics of visibility in Hannah Arendt

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (110) ◽  
pp. 294-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethânia Assy
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Active Perception ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

This paper aims to discuss the Arendtian notions of appearance and perception in order to promote a displacement of those conceptions from the generally associated domain of passive apprehension of the faculty of knowledge towards the domain of a praxiology of action and language, based on an active perception. Arendt's appropriations on the Heideggerian "to take one's <it> place" (sich hin-stellen) will be discussed, as well as the Augustinian "finding oneself in the world" (diligere). A twofold disposition of appearance will be distinguished: producing and position, whose transposed to the Arendtian notion of world correspond, respectively, to fabrication (poiesis) of the world, man's objective in-between space, and to action (praxis) in the world, man's subjective in-between space. Those conceptual replacements, in a broad sense, uphold a closer imbrication between the activities of the mind and acting, stricto sensu, and consequently, foment not only the valorization of the public space, but the visibility of our acts and deeds as well, calling out the dignity of appearance in ethics.

And Worldlessness, Alas, is Always a Kind of Barbarism: Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Educating in Worldless Times

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-532
Author(s):  
Stephanie Mackler
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Best Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Thinking Differently ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

Background/Context In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote “The Crisis in Education,” arguing that schools should not be used for political purposes and should instead introduce children to what she calls “the world.” The world, for Arendt, comprises the artifacts, ideas, values, and interactions that connect people together. In that same year, she published The Human Condition, a damning analysis of the problem of what she calls “world alienation” in the modern era. By this, she means that we experience a radical sense of disconnection and alienation from the physical and social world we share with others. The tension between these two pieces is provocative, because one advocates giving children a world, while the other suggests that there is no longer a world to give. Purpose/Objective This article begins from the aforementioned point of tension to consider what Arendt might have said about education in 2008, particularly in light of the discussion of world alienation in The Human Condition and Arendt's later work on thinking in The Life of the Mind. Although Arendt's analysis of worldlessness is multifaceted, this article focuses on one specific aspect of her argument: the way our very approaches to thinking— including the way we conduct scholarly inquiry—contribute to the loss of the world. Research Design This work is philosophical in nature, focusing on several of Hannah Arendt's published works. Conclusions/Recommendations Drawing on Arendt's work on thinking, the author argues that the best response to worldlessness is a specific type of thinking. The article concludes by suggesting that educational researchers and practitioners consider the ways in which education is currently implicated in the problem of world alienation, as well as the ways that we can start thinking differently in response. “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”1

Thomasius (Thomas), Christian (1655–1728)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud Haakonssen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Public ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
The Mind

Christian Thomasius’ stature as the ‘founder’ of the German Enlightenment has been the source of much debate. His many essays dealing with issues in moral enlightenment and law reform (bigamy, witchcraft, torture, heresy, adultery, the use of the vernacular and so on) certainly single him out from other seventeenth-century writers. He was the public philosopher par excellence, a suitable match for August Hermann Francke, the great public theologian. Both men spent most of their career in Halle (in Brandenburg), and it was there that Francke institutionalized pietism, just as Thomasius propagated secular natural law theory. Despite many tensions, pietism and modern natural law thereby fused into a social duty-ethics that was of the greatest importance in shaping the modern Prussian state. The basis for natural law was God’s will and it was the attempt to follow this law that made humanity a moral species. Since humankind could not have any certain knowledge of the content of God’s law, the natural powers of the mind would have to be relied upon, and Thomasius’ thought was an investigation into the nature and social effect of these powers. His best-known result was a series of linked divisions between law and morality, between public and private spheres, between external and internal obligation, and between action and intention.

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