>>>>> "ChrisD(RJ)" wrote:
>>
>>
>> There is a Heideggerian basis of OT, but it is a negative one (if
>> you believe the thesis I was developing in my diss.). The
>> structure of totalitarian ideology she outlines in OT resembles
>> rather closely the structure of one of St. Augustine's
>> interpretations of love she mapped out in her dissertation
Chris,
Quite a coincidence. This is precisely the stuff I've been reviewing this week in the 2nd chapter of my diss. Specifically, Augustine's logic of love, Arendt's reading of Augustine's logic of love, and the Heideggerian features of that reading. (The chapter is devoted to Augustine, but I use Arendt's dissertation heavily.)
>From reading Civitas Dei, De doctrina, De beata vita, the Homilies,
and bits of De trinitate, I think it's clear that Arendt's point about
the social and political implications of Augustine's understanding of
love (particularly the split between caritas (rightly ordered love)
and cupiditas (wrongly ordered love, often translated as 'lust'), uti
(use) and frui (enjoyment)) was spot on. It applies generally to
Augustine's thought, to much of subsequent Christian thought, and that
it has in a modern, pluralistic setting profounding inegalitarian
implications.
(and
>> said was incapable of grounding social being, because it leads to
>> viewing other people only as use-objects),
I quibble a bit with Arendt's precise reading, but part of that difference reflects Augustine's own ambiguity; he had two sets of conceptual distinctions, cupiditas/caritas & uti/frui, and I'm not sure he ever worked them out coherently.
I put Arendt's point about use-objects in more Augustinian, less Heideggerian language: God is the only object that can be loved propter se, that is, for its own sake; anything else that can be loved properly at all can only be loved propter aliud, that is, with reference to God. And that because of the kind of object God is, uniquely. Any other object of love can be lost against one's will, which inevitably leads to one *fearing* its loss, to be anxious about possessing it, which destroy happiness (felicitas).
So while Augustine was constrained to endorse the religious obligation to love the neighbor and enemies, he could not mean that one may love them in the same sense one may love God, that is, they may not be loved for their own sake, they may not be desired intrinsicially. He has very tortured arguments in the Homilies which try to get around this, but they fail.
What this comes down to, politically and socially, which is very clear in City of God, is that love of neighbor becomes a kind of allegory of the Other; i.e., loving one's neighbor with reference to God just means, practically, proselytization; if one's neighbor is a Jew or Buddhist or atheist anarcho-syndicalist, the good Augustinian only loves the neighbor in order to see the neighbor converted to Christianity, in order to see the difference and otherness of the neighbor reduced to sameness, i.e., to *read the neighbor allegorically*.
The, in my view, very hateful Christian slogan, which is often deployed against gay men and lesbians specifically, "love the sinner, hate the sin" gains its political implications (and may well originate), as far as I can tell, with Augustine, in the Homilies, specifically in an argument in which he sounds for all the world like a fascist.
Despite all the talk of love, Augustine (and the parallels here to Stanley Fish's reading of Milton on toleration of Catholics are interesting) endorsed the use of imperial force against the Donatists, who were, after all, fellow Christians, because of their ecclesial schismaticizing.
"Love, and do what thou will", a very famous Augustinian bon mot, is finally, by our lights, a strongly authoritarian move. He says very explicitly in the Homilies that if one's intentions are proper, beating your slave to correct him, the use of force to compel social conformity or to end heretical movements is perfectly legitimate.
which, in its turn, is
>> suspiciously similar to certain aspects of the structure of
>> Dasein given in Being and Time.
Hmm, I haven't noticed that. Care to say more?
Best, Kendall Clark