Thinking and the Moral Landscape

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.