Arendt and Heidegger by Villa Dana;

Author:Villa, Dana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

IV. THE TRADITION AS REIFICATION: PRODUCTIONIST METAPHYSICS AND THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE POLITICAL

For Arendt the Western tradition of political thought represents a sustained and deeply rooted effort to escape the “frailty” of human affairs, the hazards of political action, and the relativity of the realm of plurality. The haphazardness and contingency that permeate this realm call forth a succession of theoretical attempts to overcome politics, to introduce a firm (extrapolitical) ground for action or to point to a social order in which the need for action is transcended. As we had seen, what unites these efforts is the tendency to substitute making for acting, to submit praxis to the dominance of poiēsis. Such a substitution makes the idea of sovereign political freedom plausible; moreover, it leads us to look at the realm of human affairs through a very different lens, one that promotes the idea of mastery or control. Whether the grounds for this “technical” interpretation of action qua making are metaphysical (the Ideas, Nature, the rational will, History) or pragmatic (Nietzsche’s “life,” Richard Rorty’s “desires”) in the end makes little difference. What matters is that both action and politics are denatured, their essential characteristics buried under an epoch-old forgetting.

Arendt’s depiction of our tradition as animated by a will to escape politics (or, at the very least, to bring it under control by instrumentalizing political action) adds the dimension of historical depth to the “inauthenticity” of homo faber’s productive mentality. This mentality, which gains ascendence in the modern age, resonates with the tradition’s repression of action. The result is that the “withdrawal of the political” is one of the outstanding characteristics of our time.145 In singling out the tradition as being in no small way responsible for our “forgetting” of the political, Arendt is clearly following Heidegger’s own historical reworking of the theme of inauthenticity. This reworking, beginning with works published in 1930, led Heidegger to view the metaphysical tradition as a “science of grounds” that systematically covered over the “mystery” of presencing and the primordial phenomenon of the unconcealment of Being in favor of a hypostatized, leveled-off account of the “Being of beings.” Such an account, Heidegger argues, allows Western man to circumscribe Being as something representable and thus (in principle) controllable. By thinking of Being on the model of beings—by effacing what Heidegger refers to as the “ontological difference” between Being qua presencing and entities—metaphysics thrusts the primordial phenomenon of the “clearing” or disclosure of Being into oblivion. This forgetting lays the groundwork for the eventual “regulating and securing” of all that is, for planetary domination.146 From the start, then, metaphysics’s will to ground is seen, simultaneously, as a will to security and a will to power.

The narrative Heidegger develops after 1930—in which the history of metaphysics conceals a closet “history of Being,” the tale of Being’s self-withdrawal and subsequent oblivion147—clearly diverges from the “fundamental ontology” of his Being in Time. This divergence becomes more pronounced with the Kehre, the “turning,” that occurs in the course of the

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