Philosophy versus politics

Hannah Arendt liked to say that thinking is an endless process that produces no settled results and is ‘like Penelope's web, it undoes every morning what it has finished the night before’. In general, this description of intellectual life does not fit Arendt herself very well, since, as we have seen, her reflections did produce results in the shape of a complex network of concepts and distinctions which she developed and constantly reused. But there is one train of thought running through her work that really does have the shifting, unstable character that the metaphor of Penelope's web suggests, and through which we can perhaps eavesdrop on that neverending internal dialogue of the thinker with herself that Arendt took to be the essence of philosophy. The subject of this debate, and one of her major preoccupations, was the relation between thought and action, philosophy and politics.

The sources of her concern with this topic lay in her own experiences following Hitler's rise to power. Formerly a student of philosophy with little interest in politics, she was catapulted into concern with public affairs by the shock of Nazism. Only by way of political theory did she eventually find her way back to philosophy proper. Evidence that this was indeed a homecoming can be found in a remark to an old friend after she had been invited to give the Gifford Lectures that became The Life of the Mind. She told Hans Jonas that she felt she had done her bit in politics, and from now on was going to stick to philosophy.