To begin,
I don't anticipate any major opposition to this point -- that we each think topics through as though we were discussing it with another person. So far so good. Now to take it another step.Plato, interpreting Socrates, wrote:I call it a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. And I'll explain it to you though I am not too sure about it myself. It looks to me as though this is nothing else but dialegesthai, talking something through, only that the mind asks itself questions and answers them, saying yes or no to itself. Then it arrives at the limit where things must be decided, when the two say the same and are no longer uncertain, which we then set down as the mind's opinion. Making up one's mind and forming an opinion I thus call discourse, and the opinion itself I call a spoken statement, pronounced not to someone else and aloud but silently to oneself. [quoted by Arendt on pp. 91-92, from the Gorgias of Plato.]
Now we're coming to the crux of the question I asked in the title of this post. One of the potentially controversial implications of the reading Arendt offers of Gorgias is the notion that you can "spoil" you ability to think. More to the point, that behaving immorally is one way that men routinely spoil their ability to think clearly. Maybe how isn't entirely clear from the two quotations above, so allow me to paraphrase a bit.Hannah Arendt wrote:From what we know of the historical Socrates it seems likely that he who spent his days in the marketplace -- the same marketplace which Plato's philosopher shuns explicitly (Theaetetus) -- must have believed that all men do not have an innate voice of conscience, but feel the need to talk matters through; that all men talk to themselves. Or, to put it more technically, that all men are two-in-one, not only in the sense of consciousness and self-consciousness (that whatever I do I am at the same time somehow aware of doing it), but in the very specific and active sense of this silent dialogue, of having constant intercourse, of being on speaking terms with themselves. If they only knew what they were doing, so Socrates must have thought, they would understand how important it was for them to do nothing that could spoil it. [p. 92; emphasis added]
In discussing the Gorgias, Arendt means to contrast two ways of thinking about moral problems. One, the Platonic, says that we know what it good by the faculty of conscience, which, in whatever way, allows us to "see" truth directly. So, for instance, the medieval Christian scheme envisioned the conscience as a faculty that put us in direct contact with God's will, such that we could not make the excuse that we did not know the difference between right and wrong. Western culture has largely broken with the Christian notion of conscience, but there remains some confusion as to what conscience would mean in a totally secular context (more on this in another thread).
The other way of thinking about moral problems is Socratic, namely that we have to think them through by having an internal dialogue with ourselves. Saying so does not, in itself resolve all of the problems -- Plato's additions to, and departures from, the Socratic model were likely motivated by a desire to address the problems left by Socrates -- but we can leave some of the thornier issues aside for the moment. Even if we grant that, rather than know moral truth directly, we think moral problems through dialogically, we're still left with the problem of ensuring that we think clearly.
And this, I think, is where the problem Arendt wants to address arises. Throughout the book she has entertained the assertion that "it is better to suffer than to do wrong," and the reason she gives here is that doing wrong makes it impossible to trust yourself.
To see why this is so, it is important to think about the metaphor of thought as a kind of dialogue. Imagine a real dialogue, you and another person considering all the possible answers to a particular moral question. If you know that person to be a murderer, or a thief, or to have some vested interest in returning the wrong answer to a moral question, then you find yourself in a dilemma: How can you tell whether their contributions to the discussion are valid or whether they're specious?
If your answer to that question ends up being that you can't tell, you might be inclined to call an end to the discussion, since at best it will end in doubt, and at worst it might misguide you. Doing wrong yourself means that you will have to hold that sort of conversation every time you think. If you murder someone, your thought process will be like talking to a murderer. If you steal, it will be like talking to a thief. Only, in reality, the stakes are higher, since you'll be incapable of not talking to a murderer or a thief -- all of your thoughts will be the result of a discussion with an untrustworthy self. You will have "spoiled" your ability to think clearly -- at least about certain topics.
This, incidentally, seems like a curious inversion of what we are regularly taught is the gist of Platonic moral philosophy. Rather than say that no man knowingly does wrong, Arendt is saying that no man who does wrong has any hope of knowing.
I mention all of this to raise it to you as a consideration, a line of inquiry. Granting for the moment that Arendt's interpretation of Gorgias is substantially correct, does it make sense to you? Does it seem like an accurate and reasonable description of how thought can go wrong? And if yes on both counts, would you therefore say that evildoers do, in fact, spoil their ability to think clearly?