Tertiary Natality: The Nascent Character of the Life of the Mind

Abstract

Hannah Arendt was initiated into political theory when she sought to analyse the factors which led to the evils of twentieth century totalitarianism. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt won renown as a political thinker. Subsequent book-length publications testify to Arendt’s continued interest in the political and the pre-eminence of action in human experience,1 but the problem which presented itself at the beginning of her career as a political thinker — the problem of evil — continued to haunt Arendt only to re-present itself as she commenced an analysis of the life of the mind. Still baffled by the reality of evil and the perdurance of its experience in the day-to-day routine of living, Arendt turned her attention to the realm of thought and the mental activities of thinking, willing and judging. It should not surprise us, then, that Arendt introduced The Life of the Mind with the question of the phenomenon of evil and the riddle it poses for the thinking activities. Arendt tells us from the outset that her ‘preoccupation with the mental activities’ had two origins: the Eichmann trial and the manifest banality of those who committed evil deeds during wartime in Nazi Germany and the moral question which this event raises for the life of the mind.2 Both ‘preoccupations’ came to be articulated under the comprehensive question: what is thinking? It was this absence of thinking (that is, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness) — which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think — that awakened my interest … Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought? … The question that imposed itself was: could the activity of thinking as such … be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?3KeywordsPractical WisdomPolitical ImplicationHuman AffairThinking ActivityCommon WorldThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.