Jennifer Gaffney
Introduction
There is perhaps no limit to what one can say about the complexity and depth of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and her mentor Martin Heidegger. Indeed, so much has already been said that it would be imprudent to attempt here to give a comprehensive account of the ways in which they changed, motivated, challenged, and resisted each other over the course of their respective careers.1 My aim instead will simply be to highlight several aspects of their intellectual relationship that I consider crucial if we are to understand the importance of Arendt’s critical appropriation of Heidegger’s project. In so doing, I do not wish to treat as inconsequential or even distinguishable the robust and varied threads of their relationship, but instead to bring into focus the contribution that Arendt makes to deepening and challenging the stakes of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology for understanding our communal and political relations in the modern world. Heidegger’s political, ethical, and personal failures, manifest above all in his support of the Nazi Party at the beginning of the 1930s, have cast a dark shadow over this relationship, leading many to attempt to distance Arendt from the influence of her predecessor.2 Yet, I wish to suggest that it is precisely in Arendt’s refusal to assume this distance herself, to remain in conversation with Heidegger’s project even during long periods of silence between them, that enables her to ask one of the greatest and most pressing questions of the twentieth century: How is it that not only thoughtlessness but also thinking can be an accomplice to totalitarianism?
Encountering Heidegger
Arendt first met Heidegger just after her eighteenth birthday when she arrived in Marburg to attend his 1924–25 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist.3 By this point, Heidegger had acquired a reputation throughout Germany for reawakening the most ancient and meaningful questions and for teaching his students how to think.4 Looking back on her experience of this period on the occasion of Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, Arendt says:
The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: thinking has come to life again. . . . We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.5
Heidegger’s students, who, in addition to Arendt, included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacob Klein, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, and Emmanuel Levinas, were understandably taken with his concern for envisioning the task of thinking anew. Advancing the phenomenological insights of his predecessor, Edmund Husserl, beyond the confines of modern epistemology, Heidegger promised to attain the things that Husserl sought in his famous proclamation, “Back to the things themselves!”6 Heidegger made clear, too, that the concern for these “things” was not merely an academic matter, but a concern of thinking men, a concern not just of yesterday or today, but one that constitutes an enduring and timeless dimension of being human.7
This period was, for Heidegger, perhaps the most creative and decisive of his career. In 1919, he began giving a series of lecture courses in Freiburg and Marburg that would provide the basis for his 1927 masterwork, Being and Time.8 Among the most notable of these was the 1924–25 winter semester lecture course that Arendt attended on Plato’s Sophist. As Jacques Taminiaux explains, Heidegger was able to underscore in this lecture course his central argument in Being and Time that “philosophy in its cardinal form, which is metaphysics, is not a doctrine, but rather a form of existence.”9 With this, Heidegger outlines the existential structure of the human being or Dasein as being-in-the-world, developing the implications of this in his discourse on the Greek conception of truth as alethēia or unconcealment in order to give contour to his radical claim that truth is “a determination of the being of Dasein itself.”10
Heidegger begins his inquiry into Plato in this lecture course by first examining Aristotle’s designation of phronēsis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics as the apex of practical life and as a mode in which the human being grasps the truth.11 From this, Heidegger determines that truth is not a fixed property of objects but rather something that comes to appear upon being uncovered or discovered through our effort to interpret the meaningfulness of the world so that we might find a home in it.12 Human beings are thus concerned or worried about the world they have inherited, and it is this concern or worry—what Heidegger ultimately calls care (Sorge)—that allows truth to appear. This lecture course thus sets the stage for Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that Dasein’s relation to the world is never indifferent or passive. Instead, insofar as being-in means dwelling, being amid, and being together with the things in the world, Heidegger suggests that Dasein is primordially concerned about the things and others with which it is involved.13 Heidegger’s early articulation of his existential analytic of Dasein as being-in-the-world thus made a decisive intervention in the tradition of Western metaphysics, de-centering the isolated modern subject, while bringing into view the fact that human existence cannot be thought apart from its relation to the world and others.14
These insights remain central to Arendt’s corpus throughout. Yet, Arendt also identifies in these early years Heidegger’s inability to fully grasp the political and communal implications of his early formulation of the project of fundamental ontology. While Heidegger’s interpretation of phronēsis in his 1924–25 lecture course forms the basis for his notion of authenticity in Being and Time, the political significance of this concept—or the fact that phronēsis concerns praxis or action in political life—falls away in subsequent works. In placing being-toward-death at the center of his analysis, Heidegger poses his notion of authenticity in Being and Time in direct opposition to Dasein’s engagement in the world, equating Dasein’s publicly interpreted self with the “they-self” or the leveled down, average everydayness of inauthentic Dasein.15 With this, he stresses that authenticity reaches its apex through the accomplishment of a certain kind of relation to the self, one that takes shape at a distance from Dasein’s normal course of existence as being-in-the-world. As we shall see, Arendt perceives these aspects of Heidegger’s project to be a betrayal of the very interrelatedness that he so radically insists is constitutive of human existence.16 Moreover, while Heidegger undertakes a destruction of the tradition of Western metaphysics by developing a “this-worldly philosophy,” Arendt will suggest that he ultimately reaffirms this tradition by implicating himself in a philosophical prejudice against praxis that has been central to Western metaphysics since Plato.17
Disavowing Heidegger
Arendt left Marburg in 1925, traveling first to Freiburg to study with Husserl and then to Heidelberg in 1926, where she completed her dissertation, “Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin,” under the direction of Karl Jaspers in 1929.18 Though her engagement with Jaspers proved crucial for the trajectory of her thinking, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is far from absent in Arendt’s early philosophical writings. As Roy Tsao explains, “[‘Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin’] attests to Heidegger’s influence on every page . . . the questions posed, the inferences drawn, and the distinctions insisted upon all lie within the ambit of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, and conform with exactitude to its protocols.”19 Yet, even in these early years, Arendt’s work is distinguished not just by its proximity to Heidegger’s project but also by Arendt’s critical approach to it. Drawing on Augustine’s notion of love or caritas, Arendt sets out in her dissertation to put into relief the importance of the neighborhood or community for understanding human existence.20 In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the self in his existential analytic of Dasein, we find that Arendt is already thinking in 1929 about the importance of world and the plurality that she believes constitutes it. Beyond this, she takes very early steps toward the development of the concept of birth for understanding the human condition, offering an early but decisive counterpoint to Heidegger’s prioritization of death in Being and Time.21 This, in turn, opens a space for her to begin thinking about our communal relations and responsibilities in ways that appear to remain unfilled in Heidegger’s project. This early work thus offers an important and early example of Arendt’s effort to think both with and against Heidegger; it illustrates the keen critical edge of her own interpretation of his project along with her acknowledgment of the importance of his project for envisioning the task of thinking anew.22
While Arendt was entrenched in this early work in the philosophical discourses she had engaged with Heidegger and Jaspers, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 provoked a decisive shift in her thinking. She identifies February 27, 1933—the day the Reichstag was burned—as the definitive event in her memory that dated her turn toward the political.23 Reflecting on this period in her acclaimed 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, she says:
The year 1933 made a lasting impression on me. . . . The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies might be doing, but what our friends were doing. This wave of cooperation . . . made you feel surrounded by an empty space, isolated. . . . I came to the conclusion that cooperation was, so to speak, the rule among intellectuals, but not among others. And I have never forgotten that.24
Upon witnessing the illegal arrests of people, who, under the guise of protective custody, were sent to Gestapo cellars and concentration camps, Arendt decided that “indifference was no longer possible” and, for a time, resolved to disavow the intellectual tradition and profession within which she had been raised.25 Upon being forced to flee Germany in 1933 and becoming a stateless person for a period that would last eighteen years, Arendt resolved to resist all forms of worldless contemplation, leading her to develop a project that emphasized political judgment, action, and communal responsibility.
It was, of course, in April of the same year that Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University, and, only days later, on May 1, 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. Though there is much to be said about Arendt’s response to Heidegger’s decision, it is significant for our purposes that she makes a definitive gesture during this period, not merely against Heidegger the person, but against Heidegger the thinker, identifying the seeds of his political failings in his formulation of the project of fundamental ontology. We see this, for instance, in Arendt’s 1943 essay, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” where she argues that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein devolves from a being that is constituted by being-in-the-world to an isolated self whose “absolute self-ness” makes its relation to the world and others irrelevant. She insists, too, that Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death” motivates the self-oriented Dasein that emerges in Being and Time, arguing that Dasein’s anticipatory resoluteness offers “the opportunity to devote myself exclusively to being-a-Self . . . and to free myself once and for all from the world that entangles me.”26 And yet, as she explains, “Dasein could be truly itself only if it could pull back from its being-in-the-world into itself, but that is what its nature can never permit it to do.”27
While Heidegger recognizes this problem, Arendt argues that he is led by it to draw on concepts such as “folk” and “earth” in order to “supply his isolated Selves with a shared, common ground to stand on.”28 As she explains:
Concepts of that kind can only lead us out of philosophy and into some kind of nature-oriented superstition. If it does not belong to the concept of man that he inhabits the earth together with others of his kind, then all that remains for him is a mechanical reconciliation by which the atomized Selves are provided with a common ground that is essentially alien to their nature. All that can result from that is the organization of these Selves intent only on themselves into an Over-self in order somehow to effect a transition from resolutely accepted guilt to action.29
It is no surprise that the language in this passage resonates with the language of atomization and isolation that she uses to describe the vulnerability of modern mass society to totalitarianism in many of her essays throughout the 1940s, no less than in her seminal 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Upon finding themselves homeless and uprooted with “no place in the world recognized or guaranteed by others,” Arendt argues that these masses become willing to surrender to the delusional fellowship promised by totalitarianism and the “suicidal escape” that it affords.30 This phase in Arendt’s thinking thus marks a clear and decisive gesture against Heidegger’s project. A period in which she devotes herself primarily to political questions, her critique of Heidegger is marked not just by her efforts to move beyond his project but also by her emphasis on the dangers and limits of this kind of thinking for the modern world.
Reconciling with Heidegger
In 1949, two years before receiving her US citizenship, Arendt returned to Germany for the first time since her departure in 1933. During this visit, she met with Heidegger, and, as Roger Berkowitz argues, this meeting set in motion another decisive phase in her thinking.31 While her concern for the vulnerability of the modern masses to totalitarianism remained very much at work in her writings from the war period on, Berkowitz insists that a new insight emerges from the conversation they had during this meeting concerning the notion of reconciliation.32 Whereas Heidegger had emphasized the theme of guilt in his existential analytic of Dasein, Arendt takes this concept, and the Christian notion of forgiveness on which it is predicated, to be destructive of the political. Whereas guilt gives wrongful acts permanence and continuity in the world, and forgiveness forgets these wrongs altogether, reconciliation, Arendt suggests, offers a worldly and political alternative to both, creating the possibility for reestablishing solidarity within political communities without forgetting what has been done. In this, Berkowitz says, “The challenge of reconciliation is to love the world as it is, that is, as potentially irreconcilable and inclusive of evil.”33 As Berkowitz argues, this concern for conceiving of reconciliation in terms of love of the world remains central to Arendt’s corpus from this point on and, he says, “Heidegger is a silent partner in Arendt’s life-long reflection on reconciliation.”34
This concern comes into view perhaps most notably in her 1958 work, The Human Condition, where she sets before us the task of loving the world, conceiving of this task as a decidedly political one. To be sure, Heidegger remains in the background of this project. As Arendt explains in the note that she included with the German edition of The Human Condition that she sent to Heidegger:
You will see that the book does not contain a dedication. If things had ever worked out between us—and I mean between, that is, neither you nor me—I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect. As things are, I did not think it was possible, but I wanted at least to mention the bare fact to you in one way or another.35
Yet, Arendt’s original and critical insights into his project enable her to conceive of an alternative interpretation of authentic communal life that Heidegger, in his disavowal of the political, is never able to articulate. It is in this work that Arendt gives a clear articulation to her notions of natality and plurality, concepts that displace Heidegger’s emphasis on death and the self by illustrating that each newcomer who enters the world is at once irreducibly singular while at the same time irrevocably embedded within the fabric of communal life. In this, she insists that there is no self without the relations that constitute it and no disclosure without the political—what she calls the “space of appearance”—where I appear to others as they appear to me, not as endlessness reproducible entities but as radically unique and capable of acting against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and probability. Arendt thus remains committed to Heidegger’s claim that the world is something from which we can never hide; yet, she takes a step beyond Heidegger by insisting that it is precisely in virtue of this that the world is something for which we are always already responsible. She thus interprets the stakes of human finitude in terms of care of the world rather than the self, and conceives of this task as emanating not from the silent and inward resolve of authentic Dasein, but from the visible and audible call of human plurality.
Conclusion: Thinking Anew Again
Arendt’s lifelong engagement with Heidegger thus makes possible her critical appropriation of his project in the context of communal and political life. By remaining in conversation with his early formulation of the project of fundamental ontology throughout her career, she is able to put into relief the ways in which Heidegger himself falls short in his ability to clarify the significance of his original insights into the relationality of human existence for the modern world. Indeed, it is precisely in virtue of Arendt’s willingness to maintain a critical but proximate relation to Heidegger that she is able in the final stages of her career to ask one of the most important and pressing questions of the twentieth century: How is it that not only thoughtlessness but also thinking can be an accomplice to totalitarianism?
As is well known, Arendt famously and contentiously associates thoughtlessness with the rise of totalitarianism in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 36 Yet, it is perhaps no less significant that Arendt returns in such works as The Life of the Mind and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy to the task of thinking, the same task that Heidegger had promised to envision anew in his lecture courses in the 1920s. Though the The Life of the Mind was never completed, it is nevertheless clear that Arendt had begun in these later writings to put into relief the dangers of worldless thinking, or of thinking that gets trapped within itself. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of thinking that is not only characteristic of the Western metaphysical tradition since Plato but also characteristic of Heidegger, who suggests that thinking is a matter of withdrawing from oneself and the world in order to stand in the clearing of being.37 In its worldlessness, such a notion of thinking can only perpetuate the isolation and loneliness of modern life. Hence, in returning to the question of thinking, the question that first set in motion her intellectual relationship with Heidegger in 1924, Arendt is thus led to insist that the task of thinking must again be envisioned anew. In this, Arendt conceives of thinking not as a retreat into contemplation but instead as something that reaches its summit in understanding and judgment, or those worldly activities that enable us to take responsibility for the world and the plurality that constitutes it.
Notes
1 Principal works on Arendt and Heidegger include Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). More recent works include Katrin Meyer, “Ambivalence of Power: Heidegger’s das Man and Arendt’s Acting in Concert,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 10 (2017): 157–78; Ronald Beiner, “The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger” in Arendt Studies 2 (2018): 9–15; Iain Thompson, “Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt,” in Continental Philosophy Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 453–78.
2 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 23.
3 Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 50.
4 Ibid., 51.
5 Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971: 51.
6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 28.
7 Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 53.
8 Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 4.
9 Ibid., 5. See also Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 22.
10 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 23.
11 Arendt arrived in Margbug in the fall of 1924 immediately after Heidegger had given his summer semester lecture course on the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophy. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle in that course, as well as in the 1924–5 lecture course, Plato’s Sophist, proved decisive, not only for his development of Being and Time but also for Arendt’s political appropriation of his work. See Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 3. See also, Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 44.
12 Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 11.
13 Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79.
14 For Heidegger’s discussion of being-with (mitsein) as a mode of being-in-the-world, as well as his discussion of the inauthenticity of Dasein’s publicly interpreted, see §25–7 of Being and Time.
15 See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 212–23.
16 See Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 67. Arendt offers this criticism of Heidegger in her essay, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Random House, Inc., 1994), 176–81.
17 Ibid., 232. For Arendt’s criticism of Heidegger see Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” 176–81.
18 Roy Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39–57, 40.
19 Ibid., 42.
20 See Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 76.
21 See Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation [1929], ed. Ludger Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, 2003), and Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). It is important to note that the English translation of Arendt’s dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, is not a direct translation of her original 1929 dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, but is instead based on an unfinished revision of her dissertation that she translated into English in the early 1960s. Though the spirit of the original is retained, there are especially interesting changes that reflect Arendt’s mature thought in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, particularly with respect to the concept of natality. While she had certainly begun to think about birth in this original work, she had not yet fully developed the relationship between birth and the political nor had she discovered the importance of the concept of natality as it emerges in later works like The Human Condition. For more on the differences between the two versions of her dissertation, see Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 13–24. See also, Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” 41.
22 Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 58, 264–69.
23 Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken Books), 1–23, 4.
24 Ibid., 10–11.
25 Ibid., 4–5.
26 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy,” 181.
27 Ibid., 179.
28 Ibid., 181.
29 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy,” 187.
30 Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, 328–60, 358. See also, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarainism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), 471.
31 Roger Berkowitz, “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Arendt’s Politics,” in Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s Denktagebuch, ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 9–36, 15.
32 Ibid., 10.
33 Ibid., 30.
34 Ibid., 27.
35 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 123–24. See also Beiner, “The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger,” 9.
36 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1964).
37 Berkowitz, “Reconciling Oneself,” 25.