The Question of Reality under Modern ConditionsArendt’s Critique of the Phenomenological Tradition,

A Close Reading of “What is Existenz Philosophy?”

Sophie Loidolt

1. IntroductionHannah Arendt’s critique of “classic phenomenology,” shaped byHusserl and Heidegger, is a significant contribution to thedevelopment of what I would like to call “second generationphenomenology,” which contains figures such as Merleau-Ponty,Sartre, Levinas, Fink, and Patočka, all of whom developed theirown approaches by critically working through Husserl andHeidegger. It addresses three main topics, two of which runthrough the phenomenological tradition as fundamental issuesand fields of controversy: (1) the question of (theconstitution of) reality (Wirklichkeit) and (2) the question ofthe constitution of meaning (Sinn). The third is a crucialArendtian concern that deeply challenges the phenomenologicalmethod(s)1 and therefore has a special transformativepotential: (3) the question of how to properly understand anddescribe not only action (Handeln), but also basicphenomenological terms like appearance, experience, and world/liness1 By using the singular/plural of “phenomenological method(s)” I would liketo stress that phenomenologists, according to Merleau-Ponty’s famousphrase, can be recognized by a certain style that articulates itself indifferent ways (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. ColinSmith [London: Routledge, 2005], p. viii). There are, to be sure, Husserl’seidetic and transcendental reduction and his “principle of all principles,”as well as Heidegger’s “hermeneutic phenomenology,” which constitute theexemplary “phenomenological method(s).” Yet, their interpretation,combination, and continuation vary considerably in the “second generation”of phenomenologists (after Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger) who alsodetermine their own versions and transformations of “phenomenology.” Iwould like to claim that Arendt’s interest in plurality and in describingaction properly challenges most of these “methods,” or can be put into afruitful dialogue with them. This leads to a new and distinct version of“transformed phenomenology” as a “phenomenology of plurality.” In a currentbook project, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt and The Phenomenological Tradition,I try to systematically elaborate the core features of such a version ofphenomenological thinking. This reading does not intend to pigeonholeArendt as a “professional phenomenologist,” nor does it want to claim thatthere could be no other influences in Arendt’s work—both intentions wouldcertainly fail to grasp what Arendt’s philosophizing is about. The claim israther that a deep understanding of Arendt’s work is not possible withouttaking into account her engagement with phenomenology, which, in itstransformed version, guides Arendt’s thought, in her thematic and operativeconcepts.

with respect to her “core-phenomenon” of actualized plurality. Asmuch as these initial points of discussion situate Arendt at acritical distance from the tradition of phenomenology, equally—I would like to claim—does she elaborate on them in a genuinelyphenomenological way. Thereby, she develops a distinct form ofa “phenomenology of plurality.”

This is the broader context of my close reading ofArendt’s essay on Existenz philosophy. What is interesting aboutthis early text is that, in analyzing it carefully, one cangain perspective on Arendt’s theory building in statu nascendi. Theessay clearly shows her rootedness in core issues ofexistential philosophy. Although Arendt never abandoned thelatter, we can see a general tendency toward a phenomenologicalarticulation of existential issues in the development of her work.The early stages, therefore, can indicate out of whichexistential thrust and philosophical concern certain issuesreally became issues for Arendt and how much she headed for athorough transformation not only of phenomenology but also ofexistential philosophy. Viewing its core ideas as crucial, sheregarded some of its concepts, such as the self, as pernicious.In my analysis, I will focus on the questions of (1) reality and(2) meaning, since they form the methodological and systematicpoint of departure for Arendt’s critical transformation.2 The aim ofthis paper is thus to show, by referring to classical thinkersand other phenomenologists and existential philosophers, whatstance Arendt takes on these issues within the phenomenologicaldebate.

In order to situate Arendt’s contribution within thebroader phenomenological discussion, I will not limit my studyto Arendt’s indebtedness to and critique of Heidegger, as isusually done.3 Instead, an investigation of her reception ofHusserl, as well as references to the interpretations of other“second generation phenomenologists” such as Sartre andLevinas, shall provide us with a wider picture of how Arendt’swork integrates and interacts with phenomenology in itsdifferent variations. Beyond that, I will point out four

2 The development of Arendt’s core-phenomenon of actualized plurality(question (3)) is yet to come, although its first beginnings can berecognized in how Arendt sets her course.3 A number of excellent studies on the intellectual relationship betweenArendt and Heidegger already appeared in the 1990s, of which the mostfamous and commendable are Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); henceforth AH, followed bypage number; Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendtand Heidegger, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997); henceforthTM, followed by page number; and Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism ofHannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); henceforth RM,followed by page number. Instead of repeating their investigations, I willbuild on their elucidating results. This should also allow for a receptionof Arendt’s phenomenological work beyond her relation to Heidegger.

Kantian guidelines at the beginnig of my analysis thatdemonstrate how important Kant was for Arendt’stransformations: These guidelines are the questions with whichArendt challenges existential philosophy and phenomenology, andthe answers she finds at the end of the essay, with Jaspers,clearly anticipate her own further development of thought.

2. A Close Reading of “What is Existenz Philosophy?”“What is Existenz Philosophy?” is a short, but very dense textthat first appeared in English in Partisan Review in 1946.4 Twoyears later, the essay was published in a German version5 in DieWandlung, a journal founded by Jaspers, Sternberger, Krauss,and Weber shortly after the Second World War; in the same yearit appeared again in a German collection of essays, Sechs Essays,which Arendt had written for the journal. Since an English(re-)translation of the German text was recently collected inthe volume titled Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 in 1994, thereare now three versions of the text, all slightly different.This is partly due to Arendt’s own alterations; partly due topossible mistranslations in the first English version; and,finally, partly due to the new translators’ decisions.6 For

4 Hannah Arendt, “What is Existenz Philosophy?,” Partisan Review 18:1 (1946), pp.XX–XX; henceforth WEP, followed by page number; reprinted as “What isExistential Philosophy?,” trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, in Essays inUnderstanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), pp. 163–87; henceforth EP, followed by page number.5 Hannah Arendt, “Was ist Existenzphilosophie?,” Die Wandlung VOLUME: ISSUE(1948), pp. PAGES; reprinted in Hannah Arendt, Sechs Essays (Heidelberg:Schneider, 1948), pp. PAGES; quotations from the German text refer toHannah Arendt, Was ist Existenzphilosophie? (Frankfurt am Main: Hain, 1990). 6 Jerome Kohn, the editor of Essays in Understanding, explains his decision tohave the text re-translated as follows: “It should be noted that Arendtnever translated her own work, but sometimes—though she didn’t much like doingit—rewrote in English what existed in German and vice versa. The version ofthe deeply reflective essay ‘What is Existential Philosophy?’ . . . is anincomplete version of her original German manuscript. Parts of it seem lessrewritten than mistranslated. It is not known who was responsible for theEnglish version, but it seems unlikely that it was Arendt, though she maywell have collaborated on it. Because it is a tightly argued and complexphilosophical essay, one of critical importance to Arendt’s development asa thinker . . . it was decided to make a new translation from the Germanfor this volume. The process described above was thus reversed, the earlierPartisan Review text being consulted for hints of Arendt’s ‘voice’ whilepreparing the final version” (Jerome Kohn, introduction to Hannah Arendt,Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn [New York: Schocken, 1994], p.xviii). I will try to counter-check, or at least to juxtapose this textwith the German published version, which can at least guarantee forArendt’s words in her mother tongue.

important, but divergent passages I will therefore take theGerman original as a guideline7 and as a key for interpretingArendt’s or the translators’ English expressions.

Judgments about the text’s overall quality diverge:Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl calls it “simplyawkward”8 and, with respect to the passages on Heidegger,“overwrought and acerbic.”9 Young-Bruehl also tells us thatArendt never allowed it to be collected in an English volume,10

which seems to support the opinion that the author did notthink highly of it herself. Nevertheless, I agree with SeylaBenhabib’s “central thesis” that Hannah Arendt’s “recovery ofthe public world of politics in her thought was not only apolitical project but a philosophical one as well” (RM 50) AndBenhabib comes to this conclusion precisely at the end of ashort chapter devoted to the analysis of “What is ExistenzPhilosophy?”. Also Jerome Kohn concurs that the essay is“deeply reflective” and “of critical importance to Arendt’sdevelopment as a thinker.”11 Not having written on explicitlyphilosophical issues for more than ten years, this text—together with “French Existentialism”12—could even be marked asArendt’s “comeback” to the philosophical stage.

Despite its weaknesses, “What Is Existenz Philosophy”immediately shows us what philosophical consequences Arendt hasdrawn from past political horrors and events—without evenmentioning them, except in a footnote. Instead, she presents aninterrelated development of German history of thought and takesa strong philosophical position within it; she does this byrejecting Heidegger and taking side with Jaspers. However, her“philosophical comeback” hardly indicates that Arendt wasinterested in returning to a detached philosophical discourse.Quite to the contrary, it was clear to her how much

7 The reason for using the German text as a guideline goes back to Arendt’sself-description in an interview with Günter Gaus from 1964: “I write inEnglish, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is atremendous difference between your mother tongue and anotherlanguage. . . . I do things in German that I would not permit myself to doin English. That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I havebecome bold, but in general I have maintained a certain distance. TheGerman language is the essential thing that has remained and that I havealways consciously preserved” (Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The LanguageRemains,” in Essays in Understanding, p. 13).8 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1982), p. 217.9 Ibid.10 Although in German, it did appear in Sechs Essays, her first collection ofessays in 1948.11 Kohn, introduction to Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. xviii.12 Hannah Arendt, “French Existentialism,” in Essays in Understanding, pp. 188–93.

philosophical thought was in need of being transformed in thename of action and plurality.

Without a doubt, her essay is also a reckoning withHeidegger that portrays his thought as the worst and mostdisastrous outcome of existential philosophy, while it praisesJaspers effusively for everything that is right and good inthis development. As is often the case with Arendt’s texts—andwhich is particularly evident in this case—scholars will not besatisfied with her harsh and sometimes imprecise verdicts onHusserl, Heidegger, etc., which leave a lot of room for strongcounter-argumentation. How can we nevertheless read thisdifficult text most productively? I would like to suggest areading that does not take Arendt’s article as it was probablyintended: as an introduction to the historical emergence andthe different current positions of Existenz philosophy for anAmerican audience. Taken as such, the scholarly critique wouldapply to many of Arendt’s theses. Rather, if one reads the textprimarily as an elucidation of her own intentions and reads hercritical remarks as the ground for what will become a full-fledged philosophical answer in The Human Condition, then crucialissues that shape Arendt’s thought begin to come to light. Thisreading also allows us to appreciate the complex structure ofthe text, which interweaves these different issues into aprofound understanding of the passionate philosophical strugglewith modernity and its irreversible impact on andinterconnection with thought.

2.1 Four Kantian Guidelines

For Arendt, it is Kant who is the “real” but “secret king”13 ofmodern philosophy, and it is Kant who has given existentialphilosophy all its points of departure and despair. By takingup the four main Kantian points that Arendt elaborates on, wecan simultaneously clarify her own issues, which pervade thetext like hidden guidelines before they openly converge in anappraisal of Jaspers.

(1) The conceptual starting point of Arendt’s line ofargument is Kant’s initial shattering of the ancientphilosophical unity of thought and Being. By showing the verylimits of reason’s theoretical grasp, the Critique of Pure Reasonhad dared to call into question what had been an axiom ofphilosophy since Parmenides: that all there is can be thought,that all Being is accessible, understandable, and explainableby reason. In the aftermath of Kant, the consequences of this13 EP 168. Many years later, Arendt would assign the attribute of being the“hidden king” to her teacher, Martin Heidegger (Hannah Arendt, “MartinHeidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 294; henceforth HE, followed bypage number.

advance could no longer be overlooked or appeased. While Hegelwas the last to provide a classical answer to the breach ofthought and being by reconciling reality and thought,existential philosophy was born out of a shock and thaumazeinbefore the pure, naked, and inaccessible “Thatness [Dass-Sein]”of all Being, which had suddenly gaped wide open. Arendtrenders the existentialists’ initial insight, which is also herown, as follows: Thought fails to grasp this naked and emptyreality of things, just as much as it fails to explain thearbitrariness of events; essentia and existentia fall apart, sincethe nature of a thing cannot account for its reality, and, inthe worst case “has nothing to do with their reality” (EP 168).Therefore, thinkers like Kierkegaard renounce understandingindividual human existence by means of universal concepts andgeneralizable guidelines and aspire to live the “exception” fromthe universal—a practice (albeit often a practice in despair)instead of a theoretical answer. For Arendt in “What is ExistenzPhilosophy?,” the question of reality becomes the leading anddecisive question because the shock of the pure “that it is”cannot replace the lost faith in concepts. Instead, it makes theworld an uncanny and absurd place that has all the moreforfeited its very reality as a home. Alienation becomes thebasic mode of Being-in-the-world. As this can never be simply aphilosophical problem, but reveals the existential situationand reaction of thought, Arendt takes a very close look at howthe problem of reality is confronted in the authors shediscusses.

(2) “The purpose of Kant’s destruction of the ancientconcept of Being was to establish the autonomy of man, what hehimself called the dignity of man” (EP 170). In Arendt’sopinion, this central Kantian thought is precisely what is lostin the approaches of existential philosophy:

Just as it was decisive for the historical development of thenineteenth century that nothing disappeared as quickly as didthe new revolutionary concept of the citoyen, so it was decisivefor the development of the post-Kantian philosophy that nothingdisappeared as quickly as did this new concept of man that hadjust barely begun to emerge. (Ibid.)

A main theme that Arendt pursues throughout the essay is thusthe concept of man, humanity, and freedom. As much as thistestifies to the importance of Kantian thought in Arendt andmust be taken seriously when confronting normative questions,just as much does it seem to be an outright inconsistency oreven a contradiction: How can one demand an “idea of man” orhumanity (EP 178)—and later in the text even speak of an“essence of man” (EP 181)—if all faith inconcepts/ideas/essences is lost? This critical question alsoreflects Arendt’s unique and peculiar combination of Kantian

elements with elements of existential philosophy, which remainspresent throughout her work. This remarkable, but difficultalliance and its consequences have already provoked extensivediscussion, as well as attempts to resolve the issue for thebenefit of one “stronger” side or another.14 A central thesisof my reading of Arendt, however, is that both sides must betaken into account. This is possible only by recognizing herattempt to resolve the tension between the Kantian demand forfreedom, autonomy, and humanity and the undeniable insights ofexistential philosophy through her phenomenological conception ofplurality. Although it is not yet elaborated in “What is ExistenzPhilosophy?,” we can see the direction of this development inher reading of Jaspers.

(3) Even though, in Kant’s conception, man is free todetermine his own actions, those actions themselves, as soon asthey appear in the world, are subject to the law of causality.What Kant thereby retains from the old concept of Being is itsgivenness (Vorgegebenheit), i.e., its determinate force. AsArendt will put it: “Man, who is free in himself, isnonetheless hopelessly at the mercy of the workings of anatural world alien to him, of a fate opposing him anddestroying his freedom” (EP 171). Free man is placed intonature, which functions through laws to which man is subjectedand which therefore becomes a sphere alien to him. In thiscontext, Arendt uses two phrases, which appear in differentvariations throughout the text, in order to designate therespective philosopher’s position: “At the same time that Kantmade man the master and the measure of man, he also made him theslave of Being . . . . Man never seemed to have risen so high andat the same time to have fallen so low” (ibid.—emphasis added).

Arendt captures the reaction of the thinkers she discussesusing theological metaphors of power to indicate thepositioning of man vis-à-vis the world and Being: While Husserlis identified as “Creator of the World” in order to appease thebreach between thought and Being, the existential movementattempts to become a “Lord/Master of Being [Herr des Seins]” inreaction to Kant’s enslavement to causality. Arendt rejects asoutmoded a “reconciliation” in the form of a Husserlian world-constitution. At the same time, she is critical of the approachthat confirms world-alienation for the sake of becoming the

14 The most stimulating discussion is that between Seyla Benhabib, who seeksto make Arendt’s Kantian side stronger through a Habermasianinterpretation, and Dana Villa, who strongly inclines toward the postmodernand existential interpretation (RM xvff.). Both approaches bring veryimportant insights about Arendt’s thought, its motivations, and itsimplications to light. By adding a phenomenological reading to this, Iwould like to clarify Arendt’s methodological intentions, which show howshe integrated those two tendencies within a transformed phenomenologicalview.

master of one’s own Being, as in Kierkegaard’s “exception,”Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and, most of all, Heidegger’s“resoluteness.” She returns once again to the master-metaphorin Jaspers, however, only to show how it is overcome: “[M]an as‘master of his thoughts’ is not only more than what he thinks—and this alone would probably provide basis enough for a newdefinition of human dignity—but is also constitutionally abeing that is more than a Self and wills more than himself” (EP187). This constant surplus that man is (by appearing in theworld and before others), without being Being’s master andwithout being able to capture it in thought, will be Arendt’sphenomenologically elaborated answer to Kantian challenges yetto come. With this positive move toward the world and others,she also tries to overcome the “element[s] of defiance” and“open or hidden concept[s] of fate” (EP 171), which shediagnoses within every philosophy after Kant, and especially inthe existential movement:

Nietzsche’s amor fati, Heidegger’s resoluteness, Camus’s defiantattempt to take life on its own terms despite the absurdity ofa human condition rooted in man’s rootlessness in the world areall attempts at self-rescue by means of a retreat into the oldsafety. It is no coincidence that since Nietzsche the heroicgesture has become the characteristic pose of philosophy, forit does indeed require no little heroism to live in the worldKant left us. (EP 171f.)

(4) How could Kant himself keep his equanimity before thestartling results he had thought up? For Arendt, this can onlybe explained by his “firm rootedness in a tradition thatregards philosophy as essentially identical with contemplation”(EP 172). The idea that thinking, however, can also beconsidered an activity that belongs to the vita activa is anapproach we know from Arendt’s later texts. In “What Is ExistenzPhilosophy?” she associates it with Kierkegaard’s “inneractivity” of “becoming subjective,” which “leads directly outof philosophy,” as well as with Marx, who also “wanted to movedirectly to action,” but returned to the security of Hegel’sphilosophy. Moving to action is thus a consequence of thebankruptcy of concepts and thought as such before reality.While “Kierkegaard turned to psychology in the description ofinternal activity” (EP 175) and “Marx [turned] to politicalscience in the description of external activity” (EP 175), wesee Arendt herself preparing her way for a phenomenologicalconcept of action as a world-disclosing activity together withothers and within a space of appearances.

2.2 Between Reconciling Epigone and Unconscious Rebel:Husserl’s “Hubristic Humanism” and The Question of Reality

According to Arendt, philosophy after Hegel is divisble intotwo groups: (1) those who follow in Hegel’s footsteps and tryto re-establish the unity of thought and Being15; and (2) the“rebels,” who are “rebelling against, and despairing of, [what]was philosophy itself, the postulated identity of thought andBeing” (EP 164).

It is important to notice that this is the centralviewpoint from which Arendt assesses Husserl’s philosophy, itsachievements, and its impact in the essay (her later assessmentin Life of the Mind shifts to the perspective of exploring thinkingas an activity). Husserl was, of course, a well-known figure toArendt, not only because he was Heidegger’s mentor and wasstill in constant contact with him when she was a student inMarburg from 1924 to 1926,16 but also because Arendt herselfwent to Freiburg in the winter semester of 1926–1927 to hearHusserl’s lectures.17 The philosopher who had demanded to go“back to the things themselves” had initiated a movement thatmeant a completely new and fresh approach in contrast to theschools of neo-Kantianism or neo-Hegelianism: Back “‘to thethings themselves’” meant “Away from theories, away from books”and “toward the establishment of philosophy as a rigorousscience which would take its place alongside other academicdisciplines” (HE 294)—this is how Arendt herself put it in herspeech on Heidegger’s eightieth birthday.

In general, and throughout her life, Arendt holds anambivalent position toward Husserl that becomes more measuredthe older she gets. In “What is Existenz Philosophy?,” an earlytext, we can clearly see the nature of her reservations andwhere they emerge: She speaks of the “phenomenological attemptat reconstruction” (EP 164) and counts phenomenology (togetherwith pragmatism) among “the most recent and interesting of theepigonal philosophical schools of the last hundred years” (EP164). Husserl thus belongs to the “epigones” (to group [1]outlined above) and not to the “rebels,” although Arendt admitsthat he is of great influence to them and to contemporaryphilosophy in general. It is interesting to compare this to herlater account from 1969, where she counts Husserl among the“few rebels” (HE 294) in the academic establishment (Betrieb),15 This unity should be established either “by proclaiming the primacy ofmatter (materialism) or of mind (idealism)” or by playing “with variousperspectives to create a whole” (EP 164).16 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in Briefe 1925–1975 und andere Zeugnisse, ed.Ursula Ludz (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), p. 435: Heideggermentions Husserl several times in his letters to Arendt. 17 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in Briefe 1925–1975 und andere Zeugnisse, p.278. According to Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, the lecture Husserl gave inthis semester was “Introduction to Phenomenology [Einführung in diePhänomenologie],” four credit hours per week (Wochenstunden) (Rudolf Bernet,Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, Edmund Husserl: Darstellung seines Denkens [Hamburg:Meiner, 1996], pp. 199, 202, 222.

however “thoroughly [ganz] naïve” 18 and “thoroughly [ganz]unrebellious” his intentions. In this later context, Husserl asthe unconscious, naïve rebel is introduced as one of the twoantecessors of Heidegger; his counter-figure is Jaspers, who isdesignated as the “conscious” rebel.

Initially, in “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” Arendt refersbriefly to what she describes as a “detour” along the way tothe re-establishment of thought and Being—a detour “that hadalways guaranteed man his home in the world” (EP 164): theintentional structure of consciousness. Why is this a detour,and why does Arendt fail to recognize it as anything other thanthis? Because phenomenology, she claims, has found a completelynew and elegant solution to the modern problem that individualthings seem to be “torn out of their functional context” (EP165): As correlates of acts and (active or passive)accomplishments, de-contextualized things can be related to a“stream of consciousness” and can therefore also be“reintegrate[d] . . . into human life” (EP 165). “Because everyact of consciousness has by nature an object, I can be sure ofat least one thing, namely, that I ‘have’ the objects of myconsciousness” (EP 164). Now comes the objection that revealsArendt’s concern most clearly: “The question of Being, not tomention the question of reality, can thus be ‘bracketed.’ . . .(The seen tree, the tree as object of my consciousness, doesnot have to be the ‘real’ tree; it is in any case the realobject of my consciousness)” (EP 164f.).

It is true that Husserl’s method demands a suspension ofthe “natural attitude.” But what is meant by this expressionand what does it amount to? By virtue of the natural attitude,the real world is not just conscious in its contents but isendowed with a character of “factually existing ‘actuality’”19—the Germanversion says “Wirklichkeit” (reality)20—as a sort of unspoken, pre-predicative judgment. “If we state such a judgment, wenevertheless know that in it we have made thematic andconceived as a predicate what already was somehow inherent, asunthematic, unthought, unpredicated, in the originalexperiencing or, correlatively, in the experienced, as thecharacteristic of something ‘on hand’ [vorhanden]” (I1 58).When bracketing this natural attitude, “we do not in any respect alterour conviction . . . : precisely this is what we do not do.Nevertheless the positing undergoes a modification: while it in

18 Addition in the original German version of the text. 19 Edmund Husserl, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, bk. 1 of IdeasPertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. FredKersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 57; henceforth I1, followedby page number. 20 Edmund Husserl, Allgemeine Einfuhrung in die reine Phänomenologie, bk. 1 of Ideen zueiner reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 53, 62; henceforth I1, followed by pagenumer.

itself remains what it is, we, so to speak ‘put it out of action’” (I159; I1 63). Husserl’s intention is thus not to abrogate thereality of the world or the perceived tree, but to bring tolight what it means to be real; in other words: the accomplishmentsof consciousness in the constitution of reality. “The point isnot to secure objectivity but to understand it.”21

This quote articulates an attitude that is not so far fromthe Arendtian passion to understand. Husserl’s endeavor is,however, a transcendental one, and from the point of view thatArendt wants to emphasize, it is true that Husserl’s first moveis to tear us out of the ordinary frame of being a Weltkind—achild of the world.22 In Arendt’s eyes, it is all the more hissecond move that dims down the “philosophical shock” ofmodernity: to explore the full implications of the correlationof “world” and “transcendental inter/subjectivity” by aneidetic approach, and it is not surprising that these two moves

21 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: AnIntroduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 189; henceforth CES, followed bypage number; Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentalePhänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), §55, p. 193; henceforth KEW, followedby page number: “Es gilt nicht, Objektivität zu sichern, sondern sie zuverstehen.” 22 Edmund Husserl, 1921–1928, bk. 2 of Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texteaus dem Nachlass, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 443. Itis likely that Arendt heard Husserl make claims like the following (thisquote is taken out of the lectures of the winter semester 1926–1927, whenArendt was in Freiburg attending Husserl’s “Introduction toPhenomenology”): “In the reduction to pure subjectivity the world isnevertheless the experienced world and the world that otherwise holds asreality in manifold regards; but it is ‘bracketed’, it stands in the epochéwith respect to its thematic accomplishment as obtaining state. Insofar asthis bracketing does not abrogate the consciousness of the world but thisconsciousness is precisely the subject (of the analysis) and insofar as theworld as being conscious in consciousness necessarily belongs to theinseparable content of the pure subjectivity itself, it is clear how we cansay that as phenomenologists the world has become the mere phenomenon ofour pure subjectivity” (Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: VorlesungenSommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962],supp. XIX, p. 444—my translation): “In der Reduktion auf die reineSubjektivität ist die Welt zwar erfahrene Welt und in mannigfaltiger Weisesonst als Wirklichkeit geltende Welt; aber sie ist ‘eingeklammert’, siesteht in der Epoché hinsichtlich ihres thematischen Vollzugs als geltende.Sofern aber diese Einklammerung doch das Bewußtsein von der Welt nichtaufhebt, sondern dieses Bewußtsein doch gerade das Thema ist und soferndarin die Welt als im Bewußtsein bewußt notwendig mitgehört zumunabtrennbaren Bestand der reinen Subjektivität selbst, versteht es sich,daß wir davon sprechen, daß für uns als Phänomenologen die Welt zum bloßenPhänomen unserer reinen Subjektivität geworden sei.”

resemble very much Heidegger’s critique from the Prolegomena.23

“[I]t is the existence of this table, quite apart from tables ingeneral, that evokes the philosophical shock” (EP 165). Viewedfrom this angle, for Arendt, the Husserlian project results ina reconstruction of a world that had been “shattered into pieces”:“Such a reconstitution24 of the world by consciousness wouldamount to a second creation in the sense that through thisreconstitution the world would lose its contingent character,which is to say its character of reality, and it would nolonger appear to man as a world given, but as one created byhim” (EP 165).

In order to do justice to both authors, it is important,first of all, to see that Husserl’s own “philosophical shock,”on which his phenomenology is built, is very different fromwhat Arendt describes as the condition and fundamentalexperience of modernity. (It is, however, not so different fromwhat operates in her own conception of plurality as the “Who-ness” of Dasein, i.e., its irreducibility to being a thing inthe world.) Husserl’s “philosophical shock” is the discovery ofintentionality. He describes, as the “miracle of all miracles” andthe “enigma of all enigmas,”25 the fact that consciousness isnothing but a genuine “aboutness,” which cannot be reduced toan entity that could be captured in naturalistic terms.Ignoring this point of departure, Arendt regards the structureof intentionality and correlation as an appeasing philosophicalanswer for the general Befindlichkeit of the modern world. Husserl,she claims, wants to comfort us about “the very point in whichall of modern philosophy can take no comfort whatsoever,namely, that man is forced to affirm a Being that he did notcreate and that is alien to his very nature” (EP 166). We will

23 Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Peter Jaeger(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), §§10–3; History of the Concept of Time:Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1985), §§10–3, pp. 91–131; henceforth HCT, followed by page number.24 In WEP, this reads “reconstruction.”25 “The miracle of consciousness is the miracle of the so-calledintentionality. For someone who is philosophically naïve it is most self-understood that by a subjective lived experience, called presenting,judging, valuing etc. something can be meant/intended which itself is not alived experience, but beyond experiencing . . . . This taken-for-grantedness (and already the most primitive one of perceiving a thing) isthe enigma of all enigmas” (Edmund Husserl, Logik und allgemeineWissenschaftstheorie, ed. Ursula Panzer [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996], p. 341—mytrans.); “Das Wunder des Bewußtseins ist das Wunder der sogenanntenIntentionalität. Für den philosophisch Naiven ist es dasAllerselbstverständlichste, daß in einem subjektiven Erleben, genanntVorstellen, Urteilen, Werten usw., etwas gemeint sein kann, was nichtselbst ein Erlebnis ist, sondern dem Erleben jenseitig . . . DieseSelbstverständlichkeit (und schon die allerprimitivste der Wahrnehmungeines Dinges) ist das Rätsel aller Rätsel” (ibid.).

shortly see that Sartre, who departs from the very sameproblems and questions of modern world-alienation as Arendtdoes, finds—in contrast to Arendt—, a new mode of describingand thinking this situation precisely in Husserl.

The second point I would like to make with respect to thequote above is that “constitution” does not equal “creation.”If it did, and if the meaning of the word “creation” were takenseriously, it would situate Husserl within the framework of anabsurd God-like idealism or constructivism. Most Husserlscholars reject this as a misinterpretation or willfulmisreading of Husserl, although it must also be stated thatHusserl himself, as Dan Zahavi notes, “never gave a clear-cutanswer to the question of whether constitution is to beunderstood as a creation or a restoration of reality.”26

Addressing this problem, one must be careful not to limitoneself to two alternatives, both of which, to paraphrase afamous quote by Putnam, are wrong. In Zahavi’s rendering, “Itis not the mind that makes up the world, but it doesn’t justmirror it either.”27 Zahavi highlights Heidegger’sinterpretation in order to bring out a deeper and accurateunderstanding of what is also the main point in Husserl’sconcept of constitution: “‘Constituting’ does not meanproducing in the sense of making and fabricating; it meansletting the entity be seen in its objectivity.”28 This is, perhaps, a versionthat Arendt could accept. But what still seems fatal to her isthe emphasis on a consciousness in which the world can reallybe tracked and comprehended. If the world can be “reduced” toits givenness “to” or “in” consciousness, it loses its “sheergivenness,” which exceeds any possible correlation inconsciousness.

These remarks are directed more at an ongoingmisinterpretation of Husserl than at Arendt’s own reception,which—as has been clear from the beginning—cannot fruitfully beread by judging the accuracy of its verdicts on Husserl,Heidegger, or others. Instead of providing a scholarly answerto Arendt’s classification of Husserl’s philosophy, I wouldtherefore like to point to a different, rather poetic receptionof Husserl: a short text written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1939with the title “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’sphenomenology.”29 I will quote a long passage from this text inorder to illustrate the fascinating coincidence of Sartre’s andArendt’s initial concerns and their shared philosophical26 Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2003), p. 72.27 Dan Zahavi, paraphrasing Putnam, in ibid.28 Ibid. Cf. Sehenlassen des Seienden in seiner Gegenständlichkeit, “to let beings beseen in their being an object” (HCT 111).29 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’sPhenomenology,” trans. J. P. Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1:2(1970), pp. 4f.; henceforth, IFI, followed by page number.

passion to find an accurate expression for the experiences oftheir generation: the experience of the sheer “Thatness” ofthings, the failure of classical academic philosophy to capturethis experience and its inherent absurdity, as well as a sortof anarchic joy that, finally, it is only “outside, in theworld, among others” where “we will discover ourselves” (IFI5). It is this existential state—which is not only a subjectivemood, but obviously an affective disclosure of the world—thatdrew so many intellectuals to the new approach of Husserl and,even more, to Heidegger (who is also mentioned in Sartre’stext):

[T]o know is to eat. After a hundred years of academism, Frenchphilosophy remains at that point. . . . [W]e have all believedthat the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered themwith a white spit and slowly swallowed them, reducing them toits own substance. What is a table, a rock, a house? A certainassemblage of “contents of consciousness,” a class of suchcontents. O digestive philosophy! . . . The simplest andplainest among us vainly looked for something solid, somethingnot just mental, but would encounter everywhere only a soft andvery genteel mist: themselves.

Against the digestive philosophy of empirico-criticism, ofneo-Kantianism, against all “psychologism,” Husserlpersistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things inconsciousness. You see this tree, to be sure. But you see itjust where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of thedust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from theMediterranean coast. It could not enter into yourconsciousness, for it is not of the same nature asconsciousness. . . . Consciousness and the world are given atone stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world isnevertheless essentially relative to consciousness. . . . Toknow is to “burst toward,” to tear oneself out of the moistgastric intimacy, veering out there beyond oneself.

. . . All at once conscience is purified, it is clear asa strong wind. There is nothing in it but a movement of fleeingitself, a sliding beyond itself.

. . . Imagine us thus rejected and abandoned by our ownnature in an indifferent, hostile, and restive world – you willthen grasp the profound meaning of the discovery which Husserlexpresses in his famous phrase “All consciousness isconsciousness of something.” . . . The philosophy oftranscendence throws us on to the highway, in the midst ofdangers, under a dazzling light. (IFI 4f.)

This quote shows clearly how one can ask the samequestions and find different answers (in addition to all theparallels, it is not only the paradigmatic “tree,” but also the

“wind” of thought30 and the appraisal of transcendence, withrespect to Jaspers, that is equally to be found in Arendt’saccount); it also demonstrates how one can have a profitablereading of Husserl without necessarily becoming atranscendental idealist. Sartre’s remarks are, in this sense,characteristic of the French reception of phenomenology thatcombines Husserlian and Heideggerian elements of thought insteadof drawing an insurmountable difference between them. Mostprobably, this “reading of difference,” which was first andforemost performed and promoted by Heidegger himself, had astronger influence on the students and scholars in Germany atthat time than on philosophers in France, who did not directlyexperience the development and intellectual break of Heideggerwith Husserl. Rather, the French reception is shaped by thesimultaneous arrival of both thinkers in the French-speakingworld in the late 1920s and 1930s. The later development ofphenomenology shows that this combined reading had a muchstronger impact, but it also indirectly confirms Arendt’scritique of Husserl and the point she wanted to make withrespect to the “sheer Thatness” of reality: To read Husserlthrough the lens of the concerns of modernity and with aHeideggerian—and in succession, a poststructuralist—turn to it,has lead to interpretations that underline the irreducibilityof the Lebenswelt and experiences of the non-sovereign, eventraumatizing reality of the “Other,” the “event,” the“Sinnereignis” (meaning-event). There is no doubt that sources forthis can be found in Husserl; however, there is also no doubtthat Husserl put his emphasis on the harmony and inherentteleology of experience, rather than on its ruptures,irritations, and alienations. In this sense, Arendt’s verdictis correct that Husserl “did not really belong” to the “modernphilosophy” he “liberated” in so many ways (EP 166).

To Arendt, and from the perspective of Existenz philosophy,Husserl’s main achievement is his crucial contribution tophilosophy’s liberation from the “bonds of historicism” (EP166). Although Husserl would only contribute “little” to the“concrete content” of existential philosophy (EP 166), theanti-historicist aspect of his phenomenology, which is derived

30 Arendt refers to the “wind of thought” in The Life of the Mind, describingSocrates’ way of thinking, which could destroy all certainties and leavethe thinker and his dialogue-partners only with aporetic perplexities(Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977],p. 174; henceforth LM, followed by page number). In this context, she alsoquotes Heidegger using this metaphor with respect to Socrates: “Throughouthis life and up to his very death Socrates did nothing other than placehimself in this draft, this current [of thinking], and maintain himself init. This is why he is the purest of the West. This is why he wrote nothing.For anyone who begins, out of thinking, to write must inevitably be likethose people who run for shelter from a wind too strong for them”(Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken, quoted in LM 174).

directly from its method, had a tremendous impact: It put anend not only to psychologism but—most important for Arendt—topost-Hegelian speculations about an inherent law (be itpositive or negative) in history:

Because Husserl’s focus on the “things themselves” cut off thiskind of idle speculation and insisted on separating thephenomenally verifiable content of an event from its genesis,it had a liberating influence in the sense that man himself,not the historical or natural or biological or psychologicalflow in which he was caught up, once again became the mainconcern of philosophy. (EP 166)

No more “secret powers” that “act” behind men and determinetheir fate are allowed in a method that demands that “everythingoriginarily . . . offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it ispresented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there”(I1 44). The dignity of the phenomenon itself is certainly alesson Arendt learned from this approach: A thing simply iswhat it is and is not anything else—and it deserves to beanalyzed with respect to exactly this seemingly trivialinsight. Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, which looks for alogical order of systems of constitution (time, affection,association, etc.) as well as for historic events ofUrstiftungen, like, e. g., geometry, obviously does not countamong “philosophies of history” for Arendt. Or, to put itdifferently: Arendt would only have accepted the geneticapproach in phenomenology if it did not lead into thespeculative substitution of the process for the product.(Whether this really is the case or not cannot be decidedhere.) That Arendt probably knew of Husserl’s genetic project,but that she did not recognize it as decisive for changing heropinion on Husserl’s stance on history, shows that she did notalign it with classical philosophies of history. The importantArendtian point remains that human freedom and action are onlypossible if historic events are not products of hiddenprocesses, but of single and contingent events that arenevertheless accessible to understanding. Since, for Husserl,processes are never hidden and non-subjective, but can bebrought to light by reflection, human action, for him, is justas well a conscious and transparent undertaking.

Yet Husserl, whom Arendt holds to be “totally devoid ofany sense of historicity [dem es völlig an historischem Sinn gebrach],”“never really grasped the implications of his negativeaccomplishment” (EP 166). Instead, Arendt says, Husserl triedto comfort the modern world by giving it a “human face” again.This is a surprising thesis that shows how much Arendt shiftsthe usual context within which Husserl is perceived. AsBenhabib states, Arendt was “not an epistemologist and [was]not interested in issues of epistemology” (RM 50): “it was themoral, political and cultural dimensions of ‘homelessness in

the modern world’ that fascinated her” (RM 49). This is largelytrue, although I would formulate it as a philosophical decision,too: Arendt’s open disinterest in epistemological questionsdefinitely has its philosophical basis in Heidegger’s rejection ofepistemology as a non-fundamental inquiry. The fact that sheperceives a humanistic project in Husserl’s philosophy,however, indicates a broader perspective, rather than adifferent interest, since she thereby grasps—consciously orunconsciously—a central concern of the later Husserl himself.The founder of phenomenology became more and more aware thathis new philosophical approach not only operated withinethically inflected paradigms (methodological self-responsibility); on a larger (and not only methodological)scale, the whole project of disclosing the (inter)subjectiveaccomplishments of world-constitution would lead to an all-embracing historical self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) (KEW 485f.), whichcorresponds closely to the project of Enlightenment as an“ethical human becoming [ethische Menschwerdung].” Husserl’sardent and naïve belief that his phenomenology was indeed theanswer to the “Crisis” not only of “European Sciences” but alsoof “European Mankind”31 is often (deliberately) overlooked whenphenomenology is presented as a predominantly epistemologicalenterprise. Arendt, who either had a ‘nose’ for this(confirming her Kantian influence mentioned above) or whodirectly experienced the ethical driving force in Husserl’slectures, perceived the inherent or sometimes explicit humanismof Husserl’s approach as one of the most relevant aspects inthe story she wanted to tell about existential philosophy,modernity, and the falling apart of being and thought. ForHusserl’s project, precisely in its humanistic ambitions, hassomething outdated and thus tragic about it that Arendt triesto explain in the terms she developed for this analysis: Onethe one hand, she regards Husserl’s attempt to “conjure up” a“new home” by relating the alienated world to consciousness as“the most original and most modern attempt to provide a newintellectual foundation for humanism” (EP 165). On the otherhand, this enterprise, with all its good will, must fail,because it fails to recognize its own modern hubris:

By transforming this alien Being into consciousness, he[Husserl] tries to give the world a human face again, just asHofmannsthal, with the magic of little things, tries to awakenin us the old tenderness toward the world. But what dooms thismodern humanism, this expression of good will towards modesty,is the equally modern hubris that underlies it and that hopes—either secretly, as in Hofmannsthal, or openly and naively, asin Husserl—to become after all and in this quite inconspicuous

31 Cf. Husserl’s famous Vienna lecture, “Philosophy and the Crisis ofEuropean Humanity” (CES 269–300).

way what man cannot be: the creator of the world and ofhimself. (EP 166f.)

If it is not true that constitution amounts to creation,it is certainly true that Husserl intended an ethical renewal byphenomenology that contains the ideas of self-responsibility,self-reflection, and self-formation.32 But his“[hubristic/]arrogant modesty” (EP 167) is doomed by the viceof not having been able to recognize the real existential stateand stakes of his time and of his having tried to rescue whathad already been lost: a real home in the world. Arendt callsHusserl’s battle cry “to the things themselves” “no less amagic formula” than Hofmannsthal’s taking side with the “littlethings”33 in his farewell letter to Stefan George (EP 165). Inan age, though, “whose only good is that all magic fails in it”(EP 166), even this return to the “little things,” in which“the mystery of reality lies hidden” (EP 165), goes amiss.Husserl’s “apparent unpretentiousness” (EP 166)—or, as it iscalled in her early English version, his “magical homeliness”(WEP 346)—is the last attempt at a reconstruction of realityand humanity in a classicist manner. For Arendt, these twoissues, of utmost importance, must be thought anew under theconditions of modernity. Because just as Husserl failed torecognize these conditions, so, too, did the existentialphilosophers—with the exception of Jaspers—fail to account fora new humanism and a new guarantor of reality.

32 A life of renewal should be guided by the will to lead a whole life inthe light of this idea and should culminate in a “community of love,” wherethe highest telos of humankind is achieved in an infinite progress (cf.Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and HansRainer Sepp [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989]; and Ullrich Melle, “From Reason toLove,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, ed. John J.Drummond and Lester E. Embree [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002], pp. 229–48).33 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s “A Letter” in The Lord Chandos Letter and other Writings: “Awatering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabbychurchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vesselof my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones pastwhich the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment. . . suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seemtoo weak to describe” (Hugo v. Hofmannsthal, “A Letter,” in The Lord ChandosLetter and other Writings, trans. Joel Rotenberg [New York: The New York Review ofBooks, 2005], p. 123) It is not clear whether Arendt, who calls “Husserland Hofmannsthal . . . equally classicists” (WEP 346), knew that they weredistant relatives (which does not, to be sure, account for any possiblesimilarities in their conceptions). Classicism, for Arendt, “is the attempt—by means of an utterly rigorous imitation of the classic vision, which isto say, of man’s sense of being at home in the world—to conjure up a newhome from a world perceived as alien” (EP 165).

2.3 The Desperate Rebels: “Philosophy in revolt againstphilosophy”

Those thinkers after Hegel who did not want to restore theunity of thought and Being were looking for another way out ofthe dilemma: If, to reestablish a home, one could not be“creator of the world,” one could instead try to become the“master/lord of Being.”

What is the meaning of this enigmatic phrase, which Arendttakes from Schelling? To exist is the individualperformance/actualization (Vollzug) of Being. Thus, it is notthrough thought, but by the very “acting out” (consciousactualization) of one’s own Being that a unity, at least withoneself, is achieved (if the unity of oneself and the world isactually broken): This “passion to become subjective” is set inmotion by the “realized fear of death” that “becomes an ‘act’because in it man makes himself subjective and separateshimself from the world and everyday life with other men” (EP174). This is the fateful path that leads to the birth of theSelf in Kierkegaard.

In the ensuing development of existential philosophy, thispreoccupation with the self remains a fatal focus, ultimatelydenying life, world, and the importance of others. As,apparently, the only way to confront the bankruptcy of conceptsand thought, the self becomes the ultimate acting-out of Beingin its whole contingency, its thrownness, and its orientationtowards death. “On this premise rests not only the modernpreoccupation with inner life but also the fanaticaldetermination, which also begins with Kierkegaard, to take themoment seriously, for it is the moment alone that guaranteesexistence, that is reality” (EP 174—emphasis added). The second modethat guarantees reality is chance and, therefore, guilt. Since Ihave to take responsibility for actions whose consequences Icannot foresee, and since I always have to decide on one actionby neglecting all other options, I am forever doomed tofailure. “Guilt thus becomes the mode by which I become real,by which I entangle myself in reality” (EP 175). Being a real,acted-out existence is being guilty.

This rather gloomy outline leads up to the culmination ofArendt’s essay: her confrontation with Heidegger and Jaspers asthe exemplary contemporary versions of existential philosophy.As I mentioned above, I read Arendt’s criticism of Heidegger asan indicator for everything she thinks is philosophicallyfallacious and, above all, politically and ethically ruinousabout the existential movement. At the same time, her appraisalof Jaspers is more than just an appraisal: It points toArendt’s own transformation of existential philosophy.

2.4 Heidegger and All That Is Bad about Existenz Philosophy

In contrast to Arendt’s elaborations on Husserl, which arescarce (apart from this text we only find passages concerningHusserl in the Life of the Mind), there are numerous explicit andimplicit ties and allusions to Heidegger throughout Arendt’swhole work. As I have mentioned already in footnote 3, majorscholars of Arendt and/or Heidegger, such as Jacques Taminiaux,Lewis and Sandra Hinchman, Dana Villa, and Seyla Benhabib, havewritten excellent studies that have contributed much to ourunderstanding of Arendt’s intellectual relationship with, andindebtedness to, Heidegger. Building on these insights, I wouldlike to shed light on Arendt’s early reading of Heidegger witha focus on her own development of a phenomenology of plurality.Taking her reception of Husserl (which has not yet earned muchattention from scholars) together with her main criticisms andapprovals of Heidegger, we can see in which direction her“transformed phenomenology” will proceed.

Certainly, there are more balanced accounts of Heideggerto be found among Arendt’s writings than “What Is ExistenzPhilosophy?,” which even Villa attacks for its “shrill tone”(AH 120) and “remarkable hostility” (AH 232); Taminiaux and thebiographer Young-Bruehl speak of “extreme bitterness.”34 But,34 TM 9. For Taminaux’s assessment of “What Is Existenz Philosophy?,” whichconcentrates on Arendt’s comments on Heidegger, see TM 9–12. For furtherelucidating analyses concerning Heidegger’s “reversal” and his adherence tothe bios theoretikos in relation to Arendt’s development of thought, see TM134f., 157f., 179. Dana Villa’s comments on “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” arealso helpful concerning Arendt’s criticism of Heidegger as the “lastRomantic” (EP 187n.2), a point I will not cover here. Arendt mentions thisin a footnote where she directly addresses Heidegger’s “sensational”entering into the Nazi Party in 1933: “In view of the truly comic aspect ofthis development and in view of the no less genuinely abysmal state ofpolitical thought in German universities, one is tempted simply to dismissthe whole business. What speaks against such a dismissal is, among otherthings, that this entire mode of behavior has such exact parallels inGerman Romanticism that one can hardly believe them to result from thesheer coincidence of a purely personal failure of character. Heidegger is(let us hope) the last Romantic – an immensely talented Friedrich Schlegelor Adam Müller, as it were, whose complete lack of responsibility isattributable to a spiritual playfulness that stems in part from delusionsof genius and in part from despair” (EP 187n.2). Villa comments: “Aside fromits remarkable hostility, the notable feature of this early assessment ofHeidegger is its direct confrontation with the political implications ofHeidegger’s ‘romantic subjectivism.’ Arendt’s reading emphasizes how anostensibly ‘this-worldly philosophy’ winds up depriving the world of anysignificance other than providing the (fallen) context in which the Selfstrives for authenticity. From this perspective, the early Heideggeremerges as the twentieth-century culmination of the subjectification of theworld initiated by Descartes and as an inheritor of the politics ofauthenticity promoted by Rousseau. His existentialism is a clear expressionof the worldlessness of modernity. Insofar as the Heideggerian self is anextension of the romantic/Rousseauian ideal, it is destructive of the

while Arendt’s later texts certainly provide a more profitableand fair reading of Heidegger, it is worthwhile to look at“What Is Existenz Philosophy?,” especially because it displaysthe eruptive dynamic of Arendt’s own philosophical developmentand emancipation from Heidegger.

According to Arendt, it becomes clear in the essay “Whatis Metaphysics?” that the meaning of Being in the Heideggerianinterpretation is, in fact, nothingness. This is to say thatDasein is open to the experience of the actual, verbal sense ofBeing in the same sense that it is open to the experience ofnothingness in anxiety (Angst); both Being and nothingnessbelong together on one side of the ontological difference (thedifference between Being and beings). Moreover, the structuresof existence of Dasein—the “existentialia,” as opposed to the“categories” qua structures of objectivity—correspond tonothingness: The contingency of “thrownness [Geworfenheit]” intothe world is taken over in the anti-substantial and temporalconcept of “projection [Entwurf],” which is ultimately ananticipation of death as its utmost possibility. But ratherthan interpreting this constellation as a nihilistic bias,Arendt reads it in the context of a “philosophy in revoltagainst philosophy as pure contemplation.” Taken in this sense,the concept of nothingness is of “inestimable value” (EP 177),or, as she says in the German version with an unmistakableironic undertone, of “immense advantage [ungeheurer Vorteil]”35:“Proceeding from this idea, man can imagine that he stands inthe same relationship to Being as the Creator stood beforecreating the world, which, as we know, was created ex nihilo” (EP177).

This seductive possibility of nothingness as the “trulyfree domain of man” (EP 177) becomes even more intensified inHeidegger’s “great accomplishment” (EP 177) (and this is now aserious statement): his ingenious answer to the Kantianchallenge of the falling apart of essentia and existentia. Man,Heidegger states, is the being in which both essentia and existentiacoincide: “His essence is his existence [Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seinerExistenz].”36 Man has no substance, but consists in the fact thathe is. “We cannot inquire into the What of man the way we caninto the What of a thing. We can only inquire into the Who ofman” (EP 177). Arendt herself made extensive use of thisinsight in her own conceptions of action and plurality. Here,

notions of a public world and self that Arendt later identifies as the sinequa non of a world-preserving politics” (AH 232).35 Arendt, Was ist Existenzphilosophie?, p. 29. The first English version says“tremendous advantage” (WEP 354), which is the better translation of theoriginal.36 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927), p. 42;henceforth SZ, followed by page number; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrieand Edward Robinson (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1962), henceforth BT,followed by page number.

she reminds us, however, that we should be aware that man nowoccupies the place that in traditional metaphysics was reservedfor God: In God, essence and existence, as well as thinking andaction were one. Dasein becomes “the Lord of Being.”

The inherent problem of this theoretical constellationbecomes acute through the focus on the self. As we have seen inthe Kierkegaardien “passion to become subjective,” the self isthe only, and the only authentic, answer to the question of theWho of Dasein. In Heidegger, this now becomes a structuralmoment of existence: The primary concern of Dasein is beingitself. This unfolds within the following framework: Dasein isessentially characterized by the care-structure (Sorgestruktur)“which underlies all the daily care-taking in the world” (EP179) and which is essentially taking care about oneself, aboutwho one is and who one is going to be. The care-structure thusallows Dasein to live in projections or, more precisely: Itmakes Dasein exist as a project (Entwurf), and hence temporally.Most of the time, and in most cases, we are unaware of thisstructure. This means to lead an average existence, an“everybody’s life” that is determined by the anonymousauthority of how one goes to the grocery store, does one’s job,meets one’s friends, etc. Who we are and what our projects areis predetermined by “average” and “normal” expectancies inlife. Heidegger famously calls this structure “the they” or“the one [das Man]”—his cipher for “inauthenticity,” which isof enormous importance for the development (in critical andaffirmative ways) of Arendt’s own thought. Dasein’s tendency tobe completely absorbed in the they-structure is designated as“fallenness [Verfallenheit].” Although Heidegger emphasizes that hedoes not mean to evaluate or even morally judge this mode, butmerely to describe certain general structures of existence, itis difficult to elude the negative connotations of hisvocabulary concerning “fallenness,” including the word itself.Moreover, it becomes clear that Dasein cannot become itself throughthis manner of existing. The existential state of fallennessnot only comprises modes like “idle talk [Gerede]” and“curiosity [Neugier],” but eventually includes all forms ofpublic existence: “By publicness everything gets obscured [DasLicht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt alles]” (SZ 127; BT 165)

Arendt—like many other students of Heidegger37—attacksthis denigration. She dedicates her life’s work to show that itis precisely public existence that allows one to becomeoneself, namely in appearing before others and acting togetherwith them. (However, the other point she will defend maintainsthe Heideggerian distinction between authenticity andinauthenticity within the intersubjective sphere: that livingtogether with others can occur in different ways, “politically”or “socially,” authentically or inauthentically with regard toone’s self-appearance and self-disclosure.) In this early andfirst public critique of Heidegger, her analysis goes to thevery root of the structural problem of how the self isconstructed. This is partly set up by the development ofexistential philosophy; partly, it is owed to Heidegger’shubristic and, at the same time, consciously failing attempt toput man in the place of God—to make him the finite “Lord ofBeing.” Only in the rare moments of anxiety or hearing the callof conscience (which calls nothing else but: Become yourSelf!), Dasein is torn out of its fallenness and brought beforeits very own possibilities. Here, the general care-structurementioned above becomes the vehicle of the counter-enterpriseto average everydayness: In answering the “call of conscience,”Dasein can attain the existential mode of resoluteness(Entschlossenheit), which means to consciously take over its ownfinite existence with all its conditionalities andeventualities and to become itself. Arendt sees clearly thatthis means to renounce the truthfulness (or authenticity)proper to the realm of being with others, even if it was Heideggerhimself who introduced Mitsein as one of the fundamentalstructures of Dasein: “The world of Dasein is a with-world.Being-in is Being-with Others. Their Being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with.”38 And: “Even Dasein’s Being-alone isBeing-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in andfor a Being-with.”39 37 Cf. Martin Schnell’s study on the Phenomenology of the Political, in a shortchapter on “Arendt and Phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka” (Martin W. Schnell, “Arendt and Phenomenology: Husserl,Heidegger, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka,” chap. 6 of Phänomenologie desPolitischen [München: Fink, 1995], pp. 224–41): “Löwith, Levinas and Arendtagree in their reproach to Heidegger that he underdetermined the Social.They specify this critique in different ways and find equally differentsolutions. Löwith insists on an irreducible individuality within therelations of social roles. According to Levinas, Heidegger does not dojustice to ‘the ethical phenomena, as they show themselves’. . . . ForArendt, finally, Heidegger does not do justice to public and politicalphenomena” (Schnell, Phänomenologie des Politischen, p. 228; my translation).38 SZ 118; BT 155: “Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein istMitsein mit Anderen. Das innerweltliche Ansichsein dieser ist Mitdasein.”39 SZ 120; BT 156f: “Auch das Alleinsein des Daseins ist Mitsein in derWelt. Fehlen kann der Andere nur in einem und für ein Mitsein.”

But being alone and becoming a self are two differentthings. While being alone is just one mode in the world,becoming a self involves a conscious and constant facing ofone’s own finitude and death (as principium individuationis) and thusone’s ultimate separation from others and the world. It is anacted-out anticipation of this separation that serves as asource of inspiration to lead one’s very own life. “This idealof the Self follows as a consequence of Heidegger’s making ofman what God was in earlier ontology. A being of this highestorder is conceivable only as single and unique and knowing noequals. What Heidegger consequently designates as the ‘fall’includes all those modes of human existence in which man is notGod but lives together with his own kind in the world” (EP180).

We can see clearly how Arendt’s own categories evolve inthe intense examination of Heidegger’s setup (and against thebackground of her work on Augustine, in which she alreadycriticized that living a life sicut Deus means to turn away fromthe world and others; now, it is not God who man turns to, buthimself, as a surrogate for God): Although the terms“plurality” and “the political” do not yet appear by name, onecan grasp the structural framework and the set of problems fromwhich they emerge. Arendt recognizes that all those richconceptions that Heidegger disclosed and elucidated in hisphenomenological analyses—the world, being-with-others, etc.—became lost and buried again beneath the dynamics of becoming aself: “The essential character of the Self is its absoluteSelf-ness, its radical separation from all its fellows” (EP181).

And yet, Arendt claims, Heidegger “has refuted thispassionate desire, bred of hubris, to become a Self” (EP 180),because he himself had demonstrated that this is the only thingdefinitely unachievable for Dasein: “a Self, taken in itsabsolute isolation, is meaningless” (EP 180); if it is amongothers, however, it is in the state of fallenness and cannotbecome a self anymore. In my opinion, this aporia, orimpossibility of becoming a self, is Arendt’s view of things,rather than Heidegger’s—even taking into account his later“reversal” (Kehre), in which he transforms the “Lord of Being”into a “shepherd of Being [Hirt des Seins]” and “becoming a Self”into “hearing,” “receiving,” and “thanking.” Rather, withArendt’s comment, arguing that a self in “isolation” is“meaningless,” we touch upon one of our central themes in hercritique of phenomenology, namely the battle over where theconstitution of meaning actually takes place. Moreover, thequestion of reality is reinforced and reformulated with respectto this issue.

Although Arendt may not refer explicitly to the theme ofreality in her discussion of Heidegger, as she does in her

account of Husserl, she articulates the problem in terms ofworld-alienation, or, in German Unheimlichkeit (unhomeliness): “Inanxiety, which is fundamental fear of death, is reflected thenot-being-at-home in the world. Being-in (In-Sein) enters intothe existentiell mode of not-being-at-home” (EP 179). Thismeans that the existential shock of the naked “Thatness” ofbeings is not overcome, is not even confronted, but isexpressed as a shock of one’s own naked “thatness” (Dass-Sein)qua existence and finitude. As I stated above, this leads usout of the world (Arendt mentions Camus’ very consequentialconcept of suicide), and especially out of the world sharedwith others and its reality. Thus, Heidegger is not trying tocomfort us like Husserl had in his “naïve” and “homely,” albeithopeless reconstitution of the world, but is pushing theconsequences of alienation to the point of resolutely “runningforward” to the principium individuationis of death. Arendt, bycontrast, obviously searches for a possibility to “stay” in theworld, and wants this world to be a real world together withothers. Reality, for her, cannot be found in the self, no morethan meaning can. As her elaborations in the The Human Conditionshow, the character of reality can only be guaranteed inconfrontation and interaction with others.40

Arendt also finds a second mode of Heidegger’s leavingreality in the figure that still attested to the realness ofthe world in Kierkegaard: the unavoidable guilt of humanactions. In Heidegger, this concrete entanglement becomes amere structure41: “Man’s being is such that in constantlyfalling into the world it at the same time constantly hears the‘call of conscience from the ground of its being.’ To liveexistentially therefore means: ‘Willing-to-have-consciencecommits itself to this being-guilty.’”42 Arendt concludes whatfollows from this purely self-orientated and formal structure,which replaces being guilty before someone by doing something: “Ihave the opportunity to devote myself exclusively to being-a-Self and, in the mode of axiomatic guilt, to free myself onceand for all from the world that entangles me” (EP 181). This isthe end result of a deadly fixation on the self: loss of world(Weltlosigkeit).

Thus, according to Arendt, Heidegger’s philosophy hasrecognized—in contrast to Husserl’s—the challenges of theshattered modern condition of philosophy and of being-at-homein the world. But, as we could see, it provides an even moredevastating answer. Heidegger does not try to regain the world

40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1998), pp. 57f.41 “Not only can entities whose Being is care load themselves with facticalguilt, but they are guilty in the very basis of their Being; and this Being-guilty is what provides, above all, the ontological condition for Dasein’sability to come to owe anything in factically existing” (BT 332).42 EP 181, quoting from BT 353.

as a home, but seeks his desperate and impossible solution inthe self. In doing this, his ingenious accomplishments areovershadowed and corrupted: first, the accomplishment ofdisclosing the world and Being-in-the-world together withothers as the fundamental modes of Dasein in its everydayness;and, second, the accomplishment of disclosing the irreducible“Whoness” of Dasein in the coincidence of essence andexistence.

At this point, I would like to take a look at Arendt’sKantian argument, which she also directs against Heidegger. AsI outlined above, there is a difficulty in this critique,because it contradicts Arendt’s very own insight that conceptsand ideas fail to give us guidelines for the modernsituation.43 If she accuses Heidegger’s philosophy of the factthat “no idea of man guides the selection of the modes ofbeing” (EP 178), one indeed wants to ask how Heidegger couldseriously do this without being inconsistent. But let us firstexamine how Arendt builds up her argument:

Heidegger calls the being of man Dasein. This lets him avoidusing the term “man” and is by no means an example of arbitraryterminology. Its purpose is to resolve man into several modesof being that are phenomenologically demonstrable. Thatdispenses with all those human characteristics that Kantprovisionally defined as freedom, human dignity, and reason,that arise from human spontaneity, and that therefore are notphenomenologically demonstrable because as spontaneouscharacteristics they are more than mere functions of being andbecause in them man reaches beyond himself. (EP 178)

It seems that Arendt, in taking up the concept ofspontaneity from Kant, reaches a point where she must rejectphenomenology. This would not be a big problem if Arendt’soverall approach were, e.g., a more Kantian one. At this pointof her philosophical development, she could very well havetaken this direction, even if her philosophical roots and herformation had been primarily phenomenological. But for someonewho claims, or will claim, that “Being and Appearing coincide” (LM19) and who will fiercely reject Kantian ethics and all mannerof principle-knowledge for guiding action, “the (Kantian) ideaof man” must eventually amount to a mere postulate. In thecoherence of her work, it could not have a very strongsystematical standing.

Precisely on these grounds, I take this tension as a realand very fruitful tension for Arendt’s own thinking. Instead ofregarding her set of ideas as an incoherent patchwork, I wouldlike to argue that her Kantian concern serves as an intuition

43 This tension should not be solved by discerning an “idea” from an essentiaor a “concept,” since Arendt nowhere draws this distinction herself.

and as an inspiration for transforming phenomenology as sheknows it—and, eventually, for elaborating a phenomenologicalresponse to the problem she brought up with Kant. Both theconcepts of “natality” and “plurality” will be her answer toher own struggle with Heidegger’s insights and failures andwith Husserl’s doomed attempt at giving the world a human face.By taking her new departure from Jaspers, this amounts tothinking transcendence anew, as something that shows and, at thesame time, withdraws itself within the space of appearances(“man reaching beyond himself”): transcending as Being-in-the-world, transcending as acting together with others,transcending as the surplus of appearance before others—“provisionally defined” (!) as freedom, human dignity, andreason. (I will briefly elaborate on this point in the section,below, on Jaspers).

That Arendt misses this transcending quality as somethinghappening in the world together with others, and not only inbecoming a self toward death, can also be grasped by the factthat she (falsely) accuses Heidegger of a “functionalism notunlike Hobbes’ realism,” which views man as no more “than hismodes of Being or functions in the world” (EP 178). Both ofthese functionalisms, Arendt says, end up stating that “manwould function even better in a preordained world because hewould then be ‘freed’ of all spontaneity” (EP 178). Like hercrude explanation that Being-in-the-world is “quite simplysurvival in the world” (EP 179), this is certainly not areading of Heidegger’s Being and Time anymore—she knew that texttoo well to seriously interpret it this way. Obviously, ittouches upon a different agenda: an explanation of Heidegger’sengagement with National Socialism. This becomes clear when shementions that “[L]ater, and after the fact, as it were,Heidegger has drawn on mythologizing and muddled concepts like‘folk’ [Volk] and ‘earth’ in an effort to supply his isolatedSelves with a shared, common ground to stand on” (EP 181). Herphilosophical point is that the world cannot be held together,it cannot unfold as an “in-between,” if there are only isolatedselves that resolutely seek their self-ness. Her ethical pointis that a deserted world can very quickly become a dark placewhere spontaneity is abolished44 in favor of “functioning.”

44 This echoes Arendt’s description of the concentration camps as deliveredin Origins of Totalitarianism: “Total domination, which strives to organize theinfinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all ofhumanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and everyperson can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so thateach of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for anyother. . . . The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degradehuman beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, underscientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expressionof human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a merething” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt Brace

Arendt’s critique of the radical immanence and finitude ofHeidegger’s conception in Being and Time thus leads to a searchfor transcendence (which is similar to Levinas, albeit to avery different end)45 that ruptures any form of functionalismand opens up the world as a place for living together. WhatArendt expresses in partly political and partly Kantianlanguage (and which does not yet live up to her own demandedstandards of post-metaphysical thinking) are the direct ethicalconsequences of a self that intends to free itself “once andfor all from the world that entangles me” (EP 181):

What emerges from this absolute isolation is a concept of theSelf as the total opposite of man. If since Kant the essence ofman consisted in every single human being representing all ofhumanity and if since the French Revolution and the declarationof the rights of man it became integral to the concept of manthat all of humanity could be debased or exalted in everyindividual, then the concept of Self is a concept that leavesthe individual existing independent of humanity andrepresentative of no one but himself—of nothing but his ownnothingness. If Kant’s categorical imperative insisted thatevery human act had to bear responsibility for all of humanity,then the experience of guilty nothingness insists on preciselythe opposite: the destruction of the presence of all humanityin every individual [—die Anwesenheit der Menschheit in jedem Menschen zuvernichten46—]: The Self in the form of conscience has taken theplace of humanity, and being-a-Self has taken the place ofbeing human. (EP 181—trans. mod.)

Arendt’s own great challenge will be to show how humanitycan be present in the individual without making use of aKantian concept of reason and a Kantian metaphysics of twoworlds. She must make sure that, if she demands a “concept ofman” that comprises the fact “that he inhabits the earthtogether with others of his kind” (ibid.), it is not just aconcept, but something that can be acted out in the space of

Jovanovich, 1973], p. 438).45 Levinas’ conception of transcendence is the ethical relation to alterity,which amounts to a relation with the “infinite” and demands an ever-growingresponsibility on the side of the subject (see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality andInfinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,1969]). For Arendt, this version of transcendence would appear too“worldless.” Instead, she develops a world-orientated mode of transcendencethat discloses itself in common action. I have tried to elaborate thesedivergences more closely in a different paper (see Loidolt, “Alterityand/or Plurality? Two Pre-normative Paradigms for Ethics and Politics inLevinas and Arendt,” Ethics—Society—Politics: Politics. Proceedings of the 35th InternationalWittgenstein Symposium 2012. ed. Hajo Greif and Martin G. Weiss Berlin 2013: deGruyter 2013, pp. 241-251).46 Arendt, Was ist Existenzphilosophie?, p. 38.

appearances: in the one world we share together with others.Her diagnosis in “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” is that thesetting Heidegger has put up is right to a great extent, but ata certain point goes wrong. Heidegger got rid of a classicalconception of subjectivity, but became trapped in the selfinstead. For Arendt, this does not mean she must completelyturn her back on the insights of existential philosophy or onHeidegger’s outline, but that she must return to the pointwhere she believes Heidegger failed: in the analysis of Mitseinas Being-in-the-world and in its inherent possibilities fordeveloping a very different conception of being a “Self.”47

One could counter that Heidegger himself totally reversedhis conception of the self, as I mentioned above: With the“reversal,” Heidegger develops a more passive and predominantlyresponsive conception of Dasein and even changes histerminology into “the mortals”—a plural that Arendt instantlynotices.48 His central theme becomes the event (das Ereignis). Inbeing called by and into this “event of Being” and inresponding to it, a very new form of “Self” is conceptualizedthat is primarily understood along the lines of its belongingto Sein: “[T]he human being occurs essentially in such a waythat he is the ‘there’ [das ‘Da’], that is, the clearing ofbeing.”49 In the famous “Letter on Humanism” from 1946,Heidegger’s first publication after the war (and not yetaccessible to Arendt when she wrote “What Is ExistenzPhilosophy?”), he directly answers to Jean Beaufret andindirectly addresses Sartre’s efforts to make “Existentialism”a “Humanism.” Heidegger thus presents his new ideas preciselywithin the humanistic context that was not only an issue forArendt and Sartre at that time, but also for Merleau-Ponty andLevinas.50 “Humanism” as a special historical concept,Heidegger says, is to be rejected because, in its metaphysical

47 More recently, Jean-Luc Nancy has also begun to think Heideggerianontology anew, along the lines of his notion of Mitsein instead of Selbstsein—which also bears consequences for a possible political philosophy (seeJean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000]).48 Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European PhilosophicalThought” (pp. 428-447), in Essays in Understanding, p. 443. 49 “[D]er Mensch west so, daß er das ‘Da’, das heißt die Lichtung des Seins,ist” (Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’ [1946],” in Wegmarken[Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1996], p. 325; henceforth BH, followed bypage number; “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks,ed. William McNeill [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p. 248;henceforth LH, followed by page number). 50 Cf. especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. JohnO’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). For Levinas, the issue of humanism isdecisive for his whole philosophy. The publication Humanism of the Othertestifies to this by its title (Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans.Nidra Poller [Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2003]).

bias, it still reduces man to a being among beings and thusunderestimates the dignity and humanitas of man. Instead, thishumanitas is to be experienced completely anew in light of theontological difference. Man becomes the guardian of truth(aletheia: Unverborgenheit) disclosed by Being: “The human being israther ‘thrown’ by being itself into the truth of being, sothat ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth ofbeing, in order that beings might appear in the light of beingas the beings they are.”51

As we know from her assessment of the later Heidegger inLife of the Mind, Arendt was not satisfied with this development,either (cf. LM 172–94). To be sure, she agreed with Heidegger’srejection of metaphysical categories and with the idea that manwas irreducible to a being among beings. But as she alreadycriticized in “What is Existenz Philosophy?,” Heidegger’sapproach, ultimately, will always remain a “reformulation ofthe Aristotelian bios theoretikos, of the contemplative life as thehighest possibility man can attain” (EP 178). In Being and Time,it was the comprehension of one’s own existence thatconstituted the philosophical act itself, as well asconstituted an outstanding existential mode of Dasein (cf. EP178). In his late work, Heidegger even reinforces this“contemplative” primacy by conceiving of the “thinking of Being[Seinsdenken]” as prior to all differentiations between acting andthinking (LH 272). The “inconspicuous [unscheinbar] deed ofthinking” (LH 274) thus takes place before any possibledifferentiation between the theoretical and the practical. Itis solely dedicated to disclose Being by “bring[ing] it tolanguage [zur Sprache bringen]” (LH 274f.; BH 362).

As is well known, Arendt takes a very different stance onthe nature of thinking and acting. Most of all, she believesthat acting needs an elaboration according to its very owncategories. Thus, the “event,” as well as the figures ofwithdrawal and appeal-and-response, will not be her mainguiding concepts for rethinking the political (this equallycounts for the presence of “humanity in the individual”). Thisis also what separates Arendt from a later generation of Frenchand Italian political philosophers, such as Derrida, Nancy,Badiou, and Agamben, who draw explicitly on Heidegger’s latephilosophy for their own reconceptions of the political.Although there are also “postmodern” elements that can berecognized in her work,52 Arendt goes her very own way. 51 “Der Mensch ist vielmehr vom Sein selbst in die Wahrheit des Seins‘geworfen’, daß er, dergestalt ek-sistierend, die Wahrheit des Seins hüte,damit im Lichte des Seins das Seiende als das Seiende, das es ist,erscheine” (BH 330; LH 252).52 The thesis of major post-metaphysical and postmodern elements in Arendthas been thoroughly argued by Villa. For the German-speaking world cf.Wolfgang Heuer, “Gegenwart im Nirgendwo: Hannah Arendts Weg in diePostmoderne,” Merkur 51:7 (1997), pp. 596–607.

2.5 Jaspers and All That Is Good about Existenz Philosophy:Arendt’s Breakthrough

In the last and culminating chapter of the essay, Arendtprovides us with a “happy end,” or rather, a “new beginning” ofexistential philosophy, which brings together and fulfills allthe questions and issues she has raised in the course of theessay. In reading this end as her “breakthrough,” we will haveto examine closely which elements of Jaspers’ philosophy sheemphasizes and which ones she passes over. Again, the Kantianquestion regarding the “idea of man” and its place in Arendt’sconception will be in the center of our attention, since it isclearly Jaspers who inspired Arendt with respect to thisargument.

For Arendt, Jaspers’ initial and initializing move is thathe “breaks with traditional philosophy” (EP 182). It is wellknown how important this step is for Arendt herself.Certainly, this break is also present in Heidegger, who“destructs” traditional philosophy qua metaphysics, or, in hislater thought, “overcomes [verwinden]” it in the name of“thinking” (as “thinking of being [Seinsandenken]”). But, whileHeidegger carries out his destruction alongside the lines ofthe “ontological difference,” and thereby remains very much inthe domain of thought, Jaspers’ break with philosophy in hisPsychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) is different: In portrayingand relativizing “all philosophical systems as mythologizingstructures to which man flees seeking protection from the realquestions of existence” (EP 182), Jaspers abandons traditionalphilosophy from without—and not from within, as Heidegger does.It is rather from a psychiatrist’s perspective— Jaspers’original profession—and not through philosophy’s immanentvalidity claims, or, as in Heidegger, philosophy’s “unthoughtthoughts,” that “coherent theories of the Whole”53 arecriticized.

This deliberate perspective from outside is, of course,adopted only to find that the real philosophical issues emergewhen the traditional (and academic) frame of philosophy is leftbehind. Arendt writes: “He [Jaspers] attempts to transformphilosophy into philosophizing and to find ways by whichphilosophical ‘results’ can be communicated in such a way thatthey lose their character as results” (EP 182–3). Leavingphilosophy, its systems, and its constructs of ideas seems tobe the indispensable break necessary for rediscovering itsoriginal impulse, its thaumazein, and for letting it become an“enactment” or “actualization” (Vollzug) embedded in real life.This definitive move into “real life,” which is tantamount toentering the realm of communication, action and doxa, is also53 Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, quoted in EP 182

what separates Jaspers’ (and Arendt’s) break-up from Husserl’sand even from Heidegger’s: Husserl’s “Back to the thingsthemselves!” indeed rejects all philosophical theories, but itis guided by the idea of “absolute justification” from the verybeginning, a theoretical ideal inherited from Descartes andaimed at building up a philosophy as “rigorous science.” WhenArendt renders Jaspers’ critique that “coherent theories of theWhole” “confer a false peace of mind that is inherentlyunphilosophical” (EP 182), we can be sure that this is whereshe became inspired to offer her own criticism of Husserl inthis text.

Yet, to shift the focus from the object to the act (orenactment/actualization), from philosophy to philosophizing, lies—indeed originally—at the heart of the phenomenological method.It is true that Husserl makes another “science” (Wissenschaft)out of this dimension of acts/actualizations by systematicallyanalyzing its diverse structures and its functions in world-constitution. This is how and why, according to Heidegger,Jaspers, and Arendt, Husserl de-radicalizes his own move andrenders his phenomenology immune to the experiencing of limitcases, or “border situations” (Jaspers). In contrast, Heideggerexplicitly situates the experience of the ontologicaldifference (and thus, of his whole philosophy) in bordersituations such as anxiety, death, or the call of conscience.Yet, he again speaks of structures of existence, which Jaspersdoes not do. This bestows Heidegger’s existential features witha certain transcendental inevitability and makes his analysis asort of transcendental/existential “knowledge.” Jaspers wantsto avoid this, in order to save the intrinsic unpredictabilityand freedom of a concrete actualization of existence. Moreover,Heidegger does not step out into the open dialogue, but ratherinto thinking as an activity that gains increasingly meditativeand mystic traits in his late philosophy. Arendt, in thisrespect, definitively sides with Jaspers and even radicalizeshis reverse move.

In the course of the essay, Arendt compares Jaspers toSocrates, who “in communication . . . moves, as a matter ofprinciple, among his equals, to whom he can appeal and who canin turn appeal to him” (EP 183). Philosophizing, as anenactment or performance (Vollzug), is precisely this “‘perpetualappeal’” (EP 182) that seeks truth, not in the secluded epistemeof the philosopher but in the event of communication withothers, where every episteme becomes a doxa. This is a space thatindeed radically clashes with the philosopher’s (also always“radical”) intent to find an absolute grounding (Husserl) or tohear and bring to language the appeal of Sein (Heidegger).Against the Platonic bias that the sphere of doxa on the agorais just an inferior pre-stage from which the philosopher climbsto the heights of episteme, Jaspers, and subsequently, Arendt,try to emphasize the real challenge this sphere represents: Forit is effectively the space of appearance itself that alters

all truths that one has cognized in radical self-reflection(meditation). The moment they appear in the space of plurality,they are changed into mere opinions that anyone could—and thatmost likely will—contradict.

Although discussion and “public reason” (Kant) are, in acertain sense, also the philosopher’s daily business, this doesnot imply that the philosopher has fully experienced andrecognized the radical difference of this space of appearancewith respect to the space of the possible appearance of truth.Because the philosopher naturally enters into discussion withthe aim to gain better insight on the way to truth andtherefore only conceives it as a space of “discursive reason.”This makes her remain blind to the relativizing power of thespace of appearance, that converts “appearing truths” intoplural doxai, simply because they appear before many in manyperspectives. Really recognizing the fundamental difference ofthis public space of appearance, recognizing it for the waythat it makes things, truths, etc. appear—i.e., in its fulldignity and for the challenge it presents—is the thaumazein thatmotivated Arendt’s whole work. In following Jaspers in herearly development, the stakes are clear for existentialphilosophy. Later, Arendt will also develop a phenomenology ofthe public space that carefully explores its features withoutgiving up on the initiated existential “liberation” fromacademic philosophy.

For Jaspers, the purpose of communal philosophizing is notto produce results, but to “illuminate existence.” Existenz inJaspers’ terminology indicates—in contrast to Heidegger’sDasein—already an authentic form of self-being. Thornhillexplains this as “a possible way of being, in which particularsubjective life gains an awareness of itself in a manner whichcannot be defined in objective categories”54; or, as Sandra andLewis Hinchman put it: Existenz is “the disclosure of a uniqueself and the power of making new beginnings.”55 Existenz is thusnot “man’s being as such and as a given” (EP 183), but isalready a true and always a possible mode of being.

In contrast to these scholarly explanations, which areindeed accurate, we can sense directly where Arendt sets heremphasis when she describes Existenz: “The word ‘existence’ heremeans that man achieves reality only to the extent that he actsout his own freedom rooted in spontaneity and ‘connects throughcommunication with the freedom of others’” (EP 183). The keyissues of “reality,” “freedom,” and “communication with others”are immediately put back into play. Before we concentrate on54 Chris Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002),p. 16; henceforth PM, followed by page number55 Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, “Existentialism Politicised:Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers,” in Arendt and Philosophy, vol. 4 of Hannah Arendt:Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Garrath Williams (London: Routledge,1996), p. 467.

this, however, let us put into focus one last time Arendt’spositioning in siding with and then departing from Jaspers: Shefollows “Socrates” into the space of communication andappearances, the agora, but not merely to “illuminateexistence”; at the same time she is aware that this spacebelongs to the larger realm that Heidegger never fathomed inhis elucidations of Mitsein and Miteinandersein.56 The fact thatthis realm—which, for the first time, seems to be able toguarantee reality—needs closer elaboration will become Arendt’sown philosophical task. This will eventually situate her at acritical distance from Jaspers: Only a few years after thisessay, she will criticize Jaspers for concerning himself tooexclusively with the I-Thou-relationship.57 For this reason,Arendt claims, he was unable to reach the realm of trueplurality.58

However, the fundamentally positive issue that Arendtunderlines in Jaspers—as opposed to Heidegger—is Jaspers’retrieval of freedom within the terms of existentialphilosophy: “For Jaspers, existence is not a form of Being buta form of human freedom, the form in which ‘man as potentialspontaneity rejects the conception of himself as mere result’”(EP 183). This rejection also includes Heidegger’s existentialia,the ontological structures of existence, since for Jaspers noneof these “conceptions” can be made absolute. Man is always asurplus with regard to these structures, a surplus that canultimately never be captured by any thought whatsoever. Soeventually, it is a version of the Kantian image of the failure ofthought (qua “speculative reason”) that warrants freedom and

56 Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark Michalski,vol. 18 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), §9; BasicConcepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), §9.57 Villa also notes: “Arendt blasts the book [Being and Time—S.L.] in the 1947essay ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’ in which she argues that theHeideggerian ‘Self’ (Selbst) is the latest and most grossly inflatedincarnation of romantic subjectivity. Yet eight years later, in the lecture‘Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophy,’ she abandons theshrill tone for a more balanced appraisal. Significantly, Arendt downplaysthe importance of the ‘Self’ in Heidegger, emphasizing instead his conceptsof historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) and world (Welt). The latter concept she seesas standing ‘at the center of his philosophy.’ And while she had previouslypraised her teacher Karl Jaspers’s focus on communication at the expense ofHeidegger’s ‘existential solipsism,’ she now points out the fatalshortcomings of Jaspers’ dialogical model (the ‘I/Thou’ relation, she says,can never be extended to the ‘plural We’ of politics—a criticism she willrepeat in LM). Arendt hints that a potentially more fruitful starting pointfor the phenomenological investigation of the political realm is to befound in Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’” (AH 120). 58 This critique, by the way, remains constant up until The Life of the Mind. SeeLM 200.

guarantees reality: Since, in border situations, I experiencethat which “as a pure object of thought or pure possibility canno longer be grasped” (EP 184), I experience reality; because, incommunication, I experience that the enactment/actualization isalways more than the “result,” I am free:

This gives new meaning to the inquiry into the That of reality,which cannot be resolved into thought without losing itscharacter as reality. The That of given Being—whether as thereality of the world or as the unpredictability of our fellowhuman beings or as the fact that I have not created myself—becomes the backdrop from which human freedom declares itselfdistinct, becomes, as it were, the stuff from which it takesfire. That I cannot resolve reality into thought becomes thetriumph of my potential freedom. (EP 183f.)

The shaping of a certain notion of “experience” is animportant point we must notice here: It is characterized mainlyby its transcending quality, which occurs precisely in themoment that conceptual forces fail: “Experience” thereforemeans that we are pushed to the “border of reality” (EP 184),where no “knowledge” in the classical sense is possible. Thisconcept of experience is not only very closely related to theconcept of aesthetic experience, which renounces the primacy of theconceptual; it is also in the sights of contemporaryphenomenologists such as Marion, Richir, Waldenfels, andTengelyi, who explicitly refer to a “surplus” of experiencethat exceeds all categories and even reverses the intentionalrelation. Consequently, these theorists speak of an “event ofmeaning,”59 rather than of the “constitution of meaning.”

For Jaspers, thinking and philosophizing becomepreparatory modes for “encountering the reality of both myselfand the world” (EP 184). Jaspers calls this activity“transcending,” and he elaborates it systematically as a“sequential naming” of such self-transcending movements ofthought (EP 184). “Transcending” means to think “our way to theborders of the thinkable” (EP 184) and has the function of“leading man to certain experiences in which thinkingitself . . . fails” (EP 184). This failure, which is nowexplicitly aimed for, is, as we explained above, the liberatingturning point that rips up a new space of radical“unconceptual” experience, freedom, and action—a space of pureenactment (Vollzug) or praxis which is the Aristotelian categoryassociated with it. Arendt emphatically focuses on this point:

[P]hilosophizing enters a state of suspension in which itappeals to my freedom and, in invoking transcendence, createsan arena of unlimited action. This “action” that arises from

59 Sinnereignis; see Hans-Dieter Gondek, Tobias Nikolaus Klass, and LaszloTengelyi, eds. Phänomenologie der Sinnereignisse (München: Fink, 2011).

the “border situations” comes into the world throughcommunication with others who as my fellows and through anappeal to the powers of reason common to us all guarantee ussomething universal. Through action, philosophizing creates thefreedom of man in the world and thus becomes “the seed, howeversmall, of a world’s creation.” (See EP 184)

Many different ideas are concentrated within this shortpassage, which again accounts for Arendt’s Kantianism in thespace of pure enactment. Although she presents the contents ofJaspers’ philosophy, it is evident that this outline alsocomprises the fundamental coordinates for the development ofher own thought. This development includes, as the first step,the creation of an “arena,” a distinguished space, out of aliberation from “theoria” and toward the “border of reality.”Thus, there is a first-order actualization in philosophizing,through communication with others and through an appeal to our“common reason,” which determines the conditions of man’sfreedom and “provide[s] the basis for his actions” (EP 186).The second-order action, however, is the decisive enactment,taking place in this newly created arena, that realizes humanfreedom. In her later philosophy, Arendt replaces “commonreason” with “common sense,” which guarantees a shared realityand thus provides the condition for possible action; thisbelongs to her overall strategy of de-transcendentalizingconcepts by transforming them into either conditions of appearancesor appearances in a worldly context.

What might also surprise us in this passage is Arendt’sobviously affirmative quotation of Jaspers with respect to“creating a world”—something that she fiercely repudiatedbefore in her discussion of Husserl. The reason for this liesin the very different points of departure and therefore in thevery different meanings of “creation”: While in Husserl it is“thought,” or theoretical activity, that results in the re-establishment of a world-relation that has actually been lost,in Jaspers it is philosophizing as “deed” and through actionthat only plants the “seed” of a world yet to come. Arendtmakes clear that, for Jaspers, “[i]t is the task of philosophyto free man ‘from the illusory world of what is only thinkable’and to let him ‘find his way home to reality’” (see EP 185).Therefore, she opposes Husserl’s arrogantly modest“(re-)creation of the world” and Heidegger’s desperate hubristo become the “Lord of Being” to Jaspers, who stands for adifferent conception of man: For Jaspers, man, as “‘master ofhis thoughts,’ is more than any of these movements of thought”(EP 184).

To be a “master of one’s own thoughts” means that one canengage in the activity of thinking as a preparation for realityand, therefore, as a disclosure of the surplus of all my thoughts: to be abeing who enacts her existence, in a world, together withothers. Since it is only through the failure of thinking that

we experience ourselves as an irreducible surplus, our“mastery” consists in failing toward transcendence—and thus, towardthe opening up to a space of real action and, through it, areal encounter with the world, with others, and with ourselves.In this context, Arendt also reminds us, that this sort of“failing” has nothing to do with Heidegger’s “fallenness,”which is presented as an inevitable structure and not as apossibility of true Existenz. Moreover, “fallenness” necessarilyobscures and occludes the way to Eigentlichkeit, while “failing” is“the condition that makes existence possible” (EP 185) and is adisclosing activity. It is crucial to see that Jaspers andArendt are at pains to keep this open space a truly open one byneither letting the activity of disclosure (failing) nor ofsustaining (action) become knowledge about our structures ofexistence. By this, they intend to avoid Heidegger’s“designating” of existence “as a structurally inevitablephenomenon” (EP 185) that—on a structural level—leaves no spaceopen for the unexpected and incalculable and, therefore, nospace for man’s freedom. (Again, one could refer to Heidegger’slate philosophy, which exactly tries to think the “event”; andagain, the reservation against it would be that it is notsituated in the realm of “acting in concert.”) To the contrary,it “robs man of his freedom, which can only be maintained ifman does not know what Being really is” (EP 185).

We can now also see that the “concept” of man that Arendtcalled for in her discussion of Heidegger is not a concept inthe classical sense. It reminds us of it only via negativa, insaying that man is always more than his thoughts. Rather, this‘concept’ derives from an experience of surplus that cannotbe/become knowledge, but is rather a form of bearing testimonythat “Being is transcendence” (EP 185). Finally, it also bearstestimony to the irreducible experience that existence is“never isolated” (EP 186):

It exists only in communication and in awareness of others’existence. Our fellow-men are not (as in Heidegger) an elementof existence that is structurally necessary but at the sametime an impediment to the Being of Self. Just the contrary:Existence can develop only in the shared life of human beingsinhabiting a given world common to them all [—‘Existence candevelop only in the togetherness of men in the common givenworld’ (WEP 360)—]. In the concept of communication lies aconcept of humanity new in its approach though not yet fullydeveloped that postulates communication as the premise for theexistence of man [—there lies . . . a new concept of humanityas the condition for man’s Existenz’ (WEP 360)—]. (EP 186)

In this quote, Arendt hints at the decisive step of how a newconcept of humanity is to be achieved within the theoreticalframework of Existenz philosophy: by the unreachable andirreducible surplus of my own Being and the Being of others. In

her late philosophy, Arendt will spell out this transcendentBeing as a Being in the space of appearances, of(uncontrollable, anarchic) self-appearance before others and inthe world.

In her first English version of “What Is ExistenzPhilosophy?” of 1946, Arendt speaks of a “concept of humanity”as the “condition” (WEP) for the true/authentic existence(Existenz) of man. How can this “concept of humanity” be acondition? Existenz, in Jaspers’ sense, can only be achieved inthe openness of communication with others (as opposed to a“knowledge” with which I return to the self). Thus, humanity is“present” in the experience of a surplus in communication even if,or, precisely because, this surplus amounts theoretically to anabsence, a non-knowledge.60 Only in leaving thought and thedomain of the self—or rather, only in being pushed out of it bymy radical coming up short against the “That” of bordersituations—can I experience the “weight of reality” (EP 185),which instantly reveals itself as a plural encounter with others. The “presence ofhumanity” is thus inherent in my experience of reality as anundeniable fact (in the German version, Arendt, quotingJaspers, speaks of the “Wucht”61 of reality, which can betranslated as the “impact” or “vehemence” of reality).

In this context, we can also take a brief look at howArendt holds up the existential categories of in/authenticity,spelled out in a Jasperian version. It seems that the most“inauthentic” way of existence is not in the mode of falleneverydayness, but in that of the philosophical thinker.62 Theonly authentic possibility for the thinker is to confront theborders of his thought, to step out into the agora and engagein communication with others. Arendt’s existential philosophywants the realm of thought to be “free from this specter ofBeing and . . . knowing that specter” (EP 186). The Kantianlimitation of reason thus gets radicalized in the sense thateven the transcendental project is given up as a hubristiccomfort in structural knowledge about existence. Consequently,the Heideggerian question of Being is transformed into an actualization

60 This also reminds us of Levinas’ approach, which describes the ethicalencounter with the Other as an experience where knowledge fails. Knowledgeis powerless in this situation, precisely because it structurally returnsto the self and does not respond to the Other. Responding or beingresponsible is, however, the only way to sustain this encounter withtranscendence instead if transforming it into an “immanent” knowledge (seeLevinas, Totality and Infinity).61 Arendt Was ist Existenzphilosophie?, p. 45.62 In this essay there is not yet an indication of Arendt’s later criticalmodel case of fallenness in Mitsein: “the social” as opposed to “thepolitical.” This could also be the case because Arendt deals withexplicitly philosophical problems in this text and thus asks for thepossibility of authentic existential philosophizing rather than forauthentic Mitsein in a broader sense.

of plural existence. For Arendt, this is the only way to cope withthe challenges of modernity: The single honest answer to therupture between thought and Being and, consequently, to world-alienation, is to acknowledge this loss and to truly limit thepossibilities of thinking. Only in common action—a totallydifferent medium—can men again find and build a new home in theworld: “[W]e can accept the ‘fragmentation of Being’[Jaspers] . . . , and we can accommodate the modern sense ofalienation in the world and the modern desire to create, in aworld that is no longer a home to us, a human world that couldbecome our home” (EP 186).

Although it is not mentioned explicitly, it is evidentthat these sentences directly connect to the experience oftotalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. WhenArendt speaks of a “human world that could become our home,”she links her political and historical present directly to herdiagnosis of the philosophical situation. This diagnosis hasbrought to light that the authentic possibilities of creating anew human home lie in open communication and common action andnot in another theoretical system of new (ethical) principles.Although the meaning of “human” in her quote certainly has animplicit normative aspect, these “norms” are not to bearticulated in principle-knowledge (or principle-guidedaction), but rather are to be answered for in testifying forthe irreducibility and reality of plurality. The essay’s lastsentence is Arendt’s agenda: “With this understanding,existential philosophy has emerged from its period ofpreoccupation with Self-ness” (EP 187).

In conclusion, I would like to examine the differencesbetween Arendt and Jaspers. In “What Is Existenz Philosophy?,”they become visible only indirectly and only as Arendt’s pointsof emphasis and non-emphasis. As mentioned above, Arendtportrays Jaspers’ philosophy as the most fruitful developmentin existential philosophy that manages to unite the importantissues of reality, freedom, meaning, a new humanism, and a wayto create a new home in an alienated world by means ofcommunication and action. These keywords must be understood asthe central topics that Arendt appreciates in Jaspers and thatshe will focus on in her further work. However, it must also benoticed that she does not make use of Jaspers’ much broader andmore elaborated approach of the “all encompassing [das All-Umgreifende],” or his three different existential modalities ofhuman life, which he fleshes out in his three-volumePhilosophy.63

Beyond a doubt, Arendt adopts Jaspers’ style ofphilosophizing (much more than Heidegger’s), letting no element

63 Karl Jaspers, Philosophical World Orientation (volume I), The Illumination of Existence(volume II), and Metaphysics (volume III). Jaspers, Karl (1932): Philosophie.Berlin: Springer. Translated as, Philosophy, trans. E. B. Ashton, Chicago:Chicago University Press, 1969–1971.

of thought become absolute and viewing her own philosophicaltheses, not as “results,” but as inputs for furthercommunication and discussion. Similarly, one can find traces ofJaspers’ philosophy in Arendt’s phenomenology of activities.Yet, in her overall approach to the groundlessness of themodern situation and in her irrevocable break with the(metaphysical) tradition, she is more radical than Jaspers and,thus, again more akin to Heidegger. This becomes apparent, forexample, in Arendt’s unwillingness to accept any metaphysicalprinciples or foundations, even if they are articulated in an“existential” language and framework, as they are in Jaspers(e.g., Thornhill points to a refiguring of the Kantian dualismin Jaspers “as a theory of personal experience and reflexivedeferral” [PM 109]).

Jaspers’ Kantian orientation is, on the one hand, a pointthat Arendt strongly supports, for certain reasons pointed outabove; on the other hand, she does not buy into Jaspers’foundation of the political by “ideas of transcendence.”Thornhill notes: “Unlike Arendt, who follows Heidegger’sAristotelian deconstruction of the metaphysical basis of humanpolitics, Jaspers always takes a Kantian line in debate onpolitical ethics, and he conceives of politics as an orderwhich is regulated by prior ethical/metaphysical foundations”(PM 182). Politics, at best, could be an articulation of these.It is clear, that Arendt pursues a different agenda andtherefore also arrives at a “different Kant,” namely the Kantof the Third Critique.

But could Arendt, after all that has been said, agree withThornhills subsequent conclusion that the debates betweenJaspers and Heidegger illuminate “the heart of the modernopposition between neo-Kantian and neo-Aristotelian philosophy”(PM 93) in that “Heidegger . . . opts for the Aristotelianadvocacy of praxis, whereas Jaspers favors the ultimatePlatonist primacy of theory” (PM 110)? How can we make sense ofthis assessment with respect to Arendt’s essay? The answer isthat Arendt has the attitude of the philosopher and his philosophizing inmind, and not the theoretical contents of his philosophy, whenshe calls Heidegger an exponent of the bios theoretikos and Jaspersa follower of Socrates. While it is true that Heidegger’sinterpretations of Aristotle, especially his reading of thedifference between poiesis and praxis, is of crucial importancefor Arendt, this does not mean that Heidegger himself hasfathomed the dimensions of praxis beyond his account of“everydayness” (Dana Villa, in contrast to Thornhill, rightlyspeaks of an “oblivion of praxis” in Heidegger [AH 211–40]).And while it might also be true that Jaspers, lastly, builds on“a positive appropriation of transcendental reason” (PM 110),his philosophical step forward into open communication probablysituates him at a closer practical relation to praxis thanHeidegger.

In her interview with Günther Gaus from 1964, Arendt usesthe German expression that Jaspers “has brought her to reason”:“[W]enn es irgendeinem Menschen gelungen ist, mich zur Vernunft zu bringen,dann ist es ihm gelungen.”64 The English version translates: “[I]fanyone succeeded in instilling some sense in me, it was he” (EP22). Unfortunately, the double entendre of Arendt’s comment,which implicitly intertwines the personal with the newphilosophical challenge, gets lost in translation. Shortlybefore that passage, however, she explains even more clearly:

[W]here Jaspers comes forward and speaks, all becomes luminous.He has an unreservedness, a trust, an unconditionality ofspeech that I have never known in anyone else. . . . Besides,he has a conception of freedom linked to reason which wascompletely foreign to me when I came to Heidelberg. I knewnothing about it, although I had read Kant. I saw this reasonin action, so to speak.65

Arendt is certainly not a philosopher of reason, and it is alsolikely that she didn’t thoroughly accept Jaspers’ enfoldedsystem of experienced transcendence. But her experience of“reason in action” certainly had an impact on her thinking andtransformed the initial existential approach that she acquiredas a student of Heidegger. If it is not “reason incommunication” in the sense of Habermas and Apel, it iscertainly a version of common action and “unconditional” speechthat she holds up as the sources of an ethics of togetherness.For it is Jaspers who manages to answer to the four Kantianchallenges I pointed out at the beginning of this paper—and heis able to do it precisely with a Kantian figure of thought,namely the limitation of knowledge: By means of it (1) heovercomes the breach of Being and thought with his concept of“experience,” positively transcending thought in bordersituations; (2) he answers to the question of man’s autonomywith the experience of “surplus”; (3) he dissloves man’sdividedness in causality and freedom into the figure of“possible Existenz”; and, finally (4) he surmounts the primacy ofthe bios theoretikos through the actualization of existence withothers in communication. All these are issues on which Arendtwill phenomenologically elaborate.

64 (Arendt 1996, 71 f.) German transcription of the interview with GünterGaus in the volume Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, München: Piper1996, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus (Oktober 1964), pp. 46-72.65 Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with GünterGaus, in Essays in Understanding, p. 22.