Hannah Arendt: thinking between past and future

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Arendt's reflections on the activity of thinking. This activity is essential to understand our present and reconciling ourselves with contingency and human fragility. Unlike the philosophical tradition that has vindicated contemplative thinking, Arendt recovers the lost treasure of reflective thinking through the portraits of thinkers, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Walter Benjamin, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, and Franz Kafka. In dark times, when the public sphere is destroyed, the challenge of “thinking without banisters” implies an act of political resistance, by trying to examine the devastating reality, even if the answers are not what we would like to see and hear. Through reflective thinking, we can open up to the world and the drama of human freedom with its heterogeneities and destructive leaks.