Arendt and Individualism

Politics versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger
Author(s): Lawrence J. Biskowski

Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 59-89
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Politics Versus Aesthetics:
Arendt's Critiques of Nietzsche
and Heidegger
Lawrence J. Biskowski
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 postmoderist
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 modem
political condition.
The various Nietzschean, agonistic, and aesthetic elements in

Hannah Arendt's political thought have long occasioned consid-
erable concern among some of her most thoughtful readers and
interpreters. Some of these commentators have urged that the
more Nietzschean elements in Arendt's work be, if not expur-
gated, then at least revised or supplemented in some way.' The
prevailing theoretical mood has changed, however, and more
recent glosses on Arendt have attempted not only to embrace but
also to expand upon the agonistic and aesthetic dimensions of
her understanding of politics. The general aim of these newer
interpretations seems to be to reconcile or combine Arendt and
Nietzsche, and to use Nietzsche's insights to correct perceived
deficiencies in critical aspects of Arendt's thought, thereby mak-
ing it more useful to post-Nietzschean or postmodern political
theory.
1. See, for example, George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil
(Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983); Hanna Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating
Public and Private," Political Theory 9 (1981): 327-52; Ronald Beiner, Political
Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Peter Steinberger, "Hannah
Arendt on Judgment," American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990): 803-22; and
Peter Fuss, "Hannah Arendt's Conception of Political Community," in Hannah
Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 157-76.
60 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
I
Thus, Dana Villa insists that Arendt advocates a c

aestheticized theory of political action, a theory radica
to all forms of moral interpretation and "beyond good
Although he takes great pains to clarify how A
Nietzscheanism and aestheticism are limited by imp
dialogue, disinterestedness, deliberation, publicness,
feeling for a common world, Villa argues that Aren
among the contemporary advocates of an aesthetic
politics. Subsequently, Villa has argued that Arendt s
of the motivations of the major postmodernist theoris
various connections between Arendt and Nietzsche, Foucault,
and Lyotard.3 Where Arendt fails, according to Villa, is mainly in
not pursuing postmodern aestheticism, parody, and playfulness
far enough, succumbing instead to a "guilty nostalgia" for the
public realm.4
Similarly, Bonnie Honig insists that Arendt shares with
Nietzsche a commitment to conceiving the self as a "multiplicity"
incapable of ever being fully "in charge of itself" and its actions.5
Understanding the self in this way radically undermines and
problematizes usual notions of moral responsibility and thus,
"like Nietzsche, Arendt believes that we should adopt an artistic
approach to our multiplicity; for Arendt, our action is our art."6
The unique nature of action is compromised by subjecting it to
2. Dana R. Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the
Aestheticization of Political Action," Political Theory 20 (1992): 288, 276.
3. Dana R. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere," American Political
Science Review 86 (1992): 712-22.
4. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere," p. 719. Villa is not the first
commentator to accuse Arendt of this sort of nostalgia for ancient Greece. See,
for example, Judith Shklar, "Hannah Arendt as Pariah." Partisan Review 50
(1983): 71. 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 (Hannah Arendt, The Life
of the Mind, vol.1 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 157). 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).
5. Bonnie Honig, "Arendt, Identity, and Difference," Political Theory 16
(1988): 86ff.
6. Ibid., p. 88.
ARENDT, NIETZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 61
moral judgment, because moral judgment assumes a self tha

"in charge of itself" and thus responsible. Honig has also sou
to bridge "the impasse" she sees between Arendt and Jacq
Derrida by supplementing Arendt's understanding of found
and authority with Derrida's insights into the "constative anch
(and thus the inherent resistibility) present in all acts of foundi
Elsewhere, Honig draws innovatively on Arendt to remedy
displacement of agonistic politics characteristic of liberal theor
but ultimately emphasizes Arendt's alleged misunderstand
of Nietzsche and theoretical deficiencies as perceived from
Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean perspective.8 In all cases, Aren
is portrayed as having deep and important affinities w
Nietzsche and postmodernism while nevertheless remain
somehow not quite Nietzschean and postmodem enough.
I propose to reconstruct (or at least to suggest) here ho
Arendt might have responded to these efforts to reconcil
correct her political theory with Nietzsche's ideas and to t
associated attempt to accent the more Nietzschean aspects of h
thinking. In effect, I believe this accent has been misplaced;
emphasis belongs, rather, on Arendt's relentless concern wi
common public world and the difficult and tension-fil
intersubjectivity of which the public world is constituted. Wh
one confronts and takes seriously Arendt's criticisms of Nietzs
and Heidegger-certainly two of the most important figure
the "aesthetic-postmodern turn"-it is difficult to imagine
seeing contemporary attempts to combine her work with p
Nietzschean aestheticism as anything but a distortion of some
her most fundamental insights and warnings. Arendt may not
the best (and certainly will not be the last) judge of the affini
between her thought and Nietzsche's or Heidegger's, but t
radicalness and consistency of her critiques suggest that at
very least it will be a useful exercise to examine closely what s
actually had to say about these thinkers.
Compelling explorations of the more tyrannical aspect
instrumental and subject-centered reason, moral systems b
7. Bonnie Honig, "Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on

Problem of Founding a Republic," American Political Science Review 85 (19
108.
8. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ith

Corell University Press, 1993).
upon intrinsic purposes or teloi, grand narratives, an

have led thinkers in the Nietzschean tradition to embrace
aesthetics as a paradigm for thinking about the self and i
relationships to itself, to others, and to the world. Aesthe
of thinking appear to many contemporary theorists to be
alternative-in some cases the sole alternative-to the instrumental
or technological logics increasingly pervading virtually all other
spheres of modem life, to the problematic assumptions and hidden
violence of various "command" and neo-Kantian moral theories,
and to the transcendental egoism of attempts to anchor identity
in various perceptions of natural law, intrinsic purpose, or
potential consensus. But this shift to aesthetics seems to require a
radical departure from previous means of understanding human
interaction and orienting ourselves in the world. Thus, to take an
extreme, seemingly bizarre, but nevertheless illustrative example,
Jean Baudrillard insists that "we live everywhere already in an
'[a]esthetic' hallucination of reality."9 Everything, "even if it be
the everyday and banal reality, falls by this token under the sign
of art, and becomes [a]esthetic."10
The attractions of aesthetic thinking in a world still recover-
ing from its metaphysical hangover-and still largely lacking in
alternatives and curatives-are enormous. Indeed, as Lawrence
Scaff puts it, aesthetics and aesthetic ways of thinking seem
to have invaded everywhere, now threatening to subordinate indepen-
dent orders, such as the ethical or political, to its own standards and
forms. Aesthetic indifference to "substance" and an overriding concern
with the perfection of "form" encourage a kind of action and judgment
oriented toward impression, rhythm, tempo, gesture, symbolization-
in a word, toward style."
9. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 147-48.

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)" (Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991], p. x).
11. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in
the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 221.
-~~~~
The criteria and logics of aesthetics expand to fill the roles formerl
filled by the criteria and logics associated with now-discredite
or putatively obsolete institutions, practices, traditions, mora
systems, and religions. Concern with style follows from the
accession of a public life based largely on image and increasingly
devoid of any other sense of reality for many people. The leap to
Baudrillard's insistence that we live in an "aesthetic hallucination
of reality" is a surprisingly short one.
Style, however, is not beauty. Even aesthetics-insofar as it
was formerly concerned with supposedly objective, public, or at
least widely shared standards of beauty-is undermined among
contemporary intellectuals by the same radical historicism which,
by undermining other logics, institutions, understandings, and
so forth, provided the conditions for its expansion and elevation.
Standards of beauty are no more objective and universal than
standards of justice, virtue, and truth; their adoption is always an
imposition underwritten by some manifestation of power. With
all such public standards discredited, individuals are thrown
back on themselves or, rather, on their will and, more typically,
on their impulses, as their only grounds for practical choices.
Coupled with an increasing recognition of how identity is formed
and stabilized, this experience leads to a diminished sense of the
unity and consistency of the self,12 which in turn leads to the
enormous surge in interest among contemporary theorists in the
politics of identity, the nature of the self, and the political and
moral implications of a de-centered subjectivity.
Thus in at least some significant respects, and for good or for
ill, the aestheticism being proffered in somewhat different ways
in both public and intellectual life is an aestheticism of self-
fascination and self-absorption. The self, understood as a
multiplicity, must be at the center of all authentic choices and
values (which may, of course, be contradicted at any time), or the
criteria for such choices at least should come from within. Moral
or aesthetic or political criteria imposed upon the individual
from the outside cannot be legitimate. Of paramount concern
therefore, are the forces of external coercion, including, especially
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 anothe
externally-imposed standard intruding upon the self?
the surreptitious and intrusive socialization technologie

the self and its various understandings and values have
been shaped, and the means by which these technolo
overcome so that one may finally be free to be
authentically is, if indeed one believes this goal rem
the realm of the possible.
This turn inward and toward the self, surely the
liberating insights, is not without its dangers. To the e
the aesthetic supersession of morality means that indiv
thrown back on themselves or their impulses as their on
for practical choices, they are left in a state of indeter
unfreedom, ultimately unable to determine even
identities except in one rather limited way. In the
legitimate moral criteria of any source or kind, they a
controlled by changing whims and arbitrary impu
confront other people and the world in much the same
sculptor confronts a block of marble, that is, as (at lea
sources of aesthetic enjoyment, as potential sources of
to the realization of one's project(s), and ultimately as
that exists solely or mainly as a medium for self-ex
Hegel described an earlier version of this doctrine:
[t]his type of subjectivism not merely substitutes a void for

ethics, rights, duties, and laws...but in addition its form is
void, i.e., it knows itself as this contentless void and in thi
knows itself as absolute.13
For Hegel, freedom under these conditions was emptied of all

direction and purpose. Perhaps more startling yet are the other
political (and moral) implications: Laws, rights, duties, and obli-
gations, but also people, institutions, things, and the world itself
can become our playthings, little more than media for our im-
pulses and caprices lionized as self-expression.
In view of all this, it becomes extremely difficult to imagine
Arendt, animated as she was by concern for the political world
and constantly preoccupied with the problem of political evil,
embracing any of these contemporary forms of aestheticism. No
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, (London:

Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 102-103.
II
one can deny that Nietzsche exerted a profound influence on

Arendt, or that Arendt shared many of the concerns about an
diagnoses of cultural modernity found in Nietzsche and the later
Nietzschean thinkers. But Arendt by no means joins the latter in
their call for a post-moral, aestheticized politics based on parody,
play, technologies of the self, and the like. She argues instead for
a third alternative, something quite different from both meta
physical foundationalism and its aestheticist rejection.
Arendt believed that one of the chief problems facing the
modern world was its growing inability to make sense of
experience, and talk about what once was considered to be
freedom. This incapacity, she feared, might eventually result i
the loss of what has distinctively human about human beings.
Such a loss would mean the complete subjection of human beings
to the logics of economic, biological, and other types of processes,
and consequently their transformation from potentially acting
choosing, and willing subjects into merely passive objects of
manipulation, administration, and various forces beyond their
conscious control.
A very similar concern is, of course, an integral part of th
contemporary appeal of aestheticized politics, and Arendt her
self has recourse to Kantian aesthetics in formulating her theory
of political judgment, but only as an illustration of an alternativ
to customary or traditional thinking about judgment. Politic
judgment resembles aesthetic judgment in several regards, mo
importantly in that it often is not determinate or subsumptive,
but the former, Arendt makes abundantly clear, cannot simp
be reduced to the latter.14 Thus it is not Arendt's claim (nor min
on her behalf) that aesthetics is irrelevant to politics.'5 The prob
14. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronal
Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
15. In using aesthetics to illustrate the penetration of contemporary cultu
by the logic of capitalism, Horkheimer and Adomo also demonstrate the politi
relevance of aesthetics in a way with which Arendt would not necessari
disagree. Her approval of some of the other ways in which members of th
Frankfurt School put aesthetics to political use (e.g., Benjamin's stress on t
socially transformative possibilities of politicized art and Marcuse's insistenc
that great art retains an authentic utopian moment which can serve as a regulati
idea in political struggle), is more doubtful but by no means entirely improbable
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Ne
lem, rather, resides in the collapsing of one category

other. From Arendt's perspective, the conflation of aest
politics is only the latest manifestation of a growin
alienation from what she considered to be authentic
another indication of our increasing incapacity even to r
the vital and distinctive ontological elements and po
present in political action and freedom. Postmodern aest
is an alternative to moder ways of thinking about po
freedom,16 but an alternative that would be unacce
Arendt, insofar as this way of thinking is based at best
dim semi-awareness of the authentically political re
between self, others, and world. As such, it also brings
host of dangers.
Thus, I will show that recent attempts to make Aren
postmodernist, or to reconcile her with conte
Nietzscheanism, tend to obscure Arendt's real attitudes about
Nietzsche, moral judgment, the aestheticization of politics, and
so forth. I begin with Arendt's piecemeal but nevertheless
devastating critique of important aspects of Nietzsche's thinking,
including many of those embraced so fully by postmodernist and
other advocates of an aestheticized politics. To cast Arendt as a
Nietzschean, or as a postmodernist, is to ignore or misunderstand
this critique as well as Arendt's alternative response to the
problems of the metaphysical tradition exposed so dramatically
by Nietzsche. I proceed to central elements of Arendt's critiques
of Heidegger, which ultimately spring from the same insights
that led her to criticize Nietzsche. Careful scrutiny of these
critiques provides a more informed vantage point from which to
consider her likely objections to postmodern aestheticism and
the dangers and distortions she would no doubt see as inherent
in it. This scrutiny leads as well to a new appreciation of the
continuing relevance and vitality of Arendt's thinking for
contemporary politics and political theory.
York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 120-67; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 219-44; and Herbert
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1977).
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.
I
Nietzsche and the Tradition
Arendt's critical stance toward Nietzsche is a remarkabl

consistent if not always predominant theme throughout Arendt
postwar books, articles, lectures, and correspondence, virtua
from beginning to end. Like many contemporary commentators
Arendt saw Nietzsche as playing a pivotal role in the history
philosophy, ethics, and political thought. Nietzsche thought a
wrote at a critical juncture-a time when the metaphysical tra
tion in philosophy was drawing to a close, at least in Arend
telling, and when tradition in general finally lost its customa
role in orienting life.7 On the surface, Nietzsche appears to
resolutely opposed to the metaphysical tradition and certainly to
its practical application in morality and politics. But Nietzsc
remained for Arendt a part of that same philosophical tradition
In various respects, and with crucial implications for politics and
political thought, Nietzsche continued as a spokesman for t
very legacy he is often credited with trying to destroy.18 Aren
was convinced that Nietzsche shared with his philosophical pr
decessors a fundamental misunderstanding of the unique natu
and the ontological and epistemological substrata of politics.
The original philosophical turn away from politics and to
ward metaphysics is a central preoccupation of Arendt's, and
discussed throughout her writings. From the point of view of t
philosopher's vita contemplativa, politics and worldly activity in
general was originally something of a nuisance. From politic
the philosopher ultimately wanted only skhole, freedom fro
entanglement in worldly affairs, so as to be better able to contem
17. References to the philosophical or metaphysical tradition occur

throughout Arendt's oeuvre, and the conceptualization of this "tradition," thoug
not uncommon, is also not without its problems. Relatively succinct discussio
of the birth of this tradition and its fundamental misapprehension of politics c
be found in Hannah Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (199
73-103 and in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth: Pengu
1977), pp. 91-142. For Arendt's argument on the decline of tradition as such,
especially Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 17-40.
18. An interesting comparison might be made between Arendt'
understanding of Nietzsche's real relationship to the tradition he criticizes a
Habermas's somewhat parallel arguments concerning Nietzsche and positiv
science in Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Bea
Press, 1971), pp. 290-300.
plate the higher order of the physical kosmos. The phen

this higher order were in the last analysis arrheton or a
unspeakable or without word, and thus were proper
the realm of human affairs and beyond the concrete plu
human perspectives and opinions.19 Plato's attempt to
politics, or rather to subordinate it to philosophical reas
not from any irresponsible or tyrannical will to power,
the philosopher's characteristic desire for stability, secur
and order, from his quest to overcome the unreliab
danger of politics in the interest of pursuing something
Our tradition of political philosophy began, Arendt insi
the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life
same time, doubt certain fundamentals of Socrates' te
What Plato came to doubt were Socrates' commitment to
sion as a form of speech and his understanding of the p
of the philosopher in the polis. These doubts subseq
came an essential part of the tradition.
But this came at great cost to those who found or m
found meaning, value, and freedom in the vita activa, th
of which can be shown to be neither superior nor inferio
of philosophy. The vita activa and vita contemplativa are
in some ways parallel but also incommensurable-form
of life. Politics and philosophy, in Arendt's rath
conceptions of both terms, represent quite different way
different ways of finding meaning and value, different
projects in the world. But after Plato we find politics in
understood to be subject to limits and principles whi
purport to come from elsewhere, originally from philos
also from religion and then science.
The original subordination of politics to tran
standards derived through or from philosophy r
considerable change in the nature of philosophy, even
own account. At its beginning, philosophy was s
nonpractical: it began, and ultimately ended, in tha
speechless awe and wonder at the spectacle of Bei
19. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University

Press, 1958), p. 20.
20. Ibid., p. 222.
21. Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," p. 73.
ARENDT, NIE'l'ZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 69
"primarily concerned with matters that escape human

knowledge" yet nevertheless haunted human reason;22 it yielde
only ineffable results." As Arendt says:
the original function of [Plato's] Ideas was not to rule or otherwise

determine the chaos of human affairs, but, in "shining brightness" to
illuminate their darkness. As such, the ideas have nothing whatever to
do with politics, political experience, or the problem of action, but
pertain exclusively to philosophy, the experience of contemplation, the
quest for the "true being of things." It is precisely ruling, measuring
subsuming, and regulating that are entirely alien to the experience
underlying the doctrine of ideas in its original conception.24
To accomplish this transformation, Plato had to emphasize thos

aspects of the doctrine that had their origin in the experience of
poiesis or fabrication.5 The republic and its laws were objects t
be crafted by those who could comprehend the ideal republic.2
The philosopher's speechless wonder at and love for the eterna
was mixed with the craftsman's desire for permanence and im
mortality until they were almost indistinguishable in an attempt
to create a society that ran of itself.27
In the Christian era, "Plato's invisible spiritual yardsticks, by
which the visible, concrete affairs of men were to be measured
and judged, have unfolded their full political effectiveness."28
The authority of divine revelation was combined with the Platonic
notion of transcendent measurements and rule; Christianity, in a
manner of speaking, revealed the source of Plato's unseen bu
22. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1: 114.

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 expedition
to Sicily in the Seventh Letter, and also why Plato finally avers that what ultimatel
concerned him could not be put down in words. See Plato, Phaedrus and Letters
VII and VIII, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 341b
343a.
24. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 112-13.

25. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 142.
26. Arendt points out, however, that later thinkers went much farther than
Plato would have approved in the generalization of the fabrication experience t
other areas of life, leading eventually to the ascendance of instrumental rationalit
and contributing to the growing meaninglessness of modem life. See the discussion
in Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 157-59.
28. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 127.
authoritative ideas. "General and transcendent standards under

which the particular and immanent could be subsumed wer
now required for any political order, moral rules for all interhum
behavior, and rational measurement for the guidance of
individual judgment."29 And for those who lacked in grace
who did not feel the inherent compulsion of the prevaili
philosophical or theological truth, these standards were back
up by a doctrine of hell not unlike the Er-myth of the Republic
The effect of all this was for many years thereafter to ma
politics largely a question of imposing external and absolute
standards-derived, variously, from philosophical contemplatio
divine revelation, or (in the more modern version) from th
alleged nature of things-on the realm of human affairs and
relationships, "whose very essence therefore seems to b
relativity" to something external, eternal, and authoritative.30
The tradition came to an end when these transcendent
standards lost their authority, when doubt crept into the pe
relationship between the literally mundane world of eve
sensory appearances and the supersensory ground of re
from which the standards were purported to have spru
Nietzsche well knew, this meant not that it was no longer p
for people to believe in the supersensory, nor that God was
in any literal sense of the expression, nor yet that the
questions formerly answered through an appeal to supers
reality had become meaningless. Rather, the entire fra
reference, the way in which the old questions had been
and answered, the whole vast intellectual edifice through
the tradition had organized and given orientation to thi
spirituality, politics, and everyday life, increasingly began
its plausibility.
This collapse has had extraordinary implications for p
and morality. When one appreciates its depth and magn
the various catastrophes of the twentieth century becom
surprising, if no easier to accept. The "chaos of mass perple
on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual s
were susceptible to exploitation by the totalitarian move
which, "through terror and ideology, crystallized [them]
29. Ibid., pp. 127-28.

30. Ibid., p. 132.
ARENDT, NIEIZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 71
new form of government and administration."31 Less surpris

too are contemporary retreats into religious fundamentalism
nationalistic superstition, which to varying degrees are
responses to the demise of the traditional frame of referenc
"In increasingly strident voices," Arendt continues her na
tive about modernity,
the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the dange

nihilism inherent in this development; and though they thems
seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor
indeed true that once the supersensory realm is discarded, its opp
the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, is
annihilated. The sensory, as still understood by the positivists, c
survive the death of the supersensory. No one knew this better
Nietzsche, who, with his poetic and metaphoric description o
assassination of God, has caused so much confusion in these
matters...[O]nce the always precarious balance between the two worl
is lost...the whole framework of reference in which our thinking w
accustomed to orient itself breaks down. In these terms, nothing see
to make much sense anymore...[Even] to talk about nihilism in thi
context is perhaps just unwillingness to part company with concep
and thought-trains that actually died quite some time ago.32
The obliteration of the traditional framework of reference-which

was brought about far less by the great critics of the tradition and
their various "reversals" than by the rise of modern science33-is
nothing less than the distinctive moral and political crisis of
modernity.
31. Ibid., p. 26.

32. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1: 10-12.
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 modem life.
What he discovered in his attempt at 'transvaluation' was that within this
categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'etre when it is deprived
of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent." See Arendt, Between
Past and Future, pp. 26-30; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New
Edition with Added Prefaces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p.
461; and Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, ed. Lotte
Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 166.
Nietzsche's insights include the recognition that

political values can no longer be defended as object
through appeals to the lost supersensory realm. At
values can only be subjectively chosen, then asserted an
as matters of choice and commitment, and hopefu
with a certain generosity toward the rival cho
commitments of others. If one accepts this argument,
moral and political doctrines of the Western ph
tradition, and the institutions and practices found
doctrines, seem to collapse. All philosophical basis t
order in a rationally defensible and objective morality
must be abandoned. What sort of politics should fo
immediately obvious, but metaphysical or tran
foundations for morality and politics are no longer cre
Surprisingly, however, Arendt tells us repeat
Nietzsche's assault on the philosophical tradition was
radical enough. Along with Marx and Kierkegaard,
stands at the end of the tradition, not outside it but "j
the break came."34 Nietzsche "tried desperately to th
the tradition while using its own conceptual tools";35 a
he succeeded only in inverting the traditional hierar
cepts, leaving the traditional conceptual framework mo
intact and forgetting "that a reversed Plato is still Plato
doing so, he unintentionally undermined his own pr
And when Nietzsche proclaimed that he had discovered "n

higher values," he was the first to fall prey to delusions
himself had helped to destroy, accepting the old tradition
measuring with transcendent units in its newest and mo
form, thereby again carrying the relativity and exchangeab
ues into the very matters whose absolute dignity he had
assert-power and life and man's love of his earthly existen
What Nietzsche sought to change, at least in Arendt's v

the particular transcendent values by which human
34. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 28.

35. Ibid., p. 25.
36. Arendt, ibid., pp. 26, 29; Arendt, Human Condition, p. 17; Ar
the Mind, 1: 176.
37. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 34-35.
in and measure their world, not the inherent metaphy

distortion of attempting to subjugate the political world to
transcendent.
Even this great exchange of values, Arendt seems to tell us,
was not so radical as is usually believed. She considers Nietzsche
(together with Marx and Bergson) to be one of the great
representatives of modern Lebensphilosophie.38 Dionysian joy is
celebrated by Nietzsche as "temporary identification with the
principle of life."39 Nietzsche's teachings suggest that people
should abandon traditional ethics in favor of an unqualified
affirmation of life and all that life entails, even as life continually
overflows human attempts to tame and organize it. The human
capacity for willing is identified with the life-principle and life
itself is elevated as the highest value.40 In a manner not unlike the
alleged Marxian reductions of politics and culture to economics,
and life to labor and consumption, Nietzsche reduces Being to
Life.41 Like Marx and Bergson, he breaks from the philosophical
tradition primarily by conceptualizing life as more active and
productive than consciousness or contemplation.
But he also shares with them (and with the philosophical
tradition itself) a fundamental misunderstanding of politics and
of the human capacity for action. Nietzsche wrongly conceives of
action in terms of fabrication, and his ultimate point of reference
is not work, worldliness, or action but life and life's fertility.42 A
central argument of The Human Condition is that Marx had glori-
fied labor and the animal laborans in such a way that an economic
or "social" preoccupation with the needs and functions of the life
process replaced the unique ontological features and possibilities
of action and authentic politics. Nietzsche arrives at quite differ-
ent conclusions, but he works from several premises that are
fundamentally similar to those of Marx.
38. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 313n.

39. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:163.
40. Ibid., pp. 163-64.
41. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 79-135, 313n. See, also, the telling remarks
on the role of "life" in Nietzsche's thought in William E. Connolly, "Beyond
Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory 21
(1993): 371.
I
Life and the particular values he associates with l

supreme in Nietzsche's philosophy. This can be seen, for
in his famous warning about nihilism that living beings
willing to draw horizons around themselves, to form
own truth for themselves, in order to live and grow
subsumed under, or made a function of, life:
[In] Nietzsche's will to power, truth itself is understood as a fu

the life process; what we call truth is those propositions wit
we could not go on living. Not reason but our will to live m
compelling.43
And not only truth but the human capacity to will become little
more than "a mere symptom of the life-instinct."44
The justification for violence also is grounded in life; violence
can now be advertised as "a life-promoting force."45 But for
Arendt, this position, based ultimately on a category mistake,
holds disastrous implications for modern politics. "Nothing,"
she says, "could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradi-
tion of organic thought in political matters by which power and
violence are interpreted in biological terms."46 The yearning for
violence that surfaces periodically in Nietzsche, and which is
often shared by other modem intellectuals and creative artists, is
not the manifestation of power and will that he and they would
like to imagine it, but rather an expression of ressentiment, a quite
"natural reaction of those whom society has tried to cheat of their
strength."47 Indeed, the will to power itself, "as the modern age
from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it in glorification or de-
nunciation, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like
envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even
their most dangerous one."48
The reason Nietzsche was prone to such mistakes was
precisely that he remained so much a part of the tradition in his
43. Arendt, Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 119.

44. Ibid., p. 177.
45. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1970), p. 74.
46. Ibid., p. 75.
47. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 203-204.
48. Ibid., p. 203. See, also, Arendt, On Violence, p. 44.
consideration of action and politics. He was "hardly aware t

he only echoed the age-old suspicion of the philosopher aga
action."49 The route by which he came to do this, of course, w
quite different, but he too forsakes the everyday worl
appearances, which has "become a mere symbol for inw
experiences...[owing to Nietzsche's fundamental] partisansh
for man's soul apparatus, whose experiences are understood
have absolute primacy."50
Thus, in a strange way, Nietzsche is trying to interpret
vita activa from a perspective quite similar to that of the tr
tional vita contemplativa, and to subject the former to the latt
categories and standards. What makes Nietzsche different,
Arendt, is that he grasps far more clearly than any before
what modernity had done to the tradition (and to tradition
such, authority, religion, and morality): His "abiding greatn
was that "he dared to demonstrate how shabby and meaning
morality had become" in the modern world.51 But when he tur
to action, politics, and the world, he did so with the predisp
tions and orientation of the solitary, contemplative philosophe
Nietzsche's own unique version of an essentially asce
withdrawal from the world can be seen most clearly in
acknowledgment that while the will may be mentally or interna
omnipotent, the situation is much different when one confron
the external world, which frequently and successfully res
one's will. Here redemption and saying yes to life means that t
will must overcome itself, calling the world good as it is a
saying "thus I willed it" to all that has transpired.53 Clearly, f
Nietzsche,
what is needful is not to change the world or men but to change th

way of "evaluating" it, their way, in other words, of thinking an

51. These remarks are cited in Jerome Kohn, "Thinking/Acting," So
Research 57 (1990): 117.
52. This is manifest, for example, in what Arendt calls Nietzsche's "mo
prejudice to see the source of all power in the will power of the isola
individual." See Arendt, Human Condition, p. 245.
53. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufma
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 139ff.
reflecting about it. In Nietzsche's words, what must be overc

philosophers, those whose "life is an experiment of cognit
must be taught how to cope. Had Nietzsche developed these
into a systematic philosophy, he would have fashioned a kind
enriched Epictetian doctrine, teaching once more the "art of
life," whose psychologically powerful trick consists in willi
happen which happens anyhow.54
He goes on to reinterpret and reconstruct the world in

that it fits, and makes sense to, a creature strong e
foreswear entirely the consolations of traditional philos
religion, a creature that can endure living in a world dev
ultimate exterior ground of meaning.
Thus, at least in a manner of speaking, as Nietzsch
the tradition, he also embraces its fundamental appro
vita activa. The Ubermensch, just like Plato's philosop
leave the cave of everyday human understanding an
The authentic self must be extricated from the social se
the cliche-ridden language of everyday discourse an
But for Nietzsche the next step in human evolution requ
individual to free himself from traditional morality
understandings. The central characteristic of the auth
that emerges is its sheer spontaneity, which is realized o
in some manifestation of artistic creativity,55 within th
eters of the possible and without resentment of such
Nietzsche puts it:
Metaphysics, morality, religion, science...these things merit

ation only as various forms of lies; with their help one can hav
life. "Life ought to inspire confidence": the task thus imposed
dous. To solve it, man must be a liar by nature, he must be
artist. And he is one...Art and nothing but art! It is the grea
making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great st
life...Art as the redemption of the man of action-of those who
the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live
live it, the tragic-warlike man, the hero. Art as the redemp
sufferer-as the way to states in which suffering is willed, tra
deified, where suffering is a form of great delight.56

55. Ibid., p. 183.
56. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauf
York: Vintage, 1968). p. 451.
Here, then, is a source (if not the fountainhead) of much o

the confusion and conflation of aesthetics and politics that was to
come. But the move to spontaneity, artistic creativity, and ae
thetics only seems necessary, and is only possible, because th
Western philosophical tradition from Plato on, and includin
Nietzsche, "has never had a clear concept of what constitutes the
political, and couldn't have one, because, by necessity, it spoke of
man the individual and dealt with the fact of plurality tangen
tially."57 With metaphysics discredited, aesthetics became th
default, seemingly the only alternative. In other words, Nietzsch
follows a very different path but shares with the tradition i
fundamental blindness toward authentic politics, action, and
freedom.
In the absence of any real sense of what Arendt called the
authentically political, the accession, in various waves, of sundry
forms of Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie, aesthetics, and agonism
among intellectuals should not surprise us either. The demise of
the tradition has left a void, and there are few alternatives available
as metaphorical templates for making sense of politics. In many
respects, this has been an extraordinarily positive development.
But it is ultimately a poor substitute for politics, at least for
Arendt.
Heidegger and Authenticity
Although it is sometimes argued that Arendt dramatically

changed her thinking about Heidegger's philosophy as she
eventually came to forgive her former teacher his notorious and
controversial association with the Nazis,58 Arendt's fundamental
57. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, p. 166. Although Arendt

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 Margaret Canovan, "Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt's
Reflections on Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990): 137-38 and
Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge:
critique of Heidegger remained quite consistent f

onward: in a manner quite similar to that of Nietzsche,
misunderstands the unique nature of the politic
criticizing, even destroying, the metaphysical tra
succumbs to the worst perils of its way of thinking abo
and human affairs.
Heidegger's early philosophy is concerned in part with the
erosion of human possibilities in a modern culture increasingly
dominated by instrumental forms of rationality and forgetful-
ness of the basic issues posed by individual existence. Human
beings are special in that they can be aware of their existence and
can turn their own being into an issue of conscious significance
for themselves. Heidegger calls this potentiality authentic exist-
ence or Dasein.59 Existing authentically means in part to be aware
of one's own possibilities as they exist in finite time, and to be
aware that one's existence (or at least one's presence in the world,
as Arendt would say) is itself finite. As Heidegger puts it:
Once one has grasped the finitude of one's existence, it snatches one
back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer them-
selves as closest to one-those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking
things lightly-and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate [the
particular possibilities that indeed are open to one and from which one
may choose].60
For Heidegger, it is only with this awareness that authentic

choice, freedom, and responsibility become possible, and it is
only because of this awareness that it is proper to think of human
beings as having unique identities, and appropriate to speak of
them in terms of who rather than what they are. As Heidegger
subsequently emphasizes, by being aware of its own existence,
Dasein has the possibility of existing in some other way than it
does at any particular moment. This is the reason that human
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 254-55,163-64. For a very useful discussion
of similarities and divergences between Arendt and Heidegger, see Lewis P.
Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, "In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's
Phenomenological Humanism," Review of Politics 46 (1984): 183-211.
59. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 68ff.
60. Ibid., p. 435.
beings can be free and responsible for the choices they make and
thus more than mere objects "present-at-hand."61
But the awareness necessary for authentic existence (and
thus for freedom and responsibility) is no easy achievement,
particularly in the modern world. In various ways, but especially
through the development of a language more and more adapted
to speaking and thinking of human beings as mere "presences-at-
hand," metaphysics, the philosophical tradition in general, and
the scientific or technological worldview in particular all wor
together to make this awareness difficult. Moreover, by the time
an individual develops the capacity for authentic existence, s/h
is always already socialized into a world s/he inhabits with
"others" or "the they":
By "others" we do not mean everyone else but me-those over against

whom the "I" stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the
most part, one does not distinguish oneself-those among whom one is
too...the world is always the one that I share with others. The world of
Dasein is a with-world. Being-in [the world] is being-with others.62
Being-with others is what makes existence intelligible and pro-

vides a common point of reference,63 but it does pose a certain
problem: The risk posed by being with these others is that th
rules and normative strictures that become incorporated into the
individual self through socialization are likely to interfere wit
the awareness that one requires for authentic existence. Dasein
can become absorbed in the world, forgetful of its own existence
and the possibilities that existence entails. Losing oneself in "the
they" is a "constant temptation" to fall away from authentic
existence:
Proximally and for the most part the Self is lost in the they. It under
stands itself in terms of those possibilities of existence which "circulate"
in the "average" public way of interpreting Dasein today.64
This may bring about a reduction in the anxiety one feels abou
one's own mortality, but the cost of this tranquilization is th
61. Ibid., pp. 67ff. See, also, Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysic
trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 120-21.
62. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 154-55.
63. Ibid., pp. 166-68, 212.
64. Ibid., p. 435.
II I I I I I II
distraction, inauthentic self-involvement, dull bana

difference of everyday life. The hope and the remedy
resolutely to face and embrace one's anxiety, to use
to extricate oneself from one's lostness in "the they."6
happens, Dasein no longer wants to define itself in ter
on it by the public world, or in terms of the every
meanings, and concerns of "the they." Being an authen
"a way of letting the ownmost self take action in itsel
accord" beyond the distorting and limiting influe
they."66
Although Arendt considered Heidegger to be perhaps the
most important philosopher of the twentieth century, she always
objected to the political dangers and deformations inherent in
this emphasis on the self. Heidegger's philosophy led him away
from the common, public world and directed his gaze inward
toward the self.67 But this could not help but distort his political
judgment, which must take its bearings from the public world.
Instead, as we have seen, Heidegger associates the public world
with inauthentic existence, a pernicious form of socialization,
and a falling away from true Being. In fact, Arendt says, he
dismisses
all those modes of human existence which rest on the fact that Man lives
together in the world with his fellows. To put it historically, Heidegger's
Self is an ideal which has been working mischief in German philosophy
and literature since Romanticism. In Heidegger this arrogant passion to
be a self has contradicted itself; for never before was it so clear as in his
philosophy that this is probably the one being which Man cannot be.6
Without the world as a source of political and moral orientation,

the self and its death become Heidegger's central concern:
Only in the realization of death, which will take him away from the
world, has Man the certainty of being himself...in other words, the
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 Hannah Arendt,
Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace
and Company, 1994), pp. 361-62.
68. Hannah Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review 13
(1946): 50.
ARENDT, NIE'ZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 81
essential character of Man's Being is determined by what he is n

nothingness...Death may indeed be the end of human reality; a
same time it is the guarantee that nothing matters but myself. Wi
experience of death as nothingness I have the chance of devoting
exclusively to being a Self, and once and for all freeing myself fro
surrounding world.69
For Arendt, on the contrary, authentic existence is never is

in this egoistic way but rather exists only in acknowledgme
and communication with others. It can develop only in t
getherness of human beings in the common, public world.
The sort of fascination with the self advocated by Heideg
leaves one disconnected from the multiform, multiperspe
reality of the political world. Among its consequence
failure to comprehend political events, poor judgment,
peculiar form of political irresponsibility. Arendt first d
this theme in Rahel Varnhagen where the not altogether dif
Romantic cult of interiority is criticized. The turn inward t
the self made Rahel and the intellectuals and artists in her circle
blind to political reality.70 Similarly, in The Origins of Totalitarian
ism, Arendt sees romantic self-fascination as contributing to the
general conditions which made the twentieth century mass move
ments and their horrors possible.71 A resurgent romanticism
intellectual life may be symptomatic of
a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any opinion

can gain ground temporarily. No real thing, no historical event, no
69. Ibid., pp. 49-50. This central preoccupation with death and with escapin
the triviality of the world shared with others continues to be an important part o
later Nietzschean aestheticism, as can be seen, for example, in Foucault: "It is i
death that the individual becomes at one with himself, escaping from monotonou
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 bla
border isolates it, and gives it the style of its truth." See Michel Foucault, Deat
and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Garde
City: Doubleday, 1986), p. 54; Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self
a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault," in The Final Foucault,
ed. James Berauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
1988), p. 9; and Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 166, 171.
70. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. R. and
C. Winston (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 9-12, 21.
71. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 175, 316.
political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-destro

by which these first literati could always find new and ori
tunities for new and fascinating opinions.72
This playfulness, which certainly has its advocat

today's literati, is one manifestation of the general c
world-alienation which appears as a persistent theme in
Arendt's work. Whatever the undoubted aesthetic, a
expressivist aspects or moments of action (whi
recognizes and emphasizes, particularly in contradis
instrumental rationality and those philosophies and
which tend to reduce history and human life to a mere
she makes clear that action and politics cannot be re
even thought of merely in terms of aesthetic self-e
"Human plurality, the faceless 'They' from which th
Self splits to be itself alone is divided into a great many
it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a comm
men are ready for action."73 These communities
institutions
depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is

achieved by the same means that brought them into being...[U]tter
dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a
product of action.74
Finally, Arendt tells us, "the inspiring principle of action is love

of freedom, and this both in the negative sense of freedom from
oppression and in the positive sense of the establishment of
Freedom as a stable, tangible reality."75 Precisely this is the task
of politics.
But Heidegger's turn inward and away from the political
world has a pedigree that goes beyond romanticism. Arendt
consistently maintained that even though Heidegger rivals
Nietzsche as a critic of the philosophical tradition, he too shares
its general regard for "the incomprehensible triviality" of the
common, public world, the only escape from which is withdrawal
72. Ibid., p. 167.

74. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p, 153.
"into that solitude which philosophers since Parmenides a

Plato have opposed to the political realm."76 Indeed, Heideg
no less than Plato personified to Arendt what might be called
professional thinker, and succumbed to the characteri
temptations of the profession.77 Arendt makes clear that
thinking requires some measure of aloofness, seclusion, a
distance from the world,78 but this characteristic is amplified
expanded in Heidegger's philosophy. In Dasein, thinking a
being alive fold in on one another and become one.79 Authe
existence requires thinking, which in turn requires distance fr
"the they" and everyday life. Immersion in everyday
constitutes and requires withdrawal from true Being.
Heidegger, not unlike Plato, thinking requires one to leave
cave of worldly affairs. But as we have seen, Arendt suggests
such a departure may result in a loss of moral-practi
orientation.80 And this constitutes in the end perhaps the
explanation of why Heidegger's awesome ability to think did n
76. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt B

Jovanovich, 1968), p. iv. Even when praising Heidegger's philosophy A
does not shrink from castigating the poor political judgment to which it
rise. Heidegger and Plato have more in common than Heidegger would
preferred to concede, the philosophical tradition's longstanding hostility to
and alienation from the common, public world of politics: "We who wi
honor the thinkers, even if our own residence lies in the midst of the world,
hardly help finding it striking and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heide
when they entered into human affairs, turned to tyrants and Fuhrers. This s
be imputed not just to the circumstances of the times and even less to prefor
character, but rather to what the French call a deformation professionelle" (Ha
Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," New York Review of Books, 21 Oct
1971, p. 54).
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, 197ff; Arendt, The
Human Condition, pp. 75-76, 90; and Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral
Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research 38 (1971): 417-46.
79. Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," p. 51.
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 Lawrence J. Biskowski, "Practical
Foundations for Political Judgment: Arendt on Action and World," Journal of
Politics 55 (1993): 879ff.
II I Illl III I I II
prevent him from evil-doing in the form of his suppor

Nazis.81
Heidegger eventually turned away from the emp
self-assertion and Dasein's "ownmost" state of being
Being and Time.8 As Arendt tells the story, Heidegge
study of Nietzsche led him to see even his own previous
phy as having been motivated by a form of will to powe
concerned that instrumental rationality, science, and tec
degraded Dasein by reducing everything to presence-a
came to see his own philosophy as "enframed" in the
refusal to let beings be at the heart of the Western tech
worldview he so detested. The new alternative Heide
mulated was a Zen-like attitude or disposition of seren
aloofness-Gelassenheit-in which state thinkers would refrain
from attempting to impose their own will on beings (whet
through technology or even through arguing for "ownmost
"most authentic" modes of being).
Thus, like Nietzsche, Heidegger eventually repudiates t
will, a capacity Arendt sees as necessary for action and freedom
But more significantly, Heidegger's turn or reversal leaves
as alienated from politics and the common, public worl
before. From the point of view of Arendtian politics, Heide
has merely exchanged one form of world-alienation (glorif
tion of self-assertion and extrication from "the they") for anot
(a regarding of the world simply as an object of contemplation
81. It is clear, however, that Arendt does not believe that this deficienc
judgment necessarily invalidates major aspects of Heidegger's philosoph
makes all of Heidegger's insights irrelevant to politics. The possible pos
contributions Heidegger may provide to contemporary political understan
are developed fairly but very sympathetically in Fred Dallmayr, The O
Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Far less sympathetic appr
can be found in Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Tem
University Press, 1989); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Poli
The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambr
Harvard University Press, 1993).
82. For an excellent discussion of this shift or Kehre in Heidegger's think
see J. L. Mehta, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Harper and R
1971), pp. 104-22. Arendt leaves little doubt that she generally agrees w
Mehta's interpretation (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2: 173ff).
83. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:,172-94.
ARENDT, NIElTZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 85
Arendt shares with the early Heidegger the notion that to be

in the world is to be a locus of understanding, possibility, and
freedom in the midst of a surrounding texture of meaning and
significance. For the early Heidegger, however, the world serves
primarily as a medium for the aesthetic expression of the self.
After his Kehre, the world became something primarily to be
regarded with serene, disinterested, contemplative wonder. This
marked a return to the origins of philosophy in thaumazein. But
philosophy and politics are not the same; the latter requires
active engagement with the world, at least if the world is to be a
fit home for mortal beings endowed with the capacity for action
and the possibility of freedom.
Aestheticizing Politics
Arendt consistently maintained that the entire philosophical

tradition, from Plato through Heidegger and including Nietzsche,
was "not of this world,"84 and thus hostile to and dangerous for
politics. Whatever aspects of that tradition which may have ended
with Nietzsche and Heidegger, the basically unworldly nature of
its orientation to politics-as epitomized by the essentially soli-
tary philosopher searching for knowledge about human affairs
while withdrawing from them-survived. Arendt appreciated
Nietzsche and Heidegger as thinkers and philosophers, and she
certainly understood the relevance of key elements of their phi-
losophies, such as the debunking of the tradition's metaphysical
notions of Truth, for politics. But neither understood sufficiently
the distinctive elements of politics.
In view of these criticisms, it seems rather difficult to imagine
Arendt as particularly sanguine about contemporary postmodern
or aestheticized approaches to self and politics. She would al-
most certainly launch a similar critique of the contemporary turn
toward aestheticism. The pervasive and deadening effects of
bureaucracy and instrumental forms of reason have produced a
peculiar kind of overreaction. The latter-day aestheticians of poli-
tics turn from one essentially unworldly principle to the next,
and seek to make politics understandable via that principle.
Jurgen Habermas makes a similar point: "To instrumental rea-
son, they juxtapose in manichean fashion a principle

sible through evocation, be it the will to power or so
Being or the dionysiac force of the poetical."85 From th
view of Arendtian politics, aestheticization merely r
more likely-temporarily displaces rationalization,86 w
ing a host of new dangers, mainly stemming from the l
common, public world as a source of orientation. As
pointed out in her study of totalitarianism,
[t]he ruthless individualism of romanticism never meant any

serious than that "everybody is free to create for himself
ideology." What was new in Mussolini's experiment was th
to carry it out with all possible energy."87
Previous forms of intellectual aestheticism aggra

disorientation which is so much a feature of moder
inadvertently contributed to an atmosphere in which
unimaginable horrors became possible.8
But again, this is not to say that Arendt did not l
appropriate much from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and ae
general. The aesthetic-expressivist dimension of action
important to her thinking, particularly when confro
modern world's preoccupation with technology, inst
rationality, and the life-process.89 Kantian aesthetics
85. Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity Versus Post-Modernity," Ne

Critique 22 (1981): 13.
86. It is unclear, particularly in Arendtian terms, how the
individualism and self-absorption characteristic of the turn towar
can generate any sort of political power in the face of the coerc
economic and other forms of rationalization. The probable politica
associated with the generalization of aesthetics to other spheres of
been suggested by Max Weber. See Max Weber, From Max Webe
Sociology, ed. H. H. Gert and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford
Press, 1958), pp. 115, 125, 127, 342; see also Scaff, Beyond the Iron Cag
87. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 168.
88. Ibid., pp. 331-37.
89. It is worthwhile to compare Foucault's very similar concerns, p
with political and social phenomena associated with the rise of
(Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, tra
[New York: Vintage Books, 1980], pp. 140ff). Here again Arendt evi
with many of the same problems that worry Nietzscheans and pos
while offering nevertheless quite different diagnoses and conclusio
- -
useful example of an alternative mode of rationality similar in

several important respects to the faculty necessary for what Arendt
would consider to be authentically political judgments. And
Arendt certainly cannot be claimed by those who would defend
traditional philosophy and metaphysics from Nietzschean
Heideggerian, or "postmodern" criticism-she considered a re-
turn to metaphysical ways of thinking to be neither likely no
desirable and concurred with Nietzsche and Heidegger that the
traditional way of framing and answering philosophical ques
tions had come to an end.90
Even so, she would not accept any attempt to detach political
action from morality and concern for the world. Thus, even as
she elaborates the unique aesthetic-expressivist and ontological
aspects of action, she insists very explicitly that some moral
precepts-readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, willingness to
make promises and reliability in keeping them-are inherent in
action:91
These moral precepts are the only ones that are not applied to action
from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from experi-
ences outside action's own reach. They arise, on the contrary, directly
out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and
speaking, and thus are like control mechanisms built into the very
faculty to start new and unending processes.92
Indeed, most of Arendt's oeuvre may be viewed not as a

Nietzschean or aesthetic repudiation of morality but rather as a
lengthy exercise in moral interpretation under the disturbing
and uncertain conditions of modernity. In any event, she clearly
does not separate moral responsibility from political judgment
or action. The most obvious evidence of this is found in Eichmann
in Jerusalem, where Arendt condemns Eichmann specifically for
the evil of what he did:
[T]here still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore
actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the
90. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1: 9-10; Arendt, "Thinking and Moral
Considerations," pp. 419-20.
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.
nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And

supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share
with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other
though you and your superiors had any right to determine
and who should not inhabit the world-we find that no one,
member of the human race, can be expected to want to shar
with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must
Eichmann's crimes were political crimes, and the po

moral spheres are not radically disjunct. Arendt judg
yet another standard she sees as inherent in the polit
life-authentic politics and care for the common, pu
require a respect for, or at least a toleration of, human
Eichmann participated in an attempt to destroy or r
plurality. Arendt holds him morally responsible for h
the meaning of these actions apparently is not exha
some contemporary Nietzscheans would have it, in th
performance.
One lesson Arendt gleaned from the Nazi experience and its
aftermath was how easily the basic morality of a people could be
reversed under the conditions of modernity-with no more diffi-
culty than would be required "to change their table manners."94
Arendt came to the conclusion, as Canovan points out,95 that
neither tradition, religion, or authority, nor metaphysics, nor
even common-sense morality, could be counted on to provide
effective bulwarks against such monstrosities. The perpetual flux
of values possible in and sometimes characteristic of modernity
means, as Max Weber suggests,96 that the irrational reality of life
and the content of its possible meanings are inexhaustible. As a
result, Arendt says, the groundwork of the world
has begun to shift, to change and transform itself with ever-increasing

rapidity from one shape into another, as though we were living and
struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment
can become almost anything else.97
93. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 279.
95. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, pp. 157ff.
96. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. E. A. Shils and H.
A. Finch (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), p. 111.
ARENDT, NIE'ZSCHE, AND HEIDEGGER 89
I _
Fortunately, this does not necessarily entail "the loss of t

human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world
that can survive us and remain a fit place to live in for those w
come after us."98 To care for the world in this way is in large pa
the task of politics, at least for Arendt. This can be seen mo
clearly in her descriptions of the act of political founding, throu
which a kind of shelter for freedom and plurality may be cr
ated.99 In a sense, however, all genuinely political action partake
in some measure of this love of freedom and hence also in care fo
the world which makes such freedom possible.1??
Arendt attempts to find a way out of the various dilemmas
modernity, including moral solipsism, instrumental rationali
and the process-imperatives of progress and economic produ
tion. But she attempts to do so while still avoiding the seduction
of the aesthetic cult of the self-its ultimate self-referentiality, i
abjuration of morality and moral interpretation, its turning aw
from the world, and its resulting political disorientation. H
success in confronting the problems of the moder condition
of course, highly debatable; the question of her advocacy o
postmodern, aestheticized politics radically adverse to moral
and moral interpretation seems much less so.
98. Ibid.
99. Arendt, Life of the Mind, p. 203.
100. I have argued elsewhere that love of what Arendt called freedom (i
which many of the concerns of the post-Nietzscheans are included) and care
the world (which is at best far more obscure in many of the major post-Nietzsch
thinkers) may be viewed as practical foundations for political judgment
Arendt's political theory in the sense that they are values internal to the practi
of what Arendt considered to be authentic politics. See Biskowski, "Pract
Foundations for Political Judgment."

Arendt and Individualism

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

Author(s): Lawrence J. Biskowski

Cambridge University Press, University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have

The various Nietzschean, agonistic, and aesthetic elements in

Thus, Dana Villa insists that Arendt advocates a c

moral judgment, because moral judgment assumes a self tha

7. Bonnie Honig, "Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on

8. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ith

upon intrinsic purposes or teloi, grand narratives, an

9. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 147-48.

the surreptitious and intrusive socialization technologie

[t]his type of subjectivism not merely substitutes a void for

For Hegel, freedom under these conditions was emptied of all

13. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, (London:

one can deny that Nietzsche exerted a profound influence on

lem, rather, resides in the collapsing of one category

Nietzsche and the Tradition

Arendt's critical stance toward Nietzsche is a remarkabl

17. References to the philosophical or metaphysical tradition occur

plate the higher order of the physical kosmos. The phen

19. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University

"primarily concerned with matters that escape human

the original function of [Plato's] Ideas was not to rule or otherwise

To accomplish this transformation, Plato had to emphasize thos

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

24. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 112-13.

authoritative ideas. "General and transcendent standards under

29. Ibid., pp. 127-28.

new form of government and administration."31 Less surpris

the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the dange

The obliteration of the traditional framework of reference-which

31. Ibid., p. 26.

Nietzsche's insights include the recognition that

And when Nietzsche proclaimed that he had discovered "n

What Nietzsche sought to change, at least in Arendt's v

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

in and measure their world, not the inherent metaphy

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

Life and the particular values he associates with l

[In] Nietzsche's will to power, truth itself is understood as a fu

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

consideration of action and politics. He was "hardly aware t

what is needful is not to change the world or men but to change th

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

reflecting about it. In Nietzsche's words, what must be overc

He goes on to reinterpret and reconstruct the world in

Metaphysics, morality, religion, science...these things merit

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

Here, then, is a source (if not the fountainhead) of much o

Heidegger and Authenticity

Although it is sometimes argued that Arendt dramatically

57. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, p. 166. Although Arendt

critique of Heidegger remained quite consistent f

For Heidegger, it is only with this awareness that authentic

By "others" we do not mean everyone else but me-those over against

Being-with others is what makes existence intelligible and pro-

distraction, inauthentic self-involvement, dull bana

Without the world as a source of political and moral orientation,

65. Ibid., pp. 233-35, 345.

essential character of Man's Being is determined by what he is n

For Arendt, on the contrary, authentic existence is never is

a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any opinion

political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-destro