ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the tailor Hannah Arendt’s account to issues that directly relate to the general hermeneutic movement and to her comments on Romanticism, without entirely losing the breadth. Arendt argues that a serious misapprehension of human capacities and responsibilities is at work in contemporary thinking and it is often based on the same paradoxical convictions as totalitarianism. Arendt’s account provides an explanation for the aporia that appeared in the project of general hermeneutics in tracing the adoption of universality, the Archimedian point of perspective, into all branches of human thinking and acting. The internal processes of the cogito, which Arendt depicts as Descartes’ relocation of the Archimedian point to a place within the mind, had a different effect on the several areas. Arendt rejects the idea that human actions can fundamentally change human nature. The hermeneutic implications of Arendt’s discussion of the human condition seem to have evaded scholarship.
