ABSTRACT
Hannah arendt’s The Life of the Mind (LOM) is a provocative and bewildering work. Arendt’s late focus on the life of the mind does not signal a change in her rigorously dismissive approach to the inner life of the self. The best way to understand the shift in Arendt’s view and to identify the roots of the later account in the earlier text is to focus on Arendt’s debt to two thinkers cited in both accounts: St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant. In The Human Condition, Arendt describes a self that is discontinuous, a self fundamentally divided. Action, according to Arendt, has two “moral precepts” of its own: forgiving and promising. Arendt valorizes the contingency of the human world because only in a contingent world can action be truly novel and unpredictable. Arendt’s characterization of autonomy as a form of self-domination is indebted to her view, articulated fully for the first time in LOM, that there is “difference in identity.”
