Il percorso filosofico-politico di Hannah Arendt. Dall’amor mundi in Agostino alla teoria del giudizio in Kant

Abstract

In her first work, The Concept of Love in Augustine, Hannah Arendt highlights, within the transcendental bond that is Christian love, the plural relationship that joins men with each other and with the world. She then starts from Augustine’s dilectio proximi to outline her personal conception of amor mundi. With these premises, she recovers the fundamental role of political action, and identifies in it the path through which respond to the request for an authentic and unitary dimension of man. The modern age has obscured the true meaning of moral action, inserting in the minds of masses the belief that law and morality are the same thing. In this way, most of Nazis blindly followed orders and were unable to examine them from the ethical point of view of respect for humanity. Arendt searches through judgement for a possible reconciliation between theoria and praxis. She takes as her model Kant’s aesthetic judgement, which is not based on eternal and universal truths of the intellect, but offers space for the search for meaning and significance, for discussion, confrontation and freedom of thought. The right to judge is therefore absolutely inalienable, because only by constantly judging can man make sense of the world and share it with other human beings. Therefore, one cannot ignore an ethical meaning of thinking, the activity in which thought and word remain inseparably united and characterize the way of life in which truly human qualities can manifest themselves.