In Hannah Arendt’s work The Human Condition, natality, as the human capacity for bringing something new into the world, is closely related to her passionate defense of thinking. By thinking, she does not mean just any thought, but the deliberate, critical, and creative engagement of one’s own mind, the genuine and meaningful conversations that we have with ourselves. All of her works rest on her unwavering conviction that free reflective thinking is essential to human freedom as well as the functioning of democracies. This conviction profoundly animates her most influential works, her treatise The Origins of Totalitarianism and her report of the trial of the Nazi concentration camp coordinator, Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem in 1961. In the latter, she used the infamous and highly controversial phrase “the banality of evil” to capture Eichmann’s inhumanity and monstrousness. In The Human Condition, Arendt warns of thoughtlessness caused by an overreliance on machines and technology. In looking to counter thoughtlessness, she pays particular attention to poetic thinking, the uninhibited, creative work of the mind, from which works of art are born.

In this seminar, we want to ask what poetic thinking can mean for our work as humanities scholars with a civic mission. Possible questions are:

How can we cultivate a culture where acts of natality remain possible and meaningful? Which role can literature and the arts play in this?

How can turning to Arendt's writings be helpful as we live through a time of political autocracy and increasingly common authoritarianism?

How do we, as a culture, make room for the kind of unbridled potentiality that enables creativity?

How do language, music, or any of the visual arts reflect poetic thinking? And which social imaginaries emerge from these works?

Which place, if any, should or can artificial intelligence have for poetic thinking? Which limitations or new potentialities arise from the use of technologies? Was Arendt wrong in her stern warnings?

How can we understand civic humanities beyond Great Books courses and re-readings of the canonical classics?

How can we encourage others (students, peers, readers, followers) to practice this kind of thinking? How do we engage in it ourselves?

How does poetic thinking shape criticism? Can we insert ourselves in the world with acts of natality by publishing criticism?