Freedom and Fatefulness:: Augustine, Arendt and the Journey Of Memory (original) (raw)

Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo : On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil

Laval théologique et philosophique, 2000

Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.

Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of New Beginnings

The European Legacy, 2013

Hannah Arendt's philosophical project is an untiring attempt to argue that the world with all of its failures an weaknesses does and should matter. Refusing to succumb to the destructive tendency within modernity, she cultivates creativity, action and responsibility. One way to appreciate the originality of Arendt's philosophy of action and new beginnings is via her reading of two thinkers who were part of what she terms, "the great tradition." If most commentary deals either with Heidegger's influence on Arendt's thought or with her Augustinian origins, my aim is to trace Arendt's lifelong conversation with both thinkers. It is in her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine that she begins to distinguish herself from Heidegger's understanding of the world, Dasein and care. Without arguing that her work on Augustine is a hidden key to understanding her philosophy of new beginnings, an appreciation of Arendt's lifelong debate not only with Heidegger but also with Augustine enriches our understanding of why philosophy should pay more attention to the world, rather than try to escape from it.

The Role of Forgetting in our Experience of Time: Augustine of Hippo and Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt's work is deeply marked by a rich analysis of temporality. One finds references to it from her earliest works on Augustine of Hippo 1 to her last major work, The Life of the Mind. Scholars have rightly explored the significance of temporality and its constitutive centrality for Arendt's thought. 2 Her views of temporality can be divided grosso modo along three axes. First, there is time-lived or the times-experienced, which comprise or touch upon such aspects as history, biography, narrative, and a timely engagement with the issues of the day, which include, for example, various moments in American Cold-War culture and civil-rights movements. 3 Second, there is a sense of time understood as spontaneity, as natality, in which a new beginning is made possible today, hodiernus. Arising spontaneously, this time marks a new promise, as in the case of forgiveness. 4 Perhaps we can call this the time of the kairos, the opportune time, the now-time that emerges from a set of circumstances but is not merely a result of a series of causal events. Finally, one finds in Arendt's work a philosophical position on the very nature of time itself, understood as the past and the future that make possible the present, that condition the very existence of the human being. Particularly striking is the account of time that Arendt gives in the concluding parts of her work on "Thinking" in The Life of the Mind. There are, of course, many aspects of Arendt's treatment of time that could easily form the basis of a whole study, but I would like to focus on the last one mentioned above as there is little scholarship on this specific aspect of time in Arendt's corpus.

Arendt, democracy, and judgment

Contemporary Political Theory, 2017

S180 www.palgrave.com/journals original, albeit impressionistic, thinker, whose main aim was not to demolish the tradition of political thought, but to reinvigorate it out of the ''pearls'' she had herself found(ed). As to the second, however, Schwartz's case for Arendt's reappropriation of Kantian aesthetic judgment may still be insufficient. The shortcoming strikes me not so much as a problem of the author, who does an excellent job of recreating Arendt's universe, but rests inherently with the Kantian framework. Perhaps, a good example of judgment would have helped to upend this impression. Turning to the structure and main arguments, the first chapter explains the genealogical method that Arendt called ''pearl diving,'' which aimed to ''bring the original meaning of vital words back … to life through thought and imagination'' (pp. 22-23). Schwartz notes the seminal influence of Heidegger, from whom she borrowed not only a method but a conception of human beings as essentially historical. In addition, Arendt adopted several fundamental Heideggerian concepts: the idea that humans are thrown into a world that conditions their existence (which in Arendt became worldliness) and being-in, the ability to engage with worldly situations (which in Arendt became common sense). This chapter also engages Arendt's crucial understanding of ''action'' to be accomplished jointly in the public realm, where words can be heard, deeds can be seen, and events discussed and remembered. Chapter two retraces Arendt's archaeology of Western political thought with a view to retrieving ''the human faculties necessary to found and maintain a new public realm'' (p. 65). From the Greeks, she retrieved isonomia, translated ''literally as norule'' (p. 67), where men interact with one another without compulsion, as equals among equals, commanding and obeying only in emergencies. From the Romans, she retrieved authority as freely given obedience, which revolved around the preservation and carrying forward of the original foundation of the city. The Romans constituted the Western world as world, which began to crumble once the humanists, the Reformation, and seventeenth-century political theorists attacked religion, the church, and tradition. By the revolutionary period, the older world was long gone. Chapter three reverses the perspective and addresses philosophy's establishment of the tradition of political thought as an attempt to ''lay down the rules for the lunatic asylum'' (Pascal). Plato's allegory of the cave established an influential pattern, which Aristotle and the subsequent tradition continued. Schwartz is not so much interested in disputing particular readings by Arendt, but to consider ''whether she has a point'' (p. 105). For the most part, this aim allows him to stay clear of, and circumvent, pedantic criticisms. However, sometimes a further argument would be needed: for example, to restate the meaning of isonomia as ''literally no-rule'' is inaccurate, given that the term actually contains the root for law: ''nomos.'' (I will come back to this later.) Chapter four resumes the historical narrative and explains how ''necessity'' (rather than freedom) came to reign in human affairs. The first thread of the story Review Essay

Arendt's Denktagebuch, 1950-1973: An Unwritten Ethics for the Human Condition?

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt’s thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt’s political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt’s private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.