On the Possibilities and Limits of Affective Reason: Thinking and Thoughtlessness in the Work of Hannah Arendt

A number of recent critical accounts of liberal democratic theory have bemoaned its privileging of rationality and its accompanying inattention to the place of emotion and passion, of affect and sensibility, in political life. These critics join in a call for democratic theory to bring affect and sensibility in to an arena from which, they argue, they have been problematically absent. While these calls to recognize the affective dimensions of political life are urgent and welcome, they are also complicit in maintaining the ontological and practical separation of reason from passion that was a hallmark of modern thought. To insist on reconnecting passion with reason is to affirm their fundamental separateness. This insistence distorts our experiences of politics, in which affect and reason are frequently intertwined to the point of being practically indistinguishable. In this paper I illustrate one such intertwinement of affect and reason through a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of thoughtlessness and thinking. While we commonly associate thinking with reason, for Arendt, thoughtlessness and thinking are intimately connected with reason and affect. For her, thinking is inseparable from affect. Indeed, we might call Arendtian thinking a kind of affective reason. I illuminate these conceptions through the lens of human suffering, a problem which should have special resonance for democratic theory. Democracy entails the rule of and by “the people.” While the ontological status of “the people” has been hotly debated, that debate has generally neglected the question of what kinds of shared experiences might form the basis of democratic citizens’ individual and collective sense of themselves as belonging to “a people.” Our acknowledgment of implication in human suffering - an acknowledgment that is attainable through Arendtian thinking - might constitute one set of such experiences. Such implication frequently does not stop at national borders. Accordingly, Arendtian thinking might provide a compelling basis for not just national, but global, experiences of democracy. Moreover, as we will see, for Arendt thinking is intimately associated with storytelling - an aesthetic practice that is also deeply connected to our affective experiences.