Theories, Thinking, What Are We To Do?

 When I was 18, William James came into my life. He brought to me a distrust of idealism; albeit one that might have started first with Sherlock Holmes.

The Hedgehog Review published Hannah Arendt and the Loss of a Common World: Thinking in Concert Against Theory by Michael Weinman which I read wondering how it would bear on my prejudices.It started off well, then had me thinking I had bitten off more than I could chew.

What is the matter with theory? More specifically, what does a distinctively modern approach to theorizing have to do with the prevalence of the kind of conspiracist thinking that thrives in our era of post-truth politics? To find answers to that question, political and cultural analysts have recently returned to the work of Hannah Arendt—and for good reason. Despite her training as a philosopher in her native Germany, the brilliant Jewish émigré thinker (1906–75) was not only not a theorist but even something of an anti-theorist, a practitioner of exercises of political thinking that were never theoretical in the usual sense. Ranging from her magisterial Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition to her many essays, reviews, and works of analytical reportage (notably in Eichmann in Jerusalem), her oeuvre might best be characterized as a form of praxis, of thought in action. Grounded in the common world, this form of political thinking aims to support continued and active engagement in that world.

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For many readers of Arendt, then, the salient feature of her account of worldlessness, and the sense of isolation and loneliness that comes with it, is a general susceptibility to propaganda and manipulation by nefarious political actors. While this reading is not wrong, I wish to point to another dimension of the lack of the “common object,” one that is critical for understanding the alienation that she believed follows from the loss of the common world. Namely, I want to emphasize the solipsism that is endemic to two forms of life that are directly opposed to public life and the “condition of plurality” that is both necessary for and a result of such life. One is the solitary life of the lover of wisdom (the philosopher). The other is the lonely life of the lover of goodness (the saint). Both the philosopher and the saint stand, and understand themselves to stand, alone and apart from others, without whom it is impossible to share a “common object.” Arendt holds that while the philosopher and the saint share the experience of isolation from their neighbors, the political and societal salience of these forms of separation differ significantly. They do because the “goodness and loneliness” of the saint are “of much greater relevance to politics” than the “wisdom and solitude” of the philosopher. This matters, Arendt concludes, because while no one can endure the loneliness of the saint “for any length of time,” it is possible for the solitude of the philosopher to “become an authentic way of life.”²

The afterlife of the classical figure of the philosopher and the late antique figure of the saint might seem a world apart from today’s conspiracy theorist in his basement lair. But Arendt’s worries about alienation and worldlessness and her antipathy to high theorizing and the “circle of philosophers” (among whom she unquestionably intended to include her former mentor, Martin Heidegger), with whom she famously, if contentiously, sought to distance herself, suggest that the figures of the philosopher and the saint explain a great deal about our present predicament. As she sees things, the “professional thinker” in the modern age—the theorist operating in academe—has forged an amalgam of the dispassionate and disinterested pursuit of wisdom performed by the solitary philosopher and the passionate and profoundly interested pursuit of pure, unworldly, goodness performed by the lonely saint. What is destroyed in that powerful amalgam—for which Arendt (quoting Alfred North Whitehead) gives ultimate credit to René Descartes and Cartesian radical doubt—is the very possibility of common sense: “Cartesian reason is entirely based ‘on the implicit assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced’…. For common sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses [were] fitted into the common world…now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. The sense now was called common merely because it happened to be common to all.”³ In other words, Arendt argues, with the triumph of Descartes, the common of “common sense” diametrically shifts from the world to its opposite, the inner faculty—thought—that forms the object that the sense perceives. Quite literally, modern Cartesian individuals become a world unto themselves: Small wonder that the prevalence of alternative facts becomes an ever more salient issue.

Which leaves me thinking I need to stop being such a hermit, and get to Bracken Library for any books by or on Thomas Reid.

To the following, I would add ideology kills from Soviet Gulags to Auschwitz to Cambodia's killing fields to Eastern Ukraine:

The situation in which “everything is possible” is, indeed, Arendt’s diagnosis of what is distinctly totalizing in totalitarian dictatorship.⁸ It is the world-historically unique manifestation of the human capacity to will a world existing “only in ideas” (ideology) into actual reality. If we fail to achieve a sense of impartiality—what Arendt calls a “common sense”—then what is lost, along with the democratic warrant for the pursuit of truth (factual as well as rational), is the common world altogether.

Reality has a stubborn streak.

A solution proposed towards action to save democracy:

If we acknowledge that for Arendt, theorizing was an attempt to think about and understand phenomena of the world, and that her judging was more a practice than a theory, we notice that she aimed not to display a theory of judgment for others to implement but to describe a lived experience of judging as political thinking and to explore ways we can make the common world better. Or, of course, fail in the attempt to do so. The core of this experience is uncertainty. There is no human being in the world who always makes the right judgment. We never know in a particular present moment if our judgment is “right” or if the future will confirm its truthfulness.

Unlike that human birthright, action, the ability to judge requires development and improvement. Since the common world is a political space that people share with one another in its plurality, and since this world is by definition subject to constant change and development, the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized. The wealth of perspectives that can be taken into account expands again and again, and varies depending on the question the person making the judgment aims to address. Political thinking is therefore not a competence acquired once and for all, but must be grasped in its shifting dynamics. All this, though, is merely one judgment. What, Arendt asks, is yours?

It seems to me, we need to think for ourselves without our thinking being diverted from reality into fantasy. Think about it.

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