Ocalić to co się da. Witalistyczna interpretacja rozprawy doktorskiej Hanny Arendt pt. „O pojęciu miłości u Augustyna"
To redeem what could be redeemed. A vitalistic interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s doctoral thesis ‚On the concept of love in Augustine’.

Summary/Abstract: This article is a presentation of Hannah Arendt’s doctoral thesis published in 1929 and devoted to the notion of love in Augustine (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin). Its aim is to demonstrate the originality of Arendt’s work towards her major influence and object of criticism – the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Her concept of natality, derived from Augustinian thought, opposes to being-towards -death. This movement makes a different conception of subjectivity possible: Heideggerian egocentrism can be substituted by a plurality. Vitalism (as proposed by Agata Bielik-Robson) is noticeable in the interpretational efforts of Arendt and defends a particular subjectivity against dissolution of any kind into Wholeness. Simultaneously, a vision of a community is formed – the community of equals constructed thanks to the recognition of contingency in conditio humana. In other words, her argument overcomes claims to absolute freedom. Reflections from the “pretheological sphere” (Arendt) take the form of philosophical anthropology, crucial to subsequent Arendtian thought. Speculations concerning a notion of God are linked with the dissimilar approaches to a neighbor’s love. This is reflected in the problem of the constitution of dependent subjectivity, the main feature of which is a dialectically understood gratitude: the recognition of one’s dependence is a first step to overcoming it. It corresponds with a complicated attitude towards modernity far from simple resolutions: a sense of historicity builds a strategic position as a condition of successful emancipation.

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