## Metadata - Author: [[Samantha Rose Hill]] - Full Title: Hannah Arendt - Category: #books ## Highlights - There is also a radical openness in Arendt’s writing that invites interpretation and play. Arendt was a poetic thinker. Some have called her an ‘and’ thinker.14 In the words of her friend, the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, ‘her mind worked in a way not dissimilar to the poetic mind, which creates affinities, which discovers relationships that appear obvious once they are formulated but that nobody had thought of before the poet formulated them.’ Arendt knew that meaning was malleable, and that it had to be crafted through storytelling. She wanted to find a new language in order to give voice to a new century of political phenomenon, and she did this by freeing herself from tradition in order to draw together philosophy, theology, political theory, literature and poetry in new constellations. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09C6FVBMF&location=206)) - Arendt was demanding, unapologetic and opinionated. She was not a feminist, a Marxist, a liberal, a conservative, Democrat or Republican. She loved the world and accepted what she understood to be the fundamental elements of the human condition: we do not exist alone, we are all different from one another, we appear, and we will disappear. In between we exist in a space of becoming and we have to care for the earth and build the world in common. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09C6FVBMF&location=214)) - In an interview shortly before her death, she said, ‘To look to the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problems is, in my opinion, a mythological error.’ What Arendt has to teach us is how to think – how to stop and consider our actions in light of our most recent experiences, fears and desires. Our world today is not the world of the early and mid-twentieth century: it has been radically reshaped by the Cold War, the War on Terror and the rise of digital technology. Arendt shows us how to think the world anew, how to free ourselves from the tradition of Western political thought, how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology. Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09C6FVBMF&location=225)) - The question that drove Heidegger’s courses on Plato and Aristotle was: What is the ontological ground of Being? Heidegger was attempting to escape the knot of Western philosophy born from Plato and Aristotle in order to think Being anew. In Being and Time he tried to unearth a new language to address these questions of phenomenology. Heidegger wanted to understand the pre-theoretical conditions for thinking. So, he dug up the tradition of Western philosophy to lay down a ‘vast network of thought-paths’ and ‘trail-marks’ in order to open up new dimensions of thought. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09C6FVBMF&location=416))