What remains after the removal of
existential
bombast are religious customs cut off from their religious content.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
Transcendence and concretion scintillate.
Ambiguity is the medium of an attitude
? 12
toward language which is damned by its favorite phi- losophy. s
But the untruth indicts itself by becoming bom- bastic. After a long separation a certain person wrote that he was existentially secure; it took some reflection to realize that he meant he had been sufficiently taken care of in regard to his finances . A center intended for international discussions-whatever they may be good for-is called the House of Encounters; the visible house, "firmly grounded in the earth," is turned into a sacred house through those gatherings-which are meant to be superior to discussions because they occur
among existing and living individuals, although these individuals might just as well be engaged in discussion, for as long as they do not commit suicide they could hardly do anything other than exist. One's relation to his fellow man should be important prior to all con- tent; for that purpose the jargon is satisfied with the shabby group-ethos of the youth movement, an indica- tion that nothing is reaching either beyond the nose of the speaker, or beyond the capacity of the person who has only lately begun to be called his "partner. " The j argon channels engagement into firm institutions and, furthermore, strengthens the most subaltern speakers in their self-esteem; they are already something be- cause someone speaks from within them, even when
that someone is nothing at all. The resonant directive
5. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 3d ed. (Halle, 1 931 ) , pp. 2 17 ff. [English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York, 1 962 ) . Sub- sequent page references from Being and Time will be to this translation. ]
? 13
of the jargon, that its thought should not be too strenu- ous, because otherwise it would offend the community, also becomes for these people the guarantee of a higher confirmation. This suppresses the fact that the lan- guage itself-through its generality and objectivity already negates the whole man, the particular speak- ing individual subject: the first price exacted by lan- guage is the essence of the individual. But through the appearance that the whole man, and not thought, speaks, the jargon pretends that, as a close-at-hand manner of communication, it is invulnerable to de- humanized mass communication-which is precisely what recommends it to everyone's enthusiastic accept- ance. Whoever stands behind his words, in the way in which these words pretend, is safe from any suspicion about what he is at that very moment about to do: speak for others in order to palm something off on them.
The word "statement" finally secures its alibi when "true" is connected to it. By means of its prestige it wants to endow the "for others" with the solidity of the in-itself. For glorified man, who himself not too long ago invented the term "death and glory squad," is the ground of being for the jargon as well as the ad- dressee of the statement; and it has become impossible to distinguish between the two. The attribute "valid" often sticks to "statement. " The reason for this ob- viously lies in the fact that the emphatic experience, which the word claims insistently, is no longer experi-
enced by those who favor this word for the claim it makes. A loudspeaker becomes necessary? "Statement" wants to announce that something which was said has
? ? come from the depth of the speaking subject; it is removed from the curse of surface communication. But at the same time communicative disorder disguises itself in the statement. Someone speaks and, thanks to the elevated term "statement," what he says is to be the sign of truth-as if men could not become caught up in untruth, as if they could not suffer martyrdom for plain nonsense. Prior to all content this shift in- dicts statement as soon as it wants to be such; it
charges statement with being a lie. The listener is sup- posed to gain something from the statement because of its subjective reliability. This latter attribute, how- ever, is borrowed from the world of ware s . I t is the claim of the consumer that even the spiritual should direct itself according to his will, against its own con- ceptual nature.
This admonition to the spirit silently dominates the whole climate of the jargon. The real and vain need for help is supposed to be satisfied by the pure spirit, merely by means of consolation and without action. The empty chatter about expression is the ideology complementary to that silencing which the status quo imposes on those who have no power over it, and whose claim is therefore hollow in advance. But whatever turns its back critically on the status quo has been dis- counted, by Germans in solid positions, as "without ex- pressive value. " Not least of all, statement is used as the club with which to assail the new art. That art's recalcitrance against traditional communicable sense has been reproached-as though from a higher view- point-by those whose aesthetic consciousness is not up to it. If one adds to a statement that it is "valid,"
? ? ? ? ? ? 15
then whatever at a given moment holds good, whatever is officially 'stamped, can be imputed to it as metaphysi- ca! lly authorized. The formula spares people the trouble of thinking about the metaphysics which it has dragged with it, or about the content of what has been stated.
The concept of statement appears in Heidegger as nothing less that the constituent of the Da, existence. s Behind this jargon is a determining doctrine of the I-thou relationship as the locale of truth-a doctrine that defames the objectivity of truth as thingly, and secretly warms up irrationalism. As such a relation- ship, communication turns into that transpsycho- logical element which it can only be by virtue of the objectivity of what is communicated; in the end stu- pidity becomes the founder of metaphysics. Ever since Martin Buber split off Kierkegaard's view of the existen- tial from Kierkegaard's Christology, and dressed it up as a universal posture, there has been a dominant in- clination to conceive of metaphysical content as bound to the so-called relation of I and thou. This content is referred to the immediacy of life. Theology is tied to
the determinations of immanence, which in turn want to claim a larger meaning, by means of their sugges- tion of theology: they are already virtually like the words of the jargon. In this process, nothing less is whisked away than the threshold between the natural and the supernatural. Lesser authentics raise their eyes reverently before death, but their spiritual atti- tude, infatuated with the living, disregards death. The thorn in theology, without which salvation is unthink-
6. Ibid. , p. 196. 16
? ? ? able, is removed. According to the concept of theology, nothing natural has gone through death without meta- morphosis. In the man-to-man relationship there can be no eternity now and here, and certainly not in the relationship of man to God, a relationship that seems to pat Him on the shoulder. Buber's style of existential- ism draws its transcendence, in a reversed analogia entis, out of the fact that spontaneous relationships among persons cannot be reduced to objective poles. This existentialism remains the Lebensphilosophie out of which it came, in philosophical history, and which it abnegated: it overelevates the dynamism of mor-
tality into the sphere of immortality.
Thus in the jargon transcendence is finally brought
closer to men: it is the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit. The sermon in Huxley's Brave New World must have been written in the j argon . It was taped in order to be played when needed : to bring to reason the rebellious masses-by deep programmed emotion-in case they should once more band together. For advertising pur- poses the Wurlitzer organ humanizes the vibrato, once a carrier of subjective expression, by mechanically superimposing it on the mechanically produced sound. The jargon likewise supplies men with patterns for being human, patterns which have been driven out of them by unfree labor, if ever in fact traces of free labor did exist. Heidegger instituted authenticity against the
they and against small talk, without deluding himself that there could be a complete leap between the two types of existentials that he deals with; for he knew that they merge into each other precisely because of their own dynamism. But he did not foresee that what
? I7
he named authentic, once become word, would grow toward the same exchange-society anonymity against which Sein und Zeit rebelled. The jargon, which in Heidegger's phenomenology of small talk earned an honored position, marks the adept, in their own opin- ion, as untrivial and of higher sensibility; while at the same time that jargon calms the constantly festering suspicion of uprootedness.
In professional groups which, as they say, carry on intellectual work, but which are at the same time em- ployed, dependent, or economically weak, the jargon is a professional illness. Among such groups a specific function is added to a general social one. Their cul- ture and consciousness limp far behind that spirit which according to society's division of labor is their realm of activity. Through their jargon they aspire to remove this distance, to put themselves forward as sharers in higher culture ( to them old hats still sound modern) as well as individuals with an ,essence of their own; the more innocent among them may quite frankly still call all that a personal note-using an expression from the era of handicrafts, from which the jargon in question has borrowed a lot. The stereotypes of the jar- gon support and reassure subjective movement. They
seem to guarantee that one is not doing what in fact he is doing-bleating with the crowd-simply by vir- tue of his using those stereotypes to guarantee that one has achieved it all himself, as an unmistakably free person. The formal gesture of autonomy replaces the content of autonomy. Bombastically, it is called com- mitment, but it is heteronomously borrowed. That which pseudo-individualizing attends to in the culture
18
industry, the jargon attends to among those who have contempt for the culture industry. This is the German symptom of progressive half-culture. It seems to be in- vented for those who feel that they have been judged by history, or at least that they are falling, but who still strut in front of their peers as if they were an interior elite .
The importance of this jargon is not to be under- estimated simply because a small group writes it. In- numerable real-life people speak it, from the student who in his exam lets himself go on about authentic encounter, to the bishop's press secretary who asks : Do you believe that God addresses only our reason? Their unmediated language they receive from a dis- tributor. In the theological conversations of Dr. Faustus' students, in Auerbach's den of 1945, Thomas Mann intuited with precise irony most of the habits of modern German-though he no longer had much occasion Ito observe them. There certainly were appro- priate models before 1933, but only after the war,
when National Socialist language became unwanted, did the jargon gain omnipresence. Since then the most intimate interchange has taken place between the writ-, ten and the spoken word. Thus one will be able to read printed jargon which unmistakably imitates radio voices that have themselves drawn on written works of authenticity. Mediated and immediate elements are mediated through each other in frightful ways. And since they are synthetically prepared, that which is mediated has become the caricature of what is natural. The jargon no longer knows primary and secondary communities, and by the same token it knows no par-
? 19
ties. This development has a real basis. The institu- tional and psychological superstructure, which in 1930 Kr,acauer diagnosed as a culture of employees, deluded the celluloid-colla;r proletariat, who were then threat- ened by the immediacy of losing their jobs. It deluded them into believing that they. were something special. Through this delusion the superstructure made them toe the bourgeois line, while in the meantime, thanks to a lasting market boom, that superstructure has become the universal ideology of a society which mistakes itself for a unified middle class. They let themselves be con- firmed in this attitude by a uniform mode of speech, which eagerly welcomes the jargon fo;r purposes of col- lective narcissism. This ,applies not only to those who
speak it but also to the objective spirit. The j argon af- firms the reliability of the universal by means of the distinction of having a bourgeOis origin, a distinction which is itself authorized by the universal. Its tone of approved selectivity seems to come from the person himself. The greater advantage in all this is that of good references. It makes no difference what the voice that resonates in ,this way says; it is signing a social contract. Awe, in face of that existent which pretends to be more than it is, beats down all that is unruly. One is given to understand ,that that which occurs is so deep
that language could not unhallow what has been said by saying it. Pure clean hands recoil from the thought of changing ,anything in the valid property-and- authority relationships; the very sound of it all makes that idea contemptible, as the merely ontic is to Heideg- ger. One can trust anyone who babbles this jargon; peo- ple wear. it in their buttonholes, in place of the
? ? ? 20
currently disreputable party badge. The pure tone drips with 'positivity, without needing to stoop too far pleading for what is all too compromised; one escapes even the long-since-socialized suspicion of ideology. In the jargon that division between the destructive and the constructive, with which fascism had cut off critical thought, comfortably hibern ates . Simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing. It is guaranteed in the protection of the double sense of the positive : as some- thing existent, given, and as something worthy of being affirmed. Positive and negative are reified prior to liv- ing experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation.
The jargon secularizes the German readiness to view men's positive relation to religion as something immediately positive, even when the religion has dis- integrated and been exposed as something untrue. The undiminished irrationality of rational society encour- ages people to elevate religion into an end in itself, without regard to its content: to view religion as a mere attitude, as a quality of subjectivity. All this at the cost of religion itself. One needs only to be a be- liever-no matter what he believes in. Such irrational- ity has the same function as putty. The jargon of
authenticity inherits it, in the childish manner of Latin primers which praise the love of the fatherland in- itself-which praise the viri patriae amantes, even when the fatherland in question covers up the most atrocious deeds. Sonnemann has described this phe-
? ? 2I
nomenon as not being able to get rid of a benevolent attitude which at all costs defends order, even an order in which all these things are not in order. What things? According to the logic of the sentence they ought only to be accidentals, but instead they are strikingly essen- tial : "poisonous exhaust emissions, pressing taboos, insincerity, resentments, hidden hysteria on all sides. " What remains then of the orderliness of the order? Obviously, it needs first to be created. 1 Benevolence is identical with being predecided. What is affirmative and wholesome doubles the curse of evil. Through mar- riage offers, the jargon guides the petit bourgeois to a positive attitude toward life. It fastidiously prolongs the innumerable events which are to make attractive to men a life by which they otherwise would be dis- gusted-and which they would soon come to consider unbearable. That religion has shifted into the subject, has become religiosity, follows the trend of history. Dead cells of religiosity in the midst of the secular, however, become poisonous. The ancient force, which according to Nietzsche's insight nourishes everything, should enter completely into the profane; instead it preserves itself in an unreflected manner and elevates limitation, which abhors reflection, to the level of virtue.
All experts in the jargon, from Jaspers on down, unite in praise of positivity. Only the careful Heidegger avoids a too open-hearted affirmation for its own sake, and indirectly pays his dues. He is eager and genuine about it. But Jaspers writes, unashamedly: "Actually
7. Ulrich Sonnemann, Das Land der unbegrenzten Zumut barkeiten (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1963), pp. Ig6 ff.
? ? ? ? 22
only that man can remain in the world who lives out from something which in every case he possesses only through commitment. " 8 To which he adds : "Only the person who commits himself freely is proof against a disillusioned revolt against himself. " 9 It is true that his philosophy of existence has chosen, as its patron saint, Max Weber, who stood up proudly without illu- sions. Nevertheless, he is interested in religion, no matter of what kind. He is interested in it provided it is ready at hand, because it guarantees the required com- mitment; or simply because it exists, whether or not it fits with the notion of independent philosophy, which Jaspers reserves for himself as if it were a personal privilege :
Whoever is true to transcendence in the form of such a belief should never be attacked, so long as he does not become intolerant. For in the believing person only destruction can take place; he can perhaps remain open to philosophizing, and risk the corresponding burden of a doubting, which is inseparable from human exist- ence; yet he has the positivity of an historical existence as his reference and measure, which bring him ire- placeably back to himself. About these possibilities we do not speak. l0
When autonomous thought still had confidence in its humane realization, it behaved less humanely. In
8. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 5th ed. (Berlin, 1947), pp. 169if. [English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, Man in the Modern Age (New York, 1957 ) . All quotations from this work are translated from the original German. }
9 . Ibid.
10. Ibid. , pp. 127 if.
23
the meantime, the less philosophers are infected with philosophy the more innocently do they let the cat out of the bag; a bag which prominent ones weave like Noms. Sentences from O. F. Bollnow sound like this:
Therefore it seems especially meaningful that in poetry, above all in the lyric of the last years, after al the ex- periences of dread, a new feeling, of affirmation of being, is beginning to make its appearance, a joyful and thankful harmony with the very existence of man, as it is; a harmony with the world as it confronts man. Two of these poets in particular should receive special attention here : Rilke and Bergengruen. Bergengruen' s last volume of poetry Die Heile Welt (Munich, 1 950) , p. 272, closes with the confession: "What came from pain was only transient. And my ear heard nothing but songs of praise. " In other words, it is a feeling of thank- ful agreement with existence. And Bergengruen cer- tainly is not a poet who could be criticized for a cheap optimism. In this feeling of deep thankfulness he comes close to Rilke, who also, at the close of his way, is able to state : "Everything breathes and returns thanks. Oh you troubles of the night, how you sank without a trace. " U
Bergengruen's volume is on? y a few years closer to us than the time when Jews who had not been completely killed by the gas were thrown living into the fire, where they regained consciousness and screamed. The poet, who can certainly not be criticized for cheap optimism, and the philosophically minded pedagogue who eval- uates him, heard nothing but songs of praise. In a pre- liminary definition we call this inner state of man an attitude of trustful reliance. Thus the task is set: to
I I . Bollnow, Geborgenheit, pp. 26 if. 24
examine the nature of this state of the soul in order to find its possibilities. 12 Bollnow found the best of all possible names for this task, which in the face of hor- ror can no longer even appease us by virtue of its ridiculousness-he called it Seinsgliiubigkeit, faith unto Being. 13 The fact that the term reminds us of Deutschgliiubigkeit, faith unto German nationality, is certainly accidental. Once faith unto Being is achieved, there is no stopping before we reach a "positive relation to the world and life" 14 and "constructive work toward the overcoming of existentialism. " 1 ?
What remains after the removal of existential bombast are religious customs cut off from their religious content. There is no recognition of the fact that cult forms, the subject matter of folklore, like empty shells, outlive their mys- tery. This state of affairs is in fact defended with the
aid of the jargon. All of this is an insult not only to thought but also to religion, which was once man's promise of eternal bliss, while now authenticity con- tents itself resignedly with an "ultimately hale world. " 16 "In the following we can distinguish these two forms- for the sake of a convenient terminology-as hope which has a determined content and hope which has an undetermined content; or, briefly, as relative and absolute hope. " 11 This pitiful concept-splitting applies itself to the question of "existence welfare. " It makes no difference to a follower to what he attaches him-
12. Ibid. , p. 51.
13. Ibid. , p. 57?
14. Ibid. , p. 61.
IS. Ibid.
16. Ibid. , p. 63.
17. Ibid. , p. 100.
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self at a given moment. He praises this as his capacity for enthusiasm. Whether such a man ranks himself as lowbrow, middlebrow, or highbrow, he can consider that "hale" refers to the haleness of the soul, or right living, or social enclaves not yet taken over by indus- trialism, or simply places where Nietzsche and the Enlightenment have not yet been heard of; or chaste
conditions in which girls hold their maidenhood intact until they get married. We should not oppose to the catch-word of "shelteredness," the equally worn-out idea of the dangerous life; who wouldn't want to live with- out anxiety in this world of terrors? But shelteredness, as an existential value, turns from something longed for and denied into a presence which is now and here, and which is independent of what prevents it from being. It leaves its trace in the violation of the word : the reminiscence of what is hedged-in and safely bor- dered remains joined to that element of short-sighted particularity which out of itself renews the evil against which no one is sheltered. Home will only come to be when it has freed itself from such particularity, when home has negated itself as universal. The feeling of
shelteredness makes itself at home with itself, and offers a holiday resort in place of life. A landscape be- comes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words "how beautiful. " The same happens to customs, habits, institutions which barter themselves away by stressing their own naivete instead of by changing it. All talk of shelteredness is indicted by Kogon's report that the worst atrocities in the concentration camps were committed by the younger sons of farmers. The
? ? general situation in the country, which is the model for the feelin g of shelteredness , pushes disinherited sons into barbarousness. The logic of the jargon con- stantly smuggles in what is limited, finally even situa- tions of material want, under the guise of positivity; and presses for their being eternally instituted at just that moment when, thanks to the state of human
achievements, such a limitation no longer needs in reality to exist. A spirit which makes this limitation its cause hires itself out as the lackey of what is evil.
In the higher ranks of the hierarchy of authen- ticity, however, negativities are also served. Heidegger even requisitions the concept of destruction which is tabooed in the lower ranks, together with the blackness of fear, sorrow, and death. Jaspers occaSionally blares out the opposite of Bollnow's Geborgenheit, sheltered- ness: "Today philosophy is the only possibility for one who is consciously unsheltered. " 18 But the positive, like a tumbler doll, cannot be kept down. Danger, hazard, risking one's life, and the whole characteristic shudder, are not taken all that seriously. One of the Vr-authentic ones in her time remarked that in the innermost core of Dostoyevsky's hell the light of salvation shone again.
She had to swallow the reply that hell was then an awfully short railroad tunnel. Some prominent authen- tic ones a little reluctantly-put it like the parish preacher; they say they would rather harvest on burned earth. They are no less clever than social psychology, which has observed that negative judgments, of no
18. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, p. 128.
27
matter what content, give a better chance of being -affirmed than do positive judgments. 19 Nihilism turns into farce, into mere method, as has already happened to Cartesian doubt. The question-a fa. vorite prerequi- site of the jargon-must sound all the more radical the more loyally it directs itself to the kind of answer which can be everything except radical. Here is an
elementary example from Jaspers :
Existential philosophy would be lost immediately, if it once again believed that it knows what man is. It would again give us sketches of how to investigate hu- man and animal life in its typical forms; it would again become anthropology, psychology, sociology. Its mean- ing is only possible when it remains groundless in its concreteness. It awakens what it does not know; it lightens and moves, but it does not fix and hold. For the man who is underway, this philosophy is the ex- pression through which he maintains himself in his direction; the means toward preserving his highest moments-so that he can make them real through his life. . . . Insight into existence, because it remains without an object, leads to no conclusion. 20
Exactly. A concerned tone is ominously struck up: no answer would be serious enough; every answer, no matter of what content, would be dismissed as a limit- ing concretization. But the effect of this remorseless intransigence is friendly; the man never pins himself
19. Cf. Gruppenexperiment, Frankfurter Beitriige zur Soziologie ( Frankfurt, 1955), II, 482 if.
20. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, pp. 146 47.
? down : the world is all too dynamic. The old Protestant theme of absurd belief, grounding itself in the subject, converted itself from Lessing to Kierkegaard into the pathos of existence. This pathos existed in opposition to its result, the reified world seen as coagulated and alien to the subject. That old theme allies itself stra- tegically with the critique of positive science-science from which, as Kierkegaard's thesis ran, the subject has disappeared. At the cost of any possible answer, the radical question becomes what is substantial unto itself. Risk without hazard. Know-how and range of in- come are the only factors which determine whether one appears on the scene sheltered or has to start out without security. Even those who are not sheltered are safe as long as they join the chorus. This is what makes possible passages like the one from Heinz Schwitzke's Three Fundamental Theses for Television :
This is totally different in the sermon. Here a clerical speaker professed his credo for more than ten minutes, out of his own depths, in the existential manner; a single, never-changing close-up. Thanks to the noble humane power of conviction that radiated out from him, not only did his words, which were testified to by his pictorial presence, become completely credible, but the listener totally forgot the mediating apparatus. In front of the television screen, as if in the house of God, there formed itself a sort of parish among the accidental viewers, who felt as if they were being confronted with the immediate presence of the speaker, and through him felt committed to the subject matter of his sermon , God's word. There is no other explanation for this sur- prising occurrence than the supreme importance of the speaking person, the person who has enough courage
and e thos to place himself in the breach , and to serve
? nothing but the subject matter which he stands for and the listeners to whom he knows he can relate. 21
This is authenticity's funky commercial. The "word" of the preacher, as if his and God's were one without ques- tion, is testified to not by his "pictorial presence," but at best by behavior whose trustworthiness supports the credibility of his statements.
If, thanks to the appearance of the preacher, one forgets the mediating equipment, then the jargon of authenticity, which takes pleasure in this situation, is committing itself to the philosophy of As If: through stage-setting, the now and here of a cult action is simu- lated, an action which through its omnipresence is an- nulled on television. But, by the existential manner in which the preacher makes public profession of him- self, from out of himself, "in a never changing close-up," we need only to understand the self-evident fact that the preacher, who after all had no other choice, was projected as an empirical person onto the screen and in this way, perhaps, had a sympathetic effect on many people. That he formed a community
cannot be proven. The notion that he had to throw him- self into the breach, with his whole substance and existence, is imported from the sphere of risk. Still, for that preacher who details on television why the church is too narrow for him there is no risk at all: neither of contradiction from outside nor of inner ne- cessity. If in fact, hemmed in between microphone and floodlight, he had to suffer through moments of temp-
2 I . Heinz Schwitzke, "Drei Grundthesen zum Fernsehen," in Rundfunk und Fernsehen, II (I953), II ff.
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tation, the jargon would have been right there waiting with additional praise for his existentiality. The benefit of the negative is transferred to the positive, as though by a single stroke of the pen : positive negativeness to warm the heart. These dark words are numinous, just like Bollnow's whitewashed Sunday words-as close to rejoicing as the dreadful trumpet has always been. Just as the jargon uses the double sense of the word "positive," it uses the ambiguity of the term "meta- physics," according to whether at a given moment one prefers nothingness or being. On the one hand meta- physics means involvement with metaphysical themes, even if the metaphysical content is contested; on the other hand it means the affirmative doctrine of the transcendent world, in the Platonic model. In this shifting metaphysical need, that state of the spirit which long ago made itself known in Novalis' On Christendom or Europe, or which the young Lukacs called transcendental homelessness, has come down to culturally defined knowledge . The theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization. In mystical heresy, the unsatisfiable purification of the divine from myth, which loves to tremble in the gesture of deeply involved questioning, hands the divine over to whoever relates to it in any way. Liberal theology is suddenly reborn, since con- tent is to be found only in a relation, the other pole of which removes itself from all definition as the "ab- solutely indifferent," and marks all definition with the blemish of reification. Complete demythologization totally reduces transcendence to an abstraction, to a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 31
eQ. Uc. f)p. ,! . Enlightenment, which the viri obscuri 22 ac- cuse, triumphs in their thought. In the same movement of the spirit, however, the positing power of the sub- ject, veiled unto itself, again conjures up the myth inherent in all dialectical theology. That subjective power's highest value, as absolutely different, is blind. Under compulsion the viri obscuri praise commitments instead of jumping into speculation which alone could justify their own commitments to their radical ques- tioners. Their relationship to speculation is confused. One needs it because one wants to be deep, yet one shies away from it because of its intellectual nature. One would prefer to reserve it for the gurus . The others still confess their groundlessness, in order to give char- acter to the paths of offered salvation, which are re- puted to be successful in extreme even if imaginary danger. However, they find nothing but groundless thinking as soon as thinking refuses, through its atti- tude, to support from the outset those commitments which are as unavoidable in authenticity as is the happy ending in movies. If the happy ending is lacking, then among the existential authentics existentialism itself has nothing to laugh at.
Only against this background does the whole greatness of the existential ethic reveal itself. It once again actualizes, on the ground of modern historical rela- tivism, a decidedly moral stance. But in precisely that sense a danger is given; that danger which comes to expression in the possibility of an existential adven-
22. [ViTi obscuri : obscurantists , enemies of enlightenm ent. Historical reference to fictive humanist (fifteenth and six- teenth century) authors of letters against late forms <if Scho- lasticism. ]
32
turism. Having become fully unconditioned in regard to content, and without any of that constancy which re- sides in fidelity, the adventurer enjoys the risk of his engagement as a last and most sublime pleasure. Pre- cisely in the unconditioned state of any given momen- tary engagement, the existentialist is especially exposed to the temptation of inconstancy and of faithlessness. 23
All of these words draw from language, from which they are stolen, the aroma of the bodily, unmetaphorical; but in the jargon they become quietly spiritualized. In that way they avoid the dangers of which 'they are constantly palavering. The more ear- nestly the jargon sanctifies its everyday world, as
though in a mockery of Kierkegaard's insistence on the unity of the sublime and the pedestrian, the more sadly does the jargon mix up the literal with the figurative:
Heidegger's final remark aims at this fundamental meaning of residing for all human existence, and in this remark he focuses on the "need for residences" as one of the great difficulties of our time : "The true need for residence," he says here, "consists not first of all in the absence of residences," although this need should by no means be taken lightly; but behind this need a deeper one is hidden, that man has lost his own nature and so cannot come to rest. "The true need for residence consists in the fact that mortals must first learn to re- side. " But to learn to reside means : to grasp this neces- sity, that, in the face of what is threatening, man should make for himself a sheltering space and should settle into it with a trustful reliance. But, then, inversely, the possibility of this settling down is again connected in a menacing way with the availability of residences. 24
23. Bollnow, Geborgenheit, pp. 37 f. 24. Ibid. , p. 170.
33
The Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should "make for himself" such a space. The linguistic care- lessness, in the unresisting mechanism of the jargon, admittedly lays shelteredness bare, as if out of com- pulsion; lays it bare as something that is merely posited. However, that which announces itself, in the game about the need for residences, is more serious
than the pose of existential seriousness. It is the fear of unemployment, lurking in all citizens of countries of high capitalism. This is a fear which is administra- tively fought off, and therefore nailed to the platonic firmament of stars, a fear that remains even in the glorious times of full employment. Everyone knows that he could become expendable as technology de- velops, as long as production is only carried on for production's sake; so everyone senses that his job is a disguised unemployment. It is a support that has ar- bitrarily and revocably pinched off something from the
total societal product, for the purpose of maintaining the status quO. 25 He who has not been given a life ticket could in principle be sent away tomorrow. That migra- tion of people could continue which the dictators al- ready once before set in motion and channeled into Auschwitz. Angst, busily distinguished from inner- worldly, empirical fear, need by no means be an ex- istential value. Since it is historical, it appears in fact that those who are yoked into a SOCiety which is socie- talized, but contradictory to the deepest core, con-
25. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Madelle (Frankfurt, 1963), p. 137.
34
stantly feel threatened by what sustains them. They feel threatened without ever being able in specific in- stances to concretize this threat from the whole of sOciety. But in shelteredness the declassed person has his clumsy triumph-the declassed man who knows what he can get away with. On the one hand he has nothing to lose; on the other hand, the overadminis- trated world of today? still respects the compromise structure of bourgeois soci? ty, to the extent that that society-in its own interest-stops short before the ultimate, the liquidation of its members, stops short because, in the massive plans of its industry, it has the means of delay at its disposal. So Jaspers' "existence welfare" and social welfare-administrated grace- come into contact. On the social ground of the j argon's reinterpretation of complete negativity into what is positive, we suspect the coercive self-confidence of the uneasy consciousness. Even our cheap suffering from the loss of meaning, a suffering long since automatized into a formula, is not simply that emptiness which has
grown up through the whole movement of the Enlight- enment-as the more demanding viri obscuri willingly describe it. There are reports of taedium vitae even during periods of unchallenged state religion; it was as common among the Fathers of the Church as among those who carry over into the jargon Nietzsche's judg- ment about modern nihilism, and who imagine that in that way they have gone beyond both Nietzsche and nihilism-Nietzsche's concept of which they have sim- ply turned upside down. Socially, the feeling of mean- inglessness is a reaction to the wide-reaching freeing from work which takes place under conditions of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 35
tinuing social unfreedom. The free time of the subjects withholds from them the freedom which they secretly hope for; their free time chains them to the ever-same, the apparatus of production-even when this appa- ratus is giving them a vacation. With this situation they are forced to compare the obvious possibilities, and they grow the more confused the less the closed fa? ade of consciousness, which is modeled after that of so- ciety, lets through the conception of a possible freedom.
At the same time, in the feeling of meaninglessness which is the high-bourgeois expression of real need, the permanent threat of destruction is assimilated by consciousness. What this consciousness dreads it turns in such a way that the threat seems to be an innate part of it, and thus it weakens that element of the threat which can no longer be grasped in human terms. The fact that on all sides meaning of every kind seems to be impotent against evil, that the latter yields no mean- ing at all, and that the assertion of meaning may even promote evil, is registered as a lack of metaphysical content, especially in regard to religiOUS and social commitments. The falseness of this reinterpretation, using a mode of cultural criticism with which the stingy pathos of the authentics joins in, regularly be- comes visible in a particular fact: the fact that past ages-whichever one prefers-ranging from Bieder- meier to Pelasgic, appear as the ages of immanent meaning. Such reinterpretation follows an inclination
to set back the clock politically and socially, to bring to an end the dynamism inherent in a society which still, through the administrative measures of the most pow- erful cliques, appears to be all too open. As its present
? ? ? form can expect nothing good from such a dynamic, it stubbornly blinds itself to the recognition that the cure which society offers is itself the evil that it fears.
? 12
toward language which is damned by its favorite phi- losophy. s
But the untruth indicts itself by becoming bom- bastic. After a long separation a certain person wrote that he was existentially secure; it took some reflection to realize that he meant he had been sufficiently taken care of in regard to his finances . A center intended for international discussions-whatever they may be good for-is called the House of Encounters; the visible house, "firmly grounded in the earth," is turned into a sacred house through those gatherings-which are meant to be superior to discussions because they occur
among existing and living individuals, although these individuals might just as well be engaged in discussion, for as long as they do not commit suicide they could hardly do anything other than exist. One's relation to his fellow man should be important prior to all con- tent; for that purpose the jargon is satisfied with the shabby group-ethos of the youth movement, an indica- tion that nothing is reaching either beyond the nose of the speaker, or beyond the capacity of the person who has only lately begun to be called his "partner. " The j argon channels engagement into firm institutions and, furthermore, strengthens the most subaltern speakers in their self-esteem; they are already something be- cause someone speaks from within them, even when
that someone is nothing at all. The resonant directive
5. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 3d ed. (Halle, 1 931 ) , pp. 2 17 ff. [English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York, 1 962 ) . Sub- sequent page references from Being and Time will be to this translation. ]
? 13
of the jargon, that its thought should not be too strenu- ous, because otherwise it would offend the community, also becomes for these people the guarantee of a higher confirmation. This suppresses the fact that the lan- guage itself-through its generality and objectivity already negates the whole man, the particular speak- ing individual subject: the first price exacted by lan- guage is the essence of the individual. But through the appearance that the whole man, and not thought, speaks, the jargon pretends that, as a close-at-hand manner of communication, it is invulnerable to de- humanized mass communication-which is precisely what recommends it to everyone's enthusiastic accept- ance. Whoever stands behind his words, in the way in which these words pretend, is safe from any suspicion about what he is at that very moment about to do: speak for others in order to palm something off on them.
The word "statement" finally secures its alibi when "true" is connected to it. By means of its prestige it wants to endow the "for others" with the solidity of the in-itself. For glorified man, who himself not too long ago invented the term "death and glory squad," is the ground of being for the jargon as well as the ad- dressee of the statement; and it has become impossible to distinguish between the two. The attribute "valid" often sticks to "statement. " The reason for this ob- viously lies in the fact that the emphatic experience, which the word claims insistently, is no longer experi-
enced by those who favor this word for the claim it makes. A loudspeaker becomes necessary? "Statement" wants to announce that something which was said has
? ? come from the depth of the speaking subject; it is removed from the curse of surface communication. But at the same time communicative disorder disguises itself in the statement. Someone speaks and, thanks to the elevated term "statement," what he says is to be the sign of truth-as if men could not become caught up in untruth, as if they could not suffer martyrdom for plain nonsense. Prior to all content this shift in- dicts statement as soon as it wants to be such; it
charges statement with being a lie. The listener is sup- posed to gain something from the statement because of its subjective reliability. This latter attribute, how- ever, is borrowed from the world of ware s . I t is the claim of the consumer that even the spiritual should direct itself according to his will, against its own con- ceptual nature.
This admonition to the spirit silently dominates the whole climate of the jargon. The real and vain need for help is supposed to be satisfied by the pure spirit, merely by means of consolation and without action. The empty chatter about expression is the ideology complementary to that silencing which the status quo imposes on those who have no power over it, and whose claim is therefore hollow in advance. But whatever turns its back critically on the status quo has been dis- counted, by Germans in solid positions, as "without ex- pressive value. " Not least of all, statement is used as the club with which to assail the new art. That art's recalcitrance against traditional communicable sense has been reproached-as though from a higher view- point-by those whose aesthetic consciousness is not up to it. If one adds to a statement that it is "valid,"
? ? ? ? ? ? 15
then whatever at a given moment holds good, whatever is officially 'stamped, can be imputed to it as metaphysi- ca! lly authorized. The formula spares people the trouble of thinking about the metaphysics which it has dragged with it, or about the content of what has been stated.
The concept of statement appears in Heidegger as nothing less that the constituent of the Da, existence. s Behind this jargon is a determining doctrine of the I-thou relationship as the locale of truth-a doctrine that defames the objectivity of truth as thingly, and secretly warms up irrationalism. As such a relation- ship, communication turns into that transpsycho- logical element which it can only be by virtue of the objectivity of what is communicated; in the end stu- pidity becomes the founder of metaphysics. Ever since Martin Buber split off Kierkegaard's view of the existen- tial from Kierkegaard's Christology, and dressed it up as a universal posture, there has been a dominant in- clination to conceive of metaphysical content as bound to the so-called relation of I and thou. This content is referred to the immediacy of life. Theology is tied to
the determinations of immanence, which in turn want to claim a larger meaning, by means of their sugges- tion of theology: they are already virtually like the words of the jargon. In this process, nothing less is whisked away than the threshold between the natural and the supernatural. Lesser authentics raise their eyes reverently before death, but their spiritual atti- tude, infatuated with the living, disregards death. The thorn in theology, without which salvation is unthink-
6. Ibid. , p. 196. 16
? ? ? able, is removed. According to the concept of theology, nothing natural has gone through death without meta- morphosis. In the man-to-man relationship there can be no eternity now and here, and certainly not in the relationship of man to God, a relationship that seems to pat Him on the shoulder. Buber's style of existential- ism draws its transcendence, in a reversed analogia entis, out of the fact that spontaneous relationships among persons cannot be reduced to objective poles. This existentialism remains the Lebensphilosophie out of which it came, in philosophical history, and which it abnegated: it overelevates the dynamism of mor-
tality into the sphere of immortality.
Thus in the jargon transcendence is finally brought
closer to men: it is the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit. The sermon in Huxley's Brave New World must have been written in the j argon . It was taped in order to be played when needed : to bring to reason the rebellious masses-by deep programmed emotion-in case they should once more band together. For advertising pur- poses the Wurlitzer organ humanizes the vibrato, once a carrier of subjective expression, by mechanically superimposing it on the mechanically produced sound. The jargon likewise supplies men with patterns for being human, patterns which have been driven out of them by unfree labor, if ever in fact traces of free labor did exist. Heidegger instituted authenticity against the
they and against small talk, without deluding himself that there could be a complete leap between the two types of existentials that he deals with; for he knew that they merge into each other precisely because of their own dynamism. But he did not foresee that what
? I7
he named authentic, once become word, would grow toward the same exchange-society anonymity against which Sein und Zeit rebelled. The jargon, which in Heidegger's phenomenology of small talk earned an honored position, marks the adept, in their own opin- ion, as untrivial and of higher sensibility; while at the same time that jargon calms the constantly festering suspicion of uprootedness.
In professional groups which, as they say, carry on intellectual work, but which are at the same time em- ployed, dependent, or economically weak, the jargon is a professional illness. Among such groups a specific function is added to a general social one. Their cul- ture and consciousness limp far behind that spirit which according to society's division of labor is their realm of activity. Through their jargon they aspire to remove this distance, to put themselves forward as sharers in higher culture ( to them old hats still sound modern) as well as individuals with an ,essence of their own; the more innocent among them may quite frankly still call all that a personal note-using an expression from the era of handicrafts, from which the jargon in question has borrowed a lot. The stereotypes of the jar- gon support and reassure subjective movement. They
seem to guarantee that one is not doing what in fact he is doing-bleating with the crowd-simply by vir- tue of his using those stereotypes to guarantee that one has achieved it all himself, as an unmistakably free person. The formal gesture of autonomy replaces the content of autonomy. Bombastically, it is called com- mitment, but it is heteronomously borrowed. That which pseudo-individualizing attends to in the culture
18
industry, the jargon attends to among those who have contempt for the culture industry. This is the German symptom of progressive half-culture. It seems to be in- vented for those who feel that they have been judged by history, or at least that they are falling, but who still strut in front of their peers as if they were an interior elite .
The importance of this jargon is not to be under- estimated simply because a small group writes it. In- numerable real-life people speak it, from the student who in his exam lets himself go on about authentic encounter, to the bishop's press secretary who asks : Do you believe that God addresses only our reason? Their unmediated language they receive from a dis- tributor. In the theological conversations of Dr. Faustus' students, in Auerbach's den of 1945, Thomas Mann intuited with precise irony most of the habits of modern German-though he no longer had much occasion Ito observe them. There certainly were appro- priate models before 1933, but only after the war,
when National Socialist language became unwanted, did the jargon gain omnipresence. Since then the most intimate interchange has taken place between the writ-, ten and the spoken word. Thus one will be able to read printed jargon which unmistakably imitates radio voices that have themselves drawn on written works of authenticity. Mediated and immediate elements are mediated through each other in frightful ways. And since they are synthetically prepared, that which is mediated has become the caricature of what is natural. The jargon no longer knows primary and secondary communities, and by the same token it knows no par-
? 19
ties. This development has a real basis. The institu- tional and psychological superstructure, which in 1930 Kr,acauer diagnosed as a culture of employees, deluded the celluloid-colla;r proletariat, who were then threat- ened by the immediacy of losing their jobs. It deluded them into believing that they. were something special. Through this delusion the superstructure made them toe the bourgeois line, while in the meantime, thanks to a lasting market boom, that superstructure has become the universal ideology of a society which mistakes itself for a unified middle class. They let themselves be con- firmed in this attitude by a uniform mode of speech, which eagerly welcomes the jargon fo;r purposes of col- lective narcissism. This ,applies not only to those who
speak it but also to the objective spirit. The j argon af- firms the reliability of the universal by means of the distinction of having a bourgeOis origin, a distinction which is itself authorized by the universal. Its tone of approved selectivity seems to come from the person himself. The greater advantage in all this is that of good references. It makes no difference what the voice that resonates in ,this way says; it is signing a social contract. Awe, in face of that existent which pretends to be more than it is, beats down all that is unruly. One is given to understand ,that that which occurs is so deep
that language could not unhallow what has been said by saying it. Pure clean hands recoil from the thought of changing ,anything in the valid property-and- authority relationships; the very sound of it all makes that idea contemptible, as the merely ontic is to Heideg- ger. One can trust anyone who babbles this jargon; peo- ple wear. it in their buttonholes, in place of the
? ? ? 20
currently disreputable party badge. The pure tone drips with 'positivity, without needing to stoop too far pleading for what is all too compromised; one escapes even the long-since-socialized suspicion of ideology. In the jargon that division between the destructive and the constructive, with which fascism had cut off critical thought, comfortably hibern ates . Simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing. It is guaranteed in the protection of the double sense of the positive : as some- thing existent, given, and as something worthy of being affirmed. Positive and negative are reified prior to liv- ing experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation.
The jargon secularizes the German readiness to view men's positive relation to religion as something immediately positive, even when the religion has dis- integrated and been exposed as something untrue. The undiminished irrationality of rational society encour- ages people to elevate religion into an end in itself, without regard to its content: to view religion as a mere attitude, as a quality of subjectivity. All this at the cost of religion itself. One needs only to be a be- liever-no matter what he believes in. Such irrational- ity has the same function as putty. The jargon of
authenticity inherits it, in the childish manner of Latin primers which praise the love of the fatherland in- itself-which praise the viri patriae amantes, even when the fatherland in question covers up the most atrocious deeds. Sonnemann has described this phe-
? ? 2I
nomenon as not being able to get rid of a benevolent attitude which at all costs defends order, even an order in which all these things are not in order. What things? According to the logic of the sentence they ought only to be accidentals, but instead they are strikingly essen- tial : "poisonous exhaust emissions, pressing taboos, insincerity, resentments, hidden hysteria on all sides. " What remains then of the orderliness of the order? Obviously, it needs first to be created. 1 Benevolence is identical with being predecided. What is affirmative and wholesome doubles the curse of evil. Through mar- riage offers, the jargon guides the petit bourgeois to a positive attitude toward life. It fastidiously prolongs the innumerable events which are to make attractive to men a life by which they otherwise would be dis- gusted-and which they would soon come to consider unbearable. That religion has shifted into the subject, has become religiosity, follows the trend of history. Dead cells of religiosity in the midst of the secular, however, become poisonous. The ancient force, which according to Nietzsche's insight nourishes everything, should enter completely into the profane; instead it preserves itself in an unreflected manner and elevates limitation, which abhors reflection, to the level of virtue.
All experts in the jargon, from Jaspers on down, unite in praise of positivity. Only the careful Heidegger avoids a too open-hearted affirmation for its own sake, and indirectly pays his dues. He is eager and genuine about it. But Jaspers writes, unashamedly: "Actually
7. Ulrich Sonnemann, Das Land der unbegrenzten Zumut barkeiten (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1963), pp. Ig6 ff.
? ? ? ? 22
only that man can remain in the world who lives out from something which in every case he possesses only through commitment. " 8 To which he adds : "Only the person who commits himself freely is proof against a disillusioned revolt against himself. " 9 It is true that his philosophy of existence has chosen, as its patron saint, Max Weber, who stood up proudly without illu- sions. Nevertheless, he is interested in religion, no matter of what kind. He is interested in it provided it is ready at hand, because it guarantees the required com- mitment; or simply because it exists, whether or not it fits with the notion of independent philosophy, which Jaspers reserves for himself as if it were a personal privilege :
Whoever is true to transcendence in the form of such a belief should never be attacked, so long as he does not become intolerant. For in the believing person only destruction can take place; he can perhaps remain open to philosophizing, and risk the corresponding burden of a doubting, which is inseparable from human exist- ence; yet he has the positivity of an historical existence as his reference and measure, which bring him ire- placeably back to himself. About these possibilities we do not speak. l0
When autonomous thought still had confidence in its humane realization, it behaved less humanely. In
8. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 5th ed. (Berlin, 1947), pp. 169if. [English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, Man in the Modern Age (New York, 1957 ) . All quotations from this work are translated from the original German. }
9 . Ibid.
10. Ibid. , pp. 127 if.
23
the meantime, the less philosophers are infected with philosophy the more innocently do they let the cat out of the bag; a bag which prominent ones weave like Noms. Sentences from O. F. Bollnow sound like this:
Therefore it seems especially meaningful that in poetry, above all in the lyric of the last years, after al the ex- periences of dread, a new feeling, of affirmation of being, is beginning to make its appearance, a joyful and thankful harmony with the very existence of man, as it is; a harmony with the world as it confronts man. Two of these poets in particular should receive special attention here : Rilke and Bergengruen. Bergengruen' s last volume of poetry Die Heile Welt (Munich, 1 950) , p. 272, closes with the confession: "What came from pain was only transient. And my ear heard nothing but songs of praise. " In other words, it is a feeling of thank- ful agreement with existence. And Bergengruen cer- tainly is not a poet who could be criticized for a cheap optimism. In this feeling of deep thankfulness he comes close to Rilke, who also, at the close of his way, is able to state : "Everything breathes and returns thanks. Oh you troubles of the night, how you sank without a trace. " U
Bergengruen's volume is on? y a few years closer to us than the time when Jews who had not been completely killed by the gas were thrown living into the fire, where they regained consciousness and screamed. The poet, who can certainly not be criticized for cheap optimism, and the philosophically minded pedagogue who eval- uates him, heard nothing but songs of praise. In a pre- liminary definition we call this inner state of man an attitude of trustful reliance. Thus the task is set: to
I I . Bollnow, Geborgenheit, pp. 26 if. 24
examine the nature of this state of the soul in order to find its possibilities. 12 Bollnow found the best of all possible names for this task, which in the face of hor- ror can no longer even appease us by virtue of its ridiculousness-he called it Seinsgliiubigkeit, faith unto Being. 13 The fact that the term reminds us of Deutschgliiubigkeit, faith unto German nationality, is certainly accidental. Once faith unto Being is achieved, there is no stopping before we reach a "positive relation to the world and life" 14 and "constructive work toward the overcoming of existentialism. " 1 ?
What remains after the removal of existential bombast are religious customs cut off from their religious content. There is no recognition of the fact that cult forms, the subject matter of folklore, like empty shells, outlive their mys- tery. This state of affairs is in fact defended with the
aid of the jargon. All of this is an insult not only to thought but also to religion, which was once man's promise of eternal bliss, while now authenticity con- tents itself resignedly with an "ultimately hale world. " 16 "In the following we can distinguish these two forms- for the sake of a convenient terminology-as hope which has a determined content and hope which has an undetermined content; or, briefly, as relative and absolute hope. " 11 This pitiful concept-splitting applies itself to the question of "existence welfare. " It makes no difference to a follower to what he attaches him-
12. Ibid. , p. 51.
13. Ibid. , p. 57?
14. Ibid. , p. 61.
IS. Ibid.
16. Ibid. , p. 63.
17. Ibid. , p. 100.
? 25
self at a given moment. He praises this as his capacity for enthusiasm. Whether such a man ranks himself as lowbrow, middlebrow, or highbrow, he can consider that "hale" refers to the haleness of the soul, or right living, or social enclaves not yet taken over by indus- trialism, or simply places where Nietzsche and the Enlightenment have not yet been heard of; or chaste
conditions in which girls hold their maidenhood intact until they get married. We should not oppose to the catch-word of "shelteredness," the equally worn-out idea of the dangerous life; who wouldn't want to live with- out anxiety in this world of terrors? But shelteredness, as an existential value, turns from something longed for and denied into a presence which is now and here, and which is independent of what prevents it from being. It leaves its trace in the violation of the word : the reminiscence of what is hedged-in and safely bor- dered remains joined to that element of short-sighted particularity which out of itself renews the evil against which no one is sheltered. Home will only come to be when it has freed itself from such particularity, when home has negated itself as universal. The feeling of
shelteredness makes itself at home with itself, and offers a holiday resort in place of life. A landscape be- comes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words "how beautiful. " The same happens to customs, habits, institutions which barter themselves away by stressing their own naivete instead of by changing it. All talk of shelteredness is indicted by Kogon's report that the worst atrocities in the concentration camps were committed by the younger sons of farmers. The
? ? general situation in the country, which is the model for the feelin g of shelteredness , pushes disinherited sons into barbarousness. The logic of the jargon con- stantly smuggles in what is limited, finally even situa- tions of material want, under the guise of positivity; and presses for their being eternally instituted at just that moment when, thanks to the state of human
achievements, such a limitation no longer needs in reality to exist. A spirit which makes this limitation its cause hires itself out as the lackey of what is evil.
In the higher ranks of the hierarchy of authen- ticity, however, negativities are also served. Heidegger even requisitions the concept of destruction which is tabooed in the lower ranks, together with the blackness of fear, sorrow, and death. Jaspers occaSionally blares out the opposite of Bollnow's Geborgenheit, sheltered- ness: "Today philosophy is the only possibility for one who is consciously unsheltered. " 18 But the positive, like a tumbler doll, cannot be kept down. Danger, hazard, risking one's life, and the whole characteristic shudder, are not taken all that seriously. One of the Vr-authentic ones in her time remarked that in the innermost core of Dostoyevsky's hell the light of salvation shone again.
She had to swallow the reply that hell was then an awfully short railroad tunnel. Some prominent authen- tic ones a little reluctantly-put it like the parish preacher; they say they would rather harvest on burned earth. They are no less clever than social psychology, which has observed that negative judgments, of no
18. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, p. 128.
27
matter what content, give a better chance of being -affirmed than do positive judgments. 19 Nihilism turns into farce, into mere method, as has already happened to Cartesian doubt. The question-a fa. vorite prerequi- site of the jargon-must sound all the more radical the more loyally it directs itself to the kind of answer which can be everything except radical. Here is an
elementary example from Jaspers :
Existential philosophy would be lost immediately, if it once again believed that it knows what man is. It would again give us sketches of how to investigate hu- man and animal life in its typical forms; it would again become anthropology, psychology, sociology. Its mean- ing is only possible when it remains groundless in its concreteness. It awakens what it does not know; it lightens and moves, but it does not fix and hold. For the man who is underway, this philosophy is the ex- pression through which he maintains himself in his direction; the means toward preserving his highest moments-so that he can make them real through his life. . . . Insight into existence, because it remains without an object, leads to no conclusion. 20
Exactly. A concerned tone is ominously struck up: no answer would be serious enough; every answer, no matter of what content, would be dismissed as a limit- ing concretization. But the effect of this remorseless intransigence is friendly; the man never pins himself
19. Cf. Gruppenexperiment, Frankfurter Beitriige zur Soziologie ( Frankfurt, 1955), II, 482 if.
20. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, pp. 146 47.
? down : the world is all too dynamic. The old Protestant theme of absurd belief, grounding itself in the subject, converted itself from Lessing to Kierkegaard into the pathos of existence. This pathos existed in opposition to its result, the reified world seen as coagulated and alien to the subject. That old theme allies itself stra- tegically with the critique of positive science-science from which, as Kierkegaard's thesis ran, the subject has disappeared. At the cost of any possible answer, the radical question becomes what is substantial unto itself. Risk without hazard. Know-how and range of in- come are the only factors which determine whether one appears on the scene sheltered or has to start out without security. Even those who are not sheltered are safe as long as they join the chorus. This is what makes possible passages like the one from Heinz Schwitzke's Three Fundamental Theses for Television :
This is totally different in the sermon. Here a clerical speaker professed his credo for more than ten minutes, out of his own depths, in the existential manner; a single, never-changing close-up. Thanks to the noble humane power of conviction that radiated out from him, not only did his words, which were testified to by his pictorial presence, become completely credible, but the listener totally forgot the mediating apparatus. In front of the television screen, as if in the house of God, there formed itself a sort of parish among the accidental viewers, who felt as if they were being confronted with the immediate presence of the speaker, and through him felt committed to the subject matter of his sermon , God's word. There is no other explanation for this sur- prising occurrence than the supreme importance of the speaking person, the person who has enough courage
and e thos to place himself in the breach , and to serve
? nothing but the subject matter which he stands for and the listeners to whom he knows he can relate. 21
This is authenticity's funky commercial. The "word" of the preacher, as if his and God's were one without ques- tion, is testified to not by his "pictorial presence," but at best by behavior whose trustworthiness supports the credibility of his statements.
If, thanks to the appearance of the preacher, one forgets the mediating equipment, then the jargon of authenticity, which takes pleasure in this situation, is committing itself to the philosophy of As If: through stage-setting, the now and here of a cult action is simu- lated, an action which through its omnipresence is an- nulled on television. But, by the existential manner in which the preacher makes public profession of him- self, from out of himself, "in a never changing close-up," we need only to understand the self-evident fact that the preacher, who after all had no other choice, was projected as an empirical person onto the screen and in this way, perhaps, had a sympathetic effect on many people. That he formed a community
cannot be proven. The notion that he had to throw him- self into the breach, with his whole substance and existence, is imported from the sphere of risk. Still, for that preacher who details on television why the church is too narrow for him there is no risk at all: neither of contradiction from outside nor of inner ne- cessity. If in fact, hemmed in between microphone and floodlight, he had to suffer through moments of temp-
2 I . Heinz Schwitzke, "Drei Grundthesen zum Fernsehen," in Rundfunk und Fernsehen, II (I953), II ff.
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tation, the jargon would have been right there waiting with additional praise for his existentiality. The benefit of the negative is transferred to the positive, as though by a single stroke of the pen : positive negativeness to warm the heart. These dark words are numinous, just like Bollnow's whitewashed Sunday words-as close to rejoicing as the dreadful trumpet has always been. Just as the jargon uses the double sense of the word "positive," it uses the ambiguity of the term "meta- physics," according to whether at a given moment one prefers nothingness or being. On the one hand meta- physics means involvement with metaphysical themes, even if the metaphysical content is contested; on the other hand it means the affirmative doctrine of the transcendent world, in the Platonic model. In this shifting metaphysical need, that state of the spirit which long ago made itself known in Novalis' On Christendom or Europe, or which the young Lukacs called transcendental homelessness, has come down to culturally defined knowledge . The theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization. In mystical heresy, the unsatisfiable purification of the divine from myth, which loves to tremble in the gesture of deeply involved questioning, hands the divine over to whoever relates to it in any way. Liberal theology is suddenly reborn, since con- tent is to be found only in a relation, the other pole of which removes itself from all definition as the "ab- solutely indifferent," and marks all definition with the blemish of reification. Complete demythologization totally reduces transcendence to an abstraction, to a
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eQ. Uc. f)p. ,! . Enlightenment, which the viri obscuri 22 ac- cuse, triumphs in their thought. In the same movement of the spirit, however, the positing power of the sub- ject, veiled unto itself, again conjures up the myth inherent in all dialectical theology. That subjective power's highest value, as absolutely different, is blind. Under compulsion the viri obscuri praise commitments instead of jumping into speculation which alone could justify their own commitments to their radical ques- tioners. Their relationship to speculation is confused. One needs it because one wants to be deep, yet one shies away from it because of its intellectual nature. One would prefer to reserve it for the gurus . The others still confess their groundlessness, in order to give char- acter to the paths of offered salvation, which are re- puted to be successful in extreme even if imaginary danger. However, they find nothing but groundless thinking as soon as thinking refuses, through its atti- tude, to support from the outset those commitments which are as unavoidable in authenticity as is the happy ending in movies. If the happy ending is lacking, then among the existential authentics existentialism itself has nothing to laugh at.
Only against this background does the whole greatness of the existential ethic reveal itself. It once again actualizes, on the ground of modern historical rela- tivism, a decidedly moral stance. But in precisely that sense a danger is given; that danger which comes to expression in the possibility of an existential adven-
22. [ViTi obscuri : obscurantists , enemies of enlightenm ent. Historical reference to fictive humanist (fifteenth and six- teenth century) authors of letters against late forms <if Scho- lasticism. ]
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turism. Having become fully unconditioned in regard to content, and without any of that constancy which re- sides in fidelity, the adventurer enjoys the risk of his engagement as a last and most sublime pleasure. Pre- cisely in the unconditioned state of any given momen- tary engagement, the existentialist is especially exposed to the temptation of inconstancy and of faithlessness. 23
All of these words draw from language, from which they are stolen, the aroma of the bodily, unmetaphorical; but in the jargon they become quietly spiritualized. In that way they avoid the dangers of which 'they are constantly palavering. The more ear- nestly the jargon sanctifies its everyday world, as
though in a mockery of Kierkegaard's insistence on the unity of the sublime and the pedestrian, the more sadly does the jargon mix up the literal with the figurative:
Heidegger's final remark aims at this fundamental meaning of residing for all human existence, and in this remark he focuses on the "need for residences" as one of the great difficulties of our time : "The true need for residence," he says here, "consists not first of all in the absence of residences," although this need should by no means be taken lightly; but behind this need a deeper one is hidden, that man has lost his own nature and so cannot come to rest. "The true need for residence consists in the fact that mortals must first learn to re- side. " But to learn to reside means : to grasp this neces- sity, that, in the face of what is threatening, man should make for himself a sheltering space and should settle into it with a trustful reliance. But, then, inversely, the possibility of this settling down is again connected in a menacing way with the availability of residences. 24
23. Bollnow, Geborgenheit, pp. 37 f. 24. Ibid. , p. 170.
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The Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should "make for himself" such a space. The linguistic care- lessness, in the unresisting mechanism of the jargon, admittedly lays shelteredness bare, as if out of com- pulsion; lays it bare as something that is merely posited. However, that which announces itself, in the game about the need for residences, is more serious
than the pose of existential seriousness. It is the fear of unemployment, lurking in all citizens of countries of high capitalism. This is a fear which is administra- tively fought off, and therefore nailed to the platonic firmament of stars, a fear that remains even in the glorious times of full employment. Everyone knows that he could become expendable as technology de- velops, as long as production is only carried on for production's sake; so everyone senses that his job is a disguised unemployment. It is a support that has ar- bitrarily and revocably pinched off something from the
total societal product, for the purpose of maintaining the status quO. 25 He who has not been given a life ticket could in principle be sent away tomorrow. That migra- tion of people could continue which the dictators al- ready once before set in motion and channeled into Auschwitz. Angst, busily distinguished from inner- worldly, empirical fear, need by no means be an ex- istential value. Since it is historical, it appears in fact that those who are yoked into a SOCiety which is socie- talized, but contradictory to the deepest core, con-
25. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Madelle (Frankfurt, 1963), p. 137.
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stantly feel threatened by what sustains them. They feel threatened without ever being able in specific in- stances to concretize this threat from the whole of sOciety. But in shelteredness the declassed person has his clumsy triumph-the declassed man who knows what he can get away with. On the one hand he has nothing to lose; on the other hand, the overadminis- trated world of today? still respects the compromise structure of bourgeois soci? ty, to the extent that that society-in its own interest-stops short before the ultimate, the liquidation of its members, stops short because, in the massive plans of its industry, it has the means of delay at its disposal. So Jaspers' "existence welfare" and social welfare-administrated grace- come into contact. On the social ground of the j argon's reinterpretation of complete negativity into what is positive, we suspect the coercive self-confidence of the uneasy consciousness. Even our cheap suffering from the loss of meaning, a suffering long since automatized into a formula, is not simply that emptiness which has
grown up through the whole movement of the Enlight- enment-as the more demanding viri obscuri willingly describe it. There are reports of taedium vitae even during periods of unchallenged state religion; it was as common among the Fathers of the Church as among those who carry over into the jargon Nietzsche's judg- ment about modern nihilism, and who imagine that in that way they have gone beyond both Nietzsche and nihilism-Nietzsche's concept of which they have sim- ply turned upside down. Socially, the feeling of mean- inglessness is a reaction to the wide-reaching freeing from work which takes place under conditions of con-
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tinuing social unfreedom. The free time of the subjects withholds from them the freedom which they secretly hope for; their free time chains them to the ever-same, the apparatus of production-even when this appa- ratus is giving them a vacation. With this situation they are forced to compare the obvious possibilities, and they grow the more confused the less the closed fa? ade of consciousness, which is modeled after that of so- ciety, lets through the conception of a possible freedom.
At the same time, in the feeling of meaninglessness which is the high-bourgeois expression of real need, the permanent threat of destruction is assimilated by consciousness. What this consciousness dreads it turns in such a way that the threat seems to be an innate part of it, and thus it weakens that element of the threat which can no longer be grasped in human terms. The fact that on all sides meaning of every kind seems to be impotent against evil, that the latter yields no mean- ing at all, and that the assertion of meaning may even promote evil, is registered as a lack of metaphysical content, especially in regard to religiOUS and social commitments. The falseness of this reinterpretation, using a mode of cultural criticism with which the stingy pathos of the authentics joins in, regularly be- comes visible in a particular fact: the fact that past ages-whichever one prefers-ranging from Bieder- meier to Pelasgic, appear as the ages of immanent meaning. Such reinterpretation follows an inclination
to set back the clock politically and socially, to bring to an end the dynamism inherent in a society which still, through the administrative measures of the most pow- erful cliques, appears to be all too open. As its present
? ? ? form can expect nothing good from such a dynamic, it stubbornly blinds itself to the recognition that the cure which society offers is itself the evil that it fears.
