The other funeral

In February, 1969, Hannah Arendt is in Germany for Karl Jaspers funeral. She uses the occasion to arrange a meeting with Heidegger: he wants Wednesday morning for his work, but he can see he in the afternoon. After all his many train trips to Heidelberg to meet with Jaspers, he does not attend the funeral.

Arendt using this occasion to meet with the Master - the funeral of her "most honoured" - deeply offends my sensibilities. I may be alone in this.

That Jaspers failed to grasp who Heidegger was - as evidenced in Jasper's most explicit letter to Arendt - but that Arendt did not - I find I am quite sure of the former and unsure of the latter - in spite of what she wrote to Jaspers in her most explicit letter.

Even more disturbing for a reader of philosphy, is her letter to Heidegger of 1972 which reveals that only now is she reading Merleau-Ponty. This is the author of the human condition who had spent a term as a student of Husserl.

As boggling - if true - is her assertion in another letter to Heidegger that she does not understand the Jaspers "attack" on Bultmann when any reading of the alter Jaspers makes clear theology must not fog into philosophy or philosophy cloud itself with theology. His reply to Ricoeur in the Schilpp volume is very incisive (Ricoeur, in so many ways riding on the coattails of Bultmann and then drawing back in the Gospel as "narative".)

Jaspers saw clearly what theology would be tempted by in Heidegger - Loewith saw it very clearly - and yet the non-religious Arendt cannot see it. And yet she had spent daya and days with Jaspers in Basel - communing and arguing.

Jaspers never had his open dialogue with Heidegger or his Heidegger book. Women in philosphy also cannot look back to an open exchange between Susanne Langer and Hannah Arendt - perhaps at Bard instead of Davos.

And then the shadows: what we know now that suggests that Heidegger may have been abused as a boy - can we ignore what may have befallen Hannah at the hands of the step-father (especially if he saw her as divided from her mother, said to be close to his daughters?) Surely any feminist reading of Arendt should ask: where her book on the victims whom she knew personally as women - such as Afra Geiger? All that we have is Hannah and the great men ... one chapter on Rosa L. and one chapter on Isak D. Was she unaware of Edith Stein's fate and it's parallel with that of Afra Geiger? Did Heidegger never speak of Stein?

note: for the critical year of 1918, in addition to Ott see Martin Heidegger: between good and evil by Rüdiger Safranski

The Shadows quotes:

helpless, betrayed youth

This reading is suggested if only out of respect for the victim of molestation and her "fastasies" at the hands of Freud and the others who came to Daseinanalyse as "weak" in the eyes of that master and magician.