Giving up on knowing and loving oneself: Anders Nygren, Hannah Arendt, and Augustine

Abstract

Anders Nygren’s and Hannah Arendt’s critical reading of Augustine’s concept of love had its point of departure in a fundamental skepticism towards the possibility of knowing oneself. Nygren defended the need to give up the search for the ego in order to enter a fellowship with God, whereas Arendt’s turn toward the world necessitated a critical evaluation of self-love and the search for inner motivations for action in a unified self. Arendt’s solution in particular suggests that the fate of the tradition of gnothi seauton was to surrender to the new discourse on identity that effectively turned Augustine’s question of himself from a puzzle solved by inwardness into a question of performance and encounters with others.