UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world
Borren, M.
Publication date 2010
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Borren, M. (2010). Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world. F & N Eigen Beheer.
General rights
It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).
Disclaimer/Complaints regulations
If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.
Table of contents
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: integrating phenomenological philosophy, historiography
and political theory 1
The debate between modernists and postmodernists in recent Arendt-scholarship 4
Structure of this book 9
Part I. Political phenomenology 15
Ch 1. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology: understanding and
deconstruction 15
1. The phenomenological tradition 17 2. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology 20
3. Hermeneutic Exercises 26
Critique: dismantling 27
Paradoxes 34
Experiment: storytelling 35
4. The scholar-as-spectator: situated and critical impartiality 38 5. Challenging scientism and metaphysics 43 6. Misunderstandings: experience, facts and distinctions 47
Experience 47
Factuality 48
Discriminating and distinctions 50
Finally: Zu den Sachen selbst! and the broken thread of tradition 52
Ch 2. Phenomenological anthropology 55
1. Anthropological starting point: the totalitarian experience 57 2. Arendt’s phenomenology of the vita activa 63
The ‘who’, the ‘what’ and the person’s life-story 67
Table of contents
viii
The life of the mind and the human conditions 73
3. Arendt’s phenomenological topology of reality 74
Nature and the objective world 74
The objective and the intersubjective world 77
4. The worldliness of human existence and the paradoxes of plurality 82 The inter-esse, the space of appearances and the web of relationships 87
Conclusion Part I: Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology and the traditions of metaphysics, scientism and poststructuralism 91 Part II. The common world, community and the citizen 97 Introduction 97 Ch 3. Political community and the contract 101
1. The general will and enlightened self-interest: Rousseau and Hobbes 101
Solipsism 103 Unity 105
Naturalism 106
Sovereignty 107
Instability and violence 108
Hostility to plurality and worldlessness 111
2. Arendt’s alternative: the promise, opinion, action-in-concert 112 Opinion 114 Promises 115
Power as action-in-concert 117
Conclusion 117
Ch 4. Common sense 119
1. Experience and the sense of the real 123 2. Understanding and judging 129
3. Neither transcendentalism nor empiricism 132
Ch 5. Arendt and Derrida on friendship and the problem of political community 137
1. Friendship and brotherhood 139
2. Fraternization, différance and the coming friendship 140 3. Brotherhood and the loss of world and plurality 143
ix
4. Towards a politics or an ethics of friendship? 146 5. (M/F) = 2. Many is more than two 147 6. The ‘coming community’ and the common world 148
Part III. Politics of in/visibility: world as space of appearances 151
Introduction 151
1. The private and the public and the pathologies of in/visibility 151
Public invisibility 152
Natural visibility 157
2. The social and the political and the pathologies of in/visibility 158
Social in/visibility 159
Conclusion: the pathologies of citizenship 161
Ch 6. Public visibility and private invisibility 163
1. Publicity: public appearance and participatory visibility 163 2. Privacy: the private realm of non-appearance and invisibility 167 3. The paradox of revealing and concealing: the mask 170
Conclusion: citizenship 175
Ch 7. The pathologies of in/visibility I: public invisibility and
natural visibility. On the stateless and today’s illegal aliens 177
1. European refugees between the wars 177 2. The in/visibility of stateless refugees 181
Rethinking human rights and the nation-state 191
3. Today’s in/visible aliens 193
Ch 8. The pathologies of in/visibility II: social in/visibility. The social question, the race question, the Jewish question and
the woman question 207
1. Councils 210
2. The social question 213
3. The Jewish question 217
4. The race question 222
5. The woman question 226
Table of contents
x
Conclusion: Amor Mundi 237
1. The paradox of distance and engagement 237
Amor Mundi 239
Contemptus Mundi 242
Amor Hominis 243
Arendt’s humanism 246
2. Today’s forms of Amor Mundi, Contemptus Mundi and Amor Hominis 249
The care for life itself: the socialization of the political 253
The care for the soul: the moralization of the political 257
Finally 261
Bibliography 263
Primary texts by Hannah Arendt 263 Secondary scholarship on Arendt 264
Other sources 286
Policy documents, law sections, government leaflets, reports, etc. 293
News paper articles 296
Summary 297
Samenvatting in het Nederlands 311
Dankwoord 327
CR: Crises of the republic, 1972, (New York: Harcourt).
DB: Denktagebuch 1950-1973 (2 volumes), ed. Ursula Ludz und Ingeborg Nordmann, 2003 (München: Piper).
EJ: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil, 1963 (New York: Viking Press).
EU: Essays in understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, 1994 (New York: Schocken).
HC: The human condition, 1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
IP: ‘Introduction into politics’, in: The promise of politics, ed. Jerome Kohn, 2005 (New York: Schocken), 93-200.
IV: Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ursula Ludz, 1996 (München: Piper)
JW: The Jewish writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, 2007 (New York: Schocken).
LKPP: Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, ed. R. Beiner, 1982 (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
LOM I: The life of the mind I (thinking), 1971 (New York: Harcourt). LOM II: The life of the mind II (willing), 1978 (New York: Harcourt). MDT: Men in dark times, 1968 (New York: Harcourt).
OR: On revolution, 1963 (New York: Viking Press).
OT: The origins of totalitarianism, 1951 (New York: Harcourt). Without the year of publication, I tacitly refer to the 1951 edition. When referring to the second enlarged edition, I use ‘OT, 1958’.
PP: The promise of politics, ed. Jerome Kohn, 2005 (New York: Schocken). RJ: Responsibility and judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn, 2003 (New York: Schocken). UP: ‘Understanding and politics’, in: Essays in understanding, 1930-1954, ed.
Jerome Kohn, 1994 (New York: Schocken), 307-21.
Abbreviations
xii
ZP: ‘Zur Person’, in: Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ursula Ludz, 1996 (München: Piper), 44-70.
