Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys

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СКАЧАТЬ someone is and how this sense of Self is revealed is thus conditioned by Sorge, which is felt in the face of a death that is unavoidable. It is in terms of this “anxiety” that existence is experienced and that time can be made meaningful. Because Sorge is ontologically prior to the phenomena and practices of care that it facilitates, Heidegger suggests that the meaning of Dasein is to be found in care, whereby the essence of Being can be accessed with the structure of care that informs humankind’s entire experience of “Being-in-the-world.”

      Though Heidegger also theorizes the notion of “Being-with-others,” which forms a significant part of his understanding of “being-in-the-world,” I must underscore here that his phenomenology is rooted in a mode of being that is fundamentally “for-the-sake-of-itself.”⁶⁷ This is a conceptualization of care which is self-centric: “Dasein exists for the sake of a potentiality-for-Being of itself.”⁶⁸ According to Arendt, the “nature” of Heidegger’s “Dasein is not that it simply is but, rather, that in its being its primary concern [or care] is its being itself,” and thus that “care-taking has a genuinely self-reflective character.”⁶⁹ This is not to say that the Heideggerian approach is hedonistic or that Heidegger’s philosophy provides the conceptual framework for an ethic of egoism. Rather, my point is that Sorge is engendered in reference to one’s self and one’s death. For Arendt, it is this aspect of Heidegger’s “death-driven phenomenology”⁷⁰ —this self-reflective form of existing “for-the-sake-of” one’s “ownmost” potentiality—that she directly challenges when outlining her own understanding of the human condition.

      A Heideggerian, futurally focused conceptualization of “being-toward-death” is directly at odds with Arendt’s understanding of human existence, which is ontologically rooted in “natality—that is—the fact that [all people] have entered the world through birth.”⁷¹ Although the differences between Heidegger and Arendt’s work are considered more fully in subsequent chapters, it is important to emphasize here that an Arendtian conceptualization of care is world-centric, and Dasein is disclosed in the world among a plurality of people during the doing of political action. Thus, where Heidegger thinks about care in self-reflective terms and in Dasein’s relation to death, Arendt conceptualizes care as a worldly form of practice and Being as that which is disclosed publicly when one speaks and acts with one’s fellow beings. Commenting on Arendt’s doctoral dissertation entitled, Love and Saint Augustine, in which Arendt distances herself from Heidegger’s phenomenology for the first time, Joanna Scott and Judith Stark highlight how “Arendt proposes an alternative definition of care [. . .] central to its meaning is the possibility of ‘reconstituting’ relationships through friendship, forgiveness, and social bonding.”⁷² Building upon this conceptual foundation, I elaborate upon this Arendtian notion of care—arguably a type of “‘miracle’ possible despite death”⁷³ —in order to develop my theory of a caring cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. My work draws out the notion of care that Arendt alludes to throughout her corpus: that it is important to “care for the world,” as it is in the world that people—as she writes—“show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity.”⁷⁴ For Arendt, the answer to the Heideggerian question, “Who is Dasein?,” is revealed in the “world” and thus there is a need to care for spaces where worldly interactions can occur between people.

      Interwoven throughout her body of thought, Arendt’s notion of care can be understood in reference to other ideas, such as—for example—the idea of “culture.” Indeed, in Arendt’s conceptualization of “culture,” one can recognize the outlines of an Arendtian understanding of care:

      Culture, word and concept, is Roman in origin. The word “culture” derives from colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation.⁷⁵

      Arendt’s theorization of “culture” provides an insightful commentary upon links between culture and politics, yet I take from this passage only her conceptualization of “care,” which she relates to the notion of tending to and preserving the natural world. While her etymological exegesis of the word “culture” is associated with the natural world, or the earthly home that all creatures inhabit, this conceptualization is equally pertinent in terms of the non-natural, fabricated world(s) produced by people: the “space for politics.” This is an aspect of Arendt’s work that is examined throughout the remainder of this book. It is necessary here, however, to recognize that the “world” can be understood as a type of public dwelling place where a plurality of people can appear and act together, which—if adequately tended to or preserved—can become a public space fit for human habitation: a “common home”⁷⁶ for the people of a given sociopolitical community. Whereas a Heideggerian conceptualization suggests that—as Arendt observes about Heidegger’s work—the “fundamental fear of death is reflected [in] not-being-at-home in the world,”⁷⁷ which is the state of isolation that permits Dasein to be fully itself, an Arendtian account of care focuses on tending to and preserving this “common home.”

      Focused on plurality and natality, Arendt maintains that—in contrast to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Sorge—care ought to be rooted in a civic-minded form of “love for the world” (amor mundi). In other words, where Heidegger’s self-reflective, “death-driven” notion of Sorge is the “background condition for a variety of cases of caring,” Arendt’s conceptualization of care—specifically the one that she invokes when writing about “the political”—is rooted in a world-centric form of civic caritas that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests is understood as a love that “unites self and others.”⁷⁸ This is a non-erotic, non-agapic notion of love, one which is associated with the joy of being with and sharing the public realm with other people. These are individuals Arendt describes in terms of an Aristotelian notion of philia politike, whereby those with whom we must share the public realm of the political are understood as “civic friends” to be respected as people with equal standing in the “world.”⁷⁹ Caring for the world is thus not driven by a form of existential “anxiety” but by the love of acting publicly with one’s civic friends and of experiencing that which can only be manifested in the political when a plurality of distinct but equal people act in concert: freedom. Differentiating her work from that of Heidegger’s, then, Arendt claims that “care” should be practiced not out of concern for one’s death but, rather, in the spirit of amor mundi and a sense of gratitude for the possibility of freely beginning new courses of public action with other people in the “space for politics.” It is in these terms—amor mundi, plurality, and natality—that I develop my understanding of a caring forgiveness and cosmopolitanism throughout this book, “resuscitating” and reconsidering two ancient ideas from the perspective that there is a pressing need to think and act politically not simply for the sake of the Self but for the sake of the “world,” where all people can experience freedom and consequently where power can be re-engendered.

3. Book Structure

      The first chapter of this book examines the ideas of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism as they are found in Derrida’s work. He does not conceptualize these two ideas in relation to the notion of “care” nor does he assume an Arendtian conceptualization of “care for the world.” With his genealogical practice of deconstruction, however, Derrida cuts to the conceptual core of both the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, revealing the problems, pitfalls, and paradoxes inherent to the underlying logics of these two ideas. By identifying and isolating the issues and aporetic underpinnings which undergird these two concepts, his work effectively locates the boundaries inherent to the concepts of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism; these are the conceptual limits that this book seeks to rethink politically in terms of Arendt’s world-centric understanding of public care.

      Against the theoretical backdrop provided by Derrida’s deconstruction of forgiveness, the second chapter of this book conceptualizes СКАЧАТЬ