Abstract
“Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt” explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called “the passion of his life.” I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
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Notes
Giorgio Agamben begins his short essay on Heidegger and love by pointing out that many of Heidegger’s most influential early critics—including Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith, and Ludwig Binswanger (and, I would add, Herbert Marcuse)—mistakenly believed that Heidegger “maintained an obstinate silence on the subject of love.” See Agamben, “La passion de la facticité,” in Agamben and Valeria Piazza, L’ombre de l’amour: Le concept d’amour chez Heidegger (Paris: Rivages Poche, 2003), pp. 9–15 (quotation from p. 11). See also Frederick Olafson, “Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse by Frederick Olafson,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6:1 (1977), pp. 28–40.
I examine these other questions in more detail in Heidegger: A Philosophical Biography (under contract with Cambridge University Press). The current essay is part of that ongoing project and has been generously supported by a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
See Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife: 1915–1970, ed., Gertrud Heidegger, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 317.
On 5 June 1952, Heidegger writes to tell Arendt: “It is best now if you do not write and also do not visit. Everything is painful and difficult. But we must bear it.” Elfride was so devastated, and made such a scene, that Heidegger and Arendt did not see each other again for 15 years after this, though they kept up their correspondence (albeit with two significant 5 years breaks). See Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, Ursula Ludz, ed., A. Shields, trans. (New York: Harcourt, 2004), letter 80, p. 112; Briefe 1925 bis 1975 (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1999), p. 136.
I have mostly let the gendered pronouns reflect the nature of the case at hand here because I am not claiming to articulate a universal theory of love (let alone trying to defend it against all the possibly relevant alternatives), and I think interesting questions remain concerning how far the implicitly masculine biases in Heidegger’s ways of thinking love distort his conception, and whether (and how) the models of love analyzed here could have their genders reversed or otherwise mixed (as surely they often have been) in ways that would improve them significantly. On “perfectionism” as an apt description for Heidegger’s philosophical perspective, see Iain Thomson, “Heidegger’s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in Being and Time,” Continental Philosophy Review 37:4 (2004), pp. 439–467.
See e.g. the insightful treatments in Rick Anthony Furtak’s Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) and Adrian Johnston’s “Nothing is not Always No-one: (A)voiding Love,” Filozofski vestnik XXVI:2 (2005), pp. 67–81. It is worth noting that whereas many analyses of love begin by distinguishing between its different kinds (philia, eros, agape, etc.), Heidegger instead follows his usual procedure of seeking to uncover the common ontological root of these different branches. For some general background on philosophers’ different conceptions of erotic love, see e.g. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, eds, The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press, 1991). For a more contemporary analysis, see Ann Murphy, “Sexuality,” in Dreyfus and Wrathall, eds., A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 489–501. One of the most provocative recent treatments of erotic love can be found in the work of Levinas; on his view and its close relation to Heidegger, see Iain Thomson, “Rethinking Levinas on Heidegger on Death,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Vol. XVI (Fall 2009), pp. 23–43.
This may be a model of love many people rely on, but it is absent from Heidegger’s relation with Arendt, and present in his relation with Elfride only as the “bourgeois” view of marriage Heidegger repeatedly rejects. As he most directly puts it: “It’s a wholly mistaken conception of love to believe that it’s nurtured and fostered by shared contents and objects—the way the bourgeois love—they have their shared domesticity—go on journeys together and through their simultaneous and common bonds with the fortuitous contents of a life they come to believe that they love one another and are utterly happy in the process—though their whole life may never experience a genuine eruption of love.” See Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, p. 66 (9 September 1919). With his wife Heidegger instead advocates a Kierkegaardian understanding of marriage as something to “vigorously and incessantly develop and pursue…as a task.” See ibid. (26 January 1922), p. 84. In the end, I shall suggest, this existential “task” requires the kind of flexible fidelity that allows the meaning only partly glimpsed in the ontological event of a “genuine eruption of love” to unfold throughout a life. (And such a flexible fidelity might well sound like a faith for the faithless; as Nietzsche famously wrote, “only he who changes remains related to me.”)
See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 367. Here Sartre suggests that the converse is a problem as well; we feel unsatisfied not only by love given in complete freedom, unmotivated by any particularities of the beloved, but also by a love that seems completely determined by these particularities (as in extreme forms of sexual fetishism). For Sartre, the impossibility of love satisfying its need to determine the freedom of the other—love’s paradoxical “demand” for “freedom’s self-enslavement” (ibid., p. 403)—leads lovers to circulate endlessly between sadistic and masochistic erotic strategies and even intersubjective approaches.
See Hazel Rowley, Tête-a-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Harper Collins, 2005); and John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
See Alexander Nehamas’s Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in A World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
See Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 25; Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. E. Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998), p. 143. The extraordinarius/ordinarius distinction resembles the difference between a salaried lecturer and a tenured professor (as well as that between an assistant and an associate professor, as Safranski’s translator suggests), in that the term comes from the fact that the ordinarius was paid out of ordinary or recurrent university funds, whereas the extraordinarius was paid from outside sources such as student tuition fees; see William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
It is worth noting that 35 is paradigmatically that “middle-age” that seems old to those who have not yet reached it but young to those who have left it behind. One related problem with Margarethe von Trotta’s film, Hannah Arendt (2012), was that the actor who played the middle-aged Heidegger, Klaus Pohl, was 60 years old at the time, making his on screen romance with the young Arendt, played by a 26 year-old Friederike Becht, even more jarring than it would have been otherwise.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 33–5.
As Arendt’s respected biographer, Young-Bruehl, writes of the misleading way in which Ettinger’s book first introduced their correspondence: “Ettinger’s version…is a fantasy…bearing little relation to reality. Ettinger projected a naïve and helpless Jewish schoolgirl and a charming but ruthless married Catholic professor playing out a drama of passionate recklessness and betrayal, followed by slavish loyalty on the part of the betrayed mistress. …Ettinger… [shows herself here as] a biographer trapped inside her own story and drawing her subject into the trap with her.” See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 21–2. In his early letters, Heidegger frequently remarks on how much more worldly experience Arendt has than he had at the same age.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, pp. 149, 151–3 (emphasis in the original, intriguingly); Briefe, pp. 180, 182–4.
See Hans Jonas, Memoirs, ed., Christian Wiese, trans., K. Winston (Waltham, MA; Brandeis University Press, 2008), pp. 61–2. Perhaps Jonas so emphasizes Arendt’s attractiveness in mute acknowledgment of the fact that her difficult life took its toll on that legendary beauty (which also saved her life, when the police officer who arrested her became smitten and let her go again, never discovering that she was in fact “guilty”). Still, we also have the testimony of numerous “eye-witnesses” (pun intended) that she never lost her famous power to attract, and her younger friend Mary McCarthy still described Arendt in the mid-1940s as “a magnificent stage diva.” (See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 199).
The other, Anne Mendelssohn (a descendent of the philosopher, Moses, and his grandson, the composer, Felix), from whom Arendt inherited that older boyfriend, also gave Arendt the collected works of Rahel Varnhagen that later provided her with the opportunity for a vicarious self-analysis. See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 28–36; and Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. R. and C. Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 6 (21 March 1925), p. 9; Briefe, p. 18.
This was a practice Heidegger followed throughout his life; like Socrates, he seemed outwardly oblivious to the approach of dusk when caught up in a thoughtful conversation, and several interlocutors recall that when their dialogue with Heidegger finally ended it was pitch-black in the room. But the scene with Arendt is unique, and Heidegger’s apparent obliviousness is somewhat illusory, in that we can tell from the dialogues he wrote that he was keenly attuned to changes in the light and their influence on the conversation. This is particularly obvious, e.g., in his famous “Conversation on a Country Path”; see Country Path Conversations, trans. B. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 1–104.
See Hans Jonas, Memoirs, p. 63; Jonas, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 114–5.
This quotation occurs near the end of Heidegger’s difficult but important 1957 lecture, “The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, ed. and trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 72; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975-present), volume 11 [hereafter “GA + volume number”], p. 77. The immediate context is that Heidegger is criticizing philosophy’s narrowly rational and thus religiously deflated understanding of God as the “Causa sui,” the primal, self-caused cause of the universe: “This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the Causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god./The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as Causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God.” (Identity and Difference, p. 72; GA11, p. 77) The Dionysian image of dancing and playing music before God may be Nietzschean, but the idea of falling to one’s knees before God most definitely is not. Rather, that idea echoes language found in Hölderlin and reflects Heidegger’s own most enduring ideal of the divine (whether Jesus or Aphrodite). For a defense of this reading of Heidegger’s understanding of the divine, see my forthcoming Heidegger: A Philosophical Biography, as well as Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. pp. 33–39 (“On the Use and Abuse of Ontotheology for Religion”); and Iain Thomson, “Ontotheology,” in François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson, eds, The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (London and New York: Bloomsbury, August 2013), esp. pp. 324–326 (“God and Postmodernity: Beyond the Fatalistic Misreading”).
See e.g. Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, p. 292; Briefe, p. 364.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 1, p. 3; Briefe, p. 11.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 1, pp. 3–4; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe, pp. 11–2. Heidegger continues: “That we have been allowed to meet we must hold deep within as a gift and not deform it through self-deceptions about the purity of living; that means not thinking of ourselves as soul-mates, something never given to human beings.” For Heidegger, there can be no such thing as a soul mate because there is nothing about the structure of the self that can determine who we should love. (On this point, see Thomson, “Heidegger’s Perfectionist Philosophy in Being and Time.”) In context, nonetheless, the last sentence still reads like a denegation, since (as Klaus Theweleit observes) “the two of them belonged together much more than Heidegger and his Elfride—the story almost shouts it out loud.” See Theweleit, Object-Choice (All You Need Is Love…), M. R. Green, trans. (London: Verso, 1994), p. 30.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, p. xii.
According to her esteemed biographer, even as a young girl “Hannah Arendt was impressive to her schoolmates as she went about finding her own way: while they visited and chatted during recess and over lunch, she marched around the schoolyard, hands clasped behind her back, braids bouncing, lost in solitary thought.” (See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 33.)
In so doing, however, Arendt might have taken to heart Heidegger’s warning that women whose studies are not anchored in the genuine and serious issues of their own individual lives risk falling apart into an unbearable split between life and work (a point that does not only apply to women, however). Moreover, her own later opposition to the rise of feminism suggests that she never entirely escaped these traditional stereotypes herself (and so, e.g., famously said later that she had no desire to abrogate the privileges of femininity she had long enjoyed). See e.g. Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 120, p. 168; Briefe, pp. 198–9.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 2, p. 5; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe, p. 13. Unfortunately, we do not have Arendt’s letters, as Heidegger kept the pact they had made to destroy them all. Luckily for scholars, Arendt thought them too “important” and so broke her side of the agreement to do so. (See the translator’s “Foreword” to their Letters, ibid., pp. xii–xiii).
Goethe’s romantic veneration of the idea of the inherently mysterious “eternal feminine” has a lot to answer for historically, as Julian Young nicely suggested to me.
To acknowledge this, of course, we may need to see beyond our cultural insistence on monogamy as the only possible ideal of romantic fulfillment.
Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 3.
See Robert Stolorow, World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 91. On this point I find Stolorow’s analysis more insightful than Julian Kristeva’s overly optimistic interpretation “of this precocious circumvention of death.” See Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, R. Guberman, trans. (New York: Columbia University press, 2001), p. 11.
As Stolorow astutely suggests in this context, “these experiences may have been magnified in part by the stress of maintaining a secret affair with her beloved teacher.”
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, pp. 12–6; Briefe, pp. 21–5.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, pp. 13–4; Briefe, p. 23.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 12, p. 16; Briefe, p. 26.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 12, pp. 16–7; Briefe, pp. 26–7.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 12, p. 17; Briefe, p. 27.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 158; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), p. 122.
Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 158–9; Sein und Zeit, p. 122.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 159; Sein und Zeit, p. 122.
Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929), in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87; GA9, p. 110.
The disclosure of an unbridgeable difference between lover and beloved can also be experienced as traumatic rather than joyful, and so give rise to the kinds of skepticism concerning “other minds” Cavell famously discusses in The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford, 1979).
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 2, pp. 4–5 (my translation here incorporates suggestions from Mark Wrathall); Briefe, pp. 12–3. Letters like this make their correspondence worth reading, and they are obviously polysemic. Here, for instance, Heidegger is not merely expounding his philosophy of love to a new young lover but also seeking to establish some parameters for their affair. He seems to have used the informal “you” in the heat of passion—tantamount to a declaration of love—and here perhaps seeks gently to circumscribe (and so partly rescind) that implicit invitation to informality even as he explains his sense of how love opens one world onto another. In the last sentence quoted, moreover, we can also begin to glimpse the emergence of what I shall describe as the third model of thinking love, viz., love as a struggle to maintain fidelity to a disclosive ontological event.
Theweleit suggests that the “love match” with one’s (intended) Doktorvater “does not bear the mark of royal children; much clearer is the inherent tendency to create sequences of partners.” (See Theweleit, Object-Choice, p. 31.) In Heidegger’s case the erotic affairs also tended to yield philosophical works, though never another Being and Time.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 61, p. 81; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe, p. 100. See also letter 70, where Heidegger writes that “there are waves and closeness, and something inexhaustible in remembrance” (p. 98; Briefe, p. 120). Teofilo Ruiz similarly suggests in The Terror of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) that “lovemaking…is only fully delectable in cycles of denial and fulfillment” (p. 130).
Heidegger already evokes something of this view by 1937, when (discussing Plato’s Phaedrus) he writes: “As soon as man lets himself be bound by being in his view upon it, he is cast beyond himself, so that he is stretched thereby between himself and being and is outside himself. Such elevation beyond oneself in being drawn toward being is eros. Only to the extent that being is able to elicit ‘erotic’ power in its relation to man is man capable of thinking about being and overcoming the oblivion of being.” See Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 194 (minor alterations mine); Heidegger, Nietzsche I (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 226.
See Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, p. 15. It seems highly telling in this regard that Arendt writes (at the beginning of her dissertation): “Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss.” See Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark, eds and trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 9.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 35, p. 40–1; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe, 54–5.
I draw this from Franco Volpi’s “Ser y Corazón [Being and Heart],” Prologue to Angel Xolocotzi and Luis Tamayo’s Los demonios de Heidegger: Eros y mania en el maestro de la Selva Negra (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2012), p. 14 (with thanks to Francisco Gallegos for assistance with the translation).
Heidegger’s erotic Heracliteanism may seem to stand in stark contrast to the more familiar view (articulated most famously in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents) according to which it is the sublimation of repressed sexual urges that most powerfully fuels creative work. Yet, since Heidegger’s creative bursts tended to follow after, rather than coincide with, his erotic liaisons, the two views need not be incompatible. Both suggest sublimation, though the Freudian view imagines the repression of all sexual activity (allowing desire to build up to the point where it must find other means of release), whereas Heidegger’s practice seemed to involve breaking-off previously intense erotic activity (and thereby requiring the built up erotic desires to find another outlet). For the famous line from 1947, see Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” A. Hofstadter, trans., in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 4; Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrungen des Denkens (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1983), p. 76.
See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 247. On the direct connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his decision to join the Nazis, see Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 3.
“Amo heißt volo, ut sis…: ich liebe Dich—ich will, daß Du seiest, was Du bist.” See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 15 (13 May 1925), p. 21; Briefe, 31. In 1921, when Heidegger first articulates his understanding of Augustine on love, he still yokes it to his perfectionist view (according to which love helps one become what one is): “Genuine love has the fundamental tendency toward the dialectum, ut sis [i.e., the “being loved so that he may be”]. Love is thus the will toward the being of the beloved. (The content of the sense of being must correspond to the proper kind of loved object.)…Love of those who share this world has the sense of helping the beloved other achieve his existence, so that he comes toward himself.” (See Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsche and J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004], p. 221 [translation modified]; Phänomenologie des religiosen Lebens [Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995], pp. 291–2.) By the mid-1930s—that is, after Arendt has left—Heidegger begins to modify his view in the direction of what I am calling the third ontological model of love. By downplaying the active role love plays in the other’s particular becoming, Heidegger thereby makes our love of other people more like an omniscient God’s love of us in our temporally-unfolded entirety. As he puts it in 1934–5: “According to older wisdom, love is a willing, namely, willing that the beloved be, in its being, just as it is, standing firm in its essence.” See Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), p. 82.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, pp. 223–4 note 4; Briefe, pp. 269–70.
See Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one volume edition (New York: Harcourt, 1971), vol. 2, p. 136. Arendt seems to glimpse this ideal in her 1929 dissertation, when she refers to the properly “divine ‘time’” of “a timeless present” in which “it is always today,” but the idea remains undeveloped, eclipsed by her treatment of Augustine’s critique of temporal love, which (tellingly in this context) exhausts itself in its own consummation. See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark, eds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 27, 32.
On this point, see also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 54–61, discussed in Iain Thomson, “Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche,” Inquiry 54:2 (2011), esp. pp. 141–3.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 60, p. 79; Briefe, p. 98.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 60, p. 79 (and see also p. 292); Briefe, p. 98.
Heidegger’s 19 March 1950 letter to Arendt; see Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 55, p. 71; Briefe, p. 90.
See Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” F. A. Capuzzi, trans., in Pathmarks, William McNeill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 241–2/GA9, p. 316. Creatively explicating this passage, Agamben contends that love is “the passion of facticity” which, through what Agamben calls “the dialectic of desire,” allows us to affirm and so transform our ineliminable passivity (“the irreducible impropriety of being”) into freedom. See Agamben, “La passion de la facticité,” pp. 51–2.
See Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 242/GA9, p. 316; Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 56, p. 73; Arendt and Heidegger, Briefe, p. 92.
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 58, p. 77; Briefe, p. 96.
Arendt never officially dedicated any of her books to Heidegger. But we now know that Arendt planned to dedicate the book she was working on when she died, The Life of the Mind, to her former teacher and lover. We also know, even more intriguingly, that Arendt, the woman often described as “the muse of Being and Time” (see e.g. Safranski, Heidegger, p. 140), originally wanted to dedicate her own magnum opus, The Human Condition, to Heidegger. On 28 October 1960, Arendt sent Heidegger a copy of the German edition of The Human Condition (which she had translated herself), along with a typed note that read: “You will see that the book does not bear a dedication. Had things ever worked out rightly between us—I mean between, thus [blaming] neither you nor me—, then I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect. With things as they are, it seems impossible to me; but I wanted to at least mention the bare fact to you in some way.” (See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 89, pp. 123–4; Briefe, p. 149.) Complicating this “bare fact” (nackten Tatbestand), however, Arendt’s copy of this letter includes her handwritten copy of this “impossible” dedication itself: “The dedication of this book is omitted./How could I dedicate it to you,/to the intimate one [or confidante, Vertrauten],/to whose faith I held/and did not hold,/And both in love.” (See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, p. 261 note 89.3; Briefe, p. 319.) Arendt’s point, I think, is that she (more than) fulfilled his expectations, but she did so by going far beyond what he in fact expected. In fact, she would later say that her entire life felt like the vindication of his having singled her out the way he did (as we will see), the way he “favored” and so “enabled” her coming into her own (in his later terms).
See Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, letter 48, pp. 59–60; Briefe, pp. 75–6.
For a detailed explanation and defense of the latter claim and its central importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole, see Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, chs. 3 and 6; and Iain Thomson, “Heideggerian Perfectionism and the Phenomenology of the Pedagogical Truth Event,” in Kevin Hermberg and Paul Gyllenhammer, eds, Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 180–90.
I have suggested that this is the most important positive lesson to be drawn from the lifelong love affair between two great thinkers (not the only lesson, of course, but perhaps the most edifying one), so I should also acknowledge that Alain Badiou has developed very similar ideas in his avowedly post-Heideggerian philosophy. According to Badiou, to remain faithful to the irruption of an ontological truth event in the domain of love means living up the injunction: “Do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know. …Do not give up on your own seizure by a truth-process. Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.” Badiou likewise recognizes that such perseverance requires resisting “the permanent temptation of giving up, of returning to the mere belonging to the ‘ordinary’ situation, of erasing the effects of the not-known.” (See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, P. Hallward, trans. [London: Verso, 2001], p. 47.) Fidelity to any such event is justified for Badiou according to the “logic of the future anterior”: If we stay faithful to this irruptive event, then it will have been love (or the revolution will have started, or the country will have been founded well and truly, and so on). For Badiou, then, we can discover that the event of love was true only by staying faithful to it. I tend to agree with the controversial conclusion that a love that does not last was not a true love, albeit for different reasons. In my view, a great love, like a great text, remains inexhaustible (on this point, see Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, ch. 8), and so will continue to unfold indefinitely, although not continually. If a love can be exhausted in time, then it was not a great love. Still, this leaves unresolved the converse problem that Heidegger and Arendt’s relation raises for some (especially in the light of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism): Can one stay true to a love that was not truly love? I have tried to explain the sense in which I think this love between thinkers truly became love, but of course others will disagree with my reading or even any reading of their relationship that claims to find in it anything like a happy ending. (Such critics are not just second-guessing Heidegger’s philosophy, of course, but also Arendt’s own affirmative understanding of their relationship.) I would also acknowledge that Heidegger’s general phenomenological attempt to replace epistemological with ontological issues suggests that he would not be interested in the question, “How can one know if one is in love?” but, instead, in the question, “How can we best understand our own paradigmatic experiences of being in love?” This means, moreover, that if a particular hermeneutic phenomenologist never truly loved then his or her understanding of love will tend to be correspondingly impoverished. Insofar as Heidegger’s view of love as fidelity to a disclosive event remains suggestive and important, then one of the things it importantly suggests is that Heidegger and Arendt did love truly (albeit not only one another).
Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy (University of Denver, May 2011); to the American Society for Existential Phenomenology (University of New Mexico, June 2012); as the J. Glenn and Ursula Gray Memorial Lecture in Philosophy (Colorado College, March 2013); as the keynote address for two philosophy conferences (at the University of South Florida, March 2013; and at Utah Valley University, November 2013); and at Portland State University (May 2014). For helpful questions and criticisms, I would especially like to thank Leora Batnitzky, Dave Cerbone, Dan Conway, Ben Crowe, Steve Crowell, Bert Dreyfus, Megan Flocken, Rick Furtak, Francisco Gallegos, Steven Goldman, Laura Guerrero, Charles Guignon, R. Kevin Hill, Adrian Johnston, Claire Katz, Pierre Lamarche, Jonathan Lee, Paul Livingston, Dennis McEnnerney, Ann Murphy, Shannon Mussett, Sarah Pessin, James Reid, John Riker, Michael Shaw, Julia Schwartz, Bob Stolorow, C. Thi Ngyuen, Mark Wrathall, and Julian Young.
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Thomson, I. Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt. Cont Philos Rev 50, 453–478 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9421-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9421-9