ABSTRACT
The Life of the Mind was planned to be the coronation of Hannah Arendt’s lifelong preoccupation with the fundamental questions of the human condition. As is well known, of the whole work, only the volumes on “thinking” and “willing” were concluded and published posthumously. Arendt defines thinking as the faculty dealing with the invisible, but she sometimes refers to thinking as the attitude of the spectator. Except for a few subchapters in the first volume, Arendt elucidates the categories of the life of the mind by presenting and interpreting philosophies she regards as representative. In order to understand why philosophers cannot be regarded as pure thinkers, one only needs to glance briefly at Arendt’s concept of thinking. Hannah Arendt presented a philosophical system, neither a pedantic nor a closed one, but a system all the same. The system is constructed from the vantage point of the end result.
