No More Learning

We should not be persuaded, however, that it has ceased to exist; and we come across it, indeed we positively collide with it, when we meet these infinitely complex and difficult speculat- ive ideas in their elementary form in Aristotle. For in his case we are obliged to ask the question which must be addressed to all idealism: what does mind, or thinking, or knowledge really amount to, if it oilly thinks itself? Does this not make thought itself, and thus the absolute
which thought is supposed to be, one single, immense tautology? This moment recurs later, as I said, in idealism; but in Aristotle it is open to view in all its crassness. And the god who actually thinks
nothing but himself is not wholly unlike the navel-gazer we can see . downstairs in this building, in the form of the statue of the so-called sage,l who gives us the feeling that he represents being and reflects on being; and that what being says to him is only: being, being, being. I should say in fairness that this joke is not my own, but goes back to an admittedly somewhat different formulation of Hegel's. In a polemic
against Jacobi he remarked that the thought which immersed itself in the concept of being reminded him of the Tibetan rite of the prayer- wheel, in which the worshippers constantly say nothing but 'om', 'om', 'om'. 2 I don't wish to be disrespectful towards Aristotle, but if for a moment one steps outside the intellectual edifice - I almost said, the cathedral - which is his thought, such ideas do enter one's mind. In his work this notion is expressed in the absolutely idealist formulation that the thinking of god - Hegel would say: the thinking of the world
spirit - is a thinking of thinking or, to use the supreme formulation
of this principle in Aristotle: the v6'Y)at? VO? at:w? , the thinking of
thinking. 3 Now the scientist in Aristotle was clearly not too comfort-
able on this summit of his thought, and he justified the idea of the
v6'Y)at? vo? at:w? by saying that the beatitude of god lay in his self-
contemplation - a motif which became crucial to the whole of medi-
eval theology. Ideas such as that human beings are created as finite
and sinful creatures because God wants to be loved in freedom, for his
own sake as the absolute, by finite and fallible beings, are trans-
parently related to this motif. But this interpretation of divine thought
as v6'Y)at? vo? aEw? is so extraordinarily fertile because - and this is
perhaps still more important than the conception of the absolute it
contains - it amounts to something like a guide to the beatific life or
a guide to reason, since, in keeping with the Aristotelian principles of
analogy and teleology, the human mind should approximate itself to
the divine spirit as closely as it possibly can. Now, this idea already
contains the whole programme of philosophy as self-reflection. One
might almost say that since Aristotle philosophy in general has been the implementation of just this v6YJat? vo? aEw? that he ascribes to the
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,
? divine principle as the primal image of all philosophy. One might embark here, incidentally, on some reflections along the lines of Feuerbachian enlightenment, to the effect that the idea that the divin- ity derives happiness from self-contemplation contains a quite imper- missible anthropomorphism - moreover, a narcissistic and thus a psychological anthropomorphism. Following up Feuerbach's motif, one might argue that the force of egoism, the stunting of human beings which prevents them from loving and makes them capable of loving only themselves - one might argue that this narcissistic tendency, this diversion of the capacity of love onto the self, is here projected onto the divinity in order to endow it with absolute metaphysical justifica- tion, whereas one might ask what sort of a divinity it is which, instead of loving its creatures, loves only itself. But great minds have not been much troubled by this for the past few thousand years.
All the same, this idea does contain a moment which is very im- portant for the concept of philosophy - the model of self-reflection. If divine thought is regarded as the thinking of thinking, then precisely the intentio obliqua which does not appear as such in Aristotle's thought - that the essential principle of philosophy does not lie in its thinking about objects or about what is different from itself, but in reflecting on itself - is anticipated as a metaphysical principle. 4 To that extent one might say that this intentio obliqua, which is
only carried out much later in the history of philosophy, is already prefigured dialectically, in intentione recta, in this definition of the absolute as the thinking of its own thought. Moreover, for the pro- fessor of physics which Aristotle also was, this metaphysics also yielded an immediate profit - if you will once more permit me such a slovenly manner of speech. The remarkable thing is that this im- mense sublimation of the divine spirit, which really amounts to nothing
other than its self-reflection, represents a kind of unburdening of the empirical world. In my Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, using the example of Husserl's philosophy, which takes up many motifs from antiquity, I tried to characterize this phenomenon as the sacrifice of the empirical. 5 That is to say that through this very contentment with
his own self-contemplation, God abandons the world. In Aristotle's Metaphysics this abandonment is expressed in the doctrine that al- though all creation, all matter, all finitude moves towards the absolute principle, that principle does not act directly on the world, does not go outside itself. God does not turn the world towards himself; rather, teleology is brought about by the mere existence of god, as a kind of
structurally logical hierarchy. This marks a clear boundary between Aristotle's thought and theology, in that the former is turned towards the world, towards existence. If I might give you a further perspective
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? on the history of metaphysics: you will not find it hard to recognize this motif, that the unmoved mover remains outside movement, in the much later theory of deism, which amounted to an attempt to reconcile the old theological heritage with the scientific Enlightenment. However, although, for Aristotle, the highest good is also the highest purpose, towards which everything strives and everything moves, this
is only the case within the context of his hierarchical thinking, which distinguishes various gradations of purpose - and not in the sense of a divine intervention or influence.
I would remark in passing that the whole of philosophy abounds with formulations such as that the highest good is at the same time the highest purpose. If you open any book on any metaphysical philosopher you will always - especially when you get towards the conclusion - hear such things as: the highest purpose is also the highest good, or: perfect beauty is also perfect truth, or: in the absolute,
existence and essence prove to be the same; and so forth. For the moment I would only urge you, when you come across such general metaphysical equations in your studies of the history of philosophy, to be slightly on guard, and to derive from them a certain mistrust of metaphysics. For if philosophy really is the capacity for differentiation, the ability to distinguish in thought, instead of reducing everything to an abstract formula, then, to be sure, one would expect philosophy to relate its highest categories to one another and not leave them isolated;
but if they are all to be one, that would give rise to something like the night for which Hegel took Schelling to task - the night in which all cats are grey. 6 It is a kind of evidence against the substantiality of ontology - against the claim that ontology really does have access to the essences it purports to isolate - that it is never able to sustain these essences separately, but in the end posits them all as one, with- out being able to maintain their separateness within this oneness.
One of the few thinkers of the rationalist or metaphysical type who noticed this, incidentally, was Lessing, who, as far as I know, was the
first representative of that tradition to oppose, and polemically attack, this notion of oneness, this undifferentiated identity of the highest principles. ? Traditional philosophy gives us serious grounds to mistrust it, I believe, whenever it resolves everything into one, into identity, in a kind of grand finale, since it thereby forgoes the very concreteness which its results ought to have.
And, unless I am mistaken, it was not the least of Hegel's motives in developing his dialectic that he attempted both to retain an onto- logical basic structure and to do justic to differences - although, in the end, everything turns out to be the same in his philosophy too. In my opinion it is very difficult to distinguish the postulation of absolute
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? identity from actual uniformity, indeed monotony, in which nothing differs from anything else - an all-ness of thought which actually says nothing at all. At any rate, the physicist Aristotle can credit himself with the fact that there is no creative activity of God, no intervention in the world's course in his Metaphysics. In this, through the extra- ordinary tension and sublimation of the metaphysical concept in his thought, he is entirely a philosopher of the Hellenist enlightenment. And one almost finds oneself entertaining the blasphemous idea that the Epicurean theory of the absolute detachment of the gods, who let human existence pass before them as a kind of spectacleS - a theory which appeared not long after Aristotle - is itself a Peripatetic legacy not very far removed from this conception of Aristotle's. I would point out, incidentally, that the systematic division that was made,
even in antiquity, and precisely in the Hellenistic period, between the four great schools - the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Peripatetics, Stoics and Epicureans - was itself a kind of administrative com- partmentalization. In reality, the transitions within such an epoch in which, for social reasons, certain ideas necessarily impressed them- selves on thinkers of all shades, were incomparably more fluid than this schoolroomish division might lead us to expect. Later, too, in patristic philosophy and, above all, in the transitions between ancient
and Christian philosophy, these schools were not distinguished nearly as sharply as schoolroom usage suggests. I believe that if one were to elaborate systematically the elements in Aristotle that I have just described, perhaps slightly anachronistically, as Hellenistic, the differ- ences between the two specifically Hellenistic schools, Stoicism and
: Epicureanism, would diminish. Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, with this historical reflection - no, reflection is too presumptuous a term - . with this historical note I will bring to an end what I wanted to say to
. you about Aristotle.
One could, fully in keeping with what I have sketched for you, write a history of the whole of metaphysics on the basis of Aristotle. The task would be to analyse what became of his categories - and for what reasons, whether immanent philosophical ones or others imposed from outside. Here, of course, one needs to be aware that it would be a crude and primitive approach to assume that there are, on the one hand, social modifications to thought and, on the other, something like an internal development of its categories. This brings us to a proposition relating to the history of philosophy, or a theory of intel- lectual history, that I should like to develop somewhat, although I
cannot pursue it too far. It is that social motifs - in this case the powerlessness of the individual, the retreat into private life, all the
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? moments we call Hellenistic - do not influence thought from outside, but that, in a way which is difficult to pin down and which has not been analysed in principle up to now, they impinge on the immanent
coherence of thought itself, making themselves felt in the internal argumentation of the individual philosopher. If a theoretician of intel- lectual history were to attempt to understand this highly remarkable connection, which establishes within a philosophy a logic which is in curious harmony with social experiences imposed from outside, without that philosophy having to adapt itself externally to them, that would be an extremely important task. Perhaps there is someone among you who will seriously take up this question. Using the ex- ample of a number of Aristotelian categories, I have set out for you in
paradigmatic or exemplary form (as one says today) what became of those categories. But as I have promised to hold a series of lectures on the concept and problems of metaphysics, and have neither the intention nor the time to give you an entire history of metaphysics, I cannot pursue this question further. Instead I think I should use the last lectures to express some reflections on metaphysics which are located at the opposite historical extreme: that is, reflections on meta-
physics which seem to me timely and unavoidable today. You will understand that in doing so I shall have to adopt a more hypothetical and sometimes indicative approach than in the account I have given you up to now. However, I think I can promise that you will find the ideas I shall present to you in the next lectures fully developed in my
book, of which I am beginning to get an overview. 9 But before I pass on to those questions, I should like to consider one further matter of
general principle.
Please cast your minds back to what I said earlierlO about the history
of metaphysics, a history prefigured in Aristotle, which I presented as an attempt to rescue categories which were originally theological, but to do so by means of a rational critique, that is, by reason. It could therefore be said that metaphysics is a translation of theological con- ceptions into categories of reason, that it is a conceptualization of those conceptions. This could perhaps be more fully demonstrated using Plato's doctrine of Ideas, since he was closer to theology than the much more empirical and scientific Aristotle. And if it were demonstrated that, through these mechanisms of conceptualization, conceptual thought was installed as the authority responsible for metaphysics and the absolute, that would imply that conceptual thought and the con- cept itself had become, as it were, the legal basis of metaphysics. That conclusion, that metaphysics had been turned into thinking, could also
be drawn from the thesis of the thinking of thinking, of metaphysics as the concept which had become aware of itself. Now, that is indeed
i
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99
? the case, and has been the case in almost all ontologies, and is espe-
cially so in what are called rationalist philosophies, in which you can , observe over and over again that the structure of being is declared to
, be identical to the structure of thought. Ontology as the doctrine of the basic constitutive concepts of being really means only that the " basic structures of thought are elevated to categories of being. This, : too, is a principle that was first expressed by Hegel, with a trenchancy , and radicalism that I can indicate by citing his proposition that logic , is at the same time metaphysics. ll But what I should like you to see is that this hypostasis of the pure forms of thinking as the forms of being
is already implied in the transition from theological thinking to metaphysical speculation. For by attaching metaphysics firmly to the categories of thought, thought sets itself up as the justification of metaphysics and, by claiming jurisdiction over it, implicitly asserts that it is itself metaphysics - even if it does not yet overtly admit as much. So if the question of metaphysics is raised today, I would say - and this may prepare you for the matters which are going to oc- cupy us - that the basic question in discussing metaphysics is the one concerning the legitimacy of this equation. If one thinks about meta- physics today - and we have no choice, we have lost our innocence: metaphysics can no longer be anything other than a thinking about metaphysics - this presupposes a kind of critical self-reflection of
thought, in the sense that, through such self-reflection of thought and of the pure forms of thought, one asks oneself whether thought and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute. For, overtly or latently, that is really the thesis of the whole metaphysical tradition. Per- haps it would not be immodest of me to refer in this context to the first chapter of Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, entitled 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus' (Critique of logical absolutism). 12 In it I attempt to do what I have just sketched for you, but in the oppos-
' ite direction, by posing the question of the absolute validity of the logical forms themselves, and calling that validity into question in an immanent analysis carried out from a dialectical standpoint. And if the pure forms of thought, which are manifested most consummately in pure logic, are not the absolute they understand themselves to be, the conclusion to be drawn would be that thought itself, as some- thing conditioned and enmeshed in conditionality, cannot be made into the absolute it has always claimed to be in traditional metaphys- ics. In my book I did not draw this conclusion as explicitly as I am doing now, and that is why I am bringing that text to your attention,
as a kind of transition to the matters we are about to consider.
The method I shall adopt in the ideas I am about to develop is, however, quite different. I told you that in these last lectures I would
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? like to start from extreme positions. And so I shall now consider - as far as can be done with any claim to general validity - the possible status of what might be called metaphysical experience today. What is meant by metaphysical experience you will, of course, only gather more precisely from what I am about to explain in some detail. I will not be giving away a big secret - and will perhaps just provoke a laugh - if I tell you that, for me, there seems to be no possible treatment of the question of metaphysics other than the dialectical one. Now, a
dialectical treatment cannot suppose - and I come here to the specific nature of the experience I wish to talk about - that the immutable is true and substantial while the transient is inferior and despicable, a mere mode or deception of the senses, as which it has been tirelessly denounced by philosophers since Plato. If we start from an aware-
ness that, for us, the equation of the immutable with the good, the true and the beautiful has been simply refuted, then the content of metaphysics is changed. And what I want to explain to you first is the historical compassion which prevents one from presupposing such an immutability, and thus changes the contents of metaphysics. In the light of what we have experienced in our time - and I am aware that, in the face of these experiences, the form of a lecture, and the attempt even to touch on such things in the language of philosophy and from the vantage point of a lectern, has something unseemly, ridiculous, even shameless about it (yet one cannot get away from it) - these experiences, I say, change the content of metaphysics. The mutual indifference of the temporal world and ideas, which has been asserted throughout metaphysics, can no longer be maintained. There are isolated motifs scattered in the history of ideas which hint at this. And, curiously enough, they are to be found less in the history of philo-
sophy, if you leave aside certain elements in Hegel, than in heretical theology - that is to say, in mystical speculation, which has always been essentially heretical and has always occupied a precarious posi- tion within institutional religions. I am thinking here of the mystical doctrine - which is common to the Cabbala and to Christian mysti- cism such as that of Angelus Silesius - of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence. The supposition of a radical
separation, xwpwf-t6? , between the intra-mundane realm and the transcendental, which is one of the keystones of the metaphysical tradition, is highly problematic, since it is constantly confronted with evidence showing that it has picked out its eternal values, its immutabilities, from the mutable and from experience, and has then abstracted them. And if a metaphysics were consistent, it would re-
frain from using apologetics to keep such evidence at bay. A thinking
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? which is defensive, which attempts to cling to something in the face of compelling objections, is always doomed. The only way a fruitful thinking can save itself is by following the injunction: 'Cast away, that you may gain. '
I mean by this that a metaphysics which fulfilled its own concept, a concept which (even though this may not be admitted) always consists of constellations of forms and contents, concepts and what they comprise, would have radically to assimilate the relevance ofthe
temporal to its own concept. It would have to realize that it has been separated only apparently and arbitrarily from its instrument, con- cepts, and is constantly brought back to them. I should like to say that in our time the primacy which Sartre accords to existence over being and its concept reveals an extraordinarily uncompromising awareness of this state of affairs. The only fault lies in the fact that, precisely from this precedence of existence over essence, Sartre has created a new kind of ontology, a doctrine of essences. To express it crudely in terms of the history of philosophy, he has sought to be at the same time
an extreme nominalist and a Heideggerian, two things which cannot be made to agree. But I can only indicate this briefly here. This assimila- tion of the element of content means that metaphysical experience, or the concept of metaphysics - both in one - present themselves quite differently today. And as a sign of this - the word symbol would be wretchedly inadequate, since we are concerned with the most symbolic thing of all - I will take Auschwitz. Through Auschwitz - and by that I mean not only Auschwitz but the world of torture which has con- tinued to exist after Auschwitz and of which we are receiving the
most horrifying reports from Vietnam - through all this the concept of metaphysics has been changed to its innermost core. Those who continue to engage in old-style metaphysics, without concerning themselves with what has happened, keeping it at arm's length and regarding it as beneath metaphysics, like everything merely earthly and human, thereby prove themselves inhuman. And the inhumanity which is necessarily present in such an attitude must also infect the concept
of a metaphysics which proceeds in this way. It is therefore impos- sible, I would say, to insist after Auschwitz on the presence of a posit- ive meaning or purpose in being. Here, too, though from a totally different context, I would like to say quite candidly that I am entirely
of one mind with Sartre, from whose outlook I am otherwise worlds apart. The affirmative character which metaphysics has in Aristotle, and which it first took on in Plato's teaching, has become impossible. To assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted
. within itself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and
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? goodness which philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and the infinitude of their torment. And. taking this as my reference point, I would like to reflect with you on what I would describe as the completely changed status of metaphysics.
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At the end of the last lecture I attempted to explain why temporal elements decisively affect our thinking about metaphysics, and have a bearing on metaphysical experience itself. And I should like to say to you straight away that it would be mistaken to take these comments in a purely subjective sense - as meaning that it is more difficult to have metaphysical experiences under present conditions. That would
be a complete misunderstanding of what I wish to communicate to you in words which inevitably are far too insipid. Naturally, the subjective difficulty also exists, but given the intertwinement between subjective experience and the objective in this sphere, the two cannot be separated as neatly as it might appear to a naive, unreflecting consciousness, which says that all this just depends on how one hap- pens to feel towards metaphysics today, but changes nothing at all in its objective contents. My thesis is directed against precisely this atti- tude, and you will only understand me correctly if you take what I have to say in the strong and far from innocuous sense in which it is
meant. You will have noticed from my analyses and expositions of Aristotle's Metaphysics how far this whole metaphysics is filled by the affirmative side - forgive me, something can hardly be filled by a 'side' - how fundamental the affirmative moment is to this whole conception of metaphysics. You will therefore have seen how far the
theory that, even without a divine influence, being is teleologically orientated towards the divine by its own nature - how far that implies that what is meaningful. From this Aristotle draws the conclusion - I mention this to make fully clear the metaphysical problem which
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? ? concerns me here - that matter, VA1], as that which is represented by possibility, must be endowed with some kind of purposiveness; and he argues this even despite the fact that it is in some contradiction to his own doctrine of possibility as wholly abstract and indeterminate.
In face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic bomb - all these things form a kind of coher- ence, a hellish unity - in face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, become a mock- ery; and in face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning mod- erates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose. In other words, it might be said that in view of what we have experienced - and let me say that it is also experienced by those on whom it was not directly perpetrated - there can be no one, whose organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same world as it was before. And I believe that if one observes and analyses oneself closely, one will find that the awareness of living in a world in which that is possible - is possible again and is possible for the first time - plays a quite crucial role even in one's most secret reactions.
I would say, therefore, that these experiences have a compelling universality, and that one would indeed have to be blind to the world's course if one were to wish not to have these experiences. In view of them, the assertion of a purpose or meaning which is formally em- bedded in metaphysics is transformed into ideology, that is to say, into an empty solace which at the same time fulfils a very precise function in the world as it is: that of keeping people in line. No doubt meta- physics has always had its ideological aspects, and it is not difficult to demonstrate in detail in what ways the great metaphysical systems have functioned ideologically. But unless I am mistaken something like a qualitative leap has taken place at this point. That is to say that although the old metaphysical systems transfigured the existing order
by insisting on this moment of meaning, they always had the moment of truth at the same time; they tried to understand that which is, and to gain certainty about the enigmatic and chaotic. And one could always demonstrate in the older metaphysics, no less than in their ideological character, this moment of truth, this increasing power of reason to understand what is opposed to it, and not to be content with mere irrationality. This can be seen most splendidly in the metaphysics
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105
? of St Thomas Aquinas, which is an attempt to bring Christian doc- trine into agreement with speculative thought, and therein has the potential to transform what is merely posited and inculcated dog- matically into a kind of critique - however positive this critique may have been in the Thomist philosophy. That is now finished. Such an interpretation of meaning is no longer possible. And I believe I have already said! that it seems to me an achievement of Jean-Paul Sartre's that should not be overlooked - although I regard his philosophy as very incoherent and not really adequate as a philosophical structure - that he was the first to formulate this realization without any em- bellishment.
In this he went far beyond Schopenhauer who, of course, was a pessimist in the usual sense and vehemently opposed the affirmative character of metaphysics (as you probably know), espe- cially in its Hegelian form. Nevertheless, in his work he turned even this negativity into a metaphysical principle, the principle of the blind Will which, because it is a metaphysical principle and therefore a category of reflection, contains the possibility of its own negation by human beings. Thus, he also posits the idea of the denial of the Will
to Live,2 a denial which, in view of what has been and continues to
be perpetrated on the living and can increase to an unimaginable . degree, is an almost comforting idea. I mean that in a world which knows of things far worse than death and denies people the shot in the neck in order to torture them slowly to death, the doctrine of the . denial of the Will to Live itself has something of the innocence for
which Schopenhauer criticized the theodicies of philosophers.
After the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire, who had been a follower of Leibniz, abandoned Leibniz's interpretation of the world as the best of all possible worlds, and went over to the empiricism of the most
progressive figure of that time, Locke. 3 Admittedly, Leibniz's dictum is not so optimistic as it seems, but refers only to the optimum, the minimum optimum. But what, in the end, is such a limited natural catastrophe compared to the natural catastrophe of society, spread- ing towards totality, the actuality and potentiality of which we face today - when socially produced evil has engendered something like
a real hell? And that situation affects not only metaphysical thought, but, as I showed you in relation to the moment of meaning, the content of metaphysics itself. And perhaps I may add at this point that there seems to me to be hardly anything more contemptible, hardly anything more unworthy of the concept of philosophy, of what philosophy once wanted to be, than the mood, especially widespread in Germany, which amounts to a belief that, just because the absence of meaning is unbearable, those who point out that absence are to be blamed. This mood leads people to draw from the postulate that life in a world
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? without meaning cannot be endured, the conclusion that (because what should not be cannot be) a meaning must be constructed: because, after all, there is a meaning. If I may reveal to you what I
really meant by the 'Jargon of Authenticity',4 I was not just criticizing this or that linguistic cliche - I should not have taken those quite so tragically. What I was really attacking - and if you pick up that little book I would ask you to be quite clear on this point - is precisely the supposition of a meaning on the sole grounds that there must be one since otherwise one could not live: this supposition of a meaning as a lie. And in Germany this supposition seems to me to have slipped into the language to a worrying degree, so that it is no longer made ex- plicitly in thought. That is the reason why I attacked a certain linguistic
form so energetically in that book.
Briefly, therefore: the traditional compatibility between metaphys-
ical thought and intra-mundane experience has been shattered. As I indicated by the comparison between Voltaire's situation and our own, there has been a kind of switch from quantity to quality. The millionfold death has acquired a form never feared before, and has taken on a very different nuance. Nuance - the word alone is a disgrace in face of what one would like to say and for which lang- uage truly lacks words; it actually cannot be said. And that is the strongest proof of how much these things can now be understood only in material terms. Today something worse than death is to be feared. Perhaps I might draw your attention in this context to an essay on torture by Jean Amery, an author otherwise entirely unknown to me, in the latest issue of Merkur. 5 The philosophical backbone of the essay, existentialism, does not accord with my own views, but the
author does quite admirably express the changes in the rock strata of experience which have been brought about by these things. The change I have in mind can also be expressed, perhaps most simply, by saying that death, in the form it has taken on, no longer accords with the life of any individual. For it is a lie to say that death is an invariant at all times; death, too, is a quite abstract entity; death itself can be a different thing in very different times. Or one might say, if you will not take my literary references amiss, that there is no longer an epic or a biblical death; no longer is a person able to die weary, old and sated with life. Another aspect of the situation I am trying to indicate to you is that old age, with categories such as wisdom and all that goes with it, no longer exists, and that old people, in so far as they are condemned to become aged and too weak to preserve their own lives, are turned into objects of science - the science of gerontology, as it is called. In this way age is seen as a kind of second minority, so that something like a programme of euthanasia carried out by some
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? future form of inhumanity, of no matter what provenance, becomes foreseeable. Thus, the reconciliation of life, as something rounded and closed in itself, with death, a reconciliation which was always questionable and precarious and, if it existed at all, was probably a happy exception - that reconciliation is out of the question today.
I would say that the approach adopted in Being and Time - and here I'd like to make a few more comments on the 'jargon of authen- ticity' - is perhaps nowhere more ideological than when its author tries to understand death on the basis of 'Dasein's possibility of Being-a- Whole',6 in which attempt he suppresses the absolute irreconcilabil- ity of living experience with death which has become apparent with the definitive decline of positive religions. He seeks, in this way, to rescue structures of the experience of death as structures of Dasein, of human existence itself. But these structures, as he describes them, only existed within the world of positive theology, by virtue of the positive hope of resurrection; and Heidegger fails to see that through the secularization of this structure, which he at least tacitly assumes in his work, not only have these theological contents disintegrated, but without them this experience itself is no longer possible. What I really
hold against this form of metaphysics is the surreptitious attempt to appropriate theologically posited possibilities of experience without theology. I hasten to add, to avoid misunderstandings, however un- likely, that in view of the historical state of consciousness my remarks should not, of course, be construed as a recommendation of theology, simply on the grounds that, under the protection of religion, it was
'. allegedly easier to die. Now, if one is speaking of the form of death
. : which exists under the absolute controllability of people, including
their mass annihilation, one will have to say that from an intra-
mundane standpoint the change signifies that the process of adaptation
. : to which people are subject is posited as absolute - j ust as torture is : an extreme form of adaptation. Words such as ' brainwashing' already , indicate that by these horrifying means, which include the electric shock treatment of the mentally ill, human beings are to be standard- , ized by force. Any slight difference, any deviation they still possessed
? in relation to the dominant tendency - that too must be eradicated. In other words, the change that we are experiencing in meta- . 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
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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
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? 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
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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
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? ? 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.
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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
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? 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
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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
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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
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? 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
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