Located in the World by Default: Perspectives on Hannah Arendt and Indian Philosophical thought on Temporality

In my paper I use Hannah Arendt’s views on thinking to argue that thinking is temporal by default. Withdrawal is inherent in all mental activities. ‘In The Life of the Mind’, Arendt argues that reality suspended in time and space can be ‘de-sensed’ in the thinking process. It occurs in a “nowhere” while moving among universals/essences/concepts. The realm of thinking is nowhere while the realm of doing is real world of particulars. Thereby it is wrong to question of its location as it presupposed inner/outer world divide. It occurs only by withdrawal from the world of appearances in a de-spatialized context.  Thinking is ‘out of order’. It interrupts all activities and is interrupted by them. Using Kafka’s time parable, Arendt explains that in thinking both ‘past and future’ are present simultaneously in the present moment of thinking pulling in opposite directions. There are no absolute beginnings and ends of this in-between thinking moment of the present. This struggle produces a ‘rupture’.

However time in the present tense determines the connection between various ‘trains of thought’. Although thinking is always de-spatialized yet what connects various trains of thought into one thought is also the idea of sameness and difference. According to Heidegger ‘sameness implies the relationship of ‘with’, that is, mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification into unity’. Difference is always with reference to other things (a plurality). Difference ‘is inherent in every entity in the form of duality, from which comes unity as unification’. According to Heidegger difference is because each eidos ‘partakes of the character of difference’. But Arendt argues against it that if you take a thing out of context and then reflect on it then it reveals no difference since ‘it loses its reality and acquires a curious kind of erriness’. So instead of the object it becomes an experience of thinking ego. There is no thinking that is outside of the world in this sense. However thinking involves a two in one i.e. both the external appearance (being itself) and the thinking ego (for itself). It is the duality of ‘myself’ with ‘myself’ that constitutes thinking process. So thinking is always contextualized in the spatiality of the thinking subject by default. It is always in coherence with the location from where the thinking subject thinks. 

Karl Jaspers wrote: ‘I am in default of myself”. I am both the one who questions and the one who answers. The criterion for Socratic thinking is to be in agreement with oneself (without any contradictions). One cannot live in contradiction with oneself. In logic this is called the axiom of non-contradiction. Following Arendt’s approach I conclude that thinking ego is not the same as consciousness which accompanies sense experience and thinking of something whereas thinking ego is always dialectical (in a silent dialogue) and is about something whether of this world or outside but always from the perspective of this world by default. There is a paradoxical relation between the timeless activity of thinking and the worldly temporality by default. 

Pritika Nehra is a Ph.D Research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (H.S.S), Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T) Delhi. India. Currently she is working on the concept of politics within the philosophy of Hannah Arendt.