In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism Author(S): Lewis P

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In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism Author(s): Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 183-211 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1407108 Accessed: 22-01-2018 21:17 UTC

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This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman

Hannah Arendt's political theory gains in clarity and resonance when it is placed in the context of German phenomenology and Existenz philosophy. In this essay, the authors examine the points of contact (on the level of ideas rather than personal ties) between Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The argument holds that Arendt followed Heidegger in grafting traditional humanism onto an untradi- tional, self-consciously antimetaphysical body of thought. Yet almost from the beginning, she struck out in a direction peculiarly her own, seeking to escape a certain contemplative aloofness and remoteness from public affairs which she sensed in Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Against Heidegger, Arendt tried to show that the core values of human rights and dignity cannot be sustained unless one explicitly recognizes the "plurality" of human life and the importance of the public realm in revealing who we are as individuals. Hannah Arendt owed much of her renown as a political philosopher to her illuminating, often controversial studies of contemporary issues. She wanted to demonstrate how much a political philosopher could tell us about the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam war, or the Hungarian uprising. Even in her most abstruse theoretical works like The Human Condition, Arendt's pas- sionate concern for the present age shone through. There was never anything pedantic or scholastic about her. Still, anyone who makes a determined effort to come to grips with her thought as a whole faces unexpected difficulties. For example, Arendt characteristically interpreted modern phenomena such as revolutions and protest demonstrations in light of the language and experience of classical antiquity. Yet she rarely of- fered any justification for such an unorthodox move. Moreover, her "explanations" for phenomena like totalitarianism, while com- pelling, had little in common with the accounts usually proffered by historians and political scientists. And the key concepts she employed to clarify political realities -"labor," "work" and "action"- are themselves shrouded in obscurity in respect to their origin and epistemological status. In the end, one suspects, the "relevance" of Arendt's political commentary has imparted to it a false sense of familiarity. We are lulled into believing we can understand her well enough without delving too deeply into the intellectual controversies and philosophical traditions that shaped her thinking. 183

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To be sure, some American scholars have recognized - and sharply criticized - the philosophic basis of Arendt's political theory. Arendt's famous 1953 exchange with Eric Voegelin in the pages of the Review of Politics offers an instructive example.' Voegelin did not understand how Arendt could argue, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that regimes such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia somehow had altered human nature. Having recourse to one of Western philosophy's most venerable traditions, Voegelin observed that the nature of a thing is its im- mutable essence, by definition beyond the reach of accident and contingency. Yet Arendt, following a much more recent (and, we would add, consciously antimetaphysical) tradition, insisted that human beings do not have an "essence" in the sense that other things do. Their "nature" cannot be separated from the conditions of their lives and the way in which they appear to one another. Hence, it makes sense to say that man's "nature" is altered if the conditions of his life have been changed fundamentally, as Arendt believed to be the case with totalitarian regimes. Arendt's debate with Voegelin reminds us how much her political philosophy still needs to be investigated in detail. Above all, it should be determined whether one must accept her philosophic premises in order to concur in the results of her political analysis. As Voegelin discovered, a single problematic assertion may conceal major, perhaps unbridgeable disagreements in philosophic perspective. Ironically, our evalua- tion of "practical" phenomena such as revolutions, dictatorships or communes may hinge ultimately on the stance we take toward the tradition of Western metaphysical thought and its continued supremacy over our categories of interpretation. Concerning Arendt's philosophic lineage, she herself certainly put to rest any doubts: "If I can be said to 'have come from anywhere,' it is from the tradition of German philosophy."2 As her American commentators have begun to emphasize, "Ger- man philosophy" means specifically the traditions of phenomenology and ontology associated with Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers.3 In the following pages, we limit ourselves to ex- amining the nature and extent of Arendt's dependence on Heideg- ger for several crucial philosophic principles,4 and to trying to understand how far she moved out of Heidegger's shadow to stake out her own original, independent positions. To be more precise, we argue that her political thinking had at its core two related

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 185 problems: first, developing a new "humanism" derived from Ger- man phenomenology rather than from traditional liberal-socialist convictions about human nature and behavior; and second, show- ing how such a projected humanism differs in decisive ways from the path Heidegger himself chose to follow. Arendt became convinced that classical liberalism and even socialism contained some glaring weaknesses. Both treated man as, at bottom, a social instead of a political animal. Accordingly, both regarded the state and politics almost as embarrassments, institutions that by all rights should not even exist, were it not for the vagaries of human nature or of particular economic orders. Even exponents of modern welfare-state liberalism only wel- comed an expansion of the state's activities because they believed that man's social needs thereby could be served more justly and expeditiously. More importantly, Arendt shared with many of her European contemporaries the conviction that Western societies faced a crisis far more pervasive and frightening than most progressives had imagined. She sensed that in the twentieth century we were losing the capacity to reconstruct and understand experiences which men once had had of freedom, authority and political action. The atrophy of this crucial capacity, she feared, might culminate in the complete dehumanization of man, or his transformation into an utterly passive object of manipulation and administration. Phenomenology and existentialism seemed to offer a promis- ing, radical alternative to the liberal-socialist position precisely because the luminaries of these new philosophical schools cast their nets so broadly. They approached the political discontents of their time as expressions of the "crisis of European culture" (Husserl) or even of the "forgetfulness of being" (Heidegger). Arendt, one of Heidegger's and Jaspers's most brilliant students, seldom failed to acknowledge her indebtedness to the pathfinders of Existenz philosophy, however much she might dispute them on specific issues: "[Existenz philosophy] in postwar Germany, with Scheler, Heidegger, and Jaspers, reached a consciousness as yet unsurpassed of what is really at stake in modern philosophy."5 So, when we find her chiding Heidegger for his alleged indifference to human rights and, later, for his spiritual retreat from the world of human affairs, we should bear in mind that she remained an adherent of phenomenology and Existenz philosophy throughout her career (as Bhikhu Parekh has also argued in his valuable study of her political thought6).

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In reconstructing Arendt's philosophical kinship with Heideg- ger, we try to accomplish three things. First, we explain briefly the origins and principles of phenomenology as Heidegger and Arendt knew it in the 1920's and 1930's. Second, we explore those aspects of Heidegger's philosophy that appear to have influenced Arendt the most. This means that the greatest weight will be placed on Being and Time, a work written prior to Heidegger's so- called Kehre, or "turning," of the mid-1930's.7 The reason for this emphasis is simply that Arendt eventually drew away from Heidegger, initially because of the remoteness of his teachings from the sphere of practical politics, and then because of his notorious flirtation with Nazism. Third, we identify the elements of Heidegger's fundamental ontology that Arendt appropriated and those that she explicitly rejected, in the hope of isolating the fundamental principles guiding her new phenomenological humanism.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF MAN

Although dissatisfaction with established systems of philosophy was rife everywhere toward the end of the nineteenth century, phenomenology was a distinctively German response to the "crisis of metaphysics." It emerged as its founder, Edmund Husserl, wrestled with an epistemological problem that had plagued Western philosophy since Descartes. Human beings desire to know the world as it is in itself, and not simply as it is perceived or thought by us observers. Yet, Descartes believed, we lack direct knowledge of the world as it is in itself; we know only the mental representations we make of it. And unless we build some sort of metaphysical bridge from consciousness back to the world, as Descartes did, we would seem forced into the corner of subjectivism (except in the case of mathematics). One escape route from the subjectivist implications of Carte- sian philosophy was pioneered by Kant, and this is the one that helped to set the stage for phenomenology. Kant accepted the view that the mind knows not "raw" objects, but actually "representations" (Vorstellungen) of reality. These Kant called "phenomena" or "appearances" to distinguish them from transcen- dent and unknowable "noumena" or "things in themselves." But he held that the objects thus "represented" in human experience were always ordered in accordance with certain fundamental

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 187 principles (the transcendental intuitions of space and time and the categories of the understanding). Further, he argued that this prestructuring of experience by the mind follows the same pattern in each individual, as for example when all of us perceive an event as having been preceded by some cause, however much we might differ about what that cause actually was. So the basic structure of all experience is still admittedly "subjective" in the sense that we do not yet know anything about the world as it is in itself. But our knowledge of reality is "objective" to the extent that it is given to all intellects in the same way. The scope of that knowledge, however, was sharply limited by Kant. According to Kant, the system of categories and intuitions laid the epistemological foun- dations for science and mathematics. For me to experience events as causally related, for example, reflects the underlying pattern of all experience of phenomena and not simply a deeply ingrained habit of mind peculiar to me. But only science and mathematics (i.e., the Newtonian universe) could be thus construed as objective. For different reasons, Kant refused to grant speculative metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetic judgments the sort of objectivi- ty that the scientific study of nature possessed. Husserl began by pursuing the terms of Kant's philosophical "solution" in a different direction than their originator had intended. To begin with, Husserl abolished the entire notion of a "noumenal world." Conceding that we must take our bearings from the "data of consciousness," Husserl pointed out that these data are "the world" for us. Beyond them there is simply nothing at all. Consciousness cannot sensibly inquire what a world would be like of which we could not be conscious. Phenomenology, as its name suggests, is then confined to the investigation of appearances. But since the latter no longer stand in contrast to any putative "noumenal world," whatever knowledge we can obtain about them counts as objective in the fullest sense. Even knowledge about the philosophers' bite noire, the unicorn, can be objective, since the phenomenologist simply would be describing the contents of his consciousness of the unicorn, and not commit- ting himself to any position concerning its existence. Arendt herself gave a concise insight into the import of phenomenology and its attraction for so many German intellectuals: Husserl's basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that no subjective act is ever without an object; though the seen tree may be an illusion, for the act of seeing it is an object nevertheless.8

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Husserl's innovation may seem more semantic than substan- tive, but two implications leapt out at would-be phenomenologists. First, as Husserl himself was the first to pro- claim, phenomenology would allow philosophers to overcome their preoccupation with the purely subjective (especially psychological) factors in experience and get "back to the things." He even recommended a special procedure-the epochi-which involved a suspension of our customary engagement in the world of practical affairs so that we could "see" more clearly what actually appeared to us without passing judgment on its reality.9 Second, and even more important, Husserl's approach held out the promise of elevating the phenomena of everyday life (what he later called the Lebenswelt) to the same dignity, as matters for rigorous study, which Kant had bestowed only on the objects of natural science. The world as constituted by scientific inquiry now seemed a somewhat artificial construction, impressive in its accomplishments yet still rising up from a more fundamental and encompassing stratum of experience accessible first and foremost to phenomenological observation. Any attempt to subject this subtle pattern of experience and meaning to "naturalistic" categories would only distort or falsify it. On this level at least, Heidegger and Arendt were always in agreement, decrying all at- tempts to go "behind" the data of consciousness to find their putative causes or psychological origins.'0 It remains to be seen, however, how far the two thinkers followed the same phenomenological road and at what point they parted ways.

HEIDEGGER: THE TURN TOWARD FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY

Arendt's relationship to Heidegger is extremely ambiguous. She was dismayed and angered by his temporary endorsement of the Nazi seizure of power. In fact the bitterness of her attack on him in an early essay, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" can be ascribed partly to still very fresh memories of the Holocaust. But during the postwar years, Arendt succeeded to some degree in repairing her relationship to Heidegger and continued to study his writings carefully. Indeed, she included a penetrating commentary on Heidegger's pre- and post-Kehre philosophy in her last complete work, Willing. Nevertheless, we argue that her fundamental judgment about Heidegger's thought remained striking- ly consistent. In most of her mature writings she silently ap-

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propriated and developed many of Heidegger's most significant insights, yet from beginning to end she simultaneously criticized his alleged isolation from the world of human affairs. To substan- tiate this argument we must survey Heidegger's and Arendt's work with an eye to the following questions: Where in Arendt's work do we feel Heidegger's influence most strongly? What, in her view, were the most serious limitations of his thinking? And how did she believe they might be overcome? Heidegger's most famous work, Being and Time, is really an ex- tension and revision of Husserl's phenomenology." Heidegger builds on Husserl's central argument that subject and object, human awareness and the environing world, are indissolubly linked. One cannot even in principle treat the ego as something detached from its surroundings. To isolate the ego (or the object) as a detached unit after the manner of Descartes would mean imposing upon human experience the category of "substance" which, borrowed as it is from man's observation of things, distorts the true relationship between self and world. The phenomenologist instead must open himself up to the rich totality of experience, describing it without imposing on it a preconceived network of categories. Heidegger especially drew out and developed an implication of Husserl's work mentioned already: the ontological dignity (for Heidegger, it is really the primacy) of the human world as op- posed to the world "reconstructed" by scientific observers. Being and Time begins with the phenomenological study of everyday life. However, Heidegger went far beyond his mentor in several vital respects. He transformed phenomenology, which Husserl hoped to make a "rigorous science," into a method through which to carry on a more radical inquiry into ontology, the study of what it is to be. The focus of his investigation was a special kind of being: Dasein, literally "being-there" but actually, although very roughly, equivalent to man himself. To "be there" means first of all, for mankind, to be in the world. Our original relationship to the things around us is organic and unreflective, not at all the abstract relationship of ego confronting object that much previous philosophy had posited. We simply "find ourselves" in the midst of the world. Heidegger did not see epistemology as a true problem because one can posit it as a problem only by having first made an artificial separation of subject and object which itself is not grounded in Dasein's actual way of being.

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Heidegger's resolve to investigate what it means to be by clarifying the being of Dasein was no arbitrary choice, but embodied a definite stance toward traditional philosophy. It echoed Husserl's and Kant's claim that all experience of the world points back to the consciousness to which the world is present. On the other hand, locutions such as Dasein helped to fulfill Heidegger's aim to "let beings be,"'2 and not impose upon human experience such pre- judicial categories of "cognition" as mind, subject or substance. For Heidegger (and, as we will see, for Arendt as well) "knowing" or "cognizing" were "modes of being" of Dasein, neither superior to nor intrinsically more "real" than other possible modes. It is actually existence, not cognition, that constitutes man's essential being.'3 Heidegger's point is not too difficult to grasp. All the entities around us, seen from a detached, more or less scientific perspective, appear as things with properties or substances with ac- cidents. That is, we ask what they are and answer that they are things which are small or large, black or red, heavy or light. This way of being, called by Heidegger "presence-at-hand" (Vorhanden- sein), can be applied to human beings as well, for example, to their physical properties. But it is more appropriate and fitting to ask who, not what, people are.14 The "who" question "discloses" (to use Heidegger's term) the difference between Dasein and other beings. Dasein "exists" precisely by being aware of its existence or, as Heidegger said, by turning its own being into an issue. Dasein, by contrast to things present-at-hand, is free; it has the possibility of existing in a different way than it now does and is at least dimly cognizant of its possibilities (including the very important one that it will someday cease to exist). Heidegger now posed a crucial question: If Kant's twelve categories exhaustively describe the world as seen scientifically, that is, as things "present-at-hand," could not one formulate analogous concepts to describe the being of Dasein? He proposed that we can elicit such categories-he called them "existentials"- from the complex structure of Existenz, and pro- ceeded in the remainder of Being and Time to do so. Important "existentials" include "care" (the general relationship of Dasein to its world), "anxiety," "fallenness," and a host of others which we need not explore in detail. The point is simply that the "existentials" describe the various ways I have of relating myself to the world, other people and my own life, just as Kant's categories describe a

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 191 thing's way of being (number, causality, substantiality and so on). However, there is an important difference between these two sets of articulations. Kant's categories are necessary a priori ways of conceiving experience. We cannot, for Kant, experience things in our world other than as caused, as limited, etc. But we can, for Heidegger, suppress or ignore our awareness of ourselves, which is to say, the very root of Existenz. We can slip over into the mode of treating ourselves and others as "presences-at-hand," forgetting the freedom which, as Dasein, we are. This self-forgetting Heideg- ger termed uneigentlich ("ungenuine, unself-possessing") and con- trasted it to genuine Existenz in which we resolutely accept our freedom and responsibility. Up to this point, Heidegger's fundamental ontology seems to highlight just those aspects of human dignity and responsibility which so frequently are lost in the theory and practice of contemporary society. However, as we shall show later, there is a darker side to his philosophy of Existenz. Looking ahead a bit, we shall not find Arendt appropriating very many of Heidegger's specific "existentials." What she did adopt almost intact is the structure within which "existentials" make sense, namely, the intuitions of space and time that Heideg- ger works out in Being and Time. We have already indicated the direction in which Heidegger developed the meaning of space. Dasein is in the world but not in the same way that, say, a cup is in the cupboard. In the latter case we imagine space as a medium within which we can locate objects (i.e., things that are "present- at-hand"). The concept of space as a neutral medium containing objects is, of course, the same one employed for centuries in geometry and Newtonian physics. Heidegger called it "categorical" for this reason and noted that such categorical characteristics "belong to entities whose kind of Being is not of the character of Dasein."'5 He tried to elicit the original meaning of "in," of human space, through a study of certain etymological derivations in several Indo-European tongues (a point to which we return). His analysis suggests that "in"- taken as an "existential"- means to " 'dwell alongside' the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way."'" The "space" within which we are in the world is not circumscribed primarily by our physical relationship to objects (e.g., in terms of "near" or "far," "inside" or "outside"); instead, each Dasein in-habits a space of its own within which physical things take on their meaning as part of its world (at first usually as

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 192 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS implements or items to be used in the business of everyday life). This existential sense of space willibe crucial to Arendt since, in contrast to physical space, our "being in" the human world depends to a great extent on the maintenance of human institutions such as publicness. At this point we should try to forestall a possible confusion which could obscure the radicalness of Heidegger's--and Arendt's-thought. When Heidegger spoke of "dwelling" or Arendt of "public spaces" and "emerging into the light," we are apt to say that they were employing metaphors, that is, trying to illuminate what is problematical (the human world) by borrowing images from what is supposedly fundamental and non- problematical (the world as it appears to common sense). In fact, they were trying to do the very opposite. Heidegger, especially, wanted to find a language that is free of all metaphoric relationships to what is "present-at-hand." We are not to take the word "in," for example, as a metaphoric adaptation of the "in" appropriate to mere objects, but in its original human sense of innan (wohnen or "dwell") that expresses the relationships of care and familiarity within which man inhabits the world. In other words, ontological primacy is given to the being of Dasein (the human world) and not to the world taken as "present-at-hand" (i.e., as common sense and modern science see it). Heidegger turned away from the Cartesian or Newtonian con- ception of time even more radically than he had from the cor- responding notion of space. Our commonsensical ideal of time presumably holds the present to be the only "real" tense, while past and future are seen as unreal just because neither actually "is" (the first "was" and the second "will be"). From Dasein's perspective, the ontological priority goes not to the present but to the future and (in a lesser degree) the past. In human time the "present" is merely an incomplete, artificially detached slice of a whole movement that actually begins in the future. What I do now is given meaning by my "project," that is, the projecting of a possible future. For example, a present act such as starting my car makes sense only in relation to the project of which it is a fragment, such as driving to the office. From my perspective, the future is in a way more real than the present since it alone saves any act from being merely random. The past also has a solid reality within Dasein's time since it defines those features of the world (including my own being in it)

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 193 which are merely "given." For example, I find that I am an American citizen. The "am" expresses, however, a continuity between past and present since the meaning of being a citizen is in- separable from the history and culture of the Republic. Thus many of our most significant acts - for instance, a decision to protest a policy, write an article, accept a job - depend on a link between the future (our projected possibilities) and the past (the limitation of horizon that our given situation and temperament impose on us). Future, past and present are therefore all "real," all modes of being for Dasein's time. Heidegger's quest for a mode of speech that could illuminate the being of Dasein, one not cluttered with false metaphors and inappropriate assumptions, now appears in its proper light. We may "know," on some pre-cognitive level, that human being differs from the being of other things. Yet if our language does not have a way to express that difference, then our "knowledge" will remain inchoate and unfruitful; we will understand neither Dasein nor Sein (what it means to be). Thus, especially in his later works, Heidegger emphasized the role of language as that which "discloses" being, and particularly the language of poets and philosophers:

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. "1

Much, if not all, of Dasein's being is not "objective," but rather self-interpretive, since the space and time we inhabit is a mean- ingful rather than a physical one. This suggests that things are the way thay are by virtue of Dasein's understanding them as what they are. 18 But we cannot separate the way we understand things to be - our way of interpreting them - from the language in which we speak about them. Language bestows being, as Heidegger un- compromisingly insisted:

words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are. For this reason, the misuse of language in idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our authentic relation to things.19

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But for Heidegger - and this is the decisive step - the most authentic language was friequently the most ancient. The reason is that Western philosophy, especially since Descartes, has foisted on our language a "substance metaphysics" which forces us to speak about, and so experience, the world as a plethora of things which are "present-at-hand." Thus, in order to ferret out the original, authentic relationship to being, Heidegger constantly had recourse to the study of etymologies. Etymologies preserve, like fossils in amber, the primitive experiences of those people who first developed words and distinctions. And as Heidegger pointed out:

Primitive Dasein often speaks to us more directly in terms of a primordial absorption in "phenomena." . . . A way of conceiving things which seems, perhaps, rather clumsy and crude from our standpoint, can be positively helpful in bringing out the ontological structures of phenomena in a genuine way.20

Particularly in his later works, Heidegger seized upon the notion that the pre-Socratic Greek poets and thinkers possessed a far purer understanding of being than any other people. Pursuing this surmise, Heidegger went to great lengths to reinterpret the original sense of familiar Greek terms like physis21 and alitheia, usually translated as "nature" and "truth," respectively. If we translate these words by their customary equivalents, we com- pletely lose sight of the primordial experience embedded in them. Physis, for example, should be translated as "being," while alitheia really means "unconcealment," or disclosure of what is hidden. Recapturing the original experience preserved in etymology allows us to step outside of our accustomed interpretation of being and see it in a new light. Ancient language thus is the key to ancient ontology, but also perhaps to the nature of being itself. Recall Heidegger's earlier argument: we cannot assume a priori that "to be" means "to be in the mode of a substance or a thing." That understanding of being is really limited to the categories of modern metaphysics and science, although its roots do reach back to Plato and Aristotle. However, Heidegger posited that the pre-Socratic Greeks, inno- cent of "substance metaphysics," nonetheless had an instinctive grasp of the "existentials." Their "spontaneous," ontology, sedimented in poetry and speculative thought, provides an extremely vital clue to the real nature of being.

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Central to this ontology was the notion that what fully is comes to light or appears (the Greek root of "to appear"-phainesthai- means "light"). Who a man is cannot be separated from how he appears and shows himself to be to his fellow humans. As Heidegger explained, in reference to Pindar's poetry:

To glorify, to attribute regard to, and disclose regard means in Greek: to place in the light and thus endow with permanence, being. For the Greeks glory was not something additional which one might or might not obtain; it was the mode of the highest being.22

As we shall soon remark, this ancient understanding of being pro- foundly shaped Arendt's theory of politics. Keeping in mind these admittedly sketchy elements, we can now say something about Heidegger's humanism. When asked how meaning might be restored to that venerable expression, Heidegger responded, although politely and indirectly, by urging us to abandon it altogether.23 Of course, he did not recommend barbarism or brutality as an alternative. Rather he pointed out that the traditional meaning of the word humanism emphasizes its provenance from Roman and Hellenistic sources. These, in turn, derive to some degree from the philosophy of Aristotle, who defined man as a rational and political animal. Aristotle's definition, as well as the humanistic tradition that branched out from it, stressed the continuity between man and other lifeforms. Man is classed with other "living beings," since he is an animale, while his differentia specifica is his peculiar capacity to speak and form political associations. In Heidegger's view this differentia did not go far enough in expressing the chasm between the being of Dasein and the being usually accorded to objects that are "present-at-hand": "the sole implication [of Heidegger's critique of traditional metaphysics in Being and Time] is that the highest determinations of the essence of man in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man."24 Therefore, we must find a language, apart from all evocative slogans, that really does express what is distinctive and "dignified" about man. In order to do this we must "open ourselves" to the experience of being without interposing preconceived metaphysical or scientific categories. As Heidegger said, we need to "let beings be as the beings which they are."25 For this "opening" to occur, however, re-

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 196 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS quires a profound change in man's orientation toward being, a conscious renunciation of the will to dominate being and force it to mold itself to his purposes. To win his authentic self, paradox- ically, man apparently must renounce his role as the "tyrant of Be- ing"26 and allow himself to be "claimed" by it (a path that by ordinary standards would seem to imply loss of autonomy and independence). Man's being "claimed" or "engaged" by being comes to light, for Heidegger, most visibly in thought, especially poetic thought, wherein language achieves an originality and ex- pressiveness that it usually lacks in prose. But Heidegger insisted that all those who really do "let things be" and think from being's perspective (he called them "essential thinkers") "always say the Same."27 This means, then, that Heidegger's "humanism" amounts to a departure from man's individuality and what later Arendt called the condition of human "plurality," the irreducible manifold of perspectives that makes the human world what it is.

ARENDT IN HEIDEGGER'S SHADOW

Reading Arendt's few comments on Heidegger, one would scarcely imagine what a vast, pervasive influence he had upon her. It is our argument that she silently appropriated much of his distinctive approach to philosophy while resisting certain extreme conclusions in it that she found to be antihumanistic, no matter what Heidegger himself might say about them. The stamp of Heideggerian thinking is especially noticeable in three elements of Arendt's work: the status of her elaborate system of distinctions and concepts, her approach to language, and her interpretation of action as self-revelation. The exact epistemological role of concepts in the social sciences has long been problematical. But in general most social scientists would assert that their categories need not "make sense" to the actual participants in social behavior.28 Social scientific language in principle may be as remote from everyday social experience as, say, the vocabulary of medicine is distinct from ordinary-speech descriptions of bodily parts and processes. So, to take a concrete example, a boy scout leader may think he is giving a speech on patriotism to his troop, while a political scientist con- cludes that he is fulfilling the "pattern maintenance function" of the social system. The terms and concepts developed by Heidegger, by contrast, have an immediate link to the experience of the individual. They

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 197 are, in other words, "existentials" and not "categories." They describe what it means to be, from the viewpoint of Dasein and not from that of a scientific observer. Admittedly, some of Heidegger's "existentials" bear long titles bristling with hyphens. But this is only to impress upon readers how different such "existentials" are from the terms in which we customarily think. In principle, any Dasein should be able to see what Heidegger means by an existential like "temporality," "conscience" or "presence-at- hand," since these terms bear directly on Dasein's own interpretation of what it sees and does in the world. We would argue that almost all of Arendt's crucial terms are in fact "existentials" and not "categories." Arendt herself began from the distinction between the "who" and the "what" of a man,29 a dichotomy that approximately captures Heidegger's division of concepts into "existentials" and "categories." What is more, all of Arendt's most important concepts are actually articulations of what she called the "human condition," in much the same sense that Heidegger's "existentials" are articulations of being."3 "Labor," "work" and "action"- Arendt's three basic "existentials"- thus are not to be understood as empirical generalizations about what most people usually do. As "existentials" they seek to illuminate what it means to be-in-the-world.31 Each is determined by how individuals see what they are doing, even if subsequent reflection leads them to misclassify their own activity. For example, a modern factory hand sees his daily routine in terms of a cyclical, repetitive "labor" process without clear beginning or end. Yet he will probably call himself a "worker" and say that he "makes" steel tubing in analogy to the way a nineteenth-century workman would have made a table. In truth, however, the "existential" of "labor" applies to his doings, not the "existential" of "work." It is always a root principle of phenomenological investigation that we distinguish what actually appears to us in experience from the way we think and speak about what appears in subsequent reflection. An excellent example of Arendt's "existentials" may be found in her concepts "world," "worldliness" and "worldlessness," all of which can be traced back, in a somewhat altered form, to Being and Time. The "world," as Heidegger emphasized, is an "ontological" concept, not at all a totality of things, or a synonym for nature.32 Only Dasein can have a world, while entities "present-at- hand" are by their nature "worldless" (no world exists for them).33

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Arendt developed these concepts especially in her analysis of the characteristic "worldlessness" of modern life, precipitated by the shocks of mass appropriations of peasant land during the Refor- mation as well as by the rise of Cartesian dualism and modern science. To say that modern life is "worldless," then, is to make an existential, not a categorical, judgment about it. It is not just a psychological "feeling" people have which is caused and hence explained by some prior series of events. Rather, it is a shift in what it means to be, a shift in the underlying experience that we have of human existence.34 Even what pass in Arendt's works as "explanations" of historical phenomena seem to depend on "existentials" rather than on "categories." She wrote, for example, that the distinctive experience of modern mass societies is loneliness, and that modern totalitarian parties could only recruit so many members in a society of lonely people. 35 For a social scientist, this sort of explanation would seem hopelessly vague. But if he did wish to test it he would need some operational definition of loneliness, probably one capable of being applied in survey research. This sort of testing, however, would miss the point. A person who is "lonely" in Arendt's sense need not "feel" lonely or associate his current situation with familiar definitions of loneliness. The experience of loneliness arises, for Arendt, when one no longer has any solid relationships to the human artifice of durable, stable things (e.g., property, a house, a town, etc.) and to the human world of seeing and being seen in a public context. Many denizens of mass society undoubtedly lack the learning or personal experience to compare their current state with any previous one that would have been unqualifiedly different. Hence they would not describe their own situation as lonely. Or if they did, they would associate the word with idiosyncratic and, for Arendt, irrelevant variables such as having few friends, few dates and so on. But even though they do not have the language to describe their situation, still, to the phenomenological observer, they are lonely people. There is a gaping void in their lives compared to men and women of previous generations, which will foster in them a vague urge to restore some sense of being at home in the world. And for lack of any better alternative they may choose to associate themselves with a mass movement or some other ersatz human world. Arendt did not often reflect on her uses of language, yet no at- tentive reader can fail to notice how great a burden she placed on

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 199 etymology in analyzing human experience. Here again, we argue, she tacitly followed in Heidegger's footsteps. Arendt distinguished carefully between the explicit theories worked out by philosophers and the implicit distinctions that unconsciously guide their thinking. The latter were her real concern since they reveal more clearly the understanding of being which the language-user takes for granted. Systematic theory, on the other hand, in many cases may be systematic self-misinterpretation. A philosopher actually may distort rather than elucidate the immediate experiences he theorizes about, by cutting and stretching them to fit a Procrustes' bed of inappropriate categories. Arendt remarked, therefore, that it is "language, and the fundamental experiences underlying it, rather than theory" that is our best teacher about the nature of worldly phenomena.36 The distinction between ex post facto theorizing and immediate experience may be traced back to Husserl and thus to the very beginning of phenomenology as a discipline. But Arendt took a characteristically Heideggerian turn by suggesting that ancient languages reveal more clearly than modern ones the full scope of human experience and, one might venture, display a more "authentic" political awareness. In Arendt's view, the ancients understood better than we do the "true" meanings of terms like "interest," "authority" and "politics," at least in their spontaneous speech if not always in their theories. Indeed, The Human Condition is ultimately a quest to reconstruct the political experience of ancient citizens which has been obscured and overgrown by a political tradition developed from ancient theory rather than ancient practice.

this tradition [of political thought], far from comprehending and conceptualizing all the political experiences of Western mankind, grew out of a specific historical constellation: the trial of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. It eliminated many experiences of an earlier past that were irrelevant to its immediate political purposes. .. .37

However, Arendt did not simply dismiss theorizing of all varieties in favor of "naive" experience. All experience must be brought out of its inchoate and undifferentiated state and given its proper distinctions in language. In every case, whether we are dealing with philosophy, poetry, or history, the faculty charged with developing such distinctions is thinking. As thinkers we "withdraw" from the world and transform ourselves into spec-

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 200 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS tators, seeking and expressing the meaning of what we have witnessed. Because of the "existential interest" of its subject matter, philosophy for Arendt, as for Heidegger, had a closer affinity to poetry than to the constructs of the intellect (Verstand) such as everyday opinion, reasoning and science.38 The derailments of theory occur when thought loses its "open- ness" to being and either misunderstands itself or substitutes its own experiences for those of the worldly phenomena under con- sideration. The first case arises when philosophers fail to recognize (or purposely deny) the distinctive character of some inner experience. Arendt's prime example is the phenomenon of willing, which is "overlaid ... by a coat of argumentative reasoning" that often "parts company with the actual experiences of the willing ego.""39 The second lapse of theorizing arises when the theorist becomes so intoxicated with the very experience of thinking that he feels it to be paradigmatic for everything else. An example of this lapse, Arendt believed, is provided by the metaphysical thesis of a "true" being behind "mere" appearances. Such an idea does not arise from any careful observation of phenomena, but rather from the theorist's having applied the pattern of a definite inner experience (the ego existing and enduring "behind" its thoughts) to the entire world of appearances.40 The art of thinking, then, whether undertaken by poets, historians, or philosophers, lies in what Heidegger termed "letting things be" and not imposing preconceived schemata on them, no matter whether the phenomena to be fathomed are internal or ex- ternal. For this reason, Arendt's etymological turn had a great deal in common with Heidegger's. Both of them (here unlike Husserl) were very sensitive to the cunning of history in its revealing and concealing of the phenomena we wish to understand. Also, Arendt shared Heidegger's conviction that language does more than simply "name" things which we already perceive as distinct. Especially on the level of intangible political relationships, we cannot easily separate linguistic distinctions from the phenomena they are supposed to describe. When the Romans, for instance, distinguished power from authority, they were not merely interpreting a reality indifferent, in itself, to their speech about it. Rather, they were making power and authority be. Un- doubtedly, if they suddenly "forgot" their distinction, there would still be hierarchies of domination and subordination. But if power and authority were absorbed, linguistically, into a broader and vaguer notion like domination, then power and authority would

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 201 cease to be, at least in the experience of Roman citizens themselves. There only would be domination, and the raison d'itre of distinguishing, say, the senate from the people's tribunes would no longer be evident. If we are correct in associating Arendt's predilection for ancient political speech with Heidegger's fundamental ontology, then one problem in her thought seems nearer to resolution. One can understand more readily why Arendt so rarely confronted other theories of politics on their own terms, that is, as possibly valid alternative ways of construing human reality. Other theories are deficient, it would appear, because they lack access to the true origins of language and being. Arendt dismissed liberalism, for example, as a philosophy of "work," and Marxism as a philosophy of "labor"; each was in her view a false theory because each inter- prets all experience in terms of language appropriate only to one aspect of being. Indeed, for Arendt the whole tradition of political thought in the West obscured the true nature of politics, just as in Heidegger, "substance metaphysics" eclipsed the authentic understanding of being. On one last point we find a remarkable convergence between Heidegger and Arendt: the significance of glory and "appearing" for human existence. We have already taken note of Heidegger's comments on the meaning of glorification in Pindar's poetry. For him, the laurel wreath was no mere addition to a man's deed. If "to be" is actually "to appear," then glorification actually makes the deeds what they are. It is simply one more manifestation of pre- Socratic ontology which we moderns fail to understand. Arendt made it plain, in The Life of the Mind, how deeply the phenomenological tradition and especially Heidegger's writings all along influenced her portrayal of political life. She simply asserted, in Thinking, that "Being and Appearing coincide, " 41 and she continued, after twenty years, to repeat her earlier criticisms of the "few defenders of metaphysics" (presumably like Voegelin) who cling to concepts and ideas, like that of human nature, which "died quite some time ago."42 Her descriptions of glory and public life, read with an eye toward Heidegger's ontology, seem in retrospect clearer and more deeply anchored in a definite tradition of thought: "action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory and which is possible only in the public realm."43 One can see readily the concept of public space as an "existential" relating man to other human beings as well as the

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 202 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS typically Heideggerian interpretation of appearance as "coming into the light" and being seen (derived, as we noted, from the Greek phainesthai). The characteristic distinction Arendt made between "who" and "what" man is also had its roots in the contrast between fundamental ontology (which illuminates Dasein's being) and the substance metaphysics decried by Heidegger. Without a "space of appearances," a man cannot begin to know who he is: "nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word."44 Human selfhood is not "already there" like a substance "present-at-hand" that we make known to others as one would open a box and display its contents. Rather it presupposes an already established relationship between Dasein and a world of other human beings who inquire about who we are. We cannot hope to know who we are until they know. Indeed we are not anything definite until we reveal our "who" in speech or deed. Or rather, without the accompaniment of public realm and glory, the "who" of man all too readily is confused with his "what." Arendt's concern about the disintegration of political speech therefore merged with a deeper worry. She feared that if we lose the public realm altogether, we will lose our very being as selves for whom the "who" question still makes sense. In that case, "not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. "45 Arendt thus appropriated Heidegger's understanding of being as what "comes to light" and "reveals itself." But she applied it above all to the self in the context of politics. "To be" for man means to be an entity which reveals itself in public life. This mode of being (which Arendt called "action") is of course not the only one available to human beings. But it is the only one which reveals their Existenz rather than simply "what" they are. So, in her approach to the question of man's being, as in other ways, Arendt still labored in Heidegger's shadow. However, Arendt found Heidegger's answer to that question disastrously wrong. In her attack on Heidegger, Arendt accomplished three things: she declared her intellectual independence from her mentor, established her own original position as a political philosopher, and tried to restore to fundamental ontology an element of enlightenment humanism.

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ARENDT'S BREAK WITH HEIDEGGER

On a personal level, Arendt had already begun to draw away from Heidegger by the late 1920's. But the advent of National Socialism in Germany, as well as Heidegger's initially cordial relations with that movement, drove a wedge between the two that could never be entirely removed. Nevertheless, Arendt did not criticize Heidegger's philosophy in print until after the war, when she wrote her essay entitled, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" Despite its terseness and its polemical tone, the article gives us some valuable evidence about the lines Arendt's thinking had followed in the years since she studied under Heidegger. It was her first attempt to settle accounts with her own philosophical past and to incorporate into her thinking, in a systematic way, the political experiences of the thirties and forties. Whatever the exaggerations of that article may have been, her comments on Heidegger in Willing suggest a remarkable continuity in her fundamental approach to his thought from 1946 to the time of her death. Arendt located the great virtue of Heidegger's philosophy in his concern to preserve human dignity and selfhood. He gave us a new language in which to illuminate the uniqueness of individual Existenz and warned against the thoughtless reification of the human spirit in the speech and technology of our time.46 But the Western tradition of respect for individual dignity and rights grew out of a very different soil, one in which human nature and not Existenz, limitation and not absolute freedom, were the decisive concepts. What implications did Heidegger's view of man have for the core values of human rights? On this score Arendt found the most powerful reasons for criticizing Heidegger. In philosophical terms, she argued, Heidegger had actually said that man's essence (what he is) is equivalent to his existence (who he is). This definition, enticing as it may have been to Arendt, struck her as sheer hubris, since it was also the definition of God in Judaeo-Christian theology. It suggests that human beings have no limitations on what they can be. Yet the experiences of all ages would appear to confirm just the opposite conclusion: "that man is compelled to assent to a Being which he has never created and to which he is essentially alien."47 Ironically, Arendt saw a deep affinity between the proponents of scientific-technological utopia and the antitechnological Heideg- ger. Both wanted to liberate us from the "human condition," the

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 204 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS first by overcoming all physical limitations - even our mortality and earthbound origin48- and the second by placing the question of what it means to be within the power of the individual, as a confrontation with his own nonbeing (death).49 Arendt also resisted Heidegger's subtle yet portentous transformation of "man" into "self." When enlightenment philosophers such as Kant or Paine spoke of the dignity, freedom or reason of "man," they had in mind not only each individual man, but also the totality of all men as "represented" or "embodied" in the individual. In Kant, for example, the very meaning of freedom is obedience to a self-imposed (i.e., moral) law. Only in paying respect to the rights and dignity of other human beings can I be free myself. Heidegger's concept of self did not preserve these trans- individual connotations of the concept man. For one thing, he denied that there is any center or focus of consciousness (the ego) to which the universal concept man might refer in each case. He worked out instead a series of relationships between the self and its world (the "existentials" already discussed) which should show exhaustively what it means for man to be. The ego is only one such mode, not at all the "core" of man's being:50

Man's selfhood means this: he must transform the being that discloses itself to him into history and bring himself to stand in it. Selfhood does not mean that he is primarily an "ego" and an individual. This he is no more than he a we, a community.51

In these modes of being Arendt discerned a hidden "func- tionalism": "Heidegger's ontological approach hides a rigid func- tionalism in which Man appears only as a conglomerate of modes of Being, which is in principle arbitrary, since no concept of Man determines the modes of his Being."52 But more serious still, Arendt realized that Heidegger would portray the most authentic mode of existence as a sort of magnificent and poetic isolation of the great man from the masses, much in the manner that Nietz- sche depicts his Zarathustra:

We do not learn who man is by learned definitions; we learn it only when man contends with the essent, striving to bring it into its being S. . that is to say, when he projects something new . .. when he creates original poetry, when he builds poetically.53

It is true, in defense of Heidegger, that he included among his

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 205 modes of being, "being-with-other-Dasein." His whole ontology was intended to combat Cartesian "substance metaphysics," one manifestation of which is extreme solipsism. On the other hand, Heidegger did distinguish between "authentic" relationships bind- ing one Dasein to another (e.g., in the "existential" of "con- siderateness"), and the "inauthentic" relationships which he la- beled das Man (the "they"). The latter embraces all those cases where the individual merges into a mass (and treats himself as a part of it): idle talk, curiosity, newspaper reading and other familiar aspects of everyday life. "Authentic" existence for Heideg- ger seemed to require an Olympian contempt for the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people. His praise of Heraclitus, who lived the life of a recluse in his Ephesian temple to avoid contact with "the many," offers a good case in point:

rank and domination are implicit in being. If being is to disclose itself, it must itself have and maintain rank. That is why Heraclitus spoke of the many as dogs and donkeys. . . . What has the higher rank is the stronger. . . . The true is not for every man, but only for the strong. 54

Arendt did not criticize Heidegger for his elitism as such (indeed, as is well known, her own thought contained many elitist elements). What she found intolerable was the contempt in which he held public life, at least that of his own age. For Heidegger, the latter had been so corrupted by the anonymous viewpoint of the mass that an individual can be "authentic" only by fleeing it:

Distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as ways of Being for the "they," constitute what we know as "publicness" [die Oef- fentlichkeit] . .. it is insensitive to every difference of level and of gen- uineness and thus never gets to the "heart of the matter." ... By publicness everything gets obscured.55

But, Arendt argued, a self taken in utter isolation from human relationships cannot really be at all. As she later remarked in The Human Condition: "Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience mean- ingfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves."56 This is why she believed that Heideg- ger's alternative makes it impossible to do the one thing his ontology exhorts us to do - be a self:

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a Self taken in its absolute isolation is meaningless; if not isolated, on the other hand, it becomes (sunk to the everyday life of the public individual) no longer a Self .... What, consequently, appears as a "Fall" in Heidegger, are all those modes of human existence which rest on the fact that Man lives together in the world with his fellows.57

If "authentic" existence is only to be had through an inner retreat, a confrontation with our own death and "guilt," as Heidegger claimed, then the fact of human plurality can no longer play a decisive role in defining man's being. People literally have nothing in common (one might infer from Heidegger) except their human shape. The inauthentic "mass man" is nothing but a hindrance (even as an aspect of my own self) to my resolution to pose the issue of being to myself. Heidegger's self, as a philosophic description of human existence, thus stands in utter opposition to the traditional notion of man upon which human rights were grounded:

In this absolute isolation, the Self emerges as the concept really con- trary to Man. If, namely, since Kant the nature of Man consisted in the fact that every individual represents humanity; and if since the French Revolution and the rationalizing of human law it belonged to the concept of Man that in every single individual humanity can be debased or exalted; then the Self is the concept of Man according to which he can exist independently of humanity and need represent no one but himself.58

In sum, the extreme conclusion which could be drawn from the philosophy of Existenz is that "man" is an illusion. Only individuals exist. In this case, political philosophy would be impossible, for we cannot say anything sensible about the justice or injustice of our common life if we have nothing in common. With an eye to the Holocaust, Arendt made the pregnant observation:

If it is not part of the concept of man that he inhabits the world with his fellows, then there remains only a mechanical reconciliation by which the atomized Self is given a substratum essentially discordant with its own concept. This can only serve to organize the selves engaged in willing themselves into an Over-self, in order to make a transition from the fundamental guilt, grasped through resoluteness, to action.59

Arendt's harsh verdict in this early essay does not, of course,

This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:17:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HANNAH ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER 207 take account of the new tone of Heidegger's post-Kehre writings. So in order to get a complete picture of her judgment about him, we must discuss briefly her treatment of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind. Like most of Heidegger's readers, Arendt saw that he began to approach the question of "what it means to be" in a much more impersonal, less anthropocentric manner after his Kehre (notably after his dalliance with the Nazis and his lectures on Nietzsche in the mid-1930's). But Arendt claimed to find a still more significant reversal than just the simple "de-subjectivizing" of Dasein. During these years, Arendt argued, Heidegger started to in- terpret the crisis of modernity in light of Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. The forgetfulness of being which he had already deplored in Being and Time now appeared as only one manifestation of man's insatiable will to tyrannize over being in every sphere of life: intellectual, political and technological. But Arendt also believed (though her evidence is scanty here) that Heidegger detected in his own thought and actions a manifestation of the very will to power that he had come to mistrust so deeply: "In Heidegger's understanding, the will to rule and to dominate is a kind of original sin, of which he found himself guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in the Nazi movement."60 The powerful emphasis in Being and Time on "being oneself' and asserting one's individuality against das Man by confronting one's own mortality and guilt now must have appeared to Heideg- ger, or so Arendt reasoned, as yet another snare of the will to power, trapping the philosopher in an act of Promethean self- assertion.61 His despair over the modern situation, and his own part in it, drove Heidegger more and more to seek guidance from the earliest Greek thinkers. In the wake of his Kehre, the key "existentials" of Being and Time changed their function (especially the future-oriented existential of Sorge or "care"), all pointing the way toward the attitude of Gelassenheit, the serenity of thought which "lets beings be" and eschews all imposition of one's own will and thoughts onto being. Arendt was troubled by two implications of Heidegger's reversal, both amounting to indictments of his self-styled humanism. First, he abandoned the whole horizon of temporality, and particularly the ontological priority of the future which so impressed Arendt in Being and Time. If, as Arendt believed, the will is the

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"organ of the future," then to repudiate willing itself amounts to a denial of the possibility for man to shape his own destiny in freedom. Indeed, she observed that the archaic Greeks lacked even the concept of will because they had no idea of an "open future." They thought of time as cyclical; hence, human "projects" or pro-jections of the will would have seemed inherently futile. When Heidegger summoned us to "will not to will,"62 he thereby negated what for Arendt was man's most astonishing capacity, to begin something new, spontaneously to set in motion a course of events that can change reality. Although Heidegger still spoke of human freedom, he meant by it no more than "letting beings be," not projecting a new future.63 Second, Heidegger effaced the all-important distinction between thinking and acting. If, as Heidegger seemed to say, the world of everyday life (including even the public sphere) is fundamentally "inauthentic" and guided by a false understanding of being, then ordinary people cannot resolve their own crises because they cannot even see them for what they are. Hence, the level on which the great issue of being must be decided is thought itself. As Arendt wrote,

the thinker . . . acts while he does nothing. . . . He does not ... return into the "world of appearances." He remains the "solus ips'e" in "existential solipsism," except that now the fate of the world . . . has come to depend on him.64

In other words, as Arendt interpreted his "reversal," Heideg- ger never moved beyond the world-alienation of Being and Time. We still find the juxtaposition of "authentic" existence and the world of everyday life, only now authenticity means transcending one's own will to self-assertion. In her view Heidegger, for all his strictures against "metaphysics," fell into the trap of interpreting the experience of thought as thought about experience. Arendt in some respects was a sort of "left-Heideggerian" who actually remained truer to certain aspects of her teacher's philosophy than he himself did. She took man's "appearance" in a "world of appearances" more seriously than Heidegger, who kept his distance from "average everydayness" in whatever form. She also clung more tenaciously than Heidegger to the notion of time, especially the future, as the horizon for man's being. And we notice an emphasis in her theory on the unique "who" of every person, the person's individuality and distinctiveness, which

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seemed to fade from sight in Heidegger's post-Kehre writings. In sum, many of the elements for a "new humanism" are present in Being and Time, though certainly not all of them. Arendt also owed a great deal to Jaspers, to Kant, and of course to her own originality and genius. But we can also discern the seeds of her later work in Heidegger's fundamental ontology, only developed in a different direction and in a different spirit than Heidegger himself either expected or wanted.

NOTES 1 Voegelin, "Review of The Origins of Totalitarianism," Review of Politics, 15 (1953), 68-76; Arendt's "A Reply" appears in the same issue (pp. 76-85). 2 Arendt, "Letter to Gershem Scholem," cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 104. 3 Cf. Martin Jay, "Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views," Partisan Review, 45 (1978), 348-68; Ernst Vollrath, "Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking," trans. Hans Fantel, Social Research, 44 (1977), 160-82; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, especially pp. 217-20; and Bhikhu Parekh, Han- nah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981). 4 Admittedly, it will not always be easy to demonstrate in every case that Arendt's views were shaped exclusively by Heidegger rather than, say, by Jaspers as well. We do claim, however, that some of Heidegger's influences are unmistakable and others at least likely. 5 Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 34-56. 6 Parekh, Hannah Arendt, especially chapters 3 and 8. 7 We shall not hesitate, however, to cite later works by both Arendt and Heidegger when these show promise of clarifying the issues at stake here. 8 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 46. 9 Arendt remarks of the epochi that it is not "a special method to be taught and learned," as Husserl thought, but the characteristic attitude of genuine thinking when we withdraw from the world of appearances (ibid., p. 53). 10 Parekh in Hannah Arendt, pp. 4-5, makes this point in a somewhat different way in his discussion of "hierarchical ontological dualism." 11 See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 49-63. 12 Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 127. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 67. 14 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961), p. 121. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 79. 16 Ibid., p. 80. In his later essays- for example, "Building, Dwelling, Think- ing"- Heidegger pursues the meaning of "dwell" in its manifold connections to other ideas, especially that of preserving and saving what is. 17 Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," Basic Writings, p. 193. 18 There should be no mistake about this issue. Heidegger is not proposing any form of subjective idealism. He is just saying that all that is, is a phenomenon, something that appears. But how it appears - as "present-at-hand," as tool, as Ex- istenz, etc. -depends on Dasein's experiencing it as such.

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19 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 11. This is a point to which Arendt gives full assent. See, for example, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), p. 66, where she writes: "Words can be relied on only if one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to conceal." 20 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 87. 21 Cf. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 11: the "translation from the Greek into the Latin is not accidental and harmless; it marks the first stage in the process by which we cut ourselves off and alienated ourselves from the essence of Greek philosophy." 22 Ibid., p. 87. 23 Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," pp. 195, 210. 24 Ibid., p. 210. 25 Heidegger, "The Essence of Truth," Basic Writings, p. 127. 26 Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," p. 210. 27 Ibid., p. 241. 28 Cf. Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 117-69 and especially pp. 135-41. 29 Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 158-61. 30 Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 81: "In these analyses the issue is one of seeing a primordial structure of Dasein's Being-a structure in accordance with whose phenomenal content the concepts of Being must be Articulated." 31 Arendt, in Thinking, p. 57, almost paraphrases Heidegger when she notes that thinking, whenever it is "true" thinking and not just common sense reasoning, asks "what it means for [something] to be." 32 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 91-95. 33 Ibid., p. 81. 34 Arendt's analysis of worldlessness resembles an observation by Heidegger in his "Letter on Humanism," Basic Writings, p. 219: "Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world." But the difference between homelessness and worldlessness may prove to be decisive. 35 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 474-78. 36 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 81-82. 37 Ibid., p. 13. 38 Arendt, Thinking, pp. 15, 78. 39 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. II, Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 3. 40 Arendt, Thinking, pp. 42-44. 41 Ibid., p. 19. 42 Ibid., pp. 10, 12. 43 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 160. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 158. 46 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 67-68: "That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. Thus Dasein is never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand." 47 Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" p. 37. 48 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 3. 49 Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" p. 46. 50 Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 153; see also his attempt to defend himself against the charge that he is "volatilizing" the "core" of man's being. 51 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 121. 52 Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" p. 48.

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53 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 121. 54 Ibid., p. 112. 55 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 165. 56 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 4. 57 Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" pp. 49-50. 58 Ibid., p. 51. 59 Ibid. 60 Arendt, Willing, p. 173. 61 Ibid., pp. 182-83. This is similar to the charge Arendt herself leveled against Heidegger in "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" 62 Ibid., p. 22. 63 Heidegger, Basic Writings, "On the Essence of Truth," pp. 125-30. 64 Arendt, Willing, p. 187.

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