No More Learning

The hiddenness of that which humility aims at, is in itself an invitation to be celebrated. This element has long been present in the concept of reverence, even in Goethe's understanding of it. Jaspers expressly recom- mends reverence, independent of its object. He con- demns its absence and easily finds his way to the hero cult without being frightened by Carlyle's example.
In the vision of historical figures of human greatness, the strength of reverence holds fast the measure of man's essence, and of his potential. Reverence does not alow the destruction of what it has seen. It remains true to what was effective as tradition in its own self- becoming. Reverence grasps the origin of its substance in those individual men in whose shadow reverence be- came conscious. In the form of unyielding piety it stil maintains its preserving function. What no longer has reality in the world remains present in reverence as an absolute claim, by means of memory. 53
53. Jaspers, Die geistige Situation, p. 170.
? ? In the jargon, however, the word "Man" no longer re- lies on human dignity as idealism, in spite of the cult of historical figures and of greatness in itself. Instead, man is to have his powerlessness and nothingness as his substance; this becomes a theme in the philoso- phers in question. This powerlessness and nothingness of man is coming close to its realization in present society. Such a historical state of affairs is then trans- posed into the pure essence of Man. It becomes af- firmed and eternalized at the same time. In this way the jargon plunders the concept of Man, who is to be sublime because of his nothingness. It robs him of pre- cisely those traits which have, as their content, the
criticism of states of affairs which preclude the divine rights of the soul. This criticism has been immanent in all enlightenment, as well as in early German idealism. The jargon goes hand in hand with a concept of Man from which all memory of natural law has been eradi- cated. Yet as an invariable, in the jargon man himself becomes something like a supernatural nature-cate- gory. Previously, the unbearable transience of a false and unsatisfied life was counteracted by theology, which gave hope of an eternal life. This hope disap- pears in the praise of the transient as absolute, a praise which of course Hegel had already deigned to bestow. As it runs in the jargon : suffering, evil, and death are to be accepted, not to be changed. The public is being trained in this tour de force of maintaining a balance. They are learning to understand their nothingness as Being, to revere actual, avoidable, or at least corrigible need as the most humane element in the image of Man. They are learning to respect authority in itself because
? 65
of their innate human insufficiency. Although such authority now rarely calls itself god-sent, it still holds on to the regal insignia which once it borrowed from God the father. Insofar as this authority no longer has any legitimation, apart from merely being there, blind and obscure, it becomes radically evil. This is the rea- son why the universally human language-gesture is in good standing with the totalitarian state. In the view of absolute power subjects are indifferent to this lan- guage-gesture-in the double sense of indifferent. The Third Reich, which could present such considerable majorities that it was hardly necessary to forge the election returns, was once credited by Hjalmar Schacht as the true democracy. He is confirmed by the jargon's view of Man, which was at times more inno- cent. According to the latter view, al men are equal in their powerlessness, in which they possess being. Hu- manity becomes the most general and empty form of privilege. It is strictly suited to a form of consciousness which no longer suffers any privileges yet which still finds itself under the spell of privilege. Such universal humanity, however, is ideology. It caricatures the equal rights of everything which bears a human face, since it hides from men the unalleviated discrimina- tions of societal power: the differences between hun- ger and overabundance, between spirit and docile idiocy. Chastely moved, man lets himself be addressed through Man: it doesn't cost anyone anything. But whoever refuses this appeal gives himself over as non-human to the administrators of the jargon, and can be sacrificed by them, if such a sacrifice is needed. For he, the non-human, and not the institution of
66
power, is the one whose pride tramples human dignity into the dirt. In the mask of the jargon any self-inter- ested action can give itself the air of public interest, of service to Man. Thus, nothing is done in any serious fashion to alleviate men's suffering and need. Self- righteous humanity, in the midst of a general inhu- manity, only intensifies the inhuman state of affairs. This is a state of affairs which necessarily remains hid- den to those who suffer here and now. The jargon only doubles the hiding cover. The compensation and con- solation offered by the jargon and its world are stand- ardized by their twisted desire for that which they are refused.
The empty phrase, Man, distorts man's relation to his society as well as the content of what is thought in the concept of Man. The phrase does not bother about the real division of the subject into separated functions that cannot be undone by the voice of mere spirit. The so-called Platonic psychology already expresses the internalization of the societal division of labor. Each function within the person, once firmly defined, ne- gates the person's total principle. The person becomes simply the sum of his functions. In the face of this situation, however, the person becomes all the worse, since his own laboriously gained unity has remained fragile. Each individual function, created under the law of self-preservation, becomes so firmly congealed that none can exist by itself, that no life can be con- structed out of its functional pieces. The individual functions turn against the self which they are sup- posed to serve. Life, insofar as it still exists, indicts such separation as false-for example in the verbal
? separation among thinking, feeling, and desiring. No thought is a thought-or more than a tautology-that does not also desire something. Without an element of cognition, no feeling and no will can be more than a fleeting motion. It is easy for the jargon to point its finger at the silliness of this division; for in the mean- time it has swallowed the current term "alienation. " The jargon, for example, was only too willing to
grant depth to the young Marx, in order to be able to escape the critic of political economy. In this process the real force of the splitting of the individual subject is lost from view. The thought that testifies to this split suddenly finds itself vituperated. The unsatisfi- able triumph, won again over the mechanistic psy- chology of the nineteenth century, misuses the insight of Gestalt theory, which itself is no longer quite dewy fresh-misuses that insight as pretext for not having
to touch on that which is felt to be the wound. The progress of science, which otherwise is not much ad- mired, and which did not take place in precisely this situation, is viewed as the reason not to consider the wound. The authentics shun Freud by exulting in the fact that they are more modern than Freud, but with- out any reason. Meanwhile, in a timely fashion, the fulsome talk about the whole man rooted in being is
put into its place by psychoanalysis. No elevation of the concept of Man has any power in the face of his actual degradation into a bundle of functions. The only help lies in changing the conditions which brought the state of affairs to this point-conditions which un- interruptedly reproduce themselves on a larger scale. By means of the magiC formula of existence, one dis-
68
regards society, and the psychology of real individuals which is dependent on that society. Thus one insists on the changing of Man, who in Hegel's sense exists merely in the abstract. This results only in a tighten- ing of the reins-not in elevation but in the continuing of the old suppressing ideology. While the authentics
attack psychoanalysis, they are really aiming at in- stinct. The degradation of instinct is taken over unre- fiectedly into their ethics. Thus Jaspers says:
The exclusiveness in the love of the sexes uncondi- tionally binds two people for the entire future. Without being able to be grounded, this love rests in the de- cision which tied the self to this loyalty, at the moment in which it came to itself authentically through the other. To renounce what is negative-polygamous erotic activity-is the consequence of a positive element. This positive element is only true, in the form of a present love, when it includes the whole life. The nega- tive element, the will not to throw oneself away, is the result of an absolute willingness for this loyalty; wilingness exercised by means of the possibility of self-realization. There is no self-realization without strictness in eroticism. Eroticism becomes humanly meaningful only in the exclusiveness of unconditioned c ommitmen t . 54
"Commitment" is the current word for the unrea- sonable demand of discipline. The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers. At first the term was designed to naturalize a loan word. Chewing their cuds, patriotic pedagogues would say that commitment was actually the name of religion. But it was not only the exaggera-
54. Ibid. , p. I71.
69
tion of German ways that allowed for the naturaliza- tion of "commitments. " The loan-word "religion" demanded subordination to something definite : Chris- tian revelation or the divine law of the Jews. This ele- ment is no longer felt in the newly coined "commit- ment. " The expression gives the appearance of reviving that sensual concretion which had become effaced in the loan word. But, in contrast to that sensuous color, the element to which the concretion adhered has be- come obscured. People now dress up the factual state of commitment. The concept preserves the authority whose source of origin is cut off right from the begin- ning. The thing that is understood under the term "commitment" is no better than the word. Commit- ments are offered not for their own truth but as a medi- cine against nihilism, in the same manner as the values which were current a generation before, and which surreptitiously circulate again today. Commitments
are classed under mental hygiene and, for that reason, undermine the transcendence which they prescribe. The campaign that the jargon is launching records one Pyrrhic victory after another. The genuineness of need and belief, which is questionable anyway, has to turn itself into the criterion for what is desired and believed; and in this way it becomes no longer genuine.
This is the reason why no one can say the word "gen- uineness" without becoming ideological. Nietzsche still used the term in an anti-ideological way. In the jargon, however, it stands out in the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness. Like a ragpicker, the jargon usurps the final protesting movements of a subject which in its downfall is thrown back on itself and
? hucksters those movements off. The edge is removed from the living subject's protest against being con- demned to play roles. The American theory of role- playing is so popular because it flattens out this pro- test into the structure of society. And the subject is told that the force from which he flees back into his cave has no power over him. Not lastly, the jargon is sacred as the language of an invisible kingdom, which exists only in the obsessive folly of the silent majority. So as not to scatter oneself-today, through the con- sumer market-it is removed from its social context
and interpreted as something which is of essence. But in that way it only negotiates something negative. Petits-bourgeois watch over petits-bourgeois . Disper- sion, which is the consequence of the consumer habit, is viewed as original evil. Consciousness, however, has already been disowned in the sphere of produc- tion, which trains individuals to disperse themselves.
Heidegger depicts the authentic state in contrast to the dispersed one :
The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self-that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. . . . As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dis- persed into the "they," and must first find itself. This dispersal characterizes the "subject" of that kind of Being which we know as concernful absorption in the world we encounter as closest to us. 55
He does not think of the connection between the large urban center, of high capitalism and that dispersion which was noted by Georg Simmel and already felt by
55. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 167.
71
Baudelaire. Whatever remains solely by itself, as one's authentic existence, becomes no less impoverished than that which dissolves into situations. Both Hegel and Goethe experienced and criticized inwardness as a merely accidental element. They saw it as the condi- tion for right consciousness, and as an element which had to be negated because of its limitation. The mem- ory of this criticism has been sublimated, since non- mind has accomplished so much more thoroughly what the mind once demanded of the mind.
The reconciliation between the inner and outer worlds, which Hegelian philosophy still hoped for, has been postponed ad infinitum. Thus it h,as become un- necessary to advocate alienation, since the latter is in power anyway, as the law of those who are happy ex- troverts. At the same time the consciousness of the rupture becomes more and more unbearable. For slowly this rupture changes self-consciousness into self-deception. Ideology can grasp onto the fact that the growing powerlessness of the subject, its seculari- zation, was at the same time a loss of world and con-
creteness. With good reason, the first original philos- ophy after Hegel, that of Kierkegaard, has been called a philosophy of ll. wardness. But this very Kierkegaardian philosophy has rid itself of the notion of a real inner- worldly reconciliation. The reflection on inwardness, the positing of it together with an element of its be- coming, points to its real abolition. The jargon brought into circulation many of the categories of inwardness and thus contributed its part to the destruction of in- wardness by means of such a contradiction. After the failure of the bourgeois revolution in Germany, the history of inwardness became, from its first day on,
72
the history of its downfall. The less powerful the sub- ject becomes, the more the sphere, which once self- consciously confessed itself to be inwardness, shrinks to an abstract point; the greater becomes the tempta- tion for inwardness to proclaim itself and throw itself onto that same market by which it is terrified. Termi- nologically, inwardness becomes a value and a posses- sion behind which it entrenches itself; and it is surreptitiously overcome by reification . It becomes Kierkegaard's nightmare of the "aesthetic world" of the mere onlooker, whose counterpart is to be the existen- tial inwardly man. \Vhatever wants to remain abso- lutely pure from the blemish of reification is pasted
onto the subject as a firm attribute. Thus the subject becomei an object in the second degree, and finally the mass product of consolation: from that found in Rilke's "Beggars can call you brother and still you can be a king" to the notorious poverty which is the great inward gleam of the spirit.
Those philosophers like Hegel and Kierkegaard, who testified to the unhappy state of consciousness for itself, understood inwardness in line with Protestant tradition: essentially as negation of the subject, as repentance. The inheritors who, by sleight of hand, changed unhappy consciousness into a happy non- dialectic one, preserve only the limited self-righteous- ness which Hegel sensed a hundred years before fascism. They cleanse inwardness of that element which contains its truth, by eliminating self-reflection, in which the ego becomes transparent to itself as a piece of the world. Instead, the ego posits itself as higher than the world and becomes subjected to the world precisely because of this. The hardened inward-
73
ness of today idolizes its own purity, which has sup- posedly been blemished by ontic elements. At least in this regard the outset of contemporary ontology coin- cides with the cult of inwardness. The retreat of ontology from the course of the world is also a retreat from the empirical content of subjectivity. In a clas- sically enlightened attitude, Kant took an antagonistic stance toward the concept of the inward and sepa- rated out the empirical subject, which was dealt with by psychology, as one thing among others. 56 He dis- tinguished it from the transcendental subject, and sub- sumed it under the category of causality. With a re- verse stress this is followed by the pathos of the inward ones. They take pleasure in their scorn for psychology without, in the manner of Kant, sacrificing to trans- cendental universality its alleged footing within the individual person. They cash in on the profit of both, so to speak. The taboos of the inward ones, which re- sult from their animosity toward instinctual drives, become more rigid by virtue of the fact that the subject becomes an element of externality-by virtue of its psycholOgical determination.
These taboos especially rage in Jaspers' books. 57 But in the suppression of real satisfaction, in the transposition of satisfaction into a mere inner one, where the self satisfies the self, all of the authentics, even the early Heidegger, coincide. He too includes the
56. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Verunft, B 332 f. (Die Amphibolie der Refl,exionsbegriffe). [English translation by N. K. Smith, Critique of Pure Reason ( New York, 1 965 ) . ]
57. Cf. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 3d ed. (Berlin, 1925), pp. 132 if.
74
term "pleasure capacity" under the categories of in- authenticity,5B and in Sein und Zeit he affirms Jaspers' statement that a psychology of world-views is by no means a psychology. 59 The no-less-disgusting practice of psychoanalytic language, hammering "enjoyment capacity" into its patients without regard for what is to be enjoyed, is simply turned upside down. But if inwardness is neither an existent thing nor an aspect -no matter how general-of the subject, then it turns into an imaginary quantity. If every existent thing, even the psychic, is cut out from the subject, then the remainder is no less abstract than the transcendental subject in respect to which the individual's inwardness, as existent, imagines itself so superior. In the classic texts of existentialism, as in that of the Kierkegaard- ian sickness unto death, existence becomes a relation- ship to itself, under which heading nothing further can be conceived. It becomes, as it were, an absolutized moment of mediation, without any regard for what is mediated; and it pronounces a verdict, from the very beginning, against any philosophy of inwardness. In the jargon, finally, there remains from inwardness only the most external aspect, that thinking oneself superior which marks people who elect themselves:
the claim of people who consider themselves blessed simply by virtue of being what they are. Without any effort, this claim can turn into an elitist claim, or into a readiness to attach itself to elites which then quickly gives the ax to inwardness. A symptom of the transfor-
58. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68.
59. Ibid. , p. 293 . and especially pp. 348 if.
75
mation of inwardness is the belief of innumerable peo- pIe that they belong to an extraordinary family. The jargon of authenticity, which sells self-identity as something higher, projects the exchange formula onto that which imagines that it is not exchangeable; for as a biological individual each man resembles himself. That is what is left over after the removal of soul and immortality from the immortal soul.
The over-all appearance of the immediate, which comes to a head in inwardness-now merely a speci- men-makes it unusually hard for those who are steadily exposed to the jargon to see through it. In its second-hand primalness they actually find something like contact, comparable to the feeling in the fraudu- lent National Socialist Yolk-community which led peo- ple to believe that all kindred comrades are cared for and none is forgotten: permanent metaphysical sub- vention. The social basis for this is clear.
Many in- stances of mediation in the market economy, which have strengthened the consciousness of alienation, are put aside in the transition to a planned economy; the routes between the whole and atomized individual
subjects are shortened, as if the two extremes were near to one another. The technical progress of the means of communication runs parallel to this. These means-especially radio and television-reach the people at large in such a way that they notice none of the innumerable technical intermediations; the voice of the announcer resounds in the home, as though he were present and knew each individual. The an- nouncers' technically and psycholOgically created arti- ficial language-the model of which is the repel-
? ? ? ? ? lently confidential " 'Til we meet again"-is of the same stripe as the jargon of authenticity. The catch-word for all this is "encounter": "The book lying before us, which concerns itself with Jesus, is of a very unusual kind. It does not intend to be a biography, a 'Life of Jesus,' in the usual sense, but to lead us to an existen- tial encounter with Jesus . . . " 60 Gottfried Keller, the lyricist, on whom the apostles of harmony looked down condescendingly, wrote a poem called "En- counter," a poem of wonderful clumsiness. 61 The poet unexpectedly meets, in the woods, her
whom alone my heart longs for, wrapped whitely in scarf and hat, transformed by a golden shine. She was alone; yet I greeted her hardly made shy in passing on, because I had never seen her so noble, still, and beautiful.
The misty light is that of sadness, and from it the word "encounter" receives its power. But this sadness gathers to itself the feeling of departure, which is powerful and incapable of unmediated expression; it designates nothing other than, quite literally, the fact that the two people met each other without any inten- tion. What the jargon has accomplished with the word "encounter," and what can never again be repaired,
60. Archiv fur Literaturwissenschaft, 1 960, o n Rudolf Bult- mann, Jesus.
61 . Cf. Bruno Russ, Das Problem des Todes in der Lyrik Gottfried Kellers, Ph. D. diss. (Frankfurt a. M. , r959), pp. r89 ff. , 200 ff.
77
does more harm to Keller's poem than a factory ever did to a landscape. "Encounter" is alienated from its literal content and is practically made usable through the idealizing of that content. There are scarcely en- counters like Keller's any longer-at the most there are appointments made by telephone-in a society in which it is essentially accidental when men get to know one another; and in which what one once simply called '1ife" constantly melts away more and more,
and, where it maintains itself at all, is considered something to be merely tolerated. But for precisely this reason encounter is praised, language has smeared organized contacts with luminous paint, because the light has gone out. The accompanying speech-gesture is that of eye-to-eye, as is the way with dictators. Who- ever looks deep into somebody's eye is hoping to hypnotize him, to win power over him, and always with a threat: Are you really faithful to me? no be- trayer? no Judas? Psychological interpretation of the jargon should discover in this -language-gesture an un- conscious homosexual transference, and should in that way also be able to explain the patriarch's eager rejection of psychoanalysis. The manic eye-to-eye
glance is related to racial insanity; it wants a con- spiratOrial community, the feeling that we are of the same kind; it strengthens endogamy. The very desire to purify the word "encounter," and to reinstate it through strict usage, would become, through unavoid- able tacit agreement, a basic element of the jargon, along with purity and primalness-an element of that jargon from which it would like to escape. What was done to "encounter" satisfies a specific need. Those en-
? counters which counteract themselves because they are organized, those encounters to which good will, busy-body behavior and canny desire for power tire- lessly exhort us, are simply covers for spontaneous actions that have become impossible. People console themselves, or are being consoled, by thinking that something has already been done about what is op- pressing them when they talk about it. Conversation,
after having been a means of becoming clear about something, becomes an end in itself and a substitute for that which, in terms of its sense, should follow from it. The surplus in the word "encounter"-the sug- gestion that something essential is already occurring when those ordered to gather converse together-that surplus has the same deception at its center as the speculation on being helped in the word "concern. " Once that word meant a sickness. The jargon falls back on that: as though the individual's interest were at the same time his trouble. It begs for caritas but at the same time, for the sake of its human essence, it exercises terror. Here one is expected to understand a transcendental power which requires that one, again according to the jargon, should "perceive" the concern. The archaic superstition, which is still exploited today by the epistolary formula "hoping not to have asked in vain" is taken on existential RPM's by the j argon ; readiness to help being, as it were, squeezed out of being.
The counterpart to that-something over which the authentics have unquestioningly grown indignant -would be communicative usage as it is fqund in America. "Being cooperative" means, in that context,
? 79
to offer one's services to the other without remunera- tion, or at least to put one's time at the other's disposal in the expectation-no matter how vague-that all that will someday be repaid, since all men need all men. The German concern, however, evolved from the capitalist exchange principle at a stage in which this principle was still dominant, while the liberal norm of equivalence had been shattered. So dynamiC is the linguistic character of the jargon as a whole : in it that becomes disgusting which was by no means always SO. 62 In the encounters where the jargon prattles, and of which it prattles, it sides with that which it accuses by the word "encounter," namely, the over-adminis- tered world. It accommodates itself to that world through a ritual of non-accommodation. Even the Hitler dictatorship wooed for consensus; it was here that it checked its mass basis. Finally, the self-employed ad- ministration wants at every moment, under the condi- tions of formal democracy, to prove that it exists for the sake of the administrated whole. Therefore she makes eyes at the jargon, and it at her, the already irrational, self-sufficient authority.
The jargon proves itself as a piece of the negative spirit of the time; it institutes socially useful work within the tendency already observed by Max Weber; the tendency for administrations to expand out over
62. The author's own work taught him about the change in function. Nothing in the Philosophie der neuen Musik, which was written when he was still in America, warned him against "concern. " Only a German critique pointed out to him the bigotry of the word. Even he who detests the jargon cannot be safe from its contagion. For this reason one should fear it all the more.
80
what they consider as their cultural domain. There are countles s occasions on which administrators, special- ists trained in law or in management, feel themselves obliged to speak, as it were, about the content of art, science, and philosophy. They are afraid of being bor- ing, of being dry, and they would like to show their alliance with a kindred specialized spirit, though with-
out being involved too greatly with the other in their activity and experience. If an Oberstadtdirektor ad- dresses a congress of philosophers, whose own guiding principle is already as administration-oriented as the title Oberstadtdirektor, then he must use whatever cultural stuffing offers itself to him. And that is the jargon. This shelters him from the disagreeable task of expressing himself seriously on the matter at hand, about which he knows nothing. At the same time per- haps he can thus feign general acquaintance with the
subject. The jargon is so appropriate for that because, by lts very nature, it always unites the appearance of an absent concreteness with the ennobling of that concreteness. If there were no functional need for the jargon, which is hostile to function, it would hardly have become a second language-that of the language- less and those alien to language. The jargon, which is not responsible to any reason, urges people higher sim-
ply through its simultaneously standardized tone; it reproduces on the level of mind the curse which bu- reaucracy exercises in reality. It could be described as an ideological replica of the paralyzing quality of official functions. Their horror is made present to us by Kafka's dry language, which is itself a complete contrary to the jargon. Society's regulatory violence
? ? 81
becomes crassly tangible to the people when they are obliged to request something from the inaccessible mouthpieces of the administration. Like these mouth- pieces, the jargon speaks directly to them without letting them respond. In addition it talks them into thinking that the man behind the counter is really the man whom his name plate, recently introduced, pre- sents him as being. Latently, the salvation formulas of the jargon are those of power, borrowed from the ad- ministrative and legal hierarchy of authority.
. The bureaucratic language, seasoned with - authen- ticity, is therefore no merely decadent form of the appropriate philosophical language, but is already pre- formed in the most notable texts of that philosophy. Heidegger's favorite "first of all," that has its roots as much in didactic procedure as in a Cartesian first-and- then, leads thoughts along on a leash, in the spirit of philosophical systematization; as if in a business agendum, one adjourns whatever is out of order, by the throttling schema, "but before we . . . further fundamental investigations have to be undertaken":
This chapter, in which we shall undertake the explica- tion of Being-in as such (that is to say of the Being of the "there" ) breaks up into two parts : A. the existen- tial Constitution of the "there"; B. the everyday Being of the "there," and the falling of Dasein. 63
Such pedantry still propagandizes for an allegedly radical philosophical reflection, which it presents as a solid science. The pedantry, in addition, is repaid by a
63. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 171 . 82
? ? ? ? side result: that it simply never arrives at what phi- losophy promises. That all goes back to Husserl, in the course of whose extensive preliminary considerations one easily forgets the main thing though critical re- flection would first come to grips with the very phi- losophemes that fastidiousness pushes along in front of it. But even the assertion that practical conse- quences are contemptible, which has its distinguished prehistory in German idealism, cannot do without the
cleverness of strategy. The administrative offices, in Kafka's world, similarly shirk decisions, which then, ungrounded, suddenly catch up with their victims. The reciprocity of the personal and apersonal in the jargon; the apparent humanization of the thingly; the actual turning of man into thing: all this is the lumi- nous copy of that administrative situation in which both abstract justice and objective procedural orders appear under the guise of face-to-face decisions. It is impossible to forget the image of those SA-men from the early period of Hitler's rule. In them administra-
tion and terror found themselves visibly joined; the folder of documents above, and below the high boots. The jargon of authenticity preserves something of this image in words like "commission. " In such words there is calculated uncertainty about the distinction between something administratively arranged, justly or unjustly, and something absolutely commanded- between authority and sentiment.
The incorporation of the word "commission" into the jargon might have been inspired by the first of the Duino Elegies of Rilke, who was one of the founders of the jargon. For years every ambitious Privatdozent
? ? ? viewed it as an obligatory exercise to analyze that first elegy : "All that was commission. " 64 The line expresses the vague feeling that an unsayable element of ex- perience wants something from the subject. This is similarly the case with the archaic torso of Apollo : 65 "Many stars expected you to feel them. " 66 To that the poem adds the uncommittedness and vainness of such a feeling of command, especially when it expresses the poetic subject : "But did you manage it? " 67 Rilke ab- solutizes the word "commission" under the shelter of aesthetic appearance and, as the poem advances, limits the claim that his pathos already announces. The jargon needs only to cross out this limitation, with a deft movement, and to take literally the word "commission," which has been absolutized by ques- tionable poetastering. But the fact that the neo- romantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form. It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose. Both of them become unequally untrue from the same cause. The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theo- logical overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament. Where words and turns of this
64. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien (New York, n. d. ), p. 8.
65. Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Der neuen Gedichte anderer TeiZ ('Leipzig, 1919) p. I.
? 6. Rilke, Duineser Elegien, p . 7 . 67. Ibid. , p. 8.
? ? ? ? ? ? sort appear in HOlderlin-the secret model for all this -they are not yet the tremulous expressions of the j argon, however uninhibitedly the administrators of the jargon reach out their hands toward that unpro- tected genius. In lyric poetry, as in philosophy, the jargon acquires its defining character by the way it imputes its truth. It does this by making an intended object present-as though this object were Being with- out any tension toward the subject. That makes it, prior to all discursive judgment, into untruth. The expression is sufficient unto itself. It discards as an annoyance the obligation to express a thing other than itself. Beyond its difference from that thing, which may already be nothing, and out of thanks, this nothing is made into that which is supreme. Rilke's language still stands on the edge of all this, like much that is irrational from the era prior to fascism. It not only darkens, but it also takes note of, subconscious ma- terial, which, slipping away from thingly rationality, protests against it. The feeling of being touched, which the word "commission" is supposed to evoke in that elegy, is of such a nature. It at once becomes unbear- able as soon as it objectifies itself, as soon as it flaunts itself as something definite and unambiguous pre- cisely in its irrationality. It is unbearable in all its registers; from Heidegger's obedient and comprehend- ing thought to all that summoning and invoking, with whose details the subaltern self-importance of the jargon surrounds itself. Simply because Rilke, in this poem, acknowledges the multiple significance of com- mission, that multiple significance expects to be ab- solved. On the other hand, though, commission with-
85
out committing agen t is alre ady used here, as in the jargon; and a conception of Being in general is evoked which fits this usage. That again accords with the handicraftish religiosity of the early Rilke, especially of the Book of Hours, which with theological phrasings subjects the psychological to a kind of refining process.
Lyric poetry permits itself any metaphor, even the absolutely unmetaphorical, as a parable. It will not be disturbed by the question of the objectivity of those things that are allegedly suggested to the subject by its emotions. Nor will the lyric be disturbed by the question of whether the words, gathered from culture, at all cover the experiences whose objectification is the central idea of such lyric. Therefore, because it blunts itself against the truth and exactitude of its words-even the vaguest would have to be smuggled in as something vague, not as something definite- this lyric, as lyric, is already bad, despite its virtuos- ity. The problematic of that to which it claims to ele- vate itself, the problematic of its content, is also that of its form, which makes believe it could be capable of transcendence, and in that way becomes mere ap- pearance in a more fateful sense than that of the aesthetic.
The evil truth behind that appearance, nonethe- less, is precisely the bond between commission and the administrative structure, a bond which denies that ap- pearance in the service of that structure. Its words
are dossier numbers, or stamps, or that In re of of- ficial office language, which it remains the commission of the jargon to gloss over. The fussy attention to in- dividual words, as they were lexically handled in the
? ? ? 86
days of the pre-Heideggerian idol-phenomenology, was already the harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking. Whoever prepared meanings from all this, whoever acted as a midwife of today's pure words, acted by force, without regard for the sanctuaries of the philos- ophy of Being. The method which prohibits a word from being involved with its neighbors was, objectively, of the same character as the small bureaucrat, who sees to it that everything remains strictly in its cate- gory, as he himself remains in his salary-class. Even death is handled by the book, in SS-orders and in exis- tential philosophies; red tape ridden as Pegasus, ridden in extremis as an apocalyptic steed. In the jargon the sun, which the jargon has in its heart, brings the dark
secret of the method to the light of day, as the method of a procedure which eagerly takes the place of the intended object. In general, the j argon behaves in this way itself. Indifferent to the matter at hand, it is to be used for commanded purposes. Language, as once in major philosophy, no longer flows out of the necessity of the subject matter. Such language-procedural indif- ference has become a metaphysics of language : that which in terms of its form seems to fly above its cor- relative, thereby establishes itself as something higher.
The less philosophical systematizing, which Nietzsche called dishonest, is theoretically pOSSible, the more that which had its place only in the system transforms itself into mere assertion. In effect, linguistic non- sense is the heir of the diSintegrated strictness of the system. In fact, like a worthless construction, it is for- ever falling off its stilts and stumbling around in non- sense.
? ? The term "commission" sets itself up with unques- tioned authority in the vulgar jargon of authenticity. The fallibility of the term is hushed up by the absolute use of the word. By leaving out of consideration the organizations and people which give commissions, the
term establishes itself as a linguistic eyrie of totalitar- ian orders. It does this without rational examination of the right of those who usurp for themselves the charisma of the leader. Shy theology allies itself with secular brazenness. There exist cross-connections be- tween the jargon of authenticity and old school-like phrases, like that which was once observed by Tuchol- sky: "That's the way it's done here. " The same holds true for the trick of military command, which dresses an imperative in the guise of a predicative sentence. By eliminating all linguistic traces of the will of the superior, that which is intended is given greater em- phasis. Thus the impression is created that it is neces- sary to obey, since what is demanded already occurs factually. "The participants on this trip, in memory of
our heroes, assemble in Liineburg. " Heidegger, too, cracks the whip when he italicizes the auxiliary verb in the sentence, "Death is. " 68 The grammatical transla- tion of the imperative into a predication makes the imperative categorical. This imperative does not allow for refusal, since it no longer at al obliges like the Kantian imperative, but describes obedience as a com- pleted fact. Possible resistance is then eliminated simply in terms of logical form.