Although Hannah Arendt’s intellectual debt to Martin Heidegger is a perennial concern for interpreters, time is a conspicuously underexplored dimension of their scholarly comparison. This article argues that Arendt’s theory of time breaks with Heidegger’s philosophy, clarifying frequently misunderstood (and sometimes maligned) aspects of her theory: immortal fame, “the gap between past and future,” and action’s intrinsic rather than instrumental value. Well known for her controversial effort to …
Read moreAlthough Hannah Arendt’s intellectual debt to Martin Heidegger is a perennial concern for interpreters, time is a conspicuously underexplored dimension of their scholarly comparison. This article argues that Arendt’s theory of time breaks with Heidegger’s philosophy, clarifying frequently misunderstood (and sometimes maligned) aspects of her theory: immortal fame, “the gap between past and future,” and action’s intrinsic rather than instrumental value. Well known for her controversial effort to recover boundaries in space by delineating public-political from private and social, Arendt’s political theory likewise instills boundaries in time, as this article is the first to show. For Heidegger, we are finite time; for Arendt we interrupt time, enacting freedom and creating significance with no predetermined end.
