ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Hannah Arendt’s discussion of The Human Condition, which compared and contrasted the view of the Enlightenment to the Classical and, to a lesser extent, Biblical tradition. Arendt emphasised the foundational logocentric conditions of the Greek polls in defining man, as Aristotle did, as a political and ‘logical’ being. Logocentricity and its relation of the concept of man and his activities to the terms of his creation in imago Dei was the basis of Coleridge’s attack on William Wordsworth poetic theory. Wordsworth’s application of a Kantian form of universality to ‘life’ as his truth had the effect of relating everything to a mysterious origin to which man himself corresponded, as if human existence entailed no prejudices of agency. Wordsworth’s application of a Kantian form of universality to ‘life’ as his truth had the effect of relating everything to a mysterious origin to which man himself corresponded, as if human existence entailed no prejudices of agency.
