The Prejudices of Intellectualism

By Roger Berkowitz

In an essay on Hannah Arendt in a series on the Great Thinkers, Finn Bowring rightly focuses on Arendt’s worry about the power of intellectual elites. At home in abstraction and theories, intellectuals have an uncanny ability to lose themselves in flights of fancy and reject or deny the facts of this world. The philosophical temptation is to live amongst logically coherent fictions and deny those real facts that frustrate their beautiful forms. That is one reason intellectuals are uniquely predisposed to ideological rigidity. And even as Arendt came to wonder whether thinking—the conversation one has with oneself and the ability to see the world from the perspective of others—can frustrate and possibly prevent the logical prison of ideological certitude, she remained wary of what Bowring calls the “prejudices of intellectualism.”

Arendt’s initial focus on human activity was in part a reaction against the prejudices of intellectualism, which she believed had haunted Western philosophy since its inception, and which seemed to have permitted countless educated Germans to accept, if not support, the creeping horrors of Nazism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt argued that Nazism and Stalinism constituted a radical break with the political history of the Occident. But she also believed that the very tradition of Western thought was ill-equipped to recognize and resist the currents of racism and fascism that began to surface in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Its fateful error had been to elevate thinking over doing, and thus to treat the often messy and uncertain world of politics as a disposable adjunct to the flawless realm of ideas – to a theoretical doctrine or ideology.

To separate the philosopher’s solitary contemplation of eternal truth from the indeterminate exchange of citizens’ imperfect opinions was, Arendt argued, the most “anti-Socratic conclusion” that Plato could have drawn from the scandalous trial and sentencing of Socrates. For Plato’s elitism was unfaithful to Socrates’s own denial of absolute wisdom, and it broke the delicate link between thought and action that Socrates had promoted through his method of intellectual midwifery, in which reciprocal questioning and dialogue was a way of giving birth to a mutually recognizable world.