Hannah Arendt and The Phenomenon of Life

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, a work of phenomenology and existentialism in which Hans Jonas argues that all biological facts support the prefiguring of the human mind throughout all organic existence:

Hannah Arendt made a number of annotations to her copy of this classic. For example, on page 148 in the section entitled "The Nobility of the Spirit," Arendt underlined three separate passages. These read as follows:

1. "thus touch is the sense in which the original encounter with reality as reality takes place."
2. "touch is the true test of reality..."
3. "reality is disclosed in the same act and as one with the disclosure of my own reality..."

Off of this third marginalia, she draws a curving line to the top margin of the page, in the space of which she writes:

How about touching myself? Would it [unintelligible] me of the reality of my hands?

On the opposite page, Hannah Arendt underlines three passages, as well. The first reads as follows:

"Thus essence becomes separable from existence and therewith theory possible. It is but the basic freedom of vision...which are carried further in conceptual thought...."

The second passage observes that "causality is not a visual datum," whereas the final passage underlined on these two pages states,

"Vision, however, is not the primary but the most sublime case of sense perception...."

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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