There Are No Dangerous Thoughts, Thinking Itself Is Dangerous

Hannah Arendt on the difference between intellect and reason

DALL·E / Falltide illustration

Only good people have a bad conscience. The reason for this is obvious: bad people do not repent of their evil deeds. What’s worse, bad people do not even think about their evil deeds. Because it is only by stopping to think that people detach themselves from their unconscious routines and judge their actions from the outside, so to speak, as spectators. Far from being a product of a “wicked heart,”¹ most evil is a result of thoughtlessness.

This is the conclusion that Hannah Arendt makes in her remarkable meditation on the nature of thought itself entitled “Thinking,” the first volume of her final and sadly unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. This conclusion is preceded by an even more important insight, which is that our mental faculties, referred to as reason and intellect, don’t actually share the same aim. The intellect is “inspired by the quest for truth,” whereas reason is inspired “by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.”

Whereas the activity of the intellect is knowing, the activity of reason is thinking. The first pursues cognition, the latter meaning. We can think of the two as the domains of the scientist and the philosopher. Each certainly makes use of both intellect and reason, but their work is skewed towards one or the other. The scientist focuses on the external world of appearances, using empirical evidence to gradually move his model of the world closer to reality, that is, closer to something that is consistently reproducible. He wants to know how the world works. The philosopher does the opposite. He withdraws from the world of appearances and turns his thought inward, into the world of ideas inside his head. He wants to make sense of what he knows.

The problem with inwardly directed thought is that, on its own, it can never uncover any new truths about the world. For that to happen its ideas must be tested in the real world. Moreover, it never ends. There is no point at which the thinking process can fulfill its purpose, because there is no purpose, or rather, because its purpose is the process itself. Even if thinking arrives at a conclusion, it will continue to question that conclusion, re-examining every premise upon which it rests. This is what gives thought a destructive quality. “There are no dangerous thoughts,” writes Arendt, “thinking itself is dangerous.” Being a never-ending process, it never stops undermining even the ideas of its own creation. Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am,” is shortened from the longer: “I doubt, therefore I am—or, what is the same—I think, therefore I am.” To think is to doubt.

From the perspective of the modern scientist, any purely contemplative philosophy disconnected from empirical evidence—i.e. metaphysics—is a kind of obsolete stage in the history of humankind’s intellectual growth—a stage that was once the spark of progress, but which, with the advent of the scientific process, has outgrown its usefulness. The 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, referred to metaphysics as philosophy “under its most discredited name.”² But such a view is the perspective of the intellect, which assumes that the main object of thought is truth, not meaning. In actual fact, the pursuit of truth was not always the primary goal of philosophy.

For the ancient Greeks, philosophy was quite literally a means of pursuing immortality. It was, as Arendt writes, a way for “mortal men to dwell in the neighborhood of immortal things and thus acquire or nourish in themselves ‘immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits.’”³ The Greeks even had a word for it: athanatizein—immortalizing. It made sense: thought is intangible, indestructible. All material things decay, perish and die, but the world of immaterial ideas remains untouched. Hence, to spend time in thought is to spend time in the immortal domain of ideas, to become, as Cicero put it, a kind of “mortal god.” Moreover, by detaching themselves from the world of action, philosophers assumed the role of spectators—a pastime they shared with the gods.⁴

The Romans had a very different take. Under the Romans, philosophy became, as Arendt puts it, “something essentially practical.” Thinking, hitherto employed on idle speculation, is put into the service of what Epictetus calls “the art of living.” For the Stoics—of whom Epictetus is one of the greatest examples—philosophy is what helps us master our “impressions.” Simply put: we interact with the world through the impressions of our senses. The impressions are not the real world, they are a representation of the world within our consciousness. The grief of misfortune is not caused by misfortune itself, but by our negative impression of it. Consequently, we can overcome misfortune by changing how we view it and focusing our attention only on what is under our control (our will). Master your impressions, and you become invulnerable to the vicissitudes of fate.⁵

But perhaps the most interesting perspective is that of Socrates, “a thinker who was not a professional,” and who himself repeatedly said that he “did not teach anything, for the simple reason that he had nothing to teach.” Socrates was called many things. He was a gadfly. He was a midwife. He was an electric ray. Each epithet describes an aspect of Socrates’ relationship to thought.

He is a gadfly because “he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will ‘sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives’ unless somebody comes along to arouse them.” He is a midwife because, being himself sterile (“he teaches nothing and has nothing to teach”) “he knows how to deliver others of their thoughts,” to purge “people of their ‘opinions,’ … those unexamined pre-judgments that would prevent them from thinking.” And lastly, he is an electric ray because by remaining “steadfast in his own perplexities,” he “paralyzes anyone he comes into contact with,” including himself. “He does not claim to make men wise,” observes Arendt. “He only points out to them that they are not wise.” Socrates is not teaching people ideas, what he is doing is making them think.

The point of these examples isn’t that thought has some particular goal, but that it doesn’t have any one particular goal. It’s an inherent activity of a living mind. If thought is reduced to something purely instrumental, i.e. a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, then what we actually get is the death of thought, because an aim that can be satisfied implies the possibility of a result “that would make further thinking unnecessary.” In the sphere of politics this end result is dogma—a set of rules and values that makes it possible for people to live thoughtless lives.

Thoughtlessness is neither stupidity, which is the lack of intelligence, nor ignorance, which is the lack of knowledge. Thoughtlessness is the lack of thought. Thoughtless people are not fools. On the contrary, a person can be both highly intelligent and thoughtless. In fact, they are probably very successful, too, because what thoughtless people don’t do is waste any time contemplating the purpose of their lives and the meaning of their actions. They surrender that responsibility to others by going along with whatever society prescribes for them at any given time. Such people are often “the most respectable pillars of society,” and there’s nothing strange in that: their readiness to accept the dogma of the day without a second thought is precisely what makes them respectable. The charge of “corrupting the youth” for which Socrates was executed was not wholly wrong, for the greatest threat to dogma is living thought.

What’s interesting about those who unthinkingly follow a dogma is that they won’t defend it when another comes along—they’ll switch sides. “If somebody appears who, for whatever purposes, wishes to abolish the old ‘values’ or virtues, he will find that easy enough, provided he offers a new code,” writes Arendt. “The more firmly men hold to the old code, the more eager will they be to assimilate themselves to the new one.” Thus the Weimar Republic is turned into Nazi Germany, which in turn is followed by the extraordinary “reversal of the reversal,” back into liberal democracy, with its vehement denunciation of the ideology it was only yesterday eager to support. This is what Arendt meant when she said that most evil is a result of thoughtlessness. If people are incapable or unwilling to think for themselves, they will end up sleepwalking into evil. The trouble with those who are just following orders is that they really are just following orders.

In one of his letters, Flaubert made a comment on reading: “Do not read,” he wrote “as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” And that’s really the whole point of thought, the whole point of Socrates’ “examined life,” for it is not the product of the examining that we are after—not some particular truth or perspective—but the process itself. Thought is not a means to an end, it is the end, because it is a part of life. “A life without thinking is quite possible,” writes Arendt, but such a life “fails to develop its own essence—it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive.”

1. Kant suggested the reverse, that “stupidity is caused by a wicked heart.”

2. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 21, “Philosophy.”

3. Arendt is quoting from Plato’s Timaeus.

4. This view disappeared with the advent of Christianity with its immortality of all souls. Arendt notes, however, that there remained a trace of the Greeks’ idea in the Latin term that medieval mystics used for eternity as an attribute of God: nunc stans—the “standing now.” To stand in place is to partake in eternity.

5. I’ve previously covered Epictetus’ Discourses and the Enchiridion. In a couple of places, Epictetus actually says that he cares more about the usefulness of his philosophy than about truth. For example, in chapter 4 of the first book of the Discourses, Epictetus says: “If I had to be deceived into believing that externals, which lie outside our power, are not man's proper concern, personally I would consent to such a deception, provided it really could enable me to live an untroubled life, in peace of mind.” (Robert Dobbin translation).