Portrait · Self · 1973–1978
Plate · Generated interpretation
The Two-in-One
A political thinker, late, describes thinking as a conversation the mind holds with itself. Solitude, she says, is populated.
- New York
- Late twentieth-century New York
- 40.81°N 73.96°W
Two chairs that are one thinking. Which is speaking?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
Hannah Arendt, Gifford Lectures, 1973–74, published posthumously as The Life of the Mind (1978). Thinking, in the first volume, is the two-in-one of Socrates: I am not one when I think. Conscience, in this grammar, is the partner who will have to be lived with.
Arendt, The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. The Socrates of the Gorgias and the Hippias Major is her witness, not a laboratory of inner speech.
This is not Pessoa’s firm of heteronyms. It is not Ramana’s inquiry into the I. It is a civic psychology: a person who cannot be two will do anything. The Eichmann book is in the background and must not swallow the lectures.
Knowing-with, in the house’s own etymology, here becomes knowing-with-oneself. That is an echo, not a proof that Arendt was writing our title.
Whether the partner in thinking is a fact of mind or a moral demand is not settled by describing the dialogue.
Distant echoes
Echo
Colonial South India · Madurai, then Arunachala
Who is it that is aware?
Ramana asks the I. Arendt splits the I in order that it be able to live with itself.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If thinking takes two, which one, if either, is the self when the conversation stops?