Natality and amor mundi: on the relation between education and politics in Hannah Arendt

• Autor(a) principal: Correia, Adriano
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Educação e Pesquisa
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ep/article/view/28264
• topic: Natalidade; Amor mundi; Educação; Política; Natality; Amor mundi; Education; Politics

In the present article we want to examine the articulations between Hannah Arendt's essay "The crisis in education" and central themes of her political thought, such as natality, the foreigner in the world condition, the love of the world (amor mundi), the political action, and the crisis of the modern era. The central objective here is, on the one hand, to emphasize how much that time-situated essay integrates harmoniously within her political thinking and, on the other hand, to highlight the classical vigor of her analysis. To Hannah Arendt, the essence of education is natality, that is, the fact that new individuals constantly arrive into the world as foreigners, to whom the invitation to feel at home must be made. Theses foreigners in a world in constant change are capable of initiating new events, without which the very preservation of the world would be in question. The education of youngsters must deal with the paradox of acquainting the newcomers with the old world that precedes them, without at the same time accommodating them entirely to the point that the novelty of their appearance would be suffocated, putting at risk the preservation of the world itself, which requires constant zeal and renovation. Notwithstanding the difficulty of mediation, Arendt believes that education must be, first and foremost, guided by the responsibility for the world, which translates both into its introduction to the newcomers and into the preservation of novelty in them.