Hannah Arendt on Humanity and Dehumanization: An Interpretation based on Arendt's Dissertation of Augustine

Human dignity and humanity are central concerns in Hannah Arendt's political thought. For Arendt, human dignity is understood as the potentialities or capabilities of human beings manifested with fellow human beings acting in concert. Humanity is not an abstract concept but closely linked with human solidarity and the reality of the common world. Since most scholarly attentions are given to Arendt's phenomenological theory contained in The Human Condition, and those interpretations tend to ignore resources of her thought from Christian tradition, Arendt's original sustained vision about humanity has not received enough importance. By going back to these sources in her 1929 dissertation on Augustine, this article will provide an interpretation of secular humanism in Hannah Arendt, which has been obscured, by its phenomenological and political interpretation. The paper consists in three parts. In the first part, Arendt's concern with fellow human beings is clarified from the problem of neighborly love proposed in her dissertation. In the second section, the meanings of her "love of the world" or amor mundi are explored in the dissertation. In the third part, this article will argue that one of the consequences of this interpretation based on her Augustine dissertation, is to give her famous characterization of Eichmann as "banal" more light than heat.