Being and Truth in Arendt and Heidegger

8/13/2019 Being and Truth in Arendt and Heidegger

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Being and Truth in Arendt and Heidegger

Hannah Arendt was my teacher and mentor at the New School in New York City from1970 until 1975, when she died suddenly. She lectured on thinking during part of that

period and it was for us quite mysterious, because she had been known as a political

philosopher. These were quite controversial lectures since she claimed that thinking, true philosophy, did not deal with truth, but rather with meaning. We were, of course, ardentseekers after truth. Of course, she dealt with Heidegger in the lectures, but we did notknow at the time of their intimate relationship. That was revealed in 1982 by myclassmate, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. Since then various biographical works havechronicled their relationship, and it is always controversial, because she was of Jewishorigin and he was a Nazi. He never publically renounced his allegiance to the party, andhe refused to comment on the destruction of the Jews. Some have maintained that this is areflection on Arendt as a person, though so far not much has been done to establish therelation between their philosophies.

Here I want to show, not that Arendt was a mere disciple of Heidegger, or that she was anepigone, but that there are important parallels between their philosophies on topicsfundamental to philosophy, such as the nature of being and truth.

First of all, there is the parallel between their view of modern life. Heideggercharacterizes it in his notes from 1938-40 with the term, Seinsverlassenheit, which can beroughly translated as abandonment of being. We are in our time those who haveabandoned being, which we might say is reality, what truly is; or, another way of lookingat the same situation is to say that being has abandoned us. The reason for ourabandonment has to do, for one thing, with science. Of course, modern science has beenvery successful in advancing knowledge, and making life for us more comfortable, butHeidegger conducts a polemic against it, saying that it has blinded man to the truth of

bein g. That no -longer-admitting (of being,tr.) has its own special meaning anddecisiveness from this, that it has made standing in truth irrelevant. (Martin Heidegger,Die Geschichte des Seins, Vol. 69, Complete Works, 1998. P.3 7) And he continues, Inthe light of this knowledge, man is blinded and only sees himself. But this blindingadmits being as the blinding force of the abandonment of being.

The outstanding form of abandonment of being is Communism, by which he does notmean Soviet Russia, or the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, but what he takes as the

philosophy behind it, namely Platonism, understood as a received philosophy, aworldview. In a somewhat refined note, he concludes the section on the overcoming ofmetaphysics by writings that what is really wrong with our time is we do not understandPlatonism, which ---- in the writings of Nietzsche --- has been overcome. (see Heidegger,1998. P.35) This leads to the sense that what is real, what being is, is that which we candominate and plan. The particular being is in that, just what it is, and as it is, and that itis so and so, because it has been given over to the planning and directing domination ofman, and man, thereby, becomes the one whose preservation is a matter of being the onewho has business with the particular beings. (Heidegger, 1998. P. 38.) But, still, in all ofthis abandonment of being, he adds that true being, Being as such, is still essentially


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present.Communism is the name for the historical appearance of planning, wh ichdepends on technology, and has as its goal security. This is perhaps a reference to thevarious social programs of Social Democracy and the Communist party in the SovietUnion. As we shall see, it is being itself, true Being, which must disturb what is settledand secure.

A parallel to this rather bleak view of modern life is to be found in Arendt in theconclusion to a lecture course, which she held at the University of California, Berkeley,in 1955. It describes that time in which we live as a desert, and she claims that Nietzschewas the first to understand our situation, and, as well, that he helped create the desert by,among other things, denying God s existence, or any meaning to life at all. Just asHeidegger says that true Being is present, even in the situation of abandonment of Being,so Arendt states that there are oases which give us the opportunity to live and breathe.The oases are thoses fields of life which exist independently , or largely so, from

political conditions. What went wrong is politics, our plural existence, and not what wecan do and create as far as we exist in the singular: in the isolation of the artist, in the

solitude of the philosopher, in the inherently wordlessness between human beings as itexists in love. (see Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 2005. P. 202) All this isquite a remarkable quote from someone who made her reputation as a political theoriest,

because it quite plainly implies what true life, the life which gives up the opportunity to breathe is to be found outside of politics, in art, philosophy, love. And of course, it seemsto recall the common view that Germans, especially those of Jewish origin, regarded

politics as a dirty business, and retreated into private life.

There is a major diffe rence between Arendt s view of modernity and Heidegger s , ormore correctly, the view about how we are to be saved as it were from the desert andabandonment of being. Heidegger sees the way in which we can survive our situation inwhat he calls, Thinking of the History of Being. He calls for Germans to wake up fromthe desert brought about by the domination of technology, and to push into the region ofthe coming event. (Heidegger, 1998. P. 86) The event, of course, is the coming of true

being of Being, as an event which lies in a future we can strive for. We strive for it in acertain kind of thinking, namely, in thinking through our situation in the abandonment of

being, and further more, coming to awareness of our situation leads to the disturbanceof things as they are. He states his view in fragments: The occasion for the shaking up through the lighting up of the unusual. This announcesitself in the seldom ones.The seldom as the disturbance of the usual.The usual and the habitual.The unusual in the sense of the surprising and the extraordinary. ( Heidegger, 1998.P87)And he continues that the kind of thinking which disturbs the particulars and planning iswithout form:The kind of thinking of the history of being fits into the for mless which does notguarantee a hold, no image, and not a thing, explaining all. A bare and daring word.


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This leads to yet another turn in the foundation of a race as he puts it, who have a kindof presentment of being, but, being in turn with true being, they are quiet about its voice.And finally, there is the trace of being, which, in order to be thought, and to be an eventof being, cannot be represented, or intuited but, there must be a readiness for the trailto the Abyss.

This indicates that true thinking and the life of true thinkers must be characterized by thewillingness to jump at some time or another into the Abyss, which is a matter of notfinding a hold on things, certainly not in the comfort of scientific knowledge. Suchthinkers lead lives in a kind of darkness, and, as he says, they hear the voice of being, butthey keep quiet. The kind of thinking of such thinkers, and their lives, are in a certainsense the truth, which is coming, in a new age, a new God, about which Heidegger haslittle to say, except that he must be encountered in our own poverty. (See Heidegger,1998.p. 110)

HHannah Arendt had a personal preference for those who were unusual or the seldom ones,

and indeed, several of her closest students became such persons. A favorite of hers neverfinished his dissertation, quit academics, went into the publishing business, and at themoment publishes a community newspaper for homosexuals in New York. Nor did helong-time assistant finish his degree. But he has become director of her archive and herliterary executor. The classmate who wrote a biography of Arendt, and revealed therelation to Heidegger, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, did finish the PhD and taught for a while,

but gave up the academic life, and became a psychoanalysis. More than that, she cameout as a bisexual, and eventually married her female lover. I did as a matter of fact finish

but it was despite her objection.

It is perhaps her introduction to Walter Benjamin s Illuminations which gives us the best clue as to her view of the alternative to the desert of modern life, to what an oasismight be. Benjamin was special because he failed at almost everything he tried. He failedhis examination to qualify for a professor ship, and his wife divorced him, he was unableto make a living, and, in exile in Paris, he barely survived, moving from cheap hotel toanother, and sometimes starving. From 1927 until the German invasion of France in1940, he worked on a statement of his philosophy, which he could not complete, becausehe really had no thesis to prove. It is a monumental collection of quotations, called inGerman Das Passagen -Werk and translated into English as The Arcades Project. Itappears that Arendt was aware of the project because she writes in the introduction thatduring their friendship in Paris, he would visit her, and her husband to be, and read fromlittle black notebooks the quotes which he had assembled from newspapers and booksfrom the previous day --- all in a very excited way, as if to announce a major discovery.(see Arendt s introduction in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1968. P. 45.) Shedescribed his intention to produce a major work consisting entirely of quotations aswhimsical and even self-destructive. (Arendt,1968.p.47) Nonetheless, it was driven byBenjamin s conviction that such a collection was the method whereby truth could bereached. She discusses his method in the following passage: To the exent that anaccompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it insuch a way as to preserve the intention of such investigations , namely, to plumb the


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depths of language and thoughtby drilling rather than excavating , so as not to ruineverything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection. In sodoing Benjamin was quite aware that this new method of drilling required a certainforcing of insights whose inelegant pedantry , however, is preferable to todays almostuniversal habit of falsifying them (Arendt, 1968. P. 48) Such a collection

Aims at discovering and preserving what Arendt calls world essence. (Arendt, 1968. P.50) Such essences are what the poet Goethe has called urphaenomene; theurphaenomene are the original appearances of things, which have been lost, or moreimportantly, may have been falsified in the course of time. Nonetheless, this is not anhistorical investigation. The aim of a collection such as the Arcades Project is to displaysuch essences in their original state, so that they may be shown as they really are in a

pure unadulterated state. Such displays are kind of collections of very valuable objects,such as might be found in a museum, but without accompanying explanation. Benjaminwas convinced that showing them, in such a fashion, would allow them to showthemselves, to establish by their very presence, their value.

As I mentioned in the first remark, Arendt s topic in the 70 s was thinking, and it wascontroversial because she maintained that true philosophy, thinking, was not intended tograsp truth, but was concerned primarily with the meaning of things. However, shedescribes meaning in such a way as to almost equate it with truth in , Thinking, thefirst section of her s tatement of philosophy, The Life of the Mind, which was edited byMary McCarthy, the famous novelist, and published in 1977. To my mind, the following

passage is a very strained exercise in avoiding the concept of truth: The temporal dimension of the n unc stans (eternal present, Kraft) experienced in theactivity of thinking gathers the absent tenses, the not yet and the nomore into its own

presence. This is Kant s land of pure intellect , an island , enclosed by nature itselfwithin unalterable limi ts , and surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean , the sea ofeveryday life.And though I do not think that this is the land of truth it certainly is theonly domain where the whole of man s life and its meaning - which remains ungraspablefor mortal men, whose existence in distinction from all other things which begin to be, inthe emphatic sense, when they are completed, terminates when it is no more when thisungraspable whole can manifest itself in he sheer continuity of the I am, an enduring

presenc e in the midst of the world s ever -changing transitoriness. (see Arendt, The Lifeof the Mind, 1977. P. 211.) The echoes of Benjamin s method and results are apparent inthis passage. It is as if Arendt was advocating collecting and bringing thoughts onto anisland where they could be saved and made eternally present as her version ofurphaenomenome, that is, as original presence. That is to say, in more prosaic language,that philosophy is concerned with eternal truths. In this sense, she was a true philosopher,not merely a political theorist, and for her Walter Benjamin was the foremost philosopherof our time. And all of this method turns back on itself: Arendt carried some ofBenjamin s writings from Paris to Spain and then to Portugal and finally to New York,saving them from destruction.She was instrumental in the publication of some of them inGermany in 1955 and her collection, Illuminations, introduced Benjamin to the Englishlanguage world. In 1968.


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All of this started as a reflection on the coincidence between the notions of being andtruth in the philosophies of Arendt and Heidegger. Heidegger demands thatcontemporary thinking be a thinking of the history of being, and that what is uncovered isthe seldom, the unusual, and what disturbs ordinary thinking. That is precisely the casefor Benjamin s own work, which w as directed at ordinary academic thinking, and the

practice of writing treatises. He maintained that such works falsify the truth. Truth can befound by drilling, not by excavating, and, of course, that means that truth dwells as itwere in darkness. He collected and saved an enormous number of quotations in theArcades Project, and thus saved them from academic procedures. All of this is rather

bizarre, and Arendt in her introduction writes that it could be understood as a kind ofsurrealistic montage, which was whimsical and self destructive. It was self-destructive

because Benjamin had no plan for completing the work. It was destined to remain afragment, a monumental collection of fragments. Benjamin failed at ordinary life, and didnot have a real career even as a writer. And his masterwork, which he began in 1927,could not be completed, and was , too, destined to be considered an oddity. WithoutArendt it would not have survived and come to the notice of an audience.

In writing this piece, I did not hope to prove in some rigorous way that Arendt wasdependent on her lover and mentor Martin Heidegger for her philosophy, since to statesuch a thesis would be contrary to their own outlook. Rather it was to show that there is acoincidence, and furthermore, that they are united in advocating a traditional humanisticoutlook, which maintains that there are things of great value,human things, which haveno use, but must be preserved. It might be appropriate, then, to end with quoting afragment from a group of writings attributed to Aristotle, but which may be the works ofothers, his students or acolytes, and, which exists by accident as is well known to historyof philosophy students.

Now in the course of life of this first mover in like manner with our own for alimited period of time is such, also, as is the most excellent for in the present instancethat first mover continues in the enjoyment of life forever; for with us, certainly, such athing as this would be impossible. But not so with the first mover, since even does theenergy or activity of this first mover give rise to pleasure or satisfaction on the part ofsuch, and on this account vigilance, exercise of senses, and perception in general are whatis most productive of pleasure or satisfaction. Now essential perception is the perceptionof that which is essentially the most excellent; and that which is most essential perceptionis that which is perception of that which is most essential. (Aristotle, Metaphysics,1072b. see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2005. P. 236.)

Being and Truth in Arendt and Heidegger

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