Amor Mundi: Why It Is So Difficult to Love the World

Abstract

This paper examines what Hannah Arendt means when she urges us to “love the world as it is” considering that we live in a world that is marred by injustice and violence. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part, demonstrates how Arendt’s concept of amor mundi is deeply influenced by her reading of St. Augustine. The second part, in turn addresses the challenge of loving the world as it is, given Arendt’s agreement with Augustine that we live in a desert. It argues that Arendt departs from Augustine on two fronts, first she rejects notions of original sin and forgiveness in favour of reconciliation, and second, she rejects the idea of divine grace claiming that our only hope for a new humanity lies in loving the world as it is.

1. Introduction

There is no doubt that we live in a fractured world marred by wars and injustices. No-one was better aware of this than Hannah Arendt1 [1]. It is surprising, then, that Arendt wrote to her friend and mentor Karl Jaspers in 1955: ‘I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world… Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories “Amor Mundi”.’ [2] (p. 264). The book in question is The Human Condition, which was published in 1958 [3]. Why exactly she ended up calling her book The Human Condition and not Amor Mundi, I do not know, but at first sight it is not easy to make sense of Arendt’s wish. It seems strange that she wanted to call a book Amor Mundi which tries to claim throughout that love is an entirely private affair and should not play a role in the public realm which she calls “the world”.

Indeed, The Human Condition can be read as a manifesto against love. It is there (as elsewhere) that she argues most vehemently that love destroys the world. The world that Arendt has in mind is what the Greeks called the polis—it is the public world that is defined by difference, plurality and debate. For Arendt, the world refers to the spacing or ‘in-between’ that ‘relates us to and separates us from others.’ [3] (p. 242). Arendt believes that love ‘destroys the in-between’, because in love we do not cultivate plurality but we seek unicity instead. As Aristophanes already observed, in love we try to make one out of two, and thus seek to heal the wound of human nature that has been severed apart [4] (191d). For Arendt there is thus no doubt that love ‘is not only apolitical but antipolitical’ [3] (p. 242). It destroys the in-between and makes us forget about the world [3,5,6]2.

But this brings me back to the question: why did Arendt wish to call her book Amor Mundi if she believed that love not only destroys the world but is ‘perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces’? [3] (p. 242). I think we can understand Arendt’s position best if we return to her dissertation on Saint Augustine’s concept of love, which she wrote in 1929 under the supervision of Jaspers [7]. As I seek to show here, Arendt’s concept of amor mundi is in many ways a response to Augustine.

This paper is divided into two parts. The first examines Arendt’s indebtedness to Augustine. Although at first glance it may appear that she reverses the order of love by placing amor mundi above amor Dei, closer analysis shows that her account of amor mundi shares much with Augustine’s understanding of amor Dei.

While the first part focuses on these convergences, the second turns to divergences, identifying two departures from Augustine that are especially significant for Arendt’s conception of amor mundi. The first is her rejection of ideals such as the summum bonum; the second is her denial of the doctrine of original sin. The former signals an impulse to withdraw from the world, while the latter encourages a form of negative solidarity grounded in the shared condition of human fallibility. The paper argues that Arendt thereby adopts a paradoxical stance. On one hand, she agrees with Augustine that it is impossible to feel fully at home in the world in which we live. On the other, she departs from him in insisting that the task is not to flee the world but to love it from within. For Arendt, amor mundi demands the courage to discover a new humanity within the world as it is, without recourse to divine grace or hope for redemption.

2. Part One: Arendt and Saint Augustine

The argument Arendt develops is that we succumb to evil if we fail to love the world. Amor mundi thus becomes the defining feature for her account of the political world. But what exactly does it mean to love the world? Arendt borrowed the term amor mundi from St. Augustine. While at first sight it seems that she rejects Augustine’s account of love because it denies plurality, a closer look will reveal that her account of amor mundi is much indebted to Augustine.

According to Arendt, Augustine’s account of love is flawed as it undermines plurality. It seeks unicity or symbiosis at the expense of the world. Indeed, in the Confessions Augustine describes how we become most acutely aware of this when we lose the person we love. In Book IV he recalls the loss of his dearest friend from childhood (when he still followed the Manichean tradition), saying:

I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead—I who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is half one’s own soul. It felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with loathing, because I could not bear to be only half alive3 [8].

As his soul had become one with his friend’s soul, without his friend the world no longer looked the same to Augustine. The world was defined by his absence, that is, Augustine’s loss.

What is important for Arendt’s account of amor mundi is that this experience of profound loss leads Augustine to realize that genuine love can never be achieved in our transient and finite world. For us mortals, love is necessarily accompanied by the fear of loss. Though he did not know it then, he knows it now: genuine love is impossible in this world. As Augustine observes: ‘I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss, and then becomes aware of the misery that it was in even before it lost them’4 [8]. Love is a form of craving (for happiness) but as soon as we possess what we crave, we fear losing it. It is impossible to love without fear. This is why the misery is there even before we lose the one we love.

Mortal love, which Augustine calls cupiditas, cannot bring happiness: whatever it seeks is necessarily under threat. Augustine thus comes to recognize that what we truly seek in love is the freedom from fear. Such a freedom is only guaranteed if we love a life that neither threatens to disappoint nor can go out of existence. Augustine believes that only divine love can provide such a guarantee as it escapes this cycle of longing and loss. Genuine love is thus what Augustine calls caritas, ‘a craving for and the fulfilment of ‘the absolute good,’ the summum bonum’ [7] (pp. 9–13).

This leads Augustine to articulate a profound re-evaluation of love. We need to turn away from everything that is mutable (the mortal world), including what is transient about ourselves. As Arendt notes ‘the soul [must] forget itself out of love for God.’ [7] (p. 28). ‘Love of God’ as ‘the love of the self that will be (the immortal self) and the hatred of the self that is (the mortal self).’ [7] (p. 30). The self that is to be loved is thus not the self “here and now” but the true self projected into the future. A self that stands in relation to God in eternity. It is the love of the invisible future self that belongs to the invisible eternal God. This is the re-evaluation of love: Amor Mundi is replaced by Amor Dei.

What concerns Arendt is that Augustine creates a certain order of love (ordo amoris) which denies plurality. We are told we must first love God and that our love for our neighbour is secondary and derivative. Augustine thus denies plurality (though Arendt does not yet use the term plurality in the dissertation): I no longer love the neighbour as different to me but as someone who is just like me, a creation of God. I love her through God as God’s creature, but not as a neighbour who I encounter in the world. Arendt thus believes that although caritas refers to neighbourly love, it grants no value or meaning to the neighbour as distinct in her concrete existence in the world. To cite Arendt at length:

In accepting God’s love man has denied himself. Now he loves and hates as God does. […] In this way the neighbor loses the meaning of his concrete worldly existence, for example, as friend or enemy. For the lover who loves as God loves, the neighbor ceases to be anything but a creature of God. The lover meets a man defined by God’s love simply as God’s creation. All meet in this love, denying themselves and their mutual ties. […] Because man is tied to his own source [God], he loves his neighbor neither for his neighbor’s sake nor for his own sake. Love of neighbor leaves the lover himself in absolute isolation and the world remains a desert for man’s isolated existence [7] (p. 94).

Augustine, as a result, ‘makes the central Christian demand to love one’s neighbour as oneself well nigh impossible.’ [7] (p. 30). The problem is that in our love of God, we have renounced our earthly existence and can no longer love our neighbour ‘in the concrete and worldly encounter with him’ [7] (p. 95). There is no longer a distinction between me and my neighbour; what we love in the neighbour is what we love in ourselves, and that is God. So although caritas is meant to be ‘between men’ [3] (p. 53), ‘the neighbour’s relevance as a neighbour (which was previously described as a discrepancy) is overcome and the individual is left in isolation.’ [7] (p. 97). There is no doubt for Arendt that Christianity denies plurality and turns away from the world.

So when Arendt says that we should love the world, it seems we can interpret this as a response to Augustine. We should redeem cupiditas and love the mortal world. Arendt implies as much in her dissertation when she asks rhetorically: Would it not then be better to love the world in cupiditas and be at home? Why should we make a desert out of this world?’ [7] (p. 19).

This suggests that the demand to love the world can be read as a direct response to Augustine. But it is striking that a closer look at her later writings on amor mundi show that Arendt is not so much departing from Augustine but actually following a similar path. Both seem to argue: “Love, but be careful what you love”5 [7]. Indeed, the way Arendt argues we should love the world is analogous to the way Augustine tells us we should love God. Both follow the same three steps and argue that genuine love requires first freedom from what we fear (namely loss), second, self-renunciation and third, subordination of neighbourly love. Let me consider each one of them in turn.

2.1. Freedom from Fear of Loss

When Arendt tells us to love the world, it looks as if she wishes to reverse the order of love. Contrary to Augustine, we should love that from which Augustine shrinks back: the transient mortal world. If this is correct, amor mundi would then be expressing the love for what we fear, i.e., what is transient and finite. But Arendt argues the opposite and seems to concur with Augustine that in love we try to overcome fear. Indeed, in the Denktagebuch she cites Montesquieu who says in the Spirit of the Law [1] (I, Ch. 2) that we do not enter the social contract to escape war against all—as Hobbes maintains—but we enter it because we recognize a shared fear, [1] (VI, 21, 145) and the fear in question is, indeed, mortality, loss, decay and transience. So, when Arendt tells us to love the world, just like Augustine she seeks freedom from fear i.e., freedom from loss.

Indeed, for Arendt, building a world is precisely the effort to render what is transient permanent. We achieve this partly through labor and work, by building a stable and solid world, but most importantly through storytelling, remembrance and indeed art—in particular, poetry. In poetry we create things that cannot be consumed or destroyed. Poetry remains alive as long as we talk about it. So Arendt’s position is analogous to Augustine’s. While Augustine seeks the eternal in God, Arendt seeks “immortal appearances” and thus a worldly immortality.

2.2. Self-Renunciation

Arendt argues that loving the world demands courage, as it requires us to relinquish our fear of our own mortality and transcend the natural cycles of life, including the need for subsistence and protection:

It requires courage even to leave the protective security of our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may lie in wait for us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the concern for life has lost its validity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake [9] (p. 155).

Courage, in other words, liberates us from our fear of death. In a way strikingly similar to Augustine, Arendt argues that loving the world requires relinquishing the concern for our self and our wellbeing and our concern for our loved ones, which belong to the private realm. To care for the world one must transcend natural mortal concerns, that ensure one’s survival and wellbeing. Both Augustine and Arendt concur: a form of self-renunciation is necessary, be it to love God or to love the world.

2.3. Subordination of Neighbourly Love

Finally, Arendt argues that this self-renunciation goes hand in hand with the renunciation of our concern for the wellbeing of others. Arendt (whether rightly or not, we shall return to below) accuses Augustine of getting embroiled in a paradoxical position by preaching that we should both love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and love God. But it is impossible to love both as one seems to cancel out the other. Arendt believes she can avoid this pitfall when she recognizes that loving the world cannot entail loving thy neighbour as thyself. She does not mince her words when she declares that ‘I am concerned with the world as such and not with those who live in it’, or when she goes on to say that ‘in politics not life but the world is at stake’ [9] (p. 200).

What is required from me is equally required from the other: she too needs to transcend her private realm. To encounter the other in the public realm is thus to encounter a person in her public appearance, and this means not seeing her as a private person with particular (private) needs and history. This is why Arendt says in the passage quoted above that ‘we are not concerned with those who live in the world but we are concerned with what we gain through them’ [9] (p. 200), i.e., our love for the world. When Arendt accuses Augustine of holding that ‘I never love my neighbor for his own sake, but only for the sake of divine grace’, [7] (p. 111) we can find the same echoed in Arendt, when she claims “I never love my neighbor for her own sake but only for the sake of the world.” What we find through our relation with the other is the in-between, that is, our love for the world.

This explains why for Arendt, friendship and not love is the blueprint for the polis. For friendship is an enabling condition for the world. The friendship Arendt has in mind may best be called a civic one. Civic friendship is dispassionate. It is ‘without intimacy and without closeness’ [3] (p. 243). In civic friendship, we are not concerned with ‘pouring out our hearts, sharing our intimate and private concerns to each other unmolested by the world and its demands.’ [6] (p. 24). In civic friendship our concern is the world and the world alone.

What marks out civic friendship is that we do not seek unicity, but instead we regard ourselves both as equal and distinct. We recognize and respect each other as holding different viewpoints. In friendship we regard the person from a distance which the space of the world puts between us [3] (p. 243). This is why Arendt sees Aristotle as having sought friendship among fellow citizens: ‘We tend to think that he was speaking of no more than the absence of factions and civil war within it. But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse.’ [6] (p. 24). The life of the polis thus ‘consisted of an intense and uninterrupted contest of all against all.’ [10] (p. 64).

The essence of friendship is discourse. In speech, I put forward my way of seeing the world. As Arendt puts it, I become somebody6 [1] who has a particular point of view, but I can only become somebody in relation to others who stand at a distance from me and judge me. When I converse, I thus do not assume agreement, but there is a tacit acknowledgment that we may well disagree. The possibility of disagreement and controversy thus make the in-between, or the shared world, possible. In a curious way loving the world thus means loving the potential of controversy and dissent.

The argument goes as follows: there is only potential disagreement or controversy if it is disagreement about a common theme. When we converse, we necessarily talk about something (a datum) that we share, and Arendt calls what we share the common world. The common world thus only comes about through the acknowledgment that we may disagree. The potential of controversy and debate thus creates the in-between that both joins and separates us. When we debate, something is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves, and as a result a shared reality is constituted [3] (p. 50). The converse is equally true: if there is no potential controversy, there is no in-between and, as a result, there is no shared world. The shared world exists only as long as there is plurality.

This is why Arendt argues that it is in and through the constant interchange and talk with one’s neighbour that we come to love the world: ‘Speech conveys thought and that about which we speak is between men only as long as they converse. That about which we speak only comes about between men.’ [1] (X, 19, 246). The common world refers to what concerns each of us when we debate. This is why friendship is about the world and not about ourselves. To cite Arendt at length:

Friendship consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and finally, in the course of time and life, begins to constitute a little world of its own which is shared in friendship [10] (p. 64).

Friendship is thus about amor mundi and not, as Marieke Borren aptly put it, about “amor homini” [11] (p. 238). It expresses nothing other than a concern for the common world which we make visible, and which only exists as long as we converse (i.e., talk with and not at each other). It is the love for the world that is expressed in friendship, but this love is possible only as long as we treat each other in a dispassionate way and “love” the friend not for her own sake, but for the sake of the world.

Once again Arendt seems to repeat a theme we find in Augustine. As Erika Kidd has shown so well, Augustine also differentiates between a love guided by self-interest and an unselfish love. Contrary to Arendt’s contention, he thus does make room for a different order of love which indeed curiously reflects the one Arendt advocates7. This comes to light when we compare the love and grief Augustine expressed at the death of his friend in Book IV (which we discussed above), with the death of his mother Monica in Book IX of the Confessions. As Kidd notes, the love expressed about his friend is a selfish love. The grief is about Augustine himself: his pain, his loss. What Augustine loved about his friend was that he was like himself and thus malleable8 [8]. It is striking that Augustine’s entire lament is not about the friend: we do not learn anything about his character or achievements, and as Kidd notes he is not even mentioned by name (apart from in the title of the section). The focus is on Augustine and himself alone9 [12].

Kidd contrasts this with the unselfish love he expresses at the deathbed of his mother in Book IX. There it transpires that genuine love is not self-love or mortal love, but love for the sake of the other, i.e., the one who is other to oneself. The point is not, as Arendt suggests, that we turn away from the neighbour to God but, as Augustine here acknowledges, he weeps both ‘about her and for her, [and] about myself and for myself’ [12] (p. 24). He prays for her salvation and does not ‘grasp the neighbour with an agenda’10 [13]. What he learns is to see his mother not from his perspective but as “other”, occupying a perspective that is distinct from his. He sees her—to use a Kantian term—as an end and not as a means. As Kidd notes, ‘his attentive love for his mother and all that her life meant opened his heart to love God and thus perfected his love for both. In his best and most honest remembrance of his mother, Augustine refuses to conceive of her meaning primarily in terms of himself.’ Instead, his love for her opens up the ‘self-forgetful dilectio’ that Rowan Williams describes as part and parcel of a right relation to one’s neighbor.’ [12] (p. 25). His grief is testimony to his love for God which, as a result, makes him forsake his self-interest and see his mother for what she is in her relation to God. She is not just an object (res) for him but ‘signum, […] a sign of its maker’11 [14]. He thus finds the love of God through the other and not the other through God.

As a result, both Arendt and Augustine claim that we can only recognize the other in their alterity if there is something we share. In Augustine it is the relation to God, in Arendt it is in relation to the world. Moreover, just as Arendt argues that we can only find the love of the world through plurality (since it is our relation to the other that opens up the spacing or in-between of the world), Augustine finds the love of God through the right relation to the neighbour.

We can thus conclude that when Arendt refers to amor mundi she ends up arguing, in line with Augustine, that we need to forsake our mortality or finitude in the name of something that is greater than us—the common world which existed before we came into being and that will outlive us:

In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it [10] (p. 203).

3. Part Two: Arendt’s Departure from Augustine

3.1. Amor Mundi Without Transcendence

The comparison with Augustine helps us to understand what Arendt means by amor mundi. However, we have yet to explore what it truly means to love the world—or, for that matter, where Arendt diverges from Augustine.

Before addressing this, it is important to clarify that when Arendt speaks of the world, she is not referring to the familiar realm of like-minded friends that gives us a sense of belonging. Rather, she speaks of humanity as a whole. Genuine friendship, after all, is confined to a small circle and requires time and effort to cultivate. So, when Arendt appeals to friendship, we need to understand it as a blueprint for the political—as she puts it, a ‘model for republicanism’ [1] (I, 10, 12) insofar as it requires us to treat each other dispassionately, i.e., as both equal and distinct.

More crucially, however, the world we inhabit does not reflect this ideal. Instead of embracing others as equal and distinct, we live in a world marred by war, hatred, nationalism, totalitarianism, and both natural and human atrocities (to name just a few). It is a world where we renounce plurality and cut ourselves off from others and cut others off from us. Indeed, Arendt seems to be much in agreement with Augustine: The world in which we live is nothing other than a desert. As Arendt puts it, ‘The modern growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between us, can also be described as the spread of the desert.’ [10] (p. 201).

But if this is the case—and it is hard to deny the inhumanity and horror that has reared its ugly head as I write—then exactly what does Arendt have in mind when she says that we need to learn to love the world as it is? It cannot mean “love the desert”. Indeed, Arendt believes we should never become ‘true inhabitants of the desert and feel […] at home in it’ [10] (p. 201). We are not naturally at home in the world. The world we love must be a different one to the desert which we currently occupy.

But at the same time Arendt shows contempt for those who try to save the idea of humanity by pointing to a world beyond. In the same way as Marx saw religion as an opium for the people, Arendt believes that postulating ideals which remain ineffectual in real life ends up contributing to the perpetuation of injustices. This is the lesson she learned from becoming stateless after fleeing Nazi Germany. Statelessness is more than the loss of homeland or possessions because it leads to the loss of nationality, and thus a loss of what Aristotle already regards as fundamental to us—namely that we are zoon politikon. What we lose, in other words, is our belonging to a social political order. And history has made her aware of the stark fact that, without nationality, we lose the right to have rights. To cite Arendt at length:

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. [15] (pp. 295–296).

As a stateless person we become a bare life and are stripped of our humanity12 [15]. In view of this, she mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which proclaims that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (Article 1). What bothers her is that UDHR refers to inalienable rights to which we are entitled independently of whether an individual or a state violates them (Article 2). But life has taught her that such rights remain ineffectual if there is no state to protect them.

Whoever is stateless is necessarily rightless. There are no inalienable rights. The right to have rights and, moreover, the right to be someone, is synonymous with the right to have ‘national rights’ [15] (p. 299). The question then ‘is not, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong’13 [15]. No one grasped this better than Edmund Burke when he argued we should refer not to universal rights but to the ‘Rights of an Englishman’ [15] (p. 299). Indeed, Arendt believed that today we ‘know even better than Burke that all rights materialize only within a given political community’, and that rights ‘depend on our fellow-men and on a tacit guarantee that the members of a community give to each other.’ [15] (p. 299). Likewise when Jeremy Bentham refers to the concept of natural rights as ‘nonsense upon stilts,’ [16] (p. 53) he is onto something important: rights do not exist independently of a state, homeland or federation14 [18]. We thus need a state or some form of political confederation that protects minority rights15 [19]. As such Arendt identified a lacuna that still dominates the debate about human rights today: we can either be cynics or idealists. If we are cynics, we argue that there are no inalienable rights and we should just accept the status quo; if we are idealists, we refer to rights without having the political power to institute them. Arendt thus realized that the task is to find a way in which the idea of human rights has a force upon us. And for Arendt it was without question that this cannot be achieved by appealing to a summum bonum or the grace of God. But equally it cannot be guaranteed by the state either, since no state, nation or federation can function without the principle of exclusion: it cannot give rights to all.

It is here where Arendt departs from Augustine: We can only solve this conundrum if we all take responsibility for the world in which we live. Rather than fleeing the world and seeking redemption in a transcendent world (e.g., Christianity) or by imagining an ideal world (e.g., Marxism), we need to love the world as it is, that is, without transcendence and without the grace of God, and this means without the hope for redemption16 [20].

Arendt thus believes our only hope lies in the moment of utter hopelessness. We need to ‘own up to the experience of horror’ [21] (p. 445) by bearing all the weight of human history17. As Arendt notes, while for the Greeks philosophy begins with thaumazein (wonder), today’s wonder, or better hope, is rooted in the experience of horror at what we humans are capable of. This horror serves as the blueprint for a future humanity. As she puts it, not ideals or divine grace but the unimaginable horror is ‘the preliminary condition for political philosophy’18 [21]. Loving the world as it is means confronting its bleakness head-on. Our only hope lies in facing the unimaginable horror of our time with unflinching resolve.

The following passage from her Denktagebuch may illustrate well what Arendt has in mind. She draws on Martin Heidegger, who misquotes Friedrich Hegel as saying that ‘a ripped stocking is better than a darned stocking’19 [22,23]. Arendt writes that: ‘Being ripped first makes noticeable the original unity. […] The stocking thus appears as a ‘living unity’ in the ripped stocking precisely then when it proves its uselessness for life.’ [24] (p. 21). I take this passage to illustrate what it means to love the world as it is. For it suggests that we see the unity (i.e., the common world) precisely at the moment when the world falls apart. Our expression of horror about the time in which we live is indicative of the fact that we have been deprived of something that is fundamental to us: our humanity. We express this when we feel despair, outrage and horror in the name of injustice. When we say “this should not be happening”, we feel this so deeply not because we have postulated some ideal but because of our inability, or rather refusal, to accept that we are doomed [24] (p. 10). Like the rip in the stocking, the horror manifests the fundamental unity—namely the realization that we are all members of a common humanity. This is why Arendt believes that history has taught us that the idea of humanity is no longer a regulative idea ‘but has today become an inescapable fact’ [15] (p. 298). It is a fact that discloses itself in the ripping, namely when times are dire. Like Walter Benjamin, Arendt seems to suggest that we should survey the rubble of the past to expose the lie of progress toward human liberation. The hope is that the shards of the past do not turn our hearts into stone but impel us to believe in a better future20 [25]. Only this expresses our “inalienable” right to have rights21 [15]. We feel the love for the world when we come face to face with its gaping wound in all its horrors. If we fail to recognize it and, indeed, flee the horror by seeking redemption in a transcendent world, our humanity is doomed.

3.2. Original Sin Versus Positive Solitarity

But the question remains. How can we love the world as it is if it is a world where we do not treat ourselves as distinct and equal? Indeed, how can we maintain our belief in a shared humanity in view of the fact that the world we live in is inhumane? Arendt admits: ‘[it becomes daily more difficult] to follow a non-imperialistic policy and maintain a non-racist faith […] because it becomes daily clearer how great a burden mankind is for man’ [21] (p. 131). The more horrendous the reality, the less we are willing to recognize that we are all part of humanity. Instead we prefer going the easier route and argue, ‘God be thanked, I am not like that.’ [21] (p. 132). In other words, we prefer to reject the idea that we are all responsible for the ills of humanity and argue instead that evil is intrinsic to a particular race or people. But Arendt insists that our only hope for the future of humanity lies in taking the burden upon ourselves. We can only move forward if take upon ourselves a shared and equal responsibility to ensure that the crimes committed in the past will not be committed in the future. We all share equally the burden of history. As she puts it: The only hope in humanity lies in sharing the ‘inescapable guilt of the human race’ [21] (p. 132).

At face value Arendt’s position may not sound so different to that of Augustine. Her position can be read as echoing Augustine’s view that we need to accept that humanity is inevitably stained by original sin. But Arendt rejects the doctrine of original sin. If we believe we are all stained by sin, there are only two responses we can give to the injustices we face, both of which are rejected by Arendt out of the fear that they would make us feel at home in the desert. One response to injustice is revenge. If violence is a necessary feature of the world, then we cannot but act according to it. For Arendt this cannot be the right response, since revenge merely perpetuates injustice. The alternative seems to be Christian forgiveness which is based on love. But Arendt believes such forgiveness equally perpetuates injustice and is nothing other than a mirror image of revenge [1] (I, 7, 11). The problem, as she sees it, is that the Christian understanding of forgiveness also accepts that violence is a necessary feature of the world. It is based on the Christian principle that we are all the same—we have all fallen and are “sinners”. In view of this, we are all capable of the same transgressions. It is only “for the sake of God” that we have been spared. When we say “I forgive you”, we actually mean “I forgive you because this could have been me were it not for the grace of God.” In other words, “I forgive you because we are all sinners.” Arendt thus believes that forgiveness operates on the same (reversed) logic as revenge. Revenge equally accepts that we are all fallen and thus ‘poisoned’ by a desire for revenge [1] (I, 1, 5). Both revenge and forgiveness are thus different sides of the same coin, they find their source in the idea of ‘original sin’ [1] (I, 1, 5). Arendt’s main concern is that they are reactionary forces; they do not make us change the world but express a ‘negative solidarity’, since they make us accept as a given that we are fallen and live in a desert [1] (I, 1, 6). This reflects Augustine’s conception of a shared humanity which expresses a form of negative solidarity. As Arendt observes, for Augustine, ‘Humanity’s common descent is its common share in original sin. This sinfulness, conferred with birth, necessarily attaches to everyone. There is no escape from it. It is the same in all people. The equality of the situation means that all are sinful. “The whole world was guilty from Adam.” [7] (p. 102).

Against this Arendt wants to articulate a positive solidarity, but this requires that we do not accept the concept of original sin. With regard to the atrocities that were ‘performed’ in Nazi Germany she thus observes that we need to hold those accountable who have willfully performed acts that led to those injustices, or omitted to perform acts that would have mitigated them. The question of forgiveness does not feature here. I think Arendt would be in agreement with Jürgen Habermas here who observed:

When sin became guilt something was lost. The desire for pardon is still associated with the unsentimental wish to undo the harm done to others. Even more disturbing to us is the irreversibility of past suffering. This injustice inflicted on maltreated innocents, the abused and the murdered exceeds any measure of human restitution. The lost hope of resurrection leaves in its wake a perceptible void. This is expressed in Horkheinmer’s legitimate skepsis towards Benjamin’s effusive hope in the healing power of ‘Eingedenken’ (remembrance) when he says: ‘Those killed are really killed’22 [26].

Indeed, Arendt is clear that guilt is a private affair23 [21]. The past cannot be undone and those who have committed crimes need to be held accountable.

But the past haunts us and sends a warning that has universal reach. On the political level there is no monopoly of guilt. As Arendt observes:

In political terms, the idea of humanity—excluding no people and assigning a monopoly of guilty to no-one, is the only guarantee that one ‘superior race’ after another may not feel obligated to follow the ‘natural law of the right of the powerful and exterminate ‘inferior races’ unworthy of survival; so that at the end of an imperialistic age we should find ourselves at a stage which would make the Nazis look like crude precursors of future political methods” [21] (p. 131).

Arend thus believes that the only hope is ‘Upon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of inescapable guilt of the human race.’ [21] (p. 132). Part of what it means to be human is to recognize our potentiality for barbarism. Rather than expecting the Germans to show remorse, we should ‘feel ashamed of being human.’ [21] (p. 131). After all, Arendt believes that ‘this elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities share with one another today, is what finally is left of our sense of international solidarity.’ [21] (p. 131). Only by sharing the shame with the Germans do we acknowledge that we still see ourselves as members of a common humanity. After all the violation of one (or a group of) person’s rights threatens our humanity, i.e., the political world.

This leads her to argue that a different form of forgiveness needs to be in place. As Arendt notes, the Greek word in the Gospels traditionally translated as “forgiveness” is aphienai. But ‘the original meaning of aphienai is “dismiss” and “release” rather than “forgive” 24 [3]. So when Arendt refers to forgiveness in this context, she does not seek to forgive perpetuators of crimes committed rather as Roger Berkowitz rightly observes forgiveness ‘is limited to the “constant mutual release” that allows men to continue to act in the world25 [3,27]. Forgiveness in other words is forward looking and concerned about the world. What is required is that we all equally come face to face with the horrors and injustices and thus equally share the unbearable responsibility of the human race no matter on what side of history we find ourselves. When we look into the future, it does not matter if we are descendants of victims or perpetuators. What matters instead is our shared love for the world, namely, for a world where such wrongs will not be repeated, neither to the victims and their descendants nor to any other member of humanity. In other words, we need to recognize the wrong as belonging to the shared world and not exclusively to the victims. For what has been violated is the idea of humanity itself. This is why there is no “monopoly of guilt.”

It is here where the novelty of Arendt’s thought comes to the fore. For Arendt tells us we can only reconcile (versöhnen) ourselves with the horrors of history if we are willing to share the burden of history, only this makes a shared humanity possible. New, and not uncontroversial, is Arendt’s claim that a positive solidarity cannot be achieved through forgiving each other’s sins since such forgiveness fosters inequality. When I say “I forgive you”, I am releasing you from the burden of your past. It is an act of generosity, a gift that I am giving to you. You are dependent on me as the only one that can thus release you. In acts of forgiveness, therefore, we are not treating each other as equal, because one group is seen as morally inferior, and indeed dependent, on the other.26

We can break the cycle if we are forward looking and recognize the collective task to create new humanity. This is possible only if the victim and the perpetrator are released from their particular burden of history and share the burden instead. It is then that we restore each other as persons in the public realm, namely as persons expressing our care for the world [1] (I, 1, 4–5). Only like this can we be equal and speak and act (in the public realm). This is what it means to express positive solidary. It is a solidarity that is forward looking: It is the recognition that we have an equal responsibility to deal with the injustices of history that have fallen upon us all [1] (I, 1, 4–5). Amor mundi thus expresses care for the world and the refusal to accept the desert.

The task is thus to deliberate and exchange with others on how we can ensure that the wrongs will not be repeated. Arendt believes that this task must be shared, no matter on what side of history we find ourselves. If we fail to share it, we see the burden of history as belonging to a particular group (the victims), and we lose sight of the fact that the crime is not only against a particular people, but also a crime against humanity, i.e., the world27 [20]. This is why Arendt objected to the fact that Eichmann was trialed in Israel. Her concern was that the Israelis pursued justice for the Jewish victims at the expense of humanity. To cite Arendt: ‘Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it.’ [5] (p. 269). “Never again” should not mean “never again for the victims and their descendants alone”, but never again for “anyone”. “Never again” means do not forget that we are all members of a shared humanity. It requires us to recognize that we live in a world where there is hate, friction, violence, disagreement and war, moreover a world where we do not necessarily all recognize each other us as members of a common humanity, a world indeed where people are capable for the most heinous crimes and the task is to navigate in such a world without forgetting that we are all humans28 [19].

Arendt thus recognizes that although the past cannot be undone, we have a duty to hope for a better future. This is why we have to duty to forgive: we have to reconcile ourselves with the horrors of history. It is only if we are willing to share the burden of history that a shared humanity is possible. The point is not that we should all share the guilt of the past, but that we must recognize our equal and shared responsibility for the future29 [1]. It is only by treating each other as equal that we can take an equal share in our effort to work toward a future that it is not marred by injustice. Arendt thus articulates a political “ought”. The onus is on each one of us to live and act as members of humanity for the sake of the world at large on whatever side of history we find ourselves. This is our only hope in dark times.

It is impossible not to miss the Kantian overtones. Like Kant, Arendt argues that as guardians of humanity, our judgments must never be partisan to a particular group or cause, nor driven by personal interest30. They must remain dispassionate and disinterested. We must act and judge, as Arendt famously puts it, “without a banister”31 [28]. For Arendt this means thinking and judging without loving thy neighbour—that is to say without allegiances, without being able to hold onto anything that can give us support, be it religious, moral or political ideals or, for that matter, family ties, communities, or nations32 [9,28]. This is what it means to ‘be concerned with the world as such and not with those who live in it’,33 [29] and only this makes a shared humanity possible.

4. Concluding Remark: Hope Without the Grace of God

While Arendt seems to articulate a form of Kantian universal cosmopolitanism which stipulates that we should act and judge not in name of the nation but the world at large, she is not stipulating regulative ideas that she felt were walking upon stilts. Rather, as we have shown, it is at times of utter hopelessness that we gain of glimmer of hope. To return to the image of the ripped stocking, our horror and outrage expresses the recognition of the wound that has been inflicted on what is fundamental to us all—or rather fundamental to human plurality: our common humanity34 [30]. The ripped stocking discloses our “elemental shame” [21] (p. 132) namely the realization that we are denying what is most fundamental to us all, the right to have rights35 [1]. We feel such shame when we feel judged and this happens only when we see the victims for what they are: members of a shared humanity.

Arendt is only too keenly aware that this is aspirational. There is no guarantee that we do recognize the wound as a wound or, for that matter, that we feel shame and recognize each other as members of a shared humanity36. Only too often, it is our fear or need of security and our love for a group or people that conceals the wound. So although Arendt argues that a shared humanity is no longer a regulative idea ‘but has today become an inescapable fact’ [15] (p. 298), she does realize that it can remain invisible. As she concedes, ‘the rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself’,37 [15] but it is ‘by no means certain whether this is possible’ [15] (p. 298).

The challenge lies in finding a principle of humanity that can serve as a new guarantor of human dignity. This principle cannot be derived from a world beyond us; its force must come from somewhere else. It has to come from us. And since we have learned that friendship alone is the enabling condition of the world, the only hope for humanity lies in fostering friendships. As Lessing says in Nathan the Wise, ‘we must, must be friends’ [Wir müssen, müssen Freunde sein!]’ [6] (p. 25) for the sake of the world. This does not require that we must love each other, but it does require us to love the world we share. We should not confuse this with an appeal to neighbourly love, compassion or fraternity, because what is at issue is far bigger, namely, our shared humanity. We thus have a duty to prove that the idea(l) of humanity is a fact [31,32]38. But this requires one thing which is the most difficult to achieve: to face the world for what it is in all its horror, only this will make us realize that what is at stake is not my well-being or security, but our humanity. This is what it means to love the world as it is, no matter how difficult this may prove to be.