No More Learning

I appear to be measuring metaphysics by the state of culture, making the answers to so-called metaphysical questions depend on a consciousness of the historico-cultural situation, whereas, according to current notions, which endow metaphysics with an absolute truth transcending all human conditionality, no
such constitutive relationship should be attributed to that kind of consciousness. I think l owe it to you, therefore, to say something about the intertwinement between what is commonly called culture and metaphysical questions. You will have noticed that at some crucial points in my argument - and the discussion I am carrying on at present is what people call a methodological discussion - I have not drawn the currently accepted, epistemological conclusion from the intra-cultural experiences of metaphysics: that while the consciousness of the absolute depends on the given state of cultural consciousness, the absolute itself is untouched by it. I think it may be useful here, while we are enquiring into the possibility of metaphysics, to provide a decisive clarification of this point, so that you do not have the impression that I am evading the crucial issue or trying to muddy the
waters with inconsistent thinking. My position is as follows: such question - how the things which have happened were possible - not only has an epistemological or nosological influence on the question
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? about the nature of metaphysics but really and directly affects the metaphysical answers. I believe, in other words, that the metaphys- ical thesis of the inherent meaning of the world, or of a cosmic plan underlying everything which happens, must be called into question at the very moment when a meaningful connection can no longer be established between what has happened and the metaphysical ideas. The moment one falls back on the wholly abstract notion of the world's inscrutable ways - and the attribution of inscrutable ways to
anything has always been calamitous - the assumption of metaphys- ical meaning itself (and not just our consciousness of it) is shattered. For I believe that we have notbng except our reason; that we have no option but to measure by our concrete experience; and that within the constellations which now define our experience all the traditional affirmative or positive theses of metaphysics - I think I can put it most simply like this - simply become blasphemies.
There are many people who, in face of the resulting despair, take refuge in theology. I think it should be said that the demand this places on them and on their concept of the absolute - the implication that these things2 could be located within the meaning of the absolute itself - effectively demonizes the absolute. This possibility was already implicit in dialectical theology as the doctrine of the 'wholly other', which turns God into an abyss. 3 It then irrupted, with overwhelming force, into the work of Kafka, where traditional theological categories are measured against experience in a way which turns them into their
opposite, a sinister mythology or demonology. 4 That is what I had in mind. And for that reason I ask you to understand that the connec- tions between culture and metaphysics which I now propose do not relate to the spectacles we look through or the glass window behind which we are trapped,s but that the events I have referred to relate directly to reality at its most essential level. They bring about a switch from quantity to quality, in that while such horrors have always been present, and theological justification has always found it desperately
difficult to come to terms with them, what earlier appeared mysteri- ous and unfathomable only in individual cases has now become so much a part of the objective and universal course of the world that, in face of the preponderance of this objective order, any attempt at harmonization with the so-called cosmic plan or providence neces- sarily degenerates into lunacy. The theology of crisis - the name given to the dialectical theology going back to Karl Barth's commentary on
the Epistle to the Romans6 - detected the fateful intertwinement of metaphysics and culture with that against which they abstractly and impotently protested. It is undoubtedly the enormous merit of all these thinkers - Emil Brunner,7 Ebner,8 Friedrich Gogarten9 and some
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? ? others apart from Barth (although there were others whose thought took a sinister turn10) - to have recognized that the immanence of culture, and the amalgamation of cultural categories and ideas with metaphysical ones, has the tendency to deprive these ideas themselves of their objective truth, to reduce them to the level of the subject, or to mind (Geist), as the ancestor of this movement, Kierkegaard, called it. Kierkegaard also said that such tendencies 'mediate' the ideas, although, if you will forgive me the pedantry, he entirely misunder- stood the Hegelian concept of mediation, which is a mediation within the extreme itself Kierkegaard understood this concept of mediation from outside, as a kind of bridge between the absolute and the finite,
contingent human mind. This intertwinement of self-deceiving culture and an inner decay of the metaphysical ideas was registered with extraordinary honesty and rigour by the dialectical theologians. But (as is demonstrated in the still unpublished book of Hermann
Schweppenhauser11), they were denied the fruits of their insight, or remained trapped in a subjectivist position - the position they most vehemently opposed - by believing that the answer lay in the notion of the absolutely different and indeterminate, which they opposed to the decay of metaphysics. This concept of the absolutely other, they
thought, was what was needed. What can be said about this concept of the absolutely other is that either it remains entirely indeterminate and abstract, so that it cannot perform what it is supposed to perform; or it takes on determinants which are themselves subject to the criti- cism of these theologians, since they are determinants of immanence; or, finally - and this is the path taken by most of these thinkers - this content is summoned up from outside, in a dogmatic and arbitrary leap, so that the dialectic which forms the core of this theological standpoint is at the same time revoked by it. The fact is that the principle of the absolute spirit, whidl is a curiously indifferent deter- minant existing between transcendence and the quintessence of the human mind as its own most comprehensive totality, tirelessly destroys what it purports to express. It ceaselessly absorbs into itself what it seeks to formulate as the absolute, which is supposedly impervious to such assimilation. For this reason - and on this point Hegel, if you like, needs to be taken beyond himself - its supreme concept, the absolute, in which everything is supposed to come to rest, becomes dialectical within itself, so that spirit, in becoming absolute for itself,
is at the same time, by virtue of everything that is, absorbed into the mind as a human entity, thus destroying the transcendence or abso- luteness of the idea which it asserts.
I believe that the first conclusion to be drawn from this, which was not drawn by the dialectical theologians who, despite the doctrine of
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the absolutely other, continued to use the traditional words of theology without interruption - is that noble, elevated words - and things such as Auschwitz cannot be thought except in words, if I may repeat the point - can no longer be used. This is not only for the reasons I have already set out - that lofty words have become simply incommensur- able with experience - but for the, if you like, far more devilish reason that it is characteristic of evil today to appropriate the most noble
and elevated words for its own use. It is practically the trademark of totalitarian movements that they have monopolized all the so-called sublime and lofty concepts, while the terms they use for what they persecute and destroy - base, insect-like, filthy, subhuman and all the rest - they treat as anathema. And the dissimulating tissue or spell I have spoken of is so tightly woven that anyone who refuses to con- form, and thus truly stands for otherness, is almost always disparaged as base, while ideals have, to an almost inconceivable degree, become a screen for vileness. And one of the most important goals ( apart from those I have already mentioned) that I set myself in my text on the
'jargon of inauthenticity', if I might allude to it again, was to analyse this mechanism, and to show concretely how the sublime, elevated traditional words have become a cover for baseness, exploitation, oppression and evil. One would need to be a very superficial and, if you like, a very nominalistic linguistic philosopher to deny that this experience of being unable to take certain words into one's mouth - which you can all have and which was probably first registered, though in a very different way, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos' letter12 - also says something about what the words stand for. I believe that one of the crucial points on which the theory I advocate, and of which I can present you at least some sizeable fragments in these lectures, differs from the currently prevalent one, is my view that the historical- philosophical fate of language is at the same time the historical-philo- sophical fate of the subject matter to which it refers. This is supported,
incidentally, by a viewpoint which was by no means foreign to German idealism, and especially to Wilhelm von Humboldt: that language constitutes thought no less than thought language. This insight has in the meantime been trodden so flat by nominalism that few people can remember it, although any reflection on thought can show you to what degree thought is as much mediated by language as vice versa. Karl Kraus's entire work can be understood as demonstrating that the fate
of language is the history of the decay of the contents embodied in language, so that the decline of language within bourgeois society is for him an index of what has become of the great ideas themselves.
I can perhaps clarify what I am saying here, and what is constitut- ive of the standpoint towards metaphysics that I am trying to outline
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? for you in these last lectures, by telling you a story about something which happened, I believe, last year. I was on holiday in company with a writer whom I value highly for his moral integrity; he had spent many years in a concentration camp - a Jew, one of the perse- cuted - and had had the strength to record and objectify the things he
had seen in the camps. And he is one of the few to whom we owe it that, thanks to his report, we can render the only service to the victims of which we are still capable: not to forget them. 13 I went walking with this man - we were in high mountains - and when the talk turned to Beckett he revealed an extremely violent affect against that writer, giving vent to the comment: 'If Beckett had been in a concentration camp he probably would not write these despairing things; he'd write things which gave people courage. ' I believe that the confusion manifested in this remark - the subjective motivation of which I
fully understand and respect after what that man had gone through - throws light on the specific character which ideology has taken on in dealing with metaphysical concepts today. There is an American saying that there are no atheists in the trenches; the old German
proverb that danger teaches us to pray points in the same direction - and, fundamentally, this heroic man had argued in a very similar way. This argument is illogical because the situations in which people are forced to think 'positively' simply in order to survive are themselves situations of compulsion, which force people back on pure self- preservation, and on thinking only what they need to in order to survive in such a situation, to a point where the truth content of what they think is hopelessly undermined and utterly destroyed. It is pos- sible that, had Beckett been in a concentration camp, he would not have written The Unnamable or Endgame; but I do not think it possible that this would have made what he wrote better or truer. The idea you will come across again :md again in this context, that
one has to give people something, has to give them courage - all these things are conditions which restrict the thinking of truth, but which may well bring down on someone who thinks the truth the odium of inhumanity, as I demonstrated to you earlier. But I also think that this mode of thinking, this demand placed on thought, does an injustice to the people in whose honour it is ostensibly made.
Although this demand is seemingly made out of a charitable concern for the victims, in fact it reduces them to the objects of a thinking which manipulates and calculates them, and assumes in advance that it is giving them what they need and want. By the evaluation mani- fested in such ostentatiously noble injunctions, the people they pretend to serve are in reality debased. They are treated by metaphysics in fundamentally the same way as by the culture industry. And I would
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? say that the criterion to be applied to any metaphysical question today is whether it possesses or does not possess this character of connivance with the culture industry. I recall, by contrast, that when, many years ago, immediately after the war, while we were still in
America, Horkheimer and I read together Kogon's book on the 'SS state',14 and although it was the first to give us a full idea of what had happened, the reaction of both of us was to experience the reading as something immensely liberating. And I am democratic enough to believe that what we experienced could be the same for all who concern themselves with these things, except that most people are so in thrall to current notions that they lack the courage for such an experience. If there is any way out of this hellish circle - and I would not wish to exaggerate that possibility, being well aware of the weak-
ness and susceptibility of such consciousness - it is probably the ability of mind to assimilate, to think the last extreme of horror and, in face of this spiritual experience, to gain mastery over it. That is little enough. For, obviously, such an imagination, such an ability to think extreme negativity, is not comparable to what one undergoes if
one is oneself caught up in such situations. Nevertheless, I would think that in the ability not to feel manipulated, but to feel that one has gone relentlessly to the furthest extreme, there lies the only respect which is fitting: a respect for the possibility of the mind, despite everything, to raise itself however slightly above that which is. And I think that it really gives more courage (if I can use that formulation) if one is not given courage, and does not feel bamboozled, but has the feeling that even the worst is something which can be thought and, because it falls within reflection, does not confront me as some- thing absolutely alien and different. I imagine that such a thought is probably more comforting than any solace, whereas solace itself is desolate, since it is always attended by its own untruth.
There is a passage in Kant, in the theory of the dynamically sublime in the Critique ofJudgement, where he speaks of the feeling of the sublime. It is a remarkable passage, one of those in which Kant no longer uses the rococo diction of the eighteenth century, but takes on, even in his language, the tone of the great German and English lyric poetry which emerged about 1780. In it he speaks of the feeling of the sublime as a peculiar vibration between the powerlessness felt
by the empirical person in face of the infinitude of natural forces, and, on the other hand, the joy of mind, as the essence of freedom, in being superior to and stronger than this natural power. IS Compared to the spacious grandeur which such a theory still has in Kant we are now, heaven knows, crowded together on a tiny island. And what I am trying to express today certainly does not presume to reclaim for
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? the self even a remnant of the autonomy and dignity which Kant was able to assert. But something of it still remains, though impalpable and extremely confined - and lies perhaps in the fact that the possibility
of any change depends on the ability to become aware of the ultimate
negativity, which is the negativity located in the fundamental strata and not just in ephemeral surface phenomena. Perhaps changes can only be made today through thoughts which do not directly aim at change. And it is characteristic that whenever one seriously expresses thoughts which do not address the question: 'Yes, but what am I supposed to do, here and now? ' - one is regularly met with a howl of rage16 (it can also be a silent howl) which respects no demarcation lines, political or otherwise, simply because it is unbearable not to give oneself up to some praxis or other. This is rationalized, and very well rationalized - it's difficult to say anything against it - by the
argument: 'Well, is the world supposed to stay as it is, with all its horrible possibilities? Should one not do something against it? ' I honour this need; I would be the last to dare to say anything against it. I only ask you to consider, Ladies and Gentlemen, whether the compulsion to do something here and now, and the tendency to fetter thought which it contains, does not bring thought to a standstill precisely where it ought to go further, in order to reach the place where something can really be changed. When I once said - in an ironic and melancholy sense - that this is the time for theory, I meant only that. The spell which binds us today consists not least in the fact that it ceaselessly urges people to take action which they believe will
break the spell; and that it prevents the reflection on themselves and the circumstances which might really break it. I believe that there is a precise correlation between these two phenomena: on the one hand, the rage which comes over people in face of - shall we say? - reflec- tion without consequences, and, on the other hand, the moment of liberation contained in such reflection. Those who appeal for action,
for the sake of human beings, cheat them of their right, even if they believe the opposite - depriving them of their own possibility, their humanity. I give the same answer to those who accuse me of a 'lack of love for human beings', because I give no guidelines for praxis and offer no consolation. I warn them that when there is talk of a lack of love there is almost always a desire that this love be somehow directed towards evil. And in face of that, Strindberg's words in Black Banners are undoubtedly true: 'How could I love good if I did not hate evil? ,j7
If one really understands the world of today as one of total entrap- ment, in the way I have tried to set out for you, I do not know how one could be uncritical, how one could adopt an attitude of unqualified love in face of what is. But, of course, by confessing this one makes
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? oneself the target of all the instincts and affects which are ready to be unleashed, with a great feeling of moral j ustification, against anything which tries to stretch out its head or its feelers even a little way. The desire for the existing culture to be swept away and an absolutely new start to be made has been very strong in Germany since the catastrophe. And I believe that the question of the position of meta- physics today has much to do with this desire - in that there has been a belief that, if only the debris of this culture could be finally cleared away, access could be gained to the original truth to which metaphysics points and which, according to this view, has been merely concealed by culture. This demand for a new beginning places the metaphysical thinker in a somewhat precarious position; he is rather like the women who picked over the rubble in the first years after the war. You are so young that most of you will probably not have heard of those women, who were once a familiar sight. The idea of a new start was extra- ordinarily compelling. Such tendencies had existed even before Hitler. There is, however, a curious ambivalence in this: on the one hand, critical thought - ideas of the kind I have set out for you in these lectures - is branded as destructive and the pack is let loose on it; but
at the same time the concept of destruction is monopolized by the same people who have used it negatively against others. I am thinking here of Herr Heidegger, who believed himself the true, that is, the positive, destroyer, who, by demolishing all the waste products of civilization, all the alienated, reified thinking, would open the way to the rightly prized authenticity of things. However, it was proved by subsequent events - irrevocably, I would say - that this attempt to demolish culture, this destruction carried out in the hope of gaining direct access to the absolute once everything that was mere &EUEL had disappeared, led directly to barbarism and fascism. Now there is much to be criticized in culture (and I do not think that I could be suspected of adopting an apologetic or affirmative stance towards it) - not in its so-called degenerate manifestations but in its actual con- cept. But while culture has undoubtedly failed, through its own fault,
and is being punished for that, the straightforward barbarism which is brought into being through its failure is always even worse. It is, I would say, a metaphysical fallacy into which I should like to prevent you from falling to believe that because culture has failed; because it has not kept its promise; because it has denied human beings freedom,
individuality, true universality; because it has not fulfilled its own concept, it should therefore be thrown on the scrap-heap and cheer- fully replaced by the cynical establishment of immediate power rela- tionships. One of the most dangerous errors now lurking in the collective unconscious - and the word error is far too weak and
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? intellectual for it - is to assume that because something is not what it promises to be, because it does not yet match its concept, it is there- fore worse than its opposite, the pure immediacy which destroys it.
On these grounds too, therefore, for reasons arising from the dialectical nature of culture, the abstract separation of culture from metaphysics which is taken for granted today cannot be endorsed.
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27July 1965
? I spoke in the last lecture about the interconnection of metaphysics and culture, and said that the spectacular failure of culture today had radically undermined the possibility of metaphysics. But I would now like to add - not only to prevent misunderstanding but because completeness of thought requires it - that, on the other hand, the failure of culture does not give thought a kind of free passage to
some natural state. It cannot do so because the failure of culture stems from its own naturalness, if I might put it like that; it is the result of its own persistent character as a natural entity. This culture has failed because it has clung to mere self-preservation and its various derivatives in a situation in which humanity has simply outgrown that principle. It is no longer confined by direct necessity to compulsive self-preservation, and is no longer compelled to extend the principle of mastery over nature, both inner and outer nature, into the indefinite
future. On the other hand, it is idle and futile for thought to attempt now to appropriate metaphysics as a collection of pure categories which are immediate to consciousness, since knowledge can never disown its own mediateness, or, in other words, its dependence on culture in every sense. Philosophy is itself a piece of culture, is en- meshed in culture; and if it behaves as if it were rendered immediate
by some allegedly primal questions which elevate it above culture, it blinds itself to its own conditions and truly succumbs to its cultural conditionality; in other words, it becomes straightforward ideology. There is no knowledge which can repudiate its mediations; it can only reflect them. Both the alleged primal experiences, and the threadbare
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? categories of culture as something man-made, are inalienably medi- ated and have their own negativity in this mediation. As long as culture lives on in a world arranged like ours, in which, whether in South Africa or Vietnam, things happen of which we know and only with difficulty repress the knowledge that they happen - in such a world culture and all the noble and sublime things in which we take delight
are like a lid over refuse. But nature, in so far as we believe we can share in its original qualities independently of culture, is no more than a projection of the cultural desire that everything should remain unchanged; that we should stay in the good, untrue old days, in the 'aeon',1 to speak with Schelling, in which, as Kafka put it, no progress has yet taken place. 2
That, I believe, is the framework within which one should think about the complex of ideas I have spoken about in these last lectures, in which I no longer took Aristotle's text as my starting point but directly presented some of my own reflections. I have already spoken repeatedly about this complex, which concerns the question of death. Death juts into culture, into the network of civilization, as something entirely alien, which cannot be mastered even with the best connec- tions, and in face of which one cannot cut a powerful figure. And
because, if I may put it like this, culture has not integrated death - or, when it has done so, it has made itself as ridiculous as it is shown to be in Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One,3 for example - philo- sophy has used death, expressly or tacitly, as the gateway through which to break into metaphysics. This has not just happened since Heidegger, by the way; it has always been said that death is the true
spur to metaphysical speculation, that the helplessness of people in face of death provides the impetus for thoughts which seek to penetrate beyond the boundaries of experience. The metaphysics of death seems to me in principle impotent - but not in the sense that one should not reflect on death. Curiously, Heidegger sought to use reflection on
death to discourage, precisely, reflection on death,4 and it is one of the quaintest features of his philosophy that, on the one hand, it gains its concept of authenticity, and thus its central speculative motor, . through reflecting on what he calls the structure of death, but, on the . other, he was furious with anyone who, as he contemptuously put it, .
'brooded' on death:5 as if what he did was even slightly different . from such brooding; indeed, as if any thought about death - which, ? of course, is something closed off and impenetrable to thought - . . could possibly be anything other than brooding. I bring this point to . your attention only to show you how inconsistent his thought is, and ", how much, even on such a central matter, it is organized by privilege and the need for control. What appears to me to be the impotence of
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? the metaphysics of death is not the fruitlessness of brooding, which Heidegger criticized, or the belief that in the face of death only a posture of tight-lipped readiness, or some such thing, was seemly. Incidentally, very similar formulations are to be found in Jaspers; in
their cultivation of the heroic possibilities of death these two seemingly so antithetical thinkers got along very well. Heidegger's metaphysics is impotent, either because it necessarily degenerates into a kind of propaganda for death, elevating it to something meaningful, and thus, in the end, preparing people to receive the death intended for them by their societies and states as joyfully as possible - just as Professor Krieck6 declared at this university during the Third Reich that only the sacrificial victims would make 'you', meaning the students, free; or because - leaving aside this aspect of the death metaphysics, which justifies death as the meaning of existence - any reflections on death are of such a necessarily general and formal kind that they amount to tautologies, like the definition of death as the possibility of the absolute non-being of existence, which I quoted in The Jargon of Authentic-
ity/ or another, less well-known formulation of Heidegger's, in which he solemnly announces that, when we die, a corpse is left behind. 8
I believe that this insufficiency of consciousness in face of death, its inability to extract the alleged meaning from it, not only has to do with the absolute inaccessibility of what is being talked about. I
believe that if we leave aside the truly unfathomable question whether one can talk meaningfully about death at all, something else is in play, which is really connected with consciousness, and perhaps with the present state of consciousness, with history. Perhaps I might remind you once again - and this is probably one of the strongest arguments against the attempt to wring a metaphysics from death - that although nature, in the form of death, juts into society and culture as something not yet integrated, nevertheless the experience of death, the side which it turns towards us, the living, is undoubtedly determined in part by
society. Dying, if not death, is certainly a social phenomenon, and if anyone took the trouble to investigate how people die, that person would find as many mediations of culture in this side of death which is turned towards us as in any other phenomena. But what I mean is something different, that human consciousness clearly is not capable of withstanding the experience of death. I am unsure whether we are dealing here with a kind of biological fact which extends back beyond our human and conscious history, or whether it is something histor- ical. At any rate, it is the case that, in contrast to the other animalia known to us, humans are clearly the only ones which in general have
a consciousness of the fact that they must die. But it seems to me - and I suspect that for reasons connected with the social arrangements
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? our mental organization is not equal to this knowledge - that although, with this knowledge, we have, if you like, elevated ourselves so far above nature that on this crucial point we can reflect on our natural origin, on the other hand, we are still so governed by nature on this same point, so attached to our interest of self-preservation, of self- perpetuation, that we can only have this experience in a curiously
abstract form. I'd like to be very cautious here: if we were to bring vividly to mind, at each moment, that we must die . . . In any case, this is not a discovery of mine; in Book 4 of Schopenhauer's The
World as Will and Representation there is a passage in which he notes with surprise how untroubled people are, in the general course of their lives, by the thought of their mortality. 9 He explains this by the veil of Maya, and thus by the principium individuationis. I would say, rather, that there is a kind of internal antagonism in this, that people are, as it were, unequal to their own minds - an antagonism, moreover, which, if you consider the actual arrangement of the world in relation to the potentials over which human beings now have control, is being incessantly reproduced and intensified. Our con-
sciousness has clearly remained too weak to withstand the experience of death; too weak because it is too much in thrall to the biological life of which consciousness is itself a kind of derivative, a diverted energy. Because consciousness imagines itself, in its forms, in the forms of pure thought, to be something eternal, it fortifies itself against
anything which might remind it of its own unsteady floor, its own frailty. One might add to this an idea which Ernst Bloch has expressed again and again with extraordinary emphasis in our time;lO apart from the motif of utopia, with which it is intimately connected, it is perhaps the decisive motif of Bloch's metaphysics: that in the world in which we exist there is not a single human life which remotely matches what each of us could be. It is, incidentally, an old thought, conceived in the Enlightenment by Helvetius, although in him it was still accompanied by the illusion that education was all that was needed to change this and to make us, if I might put it like this, equal to our own possibility, to attain an identity between our potentiality
and our actuality. ll We know now, of course, that the mechanisms preventing us from doing so extend deeply into the organization of the very self which Helvetius, and the Enlightenment thinkers in general, believed could be changed and perfected simply by becoming con- scious. I would say that only if we were truly ourselves, only if the
infinite possibility which is radically contained in every human life - and you may think me an old-fashioned Enlightenment thinker, but I am deeply convinced that there is no human being, not even the most wretched, who has not a potential which, by conventional bourgeois
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? standards, is comparable to genius - only if such a state were reached, in which we were really identical to that which we are not but which we deeply know we could become, though we may want to believe the contrary - only then might we have the possibility of being reconciled to death. Only then, probably, would we be equal to the experience of death, and as long as that possibility is attributed to any other condition, it is merely a lie. So deeply, I would say, is the metaphysics
of death, unlike the distorted version of it concocted by a static onto- logy, bound up with history and with the deepest strata of humanity's historical life.
The metaphysics of death, as practised today, is, it seems to me, much more a vain solace for the fact that human beings have lost what may at earlier times have made death endurable: the unity of experience. I would say, in general, that the problematic feature of all the resurrected metaphysical systems, which one would probably need to destroy to be free to reflect on these matters without ideology, is that they act as a kind of substitute; and that what is most deeply suspect in the popular metaphysical systems of today is that they always convey the message, even if peripherally and as if from far off, that things are not really so bad. That is to say, they try to reassure people about certain essentialities which, precisely, have become prob-
lematic. I am referring here, above all, to time. There can be little doubt that the awareness human beings have of time, and the very possibility of a continuous experience of time, has been deeply dis- rupted. And it seems to me to be a precise response to this situation, though actually a mere reflection of it, that the current metaphysical systems are now attempting to rescue this conception of time, which is no longer accessible to experience, and to present temporality as a constituent of existence itself. These systems therefore have a tend- ency to conjure up what is no longer experienced.
And that is the true reason - which goes much deeper than a superficial, so-called
sociological interpretation - why the current metaphysical thinkers sympathize in this curious way with archaic conditions no longer important to society, especially with agrarian conditions or those of a simple, small-town barter economy. The so-called epic death, which is presented in Heidegger's doctrine of death as a necessary moment of the 'wholeness of existence', and which is really at the root of all these death metaphysics, is no longer possible, because such a whole-
ness of life no longer exists. In my Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Schriften12 I attempted to express the idea that a concept such as 'the
life's work' has become problematic today because our existence has long ceased to follow a quasi-organic law immanent to it, but is determined by all kinds of powers which deny it such an immanent
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? unfolding; and that a belief in such a wholeness of life, to which death might correspond as something meaningful, already has the character of a chimera. But I should like to go further. It has doubtless
become obvious by now that the notion of wholeness is a kind of ersatz metaphysics, because it attempts to underpin the assertion of meaningful being or meaningful life with the positivist credentials of something immediately given, as in Gestalt theory. But I should like to go a step even beyond that. For it might be asked whether that kind of epic wholeness of life, the biblical idea that Abraham died old and sated with life, whether this wishful image of a life stretching out in time so that it can be narrated, and rounded off in its own death, was not always a mere transfiguration. I cannot escape the suspicion that wherever such a harmony between a self-contained life and
death appears to have existed in the past, the life of those to which the harmony is attributed was subjected to so inordinate a burden, was, as one is apt to say today, so alienated from them, that they did not even get so far as to perceive the heterogeneousness of death, and integrated themselves with death out of a kind of weakness. Con-
sequently, the idea of a complete life, meaningful within itself, must probably be abandoned with the conception of the epic death - for catastrophes always have the power to draw into themselves remote realities and events from the distant past. If mortally weary people take an affirmative view of death, it is most likely the case that death relieves them of a burden. The reason for the allegedly positive rela- tionship to death taught by these metaphysics is none other than the one which comes forcibly to mind today, and which I already men- tioned: that the life in question amounted to so little that there was little resistance to its ending.
It is remarkable, all the same, that we are so little able to incorporate death, since, in view of our continuing state of non-identity with ourselves, the opposite might be expected. And even the power of the instinct of self-preservation - if one wishes to speak of an instinct here; Freud did sanction it by introducing the concept of the ego- drives13 - seems to me insufficient to explain it, if it is taken on its own. As far as I am able to observe these matters, it is the case that it is precisely the people who are not old and frail who put up no resistance to death, who experience it as contingent and, in a curious way, accidental. If a very large number of people fall victim to accid- ents today, in comparison to earlier times, this seems to me to indicate something structural in the experience of death: that to the precise extent that we are relatively autonomous beings aware of ourselves, we experience death, or even a serious illness, as a misfortune which comes upon us from outside. At the same time, however, it is also the
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? case that, when people die very old, their great age often does not appear as something joyous. I am speaking here of the intra- mundane aspects of death, which reflection on death cannot ignore, but in which it has shown itself curiously uninterested up to now. I am not speaking here of the discomforts associated with old age in the epic ideal. But, as far as my experience extends, there is also something immeasurably sad in the fact that, with the decline of very old people, the hope of non confundar, of something which will be preserved from death, is also eroded, because, especially if one loves them, one becomes so aware of the decrepitude of that part of them which one would like to regard as the immortal that one can hardly imagine what is to be left over from such a poor, infirm creature which is no longer identical with itself. Thus, very old people, who are really reduced to what Hegel would call their mere abstract existence, those who have defied death longest, are precisely the ones who most strongly awaken the idea of absolute annulment. Nevertheless, this experience of death as something fortuitous and external - rather like an illness one has been infected with, without knowing its source - does contain a moment connected with the autonomy of mind. It is that, because the mind has wrested itself so strongly from what we
merely are, has made itself so autonomous, this in itself gives rise to a hope that mere existence might not be everything.
If one does not cling to the thesis of the identity of subject and object taught by idealism; if the subject, mind, reflecting itself critic- ally, does not equate itself to, and 'devour', everything which exists, it may happen that the mind, which has become as unidentical to the world as the world has become to it, takes on a small moment of not-being-engulfed-in-blind-contingency: a very paradoxical form of hope, if you like. And the very curious persistence of the idea of immort-
ality may be connected to this. For this idea seems to me to manifest itself more substantially where consciousness is most advanced than in the official religions. Even as a child I was surprised how little attention was paid to these last things - just a few pages in a Protestant hymn-book, for example - whereas one would expect them to be the only ones which mattered to a religion. I would remind you here of the magnificent passage in Marcel Proust depicting the death of the writer Bergotte, who was Anatole France, in which, in a truly grandi- ose, regenerative, mystical speculation, the writer's books, displayed
by his deathbed, are interpreted as allegories of the fact that, on account of its goodness, this life was not wholly in vain. 14 You will find something similar in the writings of Beckett, who is, of course, anathema to all affirmative people and in whose work everything revolves around the question what nothingness actually contains; the
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? question, one might almost say, of a topography of the void. This work is really an attempt so to conceive nothingness that it is, at the same time, not merely nothingness, but to do so within complete negativity. IS But that, too, should be said with extreme gentleness and circumspection. And it is perhaps no accident that in the passage of Proust I have just referred to the writer chooses a formulation which
bears a curious resemblance to those of Kafka, with whom he has nothing directly in common. I attempted to explore this connection in the 'Kleine Proust-Kommentare' in the second volume of Noten zur Literatur,I6 and I do not want to speak of it now. But the less people really live - or, perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they have not really lived - the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a misfortune. It is as if, in death, they experienced their own reification: that they were corpses from the first. Such an experience was expressed in the most
diverse passages of Expressionist poetry, by BennI7 and Trakl, taking
a curiously identical form in writers otherwise at opposite poles. The
terror of death today is largely the terror of seeing how much the
living resemble it. And it might therefore be said that if life were lived
rightly, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in
Its mnermost composltion.
That is probably the most extreme speculation by which I can
demonstrate, at least as a possibility, the link I am trying to explain in these last lectures between the historical, immanent sphere and what are called the great metaphysical categories. Death and history form a constellation. Hamlet, the first wholly self-aware and despond- ently self-reflecting individual, experienced his essence as something absolutely transitory. In him the absolute experience of the individual as the self, and the experience of its absolute transience, that the rest is silence, coincided. By contrast, it is probably the case today that, because the individual actually no longer exists, death has become something wholly incommensurable, the annihilation of a nothing. He who dies realizes that he has been cheated of everything. And that is why death is so unbearable. I will close by pointing out that in this fact that the horizon of death has been displaced in the curious way I have just indicated, what I might call the good side of the decline of the individual is manifested. It is that the experience of the nullity of the individual reveals not only our ego-weakness, not only our
functionalization, but also takes away something of the illusoriness and guilt which have always persisted in the category of individuation, up to the threshold of this age.
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29July 1965
? Ladies and Gentlemen, when one of these lecture series reaches its end, it seems to be a natural law - or an unnatural one - that one has not remotely covered the ground one had intended to. That is the case with me. That is to say, I have been able to present you only fragments of what is contained in the manuscript 'Reflections on Metaphysics' on which I have been basing the second half of the series,1 and have not got nearly as far as I had hoped. That is due in part to the difference
between the forms of written and spoken expression. When one writes, one is obliged to present the matter as clearly and precisely as possible, and can permit oneself extreme concentration for the sake of clear expression. When one is talking to living people it would be absurd, and professorial in the bad sense, to cling to the fiction that one can express pure thought, and one must do one's best, following one's own innervations, to make things clear to the people one is talking to. This does, however, have the disadvantage that when people like you come to listen to a person like me, you will almost inevitably be disap- pointed, as you will expect from what I write to hear something much more pithy than is possible in a spoken lecture. In short, one is, in
educated language, in an aporia; in less educated language: however you do it, it's wrong. And so, in full awareness of this fragmentariness, I would say to you today that what I have told you, in the form I have told it, can do no more than encourage you to think further on it for yourselves, and especially to free yourselves from a collection of cliches and ideas which have been foisted on you. To expect these
lectures to have given you a comprehensive account of how or in what
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? form metaphysics, or its opposite, is possible today would be a foolish
presumption. And I should like to make it quite clear that I have no such pretension.
I spoke at different points about the concept of metaphysical experience,2 and perhaps it would not be a bad thing to say a few more words about it in this last lecture. What I mean by metaphysical experience certainly cannot be reduced to what are called primal religious experiences. The reason is simply that if one spends a little time studying the stratum of theology which claims to have access to
such primal experiences - that is, in crude terms, the mystical stratum, which places such primary experience higher than any codified theo- logy - one becomes aware of something very peculiar and, I must say, very surprising. It is that mystical texts, and descriptions of funda-
mental mystical experiences, by no means have the primary, immediate quality one might expect, but are very strongly mediated by education. For example, the intricate interrelationships between gnosticism, Neo- Platonism, the Cabbala and later Christian mysticism give rise to an area of historicity which is equal to anything in the history of dogma. And it is certainly no accident that the corpus in which the documents of Jewish mysticism are brought together more or less disconnectedly, the Cabbala, bears the title of tradition. Far less emphasis is put on a primary, immediate vision than one imagines; far more attention is paid to the T67TOt of so-called religious experience than to pure subjectivity than might be supposed. What the reasons might be I do not want to discuss; that is really a matter for the philosophy of religion. I shall content myself with one observation, that almost all the mystical speculations which exist find their support in so-called
sacred texts, which in the eyes of mystical-metaphysical thinkers be- come symbolic in the sense that they mean something quite different from what is said in them. For example, in the famous interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, as set out in the book 'Sohar', the history of the creation of the world is interpreted as a history of the inner process of creation which took place within the divinity itself. 3 This is, incidentally, the model for the speculations of Schelling which, in a later phase, became famous under the name of positive philosophy. 4 I do not wish to say anything about the truth of these matters; but I should like at least to make you aware of a problem.
Through our philosophical and, above all, our academic education - as long as it is based on the model, however latent, of the natural sciences - we have become tacitly accustomed to an irreconcilable antithesis between tradition and cognition. It is no accident that the most vehement invective against tradition is to be found in the two philosophers who mark the beginning of what is called modern
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? philosophy, Descartes and Bacon, who emancipated themselves from tradition. It is, however, questionable (and I shall only raise the ques- tion here) whether the idea underlying this position - that tradition, what is not known at first hand, should be spurned in face of the immediacy of lived experience - whether this motif, which we take almost for granted, is really so valid, in view of the fact that many such traditional elements are unknowingly contained in knowledge we regard as not traditional, but as pure, autonomous cognition. One might be inclined to think that the subject supposedly capable of cognition as a kind of actus purus, as a piece of pure actuality - and this, implicitly, is the epistemological ideal of the whole of modern philosophy - is an abstraction which does not correspond to any actual
subject of cognition; and that the traditional, that is, the historical moment, not only permeates supposedly authenticated knowledge far more deeply than is generally admitted, but actually makes that knowledge possible. One might even suppose that the moment which I have repeatedly brought to your notice under the heading of the mediatedness of thought, is contained in this traditional moment, in the implicit history which is present within any cognition. And it is probable (at any rate, I should like to think so today) that the crucial threshold between this and positivist thinking lies in the question whether thought is aware of this inalienable traditional moment con- tained within it, whether knowledge reflects it within itself or whether it simply denies it - which is not to assert, of course, that knowledge
should simply abandon itself to this traditional moment. The criticism which has been levelled at tradition has its reasons and its legitimacy, heaven knows. But it is also naive in believing that it can divest itself
entirely of this moment. The truth probably lies in a kind of self- reflection which both recognizes the inalienable presence of the tradi- tional moment within knowledge, and critically identifies the dogmatic element in it - instead of creating a tabula rasa on both sides, as now, and thus succumbing either to dogmatism or to a timeless and there- fore inherently fictitious positivism. You will perhaps understand that,
for this reason, I am unwilling to attach metaphysical experience to religious experience as firmly as is generally asserted; I am unwilling to do so, above all, because this kind of experience, as handed down by very great figures of Catholicism, such as St John of the Cross, hardly seems to be accessible any longer, given the assumptions regarding
the philosophy of history under which we live today. On its actual truth content I will hold my peace.
A more decisive contribution to these matters, I believe, is made by Marcel Proust, whose work, as a precipitate of experience and an exploration of the possibility of experience, should be taken extremely
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? seriously from a philosophical point of view. I would mention in passing that the separation between art and so-called scholarship in the sphere in which we are now moving is entirely without substance and is a mere fabrication of the division of labour. I mean - the idea that Herr Bollnow should be qualified to contribute seriously to a discussion on metaphysics while Marcel Proust should not - well, I would just mention that idea to you without commenting further. I
do not wish to reproduce Proust's theory of metaphysical experience to you here. I would just point out that perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of what I am concerned with here is the way in which certain names can vouch for that experience. In Proust they are the names of Illiers and Trouville, Cabourg and Venice. s I myself have had a similar experience with such names. When one is on holiday as a child and reads or hears names like Monbrunn, Reuenthal, Hambrunn, one has the feeling: if only one were there, at that place, that would be it. This 'it' - what the 'it' is - is extraordinarily difficult to say; one will probably be able to say, following Proust's tracks here
too, that it is happiness. When one later reaches such places, it is not there either, one does not find 'it'. Often they are just foolish villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be very thankful today. But the curious thing is that, even if 'it' is not there, if one does not find in Monbrunn any
of the fulfilment which is stored up in its name, nevertheless, one is not disappointed. The reason, if I am interpreting it correctly, is that - and you must forgive me if I ramble a bit in this lecture, in just the way that Kant forbids6 - one is, as it were, too close, one is inside the phenomenon, and has the feeling that, being completely inside it, one cannot actually catch sight of it? Once, many years ago, in Minima Moralia, I wrote about thanking and gratitude, which have their dignity - and I did not mean dignity in the idealist sense - because the giving of thanks is the only relationship that consciousness can
have to happiness, whereas the person who is happy is too close to it to be able to have any standpoint towards it within consciousness. 8 At such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding - as is also familiar from an old symbol of happiness, the rainbow - rather than that one has really been done out of it. I would say,
therefore, that happiness - and there is an extremely deep constella- tion between metaphysical experience and happiness - is something within objects and, at the same time, remote from them.
But as I mention this example to you, I become aware of how extraordinarily precarious such speculations are. I have just picked out a stratum of these experiences quite arbitrarily; another, perhaps
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? far more crucial one, is the experience of deja
did I see that before? that can be induced by a certain type of children's book. In such experiences one succumbs to the conditions of the empirical world; one succumbs to all the fallibility which attaches to one's own psychology, one's wishes, one's longing. All metaphysical experiences - I should like to state as a proposition here - are fallible. I would say, in general, that all experiences which have to be lived, which are not mere copies or reconstructions of that which is in any case, contain the possibility of error, the possibility that they can completely miss the mark. And, in much the same way as I indicated
earlier with regard to the concept of tradition, it may be one of the ! {;EVS? , the deceptions in which scientific-idealist thinking has enmeshed us, that we believe a piece of knowledge to rank higher the less it is liable to failure, to disappointment. It might well be that, according to this criterion, everything which really matters would be excluded as unworthy of being known; whereas in truth - so it seems to me - only what can be refuted, what can be disappointed, what can be wrong, has the openness I have spoken of/ that is, it is the only thing which matters. It is in the concept of openness, as that which is not already subsumed under the identity of the concept, that the possibil- ity of disappointment lies. And I should like to say that within the meaning of these reflections on the possibility of metaphysics there lies a peculiar affinity to empiricism. For empiricism, with its emphasis on empirical sources, implies an element of metaphysics at least in the sense that the essential knowledge is seen as that which does not coincide with concepts, but which, as it were, falls accidentally into my lap, and thus always includes the possibility that it might not do
so. Such knowledge therefore has an inherent fortuitousness, from which it derives an element of meaning which, according to the pre- valent logic, is excluded precisely by the concept of the accidental. Fallibility, I would say, is the condition of the possibility of such metaphysical experience. And it seems to attach most strongly to the weakest and most fragile experiences.
On the other hand, however, from the extreme doubtfulness of what I have just said, a doubtfulness which, I believe, is indispensable to thought if it wants to be anything at all, you might gain a critical insight which, from the opposed standpoint, sounds highly heretical. You all know that the critical theory of society, and especially its
popularized form in the modernistic vulgar theology of today, is fond of adducing the Hegelian and Marxian concept of rei(ication, and that,
for it, only what is entirely exempt from reification can be counted as knowledge or truth. But if you bear in mind the peculiarly fallible and unavoidably problematic nature of metaphysical experience that
vu, the feeling: When
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I have described, the concept of reification may, in a complementary way, take on a meaning which is far from purely derogatory. It is a meaning in which, as in Marx, the whole of idealism is contained, in that the assumption is made that even that which is not I, which is
not identical, must be able to resolve itself entirely, as it were, into the actual, present I, into the actus purus. That none of this is plain sailing, that these questions are not so simple - Hegel undoubtedly had an inkling of this in his later phase. And the traits of reactionary harshness we find so disturbing in Hegel are certainly connected to the realization that the moment of the complete dissolution of all objectivity in what might be called the living subject also contains a deceptive element, in the absolute presence of the subject in that which it is not. When I said earlier that pure mystical experience is a somewhat dubious matter, that it is far less pure and inward and far more concretely objective than one would expect from its concept, I was referring to this same deception.
What I am saying to you appears to be in sharp contradiction to the idea that cognition should necessarily be fallible if the resulting knowledge is to be worthy of being thought. And I would not presume, and certainly not in the miserably few minutes we have left, to resolve this contradiction. I would say, however, that precisely the polarity I am referring to - that, on the one hand, it is a condition of meta- physical experience that it can miss the mark, that it can be quite wrong; and that, on the other, it requires an objective moment, anti- thetical to it and incapable of being assimilated to it - that these two motifs together form the dialectical figure, the dialectical image,1O through which alone one can, perhaps, gain awareness of what is meant by the concept of metaphysical experience. The objective cat-
egories of theology are not only - as it appears from Hegel's early
theological writings published by Herman Nohlll - residues of the
positive moment which are then resolved into subjectivity, into life,
in a process of increasing, dialectical identification, but actually com-
plement the weakness of immanent dialectics: they reclaim, in a sense,
what is not assimilated by the dialectic and would, as the merely
other, be devoid of any determination. Thus, not only the ossified
society, but also the moment of the primacy of the object which I
have repeatedly mentioned,12 was precipitated in the objectivity of
the metaphysical categories. And between these two moments - on
the one hand the flashes of fallible consciousness which I illustrated
by the example of place names, and on the other the primacy of the
object - there seems to me to exist a curious constellation. True, it is
one which is discharged abruptly at certain moments, rather than being a merely contemplative entity which could be grasped as a kind
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143
? of categorial structure of a so-called matter of fact. If everything objective is volatilized by consciousness - and this applies especially to metaphysical objects - thought regresses to the subjectivism of the pure act. It then finally hypostatizes the mediation carried out by the
subject itself, as a kind of pure immediacy. This may help to explain the quite significant fact that Kant, who attempted in the Critique of Practical Reason to interpret metaphysical ideas as a full participation
of the subject, indeed, as nothing other than pure reason itself, finally moved almost imperceptibly to a position where he sought for that subjectivity precisely the objective correlatives that he had previously criticized and radically excluded. It is a remarkable fact that, in this way, even the concept of the highest good and the concept of human- ity are resurrected in the Critique of Practical Reason. 13 But despite all this it has to be said that, in the course of advancing enlightenment,
the possibility of metaphysical experience is tending to become paler and more desultory. If one reads Proust today, the accounts of such metaphysical experience, which play such an enormous role in his work - although even there they are far more bare and limited than one might expect - have a Romantic moment through which they are already exposed to criticism. It is as if the joy of finding that some- where some such thing as life were possible at all - and this is the counter-motif to reification - had lured the subject of the experience into directly equating these surviving traces of the life with the meaning
of life itself.
As a result, one will have to pursue metaphysical experience into a
stratum which originally was extremely alien to it. For in reality it now survives only negatively. I would say - and this must be under- stood very strictly and made into a kind of canon for metaphysical thinking itself - that the form in which metaphysical experience still manifests itself with any compelling force today is not that which has made itself suspect as a sphere of Romantic wishing, but is the ex- perience which leads to the question: Is that all? It is the experience which, if I might speak for once like an existentialist, perhaps bears the greatest resemblance, among the 'situations' we pass through,14 to the situation of fruitless waiting: that is no doubt the form in which
metaphysical experience manifests itself most strongly to us. It made an unforgettable impression on me when my composition teacher, Alban Berg, told me more than once that what he regarded as the crucial and most important parts of his own work, and the ones he liked best, were the bars in which he expressed situations of fruitless waiting. He experienced these things so deeply that they reached the threshold of consciousness, although, heaven knows, that is not re-
? quired of an artist. But the authenticity of even this is not guaranteed,
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? for where there is no longer any life, where immediacy has been so truly abolished as in the world in which we exist, the temptation is doubly strong to mistake the remnants of life, or even the negation of the prevailing condition, for the absolute.
We reach here, if you like, the crucial distinction between the considerations I have been presenting to you and the Hegelian philo- sophy to which these considerations owe so much. It lies in the fact that Hegel's philosophy contains a moment by which that philosophy, despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve, passes over into affirmation and therefore into ideology: the belief that negation, by being pushed far enough and by reflecting itself, is one with positivity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, the doctrine
of the positive negation, is precisely and strictly the point at which I refuse to follow Hegel. There are other such points, but in the context of this discussion this is the one to which I should refer. One might be inclined to think that if the present situation is really experienced as negatively as we all experience it, and as only I have taken it upon myself, as a kind of scapegoat, to express it (that is the only difference separating me from other people), one might think that by negating this negativity one had already attained the positive; and that is a very great temptation. And when I told you that the form of determin- ate negation is the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today, I myself was moving at least in the direction of that idea. But this transition is not itself compelling: for if I said that the negation of the negation is the positive, that idea would contain within itself a
thesis of the philosophy of identity and could only be carried through if I had already assumed the unity of subject and object which is supposed to emerge at the end. If, however, you take seriously the idea I put forward earlier today, that the truth of ideas is bound up
with the possibility of their being wrong, the possibility of their failure, you will see that this idea is invalidated by the proposition that, merely by negating the negation, I already have the positive. In that easelS one would be back in the sphere of false, deceptive and, I would say, mythical certainty, in which nothing can be wrong and in which, probably for that reason, everything one said would be all the more hopelessly lost. For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner's adage forbids: to work one's way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and to immerse oneself in the darkness as deeply as one possibly can. For one thing is undoubtedly true: I told you that, where there is no longer life, the temptation to mistake its remnants for the absolute, for flashes of meaning, is extremely great - and I do not wish to take
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? that back. Nevertheless, nothing can be even experienced as living if it does not contain a promise of something transcending life. This transcendence therefore is, and at the same time is not - and beyond that contradiction it is no doubt very difficult, and probably impos-
sible, for thought to gO. 16
In saying that, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the feeling that I have
reached the point where the insufficiency of my own reflections con- verges with the impossibility of thinking that which must nevertheless be thought.