CHAPTER 5

Groundless Action, Groundless Judgment: Politics after Metaphysics

Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science #125

The pronouncement “God is dead” means: The supersensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end.

—Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche”1

What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensory and the supersensory, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses—God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas—is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears, that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses. What is “dead” is not only the localization of such “eternal truths” but also the distinction itself.

—Arendt, Introduction, The Life of the Mind²

I. THE SECOND LEVEL OF APPROPRIATION: THE DIALECTIC OF TRANSCENDENCE/EVERYDAYNESS AND ARENDT’S ONTOLOGY OF THE PUBLIC WORLD

Many critics, including Hanna Pitkin and Sheldon Wolin, have charged Arendt with elitism. Adverse to what they view as the exclusionary dimension of Arendt’s “Greek” theory of action, they stress its tension with the more popular impulses of (modern) participatory democracy.³ Support for this critique may be found in the way Arendt’s agonistic conception echoes Nietzsche’s distinction between active and reactive agents (the “masterly” and “slavish,” respectively).⁴ Like Nietzsche, Arendt appears to draw a thick black line between the affirmative, robust creators of heroic values (on the one hand) and the unworldly, reactive naysayers (on the other). This creates the impression of a certain aristocratism. In championing agonistic action, Arendt appears to make authentic disclosure the prerogative of a type.

For some, the Heideggerian perspective I propose will simply confirm their suspicion that there is an antidemocratic bias at the heart of Arendt’s apparently democratic political theory. It is quite easy to twist the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction so that it reproduces Nietzsche’s hierarchy: the authentically disclosive or creative individual appears as a higher “rank order” than the herdlike “they.”5 Indeed, Heidegger himself was not above recasting his distinction along vulgar Nietzschean lines.⁶ Yet such an interpretation misleads us, and not only with respect to the nature of Heidegger’s distinction. In confounding Arendt’s hierarchy of activities with a hierarchy of types, this interpretation creates a fundmentally false picture of her political theory.

The hierarchy inscribed in the Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit distinction refers to “modes of comportment” and understanding, not groups of agents. The distinction frames a dialectical relation between transcendence and everydayness, one that belies the Nietzschean idea of a “rank order.” Most significantly, it presumes fallenness as a built-in tendency of Dasein. Viewed as a structural characteristic of existence, fallenness is not something that can be left behind or “overcome” (Heidegger’s attempted Überwindung of Platonism/nihilism in the thirties notwithstanding).⁷ The notion of fallenness highlights two of Heidegger’s basic convictions: every mode of comportment is both open and closed; every revealing or disclosure is also a concealment. Bearing this in mind, fallenness denotes our tendency to give in to the “tranquilizing” understanding of everyday concern, a tendency that intensifies reification and causes us to lose sight of our original open or disclosive character (what Heidegger calls “the truth of Being”).

The idea of fallenness, then, ties transcendence to everydayness while setting the distinction between authentic and inauthentic disclosedness into motion. “Fallenness” presents us with an everydayness that is not simply a static background, but rather an expansive, colonizing force, one that is presupposed by authenticity/transcendence but also threatens it. Thus, the idea of authentic disclosedness implies, on the one hand, an original (primordial) concealedness and a “world” or clearing that is relatively “dimmed down.”⁸ But it also implies a dialectic of transcendence and everydayness in which the reifying forces of security and daily preoccupation constantly threaten to transmute the openness of the “there” into mere semblance or disguise.

We can view Arendt’s primary distinctions—between public and private, work and action, freedom and necessity, the social and the political—as reflecting both the formal structure of concealment/unconcealment (aletheia) and the threatening dynamic suggested by the idea of fallenness. Like Heidegger, Arendt insists that the space of disclosure (the public realm) presupposes a surrounding area of hiddenness or darkness (the private). Also like him, she fears the reifying power of “average everydayness,” of the sight characteristic of work and labor, which is capable of plunging the entire public sphere into the realm of semblance (the “social”). For Arendt, the fallenness of homo faber poses a constant threat to the very arena built by him. The universalization of homo faber’s instrumentalizing mode of comportment—the drawing of everything within the horizon of ends and means (a phenomenon that, in Arendt’s view, is constitutive of modernity)—creates the conditions under which the pressing needs of life are channeled into the public sphere. The effect of this colonization of the public realm by social concerns is the radical “dimming down” of the space of disclosure. The telos of this process, equivalent to the triumph of fallenness over “wresting” or initiatory disclosure, is the substitution of normalized behavior for agonistic action, and the replacement of individualizing politics by “household administration.”

Here we arrive at what I referred to in Chapter 4 as the second level of Arendt’s appropriation of Heidegger. This stratum reveals itself when we interrogate the structure of Arendt’s distinctions and her narrative about the fate of the public realm in our time. What we find is a working out of Heidegger’s dialectic of transcendence and everydayness in a political register. This project is propelled by Arendt’s Heideggerian sense that the “dimming down” of our space of appearance has passed beyond the crisis point. The freedom of the public sphere, and with it the ontological dimensions of the public world and self, have been crowded out by the needs of life and the “socialized” pursuit of happiness (consumer society). This development takes on an additional pathos when viewed from the perspective of the fate of modern revolutions: our “treasure”—the public freedom created by revolutionary founding—has been lost.⁹

In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger extends the ontological approach to truth initiated in Section 44 of Being and Time. Setting aside the correspondence theory of truth, he famously redescribes truth in the Greek manner, as aletheia. When thought of as aletheia, truth is no “accordance” of matter and knowledge, object and intellect; rather, it is an event of disclosure, a happening that issues from a dialectic of concealment and revealment.¹⁰ The strong anti-Platonic, anti-Kantian thrust of Heidegger’s conception is apparent. But what does Heidegger mean by “concealment,” and how is it central to the phenomenon of truth?

“Concealment” for Heidegger indicates that more primordial realm of hiddenness or darkness out of which every “clearing,” every historico-ontological happening of truth, occurs. Thought of ontologically, truth is possible only on the basis of the “concealment of beings” or untruth.¹¹ There can be no disclosure without concealment, no truth without an “older,” more original untruth. Yet this concealedness (what Heidegger dubs “the mystery”) is forgotten by man, who is absorbed by what is “readily available and controllable.”¹² According to Heidegger, this constitutes our normal (fallen) state of affairs: we are in untruth. This untruth is not a preserving concealment, but rather an everyday form that Heidegger calls “erring.” Thus, as Heidegger puts it, “man’s flight from the mystery toward what is readily available, onward from one current thing to the next, passing the mystery by—this is erring.”¹³

Heidegger identifies all active comportment towards beings as, simultaneously, openness and erring. This identification extends and simplifies the analysis in BT. We can already detect the abandonment of the notion that authentic disclosure resembles praxis, an abandonment that leads Heidegger to turn to thinking as the only possible avenue for overcoming forgetfulness and penetrating l’écume des choses (the froth of things).14 As we might expect, Arendt is profoundly critical of this withdrawal and of Heidegger’s prejudice in favor of that which does not appear (Being—which remains, strictly speaking, “forgotten” or partially disclosed in a “disguised,” concealing way). Nevertheless, she is deeply influenced by Heidegger’s framing of disclosure in terms of concealment/unconcealment. Arendt appropriates this polarity for her “disclosive” theory of action. Giving it an intraworldly twist, she identifies the realms of concealment and revealment with the private and the public, respectively. The articulation of her political theory’s central distinction is thus rooted in Heidegger’s ontological treatment of truth.

Arendt has taken a pounding for the rigidity of her distinction between public and private. Feminists, critical theorists, and deconstructionists have all underlined the hazards of reifying this distinction. Insofar as Arendt presents this distinction as “natural” or self-evident, the pounding is deserved: nothing is easier to demonstrate than the historicity of what we deem “fit to appear” in the “bright light” of the public realm. The critics are wrong to assume, however, that Arendt is motivated to draw this distinction by a reactionary desire to keep certain “household” matters (or agents—e.g., women, workers) out of bounds. What is of fundamental importance to Arendt is not so much the content of the “public” or the “private” as the availability and integrity of each of these distinct realms. A political theory that identifies political action as our most authentically disclosive activity demands both a public space of disclosure and a surrounding darkness, a place of retreat from the bright light of the public sphere. As Arendt puts it, “a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.”¹⁵

Contrary to some misreadings, then, Arendt’s disclosive theory of political action does not denigrate the private realm; rather, it sees it as fundamentally important. Indeed, like the Greeks and Romans she so admires, Arendt views this realm of concealedness as “sacred”:

The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of a underworld. The non-privative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born or goes when he dies.¹⁶

Without privacy, the “dark and hidden side of the public realm,” neither action nor freedom are possible. Like aletheia, disclosive action (“the highest possibility of human existence”) presupposes hiddenness and the concealing preservation of the “mystery”—the place from which we arise and disappear.¹⁷

When Arendt laments the “rise of the social,” then, she is not simply mourning the public sphere’s loss of integrity. She is mourning, equally, the loss of an authentically private sphere. The “contradiction” between public and private that had so worried Marx is resolved, in our time, by “the utter extinction of the very difference between private and public realms,” an extinction wrought by the rise of the social and the “submersion” of public and private in a hybrid realm of concealment and “disguise.” The “social” creates a reality in which nothing is authentically public or private; in which the space of disclosure is “dimmed down” by the needs of life; in which action is submerged in a tide of conformist behavior and interiority takes the place of individuality.

This last point underlines the progressive or cumulative nature of the “dimming down” of the public sphere. This process is accelerated by the rise and triumph of “the social,” but it has its roots in homo faber’s “fallen” tendency to view everything in terms of means and ends. Arendt has no desire to place instrumentality as such on trial.18 The problem, as she sees it, is the built-in tendency to generalize this mode of comportment, a tendency that leads to the instrumentalization of politics as household administration and to the absorption of the public sphere by the needs of life.¹⁹ Thus, the “admission of household and housekeeping activities to the public realm” carries with it an “irresistible tendency to grow, to devour the older realms of the political and the private.”²⁰ This progressive tendency—the “unnatural growth of the natural”—amplifies the forces of automatism at the expense of action and spontaneity. The result is a “mass man” characterized by “mass behavior” and a situation in which Heidegger’s “perverse sounding statement” that “the light of the public obscures everything” goes “to the very heart of the matter.”²¹ As in Heidegger, the gravitational pull of fallenness exerts greater and greater force, with the polarity of everydayness and transcendence becoming more and more lopsided. For Arendt, the advent of mass society means that “rare deeds” are not simply juxtaposed to behavior; increasingly, they are subsumed by it. Thus, as Arendt writes,

The unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its “laws” is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely they are to tolerate non-behavior. Statistically, this will be shown in a leveling out of fluctuation. In reality, deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time.²²

One possible outcome of this negative dialectic of fallenness and transcendence, automatism and spontaneity, is a pervasive conformism wherein the “oneness of mankind” overrules the plurality of the human condition. Arendt’s fear is that the hegemony of the “they-self” wrought by the rise of the social will deprive our disclosive capacity of both place and occasion. The possible eclipse of this disclosive capacity—an eclipse foreshadowed by the totalitarian obliteration of the last spaces of freedom within mass society—confronts us with a paradox. On the one hand, the rise of the social and the creation of mass society apparently guarantees the survival of the animal species mankind “on a world-wide scale.” On the other hand, this very development threatens humanity—human beings considered as disclosive agents—with extinction.23

The same Heideggerian dynamic of transcendence overwhelmed by fallenness provides the narrative thread of Arendt’s On Revolution. Despite the impression sometimes given in The Human Condition, Arendt’s interpretation of revolution (a distinctively modern phenomenon) leaves no doubt that freedom is indeed a defining aspect of modernity. Revolutions are “the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”²⁴ In other words, it is only with the modern revolutions that the full pathos of freedom—the consciousness of a radical new beginning, a novus ordo saeclorum—becomes manifest. Yet the story Arendt tells in OR is, in fact, a tragedy, the story of a “lost treasure.” The radical new beginnings of the French and American revolutions come to a bad end. In the French case, the clearing of a new space for freedom begun by the revolution is almost immediately overwhelmed by the “social question.” The desperate poverty of millions, combined with the heritage of a sovereign model of power and the violent compassion of the Jacobins, ensured that the emergence of a new democratic public sphere would vanish in the violence of a prolonged, and ultimately futile, struggle for liberation.²⁵ In contrast, the American Revolution, unburdened by the crushing poverty of the Old World, succeeded in founding a new space for freedom.²⁶ Yet the promise of the ingenious “new system of power” created by the American Constitution goes unfulfilled, due largely to an ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the kind of freedom it was to house and protect. The original focus on the “pursuit of public happiness”—on the right of all to enter the public sphere and become, in Jefferson’s words, “participators in government”—gives way to the pursuit of private happiness and material welfare. For Arendt, the equivocal American attitude toward public freedom is manifest in what she calls Jefferson’s slip of the pen in the Declaration of Independence: the “pursuit of public happiness” is elided to the “pursuit of happiness.”²⁷ This elision foreshadows the historical shift away from the “contents of the Constitution” (qua system of power) to the Bill of Rights. This is a shift away from public freedom to civil liberty: the “share in public affairs” promised by the Constitution is traded for a “guarantee that the pursuit of private happiness would be protected and furthered by public power.”²⁸

In the case of the French Revolution, the founding of a space for freedom is fatally sabotaged by the overwhelming forces of necessity; in the American case, a successful founding is undone by the failure to remember “public happiness” and to provide the requisite institutions for its maintenance.²⁹ What we find in both instances is the “resoluteness” of the revolutionary spirit giving way to the self-objectification implicit in submitting to the torrent revolutionnaire, or the desire for commodious living.³⁰ This bad faith makes the “need for action” appear transitory: the creation and preservation of a space for freedom fades as a motivating force for revolution, with its place being usurped by the question of public welfare and the administration and management of economic processes.³¹ The more such processes rule our lives and our political sphere, the greater the loss of our revolutionary “treasure” (public freedom, public happiness). For Arendt, the fate of the political in the modern age is to be read in the history of its revolutions, a history in which “islands” of freedom emerge amidst a sea of automatic processes, only to be overwhelmed and disappear:

The history of revolutions—from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and the summer of 1956 in Budapest—which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age, could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana. There exist, indeed, many good reasons to believe that the treasure was never a reality but a mirage. … Unicorns and fairy queens seem to possess more reality than the lost treasure of the revolutions.32

In modernity, the dialectic of transcendence and fallenness is played out in terms of the colonization of the political by the social. The proliferation of “automatic processes” denatures the public sphere and diminishes the space for freedom.³³ In the context of this reality, the political is essentially evanescent, the champion of freedom a champion of lost causes. To be sure, public freedom has not disappeared from the world; yet the primacy of life processes—of the social and economic—has starkly and dramatically curtailed a phenomenon whose being always was, at best, episodic.³⁴

II. BEING AS APPEARING: POST-NIETZSCHEAN ONTOLOGY AND THE EVANESCENCE OF THE POLITICAL

The evanescence of the few “islands of freedom” that Arendt picks out in modernity confirms, apparently, the contemplative tradition’s low estimate of the realm of human affairs. The political realm is one of flux or becoming, lacking the permanence that is the benchmark of value for the metaphysical tradition. Political philosophy overcomes the disdain felt by the vita contemplativa toward this sphere; yet, owing to its origins within this tradition, it is informed by the same ontological prejudices. Thus, while Plato’s attempt to model the realm of human affairs upon the structure of true Being may have lost plausibility long ago, his two-world theory has continued to provide the basic architecture of political thought. Natural or divine law, right reason, the greatest good for the greatest number, distortion-free communication: these are a few of the principles called on to provide a ground to the flux, an extrapolitical normative ground from which stability and permanence might flow. Of the great Western political theorists, only Machiavelli refused this temptation, creating his own “political metaphysic” of flux and appearance to combat the inherited prejudices of Platonism and Christianity.³⁵

As we have seen, Arendt is extremely critical of the “Platonic” tendencies of our tradition of political thought.³⁶ This perspective, however, does not lead her (as it does some postmoderns) to celebrate flux for the sake of flux.³⁷ Arendt’s conviction that “in the political realm, Being and appearance coincide” does not prevent her from insisting upon a certain structural or institutional permanence for the public realm. In her view, the public realm can nurture our worldliness, provide a “home” for mortals, and preserve the meaning and memory of action only insofar as it outlasts the life span of the individual.38 This insistence upon the need for a stable, relatively permanent structure marks another respect in which Arendt’s anti-Platonism diverges from Nietzsche’s.³⁹ Insofar as Nietzsche responds to the tradition’s reification of Being as self-subsistent ground by affirming flux and becoming, he merely inverts the metaphysical hierarchy.⁴⁰ The drive for immortality that Arendt opposes to the contemplative yearning for eternity implies a different sort of ontology, one in which Being is not simply opposed to appearance, nor dismissed as mere error or illusion.

How, then, can Arendt assert the reality of appearance without falling into the Nietzschean trap? How can she reconcile the desire for a (limited) permanence with her tragic historical sense of the evanescence of the political (its “lingering awhile in presence”)?⁴¹ One way of answering the first question is to insist upon the ontological dimensions of publicity (a tack Arendt takes in her Kantian, aestheticizing mode). Another is to delve behind the ontological prejudices that inform our tradition and that promote the degradation of the political. This is the tack taken by Arendt in her “repetition” of the Greek prephilosophic experience of politics, a repetition undertaken not merely to escape the distortions perpetuated by a hostile tradition but—more profoundly—in order to “retrieve” an experience of Being as appearance lost long ago. As noted above, this anti-Platonic, post-Nietzschean turn echoes the methodological strategy of Being and Time. However, Arendt’s “repetition” resonates more strongly—and more troublingly—with another of Heidegger’s texts, the 1935 lectures An Introduction to Metaphysics. These lectures represent Heidegger’s own attempt at surmounting Platonism and nihilism, at escaping the dialectic of objectivism/subjectivism. Prefiguring Arendt, he draws on the Greeks to rethink Being as appearing. Yet it is also in this text that Heidegger notoriously refers to the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement.⁴²

The fact that Arendt’s attempt at overcoming Platonism intersects sharply with this text leads us to ask what are the politics of rethinking Being (or “the real”) as appearance; that is, against substantialist metaphysics and its “invertors”?

Like Arendt, An Introduction to Metaphysics frames the recovery of the Greek experience of Being as appearance as a profoundly political project. Heidegger begins by thematizing the Seinsvergessenheit lodged in the heart of metaphysics—a forgetfulness of Being that he views as the source of the technonihilism threatening Europe, and especially Germany, from both sides (Russia and America, “metaphysically speaking” the “same”).⁴³ The spiritual crisis of the West—a crisis manifest in “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of man into a mass, the hatred of everything free and creative”—flows from the Seinsvergessenheit of an exhausted subjectivism (expressed by the Nietzschean characterization of Being as a “mere vapor and a fallacy”).⁴⁴ The only hope for escaping this crisis, according to Heidegger, resides in the possibility of repeating “the beginning of our historical-spiritual existence, in order to transform it into a new beginning.”⁴⁵ In the question of Being—the Seinsfrage—nothing less than the “spiritual destiny of the West” is at stake; hence, “the beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness and insecurity that attend a true beginning.”46

For Heidegger, the core of this all-important repetition is a recovery of the originary experience of Being qua presence before its reification into constant presence by the tradition. Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve this Greek experience of presence proceeds by the dissection of the four most basic distinctions upon which metaphysics is based: the distinctions between Being and Becoming, Being and Appearance, Being and Thinking, Being and the Ought.⁴⁷ These distinctions play an essential role in the delimitation of Being as constant presence and, thus, as ground.⁴⁸ Yet they all retain the trace of another, more primordial, experience of Being, one that Heidegger believes has the power to save the West from the “flimsily covered abyss” opening up before it.

Heidegger’s discussion of the distinction between being and appearance in Chapter 4 of An Introduction to Metaphysics is notable in two respects. First, it undertakes a thorough revaluation of the ontological significance of appearance. Second, Heidegger insists that the differential relation between being and appearance presupposes a primordial bond or unity. Both are highlighted when Heidegger declares: “Only the tired latecomers with their supercilious wit imagine that they can dispose of the historical power of appearance by declaring it to be ‘subjective,’ hence very dubious. The Greeks experienced it differently. They were perpetually compelled to wrest being from appearance and preserve it against appearance.”⁴⁹

Deploying one of his famous etymological arguments, Heidegger maintains that the primordial or hidden “unity of Being and appearance” echoes faintly in the senses of appearance (Schein) found in everyday German. He specifies three primary modes: Schein as “radiance or glow”; as appearing or coming to light; and as mere appearance or semblance.⁵⁰ It is the second mode of Scheinen (appearing, in the sense of showing itself) that, according to Heidegger, underlies the other two. Thus, “the essence of appearance (Schein) lies in the appearing (Erscheinen).”⁵¹ Appearing is “self-manifestation, self-representation, standing-here, presence”; and “to be present,” to appear or to shine (as, for example, stars do), “means exactly the same thing as being.”⁵²

The “inner connection” between being and appearance attested to by everyday usage refers us to the Greek experience of this unity in the presencing they called physis. According to Heidegger, physis denotes “self-blossoming emergence (e.g., the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it; in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on.”⁵³ Physis, as “emergence,” can be “observed everywhere”; yet the Greeks did not learn what physis was through natural phenomenon, but vice versa. Their ontological precomprehension of the world was entirely colored in terms of this “power that emerges and the enduring realm under its sway.”⁵⁴ Thus, the “standing-in-itself” we associate with the being-present of a thing was, for the Greeks, “nothing other than standing-there, standing-in-the-light,” a “shining appearance.”⁵⁵ The experience of physis as emergence, as coming into the light, meant that to the Greek mind “appearing is not something subsequent that sometimes happens to being”; rather, “appearing is the essence of being,” “being means appearing.”56

Heidegger’s interpretation is very close to the ontological primacy of appearance posited by Arendt in The Human Condition and On Revolution, a primacy she generalizes beyond the political sphere in The Life of the Mind: “In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.”⁵⁷ What is implied here is not the turning upside down of the metaphysical hierarchy, in which appearance or “illusions” are opposed to the “error” of Being; rather, Arendt is suggesting that we view appearances or “surfaces” as the highest mode of being.⁵⁸ This, of course, is a lesson gleaned from the Greek experience of politics, in which “appearing to all” coincided with the fullest reality. Heidegger’s starting point is different; nevertheless, he emphasizes the continuity between the experience of physis as self-emergent appearance and the Greek understanding of the political realm as a space of appearance. That the essence or “truth” of being lies at least partly in appearance is shown by the Greeks understanding of “the supreme possibility of human being”: the glory or glorification achievable through political action. As Heidegger notes, “Glory is in Greek doxa. Dokeo means ‘I show myself, appear, enter into the light.’”⁵⁹ As we have seen, it is precisely this understanding of “the shining glory of great deeds,” of the illuminative capacity of action in the space of appearances, that guides Arendt’s anti-Platonist theorization of the public realm. Prefiguring Arendt yet again, Heidegger underlines the perspectival constitution of the arena in which “glorious action” stands as the highest mode of being. The regard in which an individual stands, the magnificence of a city: these realities, Heidegger points out, are constituted by doxa, by opinion. The “aspect of a thing” first offers itself and changes through the “diversity of viewpoints” found in the public realm.⁶⁰

The Greek understanding of being as appearance thus reveals the ontologically constitutive power of doxa. Arendt’s and Heidegger’s “repetitions” are in remarkable accord here. For Arendt, the superior reality of the public realm is found precisely in its doxastic dimensions, which Plato had dismissed as akin to shadows on the wall of a cave cut off from the light of the Real and the True. Heidegger stresses the historicity of the Platonic devaluation of appearance, a devaluation he sees as marking a turning point in the “spiritual” life of the Greeks and the “destiny” of the West:

It was in the Sophists and Plato that appearance was declared to be mere appearance and thus degraded. At the same time being, as idea, was exalted to a supersensory realm. A chasm, chorismos, was created between the merely apparent being here below and real being somewhere on high. In that chasm Christianity settled down, at the same time reinterpreting the lower as created and the higher as creator. These refashioned weapons it turned against antiquity (as paganism) and so disfigured it. Nietzsche was right in saying that Christianity is Platonism for the people.⁶¹

This passage clarifies the political stakes of the “destruction of the history of ontology.” It also reveals the way in which the Arendtian revaluation of worldliness and appearance is continuous with, and indebted to, Heidegger’s “surmounting” of Platonism in the nineteen thirties. There is, however, a clear and important difference between their respective “overcomings,” a difference that creates an abyss between these two attempts at post-Nietzschean ontology. The difference reveals itself, symptomatically enough, in the course of Heidegger’s discussion of doxa in An Introduction to Metaphysics. Heidegger turns from discussing the importance of doxa for the reality of appearance to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Significantly, the lesson he wishes to extract from the tragedy is that appearance, by its very nature, is self-distorting: appearance reveals, but this revelation is always and at the same time a concealment, or a deception.62 Sophocles demonstrates the Greek recognition that “this deception lies in the appearance itself”: “Only because appearance itself deceives can it deceive man and lead him into illusion.”⁶³ The structurally deceiving nature of appearance means that the all-important Greek passion was not, as Arendt believes, the agonistic urge to action and self-display; rather, the Oedipus story attests to “the passion for disclosure of being.” The Oedipus story presents us with, in the poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s words, a “tragedy of appearance”; one that enacts, according to Heidegger, “the enduring struggle between being and appearance,” a struggle in which the drive to unconcealment is constantly at war with the concealing powers of appearance.⁶⁴

Here we see the gap that separates Heidegger’s dialectic of concealment and revealment from Arendt’s appropriation. Heidegger’s equation of disclosure or unconcealment with truth (aletheia) leads him to identify the illuminative activity of the Greeks not with doxastic political action, but rather with the poetic or creative activity that “wrests” the truth of Being concealed by the “dimmed down” appearances of the public realm. Harkening back to the polarity of authentic disclosedness and everydayness in Being and Time, Heidegger underlines the structural ambiguity of appearance, and the resultant imperative to wrest being from it: “If he [man] is to take over [his] being-there in the radiance of being, he must bring to stand, he must endure it in appearance and against appearance, and he must wrest both appearance and being from the abyss of non-being.”⁶⁵

In framing the dialectic of concealment/revealment—aletheia—as an “enduring struggle between being and appearance,” Heidegger reveals the depth of his philosophical prejudice against the realm of human affairs. While this framing hardly resurrects Plato’s metaphysical hierarchy, it does create a clear ranking of authentic, wresting, “bringing-into-the-light,” on the one hand, and the inauthentic, obscuring character of everyday opinion and discourse, on the other. The ambiguous appearances of the latter have value only insofar as the authentic creator—the poet, thinker, or statesman—can mold them into something utterly novel, bringing forth a new clearing for Being through the world-disclosive capacity of his work.⁶⁶ Heidegger’s “repetition” of the Greek experience of Being as appearing thus presents us with a privileging of the poetic, world-disclosive activity of the creator over the praxis of the many. His ontology of appearance is irreducibly political insofar as it shifts the disclosive agon from an intersubjective context (the public realm) to that of the enduring struggle between being and appearance. This struggle—the struggle for the truth of Being—is one that remains the province of “leaders” or “creators” alone.67

Heidegger’s thinking of being as appearance is determined throughout by a philosophical bias in favor of “the hidden ground” of presence. This bias leads Heidegger to emphasize the structurally ambiguous character of appearance and to aim his “repetition” at the forgotten sources of Western ontology. Arendt’s “repetition” goes one step farther—or deeper—than Heidegger’s. Her “destruction” of the Western tradition of political philosophy returns us not to the originary (speculative) sources of a presence subsequently reified as constant presence by metaphysics, but rather to an experience of the being of appearance drawn entirely from the plural, doxastic, and public dimensions of praxis. Heidegger, as the discussion in IM indicates, was quite aware of this alternative phenomenal origin; yet his privileging of Greek ontology prevents him from seeing the experience of appearance born of plurality and politics as anything other than a derivative mode.⁶⁸ What is lacking in Heidegger (as Arendt points out in a note to her essay “What Is Authority?”) is an appreciation of the political context in which Plato initiates the degradation of appearance and the reification of truth as correspondence.⁶⁹ The result is a political ontology of appearance whose center of gravity remains the struggle for truth (now aletheia); a struggle inscribed, as in Plato, in the gap between the few and the many. We should not be surprised, then, that the disclosure of the being of appearance takes two radically opposed forms: the poetic agon by which the truth of Being is wrested from appearance versus the agonistic “sharing of words and deeds” characteristic of a radically democratic politics.

III. THE PROBLEM OF GROUNDLESS ACTION AND JUDGMENT

Arendt’s “debt” to Heidegger has occasioned stern and often quite hostile criticism. Rationalists of the left and right take strong exception to her characterization of the freedom of political action as spontaneous or groundless, a characterization they view as a theoretical Pandora’s box. In an essay on Arendt, Martin Jay identifies her emphasis upon the “sheer capacity to begin” with an existentialist glorification of the deed, a linkage that puts her theory of political action on the slippery slope to violence.⁷⁰ Richard Wolin raises a related but somewhat different objection, focusing on the affinity between Arendt’s “dramaturgical” model of action and Heidegger’s notion of the “clearing” as a locus of unconcealment. Wolin suggests that Arendt’s disclosive conception of politics, like Heidegger’s disclosive conception of existence, fails to provide criteria for distinguishing between “legitimate and illegitimate modes of self-unveiling.”⁷¹ Arendt’s political philosophy, he thinks, is plagued by the same “criterionlessness” that haunts Heidegger’s Being and Time.⁷² The lack of “normative grounding” is viewed as placing Arendt in a theoretical position indistinguishable from decisionism (a conclusion Jay arrives at also). It comes as no surprise when these critics turn Strauss’s critique of Heidegger upon Arendt, charging that her commitment to freedom as the “abyss-like ground” of action leads her into relativism and irrationalism.

Arendt’s political theory will appear “irrationalist” to those who believe that the task of a “rational” political theory is the establishment of normative foundations that are, strictly speaking, beyond argument and that can be called upon to provide extrapolitical criteria of legitimacy for any given consensus.73 From this perspective, the Just remains immanently connected to the True, and the specification of the conditions necessary for the circulation of true statements provides an analogical model for what constitutes legitimate agreement in the political realm.⁷⁴ As noted above, Arendt thinks this analogy is a false one: theoretical discourse provides a misleading model for practical discourse. Its advantages (for example, a more subtle set of criteria for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic consensus, or right from might) are outweighed by its disadvantages (the fetish made of a particular model of procedural rationality; the overvaluation of agreement as the telos of action and discourse). In fact, nothing in Arendt’s position signals a hostility to rationality as such, despite Jay’s suggestion that the appeal to prephilosophic experience manifests a “Heideggerian denigration of Logos.”⁷⁵ That Arendt values rational discourse highly is clear from her antipathy to a romantic politics of will or feeling à la Rousseau or Robespierre.⁷⁶ It is precisely against such a politics that she insists upon opinion and judgment as rational and political faculties of the first order.⁷⁷ From Arendt’s point of view, the scandal of the Western tradition of political thought is the way it consistently ignores the specific rationality of these faculties, reserving the honorific “rational” for discourses whose object is truth.

Martin Jay’s main charge—that Arendt’s celebration of initiatory action veers unavoidably toward violence—is even more questionable. Jay argues that Arendt’s forcefully made (and often repeated) distinction between action and violence will not stand due to the inner “affinity between beginnings and violence.”⁷⁸ In making this claim (which he sees as born out by the aporias of Arendt’s text), Jay repeats one of the West’s oldest and most pernicious prejudices, namely, that “in the beginning was a crime”; that “no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating.”⁷⁹ This prejudice, given mythic form in the legends of Cain and Abel, and of Romulus and Remus, owes its plausibility to the metaphorics of fabrication. When viewed through the prism of making, political beginnings appear essentially violent; the truth of the statement “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” seems incontrovertible. Yet the whole point of Arendt’s radical reappropriation of the distinction between praxis and poiēsis is to force us to question the ease with which we impose this metaphorics upon the realm of human affairs. Thus Arendt, like Locke, views violence as a legitimate means to resist tyranny, as almost by definition part of the struggle for liberation. However, this struggle is prepolitical, and it lacks the existential glamour (and ontological significance) attributed to it by Georges Sorel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon.⁸⁰ Like the social contract theorists of the Enlightenment, Arendt insists upon an irreducible gap between this prepolitical sphere (the “state of nature”) and the realm of political action constituted by the act of founding. The deliberative nature of the latter act, manifest in the American case, must not be overlooked.81 The “unique lesson” of the American Revolution is lost at the moment the act of founding is absorbed by metaphors drawn from the plastic arts or natural processes.

With regard to Richard Wolin’s charge that Arendt’s political theory is beset by the same “criterionlessness” found in Heidegger, I need only note the obvious. Arendt clearly provides a set of stringent criteria for distinguishing genuinely political actions and relations from nonpolitical ones. These criteria—derived, for the most part, from the idea of a “self-contained” politics—rule out violence, coercion, and deception, along with the more blatant forms of technocratic highhandedness. Arendt is adamant that a public sphere is truly possible only where plural equals interact through persuasive speech.⁸² It may be objected that her criteria are too rough and ready to provide an adequate defense against the subtler forms of ideological manipulation. What is lacking, we are told, are standards tight enough to rule over the redemption of validity claims.⁸³ Arendt’s response to this criticism is to insist that such concerns fall within the arena of political judgment and cannot shape it from without. There are, in other words, no theoretical shortcuts that might substitute for the faculty of political judgment or compensate for its deficiencies. Such a response is in line with one of her most basic and firmly held convictions, anathema to the inheritors of classical rationalism and ideologiekritik alike, namely, that citizens must be treated, for better or worse, as adults, capable of acting and judging for themselves.

The charges, then, are wide of the mark. Their vehemence, however, bespeaks an anxiety whose source is hardly Arendt’s failure to provide sufficient criteria for determining a “genuine” consensus. The accusations of irrationalism, “criterion-lessness,” and violence convey a (distorted) recognition of the magnitude of Arendt’s project. Her political theory attempts nothing less than the rethinking of action and judgment in light of the collapse of the tradition and the closure of metaphysics (the “death of God”). The negative, “destructive” side of this project consists in demonstrating how our instrumental or “technical” interpretations of action, thought, and judgment fall under the shadow of a “dead God.” Arendt’s positive tasks are the uprooting of action and judgment from the patterns imposed by metaphysical rationality and the rethinking of these activities in their autonomy and freedom; that is, without grounds (in the metaphysical sense). Such an unprecedented rethinking is the only “authentic” response to the collapse of the tradition and the crises of authority and judgment that follow in its wake.

One of the more familiar canards about Arendt is that she is somehow nostalgic for authority.⁸⁴ This misreading is occasioned by her discussion of the modern “crisis in authority” in the essay “What Is Authority?” Here, she identifies the “loss of authority,” its “vanishing from the world,” with the “loss of worldly permanence and reliability.”⁸⁵ This identification resonates all too well with the communitarian yearning for a more rooted, grounded political association. At the same time, it provides liberals with the ammunition they need to accuse Arendt of nostalgia for a premodern social order in which tradition, religion, and authority worked together to supply a stable basis for politics.86

As we shall see in Chapter 6, Arendt can with some justification be accused of harboring a desire for rootedness or “at-homeness,” a desire in conflict with the energies of modernity. Nevertheless, it is wildly inaccurate to accuse her of (or praise her for) a nostalgia for authority. According to Arendt, one salient characteristic of the current “crisis” is that we “are no longer in a position to know what authority really is,” experiences of it having vanished from our life-world.⁸⁷ The result is that we are prone to confuse authority with power or violence. Yet, as Arendt points out, “authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.”⁸⁸ Similarly, authority is “incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation.”⁸⁹ Persuasion denotes an “egalitarian order,” while the exercise of authority presupposes hierarchy. The “essence” of authority is the hierarchical relation between “the one who commands and the one who obeys,” a relation that rests “neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands.”⁹⁰ What makes authority possible is the mutual acceptance, by rulers and ruled, of “the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize.”⁹¹

As a political principle, then, authority conflicts with Arendt’s basic convictions as to what authentic politics is (namely, something that occurs only in “the egalitarian order of persuasion”).⁹² How to explain the impression that she mourns its passing? This impression is created, in part, by her citing the decline in authority as one element in the constellation that made the totalitarian seizure of power possible.⁹³ But—and this is a point overlooked by her communitarian admirers as well as her liberal critics—while the demise of authority creates clear dangers (it is, she says, “tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world”), it also creates unprecedented opportunities.⁹⁴ The loss of authority, according to Arendt, “does not entail, at least not necessarily, the loss of the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a fit place to live for those who come after us.”⁹⁵ Indeed, it may be that this loss makes a new, stronger form of “care for the world” possible.

The principle of authority created stability by providing the political order in the West with a certain kind of foundation. Arendt’s project in “What Is Authority?” is to specify the nature of this foundation and to show why it is no longer possible. Hence, the real question of the essay is “what was authority?”⁹⁶ Placed in the context of Arendt’s political thought as a whole, the essay makes a strong case for relief at the passing of authority. The overarching argument is that while authority may have provided a ground for theory and practice from the Romans up to the Enlightenment, it is only with its demise that the “elementary problems of human living-together” once more come into view.⁹⁷ The central role played by the concept of authority in Western political thought contributes mightily to the perversion of our concepts of political action, power, judgment, and freedom. By tracing the opening and closure of what could be called the “epoch of authority,” Arendt points us toward a postauthoritarian concept of the political.

What, then, was authority? In answering this question, Arendt insists (in proper Heideggerian, historicist mode) that we avoid any appeal to ahistorical generalization. What is in question is not “authority in general” but “a very specific concept of authority that has been dominant in our history.”98 What is the nature of this “specific concept,” and where did it come from?

According to Arendt, the concept of authority operative in our tradition is one that legitimates the political order by reference to some transcendent, extrapolitical force. This specification is clarified by the contrast between authoritarian and tyrannical forms of government, a contrast liberalism tends to obscure:

The difference between tyranny and authoritarian government has always been that the tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest, whereas even the most draconic authoritarian government is bound by laws. Its acts are tested by a code which was made either not by man at all, as in the case of the law of nature of God’s Commandments or the Platonic ideas, or at least not by those actually in power. The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; it is always this source, this external force which transcends the political realm, from which the authorities derive their “authority,” that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked.⁹⁹

The principle of authority demands, in short, that human affairs “be subjected to the domination of something outside their realm.”¹⁰⁰ It is only upon the supposition of some such transcendent, dominating force that authoritarian regimes (in the strict sense) are possible. Which is to say, simply, that our concept of authority is, at its heart, metaphysical. Authority presupposes metaphysics’ two-world theory; its demise, moreover, is inseparable from the closure of metaphysical rationality as traced by Nietzsche and Heidegger. To the question What was authority? then, the short answer is metaphysics.

That the “epoch of authority” and what Heidegger called the “epoch of metaphysics” are roughly coextensive is borne out by the genealogical dimension of Arendt’s inquiry. The kind of “public-political world” brought into being by the notion of authority did not always exist: as Arendt notes, the word and concept are Roman in origin.¹⁰¹ Even more important is the fact that “neither the Greek language nor the varied political experiences of Greek history show any knowledge of authority and the kind of rule it implies.”¹⁰² The Greeks did not recognize the relation of rulership as a political relation, since it inevitably implied force and violence (prepolitical modes of interaction). The idea that there could be a hierarchy not based on force or violence, and which would be accepted by both rulers and ruled as just and binding, was an idea that had to be introduced into Greek political discourse, precisely against the experience of the polis. According to Arendt, this introduction (subsequently built on by the Romans and Christianity) was performed by Plato and Aristotle.¹⁰³

Arendt views the Platonic-Aristotelian attempt to “introduce something akin to authority into the public life of the Greek polis” as fraught with paradox. Authority “implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom.”¹⁰⁴ Yet the various examples of rulership available to Plato and Aristotle in the public and private spheres all framed relations predicated upon the denial of freedom. The tyrant, the general, the household head, the master of slaves: taken individually, each provided a model of unquestionable authority, yet none could be said to preserve either the public sphere or the freedom of citizens.105 Thus, the concept of rule had to be introduced by some other means, which preserved at least the appearance of freely given obedience. The “other means,” of course, was the rule of reason, an innovation through which the “Socratic school” transferred the compelling force of truth from the sphere of theoretical insight or logical demonstration to the realm of human affairs. Reason provided a nonviolent (and hence “legitimate”) principle of coercion, which enabled Greek thought to rise above persuasion (a clearly inadequate means, as illustrated by the trial of Socrates) without resorting to despotism. But in order for reason to rule, it had to be demonstrated that the genuine standards for human conduct transcended the realm of human affairs, and were available only to those capable of contemplative “seeing”; that is, philosophers. Such a demonstration is undertaken by Plato in the Republic; “nowhere else,” Arendt writes, “has Greek thinking so closely approached the concept of authority.”¹⁰⁶

The Platonic-Aristotelian turn to reason as a way of introducing the idea of rule into the political sphere is laden with implications for our tradition. As Arendt states it, “The consequences of expecting reason to develop into an instrument of coercion perhaps have been no less decisive for the tradition of Western philosophy than the tradition of Western politics.”¹⁰⁷ Politically, this appeal entails splitting thought off from action and creating a hierarchical relation between the two. Rationality ceases to be a doxastic capacity exercised by the actor in the context of plurality. It becomes, instead, the monopoly of the “thinking class” (in Plato, those by nature suited to the contemplative life). One reason the Republic is paradigmatic for the Western concept of authority is that in Plato’s utopia this class is not, strictly speaking, a ruling class. The ruler in the Republic is neither a group nor an individual, but a set of transcendent standards. Such standards—the sine qua non of genuine authoritarian rule—are available only to the mind’s eye, a kind of sight not possessed by the hoì polloi. The “philosopher-kings” are, in fact, selfless instruments to whom true Being is revealed, and who translate this moment of vision into standards for the realm of human affairs.¹⁰⁸ The question of whether reason reveals that which is “just by nature” to an intellectual elite or (as the Enlightenment would have it) to all is less fundamental than the peculiar relation this appeal institutes between first and practical philosophy. The Platonic politicization of reason creates a relation of derivation between “general” and “special” metaphysics, ontology and practical (ethical or political) philosophy.¹⁰⁹

The “authoritarian” appeal to metaphysical rationality made by Plato thus has two key effects. First, it disentangles thought from action, firmly coupling reason to the unseen realm of the universal; second, through the idea of transcendent standards, it attributes a prescriptive power to thought such that it “rules over” action.¹¹⁰ The splitting off of thought from action accomplished by the Platonic move is, if not the origin, clearly the institutionalization of the theory/practice distinction. This distinction is irreducibly metaphysical insofar as it rests upon what Heidegger terms a “technical” interpretation of thought and action.111 From Plato forward, action is viewed primarily as a means to an end, as the production of an effect. Thought, on the other hand, is stripped of its purely contemplative (useless) status and is functionalized: its primary role, qua theory, is to guide action by the rational securing of first principles and the positing of ends in accordance with these principles. For metaphysical rationality (as Schürmann notes), action is essentially teleocratic and thought is essentially foundational.¹¹² The latter’s job is to secure the truth with which the former may be brought into accord. The Platonic appeal to transcendent standards—to the “authority” of reason as a “legitimate principle of coercion”—establishes the familiar pattern wherein action proceeds from and is legitimated by a grounding, extrapolitical “first” revealed by reason.¹¹³

Within the field of metaphysical rationality, then, action is delineated as “the practico-political effectuation of the philosophical.”¹¹⁴ Yet despite Plato’s success in articulating a new configuration of thought and action, his attempt to introduce “something akin to authority” into the political sphere suffered from a significant weakness. Arendt describes Plato’s predicament:

The trouble with coercion through reason, however, is that only the few are subject to it, so that the problem arises of how to assure that the many, the people who in their very multitude compose the body politic, can be submitted to the same truth. Here, to be sure, some other means of coercion must be found, and here again coercion through violence must be avoided if political life as the Greeks understood it is not to be destroyed. This is the central predicament of Plato’s political philosophy and has remained a predicament of all attempts to establish a tyranny of reason.¹¹⁵

Plato solved this predicament by introducing (at the end of the Republic) a myth about rewards and punishments to be meted out in the hereafter.¹¹⁶ Christianity is notable for the way it appropriates both Plato’s “invisible spiritual yardsticks” and the myth of otherworldly sanctions, a combination which proved so powerful that even the thoroughly enlightened and secular revolutionaries of the eighteenth century felt compelled to cite the fear of hell as an indispensable grounding for the maintenance of social order.¹¹⁷ It was, after all, through religion and belief in the hereafter that the authoritarian positing of transcendent yardsticks for human affairs became a political fact of the first order, successfully establishing what had previously been viewed as the negation of the political relation (authority or hierarchy) as its essence.

In Arendt’s view, authority and religion, in combination with tradition, formed a tremendously powerful and resiliant “groundwork” for premodern European civilization.¹¹⁸ She sees the relative stability of the West as a function of the mutually reinforcing elements of this constellation, an “amalgamation” that first attained its political perfection with the Romans (for whom Greek philosophy provided an unquestioned authority).¹¹⁹ The problem is that none of these elements can fill its foundational role if any one of the others is in decline. Thus, the process of secularization has the ultimate effect of making a “grounded” social order impossible. And this, in turn, produces a generalized crisis—not only in authority, but also (as we shall see) in judgment. The crucial point in Arendt’s analysis is that the closure of metaphysical rationality—the withering of ultimate grounds for action, the “death of God”—would have remained an event of strictly local (philosophical/theological) significance were it not for the fact that Christianity had indeed (as Nietzsche said) brought Platonism to the people. The result is that the various “modern deaths” which haunt contemporary intellectual life (the deaths of “God, metaphysics, philosophy, and, by implication, positivism”) have “been events of considerable historical consequence”: since “the beginning of our century, they have ceased to be the exclusive concern of an intellectual elite and instead are not so much the concern as the common unexamined assumption of nearly everybody.”120 Without the belief in otherworldly sanctions, transcendent standards become empty husks—still repeated and respected, but deprived of their effective power. The only thing that survives the “modern deaths” unscathed is the habit of legitimating action via the appeal to such standards. This is the situation Arendt has in mind when she speaks of a generalized “crisis in authority,” a situation Nietzsche and Heidegger described as nihilism.¹²¹

Arendt is under no illusions concerning the political ramifications of this situation. On the one hand, she freely acknowledges the disastrous possibilities opened by this crisis. At Toronto, in response to the philosopher Hans Jonas’s call for a revived inquiry into ultimate grounds, Arendt replies: “I am perfectly sure that this whole totalitarian catastrophe would not have happened if people still had believed in God, or in hell rather—that is, if there were still ultimates.”¹²² On the other hand is the simple and devastating fact that “there were no ultimates to appeal to,” no extrapolitical principles that retained an unshakable validity and effectivity for the average person, or that would make him or her prefer death to complicity with a criminal regime.¹²³ Nor does our discomfort end there; Arendt continues:

And if you go through such a situation [as totalitarianism] the first thing you know is the following: you never know how somebody will act. You have the surprise of your life! This goes throughout all layers of society and it goes throughout various distinctions between men. And if you want to make a generalization then you could say that those who were still firmly convinced of the so-called old values were the first to be ready to change their old values for a new set of values, provided they were given one. And I am afraid of this, because I think that the moment you give anybody a new set of values—or this famous “bannister”—you can immediately exchange it. And the only thing the guy gets used to is having a “bannister” and a set of values, no matter. I do not believe we can stabilize the situation in which we have been since the seventeenth century in any final way. …

We wouldn’t have to bother about this whole business if metaphysics and this whole value business hadn’t fallen down. We begin to question because of these events.¹²⁴

The import of these remarks is clear. Arendt does not believe that nihilism at the “practical level” is combated by a return to tradition, a reassertion of “values,” or—worse yet—the movement for “traditional values” (as she puts it elsewhere, the Fascist is “a good family man”).125 It is precisely the reliance upon such “bannisters” in our tradition that has led to the separating out of thought and action and to the positing of an overly simple (deductive) relation between “yardsticks” and action. Corresponding to these (historical) developments is a precipitous decline in our capacity for moral and political judgment. Plato’s postulation of extrapolitical, transcendent yardsticks had the effect of equating judgment with the “capacity for subsuming,” a simplification much in evidence in the monological character of Kant’s moral philosophy.¹²⁶ Our powers of reflective and inter-subjective judgment have atrophied under the weight of such objectivist regimes. The result is that the crumbling of these “yardsticks” leaves us dangerously susceptible to those who offer the narcotic of a revivified set of values, the “moral” means by which to prolong our mechanical habits of judgment and escape the complexity—and effort—of thinking and judging for ourselves.¹²⁷

For Arendt, then, the imperative issuing from the generalized “crisis in authority” is not (as Karl Jaspers wrongly assumes) to preserve whatever fragments of authority remain; rather, it is to join Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s “destructive” enterprise, in order that we might face the “elementary problems of human living-together” more honestly, without dogma or prejudice.¹²⁸ The description she gives of her efforts in The Life of the Mind applies equally to her attempt to extricate action, freedom, judgment, and an opinion-based rationality from the tyranny of what Schürmann calls metaphysics’ “attributive-participative” schema:¹²⁹

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it.¹³⁰

The “dismantling” of the remains of the substantialist machinery of legitimation and judgment according to first principles is rendered unavoidable by the “horrible originality” of totalitarianism, whose actions “constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.”¹³¹ Totalitarianism shatters what is left of conventional wisdom, leaving us with a “topsy-turvy” world in which inherited notions no longer have any purchase.¹³² However, the caesura introduced by totalitarianism had long been in preparation, its “shattering” effect being the result of a deeper, subterranean crisis at work in the Western tradition itself, the movement by which our highest values devalue themselves.¹³³ From Arendt’s perspective, the self-undermining character of the appeal to transcendent values (what Nietzsche saw as the irony of the will to truth) leads to the destruction of a crucial component of the “groundwork” of the West. This creates a situation in which political structures are held together (as Montesquieu presciently noted) solely by customs and traditions.¹³⁴ The increasingly hollow foundations of political society correspond to a “moral and spiritual breakdown of occidental culture,” the extent of which is revealed by the relative ease with which totalitarian societies succeeded in inverting our most “sacred” moral precepts. As Arendt notes in her 1953 essay “Understanding and Politics,” the frightening thing about totalitarianism is not so much its radical novelty as the fact that “it has brought to light the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”135 The bankruptcy of our “foundations” is revealed once and for all; the political consequences of an authoritarian/nihilistic investment in transcendent standards and ultimate grounds comes home to roost.

The crisis in authority, then, is inseparable from a crisis in judgment. But just as the closure of metaphysical rationality opens the possibility of thinking action in its freedom and autonomy as something other than a means, so too does the loss of “customary rules” open the way toward a renewed appreciation of our capacity for judgment. We may live “in the shadow of a great catastrophe,” but the break in our tradition is also liberating:

Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality. If the essence of all, and in particular of political, action is to make a new beginning, then understanding [judgment] becomes the other side of action.¹³⁶

Our cause for hope comes from the fact that, just as our capacity for action does not hinge upon the availability of ultimate grounds, our capacity for judgment outstrips the availability of general rules or “yardsticks.” The independence and spontaneity that characterize our capacity to “think without rules” make it possible to begin the assessment of the unprecedented (and generally horrific) political phenomenon of the twentieth century. The policy of systematized murder implemented by totalitarian regimes, for example, reveals the inadequacy of our “preconceived” categories. Totalitarian violence, manifest in “the blotting out of whole peoples” and the “clearance” of whole regions of their native populations, is no simple extension of tyranny, and the nature of its criminality is obscured by the traditional rubrics of “war crimes” or “pogrom.”¹³⁷ Such categories conceal the unprecedented nature of this (bureaucratic-technological) crime of the state, the horrible novelty of which is glimpsed in the industrialized (factory-like) production of corpses in the Nazi death camps. The inadequacy of traditional juridical concepts to deal with this new criminal reality was implicitly recognized at Nuremburg by the introduction of a new category of crime—“crimes against humanity” or, as the French prosecutor François de Menthon put it, “crimes against the human status”—a category that has become irreplaceable in the historical as well as legal judgments of state crimes of the twentieth century.¹³⁸

In the case of totalitarianism, the work of judgment is impeded not only by our propensity for “preconceived” categories, but also by a juridical discourse which insists that evil motives constitute the core of the guilt of the accused. Murder as a state policy reveals the theological assumptions concerning the nature of evil built into legal discourse, a point driven home to Arendt in the course of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. For Arendt, the Eichmann case presented the paradoxical juxtaposition of evil deeds on a gigantic scale with a patently unmonstrous, non-demonic doer—an actor whose most striking characteristics were “an extraordinary shallowness” and a “curious, quite authentic inability to think.”139 It was precisely the gap between the monstrousness of the deeds and the “ludicrousness of the man” that put Arendt “willy-nilly” in the possession of a concept: the “banality of evil.”¹⁴⁰ This concept—born of the specific phenomenon of Eichmann’s personality, and scarcely intended as a global characterization of the perpetrators of the Holocaust—is a prime example of the capacity of reflective judgment to begin with particulars and “ascend” to a universal. Qua concept, the “banality of evil” focuses our attention on a crucial dimension of twentieth-century state-sponsored violence: the thoughtless individual who, lacking wickedness, pathology, or even ideological conviction, willingly becomes a cog in the new bureaucracies of murder.

If, in response to these contemporary crises, Arendt emphasizes the autonomy of action and judgment, she does so in order to underline their freedom and spontaneity, their continued viability in a disenchanted age. Considered as our capacity for initiation, action does not stand in need of the guidance of grounding (transcendent) principles: it is, in fact, denatured by the Platonic-Aristotelian imposition of the substance/attribute, ground/action schema. Similarly, our capacity for judgment does not hinge upon the availability of “customary rules,” and it is indeed undermined by the simplistic subsumptive model of judgment such rules promote. The antinostalgia of Arendt’s perspective on the eclipse of authority and the break in tradition is evident in her conviction that the “faculties” of action and judgment come truly into their own precisely when there are no “bannisters” to lean on.¹⁴¹

Here we come to one of the more important ironies of Arendt’s political thought, one completely overlooked by her rationalist critics.¹⁴² In Arendt’s hands, the closure of the deductive relation between first and practical philosophy does not lead to decisionism or relativism, but to a recovery of the phenomena of action and judgment in their autonomy and complexity. This recovery, in turn, sets the stage for the restoration of the ethicopolitical dimension, so gravely foreshortened by the instrumentalizing dialectic Plato sets in motion. The “irony” of Arendt’s aesthetic approach to political action is that it rescues the phenomenon of reflective judgment (judgment “without criteria”) from the oblivion into which it had been thrust by a dogmatically rationalist (and ultimately nihilistic) tradition. Thus, while Arendt’s Kantian appeal to taste judgment as the appropriate model for moral-political judgment flows, first and foremost, from a desire to “save the phenomena” of the public-political world, it also provides the reorientation we need to begin the “reconstruction of moral horizons” (Beiner) in terms of shared judgments.¹⁴³ And this is the first step toward a postmetaphysical recuperation of the question of justice—which, as Arendt notes toward the end of her Eichmann book, is not fundamentally a question of knowledge or truth, but of judgment.¹⁴⁴

IV. THE TRADITION AS REIFICATION: PRODUCTIONIST METAPHYSICS AND THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE POLITICAL

For Arendt the Western tradition of political thought represents a sustained and deeply rooted effort to escape the “frailty” of human affairs, the hazards of political action, and the relativity of the realm of plurality. The haphazardness and contingency that permeate this realm call forth a succession of theoretical attempts to overcome politics, to introduce a firm (extrapolitical) ground for action or to point to a social order in which the need for action is transcended. As we had seen, what unites these efforts is the tendency to substitute making for acting, to submit praxis to the dominance of poiēsis. Such a substitution makes the idea of sovereign political freedom plausible; moreover, it leads us to look at the realm of human affairs through a very different lens, one that promotes the idea of mastery or control. Whether the grounds for this “technical” interpretation of action qua making are metaphysical (the Ideas, Nature, the rational will, History) or pragmatic (Nietzsche’s “life,” Richard Rorty’s “desires”) in the end makes little difference. What matters is that both action and politics are denatured, their essential characteristics buried under an epoch-old forgetting.

Arendt’s depiction of our tradition as animated by a will to escape politics (or, at the very least, to bring it under control by instrumentalizing political action) adds the dimension of historical depth to the “inauthenticity” of homo faber’s productive mentality. This mentality, which gains ascendence in the modern age, resonates with the tradition’s repression of action. The result is that the “withdrawal of the political” is one of the outstanding characteristics of our time.145 In singling out the tradition as being in no small way responsible for our “forgetting” of the political, Arendt is clearly following Heidegger’s own historical reworking of the theme of inauthenticity. This reworking, beginning with works published in 1930, led Heidegger to view the metaphysical tradition as a “science of grounds” that systematically covered over the “mystery” of presencing and the primordial phenomenon of the unconcealment of Being in favor of a hypostatized, leveled-off account of the “Being of beings.” Such an account, Heidegger argues, allows Western man to circumscribe Being as something representable and thus (in principle) controllable. By thinking of Being on the model of beings—by effacing what Heidegger refers to as the “ontological difference” between Being qua presencing and entities—metaphysics thrusts the primordial phenomenon of the “clearing” or disclosure of Being into oblivion. This forgetting lays the groundwork for the eventual “regulating and securing” of all that is, for planetary domination.¹⁴⁶ From the start, then, metaphysics’s will to ground is seen, simultaneously, as a will to security and a will to power.

The narrative Heidegger develops after 1930—in which the history of metaphysics conceals a closet “history of Being,” the tale of Being’s self-withdrawal and subsequent oblivion¹⁴⁷—clearly diverges from the “fundamental ontology” of his Being in Time. This divergence becomes more pronounced with the Kehre, the “turning,” that occurs in the course of the Nietzsche lectures (1936–40), a turning that spurs his critique of technology and the development of the notion of Gelassenheit as an alternative to metaphysical/technological “enframing.”148 Nevertheless, it is important to grasp the basic thematic continuities between early, middle, and late Heidegger; otherwise we risk misinterpreting not only his turn to Seinsgeschichte, but also the way his history of metaphysics decisively influences Arendt’s view of the “contemplative tradition’s” escape from politics.

In Being and Time Heidegger argued that our disclosive relation to Being is covered over by our propensity to understand ourselves and the world around us as vorhanden (present-at-hand), in terms of the categories of subject and substance. This propensity is rooted in our everydayness but also, more deeply, in our Greek and Cartesian heritage. As such it is symptomatic of a fundamental lack of resolve, an unwillingness to acknowledge either the pervasiveness of finitude or the fact of our groundlessness. The desire for security and tranquility prompts us, on the one hand, to lose ourselves in everydayness and, on the other hand, to presuppose the availability (and validity) of preestablished standards. These tendencies of inauthentic Dasein conceal the anxiety-producing freedom of disclosure by reifying our contingent vocabularies into quasi-natural entities and by stripping the world of its horizonal (historical) status.

In turning his attention to the origins of the Western metaphysical tradition, Heidegger sought to provide a genealogy of the ontological prejudices that predispose us toward such forgetfulness. Early on, Heidegger claims, metaphysics installs at the root of our culture a particular and fateful interpretation of the Being of beings, one that freezes the ontological horizon of the West so that Being loses all connotation of temporality and is understood, instead, as something permanent and selfsame, something we can take up a position toward and (ultimately) dispose of. By reifying the presence of the present and taking it as the model for Being, metaphysics disentangles man from Being and plunges the human vocation of disclosure into oblivion.¹⁴⁹ The forgetfulness it promotes is similar to the “numbing” effect of everydayness, but it occurs at a much more profound and historically diffuse level. Insofar as metaphysics’s reifying approach to Being and the “is-ness” of entities successfully seals off the temporality of presencing from thought, it constitutes a “destiny” (Geschick) for the West, one that culminates in the hegemony of the “standing-reserve.”¹⁵⁰

The rudiments of this story can be grasped by returning to Heidegger’s gloss (in IM) on the pre-Socratic comprehension of Being as physis, as self-emergence or coming-into-the-light.¹⁵¹ Heidegger’s return to the “first beginning” of the West is undertaken to reveal what he considers to be a more authentic understanding of the disclosive character of human being. This understanding, he argues, is inseparable from an experience of Being as an overpowering event or activity (the process through which what is comes to presence). With the pre-Socratics (specifically with Parmenides), the fateful identification of Being with presence is made, yet presence is understood temporally, as an occurence. With Plato, however, the eventlike character of Being as appearing is lost as the consequence of this process—appearance or visibility—is hypostatized as pure or timeless form. As ontos on, the realm of essence or idea provides a paradeigma, or model, from which the particular and temporal derives its being. A chorismos (chasm) is inserted between the real and permanent prototype and the merely apparent (transient) copy:

From the standpoint of the idea, appearing now takes on a new meaning. What appears—the phenomenon—is no longer physis, the emerging power, nor is it self-manifestation of appearance; no, appearing is now the emergence of the copy. Since the copy never equals its prototype, what appears is mere appearance, actually an illusion, a deficiency. … Because the actual repository of being is the idea and this is the prototype, all disclosure of being must aim at assimilation to the model, accommodation to idea. The truth of physis, aletheia as the unconcealment that is the essence of the emerging power, now becomes homoisis and mimesis … a correctness of vision, of apprehension as representation.152

The “transformation of Being from physis to idea” thus gives rise to “one of the essential movements in the history of the West,” insofar as it covers over both disclosure and concealment (the mystery) with a relation of correspondence.¹⁵³ The installation of a relation of representation between intellect and “the matter” (or of mimesis between essence and thing) rests upon the reinterpretation of Being as enduring, constant presence. Thought of as eidos (form or idea) or ousia (substance), Being is delimited by its permanence, self-identity, and pregivenness.¹⁵⁴ This reification facilitates the recuperation of the ontological difference between Being and beings (between presencing and what is present) as the distinction between “whatness” and “thatness,” essence and existence.¹⁵⁵ Heidegger calls this recuperation “an event in the history of Being,” because with it, Being takes up its metaphysical position as the ground of beings. As Otto Pöggeler puts it, in metaphysics “the difference between Being and beings is thought from going beyond what is present (a being) toward constant presencing (Being). Being thereby becomes a ground in which a being is grounded.”¹⁵⁶ This gives a decidedly ominous spin to Heidegger’s statement in “What Is Metaphysics?,” where he calls metaphysics “inquiry beyond or over beings, which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp.”¹⁵⁷ The interpretation of Being as constant presence or ground guarantees, so to speak, the possibility of an inclusive grasp of all that is. With this promise the metaphysical project of a total representation and securing of Being announces itself.¹⁵⁸

For Heidegger, then, the root of metaphysics’s inauthenticity—its will to security and power, its “spirit of revenge” (Nietzsche)—is found in its approach to the Seinsfrage, the question “What is Being?” For the pre-Socratics, this question remained suspended, open-ended, the most uncanny of questions. Yet for metaphysics (the science of grounds founded by Plato and Aristotle) the question is easily answered: Being is the ontos on, the ground from which “beings as such are what they are in their becoming, perishing, and persisting as something that can be known, handled, and worked upon.”¹⁵⁹ The abyss out of which economies of presence and absence happen is covered over and the role of human beings in this unmasterable event forgotten.

The manner in which metaphysics converts Being into a ground deserves somewhat closer attention. Developing a line of thought from Being and Time, Heidegger emphasizes how the understanding of the Being of beings as constant presence or present-at-hand derives from the fabrication experience—from the comportment of Dasein as producer.160 Greek ontology is seen as performing a hypostatization similar to that by which Vorhandenheit (present-at-handness) obscures Zuhandenheit (ready-to-handness). In both the historical and phenomenological cases, certain aspects of entities as they are encountered in the production process (e.g., their outward appearance, independence, their standing-in-itself [Ansichsein]) are radically decontextualized.¹⁶¹ This decontextualization makes it possible for these aspects to be projected as the essential characteristics of the Being of beings. As early as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (written directly after Being and Time), Heidegger saw the historical genealogy of Vorhandenheit as leading back to the “productionist” prejudices of the Greeks. In his subsequent work on the history of metaphysics, the productionist character of Western ontology becomes a persistent theme.¹⁶²

From Heidegger’s perspective, the Greek reliance upon the fabrication experience for a more “solid” understanding of Being initates a metaphysical tradition in which the metaphorics of production exercise an unquestioned dominance.¹⁶³ The Greek universalization of a regional ontology leaves its trace in Plato’s thinking of constant presence along the lines of an idea or a prototype, and in Aristotle’s understanding of actuality (energeia) in terms of “embodied form” or work (ergon). Indeed, according to Heidegger, Aristotle was “more Greek than Plato” in the transparency of his productionist prejudices.¹⁶⁴ The Christian understanding of the Being of beings as “created being” (ens creatum) deepens and extends the Greek productionist view of the world by casting God in the role of supreme artificer.¹⁶⁵ With Descartes, the creative representing power of the divine intellect is transferred to the human subject, who, as “thing that thinks,” is the most real being and whose prerogative it is to delimit reality in terms of the clarity and distinctness of its representations.¹⁶⁶ The predominance of poiēsis in the metaphysical tradition reaches its culmination in Nietzsche’s “artist’s metaphysics,” in which the Being of beings and truth in all its forms are seen simply as products of a creative will to power bent on increasing and enhancing its power.¹⁶⁷ Nietzsche’s “inversion” of Platonism/metaphysics brings the will to grasp and control beings (sublimated by the representational paradigm) front and center, revealing the will to planetary domination driving metaphysics from the beginning.¹⁶⁸ This will, shorn of its “bad conscience,” reaches its fulfillment in technological “enframing” (Gestell).¹⁶⁹

Heidegger’s path after Being and Time was, of course, by no means straight. Yet while he was to disown the transcendental impulses of fundamental ontology (its residual subjectivism and “humanism”), the concern with recovering our disclosive relation to Being remains constant. The truly big change after 1930 is that he comes to see the tradition, rather than everydayness, as the primary locus of inauthenticity. Fallenness comes to be seen as (so to speak) a derivative phenomenon. The real lack of resolve first surfaces in the Greek “securing” of Being as constant presence or ground, a securing accomplished through the tacit decontextualization and universalization of the productive comportment toward entities.

The point of contact between Heidegger’s critical “history of productionist metaphysics” and Arendt’s view of our tradition as a series of attempted “escapes” from politics is clear. If, as Heidegger maintains, the originary thrust of the metaphysical tradition is to deny human “guilt” and finitude; to relieve the anxiety of disclosure with the security of correspondence (to some “order of Being”); and to reassure that the possession of the ground enables us to dispose of the real as we see fit; then, we should not be surprised by what happens when this tradition turns to confront the phenomenological realm of politics and political action. If, as Arendt suggests, political action is our most groundless and disclosive activity, we can expect a peculiarly tenacious attempt to “disguise” it or cover it over. This, on Arendt’s reading at least, is precisely what happens, as the arc of the tradition—from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Nietzsche—traces the recuperation of acting as making, politics as art or technx, freedom as sovereignty or control. The antipolitical implications of this “productionist” approach to politics have been described; what I wish to stress here is the way Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics affords us a glimpse into the rootedness of this tendency. Because the predominance of poiēsis is built into our most basic ontological categories, the subsumption of praxis by poiēsis is almost a foregone conclusion. Arendt’s single-minded attempt to rescue action from the distorting metaphors of politics as making or plastic art flows, I would suggest, from her appreciation of the political implications of what Heidegger discovered when he went back to the “ground” of metaphysics. Unsurprisingly, Heidegger was to remain blind to his own insight.170