He built a trap as his burrow

When Arendt was introduced as a “philosopher” in a 1964 interview for German television she interrupted the interviewer to say, “I’m afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can speak of it all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted into the circle of philosophers.” This was not false modesty on her part; she had come to the conclusion of philosophy and politics, and she wished to examine the latter, as she put it, “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.”
When pressed on this point she explained that intellectuals generally have trouble thinking clearly about politics, in large part because they see ideas at work in everything. German intellectuals in the Thirties, she told the interviewer, “made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely interesting and fascinating things! Things far above the ordinary level! I find that grotesque.” And when she added that such thinkers inevitably become “trapped in their own ideas,” she was obviously thinking about Heidegger. In fact, in her private notebooks she once wrote a short fable, called “Heidegger the Fox,” in which she described him as a pitiful creature in the lair of his ideas, convinced it was the entire world:

Once upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness that he not only kept getting caught in traps but couldn’t even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap… He built a trap as his burrow… “So many are visiting me in my trap that I have become the best of all foxes.” And there is some truth in that, too: nobody knows the nature of traps better than one who sits in a trap whole life long.

Martin Heidegger - Hannah Arendt - Karl Jaspers [fragment]
uit: The reckless mind : intellectuals in politics - Mark Lilla