The first two aspects of Arendt's revision to the relation between thinking and the public realm enumerated in the previous chapter – the need for political thinking to be sensitive to the irreducibly plural character of the political, and the recognition of the fact that the latter constitutes a realm where thinking is, in the strictest terms, ‘good for nothing’ – establish the need for an approach capable of answering to the public realm, what we can characterise as an approach that, at least from the point of view of the tradition, incorporates an epistemological mediation. The idea of thinking as a salutary interruption with respect to the public realm also corresponds with this requirement, but already alerts us to another mediation in respect of the relation between theory and practice: one that emerges from the further features that we have identified from Arendt's account of the relationship between the two engagements. The sense that thinking is now required to be thinking against the tradition, without support of traditional intellectual reference points, and, along with this, the recognition of the fact that our very awareness of this requirement has been made available by our recent, world-changing experiences, allows us to consider a further mediation in the light of what unexpected events may have to say to us; what we can refer to, again in the light of opposition to the tradition, as a temporal mediation.