Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Political Thought in The Life of the Mind (original) (raw)

1981, The Review of Politics

Hannah Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was published in 1978 in two volumes entitled, Thinking and Willing.* She planned to write a third volume, "Judging," and in fact had just begun writing it the day she died. Instead of the final book, "Judging," Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, contains excerpts from her lectures on Kant's political philosophy and theory of judgment given at the New School for Social Research in 1970. From these excerpts we can get some idea of Arendt's theory of judgment, although we will never know her final thoughts on this subject since she intended to revise and expand the lectures for the "Judging" volume. Even without the book on judgment, The Life of the Mind remains an altogether fascinating and demanding work, a fitting capstone to a remarkable career. Part of the challenge of this work is due to Arendt's curious and elusive style with which readers of her previous books are already familiar. As in her earlier works, so in The Life of the Mind, she combines complex philosophical argumentation with speculative flights of thought, digressions on all manner of subjects, close textual analysis, and aphoristic declarations, all capped by favorite quotes from writers, poets, and philosophers ranging from Homer to Auden, and from Heraclitus and Plato to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. Given the profusion of subject matter and her unique manner of treatment, it is sometimes difficult to follow the main thread of her argument. Yet the book's difficulty should not discourage anyone from reading it. Persevering readers will be richly rewarded. Although The Life of the Mind is a dense work and difficult to read, Arendt very much wanted to be understood not only by scholars, but by the average, nonspecialized reader as well.