The Electra
monologue
of Hofmannsthal, who certainly understood such nu- ances, begins : "Alone, all alone.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
]
32. Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz (Munich, 1960) pp. 98 ff. [English translation by W. Earle, Reason and Ex- istenz: Five Lectures (London, 1956). The quotation is trans- lated from the original German. ]
? ing to be a match for it. But they agree with the Sophists in their favorite thesis, that man alone is im- portant-that sententia of Homo mensura warmed over again with unexpected fulsomeness. As once be- fore, the social model of their chosen scapegoat is ur- ban freedom, which, in the past, helped thought to emancipate itself. The only diference is the fact that in the strict rational order of bourgeois society the mo- bility of person and spirit are less threatening to
groups, which in effect no longer exist in highly indus- trialized countries. But it constantly challenges the con- tinuing irrationality of the total system, which would like to prune away what is still vegetating on from the social modes of behavior developed under liberalism.
Therefore the jargon must defend, so as not to be lost, transitory social forms which are incompatible with the contemporary state of the forces of produc- tion. If it wanted to mount the barricades itself, then it would have to engage itself not only for a position much scorned among its believers, but possibly also for that rationality which the exchange society both promises and denies, and through which that society
could be transcended. The bourgeoiS form of rational- ity has always needed irrational supplements, in order to maintain itself as what it is, continuing injustice through justice. Such irrationality in the midst of the ration al is the working atmosphere of authenticity . The latter can support itself on the fact that over a long period of time literal as well as figurative mobility, a main element in bourgeois equality, always turned into injustice for those who could not entirely keep up. They experienced the progress of society as a verdict:
47
a pawned-off remembrance of their suffering, under that system, brings authenticity, along with its jargon, to a ferment. Its bubbles cause the true object of the suffering, the particular constitution of society, to disappear. For the selected victims of the feeling against mobility have themselves been condemned, ever since the sphere of circulation was fused into the sphere of production. The jargon strives to turn the bitterness of the indigenous, of the mute, into some- thing like a metaphysical-moral verdict of annhilation against the man who can speak out; and the jargon has had so much success only for this reason, because this verdict in question has already in effect been spoken,
and has been carried out in Germany against innumer- able people-because the gesture of rooted genuine- ness is at one with that of the historical conquerors. That is the substantial element in authenticity, the holy fount of its strength. Taciturnity and silence are the best counterpoint to existential and existentialist babble. The order which this babble aims at is itself one that reaches for speechlessness of sign and com- mand. In happy agreement with its consumers, the jargon fills the breach created by the societally neces- sary disintegration of language. Petit bourgeois have few acquaintances; they feel uncomfortable as soon as they come together with people they don't already know, and their duplicity turns this attitude into a vir- tue. Not lastly, the jargon bears some resemblance to the rough manners of a doorman, in ? an Alpine hotel, who hectors the guests as if they were intruders, and in this way wins their trust. In face of the social stasis
that once again is darkening the horizon, a shimmer of
? ? humanity is shed back onto the officiously persuasive word of the day before yesterday. If philosophy were to take back into society the experiences which were pre- cipitated in the jargon in the false forms of its dis- tilled essences-society being the place where they originated-and if the word "origin" had any meaning at all, then philosophy would be able to go beyond the
opposition of mobility and fixity, of groundlessness and authenticity. It would then recognize these oppositions as elements of the same guilty whole, in which heroes and businessmen are of value to each other. The liberalism that hatched the culture industry produced forms of reflection that are encountered indignantly by the jargon of authenticity, although it is itself one of them. This liberalism was the ancestor of the fascism which destroyed both it and its later potential cus- tomers. But of course the blood guilt of that which echoes today, in the jargon, is incomparably greater
than the deceptive maneuvers of mobility, whose prin- ciples are incompatible with those of immediate power. Heidegger is not the matador of such political strat-
egies, and in fact he protects himself against their blunt directness. It is true that he does use the word "authenticity" centrally in Sein und Zeit,33 and most of the familiar shorthand is spread around over his best- known text-spread with gestures, of incontestable authority, which the mass of the authentics then me- chanically imitate; there is unquestioned agreement
about the undiscussed core of all this. In the same way Heidegger struggles to show reserve toward all the
33. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 304 if. , also pp. 68 69. 49
? current phrases which he, with ease, can put aside as vulgar misunderstanding. Nevertheless, as soon as he loosens his voluntary self-censorship, he falls into the jargon, with a provinciality which cannot be excused on the grounds that it becomes thematic of itself. He has published a little volume of gnomic thoughts en- titled Out of the Experience of Thinking. Its form keeps to the middle ground between poetry and pre-Socratic fragment. Yet the sibylline character of the pre-Socra- tic fragments really results, at least in many of them, from the accident of a discontinuous tradition, and not from secretiveness. Heidegger has praise for the "splendor of the simple. " 34 He brings back the thread- bare ideology of pure materials, from the realm of handicrafts to that of the mind-as if words were pure, and, as it were, roughened material. But textiles of that sort are mediated, today, through their calcu- lated opposition to mass production; and in just that way Heidegger wants, synthetically, to create a primal sense for pure words.
Another specifically social element plays into the category of the simple : the elevation of the cheap, in accordance with the wishes of the proudly declining elite-an elevation related to youth music, which gladly goes along with the jargon and lets itself be ac- companied by it. Being behind the times historically is no less eagerly converted into the feeling of the fate- fully tragic, than into that of something higher; that too goes along with the silent identification of the
1954), p. 13? 50
34. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens ( Pfullingen,
archaic with the genuine. But the triviality of the sim- ple is not, as Heidegger would like it to be, attributable to the value-blindness of thought that has lost being. Such triviality comes from thinking that is supposedly in tune with being and reveals itself as something supremely noble. Such triviality is the sign of that c1as- sifying thought, even in the simplest word, from which Heidegger pretends that he has escaped: namely, ab- straction. Already in the first version of Geist der Utopie, Ernst Bloch says that symbol intentions, which arefor him the traces of messianic light in the darkened world, are in fact not expressed by the most simple basic relationships and basic words, like "the old man, the mother, and death. " But Heidegger, in his fastidious Humanism letter, lets us hear these words :
Man is not the lord of existence. Man is the shepherd of being. In this '1ess" man loses nothing, but rather wins, by reaching the truth of Being. He wins the essen- tial poverty of the shepherd, whose worth consists in being called, by Being itself, into the trueness of its truth. This call comes as the throwing from which the thrownness of existence stems. In his being-historical, [seinsgeschichtlich] essence, man is the existent whose being as ek-sistence consists in his living in the neigh- borhood of Being. Man is the neighbor of Being. 85
Philosophical banality is generated when that magical participation in the absolute is ascribed to the general concept-a participation which puts the lie to that con- cept's conceivability.
3 5 . Heidegger, tJber den Humanismus ( Frankfurt, I 949 ) P? 29?
? 5I
Philosophizing, according to Heidegger, is a danger to thought. 36 But the authentic thinker, harsh toward anything so modernistic as philosophy, writes : "When in early summer isolated narcissi bloom hidden in the meadow, and the mountain rose glistens under the maple tree . . . " 37 or : "When from the slopes of the high valley, where the herds are slowly passing, the cow bells ring and ring . . . " 38 Or verses :
The woods make camp the streams rush on the cliffs remain
the rain runs.
The meadows wait
the fountains spring
the winds dwell blessing takes thought. 39
The renewing of thinking through outmoded language can be judged by these instances. The archaic is the expressive ideal of this language : "The oldest element of the old comes up behind us in our thinking and yet meets us head on. " 40 But Jungnickel knows how to put it: the revenge of the myth on the person who is curious about it, on the denouncer of thinking. "The poetic character of thinking is still concealed,"41 Heidegger adds, in order to forestall criticism at all costs: "where it shows itself, it for a long time re-
36. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, p. I S .
37. Ibid. , p. 12.
38. Ibid. , p. 22.
39. Ibid. , p. 27?
40. Ibid. , p. 19.
41. Ibid. , p. 23.
? sembles the utopia of a half-poetic intellect. " 42 Still the half-poetic intellect which babbles forth those pieces of wisdom bears less resemblance to this, or to any other unsuccessful utopia, than to the work of some trusty folk art, which after all is not used to speaking well about those things. During the Hitler period, and we can feel with him, Heidegger turned down an academic appointment in Berlin. He justifies that in an article, "Why Do We Remain in the Province? " With wily strategy he disarms the charge that he is provincial; he uses the term "provincialism" in a positive sense. His strategy takes this form: "When on a deep winter night a wild snowstorm rages around the cabin, and covers and conceals everything, then the time is ripe for philosophy. Its question must then become simple and essential. " 43 Whether ques- tions are essential can in any case only be judged by the answers given; there is no way of anticipating, and certainly not by the criterion of a simplicity based on meteorological events. That simplicity says as little about truth as about its opposite; Kant, Hegel were as complicated and as simple as their content forced them to be. But Heidegger insinuates a preestablished harmony between essential content and homey mur- muring. Therefore, the echoes of Jungnickel here are not just loveable lapses. They are there to deafen any suspicion that the philosopher might be an intellectual : "And philosophical work does not take place as the
42. Ibid.
43. Quoted in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern, 1962), p. 216.
? 53
spare-time activity of a crank. It belongs right in the midst of the labor of farmers. " 44 One would like at least to know the farmers' opinion ,about that. Heideg- ger does not need their opinion. For "during the time of the evening work-pause, he sits, on the stove bench along with the farmers . . . or at the table in the corner, under the crucifix, and then we usually don't talk at all. We smoke our pipes in silence. " 45 "One's own work's inner belonging, to the Black Forest and its people, comes from a century-long Germanic- Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable. " 46 Mter all, Heidegger says it himself. Johann Peter Hebel, who comes from the same region, and to whom Heideg- ger would like to give the place of honor on the mantel- piece, hardly ever appealed to this rootedness; instead he passed on his greetings to the peddlers Scheitele and Nausel, in one of the most beautiful pieces of prose in defense of the Jews that was ever written in German. 47 Rootedness, however, puffs itself up:
Recently I got a second invitation to the University of Berlin. On such an occasion I leave the city and go back to my cabin. I hear what the mountains and woods and farmyards say. On the way I drop in on my oId friend, a seventy-five-year-old farmer. He has read in the news- paper about the Berlin invitation. What will he say? He slowly presses the sure glance of his clear eyes against mine, holds his mouth tightly closed, lays his faithful and cautious hand on my shoulder-and almost im-
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid. , p. 217?
46. Ibid.
47. Cf. Johann Peter Hebel, Werke (Berlin, I874) II, 254.
54
perceptibly shakes his head. That means: absolutely
No! 48
While the philosopher complains to other Blubo-friends about their advertising of the Blubo,'9 which would be detrimental to his monopoly, his reflected unreflective- ness degenerates into chummy chit-chat, for the sake of the rural setting with which he wants to stand on a confidential footing. The description of the old farmer reminds us of the most washed-out cliches in plough- and-furrow novels, from the region of a Frenssen; and it reminds us equally of the praise of being silent, which the philosopher authorizes not only for his farmers but also for himself. Here we find an ignorance of everything we have learned about rural people : for instance in French realism from Balzac's late work to Maupassant; from a literature not attuned to the musty instincts of German petit-bourgeois kitsch; from a literature which would be available in translation even to a pre-Socratic. The small farmer owes his con- tinuing existence entirely to gracious gifts from that exchange SOciety by which his very ground and foun- dation, even in appearance, have been removed; in the face of this exchange the farmers have nothing on the:ir horizon except something worse-the immediate exploitation of the family without which they would be bankrupt: this hollowed-out state, the perpetual crisis of the small farmer's business, has its echo in the hollowness of the jargon. The subsidies which are
48 . Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 2 I 8 .
49. [B lubo: catchword o f the Nazi movement, emphasizing the interdependence of one's life with one's native soil. A provincial version of pro patria mori. ]
55
paid to the small farmers are ,the very ground of that which the primal words of the jargon add to that which in fact they mean. Like less prominent porte- paroles of authenticity, Heidegger is filled with the disdainful pride of inwardness, which he touches on philosophically, in his thought about Hegel's critique of it. 50 Whoever is forced by the nature of his work to stay in one place, gladly makes a virtue out of ne- cessity. He tries to convince himself and others that his bound-ness is of a higher order. The financially threatened farmer's bad experiences with middlemen substantiate this opinion. The socially clumsy person who may be partially excluded from society hates those middlemen as jacks of all trades. This hatred joins with resistance against all agents, from the cattle dealer to the journalist. In 1956 the stable professions, which are themselves a stage of social development, are still the norms for Heidegger. He praises them in the name of a false eternity of agrarian conditions: "Man tries in vain to bring the globe to order through planning, when he is not in tune with the consoling voice of the country lane. " 51 North America knows no country lanes, not even villages. Philosophy, which is ashamed of its name, needs the sixth-hand symbol of the farmer as a proof of its primalness, as a way of acquiring some otherwise unavailable distinctiveness. However, Lessing's insight still applies, as it did in his time : the insight that the aesthetic critic does not need to do better himself than what he criticizes. That which
50. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 248 fr.
51. Heidegger, Der Feldweg (Frankfurt, I956) p. 4.
? ? ? ? was right for the Hamburg Dramaturgy is also reason- able for philosophical theory : the self-awareness of its limitations does not obligate it to authentic poetic creation. But it must have the power to prevent think- ing people from producing mere aesthetic staples; otherwise, these argue against a philosophy which pre- tends to scorn arguments as confusing. Its noble philistinism grows into the jargon of authenticity.
As in this jargon, and even in Heidegger, the evi- dence of language reveals the falsity of rootedness- at least as soon as rootedness descends to something that has a concrete content. Heidegger works with an antithesis between being alone and loneliness :
City people are often surprised by the farmers' long, mo- notonous state of being alone among the mountains. Yet it is not being alone, but rather loneliness. In big cities man can easily be alone as it is hardly possible to be elsewhere. But he can never be lonely there. For loneli- ness has that primal power not of isolating us, but of casting all existence free into the wide nearness of the essence of all things. 52
However things may stand with this distinction, in terms of content, language, to which Heidegger is turning for testimony, does not know the present dis- tinction in the present form.
The Electra monologue of Hofmannsthal, who certainly understood such nu- ances, begins : "Alone, all alone. " The human condition of the heroine is, if anything at all, that ultimate being- thrown-back-on-oneself in which Heidegger trusts, somewhat optimistically. He relies on the way that
52. Quoted in Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 2 1 7 .
57
state leads ''into the wide nearness of the essence of all things"; though in fact such situations are no less likely to force people into obsessive narrowness and impoverishment. Looked at the other way around-in opposition to Heidegger-Ianguage will rather suggest that people are lonely in big cities or on public holi? days, but that they cannot be alone on such occasions. In any case present usage is indecisive on this matter. Heidegger's philosophy, which takes so much advan- tage of its ability to listen, renders itself deaf to words. The emphatic nature of this philosophy arouses the belief that it fits itself into the words, while it is only a cover for arbitrariness. Heidegger's primal sounds ape-as such sounds usually do. Of course, even a more sensitive linguistic organ than his would hardly accomplish anything better in this matter in which he fails. Every such effort has its linguistically logical limit in the accidental element of even the most pre- cise word. Words' own meanings weigh heavily in them. But these words do not use themselves up in their meanings : they themselves are cau ght up in their context. This fact is underestimated in the high praise given to science by every pure analysis of meaning, starting with HusserI's; especially by that of Heidegger, which considers itself far above science. Only that person satisfies the demand of language who masters the relation of language to individual words in their configurations. Just as the fixing of the pure element of meaning threatens to pass over into the arbitrary, so the belief in the primacy of the configurative threatens to pass into the badly functional, the merely communicative-into scorn for the objective aspect of
58
words. In language that is worth something both of these elements are transmitted.
Allegedly hale life is opposed to damaged life, on whose societalized consciousness, on whose "malaise," the jargon speculates. Through the ingrained language form of the jargon, that hale life is equated with agrarian conditions, or at least with simple commodity economy, far from all social considerations. This life is in effect equated to something undivided, protec- tingly closed, which runs its course in a firm rhythm and unbroken continuity. The field of association here is a left-over of romanticism and is transplanted with- out second thought into the contemporary situation, to which it stands in harsher contradiction than ever before. In that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalien- able possibility. Man is the ideology of dehumaniza- tion. Conclusions are drawn from certain categories which remind us of somewhat primal social relation- ships, where the institutions of exchange do not yet have complete power over the relationships of men. From those categories it is concluded that their core, man, is immediately present among contemporary men, that he is there to realize his eidos. Past forms of societalization, prior to the division of labor, are sur- reptitiously adopted as if they were eternal. Their re- flection falls upon later conditions which have already been victimized by progressive rationalization, and in contrast to those the earlier states seem the more human. That which authentics of lesser rank call with
59
gusto the image of man, they locate in a zone in which it is no longer permitted to ask from where those con- ditions emerged; neither can one ask what was done to the subjugated at any particular time, with the tran- sition from nomadic life to settledness-nor what was done to those who can no longer move around; nor whether the undivided condition itself, both uncon- scious and compulsive, did not breed and earn its own downfall. The talk about man makes itself popular in the old-fashioned, half-timbered, gable-roof way. But it also wins friends in a more contemporary way, in
the gesture of a radicalism which wants to dismantle whatever merely conceals, and which concerns itself with the naked essence that hides under all cultural disguises. However, as it is a question of Man and not, for the sake of men, of the conditions which are made by men and which harden into opposition against them, we are released from criticizing them, as though, temporally bound like its object, such a critique were all too shallow. This pOSition fundamentally suppresses the motif of the Kantian "Idea toward a General His- tory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" : the idea that states of affairs worthy of Man can only be produced through antagonism, from out of their own force, not from a pure idea. The talk about man is so worthless because it prepares for untruth that which is of high- est truth. There is great stress on the existential elements of man, in which slack and self-surfeited thought thinks it holds, in its hands, that concretion which it has lost through its transformation into method. Such maneuvers simply deflect us from seeing how little it is here a question of man, who has
60
been condemned to the status of an appendage. The expression of the word "man" has itself modified its form historically. In the expressionistic literature since the period of the First World War, the word "man" has had a historical value-thanks to the protest against that flagrant inhumanity which found human material for materiel slaughter. The honorable old reification of bourgeois society, which comes into its own in the great periods, and is called individual hu- man effort, in that way becomes graspable; and, in
that way, antagonistically, also becomes its own counter-concept. The sentence "Man is good" was false, but at least it needed no metaphysical-anthropological sauce. It is already different with the expressionistic "0 Man," a manifesto directed against that which, done only by men, is a usurpatory positing. The ex- pressionistic "0 Man" was already inclined to leave men's violence out of consideration. The undisputed, childlike sense of universal humanity taints itself with that which it opposes-as could be shown in the writ- ings of Franz Werfel. The jargon's image of man, meanwhile, is still the selling-out of that uninhibited "0 Man," and the negative truth concerning it.
To characterize the change in function of the word "man," we need only consider two titles which resem- ble one another. At the time of the German November Revolution, there appeared a book by the pacifist Lud- wig Rubiner, Man in the Middle; in the fifties, a book called Man at the Center of the Business Operation. Thanks to its abstractness, the concept lets itself be squirted like grease into the same machinery it once wanted to assail. Its pathos, meanwhile evaporated,
61
still echoes in the ideology which holds that business, which must be operated by men, exists for their sake. This means that the organization has to take care of its workers so that their productivity will climb. Like Elsie, the happy American advertisement-cow, that phrase about Man, whom the phrase enjoins us to care for, would not be so convincing if the phrase did not rely on a suspicion; the suspicion that, after al, the overpowering conditions of society really were made by men and can be undone by them. The overpowering
strength of those relationships, like that of myth, has in it an element of fetishism and mere appearance. Just as the in-itself of the institution is mere appear- ance, a reflection of petrified human states of affairs, so in reality this appearance dominates men to the same degree. This is what debases the appeal to an in- alienable essence of Man which has long been alie- nated. It was not Man who created the institutions but particular men in a particular constellation with nature and with themselves. This constellation forced the in. , stitutions on them in the same way that men erected those institutions, without consciousness. Al that was formulated. incisively during the Vormarz, particularly by Marx, against Feuerbach's anthropology and the young Hegelians. Both appearance and necessity are elements of the world of wares. Cognition fails as soon
as it isolates one of these elements. He who accepts the world of wares as the in-itself, which it pretends to be, is deceived by the mechanisms which Marx analyzed in the chapter on fetishes. He who neglects this in-itself, the value of exchange, as mere illusion, gives in to the ideology of universal humanity. He
? clings to forms of an immediate togetherness, which are historically irretrievable if in fact they ever existed in any other form. Once capitalism has grown uneasy about theoretical self-assertion, its advocates prefer to use the categories of spontaneous life in order to present what is man-made. They present those cate- gories as if they were valid now and here. The jargon busily splashes beyond all this, perhaps even proud of its historical obliviousness-as if this obliviousness were already the humanly immediate.
The angel's voices with which the jargon registers the word "Man," are derived by the jargon from the doctrine of man as the image of God. The word "Man" sounds all the more irrefutable and persuasive the more it seals itself off against its theological origin. Some element in it points back to a linguistic phe- nomenon drawn from the Jugendstil, an element which the jargon has prepared for mass consumption. The link in the history of philosophy between the ]ugendstil and the jargon is probably the youth move- ment. For one of his plays Hauptmann chose the title Solitary Men. In a novel by Countess Reventlow, a professor is ridiculed who belonged to the costume- party boheme of Munich around IglO. He says, about every person whom he considers fit to enter the Schwa- bing circle, "What a wonderful man. " This is related to the mannerism of actors, from the early Reinhardt era, who would place their hands on their hearts, would open their eyes as wide as they could, and would in general dramatize themselves. Once the original theo- logical image has fallen, transcendence, which in the
great religions is separated from the likeness by power-
? ful taboos-thou shalt have no graven images of me- is shifted to the likeness. This image is then said to be full of wonder, since wonders no longer exist. Here al the concretion of authenticity has its mystery: the concreteness of whatever is as its own image. While there is nothing more to which wonderful man has to bow down, man who is said to be wonderful because he is nothing but man, the jargon acts as man should once have acted before the Godhead. The jargon aims at a humility which is unquestioned and without rela- tion. Such humility is presented as human virtue-in- itself. From the outset such humility has gone well with the :insolence of the self-positing subject. The hiddenness of that which humility aims at, is in itself an invitation to be celebrated. This element has long been present in the concept of reverence, even in Goethe's understanding of it. Jaspers expressly recom- mends reverence, independent of its object. He con- demns its absence and easily finds his way to the hero cult without being frightened by Carlyle's example.
In the vision of historical figures of human greatness, the strength of reverence holds fast the measure of man's essence, and of his potential. Reverence does not alow the destruction of what it has seen. It remains true to what was effective as tradition in its own self- becoming. Reverence grasps the origin of its substance in those individual men in whose shadow reverence be- came conscious. In the form of unyielding piety it stil maintains its preserving function. What no longer has reality in the world remains present in reverence as an absolute claim, by means of memory. 53
53. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, p. 170.
? ? In the jargon, however, the word "Man" no longer re- lies on human dignity as idealism, in spite of the cult of historical figures and of greatness in itself. Instead, man is to have his powerlessness and nothingness as his substance; this becomes a theme in the philoso- phers in question. This powerlessness and nothingness of man is coming close to its realization in present society. Such a historical state of affairs is then trans- posed into the pure essence of Man. It becomes af- firmed and eternalized at the same time. In this way the jargon plunders the concept of Man, who is to be sublime because of his nothingness. It robs him of pre- cisely those traits which have, as their content, the
criticism of states of affairs which preclude the divine rights of the soul. This criticism has been immanent in all enlightenment, as well as in early German idealism. The jargon goes hand in hand with a concept of Man from which all memory of natural law has been eradi- cated. Yet as an invariable, in the jargon man himself becomes something like a supernatural nature-cate- gory. Previously, the unbearable transience of a false and unsatisfied life was counteracted by theology, which gave hope of an eternal life. This hope disap- pears in the praise of the transient as absolute, a praise which of course Hegel had already deigned to bestow. As it runs in the jargon : suffering, evil, and death are to be accepted, not to be changed. The public is being trained in this tour de force of maintaining a balance. They are learning to understand their nothingness as Being, to revere actual, avoidable, or at least corrigible need as the most humane element in the image of Man. They are learning to respect authority in itself because
? 65
of their innate human insufficiency. Although such authority now rarely calls itself god-sent, it still holds on to the regal insignia which once it borrowed from God the father. Insofar as this authority no longer has any legitimation, apart from merely being there, blind and obscure, it becomes radically evil. This is the rea- son why the universally human language-gesture is in good standing with the totalitarian state. In the view of absolute power subjects are indifferent to this lan- guage-gesture-in the double sense of indifferent. The Third Reich, which could present such considerable majorities that it was hardly necessary to forge the election returns, was once credited by Hjalmar Schacht as the true democracy. He is confirmed by the jargon's view of Man, which was at times more inno- cent. According to the latter view, al men are equal in their powerlessness, in which they possess being. Hu- manity becomes the most general and empty form of privilege. It is strictly suited to a form of consciousness which no longer suffers any privileges yet which still finds itself under the spell of privilege. Such universal humanity, however, is ideology. It caricatures the equal rights of everything which bears a human face, since it hides from men the unalleviated discrimina- tions of societal power: the differences between hun- ger and overabundance, between spirit and docile idiocy. Chastely moved, man lets himself be addressed through Man: it doesn't cost anyone anything. But whoever refuses this appeal gives himself over as non-human to the administrators of the jargon, and can be sacrificed by them, if such a sacrifice is needed. For he, the non-human, and not the institution of
66
power, is the one whose pride tramples human dignity into the dirt. In the mask of the jargon any self-inter- ested action can give itself the air of public interest, of service to Man. Thus, nothing is done in any serious fashion to alleviate men's suffering and need. Self- righteous humanity, in the midst of a general inhu- manity, only intensifies the inhuman state of affairs. This is a state of affairs which necessarily remains hid- den to those who suffer here and now. The jargon only doubles the hiding cover. The compensation and con- solation offered by the jargon and its world are stand- ardized by their twisted desire for that which they are refused.
The empty phrase, Man, distorts man's relation to his society as well as the content of what is thought in the concept of Man. The phrase does not bother about the real division of the subject into separated functions that cannot be undone by the voice of mere spirit. The so-called Platonic psychology already expresses the internalization of the societal division of labor. Each function within the person, once firmly defined, ne- gates the person's total principle. The person becomes simply the sum of his functions. In the face of this situation, however, the person becomes all the worse, since his own laboriously gained unity has remained fragile. Each individual function, created under the law of self-preservation, becomes so firmly congealed that none can exist by itself, that no life can be con- structed out of its functional pieces. The individual functions turn against the self which they are sup- posed to serve. Life, insofar as it still exists, indicts such separation as false-for example in the verbal
? separation among thinking, feeling, and desiring. No thought is a thought-or more than a tautology-that does not also desire something. Without an element of cognition, no feeling and no will can be more than a fleeting motion. It is easy for the jargon to point its finger at the silliness of this division; for in the mean- time it has swallowed the current term "alienation. " The jargon, for example, was only too willing to
grant depth to the young Marx, in order to be able to escape the critic of political economy. In this process the real force of the splitting of the individual subject is lost from view. The thought that testifies to this split suddenly finds itself vituperated. The unsatisfi- able triumph, won again over the mechanistic psy- chology of the nineteenth century, misuses the insight of Gestalt theory, which itself is no longer quite dewy fresh-misuses that insight as pretext for not having
to touch on that which is felt to be the wound. The progress of science, which otherwise is not much ad- mired, and which did not take place in precisely this situation, is viewed as the reason not to consider the wound. The authentics shun Freud by exulting in the fact that they are more modern than Freud, but with- out any reason. Meanwhile, in a timely fashion, the fulsome talk about the whole man rooted in being is
put into its place by psychoanalysis. No elevation of the concept of Man has any power in the face of his actual degradation into a bundle of functions. The only help lies in changing the conditions which brought the state of affairs to this point-conditions which un- interruptedly reproduce themselves on a larger scale. By means of the magiC formula of existence, one dis-
68
regards society, and the psychology of real individuals which is dependent on that society. Thus one insists on the changing of Man, who in Hegel's sense exists merely in the abstract. This results only in a tighten- ing of the reins-not in elevation but in the continuing of the old suppressing ideology. While the authentics
attack psychoanalysis, they are really aiming at in- stinct. The degradation of instinct is taken over unre- fiectedly into their ethics. Thus Jaspers says:
The exclusiveness in the love of the sexes uncondi- tionally binds two people for the entire future. Without being able to be grounded, this love rests in the de- cision which tied the self to this loyalty, at the moment in which it came to itself authentically through the other. To renounce what is negative-polygamous erotic activity-is the consequence of a positive element. This positive element is only true, in the form of a present love, when it includes the whole life. The nega- tive element, the will not to throw oneself away, is the result of an absolute willingness for this loyalty; wilingness exercised by means of the possibility of self-realization. There is no self-realization without strictness in eroticism. Eroticism becomes humanly meaningful only in the exclusiveness of unconditioned c ommitmen t . 54
"Commitment" is the current word for the unrea- sonable demand of discipline. The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers. At first the term was designed to naturalize a loan word. Chewing their cuds, patriotic pedagogues would say that commitment was actually the name of religion. But it was not only the exaggera-
54. Ibid. , p. I71.
69
tion of German ways that allowed for the naturaliza- tion of "commitments. " The loan-word "religion" demanded subordination to something definite : Chris- tian revelation or the divine law of the Jews. This ele- ment is no longer felt in the newly coined "commit- ment. " The expression gives the appearance of reviving that sensual concretion which had become effaced in the loan word. But, in contrast to that sensuous color, the element to which the concretion adhered has be- come obscured. People now dress up the factual state of commitment. The concept preserves the authority whose source of origin is cut off right from the begin- ning. The thing that is understood under the term "commitment" is no better than the word. Commit- ments are offered not for their own truth but as a medi- cine against nihilism, in the same manner as the values which were current a generation before, and which surreptitiously circulate again today. Commitments
are classed under mental hygiene and, for that reason, undermine the transcendence which they prescribe. The campaign that the jargon is launching records one Pyrrhic victory after another. The genuineness of need and belief, which is questionable anyway, has to turn itself into the criterion for what is desired and believed; and in this way it becomes no longer genuine.
This is the reason why no one can say the word "gen- uineness" without becoming ideological. Nietzsche still used the term in an anti-ideological way. In the jargon, however, it stands out in the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness. Like a ragpicker, the jargon usurps the final protesting movements of a subject which in its downfall is thrown back on itself and
? hucksters those movements off. The edge is removed from the living subject's protest against being con- demned to play roles. The American theory of role- playing is so popular because it flattens out this pro- test into the structure of society. And the subject is told that the force from which he flees back into his cave has no power over him. Not lastly, the jargon is sacred as the language of an invisible kingdom, which exists only in the obsessive folly of the silent majority. So as not to scatter oneself-today, through the con- sumer market-it is removed from its social context
and interpreted as something which is of essence.
32. Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz (Munich, 1960) pp. 98 ff. [English translation by W. Earle, Reason and Ex- istenz: Five Lectures (London, 1956). The quotation is trans- lated from the original German. ]
? ing to be a match for it. But they agree with the Sophists in their favorite thesis, that man alone is im- portant-that sententia of Homo mensura warmed over again with unexpected fulsomeness. As once be- fore, the social model of their chosen scapegoat is ur- ban freedom, which, in the past, helped thought to emancipate itself. The only diference is the fact that in the strict rational order of bourgeois society the mo- bility of person and spirit are less threatening to
groups, which in effect no longer exist in highly indus- trialized countries. But it constantly challenges the con- tinuing irrationality of the total system, which would like to prune away what is still vegetating on from the social modes of behavior developed under liberalism.
Therefore the jargon must defend, so as not to be lost, transitory social forms which are incompatible with the contemporary state of the forces of produc- tion. If it wanted to mount the barricades itself, then it would have to engage itself not only for a position much scorned among its believers, but possibly also for that rationality which the exchange society both promises and denies, and through which that society
could be transcended. The bourgeoiS form of rational- ity has always needed irrational supplements, in order to maintain itself as what it is, continuing injustice through justice. Such irrationality in the midst of the ration al is the working atmosphere of authenticity . The latter can support itself on the fact that over a long period of time literal as well as figurative mobility, a main element in bourgeois equality, always turned into injustice for those who could not entirely keep up. They experienced the progress of society as a verdict:
47
a pawned-off remembrance of their suffering, under that system, brings authenticity, along with its jargon, to a ferment. Its bubbles cause the true object of the suffering, the particular constitution of society, to disappear. For the selected victims of the feeling against mobility have themselves been condemned, ever since the sphere of circulation was fused into the sphere of production. The jargon strives to turn the bitterness of the indigenous, of the mute, into some- thing like a metaphysical-moral verdict of annhilation against the man who can speak out; and the jargon has had so much success only for this reason, because this verdict in question has already in effect been spoken,
and has been carried out in Germany against innumer- able people-because the gesture of rooted genuine- ness is at one with that of the historical conquerors. That is the substantial element in authenticity, the holy fount of its strength. Taciturnity and silence are the best counterpoint to existential and existentialist babble. The order which this babble aims at is itself one that reaches for speechlessness of sign and com- mand. In happy agreement with its consumers, the jargon fills the breach created by the societally neces- sary disintegration of language. Petit bourgeois have few acquaintances; they feel uncomfortable as soon as they come together with people they don't already know, and their duplicity turns this attitude into a vir- tue. Not lastly, the jargon bears some resemblance to the rough manners of a doorman, in ? an Alpine hotel, who hectors the guests as if they were intruders, and in this way wins their trust. In face of the social stasis
that once again is darkening the horizon, a shimmer of
? ? humanity is shed back onto the officiously persuasive word of the day before yesterday. If philosophy were to take back into society the experiences which were pre- cipitated in the jargon in the false forms of its dis- tilled essences-society being the place where they originated-and if the word "origin" had any meaning at all, then philosophy would be able to go beyond the
opposition of mobility and fixity, of groundlessness and authenticity. It would then recognize these oppositions as elements of the same guilty whole, in which heroes and businessmen are of value to each other. The liberalism that hatched the culture industry produced forms of reflection that are encountered indignantly by the jargon of authenticity, although it is itself one of them. This liberalism was the ancestor of the fascism which destroyed both it and its later potential cus- tomers. But of course the blood guilt of that which echoes today, in the jargon, is incomparably greater
than the deceptive maneuvers of mobility, whose prin- ciples are incompatible with those of immediate power. Heidegger is not the matador of such political strat-
egies, and in fact he protects himself against their blunt directness. It is true that he does use the word "authenticity" centrally in Sein und Zeit,33 and most of the familiar shorthand is spread around over his best- known text-spread with gestures, of incontestable authority, which the mass of the authentics then me- chanically imitate; there is unquestioned agreement
about the undiscussed core of all this. In the same way Heidegger struggles to show reserve toward all the
33. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 304 if. , also pp. 68 69. 49
? current phrases which he, with ease, can put aside as vulgar misunderstanding. Nevertheless, as soon as he loosens his voluntary self-censorship, he falls into the jargon, with a provinciality which cannot be excused on the grounds that it becomes thematic of itself. He has published a little volume of gnomic thoughts en- titled Out of the Experience of Thinking. Its form keeps to the middle ground between poetry and pre-Socratic fragment. Yet the sibylline character of the pre-Socra- tic fragments really results, at least in many of them, from the accident of a discontinuous tradition, and not from secretiveness. Heidegger has praise for the "splendor of the simple. " 34 He brings back the thread- bare ideology of pure materials, from the realm of handicrafts to that of the mind-as if words were pure, and, as it were, roughened material. But textiles of that sort are mediated, today, through their calcu- lated opposition to mass production; and in just that way Heidegger wants, synthetically, to create a primal sense for pure words.
Another specifically social element plays into the category of the simple : the elevation of the cheap, in accordance with the wishes of the proudly declining elite-an elevation related to youth music, which gladly goes along with the jargon and lets itself be ac- companied by it. Being behind the times historically is no less eagerly converted into the feeling of the fate- fully tragic, than into that of something higher; that too goes along with the silent identification of the
1954), p. 13? 50
34. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens ( Pfullingen,
archaic with the genuine. But the triviality of the sim- ple is not, as Heidegger would like it to be, attributable to the value-blindness of thought that has lost being. Such triviality comes from thinking that is supposedly in tune with being and reveals itself as something supremely noble. Such triviality is the sign of that c1as- sifying thought, even in the simplest word, from which Heidegger pretends that he has escaped: namely, ab- straction. Already in the first version of Geist der Utopie, Ernst Bloch says that symbol intentions, which arefor him the traces of messianic light in the darkened world, are in fact not expressed by the most simple basic relationships and basic words, like "the old man, the mother, and death. " But Heidegger, in his fastidious Humanism letter, lets us hear these words :
Man is not the lord of existence. Man is the shepherd of being. In this '1ess" man loses nothing, but rather wins, by reaching the truth of Being. He wins the essen- tial poverty of the shepherd, whose worth consists in being called, by Being itself, into the trueness of its truth. This call comes as the throwing from which the thrownness of existence stems. In his being-historical, [seinsgeschichtlich] essence, man is the existent whose being as ek-sistence consists in his living in the neigh- borhood of Being. Man is the neighbor of Being. 85
Philosophical banality is generated when that magical participation in the absolute is ascribed to the general concept-a participation which puts the lie to that con- cept's conceivability.
3 5 . Heidegger, tJber den Humanismus ( Frankfurt, I 949 ) P? 29?
? 5I
Philosophizing, according to Heidegger, is a danger to thought. 36 But the authentic thinker, harsh toward anything so modernistic as philosophy, writes : "When in early summer isolated narcissi bloom hidden in the meadow, and the mountain rose glistens under the maple tree . . . " 37 or : "When from the slopes of the high valley, where the herds are slowly passing, the cow bells ring and ring . . . " 38 Or verses :
The woods make camp the streams rush on the cliffs remain
the rain runs.
The meadows wait
the fountains spring
the winds dwell blessing takes thought. 39
The renewing of thinking through outmoded language can be judged by these instances. The archaic is the expressive ideal of this language : "The oldest element of the old comes up behind us in our thinking and yet meets us head on. " 40 But Jungnickel knows how to put it: the revenge of the myth on the person who is curious about it, on the denouncer of thinking. "The poetic character of thinking is still concealed,"41 Heidegger adds, in order to forestall criticism at all costs: "where it shows itself, it for a long time re-
36. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, p. I S .
37. Ibid. , p. 12.
38. Ibid. , p. 22.
39. Ibid. , p. 27?
40. Ibid. , p. 19.
41. Ibid. , p. 23.
? sembles the utopia of a half-poetic intellect. " 42 Still the half-poetic intellect which babbles forth those pieces of wisdom bears less resemblance to this, or to any other unsuccessful utopia, than to the work of some trusty folk art, which after all is not used to speaking well about those things. During the Hitler period, and we can feel with him, Heidegger turned down an academic appointment in Berlin. He justifies that in an article, "Why Do We Remain in the Province? " With wily strategy he disarms the charge that he is provincial; he uses the term "provincialism" in a positive sense. His strategy takes this form: "When on a deep winter night a wild snowstorm rages around the cabin, and covers and conceals everything, then the time is ripe for philosophy. Its question must then become simple and essential. " 43 Whether ques- tions are essential can in any case only be judged by the answers given; there is no way of anticipating, and certainly not by the criterion of a simplicity based on meteorological events. That simplicity says as little about truth as about its opposite; Kant, Hegel were as complicated and as simple as their content forced them to be. But Heidegger insinuates a preestablished harmony between essential content and homey mur- muring. Therefore, the echoes of Jungnickel here are not just loveable lapses. They are there to deafen any suspicion that the philosopher might be an intellectual : "And philosophical work does not take place as the
42. Ibid.
43. Quoted in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern, 1962), p. 216.
? 53
spare-time activity of a crank. It belongs right in the midst of the labor of farmers. " 44 One would like at least to know the farmers' opinion ,about that. Heideg- ger does not need their opinion. For "during the time of the evening work-pause, he sits, on the stove bench along with the farmers . . . or at the table in the corner, under the crucifix, and then we usually don't talk at all. We smoke our pipes in silence. " 45 "One's own work's inner belonging, to the Black Forest and its people, comes from a century-long Germanic- Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable. " 46 Mter all, Heidegger says it himself. Johann Peter Hebel, who comes from the same region, and to whom Heideg- ger would like to give the place of honor on the mantel- piece, hardly ever appealed to this rootedness; instead he passed on his greetings to the peddlers Scheitele and Nausel, in one of the most beautiful pieces of prose in defense of the Jews that was ever written in German. 47 Rootedness, however, puffs itself up:
Recently I got a second invitation to the University of Berlin. On such an occasion I leave the city and go back to my cabin. I hear what the mountains and woods and farmyards say. On the way I drop in on my oId friend, a seventy-five-year-old farmer. He has read in the news- paper about the Berlin invitation. What will he say? He slowly presses the sure glance of his clear eyes against mine, holds his mouth tightly closed, lays his faithful and cautious hand on my shoulder-and almost im-
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid. , p. 217?
46. Ibid.
47. Cf. Johann Peter Hebel, Werke (Berlin, I874) II, 254.
54
perceptibly shakes his head. That means: absolutely
No! 48
While the philosopher complains to other Blubo-friends about their advertising of the Blubo,'9 which would be detrimental to his monopoly, his reflected unreflective- ness degenerates into chummy chit-chat, for the sake of the rural setting with which he wants to stand on a confidential footing. The description of the old farmer reminds us of the most washed-out cliches in plough- and-furrow novels, from the region of a Frenssen; and it reminds us equally of the praise of being silent, which the philosopher authorizes not only for his farmers but also for himself. Here we find an ignorance of everything we have learned about rural people : for instance in French realism from Balzac's late work to Maupassant; from a literature not attuned to the musty instincts of German petit-bourgeois kitsch; from a literature which would be available in translation even to a pre-Socratic. The small farmer owes his con- tinuing existence entirely to gracious gifts from that exchange SOciety by which his very ground and foun- dation, even in appearance, have been removed; in the face of this exchange the farmers have nothing on the:ir horizon except something worse-the immediate exploitation of the family without which they would be bankrupt: this hollowed-out state, the perpetual crisis of the small farmer's business, has its echo in the hollowness of the jargon. The subsidies which are
48 . Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 2 I 8 .
49. [B lubo: catchword o f the Nazi movement, emphasizing the interdependence of one's life with one's native soil. A provincial version of pro patria mori. ]
55
paid to the small farmers are ,the very ground of that which the primal words of the jargon add to that which in fact they mean. Like less prominent porte- paroles of authenticity, Heidegger is filled with the disdainful pride of inwardness, which he touches on philosophically, in his thought about Hegel's critique of it. 50 Whoever is forced by the nature of his work to stay in one place, gladly makes a virtue out of ne- cessity. He tries to convince himself and others that his bound-ness is of a higher order. The financially threatened farmer's bad experiences with middlemen substantiate this opinion. The socially clumsy person who may be partially excluded from society hates those middlemen as jacks of all trades. This hatred joins with resistance against all agents, from the cattle dealer to the journalist. In 1956 the stable professions, which are themselves a stage of social development, are still the norms for Heidegger. He praises them in the name of a false eternity of agrarian conditions: "Man tries in vain to bring the globe to order through planning, when he is not in tune with the consoling voice of the country lane. " 51 North America knows no country lanes, not even villages. Philosophy, which is ashamed of its name, needs the sixth-hand symbol of the farmer as a proof of its primalness, as a way of acquiring some otherwise unavailable distinctiveness. However, Lessing's insight still applies, as it did in his time : the insight that the aesthetic critic does not need to do better himself than what he criticizes. That which
50. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 248 fr.
51. Heidegger, Der Feldweg (Frankfurt, I956) p. 4.
? ? ? ? was right for the Hamburg Dramaturgy is also reason- able for philosophical theory : the self-awareness of its limitations does not obligate it to authentic poetic creation. But it must have the power to prevent think- ing people from producing mere aesthetic staples; otherwise, these argue against a philosophy which pre- tends to scorn arguments as confusing. Its noble philistinism grows into the jargon of authenticity.
As in this jargon, and even in Heidegger, the evi- dence of language reveals the falsity of rootedness- at least as soon as rootedness descends to something that has a concrete content. Heidegger works with an antithesis between being alone and loneliness :
City people are often surprised by the farmers' long, mo- notonous state of being alone among the mountains. Yet it is not being alone, but rather loneliness. In big cities man can easily be alone as it is hardly possible to be elsewhere. But he can never be lonely there. For loneli- ness has that primal power not of isolating us, but of casting all existence free into the wide nearness of the essence of all things. 52
However things may stand with this distinction, in terms of content, language, to which Heidegger is turning for testimony, does not know the present dis- tinction in the present form.
The Electra monologue of Hofmannsthal, who certainly understood such nu- ances, begins : "Alone, all alone. " The human condition of the heroine is, if anything at all, that ultimate being- thrown-back-on-oneself in which Heidegger trusts, somewhat optimistically. He relies on the way that
52. Quoted in Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 2 1 7 .
57
state leads ''into the wide nearness of the essence of all things"; though in fact such situations are no less likely to force people into obsessive narrowness and impoverishment. Looked at the other way around-in opposition to Heidegger-Ianguage will rather suggest that people are lonely in big cities or on public holi? days, but that they cannot be alone on such occasions. In any case present usage is indecisive on this matter. Heidegger's philosophy, which takes so much advan- tage of its ability to listen, renders itself deaf to words. The emphatic nature of this philosophy arouses the belief that it fits itself into the words, while it is only a cover for arbitrariness. Heidegger's primal sounds ape-as such sounds usually do. Of course, even a more sensitive linguistic organ than his would hardly accomplish anything better in this matter in which he fails. Every such effort has its linguistically logical limit in the accidental element of even the most pre- cise word. Words' own meanings weigh heavily in them. But these words do not use themselves up in their meanings : they themselves are cau ght up in their context. This fact is underestimated in the high praise given to science by every pure analysis of meaning, starting with HusserI's; especially by that of Heidegger, which considers itself far above science. Only that person satisfies the demand of language who masters the relation of language to individual words in their configurations. Just as the fixing of the pure element of meaning threatens to pass over into the arbitrary, so the belief in the primacy of the configurative threatens to pass into the badly functional, the merely communicative-into scorn for the objective aspect of
58
words. In language that is worth something both of these elements are transmitted.
Allegedly hale life is opposed to damaged life, on whose societalized consciousness, on whose "malaise," the jargon speculates. Through the ingrained language form of the jargon, that hale life is equated with agrarian conditions, or at least with simple commodity economy, far from all social considerations. This life is in effect equated to something undivided, protec- tingly closed, which runs its course in a firm rhythm and unbroken continuity. The field of association here is a left-over of romanticism and is transplanted with- out second thought into the contemporary situation, to which it stands in harsher contradiction than ever before. In that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalien- able possibility. Man is the ideology of dehumaniza- tion. Conclusions are drawn from certain categories which remind us of somewhat primal social relation- ships, where the institutions of exchange do not yet have complete power over the relationships of men. From those categories it is concluded that their core, man, is immediately present among contemporary men, that he is there to realize his eidos. Past forms of societalization, prior to the division of labor, are sur- reptitiously adopted as if they were eternal. Their re- flection falls upon later conditions which have already been victimized by progressive rationalization, and in contrast to those the earlier states seem the more human. That which authentics of lesser rank call with
59
gusto the image of man, they locate in a zone in which it is no longer permitted to ask from where those con- ditions emerged; neither can one ask what was done to the subjugated at any particular time, with the tran- sition from nomadic life to settledness-nor what was done to those who can no longer move around; nor whether the undivided condition itself, both uncon- scious and compulsive, did not breed and earn its own downfall. The talk about man makes itself popular in the old-fashioned, half-timbered, gable-roof way. But it also wins friends in a more contemporary way, in
the gesture of a radicalism which wants to dismantle whatever merely conceals, and which concerns itself with the naked essence that hides under all cultural disguises. However, as it is a question of Man and not, for the sake of men, of the conditions which are made by men and which harden into opposition against them, we are released from criticizing them, as though, temporally bound like its object, such a critique were all too shallow. This pOSition fundamentally suppresses the motif of the Kantian "Idea toward a General His- tory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" : the idea that states of affairs worthy of Man can only be produced through antagonism, from out of their own force, not from a pure idea. The talk about man is so worthless because it prepares for untruth that which is of high- est truth. There is great stress on the existential elements of man, in which slack and self-surfeited thought thinks it holds, in its hands, that concretion which it has lost through its transformation into method. Such maneuvers simply deflect us from seeing how little it is here a question of man, who has
60
been condemned to the status of an appendage. The expression of the word "man" has itself modified its form historically. In the expressionistic literature since the period of the First World War, the word "man" has had a historical value-thanks to the protest against that flagrant inhumanity which found human material for materiel slaughter. The honorable old reification of bourgeois society, which comes into its own in the great periods, and is called individual hu- man effort, in that way becomes graspable; and, in
that way, antagonistically, also becomes its own counter-concept. The sentence "Man is good" was false, but at least it needed no metaphysical-anthropological sauce. It is already different with the expressionistic "0 Man," a manifesto directed against that which, done only by men, is a usurpatory positing. The ex- pressionistic "0 Man" was already inclined to leave men's violence out of consideration. The undisputed, childlike sense of universal humanity taints itself with that which it opposes-as could be shown in the writ- ings of Franz Werfel. The jargon's image of man, meanwhile, is still the selling-out of that uninhibited "0 Man," and the negative truth concerning it.
To characterize the change in function of the word "man," we need only consider two titles which resem- ble one another. At the time of the German November Revolution, there appeared a book by the pacifist Lud- wig Rubiner, Man in the Middle; in the fifties, a book called Man at the Center of the Business Operation. Thanks to its abstractness, the concept lets itself be squirted like grease into the same machinery it once wanted to assail. Its pathos, meanwhile evaporated,
61
still echoes in the ideology which holds that business, which must be operated by men, exists for their sake. This means that the organization has to take care of its workers so that their productivity will climb. Like Elsie, the happy American advertisement-cow, that phrase about Man, whom the phrase enjoins us to care for, would not be so convincing if the phrase did not rely on a suspicion; the suspicion that, after al, the overpowering conditions of society really were made by men and can be undone by them. The overpowering
strength of those relationships, like that of myth, has in it an element of fetishism and mere appearance. Just as the in-itself of the institution is mere appear- ance, a reflection of petrified human states of affairs, so in reality this appearance dominates men to the same degree. This is what debases the appeal to an in- alienable essence of Man which has long been alie- nated. It was not Man who created the institutions but particular men in a particular constellation with nature and with themselves. This constellation forced the in. , stitutions on them in the same way that men erected those institutions, without consciousness. Al that was formulated. incisively during the Vormarz, particularly by Marx, against Feuerbach's anthropology and the young Hegelians. Both appearance and necessity are elements of the world of wares. Cognition fails as soon
as it isolates one of these elements. He who accepts the world of wares as the in-itself, which it pretends to be, is deceived by the mechanisms which Marx analyzed in the chapter on fetishes. He who neglects this in-itself, the value of exchange, as mere illusion, gives in to the ideology of universal humanity. He
? clings to forms of an immediate togetherness, which are historically irretrievable if in fact they ever existed in any other form. Once capitalism has grown uneasy about theoretical self-assertion, its advocates prefer to use the categories of spontaneous life in order to present what is man-made. They present those cate- gories as if they were valid now and here. The jargon busily splashes beyond all this, perhaps even proud of its historical obliviousness-as if this obliviousness were already the humanly immediate.
The angel's voices with which the jargon registers the word "Man," are derived by the jargon from the doctrine of man as the image of God. The word "Man" sounds all the more irrefutable and persuasive the more it seals itself off against its theological origin. Some element in it points back to a linguistic phe- nomenon drawn from the Jugendstil, an element which the jargon has prepared for mass consumption. The link in the history of philosophy between the ]ugendstil and the jargon is probably the youth move- ment. For one of his plays Hauptmann chose the title Solitary Men. In a novel by Countess Reventlow, a professor is ridiculed who belonged to the costume- party boheme of Munich around IglO. He says, about every person whom he considers fit to enter the Schwa- bing circle, "What a wonderful man. " This is related to the mannerism of actors, from the early Reinhardt era, who would place their hands on their hearts, would open their eyes as wide as they could, and would in general dramatize themselves. Once the original theo- logical image has fallen, transcendence, which in the
great religions is separated from the likeness by power-
? ful taboos-thou shalt have no graven images of me- is shifted to the likeness. This image is then said to be full of wonder, since wonders no longer exist. Here al the concretion of authenticity has its mystery: the concreteness of whatever is as its own image. While there is nothing more to which wonderful man has to bow down, man who is said to be wonderful because he is nothing but man, the jargon acts as man should once have acted before the Godhead. The jargon aims at a humility which is unquestioned and without rela- tion. Such humility is presented as human virtue-in- itself. From the outset such humility has gone well with the :insolence of the self-positing subject. The hiddenness of that which humility aims at, is in itself an invitation to be celebrated. This element has long been present in the concept of reverence, even in Goethe's understanding of it. Jaspers expressly recom- mends reverence, independent of its object. He con- demns its absence and easily finds his way to the hero cult without being frightened by Carlyle's example.
In the vision of historical figures of human greatness, the strength of reverence holds fast the measure of man's essence, and of his potential. Reverence does not alow the destruction of what it has seen. It remains true to what was effective as tradition in its own self- becoming. Reverence grasps the origin of its substance in those individual men in whose shadow reverence be- came conscious. In the form of unyielding piety it stil maintains its preserving function. What no longer has reality in the world remains present in reverence as an absolute claim, by means of memory. 53
53. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, p. 170.
? ? In the jargon, however, the word "Man" no longer re- lies on human dignity as idealism, in spite of the cult of historical figures and of greatness in itself. Instead, man is to have his powerlessness and nothingness as his substance; this becomes a theme in the philoso- phers in question. This powerlessness and nothingness of man is coming close to its realization in present society. Such a historical state of affairs is then trans- posed into the pure essence of Man. It becomes af- firmed and eternalized at the same time. In this way the jargon plunders the concept of Man, who is to be sublime because of his nothingness. It robs him of pre- cisely those traits which have, as their content, the
criticism of states of affairs which preclude the divine rights of the soul. This criticism has been immanent in all enlightenment, as well as in early German idealism. The jargon goes hand in hand with a concept of Man from which all memory of natural law has been eradi- cated. Yet as an invariable, in the jargon man himself becomes something like a supernatural nature-cate- gory. Previously, the unbearable transience of a false and unsatisfied life was counteracted by theology, which gave hope of an eternal life. This hope disap- pears in the praise of the transient as absolute, a praise which of course Hegel had already deigned to bestow. As it runs in the jargon : suffering, evil, and death are to be accepted, not to be changed. The public is being trained in this tour de force of maintaining a balance. They are learning to understand their nothingness as Being, to revere actual, avoidable, or at least corrigible need as the most humane element in the image of Man. They are learning to respect authority in itself because
? 65
of their innate human insufficiency. Although such authority now rarely calls itself god-sent, it still holds on to the regal insignia which once it borrowed from God the father. Insofar as this authority no longer has any legitimation, apart from merely being there, blind and obscure, it becomes radically evil. This is the rea- son why the universally human language-gesture is in good standing with the totalitarian state. In the view of absolute power subjects are indifferent to this lan- guage-gesture-in the double sense of indifferent. The Third Reich, which could present such considerable majorities that it was hardly necessary to forge the election returns, was once credited by Hjalmar Schacht as the true democracy. He is confirmed by the jargon's view of Man, which was at times more inno- cent. According to the latter view, al men are equal in their powerlessness, in which they possess being. Hu- manity becomes the most general and empty form of privilege. It is strictly suited to a form of consciousness which no longer suffers any privileges yet which still finds itself under the spell of privilege. Such universal humanity, however, is ideology. It caricatures the equal rights of everything which bears a human face, since it hides from men the unalleviated discrimina- tions of societal power: the differences between hun- ger and overabundance, between spirit and docile idiocy. Chastely moved, man lets himself be addressed through Man: it doesn't cost anyone anything. But whoever refuses this appeal gives himself over as non-human to the administrators of the jargon, and can be sacrificed by them, if such a sacrifice is needed. For he, the non-human, and not the institution of
66
power, is the one whose pride tramples human dignity into the dirt. In the mask of the jargon any self-inter- ested action can give itself the air of public interest, of service to Man. Thus, nothing is done in any serious fashion to alleviate men's suffering and need. Self- righteous humanity, in the midst of a general inhu- manity, only intensifies the inhuman state of affairs. This is a state of affairs which necessarily remains hid- den to those who suffer here and now. The jargon only doubles the hiding cover. The compensation and con- solation offered by the jargon and its world are stand- ardized by their twisted desire for that which they are refused.
The empty phrase, Man, distorts man's relation to his society as well as the content of what is thought in the concept of Man. The phrase does not bother about the real division of the subject into separated functions that cannot be undone by the voice of mere spirit. The so-called Platonic psychology already expresses the internalization of the societal division of labor. Each function within the person, once firmly defined, ne- gates the person's total principle. The person becomes simply the sum of his functions. In the face of this situation, however, the person becomes all the worse, since his own laboriously gained unity has remained fragile. Each individual function, created under the law of self-preservation, becomes so firmly congealed that none can exist by itself, that no life can be con- structed out of its functional pieces. The individual functions turn against the self which they are sup- posed to serve. Life, insofar as it still exists, indicts such separation as false-for example in the verbal
? separation among thinking, feeling, and desiring. No thought is a thought-or more than a tautology-that does not also desire something. Without an element of cognition, no feeling and no will can be more than a fleeting motion. It is easy for the jargon to point its finger at the silliness of this division; for in the mean- time it has swallowed the current term "alienation. " The jargon, for example, was only too willing to
grant depth to the young Marx, in order to be able to escape the critic of political economy. In this process the real force of the splitting of the individual subject is lost from view. The thought that testifies to this split suddenly finds itself vituperated. The unsatisfi- able triumph, won again over the mechanistic psy- chology of the nineteenth century, misuses the insight of Gestalt theory, which itself is no longer quite dewy fresh-misuses that insight as pretext for not having
to touch on that which is felt to be the wound. The progress of science, which otherwise is not much ad- mired, and which did not take place in precisely this situation, is viewed as the reason not to consider the wound. The authentics shun Freud by exulting in the fact that they are more modern than Freud, but with- out any reason. Meanwhile, in a timely fashion, the fulsome talk about the whole man rooted in being is
put into its place by psychoanalysis. No elevation of the concept of Man has any power in the face of his actual degradation into a bundle of functions. The only help lies in changing the conditions which brought the state of affairs to this point-conditions which un- interruptedly reproduce themselves on a larger scale. By means of the magiC formula of existence, one dis-
68
regards society, and the psychology of real individuals which is dependent on that society. Thus one insists on the changing of Man, who in Hegel's sense exists merely in the abstract. This results only in a tighten- ing of the reins-not in elevation but in the continuing of the old suppressing ideology. While the authentics
attack psychoanalysis, they are really aiming at in- stinct. The degradation of instinct is taken over unre- fiectedly into their ethics. Thus Jaspers says:
The exclusiveness in the love of the sexes uncondi- tionally binds two people for the entire future. Without being able to be grounded, this love rests in the de- cision which tied the self to this loyalty, at the moment in which it came to itself authentically through the other. To renounce what is negative-polygamous erotic activity-is the consequence of a positive element. This positive element is only true, in the form of a present love, when it includes the whole life. The nega- tive element, the will not to throw oneself away, is the result of an absolute willingness for this loyalty; wilingness exercised by means of the possibility of self-realization. There is no self-realization without strictness in eroticism. Eroticism becomes humanly meaningful only in the exclusiveness of unconditioned c ommitmen t . 54
"Commitment" is the current word for the unrea- sonable demand of discipline. The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers. At first the term was designed to naturalize a loan word. Chewing their cuds, patriotic pedagogues would say that commitment was actually the name of religion. But it was not only the exaggera-
54. Ibid. , p. I71.
69
tion of German ways that allowed for the naturaliza- tion of "commitments. " The loan-word "religion" demanded subordination to something definite : Chris- tian revelation or the divine law of the Jews. This ele- ment is no longer felt in the newly coined "commit- ment. " The expression gives the appearance of reviving that sensual concretion which had become effaced in the loan word. But, in contrast to that sensuous color, the element to which the concretion adhered has be- come obscured. People now dress up the factual state of commitment. The concept preserves the authority whose source of origin is cut off right from the begin- ning. The thing that is understood under the term "commitment" is no better than the word. Commit- ments are offered not for their own truth but as a medi- cine against nihilism, in the same manner as the values which were current a generation before, and which surreptitiously circulate again today. Commitments
are classed under mental hygiene and, for that reason, undermine the transcendence which they prescribe. The campaign that the jargon is launching records one Pyrrhic victory after another. The genuineness of need and belief, which is questionable anyway, has to turn itself into the criterion for what is desired and believed; and in this way it becomes no longer genuine.
This is the reason why no one can say the word "gen- uineness" without becoming ideological. Nietzsche still used the term in an anti-ideological way. In the jargon, however, it stands out in the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness. Like a ragpicker, the jargon usurps the final protesting movements of a subject which in its downfall is thrown back on itself and
? hucksters those movements off. The edge is removed from the living subject's protest against being con- demned to play roles. The American theory of role- playing is so popular because it flattens out this pro- test into the structure of society. And the subject is told that the force from which he flees back into his cave has no power over him. Not lastly, the jargon is sacred as the language of an invisible kingdom, which exists only in the obsessive folly of the silent majority. So as not to scatter oneself-today, through the con- sumer market-it is removed from its social context
and interpreted as something which is of essence.
