Thinking and the Moral Landscape

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s unfinished masterpiece The Life of the Mind contains an analysis and spirited defense of thinking, which is more relevant than ever. Thinking, for Arendt, is not simply a cognitive process of problem solving, but is an existential process of meaning making. Unlike cognitions, which are instrumental, Arendt argues that thinking is an activity that is performed for its own sake. In this paper, I follow both Arendt and her teacher, Martin Heidegger, and ask, first, why non-instrumental thinking has become difficult in today’s world. There is a strong cultural critique in Arendt’s perspective on the inherent value of thinking, directed at a society in which almost everything is judged in terms of instrumental performativity. Second, I unfold what I call Arendt’s view of the moral landscape to which thinking is connected, before I conclude by discussing ways in which spaces for thinking in Arendt’s sense can be created in schools, making a form of Bildung possible for human beings.

An Ontological Turn for Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Global Warming

“…To take the ontological turn is to bring thinking back to life and research. Arendt (1978) draws a distinction between thinking and cognitionthe former has to do with meaning-making, whereas the latter, knowledge acquisition and problem solving (see also Brinkmann, 2022). Holt (2020) explains that thinking engages us in the unanswerable questions of meaning "through which we humans constitute ourselves first, as beings with a critical interest in how things are for their own sake, including ourselves, rather than in relation to other things to which they are means" (p. 587).…”

The power to promise and forgive: Stabilizers of action and the moral ecology

“…Arendt would probably not go this far (Brinkmann, 2022). She stated about radically evil acts "that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance" (Arendt, 1958(Arendt, /1998.…”

The wind of thinking

“…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.…”

“…Psychology has as an object the psyche, and it has, with the exception of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1940), focused on the conscious part of the individual psyche. Consequently, in psychology, thinking mostly designates rational, logical, problem solving, or hypothetico-deductive thinking; it is what enables us to understand and predict the course of things, to make rational decisions, and to act in the world (Baltes et al, 2006; Piaget, 1952, 1972; Robertson, 2020) (see also Brinkmann, this issue). Other forms of thinking have long been considered as biases, or doubtful common sense (Moscovici, 1993; Tversky & Kahneman, 2018).…”

“…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.…”