Paulina Sosnowska: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. 
Philosophy, Modernity, and Education.
Lanham – Boulder – New Y ork – London: Lexington Books.
ISBN: 978-1-4985-8241-4.
UDC: 165.62Arendt H. Heidgger
The book Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, authored by the Polish 
philosopher Paulina Sosnowska, assistant professor at the Faculty of Education 
of the University of W arsaw , is a meticulously researched and engagingly written 
discussion of the relationship between two of the most intriguing thinkers of the 
turbulent 20
th
 century , whose works to this date endure as a substantial source of 
philosophical inspiration, despite—and, indeed, because of—the circumstance 
of evoking sometimes diametrically opposed, mutually irreconcilable 
responses. Although the personal pathways of Arendt and Heidegger bear 
witness to a lifelong intimate bond, which was able to withstand—after the 
end of the love affair—the hiatus of the holocaust, their intellectual relation 
continually (r)evolved under the sign of the initial nonreciprocity: whereas 
the writings of Arendt reveal the careful, if (not) rather concealed efforts of 
a—paradoxically articulated—(n)ever un-faithful student, Heidegger as one of 
the formative university teachers scarcely, if (not) only covertly took notice of 
her coming-to-prominence, of her accomplishments. Instead of attempting to 
elaborate—upon the re-presented, pre-supposed background of the teacher’s 
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thought—the influence of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology on the 
development of Arendt’s political theory, Sosnowska—in a certain “reversal” 
of the pedagogical rapport (subtly indicated in the title)—re-traces, giving 
preference to the perspective of the student, seeking, through(out) Arendt’s 
entire oeuvre, for underlying convergences and fundamental divergences, for 
in-commensurable in-congruences with Heidegger, but (thereby) avoiding 
also the potential pitfalls of a biographical “explanation” of the conceptual, the 
conditions (of possibility) for the philosophical dimension of the relationship 
between both authors, insofar as it, as already the subtitle of the study suggests, 
concerns the problematic of education within the modern—as well as the 
present-day (post-?modern?)—world.
Sosnowska, thus, takes the relation between Arendt and Heidegger—
between their respective philosophical stances regarding the matters at hand—
under consideration as a particular paradigm for a universally challenging 
re-questioning of the educational role of philosophy. However, should in 
(philosophical) thinking still exist, especially after and amid the ruins of 
the frightful caesura of 20
th
-century totalitarianisms, a glimmer of hope for 
a pedagogical promise, also its complex implications for the historical and 
contemporary context(s) of (political) action require special and specific 
attention.
The first part of the book is, therefore, dedicated to a deliberation 
upon the notion of education within the Western philosophical tradition. 
Sosnowska circumscribes the often in-explicitly intricate demarcation of a 
pedagogical component within philosophy through three comprehensive 
conceptualizations, which were not only of immense importance for Arendt’s 
thought, but have also had a profound cultural and social impact. The 
parallelization of Heidegger’s ontological and Arendt’s political reading of the 
Greek idea of paideia, as embodied in Plato’s illustrious allegory of the cave, 
opens up the gateway toward an account of the dispute on Bildung among 
the proponents of the neo-humanist ideals of liberalism, the predominant of 
whom was Wilhelm von Humboldt, that subsequently, at the dawn of the 19
th
 
century, lead to the foundation of the German university. Whereas various 
interpretations of paideia and Bildung directly address the issue of education, 
the analysis of (early) Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, as elucidated in 

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Being and Time, touches upon it, emphasizing at once the ethical relevance 
of authentic existence and the lack of an adequate approach to (intra)human 
plurality, only in an inter-mediate(d) manner. However, from Arendt’s—from 
the Arendtian—viewpoint, the philosophical promise(s) for education, the 
striving for freedom, individuality, and authenticity, remained unfulfilled—
or had been betrayed—, not primarily because of flawed or failed (political) 
concretizations—Heidegger’s (albeit temporary, yet perplexing) ideological 
entanglement with National Socialism is a famed, an infamous “example”—, 
but due to the catastrophic break denoting the eventuation of tradition.
Before venturing (toward) the question of a beginning, the second part of 
Sosnowska’s book, with constantly more consummate aspects encompassing 
the conflicting “conversation” between Arendt and Heidegger, deals with the 
crossroads, whereat philosophy and education—in their inter-relation, in their 
inter-relatedness with politics—have found—or lost?—themselves with regard 
to—the author cites Arendt—“the broken thread of tradition” (81 ff.), the 
confrontation with which triggered a thorough re-thinking of thinking itself. 
Whilst, on the one hand, Heidegger’s thinking of being after the so-called 
“turn, ” through the estrangement from the previous existential categories and 
therewith from philosophy as such, wholly withdraws from the political—or, 
at least, endeavors to do so—, Arendt’s thinking of action, on the other hand, 
prompted by the unprecedented experience of the emergence of totalitarian 
movements in the 20
th
 century demanding description beyond traditional 
patterns, without reservation faces the challenges posed by the plurality of 
the public sphere. The discussed authors’ contrasting, but complementary 
readings of Aristotle, of phronesis and sophia, to a great degree additionally 
illuminate both Arendt’s indebtedness to the motivation and the movement 
that, through the (polemically) received incentive by the teacher, guided her 
to work, to write “with Heidegger and against him” (126). Although Arendt’s 
political philosophy rests upon the construction of dichotomies, such as the 
ones between life and world, between the private and the public, the searching 
for freedom, of central significance also for her comprehension of modernity, 
for her conception of alienation prevalent within it, above all renders homage 
to the multispectrality of human existence: “In Heidegger the collective subject 
(the they) veils the conditions of realization of human freedom; in Arendt the 
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Phainomena 29 | 112-113 | 2020
plurality of the people is an ontological condition of actualization of human 
freedom: the faculty of beginning, potentially given to us with the new 
beginning of our birth. ” (147)
In the final part of the book, Sosnowska, upon the basis of preceding 
reflections, explores the consequences the situation, where classical tradition 
cannot deliver any solutions, may convey for what totalitarian cataclysms 
had bequeathed to posterity as the pedagogical task of philosophy. Thus, as if 
(almost) by necessity of the debated problematic itself, the author is compelled 
to quest, with—and beyond—Arendt, for (ostensibly un-likely) allies among 
her predecessors and her successors alike, who—in one way or another—sur-
pass (through) the confinement of the “Heideggerian” con-text(s): on the one 
hand, Johann Gottfried Herder’s remarks on finiteness and historicity, on 
linguality and intersubjectivity, as well as, on the other hand, genealogies of 
(bio)political power by Michel Foucault and of state of exception by Giorgio 
Agamben (continue to) offer fundamental contributions to the function of 
philosophical critique for the preservation of essential plurality determining 
the human condition. However, as Arendt’s renowned elucidation of the “case” 
of Adolf Eichmann demonstrates, the perpetually threatening connection 
between non-thinking and the banality of evil, against (late) Heidegger’s 
recourse into contemplation, calls for a thinking as “a phenomenon of 
everydayness” (194) that does not—and will not—shy away from the affairs of 
the human(e) world.
The treatise of Paulina Sosnowska not only convincingly discloses different 
facets and layers of the philosophical relationship between Arendt and 
Heidegger, but by re-posit(ion)ing the question of education at the heart of 
confounding inter-communication between philosophy and politics also—in 
the concluding chapters—relevantly discusses the precarious circumstances, in 
which contemporary universities (and other academic institutions), under the 
immense pressure of the marketization of entire society, struggle to maintain 
the (former?) ideals of (scientific) autonomy. The extraordinary achievement of 
the book Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger that deserves attentive readers 
both among the scholars of the two authors as well as among pedagogues 
interested in the philosophical dimension of educational efforts exhorts, by 
re-awakening the promise of thinking, of its potentiality, of its potency, to 

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the “vigilance”—but by no means to a “vigilantism”—of thoughtfulness in a 
thoughtless, dark time. 
Since the destiny of a review lies in submitting a mere—more or (rather) 
less suitable—sketch of the book’ s thematic abundance, maybe the re-sounding 
words of a poet, of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy 
Evening,” nonetheless can, with regard to Sosnowska’s work, propose—how 
many times heard? how many times hearkened to?—a fitting end, a beginning: 
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And 
miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep. ”
Andrej Božič
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