No More Learning

Heidegger sees himself forced, in the analysis of curiosity, to intimate something of the historical dy- namic that necessarily dissolves static relationships. s4 On those relationships the theory of readiness to hand nourishes itself; he leaves it to the gang to call these hale. He sanctions, as an ontological possibility, that "dis-stancing" which is hallowed by its hyphen; that possibility that men might raise themselves above the mere immediacy of the reproduction of their own lives. Nevertheless, he slides into the defaming of consciousness, which has been released from im- prisonment :
Care becomes concern with the possibilities of the see- ing the "world" merely as it looks while one tarries and takes a rest. Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be carried along . . . solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongSide that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand.
84. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 216.
log
When curiosity has become free, however, it con- cerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen ( that is , to come into a Being towards it ) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. 85
For Heidegger, the way to free consciousness is pre- established, inevitable; but it is as little charming to the man who is freed as are those who are narrowed by their circle of duties, those who distrust, as artful and shifty, the mind that is emancipated from praxis. He equates emancipated consciousness with curiosity.
His hatred toward curiosity is allied to his hatred to- ward mobility; both are even hammered into the mind by the ripe old saying: stay in the country and earn your living honestly. Genetic psychoanalysis knows the castration threat against the child's sexual investi- gation; the allegedly suprapsychological stance of the ontologist fits with the brutal "that's none of your business," invoked in the castration threat. In the ques-
tion of curiosity the thinker abuses thinking; without curiosity the subject would remain imprisoned in a dull repetition-compulsion and would never open him- self up to experience. Of course such an enlightenment insight is not the whole story. It is equally untrue that, through Heidegger's admonitions about "the They," that social state of affairs whose symptoms he reprimands grows better. It is only that his objection to curiosity
stems from yea-saying at any price :
curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and with marvelling at them-Oall,ua? ftJl. To be amazed to
8 5 . Ibid.
? 110
the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known. S6
In his Di(ferenz essay Hegel criticized curiosity much more searchingly; not as a state of mind but as the position of the reified consciousness with regard to the dead object:
The living spirit which dwells in a philosophy requires, in order to be released, that it should be brought to birth by a related spirit. It passes by, as an alien phenomenon, any historical conduct which from some kind of in- terest marches forth to an understanding of opinions; and it does not reveal its interior. To the living spirit it can seem indifferent that it must serve to enlarge the remaining collection of mummies and the general heaps of accidentalia ; for it itself has flowed away through the hands curious to collect new pieces of knowledge. 87
The disagreeable aspect of curiosity, as of greedy na- ture as a whole, cannot be glossed over. But it is not a probing agitation; rather it is something that re- actively, under the pressure of early childhood denial, has emerged from that denial; and which distorts that which once wanted to get free from the always-same, the identical. Curious people are characters whose childish longing for the truth about the sexual was never satisfied; their longing is a shabby substitute. The person from whom that which concerns him was
86. Ibid.
87. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1 95 8 ) , Vol. I : Aufs iitze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Aufsiitze aus der Jenenser Zeit (Dif- ferenzschrift ) , p. 40.
III
withheld mixes himself evilly into what does not con- cern him. He becomes enviously enraptured with in- formation over matters in which he himself should not play any part. That is the relation of all greediness to free desire. To Heidegger's arrogance toward the merely ontic, the genesis of curiosity is indifferent. He chalks up mutilation to the fault of the mutilated, as a fault of existence in general. His existential security becomes a heteronomously conditioned activity that is untried by curiosity-idle knowledge. This is probably the original philosophical history of the cliche of com- mitment. By denouncing a purely ontological possi- bility according to his own teaching, Heidegger be- comes the advocate of the unfullfilment of life. Like the empty phrase of idealism, authenticity, in project- ing its existentialism right from the beginning, sides with want, over and against satisfaction and abun- dance. In spite of its eager neutrality and distance from society, authenticity thus stands on the side of
the conditions of production, which, contrary to reason, perpetuate want. When Heidegger finally calls "home- lessness" the "third essential characteristic of this phenomenon," 88 he conjures up the Ahasuerian ele- ment. He does this by means of the demagogically proven technique of allusion, which keeps quiet about that to which it expects secret consent. The pleasure of mobility becomes a curse for the homeless. The op- posite of "everyday Dasein," which "is constantly up- rooting itself," 89 is "observing entities and marvelling
88. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 217. 8g. Ibid.
112
at them," 90 though it is not yet, by any means the contemplation of Being. In philosophy 1927 the root- less intellectual carries the yellow mark of someone who undermines the established order.
How deeply rooted are the societal elements in Heidegger's analysis of authenticity is involuntarily revealed by his use of language. As is well known, Heidegger supplants the traditional category of sub- jectivity by Dasein, whose essence is existence. Being, however, which "is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. " 91 This is meant to distin- guish subjectivity from all other existent being. It intends, furthermore, to prohibit existence from being "taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at- hand. " 9? This construction, which is inspired by Kierke- gaard's doctrine of the "transparency" of the self,93 would like to make possible a starting out from some element of being. This latter is valued as the immediate givenness of the facts of consciousness in traditional epistemology; yet, at the same time, this element of being is supposed to be more than mere fact, in the same manner as the ego of speculative idealism once was. Behind the apersonal "is concerned," nothing more is hidden than the fact that Dasein is conscious- ness. The entrance of this formula is Heidegger's scene
90. Ibid. , p. 216.
91. Ibid. , p. 67.
92. Ibid.
93. Cf. Sl! iren Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode (Dus-
seldorf, 1 954 ) p. 1 0 . [English translation by W. Lowrie, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death (Garden City, N. Y. , 1954). ]
? II3
a faire. From an abstract concept Being turns into something absolute and primary, which is not merely posited. The reason for this lies in the fact that Hei- degger reveals an element of Being and calls it Dasein, which would be not just some element of Being, but the pure condition of Being-all this without losing any of the characteristics of individuation, fullness, bodiliness. This is the scheme that the jargon follows, intentionally or unintentionally, to the point of nausea. The jargon cures Dasein from the wound of meaning- lessness and summons salvation from the world of ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down once and for all in the title deed, which declares that the person owns himself. The fact that Dasein belongs to itself, that it is "in each case mine," is picked out from in- dividuation as the only general definition that is left over after the dismantling of the transcendental sub- ject and its metaphysics. The principium individua- tionis stands as a principle over and against any par- ticular individual element. At the same time it is that essence. In the case of the former element, the Hegelian dialectical unity of the general and the par-
ticular is turned into a relation of possession. Then it is given the rank and rights of the philosophical apriori. "Because Dasein has in each case mineness . . . one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it. " 94 The distinction between authen- ticity and inauthenticity-the real Kierkegaardian one -depends on whether or not this element' of being, Dasein, chooses itself, its mineness. 95 Until further
94. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68. 95. Cf. Ibid.
? ? notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their criterion the decision in which the individual subject chooses itself as its own possession. The subject, the concept of which was once created in contrast to rei- fication, thus becomes reified. Yet at the same time reification is scoffed at objectively in a form of lan- guage which simultaneously commits the same crime. The general concept o f mineness , in which this lan- guage institutes subjectivity as a possession of itself, sounds like a variant of meanness in Berlin slang. Whatever formerly went under the name of existential and existentiell now insists on this new title deed of possession. By the fact that it is ontological, the alter- native of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself according to whether someone decides for himself or not. It takes its directive, beyond real states of affairs, from the highly formal sense of belonging to oneself. Yet its consequences in reality are extremely grave. Once such an ontology of what is most ontic has been achieved, philosophy no longer has to bother about the societal and natural-historical origin of this title deed, which declares that the individual owns himself. Such a philosophy need no longer be concerned with how far society and psychology allow a man to be him- self or become himself, or whether in the concept of such selfness the old evil is concentrated one more time. The societal relation, which seals itself off in the identity of the subject, is de-societalized into an in-itself. The individual, who himself can no longer rely on any firm possession, holds on to himself in his extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly un- losable possession. Metaphysics ends in a miserable
II5
consolation: after all, one still remains what one is. Since men do not remain what they are by any means, neither socially nor biologically, they gratify them- selves with the stale remainder of self-identity as something which gives distinction, both in regard to being and meaning. This unlosable element, which has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, as Hei- degger calls it, which the authentics possess and the ina? thentics lack. The essence of Dasein, i. e. , what is more than its mere existence, is nothing but its self- ness: it is itself. The quarrel with Heidegger's lan-
guage is not the fact that it is permeated, like any philosophical language, with figures from an empirical reality which it would like to transcend, but that it transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence.
Heidegger is careful to have alibis against the charge of epistemological subjectivism. Mineness, or the self-sameness of the authentically existing self, is to be separated from the identity of the subject. s6 Otherwise, these would break through the idealism of a thinking that claims to be a thinking of origins. But Heidegger's Being, to which, after all, some con-
siderable creative acts are attributed, becomes the Fich- tean absolute ego. It appears beheaded, as it were, in contrast to the traditional, merely posited ego. But the distinction from Fichte does not hold. If the distin- guishing element, the fact that mineness belongs to real persons, was not their abstractly preordained prin- ciple, their ontological primacy would be done for.
96. Ibid. , p. 168. 116
? ? Meanwhile, even the old-fashioned idealist identity depended on elements of fact as conditions of its own possibility, insofar as it was precisely the unity of the representations of a consciousness. Almost unrecog- nizably, all this rises again in Heidegger's thought, in a reinterpretation that turns it into the hinge of his whole argument. Heidegger's point of departure turns against possible criticism, in the same manner as Hegel's once turned against the philosophy of reflec- tion. Criticism is said to miss a newly discovered or rediscovered structure, beyond the dualism of fact and essence, which was still taught by HusserI in tradi- tional fashion. Not only Heidegger's philosophy, but
also the whole jargon of authenticity that follows, de- pends on the staging of the elaboration of this struc- ture. It is pointed out at a very early stage in Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger deals with the primacy of Dasein. Heidegger interprets subjectivity as a concept of indifference: essence and fact in one. The primacy of Dasein is said to be twofold. On the one hand it is to be ontic, namely, determined by existence. In other words, existence defines something in the nature of fact, something existent. On the other hand "Dasein is in itself 'ontological,' because existence is thus determinative for it. " 97 Thus something contradictory to subjectivity is immediately attributed to subjectivity : that it be itself fact and reality, and, in line with the demand of traditional philosophy, that as conscious- ness it make facticity possible. As the latter it becomes pure concept, in contrast to facticity; it becomes es-
97. Ibid. , p. 34?
117
sence and finally Husserrs eidos ego. Against the tradi- tional doctrine of the subject this double character, which is also an absolute unity before the fall into dif- ferentiation, claims the rank of an important discovery. For that reason Heidegger uses an archaizing, scho- lastic method. Both these characteristics of the sub- ject he ascribes to Dasein, as attributes, without considering that they conflict with the principle of contradiction when they are attached in this way. Ac- cording to Heidegger, Dasein "is" not merely ontic, which would be tautological in regard to what is grasped under the concept of Dasein, but it is also ontological. In this predication of the ontic and the ontological, from the standpoint of Dasein, the falsity of the regressive element can be recognized. The con- cept of the ontological cannot be attached to a sub- stratum, as if ontological were its predicate. To be a fact is no predicate which can attach itself to a con- cept; and, since Kant's criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, any philosophy should be careful not to affirm this. The same holds true for the nonfacticity of concepts, their essentiality. This essentiality is localized in the relation of the concept to the facticity that is synthesized in it-and never belongs to it, as Heidegger suggests, as a quality of it itself. To say that Dasein "is ontic or ontological,"
can, strictly speaking, not be judged at all, for what is meant by existence is a substratum. It is for this reason that the meaning of Dasein is nonconceptual. In contrast to thiS, "ontic" and "ontological" are ex- pressions for different forms of reflection , and are thus unable only in regard to the definitions of Dasein, or to
118
the position of such definitions in theory-not im- mediately, however, in regard to the meant substratum itself. Their place is that of conceptual mediation. Heidegger declares this to be immediacy sui generis. Dasein thus suddenly becomes a third element, with- out regard to the fact that the dual character that Hei- degger bends together into this third can by no means be regarded independently from that which happens conceptually to the substratum. In Heidegger, the fact that there is nothing which maintains itself identically without the categorical unity, and the fact that this categorical unity does not maintain itself without that which it synthesizes-such facts take the form of the elements which are to be distinguished. These elements in tum take the form of derivatives. There is nothing between heaven and earth that is in itself ontic or
ontological; rather, everything becomes what it is only by means of the constellation into which it is brought by philosophy. Language had a means for making this differentiation when it spoke of ontological theories, judgments, and proofs instead of something ontologi- cal sans fa{:on. By means of an objectification of this kind, such an element would of course already be turned into that ontic against which the literal mean- ing of "ontological" sharpens itself: the logos of some- thing antic. After Sein und Zeit Heidegger tried to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his project. Yet previously, he had done something very similar to what Kant criticized in the rationalistic form of ontology: an amphiboly of the concepts of reflec-
tion. Heidegger may have missed the mistake, but it is to the advantage of his project. According to usual
? II9
terminology, it is obvious that the concept that says what essentially belongs to something that is, is onto- logical. If, however, this becomes unnoticeably the ontological essence of the existent in itself, then the result is a concept of Being that is prior to the concepts of reflection. At first this occurs in Sein und Zeit through the hypostasis of an ontological sphere that is the nourishment for all of Heidegger's philosophy. The amphiboly resides in the following: in the concept of the subject two elements flow together-the subject's own definition as something existent, in which form it still remains fixed in the Kantian interlocking of the
transcendental subject with the unity of consciousness per se, and, secondly, the definition of subject as con- stituent of everything existent. This togetherness is unavoidable in the concept of subject. It is an expres- sion of the dialectic between subject and object in the subject itself, and evidence of its own conceptuality. Without mediation subjectivity cannot be brought to either of its extremes, which belong to different genera. This aforementioned unavoidability becomes an imagi- nary thing by virtue of the deficiency of the concept: mediation toward the immediate identity of the medi-
ating and mediated elements.
Certainly one element is not without the other, but the two are by no means one, as Heidegger's fundamental thesis alleges. In their identity, identity thinking would have swallowed up
the nonidentical element, the existent, which the word Dasein intends. Thus Heidegger secretly reinstates the creator quality of the absolute subject, which was supposedly avoided, as it were, by starting with mine- ness in each case. The notion of the double character
120
of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger's disguised idealism. For the dialectic in the subject between the existent and the concept becomes being of a higher order; and the dialectic is brought to a halt. Whatever praises itself for reaching behind the concepts of reflection-sub-
ject and object-in order to grasp something sub- stantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other, into the in-itself. This is the standard philosophical form of underhanded activity, which thereupon occurs constantly in the jargon. It vindicates without authority and without theology, maintaining that what is of essence is real, and, by the same token, that the existent is essential, meaningful, and justified.
In spite of Heidegger's assertion, mineness, and consequently authenticity, result in pure identity. How true this is can be shown e contrario. Whatever is in- authentic for him, all the categories of the They are those in which a subject is not itself, is unidentical with itself. Thus for example the category of Unver- weilen, as a giving oneself over to the world;98 the sub- ject gives itself up to something other, instead of re- mainip. g with itself and "being knowingly in the truth. " 99 What was a necessary element in the ex- perience of consciousness, in Hegelian phenomenology, becomes anathema for Heidegger, since he compresses
the experience of consciousness into self-experience. However, identity, the hollow kernel of such selfness,
98. Ibid. , p. 216. 99. Ibid.
121
thus takes the place of idea. Even the cult of selfness is reactionary. The concept of selfness is here being eternalized precisely at the moment in which it has already disintegrated. Late bourgeOiS thinking re-forms itself into naked self-preservation, into the early bour- geois principle of Spinoza : sese conservare. But who- ever stubbornly insists on his mere so-being, because everything else has been cut off from him, only turns his so-being into a fetish. Cut off and fixed selfness only becomes, all the more, something external. This is the ideological answer to the fact that the current state of affairs is everywhere producing an ego weak- ness which eradicates the concept of subject as in- diViduality. That weakness as well as its opposite march into Heidegger's philosophy. Authenticity is supposed to calm the consciousness of weakness, but it also resembles it. By it the living subject is robbed of all definition, in the same way as it loses its attributes in reality. However, what is done to men by the world becomes the ontological pOSSibility of the inauthentic- ity of men. From that point it is only a step to the usual criticism of culture, which self-righteously picks on shallowness, superficiality, and the growth of mass culture .
The preterminological use of "authentic" under- lined what was essential to a thing, in contrast to what was accidental. Whoever is dissatisfied with silly ex- amples from textbooks needs to deliberate by himself; this will help more than a developed theory to assure him of what is essential. What is essential in phenom- ena, and what is accidental, hardly ever springs straightforwardly out of the phenomena. In order to
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be determined in its objectivity, it has first to be re- flected on subjectively. Certainly, at first glance, it seems more essential to a worker that he has to sell his working power, that the means of production do not be- long to him, that he produces material goods, than that he is a member of a suburban gardening club; al- though the worker himself may think that the latter is more essential. However, as soon as the question di- rects itself to so central a concept as capitalism, Marx
and the verbal definitions of Max Weber say something extremely different from each other. In many cases the distinction between essential and inessential, be- tween authentic and inauthentic, lies with the arbi- trariness of definition, without in the least implying the relativity of truth. The reason for this situation lies in language. Language uses the term "authentic" in a floating manner. The word also wavers according to its weightiness, in the same way as occasional ex- pressions. The interest in the authenticity of a concept enters into the judgment about this concept. Whatever is authentic in this concept also becomes so only under the perspective of something that is different from it. It is never pure in the concept itself. Otherwise the de- cision about it degenerates into hairsplitting. But at the same time, the essential element of a thing has its fundamentum in reo Over and against naive usage, nominalism is in the wrong to the degree that it re- mains blind toward the objective element of meaning in words, which enters into the configurations of language and which changes there. This element of objectivity carries on an unresolved struggle with those acts that merely subjectively give meaning. The con-
123
sciousness of this objective element in what is authen- tic was the impulse of Brentano's whole school, es- pecially of Husserl, and also contributed to Heidegger's doctrine of authenticity. The essence of a thing is not anything that is arbitrarily made by subjective thought, is not a distilled unity of characteristics. In Heidegger this becomes the aura of the authentic : an element of
the concept becomes the absolute concept. The phe- nomenologists pinpoint the fundamentum in re as the particularization of essence. This particularization be- comes in itself thingly like a res, and can be called upon without regard to the subjective mediation of the
concept. In his own argument Heidegger would like to escape HusserI's dualism, as well as the whole dispute of nominalism. He remains a tributary of HusserI's, however, in the short-circuited conclusion that imputes the authentic immediately to things, and thus turns the authentic into a special domain. Hence the substanti- vation of authenticity, its promotion to an existentiale, to a state of mind. By means of an alleged independ-
ence from thinking, the objective moment of that which is essential raises itself to something higher. Finally it becomes an absolute, the summum bonum over and against the relativity of the subject, while simultaneously it is presented as purely descriptive diagnosiS in the manner of Scheler. Language nerves, which may be suspect to the authentics as something
decadent revolt against that substantivation which thus befalls the authentics' favorite motto. "-Keit," "-ness," is the general concept for that which a thing is. It is always the substantivization of a characteris- tic. Thus industriousness is the substantivization of
124
those characteristics that apply to all industrious peo- ple, and which they have in common. By contrast, however, "authenticity" names no authentic thing as a specific characteristic but remains formal, relative to a content which is by-passed in the word, if not in- deed rejected in it-even when the word is used ad- jectivally. The word says nothing about what a thing is, but questions the extent to which the thing realizes what is posited by its concept. The thing stands in implicit opposition to what it merely seems to be. In any case the word would receive its meaning from the quality which it is a predicate of. But the suffix "-keit," "-ness," tempts one to believe that the word must al- ready contain that content in itself. The mere category of relationship is fished out and in its turn exhibited as something concrete. By this logic the supreme would be that which is altogether what it is. The newly created Plato is more Platonic than the authentic one, who at least in his middle period attached its proper idea to everything, even to the humblest thing, and in no way confused the Good with the pure agreement be- tween the thing and its idea. But in the name of con- temporary authenticity even a torturer could put in all sorts of claims for compensation, to the extent that he was simply a true torturer.
The primacy of the concept over the thing is now, through the alliance of authenticity with mineness,
which made a universal out of the indissolubility of the
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pushed into mere detail. That detail is as artificial as was the haecceitas of Duns Scotus' late ScholastiCism,
Diesda ( haecceitas ) , and out of its not-being-universal -made it a paradigm of an ontologizing of the ontic.
The taboo concerning subjective reflection is useful to subjectivism: authenticity, in the traditional lan- guage of philosophy, would be identical with subjec- tivity as such. But in that way, unnoticed, subjectivity also becomes the judge of authenticity. Since it is denied any objective determination, authenticity is de- termined by the arbitrariness of the subject, which is authentic to itself. The jurisdictional claim of reason, which Husserl still asserted, falls away. Traces of re- flection on such arbitrariness could still be found in Sein und Zeit in the concept of projection. That concept subsequently allowed the growth of all sorts of other ontological projections, most of them pleasantly wa- tered down. With clever strategy the later Heidegger remodeled the concept. In the projection of the philoso- phizing subject something of the freedom of thought was preserved. The provocative aspect of an openly makeshift theory is no more embarrassing to Heidegger than is the suspicion of hubris. The armored man was so conscious of his unprotected places that he pre- ferred to grasp at the most violent arrangement of arguments, rather than to call subjectivity by its name. He plays tactically with the subjective aspect of authen-
ticity : for him, authenticity is no longer a logical ele- ment mediated by subjectivity but is something in the subject, in Dasein itself, something objectively dis- coverable. The observing subject prescribes whatever is authentic to the subject as observed: it prescribes the attitude toward death. This displacement robs the subject of its moment of freedom and spontaneity: it completely freezes, like the Heideggerian states of
? mind, into something like an attribute of the substance "existence. " Hatred toward reifying psychology re- moves from the living that which would make them other than reified. Authenticity, which according to doctrine is absolutely unobjective, is made into an ob- ject. The reason for this is that authenticity is a man- ner of behavior that is ascribed to the being-a-subject of the subject, not to the subject as a relational factor. Thus it becomes a possibility that is prefixed to and foreordained for the subject, without the subject being able to do anything about it. Judgment is passed ac- cording to the logic of that joke about the coachman who is asked to explain why he beats his horse un- mercifully, and who answers that after all the animal has taken on itself to become a horse, and therefore has to run. The category of authenticity, which was at first introduced for a descriptive purpose, and which flowed from the relatively innocent question about what is authentic in something, now turns into a mythically imposed fate. For all that distance from nature which marks an ontological structure that will rise again on the far side of the existent, this destiny functions as something merely naturelike. Jews are punished for being this destiny, both ontolo gically and naturalistically at the same time. The findings of Heidegger's existential analysis, according to which the subject is authentic insofar as it possesses itself, grant special praise to the person who is sovereignly at his own disposal; as though he were his own prop- erty : he has to have bearing, which is at the same time an internalization, and an apotheosis, of the principle
127
of domination over nature. "Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own Dasein. " 100 The testi- mony of his being-human, which constitutes "the ex- istence of man," occurs "through the creation of a world and its ascent, as much as through the destruc- tion of it and its decline. The testifying to humanity, and thus its authentic completion, occurs through the freedom of decision. This grasps necessity and puts itself under the commitment of a supreme order. " 101 That very statement is nobly meant, quite in the spirit
of the jargon, as when a noncommissioned officer bawls out the "weakness of the flesh. " Outside of the tautology all we can see here is the imperative: pull yourself together. It is not for nothing that in Kierke- gaard, the grandfather of all existential philosophy, right living is defined entirely in terms of decision. All his camp followers are in agreement on that, even the dialectical theologians and the French existentialists. Subjectivity, Dasein itself, is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in a determining ob- jectivity. In Germany these determinations of objec- tivity are limited by the "sense of obligation to 'the command," as in the word-fetish "soldierly. " This obli- gation is totally abstract and thus concretizes itself ac- cording to the power structure of the moment. In honor of all that, the existential ontologists and the philosophers of existence bury the hatchet of discord.
100. Heidegger, Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munioh, 1937), p. 6.
101. Ibid. 128
? Action of the warrior. The strength to make decisions under the most extreme conditions-life or death- comes from firmness in decision; comes from such firm- ness in unique situations which never recur in abso- lutely identical form. The fundamental traits of this kind of action are readiness for risks, along with a sense for what is possible; as well as artfulness and presence of mind. Rules can be formulated for this kind of action, but in its essence no rules will cover it completely; nor can this action bc derived from rules. In the most ex-
treme situations there appears both what I am authen- tically, and my potential. 102
The spe akers for existence move toward a mythology, even when they don't notice it. Self-possession, un- limited and narrowed by no heteronomy, easily con- verges with freedom. Men would be reconciled with their essential definition if the time came when their defining limitations were no longer imposed on them. This would mean a happy reversal of the domination over nature. However, nothing is more unwanted by the philosophy and the jargon of authenticity. Apart from
the right to come into one's own, self-control is hypos- tatized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the con- trols are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Ideal- ism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical with duty. Once one extrapolates from the words of empirical language what authentically is, as those words' authentic mean- ing, one sees that the merely existing world determines
I02. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, rev. ed. (Munich, 1958), p. 340. [Our translation. This work has been translated into English by J. T. Wilde, W. Klubach, W. Kimmel, Truth and Symbol, from Von der Wahrheit (New York, 1959). ]
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what on any specific occasion applies to those words;
that world becomes the highest court of judgment over
what should and should not be. Today, nevertheless,
a thing is essentially only that which it is in the midst
of the dominant evil; essence is something negative.
Paragraph 50 of Sein und Zeit, entitled : "Prelimi- n ary Sketch of the Existential-onotological Structure of Death,"-without the print even blushing-con- tains the sentence: "However, there is much that can impend for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. " 103 Once somebody attributed to a local aphorist from Frank- furt the saying that ''Whoever looks out of the window becomes aware of many things. " Heidegger sketches his conception of authenticity itself, as Being toward death, on just this level. Such Being should be more than mortality disvalued as something thingly-em- pirical. But he also takes great care, for the sake of ontology, to separate this being from subjective re- flection on death. Being oneself does not reside in an exceptional situation of the subject, freed from the They; it is no form of the subject's consciousness. l04 Authentic being toward death is no "thinking about death," 105 an activity which is displeasing to the mo- nopolistic philosopher : "Needed, in our present world- crisis: less philosophy but more attention to thought; less literature, but more concern for the letter. " 106 The attitude which he disapproves of
103. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
104. Ibid. , p. 168.
105. Ibid. , p. 305.
106. Heidegger, iJbeT den Humanismus (Frankfurt a. M. ,
1949), p. 47? 130
,
"thinks about death," pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. As something pOSSible, it is to show as little as possible of its possibility. On the other hand, if Being-towards-death has to disclose understand- ingly the possibility which we have characterized, and if it is to disclose it as a possibility, then in such Being- towards-death this possibility must not be weakened : it must be understood as a pOSSibility, it must be culti-
vated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it. lo7
Reflection about death is anti-intellectually disparaged in the name of something allegedly deeper, and is re- placed by "endurance," likewise a gesture of internal silence. We should add that the officer learns to die according to the tradition of the cadet corps; and yet to that end it is better if he does not trouble himself about that which, in his profession, is the most im- portant thing-next to the killing of others. The fascist ideOlogy had altogether to remove from consciousness that sacrifice which was proclaimed for the sake of German supremacy. The chance that such a sacrifice would reach the goal for which it was intended was from the outset too doubtful; it would never have been able to survive such a conscious inspection. In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical
107. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305 6.
? 131
variation on a Social Democratic phrase ; " S acrifice will make us free. " 108 Heidegger is at one with that. In the eighth printing of What is Metaphysics ? , which appeared in 1960, he still retains-without any op- portunistic mitigation-the following sentences :
Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises from the abyss of freedom. In Sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone validates that grace-;:in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to the essence of man; that in his relation to Being he might take over the guarding of Being. 109
Nevertheless, once authenticity can no longer be either the empirical condition of mortality nor the subjec- tive relating to it, then it turns into grace. It turns, as it were, into a racial quality of inwardness, which man, either has or does not have-a quality about which nothing further can be stated than that, tautologically, there is mere participation in it. Consequently, in his additional discussions of death Heidegger is irresis- tably driven on to tautological manners of speaking: "It [death] is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, of
every way of existing," 110 thus, perfectly simply, the possibility of no longer existing. One could well reply
108. Cf. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, III (1938), 408.
109. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 8th ed. (Frankfurt a. M. , 1960), p. 49.