Category Archives: Buddhism

people as clusters of attention

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Attention is endangered. It is what Silicon Valley has learned to capture and commoditize. It is what LLMs pretend to offer by speaking in the first-person singular, often in a sycophantic voice. It is what my iPhone takes from me. It is what Donald Trump constantly demands.

To understand why our attention should be valuable to us, we need a satisfactory theory of it. We should not depend on the idea that we have a private, inner self that creates or determines its own attention and owns it like a plot of property. Yet our attention does not belong to Google and Meta or to Donald Trump, and we are worse off when they determine it. Here is an effort at an explanation.

1. The belief in a willing self

It feels as if we decide to do certain things. The reason they occur is that we will them. Other things happen to us, or just happen. For instance, I stand up because I decide to do so, but I fall down because someone pushes me or the leg of my chair breaks.

What am I? I am the thing that wills my own actions.

Sometimes we hear that this theory is “Western” or “modern,” but classical Indian Buddhist thinkers–who disagreed with the theory–nevertheless argued that all sentient beings believe it until they achieve enlightenment. The intended reader of a classical Buddhist text was neither Western nor modern yet believed in a self that willed its own actions. Classical Buddhist authors defined themselves as opponents of other Asian authors who explicitly endorsed this theory, including foundational Hindu texts.

I presume that most or all people believe in a willing self because it makes sense of experience. We are so constituted that we feel that we decide and choose some things, while other things happen to us.

This theory also supports significant and appropriate moral distinctions. We hold ourselves and other people accountable for choices, not for accidents. And just as we value and care for our self–which we credit with making choices–so we value and care for other selves.

When we begin by believing in our own willing selves, we naturally pose questions about other wills. Presumably, other human beings are just like us; to assume otherwise is solipsistic and maybe even psychopathic. But from there, the answers become trickier. Do other animals have selves, and if so, which animals? (My dog seems to, but it’s hard to believe that a bacterium does.) Can a group of human beings or a human institution have a will? How about a computer?

2. Drawbacks of the theory

The theory of a willing self has advantages but also limitations that many people recognize, in principle, even as our experiences keep convincing us that it is true.

For one thing, we have no direct knowledge of the self. It can seem like a magical exception in a universe otherwise determined by the causes that are known to science.

The theory of a self implies a sharp distinction between choices and accidents, even though many–possibly all–intentional behavior seems to be a mix of both. I assume that I have freely decided to stand up, but that behavior resulted from a series of neurological events that were affected, in part, by other people and objects.

Although the theory suggests a binary, the world seems to be shaded in grey. My dog Luca has a similar psychology to mine but not completely the same; a lizard is like Luca but also different from him; and an ant is further along the same continuum. A crowd of humans can have a kind of will, but not exactly like mine. A Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits will-like behavior but isn’t a person.

Finally, the notion of a freely choosing self violates important moral intuitions. It is incompatible with Moral Luck, the idea that we can be better or worse as a result of things that happen without our choosing them. For example, I didn’t choose to be an American citizen led by President Trump, but I am. It is wrong to distance myself from that fact on the ground that I didn’t will it. The theory can also encourage us to care too much about our own selves and to regard our freedom and survival as paramount while making us too judgmental about other people. In Buddhism, an enlightened person has shed the belief in itself.

But it is also problematic to deny the existence of selves in such a way that it no longer seems to matter whether we and other people have agency–or even whether we or they survive. A person is a thing of inestimable value even it’s not quite right to understand it as a self that has a will. And a dog is a being of great value even if it’s not on a par with a human person. Somehow, it must make sense to complain when a person’s private space has been violated.

3. Attention, not self

Here is an alternative. I am inspired by Jonardon Ganeri’s book Attention, Not Self (Oxford 2017), which is primarily an interpretation of Buddhaghosa’s The Path of Purification (written around 450 CE) and other works by this classical Theravada thinker, who (in turn) claimed to be faithfully interpreting the words of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims that his whole Path of Purification, which is 853 pages long in the English translation by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, is a commentary on the second stanza of Linked Discourses 1.23 (which I have loosely translated here.)

It would be a thorny matter to decide whether I am interpreting Ganeri reasonably well, whether he offers an accurate reading of Buddhaghosa, whether Buddhaghosa is a reliable interpreter of the Pali Canon, and whether the Canon reflects the ideas of the actual Buddha. Instead, I will simply sketch a view that I’ve formed while reading Ganeri.

We can begin with attention. Although this word does not have a self-evident meaning, we use it successfully. Even a toddler can understand the phrase “Pay attention!” When I say my dog’s name, he attends to me, and when he barks, he wants to get my attention. In other words, Luca and I can play language-games involving attention even if he couldn’t learn the word. In this sense, “attention” is much more tractable than “consciousness.”

In its most general sense, attention is some kind of ordering of experience by an organism. An ant can attend to a leaf.

Ganeri argues that our attention has two general aspects: it functions like a window or aperture that removes most of what we could notice so that we are less distracted; and it directs or faces us toward certain phenomena within the window so that we can more deeply understand those things. When I stare at a tree, I am ignoring other objects in my peripheral vision and I am thinking about the tree. “I have reconstructed Pali Buddhist theory as consisting in the claim that the role of attention in experience consists in an exclusion-guided placing together with a directing towards, where there is no incompatibility between them” (Ganeri 117).

This is a general account of attention, at least for human beings. Ganeri further argues that “attention is disunified;” it comes in many forms.

Among the varieties of attention are focal and placed attention, retained attention, reflective attention, attention through language to the world beyond one’s horizons, attention to one’s own mind, attention to the minds of others through their poise and posture, and attention to one’s life in total. These varieties of attention are, as we will see, put to work to explain perception, memory, mindfulness, testimony, introspection, and empathy (Generi, 221).

Each person’s attention is differentiated from others’. For example, only I can remember my own past experiences, which is a particular way of attending. You can learn about my past and possibly even know facts about my past that I don’t know, but I alone can attend to my past as a memory. Likewise, only I can focus on my future as my own, which I do when I plan. I can attend to you in the way that we call empathy, which you cannot offer to yourself.

If you and I are sitting in a lecture, I may be paying attention while your mind is wondering (or vice-versa, of course). If there is a sudden loud noise, such as a thunderclap, both of us may have our attentions captured or “grabbed,” but this may feel different to each of us because I experienced an interrupted lecture while you experienced an interrupted daydream. Compare William James:

for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, vol. 1, Chapter 9, p. 103.)

There is such a thing as voluntary or intended attention. We can tell by the fact that such attention requires effort. Maybe I am forcing myself to pay attention to the lecture while you are allowing yourself be distracted by someone else in the room, by a feeling of hunger, or by a memory.

James argues that “the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds” yet there is a clear difference between trying to attend to something and doing so because we failed to try or because something else compelled our attention. The difference matters morally:

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not have reined them in…. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law (James, vol; 2, chap 35, p. 497).

Ganeri posits that “Attention is the active organization of experience and action into centred arenas, and Buddhist anatta [the doctrine of no-self] is the claim that there is no room for something real at the centre doing or observing the ordering” (p. 26).

4. Consequences and applications

This theory has the advantage of explaining why each person’s attention is different from others’ without positing a self behind the curtain. It allows us to care whether a given person, including me or you, remains alive and free. A person is a unique cluster or concentration of attention that can attend to its past and future in a unique way. The world will be less when it is gone.

Yet there is also a continuum of qualities and degrees of attention, so that I am very similar to Luca and yet not completely like him. My attention while I write this post is not the same as your attention while you read it, but they connect to each other via the text and our shared experiences. When I am gone, some of what I attended to will be forgotten and some will still receive attention.

Most examples of attention have many causes, some of which can be located mostly inside the organism and others beyond it. There are no sharp boundaries between self and other or between freedom and necessity, but there is a difference between an intense, effortful, deliberated, and concentrated experience of attention versus a complete accident, such as a thunderclap that interrupts a lecture. There is also a difference between reading a novel or listening to a friend and being directed by an algorithm.

Moral responsibility waxes to the degree that we do–or could–expend effort on our own attention. Thus we can be blamed for focusing on bad things or for failing to attend to our responsibilities.

I think we can blame a dog for failing to attend, although much less censoriously than we would blame an adult human being; and we can blame an institution, like the Supreme Court, although we should excuse a dissenting minority.

Ganeri’s theory (to the extent that I have captured it here) is perennial, developed in dialogue with authors who lived in Asia more than 1,500 years ago. It is a theory about human beings, or perhaps about all sentient creatures. But it also feels timely and urgent because human attention is so badly threatened now.

I am currently on vacation in Penzance, Cornwall. I asked Google Gemini’s LLM whether it could summarize a long text for me, and it replied:

I would love to! Please go ahead and upload or paste the text.

Since I’m in Penzance, I’m ready to dive right into your document and pull out the key points, actionable items, or core arguments so you can get the information you need at a glance.

What would you like me to focus on?

Gemini is here in Penzance? That is just creepy. Nevertheless, I uploaded the poem from the Pali Canon that had absorbed Buddaghosa for 853 pages. Gemini “focused on it” and cheerfully gave me a summary in four bullet points. All that was lost was any possible advantage of my attending to that text.

You might think the same of this blog post. if you have read this far, you have devoted some time to my essay, whereas you could instead have read a bit of Ganeri’s book, or the 5th-century Buddhist classic that he interprets, or the original Pali Canon. The fact that I attended to my writing whereas Gemini automatically generated its summary does not make my text better for you.

Indeed, it would be better to read a classic than my blog, but it is also true that we have limited attention and cannot contemplate everything. Summaries are not intrinsically bad, so long as they allow us to focus seriously on other things. Even Gemini’s four-point summary of a poem attributed to the Buddha could enrich a person’s attention if that person then turned to other works.

If we are clusters or concentrations of attention, then each of us has the opportunity to improve their own cluster. What makes attention better is a matter for discussion, but I would nominate complexity, depth, distinctiveness, and service to other people as criteria that we can strive for. A technical tool, such as an LLM or an iPhone, can help, but it can surely erode each of those values if we are not vigilant about it.

See also: The Tangle (a translation of 1.23); AI as Satanic; what should we pay attention to?

The Tangle

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“Snarled, knotted—these neurons got as tangled
As the hair on top. The living are snagged
In their own matted mess, they are this thatch.
Who, I ask you, can fix such a tangle?”

“A person. Ethical. Concentrating. 
Insightful. Methodical yet ardent.
Someone who has fully accepted this task.
This person can unravel the tangle.

“Desire, hatred, and ignorance fade
While you pay attention to untangling.
Name and form fade, and the gap is gone
Between wish and fact. Then: no more tangle.”

This is a loose rendition of Linked Discourses 1.23 from the Pali Canon (a dialogue between a troubled demigod and the Buddha). Buddaghosa presents an entire book, The Path to Purification (probably 5th century CE), as a commentary on the second verse of this poem. See also: “Tangled Beauty,” The Fetter, etc.

why be introspective?

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According to Thomas Chatterton Williams, some leading tech oligarchs are explicitly against introspection. The “venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says that he engages in ‘zero’ introspection—or at least ‘as little as possible.’” Similarly, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel “contends that looking inward can impede action.”

Both men think that introspection is a recent phenomenon, or at least a growing one. Thiel blames “hippies, who derailed American technological progress when they ‘took over the country’ in the late 1960s.” Andreessen says, “If you go back, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

They are definitely wrong about history. Exactly 400 years ago (in 1626), John Milton began his third elegy: “Silent I sat, dejected, and alone, / Making in thought the public woes my own” (citing Cowper’s translation of Milton’s Latin).

About 2,000 years before that, Socrates had said, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Apology 37e), and his premise was echoed by all the Greek philosophical schools. Two millennia of Christian introspection resulted from this Greek heritage plus the Biblical injunction “For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). For example, St. Augustine wrote, “Do not go outside, come back into yourself. It is in the inner self that Truth dwells” (De vera religione, 39).

Meanwhile, verses like this were being attributed to the Buddha: “The mind is fast-moving and hard to subdue, / landing wherever it wishes; / it is good to train it— / a trained mind brings happiness” (Dhp 33–43). And, further east, “The Master [Confucius] said: ‘If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger'” (Analects 2.15).

Notwithstanding all this ancient advice, the tech bros may spend their entire lives taking pleasure from success and power without suffering the self-doubts and anxieties that result from introspection. Since I don’t happen to believe in a posthumous reckoning, I think their lives may conclude without any penalty for having been (as Williams says) “pathologically unreflective.” If a good life is one of pleasure, then their odds of attaining it are as high as anyone’s.

But is pleasure good? That is an ethical question, in the original sense of an ethos as a matter of character. Here is a very general account of what it means to be ethical:

  1. It is better to be good or right than bad or wrong
  2. This principle both applies inwardly and outwardly. That is, it is better to be good rather than bad to yourself and better to be good rather than bad to others.
  3. It is not obvious what being good entails. Neither the outcome (a good state) nor the appropriate means to reach this outcome is self-evident. For example, it is not obvious whether (or when, or to what extent) pleasure is good, either for oneself or for others.
  4. To know what is good requires wisdom or discernment, which is a matter of character.
  5. To improve one’s character requires knowing what it is.
  6. Therefore, introspection is crucial; the unexamined life is not worth living.

I presume that Andreeson, Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and other oligarchs (financial or political) would disagree with all of these points, and certainly with the final one.

So did Thrasymachus, as he is presented in Plato’s Republic. Thrasymachus has the arrogant, combative, proudly selfish air of a contemporary tech bro. Like them, he is successful, and he is developing a powerful technology (in his case, Sophistic rhetoric).

Socrates tries to prove to Thrasymachus that it is better to be just than unjust. Influenced by previous interpretations, I believe that Socrates essentially fails. Thrasymachus leaves, and Socrates’ disciples observe that he was unconvinced. Once he is gone, Socrates develops a detailed account of justice for them. This is a metaphor for the idea that ethical reasoning is persuasive for those who accept the first point listed above, but not for others. There are ethical reasons, but there are no reasons to be ethical.

Even before Thrasymachus exits the dialogue, Cephalus has departed. He is a character who has lived a conventionally respectable life–he has basically tried to do good but without asking what goodness is. I think his departure is a metaphor for the idea that it can be better to be good than to think too much about it, contrary to Socrates’ premise that the good life is an examined one.

It is possible to live beneficially without giving ethics too much thought, although success is then a matter of chance. It is also possible to live ethically–displaying some introspection and self-improvement.

An ethical life can serve as an example, but it will not inspire everyone. Those who are not drawn to ethics cannot be proven wrong and may not pay any price for their refusal. To the extent that their behavior threatens others, they must (like everyone else) face the restraints and penalties of the law. But they may not cause great harm or break major rules, and they have a right to organize their inner lives as they wish. Although their lives are worse for being unreflective, they will never know it.

See also: Cephalus; varieties of skepticism; introspect to reenchant the inner life, etc.

How do we know whether fish are happy? How do we know whether we are? (Zen, Aristotelian, and Taoist discussions)

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When you watch fish swimming around in very cold water, they look fine. Human beings have a protein, TRPM8, that reacts to cold and affects our nervous system, causing discomfort or even pain when the temperature goes down. But fish do not have any TRPM8 (Yong p. 138). Thus we can infer that fish do not sense cold in the way we do.

This does not mean that we know what cold is really like, while fish do not. Nor does it mean that our pain is nothing real, as if we can make it go away by disbelieving it. Nor does it mean that we know what it feels like to be a fish. But we can perceive a difference between species.

Long before anyone knew about proteins, the behavioral difference between us and fish was obvious enough that it served as an example for several thinkers who asked whether experiences like pleasure and suffering are subjective. More deeply, they asked what happiness is.

Japanese Zen Buddhism uses the term kyogai. Often translated as “consciousness,” it literally means “boundary” or “bounded place,” deriving originally from the Sanskrit word visayah, in the sense of a pasture that has a boundary. The Buddhist Abbot Mumon Yamada (1900-1988) taught:

This thing called kyogai is an individual thing. …. Only another fish can understand the kyogai of a fish. In this cold weather, perhaps you are feeling sorry for the fish, poor thing, for it has to live in the freezing water. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it would be better off if you put it in warm water; that would kill it. You are a human and there is no way you can understand the kyogai of a fish.

I think the upshot here is humility: if things seem and feel very different to creatures that have different senses, we cannot really know how things are. We should be compassionate, but that is harder than it may at first appear because it requires knowing what another feels. It would not be compassionate to move carp to a warmer pond. Our humility must temper even our compassion.

Aristotle wants to distinguish wisdom, which is knowledge of objective truths, from practical wisdom or phronesis, which allows us to act well. For example, “straight” (using the term from geometry) always means the same thing. The line that takes the shortest distance between two points is straight, regardless of whether any creature sees it as such–or sees it at all. In fact, a line would be straight even if there were no sentient creatures. Hence geometry is a part of wisdom.

However, says Aristotle, different things are healthy and good for people and for fish, and human phronesis involves doing the healthy thing for us, not for them. The “lower animals” also have practical wisdom because they also know what to do. If we try to convince ourselves that our phronesis is wisdom because we are higher than fish, we are foolish because there are things far more divine than we are (NE 1143a).

The upshot, for Aristotle, is that each creature has its own nature, and the proper definition of happiness is acting according to that nature. This means that a fish is happy if it swims around in the cold, not because that behavior feels good to it, but because happiness is accordance with nature. One distinguishing feature of human beings is that we can also know wisdom, or glimpses of it, by studying things higher than ourselves. Thus, for Aristotle, observing the behavior of fish does not really encourage humility. It directs us to identify our proper nature and its place in the cosmos as a whole.

Now here is a passage from Zhuangzi:

Zhuangzi and Huìzi wandered along the bridge over the Hao river. Zhuangzi said, ‘The minnows swim about so freely and easily. This is the happiness of fish’.

Huìzi said, ‘You’re not a fish. How do you know the happiness of fish?

Zhuangzi said, ‘You’re not me. How do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?’

Huìzi said, ‘I’m not you, so indeed I don’t know about you. You’re indeed not a fish, so that completes the case for your not knowing the happiness of fish’.

Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s go back to where we started. When you said, “How do you know the happiness of fish”, you asked me about it already knowing that I knew it. I knew it over the Hao river’. (17/87–91)

I have virtually no knowledge of Taoism or its context, so it is risky for me to venture an interpretation. But I think the idea here is that neither of the men in the story can know the other, let alone the fish, and therefore all knowledge (including of one’s self) is illusory. However, Zhuangzi was right in the first place. “This” was the happiness of fish. He could not know its content or how happiness would feel to a fish, only that because fish were being fish, they were happy.

Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Penguin Random House, 2022); Yamada as cited in Victor Sogen Hori, “Koan and Kensho in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum,” in The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism (2000); Zhuangzi. The Complete Writings, translated by Chris Fraser (Oxford World’s Classics, p. 200). I translated Aristotle from the 1894 Clarendon edition on https://scaife.perseus.org/, but I have paraphrased here because the literal text is thorny. See also: some basics; Verdant mountains usually walk

how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking

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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.