The Life of the Mind* by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind—left unfinished at her death in 1975—explores what it means to live a reflective human life. Though only the first two volumes, Thinking and Willing, were completed, they show how our minds work, how we deal with thinking and willing.  If death had not taken her, we would know much more about the process of judging, of looking into our own experience and evaluating the world around us. In addition to defining the modes in which our mind works Arendt wanted to look deeper into what she had seen in the trial of Adolph Eichmann, to ask why thoughtlessness could coexist with education and intelligence. Her answer was to return to the activity of the mind itself: thinking, willing, and judging.

In his lectures on The Life of the Mind at the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz said the key sentence of the entire book is in the Introduction on page 15 of the paperback edition:

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.  (These words are italicized in the book.)

Thinking as Interior Dialogue

For Arendt, thinking is not problem-solving or information processing but a withdrawal from the world into an inner dialogue. This is her Socratic inheritance: the “two-in-one” conversation where I, as thinker, am alone in the company of myself. This dialogue is a withdrawal from the world. Thinking refers to the present, to the here and now of existence, but in a way that suspends action. It is an activity that strips away worldly entanglements and confronts the mind with meaning rather than facts. Arendt insists that thinking is not about producing results; it is about keeping oneself in dialogue, preventing the collapse into thoughtlessness.

In thinking, Arendt says we are not searching for truth, but for meaning.  This search for meaning is individual and unique.  It may or may not lead to truth. 

In the context of Eichmann, this withdrawal is central. She believed Eichmann’s evil was thoughtless precisely because he lacked this inner two-in-one. He conformed, he obeyed, but he never withdrew to examine whether what he was doing was right. To think is to interrupt the chain of command within oneself, to stand back and confront reality in the present tense.

Willing as the Struggle with the Future

If thinking is rooted in the present, willing is oriented toward the future. It is the inner effort to control what is not yet, to choose between possibilities, to force action upon the world. Arendt describes willing as a divided, restless power: the will affirms and denies at once. Unlike the serenity of the thinking dialogue, willing is conflictual, almost violent. We both want and do not want; we command ourselves and resist our own commands.

Where thinking withdraws from the world, willing strains against it. It is the mind’s way of asserting itself against time, against the uncertainty of what comes next. For Arendt, this tension is central to understanding political action: willing is the seed of freedom, but also of frustration. We are never at peace with the will because the future is never securely ours.

Thinking, Judging, and Willing

Arendt’s tripartite scheme assigns each faculty a temporal orientation. Thinking deals with the present; judging, with the past; willing, with the future. Judging, which she did not live to write, she connected to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his idea of reflective judgment—how we make sense of past events, how we discern meaning after the fact.

Together, they give us three aspects of our inner life: thought that withdraws from the world, judgment that brings the past into evaluating the present, and will that looks to the future. The activity of the mind found in this temporal triad, is always in motion, changing and subject to chance as is all life.

The Christian Inheritance of the Will

The most striking feature of Willing is Arendt’s deep dive into the Christian tradition. She traces the genealogy of the will not to Greek philosophy, where the concept is largely absent, but to the New Testament. In Saint Paul she finds the first language of inner division: “the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The will appears here as torn between flesh and spirit, desire and command.

Augustine, whom Arendt calls the first Christian philosopher, builds on this Pauline insight. For him, the will is not simply choice but the innermost movement of the self toward or away from God. In Confessions, Augustine describes the paralysis of a divided will, torn between sin and obeying God. Arendt shows this is the decisive turn: the will becomes the core of human subjectivity, the theater of inner conflict.

Aquinas later systematizes the will into scholastic doctrine, aligning it with reason and natural law. Here the will finds its place within a rational order, no longer pure division but an instrument that can be directed toward the good. Arendt is less enamored with Aquinas than with Augustine, but she acknowledges the power of this tradition: Christianity gave the West the very concept of a faculty oriented to the future, an inner command that makes freedom both possible and perilous.

Along with Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Arendt writes at length about Duns Scotus, a scholastic thinker who accepts contingency in life and through contingency shows that we truly have free will.  The first time I read The Life of the Mind I was unaware of Scotus.  In reading Arendt, I am delighted to find people and ideas I had never encountered. 

The Life of the Mind is brilliant. Arendt writes not as a metaphysician spinning systems but as a thinker who wrestles with the facts of experience and the inheritances of tradition. Her exploration of the inner dialogue of thinking shows why reflection matters in a world of conformity. Her analysis of the will uncovers both its torment and its promise: the divided power that enables freedom but guarantees restlessness.

That she died before completing the volume on Judging is a loss, but the fragments we have are enough to make her point. To be human is to be suspended between past, present, and future, always in dialogue with ourselves, never fully at rest. Arendt’s book is not a manual but an invitation to return to that dialogue, to resist thoughtlessness, and to confront the responsibilities of freedom.

Ten Central Beliefs of Christian Nationalists

Ten Central Beliefs of Christian Nationalists

1. America is a Christian Nation – The U.S. was founded explicitly as a Christian country, and its laws should reflect biblical values.

2. The Constitution is Divinely Inspired – The Constitution is viewed as guided by God, almost on par with scripture.

3. Separation of Church and State is a Myth – Church and state should be integrated, not separate.

4. Christian Morality Should Shape Law – Government should enforce Christian teachings on issues like abortion and marriage.

5. Religious Liberty Is for Christians First – Freedom of religion mainly applies to Christians, not equally to all faiths.

6. Christianity Confers Cultural Authority – Christians (white, Protestant, conservative) should hold primary influence in society.

7. America Has a Divine Mission – The U.S. is chosen by God for a special role in history.

8. Decline in Christianity Equals National Decline – Secularization is seen as the cause of America’s problems.

9. National Identity and Religious Identity Are Bound Together – To be truly American is to be Christian.

10. Authoritarian Leadership Is Justified to Protect Christian Order – Strong rule is acceptable to enforce Christian dominance.

August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 is the first volume of his The Red Wheel cycle of novels an epic attempt to explain how Russia slid into the twin catastrophes of war and revolution. Where In the First Circle plunges us into Stalin’s infernal machinery, August 1914 takes the reader back to the slaughter of World War I, when Russia’s failures on the battlefield helped set the stage for Bolshevism. The novel is not only a historical narrative but also a philosophical inquiry into responsibility, fate, and the choice to serve when the nation is in peril.

A Novel of History and Conscience

At its core, August 1914 is a work of historical fiction that dramatizes the disastrous Russian campaign against Germany at the Battle of Tannenberg. Solzhenitsyn follows generals, ministers, and foot soldiers alike, weaving together their perspectives into a portrait of a society ill-prepared for war. The novel does not simply reconstruct events; it interrogates them. Why did Russia, a nation of immense size and resources, crumble so quickly? How did the incompetence of leaders and the blindness of institutions.

Solzhenitsyn’s method is almost documentary. He inserts archival material, official memos, and real speeches into his narrative, refusing to let the reader forget that these characters were not mere inventions but participants in a real historical collapse. The result is a hybrid form—part novel, part chronicle—that demands the reader confront history not as distant fact but as lived human tragedy.

The Figure of General Samsonov

One of the most haunting figures in August 1914 is General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army. Samsonov is portrayed with compassion, not as a villain but as a man crushed by the weight of command, undone by poor communications, a divided staff, and his own hesitations. His tragic suicide after the defeat becomes emblematic of Russia’s humiliation.

Through Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn explores the tension between personal responsibility and systemic failure. Was Samsonov a poor general, or was he doomed by a larger structure of incompetence and corruption? Solzhenitsyn leaves the question open but insists that individuals matter—that decisions, mistakes, and moral weaknesses ripple outward into history.

The Theme of National Blindness

Just as In the First Circle exposes how Stalin’s Soviet Union normalized terror, August 1914 shows how Tsarist Russia normalized complacency. Bureaucrats ignored warnings, generals distrusted one another, and ministers jockeyed for power while soldiers starved at the front. The blindness was not merely strategic but moral: leaders refused to acknowledge the rot at the heart of their system.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that the seeds of 1917 were already present in 1914. The Revolution did not come from nowhere; it germinated in the failures of war, in the gap between the Russian people’s sacrifices and the state’s corruption. August 1914 is thus not only about a battle but about the unraveling of legitimacy.

Style and Structure

The novel is sprawling and demanding. Solzhenitsyn shifts rapidly from the trenches to the salons of St. Petersburg, from the thoughts of peasants to the intrigues of ministers. At times, the sheer detail can overwhelm; he includes staff orders, reports, and digressions that feel closer to history than fiction. Yet the density is deliberate. Solzhenitsyn is building an argument: history is not shaped by a few grand figures alone but by a swarm of documents, conversations, and decisions, each carrying its weight.

Amid this density, however, moments of piercing clarity emerge. A soldier’s death in a muddy field, a general’s paralyzing doubt, a politician’s cynical calculation—these scenes crystallize the human cost of institutional failure. Solzhenitsyn writes with the authority of someone who has lived through national disaster, and he insists that history must be understood not only through archives but through moral imagination.

Solzhenitsyn’s Vision

Although set decades before Stalin, August 1914 belongs to the same moral universe as In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. All share the conviction that falsehood and cowardice corrode societies from within. The First World War becomes, in Solzhenitsyn’s vision, a kind of prelude to the greater horrors of the twentieth century. The blindness of 1914 paved the way for the brutality of 1917 and beyond.

What unites Solzhenitsyn’s works is the belief that truth, however painful, must be faced. Just as he stripped the illusions from the Soviet present, here he strips the myths from the Russian past. August 1914 refuses the easy consolations of patriotism or nostalgia. It shows instead a society collapsing under its own deceptions.

August 1914 is dense, sprawling, and often closer to a historical investigation than to traditional fiction. Solzhenitsyn compels the reader to see history as lived tragedy and to recognize how human weakness, bureaucratic inertia, and moral blindness can shape the destiny of nations.

If In the First Circle is a descent into Hell, August 1914 is the map of the road that led there. Both works are united by a single purpose: to bear witness, to insist on truth, and to remind us that history is not fate but the accumulation of choices. In confronting the disaster of 1914, Solzhenitsyn demands that we confront the disasters we inherit—and the ones we may yet create.

Appendix One: A Personal Turning Point

I first read August 1914 in 2006. At the time, I was long removed from my earlier service in the U.S. Army during the 1970s and 80s, nearly a quarter century gone. Yet in Solzhenitsyn’s Vorotyntsev, the thoughtful officer who searches for truth amid confusion, I found something that spoke directly to my own life. Vorotyntsev embodied courage not as bravado, but as clarity—the ability to see through illusions, to recognize responsibility, and to act even when the path was uncertain.

That encounter with the novel stayed with me. The following year, at the age of 54, I re-enlisted in the Army. In 2009, I deployed to Iraq for a year. Many people thought such a choice was reckless, even impossible after so many years away. But Solzhenitsyn had shown me in August 1914 that history, whether of nations or individuals, is not fate. It is made by choices, by the willingness to take responsibility, and by the courage to step forward even when the odds are long.

Vorotyntsev helped me believe that it was not too late, that a return to service was not only possible but meaningful. In that sense, August 1914 was not just a novel I read; it was a turning point, a book that helped set the course of my life in a new direction. Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, it insists on truth, responsibility, and action. For me, it became more than literature—it became a call answered in the real world.

Appendix Two:  My Family in August 1914

The date that is the title of Solzhenitsyn's book has huge significance in the history of my family.  In that month my paternal grandfather, Hyman Gussman, began a year-long escape from service and certain death in the Russian army.  The story of his escape is here.

Review of In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sharpens the vast world of his Gulag Archipelago into the story of one vile aspect of a horrible system. The title refers to the First Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: the outer ring of damnation where virtuous pagans reside. They are spared the flames and the grotesque punishments of deeper circles, but they are still in eternal Hell—and there is no hope of leaving it. Solzhenitsyn takes that metaphor shows it is the reality of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system, showing how intellectual prisoners, though treated better than the starving multitudes in labor camps, still inhabit an eternal inferno.

The First Circle as Metaphor

The sharashka—the special prison where engineers, linguists, and scientists work for the Soviet state—stands in for Dante’s First Circle. The inmates are granted privileges: they have beds, books, and food, and they are spared the freezing forests and death quotas of Kolyma or Vorkuta. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this is still Hell. They cannot see their families, their lives are suspended indefinitely, and they are harnessed to serve the same tyrannical system that destroyed them.

Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor is glaringly accurate when prisoners face the prospect of being transferred out of the sharashka into the “real” Gulag. Instead of relief, they feel terror—but also a strange certainty. In the harsher camps, stripped of privileges, there is no illusion: one knows beyond doubt that he is in Hell. In the First Circle, by contrast, the comforts deceive; they risk lulling the prisoner into thinking survival is enough. Solzhenitsyn exposes the cruelty of a system that even in its “mercies” is an instrument of damnation.

Humor and Torment

The inmates of the first circle can be very funny. Solzhenitsyn does not present unrelieved misery; he shows how men, even in bondage, share laughter as a means of survival. The dialogues among prisoners sparkle with irony and wit. They mock the absurdities of bureaucrats, trade jokes about Stalinist slogans, and puncture the pomposity of the officials who guard them. The gallows humor is often bitter, but it underscores how the human spirit resists even in chains.

At the same time, the novel is suffused with torment. The small humiliations—the inability to visit a wife, the forced participation in projects that strengthen the secret police, the betrayal of colleagues—create a steady rhythm of despair. Solzhenitsyn captures not only physical imprisonment but also moral torment. Many prisoners wrestle with the temptation to collaborate, to use their talents to build the machinery of repression. The novel insists that the Gulag was not just a site of suffering but also a test of conscience, where the stakes were one’s soul as much as one’s body.

The Portrait of Stalin’s Soviet Union

Beyond the prison walls, Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of Soviet life under Stalin. The novel opens with an NKVD officer wrestling with whether to denounce a diplomat who confided doubts about the regime. That single act of conscience—or cowardice—carries life-or-death consequences. The arbitrariness of power, the climate of fear, and the suffocating surveillance of everyday life are all laid bare. The state is shown not as a distant apparatus but as an intimate presence in every household, every phone call, every whisper among friends.

What makes In the First Circle throb with pain is that it reveals how a society can normalize terror. Families live under the constant threat of arrest; neighbors inform on one another; bureaucrats follow orders without question. The prison is only the most visible symbol of a larger cage enclosing the entire nation. Solzhenitsyn’s mastery is in showing the continuum of oppression—from the First Circle to the labor camps to the ordinary citizen’s apartment block—each a cog in Stalin’s vast machinery of repression and death.

The End of Illusion

The novel’s conclusion brings the metaphor full circle. When some of the First Circle prisoners are slated to leave the sharashka, they realize with bitter clarity what awaits them: the true Gulag. Their dread is mingled with certainty. They will no longer be cushioned by privileges; they will no longer risk mistaking survival for freedom. In the harsher camps, the truth of Hell will be undeniable. Solzhenitsyn drives home the paradox: the First Circle is in some ways the best place in Hell, but because it is still Hell, its false mercies are the cruelest torment of all.

In the First Circle is a novel of moral witness. Solzhenitsyn fuses humor and torment, narrative sweep and personal testimony, to create a vision of Stalin’s Soviet Union as an infernal landscape. The metaphor of the First Circle resonates because it captures the essential cruelty of the regime: even its kindnesses were poisoned, even its privileges a form of damnation. To read this novel is to descend into Hell—but with eyes opened by a writer who refused to let truth be extinguished.

In the end, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that there is no such thing as a humane Hell. The First Circle may offer bread, books, and laughter, but it is still eternal confinement, a parody of life under a system that devoured its own people. That is why In the First Circle is a clear, sad, and piercing indictment of totalitarianism. Like his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this novel illustrates what Gulag Archipelago documents.

-----

I read this novel shortly after re-reading Purgatorio by Dante.  In this second book of the Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil is sent back to the First Circle of Hell without a word, after guiding Dante through Hell and up Mount Purgatory.  It is a cruel fate and a betrayal. 

 

The Remains of the Day – Two Readings, Two Shadows

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

 Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about a butler looking back on his life. Its prose is measured, elegant, and deceptively calm—much like Stevens himself, the narrator whose voice guides us through decades of service at Darlington Hall. On my first reading a decade ago, I was delighted with the irony of Stevens’s life: his unwavering devotion to a flawed master, his refusal to acknowledge love when it stood before him, his self-delusion disguised as dignity. The book struck me as quietly comic and deeply human. Ishiguro’s sentences glided, and Stevens’s missteps felt both tragic and oddly endearing.

When I returned to the book recently, however, I found it much darker. In the intervening years I have visited ten Nazi death camps in Poland, Germany, France, and Czechia. That experience pressed new weight onto Ishiguro’s novel, which is, among other things, a story about collaboration, denial, and the moral cost of misplaced loyalty. What once seemed like a sad but somewhat abstract tale of professional blindness now read as a chilling study in the ordinary mechanisms of evil.

Lord Darlington’s Shadow

On the earlier reading, Lord Darlington registered to me mainly as an aristocrat duped by history, a man too naïve to see through German diplomacy in the 1930s. His Nazi sympathies were embarrassing, even foolish, but I read them with a degree of detachment. This time, they chilled me. Darlington did not simply invite Herr von Ribbentrop for tea; he opened his estate to treasonous meetings where appeasement and collaboration were dressed in the garb of “gentlemanly understanding.” Knowing, now, what Auschwitz looks like, or Majdanek, or Ravensbrück, I could not skim past these episodes. They stood out like black stains across the otherwise polished wood of Ishiguro’s setting.

Ishiguro is too subtle to sermonize. Instead, he lets the horror seep through by contrast. The novel’s silences—its evasions, its unspoken acknowledgments—become thunderous. Darlington’s name, disgraced after the war, is defended by Stevens with painful loyalty, and each defense now reads like complicity. “Lord Darlington was a gentleman of great moral stature,” Stevens insists, and one feels the lie tightening like a noose.

The Choices Stevens Made

This darker emphasis recast Stevens for me as well. Before, I pitied him primarily for his personal failures: his inability to accept Miss Kenton’s affection, his cold dismissal of his father’s dying hours, his blindness to the possibility of a life beyond service. Those ironies still sting, but now they seem less like the gentle sadness of a missed romance and more like evidence of a man who gave away his humanity to serve a cause unworthy of him. Stevens’s professional pride, his endless rationalizations about “dignity,” become mechanisms of denial.

One moment that haunts me is Stevens’s absence at his father’s deathbed. He tells himself that duty requires him to attend to Lord Darlington’s important guests. Those guests, we later understand, include Nazi envoys. His choice is not only between filial love and professional duty; it is between human compassion and participation, however indirect, in the machinery of evil. On my first reading, I saw this as tragic misjudgment. Now it looks like moral blindness of the gravest kind.

The Machinery of Rationalization

Stevens’s narration, with its pauses and hedged justifications, is itself a case study in self-deception. Ishiguro crafts a voice that reveals by what it hides. Stevens insists, for instance, that “it is not my place” to question Lord Darlington’s political views, and in that deferential phrase lies the whole tragedy: the abdication of moral responsibility under cover of professionalism. He repeatedly reframes his life’s choices as minor sacrifices for the sake of dignity, yet the cumulative effect is devastating. The more he rationalizes, the more hollow his life becomes.

This rationalization felt poignant before; now it feels terrifyingly familiar. The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is full of men and women who “just did their jobs,” who persuaded themselves that loyalty excused silence. Stevens, in his small way, becomes their mirror.

Beauty and Darkness

And yet, the book remains beautiful. Ishiguro’s prose is spare, controlled, almost like chamber music. The road trip frame, with Stevens driving through the English countryside, provides moments of pastoral calm that contrast with the storms beneath the surface. The understated style amplifies the darkness because it refuses melodrama. By the time Stevens realizes—too late—that he has given his life to a cause both ignoble and loveless, the quietness of the revelation is more devastating than any outburst could be.

The irony that first delighted me is still there, but now it feels less like a gentle smile and more like a knife’s edge. Stevens is both comic and tragic, both absurd and horrifying. Ishiguro allows us to see how an ordinary man, clinging to ideals of service and dignity, can waste his life in the service of betrayal.

Reading The Remains of the Day twice, ten years apart, shows how literature deepens with us. The book I first encountered was about lost love and misguided loyalty. The book I read now, after walking through Auschwitz and Dachau, is about moral blindness, the banality of evil, and the human cost of devotion to the wrong master. Both readings are true; the difference is in the shadow that history casts.

Ishiguro’s genius lies in writing a novel supple enough to contain both. Stevens remains one of the great unreliable narrators of modern fiction, and The Remains of the Day remains, for me, a masterpiece that only grows darker—and more necessary—with time.

Also, The Movie

A postscript: I have not and will not see the movie version of The Remains of the Day.  My habit is not to see movie versions of novels I love. But in this case, I heard Ishiguro speak at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2015.  He was talking about his just-released book (my second favorite of  his novels) The Buried Giant. As soon as the host asked for questions, everyone wanted to talk about The Remains of the Day. 

One of the first questions was about the movie. In answering the questions, Ishiguro talked about being a young novelist and all the excitement of having his novel made into a movie.  He said, "I would not have chosen Anthony Hopkins as Stevens."  

The man who could play a convincing Hannibal Lecter, Odin, Nixon and C.S. Lewis could not also be the sort of shallow martinet that is Stevens.