Arendt is that her grounds for claiming a kind of objectivity for historical phenomena, deeds, and events that falls outside naturalistic ontology are greatly strengthened, because in the context of human experience Being, according Heidegger, encompasses both nature and history as exclusive ontological domains.
In order to show that our understanding of Being can only be grasped through the phenomenological analysis of human experience, Heidegger developed powerful philosophical arguments concerning the nature of human experience and the beings that human beings are. His most significant argument was his observation that human beings are essentially contextual.38 This is a fundamental commitment Arendt adopted from Heidegger, and she provided one of the most concise and penetrating formulations of Heidegger’s perspective in the opening chapter of The Human Condition. In these opening pages, Arendt appeared to be continuing her exchange with Voegelin. Voegelin had attacked an offhand statement Arendt had made that “human nature as such is at stake” in his review of Origins, arguing that this was nonsensical, since human nature could never be changed. In her reply, Arendt challenged the very idea that there existed such a thing as a human nature in Voegelin’s Platonic sense.39 Her reasoning had to do with the nature of the existential threat she believed totalitarianism posed to human beings. If there was such a thing as an unchanging human nature, then the threat of totalitarianism was greatly diminished, since human nature could never fundamentally be altered or diminished. The essential capacities of human beings would only have to wait for a set of historical circumstances that allowed them to express their freedom again. Arendt suggested that we do not know if there is such a thing as human nature, and, furthermore, we have no grounds for believing the essential characteristics of human beings could not be altered in a fundamental way. As she remarked, “Historically we know of man’s nature only insofar as it has existence, and no realm of eternal essences will ever console us if man loses his essential capabilities.”40
Arendt expanded on this argument in the opening moments of The Human Condition. “The problem of human nature,” she writes, “seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves—this would be like jumping over our own shadows.”41 At first blush, this statement of the impossibility of comprehending human nature by drawing an analogy to “shadow jumping” seems like nothing more than a literary flourish. Yet, seen against the background of Arendt’s existentialism, it turns out to be a penetrating formulation of Heidegger’s thought: “nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what.’ The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with ‘natural’ qualities … fail us when we raise the question: And who are we?”42 Thus, in Arendt’s words, human beings, “no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings,”43 by which she means that the only certain statement that can be made about human nature is the fact that it always draws on, is dependent upon, and indeed is unintelligible without a context that transcends and gives meaning to it. A rock would always be rock, whether it had a context or not; but if a human being, however, could somehow exist without a context—if perhaps she was born and lived alone, somehow, in the vacuum of deep space—she could never truly be a human being.
Heidegger’s most well-known formulation of this idea comes in his characterization of humans as “Being-in-the-world.”44 Humans cannot be the sort of beings they are unless they always already find themselves in a meaningful context. There is virtually no doubt that Arendt drew this concept directly from Heidegger’s Being and Time when she formulated her own concepts of worldliness and common sense. The Bard College collection shows that Arendt’s German copy of Being and Time was heavily used.45 Moreover, in an article critically engaging Heidegger’s account of human action written around the time she formulated the ideas that would result in The Human Condition—her book dealing most extensively with worldliness—she raises the key critique of the tradition of political thought that is found in The Human Condition. The problem with the tradition of political thought, in her view, was that it has always sought to deal with human beings in the singular, while politics is essentially concerned with the condition of human plurality, the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth.”46 Foreshadowing the central role that worldliness would play in The Human Condition, Arendt writes in this article that “it may be—but I shall only hint at this—that Heidegger’s concept of ‘world,’ which in many respects stands at the center of his philosophy, constitutes a step out of this difficulty.”47
According to Heidegger, there could be no particular objects, no things at all, unless they were conditioned by a meaningful world that provides a background of intelligibility to them.48 This worldly background, which we only become aware of indirectly, is not a thing in itself but somehow a condition of things. The idea of “world” seems to be constitutive of many intuitive experiences. When we say things like this or that would mean “the end of the world,” typically we don’t have in mind the total annihilation of the planet. Often this phrase might be limited to the end of our particular civilization or even our personal lifestyle or long-term goals. The “world” means more to us than objects that surround us: it involves all our human meanings and involvements, things that cannot be reified into objects but somehow seem to be attached to objects from out of our world. Heidegger would occasionally use the German phrase es weltet to describe this experience, which literally translates as “it worlds,” that is, that the world worlds at us and around us.49
If this is true, it would then present modern scientific epistemology with serious complications. It implies that there will never be any truly “theoretical” position—no final Archimedean point, in Arendt’s words—for no matter what methodological and experimental precautions are adopted, they will always be rooted and have their origin in some kind of human worldly background. Moreover, it would also suggest that the whole framework of “value thinking”—which Arendt and her teachers were so critical of—would become untenable. Since meaning comes out of a world that always conditions our activities and reflections from an ever present background, there is in principle no way to ever give a satisfactory account of any particular “value.” Whatever we label a “value,” such as justice, beauty, goodness, or greatness, proceeds out of the meaningful background and never fully captures what that background implies. The attempt to objectify a meaning by labeling it a “value” only guarantees that it will lose its power to illuminate why we do and think the things we do in our lives.50
Heidegger deals with the framework of being-in-the-world primarily in the first division of Being and Time. While there are seemingly endless phenomenological refinements Heidegger carefully adds to the notion of being-in-the-world, for my purposes, I will focus on only two such specifics Heidegger develops, both of which clearly influenced Arendt’s thought: what Heidegger calls our “thrownness,” and what he calls “being-in.” Thrownness is the “factical” life situation in which human beings find themselves in their unique social, political, historical, and relational circumstances.51 Heidegger uses the word “factical,” as distinct from “factual,” in order to emphasize that the concrete facts of our lives are not just objective circumstances that have only a contingent bearing on us; they are, as Arendt emphasizes, conditions of our existence. We are, existentially speaking, thrown into the particular world we inhabit, thrown into who we are and what possibilities we have available to us. Arendt adopts this notion in her account of worldliness. A world is not merely a community; it also includes the structures and concrete conditions of our civilization.
Our ability to engage with the worldly situation we are thrown in is what Heidegger calls “being-in.”52 Being-in seems clearly to have been a primary source for Arendt’s idea of “common sense,” which she refers
