The article offers a reading of The Human Condition (1958) in light of Vita Activa (1961). After tracing the reception of The Human Condition since its publication in 1958, I argue that scholarship on Arendt has marginalized the work as a whole to extract fragments for supposed ‘models’ of politics. Considered as a whole, Arendt’s work is a reflection on the conditions of possibility of our experiences of meaning. As is evident above all in the German version, it is thus a phenomenological investigation. I argue that both the critical force and the apparent blindness that we find in Arendt are due to the phenomenological premises of her thought.
Arendt; Phenomenology; Method; The Human Condition; Vita Activa