Abstract :
Hannah Arendt’s works deal mostly with past political violences, particularly
those performed by Hitler’s regime in Germany in the tragedy of the Holocaust. In
Arendt’s view, violence has ruptured modern civilization. It has shattered all political
thoughts and moral judgments. However, it is surprising that Arendt still appeals to
human thinking to make sense of that kind of violence in order to prevent its recurrence.
Here she offers a wordly perspective of thinking that is based on neither traditional
political nor moral standards, but rather on the world and the action that takes place in
that world. Thinking about the world means being attentive to the world, the sort of
attentiveness which reveals our responsibility for the world. And in judging a political
action we should be aware of the great things that an action could bring to the world. In
other words, in judging we seek for the meaning which past events might have for
common life in the world. This is Arendt’s ethics of worldliness, understood as a way of
thinking about the man-made condition of human existence.
This dissertation takes Arendt’s emphasis on making sense of past wrongs and
proposes that her ethics of worldliness can shed light on the contemporary discourse on
political reconciliation. From the perspective of Arendt’s ethics, political reconciliation
can be formulated as the possibility of coming to terms with the givenness, which is the
world, understood as the condition of human existence that includes the horror of its
history. Recently, one way of promoting political reconciliation is through the
establishment of truth commissions whose central tasks are to discover the truth of the
past wrongs and to encourage forgiveness among the conflicting parties. These
objectives are expected to be attained through testimonies and public hearings where the
victims and perpetrators are given the opportunity to tell own stories about what had
happened.
The components of Arendt’s ethics, such as responsibility for the world and the
search for meaning are concretely manifested in her discussion of storytelling and
political forgiveness. The interesting point of Arendt’s notion of storytelling and
political forgiveness is that in telling such a story and eventually forgiving, victims and
perpetrators commonly assume the responsibility for the common world. Therefore, in
this dissertation I argue that Arendt’s constant discussion of storytelling and political
forgiveness in the light of responsibility for the world and the search for meaning of
action for the common world is the reason why her ideas are meaningful for political
reconciliation.