POLITICS AND TRUTH Heidegger, Arendt and the Modern Political Lie Anna-Karin Selberg SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES The series is attached to Philosophy at Söder- törn University. Published in the series are es- says as well as anthologies, with a particular em- phasis on the continental tradition, understood in its broadest sense, from German idealism to phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory and contemporary French philosophy. The com- mission of the series is to provide a platform for the promotion of timely and innovative phil- osophical research. Contributions to the series are published in English or Swedish. Cover image: A Dream Image, Niklas Nenzén. POLITICS AND TRUTH Heidegger, Arendt and the Modern Political Lie Anna-Karin Selberg Södertörns högskola Subject: Philosophy Research Area: Critical and Cultural Theory School of Culture and Education Södertörns högskola (Södertörn University) The Library SE-141 89 Huddinge www.sh.se/publications © Anna-Karin Selberg Cover image: Niklas Nenzén, A Dream Image Cover: Jonathan Robson Graphic Form: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson Printed by Elanders, Stockholm 2021 Södertörn Philosophical Studies 31 ISSN 1651-6834 Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations 190 ISSN 1652-7399 ISBN 978-91-89109-66-7 (print) ISBN 978-91-89109-67-4 (digital) For Inez, Bettie and Niklas Abstract In 2016, the year of Brexit and the election of Trump as the 45th president of the USA, the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year. Since then, a flood of books, newspaper articles, academic papers and political speeches have been published on the phenomenon of post-truth, alternative facts and post-fact politics. In the debate about post-truth it is generally assumed that facts, truth and truthfulness have ceased to be relevant to politics. However, questions are seldom raised about: the role of truth-claims in politics; why facts at all matter in political contexts; how truth and facts are related to reality or what we even mean with words such as fact, truthfulness and lies in the field of politics, in the first place. A general aim of the present study is to shed light on these questions. Not, however, by engaging directly in the debate about post-truth, but by inves- tigating the relation between politics and truth in the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In 1945 Arendt suggested that fascism had invented a way of “lying the truth”. She later came to call this invention the modern political lie, seeing it as one of the key elements that crystallized into the event of totalitarianism. The present study explores the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements, which, in non-totalitarian forms and con- temporary democracies, has reinvented itself. Parts of Arendt’s analysis are implicit but can be made explicit against the background of Heidegger’s political writings from the 1930s. Heidegger is not an advocate of the modern political lie, nonetheless his writings from the 1930s, while a mem- ber of the National Socialist party, reflect aspects of the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements. Studying Heidegger and Arendt together can therefore shed light on the specific problems that Arendt addressed regarding truth and lying in politics. The present study investigates not only the relation between politics and truth in Heidegger and Arendt respectively, but also the relation between their works. Starting out in Heidegger’s early works from the 1920s, it shows that there is a proto-political aspect in his early articulations of truth as aletheia. The study then explores the central role of truth in his political writings from the 1930s. Against the background of Heidegger, Arendt’s works on the modern political lie are analyzed, both with respect to the central place she assigns to the lie in her writings on totalitarianism, as well as to how the lie is invented anew, in non-totalitarian and democratic forms. It also investigates the concept of truth developed by Arendt in works after The Origins of Totalitarianism and argues that her later writings on truth should be seen partly as developing out of her writings on the lie. Ultimately, the concept of truth in Arendt’s thinking ends up putting into question the otherwise rigid divisions she deployed in her writings, e.g., the distinctions between the public and the private, the social and the political. Key Words: Post-truth, alternative facts, modern political lie, totalitarian- ism, Heidegger, Arendt, truth, politics, image-making, myth, art, facts. Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 13 I. Aim and Orientation of the Present Study .................................................... 13 II. Disposition ........................................................................................................ 22 III. Survey of Research ......................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER 2 A Community of Breakup: Truth and Politics in Heidegger’s Early Thought .. 39 I. The Question of the Present: Rethinking Philosophy in Light of World War I ........................................................................................... 39 II. A Community at the End of Time: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Paul ... 45 III. Grounding of Political Dasein in the Truth ............................................... 54 IV. The Situation as the Site of a Historical People in Being and Time ........ 68 Summary ................................................................................................................ 78 CHAPTER 3 The State as a Work of Art ........................................................................................ 81 I. The Politics of Beginnings ............................................................................... 81 II. Aestheticization of Politics ............................................................................. 88 III. Truth as Struggle between Concealment and Unconcealment................ 93 IV. The University as “Middle” in the State .................................................... 101 V. The Work of Political Space ......................................................................... 110 VI. Background and Context to the Parallel Lecture Courses on Hölderlin and Hegel ........................................................................................... 114 VII. The State’s Place in Hegel’s System .......................................................... 117 VIII. The “Metaphysical Site” Revealed by Hölderlin ................................... 122 IX. Heidegger’s Leader vs. Hegel’s Prince ....................................................... 126 X. The Myth of a Jewish World-Conspiracy ................................................... 132 Summary .............................................................................................................. 138 CHAPTER 4 The Modern Political Lie ......................................................................................... 141 I. The Problem of Politics and Truth ............................................................... 141 II. The Affinity of Lying and Political Action ................................................. 147 III. Modern Lying ............................................................................................... 152 IV. The Modern Lie as an Action of Replacement ......................................... 161 V. Truth and the Space of Appearances .......................................................... 169 VI. Contemporary Lying in Politics ................................................................. 175 Summary .............................................................................................................. 188 CHAPTER 5 Limit and Resistance: Arendt’s Concept of Truth ............................................... 191 I. The Tension Between Truth and Politics .................................................... 191 II. The Politicization of Facts in Modernity .................................................... 195 III. The Concept of Truth: Heidegger vs. Arendt........................................... 197 IV. Factual Truth ................................................................................................ 203 V. Factual Truth-Telling in Relation to Modern Lying ................................. 211 VI. Philosophical Truth ..................................................................................... 217 VII. Philosophical Truth-Telling as Demonstration ..................................... 228 VIII. The Test of Philosophy’s Reality ............................................................. 235 IX. The Tension Between Thinking and Action ............................................ 238 Summary .............................................................................................................. 243 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................... 247 References .................................................................................................................. 257 Acknowledgements My warmest gratitude to Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Cecilia Sjöholm. I enjoyed every minute of supervision with you.