No More Learning

Heidegger may have missed the mistake, but it is to the advantage of his project. According to usual
? II9
terminology, it is obvious that the concept that says what essentially belongs to something that is, is onto- logical. If, however, this becomes unnoticeably the ontological essence of the existent in itself, then the result is a concept of Being that is prior to the concepts of reflection. At first this occurs in Sein und Zeit through the hypostasis of an ontological sphere that is the nourishment for all of Heidegger's philosophy. The amphiboly resides in the following: in the concept of the subject two elements flow together-the subject's own definition as something existent, in which form it still remains fixed in the Kantian interlocking of the
transcendental subject with the unity of consciousness per se, and, secondly, the definition of subject as con- stituent of everything existent. This togetherness is unavoidable in the concept of subject. It is an expres- sion of the dialectic between subject and object in the subject itself, and evidence of its own conceptuality. Without mediation subjectivity cannot be brought to either of its extremes, which belong to different genera. This aforementioned unavoidability becomes an imagi- nary thing by virtue of the deficiency of the concept: mediation toward the immediate identity of the medi-
ating and mediated elements. Certainly one element is not without the other, but the two are by no means one, as Heidegger's fundamental thesis alleges. In their identity, identity thinking would have swallowed up
the nonidentical element, the existent, which the word Dasein intends. Thus Heidegger secretly reinstates the creator quality of the absolute subject, which was supposedly avoided, as it were, by starting with mine- ness in each case. The notion of the double character
120
of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger's disguised idealism. For the dialectic in the subject between the existent and the concept becomes being of a higher order; and the dialectic is brought to a halt. Whatever praises itself for reaching behind the concepts of reflection-sub-
ject and object-in order to grasp something sub- stantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other, into the in-itself. This is the standard philosophical form of underhanded activity, which thereupon occurs constantly in the jargon. It vindicates without authority and without theology, maintaining that what is of essence is real, and, by the same token, that the existent is essential, meaningful, and justified.
In spite of Heidegger's assertion, mineness, and consequently authenticity, result in pure identity. How true this is can be shown e contrario. Whatever is in- authentic for him, all the categories of the They are those in which a subject is not itself, is unidentical with itself. Thus for example the category of Unver- weilen, as a giving oneself over to the world;98 the sub- ject gives itself up to something other, instead of re- mainip. g with itself and "being knowingly in the truth. " 99 What was a necessary element in the ex- perience of consciousness, in Hegelian phenomenology, becomes anathema for Heidegger, since he compresses
the experience of consciousness into self-experience. However, identity, the hollow kernel of such selfness,
98. Ibid. , p. 216. 99. Ibid.
121
thus takes the place of idea. Even the cult of selfness is reactionary. The concept of selfness is here being eternalized precisely at the moment in which it has already disintegrated. Late bourgeOiS thinking re-forms itself into naked self-preservation, into the early bour- geois principle of Spinoza : sese conservare. But who- ever stubbornly insists on his mere so-being, because everything else has been cut off from him, only turns his so-being into a fetish. Cut off and fixed selfness only becomes, all the more, something external. This is the ideological answer to the fact that the current state of affairs is everywhere producing an ego weak- ness which eradicates the concept of subject as in- diViduality. That weakness as well as its opposite march into Heidegger's philosophy. Authenticity is supposed to calm the consciousness of weakness, but it also resembles it. By it the living subject is robbed of all definition, in the same way as it loses its attributes in reality. However, what is done to men by the world becomes the ontological pOSSibility of the inauthentic- ity of men. From that point it is only a step to the usual criticism of culture, which self-righteously picks on shallowness, superficiality, and the growth of mass culture .
The preterminological use of "authentic" under- lined what was essential to a thing, in contrast to what was accidental. Whoever is dissatisfied with silly ex- amples from textbooks needs to deliberate by himself; this will help more than a developed theory to assure him of what is essential. What is essential in phenom- ena, and what is accidental, hardly ever springs straightforwardly out of the phenomena. In order to
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be determined in its objectivity, it has first to be re- flected on subjectively. Certainly, at first glance, it seems more essential to a worker that he has to sell his working power, that the means of production do not be- long to him, that he produces material goods, than that he is a member of a suburban gardening club; al- though the worker himself may think that the latter is more essential. However, as soon as the question di- rects itself to so central a concept as capitalism, Marx
and the verbal definitions of Max Weber say something extremely different from each other. In many cases the distinction between essential and inessential, be- tween authentic and inauthentic, lies with the arbi- trariness of definition, without in the least implying the relativity of truth. The reason for this situation lies in language. Language uses the term "authentic" in a floating manner. The word also wavers according to its weightiness, in the same way as occasional ex- pressions. The interest in the authenticity of a concept enters into the judgment about this concept. Whatever is authentic in this concept also becomes so only under the perspective of something that is different from it. It is never pure in the concept itself. Otherwise the de- cision about it degenerates into hairsplitting. But at the same time, the essential element of a thing has its fundamentum in reo Over and against naive usage, nominalism is in the wrong to the degree that it re- mains blind toward the objective element of meaning in words, which enters into the configurations of language and which changes there. This element of objectivity carries on an unresolved struggle with those acts that merely subjectively give meaning. The con-
123
sciousness of this objective element in what is authen- tic was the impulse of Brentano's whole school, es- pecially of Husserl, and also contributed to Heidegger's doctrine of authenticity. The essence of a thing is not anything that is arbitrarily made by subjective thought, is not a distilled unity of characteristics. In Heidegger this becomes the aura of the authentic : an element of
the concept becomes the absolute concept. The phe- nomenologists pinpoint the fundamentum in re as the particularization of essence. This particularization be- comes in itself thingly like a res, and can be called upon without regard to the subjective mediation of the
concept. In his own argument Heidegger would like to escape HusserI's dualism, as well as the whole dispute of nominalism. He remains a tributary of HusserI's, however, in the short-circuited conclusion that imputes the authentic immediately to things, and thus turns the authentic into a special domain. Hence the substanti- vation of authenticity, its promotion to an existentiale, to a state of mind. By means of an alleged independ-
ence from thinking, the objective moment of that which is essential raises itself to something higher. Finally it becomes an absolute, the summum bonum over and against the relativity of the subject, while simultaneously it is presented as purely descriptive diagnosiS in the manner of Scheler. Language nerves, which may be suspect to the authentics as something
decadent revolt against that substantivation which thus befalls the authentics' favorite motto. "-Keit," "-ness," is the general concept for that which a thing is. It is always the substantivization of a characteris- tic. Thus industriousness is the substantivization of
124
those characteristics that apply to all industrious peo- ple, and which they have in common. By contrast, however, "authenticity" names no authentic thing as a specific characteristic but remains formal, relative to a content which is by-passed in the word, if not in- deed rejected in it-even when the word is used ad- jectivally. The word says nothing about what a thing is, but questions the extent to which the thing realizes what is posited by its concept. The thing stands in implicit opposition to what it merely seems to be. In any case the word would receive its meaning from the quality which it is a predicate of. But the suffix "-keit," "-ness," tempts one to believe that the word must al- ready contain that content in itself. The mere category of relationship is fished out and in its turn exhibited as something concrete. By this logic the supreme would be that which is altogether what it is. The newly created Plato is more Platonic than the authentic one, who at least in his middle period attached its proper idea to everything, even to the humblest thing, and in no way confused the Good with the pure agreement be- tween the thing and its idea. But in the name of con- temporary authenticity even a torturer could put in all sorts of claims for compensation, to the extent that he was simply a true torturer.
The primacy of the concept over the thing is now, through the alliance of authenticity with mineness,
which made a universal out of the indissolubility of the
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pushed into mere detail. That detail is as artificial as was the haecceitas of Duns Scotus' late ScholastiCism,
Diesda ( haecceitas ) , and out of its not-being-universal -made it a paradigm of an ontologizing of the ontic.
The taboo concerning subjective reflection is useful to subjectivism: authenticity, in the traditional lan- guage of philosophy, would be identical with subjec- tivity as such. But in that way, unnoticed, subjectivity also becomes the judge of authenticity. Since it is denied any objective determination, authenticity is de- termined by the arbitrariness of the subject, which is authentic to itself. The jurisdictional claim of reason, which Husserl still asserted, falls away. Traces of re- flection on such arbitrariness could still be found in Sein und Zeit in the concept of projection. That concept subsequently allowed the growth of all sorts of other ontological projections, most of them pleasantly wa- tered down. With clever strategy the later Heidegger remodeled the concept. In the projection of the philoso- phizing subject something of the freedom of thought was preserved. The provocative aspect of an openly makeshift theory is no more embarrassing to Heidegger than is the suspicion of hubris. The armored man was so conscious of his unprotected places that he pre- ferred to grasp at the most violent arrangement of arguments, rather than to call subjectivity by its name. He plays tactically with the subjective aspect of authen-
ticity : for him, authenticity is no longer a logical ele- ment mediated by subjectivity but is something in the subject, in Dasein itself, something objectively dis- coverable. The observing subject prescribes whatever is authentic to the subject as observed: it prescribes the attitude toward death. This displacement robs the subject of its moment of freedom and spontaneity: it completely freezes, like the Heideggerian states of
? mind, into something like an attribute of the substance "existence. " Hatred toward reifying psychology re- moves from the living that which would make them other than reified. Authenticity, which according to doctrine is absolutely unobjective, is made into an ob- ject. The reason for this is that authenticity is a man- ner of behavior that is ascribed to the being-a-subject of the subject, not to the subject as a relational factor. Thus it becomes a possibility that is prefixed to and foreordained for the subject, without the subject being able to do anything about it. Judgment is passed ac- cording to the logic of that joke about the coachman who is asked to explain why he beats his horse un- mercifully, and who answers that after all the animal has taken on itself to become a horse, and therefore has to run. The category of authenticity, which was at first introduced for a descriptive purpose, and which flowed from the relatively innocent question about what is authentic in something, now turns into a mythically imposed fate. For all that distance from nature which marks an ontological structure that will rise again on the far side of the existent, this destiny functions as something merely naturelike. Jews are punished for being this destiny, both ontolo gically and naturalistically at the same time. The findings of Heidegger's existential analysis, according to which the subject is authentic insofar as it possesses itself, grant special praise to the person who is sovereignly at his own disposal; as though he were his own prop- erty : he has to have bearing, which is at the same time an internalization, and an apotheosis, of the principle
127
of domination over nature. "Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own Dasein. " 100 The testi- mony of his being-human, which constitutes "the ex- istence of man," occurs "through the creation of a world and its ascent, as much as through the destruc- tion of it and its decline. The testifying to humanity, and thus its authentic completion, occurs through the freedom of decision. This grasps necessity and puts itself under the commitment of a supreme order. " 101 That very statement is nobly meant, quite in the spirit
of the jargon, as when a noncommissioned officer bawls out the "weakness of the flesh. " Outside of the tautology all we can see here is the imperative: pull yourself together. It is not for nothing that in Kierke- gaard, the grandfather of all existential philosophy, right living is defined entirely in terms of decision. All his camp followers are in agreement on that, even the dialectical theologians and the French existentialists. Subjectivity, Dasein itself, is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in a determining ob- jectivity. In Germany these determinations of objec- tivity are limited by the "sense of obligation to 'the command," as in the word-fetish "soldierly. " This obli- gation is totally abstract and thus concretizes itself ac- cording to the power structure of the moment. In honor of all that, the existential ontologists and the philosophers of existence bury the hatchet of discord.
100. Heidegger, Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munioh, 1937), p. 6.
101. Ibid. 128
? Action of the warrior. The strength to make decisions under the most extreme conditions-life or death- comes from firmness in decision; comes from such firm- ness in unique situations which never recur in abso- lutely identical form. The fundamental traits of this kind of action are readiness for risks, along with a sense for what is possible; as well as artfulness and presence of mind. Rules can be formulated for this kind of action, but in its essence no rules will cover it completely; nor can this action bc derived from rules. In the most ex-
treme situations there appears both what I am authen- tically, and my potential. 102
The spe akers for existence move toward a mythology, even when they don't notice it. Self-possession, un- limited and narrowed by no heteronomy, easily con- verges with freedom. Men would be reconciled with their essential definition if the time came when their defining limitations were no longer imposed on them. This would mean a happy reversal of the domination over nature. However, nothing is more unwanted by the philosophy and the jargon of authenticity. Apart from
the right to come into one's own, self-control is hypos- tatized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the con- trols are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Ideal- ism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical with duty. Once one extrapolates from the words of empirical language what authentically is, as those words' authentic mean- ing, one sees that the merely existing world determines
I02. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, rev. ed. (Munich, 1958), p. 340. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. T. Wilde, W. Klubach, W. Kimmel, Truth and Symbol, from Von der Wahrheit (New York, 1959). ]
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what on any specific occasion applies to those words;
that world becomes the highest court of judgment over
what should and should not be. Today, nevertheless,
a thing is essentially only that which it is in the midst
of the dominant evil; essence is something negative.
Paragraph 50 of Sein und Zeit, entitled : "Prelimi- n ary Sketch of the Existential-onotological Structure of Death,"-without the print even blushing-con- tains the sentence: "However, there is much that can impend for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. " 103 Once somebody attributed to a local aphorist from Frank- furt the saying that ''Whoever looks out of the window becomes aware of many things. " Heidegger sketches his conception of authenticity itself, as Being toward death, on just this level. Such Being should be more than mortality disvalued as something thingly-em- pirical. But he also takes great care, for the sake of ontology, to separate this being from subjective re- flection on death. Being oneself does not reside in an exceptional situation of the subject, freed from the They; it is no form of the subject's consciousness. l04 Authentic being toward death is no "thinking about death," 105 an activity which is displeasing to the mo- nopolistic philosopher : "Needed, in our present world- crisis: less philosophy but more attention to thought; less literature, but more concern for the letter. " 106 The attitude which he disapproves of
103. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
104. Ibid. , p. 168.
105. Ibid. , p. 305.
106. Heidegger, iJbeT den Humanismus (Frankfurt a. M. ,
1949), p. 47? 130
,
"thinks about death," pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. As something pOSSible, it is to show as little as possible of its possibility. On the other hand, if Being-towards-death has to disclose understand- ingly the possibility which we have characterized, and if it is to disclose it as a possibility, then in such Being- towards-death this possibility must not be weakened : it must be understood as a pOSSibility, it must be culti-
vated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it. lo7
Reflection about death is anti-intellectually disparaged in the name of something allegedly deeper, and is re- placed by "endurance," likewise a gesture of internal silence. We should add that the officer learns to die according to the tradition of the cadet corps; and yet to that end it is better if he does not trouble himself about that which, in his profession, is the most im- portant thing-next to the killing of others. The fascist ideOlogy had altogether to remove from consciousness that sacrifice which was proclaimed for the sake of German supremacy. The chance that such a sacrifice would reach the goal for which it was intended was from the outset too doubtful; it would never have been able to survive such a conscious inspection. In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical
107. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305 6.
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variation on a Social Democratic phrase ; " S acrifice will make us free. " 108 Heidegger is at one with that. In the eighth printing of What is Metaphysics ? , which appeared in 1960, he still retains-without any op- portunistic mitigation-the following sentences :
Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises from the abyss of freedom. In Sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone validates that grace-;:in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to the essence of man; that in his relation to Being he might take over the guarding of Being. 109
Nevertheless, once authenticity can no longer be either the empirical condition of mortality nor the subjec- tive relating to it, then it turns into grace. It turns, as it were, into a racial quality of inwardness, which man, either has or does not have-a quality about which nothing further can be stated than that, tautologically, there is mere participation in it.
Consequently, in his additional discussions of death Heidegger is irresis- tably driven on to tautological manners of speaking: "It [death] is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, of
every way of existing," 110 thus, perfectly simply, the possibility of no longer existing. One could well reply
108. Cf. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, III (1938), 408.
109. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 8th ed. (Frankfurt a. M. , 1960), p. 49. [Our translation. This work has been trans- lated into English by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, What Is Metaphysics? in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chi- cago, 1949). ]
lIO. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 307. 132
? at once that thinking about the states of being, or of being, is always tautological, because these states of being would be nothing other than themselves. Then, however, the mere recitation of words, with disregard for any thinking predicate, would have to liquidate thinking itself. The strategist guarded himself against drawing that conclusion; the philosopher drew it, however, in the matter at hand. For the sake of its own dignity, authenticity once more transforms theo- retical lack, indeterminability, into the dictate of some- thing that must be accepted without question. But what ought to be more than mere Dasein sucks its blood out of the merely existent, out of just that weak- ness which cannot be reduced to its pure concept, but which rather cleaves to the nonconceptual substratum. The pure tautology, which propagates the concept while at the same time refusing to define that concept-and which instead mechanically repeats the concept-is intelligence in the form of violence. The concern of the jargon, which always insists on having a concern, is to equate essence-"authenticity"-with the most bru- tal fact of all. Nevertheless this repetition compulsion betrays a failure: the violent mind's incapability of capturing what it should think about if it wanted to remain mind.
Violence inheres in the nucleus of Heidegger's philosophy, as it does in the form of his language. That violence lies in the constellation into which his philosophy moves self-preservation and death. The self-preserving principle threatens its subjects with death, as an ultima ratio, a final reason; and when this death is used as the very essence of that principle it
133
means the theodicy of death. By no means in a simply untrue way. As Hegel sees it, the ego of idealism, which posits itself absolutely, and insists entirely on itself, turns into its own negation and resembles death :
Therefore the only work and task of general freedom is death. It is death which has no inner ambience and ful- fillment since it negates the unfulfilled center of the self, which is absolutely free. Thus it is the coldest and most platitudinous death, which has no more meaning than the cutting of a head of cabbage, or a drink of water. l11
Hegel, disillusioned by the French Revolution, brought up against it all these things, as well as what touched on the violent essence of absolute selfness. For Hei- degger those themes become not a motive for criti- cism of selfness but something unavoidable, therefore something which is a commandment. Violence is com- plicity with death, and not only superficially. There has always been a natural alliance between the views that everything, even one's self, should come to an end, and that on the other hand one should continue to follow his own limited interest, with a derogatory "What the hell! " Just as particularity, as a law of the whole, fulfills itself in its annihilation, so that blind- ness which is the subjective accompa? ment of par- ticularity has something nihilistic about it, for all its
addiction to life. Ever since Spinoza, philosophy has been conscious, in various degrees of clarity, of the
I I I . Hegel, Werke, Vol. II : Phiinomenologie des Geistes, p. 454. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. B . Baillie, The Phenomenology of Mind (London and New York, 1961). J
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identity between self and self-preservation. What as- serts itself in self-preservation, the ego, is at the same time constituted by self-preservation; its identity con- stituted by its nonidentity. This still reverberates in the most extreme idealistic sublimation, the Kantian de- duction of the categories. There the moments in which the identity of consciousness presents itself, and the unity of the consciousness which puts itself together from those moments, reciprocally condition one an- other, in opposition to the deductive intention-inso- far as these and not other moments are absolutely given. The Kantian "I think" is the only abstract ref- erence point in a process of holding out, and not some- thing self-sufficient in relation to that process. To that
extent it is already self as self-preservation. Of course Heidegger, in distinction from the abstract transcen- dental unity of Kant, forms his conception of selfness along lines related to Husserl's subject-a subject that, though phenomenologically reduced, appears in the "bracketing",,-of its empirical existence as a full sub- ject with all its experiences. 1l2 But the concrete self- ness meant by Heidegger is not to be had without the empirical, actual subject; it is no pure possibility of the ontic, but is itself always, at the same time, also ontic. Self is only intelligible in relation to this content, as it were. It is impossible to subtract the ontic and leave the ontolOgical self as a remainder, or to preserve it as a structure of the ontic in general. It is senseless to assert, of something so thinned down, that it "exists authentically. " To do so, Heidegger dogmatically and
II2. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 168, 307. Also see above,pp. II6if.
I35
vainly prolongs his conception of existence as some- thing in opposition to identity; while without a break he continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity, with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. Against his intention, certainly, he falls back into the prehistory of subjectivity, instead of on- tologically disclosing existence as a primal phenome- non; for it is no such thing. But he applies the most in- wardly tautolOgical relation of self to self-preservation as if it were, in Kantian terms, a synthetic judgment. It is as though self-preservation and selfhood defined themselves qualitatively through their antithesis, death, which is intertwined with the meaning of self- preservation.
As soon as Heidegger speaks out openly, his cate? gory of Dasein, as in the early period of bourgeoi? thought, is determined by its self-preserving principle, and through the existent's asserting of itself. In his own words : "The primary item in care is the 'ahead-of- itself,' and this means that in every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. " 113 He has no desire for this "for the sake of itself" to be understood naturalistically; yet the linguistic echo, as one aspect of the matter, can- not be erased; it cannot be eradicated from Heidegger's category of care, which according to him ''is that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole. " 114 Ac- cording to his wish "the Being of the wholeness itself must be conceived as an existential phenomenon of a Dasein which is in each case one's own," 115 and ex-
II3. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 279. 114. Ibid.
IIS. Ibid. , p. 284.
? istential orientation must be won from the particular Dasein in question. All that gives the ontological key- position, in the so-called analysis of existence, to self- preservation. But thereby the same position is also accorded to death. As a limit it not only determines Heidegger's conception of Dasein, but it coincides, in the course of the projecting of that conception, with the principle of abstract selfhood, which withdraws absolutely into itself, persevering in itself. "No one can
take away another's dying," just as in Kantian idealism no ego can take away another's experiences, his "repre- sentations. " The platitude gives mineness its excessive pathos. But death becomes the core of the self, as soon as it reduces itself completely to itself. Once self has emptied itself of all qualities, on the grounds that they are accidental-actual, then nothing is left but to pro- nounce that doubly pitiful truth, that the self has to die; for it is already dead. Hence the emphasis of that sentence, "Death is. " For the ontology of Sein und Zeit, the irreplaceable quality of death turns into the essential character of subjectivity itself: this fact de- termines all the other determinations that lead up to the doctrine of authenticity, which has not only its norm but its ideal in ? eath. Death becomes the essen-
tial element in Dasein. l16 Once thought recurs-as though to its ground-to the absolutely isolated in- dividuality, then there remains nothing tangible for it except mortality; everything else derives only from the world, which for Heidegger, as for the idealists, is
? I I 6. Ibid. Cf. Being and Time, ( Grafenhainichen,
also Adolf Sternberger's I 932 criticism of in his dissertation Der Verstandene Tod I 933 ) .
137
secondary. "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. " 111 Death be- comes the representative of God, for whom the Hei- degger of Sein und Zeit felt himself to be too modem. Furthermore, it would seem to him too blasphemous to consider even the possibility of doing away with death; Being-unto-death, as an existentiale, is explicitly cut off from the possibility of any mere [sic1 ontic doing away with it. Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military matters. Now, as ear- lier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. Death and Dasein are identified; death becomes pure identity, as in an eixstent which can absolutely not happen to any per- son other than oneself. The analysis of existence glides quickly over the most immediate and trivial aspect of the relation between death and Dasein, their simple nonidentity; the fact that death destroys Dasein truly negates it. Yet for all that, the analysis of existence
does not disengage itself from triviality: "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. " 118 Secondary school teachers speak thus in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening. The characteristica universaHs of
1I7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. I lB. Ibid. , pp. 294 if.
? ? ? Dasein, as in the Dasein of a mortal, takes the place of what must die. Thus death is manoeuvered into the position of the authentic; Dasein is "distinctive"119 through the ontological, which it is anyway; and the analytical judgment becomes the precipitous philos- opheme, the empty generality becomes the specific element in the concept-while to death, as "something distinctively impending," 120 a medal of honor is given. Formerly, the cultural-historical experience of the ab- sence of ontological meaning inspired the movement of Heidegger's philosophizing; but now such absence, the blindness of the inescapable, becomes exactly that which is lacking to Heidegger's theory of death. In that way his thought brings out the hollowness which re- sounds from the jargon as soon as one knocks on it. Tautology and nihilism bind themselves into a holy alliance. Death is to be experienced only as something meaningless. That is alleged to be the meaning of the experience of death and, since death constitutes the essence of Dasein, such is also the meaning of Dasein. Hegel's metaphysics, which cannot be brought back again, and which had its positive absolute in the totality of negations, is here interiorized to a dimen- sionless point. In such a construction it is reduced to the Hegelian "fury of disappearance,"121 to the un- mediated theodicy of annihilati9'n.
Throughout history, identity thinking has been something deathly, something that devours everything. Identity is always virtually out for totality; the One as
II9. Cf. p. 294.
120. Ibid. , p. 295.
121. Hegel, Werke, II, 453.
139
the indeterminate point, and the All-One-equally in- determinate, because it has no determination outside of itself-are themselves one. In Heidegger, as in idealism, that which tolerates nothing beyond itself is understood to be the whole. The least trace which went beyond such identity would be as unbearable as anyone who insists on his own individuality is to the fascist-no matter in what remote corner of the world. Therefore, not after all does Heidegger's ontology
aspire to exclude every kind of facticity. Facticity would give the lie to the identity principle, would not be of the nature of the concept, which for the sake of its omnipotence would like precisely to gloss over the fact that it is a concept; dictators imprison those who call them dictators. Nevertheless, that identity, which strictly would be identical with nothing more than with itself, annihilates itself. If it no longer goes forth to an other, and if it is no longer an identity of something, then, as Hegel saw, it is nothing at al. Thus totality is also the moving principle of Heidegger's observa- tions about death. They apply to wholeness, as that which is constitutively preestablished over its parts;122 that wholeness which Heidegger's predecessor Scheler had already transplanted into metaphysics from a Gestalt psychology which was at first rather unpre- tentious. In prefascist Germany, wholeness was the motto of all the zealots who were opposed to the nine-
teenth century, which they looked on summarily as old- fashioned and done away with. The attack was par-
122. Occasionally Heidegger refers condescendingly to the concept of totality in other writers, but does so only to prove the superiority of his own concept.
? ? ticularly directed against psychoanalysis; it stood for enlightenment in general. In those years, around the time of the first publication of Sein und Zeit, the doc- trine of the precedence of the whole over its parts was the delight of all apologetic thinking-just as today it delights the adepts of the jargon. Heidegger directly and openly repeated that view of the then current hab- its of thought. That the task of philosophy is to sketch out the whole was for Heidegger as much an article of faith as the duty of system-making once was to the idealist :
Thus arises the task of putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having. This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity's po- tentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the "end" itself belongs. The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to
the potentiality-for-Being-that is to say, to existence- limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. 123
The thought model for this was in particular the "good Gestalt" of Gestalt theory : a forerunner of that under- standing agreement between inner and outer that is to be destroyed by "consciousness as fate. " In its turn the conception bears with it the marks of the same scientific division of labor against which its own anti- mechanistic attitude polemicizes. In that attitude the inwardness of individuals remains intact, without re- gard to society. Whether a rounded unity exists be-
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 276.
? tween subject and the surrounding world would be said to depend on the subject. It could only be whole- ness insofar as it sets itself in opposition to reality, nonrefiectingly. Therefore, accommodation, social compliance, is the goal even of a category like that of wholeness, which appears to be so anthropological or existential. An a priori partisanship toward the subject as such is exercised by the jargon in the name of man. Through this partisanship, attention is re- moved from the question of whether reality, with which men must be unmediately at one in order even to become wholes themselves, of whether this reality deserves being at one with; of whether in the end this reality, as heteronomous, does not deny them whole- ness; of whether the wholeness ideal does not in fact contribute to their oppression and to the progressive atomization of those who are without power. As an ex- pression of the whole situation the atomization of man is also the truth; the point would be to change the truth along with this situation, and not, within this situation,
to wrest the truth away, and to charge it up to the for- getfulness of being, to the forgetfulness of those who recognize the truth. Heidegger felt a slight discomfort about an optimism that was secretly proud of having proven God in the laboratory; proud of having done so by the discovery of the Gestalt which is structured prior to all thinking preparation. But Heidegger's discom- fort hid itself away in the rhetorical, and involuntarily comic, question of whether in view of death we can speak of wholeness. The thesis about immediately pre- discovered, objective structuredness came just at the time when he needed it. With the help of a makeshift
? thought construction, he brought together the obliga- tion toward wholeness-accepted without question- and the experience of our literally discontinuous life. This was an experience needed by the expression of in- corruptible earnestness. This is precisely the broken- ness of existence, he says-following a Hegelian schema which, alas, he stuck together almost mechan- ically. Presumably, death would make this brokenness into a whole. Finitude, the infirmity of existence, would enclose it as its very principle. Since negativity, for all the brow-wrinkling, is taboo, Heidegger thinks past his goal. If philosophy could define the structure of Dasein at al, it would become for her two things at once: broken and whole, identical with itself and not identical-and that would of course drive one on to a dialectic which broke through the projected ontology of Dasein. But in Heidegger, thanks to that doctrine, it becomes more evident than anywhere else that the negative, as the essence, simply and undialectically turns into the positive. He channeled into philosophy the scientifically and psychologically circumscribed doctrine of wholeness; the antithesis between the dis- persed existent and Eleatically harmonic being is si- lently totted up to the debit of mechanistic thinking-
the primal scapegoat here being Aristotle. That this thought should be "overcome"-as one of the most sus- pect expressions tirelessly continues to proclaim-was not for a moment doubted even by Heidegger; such an attitude created, for him, the double halo of the modern and the supratemporal. The irrationalistic lackey- language of the twenties prattled on about "body-soul unity. " The connection of existent elements to their
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whole is supposed to be the meaning of people in real life-as it is in art; in the fashion of the jugendstil, consolation is spread aesthetically over the harsh em- pirical world. To be sure, Heidegger's analysis of death carefully contents itself with applying the wholeness category to that of Dasein, instead of to individuals.