ABSTRACT
In recalling Orpheus who travels as if in space to an underworld far off from any dwelling, Hannah Arendt pursues her theme of the 'un-worldly' character of thought. Arendt adapts Orpheus and Eurydice as figures for the life of the mind. Arendt herself continues in the tradition of the phenomenology of Husserl and its adaptation by Merleau-Ponty. It would appear that Arendt was reading Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. Arendt insists that Kafka's parable 'does not apply to man in his everyday occupations', but records the disturbance of the usual flow of events, their surface ruffled by the need for serious choice. Kafka's protagonist, situated at the intersection of opposing forces from past and from future, uses the future's possibilities against the conservative power of the past. Arendt develops her metaphor for Kafka's Augenblick of the present: 'the small inconspicuous track of non-time beaten by the activity of thought within the timespace given to natal and mortal men'.
