For the last three and a half months, Hannah Arendt has dominated a very large part of my attention. Last year I enrolled in a class on the life, times and thoughts of Hannah Arendt. Since then I have read four of her books and three of her essays, listened to lectures by four renowned Arendt scholars, and spent three hours of every Monday evening discussing her with a class of thirteen other college students. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't have the time to explain Arendt's extraordinary life or detailed political theories here (and couldn't do it in a way that would do justice to her if I tried). However, one thing she brings up that has really hit a chord for me is her distinctions between the Vita Contemplativa and the Vita Activa; the contemplative life and the active life. After reading a few of her works I have begun to feel that I have been spending too much of my time living the Vita Contemplativa rather than the Vita Activa, I spend my days with my nose in a book, in a newspaper, in a magazine gathering information and thinking about what all of this information means. This is something that I see as admirable and good, but Arendt has made me feel like it is simply inadequate. I must, of course, think but then it is necessary for me to act, I must discuss my ideas with others and have my ideas shape theirs while their thoughts shape mine in return. So, I decided to start writing what I am thinking. Not exactly a fresh and new idea, but one that I believe I will find satisfaction in. Arendt would probably have doubts as to how much 'action' a blog can truly represent, but I will start with the hopes that expressing my thoughts through writing will help me arrange them within myself. I'd like to close my first post with one of the most striking of Hannah Arendt's thoughts that I have encountered over the course of my semester with her. It is from her essay "What is Freedom."
Objectively, that is, seen from the outside and without taking into account that man is a beginning and a beginner, the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming. Not quite so overwhelming, to be sure, but very nearly so as the chances were that no earth would ever rise out of cosmic occurrences, that no life would develop out of inorganic processes, and that no man would emerge out of the evolution of animal life. The decisive difference between the "infinite improbabilities" on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the miraculous character inherent in those events which establish historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the "miracles." It is men who perform them - men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.
