Hannah Arendt
Heidegger the Fox
From Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch of 1953 – notebooks in which she recorded her thoughts. English translation by Robert and Rita Kimber.
Heidegger says, with great pride: “People say that Heidegger is a fox.” This is the true story of Heidegger
the fox: Once upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness that he not only kept getting
caught in traps but couldn’t even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap. This fox suffered from
another failing as well. There was something wrong with his fur, so that he was completely without natural
protection against the hardships of a fox’s life. After he had spent his entire youth prowling around the
traps of people, and now that not one intact piece of fur, so to speak, was left on him, this fox decided to
withdraw from the fox world altogether and to set about making himself a burrow. In his shocking ignorance of the difference between traps, he hit on an idea completely new and unheard of among foxes: He
built a trap as his burrow. He set himself inside it, passed it off as a normal burrow—not out of cunning, but because he had always thought others’ traps were their burrows—and then decided to become sly in his
own way and outfit for others the trap he had built himself and that suited only him. This again demonstrated great ignorance about traps: No one would go into his trap, because he was sitting inside it himself. This annoyed him. After all, everyone knows that, despite their slyness, all foxes occasionally get caught in traps. Why should a fox trap—especially one built by a fox with more experience of traps than any other—not be a match for the traps of human beings and hunters? Obviously because this trap did not reveal itself clearly enough as the trap it was! And so it occurred to our fox to decorate his trap beautifully and to hang up equivocal signs everywhere on it that quite clearly said: “Come here, everyone; this is a trap, the most beautiful trap in the world.” From this point on it was clear that no fox could stray into this trap by mistake. Nevertheless, many came. For this trap was our fox’s burrow, and if you wanted to visit him where he was at home, you had to step into his trap. Everyone except our fox could, of course, step out of it again. It was cut, literally, to his own measurement. But the fox who lived in the trap said proudly: “So many are visiting me in my trap that I have become the best of all foxes.” And there is some truth in that, too: Nobody knows the nature of traps better than one who sits in a trap his whole life long.
- posted on 03/19/2007
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Chronology of Life and Works
The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During childhood, Arendt moved first to Königsberg (East Prussia) and later to Berlin. In 1922-23, Arendt began her studies (in classics and Christian theology) at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 entered Marburg University, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. In 1925 she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger, but broke this off the following year. She moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher and friend of Heidegger. Under Jasper's supervision, she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine's thought. She remained close to Jaspers throughout her life, although the influence of Heidegger's phenomenology was to prove the greater in its lasting influence upon Arendt's work.
In 1929, she met Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher, with whom she became romantically involved, and subsequently married (1930). In 1929, her dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published. In the subsequent years, she continued her involvement in Jewish and Zionist politics, which began from 1926 onwards. In 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she fled to Paris, where she subsequently met and became friends with both Walter Benjamin and Raymond Aron. In 1936, she met Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee, divorced Stern in '39, and the following year she and Blücher married in 1940.
After the outbreak of war, and following detention in a camp as an 'enemy alien', Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. Living in New York, Arendt wrote for the German language newspaper Aufbau and directed research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. In 1944, she began work on what would become her first major political book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1946, she published 'What is Existenz Philosophy', and from 1946 to 1951 she worked as an editor at Schoken Books in New York. In 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, after which she began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities and she attained American citizenship.
In 1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. In 1959, she published 'Reflections on Little Rock', her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights movement. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker.
In 1963 she published her controversial reflections on the Eichmann trial, first in the New Yorker, and then in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this year, she also published On Revolution. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1968, she published Men in Dark Times.
In 1970, Blücher died. That same year, Arendt gave her seminar on Kant's philosophy of judgement at the New School (published posthumously as Reflections on Kant's Political Philosophy, 1982). In 1971 she published 'Thinking and Moral Considerations', and the following year Crisis of the Republic appeared. In the next years, she worked on her projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind. Volumes 1 and 2 (on 'Thinking' and 'Willing') were published posthumously. She died on December 4, 1975, having only just started work on the third and final volume, Judging.
- posted on 03/19/2007
Snowblind: Martin Heidegger
& Hannah Arendt
by Berel Lang
Starting with his own several memoirs, Martin Heidegger’s biography has been inscribed in a large number of unreliable texts—fitting, it has been suggested, for his objections to the more stable traditional conception of truth. Elzibieta Ettinger now adds to these accounts her elusive rehearsal of the affair between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt—a relationship generally known as having occurred but with its features heavily veiled, and now, even with the correspondence between the two that Ettinger brings to light, not much clearer in detail or less perplexing in character. [1]
The ingredients for high drama in that relationship are unmistakable: passion, intellect, and a half-century of unusual historical crisis. Heidegger and Arendt would die only months apart (1975–76), but it is the beginning of the relationship that has been more difficult to get at, and it’s from there that Ettinger’s account sets out. The renowned thinkers-to-be first met, in the fall of 1924, at the University of Marburg: Heidegger the rising star of German philosophy, only a few years from succeeding to Edmund Husserl’s chair at the University of Freiburg (thirty-five, married, two children, philosophy having displaced his earlier studies for the priesthood); Arendt a first-year student (eighteen, Jewish, unmarried). At the time, the likelihood of anyone’s challenging an affair between professor and student was remote, as the distance conventionally honored between the two ranks was great—although the distance in this case seems to have been quickly bridged, spurred on by Heidegger’s opening letter to “Miss Arendt,” in which he asks only, Ettinger reports, “that she let him help her to remain faithful to herself.”
Arendt evidently “let him” (she “did not need coaxing,” Ettinger claims to know)— and Ettinger places the “beginning of physical intimacy” at the end of February 1925. How much or little of the banality of Heidegger’s line Arendt recognized or believed, then or later, even after she herself turned banality into a distinct moral category, remains something of a puzzle. She would subsequently describe Heidegger, in letters that Ettinger cites, as “ly[ing] notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can” (1950); “He certainly believed that … he could buy off the whole world at the lowest possible price and cheat his way out of everything that is embarrassing to him” (1949). But her devotion to Heidegger withstood this awareness, as it had already and would continue to withstand humiliation after humiliation. The times and places of their meetings—at one point, even of their correspondence—would be set by him not only in Arendt’s student days but also after the seventeen-year interruption of communication between them that began in 1933. With the renewal of their relationship, Heidegger’s wife, Elfride, learned from him of the earlier affair, and Heidegger was not above using her as a combination of excuse, buffer, and bludgeon to underscore Arendt’s awkward position as the present “friend” replacing the erstwhile “other woman.”
Arendt’s commitment to Heidegger, as it overrode her recognition of his character— he had no character, she once concluded— was so deep and constant that even love’s blindness hardly explains it. It persisted through her own two marriages, at least the second of which (to Heinrich Bluecher) involved great depth and feeling; it persisted through separation and silence and rebuff. It even survived the “gofer” role she accepted throughout their relationship (Heidegger asked her to take charge of selling the manuscript of Sein und Zeit). Arendt’s willingness to subordinate herself to Heidegger did not seem to diminish as her own success and prominence increased, matched step for step by his resentment. (Her reaction to this? “I am quite ready to behave toward Heidegger as though I have never written a word and will never write one” [1955].)
And of course, hovering over the whole of the fifty-year span was the specter of Nazism. One looks in vain for the shadow it might have cast on either or both of the couple. Heidegger, a Nazi Party member from 1933 to the war’s end, was willing to use his bully-pulpit as rector of Freiburg to announce, in November 1933, that “the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and law”; later, after the Third Reich’s demise, he would pass thirty prolific years without a public word condemning its murderous regime or, more to the immediate instance of his lover, its implementing the “Final Solution.” Arendt, who also in 1933 left Germany for exile in France, saw from the inside the internment camp at Gurs, and, upon reaching the U.S. in 1941, embarked on the searching account of The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was employed almost throughout the twelve years of Nazi power by various Jewish organizations dealing with the effects of that power, including the collateral move of Zionism toward establishing a Jewish state.
Admittedly, history is written and read with greater clarity than it is lived. Thus, the specter of Nazism might have been dim in 1924 for the young student from a household in enlightened Königsberg which was so at ease with its surroundings that “the word ‘Jew’ was never mentioned.” But the specter was more distinct by 1928, when, Ettinger declares, the affair between Heidegger and Arendt (or, more accurately, this phase of the affair) ended; when, not coincidentally, Heidegger learned of his appointment to the professorship at Freiburg and—coincidentally or not—turned to another woman, Elizabeth Blochmann. (Well before that terminus, Heidegger had begun to encourage Arendt to leave Marburg, suggesting to her, in Ettinger’s paraphrase, that “she had failed to establish herself and did not fit in”—a “Dear Joan” letter which shows great finesse.) By 1928, the Nazis had built up, in rhetoric and membership, a noticeable head of steam, including some early soundings of völkisch themes by Heidegger himself. Five years later, although the “Final Solution” was yet to be formulated in detail, the ground for it was being laid, together with the will required to implement it. Three months after Hitler became chancellor at the end of January 1933, and with the exclusion of Jewish students and faculty from the universities well under way, Heidegger latched onto the rectorship (soon to be designated the Führer-ship) of the University of Freiburg; Arendt, a bit later that same year and after receiving a last response from Heidegger in which he angrily assured her of how much he was doing for the Jews at his university, crossed the border of exile. No word would then be exchanged between the lovers for the next seventeen years.
It was during that period, 1933–1950, that the “Final Solution” was indeed posed as an answer to the “Jewish Question”—a fact of which both Heidegger and Arendt were well aware when they resumed their relationship. They were both also aware that Heidegger himself stood accused of complicity in advancing the cause of Nazism in the academy, and that, because of his activities, he had been banned from the university of which he earlier was rector (the ban lasted four years, until 1950). What effect did such events, and the other larger-scale ones that occurred during this interval (or the interval itself), have on the relationship between Heidegger and Arendt? Leaving aside the “physical intimacy” that Ettinger does not refer to after its first moment, virtually none. In 1950 Heidegger needed all of the few friends he could muster; and Arendt, presumably for the same reasons that moved her earlier, was again willing to come forward. She strained to translate the reservations she had into faults on the part of those who incited criticism of Heidegger, into a “pathology” or “professional deformation” afflicting Heidegger (as it were, beyond his control), into the baneful influence of Elfride, whose anti-Semitism indisputably antedated her awareness of the Arendt affair and who was decidedly not willing (as Martin was) to plead that “some of my best friends (or at least students) are Jews.”
There seems in fact to have been only one juncture at which Arendt’s misgivings about Heidegger seriously threatened her commitment; this was in reaction to her discovery of the letter Heidegger had sent to the retired Husserl forbidding him access to the university. At first, Arendt believed Heidegger had sent the letter personally. When Karl Jaspers pointed out to her that this was not a personal but a circular letter sent to all (former) Jewish faculty, she persisted and, in reference to Husserl’s subsequent illness and death, referred to Heidegger as a “potential murderer.” Strong words, but evidently not strong enough to override the commitment.
It is difficult to identify love from the inside, let alone from the outside—but if ever judgment can be made from appearances, there seems no doubt about, and almost no limits on, Arendt’s love for Heidegger. By the same standards, there is little doubt about the hedges and trimming in Heidegger’s relation to her—unless, perhaps, the one who “offers the cheek” has some hidden or unknown means of catching up with the other who “kisses.” Arendt herself continued to believe even in her later years that nobody had meant as much to Heidegger as she had, but Ettinger’s evidence suggests that Arendt was probably not the best or even a good judge of this. Admittedly, neither the imbalance nor the misconception cited here is less common—or more puzzling—than its millions of occurrences elsewhere. But not many of those others represent history’s encounter with personal idea and feeling as this relationship did, and so its perplexing character emerges here with special force.
I have cited Ettinger’s account as an addition to the numerous unreliable texts of the Heidegger history. (Arendt’s history, however complex and contentious, has not been similarly affected.) This criticism is not directed at Ettinger’s failure to “solve” the Heidegger-question or to explain Arendt’s postwar reconciliation with Heidegger or to show what consequences their relationship had, early or late, on their respective thinking. Ettinger could have said more than she does about these, but her purpose was more narrowly to bring to light the newly disclosed material from their correspondence. Nor, unlike much writing about Heidegger, is her book tendentious in charting his biography aside from his relationship with Arendt (the question of the connection between his life and his thinking she leaves untouched). If Ettinger has any ideological ax to grind, it is a mildly feminist one which shows Arendt as a victim—a conclusion Ettinger only in part joins to the other evidence she presents of Arendt as collaborator in that victimization.
Two errant aspects of Ettinger’s design undermine her account, however. First, she sometimes purports to know more than she has given evidence for (or, in a few instances, could find evidence for); and second, she seems carelessly indifferent in her scholarly method. So, as an instance of the former, Ettinger asks and then replies to the question of what it was that drew Arendt to Heidegger: “What truly mattered to her was not erotic attraction, which may or may not have existed—she was sensual without being strongly sexual—but the special role that she believed she played in his life.” How much, the question might here be posed, would one person have to know about another in order to substantiate this nest of claims? At any rate, if Ettinger indeed knows that much about Arendt, she does not let her reader in on it—any more than she does in describing Heidegger at the beginning of the affair: “Strict, rigid, hard-working, the son of devout Catholic peasants—[he] seems to have [previously] known little of genuine passion, of a physical and spiritual bond.” Perhaps, as Ettinger contends, Heidegger’s relationship with Arendt changed all this in his life. But it is not obvious that the qualities thus ascribed to Heidegger do exclude one another or that Heidegger had waited for Arendt before the displacement Ettinger claims to have occurred. Just when and how Heidegger’s reputation as a womanizer arose is a question that Ettinger does not even broach, although after the first step of choosing her book’s subject, it is hard to see why discretion or delicacy should hinder that smaller one.
Does any of this matter, other than as prurience on the part of readers who look for more between than in the lines of a text? Perhaps not for the larger interests of history, and perhaps not for the interests of metaphysics either. But surely it matters for a book in which the relationship, and whatever turns on it, is the thing. The ideal of history as a seamless web, after all, was never intended to exclude the seamy. (Or should editors now find a place for an “omission mark” alongside the question mark and the exclamation point—perhaps with the Latin notation infra dig?)
What Ettinger glides over here in her leaps of inference also reflects the second problem referred to: her indifference to the dull but rudimentary questions of scholarship about the sources of her account. That Heidegger and Arendt had an affair which began at Marburg has been generally known, as has the fact that their relationship revived in some form after World War II. What has produced varieties of speculation are the questions of how the relationship evolved, what its importance was for them (early and late), and the way in which it did or did not reflect or impinge on their thinking. One large obstacle in the way of answering such questions has been the restrictions placed around the Heidegger–Arendt correspondence and around the Heidegger archives generally. The latter are held under severe restraints by Heidegger’s literary executors in the Deutsches Literaturachiv at Marbach (access is permitted, as the rules have been explained to me, only to those manuscripts that have been published, which in turn depends on the executors’ permission). The bulk of the Arendt papers are partly at Marbach, partly in the Library of Congress; these include, at Marbach, about a hundred letters to Arendt by Heidegger (1925–75) and about thirty letters from Arendt to Heidegger (1928–75). (Ettinger notes that Arendt made copies of all the post-1950 letters she sent to Heidegger and some of the earlier ones. Is it these [pre-Xerox] copies that Ettinger is working from? Were the letters of which Arendt made copies indeed received by Heidegger? Were the letters sent/received identical to the copies now held? etc., etc.)
I understand that there are, in the Heidegger archives, seventeen letters from Arendt to Heidegger which remain out of public reach. Ettinger does not explicitly identify these or anything else in the Heidegger holdings that might bear on the relationship—although, according to a recent account in The New York Times Book Review, Ettinger was allowed by the Heidegger executors to read the letters in that holding. But she does not mention, let alone elaborate on, these complexities; nor does she, in citing the letters from the Arendt collection, say anything about the extent of the holdings, what letters she did or did not make use of, what restrictions she accepted even in relation to the Arendt collection, and what significance the answers to these questions could have for the story she tells. I mention the matter of restrictions since Ettinger herself hints at them, although again without explanation: she acknowledges the permission of the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust to “use” Arendt’s own letters to Heidegger and his wife (are these the copies Arendt made? Or are they the originals?); and then acknowledges the permission of the Trust to “peruse” Heidegger’s letters to Arendt (these are presumably the real thing). The difference between “use” and “peruse” is obviously fraught, but exactly what it amounts to, like everything else in the background of the “novelties” in this volume, is left for the reader to find out. (He will not be helped by the lack of an index in the book.) Perhaps nothing yet to be found or brought to the public eye in any of the now sequestered archival material would substantially change the outline of the relationship between Heidegger and Arendt that begins to emerge in Ettinger’s account. But at this point neither her readers nor perhaps Ettinger herself knows this—and the likelihood is that at least some of the answers to such questions would make a difference.
There has been ample evidence that among their other abilities, both Heidegger and Arendt knew how to wait; it has already been evident that the story of their relationship could teach something about waiting to currently impatient scholarship. Even allowing for that, however, it is remarkable that in a book intended to recover history, elementary questions of method should be so slighted that the result not only delays but hinders. But so it is: a flight of extraordinary intellect and undoubted passion stumbles over an only too visible—historical—obtrusion. Or is this itself also a portrait of the two lives?
- Re: Arendt's interesting 1953 noteposted on 03/19/2007
I don't have a clue what these 2 guys are talking about. I might have a clue when I was young, but not any more. :) - posted on 03/19/2007
海德格尔自豪地说:“人们说海德格尔是个狐狸。”
这是海德格尔狐狸的真实故事:
从前有个不仅老掉进陷阱并且连什么是陷阱什么不是都搞不清楚的苯狐狸。这个狐狸还有其他弱点。他的皮毛有问题,所以它全然没有应付狐狸艰难生活的自然保护。这个狐狸的整个青春都化在人们设下的陷阱周围徘徊,现在身上没有一块完整的皮毛;他决定完全撤离狐狸世界并给自己挖个藏身之洞。出于对陷阱的全然无知,他萌生了一个全新的,在狐狸们中闻所未闻的主意:造一个陷阱作为自己的藏身洞。他安身于陷阱中,把它当作通常的洞穴;不是出于狡猾,而是因为他一向认为别人的陷阱就是他们的藏身洞。他决定要以自己的方式表现聪明,为他人设置他为自己所造并只适合于自己的陷阱。这又表现出了对陷阱的绝大无知:因为他自己在里面坐着,没有狐狸会走进他的陷阱。这使他感到恼火。人人都知道尽管狐狸狡猾,但有时会掉入陷井里。为什么一个狐狸陷阱--特别是一个有丰富陷阱经验的狐狸造出来的陷阱--不如猎人的陷阱呢?显然这个陷阱没有明显地标示出来。于是我们的狐狸把陷阱打扮得漂漂亮亮并挂上醒目的招牌:“各位请到这里来。这是一个陷阱,世上最漂亮的陷阱。”从此,显然没有一个狐狸会误入这个陷阱。但是,很多狐狸来了。这个陷阱是我们的狐狸的藏身洞。如果你来访时他在家,你必须走进他的陷阱。当然,只有我们的狐狸能再走出来,这个陷阱是按照他的尺寸造的。住在陷阱里的狐狸自豪地说:“这么多狐狸来访问我,我是最棒的狐狸。”这里确有一点真理:没人比毕生坐在一个陷阱中的人更了解这个陷阱。
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