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Article Excerpt
I
FOR MUCH OF THE 1920S AND THE EARLY 1930s, HANNAH ARENDT, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers shared a common world of thought and experience. In particular,
* they shared a sense of the thoroughgoing crisis within modernity;
* they radically questioned the subject-centered inversion of the relationship of world and human being since Descartes;
* they viewed modern society, mass democracy, and liberalism as part of a breach in tradition in modernity;
* they shared an antipathy toward neo-Kantianism and all other transcendental philosophy, as well as an attendant awareness of the irretrievable loss of all metaphysical certitudes.
However, they reacted differently when confronted with the political reality of their time. At the end of Weimar republic, only Arendt comprehended the ever-growing violent anti-Semitism as ushering in a new era, whereas Karl Jaspers criticized anti-Semitism in terms of liberal reason. At that time Heidegger believed anti-Semitism was a necessary evil in order to forge the national renewal of Germany. Last, Arendt, Heidegger, and Jaspers held divergent views concerning the nature of German-hess. Whereas Heidegger and Jaspers felt a shared obligation to renew German universities in the name of a national resurrection, young Arendt felt her being-different as a Jew in a substantial way. In 1933 they had still shared a common way of thinking, but the world in which they had done so had fallen apart. One has to keep this in mind when reflecting on the relation between these three thinkers after the catastrophe.
Nonetheless, their common origins in the nascent "philosophy of existence" of the twenties influenced these three thinkers throughout their lives, and in some way these origins always retained a hold on them. Of course, even within this common origin, each assigned very different status to both the individual points of critique, and all three diverged in the conclusions they were subsequently to draw from this critique.
Among them, Hannah Arendt possibly went the furthest after 1945 in terms of the consequences she drew from her critique of modernity. She put the collapse, or better the self-destruction of the tradition of modernity, front and center, which for her most visibly manifested itself in the disappearance of the political sphere. Her project was thus to sound out the conditions of possibility of a world in which the political would have a place. For Heidegger, National Socialism, fascism and Soviet communism were part and expression of a deep crisis of the West, which expressed itself primarily in the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology, a process he termed "forgetfulness of being" (Seinsvergessenheitct). The genocide perpetrated against the Jews of Europe as well as the destruction of European nations and states was for him only one appearance among several of that crisis. Much as he had in the twenties, he called an opening of thinking for and toward Being.
Karl Jaspers linked questions of moral philosophy, questions as to guilt and responsibility, to the question of the meaning of human existence and the transcendental grounds for justification thereof.
In hindsight, the critique of modernity and the respective attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust in the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Arendt highlight different facets of a tableau, which in their differences point to the uniqueness of these three authors' respective approaches, and which in their totality offer an overview of different approaches to the phenomenon of the Traditionsbruch, the breach in tradition that culminated in the events of the twentieth century.
II
IN SEPTEMBER 1946, A YOUNG FRENCH PHILOSOPHY TEACHER NAMED Jean Beaufret had visited Heidegger in his hut at Todtnauberg. In a letter he sent Heidegger after that visit he had posed the question how one could restore meaning to the term "humanism": "Comment redonner un sens au mot humanisme?" It was in response to his question that in 1946 Heidegger published his first text after the end of National Socialism, the so-called "Letter on Humanism."
Partly in response to the pervasive nihilism of the prewar and war years, the humanist perspective was hotly debated in France, both in Paris and in the provinces, where Beaufret taught. In the course of the controversy, two different currents of thought came to dominate the debate: Marxism and existentialism. The Parisian journal Les Temps Modernes played host to a celebrated debate on the topic. Jean-Paul Sartre programmatically asserted that existentialism was a kind of humanism (Sartre, 1965 [1946]), and shortly thereafter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote on the communist promise of humanism (Merleau-Ponty, 1961 [1947]). The question of humanism lay heavily in the air when Heidegger decided to address it.
Heidegger's response to Beaufret's question about the meaning of the concept "humanism," unlike his personal writings from 1945 and 1946 in which Heidegger attempted to explain his role in the Nazi years, and much like his lectures on Nietzsche of the 1930s, sheds considerable light on the paths of thinking on which he was launched by his own involvement in National Socialism, as well as on those which he refused to tread (Heidegger, 1991). Against the debate over "German guilt" (Jaspers, 2001; Grunenberg, 2001), which the end of National Socialism had ushered in among the world public, the Protestant and Catholic churches and the German Bildungsburgertum, Heidegger refused to join those who called for a new moral age after the (self-)destruction of all values.
He based his critique of the traditional moral understanding of humanism on the assertion that a universal "forgetfulness of being" expressed a thoroughgoing crisis in the West. His answer to Beaufret's question starts with a fundamental critique of the traditional concept of humanism. He questioned the moral connotation of the term, which was based on the Enlightenment's claim to universality and its understanding of human rights, and criticized it as an empty phrase, which could be put to any use whatsoever. "When thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as a techne, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes" (Heidegger, 1977: 197).
His point was the following: In modern times the term "humanism" had become a banal saying that cannot be renewed or filled with meaning just by simply relying on it as a guide to morally irreproachable action. A thinker should not entrust thought to the custodianship of its application, but rather--and here the familiar line of inquiry of Being and Time appeared again--understand from the side of Being. Humanism, according to Heidegger's reading of the term, would not consist in mobilizing dormant moral dispositions and their subsequent applications to a "praxis," but instead in unearthing the capacity to think and to exist in orientation toward Being. For Heidegger, this goes along in regaining a relationality of Dasein, which had previously been eclipsed by the illusion of autonomy. According to him this means nothing other than that the thinker needs to retreat into the purity of thinking:
But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of Being (Heidegger, 1977: 199)....
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