Arendt e Patocka: un confronto su basi socratiche = Arendt and Patočka: A Comparison on a Socratic Basis

The aim of this article is to compare Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka on the basis of their own interpretations of modern nihilism and of totalitarianism as symptoms and on their own post-nihilistic perspectives. Both were scholars of totalitarianism and victims of it at the same time. And for both the origins of totalitarianism are to be searched in the history of metaphysics, which results in what Patočka identifies as ‘objectivism’. Arendt and Patočka present two diverse but complementary developments of objectivism about the critique of modernity and the abandonment of the present nihilistic time. Both highlight forms of ‘spiritual’ resistance, i.e. intellectual and moral resistance, able to produce changes also in the social and political spheres under certain circumstances.