thinking as dying in hannah arendt

In my last post I offered a quick and concise summary of Heidegger’s idea on thinking from his essay “Letter on Humanism.” I noted primarily his concern that philosophical thinking is defined, thought about in relation to scientific practice, always as a way to prove its legitimacy vis-a-vis the latter. Just as Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as a techne, an operation that becomes action and deed, consequences of quantifiable, verifiable results. Heidegger, on the other hand, reminds us that thinking falls in between poeisis and praxis.

If von Trotta cinematically represents thinking in any particular way, it is far from rendering it scientific. Yes, there are several moments in the film in which Hannah Arendt and other characters discuss evidence and accuracy. We also see the countless piles of documents from the trial of Eichmann. They besiege her office space. With rigor, Hannah Arendt reviews the statements from the trial, as she begins to focus in the expanding gap between what Eichmann says and who he seems to be, and the colossal atrocities of his deeds. Arendt’s thoughts dwell in the gap, and her thoughts are produced to make some intelligible sense of that gap. Is the banality of evil the result of her dwelling in that seemingly irreconcilable gap? This is matter for another post.

The film also presents other several moments of thinking, of her lying, sitting or standing alone accompanied only by silence and a cigarette. On two occasions we see her lying on a divan in her UPW apartment. On the coffee table near the divan we see an ashtray for the lit cigarette that remains still yet gently burning between her two fingers. She looks calm, asleep if not in a state nearing or resembling death. Without being unnecessarily extended, the duration of the scene does make us wonder, albeit briefly, whether she is indeed asleep. Soon she placidly moves the right hand closer to her mouth to smoke the cigarette. Her eyes still shut, she inhales. She is very much awake. No, she is not asleep, let alone dead. She is thinking. And yet thinking happens almost as if she were performing no deed or action. Thinking happens as if life were inadvertently slipping away from her.

The other scenes in which Hannah Arendt is thinking, reflecting or contemplating show her sitting against the window of the house in upstate NY. Fixing her gaze on the glass, she smokes and thinks. Once again, nothing much seems to be happening, yet we know that Arendt is producing thoughts. These various scenes illustrate Heidegger’s idea on thinking:

“Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man. But all working or effecting lies in Being and is directed toward beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting.” Then, he concludes: “Thinking is engagement by Being for Being” (217-8).

It seems to me that von Trotta’s recreation of Hannah Arendt’s thinking moments dramatize Heidegger’s own ideas on thinking: thinking’s autonomous validity is perched on thinking itself as it connects  person to Being. It seems that for von Trotta thinking also bears the aesthetic of dying or death, a quietude of body and mind that nears the appearance of death itself. In other words, these scenes suggest that there is an actual loss that comes with thinking, a destruction of self. Only under such conditions of destruction, loss and death, can thinking connect person to Being.

thinking (as) philosophy

I would like to follow up on some brief, unfinished reflections I laid out in the previous post, in which I discussed how the cinematic representation of thinking signifies more poeisis than praxis.  Here I would like to take a step away from the film per se to discuss instead how thinking is theorized and aestheticized in the film. To avoid an inconveniently long text, the post will consist of two or three parts.

In “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger notes that “Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (Basic Writings 217).

Heidegger continues to explain that, whereas Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as techne, “a process of reflection in service to doing and making” his text proposes a way of understanding reflection “from the perspective of praxis and poeisis” (218). Thus Heidegger insists that, taken as such thinking is not necessarily practical. He goes so far as to regard “The characterization of thinking as theoria and the determination of known as theoretical behavior” as a reactionary position that attempts “to rescue thinking and preserve its autonomy over against acting and doing” (218).

For Heidegger, the need to press argumentative exigency upon the autonomy of thinking apart from that of acting and doing stems from philosophy’s ongoing struggle to legitimate itself vis-a-vis the solid standing of the sciences, to which truth and logic are immediately attributed. Philosophy justifies itself and its main activity by stressing the fact that thinking is not structurally tied in to action or deed, nor it is merely a premature phase that becomes fulfilled upon the subsequent completion of acting and doing. Heidegger’s explanation for rejecting this reactive attempt to think philosophy’s position always in relation to that of the sciences centers on the following point:

“Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man” (217).

Heidegger’s essay carries the implication that philosophy should examine thinking at the heart of philosophy while firmly sustaining that philosophical thinking is not necessarily unscientific for not being science. And to show that it is not unscientific does not mean that it ought to be discursively and methodologically scientistic. The process that ensues is hardly dialectical. The tragic consequence of failing to dislodge philosophical thinking from the imperious place of the sciences would be, Heidegger specifies, that “Being, as the element of thinking, is abandoned by the technical interpretation of thinking” (219).