Video Archives - Lunchtime Talk with Robert Pogue Harrison (2011)

Tuesday, March 15^th, 2011: Lunchtime Talk

Featured Speaker: Robert Pogue Harrison, Professor of Literature at Stanford University

Robert Pogue Harrison’s Lunchtime Talk at the Arendt Center focuses on a particular aspect of Arendt’s concept of thinking, which is thinking’s relation to phenomena not traditionally associated with it, such as friendship, and the role of thinking “in these domains where it has different registers, motivations, and outcomes” than what one might assume. He begins by bringing attention to an article “Philosophy and Politics,” which was adapted from one of three lectures delivered by Arendt at the University of Notre Dame in 1954. In that article, Arendt meditates on the pre-Platonic Socrates, who saw thinking as a vocation by which one exists in and among the people of the polis, engaging their opinions through dialogue. This pre-Platonic philosopher took himself to be the midwife of his fellow citizens’ opinions, bringing out the latent truth of their beliefs through his personal engagements. To Arendt, Socrates is trying to build Athens into a “community of friends” (quoting Harrison). It is with friends that one thinks through issues without necessarily coming to conclusions. Friends can cohabitate even in disagreement.

Harrison then explains what Arendt identifies as a post-Socratic turn: after Socrates failed to make friends of his polis—he was, in fact, sentenced to death by them—his student Plato was so mortified that he led an aggressive push to divorce philosophy from the political, from people’s opinions, and to seek out a truth beyond mere opinion. Arendt, Harrison explains, wants to get back to Socrates’ original conception of philosophy, wherein philosophical thinking is not a science but rather a dialogue with oneself. In that way, one is able to think with another only by first thinking with oneself, so that the Socratic dialogue necessitates a solitary, internal dialogue.

[caption id="attachment_13644" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Robert Pogue Harrison[/caption]

Harrison takes an opportunity to investigate briefly the nature of what Arendt calls the “shock of wonder” which the philosopher experiences, uniquely so, in her solitary self-dialogue. This is a moment of awe at the existence of the world, which takes one in some sense outside of thinking, suspending the process of internal dialogue itself. For Arendt, this moment is both foundational to philosophy and an end of philosophy. It is the key component of “passionate thinking,” which is how she describes Heidegger’s revivification, as she experienced it, of philosophical thought through his theories.

The moment of wondrous awe is crucial to understanding the way that thinking, in Arendt’s conception, moves in so many different registers. This passionate suspense is at the root of her concept. She believed Heidegger was mistaken in supposing he could translate this kind of passion into social reality. For her, it marks the solitude of the thinker whose task is to maintain and work out from this awe.

The talk is followed by a Q&A session, including critical questions from Bard professors Ian Buruma, Karen Sullivan, and Joseph Luzzi regarding the links uniting passion, social life, and the political.

Summary by Dan Perlman

You can watch the full video of the Lunchtime Talk below:

Passionate Thinking: A Talk by Robert Pogue Harrison from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.