Hannah Arendt, Freunde und Kritiker: Denker der Stunde?

Fifty years after her death, Hannah Arendt is considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Her life and work are honored, and criticized, in hundreds of publications, some of which are examined in more detail here. However, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish between her actual life and its partially conventionalized representation in retrospect, just as Heidegger had urged to be always conscious of the fundamental logical difference between Dasein as performing one's human life in time and being an object of reflection, representation, and judgement. In particular, Arendt's genuine achievements as a courageous and radical philosophical publicist must be understood as an attempt to find the genuine middle place as a political theoretician between extremes and stereotypes. Her structural analysis leaves any merely well-meant appeal to a humanly ethics far behind. Her effort to achieve accuracy of content in general, as it is implicitly presupposed in any particular application to a historical or actual situation, also takes some lessons of Heidegger: Genuine thinking always begins with a provocative opposition to any hearsay in canonized stories about the past, present and future.