Another Thought:
What I wonder about Arendt is where her conception of logos (encompassing speech and reason) sits within a framework (or whether it does at all). Is logos given equal weight in and outside the mind, as in, must it be paired with action to constitute her equal relations? Or is it more a way of being in the world, where the thinking about thinking is encompassed in a bigger idea of us thinking in the world just as we conceive of doing in the world; as in, giving them the same necessity. In order to dissolve the duality, we must redirect thinking toward Plato's cave, back to the real world. If this is the case, I actually think this has a lot in common with Heidegger's reformulation of Being, as the way we are in the world, insofar as he advocates a more holistic way of understanding being that is not just correct, but true (to use his words). That in the general understanding of these concepts, they are only available as dualities, which is why Arendt references Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx as not breaking with the philosophical tradition but simply distorting or inverting it. A new (and perhaps Heidegger would have found an Old High German word or re-imagined a lost ancient greek one) understanding needs to be not just thought, not just ushered in to the annals of philosophical tradition, but enacted, lived. Could a dissolution of the duality see a change in the way that we exist, both alone (with ourselves) and together?
Ok, so I don't know enough about this and I did look it up on Wikipedia, but the stoics did seem to have a rather active conception of Logos, where reason is also identified with animation and generation in the world. "The stoics took all activity to imply a Logos, or spiritual principle." It was the active reason pervading the universe and animating it... it was conceived as material i.e. in this world. The law of generation was logos spermatikos or seminal logos, the "principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter." Humans possess a portion of divine logos.
So perhaps I am taking Arendt into a Heideggerian-type reformulation of language, but I find this to be crucial in a reformulation of thinking, i.e. the way that we think about ourselves, the way that we think about thinking, the way that we think about action. I think that for all the criticism of Heidegger's flowery language and poésis, it is genuinely necessary to get out of a language system that has become so restricted in its potential for meaning, i.e. to give importance to the exactness of language, rather than allowing play, multiplicity or poetry, feeds into a kind of science of ordering and fixing. Limited meaning also limits the ways of seeing and understanding. Not, of course, that reformulating would mean taking the opposite of exactness and doing away with meaning altogether or some sort of radical Dada cutting words from dictionaries, letting them fall on the floor, picking them up and as they come, assembling them into a nonsense poem. Rather, thinking in terms of the correct but not true. A more holistic view, that (an this is what I think Arendt is getting at) does not presume to know or formulate the "true" but rather acknowledges that proclaiming as "truth" is the problem. Our understanding of the separated worlds of contemplation and action can be seen in a different way, not as separate at all, but as a logos, thinking that animates, a constant relationship between us and the world that exists in no prescribed generalisation. A problem, as I see it, is that certain technologies expand this gap (thought/action) by placing action in a non-space - i.e. the Internet, of which I am a part, insofar as, if space is where we must exist, where we must be in the world, think in the world, act in the world, the placement in this non-space of the products of logos (thought/action), not only inhibits "real-world" action but diminishes something of the active thought as well. Back to the example; whilst our relation to thought and thinking on the Internet may be seen as liberating in some regards (connection to wider audiences, communities, informations etc), it necessarily exists in a different "space" to our human relationships. Not different as in opposite, just not the same. It precludes certain aspects of our physicality that cannot be denied as we engage full-bodied with the world. One interesting thing I have read about in the realms of neuroscience is our misconception of things like emotions, where we often think of them as intangible or as "mental events", but how inextricably they are connected and reliant upon bodily functions. Anger, for example, is almost inconceivable without the constriction of blood vessels, tensing of muscles, shaking and other symptoms that are part of it. These are bodily, and as such, bound in space. What happens when this physicality is somewhat diminished (as I believe it is on the Internet)? Is our engagement also limited? And if we are trying to imagine a fluid, holistic encompassing of thought and action, is not thought also diminished, being estranged from action. Again, not that I am a Luddite, nor do I believe that Heidegger was one, but I do think that each "way of..." limits another. The way of being on the Internet limit others. It is not that prescribing a ratio of these "ways of..." will fix or improve anything, or that there is or must be a "way of" understanding "ways of..", rather, simply understanding that there are ways of being and that these often privilege or limit other aspects of being, could allow the kind of ongoing, real-time relationship with thinking and action, whereby living itself is constituted as the relationship between oneself and ways of being.
I was going to end with something I like that this dude, Shiv Visvanathan, wrote before the turn of the millennium in A Letter to the 21st Century; "The magical must liberate reason from its anxieties of universalism; the part can only be the whole, if the whole is mysterious."
But instead I shall leave you with Goethe:
All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of life springs evergreen.
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