Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, tells how Hannah Arendt helped her to think.

About Lyndsey Stonebridge
“I am Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.
I work on the intellectual history and literature of the 20th century, and I’ve written books on war, justice, war-time trials, statelessness, human rights and Hannah Arendt.”

Key Points

• Arendt argues that thinking properly involves both facing up to reality and resisting it.
• From Immanuel Kant, Arendt took the idea that thinking has moral consequences; from Martin Heidegger, the concept that thinking is really all there is.
• Arendt teaches us that because thinking is an everyday activity, it’s radically democratic.

Arendt had the good fortune to be brought up in Königsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant, whom she took very seriously indeed. Königsberg might look like a backwater, but in the 18th century it was incredibly cosmopolitan. It had seven bridges, and there’s this wonderful game you can play which is to try to work out how you can get through the town while crossing each of those seven bridges but not crossing any one twice. This is where Kant, who used to cross those bridges, comes in.

What Kant and his generation worked out is that you didn’t actually have to spend all your life running around the bridges. You can use mathematical reason. You can use pure reason to work out that, in fact, you can’t cross each bridge only once; you have to cross one twice.

Kant was terribly important because he was the first person who said that how we think, and how our mind works, is absolutely constitutive about how we manage to be in the world.