It is true that Heidegger’s work in the 1930s seems to suggest a more activist and political stance, but there is no evidence that work from this period had any direct philosophical influence on Arendt, and Heidegger himself soon seemed to move on from it. By the end of the 1930s, Heidegger’s conception of praxis and phronēsis would, more than ever before, become increasingly more contemplative and quasi-religious. Heidegger would continue to articulate human freedom as having less to do with concrete acting in the world, and more to do with how we can establish an authentic relationship to Being through what he called “thinking.” Thus, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger continues to argue that true action only occurs in the authentic thinking of Being, saying that such thinking is a mode of action that is “the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man.”78
A Political Critique of Heidegger
Arendt’s approach would be based on a number of politically inspired appropriations and revisions of Heidegger, one that I will argue has far-reaching consequences for how we think about history, politics, and human agency in general. For Heidegger, the public structures of our existence—our world, history, civilization, public realm—represent sources of conformity and inauthenticity. These are the things we have in common with others, and we therefore naturally become inauthentic when we thoughtlessly take over these conditions. We get lost in “what one does.” To the extent we become differentiated from our existential history by establishing our unique identity in a confrontation with mortality, action is therefore only realized in contemplation. In this contemplative conception of agency, Heidegger has thus essentially collapsed the distinction between thought and action: action is ultimately only our ability to think Being. The resulting theory of history this conception of historicity leads to is one that gives little potency and significance to concrete human deeds, emphasizing instead general trends or “sendings from Being,” as Heidegger called them, which in many ways determine and give meaning to the specific acts of human beings.
Arendt, by turns, would seek to challenge each of these propositions. In her critique of Heidegger, she sought to reintroduce human agency, and in turn politics, back into historical reflection, articulating an account of history and politics that would return genuine potency and meaning to the concrete deeds of human agents. In her view, Heidegger’s existentialism had failed in its attempt to escape metaphysics, for even though it left many of the fundamental metaphysical categories behind, it nevertheless remained bound in a more primordial way by the philosophical tradition’s prejudices denigrating human action. This point has relevance to one of the key interpretative questions Arendt scholars have confronted: explaining the relationship between The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Seyla Benhabib, Margaret Canovan, Michael H. McCarthy, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, and Dana Villa have all dealt with this question at length.79 These two books seem in many ways to be related to each other in only the broadest thematic ways. What led Arendt to write a book so different in so many ways from the earlier book? I will argue in the following that, while there is no doubt that politics was the fundamental concern of Arendt’s work by the time of The Human Condition, it was originally her concern over the political and methodological problems of history raised by her work in Origins that instigated her turn to politics. Arendt’s political thought, in other words, was her to solution to what she believed was a problematic tendency of modern history to denigrate and largely ignore human agency.
As we will see in Chapter 4, a nexus of political and historiographic problems confronted Arendt after Origins, involving the relationship between totalitarianism, revolutionary politics, and modern conceptions of the philosophy of history. Arendt had recognized that totalitarian political movements invariably arose with revolutionary aspirations and were typically animated by what she called an “ideology,” by which she meant a conception of historical necessity or law.80 Much of her critique of modernity involved deconstructing the notion of ideology as a politics of historical movement: she would insist that history was located not in dialectical trends but in concrete human deeds. But this critique of modern historical thinking carried historiographic implications: any historiography she employed would have to reflect this emphasis on human agency and to eschew historical explanations originating from grand historical trends. As we will see, she was able to achieve this through her critique of Heidegger.
Arendt departed from Heidegger on two fundamental points. First, adopting Heidegger’s concept of worldliness, she wrote, as I noted earlier, that “the problem that has plagued political philosophy almost throughout its history … [was that philosophy has always dealt] with man in the singular, whereas politics could not even be conceived of if man did not exist in the plural.… It may be—but I shall only hint at this—that Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’ … constitutes a step out of this difficulty.”81 But Arendt was unhappy with the significance Heidegger gave the world, arguing that, contra Heidegger, worldliness was not a source of inauthenticity and conformity, but instead a realm where human beings can truly realize their identity in free human action.82 “Thus we find the old hostility of the philosopher toward the polis in Heidegger’s analyses of average everyday life … in which the public realm has the function of hiding reality.”83 Second, she argued that, while Heidegger’s concept of historicity—the narrative agency of human beings—was true, his conception of action as an essentially contemplative activity was profoundly flawed. She writes that Heidegger’s conception of historicity “shares with the older concept of history the fact that … it never reaches but always misses the center of politics—man as an acting being.”84
Arendt and Heidegger have, in essence, diametrically opposed accounts of how human beings become “whos”—how they come to have unique life stories. For Heidegger, human beings only come to have authentic life stories when they resolutely confront their ultimate groundlessness in death. Historicity, in other words, is for him rooted in the condition of mortality.85 Though certainly unimaginable without a recognition of the condition of mortality, Arendt nevertheless finds historicity to be rooted in a condition that is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s account: in birth, or what Arendt calls the condition of natality.86 Arendt equates human natality, the ability to be born, with the human capacity for action, which she defines as the ability to begin something new:87 “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world.… The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.”88 In other words, it is this capacity to act and to begin that Arendt believes forms the content of our life stories. Our lives are made up of a series of unique happenings—events and deeds that constitute our “whoness.” While, like Heidegger, this relationship between action and historicity becomes the condition of history for Arendt, it affords a very different sensibility than Heidegger gave it. In Arendt’s words: “But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind … is that both are the outcome of action.”89 And as a result, because Heidegger’s conception of history deals not merely at a psychological but instead at an ontological level, Arendt’s account of action carries extraordinary potency, in a way Heidegger’s contemplative notion of action probably never could, offering unique potential to radically alter our existing circumstances every time we perform an act.90
Arendt believed that part of the reason Heidegger arrived at these conclusions was that, especially in Being and Time, Heidegger drew his phenomenological conclusions from modern society and politics, a context that in her view greatly resisted potent human agency. In The Human Condition, Arendt set out to use Heidegger’s “pearl diving” approach against him, attempting to unearth authentic experiences of historically potent human political agency that had been lost in the past. What she discovered was that Heidegger’s view of the public realm and common world remained deeply bound to the philosophical tradition’s historical prejudices against it. This refusal to leave those prejudices behind meant that while his