Arendt, Heidegger, and the Tradition

Dana Villa Arendt, Heidegger, and the Tradition IN THIS ESSAY I WANT TO SUGGEST THAT THE ANTAGONISM MANY critics feel toward Arendt’s attem pt to conceptualize action as an end in itself—as a “pure” form of praxis—rests on a fairly basic misunderstanding. W hat is this misunderstanding? It is the idea that Arendt’s theory of political action is prim arily a normative theory directed against either the advent of mass democracy and its attendant pathologies, or the rise of the social and the reduction of politics to economics that accompanies it. To be sure, both these events play a central role in Arendt’s thought. But her theory of political action is misunder­ stood if it is seen as essentially a reaction to one or both of these “late modern” tendencies. Framed in this way, there seems little doubt that Arendt is pursuing a rearguard “elitist” strategy against the increas­ ingly inclusive—and increasingly social—character of politics in the modern age. This framing of Arendt’s political theory is, however, wrong. While useful to her critics, it fails to take sufficient account of her intellectual trajectory. This was a trajectory from the attempt to under­ stand how the supremely destructive political phenomenon of totali­ tarianism became possible in the heart of civilized Europe; to a deeper engagement with the proto-totalitarian tendencies underlying the thought of Karl Marx; to—finally—a full-fledged and remarkably deep engagement with the Western tradition of political thought from Plato to Marx. This is a tradition Arendt increasingly came to view as antisocial research Voi 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 983 pluralistic and (indeed) antipolitical in many of its most characteristic tropes, concerns, and conclusions. We can characterize the main phases in this intellectual trajec­ tory in “methodological” as well as substantive terms. Arendt, we might say, moves from the hermeneutic-analytic attem pt to under­ stand the constellation of events, practices, and mentalités that made totalitarianism possible to the genealogical attem pt to locate protototalitarian tendencies in the thought of Karl Marx to, finally, a “deconstructive ” encounter with the Western tradition of political thought itself. This encounter is driven by the desire to recover the experien­ tial basis of a “genuine” politics centered on human plurality, speech, and the exchange of opinion in the public sphere. This layer of expe­ rience—’’the political” in its original (Greek) incarnation—had been “covered over” by a fabrication model of action, a model installed by a philosophic tradition deeply hostile to human plurality and the “irre­ sponsibility and uncertainty of outcome” it apparently created in the public-political realm. It is at this level—and not at the level of any supposed existential­ ist contempt for the “inauthentic” they-self (das Man)—that we encoun­ ter Arendt’s real debt to Heidegger.1This debt has nothing to do with the politics of either Heidegger or the so-called political existentialists. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a deeper critic ofHeidegger’s philosoph­ ical politics—not to mention other fascist-leaning intellectuals—than Hannah Arendt. Rather, the debt is more methodological in character. It concerns not the substance of the political (about which Heidegger and Arendt were in total disagreement), but the manner in which one might go about recovering experiences and meanings that a layer of obfus­ cating tradition had plunged into obscurity, if not complete oblivion. To quote Arendt’s well-known characterization of her friend Walter Benjamin’s “m ethod” (a method which had remarkable affinities to both Heidegger and her own): this thinking, fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about 984 social research itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. W hat guides this thinking is...