The Life of the Mind (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2)
Hannah Arendt
Language: English
Pages: 540
ISBN: 0156519925
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
existential fact of human existence. Ten years later he broke with the whole modern age’s philosophy (in the second volume of his book about Nietzsche), precisely because he had discovered to what an extent the age itself, and not just its theoretical products, was based on the domination of the Will. He concluded his later philosophy with the seemingly paradoxical proposition of “willing not-to-will.”37 To be sure, in his early philosophy Heidegger did not share the modern age’s belief in
reversal seems a rather obvious consequence for a philosophy that drew its main inspiration from the Bible, that is, from a Creator-God, who certainly was a person, who created men in His own image, that is, necessarily as persons. And Thomas is enough of a Christian to hold that “persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota natura” (“the person signifies what is most perfect in the whole of nature”).19 The Biblical basis, as Augustine showed, is in Genesis, where all natural species
it is possessed by the citizen rather than by man in general, it can manifest itself only in communities, where the many who live together have their intercourse both in word and in deed regulated by a great number of rapports—laws, customs, habits, and the like. In other words, political freedom is possible only in the sphere of human plurality, and on the premise that this sphere is not simply an extension of the dual I-and-myself to a plural We. Action, in which a We is always engaged in
existence is determined by appearance. Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the
no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world. Thinking is out of order because the