I think there was something slightly sado-masochistic in the Arendt-Heidegger relationship. She was just ecstatic when H finally came grovelling to her in 1949. Chris Doss
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I posted something on this relationship a couple of years ago. I think I understand it or at least some aspects of it. The simple version is they had a love affair when she was a graduate student. According to her biographer and some of her letters, the relationship developed as a mixture of sensuality and intellect and revolved around a kind of resuscitation of neo-classicism, a re-reading of the greeks and pre-socratics. This was somewhat parallel to the relationships between between Hegel, Hoerderlin and Schilling and the romantic neo-classicism of their student days together. What it amounts to is that first glimmer of poetics, language, thought, and the intimate abstractions of being as thought, as words, in an expression of life as a presence, a presence in words or forms. It can be a very powerful aphrodisiac.
While I remember arguing with Justin about how far Hegel was taken by such thoughts into an embrace of an authoritarian state, the main themes of the thread revolved around the construction of german nationalism as a secular spiritual force comprehended as philosophy and high art. Nietzsche comes to mind of course, as does Mann. They all seemed unified to a certain extent in their rejection of a common bourgeois expression of these sentiments, insisting on an extremely elite or highly intellectualized and bohemian version. (A turd is still a turd no matter how many ribbons you tie on it.)
Still, the idea that the Nazis were anything but a horribly sick and twisted version, creating an artificial and fabricated nationalism for mass consumption, must have been obvious. So it remains a mystery why Heidegger bought it at all. Perhaps he was personally just a weak phony, preferring the comfort of his high bourgeois academic career and its accouterments, no matter what. He must have thought he could get out of any real price to pay.
Here is something of the exchange between Karl Jaspers and Hanna Arendt on Heidegger in Sept, 1949, starting with Jaspers on Sept 1:
``I've had some correspondence with Heidegger now and then. I'll show you the letters when you visit us. He is completely absorbed in speculation about Sein (Being); he spells it Seyn. Two and a half years ago he was experimenting with `existence' and distorted everything thoroughly. Now he's experimenting more seriously, and, again, that doesn't leave me unconcerned. I hope he doesn't distort things again. But I have my doubts. Can someone with an impure soul---that is, a soul that is unaware of its own impurity and isn't constantly trying to expel it but continues to live thoughtlessly in filth---can someone living in that kind of dishonesty perceive what is purest? Or will he experience a revolution yet?---I'm more than doubtful but don't know. What is strange is that he has knowledge of something that hardly anyone notices these days, and that he impresses people with his inklings. The form is, to be sure, self-interpretation of Sein und Zeit, as if he had always wanted and done one and the same thing.'' (140-1p, Arendt-Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969)
Arendt's answer Sept 29, 1949:
``Heidegger: because human beings are not consistent, not I at any rate, I was pleased. You are right a thousand times over in each of your sentences. What you call impurity I would call lack of character---but in the sense that he literally has none and certainly not a particularly bad one. At the same time, he lives in depths and with a passionateness that one can't easily forget. The distortion is intolerable, and the very fact that he is arranging everything now to look like an interpretation of Sein und Zeit suggests that it will all come out distorted again. i read his letter against humanism. Also very questionable and often ambiguous but still the first thing of his that is up to his old standard. (I've read him here on Hoelderlin and also his quite awful, babbling lectures on Nietzsche). This living in Todnauberg, grumbling about civilization and writing Sein with a `y' is really a kind of mouse hole he has crawled back into because he rightly assumes that the only people he'll have to see there are the pilgrims who come full of admiration for him. Nobody is likely to climb 1,200 meters to make a scene. And if somebody did do it, he would lie a blue streak and take for granted that nobody will call him a liar to his face. He probably thought he could buy himself loose from the world this way at the lowest possible price, fast-talk himself out of everything unpleasant, and do nothing but philosophize. And then, of course, this whole intricate and childish dishonesty has quickly crept into his philosophizing.'' (142p)
But the depth of this problem of nationalism and its immediate equivalence between individual identity and state has become almost universal at the other end of the Imperium. In the mid-Sixties, Marcuse (which I was scanning through last night, in nostalgia) writes in the introduction to the One Dimensional Man:
``Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole.'' (10p)
I would of course make the correction that the process isn't so dependent now on the context of work and the relations of production to communicate that mimesis, but mass media and its enveloping mythological reality that establishes and continually re-enforces that identification.
This is how the missing Twin Towers have now been escalated into a national shrine, become the Holy Hole of the Imperium. As the sacred talisman, it is pointed to over and over in mute recognition as the unquestioned source of Being for Empire, in the mumbo-jumbo that passes for US political discourse these days. The national trauma, the wound, the scar, the badge of revenge. Everything is permitted, and we smite all enemies in its name.
Chuck Grimes