ABSTRACT
Thinking stands to conversation as stage dialogue does to talking about the play after the event. One's thinking is sometimes a quite articulated conversation with oneself. If thinking is a form of privacy we choose as a social strategy then thinking may be only as 'invisible' or 'inaudible' as we make it. Hannah Arendt explains her notion of the 'invisibility' of thinking in contrast with the invisibility of latency or potentiality. Arendt makes intricate connections between solitude, representation and death: No mental act is content with its object as it is given to it. The reflexivity achieved through plurality is 'one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth'. A conscious living being is only one of many interacting others of the same kind. Withdrawal is connected with our power of thought also because it is part of our capacity to 'present to what is absent from the senses'.
