The Capacity to World: The Transcendental Ground of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of the Human

Abstract

For Hannah Arendt, loss of the world designates a full-scale dehumanization in which technology has infiltrated human life unfathomably. To humanize the world, Arendt looks to politics ‘with eyes unclouded by philosophy.’ Given her emphasis on the importance of political action for human life, the transcendental aspects of Arendt’s conception of the human tend to have been neglected. However, in this thesis, I show that we have not fully appreciated the meta dimension of the human in Arendt’s writings. To do this, I turn to her theoretical sources both from Martin Heidegger and Roman antiquity. Arendt’s indirect encounter with Heidegger’s project on metaphysics and hermeneutic phenomenology offers a refreshed glimpse at two concepts in Arendt’s thought, which are essential to her conception of the human, but are often taken for granted: polis and logos. Her direct engagement with Roman antiquity complicates but also allows us to see how she develops her conception of the human through two further concepts: amor mundi and auctoritas. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological interpretation of these concepts, I show how, for Arendt, human being is meta being with capacity to world beyond earthly and biological existence in pursuit some transcendental higher level of existence. To world is a particular human capacity in a double sense. First, as capability to love and speak, the capacity to world refers to the constitutive human ability such as creating the world into a lovable home by measuring, calculating, mapping, navigating, and legislating etc. with scientific precision, as well as establishing relationships with different worlds by initiating and acting with divergences, uncertainties, and ineffability, etc. Second, as carrier of polity and authority, the capacity to world refers to the potentiality of human capabilities to shine and immortalize, as well as ‘reservoir’ of space of appearance and space of remembrance necessary for its phenomenal and political existence because, as Heidegger suggests, human being is time and space. Thus, I explicate why and how, for Arendt, human existence itself is the capacity of confirmation of its own being.