Philosophically, where has Hannah Arendt been faithful to her teacher?
Hannah Arendt followed Heidegger in a revolutionary break with the tradition of philosophical thinking, insisting on Heidegger's position that the universal connection of mankind is not fundamentally an epistemological and theoretical existence but an activity of raising worries, and that this activity of man is at the same time a process of opening up and opening up, an event of truth. Both for Heidegger and for Hannah Arendt, what Heidegger calls the openness of light is the intrinsic goal of this life. But Heidegger, unlike Hannah Arendt, distinguished this openness from the publicness of society. In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that "the public character of society dims everything, and it treats what is hidden as something familiar and readily available." (Being and Time, p. 127) In general, in the public nature of such a society, life is ruled by ordinary people." Everyone is someone else, no one is themselves. (Ibid., p. l28) In response to this publicness of society, Heidegger argues against his famous authenticity.
Like Heidegger, Hannah Arendt insisted on an idea of openness. However, she believes that this openness can develop into a social publicity. She does not expect this openness to return the relationship of the individual to itself, i.e., not to become heideggerian authenticity, but to transform it into a consciousness of pluralism. Her point is that our presence in the world means building a world together with many people. There is openness only where people take the experience of pluralism seriously. The so-called orthodox thinking dismisses "many" as "miscellaneous", rejects it, and does not accept the challenge of pluralism, which belongs to conditio humana (the basic condition of life). When this orthodox thinking talks about people, it does not use plurals, but only singular numbers. For Hannah Arendt, this is a political betrayal of philosophy. Like Heidegger, Hannah Arendt was also looking for sources for her claims in ancient Greece. What Heidegger found was Plato's cave metaphor. Hannah Arendt also found democracy in thucydides' account of the ancient Greek city-state. In their constantly renewed conversations, the ancient Greeks discovered that in general we approach our common world from an infinite number of different positions. Correspondingly, there are many different points of view.
...... The Greeks learned to understand—not that many individuals understood each other, but that they learned to observe the same world from the standpoint of others. Look at the same thing from different, often opposing perspectives. In Thucydides' speech explaining the views and interests of competing parties, living evidence can be found that such struggles are extremely objective" (Mashra: An Explanation of the Public World, p. 126) One could also say that Hannah Arendt had rehabilitated the chatter between the bound people in Plato's cave. In her view, there is no such thing as platonic light that perfects truth or what Heidegger calls the "ascent from reality to more existence." In response to Heidegger's ban on public gossip, Hannah Arendt declared in her 1959 Lessing lecture that "if the world is not constantly talked about by man, then the world will always be a non-human world." (Arendt, People in the Dark, p. 41)
What makes the world open is not authenticity, but "the mastery of negotiation with others." (Arendt, Liberty and Politics, p. 681) And Heidegger wanted to break away from this skill.
Hannah Arendt also learned a lot from Heidegger on the question of truth, and went one step further than Heidegger. She accepted Heidegger's interpretation of truth as a deceptive view. But Heidegger is referring to the fact that the process of truth occurs is the relationship between man and thing itself. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, discovered this truth in the "between" relationships between people. For her, the concept of truth as a deceitful truth has its real use only in the tragedies and comedies in which human beings live together. The most fundamental process of truth is staged in the great arena of society. Arendt said, "In behaviorally friendly conversations, people show themselves who actively express their personal nature of existence as if they were on the world stage" (ibid., p. 169).
Because human interaction is characterized by drama, one can also turn the whole world of manifestation into a big stage. It is only because people can take the stage and perform themselves that they feel that their relationship with nature is nothing more than this. Nature also wants to "express" itself. Even Plato's ascension to the world of ideas is inseparable from the social game of manifesting himself on stage. For the idea is something that should be viewed naturally on the inner stage of the philosopher.
Here, what Hannah Arendt calls "the world" refers to a stage-like, socially open space: the world unfolds itself among people. Therefore, the world should not be understood as the sum of everything, that is, man and event, but as the place where man meets one another and where things appear before him. Finally, people also create and produce something that is beyond the sum of the activities of individuals. In a letter to be sent to Heidegger's Book of Regular Life, Hannah Arendt spoke of the question of "between men", "If there is something between us that is recognized as legitimate—I mean 'between,' neither you nor me—then I will ask you if I can dedicate this book to you." (Ettinger: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, p. 122) Hannah also had a feeling that in this relationship there was only a devotion to Heidegger and her own self-esteem. In this relationship, the world between them must be burned down, and no room for free encounter is allowed: too much not to be done, too much not to be said, too much to be noticed.
In her book Regular Life, Hannah Arendt focuses on how the world maintains this "between." How the world can be destroyed by the standards of personal life and history. She distinguishes between "labour", "production" and "behavioural activity". Here she also absorbs Heidegger's thought: she distinguishes "existence in the world into different levels of activity of different natures." People can carry out a certain degree of free production and creative activity at different levels, thus creating a premise for openness.
According to Hannah Arendt, "labor" is simply a biologically life-sustaining activity of man. Here man organizes his exchange with the material materials of nature. Labor and rest, labor and consumption, alternate at a certain rhythm, and strictly speaking, the process has neither beginning nor end, just as the process of human racial reproduction alternates between life and death. In labor, man consumes nature, and in labor man exhausts his life. This process does not produce something permanent, and labor is not really a "constitutive activity of the world."
Production activities are different. Products appear here, and they are either handmade or artistic. These products go beyond pure service to sustain life. It produces objects that cannot be used directly for consumption: utensils, architecture, furniture, works of art. These are things that can be passed down from generation to generation. - The longer an object is preserved, the more cosmopolitan the activity of producing it becomes. The process of activity of production is linear and directly directed to external purposes, because whatever is to be built, what is assembled, what is manufactured, they require themselves to have a corresponding place in the world. So they belong within the region that man created. In this area, man must find a foothold for his living life path, and find a relationship in his dwelling place. The driving force here is not the inevitable requirement of life, but the temporal life here, which needs to create a continuous factor between his life and death, to create a transcendence beyond time. This demand plays a driving role here.
The singular "behavioral activity" is more enduring than the "productive activity" that extrudes man from the cycle of natural growth of his life. "Behavioral activity" – Praxis in Greek; "productive activity" – Greek poieses; and as Aristotle has made clear, the difference between them is that "behavioural activity" is the expression and expression of human freedom itself. In behavioral activities people express themselves. They show who they are, what they want to do, what they want to be. Everything that happens between people is an acting activity if it does not directly serve labor or serves productive activity. This kind of behavioral activity constitutes the grand theater of the world, so on the stage, that is, in the world, there are love dramas, jealous dramas, political dramas, war dramas, pair dramas, educational dramas, and friendship dramas. Because human beings are free, they can act and act, and there are so many intertwined and entangled behavioral activities in consultation and discussion that they form a chaotic state of human reality. Therefore, there is no logic in human history that can be predicted and grasped. Human history is not "produced" nor is it "the process of labor." It is not a process at all, but an event that occurs intermittently, an event caused by the conflicting plurality of human behavior and activity. Humans build machines and use them to work. History, whether individual or collective, is not a machine, although there is no shortage of efforts in history to turn history into machines. In his "history of existence", Heidegger also attempts to find an authentic logic in the chaos of events, so his thoughts also belong to this attempt to turn history into a machine. Hannah Arendt, in the second volume of her posthumous work On the Spiritual Life, makes this speculation about Heidegger. There, she placed Heidegger in a group of "professional thinkers" close to her. These thinkers cannot tolerate freedom and undecipherable contingencies. Freedom and chance do not want to "trade the provisions of chance for the spontaneous goodness of the problem." (Arendt, On the Spiritual Life: The Will, p. 189)
From the standpoint of "the point of view of natural processes" and "the processes of automatic development that determine the development of the world," man's behavioral activity looks "like a monster, or a miracle." Because behavioral activity means taking the initiative.
Hannah Arendt, who survived the Holocaust, developed a spectacular philosophy about the possibility of starting over in Her Book Of Regular Life. It is in this philosophy that her love for Heidegger is revealed. When Heidegger sneaked up on her top-floor lodge in Marburg she was writing a philosophy of acquiring her authenticity "by pre-empting death." After escaping death, Hannah Arendt, like in love, supplements the philosophy of pre-death with a philosophy that is pre-oriented and can begin to innovate. "The miracle of interrupting from time to time the course of the world and the process of human affairs, saving them from their peril ... Ultimately a fact of birth rate, a fact of the birth of man. ...... This miracle is that man is born and can start again. As a result of their birth, they can evolve in behavioral activities. (Ibid., p. 167)
This is an outstanding answer to Heidegger's philosophy of death, which also recognizes the emotion of fear, but which is more aware of the joy that has come to earth. Based on this philosophy of birth, Hannah Arendt developed her concept of democracy. Democracy preserves everyone's opportunity to start innovating again in mutual co-ownership. The great task of democracy is to learn to live in inconsistencies. For if we want to meet in one world, or even to agree, we experience that we start from a different beginning and end at a completely different end in ourselves. Democracy is the recognition of this experience, and democracy is the willingness to reopen the question of how to start our coexistence life again. But this new beginning, whether individual or collective, is possible only if two conditions are met: commitment and forgiveness. When we act and negotiate, we begin a process that we cannot be responsible for. What we put into the world is always irreparable and incalculable. "For man has no recourse to what he has done, and though man does not know or cannot know what he is doing, he has a means of healing this impossibility: man has the power to forgive; and to cure unpredictability, in response to the uncertainty of the chaos of the future, man has another capacity: to commit and to keep his promise (ibid., p. 231).
Hannah Arendt made her own promise not to leave Martin Heidegger. She was able to make this promise because she had the power to forgive him.
Excerpt from Heidegger's Biography – A Master from Germany
Author: [de] Safransky
Translator: Jin Xiping