Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love by Antonia Grunenberg (review)

Antonia Grunenberg offers a fresh look at the decades-long relationship, both personal and intellectual, between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The personal relationship—"History of a Love"—discloses the character of each; the intellectual relationship illuminates their respective understandings of philosophy: the nature and purpose of philosophical thinking, and whether and how this philosophical thinking can (must?) engage with action, politics, and world. Weaving these two narratives together, Grunenberg suggests that life—world, circumstances, fate—on the one hand, and character, on the other, play a significant role in how one sees and engages with the world, how one responds to it, and, ultimately, how one understands world, being, and the philosophical life.

The setting for Grunenberg's account is the sweeping revolt occurring at the turn of the twentieth century in philosophy, culture, art, and science, and the call for "a new beginning." Beginning with the birth of German existentialism, in particular, Heidegger's replacing the traditional separation between thinking and being with Dasein, for which thinking authentically is being (chapter 1), Grunenberg then describes Heidegger's rise to power (chapter 2), and his subsequent belief that the historical moment was at hand to instantiate the philosophical ideal in the world (chapter 3). Into this account she weaves the story of Hannah Arendt, a student and lover who was inspired and influenced deeply by the new way of thinking and philosophizing that Heidegger presented (chapter 2). The rise of National Socialism and antisemitism, and Heidegger's apparent embrace of both, however, forced her to question this way of thinking, as she grappled with an ugly reality that threatened her very existence (chapters 2–3). Whereas Heidegger understood philosophy as a purely theoretical activity, Arendt became increasingly convinced that human being is, essentially, a political being, and that the thinking life must ever be in and contend with what exists in the world and with the political (chapters 4–6).

Natural talent and circumstances combined to put Heidegger in a position of power: his studies with Husserl and his reappropriation of the ancient Greeks helped him conceive of a new way of thinking; the publication of Being and Time secured him public recognition for his discovery. Being also proud, thirsty for power, and certain of his own wisdom, seduced by the rhetoric of National Socialism, he believed the opportunity was at hand to instantiate his ideal in the world: to reform the German university into Plato's Academy where he as "overseer" and "guardian" would educate a new generation of philosophically enlightened individuals to go forth and transform German society. As for his antisemitism, to which Grunenberg devotes significant attention, so certain was he that the "Jewish intelligentsia" epitomized the Enlightenment tradition against which he had revolted that he acquiesced in—even supported—the antisemitic agenda of National Socialism, albeit for his own theoretical reasons (chapter 3). As brilliant as he was, Heidegger apparently never questioned himself—his assumptions, perceptions, conclusions—nor did he ever acknowledge responsibility for his actions (chapter 5).

Where Heidegger spent most of his life in solipsistic engagement with texts and with being (apart from his one failed attempt to actualize Plato's Academy), Arendt, by contrast, was driven both by life and personality to confront and examine herself—as human being, intellectual, Jew—and the world she lived in (see especially chapters 3–4 on Rahel Varnhagen, Origins of Totalitarianism). Inspired by Heidegger's teachings regarding grappling with being and reading texts—"against the grain"—for her, "being" included world and the "action of the many," which Heidegger dismissed (chapters 5–6). Thirsty to learn, conscious that there was much she did not understand, she pulled from all the resources available in her quest for understanding. A key resource in this quest was dialogue and the communities that make it possible. In her theoretical writing, this meant the political community...