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ON THINKING
Hannah Arendt on Thinking
" […] what we generally call ‘thinking,’
though unable to move the will or provide
judgment with general rules, must prepare
the particulars given to the senses in such
a way that the mind is able to handle them
in their absence; it must, in brief, de-sense
them.
"The best description of this process
of preparation I know of is given by Augustine.
Sense perception, he says, ‘the vision, which
was without when the sense was formed by
a sensible body, is succeeded by a similar
vision within,’ the image that re-presents
it. This image is then stored in memory,
ready to become a ‘vision in thought’ the
moment the mind gets hold of it; it is decisive
that ‘what remains in the memory’—the mere
image of what once was real—is different
from the ‘vision in thought’—the deliberately
remembered object […]. Hence, the thought-object
is different from the image, as the image
is different from the visible sense-object
whose mere representation it is. It is because
of this twofold transformation that thinking
‘in fact goes even further,’ beyond the realm
of all possible imagination, ‘when our reason
proclaims the infinity of number which no
vision in the thought of corporeal things
has yet grasped’ or ‘teaches us that even
the tiniest bodies can be divided infinitely.’
Imagination, therefore, which transforms
a visible object into an invisible image,
fit to be stored in the mind, is the condition
sine qua non for providing the mind with
suitable thought-objects; but these thought-objects
come into being only when the mind actively
and deliberately remembers, recollects and
selects from the storehouse of memory whatever
arouses its interest sufficiently to induce
concentration; in these operations the mind
learns how to deal with things that are absent
and prepares itself to ‘go further,’ toward
the understanding of things that are always
absent, that cannot be remembered because
they were never present to sense experience."
[The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1978), I. 76-77]
* * *
"What these few [Scheler, Jaspers, Heidegger]
had in common was—to put it in Heidegger’s
words—that they could distinguish ‘between
an object of scholarship and a matter of
thought" (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 1947) and that they were pretty indiffierent
to the object of scholarship. At that time
[between the two World Wars] the rumor of
Heidegger’s teaching reached those who knew
more or less explicitly about the breakdown
of tradition […].
"The rumor about Heidegger, to put it
quite simply: Thinking has come to life again
[…]. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps
learn to think. […]
"Heidegger never thinks ‘about’ something;
he thinks something. In this entirely uncontemplative
activity, he penetrates to the depths, but
not to discover, let alone bring to light,
some ultimate, secure foundations which one
could say had been undiscovered earlier in
this manner. Rather, he persistently remains
there, underground, in order to lay down
pathways and fix ‘trail marks." […]
"This thinking may set tasks for itself;
it may deal with ‘problems’; it naturally,
indeed always, has something specific with
which it is particularly occupied or, more
precisely, by which it is specifically aroused;
but one cannot say that it has a goal. It
is unceasingly active, and even the laying
down of paths itself is conducive to opening
up a new dimension of thought, rather than
to reaching a goal sighted beforehand and
guided thereto. […]
"I have said that people followed the
rumor about Heidegger in order to learn thinking.
What was experienced was that thinking as
pure activity—and this means impelled neither
by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive
for cognition—can become a passion which
not so much rules and oppresses all other
capacities and gifts, as it orders them and
prevails through them. We are so accustomed
to the old opposition of reason versus passion,
spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate
thinking, in which thinking and aliveness
become one, takes us somewhat aback. […]
"That something like Heidegger’s passionate
thinking exists is indeed, as we can recognize
afterward, a condition of the possibility
of there being any philosophy at all. […]
This passionate thinking, which rises out
of the simple fact of being-born-in-the-world
and now ‘thinks recallingly and responsively
the meaning that reigns in everything that
is’ (Gelassenheit, 1959, p. 15), can no more have a final
goal—cognition or knowledge—than can life
itself. The end of life is death, but man
does not live for death’s sake, but because
he is a living being; and he does not think
for the sake of any result whatever, but
because he is a ‘thinking, that is, a musing
being.’
"A consequence of this is that thinking
acts in a peculiarly destructive or critical
way toward its own results. […]
"Every thinker, if only he grows old
enough, must strive to unravel what have
actually emerged as the results of his thought,
and he does this simply by rethinking them.
(He will say with Jaspers, ‘And now, when
you just wanted really to start, you must
die.’ […] The thinking ‘I’ is everything
but the self of consciousness.
"Moreover, thinking, as Hegel, in a
letter to Zillmann in 1807, remarked about
philosophy, is ‘something solitary,’ and
this not only because I am alone in what
Plato speaks of as the ‘soundless dialogue
with myself,’ but because in this dialogue
there always reverberates something ‘unutterable’
which cannot be brought fully to sound through
language and articulated in speech, and which,
therefore, is not communicable, not to others
and not to the thinker himself. […]
" […] no one before Heidegger saw how
much this nature [the will to will and the
will to power] stands opposed to thinking
and affects it destructively. To thinking
there belongs ‘Gelassenheit’—serenity, composure, release, a state of
relaxation, in brief a disposition that ‘lets
be.’ Seen from the standpoint of the will
the thinkers must say, only apparently in
paradox, ‘I will non-willing’; for only ‘by
way of this,’ only when we ‘wean ourselves
from will,’ can we ‘release ourselves into
the sought-for nature of the thinking that
is not a willing." ["Martin Heidegger at Eighty," ed. M. Murray, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978),
295-98, 303]
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