More Hannah Arendt

Todays blog is simply a collection of quotes on Thinking:

There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous, Arendt teaches famously; but thinking by women, which she rarely mentioned, is perhaps especially dangerous; and not least when the subjects of their thoughts is revolution. pp 228-9

Thinking means that each tine you are confronted with some difficulty in life you have to make up your mind anew, she wrote in her final book, “The Life of the Mind.” It was a lesson learned through experience. But making up your mind again doesn’t simply mean adapting to a new reality by learning to fit in or lowering your expectations. For Hannah Arendt, it meant comprehending what was new about that reality so as, when necessary, to resist it. p 24 . . . She meant a mind that is indifferent to chronological time, that hops about a large canvas of thought and experience, looking again and beginning again, whenever required. p 25

Thinking, Hannah Arendt come to argue, is how you get your second, third, and fourth birth and so on, according to whatever changes you are confronted with. p 35
. . . we think and how we think has moral consequences. p 41 . . . because we have reason and moral agency we can, indeed we must, act to make the world a good place, whatever the cost. Nobody has the right to obey! she insisted in aftermath of Eichmann ‘s trial. p 41

Talking-to-yourself is basically thinking—a kind of thinking that isn’t technical, and of which anybody is capable. p 43

These quotes are all from the excellent: Lyndsey Stonebridge, “We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience,” Random House, 2024.