what distinguished Arendt was a determination to anchor her genealogical studies in an unprecedented assertion of the role of human agency in history. Arendt first articulated this agency-based approach in The Human Condition, arguing that historical “events,” which for her always involved the “deeds” of acting human beings, were “sui generis”22 and characterized by “absolute, objective novelty.”23 It is in the nature of events and deeds “to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.”24 Arendt believed that the invention of the telescope was one such event. While many of the elements of the modern scientific outlook, such as the development of nominalist ontologies, the idea of an Archimedean thought experiment, and skepticism about the veracity of the senses preceded the telescope’s invention, it required an act of pure human natality—the uniquely human capacity to begin something new—to turn these disparate elements into a potent historical “event.” In other words, according to Arendt, there must be an act of sheer human spontaneous natality at the heart of all historical trends and processes. Such acts must appear from the viewpoint of historical causality as “miraculous.”25
Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a “miracle”—that is, something which could not be expected.… History, in contradistinction to nature, is full of events; here the miracle of accident and infinite improbability occurs so frequently that it seems strange to speak of miracles at all. But the reason for this frequency is merely that historical processes are created and constantly interrupted by human initiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is a human being.26
To assert this strong objectivity on behalf of the deeds and events of historical phenomena—an objectivity anchored in a powerful assertion of spontaneous human agency and initiative—Arendt clearly must have had an alternate conception of the meaning of historiographic “truth.” This historiography was drawn from Heidegger’s philosophy, but it would involve a series of highly original and imaginative critiques and revisions of that philosophy.
Arendt’s Heideggerian Foundation
The relationship of Arendt’s thought to Heidegger27 has been dealt with elsewhere by writers such as Seyla Benhabib, Lewis and Sandra Hinchman, Jacques Taminiaux, and Dana Villa.28 While I have learned a great deal from this work, in my view none of them sufficiently addresses my specific purpose here. I want to examine how Arendt appropriated and revised Heidegger in order to show that politics and history were intimately connected and that her interest in this connection was grounded in her determination to reassert human agency in history. Heidegger’s abiding and formative impact on Arendt is, at this point, one of the most easily established relations of influence between significant intellectual figures available. To see how extensively and avidly Arendt read Heidegger’s work, one can consult Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Collection, which provides online copies of marginalia from her personal library showing that she took notes in at least twenty-five of Heidegger’s works.29 Consulting her papers at the Library of Congress shows that in the early 1950s Arendt taught courses on Heidegger and was regularly consulted by his translators. Heidegger was arguably the key figure in her philosophical training; she attended some of his most famous and important courses and had an intermittent romantic relationship with him through much of the mid to late 1920s.30 Indeed, while Karl Jaspers supervised her dissertation, Young-Bruehl notes that “both the way in which Arendt wove Jaspers’s orientations though her work and the language in which she expressed her ideas owe a much greater debt to Heidegger.”31 In a letter from the 1950s, which described the project that would become The Human Condition and which attests to the crucial impact of Heidegger’s classes and philosophical tutelage on her own thought, she told Heidegger that “I would not be able to do this … without what I learned from you in my youth.”32 Arendt, moreover, attests to the extraordinarily influential nature of the early Heidegger courses she attended in a celebratory essay for Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, noting that “Heidegger’s ‘fame’ predates by about eight years the publication of Sein und Zeit … indeed it is open to question whether the unusual success of this book … would have been possible if it had not been preceded by the teacher’s reputation among the students, in whose opinion, at any rate, the book’s success merely confirmed what they had known for many years.”33
Heidegger pioneered an approach to philosophical argumentation that used phenomenological analysis to establish transcendental arguments about the nature of human existence, a mode of phenomenology Arendt directly appropriated in her own approach.34 In its most basic sense, phenomenology is simply the attempt to describe human experience as authentically as possible. Heidegger’s innovation was to link this descriptive procedure to the establishment of competing explanations. Certain phenomena may have popular explanations attached to them. Phenomenology can be used to describe an experience or phenomenon in such a way that the more popular explanation is somehow undermined and an alternative explanation—typically one the phenomenologist is advocating for—is presented in a more convincing light.35 When Arendt, for instance, asserted that “Hell on earth” is a more objective description of the Nazi death camps than any mode of description based on scientific methodology could provide, she was utilizing just such a phenomenological argument.
Heidegger’s use of this phenomenological approach was extremely ambitious in scope. He proposed to “raise anew the question of the meaning of Being,”36 arguing that this question had been put aside long ago in ancient Greece and given an answer that has remained fundamentally the same throughout the history of Western philosophy.37 To someone unfamiliar with metaphysical philosophy, this may seem like an outlandishly elementary proposition. Being, after all, seems self-evidently to be whatever there is. On the other hand, to metaphysical philosophers, Heidegger would seem to be making no sense at all, since a variety of different answers to the question of what Being is have been given: for Plato, Being was the eternal forms; for Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, it was God; for Nietzsche, it was the will to power. The problem with this objection, Heidegger argued, is that metaphysics is answering a different question than he is asking about Being. The metaphysicians had answered the question of what Being is, while Heidegger proposed to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. The attempt to say what Being is treats Being as if it is some sort of entity. But Heidegger points out that Being is no thing, but a quality that all things possess. The problem with attempting, as metaphysics had, to say “what Being is” is that it begs the question. When we attempt to articulate what something means, we attempt to explain it in terms of more simplistic and basic experiences and concepts. But if Being is the most basic quality of all things, if it is already present in everything, then any attempt to explain it cannot appeal to anything more basic. As a result, attempts to answer the question of what Being is already presuppose an understanding of Being. Thus, any “theoretical” approach to the question will come up short, because in attempting to conceptualize Being, modern science and metaphysical philosophy are attempting to define Being as a thing, rather than as the most basic quality of things.
In Being and Time, Heidegger sought to approach the question of the meaning of Being phenomenologically: because Being is always already presupposed in all human existence, he proposed to examine how it shows itself in human experience. What is significant in this proposition for understanding Arendt’s account of politics and history is that Heidegger has rejected as yet another version of metaphysics the idea that the physical universe, its matter and forces, can adequately describe Being. Metaphysics had always defined Being as what persists through all contingent changes, and thus, to the extent modern science defines matter and forces as what is present through all change, modern science has a metaphysical conception of Being. Heidegger argued that before this assertion can be justified, we must examine Being as it appears in human experience, for that is where our understanding of the meaning of Being is drawn from. If, as Heidegger proposed to do, we examine
