(iPoster) What Is Philosophy? Hannah Arendt between Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical); Education Politics and Policy; & Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical)

Abstract

This year’s APSA conference theme – “Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times” – raises questions the answer to which ultimately rely on specific conceptions of politics, philosophy, and their mutual relation.
Hannah Arendt wrestled for decades with the question of the relation between philosophy and politics in the Western tradition. It was the main theme in her writings. The subject matter of political philosophy, she agreed, is the relation between philosophy and politics. However, she was deeply critical of the traditional answers given to the question. She wanted, she said, “to look at politics with eyes unclouded by philosophy.”
In my paper, I intend to trace Arendt’s correspondences with both Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in order to understand her fateful preference for Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato over Jaspers’. I also develop the implications of this choice for Arendt’s more general conception of philosophy, as well as its relation to politics.
In 1950, Arendt wrote to Jaspers: “I’ve read Plato and thought a lot about the affinity between philosophy and tyrannis or the partiality philosophers have for rational tyranny, which is, after all, the tyranny of reason. That is inevitable if one believes in being able, through philosophy, to discover the truth for man as such.”
A few years later, in 1956, she wrote, also to Jaspers: “It seems to me that in the Republic Plato wanted to ‘apply’ his own theory of ideas to politics, even though that theory had very different origins … Ever since Socrates’ trial, that is, ever since the polis tried the philosopher, there has been a conflict between philosophy and politics that I’m trying to understand. Plato talked back, and what he had to say was so powerful that we have measured against it everything that has been said on the subject since.”
Combined, these two excerpts contain the central elements of Arendt’s critique of Plato: That there is an affinity between philosophy and tyranny; that reason is tyrannical because it seeks truth, instead of opinions, to guide human affairs; that there is, conversely, no truth in human affairs, only opinions; that philosophy’s quest for truth in human affairs underlies a longstanding conflict between it and politics; that Plato is at the origin of the conflict; that what he said has become the measure of everything said since.
In a footnote in her essay “What is Authority?” Arendt indicated Heidegger’s crucial influence on her interpretation of Plato’s Parable of the Cave and, more specifically, on her view that, in the parable, there is a transformation of the ideas, from true essences to be contemplated to measures to be applied: “This presentation is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s great interpretation of the cave parable in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit [Plato’s Doctrine of Truth], Bern, 1947. Heidegger demonstrates how Plato transformed the concept of truth [aletheia] until it became identical with correct statements [orthotes]. Correctness indeed, and not truth, would be required if the philosopher’s knowledge is the ability to measure.”
Arendt’s acknowledgement did not go unnoticed. Shortly after the publication of the essay, Jaspers wrote her in a letter: “I find the fact of Heidegger’s distinction between ‘correctness’ and ‘truth’ excellent.” Jaspers observed, “But the way he arrives at that distinction strikes me as deceptive. He takes as Plato’s ‘idea’ the commonly held doctrine of ideas that has been incorrectly attributed to Plato.” Crucially, Jaspers noted, “Plato as the cause in world history of the disaster of correctness, which takes the place of truth, and truth as ‘openness,’ which Plato fails to achieve, all that you find wonderful. In my copy of the essay I wrote in the margin in 1942: ‘a bit ridiculous.’ It’s too bad that I gave you the later printing a little while ago. I had forgotten the old one with my notes from that time on the margins, so I didn’t look for it. We could have had a good talk about this. It can’t be done in the brief format of a letter.”
As her footnote in “What is Authority?” indicates, Arendt used the 1947 Swiss edition of Heidegger’s essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” – the second German-language edition. One might reasonably wonder what would have happened if Arendt had actually had access to Jasper’s first edition, on the margins of which he had already annotated the most problematic features of Heidegger’s (and Arendt’s) interpretation: Heidegger, Jaspers noted, “treats Plato as if he were a man with ‘doctrines’… totally un-Platonic mode. No dialectic – no genuine following of the movement of thought – some kind of phantasm – nihil – takes the place of existence-transcendence – Plato incorrectly characterized. Overall claims are somewhat ridiculous.” The stakes could not have been higher because, as Jaspers put it, on the Plato question depends “what philosophy is, could be, and ought to be.”

Author

• Lucas Entel, Universidad de San Andres