Mystics have often advised that by turning our minds inward, we may find freedom. For instance, Marcus Aurelius restates a Greco-Roman commonplace when he writes, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. …. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul” (2:8 and 4:3).

Roughly similar ideas can be found in classical Indian and Christian sources:

“In dependence on the ear and sounds … In dependence on the mind and mental phenomena, mind-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, feeling comes to be; with feeling as condition, craving. But with the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving comes cessation of clinging … cessation of existence … cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering. This, bhikkhus, is the passing away of the world.” (Buddha, in the Pali Canon, SN 12.44)

— “But, Sir, where is the silence and where the place in which the word is spoken?”
— “As I said just now, it is in the purest part of the soul, in the noblest, in her ground, aye in the very essence of the soul. There is the central silence, into which no creature may enter, nor any image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware of any image either of herself or any creature. Whatever the soul effects she effects with her powers.” (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)

The same general idea appealed to the young Hannah Arendt. Her turn away from it explains much about her mature thought.

At age 65, Arendt recalled her early encounters with Martin Heidegger. “The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again. … There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” She remembered that in Heidegger’s seminars, she and her fellow students experienced “thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive for cognition.” They found that thinking can “become a passion” that orders the rest of one’s life.

One of the ways that Heidegger and his students would “think” was by analyzing a mental phenomenon in great detail. Heidegger resists saying that he “observes” his own mental states, such as his anxiety or boredom. That would be psychological research. Instead, “Our fundamental task now consists in awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing.” He and his students would let their moods and other mental states reveal themselves, and they saw this as a path to truth and freedom.

Certainly, Heidegger’s method was not identical to the meditative exercises of Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, or Meister Eckhardt, but it resembled them in a very general way. And it drew Arendt to Heidegger.

In the winter of 1925-6, Arendt ended her romantic relationships with him and wrote a poem about her feelings: “Klage” (or “Lament”), which I have translated here. It is a teenager’s breakup lyric. It is also a very carefully constructed poem, rhymed and rhythmic, which means that it cannot be a literal report of its author’s mental state. Although she begins, “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly,” some of her hours must have been spent rhyming “Nieder” with “Lieder” and “wie Spiel” with “Qualenspiel”–and, I presume, enjoying the results.

Meanwhile, the poem is deeply Heideggerian, focusing on how time becomes evident when we are distressed and ending with a claim of authenticity: “Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away,” yet “Never will it make me give away / The bliss of lovely truth.”

Having read the mature work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, you would assume that she would not want to retreat into introspection, especially meditation on the highly abstract and general topics that interested Heidegger. You would assume that she would decry an inward turn as irresponsibly apolitical. She would advocate engagement with fellow citizens as the basis of a good (and free) life.

One way that she brought herself to this conclusion was by way of her encounter with Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1831). Soon after Arendt left Heidegger, she began to write a book about this Prussian-Jewish salon hostess of the Romantic period.

In Arendt’s account, Varnhagen (born Levin) turned to private introspection to find freedom. Varnhagen presumed that “self-thinking brings liberation from objects and their reality, creates a sphere of pure ideas and a world which is accessible to any rational being without benefit of knowledge or experience” (p. 54). Arendt explains: “If thinking rebounds back upon itself and finds its solitary object within the soul—if, that is, it becomes introspection—it distinctly produces … a semblance of unlimited power by the very act of isolation from the world; by ceasing to be interested in the world it also sets up a bastion in front of the one ‘interesting’ object: the inner self” (p. 55).

This practice of reflecting on one’s inner life (and writing some 6,000 letters about it) was particularly appealing to someone in Varnhagen’s circumstances. She experienced prejudice as a Jew yet lacked commitment to Judaism or to other aspects of her heritage, or even much knowledge of them. She never received a formal education, so she couldn’t investigate history, society, or nature in an advanced way. Since she was poor, female, and–in her own view–physically unattractive, she had limited social prospects. She was drawn to investigating herself as if she were purely an instance of the human condition:

She saw herself as blocked not by individual and therefore removable obstacles, but by everything, by the world. Out of her hopeless struggle with indefiniteness arose her “inclination to generalize.” Reason grasped conceptually what could not be specifically defined, thereby saving her …. By abstraction reason diverted attention from the concrete; it transformed the yearning to be happy into a “passion for truth”; it taught “pleasures” which had no connection with the personal self (p. 59)

But there were reasons that she was so frustrated, and they were not inevitable features of human existence. These reasons included sexism and antisemitism. They explained some of what Varnhagen found when she looked within: her own bitter memories.

While you introspect, Arendt says, everything can feel calm and free. “The one unpleasant feature is that memory itself perpetuates the present, which otherwise would only touch the soul fleetingly. As a consequence of memory, therefore, one subsequently discovers that outer events, have a degree of reality that is highly disturbing” (p. 55).

Arendt uses “world” in a Heideggerian sense, which I think she will retain throughout her life. The “world” is the web of relationships into which we are born as human beings:

Relationships and conventions, in their general aspects, are as irrevocable as nature. A person probably can defy a single fact by denying it, but not that totality of facts which we call the world. In the world one can live if one has a station, a place on which one stands, a position to which one belongs. … In the end the world always has the last word because one can introspect only into one’s own self, but not out of it again (p. 58)

Arendt argues that Varnhagen gradually realized that she had a specific place in a specific world. Supposedly, her dying words were: “What a history! —A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. … The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed” (p. 49). She had understood, in short, that had never been free in her inner life or in her conversations and correspondence with friends and lovers. But she had been a particular person in a specific place and time, and this had given her life meaning.

For Arendt, then, a good life must involve addressing the kinds of social injustices that made Varnhagen suffer–not simply to remedy or mitigate these injustices, but because an active and ethical engagement with the “world” is a better form of freedom than the one that is promised by introspection.

Sources: I quote Marcus Aurelius from Gregory Hays’ translation, and Heidegger from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude 1,1,16a., translated by McNeill and Walker. I quote Arendt’s own English version of her Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess from The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by William Peter Baehr (Penguin 2000).

See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; introspect to reenchant the inner life; The Art of Solitude; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; etc.