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PARTISAN REVIEW
"TO THINK WHAT WE ARE DOINIG!"
THE HUMAN CONDITION.
By
Honnoh Arendt. University of Chicogo
Press. $4.75.
Miss Hannah Arendt is a puzzling writer for some of our
intellectuals: she thinks. To be an intellectual and to think are, un–
fortunately, no longer one and the same thing; and we may even ask
whether the tendency hasn't been growing, and in certain circles not
so far from us, to drive the two further and further apart. To pass
muster as an intellectual one need only have a stock of encapsulated
ideas and the facile agility to bat them back and forth like so many
tennis balls; and some intellectuals seem never to suspect that the ideas
they bounce so dexterously may be very ready-made and prefabricated
items of sporting gear. To think-in the sense of letting loose a certain
chain of ideas, letting them be and grow on their own, much as a good
painter has to let the painting grow day by day under a patient and
watchful gaze-this is a far cry from the glittering battlecock and
shuttledore of intellectual chatter; it happens to
be
just such a deed
of thinking that Miss Arendt launches in her new book,
The Human
Condition,
a really superb work, one of the best interpretations of con–
temporary history that has appeared in years.
Naturally, thinking-in this way that Miss Arendt sets about it–
makes her text rather difficult and obscure to many readers. Yet her
text, taken sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and even
page by page, is crystal clear: the difficulty ensues only in trying to
grasp her message as a whole-that is, to boil it down to something
much more easily manageable by our ordinary stock ideas. But this dif–
ficulty seems to me prefectly in order if we grant the complexity and
depth of the process of thought she has launched; a work of thought,
real thought that attempts to recast our concepts themselves, is bound
to defy any encapsulating summary. Miss Arendt is a woman with a
richly intuitive mind and from page to page there are wonderful but–
tressing insights that can, however, stop the rapid reader in his tracks
and make the going more difficult. You cannot afford even to overlook
her footnotes, where she is just as likely as not to drop one more inter–
esting and important observation. Given the nature of Miss Arendt's
task, the complaints which I have heard about her difficulty and ob–
curity seem to me at once beside the point and yet perfectly inevitable.
