Considerations about the question of culture in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The question of culture remains not sufficiently investigated within Arendt's thought, either because of the scarcity of her writings about it, or because of the neglect of the importance of culture within the arendtian theoretical framework. From the phenomenological-hermeneutic immersion carried out by Arendt, it is possible for us to unveil the horizon of meaning through which the philosopher understood the term culture and its own manifestation within history, which has to be admitted here as always elusive, as something that it cannot be fully grasped, as modern philosophies of history wanted. Therefore, the origins of the question of culture are analyzed here, its first manifestations in ancient Rome and Greece, as well as the direction of meaning of culture itself is reconstructed from the analysis of its relationship of distance and approximation towards politics, something that reveals, in addition to a tension, an ambiguous correlation within the public space, where things appear in order to be judged.