By Jon Nixon
Times of Higher Education - 26 February 2015
Jon Nixon asks what Arendt’s work can tell us about the value of universities as places of thinking together
Universities are – if nothing else – places where people meet to think together. Hannah Arendt passed through many such places in the course of her life, but never defined herself as an academic. She was – first and last – a thinker. She thought about many things, but particularly about the nature and purpose of thinking itself: its ethical and political significance, its potential for good and evil, its grounding in the commonality of human consciousness. Forty years after her death, her work is a reminder of the urgent need for us to learn how to think together – and how to imagine the university as a place in which such thinking matters.
Arendt was born on 14 October 1906 in what is now part of Hanover in Germany. Three years later, she and her parents moved to Königsberg. In the early to mid-1920s, she studied at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Heidelberg. As an 18-year-old undergraduate, she embarked on a sexual and deeply emotional affair with Martin Heidegger – a 36-year-old married professor whose work had already received international acclaim. After the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933, she fled to Paris via Prague and Geneva and began 18 years as a stateless person. After escaping from the internment camp at Gurs in occupied France, she arrived in the US by way of Spain and Lisbon in May 1941. Ten years later, she gained US citizenship. In 1974, she suffered a heart attack while delivering her Gifford Lecture series on “The Life of the Mind” at the University of Aberdeen. A year later, she suffered another heart attack in New York and died on 4 December 1975 at the age of 69. Always – in thought as in life – she was on the move.
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