Nearly 50 years after her death, a new, critical edition of The Life of the Mind, the last work of philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt, has recently been published. According to Wout Cornelissen, one of the editors, her work has by no means lost its relevance. On the contrary: “Hannah Arendt's thinking is an antidote to the idea that philosophy provides ready-made solutions.” Thanks in part to her analyses of totalitarian regimes such as National Socialism and Stalinism (The Origins of Totalitarianism), and her report on the Eichmann trial (Eichmann in Jerusalem), the German-American thinker Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential and well-known political thinkers of her time. Towards the end of her life, she started writing a book on what she considered to be the basic activities of the human mind: thinking, willing, and judging. She never completed this work. The title page for the third part was in her typewriter when she died of a heart attack in 1975, aged 69. Arendt had two reasons for writing a book about thinking, explains Cornelissen, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Law at Radboud University. “During the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, she had seen the potentially horrific consequences of non-thinking. This led to her asking herself: If non-thinking leads to evil, can the activity of thinking keep us from committing evil deeds?” With The Life of the Mind, Arendt also intended to write a sequel to The Human Condition (1958), in which she had analysed the active life of human beings, their labour, work, and action. “Arendt describes how, in philosophy, from the perspective of the contemplative life, the active life was looked down upon for interrupting the highest end of quietly beholding the truth. According to Arendt, however, thinking should also be seen as an activity in its own right, not just an instrument for achieving truth.” That was the idea she wanted to further develop in The Life of the Mind.Painstaking task Based on the texts Arendt had already written, her close friend and literary executor, Mary McCarthy, edited the book manuscript and published it. “Our research revealed that McCarthy made many adaptations to Arendt's original texts,” says Cornelissen. “For example, she omitted sentences of which she felt that they were repetitions of earlier passages in the text and ‘Englished’ Arendt's English.” As part of a major international project to publish a new, critical edition of all of Arendt's published and unpublished writings, Cornelissen and his co-editors worked on a critical edition of the text of The Life of the Mind that stays as close as possible to Arendt's original wording and phrasing. A painstaking task that Cornelissen worked on for some eight years. “We went through all the digital scans of her manuscript, and I went to the Library of Congress in Washington to see Arendt's documents in the archive with my own eyes.” The result is a readable version of Arendt's book manuscript and related texts she authored, complemented by an extensive editorial commentary and an explanation of the editing process and the choices made.More than a reservoir of solutionsThe work gave Cornelissen new insights into Arendt's last book. “Take the part on ‘willing’: anyone reading McCarthy's edition might think that Arendt is outlining a historical overview of the main philosophers who wrote about the will. But if you go back to Arendt's own writing, you see that she does not simply summarise other thinkers, but rather gives shape to her own ideas on paper, in conversation with earlier thinkers, such as Augustine.”In Cornelissen’s opinion, this is the perfect moment for new editions of Arendt's works. “People sometimes see her books on politics as containing a reservoir of solutions to contemporary problems.” For instance, after Donald Trump's victory in the presidential elections, huge numbers of people bought The Origins of Totalitarianism to understand what was happening in the US. “Arendt is known as a thinker with clear views on all kinds of topics, from power and violence to civil disobedience, but that is ignoring the fact that she also focused precisely on underlying questions, such as what power and violence exactly are. Arendt's work is intended to help us better understand the world, not to provide ready-made solutions to our problems.”Legal judgement and AI“In this respect, nearly half a century after her death, Arendt's work has not lost any of its relevance,” says Cornelissen. “In debates on topics such as legal judgement or the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence, Arendt's ideas on the distinction between thinking and cognition, and on the relationship between thinking and judging, continue to be illuminating.”Although Arendt assumed that her readers had some prior knowledge of Western philosophy, she tried not to write in unnecessarily difficult ways. It is no surprise that her essays also appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker. For those looking to discover Arendt's work, Cornelissen recommends The Human Condition. With a smile: “This will also prepare you well to embark on The Life of the Mind.”PublicationHannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, edited by Wout Cornelissen, Thomas Bartscherer, and Anne Eusterschulte, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2024. Volume 14 of Hannah Arendt, Kritische Gesamtausgabe / Complete Works: Critical Edition. After one year, the new critical edition of The Life of the Mind will also be published digitally in open access. See: www.hannah-arendt-edition.net