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Politics Versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Lawrence J. Biskoivski
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Extract

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 59 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1995

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References

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4. Villa, , “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” p. 719Google Scholar. Villa is not the first commentator to accuse Arendt of this sort of nostalgia for ancient Greece. See, for example, Shklar, Judith, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah.” Partisan Review 50 (1983): 71Google Scholar. Although this issue cannot be addressed here, it is perhaps worth noting that Arendt thought that it was not her but Nietzsche who exhibited this nostalgic homesickness for Greece and Greek concepts (Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, vol.1 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 157).Google Scholar Arendt herself declares: “I did not want to cross the ‘rainbow-bridge of concepts/ perhaps because I am not homesick enough, in any event because I do not believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which man’s mind, equipped for withdrawing from the world of appearances, could or should ever be comfortably at home” (Ibid., p. 158).

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10. Ibid., p. 151. This aesthetic and aestheticizing view of reality is by no means limited to Baudrillard, has itself a rather dubious genealogy, and has not gone unnoticed or uncriticized. Thus, as Fredric Jameson sardonically points out, postmodernism seems to include “a quantum leap in what [Walter] Benjamin still called the ‘aestheticization’ of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know it's only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush, our ‘representations’ of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood not necessarily inspired by the things themselves)” (Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], p. xGoogle Scholar).

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12. This sensation was given voice perhaps most eloquently by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself;/ I am large, I contain multitudes.” What is consistency, after all, but another externally-imposed standard intruding upon the self?

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15. In using aesthetics to illustrate the penetration of contemporary culture by the logic of capitalism, Horkheimer and Adorno also demonstrate the political relevance of aesthetics in a way with which Arendt would not necessarily disagree. Her approval of some of the other ways in which members of the Frankfurt School put aesthetics to political use (e.g., Benjamin's stress on the socially transformative possibilities of politicized art and Marcuse's insistence that great art retains an authentic Utopian moment which can serve as a regulative idea in political struggle), is more doubtful but by no means entirely improbable. See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 120-67Google Scholar; Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 219-44Google Scholar; and Marcuse, Herbert, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977).Google Scholar

16. One wonders, however, exactly how different an alternative aestheticism actually is, given its relationship to poiesis and thus also its connection to technology and instrumental rationality.

17. References to the philosophical or metaphysical tradition occur throughout Arendt's oeuvre, and the conceptualization of this “tradition,” though not uncommon, is also not without its problems. Relatively succinct discussions of the birth of this tradition and its fundamental misapprehension of politics can be found in Arendt, Hannah, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990): 73–103Google Scholar and in Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 91–142.Google Scholar For Arendt's argument on the decline of tradition as such, see especially Arendt, , Between Past and Future, pp. 17–40.Google Scholar

18. An interesting comparison might be made between Arendt's understanding of Nietzsche's real relationship to the tradition he criticizes and Habermas's somewhat parallel arguments concerning Nietzsche and positivist science in Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 290–300.Google Scholar

19. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 20.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., p. 222.

21. Arendt, , “Philosophy and Politics,” p. 73.Google Scholar

22. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1:114.Google Scholar

23. This is why Socrates always insisted that he himself knew “nothing.” It is also one of the lessons found in Plato's recounting of his disastrous expeditions to Sicily in the Seventh Letter, and also why Plato finally avers that what ultimately concerned him could not be put down in words. See Plato, , Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, trans. Hamilton, Walter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 341b–343a.Google Scholar

24. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

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26. Arendt points out, however, that later thinkers went much farther than Plato would have approved in the generalization of the fabrication experience to other areas of life, leading eventually to the ascendance of instrumental rationality and contributing to the growing meaninglessness of modern life. See the discussion in Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 157–59.Google Scholar

27. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 303.Google Scholar

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29. Ibid., pp. 127–28.

30. Ibid., p. 132.

31. Ibid., p. 26.

32. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1: 10–12.Google Scholar

33. Arendt also makes it abundantly clear that while she sees the tradition as not “altogether innocent” in the breakdown that led to totalitarianism, this is primarily due to its “lack of a clear concept of what constitutes the political.” Totalitarianism was such a unique phenomenon, and so unprecedented in previous politics and political thought, that the tradition from Plato to Nietzsche is “above suspicion.” Nietzsche, she says, was merely “the first to try to overcome the nihilism not in the notions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he discovered in his attempt at ‘transvaluation’ was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'être when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent.” See Arendt, , Between Past and Future, pp. 26–30Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New Edition with Added Prefaces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 461Google Scholar; and Arendt, Hannah and Jaspers, Karl, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Kohler, Lotte and Saner, Hans (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 166.Google Scholar

34. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 28.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 25.

36. Arendt, Ibid., pp. 26, 29; Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 17Google Scholar; Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1:176.Google Scholar

37. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

38. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 313n.Google Scholar

39. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2: 163.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., pp. 163–64.

41. Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 79–135Google Scholar,313n. See, also, the telling remarks on the role of “life” in Nietzsche's thought in Connolly, William E., “Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault,” Political Theory 21 (1993): 371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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43. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 119.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., p. 177.

45. Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), p. 74.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 75.

47. Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 203–204.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., p. 203. See, also, Arendt, , On Violence, p. 44.Google Scholar

49. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 233n.Google Scholar

50. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2: 165.Google Scholar

51. These remarks are cited in Kohn, Jerome, “Thinking/Acting,” Social Research 57 (1990): 117.Google Scholar

52. This is manifest, for example, in what Arendt calls Nietzsche's “modern prejudice to see the source of all power in the will power of the isolated individual.” See Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 245.Google Scholar

53. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 139ff.Google Scholar

54. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2: 170.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., p. 183.

56. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage, 1968). p. 451.Google Scholar

57. Arendt, and Jaspers, , Correspondence 1926–1969, p. 166.Google Scholar Although Arend apologizes in this letter for not yet having thought through these issues, they clearly remain a preoccupation for her the rest of her life.

58. Canovan, for example, suggests that while Arendt provides “a hostile and slighting account of Heidegger” in 1946, she later “came to see things very differently.” But while Arendt's personal feelings for Heidegger clearly did change over the years, her appraisal of the political deficiencies and dangers of his philosophy did not, even as she makes considerable use of aspects of that philosophy. See Canovan, Margaret, “Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt's Reflections on Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990): 137–38Google Scholar and Canovan, , Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 254–55,163–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a very useful discussion of similarities and divergences between Arendt and Heidegger, see Hinchman, Lewis P. and Inchman, Sandra K., “In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism,” Review of Politics 46 (1984): 183–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 68ff.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 435.

61. Ibid., pp. 67ff. See, also, Heidegger, Martin, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Manheim, Ralph (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 120-21.Google Scholar

62. Heidegger, , Being and Time, pp. 154-55.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., pp. 166–68, 212.

64. Ibid., p. 435.

65. Ibid., pp. 233–35, 345.

66. Ibid., p. 235.

67. See Arendt's characterization of Heidegger as a fox creating a burrow into which he could withdraw from the world altogether in Arendt, Hannah, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Kohn, Jerome (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994), pp. 361–62.Google Scholar

68. Arendt, Hannah, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” Partisan Review 13 (1946): 50.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., pp. 49–50. This central preoccupation with death and with escaping the triviality of the world shared with others continues to be an important part of later Nietzschean aestheticism, as can be seen, for example, in Foucault: “It is in death that the individual becomes at one with himself, escaping from monotonous lives and their levelling effect; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull, common life at last, becomes an individuality; a black border isolates it, and gives it the style of its truth.” See Foucault, Michel, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Ruas, Charles (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986), p. 54Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Final Foucault, ed. Bernauer, James and Rasmussen, David (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 9Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Smith, A.m. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 166, 171.Google Scholar

70. Arendt, Hannah, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. R., and Winston, C. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 9–12, 21.Google Scholar

71. Arendt, , Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 175, 316.Google Scholar

72. Ibid., p. 167.

73. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2: 201.Google Scholar

74. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p, 153.Google Scholar

75. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2: 203.Google Scholar

76. Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. iv.Google Scholar Even when praising Heidegger's philosophy Arendt does not shrink from castigating the poor political judgment to which it gives rise. Heidegger and Plato have more in common than Heidegger would have preferred to concede, the philosophical tradition's longstanding hostility towards and alienation from the common, public world of politics: “We who wish to honor the thinkers, even if our own residence lies in the midst of the world, can hardly help finding it striking and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human affairs, turned to tyrants and Führers. This should be imputed not just to the circumstances of the times and even less to preformed character, but rather to what the French call a deformation professionelle” (Arendt, Hannah, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, 21 10 1971, p. 54).Google Scholar

77. For a thorough discussion of the philosopher's peculiar vice of solitude, and of the differences between Socrates and Heidegger as exemplars of philosophical thinking, see Canovan, “Socrates or Heidegger.”

78. See, for example, Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1: 75–76, 197ffGoogle Scholar; Arendt, , The Human Condition, pp. 75–76, 90Google Scholar; and Arendt, Hannah, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38 (1971): 417–46.Google Scholar

79. Arendt, , “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” p. 51.Google Scholar

80. For a fuller discussion of how world serves to orient judgment (and of the distortion of political judgment that is a predictable consequence when contact with this source of orientation is lost), see Biskowski, Lawrence J., “Practical Foundations for Political Judgment: Arendt on Action and World,” Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 879ff.Google Scholar

81. It is clear, however, that Arendt does not believe that this deficiency in judgment necessarily invalidates major aspects of Heidegger's philosophy or makes all of Heidegger's insights irrelevant to politics. The possible positive contributions Heidegger may provide to contemporary political understandings are developed fairly but very sympathetically in Dallmayr, Fred, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Google Scholar Far less sympathetic appraisals can be found in Farias, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Lacoue-labarthe, Philippe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Turner, C. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar; and Sluga, Hans, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82. For an excellent discussion of this shift or Kehre in Heidegger's thinking, see Mehta, J. L., The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 104–22.Google Scholar Arendt leaves little doubt that she generally agrees with Mehta's interpretation (Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2:173ffGoogle Scholar).

83. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 2:, 172–94.Google Scholar

84. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 23.Google Scholar

85. Habermas, Jürgen, “Modernity Versus Post-Modernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 13.Google Scholar

86. It is unclear, particularly in Arendtian terms, how the extreme individualism and self-absorption characteristic of the turn towards aesthetics can generate any sort of political power in the face of the coercive logics of economic and other forms of rationalization. The probable political impotence associated with the generalization of aesthetics to other spheres of life has also been suggested by Max Weber. See Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gert, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 115,125,127,342Google Scholar; see also Scaff, , Beyond the Iron Cage, pp. 152-85Google Scholar

87. Arendt, , Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 168.Google Scholar

88. Ibid., pp. 331–37.

89. It is worthwhile to compare Foucault's very similar concerns, particularly with political and social phenomena associated with the rise of “bio-power” (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, R. [New York: Vintage Books, 1980], pp. 140ff).Google Scholar Here again Arendt evinces concern with many of the same problems that worry Nietzscheans and postmodernists while offering nevertheless quite different diagnoses and conclusions.

90. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1: 9–10Google Scholar; Arendt, , “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” pp. 419–20.Google Scholar

91. It is interesting to compare Arendt on this point with Nietzsche, who regards it still as nature's task to “breed an animal with the right to make promises.” See Honig, , “Declarations of Independence,” pp. 103–104.Google Scholar

92. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 245.Google Scholar

93. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 279.Google Scholar

94. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, 1: 177.Google Scholar

95. Canovan, , Hannah Arendt, pp. 157ff.Google Scholar

96. Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Shils, E. A. and Finch, H A. (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), p. 111.Google Scholar

97. Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 95.Google Scholar

98. Ibid.

99. Arendt, , Life of the Mind, p. 203.Google Scholar

100. I have argued elsewhere that love of what Arendt called freedom (in which many of the concerns of the post-Nietzscheans are included) and care for the world (which is at best far more obscure in many of the major post-Nietzschean thinkers) may be viewed as practical foundations for political judgment in Arendt's political theory in the sense that they are values internal to the practice of what Arendt considered to be authentic politics. See Biskowski, “Practical Foundations for Political Judgment.”