A ontologia política de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Seeking a more global as well as historical and philosophically situated understanding of the thought of the German philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, this thesis investigates the paths through which the author undertakes in her work, in a consistent movement of critical appropriation of the central theses that shape the contemporary philosophical traditions that helped in making of her a thinker, a philosophical turn of great ontological consequences. We have, therefore, as a general objective, to make explicit how Arendt, starting from the contemporary intersection between the phenomenological, existentialist and hermeneutic traditions, conceives a fundamentally political ontology, inserting the category of plurality, central to her thought, within philosophical thinking, so as to implode its traditional foundations. More than a regional ontology of the political dimension of human existence, what Hannah Arendt puts forward is a philosophy based on a notion of Being always constituted from plurality as a fundamental ontological condition of human existence. In this sense, we will try, from the outset, to find the ontological and methodological core of Arendt's thought in its relationship with the thought of authors such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others. Starting, then, from such a radical theoretical contextualization, we will seek, centrally, first, to conceive the properly Arendtian way of phenomenologically describing the world that, in its daily actualization, human existence, so to speak, opens up for itself. From there, taking as a touchstone the important Arendtian distinction between truth and meaning, we will propose a systematizing interpretation of the core of Arendtian ontology around the understanding of the structural articulations of the phenomenal world and the human dynamics of meaning donation. Finally, an effort will be made to understand and bring to light, in an indicative way, the deep relationships between this radically philosophical-ontological scenario and the more well-known and widely studied, although with often divergent results, thema of Arendtian political thought. In this process, will emerge the contours of a philosophical normativity, present in Arendt's thought will, that points to an understanding of democracy as an ontologically grounded imperative of human existence.