Amid the concern that we are living in a “post-truth” world of radically incompatible knowledge claims and “alternative facts”, it is easy to lose sight of that other mental faculty, the faculty of thinking. Whereas knowing is a “world-building activity”, Hannah Arendt wrote in The Life of the Mind (1978), and should thus contribute to the treasures of civilization, thinking, like Penelope with her shroud, “undoes every morning what it had finished the night before”. Thinking is the source not of truth but of meaning. It flirts with doubt, perplexity and wonder, and because of this it is the permanent enemy not just of ideological dogmatism but of all forms of intellectual complacency and elitism.
