Arendt Studies Volume 2, 2018

pp. 9–15
doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies201822

The Presence of Art and the

Absence of Heidegger

Ronald Beiner
University of Toronto

T here is one great thinker who, according to Hannah Arendt’s own

testimony, had a massive influence on her thinking and who is never
cited or mentioned in The Human Condition. It should hardly need pointing
out who that absent philosopher is: Martin Heidegger. All good Arendtians
know why he’s absent. On October 28th, 1960, Arendt wrote a short letter
to Heidegger informing him that he was being sent the German-language
edition of The Human Condition, then adding the following:
You will see that the book does not contain a dedication. If things had
ever worked out properly between us—and I mean between, that is, nei-
ther you nor me—I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you;
it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practi-
cally everything to you in every respect. As things are, I did not think
it was possible, but I wanted at least to mention the bare fact to you in
one way or another.1

1
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Or-
lando: Harcourt, 2004), 123–124. There is no evidence that Heidegger ever responded
to this strange letter. Transcribed on 261n3 is an embarrassingly poetic handwritten
dedication to Heidegger that accompanies the October 28, 1960, letter in the Arendt
archive in Marbach but likely wasn’t sent. I have to say, what seems a little shocking
in Arendt’s message to Heidegger is the suggestion that what truly matters is the
personal relationship between them, rather than Heidegger’s perversion and betrayal of
philosophy in 1933, as well as his subsequent failure to acknowledge that perversion
and betrayal. Finally, in a letter dated March 20th, 1971 (Letters, 175), Arendt asks
Heidegger’s permission to dedicate to him the work that would become The Life of the
Mind. In his next letter (176), Heidegger consents to Arendt’s request.

© Arendt Studies. ISSN 2474-2406 (online) ISSN 2574-2329 (print)

Ronald Beiner

Needless to say, it’s pretty extraordinary to write to someone to explain why

you cannot dedicate your book to them. Still, Heidegger obviously remains
an enormous intellectual presence. In this essay, I’d like to look at one aspect
of Arendt’s Heideggerianism in The Human Condition.
The last section of the chapter on “Work” is entitled “The Permanence
of the World and the Work of Art.” In its broadest outlines, the story that
Arendt tells in The Human Condition is a narrative about the erosion of a
public world on account of our modern privileging of labor, defined by the
production of what gets consumed in the process of natural sustenance and
reproduction, and to a lesser extent, of work, insofar as it reduces everything
to instrumentalities. What makes us human is not nature but fabricated
“worldliness”: a world of things and deeds—where the things are durable
rather than mere items of consumption and the deeds disclose something
that is more than instrumental. It’s not obvious that such a philosophical
narrative would culminate in an account of art, but in these seven or so
pages of the book, it becomes clear that if our hopes of sustained worldliness
haven’t already evaporated into the modern ether, art as an ever-present
human possibility makes a big contribution to keeping us human.
Art, as presented in section 23, is in effect a privileged emblem of Ar-
endtian worldliness:
Because of their outstanding permanence, works of art are the most
intensely worldly of all tangible things. .  .  . [T]heir durability is of a
higher order. . . . Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world
of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does
this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly. . . . It is as though worldly
stability had become transparent in the permanence of art.2
Art represents “something immortal achieved by mortal hands” (168). It
is world-building because it involves “reification,” “workmanship,” and
the fabrication of a durable “human artifice” (169). Art fashions “things of
thought” (169, 170), and Arendt’s emphasis is much more on the “things”
than the “thought”: the product of art contributes significantly to the build-
ing of a durable world (which is what makes us fully human) only when it
becomes “a tangible thing among things” (170). Strikingly, Arendt claims
that it is things fashioned in the realm of art that set the ultimate standard
for what it is to have a human world that is “permanent” or enduring: “the
durability of ordinary things is but a feeble reflection of the permanence of
which the most worldly of all things, works of art, are capable” (172, my italics).
Near the end of section 23, Arendt goes so far as to exalt art and its
durability above action and its capacity to raise human beings beyond the
limitations of utility and biological necessity. Art represents “homo faber in

2
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998). All in-text references to follow are from this edition.

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 The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger

his highest capacity” (173). “Acting and speaking men need . . . the help of
the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers,
because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact
and tell, would not survive at all” (ibid.). “Action and speech . . . share with
life its essential futility” because without the assistance of art and its capac-
ity to secure “the permanence of the world,” “the ‘doing of great deeds and
the speaking of great words’ will leave no trace, no product that might en-
dure after the moment of action and the spoken word has passed” (167, 173).
Given that the purpose of the book is to celebrate words and deeds enacted
in a shared public space as what ultimately humanizes us and our world, it’s
fairly astonishing that Arendt here insists so strenuously on the dependence
of action on art. If we are to have a public world that outlasts our mortal
biological lives, ultimately its existence, according to Arendt’s decisive judg-
ment in this text, will owe less to the agents who enact memorable words
and deeds than to the artists who permanently memorialize those otherwise
fleeting words and deeds.
The debt to Heidegger is readily apparent. What art bestows inheres
not simply in the particular work of art (for instance, the pleasure or illumi-
nation granted by that work of art) but rather reposes in the encompassing
world summoned up by the work of art. That is, the meaning of art hangs on
the reciprocity of artwork and world. Hence the debt to Heidegger is already
expressed in the very title of section 23 of The Human Condition. Arendt’s
themes in section 23 of art as “reification” and of art as providing anchors
for “worldliness” are lifted straight from Heidegger’s important text, “The
Origin of the Work of Art.” Consider the following characteristic passages
from the latter:
Works are as naturally present as things. The picture hangs on the wall
like a hunting weapon or a hat. A painting—for example van Gogh’s
portrayal of a pair of peasant shoes—travels from one exhibition to an-
other. Works are shipped like coal from the Ruhr or logs from the Black
Forest. During the war Hölderlin’s hymns were packed in the soldier’s
knapsack along with cleaning equipment. Beethoven’s quartets lie in
the publisher’s storeroom like potatoes in a cellar. Every work has this
thingly character.3

3
Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–3. From the 1950s onwards,
Heidegger tended to send Arendt copies of his books, and she in turn tended to
send responses indicating that she had read them. “The Origin of the Work of Art”
was originally published in Holzwege (1950). We know from a Heidegger letter dated
April 21, 1952 (Letters 1925–1975, 111) that Arendt sent him a list of typos in the sec-
ond edition of Holzwege, so presumably she gave the book (including the text on art)
a careful reading.

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Ronald Beiner

The work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force. To be a work

means: to set up a world.4
[A Greek temple is especially exemplary of this setting-up-of-a-world.]
It is the temple work that first structures and simultaneously gath-
ers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth
and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance
and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The
all-governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this histor-
ical people. . . . Standing there, the temple opens up a world.5
These texts are all important sources of what become leading themes in
The Human Condition. Living a properly human life requires participation
in a genuine world, and possessing a genuine world is not a spontaneous-
ly-available given. On the contrary, strict cultural conditions must be in
place for the generation and sustenance of such a world, and modernity (on
Heidegger’s account) seems to display a genius for undermining or erad-
icating these cultural conditions. “Worldliness” thus becomes a precious
desideratum rather than a secure possession. Arendt has her own version of
all of these teachings.
One can point out other important ways in which Heidegger sets the
agenda for Arendt. For instance, when Heidegger writes that “the sculptor
uses stone just as, in his way, the mason uses it [but] he does not use it up,”6
he seems to anticipate The Human Condition’s all-important contrast between
labor and work. And of course Arendt’s polemic against Plato, which is a
defining theme throughout The Human Condition, also owes a strong debt to
Heidegger. Heidegger had the peculiar idea that modernity in effect began
with Plato (i.e., the dominance of the Western philosophical tradition by
Platonic rationalism),7 and Arendt had her own idiosyncratic version of that
idiosyncratic thesis.
However, even if the scale of Arendt’s intellectual debt to Heidegger is
as extensive as she claims it to be in the October 28th, 1960, letter, it of course
doesn’t follow that the fundamental spirit of Arendtian political philosophy

4
Off the Beaten Track, 22; cf. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton
and Vera Fink (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 207–208: “Work makes world.”
5
Off the Beaten Track, 20–21.
6
Ibid., 25.
7
This notion is actually part and parcel of Heidegger’s key doctrine that the first
inception of the West was rudely interrupted by Platonic-Aristotelian “metaphysics,”
and that we await a second inception (ein anderer Anfang) that will pick up where the
first left off. Whatever has gone wrong with modernity thus stretches from Plato’s
derailing of the first Anfang, represented by the thought of the Presocratics, until
Being’s making-available of the next Anfang, whenever that may be. (Clearly, there
was a time during the 1930s when Heidegger, the oracle of Being, believed that the
second Anfang was at hand, but he was forced to accept that he had jumped the gun.)

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 The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger

coincides with that of Heideggerian political philosophy. Consider, first, the

Heideggerian theme of the building of a world, which we believe powerfully
influenced what is probably the central philosophical conception of The Hu-
man Condition. One should not fail to be alert to the strong polemical edge
carried by appeals in Heidegger to the conjuring up of an authentic “world.”
When one puts a work of art in a museum, or reduces its significance to aes-
thetic appreciation on the part of consumers of culture, the works are “torn out
of their own essential space”; “their re-location in a collection has withdrawn
them from their world.”8 This constitutes an essential “displacement”—one
that cannot even be undone by “visiting the temple at its site in Paestum or
Bamberg cathedral in its square—the world of the work that stands there
has disintegrated.” This constitutes an irreversible “world-withdrawal and
world-decay.”9 I wouldn’t necessarily deny that there are (or are intended
to be) parallel polemical overtones in Arendt’s idea of “world-alienation,”
but I think the philosophical take-away in each case needs to be carefully
distinguished. Arendt’s normative commitments are fundamentally egalitar-
ian and in sync with Enlightenment ideals; Heidegger’s are fundamentally
anti-democratic and hostile to the Enlightenment. Heidegger goes out of his
way to stress that the disclosure of a world is the site for “essential decisions
in the destiny of a historical people”10—hence his philosophical appeal to
“world” is inextricably entangled with a reciprocal appeal to the Volk.
There is a striking passage in one of Heidegger’s letters to Arendt:
Unlike you, I am only slightly interested in politics. For the most part,
the state of the world is clear, after all. The power inherent in the es-
sence of technology is scarcely recognized. Everything moves along at
a superficial level. The individual can no longer do anything to oppose
the arrogance of the “mass media” and the institutions—and nothing
at all when it comes to uncovering the origins of thinking in ancient
Greek thought.11
The “only slightly interested in politics” line is rather jarring coming from a
philosopher whose political adventurism was arguably the most notorious
in the history of philosophy, casting a permanent tarnish on his reputation
as a leading thinker of our time.12 Yet the passage as a whole captures quite

8
Off the Beaten Track, 19–20.
9
Ibid., 20.
10
Ibid., 26. Cf. 23: “wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, . . .
there the world worlds.”
11
Arendt and Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, 208; the letter is dated March 14th,
1974.
12
I think we have to take Heidegger to be saying: I am only slightly interested
in politics as it exists within the parameters of reigning modernity. My interest in pol-
itics would resume only when modernity is abrogated and we start to witness a

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Ronald Beiner

powerfully the Heideggerian apprehension of modernity as a “time of foun-

dering,” to quote a famous text from Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo’s
translation of Heidegger’s Der Spiegel interview.13 Unfortunately, we don’t
possess Arendt’s response. Despite Arendt’s avowing to Heidegger that The
Human Condition “owes practically everything to you in every respect,” one
thing it clearly didn’t owe to Heidegger, thankfully, was any sense that mo-
dernity, for all its discontents and frustrations, is utterly irredeemable. For
Heidegger, the work of art redeems us insofar as it helps to conduct us back
to a radically pre-modern world where Being still speaks to us through the
medium of “things” in their “thinghood” or “thingliness,” as it were.14 A
rustic jug or a peasant’s pair of work-boots are authentic “things”15 whereas
most of what we handle as benighted moderns is corrupted by modernity’s
alienation from Being. Arendt was a critic of modernity, to be sure, but her
reservations or worries about the truncating of human possibilities in the
modern world fell well short of a Heideggerian judgment of “foundering.”
While Arendt may have been subject to her own kind of romantic Helle-
nophilia, there is little suggestion in her account of worldliness that only
cultures capable of producing ancient temples or peasant folkways count as
genuine “worlds.”
In suggesting that leading themes of section 23 carry powerful echoes
of Heidegger without so much as mentioning his name or citing his works,
I’m not in any way denying the importance of a Heideggerian approach to
art, including its importance for political philosophy, nor am I denying that
Arendt’s sketch of the meaning of art has its own integrity and significance.
Indeed, perhaps it’s a pity that Arendt didn’t address Heidegger directly in
the book, especially in regard to the relevance for political philosophy of
what she appropriated from Heidegger—in order to challenge his whole-
sale trashing of modernity and to respond explicitly with a somewhat more

new inception—namely, a German völkisch re-enactment of the ancient Greek ex-

perience of Being, even if it takes centuries for us to be capable of such a grand
re-commencement. My politics are the politics of the supersession of modernity, a
politics reserved for the far-off future. Cf. note 7 above; for further discussion, see
Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), chapter 2.
13
The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 107.
14
Cf. Off the Beaten Track, 4–18, 42–43: “the thingliness of the thing.” When Ar-
endt gave a course on “Kant’s Political Philosophy” at the University of Chicago in
the fall of 1964, Heidegger’s What Is a Thing? was included as recommended reading
on her syllabus.
15
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), 166–177; Off the Beaten Track, 9–10, 13–16, 32.

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 The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger

hopeful vision of the culture and politics of the current democratic and
liberal-egalitarian dispensation.
James Barry, in his e-mail soliciting this contribution to the sixtieth anni-
versary issue, wrote: “Many aspects of Arendt’s classic work are clearly still
relevant to politics today, while some features of her 1958 book may need
reconsideration or ‘updating,’ as the economic, social, political, and tech-
nological conditions under which we lead our lives have changed in many
ways over the past six decades. . . . In what ways is The Human Condition still
relevant? If it is not, what has changed?” This makes it sound as if Arendt
were pursuing a kind of reformist project, or at least entertained reformist
hopes, and that we need to reassess where that project stands sixty years
down the road. If that is what is implied, I have to say that I don’t buy into
that reading of The Human Condition. I’m not saying that I consider Arendt a
philosopher of despair. On the contrary, I think that on the whole, hope has
the upper hand over despair in her writings, which is why she (by conspicu-
ous contrast to Heidegger) gives emphasis to natality over against mortality.
But my assumption is that she wrote a book with that title because she
thought that overarching reflection on the human condition in its normative
dimensions was part of what makes us human, in any age and regardless of
“the economic, social, political, and technological conditions” under which
we live, and reflection on (for instance) art and how it humanizes us is a
necessary part of that exercise of reflection.16

16
Of course, Arendt famously insisted that she wasn’t a philosopher, or even a
political philosopher: Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994), 1–2. I think that any reader
of The Human Condition should find it stunning that an idiosyncratic view of the
philosophical tradition should have led Arendt into such a willful misreading of
her own book. I would go so far as to pose the question: How could one write a
non-fiction work entitled The Human Condition without doing philosophy? I don’t
think it’s possible.

15