Lyndsey Stonebridge on the philosopher Hannah Arendt and her notion that when we think, there’s a separate “hidden” thinking that runs alongside our thoughts

Think for yourself. Everybody thinks, sometimes well, sometimes badly; not all the time, of course, otherwise you would never get anything done. Most of the time, our everyday thinking stays invisible, which is as it should be, but what worried Hannah Arendt was the assumption that other people, clever, learned and powerful people, therefore did all the important thinking for us. Others reason; we follow. Instead, she took from Socrates the idea that the “two-in-one” dialogue we have going on in our heads all the time is the origin of both thinking and morality.

Talking-to-yourself is basically thinking – a kind of thinking that isn’t technical, and of which anybody is capable. This was why Socrates would say that it was better to be at odds with the whole world than to fall out with oneself. Better to quarrel with others, than to censor yourself for shame.

The soundless voice with whom you would converse on your daily walk to school – this was always thinking as much as being the proud possessor of powerful reasoning for Hannah Arendt. The stories you tell yourself, the poems you juggle out of words as you slip in and out of the high visibility of early adulthood; all these are apprenticeships in thought. Of course, it is quite possible to have stupid conversations with yourself, and many poems are no sooner written than regretted at any age (I dance and dance/In ironical glory, she wrote in an early poem). But the thinking self is where morality began for Arendt.

She had the good luck to be born into a cultural milieu where thinking for the sake of thinking was taken seriously. In this matter, Arendt was as much a child of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, as she was of Kant and Lessing. One of her closest friends, Anne Mendelssohn, was a descendant of Kant’s own good friend, Moses Mendelssohn (Arendt’s first boyfriend, Ernst Grumach, had been Anne’s before, and the two women would remain friends for life).

Mendelssohn had paved the way for the Haskalah by demonstrating that it was possible to live by the principles of both the Enlightenment and Judaism. Later German-Jewish thinkers argued that reason required the abandonment of Judaism altogether and urged complete assimilation. But they had not reckoned on the rise of anti-semitism in the twentieth century.

Arendt’s was not a religious family, but their Jewishness was not a matter of indifference either. It could not have been even if they had wished it so. The subterranean current pushing against the values of tolerance, friendship and reason was already rising to the surface.

Even as a girl, Arendt knew that to be Jewish meant that she would always be more, or even less, of a thinking person so far as other people were concerned. Whatever she was thinking, wherever she was in her head, someone crossing a bridge from the opposite direction was there to remind her that they had thoughts about her and that those thoughts had consequences for how she lived. Nobody is ever allowed to retreat from the world into their own minds completely, and racism and sexism keep some visible whether they like it or not.

Arendt first met the reality of her Jewishness in the streets and in the classroom. Her mother taught her that if her teachers made anti-semitic remarks, she was to tell her and she would deal with it. The anti-semitism of other children, on the other hand, was on her. She learned to be tough.

And she learned to disobey. She would later castigate herself for her fearful inwardness as a teenager – she started to read the existential trailblazer Søren Kierkegaard about the same time as she first pulled Kant down from her family’s bookshelves. But she always knew a wrong when she saw it and never failed to act. When a teacher at her school made a blunder – we don’t know precisely what was said, but we can guess that it offended Arendt’s precocious intellectual and moral sensibility – she organised a protest. The students boycotted the teacher and the school expelled Hannah Arendt. She went to Berlin where she sat in on classes at the university and then she returned to Königsberg and passed her Abitur with flying colours.

[Her father] Paul Arendt died in 1913, the same year as did her beloved grandfather, Max Arendt. Adolf Eichmann’s mother [Hannah Arendt famously reported on Nazi Eichmann’s trial for the New Yorker] died a year later in 1914. His family had also moved, from Solingen to Linz in Austria. About the time that Arendt was reading Kant and organising boycotts, Eichmann was struggling at school and hiking through the woods reclaiming German nationalism with the Österreichischen Wandervogel, the Austrian “Bird Wanderers”, a scouting organisation with violently right-wing ambitions. He had not yet shown much aptitude for anything, although he did learn to play the violin.

Because of the importance of the larger-than-life intellectual men in her life, biographers have often dwelt on the early death of Arendt’s father. Her best biographer, her former student, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who later became a psychoanalyst, tells the story of her intellectual development through the men who helped to shape it. It’s an enviable list of paternal substitutes: Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, the Zionist-intellectual Kurt Blumenfeld, Heinrich Blücher and later, the Austrian writer, Hermann Broch. But this is not a thesis that would have particularly interested Hannah Arendt.

The problem with psychoanalysis, she thought, was that its plots tended to make the lives of the most fascinating people commonplace: if we all have father complexes, then what more is there to say? More fundamentally, she believed that it was an error to confuse biography with the life of the mind. The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities and without a life story. Hannah Arendt very much liked having a life story, an age, a sex and plenty of interesting personal qualities, but she liked having a thinking ego at least as much.

For Arendt, this “thinking ego” is not always the same as the “self” of consciousness, and so to an extent she shared with psychoanalysis the idea of a divided self. As she came to argue, there’s a kind of hidden thinking that runs alongside us, keeping check on us and the world. We do not always know quite who we are, in other words, which may not be a bad thing, especially when political and social conformity are being demanded of us.

From the perspective of other people, of course we appear as one person, one identity – she, he, they, Black, brown, white, other; this is the given plurality of the world. But as soon as I try to confirm an identity to myself and say, proudly or defensively, or maybe tentatively and curiously, “I am I”, I’ve also revealed my own inner difference from myself. I am inevitably two-in-one – which incidentally is the reason why the fashionable search for identity is futile and our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by losing consciousness, she wrote in 1971, setting her face against what we would now describe as identity politics.

This is an extract from We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Penguin) by Lyndsey Stonebridge. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is our guest on A Drink with the Idler this Thursday, 25 April from 6-7pm. Free to subscribers.

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