Page from Hannah Arendt's "Nietzsche" lectures, 1966.

If there is one fact about Hannah Arendt that is often overlooked in all of the commentary on her work, it is that she was a teacher. As her overflowing classrooms at the New School for Social Research testified, she was a brilliant, engaging, and inspiring teacher, whom students were both drawn to and unsettled by. As a new teacher myself, I was delighted to find Peter Stern and Jean Yarbrough’s article on Hannah Arendt’s teaching in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers (New York: Basic Books, 1981). The article provided me with a model for becoming an effective and inspiring teacher.

Arendt combined passion and reason in her teaching. While she read her lectures from prepared manuscripts, which typically lasted an hour, they were “lively, exciting, and sometimes overwhelming in the power and insight they expressed” (Stern and Yarbrough, p. 190). Arendt made philosophical and political ideas a tangible reality that students could locate themselves in and respond to. Her passionate delivery of the rational analysis of a subject was a catalyst for student thinking and learning.

Arendt was a great story teller. Whether in the classroom, her office, or her living room, Arendt told stories to illustrate her thought. As Stern and Yarbrough point out, Arendt had the “gift of thinking poetically,” in which she combined two seemingly contrary modes of thought: literary sensibility and logical precision (Stern and Yarbrough, p. 192-193). This uncanny ability to explore ideas in narrative frameworks was likely due to her love of poetry and fiction, especially Hölderlin and Kafka. Her poetic insight and clarity of thought provided students with a metaphorical space for thinking.

Arendt also taught the dangerous and never-ending art of thinking. As she wrote in The Life of the Mind, “there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous…” (Arendt, LOM, I, p. 176). Thinking is dangerous because it is an activity that is continually open to new ideas and answers. The activity of thinking refuses to find a resting place in creeds and dogmas. Arendt used “the image of Penelope’s weaving to capture what was for her one of the most striking aspects of this kind of thinking: that it never reaches its goal” (Stern and Yarbrough, p. 196). Thinking weaves together the rich fabric of knowledge each day, only to unweave it again each evening. It is an activity that requires an ongoing, and erotic, search for truth. Arendt had no doubt learned this from her own teacher, Karl Jaspers, who wrote that modern philosophical thought had scarcely “progressed beyond Plato” (Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom, p. 8).  She gave her students the most effective remedy for resisting the modern malaise of thoughtlessness: thinking—the ability to think for themselves.

Finally, Arendt was available to her students and was a source of encouragement. Stern and Yarbrough describe Arendt as an “accessible” teacher, who wrote letters of recommendation promptly and returned dissertation chapters “in two weeks” (Stern and Yarbrough, pp. 202, 203). She invited her students into her home and took them out to dinner on special occasions in order to celebrate their accomplishments (Stern and Yarbrough, pp. 203, 204). But, in her personal encounters with her students, Arendt exhibited a peculiar excellence for listening and encouraging her students. During her office hours, she would “hunch forward and stare straight at [the student], eyes intent, her forefinger curled slightly, moving back and forth against her upper lip like a metronome measuring the rhythm of her thought as it absorbed, then weighed, what [the student] had to say” (Stern and Yarbrough, p. 204). In comments on papers and dissertations, Arendt “was never begrudging or petty; if she had criticisms, they were constructive and to the point” (Stern and Yarbrough, p. 203). Her goal was to encourage her students to improve, not to disparage them as unfit for academic life. Arendt’s accessibility and encouragement prepared and inspired her students to confidence and intellectual excellence.

Hannah Arendt can serve as a model for good teaching. Her passionate presentation of ideas inspired her students to dare to rethink the broken tradition they had inherited. Her poetic mind conjured stories that ignited the minds of her students to question the political climate of their day. Her willingness to be present and listen to her students encouraged them to give the best of themselves to their work, much as she had done.

Stiegler’s prison melete was an instrument of self-transformation. He describes the process of assimilating ideas as anamnesis – cognition as remembrance—and the practice of making these ideas “come alive in the soul,” as hypomnesis – forgetting through supplementarity (HBP, 20). This process involved the back-and-forth of remembering and forgetting through psychotechnics like reading and writing, which formed a melete that turned the social tomb of prison into a philosophical womb for Stiegler. By engaging in the intentional suspension of action for the purpose of individuation, Stiegler recreated himself from the inside out.

Stiegler’s prison melete is worth considering for anyone seeking self-transformation, inside or outside prison. His melete was as follows:

1. Read and reread a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, or a prose text for 30 minutes every morning, in order to understand it completely.
2. Responsive writing exercises in various modes that became hypmnemonic linkages with texts.
3. Read novels in the evening.
4. Spoke rarely, and lived in written language.
5. Listened and took notes on everything heard or read.
6. Fought against the “bad soliliquy” (negative self-talk) through experimenting with an inner dialectic with oneself.

Nelson George’s recent article in The New York Times about the emergence of  a possible “New Black Wave” of film, highlights a new group of “bold spirits” who are seeking to deconstruct the monolith of black identity by turning their lenses on the outcasts at margins of blackness. These new film directors are emancipating African-American cinema that has been dominated by blaxploitation and hood films over the last forty years and has marginalized many in the African-American community who do not fit the normative cultural mold. One of these new directors is Dee Rees, whose recent film Pariah has drawn wide media attention and may be in the running for an Oscar nomination in the ingénue category. The film focuses on the experience of a young black lesbian who finds herself an outcast in her own family and denied a place in black America. Adepero Oduye plays Alike, a 17-year-old girl who struggles to come to terms with the incongruity of her sexual and racial identities. She can be African-American or lesbian, she is told, but she cannot be both. She is offered the “treacherous promise” of assimilation, but she chooses emancipation instead.

Alike’s poem in the film captures what I consider to be the hallmark of pariah dignity: the courageous ownership of difference, “Heartbreak opens onto the sunrise/for even breaking is opening/and I am broken/I am open/See the love shine in through my cracks/See the light shine out through me/My spirit takes journey/My spirit takes flight/and I am not running/I am choosing.” Pariahs are broken open by their exclusion, and their identities are constructed in the event of this disenfranchisement. Their brokenness gives birth to a consciousness of their unique difference, and the opportunity to own it. When pariahs take ownership of their identities they develop the courage to choose to be who they are, in spite of social, political, and economic disenfranchisement. They become “bold spirits,” who reject assimilation and seek emancipation from the shadows, and a place in the human family as pariahs.

Wege: märkischer Sand 1980 Saatchi Collection, London

Magie

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Aus unbeschreiblicher Verwandlung stammen
solche Gebilde-: Fühl! und glaub!
Wir leidens oft: zu Asche werden Flammen;
doch: in der Kunst: zur Flamme wird der Staub.

Hier ist Magie. In das Bereich des Zaubers
scheint das gemeine Wort hinaufgestuft…
und ist doch wirklich wie der Ruf des Taubers,
der nach der unsichtbaren Taube ruft.

Aus: Die Gedichte 1922-1926 (Muzot, August 1924)

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argued that art is the transfiguration of thought, “a veritable metamorphosis in which it is though the course of nature which wills that all fire burn to ashes is reverted and even dust can burst into flames” (HC, §23, p. 168). Works of art reify the otherwise ephemeral thought of an artist and contribute stability and durability to the human world. In a certain sense, the thought of an artist is redeemed from oblivion by means of the work of art. For example, Arendt points out that a poem transforms the remembrance (Mnemosyne) of the poet into memory by means of rhythmn and language (HC, §23, p. 169). Rhythm provides the rule and measure for the material of language to transfigure the poet’s thoughts. And yet, there is a cost for this transfiguration—for all genuine redemption is costly—it is “life itself”, the “living spirit” of the poet must take up residence in the “dead letter” of the poem (HC, §23, p. 169). But in spite of the materiality of language, the poem “remains closest to the thought that inspired it” (HC, §23, p. 169). The density of poetic language retains the traces of the life of the poet’s mind.

But why do we need poems, or art for that matter? Arendt says that artists (homo faber operating at the highest capacity) redeem the best of human action and speech from destruction.  Art saves the “great deeds” and “great words” of humanity from oblivion. It might be argued then, that art—techne—is redemptive. Without the work of the writer, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the playwright, the musician, and other artists, the best of humanity would be forgotten. The central task of the artist is therefore one of redemptive technics—the recovery of the best of human thought, speech, and action from the futility of life. Redemptive technics creates a lasting world for human beings to inhabit. In this world, ashes burst into flames—words, paint, clay, dialogue, movement, and sound reveal what is best in us and what might otherwise have been lost forever.

Billy Taylor

Every philosopher eventually stumbles upon the question of method. How should philosophical texts be approached, read, interpreted, and assimilated into one’s philosophical project? How should philosophical inquiry proceed? What are the sources of a genuine philosophical method? Conversely, is method even necessary, or does it impede philosophical reflection?

Recently, I have been thinking through these questions with my colleague Cynthia R. Nielsen, who blogs at Per Caritatem. We have been exploring the methodological potential of jazz improvisation. The possible relationship between jazz improvisation and philosophical methodology arose during a discussion of Nielsen’s dissertation and her forthcoming book titled Foucault and Self-Writing: On the Art of Living as Improvisation (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock 2012.) Nielsen, who is both a philosopher and a jazz guitarist, has been writing at the intersection of music and philosophy for some time (see her “What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart: The Dynamism and Built-in Flexibility of Music,” Expositions Vol 3 No 1 (August 2009): 57-71,) but recently jazz improvisation has begun to inform her approach to philosophical inquiry in a fresh and innovative way.

In the following interview, Nielsen explains her “improvisational approach” to philosophy, and sketches out the practical application of this approach, it benefits, and its limitations.

The Relative Absolute (TRA): Giorgio Agamben has written in The Signature of All Things: On Method that “reflection on method usually follows practical application, rather than preceding it (p. 7). Now that you are nearing the end of your dissertation, and with a new book project underway, do you find yourself reflecting on method?

Cynthia R. Nielsen (CRN): Yes and no. That is, for some time now I have been working with the idea of an improvisational hermeneutic, influenced and inspired in many respects from H-G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. My experience has been very similar to what Agamben expresses in the quote above, viz., my thoughts on method (in so far as I would even want to call what I do a “method”) or on how I approach texts, has come after the fact. Since my undergraduate degree is in the field of music–jazz studies and performance–musical analogies come somewhat naturally to me, as I find that they help to clarify and communicate aspects of philosophy and theology in new and refreshing ways.

TRA: In your article, “What has Mozart to Do with Coltrane? The Dynamism and Built-in-Flexibility of Music,” you argued that musical compositions are not “fixed,” but rather, are dynamic and fluid — open to revision and innovation. Given, that both music and philosophy are rooted in “traditions” that are capable of being developed, do you see a “built-in-flexibility” in the philosophical tradition?

CRN: Absolutely! Part of what I attempted to show in my article is that music–whether jazz or classical–like texts exhibits a flexible ontology, allowing for future generations to expand and co-create new variations on a yet recognizable theme. In other words, I do not view musical compositions or texts as static entities written by a sole author. This is not to deny a primary place to the so-called “original author,” but it is to affirm that a text, like a musical piece, takes on a life of its own and continues to be, in a sense, co-written by multiple interpreters/performers–those who take up the text/piece at a later date, approaching it in a different historical epoch and having different concerns and questions. Take, for example, a text like Plato’s Republic. When you consider how many different readings of Plato there are and how many new insights have arisen from different groups approaching the text with different questions, you begin to see just how flexible the ontology of texts can be. Yet, if we apply the principle of charity, we can see that the different schools of interpretation are still dealing with the text, even if they come up with radically diverse conclusions. Gadamer speaks of this phenomenon as the ever-present interplay of identity and difference in hermeneutics.

TRA: Given that the aims of music and philosophy are significantly different, the former being aesthetic delight and the latter being truth, do you think the “improvisational approach” to the philosophical tradition might compromise its aim. That is, does the improvisational method move us closer to the truth, or does it merely give us variations on a theme?

CRN: Given our finitude, we only grasp truth partially and from a certain perspective. In my view, an improvisational approach to texts affirms our finitude and keeps us within what Joyce Schuld calls “an ethics of humility.” I can’t claim that my interpretation is the only true interpretation possible–such a position, in my opinion, denies our finitude (not to mention our fallibility,) and it suggests that historical situatedness, cultural backgrounds, and so forth–what Gadamer calls somewhat provocatively–our “prejudices” (from the Latin, praejudicium, meaning pre-judgment) or hermeneutical horizons have no role in our interpretative activity. I do not find that at all convincing, or true to experience. In short, I think that this approach to texts does move us closer to truth, but it never gives us the last word on truth.

TRA: Billy Taylor has demonstrated that there is an inherent structure to jazz improvisation, in which the rhythm, melody, and harmony of a particular musical composition are changed in order to express a new interpretation. You have pointed this out in your work, as well. Is it possible to map this structure of improvisation onto philosophical inquiry? That is to say, are there elements of philosophy that are analogous to the rhythm, melody, and harmony of music, and can these be improvised upon?

CRN: There are so many analogies, I am not sure where to begin. In my recent work on Foucault, for example, I compare his archaeological method to the activity of a music theorist concerned with discovering the rules, formal aspects and so forth which structure, for example, the symphonic composition (a jazz piece works here as well). Then one might think of Foucault’s genealogical approach as concerned with the diachronic aspects of the piece, the particular linear movements, colorings etc. of the melodic lines themselves. Here one retraces specific melodic lines in the larger piece, attempting to discern the “causal” convergences–all of course arising contingently and not by necessity — that make that particular melodic line what it is. One might also think of the melody of piece as that which identifies the piece, which is not to say that the melody has to be played exactly the same in order to be played “correctly,” “truly,” and so forth. Consider the many variations on jazz standards–for example, the tune, “All the Things You Are,” whether played by John Coltrane or by Pat Metheny, the tune is completely and easily recognizable as “All the Things You Are.” However, if you were to analyze the notes of the melodies played, there would not be a one-to-one correspondence. With each performance (think “interpretation”) of a piece (think “text”), new ways of inflecting the melody–rhythmically, harmonically, etc. arise. Once again, we have Gadamer’s interplay between identity and difference in which interpretations are co-productions, not (repetitive) re-productions.

TRA: What do you see as the limitations of an “improvisational approach” to the philosophical tradition?

CRN: I would not want to present it as the only correct way to approach texts, as it is one way to engage texts and to pass them on by “infusing” them with new life. If I take my analogue from jazz, there are those who try to transgress strictures simply for the sake of transgressing. That is, some might say, “let’s forget the text altogether.” That is by no means what I am suggesting, as that would, in my mind, result in a loss of continuity with one’s tradition, and consequently, a loss of the wealth and insights of great thinkers of the past–those who have shaped, whether we like it or not, who we are today.

TRA: Can you think of classical or medieval thinkers that took advantage of the “built-in-flexibility” of the philosophical tradition and improvised on it to express central philosophical ideas in a new mode?

CRN: St. Augustine comes readily to mind, as I recently finished a chapter devoted to his work. In the City of God, for example, Augustine engages in what Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” that is, deploying the common, well-known “discursive elements” of hegenomic discourses by infusing fragments of those discourses with new meaning in order to develop a counter-narrative. Augustine takes up commonly accepted political and philosophical notions from the Western tradition–views on justice, reason ruling the passions, and so forth–and turns them on their head in order to show that the Roman glory narratives are actually veils to cover the violence of ancient imperalism. One could also bring Augustine into conversation with Gadamer, as both hold that multiple true meanings of the same text are possible. If you are interested in this topic, I engage these two thinkers in my article, “St. Augustine on Text and Reality (and a Little Gadamarian Spice),” Heythrop Journal 50 (2009): 98–108.

Painting by Dieter Rossi

The following passage is a translation of an entry in Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Book of Daily Thoughts,) dated October, 1950, just a year before she published Origins of Totalitarianism.

October, 1950 — Fidelity:”true”: true and loyal. It is as if, that to which one could not be loyal to had never been true. For this reason, the great crime of infidelity, if it is not an innocent infidelity; is that one murders that which was once true, to do away with what one has brought with oneself into the world, again, it is an extermination, because we are masters of our past only through fidelity: the existence of the past depends on us. Just as it depends on us whether or not truth is in the world. If there were no possibility of truth and no possibility of having been truth, then truth would not have been – fidelity as stubbornness – which would be the truth without a future, entirely without essence.

Precisely because of this connection between loyalty and truth, it is necessary to eliminate the concept of fidelity as all stubbornness, rigidity. The perversion of fidelity is jealousy. Their opposition is not infidelity in the ordinary sense – it is rather in the pre-drawn continuation of life and vitality – but forgetting. This is the only real sin, that the truth that had been is exterminated, the removal of liveliness from the world. Fossilization, and their consequence is jealousy; that is, simply rage that somewhere else life continues.

- translated from the German by J. Douglas Macready

Stiegler has noted the similarity between psychopower and education. Education, according to Stiegler, is attention formation. As he explains, to “capture attention is to form it… and to form it is to capture it.”[4] Attention formation has historically taken place through psychotechniques such as reading or writing. These psychotechniques form attention through “the play of retentions and protentions individually and collectively.”[5] Here it is possible to map Arendt’s activities of the life of the mind onto Stiegler’s model of intelligence. Retention can be understood as judging, which is concerned with the past and relies on the retentive (hypomnesis) and productive (anamnesis) capacities of the imagination. Protention can be understood as willing, with its concern for future projects. Attention can be understood as thinking, the inner dialogue which interacts with the other activities. Stiegler explains how these capacities develop through the use of psychotechnics:

The formation of at-tention always consists of the psychotechnical accumulation of re-tentions and pro-tentions. Attention is the flow of consciousness, which is temporal and, as such, is created initially by what Husserl analyszes as “primary” retentions – “primary” because they consist of apparent (present) objects whose shapes I retain as though they were themselves present. This retention, called “primary” precisely because it occurs in perception, is then “conditioned” by “secondary” retentions, as the past of the attentive consciousness – as its “experience.” Linking certain primary retentions with secondary retentions, consciousness projects protentions, as anticipation. The  constitution of attention results from the accumulation of both primary and secondary retentions, and the projection of protentions as anticipation.[6]

Without the formation of attention (education), maturity from childhood to adulthood cannot take place. This is a central concern for Stiegler because he recognizes that this maturation process is a prerequisite for becoming responsible.[7] However, this maturation process is under siege by attention control apparatuses, which are linked with an capitalist economy, that seek to create consumers rather than citizens. One of the primary indicators of this shift from citizens to consumers is the
transition from psychotechniques that facilitate knowledge and understanding to psychotechnologies that produce information. Stiegler seeks to maintain a crucial distinction between knowledge and information that is similar to Arendt’s distinction between reason and intellect:

Knowledge and understanding must be psychically assimilated and made one’s own (one’s own self), while information is merchandise made to be consumed – and is therefore disposable… Knowledge individuates and transforms the learner, interiorizing the history of individual and collective transformations; this history is knowledge. The information diffused by the programming industries disindividuates its consumer.[8]

What is ultimately at stake in the disindividuation of consumers is the destruction of attention, which for Stiegler is the ability to care – to be responsible. Stiegler incessantly pleads for a “new responsibility”:

…in the face of the care-less-ness of generalized irresponsibility, a new responsibility of public power arises, first and foremost instilling and protecting attention in children and adolescents, but inscribed within the broader challenge of reconstituting systems of care in civil and civilized societies in which political systems can potentially save democracy by reinventing it through organological evolutions and psychotechnologies themselves. Such a struggle could be based only on our having no further doubts about the program’s first priority: the battle for intelligence.[9]

The battle for intelligence is a struggle to preserve the life of the mind against psychotechnological systems of power that seek to capture and control attention, and eventually eliminate it completely. These psychotechnologies create care-less consumers (Arendt’s thoughtless individual) that know how to purchase products, but not care-full citizens (Arendt’s Selbstdenken) who know how to live responsibly.

New epochs demand new ethics to ensure the preservation of human being; that is, an ethics of resistance that safeguards against human superfluity. Hans Jonas, who emphasized the ethical imperative of responsibility for future generations of human beings, once reformulated Kant’s categorical imperative to address the threat of the coming technological age. His formulation is worth reconsidering: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life; or  expressed negatively: Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive for the future possibility of such life.”[10] This imperative could be reformulated in Arendtian terms as “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of the life of the mind; or expressed negatively: Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive to the human capacity for thinking, willing, and judging.”

NEH Seminar for K – 12 teachers

June 26 – August 5, 2011

HannahArendt was a brilliant twentieth century political thinker who tackled some of the thorniest moral and political questions of modern times. Seminar participants explore three key works by Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Human Condition. These works shed light on the problem of evil and the use of terror in the contemporary age, and provide a philosophical perspective on current debates about the use of violence to settle political conflicts, about the conditions of democracy, and about the scope and importance of human rights.

Deadline for applications is March 1, 2011. For more information on eligibility, stipends, applying, and the selection criteria, please visit the Application Guide on the NEH Arendt Seminar website. You can also watch this excellent video introduction to the NEH Arendt Seminars with Dr. Kathleen B. Jones.

Location:

Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Director:

Kathleen Jones, Ph.D., San Diego State University

Visiting Scholars:

Bat Ami Bar-On, SUNY Binghamton

Daniel Maier-Katkin, Florida State University

Roger Berkowitz, Bard College

Information:

Simone Arias

sarias2@earthlink.net

(858) 663-8827
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~arendt/

During the Eichmann trial Arendt was confronted with a new face of evil; a face that was banal and bureaucratic, and yet capable of monstrous deeds. Eichmann did not arrive at his desk each day to manage the transports of millions of Jews to extermination camps because he was envious of them, or resented them,  or hated them, or coveted their possessions, nor even because he was weak. Arendt says Eichmann carried out his monstrous deeds because he was “thoughtless;” that is, he lacked “the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence (The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 4.)” Eichmann had insulated himself from the claim of the humanity of Jewish people through “cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct (Ibid., 4).” For Arendt, Eichmann represented a significant philosophical problem: the absence of thinking in a human being.

The case of Adolph Eichmann led Arendt to consider the question, “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought (Ibid., 5)?” She realized that morality was more often caught than taught; that is, the relationship of thinking and morality was not a cause and effect relationship – right thinking leads to right behavior – but rather, morality was the result of internalizing “manners and patterns of behavior” through habit and custom. And yet, the activity of thinking – and here she is adamant that thinking is a type of action – does appear to be a “among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or [may] even ‘condition’ them against it (Ibid., 5).” This thesis led Arendt to conclude that conscience is a type of knowledge that emerges from the solitary activity of thinking (con-science: to know with).

The second motive that led Arendt back to philosophy was the relationship between thought and action. Beginning with her study of action in The Human Condition, Arendt had been concerned with recovering the activity of thinking from its petrification in the Vita Contemplativa where “thinking became meditation (Ibid., 6).” Drawing on a quote from Cato that intimates thinking as a solitary activity (“never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by  himself”), Arendt asks two questions that will govern her investigation into the activity of thinking: “What are we ‘doing’ when we do nothing but think?” and “Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves (Ibid., 8)?” These two questions open onto the metaphysical crisis of thinking, namely, that language, understood as the vehicle of thought, is inadequate to express the world given by the senses. This crisis led to the “end of metaphysics,” but as Arendt points out, “once the suprasensory realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances… is also annihilated (Ibid., 10).” We find ourselves, according to Arendt, in the midst of a philosophical lacuna where historical tradition and political authority have lost their hold on us, precisely because we no longer have any metaphysical anchors. We are philosophically adrift. However, Arendt felt that this lacuna was a new space for thinking where we could reexamine the past and our current political situations with “new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions (Ibid., 12).”

In order to take advantage of this new space for thinking, Arendt returns to an old friend: Immanuel Kant. She recovers a crucial distinction in Kant between reason (Vernunft) and intellect (Verstand). Reason  involves a “quest for meaning,” and intellect involves a “quest for truth (Ibid., 15),” but these two quests are not the same. Reason’s quest is not concerned with knowing the truth. In fact, as Arendt makes clear, it is fallacious to “interpret meaning on the model of truth (Ibid., 15).” She cites Heidegger as falling victim to this fallacy in Sein und Zeit where he equates  the “meaning of being” with the “meaning of truth.” Likewise, the quest of the intellect is not concerned with meaning. Truth cannot be interpreted on the model of meaning.