[lit-ideas] Thinking as a kind of suicide
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 17:49:27 -0800
From Thinking by Arendt (in The Life of the Mind) page 80:
"'Take on the color of the dead' - so indeed the philosopher's
absent-mindedness and the style of life of the professional who devotes his
entire life to thinking, thus monopolizing and raising to an absolute what
is but one of the many human faculties, must appear to the common sense of
common men, since we normally move in a world where the most radical
experience of disappearing is death and withdrawal from appearance is dying.
The very fact that there have always - at least since Parmenides - been men
who chose this way of life deliberately without being candidates for suicide
shows that this sense of an affinity with death does not come from the
thinking activity and the experiences of the thinking ego itself. It is,
rather, the philosopher's own common sense - his being 'a man like you and
me' - that makes him aware of being 'out of order' while engaged in
thinking. He is not immune from common opinion, because he shares, after
all, in the 'common-ness' of all men, and it is his own sense of realness
that makes him suspect the thinking activity. And since thinking itself is
helpless against the arguments of common-sense reasoning and the insistence
on the 'meaninglessness' of its quest for meaning, the philosopher is prone
to answer in common-sense terms, which he simply turns upside down for the
purpose. If common sense and common opinion hold that 'death is the
greatest of all evils,' the philosopher (of Plato's time when death was
understood as the separation of soul from body) is tempted to say, on the
contrary, 'death is a deity, a benefactor to the philosopher, precisely
because it dissolves the union of soul and body' and thus seems to liberate
the mind from bodily pain and pleasure, both of which prevent our mental
organs from pursuing their activity, just as consciousness prevents our
bodily organs from functioning properly. The whole history of philosophy,
which tells us so much about the objects of thought and so little about the
process of thinking and the experiences of the thinking ego, is shot through
with an intramural warfare between man's common sense, this sixth sense that
fits our five senses into a common world, and man's faculty of thought and
need of reason, which determine him to remove himself for considerable
periods from it."
Lawrence
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