In the present tense : contemporary engagements with Hannah Arendt

In an early entry to her Denktagebuch, or the extensive "thought diary" that she kept between 1950 and the early 1970s, Hannah Arendt asks a question that would seem to have concerned her for much of her career. "The question is," Arendt writes, "is there a thinking that is not tyrannical?" In posing this question, Arendt was not asking whether, in modernity or in the wake of totalitarianism, for example, all ways of thinking have become corrupted, or whether thought today has become subsumed by ideology. Nor was she asking whether it might be possible to return to a more authentic kind of thinking, one in which such appropriation or alienation would not occur. Rather, she was asking, or genuinely wondering, whether thought as such, or the basic experience of thinking, implies a kind of tyranny. For it would seem to be the case that, when we think, we withdraw from the world of relations with others, or what Arendt often called the "plurality" of perspectives and opinions, and seek instead our own unique, singular truth, at the exclusion of all others. Perhaps, then, there is a sense in which thought itself is tyrannical. Perhaps every thinker is a miniature tyrant, jealously guarding the domain of their own inner world.