Uncover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Pondering”

Should you’ve learn one work of Han­nah Arendt’s, it’s prob­a­bly Eich­mann in Jerusalem, her account of the tri­al of the epony­mous Nazi offi­cial — and the supply of her much-quot­ed phrase “the banal­i­ty of evil.” That ebook got here out in 1963, at which era Arendt nonetheless had a dozen professional­duc­tive years left. In actual fact, on the time of her sud­den dying in 1975, she had in her sort­author the primary web page of what would have been the third vol­ume of her closing work, The Lifetime of the Thoughts. In its two com­plet­ed vol­umes, she inves­ti­gates the character of thought and motion, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the rela­tion­ship between suppose­ing and ethical­i­ty hav­ing been fired up with­in her on the Eich­mann tri­al.

“The Lifetime of the Thoughts” additionally seems atop the syl­labus, current­ly publish­ed by Arendt biog­ra­ph­er Saman­tha Rose Hill, for “206: Assume­ing,” a category Arendt taught in 1974 on the New Faculty for Social Analysis. Encom­go­ing a spread of philoso­phers from Aris­to­tle, Cicero, and Pla­to to Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein, and Hei­deg­ger (a fig­ure with whom she may declare a extra inti­mate famil­iar­i­ty than most), it appears to have provided a rea­son­ably thor­ough sur­vey of the fig­ures we consider once we consider suppose­ing itself.

Arendt had appar­ent­ly adapt­ed a number of the con­tent from the 1973–1974 Gif­ford Lec­tures she had deliv­ered in Aberdeen, which them­selves con­densed mate­r­i­al from her cours­es on “Primary Ethical Propo­si­tions,” “Assume­ing,” “The His­to­ry of the Will,” and “Kan­t’s Cri­tique of Judg­ment.”

Arendt’s educate­ing on the New Faculty, in “Assume­ing” and oth­er cours­es like “Phi­los­o­phy of the Thoughts,” sheds a bit of sunshine on what would have gone into the unwrit­ten third vol­ume of The Lifetime of the Thoughts, or no less than into the arc of the tril­o­gy as a complete. Vol­umes one and two, drafts of which she put into cir­cu­la­tion amongst her grad­u­ate stu­dents, had been referred to as Assume­ing and Will­ing; the third was to have been Judg­ing, by far the thorni­est males­tal activ­i­ty of the set. It could be value hear­ing from for­mer New Faculty stu­dents of the mid-sev­en­ties who retain any class­room mem­o­ries of what she needed to say on the sub­ject. As for the remainder of us, we will no less than nonetheless do all of the learn­ing for “Assume­ing,” then choose for our­selves. You could find the syl­labus on the Library of Con­gress net­web site.

by way of Saman­tha Rose Hill

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Considered Han­nah Arendt: Pre­despatched­ed by the BBC Radio’s In Our Time

Massive Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Learn Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Take Han­nah Arendt’s Last Examination for Her 1961 Course “On Rev­o­lu­tion”

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & Extra)

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Whole­i­tar­i­an Regimes Come up–and How We Can Pre­vent Them

Watch Han­nah Arendt’s Last Inter­view (1973)

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly generally known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.