Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking Through the Breach in Tradition

Antonia Grunenberg Arendt, Heidegger, Jaspers: Thinking Through the Breach in Tradition i FOR MUCH OF THE I 92OS AND THE EARLY 1930S, HA NNAH ARENDT, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers shared a common world of thought and experience. In particular, ►they shared a sense of the thoroughgoing crisis within modernity; ►they radically questioned the subject-centered inversion of the rela­ tionship of world and hum an being since Descartes; ►they viewed modem society, mass democracy, and liberalism as part of a breach in tradition in modernity; ►they shared an antipathy toward neo-Kantianism and all other transcendental philosophy, as well as an attendant awareness of the irretrievable loss of all metaphysical certitudes. However, they reacted differently when confronted with the politi­ cal reality of their time. At the end of Weimar republic, only Arendt comprehended the ever-growing violent anti-Semitism as ushering in a new era, whereas KarlJaspers criticized anti-Semitism in terms ofliberal reason. At that time Heidegger believed anti-Semitism was a necessary evil in order to forge the national renewal of Germany. Last, Arendt, Heidegger, and Jaspers held divergent views concerning the nature of German-ness. Whereas Heidegger and Jaspers felt a shared obligation social research Vol 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1003 to renew German universities in the name of a national resurrection, young Arendt felt her being-different as a Jew in a substantial way. In 1933 they had still shared a common way of thinking, but the world in which they had done so had fallen apart. One has to keep this in mind when reflecting on the relation between these three thinkers after the catastrophe. Nonetheless, their common origins in the nascent “philosophy of existence” of the twenties influenced these three thinkers throughout their lives, and in some way these origins always retained a hold on them. Of course, even within this common origin, each assigned very different status to both the individual points of critique, and all three diverged in the conclusions they were subsequently to draw from this critique. Among them, Hannah Arendt possibly went the furthest after 1945 in terms ofthe consequences she drew from her critique ofmoder­ nity. She put the collapse, or better the self-destruction of the tradition of modernity, front and center, which for her most visibly manifested itself in the disappearance of the political sphere. Her project was thus to sound out the conditions of possibility of a world in which the political would have a place. For Heidegger, National Socialism, fascism and Soviet communism were part and expression of a deep crisis of the West, which expressed itself primarily in the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology, a process he termed “forgetful­ ness of being” (Seinsvergessenheitct). The genocide perpetrated against the Jews of Europe as well as the destruction of European nations and states was for him only one appearance among several of that crisis. Much as he had in the twenties, he called an opening of thinking for and toward Being. KarlJaspers linked questions of moral philosophy, questions as to guilt and responsibility, to the question of the meaning of human exis­ tence and the transcendental grounds for justification thereof. In hindsight, the critique of modernity and the respective attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust in the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Arendt highlight different facets of a tableau, which in 1004 social research their differences point to the uniqueness of these three authors’respec­ tive approaches, and which in their totality offer an overview of differ­ ent approaches to the phenomenon of the Traditionsbruch, the breach in tradition that culminated in the events of the twentieth century. II IN SEPTEMBER 1946, A YOUNG FRENCH PHILOSOPHY TEACHER NAMED Jean Beaufret had visited Heidegger in his hut at Todtnauberg. In a letter he sent Heidegger after that visit he had posed the question how one could restore meaning to the term “humanism”: “Comment redonner un sens au mot humanisme?” It was in response to his question that in 1946 Heidegger published his first text after the end of National Socialism, the so-called “Letter on Humanism.” Partly in response to the pervasive nihilism of the prewar and war years...