In her essay, Understanding and Politics, Hannah Arendt describes understanding as “an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.”1
I have turned, in recent weeks, to Arendt’s Essays in Understanding, to gain some purchase on the unsettling dynamics of the current moment in the life of our embattled democracy. Her account of understanding here speaks to a way of knowing that has been eclipsed in a social and political culture that has long demonstrated an incapacity to engage complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty with nuance and grace. To live a finite human life without banisters—to take another formulation made famous by Arendt, requires us to come to terms with reality through practices of understanding.
Reality
Reality is rooted in the complex, varied ways the world expresses itself. Our human efforts to reconcile ourselves with this complexity settle too often for the simple and the certain, seeking in them some refuge from the “unending activity” that is the practice of understanding. Arendt calls us back, however, to those dimensions of reality that undermine our efforts to settle things into set categories, easy dichotomies, and fixed ideas. She returns us to the rich complexity of experience and the vital pluralism that animates life itself and invites us to cultivate the habits of thinking at the heart of our efforts to understand.
Understanding requires us to remain present to the shifting terrain of lived experience and human plurality. It must be responsive to reality as it unfolds. It must be sober and courageous—facing the world as it shows itself, not as we wish it to be. To reconcile ourselves to reality is, however, not to passively accept it, but to respond honestly and without illusion to what is so that we might, in fact, shape it anew.
Education and University Life
The imaginative dimension of understanding announces itself here.
If education, as Arendt writes, “is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it,”2 then perhaps the university is one of those rare places in our society where we can refine and cultivate the imaginative dimensions of understanding that enable us to envision and enact a more just and beautiful future.
To do this, however, university life would need to create, nurture, and sustain itself through its unending endeavor to understand, that is, in its effort to be at home in the world, however fraught and difficult.
The difficulty lies in grounding ourselves in the complex contours of reality itself; for reality expresses dimensions of the world that are unsettling, ambiguous, and uncertain. Because contemporary culture cannot resist the seductive allure of the simple and certain, universities must cultivate practices of understanding that attend to the complexities of lived experience, the rich diversity of human plurality, and the vulnerabilities that shape our finite lives.
How can we create the conditions for imagination and understanding to take root and grow across the university; for the quiet attention that allows what is said to be heard, for the critical discernment that enables us to come to terms with the complex realities we face, and for the ethical imagination that empowers us to respond to the world we encounter in ways that create meaning and connection and joy?
If we commit to practices of understanding and imagination that make such a homecoming possible — patient, critical, open, and vulnerable to one another — then perhaps our efforts to respond to the realities we face will themselves be the pathway to the renewal we seek.
