"Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and
contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where
mental activity comes to rest. According to traditions of Christian
time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden of theology, thinking
became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind
of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out
to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it
temporarily in intuition ... "
by Maria Popova
“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking
and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the
ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but
also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every
civilization is founded.”
and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the
ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but
also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every
civilization is founded.”
In 1973, Hannah Arendtbecame the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures —
an annual series established in 1888 aiming “to promote and diffuse the
study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term,” bridging
science, philosophy, and spirituality, an ancient quest of enduring urgency to this day.
Over the years, the Gifford Lectures have drawn such celebrated minds
as William James, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Iris Murdoch, and Carl
Sagan, whose 1985 lecture was later published as a the spectacular
posthumous volume Varieties of Scientific Experience. Arendt’s own lecture was later expanded and published as The Life of the Mind (public library),
an immeasurably stimulating exploration of thinking — a process we take
for so obvious and granted as to be of no interest, yet one bridled
with complexities and paradoxes that often keep us from seeing the true
nature of reality. With extraordinary intellectual elegance, Arendt
draws “a distinguishing line between truth and meaning, between knowing
and thinking,” and makes a powerful case for the importance of that line
in the human experience.
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, andThe disciplines called metaphysics or philosophy, Arendt notes, came
contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where
mental activity comes to rest. According to traditions of Christian
time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden of theology, thinking
became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind
of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out
to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it
temporarily in intuition… With the rise of the modern age, thinking
became chiefly the handmaiden of science, of organized knowledge; and
even though thinking then grew extremely active, following modernity’s
crucial conviction that I can know only what I myself make, it was
Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind
appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the Science of
sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe
that are concealed by appearances.
to inhabit the world beyond sense-perceptions and appearances, while
science claimed the world of common-sense reasoning and perceptions
validated by empirical means. The latter is plagued by “the scandal of
reason” — the idea that “our mind is not capable of certain and
verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it
nevertheless cannot help thinking about.” (Four decades later, Sam
Harris would capture this beautifully: “There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”) But Arendt is most intensely concerned with the world we inhabit when we surrender to thought:
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where
are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are
together with no one but ourselves?
Illustration by Jean-François Martin from 'The Memory Elephant' by Sophie Strady. Click image for details.
or reason, which is concerned with the higher-order desire for
understanding the deeper meaning behind such sensory input; while
intellect is driven by cognition, reason is concerned with the unknowable. He memorably wrote:
The aim of metaphysics… is to extend, albeit onlyArendt unpacks Kant’s legacy and its enduring paradox, which plays out just as vibrantly in our ever-timely struggle to differentiate between wisdom and knowledge:
negatively, our use of reason beyond the limitations of the sensorily
given world, that is, to eliminate the obstacles by which reason hinders
itself.
The great obstacle that reason (Vernunft) puts in its own way arises from the side of the intellect (Verstand)
and the entirely justified criteria it has established for its own
purposes, that is, for quenching our thirst, and meeting our need, for
knowledge and cognition… 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. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific
metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
Hannah Arendt c. 1966 (Photograph courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust)
fault line between science and common sense. Arendt considers how
science’s over-reliance on Verstand might give rise to the very reductionism that becomes science’s greatest obstacle to tussling with the unknowable:
Something very similar seems, at first glance, to be trueThis sounds remarkably like the notion of moral wisdom
of the modern scientist who constantly destroys authentic semblances
without, however, destroying his own sensation of reality, telling him,
as it tells us, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the
evening. It was thinking that enabled men to penetrate the appearances
and unmask them as semblances, albeit authentic ones; common-sense
reasoning would never have dared to upset so radically all the
plausibilities of our sensory apparatus… Thinking, no doubt, plays an
enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a
means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is
worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.
— the necessarily subjective values-based framework that, by its very
nature, transcends the realm of science and absolute truth, rising to
the level of relative meaning. Adding to history’s finest definitions of science, Arendt writes:
The end is cognition or knowledge, which, having beenAnd therein lies the paradox of science — the idea that its aim is to
obtained, clearly belongs to the world of appearances; once established
as truth, it becomes part and parcel of the world. Cognition and the
thirst for knowledge never leave the world of appearances altogether; if
the scientists withdraw from it in order to “think,” it is only in
order to find better, more promising approaches, called methods, toward
it. Science in this respect is but an enormously refined prolongation of
common-sense reasoning in which sense illusions are constantly
dissipated just as errors in science are corrected. The criterion in
both cases is evidence, which as such is inherent in a world of
appearances. And since it is in the very nature of appearances to reveal
and to conceal, every correction and every dis-illusion “is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of another evidence,
in the words of Merleau-Ponty. Nothing, even in science’s own
understanding of the scientific enterprise, guarantees that the new
evidence will prove to be more reliable than the discarded evidence.
dispel ignorance with knowledge, but it is also, at its best, driven wholly by ignorance. In a sentiment that Carl Sagan would come to echo twelve years later in his own Gifford lecture — “If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” — Arendt writes:
The very concept of an unlimited progress, which
accompanied the rise of modern science, and has remained its dominant
inspiring principle, is the best documentation of the fact that all
science still moves within the realm of common sense experience, subject
to corrigible error and deception. When the experience of constant
correction in scientific research is generalized, it leads into the
curious “better and better,” “truer and truer,” that is, into the
boundlessness of progress with its inherent admission that the good and
the true are unattainable. If they were ever attained, the thirst for
knowledge would be quenched and the search for cognition would come to
an end.
Illustration from 'The Lion and the Bird' by Marianne Dubuc. Click image for details.
of progress,” she returns to Kant’s crucial distinction between reason
and intellect:
The questions raised by our thirst for knowledge ariseThis disconnect between the common-sense criteria of science and the
from our curiosity about the world, our desire to investigate whatever
is given to our sensory apparatus… The questions raised by the desire to
know are in principle all answerable by common-sense experience and
common-sense reasoning; they are exposed to corrigible error and
illusion in the same way as sense perceptions and experiences. Even the
relentlessness of modern science’s Progress, which constantly corrects
itself by discarding the answers and reformulating the questions, does
not contradict science’s basic goal — to see and to know the world as it
is given to the senses — and its concept of truth is derived from the
common-sense experience of irrefutable evidence, which dispels error and
illusion. But the questions raised by thinking and which it is in
reason’s very nature to raise — questions of meaning — are all
unanswerable by common sense and the refinement of it we call science.
The quest for meaning is “meaningless” to common sense and common-sense
reasoning because it is the sixth sense’s function to fit us into the
world of appearances and make us at home in the world given by our five
senses; there we are and no questions asked.
quest for meaning, Arendt argues, reverts to the original question of
thinking and the limitations of “truth”:
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we
mistake the need to think with the urge to know. Thinking can and must
be employed in the attempt to know, but in the exercise of this function
it is never itself; it is but the handmaiden of an altogether different
enterprise.
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, menThe Life of the Mind is an absolutely remarkable feat of intellectual grace in its entirety. Complement it with the art of reflection and fruitful curiosity, then revisit these animated thoughts on wisdom in the age of information.
establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive
questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones
that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is
more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for
meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would
lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call
works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions
upon which every civilization is founded… While our thirst for knowledge
may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the
activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is
retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of
its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise
required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this
particular world.
