Hannah Arendt's Most Womanly Book
Shaan Sachdev reviews the new edition of The Life of the Mind, the latest installation of the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s work. Although the Life of the Mind finds Arendt in conversation with a who’s who of male philosophers, Sachdev suggests that “The Life of the Mind is a veritable monolith of this weaker sex,” full of intuitions and free from the traditional masculine demands of systematicity. At the core of The Life of the Mind is Arendt’s insistence that thinking aims at meaning and not at truth. Sachdev is alert to this distinction, finding in the literal fidelity of the new edition of the The LIfe of the Mind to Arendt’s rough English an openness to intuitions not resolved. Above all, Sachdev delves into the way Mary McCarthy initially sought to bring coherence to Arendt’s unfinished manuscript and now the newest edition edited by my colleague Thomas Bartscherer, Wout Cornelissen, and Anne Eusterschulte aims to restore the original open-endedness in the text. Sachdev writes:
“You ask about the effect my work has on others,” Arendt said to the German television host Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview. “If I may speak ironically, that’s a masculine question. Men always want to be influential. … I want to understand.” When Gaus remarked that Arendt was “a lady with a profession that some might regard as a masculine one,” she responded with the disarming fusion of earnestness and wit that inflected her writing. “I’m afraid I have to protest,” she replied. “I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted into the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose.” Then she slipped in a remark so underhandedly arch that Gaus missed the humor. “You say philosophy is generally considered a masculine occupation,” Arendt said. “It need not remain a masculine occupation. It is possible that one day a woman will be a philosopher.”
Arendt was not a “system builder,” as she characterized the likes of Hegel and Heidegger. She was far more interested in describing and approximating systems than in building them from scratch, though this occasionally would begin to resemble its own system, or at least, given her idiosyncratic usage of cohering terms, a mythos. Wolin’s reproofs of The Life of the Mind as having no one argument, “no controlling and unifying impulse,” would not have sounded demeaning to Arendt, for she was not interested in single answers, in recipes for practical application, in “the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’” which is how she defined political ideology. Like Nietzsche, she was bold in her fixations and interpretations. But unlike Nietzsche, she was not precociously poetic or literary and could not thus get away as he did with twinges of aphoristic insight and historical curation without being accused of abruptness and arrogance.
The greatest achievement of the new edition is its resubmission of Arendt’s least-read book, and thus of thinking itself, to the public. If “the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person,” she wrote. “The matter can no longer be left to ‘specialists’ as though thinking like higher mathematics were the monopoly of specialized disciplines.” And yet Arendt’s initial frustrations at the vita contemplativa’s all-too-willing estrangement from the world soon led to disapproval of the other side, too — where thinking for its own sake was devalued and the barrier between thinking and acting was fully dissolved in the name of scientific progress. For a contemporary reader, especially one who neither reads nor writes for academic philosophy journals, it is this side of Arendt’s thinking that makes The Life of the Mind not a feat of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning."