ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt reflected on historical events of her lifetime and understood totalitarianism and the Holocaust as ruptures in tradition. Unlike Martin Heidegger, she did not encounter the past with silence. Instead, she tried to understand the complexity of historical events in the twentieth century. Totalitarianism was a new political form that shattered traditional categories of political understanding. Likewise, the concentration camps marked a caesura and rupture in historical time and traditional definitions of evil. The past, understood as tradition that was handed down from one generation to the next, no longer illuminated the future. In tracing the conflict between philosophy and politics, between the philosopher who wishes to leave the world for contemplation and the citizen who judges and acts in the world, Arendt thinks both with and against Heidegger. Although she compares him to Plato and his attraction to the tyrants of Syracuse, it is in the model of Socrates, with his emphasis on dialogue and maxim that it is better to suffer injustice than commit wrongdoing, where she finds a model within the tradition of philosophy for the thinker as a citizen of the polis and member of the world.
