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 --------------------------- I'm also addressing Carrol's question.
I have to go throw a time warp back to the time I was writing my dissertation to deal with this subject, as I haven't thought about in a long time, so I might muddle things up a bit.
In her dissertation, Arendt identifies three types of love Augustine used in his attempts to ground love of neighbor in experience. These are; love understood as based on a relation to one's own end (salvation), on a relation to one's origin (as created being) and on being part of a community with a shared history (those born of Adam and Eve). She argues that the first two paradigms fail to actually ground a concept of social togetherness due to the inherent limitations of the experience Augustine uses as a model. I focussed on the first concept of love.
In that understanding of love, Augustine uses the Plotinian paradigm; love is a desire to fully be, to fully realize one's essence; it is a form of acquisitive lust. Love is a desire to possess what will complete you. Being a Christian, Augustine equates full being with salvation, which is the only unqualified good. All other goods are objects of use (uti) which possess what good they do only to the extent that they help one achieve what is good in itself, eternal life. (As in when Augustine says that hymns are dangerous because their aesthetic beauty may distract one from their true purpose, which is meditating on God.) The essence of sin lies in mistaking use-objects -- and the class of these includes everything on earth -- for things that are good in themselves. This fails to ground social togetherness for the obvious reason that it reduces all other people to the status of tools in the individual's quest for salvation. Nothing can get into the little solipsistic bubble of the individual's obsession with salvation.
I took this as an oblique criticism of Heidegger's "existential solipsism." In H, things are first and foremost given to Dasein as beings understood as existing for-the-sake-of Dasein's ultimate project, which is determined by Dasein's orientation toward its own death. It is a world of things which are understood in relation to oneself and one's own temporal end -- very close to the Augustinian paradigm. (H. of course talks about the primordial givenness of social relations too, something Arendt picked up a lot on later, but he doesn't dwell on how this is to be reconciled with the rest of the analysis, which has reductive implications.)
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, of course, what characterizes totalitarianism and distinguishes it from run-of-the-mill dictatorship or tyranny is that it understands everything not rationally but solely in terms of its ideology, which is future-directed (End of History, victory of the Master Race) and instrumentalist (in the sense that everything is seen only as means of reaching the final goal).
BTW, the influence of Protestant theology on the early Heidegger tends to get understated. He was reading Luther's collected works vociferously in the years prior to Being and Time. Also BTW, I think Augustine was a tremendous creep, celebrating the persecution on the Donatists and mocking Pelagius' weight problem and all.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal