Jaspers and Arendt read Descartes: critical considerations based on Psychologies of worldviews and The Human Condition

Abstract

Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt read and comment on the work of the philosopher René Descartes at different moments. In 1937, Jaspers published Descartes and Philosophy, and in Arendt’s writings, the philosopher’s name appears mainly in The Human Condition and in her posthumous work The Life of the Mind. The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent Arendt’s interpretation converges with that of Jaspers—not only regarding the 1937 work, which Arendt read only in the 1950s during the occasion of the Walgreen Lectures and the preparation for The Human Condition — but also to shed light on an early work by Jaspers, Psychology of Worldviews, from 1919. The working hypothesis here is that Arendt’s reading of Descartes, framed within her interpretation of modern science, follows the same outline that Jaspers had already drawn not only in his 1937 work on Descartes but also in Psychology of Worldviews (1919), where he investigates and defines the mechanistic worldview, even though he does not explicitly refer to Descartes. It is intended to show, therefore, that the mechanical - natural worldview described by Jaspers in Psychology of Worldviews and mentioned by Arendt in The Human Condition are related to Descartes’ philosophy.