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Hannah Arendt's Moral Ontology: Comments on D avid Luban's Arendt on the Crime of Crimes
Author(s) -
Coutinho Luís Pereira
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
ratio juris
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1467-9337
pISSN - 0952-1917
DOI - 10.1111/raju.12085
Subject(s) - persecution , the imaginary , politics , framing (construction) , dignity , context (archaeology) , humanity , sociology , philosophy , psychoanalysis , epistemology , theology , law , psychology , political science , paleontology , structural engineering , biology , engineering
D avid L uban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality—or realities—that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” —an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of E ichmann— A rendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”