ABSTRACT
Thoughtlessness-the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and emptyseems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. (Arendt 1958: 5)
More than anything else, Hannah Arendt wanted us to think. 2 However, this was not often her explicit concern: Arendt insisted that she was a political theorist, with an emphasis on the political. As a German Jewish refugee who experienced up close the political disasters of the twentieth century, Arendt was concerned with real people and political events. Indeed, The Human Condition, one of her most lauded works, is devoted to a careful discussion of the vita activa, which Arendt laments has lived for too long in the shadow of the vita contemplativa.
