No More Learning

142. Ibid. 152
? ? It redeems itself only in its destruction, which it itself is to be. The highest maxim of such an attitude results in saying that "it is so," that one has to obey- or, in positivistic terms, that one has to adapt oneself. This is the pathetic commandment that he must obey that which is. It is not even really obeying, for in any case Dasein does not have a choice. Precisely for this rea- son death is so ontological in regard to Dasein. If one were to call nonideological a kind of thinking which re- duces ideology to the zero limit, then one would have to say that Heidegger's thinking is nonideological. But his operation once again becomes ideology because of his claim that he recovers the meaning of Dasein. This happens after the fashion of today's talk about the loss of ideology-talk which tramples down ideology but would like to trample down the truth.
By saying "the 'they' does not permit us the courage in the face of death," 143 Heidegger actually lays bare certain elements of ideology, such as the attempt to integrate death into just that societal immanence which has no power over death. A similar development can be seen in Evelyn Waugh's parody The Loved One. Some of Heidegger's formulas come very close to the mechanism of sublimating death. "But temptation, tranquillization, and alienation are distinguishing marks of the kind of Being called 'falling: As falling, everyday Being-towards-death is a constant fleeing in the face of death. " 14l Alienation, however, deSignates a social relationship, even if it is the relationship to death. Man and the institutions of piety reproduce
143. Ibid. , p. 298. 144. Ibid.
? 153
commercially the unconscious will to forget what one has to fear. Fundamental ontology and its nomencla- ture are not necessary for insights like the following :
In this manner the "they" provides a constant tranquil- lization about death. At bottom, however, this is a tran- quilation not only for him who is "dying" but just as much for those who "console" him. And even in the case of a demise, the public is still not to have its own tran- quillity upset by such an event, or be disturbed in the carefreeness with which it concerns itself. Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social in- convenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded. 145
In the same manner Ibsen's assessor Brack already concluded, about Hedda Gabler's suicide, "One doesn't do that sort of thing. " Heidegger, who does not want to have anything to do with psychology, has seen through the reactionary nature of the integration of death. He has himself done this in a psycholOgical fashion. The message is coded in Sein und Zeit:
But in thus faling and fleeing in the face of death, Dasein's everydayness attests that the very "they" itself already h as the definite character of B eing-towards- death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in "think- ing about death. " Even in average everydayness, this ownmost potentiality-for-Being which is non-relational and not to be outstripped, is constantly an issue for Dasein. This is the case when its concern is merely in the mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence. 14S
145. Ibid. , pp. 298 1? . 146. Ibid. , pp. 298 99.
? 154
In spite of that, he does not go far enough. Heidegger cannot make us feel and respect the despair embodied in that cramped ''Enjoy life" and in that stupid com- monplace, "One will die sometime, but not quite yet" 147_a commonplace which he rightly despises. The commonplace represses our despair. The protesta- tion against the sublimating of death would have its place in a criticism of liberal ideology. That criticism
would proceed to remind us of the naturalness which is denied by culture. For in domination culture itself propagates this naturalness. It does it by means of that which mistakes itself for the antithesis to nature. Instead of this, Heidegger does the same thing as fascism; he defends the more brutal form of Being, negative as it may be. It is possible to think of a social state in which men would no longer have to sublimate death and might be able to experience it in another form than fear. To experience death in fear is a mark
of the crude natural state that Heidegger's doctrine has eternalized in supranaturalistic terms. Death is sub- limated because of a blinded drive for self-preservation ; its terror is part of the sublimation. In a life that is no longer disfigured, that no longer prohibits, in a life that would no longer cheat men out of their dues-in such a life men would probably no longer have to hope, in vain, that this life would after all give them what it had so far refused. For the same reason they would not have to fear so greatly that they would lose this life,
no matter how deeply this fear had been ingrained in them. From the fact that men sublimate death, one
147. Ibid" p. 299,
? ? ? ISS
cannot conclude that death is itself the authentic. Heidegger is least of all in a position to do this, as he is careful not to attribute authenticity to people who do not sublimate death.
By means of a kind of philosophical Freudian slip, Heidegger himself defines the ontologizing of death insofar as death, in its certainty, is qualitatively su- perior to other phenomena. 'We have already charac- terized the everyday state-of-mind which consists in an air of superiority with regard to the certain 'fact' of death-a superiority which is 'anxiously' concerned while seemingly free from anxiety. In this state-of- mind, everydayness acknowledges a 'higher' certainty than one which is only empirical. " 148 The "higher," in spite of the quotation marks, has the proving force of a confession : theory sanctions death. The partisan of authenticity commits the same sin of which he accuses the minores gentes, the lesser people, of the They. By means of the authenticity of death as he flees from it. Whatever announces itself as "higher" than mere em- pirical certainty, in this attitude, falsely cleanses death from its misery and stench-from being an animalistic kicking of the bucket. This cleansing occurs in the same manner as a Wagnerian love- or salvation-death. Al this is similar to the integration of death into hygiene, of which Heidegger accuses the inauthentic. By means of that which is kept silent in the high stylization of death, Heidegger becomes an accomplice of what is horrible in death. Even in the cynical ma- terialism of the dissection room, this horribleness is
148. Ibid. , p. 302.
? ? recognized more honestly and denounced more strongly than in the tirades of ontology. The latter's kernel is nothing but the supraempirical certainty that death is something that has been existentially preordained to Dasein. Purity untouched by experience plays over into that which it once was unmetaphorically: purity untouched by dirt. But by no understanding can death be said to be pure. Neither is it anything apodictic. Otherwise, all the salvation promises of religion would simply be forgetful of Being. However, they are by no means needed. Some lower organisms do not die in the same sense as the higher, individuated ones. Thus, in light of our potential, and growing, control over organic processes, we cannot do away a fortiori with the thought that death might be eliminated. Such an elimination of death may be highly improbable; yet it can be thought of, and according to existential ontol- ogy that should be impossible. The affirmation of the ontological dignity of death, however, is already re-
duced to nothing by the possibility that something can change it ontically-according to Heidegger's lan- guage. Insofar as Heidegger cuts off these hopes at what inquisitors probably call the root, the authentic one speaks for all-for all those who j oin , as soon as they hear of this possibility, in the refrain that nothing would be worse than the disappearance of death. It seems legitimate to assume that those are the adepts of the jargon. The eagerness toward the eternity of death prolongs the continuing use of death as a threat. On a political level death advertises the necessity of wars. Kant, who subsumed immortality under the Ideas, did not let himself fall to those depths in which
? 157
nothing else flourishes but the affirmation of what is all too familiar. If Heidegger had made the transition from the inorganic to the organic, the existential hori- zon of death would have been thoroughly changed. His philosophy, and everything that floats with it, down to the last sewers of German faith unto being, could no- where be more vulnerable than in this transition. That understanding with the existent which motivates the elevation of the existent to being thrives on the com- plicity with death. In the metaphysics of death there comes to a head all that evil to which bourgeois society has physically condemned itself, by means of its own process of development.
The doctrine of anticipation, which is the authentic Being unto death, the "pOSSibility of taking the whole of Dasein, in advance . . . in an existentiell manner; that is to say, it includes the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-for-Being," 149 underhandedly be- comes a mode of behavior. Thus it becomes what Being-unto-death did not want to be and yet has to be if anything more than a tautology is thereby to be ut- tered. Although nothing is said about the difference of this mode of behavior from the fact that one has to die, this behavior is expected to acquire dignity by ac- cepting such a necessity speechlessly and without re- flection.
Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic Being-to- wards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free
149. Ibid. , p. 309.
? fOT one's own death, one is liberated from one's lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Antici- pation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibil- ity lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one's tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. 150
Only rarely do Heidegger's words contain as much truth as these last ones. Man's thinking about himself as nature would simultaneously mean a critical re- flection on the principle of self-preservation: the true
life would be one that does not insist on "tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. " In his doc- trine of death, however, Heidegger extrapolates such a mode of behavior from Dasein, as the positive mean- ing of Dasein. He affirms self-abnegation as an in- stance of the self, and he spoils the insight he has gained. Resignation becomes an obstinacy which turns the dissolution of the self into an inflexibly stoic posit- ing of the self. By means of relentless identification, of the dissolution of the self with the self, self becomes the absolute positihg of the negative principle. Al the categories that Heidegger then uses to explain Being unto death are linked with obstinacy: the possibility of death is supposed to be "put up with. " 151 That which should be different from domin ation a n d in- flexibility raises domination to its extreme. The sub- ject is never so authentic for Heidegger as in that
I SO. Ibid.
151. Ibid. , p. 305.
159
holding out in which it endures an extreme of pain, following the example of the ego. Even the elements with which he contrasts the stiffening of the self carry linguistic traces of the domination of the self : he calls it a "breaking. " 152 In the same way that Dasein-subject is actually identified with death, Being-unto-death be- comes subject, pure will. Ontological decisiveness must not ask what it dies for. The last word is spoken by a selfness that remains unmoved. "This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience-this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety-we call 'resoluteness. ' '' 153 The real ideological life would be this : the courage to be afraid
only when this courage would no longer have to dis- sipate into all that which has to be feared.
The jargon of authenticity is ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content. It asserts meaning with the gesture of that dignity by which Heidegger would like to dress up death. Dignity, too, is of an idealistic nature. There was a time when the subject thought itself a small divinity, as well as a lawgiving authority, sovereign in the consciousness of its own freedom. Such motifs have been extirpated from the dignity of the Heideggerian tone:
In what other way, however, could a humanity ever find the way to the primal form of thanking, if the favor of Being did not grant man the nobility of poverty by means of the open pOSSibility of relating to Being? For only that nobility of poverty conceals in it the freedom
152. Ibid. , pp. 308-g. 153. Ibid. , p. 343.
160
of sacrifice which is the treasure of its essence. Sacrifice means farewell from the existent on the way to the preservation of the favor of Being. Nevertheless, sacri- fice can be prepared in the working and effecting [Lei- stenJ within the existent, yet such action can never ful- fil the sacrifice. The fulfillment of sacrifice stems from the urgency out of which the action of every historical man rises-essential thinking, too, is an action-by means of which he preserves the achieved Dasein for the preservation of the dignity of Being. This urgency is the equanimity which does not allow itself to be tempted, in its hidden readiness for the farewell nature of any sacrifice. Sacrifice is at home in the essence of the event. In the form of an event being claims man for the truth of Being. For this reason sacrifice does not allow for any calculation. Calculation always reduces sacrifice to a purpose or purposelessness, whether such purposes are set high or low. Such a calculation disfigures the nature of sacrifice. The desire for purposes distorts the clarity of the courage for sacrifice, which is marked by an awe which readily fears; and which has taken upon itself to live in the neighborhood of that which is indestruc- tible. 154
In these sentenc? s dignity certainly plays a role as the dignity of being, and not of men. Yet the solemnity of these sentences differs from the solemnity of secu- larized burials only through its enthusiasm for irra- tional sacrifice. Combat pilots may have spoken in exactly this way when they returned from a city just destroyed by bombs and drank champagne to the health of those who did not return. Dignity was never any- thing more than the attitude of self-preservation aspir- ing to be more than that. The creature mimes the cre-
154. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? , p. 45.
161
ator. In dignity a feudal category is mediated which bourgeois society presents posthumously for the legiti- mation of its hierarchy. Bourgeois society always has had the tendency to swindle-as is clearly shown by delegated officials on festive occasions, when they ap- pear in all the fastidiousness of prescribed demeanor. Heidegger's dignity is once again the shadow of such a borrowed ideology. The subject who founds his dignity
at least on the Pythagorean claim-questionable as it may be-that he is a good citizen of a good country, is replaced. His dignity gives way to that respect which the subject can claim by the mere fact that, like all others, he has to die. In this respect Heidegger in- voluntarily proves to be a democrat. Identification with that which is inevitable remains the only consolation of this philosophy of consolation : it is the last identity. The worn-out principle of the self-positing of the ego, which proudly holds out in preserving its life at the
cost of the others, is given a higher value by means of the death which extinguishes it. What was once the portal to eternal life has been closed for Heideggerian philosophy. Instead, this philosophy pays homage to the power and dimension of the portal. That which is empty becomes an arcanum: the mystery of being permanently in ecstasy over some numinous thing which is preserved in silence. In the case of taciturn people, it is too often impossible to tell whether-as
they would like one to believe-the depth of their in- wardness shudders at the sight of anything profane, or whether their coldness has as little to say to any-
thing as anything has to say to it. The rest is piety, and in the more humane instance this rest is the helplessly
? ? ? ? ? surging feeling of people who have lost someone they loved. In the worst instance it is the convention that sanctions death by means of the thought of divine will and divine grace-even after theology has pined away. That is what is being exploited by language, and what becomes the schema of the jargon of authenticity. Its dignified mannerism is a reactionary response toward the secularization of death. Language wants to grasp what is escaping, without believing it or naming it. Naked death becomes the meaning of such talk-a meaning that otherwise it would have only in some-
thing transcendent. The falseness of giving meaning, nothingness as something, is what creates the linguistic mendacity. Thus the ]ugendstil wanted to give mean- ing, out of itself, to a meaninglessly experienced life, by means of abstract negation. Its chimerical manifesto was engraved into Nietzsche's new tablets. Nothing of the kind can any longer be voluntarily elicited from late bourgeois Dasein. That is why meaning is thrown into death. The dramas of the later Ibsen closed with the freely committed self-destruction of life that is caught up in the labyrinth of conventions.
This self- destruction was a necessarily violent consequence of
the action, as if it were its fulfillment. Yet it was al- ready close to the purifying death of agnostic crema- tion. But the dramatic form could not resolve the vain nature of such action. The subjectively consoling meaning of self-destruction remained objectively with- out consolation. The last word is spoken by tragic irony. The weaker the individual becomes, from a so- cietal perspective, the less can he become calmly aware of his own impotence. He has to puff himself up into
? selfness, in the way the futility of this selfness sets itself up as what is authentic, as Being. There is an involuntary parody of Heidegger, by an author who brought forth, one after another, books with titles like Encounter with Nothingness and Encounter with Being. But this author cannot be blamed for his parody. It has to be blamed on its model, which thinks itself superior to such depravities. Heidegger, too, only encounters nothingness with a higher propaedeutic of
Being. The Heideggerian tone of voice is indeed proph- ecied in Schiller's discussion of dignity. Schiller sees it as something secluding oneself within oneself, or as a kind of securing.
If we have many occasions to observe the affected grace in the theatre and in the ballroom, there is also often occasion for studying the afected dignity in the cabinet of ministers and in the study-rooms of men of science ( notably at universities ) . True dignity is content to prevent the domination of the affection s , to keep the instinct within just limits, but there only where it pre- tends to be master in the involuntary movements; false dignity regulates with an iron sceptre even the voluntary movements, it oppresses the moral movements, which were sacred to true dignity, as well as the sensual move- ments, and destroys all the mimic play of the features by which the soul gleams forth upon the face. It arms itself not only against rebel nature, but against sub- missive nature, and ridiculously seeks its greatness in
subjecting nature to its yoke, or, if this does not suc- ceed, in hiding it. As if it had vowed hatred to all that is called nature, it swathes the body in long, heavy- plaited garments, which hide the human structure; it paralyses the limbs in surcharging them with vain orna- ments, and goes even the length of cutting the hair to replace this gift of nature by an artificial production.
? True dignity does not blush for nature, but only for brute n ature ; it always h as an open and frank air ; feel- ing gleams in its look; calm and serenity of mind is legi- ble upon the brow in eloquent traits. False gravity, on the contrary, places its dignity in the lines of its visage; it is close, mysterious, and guards its features with the care of an actor; al the muscles of the face are tor- mented, al natural and true expression disappears, and the entire man is like a sealed letter.
But false dignity is not always wrong to keep the mimic play of its features under sharp discipline, be- cause it might betray more than would be desired, a precaution true dignity has not to consider. True dignity wishes only to rule, not to conceal nature; in false dignity, on the contrary, nature rules the more power- fully within because it is controlled outwardly. 155
The Kantian, who believed in his master's disjunction between price and dignity, could still see this as some- thing to be desired. Because of that, however, the great writer fell short of the full insight to which he came close. This is the insight that dignity contains the form of its decadence within itself. The fact can be observed when intellectuals become accomplices of that power which they don't have and which they should resist. The Kantian dignity finally disintegrates into the jar-
gon of authenticity. With it goes that humanity which has its basic nature not in self-reflection but in its dif- ference from a suppressed animality.
155. Friedrich von Schiller, Siimtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 181 8 ) , "tiber Anmut und Wiirde," Vol. VIII, pt. I, pp. 96 f. [English edition edited by N. H. Dole, The Works of Schiller (Boston, 1902), "On Grace and Dignity," pp. 231 if. ]
?