The wind of thinking

Thinking is not Knowing

One of the most remarkable propositions of Arendt in relation to thinking is her distinction between thinking as meaning making, and cognizing as knowledge building (cf. Table 1). ‘To anticipate, and put it in a nutshell: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 15, emphasis original, here and elsewhere). To ground such a position, Arendt engages in dialogue with the authors of the past – and here, the main interlocutor is Kant, and his distinction between intellect (Verstand), and reason (Vernunft): ‘the intellect (Verstand) desires to grasp what is given to the senses, but reason (Vernunft) wishes to understand its meaning’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 57). In her reading, intellect, or what she at times calls cognition, or knowing, has as object the world of appearances, given to our senses. Knowing is thus close to common sense, which unites our senses in our feeling of reality, and also is about the world. Thus, the activity of both scientists and lay people is about knowing and mastering the world; both tend toward truth. The activity of the scientist, even engaged in fundamental sciences such as mathematics, is indeed always ultimately oriented toward reality, and anticipates a change in the ‘real’ world; a scientist in a lab works like a plumber, and in that sense, ‘The activity of knowing is no less related to our sense of reality and no less a world-building activity than the building of houses’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 57) (See also Zadeh and Coultas, this issue; Brinkmann, this issue). Hence, thinking as cognizing or knowing is about the world, and aims at truth, in relation to the world. The ‘truth’ of its outcome can always be confirmed, when it holds: the carpenter’s table holds, the physicist’s formula allows the engineer to send a racket to the moon; and even 2 + 2 = 4 holds as truth for cognition. As consequence, Arendt insists, knowing is the only form of activity which can aim at truth, and even more:

there are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are factual truths, those engendered by sheer brain power and expressed in a specially designed sign language not excluded, and only factual statements are scientifically verifiable. (Arendt, 1978, p. 62).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Conceptual distinctions on thinking in Arendt.

Arendt’s distinction	Other terms/synonymous	Object	Outcome	Criteria
Knowing	Intellect, cognition, knowing (Kant: Verstand)	Aspects of the world of appearance; mastery	Knowledge	Truth (factual, logical)
Thinking	Reasoning (Kant: Vernunft)	Own activity; whatever attracts attention; general ideas (truth, justice…); unanswerable questions	Meaning	Maintaining inner dialogue?

This point is important to underlie, as many philosophers, including Kant, tried to ascribe other forms of truth to other activities of mind than knowing – which Arendt sees a fallacy. Indeed, if one considers seriously the specificity of the second mental activity that is thinking, one must admit that it will never be oriented toward truth.

In contrast to knowing, oriented toward truth, thinking is a quest for meaning ² ; and meaning cannot be true or false. Thinking as meaning making, which she mostly calls reasoning, has no aim but itself. In her characterization of the objects of thinking, Arendt moves across the volume between the general and the particular. On the one hand, thinking addresses ‘unanswerable questions’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 62) and issues ‘such as truth, justice, and beauty’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 84), and it ‘deals with the invisibles in all experience and always tends to generalize’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 213). On the other hand, it addresses deeds or the thought in which each of us is engaged in our daily lives: ‘the activity of thinking as such [is] the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 4). Thinking is thus not the privilege of ‘professional thinkers’. It is a process in which we all engage when we step out of the flow of activities, and reflect upon them: ‘thinking (…) interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 78). Or even more: ‘Practically, thinking means that each time you are confronted with some difficulty in life you have to make up your mind anew’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 177). These points thus suggest that, unlike knowing which is triggered by some curiosity we have about the world, by our desire to master it, or the wish to ameliorate our practical lives, thinking is triggered by our own activities, whether initiated by ourselves or by others, and the need we may have to understand what they mean in more general terms: thinking demands a halt, a rupture or a gap to be triggered, before eventually carrying on.

In that sense, for Arendt, thinking has no need to have results: the meanings thinking produces are only temporary, and can, and always need, to be questioned again. And so, contrarily to knowing, which can achieve truths that can remain and build progress and societies, ‘the thinking activity on the contrary leaves nothing so tangible behind, and the need to think can therefore never be stilled by the insights of “wise men”’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 62). So, what would be the criteria of an acceptable meaning? Although Arendt does not mention it explicitly, it seems dependent on the fact that it maintains the movement of thinking alive, which, as we will see below, depends on inner dialogue.

In any case, the process of meaning making seems vital, both for each person and for humankind:

if [men] were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, they would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call work of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded (Arendt, 1978, p. 62).

Thinking is also indispensable as safeguard to our other activities, including knowing: it is fundamental for scientists to question the meaning of their findings; otherwise they rely on common sense, which ‘lacks the safeguards inherent in sheer thinking, namely, thinking’s critical capacity, which, as we shall see, harbors within itself a highly self-destructive tendency’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 56). Without thinking, scientists could see products of their work used for unacceptable aims; without thinking, and question the meaning of things, we could be brought to obey and follow any new rules or societal organization offered to us by any political leader – and Arendt here alludes explicitly to people’s uncritical admission of the Nazi rule in Germany or the Stalinists one in Russia (Arendt, 1978, p. 177). Hence, thinking appears here as ethical safeguard. This proposition of a distinction between thinking as reasoning and intellectual knowing is the most radical one proposed by Arendt, and the most intriguing for psychology, and I will come back to it.

Thinking and withdrawal

Because thinking as meaning making demands us to step out of the flow of activity, it may thus appear to be separated from action or from our engagement with the world. It demands a form of withdrawal, or what psychologist would call a form of distancing. So, ‘where are we when we think’, asks Arendt? To answer this question, Arendt proposes a metaphysical inversion: against philosophers who have long seen as primacy the life of ideas, and considered the world of appearances a world of illusion beyond which we should intent, Arendt starts by grounding the undeniable primacy of what is in the world, and which is given to our senses. Drawing on the work of a Swiss biologist and zoologist, Adolf Portmann, she thus defends the primacy of appearances: for most living organisms, what matters is what is given to perception, such as the beautiful and unique feathers of a bird, not what is hidden, which is ugly and common, such as its entrails. It is also the primacy of appearances to which we are exposed through or five senses; as these usually converge, and as other people tend to agree on our perception of what is, we develop our ‘common sense’, ‘sixth sense’, or ‘sensation of reality’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 50).

So where does thinking occur? Arendt first examines the relation between common sense, or inner sense, and thinking: both are invisible and located in the ‘brain’; yet they deeply differ. Common sense is given to us in our relation to the real; it is natural and spontaneous; and it cannot question itself. Thinking, at the contrary, can doubt common sense, our relation to reality (and itself): ‘when thinking withdraws from the world of appearances, it withdraws from the sensorily given and hence also from the feeling of realness, given by common sense’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 52). Thinking is thus characterized by its withdrawing, a suspension from the real, known to others as it is visible through the absent-mindedness ‘to be observed in anyone who happens to be absorbed in no matter what sort of thought. (…) The loss of common sense (…) happens to everybody who ever reflects on something; it only happens more often to professional thinkers’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 53).

With this, Arendt has established the basis of her equation: the world is given through appearances because we relate with it and others in specific contexts, we establish it as real, through our common sense; yet, every time we are confronted with a difficulty, we stop-and-think, and can temporarily withdraw from this reality in order to think. But how do we withdraw from the world, what are the processes involved in distancing oneself from it?

Psychologists have long been interested by this capacity by which we may separate our thoughts from our activity; it may be that schema become abstracted and differentiated (Piaget, 1952, 1999), or that we use complex semiotic mediation, including verbal language, to achieve such distancing (Valsiner, 2014; 2019; Vygotsky, 1986; Zavershneva & van der Veer, 2018). For Arendt, distancing requires a combination of imagination, language and metaphors.

Thinking and imagination

If we withdraw from the environment, how can then thinking enable us to examine whatever we experience? For this, we need imagination, which enables to make present to our mind what we do not experience. ‘In imagination, we de-sense whatever had been given to our senses. And only in this immaterial form can our thinking faculty now begin to concern itself with these data’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 87). Imagination is not only about having ‘images’ in mind; it is about re-presenting what is absent to our senses (Arendt, 1978, p. 76). And thus, imagination, as

The mind’s faculty of making present what is absent [,] is of course by no means restricted to mental images of absent objects; memory quite generally stores, and holds at the disposition of recollection, whatever is no more, and the will anticipates what the future may bring but is not yet. (Arendt, 1978, p. 76).

Hence, imagination demands a double movement: first, to de-sensorialise experience, that is, to withdraw, or distance, from immediate experience; and second, to make present to mind experiences from the past or the future. Imagination is for Arendt more than simple reproduction, it is a creative imagination (which is one specific option in philosophy (Zittoun et al., 2020)). Imagination is thus a necessary preparatory process for thinking. For everybody, imagination seems to be the core movement of mind, which then will be the basis of judgement of the past and willing the future (see papers by Cabra, this issue; Marková, this issue;). For ‘professional thinkers’, that is, philosophers, experience de-sensed through imagination can then become ‘thought-objects’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 77), thanks to which they can engage in thinking about things that have never and will never be directly experienced:

these thought-objects come into being only when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects and selects from the storehouse of memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to induce concentration; in these operations the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to “go further”; toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience (Arendt, 1978, p. 77).

Non-philosophers can also withdraw from the world of experience and engage in thinking and search for meaning through imagination; they also would use more abstract terms to think, even though it may take different forms that the philosophers’ – they may then tell stories or write poems. ‘For thinking, then, though not for philosophy, technically speaking, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 78).

Hence, although we may not follow Arendt on the idea of the ‘storehouse of memory’, a metaphor not valid since we know the dynamic and reconstructive nature of memory (Boyer & Wertsch, 2009; Danziger, 2008; Wagoner, 2018), it is important to identify the role of imagination in Arendt’s theory of thinking: it is a fundamental process enabling to take distance from immediate sensory experience, so as to move through past and future; it is the precondition for more abstract thinking and thus making meaning of ‘unanswerable questions’, whether in philosophical terms or through the stories we tell.

Thinking and metaphor and language

But then, what is the vehicle for imagination and thinking, how can these thought-objects come to mind? For this, we need language:

In all such reflecting activities men move outside the world of appearances and use a language filled with abstract words which, of course, had long been part and parcel of everyday speech before they became the special currency of philosophy (Arendt, 1978, p. 78).

Arendt thus has to develop a theory of language in relation to thinking, in which she will confer a special status to metaphors. Mental activities, which are invisible, need words to become visible to ourselves. Words are ‘carriers of meaning’; we use them to ‘appropriate’ the world and make it thinkable (Arendt, 1978, pp. 99–100). Language is thus apt to capture experiences from our contact with the world, our common sense. However, there is a problem when it comes to thinking: ‘no language has a readymade vocabulary for the needs of mental activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originally meant to correspond either to sense experience or to other experiences of ordinary life’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 102). To accede to ideas disconnected from common sense, to ideas and concepts designating things which are invisible and beyond appearances, we use metaphors:

The metaphor provides the “abstract”, imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of appearances whose function it is “to establish the reality of our concepts” (Kant) and thus undo, as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition of mental activities (Arendt, 1978, p. 103).

Indeed, the metaphor, which is based on analogies, enables us to move from the world of phenomenon to the world of ideas and back, ‘the transition’ from one existential state to another (p. 103), or ‘its turning the mind back to the sensory world in order to illuminate the mind’s non-sensory experiences for which there are no words in any language’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 106).

This has surprising implications; for if thinking through metaphors is the only way we can apprehend invisible ideas, then is some ways, these bring in a bit of the world of appearances, a bit of embodiment, in thinking. Even more, metaphors ‘guarantee the unity of human experience’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 109) even when it seems disconnected from the world. The power of metaphor for thinking thus becomes an argument against dualism (mind-body) and toward monism:

Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein, of our sense experiences. There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them (Arendt, 1978, p. 110).

Of course, metaphors have limits. First, they can introduce fallacies in thinking, as their power of conviction can elude the need to support reflection with further explanation or proof, leading to unsound speculation or ‘pseudo-science’ (and Arendt here criticizes, without mentioning Freud, the ‘iceberg’ metaphor of the unconscious (Arendt, 1978, p. 113)). Second, and more importantly here, metaphors have limits: there are some intuitions they cannot capture. Arendt thus shows how the ‘great philosophers’ – Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger – all used metaphors in their attempt to capture thinking; yet, they all at some point failed, as language did not allow them capturing their ultimate intuition – there is something ineffable about thinking. For Arendt, the core of thinking escapes language, because its main characteristic is that it is a process, a movement. If thinking is in the movement, and can never achieve its goal, then any attempt to translate this into written language loses the very core of thinking.

In other words, the chief difficulty here seems to be that for thinking itself (…) there exists no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. (…) Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to its end. (…). The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. (Arendt, 1978, p. 123).

This is a very interesting idea, that the experience of thinking is an activity, a living movement, a breath ³ . How can then Arendt specify this further? There are two aspects qualifying the living nature of thinking: first, thinking is a form of dialogue, and second, thinking has to be understood as a temporal phenomenon.

Thinking as inner dialogue

To capture the movement of thinking, Arendt questions again ‘what makes us think’ – we have evoked the question of the difficulty, or the need to stop; but what makes the movement of thinking? As she often does in the Life of the Mind when she addresses a new question, Arendt engages in her genealogic enquiry and looks for answers in classical philosophy. According to her reading, if Roman thinkers used to consider that one engages in thinking to escape a hostile world, the Greeks at the contrary considered that they were brought to thinking by wonder:

what sets men wondering is something familiar and yet normally invisible, and something men are forced to admire. The wonder that is the starting-point of thinking is neither puzzlement nor surprise nor perplexity; it is an admiring wonder (Arendt, 1978, p. 163).

However, not satisfied with either of these solutions, Arendt turns back to Socrates. Never proposing a positive philosophy, Socrates was defining his role as that of a gadfly, instilling doubt and waking people up from their non-thinking state; as a midwife, bringing life to people’s thinking and purging them from opinions; and as an electric ray, which, through thinking, may paralyse action (Arendt, 1978, pp. 172–173). For Socrates, then, thinking was a movement not to be stopped; it is he who introduced the metaphor of wind to designate the thinking activity (Arendt, 1978, p. 174). Arendt further examines the core of the activity of thinking through her reading of Socrates, until she formulates the idea that thinking demands a form of inner dialogue, which she calls a ‘two-in-one’:

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company (…). It is this duality of myself with myself that makes thinking a true activity, in which I am both the one who asks and the one who answers. Thinking can become dialectical and critical because it goes through this questioning and answering process, through the dialogue of dialegesthai, which actually is a “traveling through words”, a poreuesthai dia ton logon, whereby we constantly raise the basic Socratic question: What do you mean when you say … Except that this legein, saying, is soundless and therefore so swift that its dialogical structure is somewhat difficult to detect. (Arendt, 1978, p. 185).

The origin of this inner dialogue has to be found in real dialogues we have experienced in the world, for it is ‘difference and otherness’, which we find in the world around us, that ‘are the very conditions for the existence of man’s mental ego as well, for this ego actually exists only in duality’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 187, p. 187) ⁴ . Paradoxically, however, when we are with others, engaged in real dialogues, we appear as ‘one’, having an identity: only when we are alone can we experience this inner dialogue, this two-in-one. And thus, solitude is not loneliness (see also Zadeh and Coultas, this issue) ⁵ :

Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company, when, as Jaspers used to say, I am in default of myself (ich bleibe mir aus), or, to put it differently, when I am one and without company (Arendt, 1978, p. 185).

Through this description of thinking as process, life and breath, Arendt turns thinking in an essential feature or our livelihood:

Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts. A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers. (Arendt, 1978, p. 191, p. 191)

The metaphor of the sleepwalker is very strong – the person who walks or lives while his mind is asleep to the world; it was the title of the novel of a close friend of Arendt, Hermann Broch, which describes three characters at the turn of the 20th century who live their lives without actually thinking, following a vague sense of what they should do or what other people expect from them (Broch, 1986). This fundamental inner dialogue by which we confer meaning to our activity, in the aftermath or in anticipation, or by which we question other people’s discourses, as well as rules and opinions, is the grounding of our capacity to judge and to define what is right and what is wrong.

If thinking – the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue – actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its byproduct, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self. (Arendt, 1978, p. 193, p. 193)

Thinking has thus an ethical dimension it is manifested by judgement, the ability to tell right from wrong (see Brinkmann, this issue; Zadeh and Coultas, this issue). In any case, if thinking is a breath, and a dynamic movement, it occurs in time. So how can we qualify the temporality of thinking?

Impermanence of thinking – temporality of thinking

Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking appears as fundamentally processual and dynamic. First, as we have seen, thinking has no tangible results: even when it produces meaning, it demands always be re-examined; it demands to un-wave what it has woven. Second, the core of thinking is a two-in-one, an inner dialogue which, like a breath, is a never ending living movement. In other words, thinking is both impermanent, yet necessarily needs to unfold, as dynamic, in time. How then to qualify the temporality of thinking?

In the demonstration of The Life of Mind, Arendt considers thinking in time as an alternative to the question of ‘where are we when we think’: as it was left without satisfying answers, she proposes to move away from a spatial metaphor of thinking, to a temporal metaphor ⁶ . In order to define the temporality of thinking, Arendt first draws on a novel by Kafka, which enables her to metaphorically consider thinking as emerging somewhere between the pressing past, and the pull of the future. The thinking person thus creates a gap in the ‘continuously flowing everlasting stream’ of time (Arendt, 1978, p. 205):

The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself (Arendt, 1978, p. 206).

Yet still not satisfied with the spatial metaphors involved in the idea of a gap ‘between’ past and future, or as ‘region’, Arendt rather proposes to emphasize a language of forces: past and future exert their force, coming from an infinite, to the present; because these forces are orthogonal, a resulting force can emerge, pushing toward the infinite – and this is thinking. This, she formulates as follows in Figure 1.OPEN IN VIEWER

On this diagonal toward infinite, the thinker escapes to the pressures of past and future, and he or she can find a form of peace:

In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire”, of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what It may be all about. (1978, pp. 209–210).

And thus, thinking is not only ‘out of order’, it is also ‘out of time’. Although it is tending toward the infinity, it is everlasting and passing, and it only exists as impermanent activity. In that sense, we can never rely on past thinking, and the only way to learn about thinking, is to rediscover the movement of thinking for oneself, to experience it. But then, if thinking is a dynamic, and if attempts to write it down always destroy it, can we never rely on other people’s writing? Pushed here to a difficult implication of her stance, Arendt proposes two answers: across time, people can recognize that other authors had experiences comparable to them – such as her own recognition of Socrates, Kant and many others; and second, perhaps, we can still leave traces of our activity of thinking, to be found by others. Quoting two poems, one by Shakespeare, the other by W. H. Auden, evoking the beautiful fragments of a past long gone, Arendt thus hopes that some of her own work may leave comparable traces that critical readers may preserve:

If some of my listeners or readers should be tempted to try their luck at the technique of dismantling, let them be careful not to destroy the “rich and strange,” the “coral” and the “pearls,” which can probably be saved only as fragments (Arendt, 1978, p. 212).

Hence, in her attempt to define thinking as process, Arendt finds herself in a difficult situation: the temporality of thinking seems to escape so much to the pressure of mundane time, it may so much be experienced, as we withdraw from the world, as form of ‘other temporality’, that she is brought to formulate a temporality of thinking which seems to point to a form of eternity, or at least, a form of different temporality that connects thinking fellows across time and space. This statement has two implications: on the one hand, it excludes any grand theory of meaning, as thinking is always evanescent. On the other hand, there is something fundamentally melancholic about this statement. By acknowledging the impermanence of meaning, Arendt has to recognize that her own lifework as thinker may vanish as ashes blown by the wind; as only consolation, she can point at some meeting point, beyond time, between her intuitions and these of past authors and hope that some other thinkers or readers may equally recognize the beauty of some aspects of her work.

As psychologists, we may perhaps see this as a form of recognition of the circulation of meaning through generations; but more interestingly, it raises the question of the experienced temporality of thinking – which may indeed escape objective time.