The Gift of Freedom: Reading the New Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind

This event occurred on:  Several political theorists have pointed to a contradiction in Arendt’s The Human Condition. On the one hand, the book appears to argue that action is possible anytime, anywhere: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” On the other hand, action appears as conditioned–without lawmaking, no space would exist in which action could appear–and finally, due to the rise of “the social” in the modern age, action seems to have become altogether unavailable to us. Looking for ways out of this seeming contradiction, with a view to understanding “the gift of freedom,” Wout Cornelissen turns to The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s investigation into the three mental activities she regarded as “constitutive for all political action,” a book project she conceived of as “a kind of second volume” to The Human Condition. By analyzing specific passages from the newly constituted text of The Life of the Mind, which he co-edited for the Complete Works: Critical Edition and which is based on Arendt’s original typescripts, he will present a reading of her unfinished work that offers resources for answering Arendt’s critical interpreters. Dr. Wout Cornelissen is appointed as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He co-edited the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (Wallstein, 2024), which appeared as vol. 14 of the Complete Works: Critical Edition. He published essays on Arendt’s conceptions of thinking in the Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt (2020) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Fordham UP, 2017). Previously, he taught at FU Berlin, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and VU Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from Leiden University.