The Life Of The Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation On How We Think (1981) - Plot & Excerpts
This book is very important and worth careful study. Arendt takes up where Kant's Critique of Pure Reason stops, showing how "reason" goes beyond conceptual knowledge. Knowing that Arendt was one of Heidegger's most important students, you can see places where she is pointing toward Heidegger's non-representational 'thought' as the path beyond knowledge and into the unknowable metaphysical realities. She is at her best in the first section of this two volume work, where she deals with thinking per se, although I found her analysis of judgment quite interesting as well. In any event for those who wish to see through the veil to the other side, this last work of Arendt's is a valuable piece of the puzzle. She claims less than she accomplishes to the perceptive reader. Most philosophers accept that Kant has limited knowledge and that the rest, the questions of metaphysics, cannot be known as scientific knowledge. But really Kant's delimitation of scientific knowledge frees our search to go beyond representational thought to a higher mind. Arendt doesn't always know this, but we can use her to reveal what she couldn't yet see in her time and world.She lays out what she is doing pretty well in her Introduction, but rarely ties it all together again.
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