Thinking Without a Banister

"Well, we’re all wandering up and down a staircase without banisters to hold on to, endlessly, never arriving at wherever we’re going because thinking itself is an endless process. This was the secret metaphor she kept for herself in thinking about how to think about thinking. It is really a reference back to the need to find new language and concepts and categories to hold onto in thinking in order to understand our present moment. Yes. She was critical of Descartes. I think about those banisters as the concepts and categories we hold onto in thinking, that allow us to make judgments about what’s happening in the world. Arendt isn’t writing systematic philosophy like Kant, aiming to arrive at a concept of ‘the judgment of the beautiful’, but she’s very interested and engaged with the concept of ‘judgment’ and wants to understand what judgment is in our world today. I reviewed Thinking Without a Banister when it was published in 2018 for the LA Review of Books . It is an edited volume, which I think is a great introductory overview to Hannah Arendt’s work. It is full of interviews that give you a sense of her as a person, conversations where she’s teasing out what she meant by ‘the banality of evil’—most readers of Arendt are familiar with that phrase, even if they haven’t read Eichmann . It has some of the early work on Marx that was never published, some of her essays of cultural criticism, some book reviews. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I taught an introductory course on Arendt two years ago using this as the main text, and it was a wonderful way of getting a general sense of who Hannah Arendt was, but it also includes all of her major concepts, categories, and terms, her distinction between labour, work, and action, and her understanding of freedom. There are also essays on Heidegger and her essay on W H Auden. This is a really wonderful book. It was edited by Jerome Kohn, who was one of Hannah Arendt’s students. He’s the literary executor of Arendt’s estate. He’s published most of the posthumous volumes we have of Hannah Arendt’s work, and really we have him to thank for Arendt’s legacy as it endures in the world today. It depends who the person is that’s reading Hannah Arendt for the first time. So, if the list of books I gave you is being picked up by somebody who is completely new to Hannah Arendt, I would probably give them Thinking Without a Banister first because that way they can play, they can pop around, they can explore, they can get a sense of her language and her concepts and categories and then go back to Origins and The Human Condition , which are her two major works about the emergence of totalitarianism and freedom and protecting spaces of freedom. And then Men in Dark Times is really a collection of humanistic essays about what it was like to be alive in the 20th century, about poetry and conversation and—very importantly for Arendt—friendship."