Amor mundi, or “love of the world,” was the title Arendt wanted for The Human Condition. In an August 6, 1955 letter to Karl Jaspers, her teacher and friend, she said:
I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory ‘Amor Mundi.’
Within this statement there is a recognition and reckoning with the events of the past. What does it mean to love the world in face of such great loss? [. . .] It’s a promise of continued existence, a way of not resigning from the world when the world seems too unbearable to live in.
For political theorist Ella Myers, amor mundi provides inspiration for a feminist account of political caring. Political care can promote social justice and a thriving, inclusive democracy.
Amor mundi as political care for worldly things
Myers states:
As I read it, the phrase [amor mundi] is meant to describe an emotional investment in and deep affection for something other than human selves, namely, for the complex, extrasubjective ‘web’ that constitutes the conditions of our lives (87).
However, for Myers, caring for the world isn’t only an emotional investment. It also describes a political practice that centers on worldly things (as opposed to personal relationships). This phrase “worldly thing” is a technical term which she develops from the thought of Arendt and another teacher of Arendt’s, Martin Heidegger.
In The Human Condition, Arendt describes “the world” as the home for humanity. In addition, it is that which “is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it” (p. 52). As a common space, the world brings people together, and it also separates them. People are separate insofar as each has a particular location within the world and a unique perspective.
In his essay “The Thing,” Heidegger points out that “thing” originally referred to “a gathering, andspecifically a gathering to deliberate a matter under discussion, a contested matter” (qtd. In Myers p. 92). The sense of the thing as a gathering evolved into the subject of a gathering.
Bringing these two ideas together, Myers defines a worldly thing as a matter of public concern. Importantly, worldly things are open to multiple meanings that do not have to be shared for the worldly thing to be the object of joint political action.
Caring for the world as world
Not all political action around a worldly thing constitutes care for the world. Myers argues that caring for the world as world has two dimensions which relate to Arendt’s dual definitions of world mentioned above.
- The world is the home for humanity: For Myers, to care for the world as the home for humanity is to ensure that all people have their basic needs met.
- The world is what brings people together and separates them: Myers argues that caring for the world means that we (members of a political community) make space for people to be able to contribute to our shared political lives. We implement practices and build institutions that are inclusive for everyone’s participation.
These two dimensions of caring for the world may support each other, but they are not necessarily connected.
Where is care for community?
For Myers, it is important to distinguish between different types of caring relationships: care for the self, care for others, and political care. And yet, I am curious about whether Myers could have a more developed account of where care for community fits. Is caring for community a mode of caring for others? Or is it caring for the world?
Community as world
For Arendt, community is part of the world. To care for the world is to care for community. Community also emerges from political action. In other words, caring for the world creates new communities.
And yet, there is some sense of community that need not capture the emergent communities of political action. As I follow various political actions, I often hear people (e.g., anti-racism educators, Black Lives Matter activists, Indigenous land defenders, disability activists) say that they are engaging in that work for the sake of their communities. Their actions are aimed at making the world a home, aligning with the first mode of caring for the world as world. But it is not a home for “humanity” at large but for their communities. Such communities have been ignored, under-served, exploited, or subjugated by dominant oppressive structures, such as White supremacy.
Myers is skeptical about identity politics, or politics that organized around a shared identity. I will bracket this concern for now, as I don’t think that movements for Black lives, or Indigenous sovereignty, or other movements for social justice necessarily replicate the kinds of worries about group identity common in critiques of identity politics. Revisionary accounts of identity politics emphasize communities are diverse, heterogenous, and dynamic.
Community and communities
Myers does not discuss specific communities as a sub-set of the world, as a gathering that might be in-between interpersonal and worldly relations. I speculate that Myers does not explicitly address this for two reasons. One is to avoid a mode of identity politics or solidarity through association. Myers argues that theorists such as Joan Tronto fail to ignore differences between care in interpersonal relationships and political care. Thus, she may find care for community to be another muddled form of collapsing care into an interpersonal model.
The second is because Arendt does not take up this question. As Arendt admits in a letter to Gershom Scholem, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective. . . I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”
And yet, there seems to be room for care for community in Myers’ account of love for the world. (There likely is for Arendt too, who was politicized by the Nazi’s oppression of Jewish people and the world’s lack of concern for Jewish life.) By “care for community” I mean that there seems to be room for a community, as well as the world, to be the recipient of care.
No Más Muertes/No More Deaths
Consider one of Myers’ examples of caring the world: No Más Muertes/No More Deaths, the Arizona based organization working to prevent migrant deaths along the border with Mexico. As Myers states, “Members of No Más Muertes exhibit their love for the world by simultaneously seeking to transform the material conditions faced by people in the border region and by generating new forms of democratic power” (137).
Myers is right that members of No Más Muertes do not share an identity. After all, the group was formed as a coalition between various faith and community groups. And yet, I wonder whether someone might take up work with No Más Muertes as an expression of care for their (identity-based) community.
Multiple worlds and multiple tables
Mariana Ortega, bringing together the thought of Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Heidegger, points out that there is not just one shared world. Rather, people inhabit multiple worlds and sometimes dwell in-between worlds. Ortega describes herself as inhabiting many different worlds, some of which overlap, including the Latinx world, academic world, queer Latina world, and Nicaraguan world. These worlds are not necessarily fixed, nor are the people who shared these worlds homogenously constituted. However, the idea of multiple worlds helps illustrate how complex identity is.
The multiplicity of worlds invites me to rethink Myers’ table analogy for caring for the world. When Myers describes caring for worldly things, she modifies Arendt’s metaphor of the table as that which brings people together, but around which we maintain our unique and individual positions. In Myers’ version, a worldly thing is akin to a table. There are multiple tables, or multiple sites around which democratic action focuses.
Because these tables are open to multiple and contested meanings, Myers might say that a democratic actor can bring multiple meanings to a particular table. But I also think it makes sense, following Ortega, to think of some tables as belonging to particular worlds (that not everyone may have access to). A person’s action may relate to both that table and another at the same time; the worldly thing may actually be a grouping of tables. Or perhaps, some tables are reserved for certain communities relating to a particular worldly think, and other tables for broader coalitions around that worldly thing.
Caring for community as caring for the world
Acknowledging the multiplicity of worlds might enrich an Arendtian account of political caring. Although feminist skepticism of identity politics is well-warranted, for Ortega (citing Kimberlé Crenshaw) it is equally worrisome to reject identity as an important site of political organizing, especially since it has been central to Black and Latinx feminists. In other words, communities can be the recipient of worldly care, in addition to worldly things. In this sense, care for the world and for worldly things can encompass care for communities.
Credit
Photo by Elizabeth Botté, retrieved from the United Nations COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub.