Amor Mundi and Saving the Circumstance: Loving a technoscientific world according to José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt were two thinkers influenced by the phenomenological tradition for whom worldly experiences within a specific circumstance were essential to what it means to be human. This article, first, examines Arendt’s ‘amor mundi’ and Ortega’s ‘salvation of circumstance’. It then moves on to investigate some of Ortega y Gasset’s and Arendt’s notions about science, technology, and the concomitant bureaucratization and technocratization of the world, discussing love for the world within an increasingly technologically-mediated.