Augustine of Hippo in the early arendtian reading

Abstract

Abstract. Hannah Arendt. Early education. Augustine of Hippo.

This article is a part of an ongoing investigation, where we explore Arendt’s reading of Augustine of Hippo, starting fron the early work, El concepto de amor en San Agustín (2001). We consider that the research of the doctoral dissertation, a work so little explored by her most relevant exponent, can provide us new keys to reading Hannah Arendt's political theory, making our approach more complex to her heterodox reading of the tradition of philosophical thought. According to our hypothesis, is in the 1929 doctoral thesis, where the political dimension of the problem in a broad sense begins to emerge, from the question of what is specifically human, always subject to the constant tension between a “no longer” and a “no yet ” (Arendt, 2001: 311; Agustín, 2005: XI, 21,27). Only in later works is the reading of the Augustinian source - increasingly focused on the Confesiones (2005) and La Ciudad de Dios (1958) - is explicitly articulated with the elaboration of the most well-known plot of the phenomenology of political action; in which numerous and prominent exponents have located Heidegger and Jaspers' student, her turn towards the politics (Young Bruehl, 2006; Canovan, 2002; Benhabib, 2000; Forti, 2001). While these authors acknowledge the influence of Arendt's early education, in general they all accentuate her break with the entire scope of her university education in philosophy and theology.