5/30/2023 0 Comments Fill the gap past future simple![]() ![]() Although freedom happens in moments, as experienced by freedom fighters, we don’t have the space to make it real. Freedom isn’t bound in tradition that we can hold onto, so how can we bring freedom to be? Here, I think, she is talking about freedom of thought and freedom to act. Arendt asks how we re-find this lost treasure that has no testimony/tradition. What does this mean? For Arendt our inheritance is the lost treasure of freedom, freedom as experienced, for example, by the freedom fighters of the French resistance and other revolutionaries and challengers, who recognised the uncertainty of what it is to be a challenger and learned what it means to start something new. Her thinking seems so current.Īrendt starts her book, in the Preface, with a quotation from Rene Char (French poet and writer): “our inheritance was left to us by no testament”. It’s amazing to think that Arendt published this book in 1977. For Arendt this loss of tradition means that the gap between past and future, the space for thinking, has now become relevant to all, a fact of political relevance, but politics today no longer brings thought to reality we live in a world in which there is no political truth. The demise of the Church over past years comes to mind, and its fairly easy to think of other similar examples. However, Arendt also discusses the loss of tradition, saying that most of us can no longer orient our lives through tradition. There have always been some greater thinkers (philosophers, poets, artists) who have lived in this gap, who have made thinking their primary business, but most of us haven’t. My understanding is that she means that we no longer have the ability, nor the capability to think. Tradition provides us with habits and institutions that largely prevent us from living in this gap, which I take to mean, largely prevent us from thinking. She tells us that since the time of the Romans the gap has been bridged over by what we call tradition. Arendt thought that most people don’t live in this gap they don’t think. The extended metaphor is ‘the gap’, which comes to stand for the space for thinking. Together these essays offer an extended metaphor. In this book Hannah Arendt pulls together eight essays, which she calls exercises in political thinking, and in which she examines the gap between past and future. For me writing these posts has helped me see her key points more clearly, or her key points as I understand them, but the content of these posts is no substitute for reading her book. This is to help me clarify my own understanding, and I should stress that her writing is so dense, so complicated, and so full of ideas, that it is impossible to do it justice in these short posts. ![]() Between Past and Future is a good introduction to her work and ideas, which I have thoroughly enjoyed engaging with, to the extent that I have decided to write a post on each chapter. I have heard Hannah Arendt referred to many times in the past, but I have never got round to reading her books. But what has really uplifted me in this dark month of January 2021, has been my discovery of Hannah Arendt, whose book ‘The Gap Between Past and Future’ has been selected by the Philosophy of Education virtual Reading Network for discussion next week on Tuesday 19 th January. ‘Dark’ also in the sense of the political mess my country (Brexit and the economy), and other countries (in particular the US) seem to be in. Short, dark, very cold days, with snow (which is unusual in my area) and frost on the ground, and stuck indoors because Covid-19 has mutated and we are yet again in lockdown, and yet again under threat of being completely overwhelmed by the number of cases of sick and dying people. I will always remember the start of 2021 as being, for the most part, ‘dark’.
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