Hannah Arendt: ritornare al pensiero nelle crisi della modernità

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 unites 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 we can 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 the 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. Just as for Thomas Aquinas reason enables us to recognize our essence and the will make us strong in cultivating the true good, so for Arendt the ability to think, as the exercise of reason, enables us to prevent evil through judgment and individual responsibility. Therefore, one cannot ignore the 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.