“However, the function of any action, as something different from the simple behavior, is to interrupt the automatic and expectable development” - says Hannah Arendt in the first part of her study On Violence (1969). Following Proudon she states: “The fertility of the unexpected exceeds far enough the foresight of the statesman”; that is, “The unexpected events could not be called contingent … this trick permits to purify the theory, but by the cost of its further remoteness from reality.” In this sense, the letters between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, which reveal a relationship that lasted 50 years between one of the most influential women in the field of political thought and one of the most influential men in philosophy of 20th century, may be called unexpected but not contingent.
The love principle in this relation, which has been circulating for a long time in academic circles as gossip or rumor, seems to be the ground for the common attitude of two philosophers obviously different in their expression. Later confessions of Hannah Arendt, especially her speech for the occasion of Heidegger’s 80th birthday, also offer enough grounds for arguments that situate them both in the same philosophical camp: one of the cultural-conservative defenders of tradition. This is very much independent of their different political positions - consequences of events in Germany after 1933 and because of Arendt’s Jewish origin. Like other German philosophers of Jewish origin who have studied under Heidegger, Arendt is susceptible of both complexes - of her origin and of her teacher. Her “Heideggerian complex” seems to be stronger than that of the origin. Nevertheless, we could not say about her what Marcuse said about Adorno: that he would have become a Nazi if he were not a Jew. In the same way, Arendt views the totalitarian power and the violence typical of it as not being entirely inconsistent with Heidegger’s ideas about the confused way of philosophical and scientific thought after forgetting about Being. This suspected intimacy was confirmed by the letters edited by M. Ludz at the end of the 1990s documenting the passionate beginning, sudden interruption, and revival of their contact.