category of worldliness, there can be little doubt that “being-in” and “common sense” for all intents and purposes refer to the same basic existential structure, particularly since Heidegger devotes so much of Being and Time to “being-in.”53 Heidegger articulates being-in as our ability to be and feel at home in our concrete worldly surroundings. Being-in has the sense of “inhabiting,” “residing,” “dwelling,” “to be accustomed to,” and “to be familiar with.”54 As we will see later, Arendt believed that being-in, or common sense, has atrophied in the modern era, and that the modern attempt to replace it with what she called “common sense reasoning,” an orientation based on the basic structure of the human mind and body, is what would ultimately lead to a variety of modern political pathologies. In Chapter 5, we will see Arendt attempt in her theory of judgment to theorize the possibility of reestablishing some form of common sense.
While the first division of Being and Time was thus clearly of great importance to Arendt, the second division is arguably even more so. As we will see, it is from the second division that Arendt makes her most distinctive departures from Heidegger. Being and Time was famously intended by Heidegger to have four more divisions. Heidegger eventually abandoned the project’s more ambitious objective, which would have required the final four divisions. This ultimate objective had been to work out the meaning of Being by appealing to the experience of Time.55 Heidegger had proposed to do this by examining first the being that already has an understanding of Being—however vague that understanding may be—what Heidegger calls Dasein, his word for human beings.56 In Being and Time, Heidegger approached human beings and their experience of Being in two steps: in the first division he looks at the basic existential structures of human experience, while in the second division he articulates the new qualities these structures take on when they are reinterpreted from the perspective of what he called “ecstatic temporality,” his term for how time manifests itself in human experience.57 While the existential structures of our being-in-the-world provide the background conditions that allow us to start to bring the meaning of Being into focus, Heidegger believed that it is only after we reinterpret these background conditions from our primordial experience of time as “temporality” that we finally come into genuine contact with Being. He argued that the common way of thinking about time as a linear progression or sequence of events actually drew on a primordial experience of time that we always already have before developing this more theoretical notion of time. This temporality is “ecstatic” because in each element of this experience of time (past, present, or future) we “stand out” from our worldliness and “into the truth of Being,”58 that is, we somehow exist in an existential position that is removed from our worldliness, because it brings into focus the limits or “horizons” of that worldliness.59 Heidegger believed that when we can confront our primordial temporality, it will allow us to experience Being in its authentic meaning. This confrontation with Being will give insight, depth, and authenticity to our worldly involvements.
According to Heidegger, the past, as an aspect of temporality, is rooted in our existence as essentially historical beings, what he calls our “historicity.”60 By saying we are “historical,” Heidegger is not simply asserting that there were a sequence of well-known events that our civilization’s historians have documented and placed in bound narratives. He means that our lives are always grasped as narratives that stretch out from birth to death.61 It is these unique stories that allow us to have an identity—to become a “who” rather than a “what.”62 The history books written by historians are only possible because we first and foremost originally experience our own individual lives as narratives.63 However, the ability to grasp ourselves as a “who” with a unique life story requires a direct confrontation with our ecstatic temporality.64 This is crucial for understanding Arendt’s account of historical methodology: there is an essential link between our existence as narratively structured agents and the histories we produce. Our histories are narrative because we ourselves are narratives.
But while our past plays an important role in providing a traditional and cultural background or “heritage,”65 it is only by confronting our future that we truly experience Being in its immediacy, in such a way that our story becomes truly our own unique story. This primordial future is not our goals and plans in life. We only confront Being when we confront the absolute limit of our own being-in-the-world: death. Recall that Heidegger had argued that Being is not a thing but the most basic and fundamental quality of all things. Being is therefore literally nothing: “no-thing.”66 In other words, Being is that mysterious aspect of all things that is both its ground—the source from which it all came—but also completely opaque and mysterious, beyond human comprehension because it is the fundamental condition of all such comprehension. As a result, it cannot be thought, but only left in question, as the mysterious groundless ground, the nothing, of all things. This nothingness underlying all things can only be confronted when we confront our absolute mortality, the fundamental nothingness that awaits all of us in death.67 When we do this, we receive a “moment of vision”68 that allows us to fully live in our present by resolutely choosing the life we were originally thoughtlessly channeled into by the patterns of our worldly possibilities.69 This ability to choose what we have already been, in terms of both our own lives and our civilization’s heritage occurs in the mode of what Heidegger calls “resoluteness.”70 Resoluteness allows the moment of vision to take some kind of articulate form in what Heidegger had called “discourse,” the linguistic and communicative element of our being-in. After we have faced up to our death and placed this moment of vision in some kind of articulate and expressive form or “discourse,” we come to have what he calls “primordial truth” or “disclosedness,” and later, after Being and Time, aletheia, the word for truth he borrows from the Greeks, which meant truth as “uncoveredness” or “unconcealment.”71
For Heidegger, since all truth is conditioned by an existential point of view, all truth always reveals only certain facets of Being.72 One might take for example an artwork such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream. From a scientific point of view, it would be a “correct” statement about the being of The Scream to define it as canvas with dried paint on it. In that sense, science has indeed “revealed” something about the painting. Yet, at the same time, it has concealed something about the painting; indeed, it might be argued that it has concealed much more than it has revealed. Consider the way the world is revealed or disclosed in The Scream. Munch captures in its bizarre surreality and strangeness the way the world “worlds” when we experience moments of horror. In these unforgettable moments, the “worlding” of the world seems to slow down to a crawl in an odd slow-motion effect, making people around us become shadowy figures, little more than part of the landscape, doing utterly meaningless things. Thus, it may indeed be scientifically “correct” that The Scream is only a canvas with dried paint on it, but its aletheia, what it reveals or opens up—its essential truth about its being—is also much more than that.
But while art may provide an exemplary instance of Heideggerian aletheia, Heidegger believed aletheia went far beyond art, leading ultimately to a confrontation with the meaning of Being itself, which he believed was the source of human freedom and could only be approached through what he called “thinking.” It is a well-established fact of twentieth-century philosophical history that both Heidegger’s and Arendt’s projects were inspired by and responding to Aristotle’s practical philosophy, especially as it was articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics in Heidegger’s case, while it appears Arendt drew broadly on the Ethics, the Politics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics.73 It is by now clear that Being and Time should be interpreted as an attempt to establish the priority of Aristotle’s account of action, or praxis, as the fundament of human existence.74 The first division of Being and Time seems clearly intended to establish this assertion. Yet, free human action is never achieved in the first division. The closest we come to action is in the context of technical activities, Aristotle’s poiesis,
