Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Antonia Grunenberg, Elizabeth Von Witzke Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva, Peg Birmingham

Description

How could Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Germany in 1931, have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had joined and actively participated in the Nazi Party? In this remarkable biography, Antonia Grunenberg tells how the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger embraced both love and thought and made their passions inseparable, both philosophically and romantically. Grunenberg recounts how the history between Arendt and Heidegger is entwined with the history of the twentieth century with its breaks, catastrophes, and crises. Against the violent backdrop of the last century, she details their complicated and often fissured relationship as well as their intense commitments to thinking.

Foreword by Peg Birmingham
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the English Translation
Introduction
1. World Out of Joint, or How the Revolution in Philosophy Began
2. Life's Transformation, or the Sudden Eruption of Love into Life
3. The Failure of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, or Friends Becoming Enemies
4. Heidegger absconditus, or the Discovery of America
5. The Break in Tradition and a New Beginning, or Arendt and Heidegger in Counterpoint
6. Amor mundi, or Thinking the World after the Catastrophe
Chronology
Index

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• General
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027184
• Langue: English

Extrait

HANNAH ARENDT AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
James Risser
Dennis J. Schmidt
Calvin O. Schrag
Charles E. Scott
Daniela Vallega-Neu
David Wood
HANNAH ARENDT AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER
History of a Love
Antonia Grunenberg
Translated by Peg Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva, and Elizabeth von Witzke Birmingham
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Published in German as Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte einer Liebe .
2006 by Piper Verlag GmbH, M nchen.
English translation 2017 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02523-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02537-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02718-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
Contents
Foreword by Peg Birmingham
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the English Translation
Introduction
1 World Out of Joint, or How the Revolution in Philosophy Began
2 Life s Transformation, or the Sudden Eruption of Love in Life
3 The Failure of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, or Friends Becoming Enemies
4 Heidegger absconditus , or the Discovery of America
5 The Break in Tradition and a New Beginning, or Arendt and Heidegger in Counterpoint
6 Amor Mundi , or Thinking the World after the Catastrophe
Chronology
Index
illustrations begin on page 145
Foreword
Arendt and Heidegger: Erotic Reversals, Conflict, and Fissures
Peg Birmingham
O VER THE PAST several decades the question has often been raised: How could Hannah Arendt have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had joined and actively participated in the Nazi Party when taking over the rectorship of Freiburg University? The same question, asked differently: How could Arendt, a Jewish-German refugee who had fled Germany in 1931, have resumed her relationship with Heidegger, her former teacher, on her first trip back to Germany in 1948, a trip undertaken on behalf of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to recover stolen Jewish cultural artifacts? Grunenberg s biography is remarkable in showing that this way of asking the question is too stark and does not capture the ways in which the history of these two major thinkers of the twentieth century is not simply one of a broken intimacy followed by reconciliation; instead, it is a history marked as much by estrangement, breaks, and distance as it is of proximity, reunion, and resumed friendship. The biography reveals that the history of the love between Arendt and Heidegger is best captured in the English idiom they have a history, indicating an erotic relationship that is complicated and fraught.
Perhaps the most striking example of the estrangement, distance, and reversals that continued to mark the history between Arendt and Heidegger is the long silence between them that ensued only a few years after the reconciliation in 1948, a silence due not to political or philosophical disagreements-on the contrary, it was personal. The personal silence finds momentary philosophical voice in a note that Arendt sent to Heidegger via her publisher on the occasion of the 1960 publication of Vita Activa , the German edition of The Human Condition : You will see that the book does not contain a dedication. Had things worked out properly between us-and I mean between , that is, neither you nor me-I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect. 1 Arendt s note on an absent dedication should put to rest the pervasive assumption by many of Arendt s readers that The Human Condition announced a break with Heidegger s thinking; it should also cast doubt on the often-repeated claim that Heidegger s lack of response was due to a philosophical rejection of Arendt s account of the vita activa . 2 As the note indicates, this lack of dedication and of response is due to the absence of a personal between that renders impossible any philosophical engagement between them. More than a decade later in 1971 there is yet another reversal as Arendt dedicates Life of the Mind: Thinking to Heidegger, a dedication that cites several lines from his Discourse on Thinking . By this time, another between has been established.
As Grunenberg notes, the history between Arendt and Heidegger, a history spanning fifty-one years, takes place against the background of the twentieth century with its violence, catastrophes, wars, and mass migrations. Here, too, Grunenberg adds significantly to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl s biography. She captures-as perhaps only someone who was born during the Dresden firebombing in 1945, who spent her early childhood in East Germany, who then escaped with her family to West Germany, and who as a Berliner participated in the 1989 reunification-the ways in which Arendt lived in two worlds, the European and the American, unwilling and unable to decide between the two. In fact, Grunenberg s biography emphasizes the ways in which Arendt continued to be an exile even after receiving her citizenship papers in 1948. Better, she captures the ways in which Arendt lived a transnational existence after 1941 and how this transnational existence influenced her thinking. Arendt s fragmented history, her critique of history as process, her critique of the nation-state and a certain conception of human rights and citizenship emerge first from her status as a refugee and then as a nationalized US citizen who never cut ties to Europe generally and to Germany specifically. This experience of exile appears to mark the greatest distance between Arendt and Heidegger, the latter living his entire life in Germany and for much of that life in one city: Freiburg.
Yet here, too, caution must be exercised as Grunenberg s biography shows how Heidegger s world, both personally and professionally, collapsed after the Second World War. Her history of the relationship between these two thinkers raises the difficult question of the difference between a collapsed world and a world of exile and how this difference led Heidegger and Arendt to different understandings of a new beginning, a central concern that runs through each of their work.
Grunenberg s biography of these two thinkers stands between Elzbieta Ettinger s pinched biography of Arendt and Heidegger, in which Arendt is reduced to nothing more than a disciple of Heidegger, and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl s biography of Arendt, in which her relation to Heidegger is briefly discussed. Grunenberg does not reduce Arendt to Heidegger s disciple nor is she interested in adding to Young-Bruehl s account by claiming that Heidegger is more central to Arendt s life than Young-Breuhl admits. Instead, Grunenberg s notable achievement is to show how Arendt and Heidegger s shared history, from their initial meeting in Heidegger s 1924 seminar on Plato s Sophist , is the history of a double, inseparable eros: the philosophical and the personal. (At the same time she documents the ways in which this double eros of the philosophical and the personal infuses each thinker s relation with others.) This is not to reduce the work of each thinker to his or her biography or even to a shared biography. Grunenberg is not arguing that Arendt s thinking can be read solely through the lens of Heidegger s thought. It cannot. As she writes in her preface to the English translation, there are significant differences between Arendt s and Heidegger s thought. Nor is she arguing that Heidegger was influenced by Arendt s insistence on the philosophical importance of the vita activa . There is no evidence for this. Instead, at the center of Grunenberg s biography is how each thinker engaged with the vita activa , how each became aware of its dangers, how one thinker, Heidegger, withdrew from this life, while the other, Arendt, spent her life thinking through its dangers as well as its possibilities for inaugurating the new.
Heidegger s early years, including his involvement with National Socialism, can be read as a cautionary tale of an overzealous commitment to the vita activa or, more precisely, of thinking that the activity of thinking can be directly transposed into political action. As Grunenberg describes in detail, and here she makes a significant contribution to the present debate and discussion surrounding the publication of Heidegger s Black Notebooks , Heidegger was not alone in thinking this. Her biography, especially chapter 3 , goes beyond Heidegger to give a detailed history of the time in Germany between the two world wars. More specifically, she describes the history of the academic community in the 1920s and 1930s, showing that Heidegger wa