Augustine's concept of love

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Augustine's concept of love. An attempt at a philosophical interpretation is the dissertation of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and at the same time the first book she has come down to. It was first published in 1929 and was not reissued during her lifetime. The English-American edition, partially developed by Arendt in 1964/65, was not published until 1996. There has also been a French and a Spanish version of the original version since 1991.

content

The approximately one-hundred-page work with which the 22-year-old Hannah Arendt obtained her doctorate in philosophy with her academic teacher Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1928 , deals with the concept of love of the Christian philosopher and church teacher Augustinus von Hippo (354-430). In evaluating his works as well as referring to the Christian Gospels and the Pauline letters , she elaborates a fundamental differentiation between three types of love, to which she ascribes an essential philosophical and thus existential meaning in addition to the religious:

  • amor (ἔρως): the worldly love based on desire ( appetitus ), which constantly strives for satisfaction, but never reaches it and thus, despite its world affirmation, only negatively realized.
  • caritas (ἀγάπη): the love of God striving for the summum bonum, which strives away from worldliness into heaven, to God and longs for paradisiacal peace, but is thus in a permanent disproportion to the world that rejects it.
  • dilectio (στοργή): the love of the neighbor ( dilectio proximi ), which anticipates the love of God in the releasing, non-desiring affection for the other person and thus enables a godly standpoint in the world.

The concept of love revolves thematically less about God and man's relationship to him as to

  • the world, its worldliness and worldlessness,
  • the tense relationship of the individual to the world as well
  • the problem of being with others in the world.

Thus one of the treatise both - namely thematically and argumentatorisch - in the existential philosophy tradition of Jaspers and Heidegger and - by their religious horizon - in the philosophy of religion Rudolf Bultmann and integrated by the thought influences of three major academic teacher of the author with a strong independent accentuation that also indicates her later work. Her friend and fellow student Hans Jonas also wrote his dissertation on Augustine in 1928 and published a book on Augustine's concept of freedom in 1930. Heidegger and Jaspers also worked on the subject.

rating

Karl Jaspers, who gave the work a grade II to I, rated it in his report as follows:

“As a factual understanding, the method is at the same time violent [...] Neither historical nor philological interests are decisive. Ultimately, impetus is provided by what has not been said: the author would like to justify her freedom from Christian possibilities, which at the same time attract her, through philosophical work on thoughts. It does not seek to achieve the systematics of the didactic pieces as a whole, but precisely their inconsistencies in order to gain a glimpse of the existential origins of the thought. "

reception

In contemporary reception, the script was consistently received negatively in the philosophical media and among theologians. On the one hand, Arendt only understood Augustine as a philosopher, not as a theologian, on the other hand, she did not take current theological literature into account.

The concept of love was not expected for a long time to the actual work of Hannah Arendt canon that is often only with their after the end of World War II can begin written books. Accordingly, it is - unlike her hardly more recent habilitation thesis Rahel Varnhagen. Life story of a German Jewish woman from the Romantic era - not published by her later in-house publisher Piper either and was first reissued in 2003 after publication in 1929. In public he was largely forgotten. More recently, however, it has been given more attention and its importance as an exposition of the later major work has been increasingly understood.

In later years Arendt herself always described herself as a political theorist, rejected the term philosophy in relation to her work and therefore continued to deal with topics that were echoed in the dissertation, but without referring to this text.

In his foreword to the new edition of the dissertation in 2003, Ludger Lütkehaus points out that Arendt had already indicated her concept of birth ( natality ) in this early work and explicitly developed it in the English-language edition, which was revised in 1964/65 and published much later posthumously. Ursula Ludz contradicts this statement in 2008 regarding the text published in 1929. This train of thought is not mentioned there with reference to a quote from Augustine. In her standard work on Arendt research Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World , Elisabeth Young-Bruehl presented a comparison of the original dissertation with Arendt's 1964/65 adaptations for the English version. The new publication 2006 in facsimile reprint with an introductory essay by Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher contains the translation of all ancient Greek and Latin terms and quotations from Arendt, an aid that considerably increases the understanding of the study for a broader target group, with Ludz working on the implementation of the Criticism of the translation project. With her essay Love for Being as Love for Life , Kurbacher would like to contribute to the philosophical examination of the “ phenomenological content” of the text in order to narrow a gap in Arendt's research. She emphasizes that Arendt's work focuses on the critical understanding of Augustine's ideas of love and sees the contradictions of modern man as inherent in Augustine. Arendt is interested in “love” as a “possible basis for mutual interaction in or even as a foundation for community”. From this follows, according to Kurbacher, the later term of fundamental plurality.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl made the love affair between Heidegger and Arendt public in 1982. Since then, some authors have identified autobiographical references.

expenditure

  • Augustine's concept of love. Julius Springer (Series: Philosophical Research Vol. 9), Berlin 1929.
    • Augustine's concept of love. Attempt at a philosophical interpretation. Ed. And preface by Ludger Lüdkehaus. Philo, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8257-0343-6 .
    • Augustine's concept of love: attempt at a philosophical interpretation . Ed. And essay for the introduction by Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher. Olms, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 3-487-13262-1 .
      • O conceito de amor em Santo Agonstinho. Ensaio de interpretãçao filosófica Verlag Instituto Piaget, Lisbon 1997, ISBN 972-8407-57-2 (portug.)
      • Le Concept d'amour chez Augustin. Essai d'interprétation philosophique . Translation from German. Edition Tierce, Paris 1991, Rivages 1999, ISBN 2-7436-0560-X (French)
      • El concepto de amor en San Agustin. En Cuentro Publishing House, Madrid 2001, 2009 ISBN 84-7490-632-6 (Spanish)
      • Augusutinuso no ai no gainen. Misuzushobo Publishing House, Tokyo 2012, ISBN 978-4-622-08349-8 (japan.)
  • Love and Saint Augustine. Hannah Arendt. Ed. And essay v. Joanna Vecchiarelli, Judith Chelius Stark. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1996, ISBN 0-226-02597-7 . (English)

literature

  • Wolfgang Heuer : Citizen. Personal integrity and political action. A reconstruction of Hannah Arendt's political humanism. Akademie, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-05-002189-6 , pp. 32–34.
  • Antonia Grunenberg : Arendt. Herder, Freiburg et al. 2003, ISBN 3-451-04954-6 , p. 29f.
  • Frauke Annegret Kurbacher: Early writings. Augustine's concept of love. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02255-4 , pp. 20-22.
  • Frauke Annegret Kurbacher: Foreword and love for being as love for life. An introductory essay. In: Hannah Arendt: The concept of love in Augustin: attempt at a philosophical interpretation . Olms, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 3-487-13262-1 , pp. XII-IX, pp. XI-XLIV.
  • Frauke Annegret Kurbacher: Introduction , in: Hannah Arendt : The concept of love in Augustin. Attempt at a philosophical interpretation. Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7873-2990-8 , pp. VII - LXVIII
  • Ludger Lütkehaus (Ed.): Foreword and the edition . In: Hannah Arendt: Augustin's concept of love. Attempt at a philosophical interpretation. Philo, Berlin Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-86572-343-8 , pp. 7-18, pp. 19-23.
  • Thomas Wild: Hannah Arendt. Life, work, effect. Frankfurt / Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-18217-X , p. 67f.
  • Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, ISBN 3-10-095802-0 , pp. 123-127. Ibid: Arendt's dissertation. A synopsis. Pp. 650-663. Original edition: Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World. Yale University-Press, New Haven, London 1982
  • Rosa Kassandra Coco Schinagl: Love as a philosophical-theological concept in Hannah Arendt's thinking. A consideration of her dissertation The Concept of Love in Augustine. Attempt at a philosophical interpretation in the light of your complete works , master thesis 2012, Stellenbosch University [as PDF at Google].

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ludger Lüdkehaus: To the edition . In: Arendt / Lüdkehaus 2003, pp. 15, 19f. According to Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher 2006, p. XII, Arendt began the revision in 1966. In the Arendt Handbook, p. 20, Kurbacher traces the complicated edition history of 2011.
  2. ↑ Hans Jonas: Augustine and the Pauline freedom problem. A philosophical contribution to the genesis of the Christian-occidental idea of ​​freedom. Goettingen 1930.
  3. ↑ Ludger Lütkehaus: Foreword . In: Arendt / Lüdkehaus 2003, p. 9ff.
  4. ↑ The dissertation report v. Karl Jaspers. In: Arendt / Lüdkehaus 2003, p. 130.
  5. ^ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. Frankfurt a. M. 1986, p. 125.
  6. ↑ Thomas Wild: Hannah Arendt. Life, work, effect. 2006, p. 67f
  7. ↑ Ludger Lütkehaus: To the edition . In: Arendt / Lüdkehaus 2003, p. 15.
  8. ↑ Ursula Ludz: Two new editions of Hannah Arendt's dissertation , review 2008.
  9. ↑ by Kirsten Groß-Albenhausen.
  10. ↑ Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher 2006, p. XII.
  11. ↑ Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher 2006, pp. XIII, XIV.
  12. ↑ Frauke-Annegret Kurbacher 2006, p. XXI.
  13. ↑ for example in Lüdkehaus (2003), p. 9ff, see also: Arendt-Handbuch (2011), p. 20f
  14. ↑ Ludz compares the two German-speaking New editions by Philo and Olms. Additional information on Arendt's revision of the font in the 1960s (not published in Germany), reference to the English version by Scott and Stark.