According to Heidegger, the past, as an aspect of temporality, is rooted in our existence as essentially historical beings, what he calls our “historicity.”60 By saying we are “historical,” Heidegger is not simply asserting that there were a sequence of well-known events that our civilization’s historians have documented and placed in bound narratives. He means that our lives are always grasped as narratives that stretch out from birth to death.61 It is these unique stories that allow us to have an identity—to become a “who” rather than a “what.”62 The history books written by historians are only possible because we first and foremost originally experience our own individual lives as narratives.63 However, the ability to grasp ourselves as a “who” with a unique life story requires a direct confrontation with our ecstatic temporality.64 This is crucial for understanding Arendt’s account of historical methodology: there is an essential link between our existence as narratively structured agents and the histories we produce. Our histories are narrative because we ourselves are narratives.
But while our past plays an important role in providing a traditional and cultural background or “heritage,”65 it is only by confronting our future that we truly experience Being in its immediacy, in such a way that our story becomes truly our own unique story. This primordial future is not our goals and plans in life. We only confront Being when we confront the absolute limit of our own being-in-the-world: death. Recall that Heidegger had argued that Being is not a thing but the most basic and fundamental quality of all things. Being is therefore literally nothing: “no-thing.”66 In other words, Being is that mysterious aspect of all things that is both its ground—the source from which it all came—but also completely opaque and mysterious, beyond human comprehension because it is the fundamental condition of all such comprehension. As a result, it cannot be thought, but only left in question, as the mysterious groundless ground, the nothing, of all things. This nothingness underlying all things can only be confronted when we confront our absolute mortality, the fundamental nothingness that awaits all of us in death.67 When we do this, we receive a “moment of vision”68 that allows us to fully live in our present by resolutely choosing the life we were originally thoughtlessly channeled into by the patterns of our worldly possibilities.69 This ability to choose what we have already been, in terms of both our own lives and our civilization’s heritage occurs in the mode of what Heidegger calls “resoluteness.”70 Resoluteness allows the moment of vision to take some kind of articulate form in what Heidegger had called “discourse,” the linguistic and communicative element of our being-in. After we have faced up to our death and placed this moment of vision in some kind of articulate and expressive form or “discourse,” we come to have what he calls “primordial truth” or “disclosedness,” and later, after Being and Time, aletheia, the word for truth he borrows from the Greeks, which meant truth as “uncoveredness” or “unconcealment.”71
For Heidegger, since all truth is conditioned by an existential point of view, all truth always reveals only certain facets of Being.72 One might take for example an artwork such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream. From a scientific point of view, it would be a “correct” statement about the being of The Scream to define it as canvas with dried paint on it. In that sense, science has indeed “revealed” something about the painting. Yet, at the same time, it has concealed something about the painting; indeed, it might be argued that it has concealed much more than it has revealed. Consider the way the world is revealed or disclosed in The Scream. Munch captures in its bizarre surreality and strangeness the way the world “worlds” when we experience moments of horror. In these unforgettable moments, the “worlding” of the world seems to slow down to a crawl in an odd slow-motion effect, making people around us become shadowy figures, little more than part of the landscape, doing utterly meaningless things. Thus, it may indeed be scientifically “correct” that The Scream is only a canvas with dried paint on it, but its aletheia, what it reveals or opens up—its essential truth about its being—is also much more than that.
But while art may provide an exemplary instance of Heideggerian aletheia, Heidegger believed aletheia went far beyond art, leading ultimately to a confrontation with the meaning of Being itself, which he believed was the source of human freedom and could only be approached through what he called “thinking.” It is a well-established fact of twentieth-century philosophical history that both Heidegger’s and Arendt’s projects were inspired by and responding to Aristotle’s practical philosophy, especially as it was articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics in Heidegger’s case, while it appears Arendt drew broadly on the Ethics, the Politics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics.73 It is by now clear that Being and Time should be interpreted as an attempt to establish the priority of Aristotle’s account of action, or praxis, as the fundament of human existence.74 The first division of Being and Time seems clearly intended to establish this assertion. Yet, free human action is never achieved in the first division. The closest we come to action is in the context of technical activities, Aristotle’s poiesis, what Arendt would eventually call “work.” All human activity in the first division, while certainly inescapable and fundamental, is still essentially thoughtless and inauthentic, at best employing theoretical or technical means/ends thinking, because it does not reflect on the essentially mysterious grounds of our being-in-the-world.75 It is only in the second division, after phronēsis, or what Heidegger would later come to call authentic “thinking,” has been faced up to through a confrontation with mortality that our practical activity takes on the quality of action, or praxis.
A crucial upshot of this—one that Arendt will relentlessly attack—is that Heidegger believes that free human action has less to do with the specific choices, activities, or concrete courses of action we choose to take, and more to do with how our everyday activities, which are thoughtless and conformist in nature, can be transfigured and take on a deep and profound quality—a quality that makes it truly free action—only when we reflect on and confront the meaning of Being. Michael Allen Gillespie argues: “In this respect, this phronetic moment of vision looks more like a conversion experience than a deliberative judgment. Heidegger reads Aristotle more through Paul, Augustine, Eckhart, and Luther than through the Aristotelian ethical tradition.… This phronetic moment of vision brings about not merely a transformation of the world but first and foremost a transformation or conversion of Dasein itself.”76 As we will see, this conception of human freedom as an essentially reflective or contemplative endeavor is what ties Heidegger most closely to the philosophical tradition and is the fundamental point of departure for Arendt. Of course, from Heidegger’s perspective this is still ultimately a practical philosophy—indeed, all philosophy is ultimately practical, in Heidegger’s very broad, existentialist sense. But Arendt, for her part, rejects this claim: she will go on to argue that contemplation and action are two very different activities, and their relationship—if indeed there is one at all—is extremely obscure. In her critique of Heidegger in the “Willing” volume of The Life of the Mind, she characterizes Heidegger’s notion of action as “a kind of ‘acting’ (handeln) which is polemically understood as the opposite of the ‘loud’ and visible actions of public life.… This acting is silent, a ‘letting one’s own self act in its indebtedness,’ and this entirely