Abstract
Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Kant’s city, then called Königsberg, in East Prussia. (For her life, see Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s 1982 biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World). Whereas for her family and many of the five thousand Jews in Königsberg Moses Mendelssohn was the exemplary social and cultural figure, the Social Democrat and Reform Rabbi Hermann Vogelstein was the religious and political leader. Arendt as a little girl had a crush on Vogelstein. After learning of some of the complexities of a secular Jewess marrying a Rabbi, this little girl was led to remark: “I will marry a rabbi with pork.” (When older she proclaimed to the rabbi that she no longer believed in God, and he replied, “And who asked you?”) In her teens she was fascinated with Kierkegaard and when sixteen she read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Selected Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1951.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, rpt. 1998.
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press, 1968.
Arendt, Hannah. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Social Research 38 (1971): 417–446.
Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harvest, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972.
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1. Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Vol. 2. Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Arendt, Hannah. “Collective Responsibility.” In Amor Mundi. Ed. James W. Bernauer, 43–50. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding (1930–1954). New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1929.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1974.
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
References
See Kimberley F. Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 33ff. Cf. the similar theme in Michel Henry’s writings, e.g., La barbarie (Paris: Éditions Grasset and Faszuelle, 1987).
Note that judgment’s re-presentation has for Arendt the double burden of making present all relevant others and re-presenting exemplary figures. When I say “This is a noble deed” I encompass the multiple relevant perspectives, but at the same time the virtuosity of an exemplary exercise of radical freedom suffuses my representation of their representations—which exemplarity I assume also suffuses their representations. I might here also add that in Arendt there is no “likely story,” such as Max Scheler’s rich endeavor, to tie culture, value, character, and motivation to these examplars. See Scheler’s Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Bern: Francke, 1966), 558ff., and Schriften aus dem Nachlass (Bern: Francke, 1957), 1:255-376.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hart, J.G. (2002). Hannah Arendt: The Care of the World and of the Self. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6082-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9924-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive