They were later made into a permanent
institution
by Heidegger, under the benediction of public opinion.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
The Kantian enlighten- ment asserts deceptively that it is not necessary to know the categorical imperative in order to act rightly.
Meanwhile, the categorical imperative, if it is truly to be one with the principles of reason, trusts that each one who acts has reason, which if unimpaired would be philosophical reason.
Christian Schlitze has published a satire called the "Stenciled Speech for Festive Occasions. " It throws light on the j argon with great comic force :
Most honored Mr. President, ministers, secretaries of state, mayors, advisors, administrators, and assist- ants, highly esteemed men and women of our cultural life, representatives of science, of industry, and of the self-employed middle-class, honored public of this fes- tive gathering, ladies and gentlemen!
It is not by chance that we are gathered here today for the purpose of celebrating this day. In a time like ours, in which the true human values have more than ever to be our innermost concern, a statement is ex- pected from us. I do not wish to present you with a patented solution, but I would merely like to bring up for discussion a series of hot potatoes which do after all face us. For we do not need ready-made opinions, which anyway do not touch us deeply, but what we need is rather the genuine dialogue which moves us in our humanity. What brought us together here is our knowl- edge of the power of encounter in the forming of the intrahuman sphere. The things which matter are set-
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tled in this intrahuman sphere: I do not have to tell you what I mean by this. You will all understand me, for in a particular and extraordinary sense you all have to do with people.
In a time like ours-I have mentioned it already- in which the perspective of things has everywhere begun to waver, everything depends more than ever on
the individual who knows of the essence of things, of things as such, of things in their authenticity. We need openhearted people who are capable of this. Who are th. ese people? -you will ask me-and I will answer you : You are they! By being gathered here you have proven more thoroughly than by words that you are prepared to put emphasis on your concern. That is what I would like to thank you for. But I would also like to thank you for energetically opposing, by your commitment to this good cause, the flood of materialism which threatens to drown everything around us. To say it in a nutshell from the start: you have come here to be given direc- tions; you have come to listen. From this encounter, on an intrahuman level, you expect a contribution to the reestablishment of the interhuman climate. You expect a restoration of that homey warmth which seems to be lacking, in our modern industrial society, to such a
terrifying degree. . . .
But what do'es this mean for our concrete situation
here and now? To pronounce the question means to pose it. But in fact it means much more than that. It means that we expose ourselves to it, that we surrender to it. That we must not forget. But in the rush and busy work of the day, modem man forgets it all too easily. But you who belong to the silent majority, you know of it. For our problems stem from a region which it is our vocation to preserve. The wholesome perplexity which comes from this situation opens perspectives which we should not simply block out by turning away in bore-
dom. It is important to think with the heart and to tune in the human antenna to the same wave length. Today
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no ones knows better than man that which is of im- portance in the end. 69
Now, everything is assembled here : the innermost concern, the true dialogue, things in their authenticity, with a vague reminiscence of Heidegger, the encounter on an intrahuman level, the question for its own sake, even the slightly anachronistic reserve army of the silent majority. The long-winded address designates the participating notables in terms of their function and subordinates the whole speech from the beginning to an intangible administrative purpose. . While what the speaker is aiming at remains unspecified, the jar-
gon brings it to light. The concern is the working climate. By calling the listeners people "who in a par- ticular and extraordinary sense have to do with peo- ple," it can be gathered that the subject matter is that kind of human leadership in which men are merely the pretext for leadership-in-itself. To this is accurately fitted the indestructible phrase about the "flood of ma- terialism" which full-blooded industrial leaders usu- ally vituperate in those who are dependent on them. That is the ground of being of the higher element in
the jargon. In its slips of the tongue the jargon ac- knowledges that administration is its essence. The intrahuman level, which is supposed to contribute to the "reestablishment of the human climate," places the word '1evel" beside "intrahuman," together with the association of "I and thou," which has a social- scientific as well as a homey character. The levels, how-
69. Christian Schiitze, "Gestanzte Festansprache," in Stuttgarter Zeitung, Dec. 2, 1962, quoted in Der Monat, Jan. , 1963, p. 63, n. 160.
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ever-the level of counties, of the federation-desig- nate areas of judicial and administrative responsibility. The exhortation to think with the heart-Pascal's formula que les grandes pensees proviennent du coeur -has been admired by business men right from the beginning; it is pronounced with the same breath as "the human antenna is tuned in to the same wave length. " The total content, however, is flowering non- sense. This becomes obvious in phrases like "To pro- nounce the question is to pose it," or, "No one knows better than man that which is of importance in the end. " Such nonsense also has its reasonable basis in the world. It hides the fact that both it and the goal at which it aims are manipulated. For this reason all content is "bracketed," as it goes in administrative German. At the same time the appearance of content must not be renounced; those who are addressed, again in the same German, must "toe the line. " The purpose, the intention, contracts itself into an intentionless underworldly language, truthful to the objective deter- mination of the jargon itself, which has no other con- tent than its wrapping.
Mter the fact, the jargon adapts itself to the need for a philosophy which was current in about 1925. This was a philosophy that strove for the concretiza- tion of experience, thought, and behavior in the midst of a total state of affairs which oriented itself accord- ing to something abstract-according to exchange. For this reason the jargon is neither able nor willing
to concretize the elements which condemn it to aJ. stractness. The jargon turns in a circle. It wants to be
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immediately concrete without sliding into mere fac- ticity. It is consequently forced into secret abstraction, which is the same formalism against which Heidegger's own school, that of phenomenology, once strongly spoke out. This can be grasped in existential ontology's theoretical criticism, especially in the paired concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity in Sein und Zeit. Already there the drive for concretion is coupled with a hands-off attitude. One speaks from a depth which would be profaned if it were called content. Yet this depth wants to be this content, which in turn wants to express itself. Heidegger's defensive technique of with-
drawing into eternity takes place at this "pure and dis- gusting height" of which Hegel spoke in his polemic against Reinhold. 70 Like Reinhold, Heidegger cannot get enough of the ritual preliminaries for the "step into the temple," 71 although hardly anyone nowadays dares to tie a warning bell around the cat's neck. Heidegger is by no means incomprehensible, as one might gather from the marginalia of the positivists, but he lays around himself the taboo that any under- standing of him would simultaneously be falsification. The impossibility of saving what this thinking wants to save is cleverly turned into its own life element. This thinking refuses all content which would have to be argued against. MetaphysicS is said to miss this ele- ment in the same manner as it is missed in translation into ontic statements, which, as parts of the individual
70. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1958) Vol. I: "Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems," p. 43.
7 1 . Ibid.
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scientific disciplines, are regarded with some favor. 72 Even authenticity and inauthenticity are first of all treated cautiously. Heidegger shuns the reproach that he paints in black and white. He claims that he does not give a directive for philosophical judgment, but that he introduces descriptive and neutral terms in the manner of that which in earlier phenomenology was called investigation. In Weber's interpretation of soci- ology, a discipline denounced by Heidegger, this was called neutrality of values :
As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity ( these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness. But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any "less"
72. Careless for one moment, Heidegger shows his hand in the tractatus on Identitiit und Differenz:
But let us assume for a moment that difference is an element added by our representation. Then the question rises: added to what? The answer is, to the existent. All right. But what does this mean-the existent? What else does it mean but such a thing as is? Thus we enter the supposed addition, the conception of difference under being. But "Being" says itself: being which is existent? Where we wanted to take difference as supposed addition we already always find what is existent and being in their difference. It is the same story as Grimm's fairy tale about the hare and the hedgehog: ''I'm here already. " (Heidegger, Identitiit und Differenz [Pfiillingen, 1957], p. 60. )
What is said here about so-called ontological difference by means of a rather primitive hypostasis of the copula, is said in order to shift the ontological primacy of difference into being itself. This is actually Heidegger's method. This method protects itself by conSidering possible contradictions as ele ments that have already been considered in the particular thesis. These are false syllogisms which any logician could check. These false syllogisms are projected into, and thus justified by, the objective structure of that at which the thought
aims.
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Being or any "lower" degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity-when busy, when ex- cited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment. 13
In a much later passage of Sein und Zeit, the category of "the They" is subsumed under inauthenticity. In this passage Heidegger says
that interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any moralizing critique of every- day Dasein, and from the aspirations of a "philosophy of culture. " . . . Even the expression "idle talk" is not to be used here in a "disparaging" signification. 74
The quotation marks around "disparaging" are the kid gloves of a prudish metaphysics. Considerable advan- tages are connected with this kind of methodological performance. The affirmations of scientific purity in Husserl's texts provide the model for all thi s . The philosophy of authenticity needs its proviso clauses so that it can on occasion make the excuse that it is not a philosophy. The reputation of scientific objec- tivity grows together with its authority and, at the same time, leaves the decision between authentic and in- authentic being up to an arbitrariness-one that has been absolved from the judgment of reason, in a fash- ion not much different from Max Weber's "value. " The execution of the volte is so elegant because "the terminologically chosen" expressions are not exhausted by the uses of them that are chosen in subjective free- dom. Rather, and Heidegger the philosopher of lan- guage should be the first to concede this, they keep as
73. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68. 74. Ibid. , p. 211.
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their objective content those standards from which Heidegger distinguishes them. The nominalists saw that better than the latecomer of language mysticism. Following Bacon's doctrine of idols, Hobbes already noted "that men usually express their affects simul- taneously with words so that the latter already include a certain judgment on the subject matter. "75 The triviality of this observation does not free us from the responsibility of reminding people of it when they merely ignore it. As an impartial contemplative of essence, Heidegger allows for the fact that inauthen-
ticity "can define existence in its fullest concretion. " Yet the accompanying words, which he attributes to this mode of being, are essentially vituperative. As officiousness and interestedness, they characterize such qualities as have given themselves up to the world of exchange and wares and resemble this world. Some- body is officious when he carries on business activity for his own sake and confuses means with ends. If a person is "interested," it means that-all too openly
according to the rules of the bourgeois game-he sees to his own interest, or disguises as his objective that which only serves himself. Pleasure capacity falls in the same line. According to the habit of the petit bour- geois, the deformations inflicted on men by the world of profit are explained by men's greed, as if it was
their fault that they were cheated out of their sub- jectivity. In the end, however, Heidegger's philosophy does not want to have anything to do with the cultural
75. Quoted in Rudolf Eucken, Geschichte der philosophi- schen Terminologie (Leipzig, 1879), p. 86, in reference to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps. 4 and 5.
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4
philosophy in which such questions appear. And in- deed, the concept of cultural philosophy is just as ridiculous as that of social philosophy. The limitation of philosophy to one specific area is incompatible with the fact that it should reflect on institutional separa- tion. For philosophy should itself derive this separa- tion, and recognize that which is necessarily separated as something which then again is not separated. By virtue of its self-limitation, cultural philosophy accepts the division of phenomena into areas of subject matter and possibly even into those of hierarchy within areas. In the structure of alleged levels the place of culture is almost unavoidably a derived one. For this reason a philosophy which enjoys itself fastidiously in this sphere would be satisfied with that which officials patronize as essayism. By the same token it would avoid that which has been handed down under the name of constitutive problems, which, of course, could only be stubbornly ignored by such a philosophy. Hei- degger keeps that in mind. He is familiar, on the one hand, with Husserl's schema of philosophical-eidetic diSCiplines, and, on the other, of disciplines which are directed toward objects-both of which disciplines he melted together with the idealistic criticism of reifica- tion. But an overtone of the word "cultural-philosophi- cal" cannot fail to be heard in Heidegger. He defames that which sticks like a parasite to what is secondary, to life which has already been produced. He acts peevish toward any form of mediation, even in the mind which is itself essentially mediation. The growth climate of this hostility to cultural philosophy is that academic climate in which they admonished the Jew
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Georg Simmel, on the grounds that, at least in inten- tion, he absorbed himself in that concretion which the systems were forever only promising. Thus he trans- gressed a taboo of traditional philosophy which busies itself, if not with the fundamental themes of occidental metaphysics, at least with the question of their pos- sibility. Criticism of the limitations of cultural phi- losophy is vengefully limited. The chemically pure
concept of philosophy, as the inquiry into an unruined essence, underneath that which has only been made and posited by men, is worth just as little as that limited cultural philosophy. The subject area of the pure has no advantage over culture, whether this pure essence be considered as a truthfully philosophical element, as something merely explanatory, or as a supporting element. It is, rather, like culture, a deter- mination of reflection. While specialistic cultural phi- losophy absolutizes the form of that which has be-
come, against that on which it feeds, fundamental ontology embezzles its own cultural mediation, insofar as it shies away from a spirit which is concretized in objectivity. Whatever the possibilities of natural phi- losophy may be nowadays, primalness now has the same place in the philosophical atlas in which nature was once registered. This primalness is as much a part, as not, of that which fundamental ontology despises as culture. Culture includes even the material infrastructure of society, in which human work and
thought are rooted, and the only means by which work becomes real societal work. This does not mean that the contrast to the suprastructure becomes any less sharp. Philosophical nature has to be regarded as his-
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. .
tory, and history as nature. The contrast between primal experiences and cultural experiences, which Gundolf invented ad hoc for George, was ideology in the midst of the suprastructure, devised for the pur- pose of obscuring the contrast between infrastructure and ideology. The categories which he popularized, and among which even the later, more successful, category of godlike being is present, were marketed as substantial;76 while precisely in neoromanticism cultural mediation stands out blatantly, in the form
of the ]ugendstil. Bloch rightfully made fun of Gundolf for his belief in today's primal experiences. These primal experiences were a warmed-over piece of ex- pressionism.
They were later made into a permanent institution by Heidegger, under the benediction of public opinion. What he dislikes in dealing with cul- ture, to which, incidentally, his own philological di- vagations belong, is the business of starting with the experience of something derived. But this cannot be avoided and has to be taken into consciousness. In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally preformed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it. But funda- mental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretend- ing it has a starting point somewhere outside. In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of that on- tology'S own purity. Philosophy involves itself all the
76. Cf. Friedrich Gundolf, George, 3d ed. ( Berlin, 1930 ) P? 269.
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more deeply in society as it more eagerly-reflecting upon itself-pushes . off from society and its objective spirit. It claws itself firmly into its blindly social fate, which-in Heidegger's terminology-has thrown one into this and no other place. That was according to the
taste of fascism. With the downfall of market liberal- ism, relationships of domination stepped nakedly into the foreground. The baldness of their order, the au- thentic law of the "needy time," easily permits itself to be taken for something primal. That is how people
could jaw about blood and soil, without a smile, during the excessively accumulating industrial capitalism of the Third Reich. The jargon of authenticity continues al that, less tangibly-with impunity, because at that time social differences <? ccasionally led to conflicts -such as those between the primary-school teacher appOinted to ordinarius and the career professor, or between the official optimism of the deadly war ma-
chine and the philosophical frowning of far too auto? cratic enthusiasts, who were deeply attracted to Being unto death.
Heidegger's complaints against cultural philosophy have fateful consequences in the ontology of authen- ticity: what this ontology at first bans into the sphere of cultural mediation it now shoves directly on into hell. To be sure, the world is similar enough to hell,
dipped as the world is in a gloomy flood of nonsense, the fallen form of language. Karl Kraus compressed that fact into the thesis that today the phrase gives birth to reality-especially to that reality which arose, after the catastrophe, under the name of culture. To a great extent that reality is, as Valery defined politics,
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only there to keep men away from what is of im- portance to them. In agreement with Kraus, whom he does not mention, Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit:
Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is said-in-the-talk as such. " 77
So the business of communication and its formulas cut in between the matter and the subject, and blind the subject against precisely that which all the chatter is about. "What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. " 78 But Heidegger imposes the critical diagnosis of a negative ontological presence on the "everyday being of the Da, existence," which in truth is historical in nature: the entangling of the mind with the sphere of circulation, at a stage in which the objective spirit is covered by the economic utilization process, as if by a fungus which stifles the quality of thought. This confusion has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein.
Heidegger rightly perceives the abstractness of chatter "as such," which has emptied itself of any relationship to its content; but from the aberrant abstractness of chatter he draws conclusions as to its metaphysical invariance, however questionable that may be. Chatter would already be in decline if, in a reasonable econ- omy, the expenditure of advertisements disappeared . Chatter is forced on men by a social structure which
77. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 212. 78. Ibid.
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negates them as subjects long before this is done by the newspaper companies. But Heidegger's critique becomes ideological by grasping the emancipated spirit as that which becomes of it under supremely real engagements, and by doing so without making distinc- tions. He condemns idle chatter, but not brutality, the alliance with which is the true guilt of chatter, which is in itself far more innocent. As soon as Heidegger wants to silence chatter, his language clatters with weaponry :
To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say-that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one's ret- icence . . . makes something manifest, and does away with "idle talk. " 79
His language itself speaks forth, as seldom elsewhere, from the word "to strike down"; it is a language of power. But it has already been seen in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts. Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything :
The "they" is there alongside everywhere, . . . but in such a manner that it has always stolen away when- ever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the "they" presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The "they" can, as it were, manage to have "them" con- stantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It "was" always the "they" who
79. Ibid. , p. 208. 102
? ? ? did it, and yet it can be said that it has been "no one. " In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that "it was no one. " 80
That is precisely what came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand,81 that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse. Heidegger's sketch of the They comes closest to what it is, the exchange relationship, when he is treating averageness :
The "they" has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called "distan- tiality" is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one- another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the "they. " The "they," in its Being, essentially makes an issue of this. Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the aver- ageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it re- gards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything excep- tional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of pri- ority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a strug- gle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the "levelling" down . . . of all possibilities of Being. "82
80. Ibid. , p. I65.
8I. [Befehlsnotstand: morally compelling situation for a soldier, who must carry out an order with which he cannot square his conscience. ]
82. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. I64 65.
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That leveling is described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that "prerogative" for themselves. It is a leveling which they themselves want to employ, and is no other than the leveling which occasionally befalls the exchanger, through his inevitable reduction to the equivalence form; the critique of political econ- omy grasping exchange value in terms of the social work-time which on the average has to be spent. In its hostility to the negatively ontologized They, the opposi-
tion to capitalist anonymity eagerly overlooks the law of value which is asserting itself-a suffering which will not have it said what it is suffering from. When that anonymity, whose social source is unmistakable, is analyzed as a possibility of being, then that society is exonerated which simultaneously both disqualifies and determines the relationships of its members.
The mobility of words unquestionably continued their degradation from the beginning. In the functional word, deception is posited simultaneously with the exchange principle itself and grasps spirit; because this latter cannot be without the idea of truth, it ex- hibits flagrantly what has entrenched itself in material praxis behind the free and upright exchange of goods. But without mobility language would never have be- come capable of that relation to the matter at hand, by whose criterion Heidegger judges communicative language. Language philosophy, in the question of communicative language, would have to investigate
the metamorphosis of quantity into the quality of mere chatter, or, better, the interinvolvement of both as- pects; and would not proceed in an authoritarian spirit to sort out the wheat from the chaff of language. No
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thinking could unfold itself into the not-yet-thought without that shot of irresponsibility over which Hei- degger grows so excited; in that, the spoken distin- guishes itself from the authentically written word, and even in the latter positivists can easily criticize as ir- responsible that which goes beyond what is the case. Immaturity and timidity stand no higher than chatter. Even that linguistic objectivity which presupposes the utmost alertness toward the phrase also has as its pre- condition mobility of expression, no matter how broken : urbanity. Nobody can write without phrases, and who is true to the matter who is not also a literate person? The defense of this kind of person seems to be in place after the murder of the Jews. Kraus him- self despised the illiterate, if possible even more than the literate. On the other hand the summary judgment concerning idle talk, which insinuates it through a negative ontology, constantly permits the justification of the phrase as if it were fate. Once idle talk is a state of mind, one need not be greatly embarrassed when
authenticity turns into idle talk. That is happening today to Heidegger's own legend. We might pull some sentences out of a piece on The Idea of the German University and the Reform of the German Universities by Ernst Anrich :
It is no encroachment [that is, on academic autonomy] when from this Hippocratic oath we make a certain de- mand, out of our clear knowledge that no specific phi- losophy can today be placed deciSively at the center of the university, a demand that we shall keep alert our universality and our responsiveness in face of the whole of reality; it is no encroachment on this situation when we ask each scholar in this body to carry on his
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scholarship under the sign of the final question about the ground of Being and the whole of Being; and when we ask him to discuss and exchange these problems within the whole body, the dignity of which resides therein. If it is right to demand of the student that the essence of his study must be to drive forward, within his own specialty, to the view of Being, and to responsibility in face of the totality of Being; if that is right, then we must require of the professor that it be made clear, through his courses, how his own research is itself ultimately motivated by a struggle with these questions; and it may be expected that each of his courses should be an invoking and awakening force, in this sense. S3
In an organizational, uncommonly ontic context such sentences use the jargon of authenticity in just the way in which Heidegger portrays it in Sein und Zeit: as a characteristic feature of idle talk. The authority to which in that way the jargon obliges itself is no other than the authority of the Heideggerian philoso- phy itself. That in the relevant chapter the author constantly and rhetorically repeats, "It is no encroach- ment," is meant to hide precisely such an encroach- ment; namely, the oath-Anrich himself uses the mythical word-on the so-called question of Being. Yet in the same breath the author concedes that no definite philosophy could today be placed at the center of the university. It is as though the ominous question of Being were beyond criticism. Whoever justly spurns the question of Being together with the chatter about it had best be sent away entirely. Anrich skillfully
83. Ernst Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universitiit und die Reform der deutschen Universitiiten, (Darmstadt, 1960), l" 114?
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latches onto the fact that, in formulas like that of the question concerning the ground of Being, the innocent still hear the sound of resistance against the dispirited atmosphere in which the humanities are today carried on. A human right of students, their need for the es- sential, becomes blurred in the jargon, in the Hei- deggerian essence-mythology of Being. The spirit which they miss in the universities is silently converted into the monopoly of an instructional system which, for its part, cried heresy against the spirit when it appeared in the form of reason.
As in the concept of idle chatter, so in that of readi- ness to hand, which is portrayed with sympathy, and which is the philosophical ancestress of shelteredness, suffering experience is interpreted into its opposite. At some historical stages of agriculture, and in simple wares-economy, production was not radically subordi- nated to exchange and was nearer to the workers and consumers; and their relationships to one another were not totally reified. The idea of something undis- figured, undeformed, an idea which has yet to be actualized, could hardly have been created without a memory trace of such earlier conditions; although over long periods they probably caused more immediate suffering to those exposed to such conditions than did capitalism. Nonetheless, identifying thought, schooled in exchange, brought the differentiated down to the identity of the concept, and chopped up this more in- nocent identity. What Hegel and Marx in their youth condemned as alienation and reification, and against which all are spontaneously united today, is what Heidegger interprets ontologically as well as unhis-
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torically, and, in its function as a being-form of Dasein, as something bodily. The ideology of readiness to hand, and its counterpart, strips itself bare in the practice of those devotees of the musical youth movement, who swear to it that a proper fiddle is one that a fiddler has rigged up for himself. Since the artisan forms of pro- duction have been overtaken by technology, and are superfluous, the intimacy which adhered to them has become as worthless as the do-it-yourself movement. The unfunctional self-being of things, their freedom from the compulsion of identity, which the dominating mind imposes, would be utopia. It presupposes the alteration of the whole. Nonetheless, in the midst of our all-embracing function context every ontological light on the remains of so-called readiness to hand gilds that context. For its sake the jargon of authen- ticity speaks as though it were the voice of men and things that are there for their own sake. Through this manoeuver, the jargon becomes all the more a for- others, something for planned and pedagogically deco- rated effect-contexts. Indeed, the Wagnerian ''To be German means to do something for its own sake" accelerated, in slogan form, the export of the German spirit. That spirit competed successfully with the more advanced commodity-thinking of the West, through the slogan's imprimatur, which declared that it was no commodity. That throws light on the artsy-craftsy element in the jargon. It provides a refuge for the stale notion that art should be brought back into life, and
that there should be more than art but also more than mere usage. The jargon pursues artisanship under the shadow of industry, as carefully chosen as it is cheap;
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it gathers reproductions of kitschy life-reforming im- pulses that real life has buried under itself, and spares them the hopeless testing ground of actualization. Instead, language rolls up its sleeves and lets it be understood that right action, in the right place, is worth more than reflection. In that way a contempla- tive attitude, without any perception of the praxis which brings about changes, sympathizes all the more strikingly with the here and now, the servicing of obligations presented within the given.
Heidegger sees himself forced, in the analysis of curiosity, to intimate something of the historical dy- namic that necessarily dissolves static relationships. s4 On those relationships the theory of readiness to hand nourishes itself; he leaves it to the gang to call these hale. He sanctions, as an ontological possibility, that "dis-stancing" which is hallowed by its hyphen; that possibility that men might raise themselves above the mere immediacy of the reproduction of their own lives. Nevertheless, he slides into the defaming of consciousness, which has been released from im- prisonment :
Care becomes concern with the possibilities of the see- ing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along . . . solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongSide that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.
84. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 216.
log
When curiosity has become free, however, it con- cerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is , to come into a Being towards it ) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. 85
For Heidegger, the way to free consciousness is pre- established, inevitable; but it is as little charming to the man who is freed as are those who are narrowed by their circle of duties, those who distrust, as artful and shifty, the mind that is emancipated from praxis. He equates emancipated consciousness with curiosity.
His hatred toward curiosity is allied to his hatred to- ward mobility; both are even hammered into the mind by the ripe old saying: stay in the country and earn your living honestly. Genetic psychoanalysis knows the castration threat against the child's sexual investi- gation; the allegedly suprapsychological stance of the ontologist fits with the brutal "that's none of your business," invoked in the castration threat. In the ques-
tion of curiosity the thinker abuses thinking; without curiosity the subject would remain imprisoned in a dull repetition-compulsion and would never open him- self up to experience. Of course such an enlightenment insight is not the whole story. It is equally untrue that, through Heidegger's admonitions about "the They," that social state of affairs whose symptoms he reprimands grows better. It is only that his objection to curiosity
stems from yea-saying at any price :
curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and with marvelling at them-Oall,ua? ftJl. To be amazed to
8 5 . Ibid.
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the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. S6
In his Di(ferenz essay Hegel criticized curiosity much more searchingly; not as a state of mind but as the position of the reified consciousness with regard to the dead object:
The living spirit which dwells in a philosophy requires, in order to be released, that it should be brought to birth by a related spirit. It passes by, as an alien phenomenon, any historical conduct which from some kind of in- terest marches forth to an understanding of opinions; and it does not reveal its interior. To the living spirit it can seem indifferent that it must serve to enlarge the remaining collection of mummies and the general heaps of accidentalia ; for it itself has flowed away through the hands curious to collect new pieces of knowledge. 87
The disagreeable aspect of curiosity, as of greedy na- ture as a whole, cannot be glossed over. But it is not a probing agitation; rather it is something that re- actively, under the pressure of early childhood denial, has emerged from that denial; and which distorts that which once wanted to get free from the always-same, the identical. Curious people are characters whose childish longing for the truth about the sexual was never satisfied; their longing is a shabby substitute. The person from whom that which concerns him was
86. Ibid.
87. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1 95 8 ) , Vol. I : Aufs iitze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Aufsiitze aus der Jenenser Zeit (Dif- ferenzschrift ) , p. 40.
III
withheld mixes himself evilly into what does not con- cern him. He becomes enviously enraptured with in- formation over matters in which he himself should not play any part. That is the relation of all greediness to free desire. To Heidegger's arrogance toward the merely ontic, the genesis of curiosity is indifferent. He chalks up mutilation to the fault of the mutilated, as a fault of existence in general. His existential security becomes a heteronomously conditioned activity that is untried by curiosity-idle knowledge. This is probably the original philosophical history of the cliche of com- mitment. By denouncing a purely ontological possi- bility according to his own teaching, Heidegger be- comes the advocate of the unfullfilment of life. Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its existentialism right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance. In spite of its eager neutrality and distance from society, authenticity thus stands on the side of
the conditions of production, which, contrary to reason, perpetuate want.
Christian Schlitze has published a satire called the "Stenciled Speech for Festive Occasions. " It throws light on the j argon with great comic force :
Most honored Mr. President, ministers, secretaries of state, mayors, advisors, administrators, and assist- ants, highly esteemed men and women of our cultural life, representatives of science, of industry, and of the self-employed middle-class, honored public of this fes- tive gathering, ladies and gentlemen!
It is not by chance that we are gathered here today for the purpose of celebrating this day. In a time like ours, in which the true human values have more than ever to be our innermost concern, a statement is ex- pected from us. I do not wish to present you with a patented solution, but I would merely like to bring up for discussion a series of hot potatoes which do after all face us. For we do not need ready-made opinions, which anyway do not touch us deeply, but what we need is rather the genuine dialogue which moves us in our humanity. What brought us together here is our knowl- edge of the power of encounter in the forming of the intrahuman sphere. The things which matter are set-
89
tled in this intrahuman sphere: I do not have to tell you what I mean by this. You will all understand me, for in a particular and extraordinary sense you all have to do with people.
In a time like ours-I have mentioned it already- in which the perspective of things has everywhere begun to waver, everything depends more than ever on
the individual who knows of the essence of things, of things as such, of things in their authenticity. We need openhearted people who are capable of this. Who are th. ese people? -you will ask me-and I will answer you : You are they! By being gathered here you have proven more thoroughly than by words that you are prepared to put emphasis on your concern. That is what I would like to thank you for. But I would also like to thank you for energetically opposing, by your commitment to this good cause, the flood of materialism which threatens to drown everything around us. To say it in a nutshell from the start: you have come here to be given direc- tions; you have come to listen. From this encounter, on an intrahuman level, you expect a contribution to the reestablishment of the interhuman climate. You expect a restoration of that homey warmth which seems to be lacking, in our modern industrial society, to such a
terrifying degree. . . .
But what do'es this mean for our concrete situation
here and now? To pronounce the question means to pose it. But in fact it means much more than that. It means that we expose ourselves to it, that we surrender to it. That we must not forget. But in the rush and busy work of the day, modem man forgets it all too easily. But you who belong to the silent majority, you know of it. For our problems stem from a region which it is our vocation to preserve. The wholesome perplexity which comes from this situation opens perspectives which we should not simply block out by turning away in bore-
dom. It is important to think with the heart and to tune in the human antenna to the same wave length. Today
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? go
no ones knows better than man that which is of im- portance in the end. 69
Now, everything is assembled here : the innermost concern, the true dialogue, things in their authenticity, with a vague reminiscence of Heidegger, the encounter on an intrahuman level, the question for its own sake, even the slightly anachronistic reserve army of the silent majority. The long-winded address designates the participating notables in terms of their function and subordinates the whole speech from the beginning to an intangible administrative purpose. . While what the speaker is aiming at remains unspecified, the jar-
gon brings it to light. The concern is the working climate. By calling the listeners people "who in a par- ticular and extraordinary sense have to do with peo- ple," it can be gathered that the subject matter is that kind of human leadership in which men are merely the pretext for leadership-in-itself. To this is accurately fitted the indestructible phrase about the "flood of ma- terialism" which full-blooded industrial leaders usu- ally vituperate in those who are dependent on them. That is the ground of being of the higher element in
the jargon. In its slips of the tongue the jargon ac- knowledges that administration is its essence. The intrahuman level, which is supposed to contribute to the "reestablishment of the human climate," places the word '1evel" beside "intrahuman," together with the association of "I and thou," which has a social- scientific as well as a homey character. The levels, how-
69. Christian Schiitze, "Gestanzte Festansprache," in Stuttgarter Zeitung, Dec. 2, 1962, quoted in Der Monat, Jan. , 1963, p. 63, n. 160.
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ever-the level of counties, of the federation-desig- nate areas of judicial and administrative responsibility. The exhortation to think with the heart-Pascal's formula que les grandes pensees proviennent du coeur -has been admired by business men right from the beginning; it is pronounced with the same breath as "the human antenna is tuned in to the same wave length. " The total content, however, is flowering non- sense. This becomes obvious in phrases like "To pro- nounce the question is to pose it," or, "No one knows better than man that which is of importance in the end. " Such nonsense also has its reasonable basis in the world. It hides the fact that both it and the goal at which it aims are manipulated. For this reason all content is "bracketed," as it goes in administrative German. At the same time the appearance of content must not be renounced; those who are addressed, again in the same German, must "toe the line. " The purpose, the intention, contracts itself into an intentionless underworldly language, truthful to the objective deter- mination of the jargon itself, which has no other con- tent than its wrapping.
Mter the fact, the jargon adapts itself to the need for a philosophy which was current in about 1925. This was a philosophy that strove for the concretiza- tion of experience, thought, and behavior in the midst of a total state of affairs which oriented itself accord- ing to something abstract-according to exchange. For this reason the jargon is neither able nor willing
to concretize the elements which condemn it to aJ. stractness. The jargon turns in a circle. It wants to be
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immediately concrete without sliding into mere fac- ticity. It is consequently forced into secret abstraction, which is the same formalism against which Heidegger's own school, that of phenomenology, once strongly spoke out. This can be grasped in existential ontology's theoretical criticism, especially in the paired concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity in Sein und Zeit. Already there the drive for concretion is coupled with a hands-off attitude. One speaks from a depth which would be profaned if it were called content. Yet this depth wants to be this content, which in turn wants to express itself. Heidegger's defensive technique of with-
drawing into eternity takes place at this "pure and dis- gusting height" of which Hegel spoke in his polemic against Reinhold. 70 Like Reinhold, Heidegger cannot get enough of the ritual preliminaries for the "step into the temple," 71 although hardly anyone nowadays dares to tie a warning bell around the cat's neck. Heidegger is by no means incomprehensible, as one might gather from the marginalia of the positivists, but he lays around himself the taboo that any under- standing of him would simultaneously be falsification. The impossibility of saving what this thinking wants to save is cleverly turned into its own life element. This thinking refuses all content which would have to be argued against. MetaphysicS is said to miss this ele- ment in the same manner as it is missed in translation into ontic statements, which, as parts of the individual
70. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1958) Vol. I: "Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems," p. 43.
7 1 . Ibid.
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scientific disciplines, are regarded with some favor. 72 Even authenticity and inauthenticity are first of all treated cautiously. Heidegger shuns the reproach that he paints in black and white. He claims that he does not give a directive for philosophical judgment, but that he introduces descriptive and neutral terms in the manner of that which in earlier phenomenology was called investigation. In Weber's interpretation of soci- ology, a discipline denounced by Heidegger, this was called neutrality of values :
As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity ( these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness. But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any "less"
72. Careless for one moment, Heidegger shows his hand in the tractatus on Identitiit und Differenz:
But let us assume for a moment that difference is an element added by our representation. Then the question rises: added to what? The answer is, to the existent. All right. But what does this mean-the existent? What else does it mean but such a thing as is? Thus we enter the supposed addition, the conception of difference under being. But "Being" says itself: being which is existent? Where we wanted to take difference as supposed addition we already always find what is existent and being in their difference. It is the same story as Grimm's fairy tale about the hare and the hedgehog: ''I'm here already. " (Heidegger, Identitiit und Differenz [Pfiillingen, 1957], p. 60. )
What is said here about so-called ontological difference by means of a rather primitive hypostasis of the copula, is said in order to shift the ontological primacy of difference into being itself. This is actually Heidegger's method. This method protects itself by conSidering possible contradictions as ele ments that have already been considered in the particular thesis. These are false syllogisms which any logician could check. These false syllogisms are projected into, and thus justified by, the objective structure of that at which the thought
aims.
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Being or any "lower" degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity-when busy, when ex- cited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment. 13
In a much later passage of Sein und Zeit, the category of "the They" is subsumed under inauthenticity. In this passage Heidegger says
that interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any moralizing critique of every- day Dasein, and from the aspirations of a "philosophy of culture. " . . . Even the expression "idle talk" is not to be used here in a "disparaging" signification. 74
The quotation marks around "disparaging" are the kid gloves of a prudish metaphysics. Considerable advan- tages are connected with this kind of methodological performance. The affirmations of scientific purity in Husserl's texts provide the model for all thi s . The philosophy of authenticity needs its proviso clauses so that it can on occasion make the excuse that it is not a philosophy. The reputation of scientific objec- tivity grows together with its authority and, at the same time, leaves the decision between authentic and in- authentic being up to an arbitrariness-one that has been absolved from the judgment of reason, in a fash- ion not much different from Max Weber's "value. " The execution of the volte is so elegant because "the terminologically chosen" expressions are not exhausted by the uses of them that are chosen in subjective free- dom. Rather, and Heidegger the philosopher of lan- guage should be the first to concede this, they keep as
73. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68. 74. Ibid. , p. 211.
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their objective content those standards from which Heidegger distinguishes them. The nominalists saw that better than the latecomer of language mysticism. Following Bacon's doctrine of idols, Hobbes already noted "that men usually express their affects simul- taneously with words so that the latter already include a certain judgment on the subject matter. "75 The triviality of this observation does not free us from the responsibility of reminding people of it when they merely ignore it. As an impartial contemplative of essence, Heidegger allows for the fact that inauthen-
ticity "can define existence in its fullest concretion. " Yet the accompanying words, which he attributes to this mode of being, are essentially vituperative. As officiousness and interestedness, they characterize such qualities as have given themselves up to the world of exchange and wares and resemble this world. Some- body is officious when he carries on business activity for his own sake and confuses means with ends. If a person is "interested," it means that-all too openly
according to the rules of the bourgeois game-he sees to his own interest, or disguises as his objective that which only serves himself. Pleasure capacity falls in the same line. According to the habit of the petit bour- geois, the deformations inflicted on men by the world of profit are explained by men's greed, as if it was
their fault that they were cheated out of their sub- jectivity. In the end, however, Heidegger's philosophy does not want to have anything to do with the cultural
75. Quoted in Rudolf Eucken, Geschichte der philosophi- schen Terminologie (Leipzig, 1879), p. 86, in reference to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps. 4 and 5.
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4
philosophy in which such questions appear. And in- deed, the concept of cultural philosophy is just as ridiculous as that of social philosophy. The limitation of philosophy to one specific area is incompatible with the fact that it should reflect on institutional separa- tion. For philosophy should itself derive this separa- tion, and recognize that which is necessarily separated as something which then again is not separated. By virtue of its self-limitation, cultural philosophy accepts the division of phenomena into areas of subject matter and possibly even into those of hierarchy within areas. In the structure of alleged levels the place of culture is almost unavoidably a derived one. For this reason a philosophy which enjoys itself fastidiously in this sphere would be satisfied with that which officials patronize as essayism. By the same token it would avoid that which has been handed down under the name of constitutive problems, which, of course, could only be stubbornly ignored by such a philosophy. Hei- degger keeps that in mind. He is familiar, on the one hand, with Husserl's schema of philosophical-eidetic diSCiplines, and, on the other, of disciplines which are directed toward objects-both of which disciplines he melted together with the idealistic criticism of reifica- tion. But an overtone of the word "cultural-philosophi- cal" cannot fail to be heard in Heidegger. He defames that which sticks like a parasite to what is secondary, to life which has already been produced. He acts peevish toward any form of mediation, even in the mind which is itself essentially mediation. The growth climate of this hostility to cultural philosophy is that academic climate in which they admonished the Jew
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Georg Simmel, on the grounds that, at least in inten- tion, he absorbed himself in that concretion which the systems were forever only promising. Thus he trans- gressed a taboo of traditional philosophy which busies itself, if not with the fundamental themes of occidental metaphysics, at least with the question of their pos- sibility. Criticism of the limitations of cultural phi- losophy is vengefully limited. The chemically pure
concept of philosophy, as the inquiry into an unruined essence, underneath that which has only been made and posited by men, is worth just as little as that limited cultural philosophy. The subject area of the pure has no advantage over culture, whether this pure essence be considered as a truthfully philosophical element, as something merely explanatory, or as a supporting element. It is, rather, like culture, a deter- mination of reflection. While specialistic cultural phi- losophy absolutizes the form of that which has be-
come, against that on which it feeds, fundamental ontology embezzles its own cultural mediation, insofar as it shies away from a spirit which is concretized in objectivity. Whatever the possibilities of natural phi- losophy may be nowadays, primalness now has the same place in the philosophical atlas in which nature was once registered. This primalness is as much a part, as not, of that which fundamental ontology despises as culture. Culture includes even the material infrastructure of society, in which human work and
thought are rooted, and the only means by which work becomes real societal work. This does not mean that the contrast to the suprastructure becomes any less sharp. Philosophical nature has to be regarded as his-
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. .
tory, and history as nature. The contrast between primal experiences and cultural experiences, which Gundolf invented ad hoc for George, was ideology in the midst of the suprastructure, devised for the pur- pose of obscuring the contrast between infrastructure and ideology. The categories which he popularized, and among which even the later, more successful, category of godlike being is present, were marketed as substantial;76 while precisely in neoromanticism cultural mediation stands out blatantly, in the form
of the ]ugendstil. Bloch rightfully made fun of Gundolf for his belief in today's primal experiences. These primal experiences were a warmed-over piece of ex- pressionism.
They were later made into a permanent institution by Heidegger, under the benediction of public opinion. What he dislikes in dealing with cul- ture, to which, incidentally, his own philological di- vagations belong, is the business of starting with the experience of something derived. But this cannot be avoided and has to be taken into consciousness. In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally preformed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it. But funda- mental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretend- ing it has a starting point somewhere outside. In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of that on- tology'S own purity. Philosophy involves itself all the
76. Cf. Friedrich Gundolf, George, 3d ed. ( Berlin, 1930 ) P? 269.
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more deeply in society as it more eagerly-reflecting upon itself-pushes . off from society and its objective spirit. It claws itself firmly into its blindly social fate, which-in Heidegger's terminology-has thrown one into this and no other place. That was according to the
taste of fascism. With the downfall of market liberal- ism, relationships of domination stepped nakedly into the foreground. The baldness of their order, the au- thentic law of the "needy time," easily permits itself to be taken for something primal. That is how people
could jaw about blood and soil, without a smile, during the excessively accumulating industrial capitalism of the Third Reich. The jargon of authenticity continues al that, less tangibly-with impunity, because at that time social differences <? ccasionally led to conflicts -such as those between the primary-school teacher appOinted to ordinarius and the career professor, or between the official optimism of the deadly war ma-
chine and the philosophical frowning of far too auto? cratic enthusiasts, who were deeply attracted to Being unto death.
Heidegger's complaints against cultural philosophy have fateful consequences in the ontology of authen- ticity: what this ontology at first bans into the sphere of cultural mediation it now shoves directly on into hell. To be sure, the world is similar enough to hell,
dipped as the world is in a gloomy flood of nonsense, the fallen form of language. Karl Kraus compressed that fact into the thesis that today the phrase gives birth to reality-especially to that reality which arose, after the catastrophe, under the name of culture. To a great extent that reality is, as Valery defined politics,
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only there to keep men away from what is of im- portance to them. In agreement with Kraus, whom he does not mention, Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit:
Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is said-in-the-talk as such. " 77
So the business of communication and its formulas cut in between the matter and the subject, and blind the subject against precisely that which all the chatter is about. "What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. " 78 But Heidegger imposes the critical diagnosis of a negative ontological presence on the "everyday being of the Da, existence," which in truth is historical in nature: the entangling of the mind with the sphere of circulation, at a stage in which the objective spirit is covered by the economic utilization process, as if by a fungus which stifles the quality of thought. This confusion has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein.
Heidegger rightly perceives the abstractness of chatter "as such," which has emptied itself of any relationship to its content; but from the aberrant abstractness of chatter he draws conclusions as to its metaphysical invariance, however questionable that may be. Chatter would already be in decline if, in a reasonable econ- omy, the expenditure of advertisements disappeared . Chatter is forced on men by a social structure which
77. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 212. 78. Ibid.
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negates them as subjects long before this is done by the newspaper companies. But Heidegger's critique becomes ideological by grasping the emancipated spirit as that which becomes of it under supremely real engagements, and by doing so without making distinc- tions. He condemns idle chatter, but not brutality, the alliance with which is the true guilt of chatter, which is in itself far more innocent. As soon as Heidegger wants to silence chatter, his language clatters with weaponry :
To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say-that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one's ret- icence . . . makes something manifest, and does away with "idle talk. " 79
His language itself speaks forth, as seldom elsewhere, from the word "to strike down"; it is a language of power. But it has already been seen in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts. Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything :
The "they" is there alongside everywhere, . . . but in such a manner that it has always stolen away when- ever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the "they" presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The "they" can, as it were, manage to have "them" con- stantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It "was" always the "they" who
79. Ibid. , p. 208. 102
? ? ? did it, and yet it can be said that it has been "no one. " In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that "it was no one. " 80
That is precisely what came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand,81 that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse. Heidegger's sketch of the They comes closest to what it is, the exchange relationship, when he is treating averageness :
The "they" has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called "distan- tiality" is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one- another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the "they. " The "they," in its Being, essentially makes an issue of this. Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the aver- ageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it re- gards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything excep- tional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of pri- ority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a strug- gle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the "levelling" down . . . of all possibilities of Being. "82
80. Ibid. , p. I65.
8I. [Befehlsnotstand: morally compelling situation for a soldier, who must carry out an order with which he cannot square his conscience. ]
82. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. I64 65.
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That leveling is described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that "prerogative" for themselves. It is a leveling which they themselves want to employ, and is no other than the leveling which occasionally befalls the exchanger, through his inevitable reduction to the equivalence form; the critique of political econ- omy grasping exchange value in terms of the social work-time which on the average has to be spent. In its hostility to the negatively ontologized They, the opposi-
tion to capitalist anonymity eagerly overlooks the law of value which is asserting itself-a suffering which will not have it said what it is suffering from. When that anonymity, whose social source is unmistakable, is analyzed as a possibility of being, then that society is exonerated which simultaneously both disqualifies and determines the relationships of its members.
The mobility of words unquestionably continued their degradation from the beginning. In the functional word, deception is posited simultaneously with the exchange principle itself and grasps spirit; because this latter cannot be without the idea of truth, it ex- hibits flagrantly what has entrenched itself in material praxis behind the free and upright exchange of goods. But without mobility language would never have be- come capable of that relation to the matter at hand, by whose criterion Heidegger judges communicative language. Language philosophy, in the question of communicative language, would have to investigate
the metamorphosis of quantity into the quality of mere chatter, or, better, the interinvolvement of both as- pects; and would not proceed in an authoritarian spirit to sort out the wheat from the chaff of language. No
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thinking could unfold itself into the not-yet-thought without that shot of irresponsibility over which Hei- degger grows so excited; in that, the spoken distin- guishes itself from the authentically written word, and even in the latter positivists can easily criticize as ir- responsible that which goes beyond what is the case. Immaturity and timidity stand no higher than chatter. Even that linguistic objectivity which presupposes the utmost alertness toward the phrase also has as its pre- condition mobility of expression, no matter how broken : urbanity. Nobody can write without phrases, and who is true to the matter who is not also a literate person? The defense of this kind of person seems to be in place after the murder of the Jews. Kraus him- self despised the illiterate, if possible even more than the literate. On the other hand the summary judgment concerning idle talk, which insinuates it through a negative ontology, constantly permits the justification of the phrase as if it were fate. Once idle talk is a state of mind, one need not be greatly embarrassed when
authenticity turns into idle talk. That is happening today to Heidegger's own legend. We might pull some sentences out of a piece on The Idea of the German University and the Reform of the German Universities by Ernst Anrich :
It is no encroachment [that is, on academic autonomy] when from this Hippocratic oath we make a certain de- mand, out of our clear knowledge that no specific phi- losophy can today be placed deciSively at the center of the university, a demand that we shall keep alert our universality and our responsiveness in face of the whole of reality; it is no encroachment on this situation when we ask each scholar in this body to carry on his
105
scholarship under the sign of the final question about the ground of Being and the whole of Being; and when we ask him to discuss and exchange these problems within the whole body, the dignity of which resides therein. If it is right to demand of the student that the essence of his study must be to drive forward, within his own specialty, to the view of Being, and to responsibility in face of the totality of Being; if that is right, then we must require of the professor that it be made clear, through his courses, how his own research is itself ultimately motivated by a struggle with these questions; and it may be expected that each of his courses should be an invoking and awakening force, in this sense. S3
In an organizational, uncommonly ontic context such sentences use the jargon of authenticity in just the way in which Heidegger portrays it in Sein und Zeit: as a characteristic feature of idle talk. The authority to which in that way the jargon obliges itself is no other than the authority of the Heideggerian philoso- phy itself. That in the relevant chapter the author constantly and rhetorically repeats, "It is no encroach- ment," is meant to hide precisely such an encroach- ment; namely, the oath-Anrich himself uses the mythical word-on the so-called question of Being. Yet in the same breath the author concedes that no definite philosophy could today be placed at the center of the university. It is as though the ominous question of Being were beyond criticism. Whoever justly spurns the question of Being together with the chatter about it had best be sent away entirely. Anrich skillfully
83. Ernst Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universitiit und die Reform der deutschen Universitiiten, (Darmstadt, 1960), l" 114?
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latches onto the fact that, in formulas like that of the question concerning the ground of Being, the innocent still hear the sound of resistance against the dispirited atmosphere in which the humanities are today carried on. A human right of students, their need for the es- sential, becomes blurred in the jargon, in the Hei- deggerian essence-mythology of Being. The spirit which they miss in the universities is silently converted into the monopoly of an instructional system which, for its part, cried heresy against the spirit when it appeared in the form of reason.
As in the concept of idle chatter, so in that of readi- ness to hand, which is portrayed with sympathy, and which is the philosophical ancestress of shelteredness, suffering experience is interpreted into its opposite. At some historical stages of agriculture, and in simple wares-economy, production was not radically subordi- nated to exchange and was nearer to the workers and consumers; and their relationships to one another were not totally reified. The idea of something undis- figured, undeformed, an idea which has yet to be actualized, could hardly have been created without a memory trace of such earlier conditions; although over long periods they probably caused more immediate suffering to those exposed to such conditions than did capitalism. Nonetheless, identifying thought, schooled in exchange, brought the differentiated down to the identity of the concept, and chopped up this more in- nocent identity. What Hegel and Marx in their youth condemned as alienation and reification, and against which all are spontaneously united today, is what Heidegger interprets ontologically as well as unhis-
107
torically, and, in its function as a being-form of Dasein, as something bodily. The ideology of readiness to hand, and its counterpart, strips itself bare in the practice of those devotees of the musical youth movement, who swear to it that a proper fiddle is one that a fiddler has rigged up for himself. Since the artisan forms of pro- duction have been overtaken by technology, and are superfluous, the intimacy which adhered to them has become as worthless as the do-it-yourself movement. The unfunctional self-being of things, their freedom from the compulsion of identity, which the dominating mind imposes, would be utopia. It presupposes the alteration of the whole. Nonetheless, in the midst of our all-embracing function context every ontological light on the remains of so-called readiness to hand gilds that context. For its sake the jargon of authen- ticity speaks as though it were the voice of men and things that are there for their own sake. Through this manoeuver, the jargon becomes all the more a for- others, something for planned and pedagogically deco- rated effect-contexts. Indeed, the Wagnerian ''To be German means to do something for its own sake" accelerated, in slogan form, the export of the German spirit. That spirit competed successfully with the more advanced commodity-thinking of the West, through the slogan's imprimatur, which declared that it was no commodity. That throws light on the artsy-craftsy element in the jargon. It provides a refuge for the stale notion that art should be brought back into life, and
that there should be more than art but also more than mere usage. The jargon pursues artisanship under the shadow of industry, as carefully chosen as it is cheap;
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it gathers reproductions of kitschy life-reforming im- pulses that real life has buried under itself, and spares them the hopeless testing ground of actualization. Instead, language rolls up its sleeves and lets it be understood that right action, in the right place, is worth more than reflection. In that way a contempla- tive attitude, without any perception of the praxis which brings about changes, sympathizes all the more strikingly with the here and now, the servicing of obligations presented within the given.
Heidegger sees himself forced, in the analysis of curiosity, to intimate something of the historical dy- namic that necessarily dissolves static relationships. s4 On those relationships the theory of readiness to hand nourishes itself; he leaves it to the gang to call these hale. He sanctions, as an ontological possibility, that "dis-stancing" which is hallowed by its hyphen; that possibility that men might raise themselves above the mere immediacy of the reproduction of their own lives. Nevertheless, he slides into the defaming of consciousness, which has been released from im- prisonment :
Care becomes concern with the possibilities of the see- ing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along . . . solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongSide that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.
84. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 216.
log
When curiosity has become free, however, it con- cerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is , to come into a Being towards it ) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. 85
For Heidegger, the way to free consciousness is pre- established, inevitable; but it is as little charming to the man who is freed as are those who are narrowed by their circle of duties, those who distrust, as artful and shifty, the mind that is emancipated from praxis. He equates emancipated consciousness with curiosity.
His hatred toward curiosity is allied to his hatred to- ward mobility; both are even hammered into the mind by the ripe old saying: stay in the country and earn your living honestly. Genetic psychoanalysis knows the castration threat against the child's sexual investi- gation; the allegedly suprapsychological stance of the ontologist fits with the brutal "that's none of your business," invoked in the castration threat. In the ques-
tion of curiosity the thinker abuses thinking; without curiosity the subject would remain imprisoned in a dull repetition-compulsion and would never open him- self up to experience. Of course such an enlightenment insight is not the whole story. It is equally untrue that, through Heidegger's admonitions about "the They," that social state of affairs whose symptoms he reprimands grows better. It is only that his objection to curiosity
stems from yea-saying at any price :
curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and with marvelling at them-Oall,ua? ftJl. To be amazed to
8 5 . Ibid.
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the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. S6
In his Di(ferenz essay Hegel criticized curiosity much more searchingly; not as a state of mind but as the position of the reified consciousness with regard to the dead object:
The living spirit which dwells in a philosophy requires, in order to be released, that it should be brought to birth by a related spirit. It passes by, as an alien phenomenon, any historical conduct which from some kind of in- terest marches forth to an understanding of opinions; and it does not reveal its interior. To the living spirit it can seem indifferent that it must serve to enlarge the remaining collection of mummies and the general heaps of accidentalia ; for it itself has flowed away through the hands curious to collect new pieces of knowledge. 87
The disagreeable aspect of curiosity, as of greedy na- ture as a whole, cannot be glossed over. But it is not a probing agitation; rather it is something that re- actively, under the pressure of early childhood denial, has emerged from that denial; and which distorts that which once wanted to get free from the always-same, the identical. Curious people are characters whose childish longing for the truth about the sexual was never satisfied; their longing is a shabby substitute. The person from whom that which concerns him was
86. Ibid.
87. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1 95 8 ) , Vol. I : Aufs iitze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Aufsiitze aus der Jenenser Zeit (Dif- ferenzschrift ) , p. 40.
III
withheld mixes himself evilly into what does not con- cern him. He becomes enviously enraptured with in- formation over matters in which he himself should not play any part. That is the relation of all greediness to free desire. To Heidegger's arrogance toward the merely ontic, the genesis of curiosity is indifferent. He chalks up mutilation to the fault of the mutilated, as a fault of existence in general. His existential security becomes a heteronomously conditioned activity that is untried by curiosity-idle knowledge. This is probably the original philosophical history of the cliche of com- mitment. By denouncing a purely ontological possi- bility according to his own teaching, Heidegger be- comes the advocate of the unfullfilment of life. Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its existentialism right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance. In spite of its eager neutrality and distance from society, authenticity thus stands on the side of
the conditions of production, which, contrary to reason, perpetuate want.
