Thinking Without a Banister

"Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality."

-Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Essays in Understanding.

Arendt here is speaking of understanding and judging by oneself – without reliance on “preconceived categories.”  This is what she meant by “thinking without a banister.” As did Nietzsche—who asked in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,  "Have not all hand-rails [banisters] and foot-bridges fallen into the water?”  Arendt saw the loss of yardsticks and measures that mark our age as both a crisis and an opportunity.

When one thinks without a banister, one thinks without reference to either unquestioned categories of thought or to unquestionable ones.

When Nietzsche urges us to “doubt better than Descartes” he is urging us to think without a banister. Such thinking is dangerous, as it must be beyond good and evil and thus without reference to “morality.”

Arendt's concern with self-thinking and judging for oneself is lifelong, dating at least from the time of her work with Martin Heidegger. The Human Condition, written in 1958, announces its attention "to think what we are doing."

Yet, Arendt's initial and most extended reflections on thinking come to a great degree from her experience of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She had been struck in Jerusalem by the degree to which Eichmann was a usual human being – not sadistic, not even particularly anti-Semitic.  What was central to him, she found, was his thoughtlessness. The challenge she sets for herself—and for all of us in an age without banisters—is to re-learn the art of thinking.

—Tracy Strong