Philosophy and the Quest for Meaning

Abstract

As we saw, Arendt contends that our tradition of philosophy takes a dim view of and is inherently ill-equipped to study human aflàirs. Like Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and others, she maintains that from its very beginning it was fascinated by nature, took nature rather than man as its primary object of interest, devised a body of questions, categories of thought, modes of reasoning and methods of inquiry suited to the study of nature, and had in general a naturalistic and positivist orientation. Accordingly, it engaged in cosmological reflections, aimed to construct a conceptual system capable of application to the human and non-human beings alike, developed such distinctions and dichotomies as essence and appearance, reason and the senses, the subject and the object, appearance and reality, and Being and un-being, and adopted a spectatorial approach to its subject matter. It viewed man as an essentially natural being, asked questions about him and applied distinctions to him that were developed in relation to the world of nature, and studied him as if the philosopher belonged to an entirely different species.

This distinction between truth and meaning seems to me to be … decisive for any inquiry into the nature of human thinking.¹