CHAPTER 7

Arendt, Heidegger, and the Oblivion of Praxis

… thinking is a deed. But a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above action and production.

—Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”

If philosophers, despite their necessary estrangement from the everyday life of human affairs, were ever to arrive at a true political philosophy they would have to make the plurality of men, out of which arises the whole realm of human affairs—in its grandeur and misery—the object of their thaumadzein.

—Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics”

I. INTRODUCTION

My description of Arendt’s project and Heidegger’s influence upon it will strike some as controversial, not to say perverse. For from the perspective I have offered, Heidegger’s work appears as a kind of prolegomenon to Arendt’s recovery of praxis. But, it will be objected, has not Heidegger’s philosophy itself contributed in no small degree to the oblivion of praxis in our time? Does not Heidegger consistently devalue the public realm (the arena of praxis), seeing it first as the domain of inauthenticity, and later as the expression of the “dominance of subjectivity”?

The confrontation of Arendt’s work with Heidegger’s is bound to raise such questions. They have been forcefully put by such Arendt-inspired critics of Heidegger as Habermas and Richard Bernstein. And it must be admitted, Arendt, for her part, hardly underlined the importance of Heidegger to her rethinking of political action. Indeed, in the Heidegger critique composed toward the end of her life and included in The Life of the Mind, she stressed Heidegger’s avoidance of the question of action throughout his work.1

In this chapter and the next, I address the nature of this avoidance with an eye to its implications for political theory. Viewed from an Arendtian perspective, this avoidance has been interpreted as the symptom of two very different impulses. Arendt herself sees it as reflecting the fundamentally unpolitical nature of Heidegger’s thought, which she presents as unworldly in the extreme. Habermas and Bernstein, on the other hand, view the suppression of praxis as the sign of something more dangerous, the outgrowth of a deeply antipolitical impulse. According to this reading, Heidegger’s philosophy offers ample evidence of a quasi-Platonist desire to overcome plurality, deny human freedom, and secure a cosmically grounded authority. Heidegger appears in one of two garbs: as an irrationalist voluntarist whose existentialism leads to a politics of will, or (in the later thought) as a kind of ascetic priest who denies the efficacy of human action.

Unpolitical or antipolitical? Both characterizations capture a part of the truth, and the criticisms they stand for must be taken into account in any assessment of Heidegger’s relevance to political theory (on the one hand) and the relationship of his philosophy to his politics (on the other). Problems arise when one attempts to deduce the answer to the first question from the answer to the second. The failure to keep these questions at least analytically distinct is, I think, the root of a tendency to essentialize Heidegger, to present his thought as either absolutely remote from the realm of human affairs or as political in an all too predictable (authoritarian) sense. Such readings, as I show in Chapter 8, are dubious on interpretive and textual grounds; moreover, they make it all but impossible to see how Heidegger’s thought can be a resource in the rethinking of the political. The present chapter explores both characterizations, in order to more fully articulate the nexus of Arendt’s political theory and Heidegger’s philosophy. The overarching question concerns the availability of Heidegger’s thought for politics, a question that returns us to one of Arendt’s primary themes: the conflict between philosophy and politics.

II. HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL

The Devaluation of Communicative Action and the Public Sphere in Being and Time

In the rehearsing of the central themes of Being and Time in Chapter 4, I stressed how Heidegger’s notion of authentic disclosedness does not isolate Dasein from its world. Far from advocating a Kierkegaardian withdrawal from the world, Heidegger insists that “authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness.”² Authenticity is a mode of Being-in-the-world, and as such is both a way of acting and a mode of Being-with-others. Thus, the “transcendence” of fallen everydayness aims not at an individual purified of his ties to the world, but can imply the achievement of a more authentic form of community life. The possibility of an authentic mitsein (being with) opens the way to a political reading of Being and Time, a possibility seized upon by critics of Heidegger as well as those eager to escape a subject-centered political theory.³

From a political point of view, the Heideggerian notion of authenticity indicates a preference for those forms of community life that are most conducive to “striving activity,” and that increase the opportunity for events of authentic disclosedness. Indeed, following Taminiaux’s suggestion, it is possible to read the distinction between Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) and Uneigentlichkeit (inauthenticity) as an appropriation of the distinction between praxis (as authentic action) and poiēsis (as concernful absorption).⁴ This reading helps to create a bridge to the Arendtian conception of an agonistic public sphere in which the bios politikos is the chief vehicle for such striving activity, in the form of genuine political action that achieves authentically disclosive effects.

Given these links, the question is whether the Heidegger of Being and Time can be said to share Arendt’s enthusiasm for the public realm as the space in which the extraordinary becomes “an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.” As any reader of Being and Time can attest, the answer would seem to be clearly and decisively negative. The antipublic rhetoric of sections 27 and 38 is overwhelming; the identification of “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit) with fallenness, inauthenticity, and the “they-self” is undeniable.

According to Heidegger, publicness is the mode of understanding characteristic of the “they,” the readily accessible interpretation to which Dasein—as thrown Being-in-the-world—is always already given over to. Expressing the “dis-tantiality, averageness, and leveling down” in which the “they” is, publicness, according to Heidegger, “proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted. … By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed on as something familiar and accessible to everyone.”5 Lost in the publicness of the “they,” Dasein understands and expresses itself as “one” understands and expresses oneself.⁶ It is through the “idle chatter” of fallen Dasein that the “public interpretation of the world” manifests and reifies itself.⁷ Insofar as Dasein remains caught in the web of such public talk, insofar as it unthinkingly accepts the “way in which things have been publicly interpreted,” it is “held fast” in its fallenness.”⁸

In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas thinks through the consequences of what he calls Heidegger’s denigration of “the communicative practice of everyday life.”⁹ Given Heidegger’s emphasis upon the worldliness of Dasein and its Being-with-others, the disdain for the structures of “linguistic intersubjectivity” comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, one of the main thrusts of Being and Time, as Habermas notes, is to “dissolve the concept of transcendental subjectivity dominant since Kant” and thereby overcome the philosophy of the subject.¹⁰ The concept of “world” goes a long way toward achieving this end, decentering the subject by thematizing the “meaning-disclosing horizon” in terms of which entities appear and upon which all being-toward-entities—all subject/object relations—are founded.

This decentering of the subject receives further impetus from Heidegger’s insistence that being-in-the-world is always a being-with-others. The existential analytic, then, achieves a radical change in perspective, one in which the pretheo-retical lifeworld established by social interaction becomes, for the first time in Western philosophy, the focus of attention. Hence, what Habermas calls the “promise” of Being and Time, the promise “to illuminate the very processes of mutual understanding … that keep present the world as an intersubjectively shared lifeworld background.”¹¹ Yet the promise goes unfulfilled, and the paradigm shift it implies (from the philosophy of the subject to the “paradigm of mutual understanding” or communicative action) fails to occur. Heidegger emphasizes, instead, the constitutive, world-projecting performances of Dasein as well as the “mineness” of Dasein. In the end, fundamental ontology returns to what Habermas calls “the blind alley of the philosophy of the subject.”12

Why does Heidegger’s attempt to “tear away from the enchanted circle of the philosophy of the subject” break down? In part, Habermas suggests (following Michael Theunissen), because fundamental ontology is “still tinged with the solipsism of Husserlian phenomenology,” and is therefore unable to accord the intersubjective lifeworld its full priority.¹³ But the real reason has less to do with this theoretical taint than with a simple prejudice. From the beginning, Habermas states, Heidegger “degrades the background structures of the lifeworld that reach beyond the isolated Dasein,” casting them as “structures of an average everyday existence, that is of inauthentic Dasein.”¹⁴ With the prejudice against “the communicative practice of everyday life” firmly in place, it is not surprising that Heidegger loses sight of the priority of the lifeworld’s intersubjectivity and concentrates instead upon “the existential efforts of a Dasein that has tacitly assumed the place of transcendental subjectivity.”¹⁵ The denigration of communicative action so evident in the descriptions of “publicness” and the “they” thus not only shapes the fundamental theoretical choices of Being and Time, but it also guarantees that praxis will be ignored through the focus on a heroically projecting Dasein, manfully affirming its finitude.¹⁶ The residual subjectivism of Being and Time is so strong that the political possibilities it opens are either nil or alarmingly predictable (in 1933, Habermas argues, Heidegger “substitutes for this ‘in-each-case-mine’ Dasein, the collective Dasein of a fatefully existing and ‘in-each-case-our people’”).¹⁷ All of this stands in the starkest opposition to Arendt, who (as Habermas writes elsewhere) attempts to “read off the general structures of unimpaired intersubjectivity [from] the formal properties of communicative action.”¹⁸

The denigration of communicative action also apparently yields what Richard Wolin has called a “radically dichotomous social ontology,” one that splits the social world between authentic Dasein and the “they.”¹⁹ Once authenticity is defined in opposition to “the nefarious sphere of everydayness,” it can only emerge as essentially nonrelational. As Habermas puts it, “the ‘they’ now serves as a foil before which a Kierkegaardian existence, radically isolated in the face of death … can now be identified as the ‘who’ of Dasein.”²⁰ Such a polar opposition seems to open an “unbridgeable gulf” between the authentic and the inauthentic, a gap that can be interpreted in one of two ways: either as “a total repudiation of the public world and its projects,” or as an “antihumanist philosophical anthropology” upholding an order of rank where the inauthentic (the “human, all too human”) submit to those made of sterner (more authentic) stuff.²¹

What are we to make of Habermas’s reading? Is the “subjectivism” of the early Heidegger so pervasive that not only is praxis ignored, but the entire space for political life is either closed off or rendered rigidly hierarchical and collectivist?

As the reading of Being and Time in Chapter 4 indicates, I do not think this is the case. It is tempting to read Heidegger’s Being and Time in light of the Rektoratsrede (Rectoral Address) and texts from his middle period like An Introduction to Metaphysics. Indeed, the thematic links are undeniable.22 But Habermas’s reading goes too far in suggesting a categorial predetermination of the nature of Heidegger’s politics. The trope of “substitution” employed by Habermas (and originated by Karl Löwith) suggests that National Socialism is somehow the flip side of fundamental ontology, a simple matter of plugging in the Volk for a “radically isolated” Dasein. The problematic opened by Being and Time certainly makes such a move possible; as I shall show below, Chapter 5, Division II, to some extent prefigures it. Yet the politics of Being and Time—the kind of political space it opens—are by no means reducible to the either/or Habermas suggests.

Another problem with Habermas’s analysis is that it suggests a simple opposition between Arendt and Heidegger on the question of the public sphere. The condescending descriptions of Öffentlichkeit (publicity or publicness) certainly seem to warrant Habermas’s placement of Arendt and Heidegger in two radically different paradigms. “Following” Arendt, Habermas equates the public sphere with communicative action, and tacitly presumes that Heidegger’s Öffentlichkeit has the same referent. If this were so—if Heidegger’s contempt for publicness were tantamount simply to a repudiation of the “public sphere”—then the politics of Being and Time would be either nonexistent or a cryptototalitarian antipolitics, a form of politics predicated upon the effacement of plurality and the public realm. While Heidegger can scarcely be called a champion of plurality in Arendt’s sense (for reasons I will discuss below), the conclusion is nevertheless unjustified. The relation between “publicness” and “the public sphere” is complex: Arendt is extremely rigorous about what constitutes a genuine (agonistic, world-illuminating) public sphere. She fears, moreover, that the world alienation of modernity has robbed the public realm of “the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature.”²³ Under such historical conditions, the Heideggerian description of an existence “assaulted by the overwhelming power of ‘mere talk’ that irresistibly arises out of the public realm” is, in fact, a phenomenologically accurate description of a “world” in which public life has been reduced to show or spectacle.²⁴ Anyone who would detect in Heidegger’s descriptions of Öffentlichkeit a “total repudiation of the public world,” or see in Arendt an undifferentiated endorsement of publicity in all its forms, must come to grips with Arendt’s statement that, where public talk is manipulative and hypocritical, “the sarcastic, perverse-sounding statement Das Licht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt olles” (The light of the public obscures everything) goes “to the very heart of the matter.”²⁵

We can, then, bracket the conclusion that fundamental ontology entails a kind of a priori repudiation of the public sphere, in order to focus upon the consequences for political speech and action that flow from Heidegger’s devaluation of communicative action. What role emerges for politics in the early Heidegger, once we get past the impression that he simply relegates all Being-with-others to “the sphere of inauthentic dealings”? How might politics contribute to the realization of a “more authentic form” of community life, and what sort of speech will be conducive to this end?

In the most general of terms, it can be said that Being and Time reserves a twofold role for politics. The first would be to shatter the tranquillity of everyday Dasein, to perform for the community the role that anxiety performs for the individual.26 Anxiety brings Dasein back from its absorption in the world of everyday concerns by bringing it face to face with its finitude, by confronting it with its thrown Being-in-the-world.²⁷ Once mitsein is fully recognized as a constitutive structure of Dasein, and once Dasein’s historizing is recognized as always a cohistorizing, it follows that the community of which Dasein is irreducibly a part stands in need of a similarly sharp reminder of its radical historicality and finitude, of the abysslike nature of its ground.²⁸ Such a reminder—presumably performed by authentic political speech and leadership—is necessary if the community is to be called back from its absorption in everyday life and politics, and made ready for a recommitment to its “ownmost distinctive possibility,” a possibility opened at the founding of the community but long since covered over.²⁹

The second role follows from the first. Simply calling the community back from its “lostness” to a sense of its finitude and, thus, to resoluteness is not enough. An authentic politics must do more. As Karsten Harries notes, the categorial structure of “resolve” in Heidegger threatens to collapse into arbitrariness: knowing the groundlessness of all pregiven measures for action, yet impelled to grasp some concrete possibilities, resolute Dasein faces a choice—a decision that seems, in a very real sense, criterionless.³⁰ The existential freedom of Dasein appears to be indistinguishable from spontaneity: Dasein will fall into what Habermas calls “the decisionism of an empty resoluteness” unless there is some authority to give it both direction and content.³¹ Thus the second role reserved for authentic politics and political speech: to provide the authority needed to guide Dasein’s choice, an authority that can be reconciled with the demands of resolve, an authority that is neither metaphysical nor traditional.

There is, then, a clear role for politics and political speech in the space opened by Being and Time. One could even say that Being and Time implies a notion of an authentic public space. It already appears doubtful, however, that the agonistic yet deliberative politics advanced by Arendt could fulfill what for Heidegger are the two chief tasks of an “authentic politics.” Arendtian speech and action can hardly be reduced to “the communicative practice of everyday life”; nevertheless, they remain, from a Heideggerian standpoint, far too mired in the everyday to achieve the kind of “shattering” effect authenticity demands. Because fallenness is a structurally built-in tendency of Dasein, even the most “fiercely agonal” deliberation by diverse equals will fail to do the trick.³² (In this sense, the charge that Heidegger relegates “communicative action” to the sphere of inauthenticity hits home.) What kind of political speech could achieve the desired effect? What speech breaks through the alienation of everyday life and makes possible a transformative appropriation of the essence of the community?

Answering this question demands a return to Entschlossenheit: what speech serves as a spur to resolve? Doxa (opinion) is evidently excluded, since the plurality of perspectives it expresses yield nothing “essential”: opinion takes its place as part of the “idle chatter” of the “they.” As Taminiaux points out, there are clear resonances with Plato here.³³ Yet Heidegger’s denigration of opinion in no way attributes the required tranquillity-shattering power to epistxmx (scientific or theoretical knowledge). To presume that the devaluation of opinion implies the privileging of a discourse of Truth is to fall back upon the most traditional of philosophical moves, the derivation of prescriptive statements from descriptive or cognitive discourse.34 For Heidegger as much as Weber, the idea that any theoretical understanding of the world could provide us with a standard for how we ought to act is the height of bad faith.³⁵ If political speech as doxa stands for absorption in the way things are publicly interpreted, political speech as epistxmx represents that yearning for a ground beyond its own finitude that authentic Dasein knows it cannot have.

Neither doxa nor epistxmx, then, contribute to the cultivation of resoluteness in a community. Nor can authentic Being-in-the-world be spurred by the appeal to tradition or the status quo.³⁶ The last place a speech that seeks to shatter the numbing tranquillity of everyday life can turn to is that very life or its historical rootedness. To do so would be to cover over the moment of “pure” choice that, as many critics have noted, is implicit in Heidegger’s concepts of resolve and authenticity. Dasein must crystallize its resolve in particular actions with others or remain trapped in fallenness. The “criterionlessness” of this choice will overwhelm it unless some agency provides the requisite direction-giving authority.

Thus the paradox alluded to: in order for the community to be called back to itself, a peculiar, nonfoundational authority must be exercised; one that directs without making Dasein’s commitment any easier; one that provides content without perpetuating the status quo or the comforting illusion of some higher, transcendental authority, such as God, Reason, Nature, or even History. The question of an “authentic politics” in Heidegger boils down to the question of the viability of such authority. What form can this authority possibly take? What kind of political speech is capable of conveying it? Whose speech is capable of reconciling resolve with authority?

Heidegger’s answer to these questions, or at least the beginnings of an answer, can be found in Chapter 5, Division II (“Temporality and Historicality”), of Being and Time and in the notorious Rectoral Address of 1933 (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”).³⁷ In Being and Time, the required authority is sought for in the past of concrete historical Dasein; that is, in the heritage of the particular historical community.³⁸ If thrown Dasein is to “come back to itself” from its dispersion in the “public way of interpreting existence” and uncover “current practical possibilities of authentic existing,” then it must do so “in terms of that heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over.”³⁹ The only authority commensurable with resolve (the “sole possible authority which a free existing can have,” as Heidegger says) derives from the “repeatable possibilities of existence” buried in this mostly forgotten heritage.⁴⁰ In this understanding, authentic action—which is at the same time resolved but not arbitrary—can only be a kind of repetition, a repetition that “does not abandon itself to that which is past,” but which willfully appropriates a heritage in light of Dasein’s essentially futural orientation.⁴¹

The authority that makes authentic action understood as repetition (Wieder-holung) possible is, then, an interpetation of the destiny (Geschick) of the community.⁴² Through such interpretation, authentic political leaders (those capable of what the Rectoral Address calls “spiritual legislation”) enable citizens to “take over” their thrownness through the recognition of a shared destiny.43 The interpretation of the “leader” itself repeats the moment of vision in which the world of the community “sprang into being.”⁴⁴ As repetition, this interpretation brings into the present a sense of the greatness and uncanniness that attended the community’s origin. The past now appears as an “abysslike” ground that draws the community back from its fallenness and makes possible a recommitment to the community’s “ownmost distinctive possibility,” its historical essence.⁴⁵

Wresting a destiny from history through creative, even violent, interpretation, genuine political speech provides a way out of the “decisionism of an empty resoluteness.” Resolute Dasein comes to see its fate as primordially linked to the destiny of the community, and to understand its “essence” in terms of the community.⁴⁶ The need for authority, Heidegger would persuade us, is met in a non-metaphysical, nontraditionalist way, through interpretation permeated by a sense of finitude and the inevitability of ambiguity. It is clear that the kind of hermeneutic authority so exercised is limited: the categories of “resolve” and “authenticity” rule out anything like a blind or unquestioning obedience (although Heidegger’s idea of an “authentic following” remains problematic).⁴⁷ The fact remains that the leader’s interpretation stands above the deliberative judgment of the citizens, having, so to speak, a fuller ontological ground. Suspicious of the bios politikos (the sharing of word and deeds amongst equals) if not politics per se, Heidegger grounds the authority of authentic political speech in a “moment of vision” that transcends, in the manner of Plato, the deliberative speech of the many.

It is here that Heidegger’s devaluation of the “communicative practice of everyday life” comes back to haunt us. Heidegger’s supposed entrapment in the philosophy of the subject does not really answer the question of what a politics extrapolated from Being and Time would look like. Yet Habermas’s focus upon the Heideggerian prejudice against intersubjectivity and “publicness” does help to illuminate Heidegger’s preference for a species of authority that trumps the judgment (or “communicative rationality”) exercised by deliberating equals. The problem here is not that any interpretation will do, so long as it stirs the masses; nor is it that all interpretations are equal (Heidegger is very clear about the difference between an authentic and inauthentic “historizing”). The problem instead involves the criteria for judging the authenticity or “rootedness” of a given interpretation. When genuine political speech is juxtaposed, even implicitly, to the deliberative speech of the many, phronxsis and hermeneutic judgment are torn apart, and the criterionlessness that had so plagued the notion of resolve returns. The authority envisaged by Heidegger produces interpretation, not truth; yet it might as well claim for itself the status of epistxmx insofar as Heidegger provides no answer to Harries’s persistent question: “What enables us to distinguish the genuine leader from his false counterpart?”⁴⁸

The seriousness of this lack, of course, is driven home by Heidegger’s own experience in 1933. Unwilling or unable to subject such hermeneutic authority to the kind of judgment exercised in the public realm and oblivious to the minimal conditions necessary to preserve such judgment, Heidegger falls prey to a kind of intuitionism all too capable of seeing in National Socialism the disclosure of “the spiritual world” of the German people.49 The antideliberative stance implied by the polarity of authentic and everyday speech yields a vision of authentically disclosive politics in which plurality, while not totally effaced, is neutered by an authority whose basis remains problematic.

The Poetic Model of Disclosure in the Work of the Thirties

As Karsten Harries (following Alexander Schwan) has observed, any attempt to understand Heidegger’s thinking of the political in the thirties “has to begin with his analysis of the work of the artist and poet.”⁵⁰ This is so because in his works of this period (An Introduction to Metaphysics, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” the first volume of the Nietzsche lectures), Heidegger not only extends his thoughts on the political role of the creative leader, but also develops an explicitly poetic model of disclosure, one that comes to dominate his thinking of politics and the space of the political. The work of the thirties attempts nothing less than the radical rethinking of the notion of poiēsis, a rethinking that will bear its first fruit in the concept of the world-disclosing “work” in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” This concept, in which the new, poetic model of disclosure is crystallized, emerges in the context of Heidegger’s ruminations on art, but it is quickly generalized to include the work of all “genuine creators,” including poets, thinkers, and statesmen as well as artists in the more limited sense.⁵¹ It is through the work of such creators, Heidegger argues, that the historicity of a community is established, its “destiny” defined, and the possibility of an authentic relation to Being opened.⁵²

Heidegger’s political thinking of this period can be characterized as the attempt to subsume praxis under a new and postmetaphysical conception of authentic art (technx) or poetry (poiēsis). Driven by the need to overcome the subjectivism that had characterized aesthetics since Kant, Heidegger incessantly returns to the question of the ontological status of the work of art and its truth-revealing or world-disclosing capacity. In order to understand the political ramifications of Heidegger’s notion of a “radical poiēsis”—a poiēsis liberated from the Aristotelian delimitation in terms of substance and causality—we need to answer two broad questions.⁵³ First, what, according to Heidegger, is the nature of art? What accounts for its singular ontological status? Second, in what does the “work-being” of the work consist? What is the “ontological vocation” of the work and how does it fulfill it?⁵⁴

“All art,” Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “… is essentially poetry.”⁵⁵ By this, Heidegger means that all genuine art is characterized by the poetic capacity to bring into being something that is radically new, that was not somehow contained, in potentia, in that which already is. Poetic in the sense of a radical (non-Aristotelian) poiēsis, art is a kind of “illuminating projection” that “first brings beings to word and appearance,” that “nominates beings to their being from out of their being.”56 Because art is, in essence, poetic, it can be described as a “becoming and happening of truth,” as a distinctive and privileged event of disclosure.⁵⁷

A genuine work of art, then, neither represents nor expresses. What it does do, first and foremost, is to “open” or “set up” a world: the work establishes or clears that primordial space of truth in which “the world of [an] historical people” first comes to stand. The work-being of the work consists, according to Heidegger, in this world-disclosing or world-opening capacity: “To be a work means to set up a world.”⁵⁸ Heidegger famously illustrates the ontological “opening up” performed by the work of art by the example of a Greek temple, which, though it “portrays nothing,” nevertheless

fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.⁵⁹

“Towering up within itself,” the temple-work “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in being.”⁶⁰ But what, Heidegger asks, is a world? Moreover, how is it that a work such as the temple not only “sets up” a world, but holds its openness open, thereby facilitating what Richard Wolin calls “the epochal encounter between Being and beings”?⁶¹

I have already described how the notions of “world” and “clearing” figure in Heidegger’s thought (see Chapter 4). In OWA Heidegger amplifies his reference to the “open relational context” by explaining that “The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar or unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. … World is the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.”⁶² It is the “vocation” of the work of art to accomplish the worlding of the world, to “hold open the open of the world” and prevent it from decaying into a taken for granted status quo, cut off from a sense of its partiality and finitude.

The work-being of the work fulfills this ontological task by being the site of conflict between the openness of the world and the concealedness of what Heidegger calls “earth.” “Earth” stands for that more primordial darkness or concealment that every “clearing” for beings presupposes. As work, art clears a world while simultaneously “setting forth” the earth; that is, preserving that which conceals and shelters.⁶³ But the crucial ontological function of the work is not to mediate or reconcile world and earth; rather, the work-being of the work consists in “setting up a world” and “setting forth the earth” in a relation of strife or striving. The work, according to Heidegger, both “instigates” and “accomplishes” this striving, allowing the strife “to remain a strife.”⁶⁴ By bringing world and earth into a relation in which the former constantly strives to surmount the latter, the work becomes the site of that primordial struggle for disclosure—the appropriation of Being—to which Heidegger’s thought ceaselessly returns. And here we have an essential specification of the work-being of the work: “The work-being of the work consists in the fighting of the battle between world and earth.”65

Neither the “setting up” of the world, nor the “setting forth” of the earth, let alone the establishment of the conflict between the two, could occur without the work. “Truth” (in the Heideggerian sense of the disclosure of Being) could not happen without the work, since “truth establishes itself in the work. Truth is present only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth.”⁶⁶ The work-being of the work (the “fighting of the battle between world and earth”) is thus the vehicle through which Being is disclosed, the vehicle through which truth happens as a historical occurrence. Indeed, Heidegger claims that the nature of truth is such that “it has to happen in such a thing as something created.”⁶⁷ There is an “impulse toward the work” in the nature of truth, an impulse toward occurrence in something whose essence involves createdness.⁶⁸ Truth “wills” to be established in the createdness of a work whose “bringing forth” clears “the openness of the Open into which it comes forth.”⁶⁹ The happening of truth as a historical-ontological event is, for Heidegger, identical with what he refers to as the “setting-itself-into-work” of truth.

We have only to ask what counts as such a world-opening work to see the connection to the political. In OWA Heidegger observes that “one essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened up is truth setting itself into work. Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state.”⁷⁰ The apparent dichotomy between works and states as sites for the historical happening of truth is removed in a passage from An Introduction to Metaphysics: “Unconcealment,” Heidegger states, “occurs only when it is achieved by work: the work of the word in poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thought; the work of the polis as the historical place in which all this is grounded and preserved.”⁷¹ Not only is the polis grouped with other artworks as an example of the “setting-into-work” of truth, but it is accorded a clear historical-ontological priority.

The works of “creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen” are precisely the works through which truth happens, through which worlds are “opened” or “founded.” It is the nature of such works to embody the conflict or struggle through which “a world comes into being.”⁷² Glossing a fragment from Heraclitus—“Conflict is for all the creator that causes to emerge, but [also] the dominant preserver. For it makes some appear as gods, others as men; it creates [shows] some as slaves, others as freemen”—Heidegger comments upon the essential agon made manifest in such works:

The struggle meant here is the original struggle, for it gives rise to the contenders as such; it is not a mere assault on something already here. It is this conflict that first projects and develops what had hitherto been unheard of, unsaid and unthought. The battle is then sustained by the creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen. Against the overwhelming chaos they set up the barrier of their work, and in their work they capture the world thus opened up. It is with these works that the elemental power, the physis first comes to stand. Only now does the essent become essent as such. This world-building is history in the authentic sense. … When struggle ceases, the essent [beings] does not vanish, but the world turns away.73

The essential agon between world and earth comes to stand in or is accomplished by the originary struggle of “creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen.” Through their works, which act as “barriers” against an “overwhelming chaos,” the world of a historical people is founded and that people is given a history. This is what Heidegger means when he says “this world-building is history in the authentic sense.” Art, which encompasses various kinds of radical poiēsis, grounds history; it is the origin of a “people’s historical existence.”⁷⁴ The artwork founds or begins a world; through the strife it opens the creators and preservers of this work and world have their origin.⁷⁵

Two important themes emerge out of Heidegger’s view of the process by which truth sets itself into work. The first is that this setting-into-work, by Heidegger’s own admission, is violent. The “thrust” into history performed by the work, the beginning or the founding it accomplishes, is a “violent act” (Gemalttat), an act of originary violence through which new “paths” are created and old ones left behind.⁷⁶ The world-building work, whether it be words, thoughts, or a state, forms the openness of the world.⁷⁷ Such forming, despite its radical and primordial nature, is linked to more mundane examples of poiēsis by the unavoidable violence that attends all making.⁷⁸ Heidegger confirms this Arendtian/Aristotelian point even as he attempts to prevent such ontological violence from being confused with ontic violence, the violence born of human aggression and will: “The violence of poetic speech, of thinking projection, of building configuration, of the action that creates states is not a sanction of faculties man has, but a taming and ordering of powers by virtue of which the essent opens up as such when man moves into it.”⁷⁹

The second theme concerns the priority or primordiality of the work of the statesman amongst all such history-producing, world-disclosing works. The act of radical poiēsis, of originary violence, performed by the statesman creates the ground for all subsequent disclosure: the polis, according to Heidegger, is “the place, the there, wherein and as which historical being-there is. The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens.”⁸⁰ Commenting on Sophocles in An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger elaborates the ontological primordiality of the political space, emphasizing the way in which this space “gathers” the essential aspects of Greek life. In the process, he gives a truly remarkable picture of those “artists with the look of bronze” (Nietzsche) whose work is this space:

To this place and scene of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the army and the fleet. All this does not first belong to the polis, does not become political by entering into a relation with a statesman and a general and the business of state. No, it is political, i.e., at the site of history, provided there be (for example) poets alone, but then really poets, priests alone, but then really priests, rulers alone, but then really rulers. Be; but this means: as violent men to use power, to become pre-eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essert as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this.81

The state or, to be more precise, the polis, emerges here as what Harries calls the “violent setting-itself-into-work of truth.”⁸² And while it is too easy to extrapolate a “statist conception of politics” from such passages, the distorting effects of Heidegger’s identification of the political and the poetic can scarcely be denied.⁸³ Throughout the works of the thirties, the figure of the state as artwork intrudes violently, underscoring what Arendt calls the “conflict between art and politics,” a conflict to which Heidegger appears oblivious.

How does the adoption of a poetic model of disclosure distort Heidegger’s conception of the political and contribute to the oblivion of praxis? First, by perpetuating an organic notion of community, one that follows from framing the state as a harmonious or authentic artwork. Such a community/work, while the locus of a primordial ontological striving, is nevertheless devoid of genuine plurality and the agonism that goes with it. Second, the poetic model restricts authentic political action to founding and preserving the work/state.

Heidegger’s emphasis upon founding is a direct result of his defining art as poetry. If “the nature of art is poetry” or projective saying, the “nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth.”⁸⁴ Through his originary violence, the creator sets truth into work in a way that “thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such.”⁸⁵ Such founding is a “bestowing,” “grounding,” and “beginning.”⁸⁶ In “setting up the barrier of their work against overwhelming chaos,” the “lonely, strange and alien” founders of states simultaneously establish a world and instigate a strife, giving to a people through their world-founding work a place, a destiny, and an ethos.⁸⁷

As a world-opening work or “field of strife,” the state stands in need of preservers as well as founders. Indeed, this is so much the case that Heidegger claims that “the preservers of a work belong to its createdness with an essentiality equal to that of the creators … it is the work that makes creators possible in their nature, and that by its nature is in need of preservers.”⁸⁸ The work-being of the work—the state—demands those who will “begin” and “bestow,” but it also demands those who will ensure that the strife will remain a strife, whose creative intervention will preserve this “playing field of openness,” preventing it from degenerating into “a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course.”⁸⁹ Choosing a theatrical metaphorics to convey a sense of ontological/historical petrification, Heidegger’s insists upon the importance of preservers, stressing the poetic nature of their vocation. The implication is that the work-character of this work—the state—can be brought into being and preserved only by a poetic speech, a projective saying, of founders or leaders. The state remains a work so long as there are leaders of the sort Being and Time had gestured toward, leaders whose vision and speech pierces the fallenness of the public realm and reappropriates the original strife between world and earth.

Heidegger’s framing of the political as work in need of creators and preservers shifts the agon of the political realm to an ontological level untouched by the political speech of deliberating equals. The agon that occurs here (in the public realm, as Arendt understands it) is a nonessential one. The essential striving is that which occurs between world and earth, between the political life of a community and the unmastered depths of its past, the sheer uncanniness of its founding.90 This agon is brought to language only by the poetic speech of those who, as founders and preservers, derive their being from the work.

Heidegger’s work of the thirties is remarkable for the way it poeticizes the disclosiveness of political action—for the line it draws between the world-disclosive speech of “founders and preservers” and the public, ontic speech of the many. The devaluation of communicative action is taken to new extremes, as authentic praxis is identified with a poetic saying whose sole concern and accomplishment is to “nominate beings to their being from out of their being.”⁹¹ In “The Origin of the Works of Art,” Heidegger insists upon seeing communicative and world-disclosive speech as antithetical: on the one hand, language “serves for verbal exchange and agreement, and in general for communicating”; on the other, there is poetic language that “brings what is, as something that is, into the open for the first time.”⁹²

The reification of world-disclosive, poetic speech goes hand in hand with Heidegger’s contempt for public talk. Such speech, Heidegger remarks in An Introduction to Metaphysics, is “worn out and used up,” drained of all world-illuminating capacity; it is an “indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used as one pleases, as indifferent as a means of public transport, as a streetcar which everyone rides in.”⁹³ The polarity of Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit has hardened into a rigid dichotomy between ontic and ontological speech. The irony is that Heidegger’s idea of a “happening of truth”—so obviously anti-Platonic in intent—issues in a hierarchy parallel to the Platonic ranking of doxa and epistxmx. Like Plato, Heidegger is convinced that doxa is excluded from the “truth of Being.” And while his concept of historicity prevents him from resurrecting a “true world” in opposition to appearance, it nevertheless inclines him to think of praxis in terms of poiēsis. Anxious to preserve the revelatory dimension of praxis from the taint of the “sharing of words and deeds,” Heidegger rethinks it as a form of radical poiēsis.⁹⁴

The “Oblivion of Praxis” in Heidegger’s Later Work

Habermas’s critique underlines the difference between Arendt’s model of authentic disclosedness and Heidegger’s. For Arendt, the “sharing of words and deeds,” genuine political action, is simultaneously communicative and disclosive, intersubjective and “poetic,” in the broad Heideggerian sense. The distinctions Heidegger draws between authentic (ontological) and inauthentic (ontic) speech, between “poetry” and communication, serve to obsure the disclosive potential—the ontological dimensions—of an agonistic, deliberative politics à la Arendt.95

From the Habermasian perspective, the devaluation of communicative action found in Heidegger’s early and middle work is taken to new extremes after the “turning,” or Kehre. The primary difference is that while the pre-Kehre work at least reserved a space for the political, the later work made it disappear: the perspective of Seinsgeschichte (the history of Being) deprives the realm of human affairs of any interest. As we shall see, the primary weight of this evaluation is echoed in Arendt’s own Heidegger critique, which emphasizes Heidegger’s unconcern with action in general.

The general import of Heidegger’s “turning” is well known. Increasingly convinced that the technological goals of “planetary domination” and a total organization of the lacks inherent in human existence represented the culmination of the metaphysical project begun by the Greeks, Heidegger comes to see the “will to power” as the subterranean drive that animates the West from its inception. With modernity—that is, from Descartes to Nietzsche—this drive reveals itself in the subjectification of the world and the celebration of the “will to will” as the source of meaning after the death of God.⁹⁶ The “truth of Being”—the presencing process by which a particular historical world is “cleared” or “lighted”—is thrust farther into oblivion as our power to manipulate beings becomes limitless. In the technological age, our “fallenness” is extreme because the lacks that might call us back to our finitude are increasingly dominated and secured. Hence, the apocalyptic tone adopted by Heidegger in the notes entitled “Overcoming Metaphysics” (1936):

The decline of the truth of beings occurs necessarily, and indeed as the completion of metaphysics.

The decline occurs through the collapse of the world characterized by metaphysics, and at the same time through the desolation of the earth stemming from metaphysics.

Collapse and desolation find their adequate occurrence in the fact that metaphysical man, the animal rationale, gets fixed as the laboring animal.

This rigidification confirms the most extreme blindness to the oblivion of Being. But man wills himself as the volunteer of the will to will. …

Before Being can occur in its primal truth, Being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and the earth must be driven to desolation, and man to mere labor.⁹⁷

While Heidegger will somewhat modify the apocalypticism of this passage, the direction of his later thought is clearly indicated. If, as this passage suggests, the reification of Being into a detemporalized, stable ground finds completion in an absorption of Being by the subject—in an anthropologism from which alterity, finitude, and historicality in the Heideggerian sense have been largely expunged—then a radical change of both mood and perspective is necessary to escape the coming technological world-night.98 From Heidegger’s post-Kehre perspective, the “will to will” represents the apogee of the “oblivion of Being,” and the Dasein-oriented perspective of Being and Time (in which the meaning of Being is interpreted through the structures of human existence) appears intolerably anthropocentric. In Being and Time, Heidegger had written that “only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) ‘is there’ Being.”⁹⁹ Heidegger’s point after the Kehre is not that Being exists apart and above Dasein, as some sort of “cosmic ground” (although both Habermas and Arendt see Seinsgeschichte as implying precisely this); rather, he simply wants to avoid the impression that Being is, somehow, the “product” of man.¹⁰⁰ In a world characterized by the will to will, by the “struggle for dominion over the earth” and the unconditional objectification of all that is, the metaphors of “striving” and “violent co-creation” badly express the essential finitude of Dasein—its thrownness into the “destining” of a presencing process of which it is by no means the author.¹⁰¹

The Kehre, then, is Heidegger’s attempt to complete the decentering of the subject begun in Being and Time. Responding to the “insurrection” of man in the form of an all-consuming subjectivity, Heidegger urges the cultivation of a sense of human inessentiality and “thankfulness for Being.” The unconditional domination of subjectivity in the will to power has resulted in our essential estrangement, a “homelessness” that “is coming to be the destiny of the world.”¹⁰² “Homelessness,” according to Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism” (in Basic Writings), “consists in the abandonment of Being by beings”; it is “the symptom of oblivion of Being.”¹⁰³ Such homelessness can be overcome only if man abandons the posture of “unconditional self-assertion” and “learns to exist in the nameless.”¹⁰⁴ For Heidegger, “man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being,”¹⁰⁵ of the temporalized presencing process by which ontological preunder-standings are “sent” to man from nowhere. Thus, the later Heidegger’s talk of the “destiny of Being” (Seinsgeschick), a figure of speech designed to underline the fact that “man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the lighting of Being, come to presence and depart.”¹⁰⁶ That man does not control this “dispensation,” anymore than he controls the history of modes of production (Marx) or the history of practices by which he is made a subject (Nietzsche), does not, in Heidegger’s eyes, in any way lessen human dignity. For although “the advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being,” it is through Dasein alone that the “lighting of Being” occurs, since only Dasein “has” language.¹⁰⁷

Language, Heidegger famously declares in the “Letter on Humanism,” is “at once the house of Being and the home of human beings.”¹⁰⁸ It is through language that the “lighting” which is Being occurs, that beings first come to presence and are, that the Da of Dasein is cleared for the first time. The “homelessness of contemporary man” is a function of the dis-essencing of language, of the reduction of language to a means for communication employed by an all-dominating subjectivity. Such a reduction conceals “the word’s primordial belongingness to Being”: “Only because language is the home of the essence of man can historical mankind and human beings not be at home in their language, so that for them language becomes a mere container for sundry preoccupations.”109

Here we return to a by now familiar Heideggerian theme, namely, the denaturing effects of communicative speech on the world-disclosive (poetic) essence of language. For Heidegger, the “word’s primordial relationship to Being”—the fact that Being comes to presence in language—is obscured by the public realm. The reason for this (to draw an analogy with Wittgenstein) is that in this realm we play established, familiar language games, with evolving but fairly strict rules about what counts as an acceptable move or a meaningful utterance. The sum of a culture’s language games constitutes a particular historical form of life—an understanding of Being or “clearing,” as Heidegger would say—the contingency of which is obscured by its apparent self-evidence and our own absorption in playing these games.¹¹⁰ So viewed, the public realm epitomizes “the widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language”; here, the “dominance of subjectivity” makes itself felt as “language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.”¹¹¹ Under the “peculiar dictatorship of the public realm,” language is codified in a way “which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible.”¹¹² Heidegger suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche as well as Wittgenstein, that this sort of reification of language can be overcome only by a particular form of therapy, which dissolves the taken-for-granted and calcified and which opens us to the historicity and contingency of the vocabularies that make up our world.

The name Heidegger gives to this therapy is “thinking.” Thinking brackets the willful attempts to regulate and secure and adopts a meditative, responsive attitude toward what is. This attitude—Gelassenheit, or “releasement”—achieves a poetic comportment toward Being by “letting beings be.” Thinking “accomplishes” the relation of Being to man by giving up the metaphysical struggle for power inherent in the will to truth and accepting the contingency and partiality of the understanding of Being in which it finds itself. Withdrawing from “the peculiar dictatorship of the public realm,” eschewing all willing and trafficking, thinking listens to language, and thereby allows language to slip back into its element (Being). Learning to “exist in the nameless,” the thinker allows language to open out, to provide spaces of silence around those words and practices that seem literally unquestionable from our everyday standpoint—the standpoint of doing and acting.¹¹³ Adopting an attitude of releasement, thinking allows language to resonate beyond the understanding of Being that gives our form of life both its coherence and its self-evidence. Thus, in its saying, thinking does not grasp, manipulate, or facilitate anything; thinking “merely brings the unspoken word of Being to language.”¹¹⁴

On the face of it, this may seem an unusual way to lead the fly out of the fly bottle. Heidegger’s response to the reification of language, and to the pathologies of modernity born of a consummated metaphysics, seems to be a retreat to the most traditional sort of philosophical contemplation. But this is hardly what Heidegger means by “thinking.” As the “Letter on Humanism” emphasizes, the technical interpretation of action—action as causing an effect, as the achievement of an end—goes hand in hand with an interpretation of thinking as essentially calculative. Heidegger views theoria, as conceived by Plato and Aristotle, as the prototype of such calculative thinking: Plato and Aristotle “take thinking itself to be a technx, a process of reflection in the service to doing and working … here reflection is already seen from the perspective of praxis and poiēsis.”115 Moreover, the “characterization of thinking as theoria and the determination of knowing as ‘theoretical’ behavior occur already within the ‘technical’ interpretation of thinking. Such characterization is a reactive attempt to rescue thinking and preserve its autonomy over acting and doing.”¹¹⁶ But while Arendt chooses to rethink praxis against this constellation, Heidegger aims at the deeper, “more primordial” experience of genuine thinking. “Thinking,” in his sense, is always the thinking of what metaphysics leaves unthought: Being, “the lighting,” itself. The stakes of such thinking become clear when Heidegger asks, “In what relation does the thinking of Being stand to theoretical and practical behavior?” His answer deserves quoting in full:

It exceeds all contemplation because it cares for the light in which a seeing, a theoria, can first live and move. Thinking attends to the lighting of Being in that it puts saying of Being into language as the home of existence. Thus thinking is a deed. But a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above action and production, not through the grandeur of its achievement and not as a consequence of its effect, but through the humbleness of its inconsequential accomplishment.¹¹⁷

It is at this point that even reasonably sympathetic readers, such as Richard Bernstein, balk. Heidegger’s account, by emphasizing the mutual belonging together of theoria and praxis within the broader, metaphysical-technologizing interpretation of Being, evidently renders the distinctions between praxis and poiēsis, phronxsis and technx, superfluous.¹¹⁸ Heidegger was intimately familiar with these distinctions, as the famous Marburg Seminar on Plato’s Sophist (attended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arendt) makes clear.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, he chooses, in his later work, to “pass over these distinctions in silence.” The reason for this, Bernstein argues, is that the later Heidegger’s exclusive focus upon the question of Being and the ontological difference between beings and Being—the difference unthought, or not thought deeply enough, by metaphysics—results in a “relentless, inductable drive toward making manifest the concealed technical thrust implicit in the history of metaphysics.”¹²⁰ If one views philosophy/metaphysics/humanism as culminating in the technological nihilism of enframing, and if one sees “the seeds of the technical sense of action and calculative thinking already implicit in Plato and Aristotle,” then the conclusion that “all human activity … reduces itself—flattens out—into Gestell, manipulation, control, will to will, nihilism” will seem inescapable.¹²¹ The only human activity that can possibly escape this all-encompassing technical horizon is the thinking Heidegger describes—a thinking that “accomplishes” the relation of Being to man by “unfolding” it, whose “inconsequential accomplishment” (the bringing of Being to language) mark it as the “simplest” yet “highest” form of action; indeed, as the only genuine action.¹²²

Bernstein, then, suggests that the later Heidegger’s primary contribution to the “oblivion of praxis” is the adoption of a perspective that renders reflection on the modern assimilation of praxis to a technical mentality redundant, since praxis, like theoria, was always already on the way toward Gestell. He argues that Heidegger further obscures things by identifying thinking with genuine action, by seeing the “thought of Being” as the only real deed.123 Habermas goes Bernstein one better, suggesting that Seinsgeschichte constitutes an attack on the most basic categories of Western political thought, an attack in which the human faculties of reason, will, and freedom are denigrated as “subjectivist,” as part and parcel of the “oblivion of Being.”

According to Habermas, the Kehre signifies the switch from a radical voluntarism to an equally radical fatalism: Heidegger’s later philosophy has “the illocutionary sense of demanding resignation to fate [in the form of Seinsgeschick]. Its practical-political side consists in the perlocationary effect of a diffuse readiness to obey in relation to an auratic but indeterminate authority [Being].”¹²⁴ Heidegger’s later philosophy does not merely cover over the category of praxis, as Bernstein suggests; rather, the perspective of Seinsgeschichte (the history of Being) and Seinsgeschick (destiny of Being) is tantamount to a denial of the responsibility to act, and to act rationally and justly. By subjecting human will and reason to a radical critique, Heidegger contributes to a destruction of the conceptual resources within our tradition that make praxis conceivable in the first place, and that could potentially lead to a renewal of both practical philosophy and a democratic politics. This side of Habermas’s critique is pushed very hard by Richard Wolin, who claims that the later Heidegger purveys a “philosophy of heteronomy,” one that celebrates mysterious, fateful powers, while denigrating the human capacity for action; one that actually regresses behind the “inherited ethico-political foundations of the Western tradition.”¹²⁵ Through his “uncritical celebration of a superordinate, nameless destiny,” Heidegger supposedly negates “the central category of Western political thought”—freedom.¹²⁶

As with the devaluation of intersubjectivity in Being and Time, what starts out as a plausible and helpful critique by Habermas and his followers rapidly degenerates into a fairly crude campaign to place Heidegger’s thought outside the boundaries of the Western tradition. Whether willful (early) or nonwillful (later), Heidegger’s thought is presented as ineluctably leading to a worship of authority and a celebration of obedience. The problem with this interpretation is that it so fully hinges upon the binary of voluntarism and fatalism, evils one supposedly slides into the moment reason’s power to comprehensively adjudicate competing ends, or the subject’s power to act autonomously, is questioned.¹²⁷ Thus, while the proponents of communicative rationality employ Arendt to expose a very real blind spot in Heidegger’s thought, their desire to exclude him from any conversation about what postmetaphysical conceptions of action, freedom, and agency might look like produces a caricature. This, I suggest, is a function of two factors: first, a reifying, metaphysical interpretation of the ontological difference, which enables the view that Being is “an all-powerful metasubject”; second, a failure to penetrate the surface of Heidegger’s thought in order to see how his critique of productionist metaphysics and the “technical interpretation of action” might be appropriated precisely to aide in the recovery of praxis. These themes will be explored further below, but first I wish to turn to the matter of Arendt’s own Heidegger critique.

III. ARENDT’S HEIDEGGER CRITIQUE: THE UNWORLDLINESS OF THE PHILOSOPHER

Whatever problems Habermas’s Arendt-inspired critique of Heidegger may present, its goal is clear. By focusing on Heidegger’s disregard for intersubjectivity and his contempt for (merely) communicative speech, Habermas reveals a deeply antipolitical strain in Heidegger, which he hopes will compel a reconsideration of the totalizing tendencies of the Heideggerian critique of modernity and rationality. While Habermas may fall short of demonstrating that Heidegger’s thought is, in Adorno’s words, “fascist down to its most intimate components,” he does succeed in presenting Heidegger as a dubious resource for the theoretical consideration of politics.

Arendt’s critique of Heidegger, while elucidating some of the same themes, is very different. Her goal is not to reveal a profoundly antipolitical Heidegger; rather, she wishes to see Heidegger’s contribution to the oblivion of praxis as the effect of the deeply unpolitical nature of his thought.128 Thus, while her earlier readings of Heidegger did not shy away from considering the political ramifications of his thought, the Heidegger critique she offers in The Life of the Mind is surprisingly unconcerned with such “direct” links. Ignoring, for the most part, the way Heidegger’s devaluation of communicative speech determines his concept of the political, Arendt attempts something much more difficult. She constructs what is, in effect, a metacritique, which argues that, strictly speaking, there is no space for the political in Heidegger’s thought, early or late. The oblivion of praxis follows from Heidegger’s reification of thought as the only geniune action.

The unpolitical nature of Heidegger’s thought is a function of its unworldly character, a feature of all genuine thinking, as Arendt defines it.¹²⁹ Thinking—which is distinct not only from the activities that constitute the vita activa, but from contemplation, cognition, and judgment as well—is an activity predicated upon withdrawal from the world.¹³⁰ It is a solitary and restless activity that can begin, according to Arendt, only when the commonsense world of appearances is left behind. Questing after meaning, thinking disdains particulars; by nature, it “clings to the absent,” that which is obscured by particulars. It is only by drawing what is most distant into the nearness of its “sequestered stillness” that thinking truly engages its matter.¹³¹ Considered as an activity, thinking, to use Heidegger’s phrase, is “out of order”: it produces no results and “does not endow us directly with the power to act.”¹³² Its essential unworldliness makes thinking notoriously ill-suited for the consideration of the realm of human affairs; its attempts to overcome its remoteness from this realm lead to comic misapprehensions (Arendt cites Aristotle’s warning to his fellow philosophers not to yield to the Platonic temptation to consider this realm sub specie aeternatatis—under the aspect of eternity).133

What impulse motivates this reading, which goes out of its way to deny the relevance of Heidegger’s thought to political theory and which ignores all those “worldly” aspects that would taint the picture Arendt wants to present? The stakes come into view in Arendt’s tribute to Heidegger, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty.” In addition to providing a compelling portrait of Heidegger’s “passionate thinking,” Arendt presents his brief but notorious entry into the realm of human affairs as a tragic episode resulting from the thinker’s abandonment of his genuine (unworldly) abode. Leaving his “place of stillness,” Heidegger plunges or falls into the world, becoming victim to the blindness and disorientation that accompany the philosopher’s return to the cave.¹³⁴ Egregious errors of political judgment result. Arendt’s controversial point is that these errors, inexcusable in themselves, are less the result of some kind of affinity between Heidegger’s thought and National Socialism than a function of the purity of Heidegger’s philosophical temperament (the “attraction to the tyrannical,” she notes, is a kind of deformation professionelle among philosophers, one that “can be demonstrated theoretically in many of the great thinkers”).¹³⁵ According to Arendt’s extremely charitable reading, the “shock of the collision” of 1933 was enough to drive the thinker “back to his residence,” where he would “settle in his thinking what he had experienced.”¹³⁶ What emerged from all this was Heidegger’s “discovery of the will as the ‘will to will’ and hence as the ‘will to power.’”¹³⁷

This discovery, made in the course of Heidegger’s “confrontation” with Nietzsche between 1936 and 1940, led Heidegger to repudiate the will and, according to Arendt, the realm of human affairs. As an expression of the will to will, this realm is seen by the later Heidegger as a function of the self-withdrawal or self-concealment of Being.¹³⁸ It was Heidegger’s desire to annul this withdrawal, and to draw closer to Being, that led to the “reversal” and the post-Kehre attitude of Gelassenheit (what Arendt calls his “will-not-to-will”). The change in mood after the Kehre is conveyed by Heidegger’s identification of thinking as the only genuine (nonwillful) form of action. For Arendt, as for Bernstein, the subsumption of acting by thinking goes hand in hand with Heidegger’s characterization of politics and human history as the realm of “erring,” as functions of a predestined and unalterable oblivion of Being.

This picture provides the background of Arendt’s extended Heidegger critique in LM. There, she takes Heidegger’s own reinterpretation of the Kehre seriously, pointing to a fundamental continuity in his thought, which is revealed only in light of the opposition between willing and thinking. According to Arendt, Heidegger radicalizes this opposition, and it is this radicalization that allows us to see that what unites the two phases of his thought (all superficial differences aside) is an emphasis upon the “inner action” of thinking as the sole route to either the recovery of Self (Being and Time) or the retrieval of Being.¹³⁹ Minimizing the willfulness and worldliness of the early work as mere signs of the time, Arendt focuses upon the meditative kernel that she sees as linking the “call of conscience” to the “Thought of Being.” By drawing out the mediative unity at the root of Heidegger’s thought, Arendt finds support for her earlier characterization of Heidegger’s “error” as a misstep analogous to Thales tumbling into the well.140 This tack enables her to salvage Heidegger’s philosophical reputation from the questions raised by his political involvements, while attacking his contributions to the oblivion of praxis (a contribution born of his denunciation of will and the realm of human affairs, on the one hand, and his deification of thought and Being, on the other).

While Arendt always drew attention to a certain “worldlessness” in Heidegger, she did not always shy away from a more directly political reading of his work. Before turning to her mature Heidegger critique, it is perhaps appropriate to trace the development of her later metacritical perspective out of earlier, more political, readings.

In her first published consideration of Heidegger in “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” (1946), Arendt unfavorably compares the early Heidegger to Karl Jaspers. Prefiguring much of Habermas’s critique, she focuses upon the subjectivist tendencies of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Her argument is that Heidegger’s characterization of existenz as Being-in-the-world did not prevent him from promoting an ideal of the self that measured authenticity in terms of a withdrawal from social relations. “The most essential characteristic of this [Heideggerian] self,” she writes, “is its absolute egoism, its radical separation from all of its fellows.”¹⁴¹ Heidegger’s “Self,” according to Arendt, absorbs the figure of “Man,” which had previously usurped the place of God. Radically isolated through its anticipation of death, this Self absorbs and ultimately negates the humanity of Man via its fixation on the experience of “guilty nothingness.”¹⁴² “Heidegger’s Self,” Arendt suggests, “is an ideal which has been working mischief in German philosophy and literature since Romanticism.”¹⁴³ Such romantic subjectivism stands in sharp contrast to Jasper’s Existenz-philosophie, with its emphasis on “the togetherness of men in the common given world” and its concept of communication that contains, an embryo, “a new concept of humanity.”¹⁴⁴

Aside from its remarkable hostility, the notable feature of this early assessment of Heidegger is its direct confrontation with the political implications of Heidegger’s “romantic subjectivism.” Arendt’s reading emphasizes how an ostensibly “this-worldly philosophy” winds up depriving the world of any significance other than providing the (fallen) context in which the Self strives for authenticity. From this perspective, the early Heidegger emerges as the twentieth-century culmination of the subjectification of the world initiated by Descartes and as an inheritor of the politics of authenticity promoted by Rousseau. His existentialism is a clear expression of the worldlessness of modernity. Insofar as the Heideggerian self is an extension of the romantic/Rousseauian ideal, it is destructive of the notions of a public world and self that Arendt later identifies as the sine qua non of a world-preserving politics.¹⁴⁵

Arendt’s next public consideration of Heidegger came in 1954, in the form of an only recently published address to the American Political Science Association (APSA).¹⁴⁶ Her stance here is critical, yet she is quite optimistic about Heidegger’s potential contribution to political theory. Heidegger’s approach, she suggests, while not being specifically geared to political phenomena, opens up an exit from the alien metaphorics Western philosophy has imposed upon them.

Arendt focuses her remarks upon the concept of “historicity” (Geschichlichkeit). Seen from the perspective of politics, this concept is double-edged. On the one hand, it serves as the basis for the development of Heidegger’s “history of Being,” a history that reveals the logic at work behind human history, much in the manner of Hegel’s presupposition of the unfolding of Geist (spirit). To the extent that Heidegger’s notion of historicity falls into the Hegelian pattern, it denies both the freedom and meaning of action; it is, as a result, antipolitical. However, on the other hand, the notion of historicity underlines the irreducibly partial nature of every presencing or understanding of Being. It therefore leads Heidegger to reject the Hegelian/Platonic presumption that theoria occupies a standpoint from which the whole can be grasped, a standpoint that provides the theorist with insight denied to the historical actors themselves. The concept of historicity points, contra Hegel, to an inescapable finitude of understanding and a notion of truth that is historical “all the way down.” For this reason Heidegger can claim—quite rightly in Arendt’s view—to have left “the arrogance of all Absolute behind us.”147

From Arendt’s perspective, the implications of Heidegger’s concept of historicity are nothing less than revolutionary. With this notion “the philosopher left behind him the claim to being ‘wise’ and knowing eternal standards for the perishable affairs of the City of man,” a claim that had force so long as the philosopher was understood to “dwell in the proximity of the Absolute.”¹⁴⁸ With the advent of the concept of historicity, it becomes impossible to conjure away the contingency and haphazardness of politics by the appeal to theoria or History: the realm of human affairs no longer appears as an object for philosophical comprehension and domination. More to the point, and most exciting for Arendt, is the way that Heidegger’s “rejection of the claim to wisdom” opens the way to a “reexamination of the whole realm of politics in light of elementary human experiences within this realm itself, and demands implicitly concepts and judgments which have their roots in altogether different kinds of human experience.”¹⁴⁹

This is as close as Arendt ever comes to acknowledging Heidegger’s work’s decisive importance for illuminating the distortion that results from philosophical conceptualization in the realm of human affairs. As argued above, Heidegger’s critique of productionist metaphysics reveals the predominance of the metaphorics of fabrication within the Western tradition. This insight provides the cornerstone for the entire analysis given by Arendt in The Human Condition, an analysis devoted to showing how long we have been thinking of acting in terms of making and the resulting deformation of our understanding of the political.¹⁵⁰ The hint contained in Arendt’s APSA address is made even more tantalizing by her judgment that Heidegger failed to exploit the opening created by his concept of historicity. This failure indicated that a questioning of the West’s productionist ontological prejudices was, in itself, insufficient for “the reexamination of the whole realm of politics in the light of … experiences within this realm itself.” What was needed was a theorist who would put action itself at the center. This Heidegger manifestly failed to do; for although he abandoned the philosopher’s claim to wisdom, he was unable to divest himself entirely of philosophy’s contemplative prejudices. These prejudices assert themselves in the concept of historicity that, despite its obvious closeness to the political realm, “never reaches its center—man as acting being.”151

Because it is geared toward the “coincidence of thought and event” rather than the nexus of action and judgment, the concept of historicity can “throw new light on history rather than politics, on happenings rather than action.”¹⁵² Heidegger’s ability to elucidate such world-historical trends as the “technicalization of the world, the emergence of One World on a planetary scale, the increasing pressure of society upon the individual and the concomitant atomization of society” is a function of thought tuned to historicity rather than action.¹⁵³ Ironically, it is this very historical insight, born of the abandonment of Platonic pretensions, that leads to a forgetfulness concerning what Arendt calls “the more permanent questions of political science”; namely, “What is politics? Who is man as a political being? What is freedom?”¹⁵⁴

Arendt develops the critical themes of the APSA lecture and her “Existenz Philosophy” essay in the Heidegger critique The Life of the Mind; however, she situates them in an entirely new context. The goal is no longer to explore Heidegger’s possible contribution to political theory, but to trace the disjunction between thinking and acting, ontology and politics, to the core of his thought.

She begins by considering the Kehre independently of Heidegger’s subsequent reinterpretation. Bracketing, for the moment, the claim of continuity, Arendt presents the “reversal” in terms of the thematization of the opposition between willing and thinking, a thematization that culminates in Heidegger’s contention (contra Nietzsche) that the will is essentially destructive, not creative.¹⁵⁵ Heidegger’s “reversal,” according to Arendt, pits itself against this destructiveness, which is manifest in technology’s desire to “subject the whole world to its domination and rulership.”¹⁵⁶ Heidegger’s alternative to such rulership (characteristic of the will to will) is, of course, “letting-be” or releasement, a mode of ontological comportment opposed to the “mood of purposiveness” dominant in willing. Thus, the Nietzsche lectures produce the insight that “thinking and willing are not just two different faculties,” but in fact are “opposite,” engaged in “deadly conflict.” The reversal signifies Heidegger’s repudiation of willing in favor of the kind of comportment toward entities enabled by thinking. However—and for Arendt this is decisive—Heidegger makes it clear that it is the History of Being—and not the mind of man—that “determines whether men respond to Being in terms of willing or in terms of thinking.”¹⁵⁷

With the theme of Seinsgeschichte, of a separate and determining history of Being, we approach what is for Arendt the most radical of Heidegger’s claims: that Being itself, “forever changing, manifests itself in the thinking of the actor so that acting and thinking coincide.”¹⁵⁸ The idea of such a “merging” is enough to distinguish Heidegger from philosophies of history such as Hegel’s, in which human actors are the unconscious vehicles of Spirit. Moreover, it highlights the most “startling consequences” of the reversal, consequences that flow directly from Heidegger’s repudiation of the will and that are obscured by the later claim of an inner continuity. For Arendt, these consequences are “first, the notion that solitary thinking in itself constitutes the only relevant action in the factual record of history, and second, that thinking is the same as thanking.”159

These consequences certainly lend support to Arendt’s thesis that Heidegger is an essentially unworldly philosopher, one who denies a priori any relation between the disclosure of Being and politics. But they also stand in stark contrast to the positions staked out in Heidegger’s Being and Time and his writings up to Nietzsche, in which authentic disclosedness appeared as something worldly, active, willful, and poetic. This very real difference would seem to throw the later Heidegger’s claim of a profound inner unity in doubt, and it certainly places Arendt’s claim—that the experience of thinking is determinative for the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy—in question.

For her part, Arendt is aware of the discrepancy between the later Heidegger’s view of thinking as the only genuine form of action and his earlier conception of authentic disclosedness. She makes no attempt to deny the similarity between Being and Time’s futurally oriented care structure and the will (man’s “organ for the future”).¹⁶⁰ Nor does she deny Heidegger’s tendency to define the authentic individual in terms of a spontaneous and resolved willing, which liberates this self from the social and linguistic bonds of the “they-self.” In this regard, Arendt notes the affinity between the early Heidegger’s view of a spontaneously disclosive self and Nietzsche’s emphasis upon the priority of “artistic willing” over thought. Heidegger appears to confirm this link when he writes in the first volume of Nietzsche, “To will means: to bring oneself to one’s self. … Willing, we encounter ourselves as who we are authentically.”¹⁶¹

Yet despite these affinities, Arendt maintains that Heidegger never really intended the notion of authenticity or authentic disclosedness to be read in terms of an artistic or poetic creativity, much less in a political mode. (She dismisses the former possibility by noting that “nowhere in Being and Time … is artistic creativity mentioned.”)¹⁶² What distinguishes the authentic individual from his fallen peers is neither spontaneity nor creativity, according to Arendt, but that individual’s response to the call of conscience, which “calls man back from his everyday entanglement in the ‘they’.”¹⁶³ Emphasizing conscience’s role in revealing Dasein’s guilt to itself, Arendt frames an opposition between an authentic Dasein withdrawn into thought and the worldliness (and alienation) of public existence. Conscience calls the self to an acceptance of its indebtedness or thrownness, to “a kind of ‘acting’ (handeln) which is polemically understood as the opposite of the ‘loud’ and visible actions of public life—the mere froth of what truly is.”¹⁶⁴ Authentic Dasein hardly seizes upon possibilities latent in its everyday existence. In Arendt’s interpretation, the “taking up” that Heidegger speaks of is, in fact, a meditative reconciliation with what is. The movement of reconciliation born of the call of conscience is achieved through an “entirely inner ‘action’ in which man opens himself to the authentic actuality of being thrown.” Such action “can exist only in the activity of thinking.”¹⁶⁵

It is through thinking that Dasein effects reconciliation with its essential finitude. Authenticity, then, is not really a mode of Being-in-the-world at all, for “what the call of conscience actually achieves is the recovery of the individualized self from involvement in the events that determine man’s everyday activities as well as the course of recorded history—l’écume des choses (the foam of things).”166 The authentic self, in other words, is not essentially with others, but apart from them; it does not strive for a more authentic form of community life, it gives thanks for individual existence in all its contingency. Turned away from everything public and everyday, the authentic Heideggerian self, according to Arendt, is turned toward “a thinking that expresses gratitude that the ‘naked That’ has been given at all.”¹⁶⁷

Arendt’s reading of Being and Time makes it a relatively small step from the “inner activity” of such a self to the later Heidegger’s conception of the thinker who listens attentively for the call of Being. Noting how Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte differs from German Idealism while extending its basic speculative thrust, Arendt observes that, in Heidegger, “there is a Somebody who acts out the hidden meaning of Being and thus provides the disastrous course of events [of human history] with a counter-current of wholesomeness.”¹⁶⁸ This Somebody (the thinker who “has weaned himself from willing to ‘letting be’”) is, according to Arendt, “actually the ‘authentic Self’ of Being and Time, who now listens to the call of Being instead of the call of conscience.”¹⁶⁹

Thus, from Arendt’s perspective, the later Heidegger is distinguished not by a renunciation of worldly activity (this, in her account, is nothing new), nor by a rethinking of the “poetic” nature of disclosure (which was not really artistic in inspiration anyway). What marks Heidegger after the Kehre is a new self-consciousness concerning the meditative core of authentic disclosedness (the disclosure of Being). For the later Heidegger, the “inner activity” of the thinker is not willed: unlike the authentic self of Being and Time, the thinker does not initiate, he responds. He is not “summoned by himself to his Self,” but is rather summoned by Being to Being.¹⁷⁰ Hence, Heidegger’s famous characterization of thinking as thanking, as an expression of gratefulness to Being that could not exist without the “generosity” of Being. So viewed, the activity of thinking is radically desubjectified; as Arendt puts it, “the Self no longer acts in itself but, obedient to Being, enacts by sheer thinking the counter-current of Being underlying the ‘foam’ of beings—the mere appearances whose current is steered by the will to power.”¹⁷¹ Necessarily withdrawn from the public world and everydayness, thinking, it turns out, must also be withdrawn from the Self if it is to engage the absent, if it is to bring the silent word of Being to language. It is only by severing its ties to both the world and the Self that thinking responds to the call of Being.¹⁷²

By focusing upon the meditative thread that she sees running through all of Heidegger’s work, Arendt is able to present a novel, even surprising, picture of his philosophy. Her claim, roughly, is that Heidegger’s ontological concern, obscured by the existential motifs of Being and Time, realizes itself after the Kehre in thought’s communion with Being, in a thinking that stands in radical opposition to the entire realm of beings/appearances.¹⁷³ Heidegger, who claimed to be more genuinely anti-Platonist than Nietzsche, turns out to be more Platonist than Plato, insofar as the ontological difference between Being and beings is not seen as something to be overcome (by recourse to the Idea of the Good, God, mind, dialectic, etc.), but rather as the sine qua non of thought. The “philosophical” withdrawal of the later Heidegger is pure and complete: the Kehre does not lead the thinker back into the cave as does the Platonic turning, or periogoge. Quite the contrary; it is the total character of Heidegger’s withdrawal from the world of appearances, his “taking up residence” in an abode where even the most renowned of philosophers only sojourned, that makes him, even more than Plato (though perhaps less than Socrates), the “philosopher’s philosopher.” It is this total withdrawal that also makes his “error” both more grotesque and more tragic than Plato’s misguided attempt to transform a run of the mill tyrant into a philosopher-king.174 And, Arendt would add, it also makes Heidegger’s actions more demanding, and perhaps more worthy, of forgiveness.

Arendt was no doubt aware of the objections that her interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy (which locates its gravitational center in the experience of thinking) would elicit. By presenting the Kehre as the radicalization of thinking’s essential unworldliness, she opens herself to the charge that she effaces the very dimensions of the early Heidegger’s thought that were conducive to (if not a sufficient cause of) the commitment of 1933. We can read the conclusion of her Heidegger critique as the attempt to forestall objections from those who take issue with her portrait of a deeply unpolitical philosophy, a philosophy whose fidelity to the activity of thinking made it all the more opposed (or oblivious) to the realm of action.

Arendt devotes the last pages of her critique to a consideration of an “interruption” in Heidegger’s life and thought even more radical than the “reversal”—namely, the “point zero” (Jünger) of Germany’s defeat.¹⁷⁵ With this interruption, according to Arendt, there came a brief but dramatic change of mood in Heidegger’s thought, a change of outlook captured in the rather obscure ontological speculations of “Der Spruch des Anaximander” (“The Anaximander Fragment,” 1946). The mood here, distinct from earlier willfulness and Gelassenheit (releasement) is one of despair tempered by the anticipation of an epochal transformation, a “transitional moment” in the history of Being that follows “the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone.”¹⁷⁶ According to Arendt, this change in mood produced “an altogether new and unexpected outlook on the whole posing of the problem of Being,” a radical change in perspective on the Seinsfrage (question of Being) that affords a telling glimpse into the core of Heidegger’s ontological vision.¹⁷⁷

The object of Heidegger’s commentary in “The Anaximander Fragment” is the following text: “But that from which things arise also gives rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.”¹⁷⁸

This fragment, as Arendt notes, concerns “the coming-to-be and passing-away of everything that is.”¹⁷⁹ Heidegger extrapolates from Anaximander in order to identify the being of entities with a “lingering awhile is presence” between a “twofold absence.” All that is emerges from an original concealment to “linger awhile” in the world of appearances, ultimately departing and withdrawing once again into concealment.180

From Arendt’s perspective, the Heideggerian gloss on Anaximander is noteworthy for its stark departure from his usual teaching on aletheia (the disclosure of Being) and the ontological difference. Normally, Heidegger places disclosure or unconcealment “on the side of Being,” identifying, for example, the attentive response of the thinker with the revelation of Being in the world of appearances.¹⁸¹ However, as Arendt observes, in “The Anaximander Fragment,” “unconcealment is not truth; it belongs to the beings that arrive and depart into a hidden Being.”¹⁸² The relation of disclosure previously implied by the ontological difference between Being and beings has been reversed. Once the presencing of beings is seen as belonging to beings, it follows that “the unconcealment of beings, the brightness granted them, obscures the light of Being.”¹⁸³ Hence, Heidegger’s central thesis: “as it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws.”¹⁸⁴

This new view of disclosure, in which truth by nature remains concealed, covered over by the unconcealment of beings, leads Heidegger (according to Arendt) to reconfigure the relationship between Being and Becoming. Whereas before and after “The Anaximander Fragment” the realm of Becoming appears as an arena for the disclosure of Being through the poetic/thinking activity of man, in the essay it is viewed as “the opposite of Being.”¹⁸⁵ Becoming—the process of emergence into the light of presence—is the “law that rules beings”; but this law also dictates that things will pass away, that the entire realm of Becoming “changes again into that Being from whose sheltering, concealing darkness it had originally emerged.”¹⁸⁶ Instead of a disclosure in which Being is illuminated through the presencing of beings, we now find, according to Arendt, an opposition between Being “in the strong durative sense” and a Becoming that conceals but does not disclose Being.

In the Anaximander essay, Arendt maintains, Heidegger has inscribed Becoming in an eternally recurring economy of presence and absence. The unconcealment of beings now depends upon the self-concealment or withdrawal of Being. This is not only a reversal with respect to disclosure, but it is also a new way of posing the Seinsfrage. For with the position Heidegger takes in the Anaximander essay, it is “no longer genuine inauthenticity or any particularity of human existence that causes man to ‘forget’ Being … nor does he do it because he is distracted by the sheer superabundance of mere entities.”¹⁸⁷ Rather, Heidegger’s new position is that “oblivion of Being belongs to the self-veiling essence of Being … the history of Being begins with the oblivion of Being, since Being … keeps to itself.”¹⁸⁸

One crucial result of this reversal, according to Arendt, is that there is no longer a link between the history of Being and human history actualized through some form of human activity (for example, “thinking” as the only real action). Being’s initial withdrawal sets in motion a double movement that radicalizes the “categorical separation of Being and beings” by placing the two in an alternating, mutually exclusive temporal sequence. Thus, Arendt can say that the ontological difference acquires “a kind of history with a beginning and an end”: Being discloses itself in beings, simultaneously withdrawing into itself as beings are “set adrift” to constitute what Heidegger calls “the realm of error”; that is, the sphere of common human history.189 The only time the “Da” draws closer to Being is when it ceases to exist.

The difference between the history of Being outlined in “The Anaximander Fragment” (in which Being “keeps to itself”) and Seinsgeschichte proper is that the former does not allow a “secret” ontological history to be enacted “behind the backs of acting men” by philosophers who say the word of Being.¹⁹⁰ The thinker, no less than any other man, is cast adrift in the realm of erring. So long as Being remains “sheltered in its concealment,” it has, strictly speaking, no history, and thinking cannot lay claim to responding to and actualizing Being in the midst of human history.¹⁹¹ At most, the thinker can hope to respond to those “transitional moments” between epochs of erring. At such moments, “Being qua Truth breaks into the continuum of error,” not to disclose itself, but to withdraw itself once again.¹⁹² It is the trace of this withdrawal manifest in such moments that the thinker must content himself with.

Arendt’s reading of the Anaximander essay reveals a step beyond the radicalization of the opposition between thinking and willing found in the Kehre. If the change of mood manifest in Heidegger’s “reversal” signaled his desire to strip thinking of its willful and self-centered elements, the Anaximander essay contains a recognition of the irreducible willfulness of life or existence itself. No “purified” thinking can annul Being’s withdrawal through its disclosive action, for all action—even thinking—is erring. Insofar as thinking desires to overcome this withdrawal and make Being manifest in the realm of beings, it remains tied to the will to persist, to self-preservation. From this perspective, Gelassenheit affords no escape from errancy, since all comportment toward beings—all “lingering awhile in presence”—is tainted by the “craving to persist.” The ontological difference—which, at other moments, Heidegger felt could be bridged by the disclosive action of the thinker—is here an unbridgeable abyss. Trapped by virtue of his sheer existence in the realm of erring; knowing full well that “to act is to err, to go astray,” the thinker ceases to view his activity as “the only genuine form of action” and sees it, rather, as an activity that allows him to join with, however fleetingly, that which lies beyond life—the absent in its enduring withdrawal.¹⁹³

“The Anaximander Fragment,” then, expresses a mood of truly radical unworldliness, a mood that is extreme even by the standards of the Western tradition. Heidegger expresses no gratitude for existence here: thinking is not a thanking. But neither does Heidegger give vent to the resentment against the human condition that both he and Arendt see at the root of the Western tradition and modernity’s self-assertion. If anything, the tone is closest to the wisdom of Silenus, to the deeply tragic view of existence that Arendt and Nietzsche also (provisionally) accept. The difference, of course, is that for Nietzsche art, and for Arendt political action, could redeem human existence. For Heidegger in the Anaximander essay, no such redemptive powers exist: there is only “erring,” estrangement, homelessness.

What, then, does the Anaximander essay reveal about Heidegger’s thought? From Arendt’s point of view, the essay dramatically confirms the trajectory away from all willing and acting manifest throughout the Heideggerian corpus. Embodying the unworldly (one might almost say contemplative) impulse behind all genuine philosophy in a pure, even exaggerated, form, the Anaximander essay reveals a philosopher every bit as much in love with death as Plato in the Phaedo.194 And with this insight a new level of depth and irony is added to Arendt’s claim that Heidegger is the “philosopher’s philosopher.”

While the philosophical urge to overcome the will to life, to have done with this world in order to draw closer to Being, is something that, in Arendt’s view, unites Heidegger and Plato, an important difference remains. It is marked by the lines Arendt cites from Goethe at the conclusion of her Heidegger critique:

The Eternal works and stirs in all For all must into Nothing fall, If it is to persist in Being.195

For Plato, the contemplative metaphysician par excellence, the Eternal (Being) was constant presence as “embodied” in the forms. Two thousand years later, after all the “monstrous transformations” enabled by Plato’s interpretation of Being have been played out, the philosopher (Heidegger) remains steadfast in his unworldly commitment to the Eternal. However, at the end of metaphysics “the Eternal” can signify only one thing: an enduring Nothing.