Introduction

Summary

“An experience in thinking […] can be won, like all experience in doing something, only through practice, through exercises,” notes Hannah Arendt in the introduction to her essay collection Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2006). This inconspicuous remark escapes the attention of most readers and has only been taken up by a few interpreters (such as Bar On 2002; Koivusalo 2010; Robaszkiewicz 2017). Although it appears in the title of the book, Arendt herself refers to the notion of exercises only briefly in the introduction. But although its significance can easily be missed, on a closer look the concept turns out to be one of the foundations of her specific conception of the political and has great potential for the interpretation of her work.

Arendt already had exercises in thinking in mind when working on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first large project after the Second World War. In her pointed reply to Eric Voegelin (1953) in his critical review of this book, she rejected the charge that her study lacked objectivity, emphasizing that her goal was not to present an objective theory of totalitarian regimes but to understand what had happened. She connected this pursuit of understanding to the power of imagination and linked it to the practice of what she on this occasion described as spiritual exercises:

I do not wish to go into this matter here, but I may add that I am convinced that understanding is closely related to that faculty of imagination which Kant called Einbildungskraft and which has nothing in common with fictional ability. The Spiritual Exercises are exercises of imagination and they may be more relevant to method in the historical sciences than academic training realizes. (Arendt 1953: 79)

And indeed, Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as examples of such exercises. Throughout her body of work, she never loses sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of our political life.

There would be much to write about Hannah Arendt’s own life story.