The Masterpiece Hannah Arendt Died Writing

In the spring of 1969, Hannah Arendt solicited funding to write a book. “You may remember that more than 10 years ago I published, under the title The Human Condition, a book that dealt with the three fundamental human activities,” she wrote to Kenneth Thompson, then the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. In that book, as she reminded him, she had conceived of labor, work, and action as the components of the vita activa (Latin for “active life”).

“Since its publication I have often been asked whether I do not prepare a second volume and do for the vita contemplativa” — the contemplative life — “what I had done for the vita activa,” Arendt continued. While such entreaties, she wrote, tended to miss her efforts to reformulate this traditional dichotomy between action and contemplation, “it was true that I had left ‘the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking’ (as I then put it) out of my considerations. The reason for this omission was simple. I was perplexed and did not know how to deal adequately with mental processes.”

More than a decade after publishing The Human Condition, and after a few years of discussing theories of consciousness in lectures on Socrates, Nietzsche, and Kant, which she delivered at The New School and the University of Chicago, Arendt was at last ready to give book-length treatment to the vita contemplativa. Still, her letter to Thompson was not the last time she’d express uncertainty about her ability to describe the stubbornly ineffable life of the mind.

At a conference in Toronto in 1972, Arendt dangled her latest project before the audience. “I am not ready to tell you about it,” she said. “And I am by no means sure that I will succeed.” Writing about politics, even about political theory, was easier than writing about metaphysical questions, she told them, because she preferred the role of spectator to that of actor. She could look upon political matters from the outside — “but not here,” she said, referring to thinking about thinking. “Here, I am immediately in it. And therefore I’m quite doubtful whether I will get it or whether I won’t.”

Arendt’s lettered peers and supporters would hear none of this. In 1972, she was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she decided to essay her material on the mind before a public audience. The New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, who’d overseen Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” urged her to run her lecture drafts by the magazine. “Perhaps they will turn out to be over our head, but perhaps not,” he wrote. Her longtime publisher Bill Jovanovich told her he was “consumed with impatience to read How to Think,” the manuscript’s provisional title, and he soon afterward offered her a book contract.

How to Think was eventually to become The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s tripartite analysis of the mind’s essential activities: thinking, willing, and judging. Sadly, Arendt died two-thirds of the way through writing it. On December 4, 1975, she hosted her friends, the Jewish historian Salo Baron and his wife, Jeanette, for dinner at her Riverside Drive apartment in New York City. She’d finished what would become the book’s first volume, Thinking, in 1973 and what would become its second volume, Willing, earlier that week. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s first biographer, tells the story, after moving to the living room to serve after-dinner coffee, Arendt had a short coughing fit before losing consciousness. She died of a heart attack, her second in 19 months. Rolled into her typewriter was a single page with the third volume’s title, Judging. Underneath it were two epigraphs — one by the Roman historian Cato the Elder and one by her much beloved Goethe — and not a word more.

Arendt’s publishers turned to her dear friend Mary McCarthy to shape what had made it to paper into a book. Esteemed for her sharp quill, McCarthy was best known for her novels and cultural criticism. But she’d edited a number of Arendt’s earlier essays and even taken a pass at sections of the “Thinking” and “Willing” lectures in Aberdeen. Arendt deeply trusted McCarthy in matters both personal and intellectual. She was convinced that McCarthy’s Catholic upbringing alongside years of French and Latin study had predisposed her to think philosophically. And there remained the fact that in their decades-long friendship, as McCarthy wrote in her postface to The Life of the Mind, she had learned a great deal from Arendt herself.

In 1977, two years after its author’s death, The Life of the Mind finally emerged as a sweeping formulation of what Arendt deemed to be the non-hierarchically constitutive “faculties of the mind,” that “organ” of thought, will, and judgment. She rendered her triumvirate through a symposium on the philosophy of consciousness spanning Greek antiquity to Wittgenstein, with special attention paid to Socrates, Saint Augustine, Duns Scotus, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Thinking, “the silent dialogue of myself with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body,” she wrote. It entails a withdrawal from the world of sensory appearances, to which it remains bridged by metaphorical language. Thinking, for Arendt, inhabits the present, and seeks not truth but meaning. (While truth appears to the senses, meaning pursues not whether something exists but what it means for it to be.) Willing, on the other hand, aims at the future and comprises a tenser internal dialectic — a push-and-pull that Arendt saw as essential to enacting freedom in the world. The power to initiate a chain of events is always up against inertia and refusal, even inside oneself. “Willing,” the writer George McKenna nimbly synopsized in his 1978 review of the book, “like thinking, is a two-in-one process, but here the two halves of the self are not friends”: what we will is not necessarily identical to what we are able to bring about. Judging, lastly, looks backward, appraising particulars: “This rose is beautiful because … .”

Given her avocation as a political theorist, it is unsurprising that Arendt was drawn, even in her most metaphysical project, to that critical terrain where acting ends and thinking begins — and to what happens when thinking and acting become either estranged or indistinguishable from each other. Arendt, theorist of such worldly affairs as revolution, violence, lying, and evil, would naturally object to any notion of the mind as being too snugly sequestered from our sensed and shared reality.

In fact, she wrote, it was not some metaphysical curio but the intensely political controversy surrounding her writing about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem that most immediately prompted these investigations of thinking. By invoking “the banality of evil,” a coinage whose revilement would haunt her until her death, she had meant that she discerned no deeply wicked roots or motives in Eichmann himself — “the deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” she wrote in her introduction to The Life of the Mind. “It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness” that seemed to have characterized the Nazi bureaucrat’s mind. This brought Arendt to a central question she hoped to answer in her broader taxonomy of introspection: If thoughtlessness permitted evil, could thinking prevent it?

Her answer, surfacing in the book’s most enthralling chapter, was yes. Availing herself of Socrates’s conception of thinking as a spirited but congruous “two-in-one” — a swift and soundless inner dialogue within oneself — Arendt wrote that if you and yourself are not friends, and thus not as nakedly honest as two voices must be in order to earnestly question and answer together, then you are not really thinking. It followed that in this state of dialectical transparency, one could not possibly justify cold-blooded murder to oneself, suffused as our inner voices are with a collectivized conscience. “The partner who comes to life when you are unsleepily alone is the only one whom you cannot risk to have as your adversary, since he is the only one from whom you can never get away — except by ceasing to think,” she wrote. Accordingly, she continued, “it is better for you to suffer than to do wrong because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer.”

The thoughtless are like sleepwalkers: They are without essence; they are not fully alive. This, Arendt came to realize, was the banality she had observed within the executor of colossal evil whom she saw tried and sentenced in Jerusalem.

In a 2007 seminar, Young-Bruehl called Arendt’s answer to the question of whether thinking could prevent evil “the most individual moral notion, I think, in the whole history of Western philosophy.” And yet, she solemnized, despite being in many respects Arendt’s most important book, The Life of the Mind was her least read. It certainly accrued its share of criticism upon publication. The most withering review came in 1978 from the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, who criticized Arendt’s “majestic indifference toward the existing literature that surrounds her subject matter” and accused her of having “disdained even the most elementary precautions in taking up such complex matters.” Even her allies alleged shortcomings. Her close friend Hans Jonas noted the book’s “sometimes perhaps too peremptory pronouncements,” while Richard Bernstein, a friend and pupil, wrote, “One feels that at times she is not in complete control of the material she sought to master.”

Arendt herself, in life and in death, compelled and still compels curiously strong reactions from her readers: exaltation on one side, torrents of displeasure on the other. The scholar Jana V. Schmidt recently suggested that Arendt was diminished and dismissed by the academic establishment perhaps more than any major philosopher of the 20th century. “Peremptory” is a recurring descriptor; “arrogant” and “imperious” are others. Isaiah Berlin, for one, is said to have called her the most overrated philosopher of the century.

Her style was scorched with relish. George Prochnick pointed to “an urbane and unceremonious style,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to her “Teutonic prose.” “Even after the most careful readings,” Russell Jacoby wrote in these pages, “it is difficult to know what Arendt is trying to say.” Her sentences, it is true, weave and wind like the brambly footpaths of her motherland’s Black Forest, often dispensing with conjunctions and choosing instead to string together, with queerly distributed commas, fusillades of teeteringly dependent clauses brimming with historical references and resting upon terms abruptly endowed with mythical significance. But then, how easily one forgets that Arendt arrived at Ellis Island as a 35-year-old refugee fluent in German and French and proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Yiddish; that she first learned English by taking up work as a housecleaner; and that though she came to embrace the United States as her homeland, she never came close to loving English as she loved her mother tongue. “I’ve always kept a certain distance from it,” Arendt said about English to an interviewer in 1964. “She chafed against our language and its awesome, mysterious constraints,” McCarthy affirmed in her afterword to The Life of the Mind. McCarthy went so far as to compare editing the manuscripts, a process that for her was marked by tortured caesuras and second guesses, to the work of translation. McCarthy said she even took to translating particularly tricky passages into German, where they acquired greater clarity, before returning them to English.

McCarthy’s afterword, though deft and down-to-business, bespeaks a general sadness. When Arendt was alive, editing her was joyful because it was collaborative. They’d haggle mostly over meanings; Arendt would relent on grammar. But now, McCarthy had to commune with a ghost. There were days, she wrote, “when I would become a battlefield on which allegiance to the prose of my forefathers fought my sense of a duty to her.” Still, she was certain that her fastidious edits did not even slightly bear upon the ideas themselves.

In 2024, for the first time in the half-century since the book’s publication, the full weight and breadth of McCarthy’s editorial interventions were made public. The new edition of The Life of the Mind is the fourth and latest installment in the ongoing, 17-volume Complete Critical Edition series of Arendt’s works, which is being edited by an international consortium of scholars. Arendt rewrote her major books in German after sending them to press in English, and the series is the first to present all her published and unpublished works in both languages, online and in print, and with critical commentary.

The critical edition of The Life of the Mind was compiled and annotated by Wout Cornelissen of Radboud University in the Netherlands, Thomas Bartscherer of Bard College, and Anne Eusterschulte of Berlin’s Free University. In a purist twist very much in line with the spirit of the ongoing project, the editors decided to draw upon Arendt’s original lecture notes and manuscripts, eschewing McCarthy’s vast edits, cuts, rearrangements, and re-stylings.

The result is a significantly altered text on the sentence level. It turned out that McCarthy, renowned for her meticulous prose, had indeed done battle with Arendt’s language. Nearly every sentence in the original manuscripts was tweaked if not transformed. McCarthy replaced words, swapped clauses, redistributed commas, deployed periods, and, most laboriously, assuaged Arendt’s pathological conflation of “which” and “that.”

The consequent downside of the new, de-edited edition is the cumbersomeness of its reading experience. A sentence, for instance, that in McCarthy’s edition reads: “Self-presentation would not be possible without a degree of self-awareness — a capability inherent in the reflexive character of mental activities and clearly transcending mere consciousness, which we probably share with the higher animals” — now reads as it did when Arendt was still exhaling cigarette smoke: “Self-presentation would not be possible without a degree of self-awareness which is inherent in the reflexive character of mental activities which clearly transcends mere consciousness which we probably share with the higher animals.” Now and again, when faced with a particularly meandering or oddly structured passage, one cannot help but consult McCarthy’s version. Sometimes one goes to her in search of clarity; on other occasions, one is compelled by curiosity about how McCarthy the stylist chose to render her friend’s expressions.

There are upsides to all this. The editors exhaustively amassed notes, letters, and marginalia that are sure to titillate Arendtian scholars, if not general readers, in their illumination of exactly how Arendt came to write the book. Moreover, the editors supply detailed commentary in both English and German on the complexities of her (and their) mammoth task, unraveling prior mysteries and litigating folkloric minutiae. For example, we learn that Arendt disapproved of her initial Gifford Lectures attendees, finding them to be sparse and disengaged; that while her epigraph from Goethe’s Faust appears nowhere else in the book, she had recited the lines in a 1950 letter to her husband, Heinrich Blücher; and that in August 1974, she replied to an inquiry about her newest venture from a young theologian at Northwestern University: “It is a long time since we met and I’m now an old lady who feels she can do as she pleases, hence, I came back to my first ‘amour’ and am engaged in something awfully ambitious and probably entirely useless called ‘The Life of the Mind.’ [...] Then I hope I’m through with writing.”

Most importantly, the edition restores what Schmidt rightfully calls “the halting, open, and continually restarting rhythm of the manuscript [which] in particular is strikingly absent from the text as we know it today.” We see Arendt’s thought in motion as she approaches the same questions again and again, from different angles, with different metaphors, filling and then refilling gaps when conclusions seem to have evaporated. We can now nearly hear her thinking. Her unburnished sentences sound a bit like the transcriptions of lushly cogitative voice recordings, in which ideas, unrolled in real time, tend to stretch through caveats and tangents, turnabouts and cul-de-sacs.

Still, even as the editors point to alterations by McCarthy that appear to have turned meditative “thought-trains” into ossified summations, she hardly touched the order of paragraphs or the general structure of the book. In this way, McCarthy’s broader claim stands: As much as she might have decluttered and embroidered sentences, she left the ideas alone. She preserved, too, Arendt’s habit of plucking fragments from the history of philosophy to corroborate her points (Arendt called it “pearl diving”). Where this discursiveness grates against the ears and curatorial expectations of some scholars and critics, it positively elates her more faithful readership.

There might have also been something more subliminal at work in The Life of the Mind — and in all of Arendt’s later writing. The philosopher Hans Jonas, her lifelong friend, claimed that when he would demand proof after Arendt had just let loose a quick, cutting judgment, she would exchange an exasperated look with his wife. “Hannah, please tell me, do you find me stupid?” he recalled once asking her. “But no!” she answered. “I only think you are a man.” Arendt “considered men on the whole the weaker sex,” wrote Jonas in 1977, “more removed from the intuitive grasp of reality, more subject to the deception of concept, therefore more prone to illusion and less perceptive of the ambiguity and admixture of shadows in the human equation.”

The Life of the Mind is a veritable monolith of this weaker sex. Male philosophers, male theorists, and male intellectuals are made to confidently decode the mysteries of thinking and willing while Arendt, virtually the lone female of the lot, smilingly arranges their theories in the service of her intuitions. So when she mocks full-time philosophers as “professional thinkers” who are too happy to withdraw from the world in order to concoct elaborate systems, she might in part have been mocking masculine bravado.

“You ask about the effect my work has on others,” Arendt said to the German television host Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview. “If I may speak ironically, that’s a masculine question. Men always want to be influential. … I want to understand.” When Gaus remarked that Arendt was “a lady with a profession that some might regard as a masculine one,” she responded with the disarming fusion of earnestness and wit that inflected her writing. “I’m afraid I have to protest,” she replied. “I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted into the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose.” Then she slipped in a remark so underhandedly arch that Gaus missed the humor. “You say philosophy is generally considered a masculine occupation,” Arendt said. “It need not remain a masculine occupation. It is possible that one day a woman will be a philosopher.”

Arendt was not a “system builder,” as she characterized the likes of Hegel and Heidegger. She was far more interested in describing and approximating systems than in building them from scratch, though this occasionally would begin to resemble its own system, or at least, given her idiosyncratic usage of cohering terms, a mythos. Wolin’s reproofs of The Life of the Mind as having no one argument, “no controlling and unifying impulse,” would not have sounded demeaning to Arendt, for she was not interested in single answers, in recipes for practical application, in “the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’” which is how she defined political ideology. Like Nietzsche, she was bold in her fixations and interpretations. But unlike Nietzsche, she was not precociously poetic or literary and could not thus get away as he did with twinges of aphoristic insight and historical curation without being accused of abruptness and arrogance.

The greatest achievement of the new edition is its resubmission of Arendt’s least-read book, and thus of thinking itself, to the public. If “the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person,” she wrote. “The matter can no longer be left to ‘specialists’ as though thinking like higher mathematics were the monopoly of specialized disciplines.” And yet Arendt’s initial frustrations at the vita contemplativa’s all-too-willing estrangement from the world soon led to disapproval of the other side, too — where thinking for its own sake was devalued and the barrier between thinking and acting was fully dissolved in the name of scientific progress. For a contemporary reader, especially one who neither reads nor writes for academic philosophy journals, it is this side of Arendt’s thinking that makes The Life of the Mind not a feat of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning.