CHAPTER 4

The Heideggerian Roots of Arendt’s Political Theory

The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the will and even less with the causality of human willing.

—Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

Freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of will. … Man does not possess freedom so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe. … Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are the same.

—Arendt, “What Is Freedom?”

Dasein is its disclosedness.

—Heidegger, Being and Time

I. INTRODUCTION: THE ONTOLOGICAL-POLITICAL STAKES OF ARENDT’S THEORY OF ACTION

Arendt’s turn to Kant throws the antipolitical aspects of Nietzsche’s agonism into sharp relief; it also reveals the ontological commitments that inform her rethinking of freedom, action, and judgment. The appeal to Kant’s aesthetics underscores not only the phenomenality of political action, but the being of the space of appearances—the public world—as well. It is precisely the reality of this flux-filled phenomenal realm that the metaphysical tradition (beginning with Plato and ending with Nietzsche) repeatedly denies. For Plato, the world of appearance—of democratic politics—is a mere shadow realm; for Nietzsche, the “apparent world” (understood as a shared realm of appearance) disappears with the unmasking of the “true” one.

We are now in a position to appreciate the gap that separates Arendt not only from Aristotle and Kant, but from Nietzsche as well. The dialectic of objectivism and subjectivism dramatized by Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical thought appears, from her perspective, as antipolitical throughout. Both poles of this dialectic (which is to say, both ancients and moderns) obscure the world disclosed and illuminated by political action. Arendt’s desire is to rescue at least the memory of the public world (and the action within it) from a philosophically induced oblivion. Escaping this dialectic, however, is no easy task; the stubborn persistence of the antipolitical metaphorics instituted by Plato and (to a lesser degree) Aristotle conspires with modern “world alienation” to make this world seem infinitely remote. In order to “recover” this world, and in order for action, freedom, judgment, and plurality to be thought politically, a peculiar strategy is required, one that makes possible a return to “the things themselves” prior to their distortion by the contemplative tradition.

Arendt facilitates this “return to the origin” by adopting the double Heideggerian strategy of deconstruction (Abbau) and repetition sketched in the Introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Her goal is to reveal the phenomenal core of the prephilosophic Greek experience of politics by dissolving the tradition’s ontological prejudices (in favor of “true” Being) and by bracketing its translation of acting into the idiom of making.1 The “negative” moment of this project closely parallels the “destruction of the history of ontology” announced, but deferred, in Being and Time. The “positive” moment, Arendt’s construction of a phenomenology of action and the public realm on the basis of such originary experience, reflects fundamental ontology’s attempt to delve behind a reified subject/object distinction in order to articulate the structure of our pretheoretical being-in-the-world.

The parallels between Arendt’s project and Heidegger’s thought go well beyond the question of “method,” however. The thesis that serves as a point of departure for the present chapter is that Heidegger’s ontological approach to the question of human freedom effects a radical shift in paradigm, a shift that turns out to be absolutely central to the thinking of freedom as a “worldly, tangible reality.”² It is true that Heidegger himself failed to seize the opportunity presented by his framing of freedom as a mode of being rather than as a property of the subject. We can view Arendt, however, as appropriating his existential-ontological approach, eliminating its residual subjectivism in the attempt to do justice to the phenomena of political freedom, action, and judgment. Thus, her theorization of action as nonsovereign disclosure proceeds by the appropriation of some of the most important themes of Being and Time and the so-called “middle” works. Among these are Heidegger’s emphasis upon finitude, contingency, and worldliness as structural components of human freedom; his conception of human existence as disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) or unconcealment (Unverborgenheit); the distinction between authentic (eigentlich) and inauthentic (uneigentlich) disclosedness; and his view of the “there” or “Da” of Dasein as a space of disclosedness or “clearing” (Lichtung).

These themes are discussed in Sections II and III of this chapter, where I show how they inform Arendt’s hierarchy of human activities, her conceptions of political freedom and action, and her ontology of the public realm. The continuities are deep but never simple; Arendt is no mere “disciple” of Heidegger.³ Moreover, these thematic links reveal only the first, most obvious level of Arendt’s appropriation of Heidegger. A second, more profound level of influence is revealed when we turn to her transposition of the Heideggerian dynamics of transcendence and everydayness from an existential to a political context (Chapter 5). I contend that Arendt’s controversial depiction of the relations between the public and the private, freedom and necessity, meaning and instrumentality, and the political and the social, need to be understood as reflections of the peculiar and complex relationship Heidegger constructs between authenticity and everydayness, unconcealment and concealment. Much of what Arendt has to say on these matters—from her contrast of the “shining brightness” of the public sphere with the “darkness” of the household, to her indictment of homo faber’s tendency to universalize the means/end category, a tendency that undermines the possibility of genuine politics—flows from her acceptance of the Heideggerian polarity of transcendence and fallenness. Like Heidegger, she views our capacity for transcendence as manifest in “authentically disclosive” pursuits; also, like him, she sees this distinctively human capacity as undermined by a tendency to prefer the “necessity” or “tranquillity” of everyday life to the contingency of freedom. Hence, her insistence that the public realm is a genuine space of disclosure only when animated by a “fiercely agonal” or “revolutionary” spirit, an insistence that resonates with Heidegger’s problematic notion of “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit). Hence, also, her pessimism regarding those few “islands of freedom” that men succeed in creating amidst a sea of “automatic” processes. Arendt is haunted by a profoundly Heideggerian sense of the evanescence of all such “open spaces.”4

Few would contest the notion that Arendt was influenced by Heidegger: her debt has often been noted, although often in quite vague terms. Specific consideration tends to occur in the course of assessing the liabilities, even “dangers,” of her political theory: those aspects that seem most questionable are, predictably, traced back to Heidegger. Thus, for example, we find Martin Jay, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, and Richard Wolin all emphasizing what they see as the “decisionistic” or irrationalist elements of Arendt’s “dramaturgical” account of action—elements they relate back to Heidegger.⁵ This line of criticism resonates with Leo Strauss’s characterization of Heidegger’s “existentialism.” Strauss claims that existentialism “begins … with the realization that as the ground of all objective, rational knowledge we discover an abyss. All truth, all meaning, is seen in the last analysis to have no support except man’s freedom.”⁶ Insofar as Arendt follows Heidegger in making freedom the “abyss-like ground” of action, she seems committed to a similar repudiation of standards provided by Reason, Nature, or even discursive rationality (the various “permanencies” Strauss opposes to modern “historicism”).⁷ This repudiation, Jay tells us, leads to the suspension of “all instrumental and normative constraints” upon “autonomous” action, a suspension that culminates in the untenable glorification of action for the sake of action, politique pour la politique. In this regard, Jay does not hesitate to place the “existentialist” Arendt in the company of Alfred Bäumler, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt.⁸

I think the appeal to Heidegger as a way of establishing guilt by association is both interpretively dubious and intellectually lazy. Arendt can appear as “decisionistic” only if one brackets her critique of will in politics, her strictures against violence, and her strong endorsement of a doxastically based rationality. Nevertheless, the rationalist/liberal anxiety elicited by Arendt’s advocacy of an autonomous politics and her emphasis upon the initiatory character of action underlines a fundamental issue. What the critics are responding to—albeit through a glass, darkly—is one of the central drives of Arendt’s political theory: the desire to think political action and judgment without grounds.

The groundlessness of action and judgment—the absence of any “bannisters” or transcendent yardsticks that might tell us how to act and how to judge—is a theme that runs throughout Arendt’s work. Emerging for the first time in her skeptical treatment of the “rights of man” in OT, this theme becomes explicit in her reflections upon the collapse of the tradition and the loss of authority in the modern age, and it provides the backdrop for her unfinished work on the nature of judgment. One can without exaggeration describe her political theory as an extended meditation upon the problem of action and judgment after metaphysics. Seen from this angle, the Arendtian “uprooting” of action and judgment reflects less an existentialist privileging of the deed than a profound hostility to the “authoritarian” idea that reason or theory can secure an extrapolitical ground for these activities. Arendt sees the desire for such a ground as the wish to be relieved of the “burden” of our freedom and the need to think and judge for ourselves.

The idea of a ground beyond the realm of human affairs provides what Reiner Schürmann has called the “backbone” of metaphysics.⁹ It makes possible the articulation of first and practical philosophy, the latter defined by its derivative relation to the principles or standards uncovered by the former (“ontology” in the strict or traditional sense). It also makes possible the separation of knowing from doing and the reconstitution of the political relation as one of hierarchy or authority—of ruler and ruled distributed according to a principle of superior virtue, reason, or knowledge. Arendt views the historical phenomenon of authority in the West as coextensive with the inception and decline of metaphysics.¹⁰ As she emphasizes in her essay “What Is Authority?” the deployment of a nonviolent, generally accepted form of coercion (of reason, truth, ability, etc.) is the sine qua non of authoritarian rule, and this deployment hinges upon the appeal to transcendent standards. Yet this appeal is paradoxical, since the “transcendent” rarely makes its appearance in anything so ready-to-hand as rules for human conduct. The mediation between “true Being” (the realm available to contemplation) and the realm of human affairs was effected by the Platonic turn to the fabrication experience, which provided both a handy set of metaphors for “rephrasing” action and an image of the real (qua “idea”) that was suited to practical requirements.¹¹ The resulting institutionalization of the split between theory and practice is authoritative for the entire tradition, as is the reduction of action to an instrumentality by which the truths revealed by philosophy are applied to the political sphere. This instrumental or teleocratic conception of action is never really questioned by the Western tradition, which views action as “the practical effectuation of the philosophical.”¹²

For Arendt, the collapse of the tradition means, simply, that recourse to such standards-setting “firsts” is no longer possible. The demise of authority—the withering of ultimate grounds for action—confronts us with the demand to rethink our concepts of freedom, action, and judgment, concepts decisively shaped by their metaphysical origin. To refuse this challenge is to fall back into a theoreticist bad faith, wherein one props up the old bannisters or sets about discovering new ones. Today, the desire to prolong our self-incurred tutelage (a tutelage consisting in the submission of action and judgment to “ultimate” standards) is matched by the bland assurance that liberal democracy never really relied upon metaphysical justification, and can easily be made to “swing free” of the foundationalist impulses that animate the tradition. This view, associated with Richard Rorty and the more recent work of John Rawls, contains the effects of metaphysics by identifying it with a certain type of foundationalist argumentation, a species of justification that one can simply dispense with as one would any other quaint anachronism.13 The trouble with this view is that it ignores the extent to which the language we use to talk about politics has been preformed by our antipolitical (contemplative) tradition. Thus, “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” dispenses with the quest for grounds only to leave the network of inherited concepts more or less intact. The shallowness of this kind of antifoundationalism becomes clear in its affirmation of the status quo: “philosophy leaves everything as it is”—in this instance, the vocabulary and unthought prejudices of political theory.

Foundationalists and antifoundationalists alike thus fail to grasp the opportunity presented by the implosion of tradition. For Arendt, this event offers the chance to theorize action and judgment as autonomous activities, which are freed not only from the domination of extrapolitical ultimates but also from the alien metaphorics imposed long ago on the realm of human affairs by a hostile philosophical tradition. Any objective assessment of Arendt’s uprooting of action and judgment must begin with acknowledgment of this context: the peculiar space brought into being by the closure of metaphysical rationality, a space in which the demise of higher ends leaves untouched the view of action as means and judgment as the application of “preconceived categories” or “customary rules.”¹⁴ This habitual view does not merely deprive the political realm of its intrinsic dignity, but it also deprives us of the privilege of acting and judging for ourselves.

II. THE ABYSS OF FREEDOM AND DASEIN’S DISCLOSEDNESS: THINKING FREEDOM IN ITS WORLDLINESS AND CONTINGENCY

Throughout her work Arendt emphasizes the difficulty we have in thinking of freedom as a worldly phenomenon, one manifest in plural action. The problem (to oversimplify) is that our tradition extends and perpetuates the Greek philosophical and early Christian prejudices against such freedom. Greek philosophy dismissed the freedom found in the political sphere through its assertion of the superiority of the bios theoretikos (the contemplative life); early Christianity compensated for the loss of a secure public world by relocating freedom to an interior realm.¹⁵ Historically, the Platonic ideal of self-mastery combines with the Pauline discovery of an internally divided will in a way that enables what Arendt views as a strictly derivative phenomenon—the freedom of the will, inner freedom—to usurp the place of freedom as it was originally experienced, as a “worldly, tangible reality.”16 The Christian/philosophical identification of freedom with will obscures the phenomenal reality of worldly freedom, a development that has “fatal consequences” for political theory.¹⁷

Our virtual inability to think about the nonsovereign freedom of the political sphere leads Arendt to strongly reassert the Montesquieuian distinction between philosophical freedom (the freedom of the will) and political freedom (the freedom of a “plural We”).¹⁸ It also motivates her search for models of action that effectively convey freedom’s phenomenality, spontaneity, and contingency. This effort—to think of freedom in its nonsovereign worldly form, as a “mode of being” rather than as a capacity of the subject¹⁹—is complicated not only by our habitual reduction of freedom to will but also by our embarrassment with the idea of there being an “absolute” beginning. Kant, the only philosopher to truly affirm a faculty of “spontaneous beginning,” noted the paradox of such a capacity, one that apparently shatters the temporal continuum itself.²⁰ Confronted with the seeming arbitrariness of such freedom (the human equivalent of creatio ex nihilio), is it surprising that our tradition has preferred to “trust in necessity” rather than to purchase freedom at the price of contingency?²¹

The groundless nature of the freedom of action—the fact that an “abyss of nothingness … opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality”—goes a long way toward explaining the philosophers’ preference for necessity and substantialist recuperations of novelty.²² Moreover, as Arendt notes in the last chapter of The Life of the Mind, the philosophers are not alone in their fall into bad faith on this issue. Surprisingly, even “men of action,” those “who ought to be committed to freedom because of the very nature of their activity,” quail before what Arendt calls “the abyss of spontaneity.”²³ This bad faith on the part of men of action is most apparent in the recourse the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century had to the “device” contained in the foundation legends of the Occidental tradition; namely, the trick of “understanding the new as an improved restatement of the old.”²⁴ Just as the idea of an “absolute beginning” has proved to be too much for the “professional thinkers,” so too has the “revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new” proved to be too much for the “men of action.”

Where, then, do we turn in order to find an affirmation of the groundless freedom of political action? How do we go about overcoming the network of prejudices that frame this freedom as either illusory or unbearable? For reasons outlined above, Kant provides little aid in this project. In The Life of the Mind Arendt notes that only John Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century theologian, was “ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom,” and in The Human Condition and “What Is Freedom?” she more famously gestures toward Augustine’s conception of freedom in the City of God: “… freedom is conceived there not as an inner human disposition but as a character of human existence in the world.”25 Yet, it seems clear that neither Scotus’s affirmation of contingency nor Augustine’s conception of human natality (“because he is a beginning, man can begin”) by themselves effect the paradigm shift presupposed by Arendt’s theory of political action. The ontological approach to human freedom presumed by this theory, together with its focus on nonsovereignty and disclosure, point unequivocally toward Heidegger, and specifically toward Being and Time.

In what follows I will sketch the way Heidegger’s existential-ontological approach to the “problem” of human freedom effects the paradigm shift Arendt’s theory of political action demands. By thinking of freedom existentially and ontologically, Heidegger breaks fundamentally with the ground of the will, opening the way to the elucidation of freedom as a mode of being-in-the-world. This is a necessary, albeit insufficient, step toward the elucidation of freedom as a mode of being-of-the-world, which Arendt’s political theory undertakes.²⁶

In his 1936 lecture course on “Schelling’s Treatise: ‘On the Essence of Human Freedom’” (1809), Heidegger observes:

With [the] question of free will—which in the end is wrongly put and thus not even a proper question—Schelling’s treatise has nothing whatever in common. For in this treatise freedom is not a property of man, but rather the reverse: man is at best a property of freedom. Freedom is the comprehensive and pervasive dimension of being in whose ambiance man becomes man in the first place. This means: the essence of man is grounded in freedom.²⁷

In this passage, Heidegger gives less a paraphrase of Schelling than a concise characterization of his own approach to the question of human freedom. And while (as Frederick Dallmayr points out) the Schelling course represents a transitional moment in Heidegger’s thinking of freedom, an anticipation of the coming “turning,” or Kehre, it sums up themes present in the 1930 essay “On the Essence of Truth” and the lecture course Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (“Of the Essence of Human Freedom”) from the same year.²⁸ These texts are sustained by Heidegger’s desire to get beyond the traditional identification of freedom with free will or choice, and to clarify an ontological conception of freedom as the ground of human existence.

Heidegger’s approach may be summarized as follows. Convinced that the traditional approach to the question of freedom presumed an answer to the question “What is man?” Heidegger sought to shift attention away from the will (conceived as a unique kind of causality) to the more primordial phenomenon of human openness or comportment toward Being. Thus, in “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger writes:

Freedom is not merely what common sense is content to let pass under this name: the caprice, turning up occasionally in our choosing, of inclining in this or that direction. Freedom is not mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do. Nor is it on the other hand mere readiness for what is required and necessary (and so somehow a being). Prior to all this (“negative” and “positive” freedom), freedom is the engagement in the disclosure of being as such. Disclosedness itself is conserved in ek-sistent engagement, through which the openness of the open region, i.e., the “there” [“Da”], is what it is.29

Unpacking this disclosive, ontological conception of freedom, and showing how it affirms the dimensions of worldliness and contingency, demands that we turn to Being and Time (1927). It is in this work that Heidegger begins his radical questioning of the identification of freedom with will and a certain kind of causality. The break with this “subjectivist” view of freedom prepares the way for a questioning of the traditional teleocratic or teleological concept of action: action as guided by reason (which posits a goal) and sustained by will.³⁰ Thinking of freedom in ontological as opposed to causal terms allows us to appreciate the truth of Arendt’s claims that “action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of will”; that “action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as predictable effect on the other.”³¹ In other words, it is only after we make the turn indicated by Heidegger in Being and Time that we are able to appreciate the nonsovereign freedom of action in the realm of plurality as freedom.

Being and Time would seem, at first blush, an odd place to turn to for aid in grasping the freedom peculiar to political action. The heavy emphasis upon authenticity, being-toward-death, and the “call of conscience”—to say nothing of the attack upon the “public interpretation of the world” perpetuated by the “idle talk” of the “they”—have led many to view Being and Time as a supremely unpolitical text.³² Indeed, Arendt blasts the book in the 1947 essay “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” in which she argues that the Heideggerian “Self” (Selbst) is the latest and most grossly inflated incarnation of romantic subjectivity.³³ Yet eight years later, in the lecture “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophy,” she abandons the shrill tone for a more balanced appraisal. Significantly, Arendt downplays the importance of the “Self” in Heidegger, emphasizing instead his concepts of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) and world (Welt). The latter concept she sees as standing “at the center of his philosophy.”³⁴ And while she had previously praised her teacher Karl Jaspers’s focus on communication at the expense of Heidegger’s “existential solipsism,” she now points out the fatal shortcomings of Jaspers’ dialogical model (the “I/Thou” relation, she says, can never be extended to the “plural We” of politics—a criticism she will repeat in LM).³⁵ Arendt hints that a potentially more fruitful starting point for the phenomenological investigation of the political realm is to be found in Heidegger’s concept of “world.”³⁶

Heidegger’s ontological treatment of freedom grows out of his concept of “world,” specifically out of his characterization of human being in Being and Time as “Being-in-the-world.”³⁷ Heidegger deployed this somewhat awkward locution for a number of reasons. First, he wanted to avoid the tendency to treat human being as something present-at-hand, as basically an animal with reason added. Thus, “Being-in-the-world” serves to distinguish the kind of being peculiar to humans—existence—from other modes: only human being is “Being-in-the-world.” Second, this formulation is intended to combat the ontological prejudices built into Cartesian epistemology and the representational problematic stretching from Kant to Edmund Husserl.38 Heidegger’s fundamental critical point is that the epistemological approach begins by taking the agent out of the world, reifying what is essentially relational into a substance/subject, and opposing this entity to the world considered as thing or object realm. The result is that we lose sight of the essentially situated (and essentially involved) character of human being, creating a largely artificial distance through the imposition of a spectatorial metaphorics. Third, and following from this, Heidegger wants to question the assumption that our primary or original encounter with entities is of a cognitive or theoretical nature. The Cartesian splitting up of the world into subjects, on the one hand, and objects, on the other, gives a false priority to knowing as a kind of encounter, and this leads to a dubious characterization of the “nature” of man. For Heidegger, “knowing the world” is a derivative relation: existence (that is, Being-in-the-world), not cognition, constitutes man’s essential being. As Heidegger famously puts it, “‘the essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.”³⁹

Originally, Heidegger argues, we do not stand over against or out of the world (as the Cartesian picture would have it), but always already find ourselves within a world, alongside other entities and beings like ourselves. Moreover, the “world” in which we find ourselves is no mere container into which we, and the sum of things, have been dumped, as if into a bag. Nor is the “world” something extra, a kind of superentity. Nor, finally, does it denote the range of entities that we are not. Rather, “world” is “a characteristic of Dasein itself.”⁴⁰ It is one of the fundamental existential structures (existentialia) that Heidegger claims is constitutive of human being, or Dasein (literally, “there-being”). The “world” is a totality of relations, not things, an encompassing network of instrumental—or what Heidegger calls “equipmental”—relationships.⁴¹ We first encounter entities not as things present-at-hand (vorhanden), but rather as equipment, in terms of their function, their place in a network of “in-order-to” relations. This network, this totality of equipmental relationships, is given to us pretheoretically, by the “sight” peculiar to practical involvement (what Heidegger calls “circumspection”).⁴² The “world” is not originally “beheld,” but is dwelled in. And it is through this dwelling that we become familiar with the various functional contexts within which entities are what they are. Thus, to take Heidegger’s famous example from Being and Time, a hammer is what it is not because, qua thing, it possesses certain properties, but rather because it fulfills certain functions within the nexus of our pragmatic concerns. The hammer is “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) in the workshop: it is situated within a set of “in order to” relationships; namely, those constitutive of building.⁴³ And these relationships, in turn, are given direction by Dasein’s existential concerns, which structure what Heidegger calls the “totality of involvements.”

Our pretheoretical grasp of this totality provides the background understanding presupposed by all our activities and practices.⁴⁴ Thus, the “world” is a kind of historicotranscendental condition for the possibility of meaning. It provides, in Karsten Harries’s phrase, a “space of intelligibility,” the actuality of which we consistently pass over in our everyday dealings.⁴⁵ It is only when the hammer breaks that its inconspicuous being as equipment gives way to a confrontation with something present-at-hand as sheer object.46 Moreover, it is only when equipment no longer functions that we become aware of the context of “in-order-to” relations. This context is pregiven by practical circumspection, yet “dimmed down”: a “disturbance” is required for it to be “lit up,” and, thereby, for the worldhood of the world to announce itself.⁴⁷ Otherwise, the horizon phenomenon of world, like the context of use itself, gets passed over in everyday “absorption” in our activities.

The “work world” (Werke welt) described by Heidegger, with its pervasive instrumentality and teleology (the “for the sake of”), clearly sets the pattern for Arendt’s description of the “world” created and manipulated by homo faber. In contrast to Heidegger, Arendt emphasizes the durability of this world and the things in it, as opposed to its “transcendental” status as the set of background understandings and practices presupposed by our activities. Nevertheless, the similarity is striking; and, as we shall see, both Heidegger and Arendt juxtapose a certain kind of “authentic” activity and its “sight” or understanding to the everyday way of viewing the world manifest to homo faber or “absorbed” Dasein.

I have given a preliminary characterization of the “world” of Being-in-the-world. Following Heidegger, I turn now to the second component of this “structural totality,” the entity that has being-in-the-world. Phenomenologically, the being of this entity—Dasein—is in fact “in each case mine.” Dasein is not something present-at-hand: it is not a “what,” but a “who.”⁴⁸ And the answer to the question of the “who” of Dasein is always, as Heidegger says, “in terms of the ‘I’ itself, the ‘subject,’ the ‘self.’ The ‘who’ is what maintains itself as something identical throughout changes in its experiences and ways of behavior.”⁴⁹ Yet this way of answering the question of “who is Dasein?”—while avoiding the temptation of treating Dasein “like any other entity” (namely, as a “what” or something present-at-hand)—nevertheless misleads us. It points us toward the “indubitable I” of Descartes, toward a subject which is who it is by virtue of its isolation. However, as Heidegger reminds us, “in clarifying Being-in-the-world we have shown that a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given. And so in the end an isolated “I” without others is just as far from being proximally given.”⁵⁰ The “others”—the knowability of which had been such a problem from Descartes to Husserl—“already are there with us”: we are always already with others, just as we are always alongside entities. Considered from the perspective of the “who” of Dasein, the world of Being-in-the-world is a “with world” (Mitwelt); “Being-in,” according to Heidegger, is a “Being-with-others.”⁵¹ As beings-in-the-world, we are originally amongst others like ourselves (hence the Husserlian “problem” of intersubjectivity dissolves).

Arendt similarly eschews the tendency to substantialize human being into a “what,” or to see “human nature” as an appropriate response to the attempt to characterize human existence.⁵² If “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence,” then something called “human nature” cannot be isolated without regard to the historical-existential conditions of human being. Rather, what is called for is the phenomenological description of the “worldly” conditions under which existence is given to human beings, and the delineation of the existential structures and capacities of the “who” so enabled. The point, crucial for Arendt and for Heidegger, is that the conditions of human existence might change so radically (whether as a result of technology or totalitarianism) that capacities which were previously viewed as intrinsic, as “part of human nature,” disappear.53 In addition to subscribing to what is pejoratively described as Heidegger’s “historicism” on this score, Arendt presses his suggestion that the world of Dasein is a “with world” further than he did himself. Transformed into the notion of “plurality,” the condition of political action, Arendt takes the Heideggerian notion of “co-being” in a radically un-Heideggerian direction.⁵⁴

The third structural component of Being-in-the-world is the relation of “Being-in” itself, a relation that, in Heidegger’s lingo, is “equiprimordial” with “world” and Dasein. Actually, it is in terms of this relation that the polarities “world” and Dasein appear as such. As Heidegger puts it, “Being-in is not a characteristic that is effected, or even just elicited, in a present-at-hand subject by the ‘world’s’ Being-present-at-hand; Being-in is rather an essential kind of Being of this entity itself.”⁵⁵ Heidegger moves quickly to avoid the misunderstanding that “Being-in” simply refers to the “commercium that is present-at-hand between a subject present-at-hand and an Object present-at-hand.”⁵⁶ Closer to the truth would be to say that “Dasein is the Being of this ‘between’”—a nothingness, gap, or in-between that resides in the space opened by its world.⁵⁷

The “Being-in” of Being-in-the-world thus gives to Dasein’s existence the character of a “there”: “The entity which is essentially constituted by Being-in-the-world is itself in every case its ‘there.’”⁵⁸ By Being-in the world in a concerned way, by the fact of its existential care for its own Being, Dasein “clears” or opens a world, a space of significance, a “there.” Moreover, it is precisely as this “there”—as a particular, historical way of Being-in-the-world—that Dasein has its fundamental character, its “there-being” (Da-sein). As “there,” Dasein is not closed off, an enspirited substance that must somehow establish links to the “external world.” The “there-being” of Dasein is an open structure, a mode of being at odds with the bundle of prejudices we have inherited from substantialist metaphysics.⁵⁹ Dasein as Being-in is not simply open; it is this openness:

When we talk in an ontically figurative way of the lumen naturale in man, we have in mind nothing other than the existential-ontological structure of this entity, that it is in such a way as to be its “there.” To say that it is “illuminated” means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing. Only for an entity which is existentially cleared in this way does that which is present-at-hand become accessible in the light or hidden in the dark. By its very nature, Dasein brings its “there” along with it. If it lacks its “there,” it is not factically the entity which is essentially Dasein; indeed, it is not this entity at all. Dasein is its disclosedness.⁶⁰

At this point Heidegger’s basic description of human existence as Being-in-the-world takes on a more specific character. Anticipating a bit, we can say that the notion that Dasein is its “there,” or disclosedness, captures, for Heidegger, the general nature of man’s relation to Being. As “there-being,” Dasein possesses, through its practices and involvements, a pretheoretical understanding of the world; and this understanding—presupposed by all subject/object relations—in turn presupposes an unthematized (preontological) comprehension of Being. The practices and beliefs of every culture—whether ancient Greek, Aztec, or modern European—are built upon such precomprehensions, understandings of Being that find expression in the various “worlds” these cultures create and inhabit. That the understandings or disclosures of Being which animate these cultures are different—that Greek existenz expressed a comprehension of Being different from that of the Aztecs or ourselves—is hardly a controversial thesis. Moreover, it helps to explain what, in Being and Time’s existential analytic, remains somewhat unclear. Heidegger is maintaining that human existence, at its most fundamental level, is nothing other than the “disclosure of Being,” the opening of a particular economy of presence, accomplished by specific historical ways of Being-in-the-world.

This view of human existence has a number of consequences. First, as the “Da” of Dasein implies, every clearing or disclosure of Being is, by its very nature, partial, finite. There can be no such thing as a full or final disclosure of Being, since Being itself is nothing other than the series of “theres”—particular historical economies of presence and absence—opened or “cleared” by Dasein. Hence Heidegger’s well-known (and often misunderstood) statement in Being and Time that “only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) ‘is there’ Being.”61 “Being” is neither a “super thing” nor a self-subsistent ground of presence; least of all is it (as some commentators have claimed) a kind of metasubject.⁶² When Heidegger speaks of Being, he is (as he constantly reminds us) speaking of something different from entities: he is speaking of the presencing process manifest in this series of “theres,” or clearings (which, for our purposes, may be identified with the complex network of beliefs and practices we call “cultures”).⁶³

Second, the description of Dasein as its disclosedness means that human existence has the basic character of “uncovering” or discovering, in the double sense of “creating a clearing for Being” (a “there”) and bringing new “entities” (things, discourses, cultural achievements from art to political forms) to stand within it. As Heidegger puts it in Section 44 of Being and Time, “uncovering is a way of Being for Being-in-the-world … disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there.’”⁶⁴ As the rest of this section (and much of Heidegger’s subsequent work) clarifies, disclosedness is to be understood in contrast to the trope of correspondence upon which traditional theories of truth and definitions of man (as animal rationale) are based. As disclosedness, Dasein does not bring itself into accord with truth; rather, thanks to its preontological comprehension of Being, Dasein is always already “in the truth.”⁶⁵ Moreover, it is this “primordial” phenomenon of “truth” at the level of clearing that makes the truth of assertion—and particular knowledge discourses—possible.⁶⁶

The third and final consequence of the notion that Dasein is its disclosedness (the “clearing” of the “there”) is that all attempts to achieve a full, final, complete disclosure of Being—to get behind the obscuring web of appearances, to get in touch with something “larger and stronger” than ourselves (Rorty)—are doomed to failure. None of man’s cognitive, moral, or aesthetic vocabularies can claim to be “right” or “correct” by virtue of their correspondence to a Nature, a human essence, or a beauty beyond the ontologically constitutive presuppositions of human practice. The effort to achieve such a full or final disclosure is (to stick with Heidegger’s preferred metaphor) tantamount to dragging the forest into the clearing. Since every “open region” or clearing presupposes a surrounding darkness—a more primordial realm of unconcealment or hiddenness—all disclosure is necessarily partial.67 There can no more be a “correct” science or “correct” political theory than there can be a “correct” art, since the notion of “correctness” (orthotes) hinges upon the availability of an unsituated perspective, a realm of full or enduring presence available to human reason (hence the traditional definition of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei).⁶⁸ Of course, the fact that one cannot speak of “correctness” at a level of vocabularies (what would it mean, for example, to call the vocabulary of representative democracy “correct” or “true”?) does not mean that one cannot make judgments about it; it is just that these judgments are shaped by our hermeneutic situation, rather than delivered sub specie aeternitatis.⁶⁹

Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein as its disclosedness, and the consequences this characterization has for how we view human freedom, are further clarified if we turn to his discussion of Dasein as an open structure of possibility or “thrown projection” (Sections 31 and 44 of BT). The description of Dasein as Being-in or the Being of the “there” provides the basis for Heidegger’s polemic against a substantialist interpretation of selfhood, a polemic that crescendos in the declaration that Dasein is the Being of the “between” (Section 28). What precisely Heidegger means by this formulation is elucidated in Section 31 of Being and Time, where we learn that Dasein’s originary disclosedness—its having a “world”—is accomplished by a projective understanding that “clears” the world, and orients itself within the horizon of significance, in terms of Dasein’s existential possibilities or “potentiality for Being.”

The kind of Being which Dasein has, as potentiality-for-Being, lies existentially in understanding. Dasein is not something present-at-hand which possesses its competence for something by way of an extra; it is primarily Being-possible. Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility. This Being-possible … is essential for Dasein. … Possibility as an existentiale is the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically.⁷⁰

As its disclosedness, then, Dasein is a projective structure of understanding, an open structure of possibility.⁷¹ And as possibility or structure of projection “ahead of itself,” Dasein is not a something, but a nothing: the place where beings disclose themselves in light of Dasein’s care or concern for its own Being. In “What Is Metaphysics?”—his inaugural lecture at Freiburg University (1929)—Heidegger draws attention to how this projective structure forms the basis of Dasein’s ontological freedom: “Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call ‘transcendence.’ If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending … then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself.”72 Which is to say (to return to Section 31) that possibility, considered as a fundamental existential structure, or existentiale, “does not signify a free-floating potentiality-for-Being in the sense of the ‘liberty of indifference’ (libertas indifferentiae).”⁷³ Rather, it signifies the mode of Being-free (Freisein) that comes from being “thrown” into a definite range of possibilities, which Dasein can recognize as constitutive of its “ownmost” Being or which it can externalize as ontic alternatives awaiting its choice.⁷⁴ For Heidegger, the important point is that freedom as a mode of Being—as thrown projection—makes the liberum arbitrium (the will as faculty of choice or decision) possible.⁷⁵

So, what kind of freedom is Heidegger talking about when he moves from the “nothingness” or transcendence of Dasein’s “Being-possible” to what he calls Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality-for-Being”? If this freedom is not a “liberty of indifference,” is it, perhaps, a form of positive freedom—a freedom for the mode of Being that would be authentic (“ownmost”) for Dasein?

Heidegger’s language, especially in Being and Time, tends to promote such a misinterpretation. However, we must bear in mind the assertion he makes in “On the Essence of Truth,” cited above. The kind of freedom Heidegger is pointing to is neither “mere absence of constraint” nor “readiness for what is required and necessary” (an “ought” or duty); it is, rather, a freedom prior to negative and positive freedom, a freedom that is the condition of possibility for both. This freedom—the ontological freedom of the being whose Being is thrown projection—is the freedom of the “open region,” the freedom found in the “engagement in the disclosure of beings as such.”⁷⁶ It is the freedom of disclosedness; the freedom of an “open comportment” toward the world that both animals and things lack, and that the will (our organ of choice or purposiveness) covers over; it is the freedom of the “there,” a freedom for the world.

As the thrown projection of possibilities, Dasein’s disclosedness, its Being-in-the-world, is essentially care (Section 41 of BT). According to Heidegger, this “primordial structural totality” has three moments: thrownness (Geworfenheit), projection (Entwerfen), and fallenness (Verfallenheit). I have discussed Dasein’s projection with regard to its Being as possibility; before turning to Heidegger’s central distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness, I should like to discuss thrownness and fallenness.

The notion of “thrownness” is deployed by Heidegger to emphasize the “already-being-in-the-world,” which is constitutive of Dasein’s projection and disclosedness. Dasein “finds itself” (sich befindet) within a world; it is “already in a definite world and alongside a definite range of definite entities within-the-world.”⁷⁷ Disclosedness always occurs within a world whose conditions of constitution Dasein does not control. The range of possibilities open to it is finite in the sense that the outermost horizon of possibility is historically and culturally pregiven. Thus, when Heidegger says that “disclosedness is essentially factical,” he is underlining the conditioned nature of Dasein’s Being as possibility, as projection.78 Facticity—that which confronts us as thrown beings-in-the-world—is not something separate that can be overcome or eradicated via a Fichtean assertion of will; nor is it something that inhibits Dasein’s projection of possibilities. Rather, it is that in terms of which such projection becomes possible.

This emphasis on thrownness as a structural characteristic of Dasein is frequently overlooked in the attempt to portray Heidegger as the inheritor of the German idealist “philosophy of freedom.”⁷⁹ A genealogical line is drawn from the radical conception of freedom in the second Critique, through Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, down to Nietzsche and, finally, Heidegger. What prompts this “voluntaristic” reading of Being and Time is the mistaken view that the repudiation of the idea of “human nature” somehow implies the removal of any and all constraints: Heidegger’s dictum “higher than actuality stands possibility” takes on Faustian overtones.⁸⁰ In fact, Heidegger’s questioning of the assumption that “man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things” (Arendt) promotes a renewed appreciation of human finitude.⁸¹ The initial modern response to the demise of Nature as a teleological order of Being may have been to cross what Arendt calls the “rainbow bridge of concepts” to a radically unsituated concept of human freedom and the myth of total human self-creation; however, if Being and Time stands for nothing else in the history of modern philosophy, it definitively repudiates this Cartesian-Kantian-idealist heritage.⁸² Fundamental ontology highlights our worldly or conditioned character in a philosophically unprecedented way, a point not lost upon Arendt, who begins The Human Condition by questioning the concept of human nature and stressing the conditioned character of human existence:

Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition. The impact of the world’s reality is felt and received as a conditioning force. … because human existence is a conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence.⁸³

Heidegger’s description of the disclosedness of Dasein as thrown projection thus implies a continuing taking up or creative appropriation of possibilities that are “given” to us, but unrealized as possibilities. As disclosedness, Dasein is constantly at work bringing new “entities”—vocabularies, practices, beliefs—to light within the clearing. However—and here we encounter one of the most important themes of Being and Time—Dasein has a built-in tendency to “forget” its disclosive or projective character. In its “everydayness,” Dasein is “absorbed” or “fascinated” by the world; that is, by the things, people, and concerns it encounters daily. This tendency is especially manifest in what Heidegger calls “the public interpretation of the world,” an interpretation embodied in “idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity” (Sections 35–37). These modes express the understanding or disclosedness peculiar to the “they,” to the self that has been thrown into “publicness.”84

The problem with “publicness”—the reason why Heidegger devotes so much energy decrying it—is that it conveys an “average intelligibility” which is ready-to-hand and available to all. This intelligibility—a kind of degenerate form of what Arendt has in mind with the Kantian notion of a sensus communis—creates the impression that the disclosure or openness embodied by our everyday practices constitutes a full, adequate, and complete grasp of existence. It creates the impression that things could not be otherwise than they are, that there is nothing else to disclose. Practices and understandings that are in fact contingent take on the appearance of naturalness; the given and, as it were, accomplished way of Being-in-the-world is reified. It is this reification of a current set of practices that Heidegger has in mind when he speaks of our “fallenness” or our being “lost in the world.” Through this reification, the truth of Dasein becomes untruth: a partial illumination is mistaken for a full one, with the result that our disclosive character falls into oblivion. This forgetting, Heidegger points out, is tremendously reassuring: it provides an escape from a finitude and contingency that are otherwise overwhelming; it subjects the unknown and uncontrollable possible to the domination of the actual:

… the way in which things have been publicly interpreted … holds Dasein fast in its fallenness. Idle talk and ambiguity, having seen everything, having understood everything, develop the supposition that Dasein’s disclosedness, which is so available and so prevalent, can guarantee to Dasein that all the possibilities of its Being will be secure, genuine, and full. Through the self-certainty and decidedness of the “they,” it gets spread abroad increasingly that there is no need of authentic understanding or the state of mind that goes with it. The supposition of the “they,” that one is leading and sustaining a full and genuine “life,” brings Dasein a tranquillity, for which everything is “in the best of order” and all doors are open. Falling Being-in-the-world, which tempts itself, is at the same time tranquillizing.⁸⁵

In reading Heidegger’s descriptions of fallenness, it is of the utmost importance to remember two points. First, “falling” is not a “bad and deplorable ontical property of which … more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves”; it is, rather, “a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself.”⁸⁶ “Falling” is “the basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness” and, as such, is not something that can gradually be eliminated or left behind.⁸⁷ This is crucial for the understanding of Heidegger’s idea of “authentic” existenz: we are dealing here not with a binary opposition, but a kind of dialectic, a dialectic of transcendence and everydayness. As Heidegger himself warns us, “authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon.”⁸⁸ In many respects, this qualification is what makes Arendt’s positive appropriation of Heidegger possible.

Secondly, we must not lose sight of the fact that fallen Being-in-the-world is itself a kind of disclosedness. In Heidegger, there can be no opposition between a Being-in-the-world that discloses and one that does not: after all, Dasein is its disclosedness. The opposition or tension that Heidegger develops with his distinction between authentic (eigentlich) and inauthentic (uneigentlich) existence is between a disclosedness that grasps itself as such and a disclosedness that forgets itself, which views itself as something vorhanden. Thus, when Heidegger says in “On the Essence of Truth” that “every mode of human comportment is in its own way open,” he is stating the obvious (a point he later drives home in “The Question Concerning Technology,” where even technological “enframing” is presented as a “mode of revealing”).89 This does not, however, prevent some modes of comportment (and some preontological comprehensions of Being) from being more open than others. The hallmarks of an “inauthentic” understanding of Being—the kind of understanding possessed by “fallen” Dasein—are its passing over of the “world” as horizon phenomenon, its forgetting of the projective character of the self, and its hypostatization of the “open” or clearing as (in Wittgen-stein’s phrase) “everything which is the case.”

This thought is perhaps made clearer if, borrowing from Thomas Kuhn, we identify inauthentic understanding with a specific vocabulary or practice. The Kuhnian equivalent of inauthenticity is an established “normal science” that has utterly forgotten its “revolutionary” origins, to the point of forgetting its own historicity and losing the ability to conceive a shift in paradigm.⁹⁰ When any vocabulary, practice, or space of disclosure becomes this rigidified, it begins to conceal more than it reveals. The “truth” of its mode of comportment becomes “untruth”:

That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Being towards entities has not been extinguished, but it has been uprooted. Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance. Likewise what has formerly been uncovered sinks back again, hidden and disguised. Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in “untruth.”⁹¹

How, if at all, is it possible to prevent this seemingly inevitable movement by which “truth” passes over into “untruth,” by which disclosure becomes concealment? To some extent, this movement is inevitable, an inescapable process of reification by which the revolutionary becomes everyday, poetry becomes prose. Yet within this “proximally and for the most part fallen” existence, Heidegger holds out the possibility of a different kind of comportment, a different mode of disclosedness. And this mode—authentic existence—sets the pattern for Arendt’s idea of political action as nonsovereign disclosure.

III. HEIDEGGER’S DISTINCTION BETWEEN AUTHENTIC AND INAUTHENTIC DISCLOSEDNESS AND ARENDT’S APPROPRIATION

I now want to examine Heidegger’s articulation of Dasein’s disclosedness in terms of the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction. This distinction frames the relationship between the kinds of activity and understanding that are genuinely disclosive, and those that are not. It expresses the peculiar dynamic Heidegger sees between our transcendence and our everydayness, a dynamic in which an authentic striving to disclose or uncover is juxtaposed to our tendency to seek out the security of the “ground” of the everyday. Heidegger’s identification of the everyday with publicness (Öffentlichkeit) leads him to see the achievement of authentic disclosedness as contingent upon an inward turn: only the individual’s confrontation with his own groundlessness or mortality is enough to shatter the tranquillity of the everyday. Arendt is obviously hostile to this turn to the self; yet this does not prevent her from appropriating Heidegger’s general description of human existence and the distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness. Arendt takes up this distinction, spatializing or externalizing it in such a way that the public realm—now the arena of agonistic politics—is seen as the proper venue for authentic disclosedness, the realm in which the “Da” of Dasein is illuminated. “Groundless freedom” is made manifest in political action, in a way that transforms the world into “a home for mortal man” (something it could never be for Heidegger, the philosopher of Unheimlichkeit, [uncanniness, or the sense of not being at home]).

According to Heidegger, the world in which fallen everyday Dasein finds itself is the world of work or daily preoccupation. “Proximally and for the most part,” Dasein is absorbed in its environment (Umvelt), encountering things and others through the “sight” or understanding provided by practical circumspection and concern. Such a world is “dimmed down”: the preoccupied self, engaged in productive comportment toward entities, sees only things that are “handy” for one purpose or another.92 Absorbed in its daily routine, everyday Dasein passes over not only the world, but its “self.” Indeed, Dasein is so deeply enmeshed in the objects of its concern that it universalizes the type of seeing, the mode of understanding, that guides it in the workplace: equipment “announces itself” as present-at-hand, while Dasein interprets itself and its mode of existence as something vorhanden. As we shall see, Heidegger views the metaphysical delimitation of the meaning of Being as “presence” as the result of Greek philosophy’s naive universalization of the understanding of Being appropriate to the fabrication experience.⁹³ Against this naïveté, Being and Time insists upon the existential temporality of Dasein as the more primordial horizon within which every understanding of Being originates. The important point in the present context is that the universalization of productive comportment toward entities (a universalization characteristic of everyday Dasein) obscures our Being as disclosedness, as thrown projection. The result is that Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality for Being”—its capacity for making possibilities its own, for individuation—is dispersed in the “they” self.

For Heidegger, this fallen or inauthentic way of grasping ourselves and the world is a decline from a higher mode, one that (as Jacques Taminiaux puts it) is “adequately adjusted to the ownmost Being of Dasein.”94 In other words, there is a different kind of “sight,” geared to a different mode of comportment or activity, one more genuinely expressive of our capacity for transcendence qua Being-in-the-world. Such understanding and activity is authentically disclosive; it is not undertaken for a variety of posited (limited) ends, but rather arises from Dasein’s care for its own Being. As such, it is undertaken for its own sake. As Heidegger says, “Das Dasein existiert umwillen seiner” (Dasein exists for the sake of itself).⁹⁵ This mode of existence stands in tension with average everydayness, yet the two are related.

How, then, are we to understand “authentic disclosedness”? Assuming the “built-in” quality of Dasein’s fallenness, what makes this kind of existence, this mode of activity and understanding, possible?

It is all too easy to lose the thread of Heidegger’s argument, particularly if we fall back upon existentialist clichés (what Theodor Adorno called the “jargon of authenticity”). Heidegger’s foremost desire is to indicate a way of Being-in-the-world that does not settle into the security and familiarity of the everyday world, the world in which “everything is ‘in the best of order’ and all doors are open.” Authentic disclosedness, unlike its inauthentic counterpart, objectifies neither its self nor its world: it maintains a sense of the fluidity of the possibilities available to it, while grasping its own situated character. An authentic understanding is one that resists the reification of the status quo into a “full disclosure” by actively pursuing its vocation as possibility, as the disclosing or uncovering of “entities.” Authentic existence, in this sense, is nothing other than disclosedness that knows itself to be such; which eschews notions of correspondence or the idea that the world is “everything that is the case”; which recognizes its historicity and the futility of erecting “permanencies” or grounds for an existence that has none. Against such attempts, authentic Dasein strives to keep its horizon open, to prevent its “truth” from slipping into “untruth.” Authentic disclosedness in this sense signifies a wresting or contentious relation to Being, a relation best conveyed by the notion of “creative appropriation.” The “ethos” of authentic disclosedness is expressed by Heidegger in Section 44 of Being and Time, where, after describing the way “fallen” Dasein “disguises” what it has revealed (as given, or ready-to-hand), he states:

It is therefore essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered to defend it against semblance and disguise, and ensure itself of its uncoveredness again and again. … Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery.⁹⁶

Only through such striving to disclose, a process Heidegger refers to as “making one’s own,” does Dasein fully realize its transcendence, its capacity for uncovering or disclosure, its Being as “discoveredness.” Seen in this light, the distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness provides us, first and foremost, with a hierarchical relation between reified (everyday) disclosedness and an unreified form that (potentially) prevents the “clearing” from “dimming down”; one that illuminates through its ability to uncover the new, through its creative or originary spontaneity. This configuration of genuine disclosedness and inauthentic understanding reformulates the relation between transcendence and everydayness. Authenticity “tears itself away” from the everyday; however, the “uncovering of anything new,” according to Heidegger, “is never done on the basis of having something completely hidden, but takes its departure from uncoveredness in the mode of semblance.”97 Authentic disclosedness, in other words, neither removes itself from its “there” nor creates a world of its own; rather, it is a mode of activity and understanding that breathes new life into the familiar.

This point is frequently overlooked, usually in favor of the more familiar “existential” themes of Division II of Being and Time. Yet it is, perhaps, the central strand of Heidegger’s thought, insofar as it represents his continuing attempt to think the relationship of man and Being.⁹⁸ Thus, in the 1936 essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger returns to the question of how the “clearing” is to be kept “open,” of how the inevitable process of reification and “dimming down” is to be forestalled. In this essay, Heidegger turns away from authentic disclosedness as a kind of praxis to the ability of poiēsis and the artwork to “clear” a world and maintain a “strife” between the “world” and its primordial hiddenness (what he calls the “earth”).⁹⁹ While the focus of the “striving” or “wresting” has shifted importantly—the agon of disclosure has ceased to be something intraworldly and has become more profoundly ontological—the central concern remains the same. The somewhat threatening talk of “creators” and “preservers” obscures this continuity, which is an expression of the desire to prevent culture from freezing over. In this desire—in his preference for the metaphorics of disclosing, uncovering, and revealing over those of correspondence or correctness—Heidegger overlaps not only with Nietzsche, but also with J. S. Mill (and, more recently, Richard Rorty).¹⁰⁰

In turning to consider what makes authentic disclosedness possible, we confront those aspects of Heidegger’s account most antipodal to Arendt. Yet even these more familiar “existential” facets of Heidegger are (as I shall argue below) taken up and transposed by Arendt in her appropriation of the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction. Thus, while Heidegger’s “authentic self” signals a Kierkegaardian turn that Arendt deplores, his emphasis in Division II upon Dasein’s groundlessness sets the stage for Arendt’s conception of the non-sovereign freedom of the public realm. Moreover, while the Heideggerian category of “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) has overtones of willfulness (as his critics have been quick to point out), it also stands for the acceptance of nonsovereignty as the basic precondition for the exercise of human freedom.¹⁰¹ Again, this is a lesson not lost upon Arendt.

For Heidegger, the possibility of authentic disclosedness hinges upon our capacity not simply to tear ourselves away from everydayness, but to affirm our thrownness or contingency. If authenticity means anything, it means a willingness to put oneself at risk in the opening of new possibilities, the willingness to abandon the security and tranquillity of the ground provided by everydayness. “Proximally and for the most part,” we cover up the contingency of human existence, of “thrown projection,” with the preoccupations of everyday life. However, intimations of this contingency (the groundlessness of the “there”) are found, as Heidegger famously argues, in the phenomenon of anxiety (Section 40 of BT). With the onset of anxiety, the familiar and secure world of things slips away, and the nothingness that underlies it is revealed. Anxiety “takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of its ‘world’ and the way things are publicly interpreted”; it “throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world.”¹⁰² In this manner, anxiety individualizes Dasein by bringing it “face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world”; which is to say that it reveals Dasein to itself as Being-possible, as (in Heidegger’s phrase) a “Being-free-for.”¹⁰³ Unable to get a hold on things, thrown back upon itself, anxious Dasein is unheimlich, not-at-home.

Insofar as anxiety confronts us with the nothingness of our Being-possible, it can either lead us “back to ourselves” or precipitate a flight away from our “own-most Being.” Thus, as Karsten Harries notes, “authenticity and inauthenticity have their ground in anxiety.”¹⁰⁴ The experience of Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) makes the familiarity and security of the “they” self all the more tempting. While anxiety can be said to shatter the tranquillity of fallen Dasein, it nevertheless heightens the desire to retreat to this inauthentic self and to a public interpretation of things that present possibilities as “secure, genuine, and full.” Only the “silent call of conscience,” according to Heidegger, calls us away from this self-forgetting world to care for our “ownmost” Being.¹⁰⁵

What, then, does conscience demand? It demands, above all else, the acknowledgment of what Heidegger calls Dasein’s “guilt.”¹⁰⁶ With this theme, we arrive at the essential precondition of authentic disclosedness. “Guilt,” in Heidegger’s lexicon, does not denote moral imperfection or original sin. It signifies, rather, Dasein’s facticity or thrownness, considered from the angle of our existential “ground.” The basis of Dasein’s existence (the horizon in terms of which it projects itself, the world in which it finds itself) is not in Dasein’s power. Insofar as Dasein’s existence can be said to have a ground, this ground does not have the character of a foundation.¹⁰⁷ There is no overcoming either the contingency of this ground or the fact that Dasein must nevertheless bear responsibility for it. Heidegger sums up the existential consequences of Dasein’s thrownness or contingency thus: “In Being a basis—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus, “Being-a-basis” means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up. This “not” belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness.”¹⁰⁸ In other words, because “Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being” but, as thrown projection, the “Being of its Basis,” Dasein “as such is guilty,” without foundation.¹⁰⁹

The intent of such formulations is to drive home the uncertainty and lack of security implicit in our finitude and our character as projecting beings. The acknowledgment of “guilt” equals Dasein’s recognition of its incapacity to ground itself; it is Dasein’s self-recognition as “groundless ground,” or Abgrund. Negatively, such recognition reveals the futility of attempting to fix man a place in an “order of Being” or to identify a proper telos. Positively, it serves as an affirmation (on the existential level) of the ontological freedom of the “there.” This freedom, it will be recalled, is prior to the will and essentially nonsovereign. The theme of Dasein’s “guilt” gives this ontological freedom—the freedom of Dasein’s original openness—an existential concreteness. Authentic existenz demands an abandonment of everyday preoccupation and foundational schemes, along with the affirmation of the finitude manifest in Dasein’s thrownness. It demands, in other words, an affirmation of the nonsovereign freedom made possible by the fact of human finitude.

This brings us to the role of resolve as “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) in Heidegger’s thought. In Section 60 of Being and Time, resoluteness is presented as the authentic response to the call of conscience. Dasein can choose to submerge itself in the “lostness” of the “they,” or it can resolutely take up its thrownness, be “ready” for anxiety, and accept the burden of its contingent, projective character. As “a distinctive mode of Dasein’s disclosedness,” resoluteness implies a steadfast acknowledgment of “guilt”; it stands for “an openness to the uncertainty of human existence,” a surrender “of all claims to something like a ground.”110 As the mode in which authentic disclosedness becomes actual, resoluteness entails concrete choices, commitments, and actions—in the world and with others—lest it fall back into an inauthentic solipsism:

Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I.’ And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into a solicitous Being with Others.¹¹¹

We see here how far Heidegger’s idea of “authentic Dasein” is from Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith.”

Resoluteness, then, “is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time.”¹¹² But, Heidegger asks, “on what basis does Dasein disclose itself in resoluteness? On what is it to resolve? Only the resolution itself can give the answer.”¹¹³ Heidegger’s critics have seized upon this formulation and others like it in order to accuse him of holding a position indistinguishable from decisionism. Thus Leo Strauss, for example, see historicism as the “truth” of existentialism, and decisionism as the “truth” of historicism: “Existentialism appears in a great variety of guises but one will not be far wide of the mark if one defines it … as the view according to which all principles of understanding and action are historical, i.e., have no other ground than groundless human decision.”¹¹⁴ Richard Wolin, in his recent critique of Heidegger, claims that Strauss has identified “a crucial intellectual historical dynamic”; for “once the arbitrariness and contingency of human belief-structures has been demonstrated—and once traditional moral claims have been dissolved amid the eternal flux of historical emergence and passing away—“values” themselves become an arbitrary posit, and the only power that is capable of establishing them proves to be a sovereign act of human will.”115 With the unmasking of moral objectivism and the “naturalness” of traditional norms, the sole remaining basis for moral-political orientation appears to be “decision ex nihilo, a radical assertion of will.”¹¹⁶

Since I argue that Arendt appropriates Heidegger’s notion of authentic disclosedness, it is necessary to pause and consider the validity of this charge. As indicated above, I think the reading of Being and Time as voluntarist is dubious, largely because Heidegger is addressing an openness of comportment prior to will.¹¹⁷ Nevertheless, in transposing this ontological point into existential terms, Heidegger certainly seems to stress sheer decision or the will to authenticity or resoluteness. Two points, however, serve to reveal the one-sidedness of Strauss’s and Wolin’s interpretation. First, insofar as BT emphasizes Dasein’s historicity, it does in fact reveal our “values” as contingent. But what does this mean? Only that our moral horizons are horizons, informed by a complex intersection of traditions and beliefs, and by certain large-scale historical processes (secularization; the gradual growth of a “universalist” moral consciousness). Dasein’s thrownness does not imply a void. The thesis that our moral horizons are historical in this broad sense implies a radical subjectivism only to those who have internalized the metaphysical/psychological need to ground moral vocabularies on some originary source of value. In Strauss’s and Wolin’s view, there must be some such grounding source; and if it is not Nature, God, or an unsituated Reason, then it must be (so the argument goes) human will: the willing subject provides the lost ground in a disenchanted world. Heidegger, however, does not frame resoluteness as the source of value; rather, he offers it as a response to the weight of judgment and action in a disenchanted world. The absence of pregiven measures (or “yardsticks,” as Arendt calls them) focuses our attention on the difficulty of moral and political judgment, and upon our responsibility for our commitments.¹¹⁸

The second reason the “decisionism” charge will not hold true follows from the first. On Strauss’s and Wolin’s reading, authenticity, qua resoluteness, implies the radical devaluation of all socially encountered norms and values as “inauthentic”: the authentic individual, in tearing himself away from everydayness, must, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, create his own set of values out of nothing. Yet this reading totally distorts what Heidegger means by “authentic disclosedness.” Dasein’s disclosedness, in its “authentic” mode, has the character of a “making one’s own,” not a creatio ex nihilo. To repeat what Heidegger says in Section 44, “The uncovering of anything new is never done on the basis of having something completely hidden, but takes its departure rather from uncoveredness in the mode of semblance.”¹¹⁹ In other words, authenticity in Heidegger’s sense is a certain way of taking up what is given yet “dimmed down,” the creative appropriation of contents and possibilities that are encountered within our lifeworld yet which have, in their codified, reified, or clichéd forms, ceased to signify. Hence, Heidegger’s insistence that Dasein needs to “explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered … assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again” lest vocabularies and practices sink to the level of thoughtless habit. Therefore, it is not a question of dispensing with what is given, but of trying to breathe life into it by taking it seriously, as something that one desires to make one’s own.120 After all, authentic existence is “not something that floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon.”¹²¹

In turning to Arendt’s appropriation of Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness, I should underline the broad lines of continuity. First, Heidegger’s ontological approach to human freedom (what I have called his “paradigm shift”) clearly sets the stage for Arendt’s own phenomenological account, in the double sense that it questions the priority of will and insists upon finitude, contingency, and worldliness as structural aspects of human freedom. Second, Heidegger’s conception of existence as disclosedness provides Arendt with a postmetaphysical framework for considering the vita activa, one that abandons the teleological approach based on human nature and its ends in order to focus upon conditions, capacities, and the ability to create or disclose meaning.¹²² Third and last, Heidegger’s description of the nonsovereign freedom of the “there” prefigures Arendt’s account of the transcendence peculiar to political action and the kind of freedom we encounter in the plural, public realm (itself a “space of disclosure”).

These continuities serve to create something like a common problematic for Arendt and Heidegger, despite radical differences in emphasis and ultimate concern (the “meaning of Being,” on the one hand, politics and the public realm, on the other). It is, however, Heidegger’s articulation of the relation between authentic, open, or resolved activity and the preoccupied comportment of everydayness that really drives home the importance of fundamental ontology for Arendt’s project. I wish to make two claims. First, I think that a full understanding of the distinction Arendt draws between the world of work and the activity of homo faber (on the one hand) and political action in the public realm (on the other) is possible only in light of Heidegger’s distinction. The relation Arendt sets up reproduces—albeit in a very different context—the dynamic Heidegger poses between transcendence and everydayness in the existential analytic. The second claim follows from the first: the hierarchy implicit in the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction sets the pattern for Arendt’s hierarchy of human activities—not, to be sure, in terms of an order of ends (Aristotle), but rather in terms of relative disclosive or meaning-creative capacity.

Taken together, these two claims suggest that we view Arendt’s theory of political action and her hierarchy of human activities as attempts to “spatialize” or externalize the very distinction that “regulates” Heidegger’s entire project.¹²³ Yet this suggestion runs up against immediate objections. Is it plausible to suggest that Heidegger’s distinction can be transposed from an existential to a political context, without doing great violence to the phenomena of politics? (Heidegger’s own formulations during the thirties would seem to confirm this.) How coherent is it to “spatialize” the distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness? After all, if “authentic disclosedness” is “only a modified way in which everydayness is seized upon”—if, in other words, it is not separated by an abyss from the “fallen” world of everydayness—then how is it possible to maintain that Heidegger’s distinction informs Arendt’s articulation of the relation between the world of work and the public realm?

We need to recall, first, that the world created by homo faber (what Arendt calls the “human artifice”) is not a different world from that inhabited by human beings qua political actors. The world created by work and the world “illuminated” by action are the same world, notwithstanding Arendt’s insistence that these activities occupy quite different places within the world.124 For Arendt, the worldliness of human existence first becomes manifest in the activity of work—man as animal laborans being a specifically worldless creature.¹²⁵ To be sure, labor also takes place “in the world”; however, the harder the forces of nature, necessity, and life press upon us, the more the world “de-worlds” itself. In Arendt’s view, labor is a mode of activity so driven by the needs of life that it sinks below the horizon of instrumentality. As laboring beings we are, so to speak, prior to preoccupation; we are absorbed not by the world, but by ourselves, by our sheer bodily existence.¹²⁶ Thus, while labor clearly presupposes a particular kind of “sight,” Arendt’s analysis implies that this sight is not really disclosive: what it reveals is not so much a world as an environment. For this reason, labor does not distinguish us from animals so much as link us to them. As Arendt writes, “The animal laborans is indeed only one, at best the highest, of the animal species which populate the earth.”¹²⁷

If labor, in this sense, is predisclosive, the same cannot be said of work. According to Arendt, it is precisely the activity of work that gives us a world, an artificial, durable “home” that removes us somewhat from the immediacy of the natural and destructive cycle of production and consumption.¹²⁸ This world, the world of homo faber, is a more or less stable structure whose being consists in its reified quality and whose meaning is circumscribed in terms of instrumentality.¹²⁹ The world of homo faber is in essence a reification, because work creates a realm of objects that outlasts consumer goods and individual life span. This realm of objects is a world, and not just a heap of unrelated articles, insofar as it is entirely framed in terms of the category of means and end.¹³⁰ Utility, in other words, provides the horizon of vision or understanding for homo faber, who negotiates his world as a totality of “in order to” relations posited in accordance with the standard of usefulness.

Arendt’s analysis is quite close to Heidegger here: they both view the “work world” as our everyday form of worldliness. And, despite her emphasis upon the objective or reified quality of this world, Arendt more or less accepts the Heideggerian description of it as a totality of equipmental relations. This is made plain by her adoption of his vocabulary of the “in order to” (das Um-zu) and the “for the sake of” (das Worumwillen) to convey the understanding characteristic of homo faber’s productive comportment. Following Heidegger, Arendt argues that homo faber’s productive approach to the world necessarily discloses the world as a series of “in order to” relations structured according to the criterion of utility. Moreover, she argues that this particular “ontological precomprehension” is so pervasive—so absorbing or totalizing—that meaning itself is grasped in terms of utility.131 Because homo faber “judges and does everything in terms of ‘in order to,’” the place of the “for the sake of which” is occupied by utility. Thus, as Arendt puts it, “the ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of.’”¹³²

The result of this universalization of the productive comportment characteristic of homo faber is that the world is simultaneously disclosed and “dimmed down.” Heidegger’s claim that Dasein’s everyday comportment toward entities disguises or covers over phenomena is echoed by Arendt’s assertion that homo faber has “an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness”; that “insofar as he is nothing but a fabricator and thinks in no terms but those of means and ends which arise directly out of his work activity, [homo faber] is just as incapable of understanding meaning as the animal laborans is incapable of understanding instrumentality.”¹³³ This incapacity lies at the root of the conflation of meaning and utility referred to above, the practical effect of which is to rob the public world of inherent value, to reduce the realm of appearances to a collection of use objects for the sake of an “ultimate” end—namely, man.¹³⁴ Such a reduction, Arendt argues, is typical of homo faber and is exacerbated by the submersion of “the limited instrumentality of fabrication” in the life process itself. The result is a reification not in the sense of an objectification, but in the Heideggerian sense of an ontological one-dimensionalization: the “limitless instrumentalization of everything that is” levels the world down to a set of familiar contexts of use, one we encounter in our everydayness, yet one deprived of all revelatory capacity.¹³⁵

This brings us to the possibility of transcending the world as Zeug, as equipment or use objects. For Heidegger, an “immanent” transcendence of this “dimmed down” world hinges upon the breaking away from concernful absorption and the recovery of a higher mode of sight and activity, one undertaken for its own sake. In Arendt, the possibility of transcendence is concertized through the entry into the public realm that, as “space of appearances,” provides the site for authentically disclosive action and speech. The meaningfulness of such action and speech has nothing to do with utility or success; indeed, the illuminative or revelatory capacity of action springs from its ability to transcend these criteria. Thus, just as “authentic disclosedness” illuminates the world through a certain “wresting” or taking up of the everyday, so political action in the Arendtian sense places the world under a new and unexpected aspect. The result, if not exactly a “transfiguration of the commonplace,” is something similar, for what political action does, according to Arendt, is to reveal or disclose an unsuspected meaningfulness at the heart of the familiar, public, and everyday world. It endows this world with a significance it otherwise lacks. As Arendt puts it, “the meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life, but in rare deeds, just as the significance of a historical period shows itself in the few events that illuminate it.”¹³⁶ What matters, in short, is the event of authentic disclosedness, an event that, in both Arendt and Heidegger, signifies a wrenching free of everydayness and its illumination through the unpredictable uncovering of the new. Through such disclosive spontaneity, the world is revealed in its worldliness, the actor or Dasein (anonymous in his everydayness, qua laborer or producer) revealed in his individuality.137

This juxtaposition of Arendt and Heidegger in terms of the relation between everydayness and disclosedness, the world of work and political action, serves to highlight just how important the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction is for Arendt. Moreover, it provides a new perspective on the agonistic public realm as theorized by Arendt. This “space of appearances,” the site of the authentically disclosive activities of speech and action, is, potentially, the one place in the world where both the functionalism of life and the utility of work are transcended; where, in Heidegger’s words, “the semblance and disguise that covers over phenomena in their everydayness is at last penetrated.”¹³⁸ Arendt is adamant about the ability of political action to achieve this “penetrating” effect. As laborers we are preoccupied by the needs of life and subject to its rhythms; as producers we are absorbed by the imperative of usefulness, by the question of means and ends. It is only in tearing ourselves away from these preoccupations and entering the public realm—a true “space of disclosure”—that we manifest our disclosive capacity and become free for the world.

Heidegger’s distinction clarifies Arendt’s theory of political action in another respect. I mentioned how Arendt’s rhetoric concerning the realms of freedom and necessity encourages us to view the “worlds” of action and work as absolutely separate, even though, strictly speaking, only the activity of labor is determined by necessity per se. This impression is reinforced by Arendt’s insistence upon the self-containedness of action and the need for an autonomous public sphere. Heidegger’s distinction will appear discontinuous with Arendt’s theory so long as we view her call for an “autonomous” politics as an attempt to seal off a zone of transcendence from the rest of the world. However, as the preceding reading indicates, the relation Arendt describes between the world of work (the “human artifice”) and the public realm is more complex, complementary, and “Heideggerian.” The central question for Arendt is whether the world built by homo faber provides a stage for authentically disclosive (revelatory) action, or remains simply the site of productive comportment. Thus, action concerns the world originally disclosed through work, the “subjective in-between” of words and deeds not taking leave of the world, but “overlaying” it.¹³⁹ This confirms the suggestion made in Chapter 1, that the relation between action and work, or what we would call the political and the social, is somewhat more permeable than it first appears. What seems an arbitrary and a priori demarcation of the political in terms of a hyper-idealized content pales beside the more important criteria of the kind of understanding, interaction, and spirit that permeates the public sphere. As theorized by Arendt, the public realm is first and foremost a space of disclosure, one not intended to detach action from the surrounding world, but rather to provide a space where (in Arendt’s words) “the extraordinary becomes an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.”¹⁴⁰

These, then, are a few of the ways Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction informs Arendt’s political theory, particularly her reappropriation of the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiēsis. Heidegger’s distinction mediates Aristotle’s, bracketing the latter’s teleological apparatus in favor of the criterion of relative disclosedness. Thus, when Arendt takes up Aristotle’s distinction between acting and making, she is in fact reformulating praxis as authentic existenz. This brings me to my second claim, namely, that Arendt’s hierarchy of human activities reproduces the order Heidegger inscribes in the contrast between a preoccupied, everyday disclosedness and an open or “resolved” mode, one predicated upon the affirmation of contingency. According to Arendt, as laboring beings we can hardly be said to disclose at all, our world having the character of a “non-world” or environment.141 As fabricators or producers, our disclosive capacity takes the form of the reification of things, an activity that, with the exception of works of art, is circumscribed by the dim light of the in-order-to.¹⁴² It is only as actors in the public sphere that we are genuinely disclosive, of ourselves and of our world in its tangibility and durability—as a place of dwelling, a “home for mortal men.”

While Heidegger’s distinction importantly structures Arendt’s political theory, we must not lose sight of the transformative nature of her appropriation. The characterization of action as our disclosive capacity par excellence, combined with the depiction of the public realm as a space of disclosure, serves to wrench Heidegger’s “regulating” distinction away from the individualist, quasi-Kierkegaardian context of Being and Time. Eschewing Heidegger’s residual subjectivism and his philosopher’s distaste for the realm of human affairs, Arendt transforms his distinction by spatializing or externalizing it. Authentic disclosedness is identified with a particular worldly activity—political action—and this activity is seen as having a “proper location in the world,” namely, the public sphere.¹⁴³ Arendt’s conviction that each human activity has its “proper place” means that her hierarchy of human activities takes the form of a phenomenological topography of the vita activa. The ironic and supremely un-Heideggerian result is that authentic disclosedness is “localized” or domiciled in a realm of opinion and talk. As we have seen, Heidegger views this realm as irredeemably “fallen,” and this precipitates his turn to the self (Selbst). Arendt, free of the philosophical prejudice against the realm of human affairs that motivates this retreat, sees Heidegger’s strategy as futile and self-deluding. She opposes it with the same vehemence with which she opposes all romanticism, particularly the “politics of authenticity” invented by Rousseau.¹⁴⁴ Arendt combats the modern “flight from the world to the self” by asserting that individuation occurs in the context of plurality, through the performance of action in a “theatrical” public space. Nothing could be further from the Heideggerian identification of individuation with being-toward-death. Thus, in politicizing Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction, Arendt can be said to turn it inside out: the “proper” and the “improper,” which Heidegger aligns with interiority and publicness, respectively, are transposed.¹⁴⁵

An abyss, then, separates Arendt’s celebration of disclosive political action in the public sphere from Heidegger’s repudiation of the “public interpretation of the world.” However, the vast difference between them concerning the “place” of authentic disclosedness should not lead us to assume—as some have—that Heidegger’s “publicness” and Arendt’s “public realm” have precisely the same referent.146 In fact, as we shall see, there is much in Heidegger’s critique of Öffentlichkeit (publicness)that Arendt endorses. Moreover, we should not assume that Arendt’s appropriation of the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction dispenses with all of the more well known themes of Division II. Generally speaking, Arendt avoids Heidegger’s identification of authenticity with an affirmation of our mortality. Yet, as noted above, she retains his emphasis upon the “groundless” or “guilty” character of authentic disclosedness. Where Heidegger presents our “guilt” as an essentially individual phenomenon—as the lack of foundation confronted by thrown, mortal Dasein—Arendt once again “externalizes” this existentiale, emphasizing the intersubjective dimensions of Dasein’s thrownness. Our finitude or nonsovereignty is phenomenologically most apparent in the “futility, boundlessness, and unpredictability” of action in the public world. Our thrownness or contingency is highlighted when we initiate actions that change constellations in unforeseeable ways. Groundlessness, then, is concretely encountered in the realm of plurality, not the self. This is why Arendt identifies natality (the ontological condition of the actor qua beginner) and not mortality as “the central category of political, as opposed to metaphysical, thought.”¹⁴⁷

Arendt’s reemphasis on plurality as constitutive of our thrownness and her relocation of “groundless” freedom to the public realm transform the role and nature of Entschlossenheit (resolve). It is true that Arendt nowhere employs the category of “resolve”; indeed, in her Heidegger critique in Life of the Mind, she eyes it suspiciously as a substitute for the will. Nevertheless, it is clear that the non-sovereign freedom of the public sphere requires something like Entschlossen-heit, if only because the temptation to forgo this freedom—to retreat to the darkness of the private realm or to escape contingency through instrumental/strategic action—is so strong. The freedom of political action demands, first, the affirmation of plurality and contingency; second, it demands a commitment to a public way of Being-in-the-world. Not for nothing does Arendt insist that the entry into the public realm requires courage.¹⁴⁸ It is in the “fiercely agonal spirit” of the Greeks and the “revolutionary spirit” of the bourgeois revolutions, the original soviets, the Hungarian revolt, that we find the mixture of affirmation and commitment required of every new beginning. Without insisting upon too neat a parallel, it is possible to view the heroism of the nonsovereign political actor as a concrete, worldly form of Entschlossenheit, so long as we are careful not to identify “resolve” with “blind decision” or commitment for the sake of commitment (Sartrean engagement, of which Arendt was decidedly critical).¹⁴⁹

Reading Arendt’s theory of political action in this way raises two obvious objections. The first is that it is simply not coherent to “spatialize” Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness: the attempt to “localize” either in terms of activity or place makes a hash of the distinction. The second objection is more categorical. It is that the structure of Heidegger’s distinction, so completely framed in terms of individual Dasein, defies anything like a political appropriation. The only way to give Heidegger’s distinction a political twist is to plug in the Dasein of a people for the resolved self, a substitution that politicizes “authenticity” in a patently totalitarian direction.150

In response to the first objection, it should be noted that Heidegger’s early and middle work prepares us for just such a spatialization, prefiguring Arendt’s identification of freedom with an open space of disclosure through a historicizing of the “there,” or clearing. Thus, we find the “Da” of Dasein reformulated as a particular historical open space in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936). These works go so far as to identify the polis with the original or most primordial space of disclosure, the place where the world “worlds” itself.¹⁵¹ The agon is also present, albeit in a highly speculative, undemocratic form, namely as the “striving” or “struggle” initiated by the “world-opening work” of the “creator.” The result is the lamentable and peculiarly Heideggerian mix of an ontological conception of freedom with a metaphysical conception of the state. Following Plato and Hegel, Heidegger casts the state as fulfilling an essentially speculative function, as the place where Being is brought to presence.¹⁵²

The issues raised by the second objection are more complex, centering on the alleged subjectivism of Being and Time. The more we view the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit polarity as circumscribed by Dasein’s individual (“in each case mine”) existence, the more odd the suggestion of a political appropriation appears, particularly one devoted to preserving the essential dimension of plurality. My claim that Arendt’s distinction between action and work constitutes such an appropriation will appear less outlandish if, following Taminiaux’s suggestion, we see Heidegger’s distinction as itself a reappropriation (and transformation) of the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiēsis.¹⁵³ This perspective on the “regulating” distinction of Being and Time clarifies the hierarchy Heidegger draws between the sight and comportment peculiar to “preoccupied” Dasein and the higher mode (undertaken for its own sake) characteristic of authentic existenz.¹⁵⁴ Thus, despite the apparent “oblivion of praxis” in Heidegger’s work, the case can be made that “authentic disclosedness” represents the early Heidegger’s attempt to recuperate praxis as transcendence. This suggestion gains credence from a passage in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, the book derived from a lecture course Heidegger gave in Marburg in 1928. After noting the Greek philosophic propensity to identify transcendence with theoria, Heidegger observed, “Nevertheless, Dasein was known to antiquity also as authentic [eigentliche] action, as praxis.”¹⁵⁵

As Taminiaux notes, “The use of eigentlich to characterize Greek praxis is in itself extremely significant.”¹⁵⁶ In the context of the present discussion, it provides a vital clue, one that not only illuminates Heidegger’s project, but also enables us to see how, structurally speaking, Arendt could appropriate Heidegger’s distinction for her own purposes—namely, an antiteleological reading of Aristotle’s distinction between acting and making. Arendt positively appropriates Heidegger’s emphasis upon a genuinely disclosive, wresting, and individuating “mode of comportment,” upon a transcendence inherent in being-in-the-world. While going along with the gist of Heidegger’s transformation of Aristotle, she strongly reasserts the plural, public, and doxastic dimensions of the original against him. Unlike Taminiaux, I do not think we can view this as a “return” to Aristotle on the part of Arendt. In addition to the reasons cited above, it is clear that Arendt follows Heidegger’s lead in insisting upon the groundless and “end”-less quality of the freedom of action. She may quarrel, violently, with Heidegger’s location of freedom as a “mode of being,” wanting nothing to do with his turn to the self. Nevertheless, she sees in his articulation of transcendence and everydayness a path beyond teleology and will, a path of the greatest significance to post-metaphysical political theory.