But the
inauthenticity
of Dasein does not signify any "less"
72.
72.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
" 64 The line expresses the vague feeling that an unsayable element of ex- perience wants something from the subject.
This is similarly the case with the archaic torso of Apollo : 65 "Many stars expected you to feel them.
" 66 To that the poem adds the uncommittedness and vainness of such a feeling of command, especially when it expresses the poetic subject : "But did you manage it?
" 67 Rilke ab- solutizes the word "commission" under the shelter of aesthetic appearance and, as the poem advances, limits the claim that his pathos already announces.
The jargon needs only to cross out this limitation, with a deft movement, and to take literally the word "commission," which has been absolutized by ques- tionable poetastering.
But the fact that the neo- romantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form.
It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose.
Both of them become unequally untrue from the same cause.
The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theo- logical overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament.
Where words and turns of this
64. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien (New York, n. d. ), p. 8.
65. Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Der neuen Gedichte anderer TeiZ ('Leipzig, 1919) p. I.
? 6. Rilke, Duineser Elegien, p . 7 . 67. Ibid. , p. 8.
? ? ? ? ? ? sort appear in HOlderlin-the secret model for all this -they are not yet the tremulous expressions of the j argon, however uninhibitedly the administrators of the jargon reach out their hands toward that unpro- tected genius. In lyric poetry, as in philosophy, the jargon acquires its defining character by the way it imputes its truth. It does this by making an intended object present-as though this object were Being with- out any tension toward the subject. That makes it, prior to all discursive judgment, into untruth. The expression is sufficient unto itself. It discards as an annoyance the obligation to express a thing other than itself. Beyond its difference from that thing, which may already be nothing, and out of thanks, this nothing is made into that which is supreme. Rilke's language still stands on the edge of all this, like much that is irrational from the era prior to fascism. It not only darkens, but it also takes note of, subconscious ma- terial, which, slipping away from thingly rationality, protests against it. The feeling of being touched, which the word "commission" is supposed to evoke in that elegy, is of such a nature. It at once becomes unbear- able as soon as it objectifies itself, as soon as it flaunts itself as something definite and unambiguous pre- cisely in its irrationality. It is unbearable in all its registers; from Heidegger's obedient and comprehend- ing thought to all that summoning and invoking, with whose details the subaltern self-importance of the jargon surrounds itself. Simply because Rilke, in this poem, acknowledges the multiple significance of com- mission, that multiple significance expects to be ab- solved. On the other hand, though, commission with-
85
out committing agen t is alre ady used here, as in the jargon; and a conception of Being in general is evoked which fits this usage. That again accords with the handicraftish religiosity of the early Rilke, especially of the Book of Hours, which with theological phrasings subjects the psychological to a kind of refining process.
Lyric poetry permits itself any metaphor, even the absolutely unmetaphorical, as a parable. It will not be disturbed by the question of the objectivity of those things that are allegedly suggested to the subject by its emotions. Nor will the lyric be disturbed by the question of whether the words, gathered from culture, at all cover the experiences whose objectification is the central idea of such lyric. Therefore, because it blunts itself against the truth and exactitude of its words-even the vaguest would have to be smuggled in as something vague, not as something definite- this lyric, as lyric, is already bad, despite its virtuos- ity. The problematic of that to which it claims to ele- vate itself, the problematic of its content, is also that of its form, which makes believe it could be capable of transcendence, and in that way becomes mere ap- pearance in a more fateful sense than that of the aesthetic.
The evil truth behind that appearance, nonethe- less, is precisely the bond between commission and the administrative structure, a bond which denies that ap- pearance in the service of that structure. Its words
are dossier numbers, or stamps, or that In re of of- ficial office language, which it remains the commission of the jargon to gloss over. The fussy attention to in- dividual words, as they were lexically handled in the
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days of the pre-Heideggerian idol-phenomenology, was already the harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking. Whoever prepared meanings from all this, whoever acted as a midwife of today's pure words, acted by force, without regard for the sanctuaries of the philos- ophy of Being. The method which prohibits a word from being involved with its neighbors was, objectively, of the same character as the small bureaucrat, who sees to it that everything remains strictly in its cate- gory, as he himself remains in his salary-class. Even death is handled by the book, in SS-orders and in exis- tential philosophies; red tape ridden as Pegasus, ridden in extremis as an apocalyptic steed. In the jargon the sun, which the jargon has in its heart, brings the dark
secret of the method to the light of day, as the method of a procedure which eagerly takes the place of the intended object. In general, the j argon behaves in this way itself. Indifferent to the matter at hand, it is to be used for commanded purposes. Language, as once in major philosophy, no longer flows out of the necessity of the subject matter. Such language-procedural indif- ference has become a metaphysics of language : that which in terms of its form seems to fly above its cor- relative, thereby establishes itself as something higher.
The less philosophical systematizing, which Nietzsche called dishonest, is theoretically pOSSible, the more that which had its place only in the system transforms itself into mere assertion. In effect, linguistic non- sense is the heir of the diSintegrated strictness of the system. In fact, like a worthless construction, it is for- ever falling off its stilts and stumbling around in non- sense.
? ? The term "commission" sets itself up with unques- tioned authority in the vulgar jargon of authenticity. The fallibility of the term is hushed up by the absolute use of the word. By leaving out of consideration the organizations and people which give commissions, the
term establishes itself as a linguistic eyrie of totalitar- ian orders. It does this without rational examination of the right of those who usurp for themselves the charisma of the leader. Shy theology allies itself with secular brazenness. There exist cross-connections be- tween the jargon of authenticity and old school-like phrases, like that which was once observed by Tuchol- sky: "That's the way it's done here. " The same holds true for the trick of military command, which dresses an imperative in the guise of a predicative sentence. By eliminating all linguistic traces of the will of the superior, that which is intended is given greater em- phasis. Thus the impression is created that it is neces- sary to obey, since what is demanded already occurs factually. "The participants on this trip, in memory of
our heroes, assemble in Liineburg. " Heidegger, too, cracks the whip when he italicizes the auxiliary verb in the sentence, "Death is. " 68 The grammatical transla- tion of the imperative into a predication makes the imperative categorical. This imperative does not allow for refusal, since it no longer at al obliges like the Kantian imperative, but describes obedience as a com- pleted fact. Possible resistance is then eliminated simply in terms of logical form. The objection raised
68. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. 88
by reason is banned from the range of what is at all conceivable in society. Such irrationality, in an ele- ment which still, in times of pawned-off myths, insists on calling itself thinking, was, of course, the blemish of the Kantian enlightenment. 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-
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.
? ? ? ? ? 91
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.
? ? ? 94
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.
95
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-
? 98
. .
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.
101
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.
103
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.
64. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien (New York, n. d. ), p. 8.
65. Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Der neuen Gedichte anderer TeiZ ('Leipzig, 1919) p. I.
? 6. Rilke, Duineser Elegien, p . 7 . 67. Ibid. , p. 8.
? ? ? ? ? ? sort appear in HOlderlin-the secret model for all this -they are not yet the tremulous expressions of the j argon, however uninhibitedly the administrators of the jargon reach out their hands toward that unpro- tected genius. In lyric poetry, as in philosophy, the jargon acquires its defining character by the way it imputes its truth. It does this by making an intended object present-as though this object were Being with- out any tension toward the subject. That makes it, prior to all discursive judgment, into untruth. The expression is sufficient unto itself. It discards as an annoyance the obligation to express a thing other than itself. Beyond its difference from that thing, which may already be nothing, and out of thanks, this nothing is made into that which is supreme. Rilke's language still stands on the edge of all this, like much that is irrational from the era prior to fascism. It not only darkens, but it also takes note of, subconscious ma- terial, which, slipping away from thingly rationality, protests against it. The feeling of being touched, which the word "commission" is supposed to evoke in that elegy, is of such a nature. It at once becomes unbear- able as soon as it objectifies itself, as soon as it flaunts itself as something definite and unambiguous pre- cisely in its irrationality. It is unbearable in all its registers; from Heidegger's obedient and comprehend- ing thought to all that summoning and invoking, with whose details the subaltern self-importance of the jargon surrounds itself. Simply because Rilke, in this poem, acknowledges the multiple significance of com- mission, that multiple significance expects to be ab- solved. On the other hand, though, commission with-
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out committing agen t is alre ady used here, as in the jargon; and a conception of Being in general is evoked which fits this usage. That again accords with the handicraftish religiosity of the early Rilke, especially of the Book of Hours, which with theological phrasings subjects the psychological to a kind of refining process.
Lyric poetry permits itself any metaphor, even the absolutely unmetaphorical, as a parable. It will not be disturbed by the question of the objectivity of those things that are allegedly suggested to the subject by its emotions. Nor will the lyric be disturbed by the question of whether the words, gathered from culture, at all cover the experiences whose objectification is the central idea of such lyric. Therefore, because it blunts itself against the truth and exactitude of its words-even the vaguest would have to be smuggled in as something vague, not as something definite- this lyric, as lyric, is already bad, despite its virtuos- ity. The problematic of that to which it claims to ele- vate itself, the problematic of its content, is also that of its form, which makes believe it could be capable of transcendence, and in that way becomes mere ap- pearance in a more fateful sense than that of the aesthetic.
The evil truth behind that appearance, nonethe- less, is precisely the bond between commission and the administrative structure, a bond which denies that ap- pearance in the service of that structure. Its words
are dossier numbers, or stamps, or that In re of of- ficial office language, which it remains the commission of the jargon to gloss over. The fussy attention to in- dividual words, as they were lexically handled in the
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days of the pre-Heideggerian idol-phenomenology, was already the harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking. Whoever prepared meanings from all this, whoever acted as a midwife of today's pure words, acted by force, without regard for the sanctuaries of the philos- ophy of Being. The method which prohibits a word from being involved with its neighbors was, objectively, of the same character as the small bureaucrat, who sees to it that everything remains strictly in its cate- gory, as he himself remains in his salary-class. Even death is handled by the book, in SS-orders and in exis- tential philosophies; red tape ridden as Pegasus, ridden in extremis as an apocalyptic steed. In the jargon the sun, which the jargon has in its heart, brings the dark
secret of the method to the light of day, as the method of a procedure which eagerly takes the place of the intended object. In general, the j argon behaves in this way itself. Indifferent to the matter at hand, it is to be used for commanded purposes. Language, as once in major philosophy, no longer flows out of the necessity of the subject matter. Such language-procedural indif- ference has become a metaphysics of language : that which in terms of its form seems to fly above its cor- relative, thereby establishes itself as something higher.
The less philosophical systematizing, which Nietzsche called dishonest, is theoretically pOSSible, the more that which had its place only in the system transforms itself into mere assertion. In effect, linguistic non- sense is the heir of the diSintegrated strictness of the system. In fact, like a worthless construction, it is for- ever falling off its stilts and stumbling around in non- sense.
? ? The term "commission" sets itself up with unques- tioned authority in the vulgar jargon of authenticity. The fallibility of the term is hushed up by the absolute use of the word. By leaving out of consideration the organizations and people which give commissions, the
term establishes itself as a linguistic eyrie of totalitar- ian orders. It does this without rational examination of the right of those who usurp for themselves the charisma of the leader. Shy theology allies itself with secular brazenness. There exist cross-connections be- tween the jargon of authenticity and old school-like phrases, like that which was once observed by Tuchol- sky: "That's the way it's done here. " The same holds true for the trick of military command, which dresses an imperative in the guise of a predicative sentence. By eliminating all linguistic traces of the will of the superior, that which is intended is given greater em- phasis. Thus the impression is created that it is neces- sary to obey, since what is demanded already occurs factually. "The participants on this trip, in memory of
our heroes, assemble in Liineburg. " Heidegger, too, cracks the whip when he italicizes the auxiliary verb in the sentence, "Death is. " 68 The grammatical transla- tion of the imperative into a predication makes the imperative categorical. This imperative does not allow for refusal, since it no longer at al obliges like the Kantian imperative, but describes obedience as a com- pleted fact. Possible resistance is then eliminated simply in terms of logical form. The objection raised
68. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. 88
by reason is banned from the range of what is at all conceivable in society. Such irrationality, in an ele- ment which still, in times of pawned-off myths, insists on calling itself thinking, was, of course, the blemish of the Kantian enlightenment. 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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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
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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.
