Thinking in Public by Wurgaft Benjamin Aldes;

Author:Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Love and Saint Augustine

As was the case with Emmanuel Levinas and Leo Strauss, the works of Arendt’s maturity displayed important filiations with her youthful studies. The rough and ready truth of Arendt’s claim that she had abandoned philosophy for politics and history belies the way her 1929 doctoral dissertation, Die Liebsbegriff bei Augustin (rendered as Love and Saint Augustine in its English translation), can help us to understand her development. In particular, it demonstrates that from the very start she understood philosophy to be marked by a private and inward orientation, a turning-away from other persons. The dissertation offers a window onto Arendt’s early account of social ontology, but it also illuminates her original leave-taking from Heidegger’s version of Existenzphilosophie and her search for the limits of Heideggerian social ontology, which actually began before her interests became primarily “political.” Years later she would, in a letter to Jaspers, complain of philosophy’s failure to deal more than tangentially with the “fact of plurality.”33 It was here that she had first approached the problem, albeit obliquely, through the surrogate of writing on a father of the Christian Church.

Arendt wrote Love and Saint Augustine in 1928, five years before her shift away from philosophy and toward politics. In his comments on Love and Saint Augustine, Jaspers, writing as her dissertation advisor, suggested that Arendt had been drawn by something beyond philosophy: “The impulse behind this work is ultimately something not explicitly stated: through philosophical work with ideas the author wants to justify her freedom from Christian possibilities, which also attract her.”34 But there is a crucial difference between an interest in theology writ large, which Arendt certainly had, and an interest in “Christian possibilities,”35 which she did not. Samuel Moyn has explored Arendt’s dissertation as the site of her consideration and subsequent abandonment of a transcendental approach to ethics. This would derive ethics from the recognition that one and one’s neighbor are both God’s co-creations.36 Arendt’s central concern about such an approach had to do with its fundamental denial of worldly alterity—mirroring Heidegger’s prior critique of Husserl’s failure to adequately account for the world in his own transcendental phenomenology. In Augustine’s view, mutual recognition between two persons who see one another as co-creations of God, involves a shift from loving the features of this world (including the characteristics of the other person) to loving God: from cupiditas to caritas, in his terms. In Arendt’s view, the negative result is that in loving one’s neighbor as a co-creation we must efface her distinguishing and “worldly” features, shifting focus from what Augustine termed the “city of man” to the “city of God.” While the young Arendt did not invoke the language of publicness and privacy, she seemed troubled by the way Augustinian caritas involved abandoning the same phenomenal realm she would in later years view as critical to the establishment of a healthy public life. This worry would find its echo in The Human Condition, where Arendt claimed that Augustine exemplified the Christian tendency to find a replacement for the world itself in the bond between the faithful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.