As aventuras da liberdade: ação e pensamento na obra de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This investigation – from the standpoint of present reality and based on Hannah Arendt's philosophical work – looks for the possible relations between the fundamental human activities of action and thinking. The careful analysis of Arendt's work, I wish to argue, be it focused on studying our mental activities or historical events and the phenomenality characteristic of the universe of action, points out the existence of a central axis for understanding what configure the peculiarity of the beings we are. This same axis is what will allow us, considering the proposed, to expose the nature of the relationships between action and thinking while trying to understand our time and the depth of the crisis we are in. Such an axis focuses on the Arendtian notion of freedom, and this notion comes to light through the hypothesis that human freedom, the central factor of our humanity, is a cyclical political exercise to which converge mutually, in harmonic tension, the activities of acting and thinking. In order to corroborate this hypothesis, are investigated, in a transversal way across the text, three dimensions of human existence taken as constitutive of the understanding of freedom here at stake: a) the metaphorical discursive language we are capable of, b) the singular personality we perform in the world and c) our faculty of reflective judgment.