Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind *** 1/2

I expected The Life of the Mind to present Arendt's late-in-life wisdom about the value of a contemplative life. However, it is a more traditional philosophical treatise on the nature of the human mind and the metaphysical conundrums that arise from it.

Arendt says that the mind comprises three distinct activities, each with its own ego: thinking, willing, and judging. She makes a distinction between thinking, which involves reasoning about abstract concepts, and cognition, which integrates data from our senses and performs "common sense" reasoning about the world of appearances. Cognition is concerned with truth and with knowing, while thinking is concerned with meaning. The book is divided in two, the first part about Thinking and the second about Willing; Arendt died before tackling the third part, Judging.

Arendt takes a traditional approach to philosophy in The Life of the Mind, by which I mean she reflects on her subject in a discursive manner and doesn't pretend to have answers. ("I hope that no reader expects a conclusive summary" [p 197]). I was especially struck by two insights:

• Thinkers throughout the ages have distinguished between the world of (mere) appearance and the world of (true) Being, and philosophical tradition has consistently considered Being as metaphysically prior or supreme. For example, we consider natural laws to be true and the behavior of the world to be an epiphenomenon. "Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances?" The world of appearances is much richer, and is not changed by new discoveries in the world of Being.
  
  I find the idea of flipping the metaphysical hierarchy quite stimulating.
  
  
• Socrates did not offer a particular philosophy. His method was to ask questions that "problematized" people's understanding of everyday assumptions, with the goal of making people as perplexed as he was. Arendt's discussion of Socrates made me want to track down her source, The Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Gregory Vlastos. Actually, I was intrigued by her entire chapter on "Pre-philosophic assumptions of Greek philosophy," especially the idea that the purpose of life was to put on a good show for the gods. (Notice that this idea favors the world of appearances over any sort of inner life.)

I found the "Thinking" section of the book far more stimulating. Frankly, I found the "Willing" section to be a slog. It features far less original thought from Arendt; just looking at the table of contents you can see that nearly every chapter summarizes another philosopher. Furthermore, the subject area is rife with impenetrable terminology: "Note the difference between the sheer isness of beings and the Being of isness itself, the Being of Being."

The edition I read includes a "postface" from the editor, Mary McCarthy. It includes enjoyable tidbits about the difficulty of editing a work of this complexity.