Tikhon G. Sheynov

The article offers a reflection on the Russian translation of Introduction into Politics by the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, published by Vladimir Dal’ Publishers in 2025 under its original title What is Politics?. The book presents excerpts from Arendt’s legacy that pertain to her work on the unfinished project Introduction into Politics from the 1950s. The author notes that despite the thematic diversity and rich history of contemporary Russian Arendt studies, there are still gaps in the field due to insufficient attention to important episodes in Arendt’s early work. It is argued that the publication of fragments from Introduction into Politics is likely not only to contribute to the reconstruction of key concepts in Arendt’s thought (such as judgment, violence, war, etc.), but also to serve as an occasion for re-examining and more closely analysing under-studied issues in her philosophy. These include Arendt’s contradictory assessment of the theological justification of the (a)political nature of the human, as well as the question of the principles governing the emergence and legitimation of forms of government based on the political myth of annihilation war. The article examines how and in what context Arendt formulates both problems in certain parts of Introduction into Politics, identifies the thematic connection between these parts and her other little-known works, and highlights elements of Arendt’s explicit and implicit dialogue with the classics of political philosophy and her contemporaries (Hobbes, Montesquieu, Strauss, Schmitt). The author concludes by emphasizing the significance of the examined issues for research on Arendt’s philosophy and proposes promising areas of contemporary political-philosophical discourse where the resolution of these issues could be of interest.

This dissertation presents a comparative analysis of Arendt’s and Strauss’s approaches to the crisis of modernity, the philosophers’ justifications for a return to classical political thought, and their interpretations of key aspects of the political thought and experience of the classical thinkers. The study analyzes non-overlapping themes in classical political thought that interested Arendt and Strauss separately but allow us to identify the specific nature of each philosopher’s approach to solving a common problem. Second, the study demonstrates that the issue of the “tyranny of truth,” explicitly developed by Arendt within the framework of her interpretation of Socratic and Platonic thought, is also present in other theoretical contexts to which the philosopher turns throughout her work. The study identifies vulnerabilities in Arendt’s and Strauss’s approaches to resolving the conflict between truth and politics as the central problem of classical political thought. It is shown that Arendt’s approach suffers from a problem of normative indifference, manifested in the political subject’s insensitivity to normative standards lying outside the political community. With regard to Strauss’s approach, it is argued that there is a problem of political passivity, manifested in the denial of epistemological autonomy to the political sphere. The study demonstrates both the possibility and the necessity of viewing Arendt’s and Strauss’s interpretations of classical political thought not as opposing approaches to understanding the authors of the past, but as complementary elements of a comprehensive conception of the virtue of the political subject.

One of the important issues of contemporary political thought is the complex relationship between truth and politics, the combination of which can lead to the depoliticization of the community under the “tyrannical” influence of truth or, on the contrary, the substitution of truth with politically advantageous lies. A relevant context emphasizing the dangerous consequences of the conflict between truth and politics is the spread of post-truth as a phenomenon expressing the alarming state of the modern public sphere. The article is devoted to comprehending the crisis of political life associated with the emergence of the phenomenon of post-truth, as well as the possibilities of resolving the modern conflict of truth and politics. The theoretical basis of the study comprises the philosophical ideas of H. Arendt and L. Strauss, which substantiate the incompatibility between truth and the world of human affairs. The author analyzes Arendt’s main ideas related to the tyrannical nature of truth, as well as the interpretation of these ideas by modern post-truth researchers. It is found that Arendt’s theory lacks a normative dimension important for understanding the nature of post-truth, and its interpretation by contemporary critics of post-truth contains an unfounded assumption about the possibility of the political legitimization of truth. On the basis of Strauss’s “On Tyranny”, alternative views to Arendt’s on the contradiction between truth and politics are reconstructed. The author proposes to rethink modern conceptions of post-truth and to present it as an ethico-political phenomenon caused by the lack of moral responsibility of political subjects for the search and defense of truth and for the preservation of political life from its tyrannical influence. The key danger of post-truth is the concealment of the value content of political life, and the practical means of overcoming it can be to ensure a value-pluralistic approach to the public sphere, and to raise the question of the virtue of participants in political life.

One of the most important cultural and philosophical subject of the last century is the reflection on the crisis state of Western culture. In search of the causes of philosophical and socio-cultural upheavals, philosophers turned to the spiri­tual origins of European civilization and saw the conflict between philosophical rationality and biblical faith as the event that determined the spiritual shape of Western culture and explains its current crisis. The article is devoted to the problem of confrontation of ancient Greek and biblical beginnings of Euro­pean culture in the works of Leo Strauss and Leo Shestov. The theoretical framework of the study is the method of conceptual analysis, which allows us to identify the conceptual content of the concepts of Athens and Jerusalem in the phi­losophical projects of Strauss and Shestov. Analyzing Strauss’s and Shestov’s views on the conflict between philosophical reason and the religion of revela­tion, the author identifies the peculiarities of their interpretation of the images of Athens and Jerusalem, as well as the contexts in which the philosophers ad­dress their confrontation. The author concludes that the idea of Strauss and Shestov as apologists of rational and religious principles of European culture does not exhaust the actual content of their philosophical projects. Both philoso­phers share a common understanding of the problem, but view it from different perspectives. Strauss focuses on the political-philosophical aspects of the con­flict between Athens and Jerusalem, expressed in the necessity of choosing philosophy and religion as the ultimate images of human life and the problem of their applicability as principles for organizing the political community. Shestov’s main interest is the existential significance of faith as a guide in the li­beration of the human spirit from the shackles of metaphysical necessity. Based on these views, the author draws conclusions about Strauss’s and Shestov’s un­derstanding of the essence of the contemporary cultural crisis and formulates a possible strategy for overcoming it.

The most important problem of modern political philosophy is the loss of politics’ independence from other spheres of human activity. Since the beginning of the last century, philosophers have sought to justify the uniqueness of political being and to update the modern politicalphilosophical vocabulary by redefining the categories of antiquity (e.g. τὸ ᾰ̓γᾰθόν, φῐλία, παρρησία, etc.). The article is devoted to the approach to the rehabilitation of the political sphere based on the political-philosophical experience of the ancient Greeks. The theoretical basis of the study is H. Arendt’s solution of the issue of depoliticization in the context of her reminiscences of the ancient heritage. The author turns to the notion of civic friendship, which largely determines Arendt’s contribution to the discussions on the rehabilitation of politics and acts as a practice endowing the community with political potential. On the basis of Arendt’s interpretation of the political philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the author justifies the appeal to this notion and shows the connection of civic friendship with other categories of ancient thought (truth, opinion, Maieutics). The analysis reveals that the requirement borrowed from Socrates to eliminate truth from the sphere of human affairs puts Arendt’s philosophy in opposition to the tradition of political thought, and the use of political-philosophical categories to describe the human lifeworld allows us to consider it as a version of the hermeneutics of the subject. The author concludes that the justification of politics by means of ancient thought has an original anthropological dimension. It consists in the recognition of the significance of political action for the orientation of man in the world and the assertion of his identity in the community.

The article analyzes Hannah Arendt's views on the apolitical nature of the Christian worldview and uses them as a conceptual framework for interpreting Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. In the first part of the article, the author reveals the main points concerning the opposition between the private and the public in Arendt's theory and points out the contradictory status of Christianity in its relation to the field of the political realm. On the one hand, the philosopher uses the reference to the book of Genesis as an argument for the conditionality of action by man's original being in the multitude and considers the teaching of Jesus as a special interpretation of faith as the beginning of action and the miracle that constitutes its principle. On the other hand, Arendt draws attention to the worldlessness (apoliticality) of Christianity due to the eschatological expectation of the end of the world as well as the emphasis of certain personalities (St. Paul, Aurelius Augustine) on the solitude of the created man. In its most explicit form, this ambivalence is expressed in the concept of the active good, an act whose necessary inclusion in the world is accompanied by a demand for radical concealment. In the second part of the article, the author demonstrates this contradiction using the example of Prince Myshkin, a hero whose orientation combines key features of the Christian worldview: the negativity of the author of the action in relation to the world, and the interruption of the consequences of the action, achieved by its cancellation in an act of forgiveness.