Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

"Arendt, Augustine, and Evil," Grumett - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Arendt: "The law of sin is the force of habit" (157)
  - - - Friends = "a substitute for God" (158)
        
        Such friendship = "a symptom and source of human sin" (158)
  - - - How? "The fact that inordinate desire rules the mind is itself no small punishment" (Augustine, qtd. 159)
        
        "Because 'only its will and free choice can make the mind a companion of cupidity' (ibid.), one's punishment is 'that which human beings do to their own injury' because, even when they are sinning against God, 'their wicked actions are against their own souls'" (159)
        
        "[Augustine's] thesis is that nothing is guided by God purely externally without at the same time being guided internally" (159)
- - - - "For Arendt, Eichmann has excluded himself from the natural human and moral order - Augustine's ordo - completely and irreversibly, and brought his end upon himself" (161)
- - - - Role of "intellect" = "safeguard for factual truth" (162)
      - Role of "non-intellectual branch of thought" = end meaning, not truth (162)
      - "Arendt appropriates the Platonic concept of thinking as a silent dialogue with oneself, according to which thinking requires self-integrity" (162)
        
        "Since thinking is the silent dialogue carried on between me and myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact; for otherwise I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether" (Arendt, qtd. 162-163)
        
        "Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home" (Arendt, qtd. 163)
      - Augustine: knowledge of good and evil no longer fully recoverable due to imperfect of human wills (163)
        
        Arendt: "if there is anything in thinking that can protect men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its object" (qtd. 163)
        
        "The denial of thinking as a dialogue between equal partners in the soul leads directly to the denial of human equality in sinfulness and thus to the disordering of human social life" (163)
  - - - Why? "only the will... 'unites the mind's inwardness to the outside world' and thus for Arendt as for Augustine 'the will indeed partakes in the very act of cognition'" (Arendt, qtd. 164)
        
        Will "preserves" truth; is therefore pre-political
        
        "The will, as both Roman voluntas and specifically Augustinian velle, unifies the different faculties of the mind and unites them with the outside world. Willing is thus not confined to issues of personal morality but occurs within relationships of power and even of violence" (166)
        
        "The banality of evil" = "the misdirection of human free will from higher to lower goods, from caritas to cupiditas" (167)
    - - "All striving after knowledge is linked to caritas, which is the turning of the human will (velle) from temporal goods to God. Morality is for neither Arendt nor Augustine only an epistemological problem but one of human love and human will. Morally good actions and moral responsibility require a good velle" (164)