The control in the story is Karl Jaspers. What Arendt saw in Heidegger, he saw too. What she felt, he felt too. He yearned for the company of Martin Heidegger’s conversation. When the war was over, Jaspers thought continually of seeing his former brilliant student. The two men wrote a number of times to one another (Heidegger wanted reconciliation badly), but they never again met. Heidegger had been a Nazi who had neither repented nor apologized; that, in the end, carried more weight with Jaspers than the beloved greatness of mind. It was hard for Jaspers-—when Arendt came to visit he spoke openly of his difficulty—-but he was a man of integrated feeling. He understood his conflict, and he subdued it. He acted rationally.

Hannah Arendt could not avail herself of Jaspers's solution. She had been the student, not the teacher, and she had slept with Heidegger. Worship of the transcendent mind, once eroticized, can (and for her I believe it did) become a thing one bonds with somewhere in the nerve endings. Once an experience becomes fused with an irreducible sense of self—-and this is inescapable-—the impulse to rationalize its "contradictions" replaces the impulse to act rationally and looks, to the one doing it, like the same thing. To explain Heidegger's Nazi sympathies is harmless became a reasonable undertaking for Arendt, as reasonable as she was to herself. I understand the act perfectly. I grew up in the company of people unable to separate from the Communist Party when to stay meant to go on explaining the inexplicable, but to leave—-to walk away from the only transcendence they would ever know—-meant living with a granulated ache in the nerves that would tell themfor the rest of their lives theyed been expelled from Eden. And this, they decided, they simply could not do. Such "decisions" are taken in a place in the psyche well below the one where rational thought operates effectively—-the place that Arendt, essentially, discounted.

Pp. 110-1

¶ 6:52 AM