Calibrating Our “Inner Compass”
| Author | Ashley N. Biser |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591714538429 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
research-article2014
Special Section: Arendtian Orientations
Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(5) 519 –542
Calibrating Our “Inner
© 2014 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714538429
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Thinking and the Dangers
of Disorientation
Ashley N. Biser1
Abstract
In this article, I argue that Heidegger’s political failures haunt Arendt’s
complex “phenomenology of thinking,” and, in the words of Richard
Bernstein, “Arendt’s most novel and striking thesis—that there is an
intrinsic connection between our ability or inability to think and evil—
depends on discriminating the thinking that may prevent catastrophes from
the thinking that does not.” The key to doing so, I suggest, is to attend
more closely to Arendt’s persistent use of the language of stabilization,
orientation, and navigation: in other words, how we “take our bearings” in
a world of perpetual change and motion. The ability (or inability) to locate
oneself in relation to the world is a recurrent theme in Arendt’s writings,
and the metaphors of (dis)orientation appear frequently in her attempts
to understand totalitarianism and Heidegger’s turn to National Socialism.
Whereas most theorists collapse the idea of “taking our bearings” into
judging, I argue that the activity of orientation should be theorized in its own
right. As such, I explore the disorientation experienced during the traversal
between thinking and acting via a close reading of Heidegger’s “Conversation
on a Country Path About Thinking.” My reading illustrates how certain
elements of the world, crucial to maintaining our bearings, fade from view
while one is thinking. I conclude by discussing representative thinking as
an explicitly political mode of thought that escapes some of the difficulties
1Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, USA
Corresponding Author:
Ashley N. Biser, Ohio Wesleyan University, 61 S. Sandusky St., Delaware, OH 43015, USA.
Email: anbiser@owu.edu
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Political Theory 42(5)
inherent in pure thinking—showing how it shores up those elements of the
world that enable us to take our bearings.
Keywords
Arendt, thinking, stabilizing, Heidegger, judging
[m]y assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience
and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its
bearings.1
Hannah Arendt’s appreciation for thinking and her famous admonition to her
readers to engage in this vital political activity are frequently cited. Indeed,
the complex relationship between thinking and acting lies at the heart of
many of the reflections in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics
and Politics, a set of essays collected in honor of her hundredth birthday. In
these essays, Socrates repeatedly appears as “the one pure example she
admits of the thinking man” and his ability to think is often juxtaposed with
Adolf Eichmann’s infamous “thoughtlessness.”2 However, the dichotomy
between Socrates and Eichmann is problematic; a third, often unacknowl-
edged, figure disturbs this neat equation, which puts thinking solely on the
side of “conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing.”3 Martin
Heidegger, like Socrates, also functions for Arendt as exemplar of the think-
ing man, and, as I argue below, his works offer a vivid depiction of the think-
ing activity—one that closely mirrors Arendt’s account. But, unlike Socrates,
Heidegger’s thinking did not “condition” him against evil-doing or make him
any more adept at acting during dark times.4 As such, Heidegger’s political
failures haunt Arendt’s complex “phenomenology of thinking,” and, in the
words of Richard Bernstein, “Arendt’s most novel and striking thesis—that
there is an intrinsic connection between our ability or inability to think and
evil” requires us to “account for the differences between the thinking of
Heidegger and Socrates.”5
In this article, I argue that the key to differentiating between Heidegger’s
and Socrates’s modes of thinking or, more generally, to “discriminating the
thinking that may prevent catastrophes from the thinking that does not,”6 is to
attend more closely to Arendt’s persistent use of the language of stabilization,
orientation, and navigation: in other words, how we “take our bearings” in a
world of perpetual change and motion.7 The ability (or inability) to locate
oneself in relation to the world is a recurrent theme in Arendt’s writings, and
the metaphors of (dis)orientation appear frequently in her attempts to under-
stand totalitarianism and Heidegger’s turn to National Socialism.8 Whereas
Biser
521
most theorists collapse the idea of “taking our bearings” into judging—treat-
ing the former simply as a stylistic rendering of the latter—I argue that the
activity of orientation should be theorized in its own right.
To do so, I explore the disorientation experienced during the traversal
between thinking and acting. In what follows, I engage a specific example of
thinking, as discussed and performed in Heidegger’s “Conversation on a
Country Path About Thinking.”9 While we might suspect that there is some-
thing about Heidegger’s performance that sets it apart from Arendt’s descrip-
tion of thinking—and thus contributes to Heidegger’s disorientation—I show
that Heidegger’s depiction closely resembles Arendt’s own account of this
mysterious activity. In reading Heidegger’s work, I make no causal argument
about his own political activities; instead, I take him (as Arendt does) as an
exemplar of the thinking activity. My intent is to illustrate how certain ele-
ments of the world, crucial to maintaining our bearings, fade from view while
one is thinking. As the article proceeds, I identify representative thinking as
an explicitly political mode of thought that escapes some of the difficulties
inherent in pure thinking. As such, the article concludes with a discussion of
how representative thinking shores up those elements of the world that enable
us to “take our bearings.” Although I do not proffer an extended comparison
of Heidegger’s and Socrates’s modes of thought, what my reading suggests is
that the differences for which those like Bernstein yearn are less stark than he
(or we) might wish. What might ultimately distinguish Socrates’s thinking
from that of Heidegger may simply be that Socrates is more attuned to those
tenuous “guideposts” by which we take our bearings—and hence better able
to reorient himself upon return to the political world. Via this reading, it is the
reliability of these guideposts—and not a specific mode of thought—that
might prevent political catastrophes.
The Dangers of Disorientation
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt posits that the primary experience
of totalitarianism is “perpetual motion”—or a “trembling wobbling motion of
everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality.”10 In Arendt’s
works, this sense of disorientation is implicated in the masses’ susceptibility
to totalitarian propaganda and blamed for the refusal of the outside world to
comprehend the seriousness of the situation (OT 381, 436). The metaphor
reappears in Arendt’s attempts to understand her teacher, Martin Heidegger’s
involvement with the Nazi party (“Birthday” 216). Yet this experience of
being surrounded by a world that refuses to stand still long enough for us to
make sense of it is not, for Arendt, specific to totalitarianism. In The Human
Condition, she suggests that political disorientation—albeit in perhaps less
severe form—is a historical consequence of modernity.11 Elsewhere,
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disorientation seems simply an existential fact of the human condition: as
political actors we are continually acting into (and thus located within) a
swiftly changing world that makes it difficult to find our sense of direction.
Perhaps this is why Arendt so frequently praises the ability to “take our
bearings” and closely connects it to the political faculty of judgment (TP 257,
LM 109). Throughout her works, there are continual references to the “stabi-
lizing forces” that allow us to “orient” ourselves in the realm of human affairs
(TP 257; HC 198, Cf. HC 137, 167, 173, 182, 191, LM 170, 178, 201, pas-
sim). Without eschewing change, dynamism, or unpredictability, Arendt
seems intent on pointing to the various ways by which we take our bearings
in a world of perpetual change and motion.
Technically, the term “bearing” refers to the comprehension of one’s posi-
tion. The taking of one’s bearings involves the determination of this situation
with respect to other fixed points. However, in Arendt’s conception of the
human condition, we humans encounter no points which are inherently fixed
and will forever remain so; there are only points which are relatively more
stable and relatively more fixed than others. These “guideposts of reliability”
include reality and promises—the closest things to “fixed points” we humans
are granted (HC 244, LM 50). Whereas promises aid stabilization by making
an uncertain future more predictable, reality functions in the present, confer-
ring that invaluable “sensation of realness” which allows us to differentiate
between fact and fiction (LM 49). For Arendt, both reality and promises offer
“islands of predictability” in an “ocean of uncertainty” (HC 244).12
In some sense, to speak of Arendt as a proponent of stabilizing is an almost
laughable proposition....
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