Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Political Thought in The Life of the Mind

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was published in 1978 in two volumes entitled, Thinking and Willing. She planned to write a third volume, “Judging,” and in fact had just begun writing it the day she died. Instead of the final book, “Judging,” Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, contains excerpts from her lectures on Kant's political philosophy and theory of judgment given at the New School for Social Research in 1970. From these excerpts we can get some idea of Arendt's theory of judgment, although we will never know her final thoughts on this subject since she intended to revise and expand the lectures for the “Judging” volume.