Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is
considered
absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
The findings of Heidegger's existential analysis, according to which the subject is authentic insofar as it possesses itself, grant special praise to the person who is sovereignly at his own disposal; as though he were his own prop- erty : he has to have bearing, which is at the same time an internalization, and an apotheosis, of the principle
127
of domination over nature. "Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own Dasein. " 100 The testi- mony of his being-human, which constitutes "the ex- istence of man," occurs "through the creation of a world and its ascent, as much as through the destruc- tion of it and its decline. The testifying to humanity, and thus its authentic completion, occurs through the freedom of decision. This grasps necessity and puts itself under the commitment of a supreme order. " 101 That very statement is nobly meant, quite in the spirit
of the jargon, as when a noncommissioned officer bawls out the "weakness of the flesh. " Outside of the tautology all we can see here is the imperative: pull yourself together. It is not for nothing that in Kierke- gaard, the grandfather of all existential philosophy, right living is defined entirely in terms of decision. All his camp followers are in agreement on that, even the dialectical theologians and the French existentialists. Subjectivity, Dasein itself, is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in a determining ob- jectivity. In Germany these determinations of objec- tivity are limited by the "sense of obligation to 'the command," as in the word-fetish "soldierly. " This obli- gation is totally abstract and thus concretizes itself ac- cording to the power structure of the moment. In honor of all that, the existential ontologists and the philosophers of existence bury the hatchet of discord.
100. Heidegger, Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munioh, 1937), p. 6.
101. Ibid. 128
? Action of the warrior. The strength to make decisions under the most extreme conditions-life or death- comes from firmness in decision; comes from such firm- ness in unique situations which never recur in abso- lutely identical form. The fundamental traits of this kind of action are readiness for risks, along with a sense for what is possible; as well as artfulness and presence of mind. Rules can be formulated for this kind of action, but in its essence no rules will cover it completely; nor can this action bc derived from rules. In the most ex-
treme situations there appears both what I am authen- tically, and my potential. 102
The spe akers for existence move toward a mythology, even when they don't notice it. Self-possession, un- limited and narrowed by no heteronomy, easily con- verges with freedom. Men would be reconciled with their essential definition if the time came when their defining limitations were no longer imposed on them. This would mean a happy reversal of the domination over nature. However, nothing is more unwanted by the philosophy and the jargon of authenticity. Apart from
the right to come into one's own, self-control is hypos- tatized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the con- trols are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Ideal- ism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical with duty. Once one extrapolates from the words of empirical language what authentically is, as those words' authentic mean- ing, one sees that the merely existing world determines
I02. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, rev. ed. (Munich, 1958), p. 340. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. T. Wilde, W. Klubach, W. Kimmel, Truth and Symbol, from Von der Wahrheit (New York, 1959). ]
? 129
what on any specific occasion applies to those words;
that world becomes the highest court of judgment over
what should and should not be. Today, nevertheless,
a thing is essentially only that which it is in the midst
of the dominant evil; essence is something negative.
Paragraph 50 of Sein und Zeit, entitled : "Prelimi- n ary Sketch of the Existential-onotological Structure of Death,"-without the print even blushing-con- tains the sentence: "However, there is much that can impend for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. " 103 Once somebody attributed to a local aphorist from Frank- furt the saying that ''Whoever looks out of the window becomes aware of many things. " Heidegger sketches his conception of authenticity itself, as Being toward death, on just this level. Such Being should be more than mortality disvalued as something thingly-em- pirical. But he also takes great care, for the sake of ontology, to separate this being from subjective re- flection on death. Being oneself does not reside in an exceptional situation of the subject, freed from the They; it is no form of the subject's consciousness. l04 Authentic being toward death is no "thinking about death," 105 an activity which is displeasing to the mo- nopolistic philosopher : "Needed, in our present world- crisis: less philosophy but more attention to thought; less literature, but more concern for the letter. " 106 The attitude which he disapproves of
103. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
104. Ibid. , p. 168.
105. Ibid. , p. 305.
106. Heidegger, iJbeT den Humanismus (Frankfurt a. M. ,
1949), p. 47? 130
,
"thinks about death," pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. As something pOSSible, it is to show as little as possible of its possibility. On the other hand, if Being-towards-death has to disclose understand- ingly the possibility which we have characterized, and if it is to disclose it as a possibility, then in such Being- towards-death this possibility must not be weakened : it must be understood as a pOSSibility, it must be culti-
vated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it. lo7
Reflection about death is anti-intellectually disparaged in the name of something allegedly deeper, and is re- placed by "endurance," likewise a gesture of internal silence. We should add that the officer learns to die according to the tradition of the cadet corps; and yet to that end it is better if he does not trouble himself about that which, in his profession, is the most im- portant thing-next to the killing of others. The fascist ideOlogy had altogether to remove from consciousness that sacrifice which was proclaimed for the sake of German supremacy. The chance that such a sacrifice would reach the goal for which it was intended was from the outset too doubtful; it would never have been able to survive such a conscious inspection. In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical
107. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305 6.
? 131
variation on a Social Democratic phrase ; " S acrifice will make us free. " 108 Heidegger is at one with that. In the eighth printing of What is Metaphysics ? , which appeared in 1960, he still retains-without any op- portunistic mitigation-the following sentences :
Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises from the abyss of freedom. In Sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone validates that grace-;:in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to the essence of man; that in his relation to Being he might take over the guarding of Being. 109
Nevertheless, once authenticity can no longer be either the empirical condition of mortality nor the subjec- tive relating to it, then it turns into grace. It turns, as it were, into a racial quality of inwardness, which man, either has or does not have-a quality about which nothing further can be stated than that, tautologically, there is mere participation in it. Consequently, in his additional discussions of death Heidegger is irresis- tably driven on to tautological manners of speaking: "It [death] is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, of
every way of existing," 110 thus, perfectly simply, the possibility of no longer existing. One could well reply
108. Cf. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, III (1938), 408.
109. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 8th ed. (Frankfurt a. M. , 1960), p. 49. [Our translation. This work has been trans- lated into English by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, What Is Metaphysics? in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chi- cago, 1949). ]
lIO. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 307. 132
? at once that thinking about the states of being, or of being, is always tautological, because these states of being would be nothing other than themselves. Then, however, the mere recitation of words, with disregard for any thinking predicate, would have to liquidate thinking itself. The strategist guarded himself against drawing that conclusion; the philosopher drew it, however, in the matter at hand. For the sake of its own dignity, authenticity once more transforms theo- retical lack, indeterminability, into the dictate of some- thing that must be accepted without question. But what ought to be more than mere Dasein sucks its blood out of the merely existent, out of just that weak- ness which cannot be reduced to its pure concept, but which rather cleaves to the nonconceptual substratum. The pure tautology, which propagates the concept while at the same time refusing to define that concept-and which instead mechanically repeats the concept-is intelligence in the form of violence. The concern of the jargon, which always insists on having a concern, is to equate essence-"authenticity"-with the most bru- tal fact of all. Nevertheless this repetition compulsion betrays a failure: the violent mind's incapability of capturing what it should think about if it wanted to remain mind.
Violence inheres in the nucleus of Heidegger's philosophy, as it does in the form of his language. That violence lies in the constellation into which his philosophy moves self-preservation and death. The self-preserving principle threatens its subjects with death, as an ultima ratio, a final reason; and when this death is used as the very essence of that principle it
133
means the theodicy of death. By no means in a simply untrue way. As Hegel sees it, the ego of idealism, which posits itself absolutely, and insists entirely on itself, turns into its own negation and resembles death :
Therefore the only work and task of general freedom is death. It is death which has no inner ambience and ful- fillment since it negates the unfulfilled center of the self, which is absolutely free. Thus it is the coldest and most platitudinous death, which has no more meaning than the cutting of a head of cabbage, or a drink of water. l11
Hegel, disillusioned by the French Revolution, brought up against it all these things, as well as what touched on the violent essence of absolute selfness. For Hei- degger those themes become not a motive for criti- cism of selfness but something unavoidable, therefore something which is a commandment. Violence is com- plicity with death, and not only superficially. There has always been a natural alliance between the views that everything, even one's self, should come to an end, and that on the other hand one should continue to follow his own limited interest, with a derogatory "What the hell! " Just as particularity, as a law of the whole, fulfills itself in its annihilation, so that blind- ness which is the subjective accompa? ment of par- ticularity has something nihilistic about it, for all its
addiction to life. Ever since Spinoza, philosophy has been conscious, in various degrees of clarity, of the
I I I . Hegel, Werke, Vol. II : Phiinomenologie des Geistes, p. 454. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. B . Baillie, The Phenomenology of Mind (London and New York, 1961). J
? 134
identity between self and self-preservation. What as- serts itself in self-preservation, the ego, is at the same time constituted by self-preservation; its identity con- stituted by its nonidentity. This still reverberates in the most extreme idealistic sublimation, the Kantian de- duction of the categories. There the moments in which the identity of consciousness presents itself, and the unity of the consciousness which puts itself together from those moments, reciprocally condition one an- other, in opposition to the deductive intention-inso- far as these and not other moments are absolutely given. The Kantian "I think" is the only abstract ref- erence point in a process of holding out, and not some- thing self-sufficient in relation to that process. To that
extent it is already self as self-preservation. Of course Heidegger, in distinction from the abstract transcen- dental unity of Kant, forms his conception of selfness along lines related to Husserl's subject-a subject that, though phenomenologically reduced, appears in the "bracketing",,-of its empirical existence as a full sub- ject with all its experiences. 1l2 But the concrete self- ness meant by Heidegger is not to be had without the empirical, actual subject; it is no pure possibility of the ontic, but is itself always, at the same time, also ontic. Self is only intelligible in relation to this content, as it were. It is impossible to subtract the ontic and leave the ontolOgical self as a remainder, or to preserve it as a structure of the ontic in general. It is senseless to assert, of something so thinned down, that it "exists authentically. " To do so, Heidegger dogmatically and
II2. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 168, 307. Also see above,pp. II6if.
I35
vainly prolongs his conception of existence as some- thing in opposition to identity; while without a break he continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity, with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. Against his intention, certainly, he falls back into the prehistory of subjectivity, instead of on- tologically disclosing existence as a primal phenome- non; for it is no such thing. But he applies the most in- wardly tautolOgical relation of self to self-preservation as if it were, in Kantian terms, a synthetic judgment. It is as though self-preservation and selfhood defined themselves qualitatively through their antithesis, death, which is intertwined with the meaning of self- preservation.
As soon as Heidegger speaks out openly, his cate? gory of Dasein, as in the early period of bourgeoi? thought, is determined by its self-preserving principle, and through the existent's asserting of itself. In his own words : "The primary item in care is the 'ahead-of- itself,' and this means that in every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. " 113 He has no desire for this "for the sake of itself" to be understood naturalistically; yet the linguistic echo, as one aspect of the matter, can- not be erased; it cannot be eradicated from Heidegger's category of care, which according to him ''is that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole. " 114 Ac- cording to his wish "the Being of the wholeness itself must be conceived as an existential phenomenon of a Dasein which is in each case one's own," 115 and ex-
II3. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 279. 114. Ibid.
IIS. Ibid. , p. 284.
? istential orientation must be won from the particular Dasein in question. All that gives the ontological key- position, in the so-called analysis of existence, to self- preservation. But thereby the same position is also accorded to death. As a limit it not only determines Heidegger's conception of Dasein, but it coincides, in the course of the projecting of that conception, with the principle of abstract selfhood, which withdraws absolutely into itself, persevering in itself. "No one can
take away another's dying," just as in Kantian idealism no ego can take away another's experiences, his "repre- sentations. " The platitude gives mineness its excessive pathos. But death becomes the core of the self, as soon as it reduces itself completely to itself. Once self has emptied itself of all qualities, on the grounds that they are accidental-actual, then nothing is left but to pro- nounce that doubly pitiful truth, that the self has to die; for it is already dead. Hence the emphasis of that sentence, "Death is. " For the ontology of Sein und Zeit, the irreplaceable quality of death turns into the essential character of subjectivity itself: this fact de- termines all the other determinations that lead up to the doctrine of authenticity, which has not only its norm but its ideal in ? eath. Death becomes the essen-
tial element in Dasein. l16 Once thought recurs-as though to its ground-to the absolutely isolated in- dividuality, then there remains nothing tangible for it except mortality; everything else derives only from the world, which for Heidegger, as for the idealists, is
? I I 6. Ibid. Cf. Being and Time, ( Grafenhainichen,
also Adolf Sternberger's I 932 criticism of in his dissertation Der Verstandene Tod I 933 ) .
137
secondary. "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. " 111 Death be- comes the representative of God, for whom the Hei- degger of Sein und Zeit felt himself to be too modem. Furthermore, it would seem to him too blasphemous to consider even the possibility of doing away with death; Being-unto-death, as an existentiale, is explicitly cut off from the possibility of any mere [sic1 ontic doing away with it.
Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military matters. Now, as ear- lier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. Death and Dasein are identified; death becomes pure identity, as in an eixstent which can absolutely not happen to any per- son other than oneself. The analysis of existence glides quickly over the most immediate and trivial aspect of the relation between death and Dasein, their simple nonidentity; the fact that death destroys Dasein truly negates it. Yet for all that, the analysis of existence
does not disengage itself from triviality: "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. " 118 Secondary school teachers speak thus in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening. The characteristica universaHs of
1I7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. I lB. Ibid. , pp. 294 if.
? ? ? Dasein, as in the Dasein of a mortal, takes the place of what must die. Thus death is manoeuvered into the position of the authentic; Dasein is "distinctive"119 through the ontological, which it is anyway; and the analytical judgment becomes the precipitous philos- opheme, the empty generality becomes the specific element in the concept-while to death, as "something distinctively impending," 120 a medal of honor is given. Formerly, the cultural-historical experience of the ab- sence of ontological meaning inspired the movement of Heidegger's philosophizing; but now such absence, the blindness of the inescapable, becomes exactly that which is lacking to Heidegger's theory of death. In that way his thought brings out the hollowness which re- sounds from the jargon as soon as one knocks on it. Tautology and nihilism bind themselves into a holy alliance. Death is to be experienced only as something meaningless. That is alleged to be the meaning of the experience of death and, since death constitutes the essence of Dasein, such is also the meaning of Dasein. Hegel's metaphysics, which cannot be brought back again, and which had its positive absolute in the totality of negations, is here interiorized to a dimen- sionless point. In such a construction it is reduced to the Hegelian "fury of disappearance,"121 to the un- mediated theodicy of annihilati9'n.
Throughout history, identity thinking has been something deathly, something that devours everything. Identity is always virtually out for totality; the One as
II9. Cf. p. 294.
120. Ibid. , p. 295.
121. Hegel, Werke, II, 453.
139
the indeterminate point, and the All-One-equally in- determinate, because it has no determination outside of itself-are themselves one. In Heidegger, as in idealism, that which tolerates nothing beyond itself is understood to be the whole. The least trace which went beyond such identity would be as unbearable as anyone who insists on his own individuality is to the fascist-no matter in what remote corner of the world. Therefore, not after all does Heidegger's ontology
aspire to exclude every kind of facticity. Facticity would give the lie to the identity principle, would not be of the nature of the concept, which for the sake of its omnipotence would like precisely to gloss over the fact that it is a concept; dictators imprison those who call them dictators. Nevertheless, that identity, which strictly would be identical with nothing more than with itself, annihilates itself. If it no longer goes forth to an other, and if it is no longer an identity of something, then, as Hegel saw, it is nothing at al. Thus totality is also the moving principle of Heidegger's observa- tions about death. They apply to wholeness, as that which is constitutively preestablished over its parts;122 that wholeness which Heidegger's predecessor Scheler had already transplanted into metaphysics from a Gestalt psychology which was at first rather unpre- tentious. In prefascist Germany, wholeness was the motto of all the zealots who were opposed to the nine-
teenth century, which they looked on summarily as old- fashioned and done away with. The attack was par-
122. Occasionally Heidegger refers condescendingly to the concept of totality in other writers, but does so only to prove the superiority of his own concept.
? ? ticularly directed against psychoanalysis; it stood for enlightenment in general. In those years, around the time of the first publication of Sein und Zeit, the doc- trine of the precedence of the whole over its parts was the delight of all apologetic thinking-just as today it delights the adepts of the jargon. Heidegger directly and openly repeated that view of the then current hab- its of thought. That the task of philosophy is to sketch out the whole was for Heidegger as much an article of faith as the duty of system-making once was to the idealist :
Thus arises the task of putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having. This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity's po- tentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the "end" itself belongs. The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to
the potentiality-for-Being-that is to say, to existence- limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. 123
The thought model for this was in particular the "good Gestalt" of Gestalt theory : a forerunner of that under- standing agreement between inner and outer that is to be destroyed by "consciousness as fate. " In its turn the conception bears with it the marks of the same scientific division of labor against which its own anti- mechanistic attitude polemicizes. In that attitude the inwardness of individuals remains intact, without re- gard to society. Whether a rounded unity exists be-
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 276.
? tween subject and the surrounding world would be said to depend on the subject. It could only be whole- ness insofar as it sets itself in opposition to reality, nonrefiectingly. Therefore, accommodation, social compliance, is the goal even of a category like that of wholeness, which appears to be so anthropological or existential. An a priori partisanship toward the subject as such is exercised by the jargon in the name of man. Through this partisanship, attention is re- moved from the question of whether reality, with which men must be unmediately at one in order even to become wholes themselves, of whether this reality deserves being at one with; of whether in the end this reality, as heteronomous, does not deny them whole- ness; of whether the wholeness ideal does not in fact contribute to their oppression and to the progressive atomization of those who are without power. As an ex- pression of the whole situation the atomization of man is also the truth; the point would be to change the truth along with this situation, and not, within this situation,
to wrest the truth away, and to charge it up to the for- getfulness of being, to the forgetfulness of those who recognize the truth. Heidegger felt a slight discomfort about an optimism that was secretly proud of having proven God in the laboratory; proud of having done so by the discovery of the Gestalt which is structured prior to all thinking preparation. But Heidegger's discom- fort hid itself away in the rhetorical, and involuntarily comic, question of whether in view of death we can speak of wholeness. The thesis about immediately pre- discovered, objective structuredness came just at the time when he needed it. With the help of a makeshift
? thought construction, he brought together the obliga- tion toward wholeness-accepted without question- and the experience of our literally discontinuous life. This was an experience needed by the expression of in- corruptible earnestness. This is precisely the broken- ness of existence, he says-following a Hegelian schema which, alas, he stuck together almost mechan- ically. Presumably, death would make this brokenness into a whole. Finitude, the infirmity of existence, would enclose it as its very principle. Since negativity, for all the brow-wrinkling, is taboo, Heidegger thinks past his goal. If philosophy could define the structure of Dasein at al, it would become for her two things at once: broken and whole, identical with itself and not identical-and that would of course drive one on to a dialectic which broke through the projected ontology of Dasein. But in Heidegger, thanks to that doctrine, it becomes more evident than anywhere else that the negative, as the essence, simply and undialectically turns into the positive. He channeled into philosophy the scientifically and psychologically circumscribed doctrine of wholeness; the antithesis between the dis- persed existent and Eleatically harmonic being is si- lently totted up to the debit of mechanistic thinking-
the primal scapegoat here being Aristotle. That this thought should be "overcome"-as one of the most sus- pect expressions tirelessly continues to proclaim-was not for a moment doubted even by Heidegger; such an attitude created, for him, the double halo of the modern and the supratemporal. The irrationalistic lackey- language of the twenties prattled on about "body-soul unity. " The connection of existent elements to their
? 143
whole is supposed to be the meaning of people in real life-as it is in art; in the fashion of the jugendstil, consolation is spread aesthetically over the harsh em- pirical world. To be sure, Heidegger's analysis of death carefully contents itself with applying the wholeness category to that of Dasein, instead of to individuals. The borrowing from the psychological theory of whole- ness pays off after all. Its grammatical character is the renunciation of any causal argumentation, a re- nunciation which removes the alleged wholenesses from nature, and transfers them to the transcendence of Being. For this transcendence is really none at all; it does not, in the Kantian way, go beyond the pos- sibility of experience, but rather behaves as though ex- perience is itself unmediated, incontrovertible, aware of itself as if it were face to face with itself. A fictive bodily contact with phenomena aids this anti-intel- lectualism. The pride in controlling phenomena in their undisfigured state bases itself inexplicitly on a certain judgmental claim: that the world is divided up into thingly pieces through an unraveling thought-process, not through the structure of society. Still-in accord with the then reigning ! ules of the trade of philosophy
-there is some talk of analysis; but this trade would already prefer to do no more analyzing.
The central chapter of Sein und Zeit treats "Da- sein's possibility of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards- Death. " 124 The question is raised-merely in a rhetor- ical fashion, as we can see at once-"whether this entity, as something existfng, can ever become acces-
124. Ibid. , p. 278. 144
sible in its Being-a-whole. " 125 It is obvious that a "pos- sibility of this entity's Being-a-whole" 126 could contra- dict the self-preservation which has been ontologized into "care. " Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as "that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole," 127 wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Da- sein-a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. We can anticipate, as immanent in Hei- degger, what he later announces with so much aplomb : that the fact of mortality does not a priori exclude the possibility that man's life should round itself out to a whole, as in the Biblical and epic conception. Hei- degger may have been forced to the effort to ground existential wholeness by the undeniable fact that the life of individuals today does without wholeness. 128 Wholeness is supposed to survive despite historical experience. For this purpose the whole-being of the eixstent, toward which Heidegger's theory is heading -and out of which "concern" emerges in the jargon-
the whole-being is distinguished, in the approved man- ner, from the merely cumulatively existent, "for which anything is still outstanding. " 129 The latter is said to have "the same kind of Being as those which are ready- to-hand"; 130 to it is contrasted the totality raised into
125. Ibid. , p. 279.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Cf. the introduction to Benjamin, Schriften I, p. xxii. 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 286.
130. Ibid.
145
an existential wholeness apart from the empirically individual life.
The togetherness of an entity of the kind which Dasein is "in running its course" until that "course" has been completed, is not constituted by a "continuing" piec- ing-on of entities which, somehow and somewhere, are ready-to-hand already in their own right. That Dasein should be together only when its "not-yet" has been filled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer. Any Dasein always exists in just such a manner that its "not-yet" belongs to it. l3l
That only applies to the extent that mortality is already thought together with the concept of Dasein- to the extent, that is, that Heidegger's philosophy is presupposed. For the ontologist, whole-being cannot be the unity of the whole content of real life but, qualita- tively, must be a third thing; and thus unity will not be sought in life as something harmonious, articulated, and continuous in itself, but will be sought at that point which delimits life and annihilates it, along with its wholeness. As a nonexistent, or at least as an ex- istent sui generis, outside life, this point is once again ontological. "But this lack-of-togetherness which be- longs to such a mode of togetherness-this being- missing as still-outstanding-cannot by any means de- fine ontologically that 'not-yet' which belongs to Dasein
as its possible death. Dasein does not have all the kind of Being of something ready-to-hand-within-the world. " 132 Removed from facticity, death becomes the ontological foundation of totality. Thus it becomes a
131. Ibid. , p. 287? I32. Ibid. , pp. 286 ff.
? meaning-gIVIng element in the midst of that frag- mentation which, according to ontological topography, characterizes the atomized consciousness of the late industrial age. This is done according to a habit of thinking, unquestioned by Heidegger, which imme- diately equates a structural whole with its own mean- ing-even if it were the negation of all meaning. Thus death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being. 133 Insofar as death is the ontological constituent of Dasein, death alone can
give existence the dignity of totality : "death as the end of Dasein, is Dasein's ownmost possibility-non-rela- tional, certain and as such indefinite, not to be out- stripped. " 131 Thus Heidegger gives a negative answer to his own starting question; the question which is only posed in order to be refuted :
So if one has given an ontologically inappropriate Inter- pretation of Dasein's "not-yet" as something still out- standing, any formal inference from this to Dasein's lack of totality will not be correct. The phenomenon of the "not-yet" has been taken over from the "ahead-of- itself'; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of cm existent Being-a-whole; indeed this "ahead-of-itself" is what first of all makes such a Being- towards-the-end possible. The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of us is, is a correct one if care, as Dasein's basic state, is "con- nected" with death-the uttennost possibility for that
entity. " 135
I33. Cf. above pp. I42 if.
I34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. I35. Ibid.
? ? 147
Ontologically, existence becomes a totality by means of death, which disrupts Dasein ontically. Death, how- ever, is authentic because it is removed from the They, which in turn is justified by the fact that there cannot be a proxy in death. Heidegger criticizes all thinkable real attitudes toward death as manifestations of the They. For, according to his own verdict, only the They speak of "death as a regularly occurring state of af- fairs. " 136 Thus he singles out his authentic death as something that is extremely real and at the same time beyond all facticity. Since there cannot be a proxy in death it becomes as unconceptual as the pure Diesda (haecceitas). Its concept would precede it and would become its representative, as is the case in the relation of any concept to that which is its content. In the same breath, however, Heidegger slanders facticity, which alone allows him to speak of the impossibility of hav- ing a proxy in death. The reason for this lies in the fact that death as a general concept designates the death of all and not of each individual one. Death as event, factual death indeed, is not to be the authentic death. Thus ontological death is not all that terrible.
In the publicness with which we are with one an- other in our everyday manner, death is "known" as a mishap which is constantly occurring-a "case of death. " Someone or other "dies," be he neighbour or stranger [Niichste oder Fernerstehendel . People who are no acquaintances of ours are "dying" daily and hourly. "Death" is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the in- conspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered
136. Ibid. , p. 297.
? ? ? in an everyday fashion. The "they" has already stowed away . . . an interpretation for this event. It talks of it . . . expressly or else in a way which is mostly in- hibited, as if to say, "One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us. " 137
In his eagerness to distinguish between death as an event and death as something authentic, Heidegger does not turn his back on sophisms.
The analysis of the phrase "one dies" reveals un- ambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to every- day Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for one- self, and is therefore no threat. The expression "one dies" spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the "they. " In Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that "one dies," because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that "in no case is it I myself," for this "one" is the "nobody.
127
of domination over nature. "Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own Dasein. " 100 The testi- mony of his being-human, which constitutes "the ex- istence of man," occurs "through the creation of a world and its ascent, as much as through the destruc- tion of it and its decline. The testifying to humanity, and thus its authentic completion, occurs through the freedom of decision. This grasps necessity and puts itself under the commitment of a supreme order. " 101 That very statement is nobly meant, quite in the spirit
of the jargon, as when a noncommissioned officer bawls out the "weakness of the flesh. " Outside of the tautology all we can see here is the imperative: pull yourself together. It is not for nothing that in Kierke- gaard, the grandfather of all existential philosophy, right living is defined entirely in terms of decision. All his camp followers are in agreement on that, even the dialectical theologians and the French existentialists. Subjectivity, Dasein itself, is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in a determining ob- jectivity. In Germany these determinations of objec- tivity are limited by the "sense of obligation to 'the command," as in the word-fetish "soldierly. " This obli- gation is totally abstract and thus concretizes itself ac- cording to the power structure of the moment. In honor of all that, the existential ontologists and the philosophers of existence bury the hatchet of discord.
100. Heidegger, Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munioh, 1937), p. 6.
101. Ibid. 128
? Action of the warrior. The strength to make decisions under the most extreme conditions-life or death- comes from firmness in decision; comes from such firm- ness in unique situations which never recur in abso- lutely identical form. The fundamental traits of this kind of action are readiness for risks, along with a sense for what is possible; as well as artfulness and presence of mind. Rules can be formulated for this kind of action, but in its essence no rules will cover it completely; nor can this action bc derived from rules. In the most ex-
treme situations there appears both what I am authen- tically, and my potential. 102
The spe akers for existence move toward a mythology, even when they don't notice it. Self-possession, un- limited and narrowed by no heteronomy, easily con- verges with freedom. Men would be reconciled with their essential definition if the time came when their defining limitations were no longer imposed on them. This would mean a happy reversal of the domination over nature. However, nothing is more unwanted by the philosophy and the jargon of authenticity. Apart from
the right to come into one's own, self-control is hypos- tatized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the con- trols are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Ideal- ism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical with duty. Once one extrapolates from the words of empirical language what authentically is, as those words' authentic mean- ing, one sees that the merely existing world determines
I02. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, rev. ed. (Munich, 1958), p. 340. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. T. Wilde, W. Klubach, W. Kimmel, Truth and Symbol, from Von der Wahrheit (New York, 1959). ]
? 129
what on any specific occasion applies to those words;
that world becomes the highest court of judgment over
what should and should not be. Today, nevertheless,
a thing is essentially only that which it is in the midst
of the dominant evil; essence is something negative.
Paragraph 50 of Sein und Zeit, entitled : "Prelimi- n ary Sketch of the Existential-onotological Structure of Death,"-without the print even blushing-con- tains the sentence: "However, there is much that can impend for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. " 103 Once somebody attributed to a local aphorist from Frank- furt the saying that ''Whoever looks out of the window becomes aware of many things. " Heidegger sketches his conception of authenticity itself, as Being toward death, on just this level. Such Being should be more than mortality disvalued as something thingly-em- pirical. But he also takes great care, for the sake of ontology, to separate this being from subjective re- flection on death. Being oneself does not reside in an exceptional situation of the subject, freed from the They; it is no form of the subject's consciousness. l04 Authentic being toward death is no "thinking about death," 105 an activity which is displeasing to the mo- nopolistic philosopher : "Needed, in our present world- crisis: less philosophy but more attention to thought; less literature, but more concern for the letter. " 106 The attitude which he disapproves of
103. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
104. Ibid. , p. 168.
105. Ibid. , p. 305.
106. Heidegger, iJbeT den Humanismus (Frankfurt a. M. ,
1949), p. 47? 130
,
"thinks about death," pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. As something pOSSible, it is to show as little as possible of its possibility. On the other hand, if Being-towards-death has to disclose understand- ingly the possibility which we have characterized, and if it is to disclose it as a possibility, then in such Being- towards-death this possibility must not be weakened : it must be understood as a pOSSibility, it must be culti-
vated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it. lo7
Reflection about death is anti-intellectually disparaged in the name of something allegedly deeper, and is re- placed by "endurance," likewise a gesture of internal silence. We should add that the officer learns to die according to the tradition of the cadet corps; and yet to that end it is better if he does not trouble himself about that which, in his profession, is the most im- portant thing-next to the killing of others. The fascist ideOlogy had altogether to remove from consciousness that sacrifice which was proclaimed for the sake of German supremacy. The chance that such a sacrifice would reach the goal for which it was intended was from the outset too doubtful; it would never have been able to survive such a conscious inspection. In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical
107. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305 6.
? 131
variation on a Social Democratic phrase ; " S acrifice will make us free. " 108 Heidegger is at one with that. In the eighth printing of What is Metaphysics ? , which appeared in 1960, he still retains-without any op- portunistic mitigation-the following sentences :
Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises from the abyss of freedom. In Sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone validates that grace-;:in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to the essence of man; that in his relation to Being he might take over the guarding of Being. 109
Nevertheless, once authenticity can no longer be either the empirical condition of mortality nor the subjec- tive relating to it, then it turns into grace. It turns, as it were, into a racial quality of inwardness, which man, either has or does not have-a quality about which nothing further can be stated than that, tautologically, there is mere participation in it. Consequently, in his additional discussions of death Heidegger is irresis- tably driven on to tautological manners of speaking: "It [death] is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, of
every way of existing," 110 thus, perfectly simply, the possibility of no longer existing. One could well reply
108. Cf. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, III (1938), 408.
109. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 8th ed. (Frankfurt a. M. , 1960), p. 49. [Our translation. This work has been trans- lated into English by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, What Is Metaphysics? in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chi- cago, 1949). ]
lIO. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 307. 132
? at once that thinking about the states of being, or of being, is always tautological, because these states of being would be nothing other than themselves. Then, however, the mere recitation of words, with disregard for any thinking predicate, would have to liquidate thinking itself. The strategist guarded himself against drawing that conclusion; the philosopher drew it, however, in the matter at hand. For the sake of its own dignity, authenticity once more transforms theo- retical lack, indeterminability, into the dictate of some- thing that must be accepted without question. But what ought to be more than mere Dasein sucks its blood out of the merely existent, out of just that weak- ness which cannot be reduced to its pure concept, but which rather cleaves to the nonconceptual substratum. The pure tautology, which propagates the concept while at the same time refusing to define that concept-and which instead mechanically repeats the concept-is intelligence in the form of violence. The concern of the jargon, which always insists on having a concern, is to equate essence-"authenticity"-with the most bru- tal fact of all. Nevertheless this repetition compulsion betrays a failure: the violent mind's incapability of capturing what it should think about if it wanted to remain mind.
Violence inheres in the nucleus of Heidegger's philosophy, as it does in the form of his language. That violence lies in the constellation into which his philosophy moves self-preservation and death. The self-preserving principle threatens its subjects with death, as an ultima ratio, a final reason; and when this death is used as the very essence of that principle it
133
means the theodicy of death. By no means in a simply untrue way. As Hegel sees it, the ego of idealism, which posits itself absolutely, and insists entirely on itself, turns into its own negation and resembles death :
Therefore the only work and task of general freedom is death. It is death which has no inner ambience and ful- fillment since it negates the unfulfilled center of the self, which is absolutely free. Thus it is the coldest and most platitudinous death, which has no more meaning than the cutting of a head of cabbage, or a drink of water. l11
Hegel, disillusioned by the French Revolution, brought up against it all these things, as well as what touched on the violent essence of absolute selfness. For Hei- degger those themes become not a motive for criti- cism of selfness but something unavoidable, therefore something which is a commandment. Violence is com- plicity with death, and not only superficially. There has always been a natural alliance between the views that everything, even one's self, should come to an end, and that on the other hand one should continue to follow his own limited interest, with a derogatory "What the hell! " Just as particularity, as a law of the whole, fulfills itself in its annihilation, so that blind- ness which is the subjective accompa? ment of par- ticularity has something nihilistic about it, for all its
addiction to life. Ever since Spinoza, philosophy has been conscious, in various degrees of clarity, of the
I I I . Hegel, Werke, Vol. II : Phiinomenologie des Geistes, p. 454. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. B . Baillie, The Phenomenology of Mind (London and New York, 1961). J
? 134
identity between self and self-preservation. What as- serts itself in self-preservation, the ego, is at the same time constituted by self-preservation; its identity con- stituted by its nonidentity. This still reverberates in the most extreme idealistic sublimation, the Kantian de- duction of the categories. There the moments in which the identity of consciousness presents itself, and the unity of the consciousness which puts itself together from those moments, reciprocally condition one an- other, in opposition to the deductive intention-inso- far as these and not other moments are absolutely given. The Kantian "I think" is the only abstract ref- erence point in a process of holding out, and not some- thing self-sufficient in relation to that process. To that
extent it is already self as self-preservation. Of course Heidegger, in distinction from the abstract transcen- dental unity of Kant, forms his conception of selfness along lines related to Husserl's subject-a subject that, though phenomenologically reduced, appears in the "bracketing",,-of its empirical existence as a full sub- ject with all its experiences. 1l2 But the concrete self- ness meant by Heidegger is not to be had without the empirical, actual subject; it is no pure possibility of the ontic, but is itself always, at the same time, also ontic. Self is only intelligible in relation to this content, as it were. It is impossible to subtract the ontic and leave the ontolOgical self as a remainder, or to preserve it as a structure of the ontic in general. It is senseless to assert, of something so thinned down, that it "exists authentically. " To do so, Heidegger dogmatically and
II2. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 168, 307. Also see above,pp. II6if.
I35
vainly prolongs his conception of existence as some- thing in opposition to identity; while without a break he continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity, with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. Against his intention, certainly, he falls back into the prehistory of subjectivity, instead of on- tologically disclosing existence as a primal phenome- non; for it is no such thing. But he applies the most in- wardly tautolOgical relation of self to self-preservation as if it were, in Kantian terms, a synthetic judgment. It is as though self-preservation and selfhood defined themselves qualitatively through their antithesis, death, which is intertwined with the meaning of self- preservation.
As soon as Heidegger speaks out openly, his cate? gory of Dasein, as in the early period of bourgeoi? thought, is determined by its self-preserving principle, and through the existent's asserting of itself. In his own words : "The primary item in care is the 'ahead-of- itself,' and this means that in every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. " 113 He has no desire for this "for the sake of itself" to be understood naturalistically; yet the linguistic echo, as one aspect of the matter, can- not be erased; it cannot be eradicated from Heidegger's category of care, which according to him ''is that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole. " 114 Ac- cording to his wish "the Being of the wholeness itself must be conceived as an existential phenomenon of a Dasein which is in each case one's own," 115 and ex-
II3. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 279. 114. Ibid.
IIS. Ibid. , p. 284.
? istential orientation must be won from the particular Dasein in question. All that gives the ontological key- position, in the so-called analysis of existence, to self- preservation. But thereby the same position is also accorded to death. As a limit it not only determines Heidegger's conception of Dasein, but it coincides, in the course of the projecting of that conception, with the principle of abstract selfhood, which withdraws absolutely into itself, persevering in itself. "No one can
take away another's dying," just as in Kantian idealism no ego can take away another's experiences, his "repre- sentations. " The platitude gives mineness its excessive pathos. But death becomes the core of the self, as soon as it reduces itself completely to itself. Once self has emptied itself of all qualities, on the grounds that they are accidental-actual, then nothing is left but to pro- nounce that doubly pitiful truth, that the self has to die; for it is already dead. Hence the emphasis of that sentence, "Death is. " For the ontology of Sein und Zeit, the irreplaceable quality of death turns into the essential character of subjectivity itself: this fact de- termines all the other determinations that lead up to the doctrine of authenticity, which has not only its norm but its ideal in ? eath. Death becomes the essen-
tial element in Dasein. l16 Once thought recurs-as though to its ground-to the absolutely isolated in- dividuality, then there remains nothing tangible for it except mortality; everything else derives only from the world, which for Heidegger, as for the idealists, is
? I I 6. Ibid. Cf. Being and Time, ( Grafenhainichen,
also Adolf Sternberger's I 932 criticism of in his dissertation Der Verstandene Tod I 933 ) .
137
secondary. "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. " 111 Death be- comes the representative of God, for whom the Hei- degger of Sein und Zeit felt himself to be too modem. Furthermore, it would seem to him too blasphemous to consider even the possibility of doing away with death; Being-unto-death, as an existentiale, is explicitly cut off from the possibility of any mere [sic1 ontic doing away with it.
Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military matters. Now, as ear- lier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. Death and Dasein are identified; death becomes pure identity, as in an eixstent which can absolutely not happen to any per- son other than oneself. The analysis of existence glides quickly over the most immediate and trivial aspect of the relation between death and Dasein, their simple nonidentity; the fact that death destroys Dasein truly negates it. Yet for all that, the analysis of existence
does not disengage itself from triviality: "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. " 118 Secondary school teachers speak thus in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening. The characteristica universaHs of
1I7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. I lB. Ibid. , pp. 294 if.
? ? ? Dasein, as in the Dasein of a mortal, takes the place of what must die. Thus death is manoeuvered into the position of the authentic; Dasein is "distinctive"119 through the ontological, which it is anyway; and the analytical judgment becomes the precipitous philos- opheme, the empty generality becomes the specific element in the concept-while to death, as "something distinctively impending," 120 a medal of honor is given. Formerly, the cultural-historical experience of the ab- sence of ontological meaning inspired the movement of Heidegger's philosophizing; but now such absence, the blindness of the inescapable, becomes exactly that which is lacking to Heidegger's theory of death. In that way his thought brings out the hollowness which re- sounds from the jargon as soon as one knocks on it. Tautology and nihilism bind themselves into a holy alliance. Death is to be experienced only as something meaningless. That is alleged to be the meaning of the experience of death and, since death constitutes the essence of Dasein, such is also the meaning of Dasein. Hegel's metaphysics, which cannot be brought back again, and which had its positive absolute in the totality of negations, is here interiorized to a dimen- sionless point. In such a construction it is reduced to the Hegelian "fury of disappearance,"121 to the un- mediated theodicy of annihilati9'n.
Throughout history, identity thinking has been something deathly, something that devours everything. Identity is always virtually out for totality; the One as
II9. Cf. p. 294.
120. Ibid. , p. 295.
121. Hegel, Werke, II, 453.
139
the indeterminate point, and the All-One-equally in- determinate, because it has no determination outside of itself-are themselves one. In Heidegger, as in idealism, that which tolerates nothing beyond itself is understood to be the whole. The least trace which went beyond such identity would be as unbearable as anyone who insists on his own individuality is to the fascist-no matter in what remote corner of the world. Therefore, not after all does Heidegger's ontology
aspire to exclude every kind of facticity. Facticity would give the lie to the identity principle, would not be of the nature of the concept, which for the sake of its omnipotence would like precisely to gloss over the fact that it is a concept; dictators imprison those who call them dictators. Nevertheless, that identity, which strictly would be identical with nothing more than with itself, annihilates itself. If it no longer goes forth to an other, and if it is no longer an identity of something, then, as Hegel saw, it is nothing at al. Thus totality is also the moving principle of Heidegger's observa- tions about death. They apply to wholeness, as that which is constitutively preestablished over its parts;122 that wholeness which Heidegger's predecessor Scheler had already transplanted into metaphysics from a Gestalt psychology which was at first rather unpre- tentious. In prefascist Germany, wholeness was the motto of all the zealots who were opposed to the nine-
teenth century, which they looked on summarily as old- fashioned and done away with. The attack was par-
122. Occasionally Heidegger refers condescendingly to the concept of totality in other writers, but does so only to prove the superiority of his own concept.
? ? ticularly directed against psychoanalysis; it stood for enlightenment in general. In those years, around the time of the first publication of Sein und Zeit, the doc- trine of the precedence of the whole over its parts was the delight of all apologetic thinking-just as today it delights the adepts of the jargon. Heidegger directly and openly repeated that view of the then current hab- its of thought. That the task of philosophy is to sketch out the whole was for Heidegger as much an article of faith as the duty of system-making once was to the idealist :
Thus arises the task of putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having. This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity's po- tentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the "end" itself belongs. The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to
the potentiality-for-Being-that is to say, to existence- limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. 123
The thought model for this was in particular the "good Gestalt" of Gestalt theory : a forerunner of that under- standing agreement between inner and outer that is to be destroyed by "consciousness as fate. " In its turn the conception bears with it the marks of the same scientific division of labor against which its own anti- mechanistic attitude polemicizes. In that attitude the inwardness of individuals remains intact, without re- gard to society. Whether a rounded unity exists be-
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 276.
? tween subject and the surrounding world would be said to depend on the subject. It could only be whole- ness insofar as it sets itself in opposition to reality, nonrefiectingly. Therefore, accommodation, social compliance, is the goal even of a category like that of wholeness, which appears to be so anthropological or existential. An a priori partisanship toward the subject as such is exercised by the jargon in the name of man. Through this partisanship, attention is re- moved from the question of whether reality, with which men must be unmediately at one in order even to become wholes themselves, of whether this reality deserves being at one with; of whether in the end this reality, as heteronomous, does not deny them whole- ness; of whether the wholeness ideal does not in fact contribute to their oppression and to the progressive atomization of those who are without power. As an ex- pression of the whole situation the atomization of man is also the truth; the point would be to change the truth along with this situation, and not, within this situation,
to wrest the truth away, and to charge it up to the for- getfulness of being, to the forgetfulness of those who recognize the truth. Heidegger felt a slight discomfort about an optimism that was secretly proud of having proven God in the laboratory; proud of having done so by the discovery of the Gestalt which is structured prior to all thinking preparation. But Heidegger's discom- fort hid itself away in the rhetorical, and involuntarily comic, question of whether in view of death we can speak of wholeness. The thesis about immediately pre- discovered, objective structuredness came just at the time when he needed it. With the help of a makeshift
? thought construction, he brought together the obliga- tion toward wholeness-accepted without question- and the experience of our literally discontinuous life. This was an experience needed by the expression of in- corruptible earnestness. This is precisely the broken- ness of existence, he says-following a Hegelian schema which, alas, he stuck together almost mechan- ically. Presumably, death would make this brokenness into a whole. Finitude, the infirmity of existence, would enclose it as its very principle. Since negativity, for all the brow-wrinkling, is taboo, Heidegger thinks past his goal. If philosophy could define the structure of Dasein at al, it would become for her two things at once: broken and whole, identical with itself and not identical-and that would of course drive one on to a dialectic which broke through the projected ontology of Dasein. But in Heidegger, thanks to that doctrine, it becomes more evident than anywhere else that the negative, as the essence, simply and undialectically turns into the positive. He channeled into philosophy the scientifically and psychologically circumscribed doctrine of wholeness; the antithesis between the dis- persed existent and Eleatically harmonic being is si- lently totted up to the debit of mechanistic thinking-
the primal scapegoat here being Aristotle. That this thought should be "overcome"-as one of the most sus- pect expressions tirelessly continues to proclaim-was not for a moment doubted even by Heidegger; such an attitude created, for him, the double halo of the modern and the supratemporal. The irrationalistic lackey- language of the twenties prattled on about "body-soul unity. " The connection of existent elements to their
? 143
whole is supposed to be the meaning of people in real life-as it is in art; in the fashion of the jugendstil, consolation is spread aesthetically over the harsh em- pirical world. To be sure, Heidegger's analysis of death carefully contents itself with applying the wholeness category to that of Dasein, instead of to individuals. The borrowing from the psychological theory of whole- ness pays off after all. Its grammatical character is the renunciation of any causal argumentation, a re- nunciation which removes the alleged wholenesses from nature, and transfers them to the transcendence of Being. For this transcendence is really none at all; it does not, in the Kantian way, go beyond the pos- sibility of experience, but rather behaves as though ex- perience is itself unmediated, incontrovertible, aware of itself as if it were face to face with itself. A fictive bodily contact with phenomena aids this anti-intel- lectualism. The pride in controlling phenomena in their undisfigured state bases itself inexplicitly on a certain judgmental claim: that the world is divided up into thingly pieces through an unraveling thought-process, not through the structure of society. Still-in accord with the then reigning ! ules of the trade of philosophy
-there is some talk of analysis; but this trade would already prefer to do no more analyzing.
The central chapter of Sein und Zeit treats "Da- sein's possibility of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards- Death. " 124 The question is raised-merely in a rhetor- ical fashion, as we can see at once-"whether this entity, as something existfng, can ever become acces-
124. Ibid. , p. 278. 144
sible in its Being-a-whole. " 125 It is obvious that a "pos- sibility of this entity's Being-a-whole" 126 could contra- dict the self-preservation which has been ontologized into "care. " Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as "that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole," 127 wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Da- sein-a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. We can anticipate, as immanent in Hei- degger, what he later announces with so much aplomb : that the fact of mortality does not a priori exclude the possibility that man's life should round itself out to a whole, as in the Biblical and epic conception. Hei- degger may have been forced to the effort to ground existential wholeness by the undeniable fact that the life of individuals today does without wholeness. 128 Wholeness is supposed to survive despite historical experience. For this purpose the whole-being of the eixstent, toward which Heidegger's theory is heading -and out of which "concern" emerges in the jargon-
the whole-being is distinguished, in the approved man- ner, from the merely cumulatively existent, "for which anything is still outstanding. " 129 The latter is said to have "the same kind of Being as those which are ready- to-hand"; 130 to it is contrasted the totality raised into
125. Ibid. , p. 279.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Cf. the introduction to Benjamin, Schriften I, p. xxii. 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 286.
130. Ibid.
145
an existential wholeness apart from the empirically individual life.
The togetherness of an entity of the kind which Dasein is "in running its course" until that "course" has been completed, is not constituted by a "continuing" piec- ing-on of entities which, somehow and somewhere, are ready-to-hand already in their own right. That Dasein should be together only when its "not-yet" has been filled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer. Any Dasein always exists in just such a manner that its "not-yet" belongs to it. l3l
That only applies to the extent that mortality is already thought together with the concept of Dasein- to the extent, that is, that Heidegger's philosophy is presupposed. For the ontologist, whole-being cannot be the unity of the whole content of real life but, qualita- tively, must be a third thing; and thus unity will not be sought in life as something harmonious, articulated, and continuous in itself, but will be sought at that point which delimits life and annihilates it, along with its wholeness. As a nonexistent, or at least as an ex- istent sui generis, outside life, this point is once again ontological. "But this lack-of-togetherness which be- longs to such a mode of togetherness-this being- missing as still-outstanding-cannot by any means de- fine ontologically that 'not-yet' which belongs to Dasein
as its possible death. Dasein does not have all the kind of Being of something ready-to-hand-within-the world. " 132 Removed from facticity, death becomes the ontological foundation of totality. Thus it becomes a
131. Ibid. , p. 287? I32. Ibid. , pp. 286 ff.
? meaning-gIVIng element in the midst of that frag- mentation which, according to ontological topography, characterizes the atomized consciousness of the late industrial age. This is done according to a habit of thinking, unquestioned by Heidegger, which imme- diately equates a structural whole with its own mean- ing-even if it were the negation of all meaning. Thus death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being. 133 Insofar as death is the ontological constituent of Dasein, death alone can
give existence the dignity of totality : "death as the end of Dasein, is Dasein's ownmost possibility-non-rela- tional, certain and as such indefinite, not to be out- stripped. " 131 Thus Heidegger gives a negative answer to his own starting question; the question which is only posed in order to be refuted :
So if one has given an ontologically inappropriate Inter- pretation of Dasein's "not-yet" as something still out- standing, any formal inference from this to Dasein's lack of totality will not be correct. The phenomenon of the "not-yet" has been taken over from the "ahead-of- itself'; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of cm existent Being-a-whole; indeed this "ahead-of-itself" is what first of all makes such a Being- towards-the-end possible. The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of us is, is a correct one if care, as Dasein's basic state, is "con- nected" with death-the uttennost possibility for that
entity. " 135
I33. Cf. above pp. I42 if.
I34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. I35. Ibid.
? ? 147
Ontologically, existence becomes a totality by means of death, which disrupts Dasein ontically. Death, how- ever, is authentic because it is removed from the They, which in turn is justified by the fact that there cannot be a proxy in death. Heidegger criticizes all thinkable real attitudes toward death as manifestations of the They. For, according to his own verdict, only the They speak of "death as a regularly occurring state of af- fairs. " 136 Thus he singles out his authentic death as something that is extremely real and at the same time beyond all facticity. Since there cannot be a proxy in death it becomes as unconceptual as the pure Diesda (haecceitas). Its concept would precede it and would become its representative, as is the case in the relation of any concept to that which is its content. In the same breath, however, Heidegger slanders facticity, which alone allows him to speak of the impossibility of hav- ing a proxy in death. The reason for this lies in the fact that death as a general concept designates the death of all and not of each individual one. Death as event, factual death indeed, is not to be the authentic death. Thus ontological death is not all that terrible.
In the publicness with which we are with one an- other in our everyday manner, death is "known" as a mishap which is constantly occurring-a "case of death. " Someone or other "dies," be he neighbour or stranger [Niichste oder Fernerstehendel . People who are no acquaintances of ours are "dying" daily and hourly. "Death" is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the in- conspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered
136. Ibid. , p. 297.
? ? ? in an everyday fashion. The "they" has already stowed away . . . an interpretation for this event. It talks of it . . . expressly or else in a way which is mostly in- hibited, as if to say, "One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us. " 137
In his eagerness to distinguish between death as an event and death as something authentic, Heidegger does not turn his back on sophisms.
The analysis of the phrase "one dies" reveals un- ambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to every- day Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for one- self, and is therefore no threat. The expression "one dies" spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the "they. " In Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that "one dies," because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that "in no case is it I myself," for this "one" is the "nobody.
