Action, Love, and the World: An Inquiry Into the Political Relevance of Christian Charity (With Constant Reference to Hannah Arendt)
Authors
Tebbutt, AndrewAdvisors
Kuipers, Ronald A.Affiliation
Institute for Christian StudiesIssue Date
2013-03-21Keywords
Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975. Human condition
Sociology
Charity
Marion, Jean-Luc, 1946-
Phenomenology
Christian sociology
Christianity and politics
Philosophy and religion
Love
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt identifies the central principle that has defined Christian communities since their earliest appearance as “worldlessness.” On Arendt’s analysis, Christianity has always tended to found relations between people on charity, a virtue that, due to its affiliation with the anti-political experience of passionate love, is incapable of serving as the basis of any public realm or common political world. This thesis aims to reconcile the virtue of charity to Arendt’s political vision on the basis of a reconsideration of love’s “worldlessness.” In the first two chapters, I characterize Arendt as a political thinker and provide an account of her ideas of political action and the common world. In the third chapter, I place Arendt’s understanding of the world in dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological account of charity, which dissociates charity from the idea of passion and presents it as an act of will through which one resolves to see past the simple objectivity of the world and to perceive the invisible “flesh” or personhood of others. Charity is “worldless”—and thus crucial to an Arendtian understanding of politics—in the sense that it looks beyond what the world automatically makes present in order to “see” the other person and to invite her voice into the common world of speech and action.Publisher
Institute for Christian StudiesType
ThesisLanguage
enRights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Rights holder
This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner.Degree Title
Master of Arts (Philosophy)Collections
The following license files are associated with this item:
- Creative Commons
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License