areas of her thought. At no point in either volume of The Life of the Mind does Arendt ever promise any such explanation, and in fact it would have been quite a jolting break in the trajectory of argument as it had developed in the previous two volumes. Several sources attest to the fact that Arendt would have drawn on her lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which, while quite political, nevertheless have a similar orientation toward that part of her thought that appears as the vita contemplativa.23 Moreover, her projections of the length of the section, which was not intended to be a full third volume, but more likely some kind of extended concluding section to the “Willing” volume, seemed unlikely to have afforded the necessary space.24 I will eventually argue that the lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment are indeed crucial to understanding how the two parts of her work are related—indeed, that it provides the final piece to the puzzle. Nevertheless, it is still only a piece of a puzzle that requires much more information than is available, not only in the Kant lectures, but also in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind.
That Arendt understood The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind to be her key works addressing the two fundamental spheres of human experience is beyond question. In The Human Condition, Arendt is quite clear that the sphere of experience where thought occurs, what she calls the vita contemplativa, is distinct and separate from the sphere of experience of action, which she calls the vita activa, and she is careful to stipulate that her concern in The Human Condition is almost exclusively with the vita activa.25 Writing of the ancient philosophers’ discovery of contemplation, and the tradition and way of life it gave birth to, Arendt writes that the vita contemplativa “must lie in an altogether different aspect of the human condition, whose diversity is not exhausted in the various articulations of the vita activa and, we may suspect, would not be exhausted even if thought and the movement of reasoning were included in it.”26 Arendt goes on to stipulate that “my use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concern underlying all its activities is not the same as and is neither superior nor inferior to the central concern of the vita contemplativa,” describing this distinction in terms of “the various modes of active engagement in the things of this world, on one side, and pure thought culminating in contemplation, on the other.”27 It is clear, then, that Arendt believed that there is an aspect of the human condition that is separate from that of the vita activa, which exists somehow outside “the world” and its “various modes of active engagement,” and concerns itself with human faculties such as contemplation and thought.
While the text of The Human Condition never suggests that she planned to write a book devoted solely to the vita contemplativa and its sphere of experience, there are clear indications that she thought it would eventually be necessary. The Human Condition seems to end with the equivalent of a “to be continued.” Quite abruptly, in the book’s final paragraph, Arendt leaves her discussion of the distinctions in the vita activa and turns to the matter of thought. The paragraph clearly has no summary or concluding function—at least, not in relation to the concerns of the vita activa—and it is therefore difficult to imagine that she had any other purpose in concluding with this paragraph than to suggest that her discussions of the vita activa in the book were not a full account of the human condition, and thus that The Human Condition was in a certain sense incomplete. After The Human Condition’s publication, Arendt regularly described the project of The Life of the Mind as a direct sequel to The Human Condition.28 In a letter to Mary McCarthy in 1968 she said that her “preparations for writing about Thinking-Willing-Judging” are “a kind of part II to the Human Condition [sic],”29 while during the 1972 conference on her work, she said, “I feel that this Human Condition needs a second volume and I’m trying to write it.”30 The Human Condition, thus, at least by the late sixties, was in fact understood by Arendt to contain two parts, only one of which had been written.
Yet, it appears that Arendt always recognized there was a further step necessary beyond this vita contemplativa sequel and that this further step was in fact the most important step of all. The crucial issue that originally prompted her to write The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind had always been the matter of the relationship between thought and action and between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Theoretically speaking, this should not be surprising. The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind focused almost exclusively on their respective spheres of experience and almost completely ignored the question of their broader relationship to each other. Most of the attempts by scholars to flesh out this relationship for Arendt have typically focused on reconstructing Arendt’s theory of political judgment out of a diverse set of published essays such as “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture,” along with various posthumously published materials such as the Kant lectures, The Life of the Mind, and, more recently, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.”31 Yet, these attempts have remained for the most part speculative and lacking a clear connection with Arendt’s work on action, and so much so that some of her most prominent interpreters have concluded that Arendt’s work is somehow fundamentally conflicted.32 The reason for this perplexity, I believe, is that Arendt’s interpreters have been trying to make her theory of judgment do more than it was intended to do. To be sure, they are correct that it does somehow provide a connecting link between the sphere of thought and action. Yet, I believe that the broader relationship between thought and action was never adequately sketched out in the work on judgment. On a theoretical level, it needed something else, something that did not focus exclusively on a particular sphere of experience but instead seeks to come to terms with how these two spheres were related to each other.
Why did Arendt never publish this account the relationship between the vita activa and vita contemplativa? The obvious conclusion would be that she did not really have an answer. But given her continuing unpublished work on the question of the relation of philosophy and politics, this does not appear to be a plausible conclusion, and in fact these writings suggest she felt she understood the general structure of the relationship quite well. But then the question of why she never published an account of the relationship between the two spheres becomes quite perplexing. Frankly, I am doubtful there is any one decisive reason. As we’ve seen, Arendt’s style of theorizing was quite idiosyncratic, verging on eccentric, and she seemed to gravitate much more to the genealogical process of what she called “pearl diving,” of digging deeper and deeper into the origins of our historical world, than to the process of attempting to tie up all the loose ends of her explorations. On the other hand, it may simply have been that she ran out of time, dying before she had even finished The Life of the Mind.
But whatever the reason, it will be my contention here that Arendt in essence needed to write a second sequel to The Human Condition, or perhaps, instead, a prequel, which explained the how the two vitas were related to each other. To simplify things in the form of an analogy, I want to argue that this reconstructed theory of judgment that has been developed by many of her interpreters, coupled with her articulations of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, are like three large chunks of a picture puzzle; but, unfortunately, they do not form a full picture. We still need more pieces. It will be my task in what follows to attempt to reconstruct, at times through well-informed inference, what this prequel would have argued by showing what the relationship between thought and action truly were for Arendt and how she understood it to be a genuine positive response to the modern predicament. For Arendt, this meant coming to understand the authentic meaning of political philosophy.
Considering Arendt in a Different Light
People have, of course, practiced political philosophy for millennia. Is it really believable that they did not know what they were doing? Does understanding the true nature of political philosophy even matter, so long as it produces useful answers to political problems? As we will see, it does matter quite a bit. For as Arendt will show us, what one understands political philosophy to be can have an enormous impact on the answers it produces. Arendt criticized the tradition of political thought for understanding itself in terms of sovereignty: the idea