Steven Douglas Maloney

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group – aside from encountering Parfit – is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.  

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification.  She is one “with a hammer,” as Nietzsche would say.  I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus’ reading of Nietzsche’s aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.  

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an “anti-philosopher.”  She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.  

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.  Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, “I want only to understand.” and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, “being home.”  For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.