For Heidegger, the world is phenomenological; that is, it is approached as one finds oneself in it, not as one might theorize from outside (being what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a cosmotheoros). The world allows Heidegger to talk about the problem of being, since the world is not some kind of pretheoretical superentity but (as he puts it in Being and Time, p. 63) “an ontological concept [that] designates the structure of a constitutive factor of being-in-the-world.” To be, for Heidegger, is to experience and create a world with the other. Arendt finds a similar transformation of ontological questions to relational ones in the work of Augustine (who she wrote her 1929 doctoral thesis on). For Augustine, love of God is love of the neighbor; we create a world through our action of loving God and, equivalently, loving one another. Here, too, the questions of being — “Who am I?”; “Who is God?” — become questions that can only be answered by the other through a common act of world-making.

The preoccupation with community would abide with Arendt for the rest of her life. Indeed, it is the crux of her analysis of rights. For Arendt, rights are not possessions but rather, as Lida Maxwell puts it, “part of political projects of creating certain kinds of political worlds.” To have rights in this sense is like having a party, not having a bicycle: you must participate in making a world where rights-claims can be heard from everyone. This re-reading of rights-claims resembles the transformation of ontological to relational questions. 

Aliosha Bielenberg