Contribution short abstract:

We tend to think of the world as ‘out there’ with us ‘in it’, but for Hannah Arendt the world “arises between people” in discourse. Drawing on my observations from teaching her œuvre to students, I use her “On humanity in dark times” to rethink the university as a public realm of world-making.

Contribution long abstract:

“Nothing in our time is more dubious … than our attitude towards the world” said Hannah Arendt when accepting the Lessing prize in 1959. It has remained like this until today: we tend to think of the world as ‘out there’ with us ‘in it’. But in her speech “On humanity in dark times”, Arendt conceptualized the world as that which “arises between people” in discourse. When I teach Arendt’s œuvre to BA-students at the University of Konstanz, a key aspect of this seminar is a ‘walking lab’ in which the students and I leave the seminar room. Walking through the university adjacent forest, we retrace the flight story of Hannah Arendt and her companions, such as Walter Benjamin, and work through assembled materials that I hand out: maps, ID documents, letters, poems, and photographs. Through moving our own bodies, and by jointly engaging with these various artefacts, abstract concepts such as freedom, Paria, rights, or humanity take on a new, embodied connotation. Students begin to relate to Arendt’s insistence that thinking is a practice, too. They interweave their own accounts of foreignness and isolation into our group discussions. Teaching Hannah Arendt in contemporary times enables students to rethink the purpose of the university, to learn that critical thought is bound up with subjectivity, that truth is never final, and that the human condition needs an (imagined) other worth fighting (for). Instead of retreating into what Arendt calls worldlessness, I view the university as a public realm of world-making.