Notas sobre la relación entre el amor y el perdón en el pensamiento político de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

In 1953 Hannah Arendt affirmed that forgiveness is “[…] one of the biggest human capacities and may be the boldest of actions […]”. The explanation came fi ve years later, with The Human Condition (1958), Arendt’s great book about action. There she states that the fundamental value of forgiveness in public and political life was discovered and expressed by Jesus of Nazareth. This discorery was not recognized as such by the political thinking and, as a result, forgiveness is not institutionalized in the public area of human matters. Arendt is very much concerned about this secular value of forgiveness, but she finds a difficulty: in the texts of Judeo Christian tradition forgiveness is always linked to love and, for her, love is one of the biggest anti-political human forces. In order to rescue the political value of forgiveness and to institutionalize it in political life, she thinks it cannot remain linked to love in a causal way. In this work we intend to show some problems about the Arendtian conception of love as found in The Human Condition, and its links to forgiveness. However, forgiveness is praxis. Therefore, we will show in a preliminary moment the Arendtian conception of action in order to understand the condition of practice (praxis) of forgiveness, its practical eminency and its relevance in common life.