Mondanità dell'uomo e umanità del mondo. Il superamento dell'acosmismo in Hannah Arendt

This research project moves from Arendt’s syntagma Amor Mundi: the transformation of this lemma has been followed across its phenomenological heritage to its later politicization. The first chapter analyses Arendt’s dissertation, where she analyses Augustine’s Amor mundi: according to Arendt, in the first context which influences Augustine - the Greek one - love means appetitus, desire. The second context, the Christian one, implies the dedication to the Creator, whose unfounded love men try to imitate. The two different contexts assume two different ideas of World: the first one corresponds to the world produced by the dilectores mundi, the second one to the fabrica dei, the result of the divine creation. The second chapter analyses the transformations of these meanings of the term “world”: the world produced by men and the world given to men, in which they live. The world produced by men is, according to Arendt, the structure of meanings, which Heidegger named being-in-the-world; however, Arendt roots this structure in the specific human activity which fabricates lasting objects. Indeed, Arendt sheds light on the different human activities, and their respective realms, which compose the human condition: labor produces and consumes the subsistence goods; work fabricates lasting objects, which partake in the common world; action consists in public action and speech which actualize human plurality. Each human activity enacts at its best in its respective condition: labor enacts at its best when it addresses nature and its endless reproduction; work, when it produces lasting objects; last, action is fully accomplished when it sticks to human plurality. Contrarily, the confusion among activities and conditions threatens both: for example, the confusion between labor and work under the sign of an endless production abrades the common world, by shaping every human activity in the form of a biological process. Last, Arendt talks about the spectacle of the world, by which she seems to expand the world towards nature. This expansion depends on the fact that the world is the only way in which nature can appear; moreover, world reveals the consumption which the natural process sets up, and which shows by contrast to the durability of the world. Last, the third chapter addresses Arendt’s idea of mental activities, and it aims at finding the meaning of the term “love”; thinking and willing are mainly analyzed. Thinking, according to Arendt, is an inner dialogue between one and oneself; furthermore, thinking is always aporetic and negative, for it always destroys common certitudes and truisms. The negativity and reflexivity of thought shapes the moral experience, too: according to Arendt, morality forces each man to abstain from what would make the inner dialogue between the two selves impossible. Willing is as reflexive as thinking, according to Arendt; nevertheless, if the two selves dialogue peacefully in thought, they struggle in willing: this fight makes willing powerless, since willing is always split between velle and nolle. Thus, willing can act worldly and politically only by turning into a despotic sovereignty. Nevertheless, Arendt points out at the cornerstone of willing, that is to the faculty of affirming and negating the particular: this hard core of willing does not presume to create what it wants, but it locates in the world and directs men in it. Furthermore, the faculty of affirming and negating is willing’s contribution to judging: the idiosyncrasy of inner negation and affirmation matches with the common sense, which connects men with their community. Thus, Love of the World is the direction of mental faculties towards the world, without servitude to it: welcoming the world does not correspond to its indiscriminate acceptance, nor to a flight in the realm of thought; it means accepting the world while always preserving the space for criticizing it.