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''Between Past and Future'' is book written by German philosopher Hannah Arendt. It was published for the first time in 1961 by The Viking Press in the United States and by Faber and Faber in Great Britain. The first edition consisted of six essays, and two more were added to a 1968 revision. The book is a collection of various essays written between 1954 and 1968. The final version of the book includes essays dealing with different philosophical subjects including freedom, education, authority, tradition, history and politics.〔( Online version (incomplete) ) on Google books.〕 The subtitle of the final version is ''Eight exercises in political thought''. All of the essays share a central idea. Humans are living between the past and the uncertain future. They must permanently think to exist, and each man is required to learn thinking. For a long time humans have resorted to tradition, but in modern times, this tradition has been abandoned, there is no more respect for tradition and culture. With her essays, Hannah Arendt tries to find solutions to help humans think again today. According to her, there is no way to live again with tradition, and modern philosophy has not succeeded in helping humans to live correctly.〔.〕 == Preface == The title of the preface is ''The Gap between Past and Future''. The first sentence of the preface is a citation of French poet and résistant René Char: "Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament," translated by Arendt herself as "our inheritance was left to us by no testament." For Arendt, this sentence perfectly illustrates the situation in which European peoples are left after the Second World War. It also illustrates the crisis in culture–the main subject of the sixth essay. Indeed, the absence of testament means the current breaking-off with tradition. To characterize the way writers, men of letters and thinkers had lived the period of the French Résistance, Hannah Arendt speaks of a "treasure." Indeed, René Char had stated during this period: "If I survive, I know that I have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject my treasure." This treasure is the experience of freedom all intellectuals made during this unique period, when they left their traditional occupation, that is a life focused on their personal affairs and the quest of themselves. With the Resistance, these men had at last found themselves, they had discovered what is freedom. But with the Liberation, they had lost their treasure, in other words they had either to return to their past occupations or to be involved again in public life but defending ideologies and engaging themselves into endless polemics, which had nothing to do with the time of the Resistance movement. The example of the French Resistance is one of the several historical experiences in which a treasure appears and then disappears. It was the case with the Revolutions of 1776 in the United States, 1789 in France or 1956 in Budapest. Although this treasure has no name, it was called public happiness in the United States in the eighteenth century. Any time this treasure appeared, it did not remain, not because of historical events nor chance, "but because no tradition had foreseen its appearance," no tradition or no "testament" had been able to announce the coming and the reality of this treasure. Indeed, tradition is what "selects and names, (...) hands down and preserves, (...) indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Between Past and Future」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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