World and alienation in Hannah Arendt’s

Abstract

This study presents an interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s reflection on man as a “being of the world” as well as the most general worldly conditions of human existence. By examining the untold totalitarian deworldlization, it aims at analyzing the extent to which Arendt critically reconsidered the pre-modern and modern “alienation”, distinctly expressed both in the conceptual scenario of the traditional political philosophy and in the history of hierarchical assortment of man’s most active and basic engagements (labor, work and action) and nonactive engagements (thinking) in the world. Alienation literally means a denial of the cosmos (mundus, in Latin), a degradation of everything which connects the human existence to the human world, or yet, a lack of balance in the full foundation and preservation of the world, and above all, of “the public side of the world”. The totalitarian regimes broke the line of Occidental History, pointing out the coming of a dim era in relation to the traditional philosophic legacy and brightening up the “trances of our times” still so much current in modern societies’ passage to the 21st century.

Keywords: Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism, action, thinking, science, technology, philosophy politics.