Hannah Arendt was very careful to keep politics and philosophy apart. At first glance, her two (arguably) best-known books seem to reflect this opposition. The Human Condition stands for our active, which is to say political, life among others, while The Life of the Mind provides its antipole, examining what happens when we leave the company of others to engage with thinking. A closer look at her works and her biography, however, discloses an unbreakable bond between philosophy and politics, threads of this bond woven together throughout her life, partly as a result of her own actions and partly due to actions of others and the unforeseeable paths of human history. She is remembered for her bold denial of being a philosopher, when asked in a television interview with Günter Gaus in 1964:

While it was rather political theory where she saw herself at this point, there is no doubt that she was intellectually rooted in the European philosophical tradition, which she—already as a young student—confronted with a considerable dose of skepticism. Even though she had already been well acquainted with classic philosophy during her teens, she was first and foremost interested in the critical movements in philosophy, represented by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (Young-Bruehl 1982: 32, 36). It was Heidegger who first drew her to philosophy in its then rebellious guise, and it was Heidegger who played a major role in her later distancing from philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical thinking altogether. Later, Heidegger’s own involvement in the National Socialist regime’s apparatus of power and his commitment to its ideology, as we argue in Chapter 4, were decisive for her diagnosis of a déformation professionelle of philosophers, which not only made them incapable of responsible political action but also rendered them potentially harmful when entering the public sphere.