A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux
05-22-2019In honor of his life and the works he left behind, I would like to trace some memorable personal exchanges with him in the hope it sheds light upon his contribution to Arendt studies.
One afternoon in the fall of 1997, I was standing inside of Professor Taminiaux’s office. (I don’t know why we weren’t seated but somehow we were both standing.) Gentle fall afternoon light filled in the room. It was a beautiful day, yet standing there, I was extremely nervous and uncomfortable. After I introduced myself and answered a few questions, there was silence. An awkward few seconds felt like forever to me. I had recently arrived from Japan and just started my master’s program in philosophy at Boston College.
Before I came to the States, I was a doctoral student in politics in Tokyo and planning to write my dissertation on Hannah Arendt. The more I read of Arendt, the more I became convinced that there were deeper philosophical discussions in her texts. I had to admit, unwillingly, that I needed systematic philosophical training if I really wanted to understand Arendt. That was the sole reason why I came to the States. To every single person I met in our department, I repeated the same story over and over again. Eventually those graduate students around me said, “If that is so, you should go and see Professor Taminiaux. He is very famous and Arendt is one of his specializations.” To be honest with you, I’d never heard of Jacques Taminiaux. After all, I wasn’t a philosophy student back home. In any case, I followed their advice and visited him to his office in one afternoon.
That is how I found myself standing stupidly in his office amidst the awkward silence. He learned that I was a new master’s student from Japan who had never studied philosophy before and did not speak fluent English. “Yet," he said, "you want to study Hannah Arendt in philosophy…” In those ellipses, a dreadful silence resided. Finally, he said, “We will see.” It didn’t sound promising but at least he didn’t refuse me. I was just happy that I could excuse myself to leave his office.
Professor Taminiaux’s contribution to Arendt studies is condensed into his book, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (1997). His analyses and discussions in that book are dense and grounded on his solid understanding of Husserl and Heidegger. We need to recall that Arendt herself is neither explicit about her method nor transparent about the theoretical framework of her own thought. It was Professor Taminiaux who made those unsaid theoretical frameworks and thematic developments of Arendt’s thought visible for the first time. through a keen and insightful gaze, he showed that Arendt’s thought had been shaped through her critical dialogue with Heidegger and pointed out the many parallels between the two. By doing so, however, Professor Taminiaux didn’t aim to suggest that Arendt is merely one of Heidegger’s disciples. Quite the contrary, his whole point was to show that while Arendt owed her method to Heidegger, she challenged Heidegger’s account of human existence (Dasein), its meaning of life, and the question of Being. Taminiaux showed that Arendt offered completely different ways of understanding an individual human life, one that is enmeshed in human plurality. Human life is not just Being in the world but of the world.[i]
I recall Professor Taminiaux brushing off rather angrily a mention by someone of Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger as his former mistress. He held the same tone in the preface of his book I mention above, in which he didn’t hide his disapproval and objection toward Elzbieta Ettinger, who published Hannah Arendt/ Martin Heidegger (1995).[ii] He couldn’t tolerate the reduction of Arendt’s earnest philosophical endeavor, her critical dialogue with Heidegger on an ardent intellectual level, to a cheap romance novel.
I have to confess that it took me many years to actually be able to recognize those parallels which Professor Taminiaux mentions in his book. Of course, after our initial meeting in his office, I ran to the bookstore to obtain a copy. Before I completed my M.A program, I read it through at least five times, but had no clue where his analyses came from or if what he wrote was a “correct” exposition of Arendt. I was such a beginner as a philosophy student. I just kept attending every course he offered, regardless of the topic. Every week during office hours, I would knock on his office door with questions about the course materials and Arendt.Heidegger’s teaching was the necessary condition for her investigations. But in no way was it the sufficient condition, as Ms. Ettinger suggests, because as soon as one confronts what Arendt says on “world,” “work,” “speech,” the “political,” with what Heidegger says, one cannot fail to note that Arendt, far from being an intellectual epigone of Heidegger, at every point delivers a retort.[iii]
I asked him three questions that I vividly remember because his answers have led me to ponder Arendt’s thought over the course of years: 1) “How does ‘labor’ originally belong to the private realm?” 2) “Why does Arendt claim that the actor always sees partially while the spectator sees the whole?” 3 ) “What is important for me to understand Arendt’s notion of ‘action’?”
In response to the first one, Professor Taminiaux said, “Arendt’s distinction among ‘labor,’ ‘work,’ and ‘action’ is based on her phenomenological description.” For the second, he answered, “There is no one who is only the actor, or the spectator. They are different sides of the same coin.” And lastly, “Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VI is crucial.” Those were all of what he said to me.
I asked him my first question, for it seemed to me that according to Arendt’s description of “labor,” there was no room for addressing social inequality particularly on the issues related to economy as the political ones in Arendt. What I didn’t understand then and eventually could see in Professor Taminiaux’s response is that Arendt’s descriptions of three human activities (“labor,” “work,” and “action”) are derived from the temporal characteristics entailed in each activity. “Labor” shares its temporal character with the eternal recurrence of the biological life cycle as a species or as life that is as such shared with everything that exists in nature. Whereas “work” has a definite beginning and end as human-made and surpasses the life-span of a human being; work thus gives durability to the human world. Furthermore, “action” represents a human being as a unique individual whose life starts in the web of human plurality. Action manifests who s/he is through interactions with others, and has no predetermined end, which is why the actor is a free agent. Yet, strictly speaking, it is only through “action” that a life can be understood as the story of a unique person. Those are phenomenological descriptions. They are valid insofar as they focus on the peculiar temporal dimension of each activity, or, a mode of Being of us. In other words, the distinctions Arendt points out in these three activities should be understood in terms of their ruling temporal characteristics and not on the basis of the activity per se as a category. Thus, when Arendt makes the clear demarcation between the public and private realms, by no means does she insist that labor, what seems to belong to the private realm, cannot be taken up as a political issue.
Similar points can be made about the distinction between the actor and the spectator in the Lectures of Kant Political Philosophy. By saying that the actor and spectator were different sides of the same coin, what Professor Taminiaux hinted at was that perception, or, more specifically the perception of appearances is fundamentally intersubjective due to the account of human plurality in Arendt. One appears as an actor only when there are others who see and hear what one does and says. The same can be said about the spectators.
How about Professor Taminiaux’s answer to my third question? Arendt’s account of human existence was shaped as her counterargument toward Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of phronêsis (practical wisdom), taken from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI of Aristotle. To put it another way, there is a significant difference between Arendt and Heidegger when it comes to their understandings of what marks human life most properly. Heidegger argues that human life is fundamentally marked by the activity of thinking based on one’s finitude and thus her/his death. Arendt, on the other hand, sees human life as founded upon action based again on one’s finitude but focusing on one’s birth, bringing something new in the world of appearances where “plurality is the law on earth.”[iv]
The brevity of Professor Taminiaux’s answers may give you the impression that he was rather unkind. It was quite the opposite. Certainly I was puzzled by his answers and have remained so. But they have pushed me to refine my questions anew as my understanding of Arendt has grown deeper. They have helped me to grasp her thought more comprehensively over many years they continue to do so to this day.
Professor Taminiaux’s lectures were always very concise. He would read passages from the text we were reading and tell us their meanings. Certainly those passages must have been important in order for us to grasp their significance. Yet, he never told us on what account they were crucial and how they were related. In my copies of those texts, I can still see "T" marks in the margins of the pages he read out in the class.
As I started to teach, I gradually came to realize his intention, and have been following in his footsteps as a professor. His point was to let his students think! It is always much easier to explain what is really going on behind the printed pages of a text than to push students to navigate their own course, to let them ask questions, to allow them to think by themselves. But if you do what is easy, your students never learn how to read a text, grasp the structure of arguments, comprehend, and think by themselves. I wrote this realization in a letter, which I sent to him last December. (We had a tradition in which I sent him a report of the year, around Christmas, and he sent his response). In his reply, which turned out to be his last letter to me, he wrote, “I enjoyed reading in your letter that my teaching is still with you now, when in a Japanese classroom you give courses on Arendt.” I could almost see the twinkle in his eyes.
When Professor Taminiaux said, “We will see” more than 20 years ago, neither of us expected that he would oversee my (very) slow academic progress for such a long time. He co-directed my dissertation even after his official retirement. There are no proper words for expressing my deep gratitude to him for his guidance and care. Though he was 90 years old, I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to him. I probably never will be. My dialogue with him will continue through his works.
End Notes
[i] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (thinking), (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publisher, 1978), 20. Hereafter abbreviated as LM I.
[ii] Elizbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/ Martin Heidegger, (Yale University Press, 1995)
[iii] Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Tr. Michael Gendre, (State University of New York, 1997), ix-x. My emphasis.
[iv] Hannah Arendt, LM I, 19.