No More Learning

physics is on the most fundamental level a change in the self and its so-called substance. It is the liquidation of what the old metaphysics
.
". sought to encompass by a rational doctrine of the soul as something
) existing in itself. Brecht has characterized this experience, though in a very,uncertain and ambiguous way, with his formula: 'A man's a man . 7 I would just point out (but will not be able to go into this in
detail in these lectures) that it is here, in the question of the liquidation
?
? ?
108 LECTURE FOURTEEN
of the self or the ego, in the question of depersonalization, that the
most unfathomable problems of metaphysics are concealed; for this ego itself, as the incarnated principle of self-preservation, is involved in the context of social guilt right to its innermost core. And in its social liquidation today the self is only paying the price for what it once did by positing itself; repaying the debt of its guilt. This is a horizon of metaphysical speculation that I can only touch on here,
since one cannot speak at all seriously about these things without knowing at least whether the concept of the person itself, into which,
for so many - for example, Martin Buber, who died recently - the metaphysical substance has withdrawn and concentrated itself, is not precisely the node which needs to be removed in order to liberate that which might be different in human beings. One should not, therefore regard the liquidation of the ego that we are witnessing today as absolutely evil and negative, since to do so would probably be to make into the principle of good and bad something which itself is entangled in evil, and which bears within it an historical dynamic which prevents it from being hypostatized. For people chained to the blind principle of self-preservation under the prevailing social condi- tions of production, however, this liquidation of the ego is what is most to be feared. And in the present situation, in order to recognize
the dialectic between the ego and its disintegration that I have just touched upon, or to gain any insight into present conditions, what is called for is precisely that unyielding and unerring strength of the ego in face of the predominant tendency which is obstructed by the historical tendency and which is realized in fewer and fewer people now. What meets its end in the camps, therefore, is really no longer the ego or the self, but - as Horkheimer and I called it almost a generation ago in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment8 - only the specimen; it is, almost as in vivisection, only the individual entity reducible to the body or, as Brecht put it/ the torturable entity, which can be happy if it has time to escape that fate by suicide. One might say, therefore,
that genocide, the eradication of humanity, and the concentration of people in a totality in which everything is subsumed under the prin- ciple of self-preservation, are the same thing; indeed, that genocide is absolute integration. One might say that the pure identity of all people with their concept is nothing other than their death - an idea which, most surprisingly and remarkably, though with a quite differ- ent, reactionary accent, is anticipated in the theory in the Phenom- enology of Spirit by which Hegel equates absolute freedom with death. 1O I do not need to engage polemically with the denunciation of the French Revolution which Hegel had in mind at that point; but it is the case that the early Hegel, with his unparalleled speculative
? ? ? LECTURE FOURTEEN
109
? power, had an inkling of the fact that absolute self-assertion and the absolute negation of all that lives, and thus, finally, genocide, are the same thing, at a time - more than one hundred and fifty years ago - when nothing of that kind was foreseeable within the actual his- torical perspective. In this connection, a formulation - reported by Kogon in his book on the '5S state' - which was said to have been used
by SS henchmen against earnest Bible scholars moments before their end, made an indelible impression on me. They are said to have told them: 'Tomorrow you shall wind from this chimney as smoke to the heavens. ,11 That is no doubt the most exact formulation of the satanic perversion of the metaphysical idea and of the substance of metaphysics itself that we are forced to witness today.
When I said that these experiences affect everyone, and not only the victims or those who narrowly escaped them, I did not mean only that the experiences I have tried to characterize are of such terrible violence that no one whom they have touched, even from a distance,
so to speak, can ever escape them - as Amery says very convincingly in his essay that no one who has once been tortured can ever forget it again, even for a moment. 12 By saying that I also referred to something objective, and, again, my intention in pointing this out is that you should not simply equate the things I am speaking of today with the subjectivity of the person who experiences them. A situation has been reached today, in the present form of the organization of work in conjunction with the maintenance of the existing relations of produc- tion, in which every person is absolutely fungible or replaceable, even under conditions of formal freedom. This situation gives rise to a
feeling of the superfluity and, if you like, the insignificance of each of us in relation to the whole. That is the reason, located in the objective development of society, for the presence of the feeling I have referred to, even under conditions of formal freedom. I am trying, inadequately as ever, to express these changes for you today, because I have the feeling that to speak of metaphysics without taking account of these
things would really be nothing but empty verbiage. In my view, these experiences have such deep objective reasons that they are actually untouched even by political forms of rule, that is, by the difference between formal democracy on the one hand and totalitarian control on the other. That, at least, is how matters have appeared up to now. But we must also be well aware that, just because we live under the universal principle of profit and thus of self-preservation, the individual has nothing more to lose than himself and his life. At the same time -
as Sartre has shown in his doctrine of the absurdity of existence - the individual's life, though it is all he has, has become, objectively, abso- lutely unimportant. Yet what he must know to be meaningless is forced
. I
?
? ?
110 LECTURE FOURTEEN
? on him as the meaning of his life; indeed, a life which is really no more than the means to the end of his self-preservation is, by that very fact, bewitched and fetishized as an end. And in this antinomy - on the one hand the debasement of the individual, of the self, to something insignificant, his liquidation, and on the other, his being thrown back on the fact that he no longer has anything but this atomized self which lives our life - in this contradiction lies the horror of the
development which I regard it as my duty to present to you today.
I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry,13 and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote
those words. I did not anticipate it because it is in the nature of philosophy - and everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical themes - that noth- ing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. It is a misunderstanding of philosophy, resulting from its growing closeness to all-powerful sci- entific tendencies, to take such a statement at face value and say: 'He wrote that after Auschwitz one cannot write any more poems; so either one really cannot write them, and would be a rogue or a cold-hearted person if one did write them, or he is wrong, and has said something which should not be said. ' Well, I would say that philosophical re- flection really consists precisely in the gap, or, in Kantian terms, in the vibration, between these two otherwise so flatly opposed possib- ilities. I would readily concede that, just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not write poems - by which I meant to point to the hol-
lowness of the resurrected culture of that time - it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel's statement in his Aesthetics14 that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do not
claim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do so since my own impulses in this antinomy are precisely on the side of art, which I am mistakenly accused of wishing to suppress. Eastern-zone newspapers even said I had declared my opposition to art and thereby adopted the standpoint of barbarism. Yet one must ask a further question, and this is a metaphysical question, although it has its basis in the total suspension of metaphysics. It is, in fact, curious how all questions which negate and evade metaphysics take on, pre- cisely thereby, a curiously metaphysical character. It is the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. This question has appeared to me, for example, in the recurring dreams which plague me, in which I have the feeling that I am no longer really alive, but am just the emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz. Well, the bleaters
? LECTURE FOURTEEN 111
? ? of connivance soon turned this into the argument that it was high time for anyone who thought as I did to do away with himself as well - to which I can only respond that I am sure those gentlemen would like nothing better. But as long as I can express what I am trying to express, and as long as I believe I am finding words for what otherwise would find none, I shall not, unless under extreme compulsion, yield to that hope, that wish. Nevertheless, something said in one of the most important plays by Sartre, which for that reason is hardly ever played in Germany, deserves to be taken immensely seriously as a metaphysical question. It is said by a young resistance fighter who is
subjected to torture, who asks whether or why one should live in a world in which one is beaten until one's bones are smashed. 15 Since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this question
cannot be evaded. And I would think that any thought which is not measured by this standard, which does not assimilate it theoretically, simply pushes aside at the outset that which thought should address
- so that it really cannot be called a thought at all.
? ?
?
LECTURE FIFTEEN
20July 1965
? ? I do not wish to recapitulate or sum up what I said in the last lecture, but would remind you that we arrived at the idea that the question whether it is still possible to live is the form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently today. Without being a follower of Spengler one might well compare this situation to that of the philosophy of late antiquity, in which, in response to the same question, people fell back on expedients such as ataraxy, that is, the deadening of all affects, just to be capable of living at all. I cannot undertake a critique of Stoicism here. There is undoubtedly much which impels us towards the Stoic standpoint today, as appears very clearly in some motifs of Heidegger, especially in his early work. But I would say that even this standpoint, although it emphatically embraces the idea of the freedom of the individual, nevertheless has a moment of narrow-mindedness in the sense that it renders absolute the entrapment of human beings by the totality, and thus sees no other possibility than to submit. The possibility of seeing through this situation as a context of guilt con-
cealed through blinding, and thus of breaking through it, did not occur to that entire philosophy. Stoicism did, it is true, conceive for the first time the idea of the all-encompassing context of guilt, but it did not discern the moment of necessary illusion in that context - and that, I would say, is the small advantage that we, with our social and philosophical knowledge, enjoy over the Stoic position. It should be said, at any rate, that the guilt in which one is enmeshed almost by the mere fact of continuing to live can hardly be reconciled any longer with life itself. Unless one makes oneself wholly insensitive one can
LECTURE FIFTEEN 113
? hardly escape the feeling - and by feeling I mean experience which is not confined to the emotional sphere - that just by continuing to live one is taking away that possibility from someone else, to whom life has been denied; that one is stealing that person's life. Similarly, a society which in its absurd present form has rendered not work, but people superfluous, predetermines, in a sense, a statistical percentage of people of whom it must divest itself in order to continue to live in its bad, existing form. And if one does live on, one has, in a sense,
been statistically lucky at the expense of those who have fallen victim to the mechanism of annihilation and, one must fear, will still fall victim to it. Guilt reproduces itself in each of us - and what I am saying is addressed to us as subjects - since we cannot possibly remain fully conscious of this connection at every moment of our waking lives. If we - each of us sitting here - knew at every moment what has happened and to what concatenations we owe our own existence,
and how our own existence is interwoven with calamity, even if we have done nothing wrong, simply by having neglected, through fear, to help other people at a crucial moment, for example - a situation very familiar to me from the time of the Third Reich - if one were fully aware of all these things at every moment, one would really be unable to live. One is pushed, as it were, into forgetfulness, which is already a form of guilt. By failing to be aware at every moment of what threatens and what has happened, one also contributes to it; one resists it too little; and it can be repeated and reinstated at any moment. ;, It is not my style to justify philosophy just because it is my job, if bne may put it so paradoxically. I am aware, heaven knows, how
dubious it is to occupy oneself with philosophy in a world like the one in which we live. But - since one always seeks justification for what one does - there is, perhaps, a certain justification for occupying oneself with philosophy in that, as the one form of knowledge which
has not yet been departmentalized, split into branches, reified, it seems to me to represent the only chance, within the boundaries of this departmentalized world, of making good at least a part of what, as I have tried to explain to you, is otherwise denied. If one is not oneself capable at each moment of identification with the victims, and of
alert awareness and remembrance, philosophy, in the necessary forms of its own reification, is perhaps the only form of consciousness which, by seeing through these matters and making them conscious in a more objective form, can at least do something, a small part of that which we are unable to do. And it must be admitted that to do this in a
universal way would by far overtax the strength of any individual person. On the other hand, it must be said - when circling around the problems of metaphysics in this connection, as I am doing now - that
? 114 LECTURE FIFTEEN
?
? the world in which we live arouses a kind of mistrust towards philo- sophy from a different point of view from the one I have set out up to now. The fact is that the deeper philosophy grows and the further
it is removed from the surface of the merely existent, the harder it becomes to free oneself of the feeling that, through its depth and remoteness from mere existence, philosophy is also growing remote from the way things really and actually are, comment c'est, as Beckett puts it. 1 One has the feeling that the depth of philosophical reflection, which is necessary as a resistance to all the illusion with which reified consciousness surrounds us, at the same time leads away from the truth, since one sometimes suspects that this same existence which it is the inalienable impulse of philosophy to penetrate and go beyond, is the only thing which exists and is worth reflecting upon at all. The considerations concerned with the crisis of the concept and of mean- ing, and the impossibility of restoring meaning to existence, which I set out in the last lectures, point in exactly this direction. And I believe that you need only to apply these considerations to the ques- tion I am presenting to you at this moment and you will quite easily see the problem that, on the one hand, any construction of a mean- ing, however constituted, is forbidden to us, but that, on the other, the task of philosophy is precisely to understand, and not simply to reflect, what happens to be, or to copy it, to use Kant's expression. This has placed philosophy in a true quandary. One sometimes has the feeling that the prevalent positivist science is right in capturing only the most superficial and trivial and thus the most external rela- tionships with its classifying procedures, whereas essence, once dis- closed, aims at depth. As a metaphysical thinker, that is, someone who cannot do otherwise than seek to understand, one is sometimes overcome by the eerie suspicion that understanding itself is an illu-
sion that one ought to be rid of, and that precisely the superficial
mind which merely registers facts, which one resists with every fibre
of one's being, may in the end be right. One must, as it were, include
common sense and human triviality in metaphysical meaning; one
must incorporate it in speculation as the principle which ensures that
the world merely is as it is and not otherwise, if the depth of specula-
tion is not to be false, that is, a depth which confers an illusory ?
meanmg.
On the other hand, however, the joy of thought, which motivates
us to think on metaphysical matters in the first place and to raise the questions I have discussed in the course of these lectures, is simply the joy of elevation, the joy of rising beyond what merely is. And one of the most painful thoughts which can afflict someone who engages in philosophy is that, in giving way to this joy of philosophizing - in
? LECTURE FIFTEEN
115
? refusing to be bargained out of truth by mere being - one is being lured into a demonic situation by this very truth. If the pedestrian replacement of knowledge by the mere registering, ordering and summarizing of facts were to have the last word against the elevation of thought, truth itself would really be a chimera, and there would be
no truth, for truth would be no more than the practicable summarizing and arranging of the merely existent. The suspicion I am expressing here and which, I would say, is an indispensable moment of philo- sophical speculation, is that trivial, positivist awareness may today be closer to the adaequatio rei atque intellectus than sublime conscious- ness. I believe that the only way out of this dilemma would be to reflect on the idea of truth itself, and to grasp truth, not as an adaequatio, not as a mere measuring against factual circumstances, but as a procedure adopted towards a being of a quite different nature and dimension, and tied to a quite different procedure of consciousness than mere registration. But in face of this pedestrian or positivist motif that mind really consists in nothing other than counting the feet of the millipede - and I can say that everything I think is just one single resistance to that conception of mind - the impulse opposed to it can probably only survive by adopting the principle: renounce, that you may gain. That is to say, one will not survive by preserving some so-called higher spheres, or what I would prefer to call nature reserves, which reflection is not allowed to touch, but by pushing the pro-
cess of de-mythologizing, or enlightenment, to the extreme. Only in this, if at all, is there any hope that the philosopher, through his self- reflection, will not end by consummating triviality, the consumma- tion of which is absolute horror. For no matter how one may view the works of Hannah Arendt, and I take an extremely critical view of them, she is undoubtedly right in the identification of evil with triviality. 2 But I would put it the other way round; I would not say that evil is trivial, but that triviality is evil - triviality, that is, as the form of con- sciousness and mind which adapts itself to the world as it is, which
obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil. I would say, therefore, that if metaphysical thinking today is to have any chance, and is not to degenerate into claptrap about a 'new protectedness' [neue Geborgenheitp and such- like nonsense, it will have to cease being apologetic and pointing to something one can hold onto and never lose, and think against itself. And that means that it must measure itself against the ultimate, the
absolutely unthinkable, to have any right to be a thinking at all. Ladies and Gentlemen, in the last lecture I spoke about Auschwitz and said that because of the things which happened there - for which I used only the name Auschwitz, although, of course that name stands
?
?
116
LECTURE FIFTEEN
? for something unthinkable beyond the unthinkable, namely, a whole historical phase - metaphysics has been changed in its innermost motifs. I could, if you like, give this a moral-philosophical twist and say that Hitler has placed a new imperative on us: that, quite simply, Auschwitz should not be repeated and that nothing like it should ever exist again. It is impossible to found this imperative on logic - it has that in common with the Kantian imperative. When Kant states that his own imperative is simply given, that assertion doubtless con- tains all kinds of grimly authoritarian and irrationalist elements, but
also - as I tried to explain to you in my lectures last semester4 - an awareness that the sphere of right action does not coincide with mere rationality, that it has an 'addendum'. s I believe that an attempt to state as a general law why Auschwitz or the atom bomb or all those things which belong together here should not be repeated would have something utterly feeble about it because it would transfer into the sphere of rationality, which is ultimately the secondary sphere of mind, the right to a jurisdiction which it can only usurp. It is also the case - and this does belong within that sphere - that as soon as one attempts to apply logic here one is drawn into an insoluble dialectic.
Consider one of the dreadful semi-colonial wars which are so charac- teristic of our time, in which one party - and one can always toss a coin to decide which one it is - tortures and commits dreadful atrocit- ies, so that the other is also forced to torture, as it claims, to prevent its opponent from doing so. I do not wish to explore the validity or otherwise of such considerations, but just to say that as soon as one attempts to provide a logical foundation for a proposition such as that one should not torture, one becomes embroiled in a bad infinity;
and probably would even get the worst of the logical argument, whereas the truth in this proposition is precisely what falls outside such a dialectic. And I do not think you will misunderstand this statement as advocating a form of irrationalism or a belief in some natural law directly accessible to intuition. All that is far from my intention. What I wish to point out is this practical moment, which does not coincide with knowledge but is constitutive of moral philosophy. The extra-logical element to which I am appealing - to make this quite clear and to rule out any irrationalism - is really that which is conjured away by philosophy and rationalism. But what they conjure away is not irrational moments or values, as is claimed, but the converse: it is
quite simply the moment of aversion to the inflicting of physical pain on what Brecht once called the torturable bodl of any person.
If I say to you that the true basis of morality is to be found in bodily feeling, in identification with unbearable pain, I am showing you from a different side something which I earlier tried to indicate
? LECTURE FIFTEEN 117
? in a far more abstract form. It is that morality, that which can be called moral, i. e. the demand for right living, lives on in openly materialist motifs. The metaphysical principle of the injunction that 'Thou shalt not inflict pain' - and this injunction is a metaphysical principle point- ing beyond mere facticity - can find its j ustification only in the recourse to material reality, to corporeal, physical reality, and not to its opposite pole, the pure idea. Metaphysics, I say, has slipped into material existence. Precisely this transition of metaphysical questions and, if I might state it so grandly, of metaphysics itself to the stratum of the material, is what is repressed by the conniving consciousness, the official yes-saying of whatever ilk. As a child, I believe, one still knows something about this stratum - with the dim knowledge chil-
dren have of such things. It is the zone which later materialized liter- ally in the concentration camps; as a child one had an inkling of it in subliminal experiences - as when the dog-catcher's van drove by, or suchlike things: one knew that that was the most important thing of all, that was what really mattered, the zone of the carcass and the knacker. And this unconscious knowledge - that that was the most important thing to know - is, no doubt, hardly less significant than infantile sexuality, which, as Freud has demonstrated, is extremely closely related to this sphere and has a very great deal to do with it. I would say that this feeling that the most wretched physical existence, as it confronts us in these phenomena, is connected to the highest interests of humanity, has hardly been thought through properly up
to now, but has been only skirted by thought. I believe the education we undergo as students is perhaps the only place where we find out anything about these matters - in anatomy in the study of medicine. And the terrible excitement which that zone arouses in students in their first semester - all this seems to point to the fact that that is where the truth is hidden, and that the most important thing of all is to divest ourselves of the civilizing mechanisms which, again and
again, blind us to that sphere. It is almost as if philosophy - and most of all the great, deep, constructive philosophy - obeyed a single im- pulse: to get away from the place of carrion, stench and putrefaction. And just because of this distance, which gains its depth from that most wretched place, philosophy is no doubt in perennial danger of itself becoming something just as thin, untrue and wretched. I would remark in passing that the reflections I am presenting to you, however fragmentary they may be, may perhaps help you to understand why the dramas of Beckett, which, as you know,7 seem to me to be the
only truly relevant metaphysical productions since the war, constantly end up in this sphere. And the cheap jibe that Beckett can never get away from urns, refuse bins and sand-heaps in which people vegetate
? ? ?
118 LECTURE FIFTEEN
? between life and death - as they actually vegetated in the concentra- tion camps - this jibe seems to me just a desperate attempt to fend off the knowledge that these are exactly the things which matter.
If one realizes that everything we call culture consists in the sup- pression of nature and any uncontrolled traces of nature, then what this culture finds most unbearable are those places where it is not quite
able to control natural manifestations, where they intrude persistently into its own domain, as in the case of the dark stratum I just spoke about. It might be said that culture banishes stench because it itself stinks - which Brecht once formulated in the truly magnificent and inspired statement that humanity up to now had built itself an im- mense palace of dogshit. 8 I believe that culture's squalid and guilty suppression of nature - a suppression which is itself a wrongly and blindly natural tendency of human beings - is the reason why people refuse to admit that dark sphere. And if one really wants to cure philosophy of its ideological, dissembling character, which has reached an almost unendurable level today, then this is probably the n'nro<; vOYj'To<;, the point of recognition, where that transformation should be achieved. If what I have tried to explain - in extreme terms - about the concept of culture is true, and if it is the case that philosophy's only raison d'etre today is to gain access to the unsayable, then it can be said that Auschwitz and the world of Auschwitz have made clear something which was not a surprise to those who were not positivists
but had a deep, speculative turn of mind: that culture has failed to its very core. This was also stated by Marx in the magnificent formula- tions in his drafts for Capital which he later suppressed, in which he spoke of the narrow-mindedness of all culture up to that time. 9 The
same idea was, of course, expressed by Nietzsche who, because his attention was fixated on the cultural superstructure, peered more deeply into it than any other. The reason can be seen most clearly in the fact that philosophy, art and rational science have not really impinged on human beings, to whom they are necessarily addressed as their ideal subject. I recall a visit to Bamberg, when the question was raised whether the spectacle of the indescribably beautiful and intact town, partly medieval and partly Baroque, had had even a slightly beneficial influence on the people living there. If I only mention
the word 'Bamberg', I think the question answers itself. tO
But when I speak of culture, more is at stake than its failure in relation to human beings, for the autonomy which culture has acquired cannot be cancelled simply by demanding that it should now address itself to human beings, that it should be something for them or give something to them. Culture, especially in its great manifestations, is
? not some kind of social, pedagogical institution, but has its truth - if
LECTURE FIFTEEN
119
? ? it has any - only within itself. And it can only fulfil what might be its meaning for human beings by not thinking of them but by being purely and consistently formed within itself. However, such is the blindness of the world's course that any such tendency is generally held against culture as a lack of love, a failure to adapt in the specific way people require. But, leaving that aside, I believe that untruth is also lodged in the autonomous zones of mind. And if I give such promin- ence to what can be criticized in the products of the objective mind, in a way which may make some of you uncomfortable, I do so because I believe it essential, in liberating human beings from the veil of ideology, to make them aware of the moment of untruth precisely where it mistakes itself for truth, and mindlessness for mind. We see this perhaps most clearly in the area which, many years ago, directly after my return from America, I called the resurrected culture,l1 a culture which was rehashing its traditional values of truth, beauty and goodness as if nothing had happened. For this whole sphere of resurrected culture is itself precisely the refuse, the rubbish from which, as I said earlier, culture is trying to escape. This resurrected culture resembles the ruins it has cleared away; having removed them it then reinstalled itself on them in the wretchedly makeshift way which is symbolically revealed by the outward image of our rebuilt cities. This culture has now become wholly the ideology which, through the division between mental and physical work, it has always partly been. In face of this, one is caught in an antinomy; for anyone who pleads for the preservation of this culture makes himself an accomplice of its
untruth and of ideological illusion in general; but whoever does not do so and demands the creation of a tabula rasa, directly promotes the barbarism over which culture had elevated itself and which the mediations of culture had actually moderated. Not even silence leads out of this circle, since he who keeps silent, who says nothing at all - and, heaven knows, the temptation to do that is strong enough - not only attests to his incapacity to say what needs to be said, but inter- prets this subjective incapacity as permitting a serene detachment with regard to objective truth. The abolition of culture as perpetrated in the eastern bloc, that is, culture's transformation into a mere in- strument of power, only combats like with like, since culture has always been enmeshed with power. But this abolition is not, itself,
better than culture, but even worse, since it strangles even the element of promise and hope which culture had contained and which went beyond the ever-sameness of control, and turns it back into direct oppression - while trying to convince people that this state of direct oppression is freedom. In pointing to this cultural and philosophical antinomy, therefore, I believe I have also expressed a political one.
LECTURE SIXTEEN
22 July 1965
? ? I am afraid you may be thinkingl that I have adjourned the discussion of metaphysical subjects by enquiring into the possibility of saying anything about those subjects. But that enquiry has not been into a particular subject, of whatever kind, as happens in the current idealist theories, but into culture itself. 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
a
? LECTURE SIXTEEN
121
? 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
? ?
122 LECTURE SIXTEEN
? ? 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
? ? LECTURE S IXTEEN
123
? ? ? ,
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
?
124
LECTURE SIXTEEN
? 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
? ? ? LECTURE S IXTEEN 125
? 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
?
?
126
LECTURE S IXTEEN
? 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
? ? ? ? ,'
LECTURE SIXTEEN 127
? 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
?
? 128 LECTURE SIXTEEN
? 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.
? ? ? ? LECTURE SEVENTEEN
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
?
? 130
LECTURE SEVENTEEN
? 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
? ? LECTURE SEVENTEEN
131
? 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
? ?
?
132
LECTURE SEVENTEEN
? 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
? ? ? LECTURE SEVENTEEN 133
? 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
? ? ?
?
134 LECTURE SEVENTEEN
? 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.