Stop to think, and think to be happy: Hannah Arendt’s credo for life

When was the last time you paused for thought? I mean, properly downed tools, turned away from the screen and surrendered to introspection?

"There's an English idiom, 'Stop and think.' Nobody can think unless he stops," said Hannah Arendt.

The always-on modern citizen is allergic to stopping. Thinking “is a profitless enterprise as far as results are concerned”, according to Arendt, yet much of what goes wrong in the world and in our lives can be put down to an absence of consideration.

Arendt, who was born on this day 115 years ago, in 1906, is famous for her analysis of evildoing. She used the phrase the “banality of evil” to try to explain the actions of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. But she was also concerned with everyday human activities and believed “unthinking” to be a factor in general unhappiness and alienation in society.

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Thinking requires solitude and space. But it's not just a room of one's own, as Virginia Woolf said, it is psychic space, and creating space in our thinking to expand our imaginations. We need to unplug to do that

"Arendt was pushing against the emphasis on action over thinking in modern-day society, where it is far easier to do than think," explains Samantha Rose Hill, author of a new biography of the German-American philosopher.

If reading books is an indication of willingness to think then the data is not encouraging. An EU study shows that the average time spent reading books in 15 European countries ranges from just two minutes per day, in France, to just over 10 minutes, in Finland and Estonia.

Reading in general has migrated online, and, while this might seem to offer a platform for thinking, introspection is next to impossible when there is a constant stream of alerts, comments, notifications and pop-up ads.

“Arendt described thinking as the two-in-one conversation that I have with myself. It requires solitude and space,” says Hill. “But it’s not just a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf said; it is psychic space, and creating space in our thinking to expand our imaginations. We need to unplug to do that.”

Hill is not averse to plugging in at times – she tweets on critical theory to over 20,000 followers – but shares Arendt’s concern with blurring the lines between private life, social time and public life. She further explains Arendt’s thinking about thinking as this week’s Unthinkable philosophy column guest.

There seems to be an idealised form of thinking at the heart of Arendt's philosophy, a kind of 'pure' reasoning that stands opposed to 'tyrannical' thinking. How do we identify good thinking, by Arendt's definition, over bad?

Samantha Rose Hill: "I'm not sure I would say it is an idealised form of thinking, so much as it's a concept of thinking as an endless activity we engage in.

“Arendt is not writing to produce knowledge, or get to a concept like the good, truth or beauty. For her, all thinking moves from experience. In a lecture on the history of political philosophy she gave in 1955 she said concepts like evil, truth and beauty are not ends in themselves but wellsprings from which we begin to do the work of thinking.

“The metaphor Arendt used for thinking was ‘thinking without a banister’, wandering endlessly up and down a staircase with nothing to hold on to. Thinking only ceases with the breath, and in many ways it’s the opposite of ideal.

“I think it is what frustrates a lot of people about Arendt’s work. She offers us a vocabulary to think with, but she doesn’t give us a framework to think from.

"For Arendt, all thinking moves from experience. And experience and experiment share the same etymological root, experiri, meaning to try, which is related to periculum, meaning 'attempt and peril'. I think this is what she had in mind when she said there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous.

“Let me give you an example. In 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag, Arendt broke with the so-called professional thinkers. She left the world of academic philosophy, because she was horrified watching friends, colleagues and professors going along with the Nazification of German social, cultural, political and educational institutions.

“The people who spent their whole lives thinking about the good, about morality and ethics, were no better equipped to deal with the rise of fascism than anybody else. In her essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship she doesn’t mince words. She says the difference between those who went along and those who resisted was that those who resisted chose to think. That is, they realised they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they did nothing.

“Tyrannical thinking is unmoving, it is isolation in thought. One has thoughts, but one can’t actively think and respond to what’s happening in front of them.”

Arendt's idea of happiness as a political virtue seems rather countercultural today. A lot of public dialogue is angry, accusatory and judgmental. What would she make of the way we talk to each other in political forums and on social media?

"Yes. Criticism has replaced critique, and indignation reigns triumphant in our contemporary political landscape. I'm not sure we can disconnect the angry, accusatory, 'got you' politics of this moment from social media. Social media seems to fuel it.

“Arendt believed in the virtue of what she called ‘public happiness’. There’s a joy to be found in politics and spontaneous political action. And she held this public happiness apart from private happiness, as a way to uplift the value of engaging in politics.

“She was wary of representative democracy, and saw it as a kind of outsourcing of democratic responsibility. She argued politics should take place at the most local level possible. This doesn’t mean everyone will want to run for town council, but it does mean moving away from the domination of political party machinery toward a more participatory style of governance.

“So much of Hannah Arendt’s conception of politics rests upon the idea of human-to-human interaction. All thinking moves from experience, and many of our experiences today are mediated by technology, which means our thinking has changed. I’m not sure for the better.

“We need the physicality of being together in the world. When we lose that we lose part of our humanity, our dignity, and there’s not much dignity online.”

You say that "in order to experience public happiness, we need to preserve the sanctity of the private realm". Do we need some kind of public relations campaign – or, better still, perhaps, a public health campaign – to highlight the value of introspection?

"Yes. Brilliant idea. There are now ministers of loneliness in the UK and Japan. We need ministers of solitude to teach us how to be alone with ourselves. Even when we are alone today, we are connected to our phones, our computers, our television screens.

“According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual American Time Use Survey, people spend about 17 minutes a day thinking, compared to nearly three hours a day spent watching television, and up to six hours a day on the internet.

“We are never alone with ourselves even when we are alone. And when this happens, when we are constantly giving ourselves away to social media and email at all hours of the day, our worlds become very small, and we lose the ability to think and judge for ourselves because everything is enjambed together.”

If she were alive today, what would Arendt be saying about social media?

"In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt warned about 'the rise of the social' and the loss of distinction between public and private life. In many ways she predicated the domination of social media.

"All I can say is, she was not hopeful."

Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill is published by Reaktion Books