Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its
existentialism
right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
These primal experiences were a warmed-over piece of ex- pressionism.
They were later made into a permanent institution by Heidegger, under the benediction of public opinion.
What he dislikes in dealing with cul- ture, to which, incidentally, his own philological di- vagations belong, is the business of starting with the experience of something derived.
But this cannot be avoided and has to be taken into consciousness.
In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally preformed.
Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it.
But funda- mental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretend- ing it has a starting point somewhere outside.
In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of that on- tology'S own purity.
Philosophy involves itself all the
76. Cf. Friedrich Gundolf, George, 3d ed. ( Berlin, 1930 ) P? 269.
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more deeply in society as it more eagerly-reflecting upon itself-pushes . off from society and its objective spirit. It claws itself firmly into its blindly social fate, which-in Heidegger's terminology-has thrown one into this and no other place. That was according to the
taste of fascism. With the downfall of market liberal- ism, relationships of domination stepped nakedly into the foreground. The baldness of their order, the au- thentic law of the "needy time," easily permits itself to be taken for something primal. That is how people
could jaw about blood and soil, without a smile, during the excessively accumulating industrial capitalism of the Third Reich. The jargon of authenticity continues al that, less tangibly-with impunity, because at that time social differences <? ccasionally led to conflicts -such as those between the primary-school teacher appOinted to ordinarius and the career professor, or between the official optimism of the deadly war ma-
chine and the philosophical frowning of far too auto? cratic enthusiasts, who were deeply attracted to Being unto death.
Heidegger's complaints against cultural philosophy have fateful consequences in the ontology of authen- ticity: what this ontology at first bans into the sphere of cultural mediation it now shoves directly on into hell. To be sure, the world is similar enough to hell,
dipped as the world is in a gloomy flood of nonsense, the fallen form of language. Karl Kraus compressed that fact into the thesis that today the phrase gives birth to reality-especially to that reality which arose, after the catastrophe, under the name of culture. To a great extent that reality is, as Valery defined politics,
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only there to keep men away from what is of im- portance to them. In agreement with Kraus, whom he does not mention, Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit:
Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is said-in-the-talk as such. " 77
So the business of communication and its formulas cut in between the matter and the subject, and blind the subject against precisely that which all the chatter is about. "What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. " 78 But Heidegger imposes the critical diagnosis of a negative ontological presence on the "everyday being of the Da, existence," which in truth is historical in nature: the entangling of the mind with the sphere of circulation, at a stage in which the objective spirit is covered by the economic utilization process, as if by a fungus which stifles the quality of thought. This confusion has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein.
Heidegger rightly perceives the abstractness of chatter "as such," which has emptied itself of any relationship to its content; but from the aberrant abstractness of chatter he draws conclusions as to its metaphysical invariance, however questionable that may be. Chatter would already be in decline if, in a reasonable econ- omy, the expenditure of advertisements disappeared . Chatter is forced on men by a social structure which
77. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 212. 78. Ibid.
101
negates them as subjects long before this is done by the newspaper companies. But Heidegger's critique becomes ideological by grasping the emancipated spirit as that which becomes of it under supremely real engagements, and by doing so without making distinc- tions. He condemns idle chatter, but not brutality, the alliance with which is the true guilt of chatter, which is in itself far more innocent. As soon as Heidegger wants to silence chatter, his language clatters with weaponry :
To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say-that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one's ret- icence . . . makes something manifest, and does away with "idle talk. " 79
His language itself speaks forth, as seldom elsewhere, from the word "to strike down"; it is a language of power. But it has already been seen in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts. Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything :
The "they" is there alongside everywhere, . . . but in such a manner that it has always stolen away when- ever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the "they" presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The "they" can, as it were, manage to have "them" con- stantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It "was" always the "they" who
79. Ibid. , p. 208. 102
? ? ? did it, and yet it can be said that it has been "no one. " In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that "it was no one. " 80
That is precisely what came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand,81 that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse. Heidegger's sketch of the They comes closest to what it is, the exchange relationship, when he is treating averageness :
The "they" has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called "distan- tiality" is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one- another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the "they. " The "they," in its Being, essentially makes an issue of this. Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the aver- ageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it re- gards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything excep- tional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of pri- ority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a strug- gle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the "levelling" down . . . of all possibilities of Being. "82
80. Ibid. , p. I65.
8I. [Befehlsnotstand: morally compelling situation for a soldier, who must carry out an order with which he cannot square his conscience. ]
82. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. I64 65.
103
That leveling is described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that "prerogative" for themselves. It is a leveling which they themselves want to employ, and is no other than the leveling which occasionally befalls the exchanger, through his inevitable reduction to the equivalence form; the critique of political econ- omy grasping exchange value in terms of the social work-time which on the average has to be spent. In its hostility to the negatively ontologized They, the opposi-
tion to capitalist anonymity eagerly overlooks the law of value which is asserting itself-a suffering which will not have it said what it is suffering from. When that anonymity, whose social source is unmistakable, is analyzed as a possibility of being, then that society is exonerated which simultaneously both disqualifies and determines the relationships of its members.
The mobility of words unquestionably continued their degradation from the beginning. In the functional word, deception is posited simultaneously with the exchange principle itself and grasps spirit; because this latter cannot be without the idea of truth, it ex- hibits flagrantly what has entrenched itself in material praxis behind the free and upright exchange of goods. But without mobility language would never have be- come capable of that relation to the matter at hand, by whose criterion Heidegger judges communicative language. Language philosophy, in the question of communicative language, would have to investigate
the metamorphosis of quantity into the quality of mere chatter, or, better, the interinvolvement of both as- pects; and would not proceed in an authoritarian spirit to sort out the wheat from the chaff of language. No
104
thinking could unfold itself into the not-yet-thought without that shot of irresponsibility over which Hei- degger grows so excited; in that, the spoken distin- guishes itself from the authentically written word, and even in the latter positivists can easily criticize as ir- responsible that which goes beyond what is the case. Immaturity and timidity stand no higher than chatter. Even that linguistic objectivity which presupposes the utmost alertness toward the phrase also has as its pre- condition mobility of expression, no matter how broken : urbanity. Nobody can write without phrases, and who is true to the matter who is not also a literate person? The defense of this kind of person seems to be in place after the murder of the Jews. Kraus him- self despised the illiterate, if possible even more than the literate. On the other hand the summary judgment concerning idle talk, which insinuates it through a negative ontology, constantly permits the justification of the phrase as if it were fate. Once idle talk is a state of mind, one need not be greatly embarrassed when
authenticity turns into idle talk. That is happening today to Heidegger's own legend. We might pull some sentences out of a piece on The Idea of the German University and the Reform of the German Universities by Ernst Anrich :
It is no encroachment [that is, on academic autonomy] when from this Hippocratic oath we make a certain de- mand, out of our clear knowledge that no specific phi- losophy can today be placed deciSively at the center of the university, a demand that we shall keep alert our universality and our responsiveness in face of the whole of reality; it is no encroachment on this situation when we ask each scholar in this body to carry on his
105
scholarship under the sign of the final question about the ground of Being and the whole of Being; and when we ask him to discuss and exchange these problems within the whole body, the dignity of which resides therein. If it is right to demand of the student that the essence of his study must be to drive forward, within his own specialty, to the view of Being, and to responsibility in face of the totality of Being; if that is right, then we must require of the professor that it be made clear, through his courses, how his own research is itself ultimately motivated by a struggle with these questions; and it may be expected that each of his courses should be an invoking and awakening force, in this sense. S3
In an organizational, uncommonly ontic context such sentences use the jargon of authenticity in just the way in which Heidegger portrays it in Sein und Zeit: as a characteristic feature of idle talk. The authority to which in that way the jargon obliges itself is no other than the authority of the Heideggerian philoso- phy itself. That in the relevant chapter the author constantly and rhetorically repeats, "It is no encroach- ment," is meant to hide precisely such an encroach- ment; namely, the oath-Anrich himself uses the mythical word-on the so-called question of Being. Yet in the same breath the author concedes that no definite philosophy could today be placed at the center of the university. It is as though the ominous question of Being were beyond criticism. Whoever justly spurns the question of Being together with the chatter about it had best be sent away entirely. Anrich skillfully
83. Ernst Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universitiit und die Reform der deutschen Universitiiten, (Darmstadt, 1960), l" 114?
? ? ? ? ? ? 106
latches onto the fact that, in formulas like that of the question concerning the ground of Being, the innocent still hear the sound of resistance against the dispirited atmosphere in which the humanities are today carried on. A human right of students, their need for the es- sential, becomes blurred in the jargon, in the Hei- deggerian essence-mythology of Being. The spirit which they miss in the universities is silently converted into the monopoly of an instructional system which, for its part, cried heresy against the spirit when it appeared in the form of reason.
As in the concept of idle chatter, so in that of readi- ness to hand, which is portrayed with sympathy, and which is the philosophical ancestress of shelteredness, suffering experience is interpreted into its opposite. At some historical stages of agriculture, and in simple wares-economy, production was not radically subordi- nated to exchange and was nearer to the workers and consumers; and their relationships to one another were not totally reified. The idea of something undis- figured, undeformed, an idea which has yet to be actualized, could hardly have been created without a memory trace of such earlier conditions; although over long periods they probably caused more immediate suffering to those exposed to such conditions than did capitalism. Nonetheless, identifying thought, schooled in exchange, brought the differentiated down to the identity of the concept, and chopped up this more in- nocent identity. What Hegel and Marx in their youth condemned as alienation and reification, and against which all are spontaneously united today, is what Heidegger interprets ontologically as well as unhis-
107
torically, and, in its function as a being-form of Dasein, as something bodily. The ideology of readiness to hand, and its counterpart, strips itself bare in the practice of those devotees of the musical youth movement, who swear to it that a proper fiddle is one that a fiddler has rigged up for himself. Since the artisan forms of pro- duction have been overtaken by technology, and are superfluous, the intimacy which adhered to them has become as worthless as the do-it-yourself movement. The unfunctional self-being of things, their freedom from the compulsion of identity, which the dominating mind imposes, would be utopia. It presupposes the alteration of the whole. Nonetheless, in the midst of our all-embracing function context every ontological light on the remains of so-called readiness to hand gilds that context. For its sake the jargon of authen- ticity speaks as though it were the voice of men and things that are there for their own sake. Through this manoeuver, the jargon becomes all the more a for- others, something for planned and pedagogically deco- rated effect-contexts. Indeed, the Wagnerian ''To be German means to do something for its own sake" accelerated, in slogan form, the export of the German spirit. That spirit competed successfully with the more advanced commodity-thinking of the West, through the slogan's imprimatur, which declared that it was no commodity. That throws light on the artsy-craftsy element in the jargon. It provides a refuge for the stale notion that art should be brought back into life, and
that there should be more than art but also more than mere usage. The jargon pursues artisanship under the shadow of industry, as carefully chosen as it is cheap;
? 108
it gathers reproductions of kitschy life-reforming im- pulses that real life has buried under itself, and spares them the hopeless testing ground of actualization. Instead, language rolls up its sleeves and lets it be understood that right action, in the right place, is worth more than reflection. In that way a contempla- tive attitude, without any perception of the praxis which brings about changes, sympathizes all the more strikingly with the here and now, the servicing of obligations presented within the given.
Heidegger sees himself forced, in the analysis of curiosity, to intimate something of the historical dy- namic that necessarily dissolves static relationships. s4 On those relationships the theory of readiness to hand nourishes itself; he leaves it to the gang to call these hale. He sanctions, as an ontological possibility, that "dis-stancing" which is hallowed by its hyphen; that possibility that men might raise themselves above the mere immediacy of the reproduction of their own lives. Nevertheless, he slides into the defaming of consciousness, which has been released from im- prisonment :
Care becomes concern with the possibilities of the see- ing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along . . . solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongSide that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.
84. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 216.
log
When curiosity has become free, however, it con- cerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is , to come into a Being towards it ) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. 85
For Heidegger, the way to free consciousness is pre- established, inevitable; but it is as little charming to the man who is freed as are those who are narrowed by their circle of duties, those who distrust, as artful and shifty, the mind that is emancipated from praxis. He equates emancipated consciousness with curiosity.
His hatred toward curiosity is allied to his hatred to- ward mobility; both are even hammered into the mind by the ripe old saying: stay in the country and earn your living honestly. Genetic psychoanalysis knows the castration threat against the child's sexual investi- gation; the allegedly suprapsychological stance of the ontologist fits with the brutal "that's none of your business," invoked in the castration threat. In the ques-
tion of curiosity the thinker abuses thinking; without curiosity the subject would remain imprisoned in a dull repetition-compulsion and would never open him- self up to experience. Of course such an enlightenment insight is not the whole story. It is equally untrue that, through Heidegger's admonitions about "the They," that social state of affairs whose symptoms he reprimands grows better. It is only that his objection to curiosity
stems from yea-saying at any price :
curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and with marvelling at them-Oall,ua? ftJl. To be amazed to
8 5 . Ibid.
? 110
the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. S6
In his Di(ferenz essay Hegel criticized curiosity much more searchingly; not as a state of mind but as the position of the reified consciousness with regard to the dead object:
The living spirit which dwells in a philosophy requires, in order to be released, that it should be brought to birth by a related spirit. It passes by, as an alien phenomenon, any historical conduct which from some kind of in- terest marches forth to an understanding of opinions; and it does not reveal its interior. To the living spirit it can seem indifferent that it must serve to enlarge the remaining collection of mummies and the general heaps of accidentalia ; for it itself has flowed away through the hands curious to collect new pieces of knowledge. 87
The disagreeable aspect of curiosity, as of greedy na- ture as a whole, cannot be glossed over. But it is not a probing agitation; rather it is something that re- actively, under the pressure of early childhood denial, has emerged from that denial; and which distorts that which once wanted to get free from the always-same, the identical. Curious people are characters whose childish longing for the truth about the sexual was never satisfied; their longing is a shabby substitute. The person from whom that which concerns him was
86. Ibid.
87. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1 95 8 ) , Vol. I : Aufs iitze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Aufsiitze aus der Jenenser Zeit (Dif- ferenzschrift ) , p. 40.
III
withheld mixes himself evilly into what does not con- cern him. He becomes enviously enraptured with in- formation over matters in which he himself should not play any part. That is the relation of all greediness to free desire. To Heidegger's arrogance toward the merely ontic, the genesis of curiosity is indifferent. He chalks up mutilation to the fault of the mutilated, as a fault of existence in general. His existential security becomes a heteronomously conditioned activity that is untried by curiosity-idle knowledge. This is probably the original philosophical history of the cliche of com- mitment. By denouncing a purely ontological possi- bility according to his own teaching, Heidegger be- comes the advocate of the unfullfilment of life.
Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its existentialism right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance. In spite of its eager neutrality and distance from society, authenticity thus stands on the side of
the conditions of production, which, contrary to reason, perpetuate want. When Heidegger finally calls "home- lessness" the "third essential characteristic of this phenomenon," 88 he conjures up the Ahasuerian ele- ment. He does this by means of the demagogically proven technique of allusion, which keeps quiet about that to which it expects secret consent. The pleasure of mobility becomes a curse for the homeless. The op- posite of "everyday Dasein," which "is constantly up- rooting itself," 89 is "observing entities and marvelling
88. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 217. 8g. Ibid.
112
at them," 90 though it is not yet, by any means the contemplation of Being. In philosophy 1927 the root- less intellectual carries the yellow mark of someone who undermines the established order.
How deeply rooted are the societal elements in Heidegger's analysis of authenticity is involuntarily revealed by his use of language. As is well known, Heidegger supplants the traditional category of sub- jectivity by Dasein, whose essence is existence. Being, however, which "is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. " 91 This is meant to distin- guish subjectivity from all other existent being. It intends, furthermore, to prohibit existence from being "taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at- hand. " 9? This construction, which is inspired by Kierke- gaard's doctrine of the "transparency" of the self,93 would like to make possible a starting out from some element of being. This latter is valued as the immediate givenness of the facts of consciousness in traditional epistemology; yet, at the same time, this element of being is supposed to be more than mere fact, in the same manner as the ego of speculative idealism once was. Behind the apersonal "is concerned," nothing more is hidden than the fact that Dasein is conscious- ness. The entrance of this formula is Heidegger's scene
90. Ibid. , p. 216.
91. Ibid. , p. 67.
92. Ibid.
93. Cf. Sl! iren Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode (Dus-
seldorf, 1 954 ) p. 1 0 . [English translation by W. Lowrie, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death (Garden City, N. Y. , 1954). ]
? II3
a faire. From an abstract concept Being turns into something absolute and primary, which is not merely posited. The reason for this lies in the fact that Hei- degger reveals an element of Being and calls it Dasein, which would be not just some element of Being, but the pure condition of Being-all this without losing any of the characteristics of individuation, fullness, bodiliness. This is the scheme that the jargon follows, intentionally or unintentionally, to the point of nausea. The jargon cures Dasein from the wound of meaning- lessness and summons salvation from the world of ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down once and for all in the title deed, which declares that the person owns himself. The fact that Dasein belongs to itself, that it is "in each case mine," is picked out from in- dividuation as the only general definition that is left over after the dismantling of the transcendental sub- ject and its metaphysics. The principium individua- tionis stands as a principle over and against any par- ticular individual element. At the same time it is that essence. In the case of the former element, the Hegelian dialectical unity of the general and the par-
ticular is turned into a relation of possession. Then it is given the rank and rights of the philosophical apriori. "Because Dasein has in each case mineness . . . one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it. " 94 The distinction between authen- ticity and inauthenticity-the real Kierkegaardian one -depends on whether or not this element' of being, Dasein, chooses itself, its mineness. 95 Until further
94. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68. 95. Cf. Ibid.
? ? notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their criterion the decision in which the individual subject chooses itself as its own possession. The subject, the concept of which was once created in contrast to rei- fication, thus becomes reified. Yet at the same time reification is scoffed at objectively in a form of lan- guage which simultaneously commits the same crime. The general concept o f mineness , in which this lan- guage institutes subjectivity as a possession of itself, sounds like a variant of meanness in Berlin slang. Whatever formerly went under the name of existential and existentiell now insists on this new title deed of possession. By the fact that it is ontological, the alter- native of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself according to whether someone decides for himself or not. It takes its directive, beyond real states of affairs, from the highly formal sense of belonging to oneself. Yet its consequences in reality are extremely grave. Once such an ontology of what is most ontic has been achieved, philosophy no longer has to bother about the societal and natural-historical origin of this title deed, which declares that the individual owns himself. Such a philosophy need no longer be concerned with how far society and psychology allow a man to be him- self or become himself, or whether in the concept of such selfness the old evil is concentrated one more time. The societal relation, which seals itself off in the identity of the subject, is de-societalized into an in-itself. The individual, who himself can no longer rely on any firm possession, holds on to himself in his extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly un- losable possession. Metaphysics ends in a miserable
II5
consolation: after all, one still remains what one is. Since men do not remain what they are by any means, neither socially nor biologically, they gratify them- selves with the stale remainder of self-identity as something which gives distinction, both in regard to being and meaning. This unlosable element, which has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, as Hei- degger calls it, which the authentics possess and the ina? thentics lack. The essence of Dasein, i. e. , what is more than its mere existence, is nothing but its self- ness: it is itself. The quarrel with Heidegger's lan-
guage is not the fact that it is permeated, like any philosophical language, with figures from an empirical reality which it would like to transcend, but that it transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence.
Heidegger is careful to have alibis against the charge of epistemological subjectivism. Mineness, or the self-sameness of the authentically existing self, is to be separated from the identity of the subject. s6 Otherwise, these would break through the idealism of a thinking that claims to be a thinking of origins. But Heidegger's Being, to which, after all, some con-
siderable creative acts are attributed, becomes the Fich- tean absolute ego. It appears beheaded, as it were, in contrast to the traditional, merely posited ego. But the distinction from Fichte does not hold. If the distin- guishing element, the fact that mineness belongs to real persons, was not their abstractly preordained prin- ciple, their ontological primacy would be done for.
96. Ibid. , p. 168. 116
? ? Meanwhile, even the old-fashioned idealist identity depended on elements of fact as conditions of its own possibility, insofar as it was precisely the unity of the representations of a consciousness. Almost unrecog- nizably, all this rises again in Heidegger's thought, in a reinterpretation that turns it into the hinge of his whole argument. Heidegger's point of departure turns against possible criticism, in the same manner as Hegel's once turned against the philosophy of reflec- tion. Criticism is said to miss a newly discovered or rediscovered structure, beyond the dualism of fact and essence, which was still taught by HusserI in tradi- tional fashion. Not only Heidegger's philosophy, but
also the whole jargon of authenticity that follows, de- pends on the staging of the elaboration of this struc- ture. It is pointed out at a very early stage in Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger deals with the primacy of Dasein. Heidegger interprets subjectivity as a concept of indifference: essence and fact in one. The primacy of Dasein is said to be twofold. On the one hand it is to be ontic, namely, determined by existence. In other words, existence defines something in the nature of fact, something existent. On the other hand "Dasein is in itself 'ontological,' because existence is thus determinative for it. " 97 Thus something contradictory to subjectivity is immediately attributed to subjectivity : that it be itself fact and reality, and, in line with the demand of traditional philosophy, that as conscious- ness it make facticity possible. As the latter it becomes pure concept, in contrast to facticity; it becomes es-
97. Ibid. , p. 34?
117
sence and finally Husserrs eidos ego. Against the tradi- tional doctrine of the subject this double character, which is also an absolute unity before the fall into dif- ferentiation, claims the rank of an important discovery. For that reason Heidegger uses an archaizing, scho- lastic method. Both these characteristics of the sub- ject he ascribes to Dasein, as attributes, without considering that they conflict with the principle of contradiction when they are attached in this way. Ac- cording to Heidegger, Dasein "is" not merely ontic, which would be tautological in regard to what is grasped under the concept of Dasein, but it is also ontological. In this predication of the ontic and the ontological, from the standpoint of Dasein, the falsity of the regressive element can be recognized. The con- cept of the ontological cannot be attached to a sub- stratum, as if ontological were its predicate. To be a fact is no predicate which can attach itself to a con- cept; and, since Kant's criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, any philosophy should be careful not to affirm this. The same holds true for the nonfacticity of concepts, their essentiality. This essentiality is localized in the relation of the concept to the facticity that is synthesized in it-and never belongs to it, as Heidegger suggests, as a quality of it itself. To say that Dasein "is ontic or ontological,"
can, strictly speaking, not be judged at all, for what is meant by existence is a substratum. It is for this reason that the meaning of Dasein is nonconceptual. In contrast to thiS, "ontic" and "ontological" are ex- pressions for different forms of reflection , and are thus unable only in regard to the definitions of Dasein, or to
118
the position of such definitions in theory-not im- mediately, however, in regard to the meant substratum itself. Their place is that of conceptual mediation. Heidegger declares this to be immediacy sui generis. Dasein thus suddenly becomes a third element, with- out regard to the fact that the dual character that Hei- degger bends together into this third can by no means be regarded independently from that which happens conceptually to the substratum. In Heidegger, the fact that there is nothing which maintains itself identically without the categorical unity, and the fact that this categorical unity does not maintain itself without that which it synthesizes-such facts take the form of the elements which are to be distinguished. These elements in tum take the form of derivatives. There is nothing between heaven and earth that is in itself ontic or
ontological; rather, everything becomes what it is only by means of the constellation into which it is brought by philosophy. Language had a means for making this differentiation when it spoke of ontological theories, judgments, and proofs instead of something ontologi- cal sans fa{:on. By means of an objectification of this kind, such an element would of course already be turned into that ontic against which the literal mean- ing of "ontological" sharpens itself: the logos of some- thing antic. After Sein und Zeit Heidegger tried to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his project. Yet previously, he had done something very similar to what Kant criticized in the rationalistic form of ontology: an amphiboly of the concepts of reflec-
tion. 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.
76. Cf. Friedrich Gundolf, George, 3d ed. ( Berlin, 1930 ) P? 269.
? 99
more deeply in society as it more eagerly-reflecting upon itself-pushes . off from society and its objective spirit. It claws itself firmly into its blindly social fate, which-in Heidegger's terminology-has thrown one into this and no other place. That was according to the
taste of fascism. With the downfall of market liberal- ism, relationships of domination stepped nakedly into the foreground. The baldness of their order, the au- thentic law of the "needy time," easily permits itself to be taken for something primal. That is how people
could jaw about blood and soil, without a smile, during the excessively accumulating industrial capitalism of the Third Reich. The jargon of authenticity continues al that, less tangibly-with impunity, because at that time social differences <? ccasionally led to conflicts -such as those between the primary-school teacher appOinted to ordinarius and the career professor, or between the official optimism of the deadly war ma-
chine and the philosophical frowning of far too auto? cratic enthusiasts, who were deeply attracted to Being unto death.
Heidegger's complaints against cultural philosophy have fateful consequences in the ontology of authen- ticity: what this ontology at first bans into the sphere of cultural mediation it now shoves directly on into hell. To be sure, the world is similar enough to hell,
dipped as the world is in a gloomy flood of nonsense, the fallen form of language. Karl Kraus compressed that fact into the thesis that today the phrase gives birth to reality-especially to that reality which arose, after the catastrophe, under the name of culture. To a great extent that reality is, as Valery defined politics,
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only there to keep men away from what is of im- portance to them. In agreement with Kraus, whom he does not mention, Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit:
Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is said-in-the-talk as such. " 77
So the business of communication and its formulas cut in between the matter and the subject, and blind the subject against precisely that which all the chatter is about. "What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. " 78 But Heidegger imposes the critical diagnosis of a negative ontological presence on the "everyday being of the Da, existence," which in truth is historical in nature: the entangling of the mind with the sphere of circulation, at a stage in which the objective spirit is covered by the economic utilization process, as if by a fungus which stifles the quality of thought. This confusion has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein.
Heidegger rightly perceives the abstractness of chatter "as such," which has emptied itself of any relationship to its content; but from the aberrant abstractness of chatter he draws conclusions as to its metaphysical invariance, however questionable that may be. Chatter would already be in decline if, in a reasonable econ- omy, the expenditure of advertisements disappeared . Chatter is forced on men by a social structure which
77. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 212. 78. Ibid.
101
negates them as subjects long before this is done by the newspaper companies. But Heidegger's critique becomes ideological by grasping the emancipated spirit as that which becomes of it under supremely real engagements, and by doing so without making distinc- tions. He condemns idle chatter, but not brutality, the alliance with which is the true guilt of chatter, which is in itself far more innocent. As soon as Heidegger wants to silence chatter, his language clatters with weaponry :
To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say-that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one's ret- icence . . . makes something manifest, and does away with "idle talk. " 79
His language itself speaks forth, as seldom elsewhere, from the word "to strike down"; it is a language of power. But it has already been seen in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts. Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything :
The "they" is there alongside everywhere, . . . but in such a manner that it has always stolen away when- ever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the "they" presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The "they" can, as it were, manage to have "them" con- stantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It "was" always the "they" who
79. Ibid. , p. 208. 102
? ? ? did it, and yet it can be said that it has been "no one. " In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that "it was no one. " 80
That is precisely what came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand,81 that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse. Heidegger's sketch of the They comes closest to what it is, the exchange relationship, when he is treating averageness :
The "they" has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called "distan- tiality" is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one- another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the "they. " The "they," in its Being, essentially makes an issue of this. Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the aver- ageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it re- gards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything excep- tional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of pri- ority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a strug- gle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the "levelling" down . . . of all possibilities of Being. "82
80. Ibid. , p. I65.
8I. [Befehlsnotstand: morally compelling situation for a soldier, who must carry out an order with which he cannot square his conscience. ]
82. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. I64 65.
103
That leveling is described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that "prerogative" for themselves. It is a leveling which they themselves want to employ, and is no other than the leveling which occasionally befalls the exchanger, through his inevitable reduction to the equivalence form; the critique of political econ- omy grasping exchange value in terms of the social work-time which on the average has to be spent. In its hostility to the negatively ontologized They, the opposi-
tion to capitalist anonymity eagerly overlooks the law of value which is asserting itself-a suffering which will not have it said what it is suffering from. When that anonymity, whose social source is unmistakable, is analyzed as a possibility of being, then that society is exonerated which simultaneously both disqualifies and determines the relationships of its members.
The mobility of words unquestionably continued their degradation from the beginning. In the functional word, deception is posited simultaneously with the exchange principle itself and grasps spirit; because this latter cannot be without the idea of truth, it ex- hibits flagrantly what has entrenched itself in material praxis behind the free and upright exchange of goods. But without mobility language would never have be- come capable of that relation to the matter at hand, by whose criterion Heidegger judges communicative language. Language philosophy, in the question of communicative language, would have to investigate
the metamorphosis of quantity into the quality of mere chatter, or, better, the interinvolvement of both as- pects; and would not proceed in an authoritarian spirit to sort out the wheat from the chaff of language. No
104
thinking could unfold itself into the not-yet-thought without that shot of irresponsibility over which Hei- degger grows so excited; in that, the spoken distin- guishes itself from the authentically written word, and even in the latter positivists can easily criticize as ir- responsible that which goes beyond what is the case. Immaturity and timidity stand no higher than chatter. Even that linguistic objectivity which presupposes the utmost alertness toward the phrase also has as its pre- condition mobility of expression, no matter how broken : urbanity. Nobody can write without phrases, and who is true to the matter who is not also a literate person? The defense of this kind of person seems to be in place after the murder of the Jews. Kraus him- self despised the illiterate, if possible even more than the literate. On the other hand the summary judgment concerning idle talk, which insinuates it through a negative ontology, constantly permits the justification of the phrase as if it were fate. Once idle talk is a state of mind, one need not be greatly embarrassed when
authenticity turns into idle talk. That is happening today to Heidegger's own legend. We might pull some sentences out of a piece on The Idea of the German University and the Reform of the German Universities by Ernst Anrich :
It is no encroachment [that is, on academic autonomy] when from this Hippocratic oath we make a certain de- mand, out of our clear knowledge that no specific phi- losophy can today be placed deciSively at the center of the university, a demand that we shall keep alert our universality and our responsiveness in face of the whole of reality; it is no encroachment on this situation when we ask each scholar in this body to carry on his
105
scholarship under the sign of the final question about the ground of Being and the whole of Being; and when we ask him to discuss and exchange these problems within the whole body, the dignity of which resides therein. If it is right to demand of the student that the essence of his study must be to drive forward, within his own specialty, to the view of Being, and to responsibility in face of the totality of Being; if that is right, then we must require of the professor that it be made clear, through his courses, how his own research is itself ultimately motivated by a struggle with these questions; and it may be expected that each of his courses should be an invoking and awakening force, in this sense. S3
In an organizational, uncommonly ontic context such sentences use the jargon of authenticity in just the way in which Heidegger portrays it in Sein und Zeit: as a characteristic feature of idle talk. The authority to which in that way the jargon obliges itself is no other than the authority of the Heideggerian philoso- phy itself. That in the relevant chapter the author constantly and rhetorically repeats, "It is no encroach- ment," is meant to hide precisely such an encroach- ment; namely, the oath-Anrich himself uses the mythical word-on the so-called question of Being. Yet in the same breath the author concedes that no definite philosophy could today be placed at the center of the university. It is as though the ominous question of Being were beyond criticism. Whoever justly spurns the question of Being together with the chatter about it had best be sent away entirely. Anrich skillfully
83. Ernst Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universitiit und die Reform der deutschen Universitiiten, (Darmstadt, 1960), l" 114?
? ? ? ? ? ? 106
latches onto the fact that, in formulas like that of the question concerning the ground of Being, the innocent still hear the sound of resistance against the dispirited atmosphere in which the humanities are today carried on. A human right of students, their need for the es- sential, becomes blurred in the jargon, in the Hei- deggerian essence-mythology of Being. The spirit which they miss in the universities is silently converted into the monopoly of an instructional system which, for its part, cried heresy against the spirit when it appeared in the form of reason.
As in the concept of idle chatter, so in that of readi- ness to hand, which is portrayed with sympathy, and which is the philosophical ancestress of shelteredness, suffering experience is interpreted into its opposite. At some historical stages of agriculture, and in simple wares-economy, production was not radically subordi- nated to exchange and was nearer to the workers and consumers; and their relationships to one another were not totally reified. The idea of something undis- figured, undeformed, an idea which has yet to be actualized, could hardly have been created without a memory trace of such earlier conditions; although over long periods they probably caused more immediate suffering to those exposed to such conditions than did capitalism. Nonetheless, identifying thought, schooled in exchange, brought the differentiated down to the identity of the concept, and chopped up this more in- nocent identity. What Hegel and Marx in their youth condemned as alienation and reification, and against which all are spontaneously united today, is what Heidegger interprets ontologically as well as unhis-
107
torically, and, in its function as a being-form of Dasein, as something bodily. The ideology of readiness to hand, and its counterpart, strips itself bare in the practice of those devotees of the musical youth movement, who swear to it that a proper fiddle is one that a fiddler has rigged up for himself. Since the artisan forms of pro- duction have been overtaken by technology, and are superfluous, the intimacy which adhered to them has become as worthless as the do-it-yourself movement. The unfunctional self-being of things, their freedom from the compulsion of identity, which the dominating mind imposes, would be utopia. It presupposes the alteration of the whole. Nonetheless, in the midst of our all-embracing function context every ontological light on the remains of so-called readiness to hand gilds that context. For its sake the jargon of authen- ticity speaks as though it were the voice of men and things that are there for their own sake. Through this manoeuver, the jargon becomes all the more a for- others, something for planned and pedagogically deco- rated effect-contexts. Indeed, the Wagnerian ''To be German means to do something for its own sake" accelerated, in slogan form, the export of the German spirit. That spirit competed successfully with the more advanced commodity-thinking of the West, through the slogan's imprimatur, which declared that it was no commodity. That throws light on the artsy-craftsy element in the jargon. It provides a refuge for the stale notion that art should be brought back into life, and
that there should be more than art but also more than mere usage. The jargon pursues artisanship under the shadow of industry, as carefully chosen as it is cheap;
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it gathers reproductions of kitschy life-reforming im- pulses that real life has buried under itself, and spares them the hopeless testing ground of actualization. Instead, language rolls up its sleeves and lets it be understood that right action, in the right place, is worth more than reflection. In that way a contempla- tive attitude, without any perception of the praxis which brings about changes, sympathizes all the more strikingly with the here and now, the servicing of obligations presented within the given.
Heidegger sees himself forced, in the analysis of curiosity, to intimate something of the historical dy- namic that necessarily dissolves static relationships. s4 On those relationships the theory of readiness to hand nourishes itself; he leaves it to the gang to call these hale. He sanctions, as an ontological possibility, that "dis-stancing" which is hallowed by its hyphen; that possibility that men might raise themselves above the mere immediacy of the reproduction of their own lives. Nevertheless, he slides into the defaming of consciousness, which has been released from im- prisonment :
Care becomes concern with the possibilities of the see- ing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along . . . solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongSide that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.
84. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 216.
log
When curiosity has become free, however, it con- cerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is , to come into a Being towards it ) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. 85
For Heidegger, the way to free consciousness is pre- established, inevitable; but it is as little charming to the man who is freed as are those who are narrowed by their circle of duties, those who distrust, as artful and shifty, the mind that is emancipated from praxis. He equates emancipated consciousness with curiosity.
His hatred toward curiosity is allied to his hatred to- ward mobility; both are even hammered into the mind by the ripe old saying: stay in the country and earn your living honestly. Genetic psychoanalysis knows the castration threat against the child's sexual investi- gation; the allegedly suprapsychological stance of the ontologist fits with the brutal "that's none of your business," invoked in the castration threat. In the ques-
tion of curiosity the thinker abuses thinking; without curiosity the subject would remain imprisoned in a dull repetition-compulsion and would never open him- self up to experience. Of course such an enlightenment insight is not the whole story. It is equally untrue that, through Heidegger's admonitions about "the They," that social state of affairs whose symptoms he reprimands grows better. It is only that his objection to curiosity
stems from yea-saying at any price :
curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and with marvelling at them-Oall,ua? ftJl. To be amazed to
8 5 . Ibid.
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the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. S6
In his Di(ferenz essay Hegel criticized curiosity much more searchingly; not as a state of mind but as the position of the reified consciousness with regard to the dead object:
The living spirit which dwells in a philosophy requires, in order to be released, that it should be brought to birth by a related spirit. It passes by, as an alien phenomenon, any historical conduct which from some kind of in- terest marches forth to an understanding of opinions; and it does not reveal its interior. To the living spirit it can seem indifferent that it must serve to enlarge the remaining collection of mummies and the general heaps of accidentalia ; for it itself has flowed away through the hands curious to collect new pieces of knowledge. 87
The disagreeable aspect of curiosity, as of greedy na- ture as a whole, cannot be glossed over. But it is not a probing agitation; rather it is something that re- actively, under the pressure of early childhood denial, has emerged from that denial; and which distorts that which once wanted to get free from the always-same, the identical. Curious people are characters whose childish longing for the truth about the sexual was never satisfied; their longing is a shabby substitute. The person from whom that which concerns him was
86. Ibid.
87. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1 95 8 ) , Vol. I : Aufs iitze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Aufsiitze aus der Jenenser Zeit (Dif- ferenzschrift ) , p. 40.
III
withheld mixes himself evilly into what does not con- cern him. He becomes enviously enraptured with in- formation over matters in which he himself should not play any part. That is the relation of all greediness to free desire. To Heidegger's arrogance toward the merely ontic, the genesis of curiosity is indifferent. He chalks up mutilation to the fault of the mutilated, as a fault of existence in general. His existential security becomes a heteronomously conditioned activity that is untried by curiosity-idle knowledge. This is probably the original philosophical history of the cliche of com- mitment. By denouncing a purely ontological possi- bility according to his own teaching, Heidegger be- comes the advocate of the unfullfilment of life.
Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its existentialism right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance. In spite of its eager neutrality and distance from society, authenticity thus stands on the side of
the conditions of production, which, contrary to reason, perpetuate want. When Heidegger finally calls "home- lessness" the "third essential characteristic of this phenomenon," 88 he conjures up the Ahasuerian ele- ment. He does this by means of the demagogically proven technique of allusion, which keeps quiet about that to which it expects secret consent. The pleasure of mobility becomes a curse for the homeless. The op- posite of "everyday Dasein," which "is constantly up- rooting itself," 89 is "observing entities and marvelling
88. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 217. 8g. Ibid.
112
at them," 90 though it is not yet, by any means the contemplation of Being. In philosophy 1927 the root- less intellectual carries the yellow mark of someone who undermines the established order.
How deeply rooted are the societal elements in Heidegger's analysis of authenticity is involuntarily revealed by his use of language. As is well known, Heidegger supplants the traditional category of sub- jectivity by Dasein, whose essence is existence. Being, however, which "is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. " 91 This is meant to distin- guish subjectivity from all other existent being. It intends, furthermore, to prohibit existence from being "taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at- hand. " 9? This construction, which is inspired by Kierke- gaard's doctrine of the "transparency" of the self,93 would like to make possible a starting out from some element of being. This latter is valued as the immediate givenness of the facts of consciousness in traditional epistemology; yet, at the same time, this element of being is supposed to be more than mere fact, in the same manner as the ego of speculative idealism once was. Behind the apersonal "is concerned," nothing more is hidden than the fact that Dasein is conscious- ness. The entrance of this formula is Heidegger's scene
90. Ibid. , p. 216.
91. Ibid. , p. 67.
92. Ibid.
93. Cf. Sl! iren Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode (Dus-
seldorf, 1 954 ) p. 1 0 . [English translation by W. Lowrie, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death (Garden City, N. Y. , 1954). ]
? II3
a faire. From an abstract concept Being turns into something absolute and primary, which is not merely posited. The reason for this lies in the fact that Hei- degger reveals an element of Being and calls it Dasein, which would be not just some element of Being, but the pure condition of Being-all this without losing any of the characteristics of individuation, fullness, bodiliness. This is the scheme that the jargon follows, intentionally or unintentionally, to the point of nausea. The jargon cures Dasein from the wound of meaning- lessness and summons salvation from the world of ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down once and for all in the title deed, which declares that the person owns himself. The fact that Dasein belongs to itself, that it is "in each case mine," is picked out from in- dividuation as the only general definition that is left over after the dismantling of the transcendental sub- ject and its metaphysics. The principium individua- tionis stands as a principle over and against any par- ticular individual element. At the same time it is that essence. In the case of the former element, the Hegelian dialectical unity of the general and the par-
ticular is turned into a relation of possession. Then it is given the rank and rights of the philosophical apriori. "Because Dasein has in each case mineness . . . one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it. " 94 The distinction between authen- ticity and inauthenticity-the real Kierkegaardian one -depends on whether or not this element' of being, Dasein, chooses itself, its mineness. 95 Until further
94. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68. 95. Cf. Ibid.
? ? notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their criterion the decision in which the individual subject chooses itself as its own possession. The subject, the concept of which was once created in contrast to rei- fication, thus becomes reified. Yet at the same time reification is scoffed at objectively in a form of lan- guage which simultaneously commits the same crime. The general concept o f mineness , in which this lan- guage institutes subjectivity as a possession of itself, sounds like a variant of meanness in Berlin slang. Whatever formerly went under the name of existential and existentiell now insists on this new title deed of possession. By the fact that it is ontological, the alter- native of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself according to whether someone decides for himself or not. It takes its directive, beyond real states of affairs, from the highly formal sense of belonging to oneself. Yet its consequences in reality are extremely grave. Once such an ontology of what is most ontic has been achieved, philosophy no longer has to bother about the societal and natural-historical origin of this title deed, which declares that the individual owns himself. Such a philosophy need no longer be concerned with how far society and psychology allow a man to be him- self or become himself, or whether in the concept of such selfness the old evil is concentrated one more time. The societal relation, which seals itself off in the identity of the subject, is de-societalized into an in-itself. The individual, who himself can no longer rely on any firm possession, holds on to himself in his extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly un- losable possession. Metaphysics ends in a miserable
II5
consolation: after all, one still remains what one is. Since men do not remain what they are by any means, neither socially nor biologically, they gratify them- selves with the stale remainder of self-identity as something which gives distinction, both in regard to being and meaning. This unlosable element, which has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, as Hei- degger calls it, which the authentics possess and the ina? thentics lack. The essence of Dasein, i. e. , what is more than its mere existence, is nothing but its self- ness: it is itself. The quarrel with Heidegger's lan-
guage is not the fact that it is permeated, like any philosophical language, with figures from an empirical reality which it would like to transcend, but that it transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence.
Heidegger is careful to have alibis against the charge of epistemological subjectivism. Mineness, or the self-sameness of the authentically existing self, is to be separated from the identity of the subject. s6 Otherwise, these would break through the idealism of a thinking that claims to be a thinking of origins. But Heidegger's Being, to which, after all, some con-
siderable creative acts are attributed, becomes the Fich- tean absolute ego. It appears beheaded, as it were, in contrast to the traditional, merely posited ego. But the distinction from Fichte does not hold. If the distin- guishing element, the fact that mineness belongs to real persons, was not their abstractly preordained prin- ciple, their ontological primacy would be done for.
96. Ibid. , p. 168. 116
? ? Meanwhile, even the old-fashioned idealist identity depended on elements of fact as conditions of its own possibility, insofar as it was precisely the unity of the representations of a consciousness. Almost unrecog- nizably, all this rises again in Heidegger's thought, in a reinterpretation that turns it into the hinge of his whole argument. Heidegger's point of departure turns against possible criticism, in the same manner as Hegel's once turned against the philosophy of reflec- tion. Criticism is said to miss a newly discovered or rediscovered structure, beyond the dualism of fact and essence, which was still taught by HusserI in tradi- tional fashion. Not only Heidegger's philosophy, but
also the whole jargon of authenticity that follows, de- pends on the staging of the elaboration of this struc- ture. It is pointed out at a very early stage in Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger deals with the primacy of Dasein. Heidegger interprets subjectivity as a concept of indifference: essence and fact in one. The primacy of Dasein is said to be twofold. On the one hand it is to be ontic, namely, determined by existence. In other words, existence defines something in the nature of fact, something existent. On the other hand "Dasein is in itself 'ontological,' because existence is thus determinative for it. " 97 Thus something contradictory to subjectivity is immediately attributed to subjectivity : that it be itself fact and reality, and, in line with the demand of traditional philosophy, that as conscious- ness it make facticity possible. As the latter it becomes pure concept, in contrast to facticity; it becomes es-
97. Ibid. , p. 34?
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sence and finally Husserrs eidos ego. Against the tradi- tional doctrine of the subject this double character, which is also an absolute unity before the fall into dif- ferentiation, claims the rank of an important discovery. For that reason Heidegger uses an archaizing, scho- lastic method. Both these characteristics of the sub- ject he ascribes to Dasein, as attributes, without considering that they conflict with the principle of contradiction when they are attached in this way. Ac- cording to Heidegger, Dasein "is" not merely ontic, which would be tautological in regard to what is grasped under the concept of Dasein, but it is also ontological. In this predication of the ontic and the ontological, from the standpoint of Dasein, the falsity of the regressive element can be recognized. The con- cept of the ontological cannot be attached to a sub- stratum, as if ontological were its predicate. To be a fact is no predicate which can attach itself to a con- cept; and, since Kant's criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, any philosophy should be careful not to affirm this. The same holds true for the nonfacticity of concepts, their essentiality. This essentiality is localized in the relation of the concept to the facticity that is synthesized in it-and never belongs to it, as Heidegger suggests, as a quality of it itself. To say that Dasein "is ontic or ontological,"
can, strictly speaking, not be judged at all, for what is meant by existence is a substratum. It is for this reason that the meaning of Dasein is nonconceptual. In contrast to thiS, "ontic" and "ontological" are ex- pressions for different forms of reflection , and are thus unable only in regard to the definitions of Dasein, or to
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the position of such definitions in theory-not im- mediately, however, in regard to the meant substratum itself. Their place is that of conceptual mediation. Heidegger declares this to be immediacy sui generis. Dasein thus suddenly becomes a third element, with- out regard to the fact that the dual character that Hei- degger bends together into this third can by no means be regarded independently from that which happens conceptually to the substratum. In Heidegger, the fact that there is nothing which maintains itself identically without the categorical unity, and the fact that this categorical unity does not maintain itself without that which it synthesizes-such facts take the form of the elements which are to be distinguished. These elements in tum take the form of derivatives. There is nothing between heaven and earth that is in itself ontic or
ontological; rather, everything becomes what it is only by means of the constellation into which it is brought by philosophy. Language had a means for making this differentiation when it spoke of ontological theories, judgments, and proofs instead of something ontologi- cal sans fa{:on. By means of an objectification of this kind, such an element would of course already be turned into that ontic against which the literal mean- ing of "ontological" sharpens itself: the logos of some- thing antic. After Sein und Zeit Heidegger tried to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his project. Yet previously, he had done something very similar to what Kant criticized in the rationalistic form of ontology: an amphiboly of the concepts of reflec-
tion. Heidegger may have missed the mistake, but it is to the advantage of his project. According to usual
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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
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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.
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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-
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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.
