Åndens liv

by Hannah Arendt

Tysk-jødiske Hannah Arendt er en af det tyvende århundredes mest udbredte og originale tænkere, og ‘Åndens liv’ er hendes ufuldendte hovedværk, som hun skrev på til sin død i 1975.

I ‘Åndens liv’, der var planlagt som et trebindsværk, men som på dansk udgives som ét bind, undersøger hun tanken selv, som den udfolder sig i det kontemplative liv. Til forskel fra sine tidligere skrifter, hvor hun fortrinsvis fokuserede på det aktive, politiske liv i den ydre verden, er dette værk anlagt som en afdækning af det indre liv, åndens liv, som af Arendt blev anset for at være det fundamentale. Ud af denne metafysiske undersøgelse kom et dybt originalt og udfordrende værk om at tænke, om at ville og om at dømme.

Arendt står på skuldrene af traditionen, men altid modigt og selvstændigt - hun udfolder med sit eget pligtbud en dybt original “tænkning uden gelænder”. I ‘Åndens liv’ tænker hun i forlængelse af Aristoteles, Augustin, Immanuel Kant og Martin Heidegger, og stor opmærksomhed vies til Paulus, Epiktet, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Hegel og Nietzsche.

529 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).