Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975)

Thinking [from The Life of the Mind]

New York

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

1971, 1978

"Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead."

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. In other words, the delight of which Aristotle speaks, though manifest to the thinking ego, is ineffable by definition. 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. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of Book Lambda of the Metaphysics: "The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life." Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is "unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle"--the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. [...]
(I.ii.13, pp. 123-4)

Body::Breath Body::Life

Reading

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978). Originally published in two volumes, Thinking and Willing.

02/29/2012