From Love to Worldliness: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Abstract

Hannah Arendt wrote that a passionate love “for a single one” can result in a “totalitarianism for two.”1 What Arendt means here is that the lovers’ crime of passion lies in obliterating the world around and in-between them. Indeed, love can obliterate worldliness but its experience can also contribute to co-creation in the world and such world-making sometimes outlasts the love-making. Experience of love can put an end to the individual autonomy of two lovers and shrink their worlds, or on the contrary, carve a new unpredictable “third space” that is never the sum of the two. “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard in The Diary of the Seducer, suggesting that one’s own imagination is the most powerful aphrodisiac.2 (I am afraid many of my fellow-scholars would concur with that statement). I will examine one particular possibility in the relationship between love and freedom of the other, and explore how the break of romantic passion can give birth to a form of passionate thinking, understanding of differences, and public imagination that lies at the foundation of a ‘common world.’ Arendt’s conception of the ‘common world’ seems particularly timely today. She realized its fra1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958: 242. For a discussion of Arendt’s theory of freedom, see Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2010.