In the 1960s, Hannah Arendt emerged as a leading public intellectual in the United States—though not in Germany, where she was less appreciated. To conservatives, she was too liberal; to the left, she had equated the USSR with the Nazis. After several perilous escapes—in 1933 via Prague to Paris, in 1940 from the Gurs internment camp to Montauban, and in 1941 via Lisbon to New York—she gained prominence in 1951 with her seminal work on totalitarianism. Her controversial books include The Human Condition (1958), in which she questions the value of labor, and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she attributes the Holocaust to the nature of blind obedience. As a political theorist, she increasingly developed philosophical ideas, such as her view that Kant’s faculty of judgment is the most important political skill. Alongside the conservative Leo Strauss and the liberal John Rawls, the politically independent Arendt is considered one of the most significant political philosophers of the 20th century.

She commented on Nietzsche in her essay on Rosa Luxemburg, among other works. Hannah Arendt notes there that "only Nietzsche saw clearly [...] that the position and function of the Jews in Europe must inevitably make them the 'good Europeans' par excellence," and writes shortly thereafter:

While the self-deception of assimilated Jews usually consisted in the error of considering themselves as German as the Germans or as French as the French, the self-deception of intellectual Jews lay in the belief that they had no "fatherland," when in truth their fatherland was Europe.¹

Jewish intellectuals maintained strong connections across national borders and therefore thought in European rather than national terms—entirely in line with Nietzsche’s repeatedly championed ideal of the "good European," who, as an "interpreter and mediator of peoples," is intended to "work toward the fusion of nations through action."² soll.

Nietzsche, of course, hoped for a unified policy for a powerful Europe, whose nation-states largely dominated the world through their colonial empires toward the end of the 19th century. Thus, in 1884, he uttered those ominous words: "The time for small-scale politics is over: the very next century will bring a struggle for global dominance—the compulsion to engage in large-scale politics."³

Arendt does not share this assessment. For her, the imperialism of the 19th century paved the way for totalitarianism, a subject on which she published a thousand-page book in 1951 that brought her international fame: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

‍

1. Will to power instead of free will

Since the 19th century, philosophy has moved away from Kant’s critical thinking, which sets limits on reason. According to Arendt, this shift was driven by the "generation from Marx to Nietzsche," which assumed "that reason and philosophical thinking were no longer of any use and that 'critique' meant the intellectual destruction of everything it touches."⁴. For Marx, philosophy is idealism, to which he opposes a materialistic understanding that prioritizes the economy as the foundation.

Nietzsche, also no friend of Kant’s enlightened reason, replaces it with the will to power, which he understands as a biological driving force and as power over one's worldview—in other words, as an interpretation of the world. As it says in the Nachlass: "The will to power interprets [. . .]. In truth, interpretation is a means in itself, to become master of something (The organic process presupposes constant interpreting .)".)"⁵ Whoever has the power to make others understand a thing as something specific—for example, justifying torture as a means to supposedly save lives—asserts their will as power over the understanding of the world.

With this, Nietzsche discards the will as the foundation of freedom, as propagated by Augustine around 400 AD and as Kant would still understand it—namely, as a free will determined only by reason and not by emotions. Nietzsche dismisses such ideas as nonsense. As Arendt writes in her final completed work on Willing, the second volume of her major work The Life of the Mind, which was published after her death in 1975:

The most extreme example is Nietzsche, who argues that the entire doctrine of the will is the most consequential forgery ever to occur in psychology; he claims it was invented primarily to make punishment possible.⁶

This is where the paths of Nietzsche and Arendt partially diverge. For Nietzsche, power is realized in many ways through the will, a notion that ethicists are not fond of. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life, but—so I teach you—will to power!"⁷ Nietzsche’s vital will is not guided by reason.

‍

2. The human being as a new beginning rather than an Übermensch

However, Arendt by no means joins such critics of Nietzsche. For her, a properly defined will is not primarily the foundation of moral action. No, for Arendt, the will is the foundation of the individuality that makes a human being unique. As Arendt writes: "Undoubtedly, every human being, by the very fact of being born, is a new beginning, and their capacity for beginning could well correspond to this fact of human life."⁸

Such notions are not appreciated by those proponents of elitist state concepts who are oriented toward the community, as they believe the individual should instead subordinate themselves to the collective. Where would we end up if everyone pursued their own ideas! The young Nietzsche thinks similarly, whereas later, in Zarathustra he develops individualistic approaches:

There, where the state ends, is where the human being who is not superfluous begins: there begins the song of the necessary, the unique and irreplaceable way. There, where the state ends, – look there, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridges of the Übermensch?⁹

Arendt is wary of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and does not adopt the term herself. However, just as the Übermensch is meant to invent new ethical values for Nietzsche, for Arendt, the human being uses the will to introduce new perspectives. She writes: The will “is just as obviously our mental organ for the future as memory is for the past.”¹⁰

For Arendt, the will makes every person unique, distinguishing them from others. Because of this difference, people must communicate with one another to bridge these gaps. Authoritarian regimes, especially totalitarian ones, use terror to flatten such differences so that communication is no longer necessary, replaced instead by marching in unison and singing together. The subjects then believe they are not responsible for their actions, as Eichmann, the organizer of the Holocaust, presented himself during his trial in Jerusalem.

When Arendt, in her moral-philosophical essay Eichmann in Jerusalem holds this ethics of submissiveness responsible for the Holocaust—a stance that pleased no political camp and drew fierce criticism—she can, however, appeal to Nietzsche. For he wrote around the turn of the year 1887/88: The state is

organized immorality … [/] inwardly: as police, criminal law, social classes, trade, family [/] outwardly: as the will to power, to war, to conquest, to revenge [/] how is it achieved that a large crowd does things to which the individual would never consent? [/] – by dividing responsibility [/] – of commanding and executing – [/] by interposing the virtues of obedience and duty[.]¹¹

In doing so, Nietzsche describes the ethical preconditions for the Holocaust, which Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem sees realized in the person of Eichmann, but which concerns all followers of all regimes that rely on such individuals, as the state apparatus would otherwise not function.

‍

3. “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”

What they require for this is a shared, uniform understanding of reality based on the same conceptions of the world—that is, on what is, on being—in other words, a common religion or ideology. A prerequisite for this is an assessment shared by all members of society regarding what is true and what is false. Yet, in the age of modern science, this is by no means as self-evident as is currently being proclaimed by scientific experts.

While antiquity was familiar with a certain skepticism, it did not yet have a lasting problem of knowledge. Knowledge was either based on experience, as it was for Aristotle, or on the correct conceptual grasp of the world through Plato’s ideas, and was therefore considered true. Thus, Nietzsche writes under the heading “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable. The History of an Error”:

1. The true world—attainable for the wise, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, it is she. [/] (The oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. A paraphrase of the sentence "I, Plato, am the truth".)¹²

Likewise, Christianity had no problem with cognition. God created the world and endowed humans with the reason to perceive the world correctly, provided that humans also adhere to the correct faith. Who believes that above all? Nietzsche writes: "The true world, [. . .] progress of the idea: it becomes finer, more elusive, more incomprehensible, – it becomes woman, it becomes Christian" (ibid.). The prerequisite for truth is faith, which women are supposedly more prone to than men, and not just in antiquity.

The emerging modern natural sciences cleared this away. Nevertheless, they cannot solve the problem of cognition. For without God as a guarantor, it is no longer certain whether reason can correctly grasp the world. Therefore, Descartes established subjectivism through radical doubt of all supposed certainties. In doing so, he arrived at the only firm point: the doubting and thinking self. Kant would differentiate subjectivism, so that for many it appeared as if truth were now well-founded. But for Arendt, this appearance is deceptive:

Only when science had not only proven that human senses were subject to error – which could be corrected in the light of new data, so that the "truth" revealed itself – but that the sensory apparatus could fundamentally not lead to evident certainties, did the human mind, now completely thrown back upon itself, begin with Descartes to look for a "certainty" that would be a pure datum of consciousness.¹³

Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" does not remain undisputed, however. On this, Arendt notes: Nietzsche assumed

that at least since Descartes, there had been no certainty left for humans, not even that they truly existed; they needed proof, not only for the existence of God, but also for their own. Descartes found the certainty of the "I am" in his cogito me cogitare, that is, in a mental experience for which none of the senses are necessary[.] […] This certainty, of course, is highly questionable.¹⁴

Therefore, Nietzsche refutes the ideology of positivism, founded by Auguste Comte, which was widespread in the 19th century alongside Marxism. Positivism relies on science and technology. But Comte is aware that even scientific findings are only relative, so that one does not grasp the world scientifically as it truly is. Thus, Nietzsche can state:

4. The true world – unattainable? In any case, unattained. And as unattained, also unknown. Consequently, also not comforting, redeeming, or binding: what could something unknown possibly bind us to? . . . [/] (Gray morning. First yawn of reason. Cockcrow of positivism.)¹⁵

Thus, Cartesian doubt was not stopped and ended around 1900 by scientific truth, but simply by the inability of the sciences to base true knowledge on an irrefutable foundation:

When it dawned on philosophers that "the new" in our current stance toward philosophy is a conviction that no previous age had: that we do not possess the truth. All earlier people "had the truth," even the skeptics. [...] But it was not until the end of the 19th century [...] that the conviction that one does not possess the truth became the general view of the educated and something of a zeitgeist, whose most fearless representative was arguably Nietzsche.¹⁶

‍

4. From Nietzsche through Heidegger to Arendt

Heidegger also builds on Nietzsche's thought. Arendt, for her part, engages intensively with Heidegger's later work, which revolves particularly around the question What is called thinking? . The first volume of Arendt's The Life of the Mind is indeed titled Thinking and spells out Heidegger's question further. And the second volume The Will follows up on Nietzsche's central concept of the will to power.

Certainly, Arendt doubts enlightened reason less than Nietzsche and Heidegger do. But she recognizes that Nietzsche's concept of the will corresponds to the spirit of the age when she writes:

In Nietzsche's "will to power," truth itself is understood as a function of life: what we call truth are those statements without which we could not continue to live. It is not reason, but our will to live that makes truth irresistible.¹⁷

For Arendt, the will not only supports individuality because it enables humans to bring something new into the world. Arendt interprets action—which in the philosophical tradition focuses on the realization of ends—primarily as communication, and thus as mutual understanding and as the interpretation of everything that happens in the world. From this perspective, she also comes close to Nietzsche's understanding of the will to power as interpretation.

Thus, Arendt praises Nietzsche philosophically: "Nietzsche analyzed the spirit of this post-Kantian German philosophy with unsurpassed clarity; he knew this philosophy only too well and eventually followed a similar, perhaps even more extreme path"¹⁸, which Arendt follows to some extent. Like many German philosophers, Nietzsche wants to leave Kant's subjectivism behind. But that is difficult. Nietzsche radicalizes subjectivism even further by interpreting Kant's mathematical category of quantity as idealism. Arendt also continues to think through Kant by rethinking him; for her, the power of judgment plays the decisive role in politics, not in aesthetics. Thus, similar intellectual movements can be found in both Nietzsche and Arendt.

In this way, Arendt praises Nietzsche politically,

whose so frequently misunderstood remarks on the Jewish question stem entirely from a concern for "good Europeanism," and whose assessment of the Jews in the intellectual life of his time is therefore astonishingly fair, free of resentment, sentimentality, and cheap philosemitism.¹⁹

‍

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 9th ed. Munich 2003.

Ibid.: Rosa Luxemburg (1966). In: Men in Dark Times (1968), 2nd ed. Munich 1989.

Ibid. The Life of the Mind – Willing (1977), 2nd ed. Munich 2002.

Ibid., Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1970). In: Ibid.: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1982). Munich & Zurich 1998.

‍

Footnotes

1: Rosa Luxemburg, p. 57.

2: Human, All Too Human I, aph. 475.

3: Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 208.

4: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 52.

5: Posthumous Fragments, no. 1885 2[148].

6: The Will, p. 246.

7: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Self-Overcoming.

8: The Will, p. 248.

9: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the New Idol.

10: The Will, p. 252.

11: Posthumous Fragments, no. 1887 11[407].

12: Twilight of the Idols, How the "true world" …

13: The Will, p. 378.

14: Ibid.

15: Twilight of the Idols, How the "true world" …

16: The Will, p. 379.

17: Ibid., p. 350.

18: Ibid., p. 385.

19: The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 72.