Ambiguity
is the medium of an attitude
?
?
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
The mature statement of the notion of critical reason has been recently translated as Negative Dialectik (New York, 1973).
? xvi
subject. This concept of subject, in attempting to over- come the pure possibility of the ontic, claims to be it- self concrete. Hence, Heidegger dogmatically proclaims his concept of existence as something in opposition to identity-while at the same time he "continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. " Hence, Adorno examines the notions of "Dasein," "au- thenticity," "death," "care," etc. , and shows that their use evades the issue of historical determinateness by means of a primary and absolute creative subject- which is, by definition, supposedly untouched by reifi- cation.
Hence, the aura of authenticity in Heidegger is that it names "nothing" ; the "1" remains formal and yet pretends that the word contains content in-itself. For Adorno, Heidegger's existentialism is a new Platonism which implies that authenticity comes in the complete disposal of the person over himself-as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of his- tory .
TRENT SCHROYER
Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research
February, 1973
x vi i
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author conceive d the Jar- gon of Authenticity as part of the Negative Dialectic. However, he finally excluded that text from the latter work not only because its size grew disproportionate to the other parts, but also because the elements of lin- guistic physiognomy and sociology no longer fitted properly with the rest of the plan. The resistance against intellectual division of labor requires that this division of labor should be reflected on and not merely
ignored. Certainly in intention and in theme the Jar- gon is philosophical. As long as philosophy was in line with its own nature, it also had content. However, in retreating to the ideal of its pure nature, philosophy cancels itself out. This thought was only developed in the book which was then still unfinished, while
xix
the Jargon proceeds accord:ing to this insight without, however, grounding it fully. Thus it was published earlier, as a k:ind of propaedeutic.
Insofar as the author has paid homage to the di- vision of labor, he has at the same time all the more rudely challenged this division. He might be accused of philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic seduction without employing the traditional manner of keeping the categories separate-or maybe even of discussing
them distinct from each other. Yet he would have to answer that a demand of this kind projects onto ob-
jects the desire for order which marks a classifying science, and which then proclaims that it is elevated by objects. The author, however, feels more inclined to give himself over to objects than to schematize like a schoolmaster-for the sake of an external standard: a standard which, questionably, has been brought to bear on the subject matter from the outside. This atti- tude determines itself by precisely the fact that the subject-matter elements of philosophy are intertwined. The common methodological ideal would break up this intimate unity. By means of such a unity of the subject matter, the unity of the author's own attempts should become all the more visible-for example, the unity of the author's philosophical essays with the essay, "Criticism of the Musician" from the Disso- nances. What is aesthetically perceived :in the bad form of language, and interpreted sociologically, is deduced from the untruth of the content which is posited with it : its implicit philosophy.
This makes for bad blood. Passages from Jaspers and idea blocks from Heidegger are treated on the same levels, and with that same linguistic attitude, which schoolmasters would probably reject with indig- nation. The text of the Jargon, however, contains xx
enough evidence, from a truly inexhaustible wealth, to show that those men write in the same manner which they despise in their lesser followers as a justi- fication of their own superiority. Their philosophemes show on what the jargon feeds, as well as its indirect suggestive force. The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded. To show this fact might help to prevent criticism from stagnating in a vague and noncom- mittal suspicion of ideology, a suspicion which has itself fallen into ideology. Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones. Ideology has shifted into language. Social and anthropological changes have brought about this shift, though without breaking the veil. The fact that such language is actually ideol- ogy, i. e. , societally necessary Schein, "appearance," can be shown from within it. This becomes obvious in the contradiction between its "how" and its "what. " In its objective impossibility the jargon reacts toward the imminent impossibility of language. Language gives itself over either to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity. On the other hand lan-
? ? xxi
guage shoves its way toward the judge's bench, en- velopes itself in judicial garb, and in that way asserts its privilege. The jargon is the happy synthesis which makes it explode.
Showing this has practical consequences. As irre- sistible as the jargon appears in present-day Germany, it is actually weak and Sickly. The fact that the jargon has become an ideology unto itself destroys this ideol- ogy as soon as this fact is recognized. If the jargon were finally to become silent in Germany, part of that would have been accomplished for which skepticism, itself prejudiced, is praised-prematurely and without justification. The interested parties who use the jargon as a means of power, or depend on their public image for the jargon's social-psychological effect, will never wean themselves from it. There are others who will be embarrassed by the jargon. Even followers who believe in authority will shy away from ridiculousness, as soon as they feel the fragile nature of that authority to which they look for support. The jargon is the histori- cally appropriate form of untruth in the Germany of the last years. For this reason one can discover a truth in the determinate negation of the jargon, a truth which refuses to be formulated in positive terms. Parts of the first sections were originally published in the third issue of the Neue Rundschau in 1963, and have been incorporated into the text.
June, 1967
xxii
THE Jargon
OF Authenticity
In the early twenties a number of people active in philosophy, sociology, and theology, planned a gathering. Most of them had shifted from one creed to another. Their common ground was an emphasis on a newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. All of them were unsatisfied with the idealism which at that time still dominated the univer- sities. Philosophy swayed them to choose, through free- dom and autonomy, a positive theology such as had already appeared in Kierkegaard. However, they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth con- tent of revelation, than in conviction. To his slight annoyance, a friend, who was at that time attracted by
this circle, was not invited. He was-they intimated- not authentic enough. For he hesitated before Kierke- gaard's leap. He suspected that religion which is con- jured up out of autonomous thinking would subordi-
3
nate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which, after all, in terms of its own conceptual nature, it wants to be. Those united together were anti- intellectual intellectuals. They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another. What they fought for on a spiritual and in- tellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the
teachin g of higher ideals ; as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees. Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out on the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical
thought had no objective foundation but was a sub- jective deviation. People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves- in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections -as if they didn't completely believe in themselves. Today, as then, they sense the danger of losing again what they call the concrete-of losing it to that ab-
straction of which they are suspicious, an abstraction which cannot be eradicated from concepts. They con- sider concretion to be promised in sacrifice, and first of all in intellectual sacrifice. Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones. "
This was long before the publication of Sein und Zeit. Throughout this work Heidegger employed "au- thenticity," in the context of an existential ontology,
? 4
as a specifically philosophical term. Thus in philosophy he molded that which the authentics strive for less theoretically; and in that way he won over to his side all those who had some vague reaction to that philos- ophy. Through him, denominational demands became dispensable. His book acquired its aura by describing the directions of the dark drives of the intelligentsia before 1933-directions which he described as full of insight, and which he revealed to be solidly coercive.
Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminLshed tbeo1. ocical resgnance can be heard to this very day. The theological addictions of these years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where-for temporary lack of any other available authority-its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any con- sideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommo-
dates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy-although it was that-but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil ex- presses itself as though it were salvation.
In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken- even more so, written. Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once-
? ? ? ? ? 5
sub-language as superior language. The jargon extends from philosophy and theology-not only of Protestant academies-to pedagogy, evening schools, and youth organizations, even to the elevated diction of the rep- resentatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its mes- sage automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received as promptly as
Signals. "Authenticity" itself is not the most prominent of them. It is more an illumination of the ether in which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently feeds it. For a beginning, terms like "existential," "in the decision," "commission," "appeal," "encounter," "genuine dialogue," "statement," "con- cern," will do for examples. Not a few nontermino- logical terms of similar cast could be added to this list. Some, like "concern," a term still innocently used by Benjamin and verified in Grimm's dictionary, have only taken on such changed coloring since getting into this "field of tension"-a term that is also an appro- priate example.
Thus the important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function in the jargon. Certainly not all its words are noble nouns. At times it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner
6
which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements. Neo- romantic poets who drank theirfill of the precious, like George Hofmannsthal, by no means wrote their prose in the jargon. However, many of their intermediaries- like Gundolf-did so. The words become terms of the jargon only through the constellation that they negate, through each one's gesture of uniquene'ss. The magic that the singular word has lost is procured for it by manipulations-of whatever kind. The transcendence
of the single word is a secondary one, one that is de- livered ready from the factory, a transcendence which is a changeling said to be the lost original. Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigid- ity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred cere- monial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. The ether is me- chanically sprayed, and atomistic words are dressed up without having been changed. Thus they become more important than the jargon's so-called system. The jargon-objectively speaking, a system-uses disor-
ganization as its principle of organization, the break- down of language into words in themselves. Many of them, in another linguistic constellation, can be used without a glance at the jargon: "statement," where it is used in its fullest sense, in epistemology, to desig- nate the sense of predicative judgments; "authentic" -already to be used with caution-even in an adjec- tival sense, where the essential is distinguished from the accidental; "inauthentic," where something broken is implied, an expression which is not immediately appropriate to what is expressed; "radio broadcasts of
? ? ? ? 7
traditionM music, music conceived in the categories of live performance, are grounded by the feeling of as if, of the inauthentic. " 1 "Inauthentic" in that way be- comes a "critical" term, in definite negation of some- thing merely phenomenal. However, the jargon ex- tracts authenticity, or its opposite, from every such transparent context. Of course one would never criti- cize a firm for using the word Auftrag (commission), when it has been assigned a commission. But possi- bilities of that sort remain narrow and abstract. Who- ever overstrains them is paying tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.
Yet history does intrude on every word and with- holds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down. What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individ- ual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite for- mal : it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt
and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used. It takes under its own control the preconceptual, mimetic element in language-for the sake of effect connotations. "State- ment" thus wants to make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepitor (Frankfurt, 1963) p. 218.
8
with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity. The jargon makes it seem that without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be in- authentic, that the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin. This formal element favors demagogic ends. Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes
over this task and devaluates thought. That the whole man should speak is authentic, comes from the core. Thus something occurs which the jargon itself stylizes as "to occur. " 2 Communication clicks and puts forth as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of the prompt collective agreement. The tone of the jar- gon has something in it of the seriousness of the augurs, arbitrarily independent from their context or conceptual content, conspiring with whatever is sacred.
The fact that the words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean sug- gests the term "aura. " It is hardly an accident that Benjamin introduced the term at the same moment when, according to his own theory, what he under- stood by "aura" became impossible to experience. 3 As words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the terms of the jargon of authenticity
2. Later in the text Adorno refers to Heidegger's tenn Ereignis, which has been rendered as "event" in the standard translation of Being and Time. "To occur" our rendering of sioh ereignen, has been chosen for lack of an English verb corresponding to the noun "event. "
3. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Schriften I (Frankfurt, 1955), ''Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier- barkeit," p. 374. [English translation by Harry Zohn, in Il- luminations (New Y ork, 196 8 ) . ]
? 9
are products of the disintegration of the aura. The latter pairs itself with an attitude of not being bound and thus becomes available in the midst of the de- mythified world; or, as it might be put in paramilitary modern German, it becomes einsatzbereit, mobi- lized. The perpetual charge against reification, a charge which the jargon represents, is itself reified. It falls under Richard Wagner's definition of a theatrical effect as the result of an action without agent, a definition which was directed against bad art. Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues. The secret which is suggested, and from the beginning is not there, is a public one. First one can subtract the misused Dostoevski from the expressionist formula "each man is selected," which can be found in a play by Paul Kornfeld-who was murdered by the Nazis. Then the formula is good only for the ideological self- satisfaction of a lower middle class which is threatened and humbled by societal development. The jargon de- rives its own bleSSing, that of primalness, from the fact that it has developed as little in actuality as in spirit. Nietzsche did not live long enough to grow sick at his stomach over the jargon of authenticity : in the
'twentieth century he is the German resentment phe- nomenon par excellence. Nietzsche's "something stinks" would find its first justification in the strange bathing ceremony of the hale life :
Sunday really begins on Saturday evening. When the tradesman straightens his shop, when the housewife has put the whole house into clean and shining condi- tion, and has even swept the street in front of the house and freed it from all the dirt which it has collected dur-
? 10
ing the week; when, finally, even the children are bathed; then the adults wash off the week's dust, scrub themselves thoroughly; and go to the fresh clothes which are lying ready for them : when all of that is ar- ranged, with rural lengthiness and care, then a deep warm feeling of resting settles down over the people:!
Expressions and situations, drawn from a no longer existent daily life, are forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some abso- lute which is kept silent out of reverence. While those who know better hesitate to appeal to revelation, they arrange, in their addiction to authority, for the ascen- sion of the word beyond the realm of the actual, con- ditioned, and contestable; while these same people, even in private, express the word as though a blessing from above were directly composed into that word. That supreme state which has to be thought, but which also refuses being thought, is mutilated by the jargon. The latter acts as if it had possessed this state "from the beginning of time," as it might run in the jargon. What philosophy aims at, the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it, causes all its words to say more than each single one. This characteristic is exploited by the jargon. The transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of in- dividual words and propositional statements is attrib- uted to the words by the jargon, as their immutable possession, whereas this "more" is formed only by the mediation of the constellation. According to its ideal, philosophical language goes beyond what it says by
4 . Otto F rie d r ic h B ollnow, Neue Geborgenheit (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 205.
II
means of what it says in the development of a train of thought. Philosophical language transcends dialec- tically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself. The jargon takes over this transcendence de- structively and consigns it to its own chatter. What- ever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for al as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic, within language, between the individual words and their re- lations. Without judgment, without having been thought, the word is to leave its meaning behind. This is to institute the reality of the "more. " It is to scoff, without reason, at that mystical language speculation which the jargon, proud of its simplicity, is careful not to remember. The jargon obliterates the difference between this "more" for which language gropes, and the in-itself of this more. Hypocrisy thus becomes an a priori, and everyday language is spoken here and now as if it were the sacred one. A profane language
could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy, instead of by trying to imitate it. The jargon transgresses this rule blasphe- mously. When it dresses empirical words with aura, it exaggerates general concepts and ideas of philosophy
-as for instance the concept of being-so grossly that their conceptual essence, the mediation through the thinking subject, disappears completely under the var- nish. Then these terms lure us on as if they were the most concrete terms . 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.
? xvi
subject. This concept of subject, in attempting to over- come the pure possibility of the ontic, claims to be it- self concrete. Hence, Heidegger dogmatically proclaims his concept of existence as something in opposition to identity-while at the same time he "continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. " Hence, Adorno examines the notions of "Dasein," "au- thenticity," "death," "care," etc. , and shows that their use evades the issue of historical determinateness by means of a primary and absolute creative subject- which is, by definition, supposedly untouched by reifi- cation.
Hence, the aura of authenticity in Heidegger is that it names "nothing" ; the "1" remains formal and yet pretends that the word contains content in-itself. For Adorno, Heidegger's existentialism is a new Platonism which implies that authenticity comes in the complete disposal of the person over himself-as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of his- tory .
TRENT SCHROYER
Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research
February, 1973
x vi i
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author conceive d the Jar- gon of Authenticity as part of the Negative Dialectic. However, he finally excluded that text from the latter work not only because its size grew disproportionate to the other parts, but also because the elements of lin- guistic physiognomy and sociology no longer fitted properly with the rest of the plan. The resistance against intellectual division of labor requires that this division of labor should be reflected on and not merely
ignored. Certainly in intention and in theme the Jar- gon is philosophical. As long as philosophy was in line with its own nature, it also had content. However, in retreating to the ideal of its pure nature, philosophy cancels itself out. This thought was only developed in the book which was then still unfinished, while
xix
the Jargon proceeds accord:ing to this insight without, however, grounding it fully. Thus it was published earlier, as a k:ind of propaedeutic.
Insofar as the author has paid homage to the di- vision of labor, he has at the same time all the more rudely challenged this division. He might be accused of philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic seduction without employing the traditional manner of keeping the categories separate-or maybe even of discussing
them distinct from each other. Yet he would have to answer that a demand of this kind projects onto ob-
jects the desire for order which marks a classifying science, and which then proclaims that it is elevated by objects. The author, however, feels more inclined to give himself over to objects than to schematize like a schoolmaster-for the sake of an external standard: a standard which, questionably, has been brought to bear on the subject matter from the outside. This atti- tude determines itself by precisely the fact that the subject-matter elements of philosophy are intertwined. The common methodological ideal would break up this intimate unity. By means of such a unity of the subject matter, the unity of the author's own attempts should become all the more visible-for example, the unity of the author's philosophical essays with the essay, "Criticism of the Musician" from the Disso- nances. What is aesthetically perceived :in the bad form of language, and interpreted sociologically, is deduced from the untruth of the content which is posited with it : its implicit philosophy.
This makes for bad blood. Passages from Jaspers and idea blocks from Heidegger are treated on the same levels, and with that same linguistic attitude, which schoolmasters would probably reject with indig- nation. The text of the Jargon, however, contains xx
enough evidence, from a truly inexhaustible wealth, to show that those men write in the same manner which they despise in their lesser followers as a justi- fication of their own superiority. Their philosophemes show on what the jargon feeds, as well as its indirect suggestive force. The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded. To show this fact might help to prevent criticism from stagnating in a vague and noncom- mittal suspicion of ideology, a suspicion which has itself fallen into ideology. Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones. Ideology has shifted into language. Social and anthropological changes have brought about this shift, though without breaking the veil. The fact that such language is actually ideol- ogy, i. e. , societally necessary Schein, "appearance," can be shown from within it. This becomes obvious in the contradiction between its "how" and its "what. " In its objective impossibility the jargon reacts toward the imminent impossibility of language. Language gives itself over either to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity. On the other hand lan-
? ? xxi
guage shoves its way toward the judge's bench, en- velopes itself in judicial garb, and in that way asserts its privilege. The jargon is the happy synthesis which makes it explode.
Showing this has practical consequences. As irre- sistible as the jargon appears in present-day Germany, it is actually weak and Sickly. The fact that the jargon has become an ideology unto itself destroys this ideol- ogy as soon as this fact is recognized. If the jargon were finally to become silent in Germany, part of that would have been accomplished for which skepticism, itself prejudiced, is praised-prematurely and without justification. The interested parties who use the jargon as a means of power, or depend on their public image for the jargon's social-psychological effect, will never wean themselves from it. There are others who will be embarrassed by the jargon. Even followers who believe in authority will shy away from ridiculousness, as soon as they feel the fragile nature of that authority to which they look for support. The jargon is the histori- cally appropriate form of untruth in the Germany of the last years. For this reason one can discover a truth in the determinate negation of the jargon, a truth which refuses to be formulated in positive terms. Parts of the first sections were originally published in the third issue of the Neue Rundschau in 1963, and have been incorporated into the text.
June, 1967
xxii
THE Jargon
OF Authenticity
In the early twenties a number of people active in philosophy, sociology, and theology, planned a gathering. Most of them had shifted from one creed to another. Their common ground was an emphasis on a newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. All of them were unsatisfied with the idealism which at that time still dominated the univer- sities. Philosophy swayed them to choose, through free- dom and autonomy, a positive theology such as had already appeared in Kierkegaard. However, they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth con- tent of revelation, than in conviction. To his slight annoyance, a friend, who was at that time attracted by
this circle, was not invited. He was-they intimated- not authentic enough. For he hesitated before Kierke- gaard's leap. He suspected that religion which is con- jured up out of autonomous thinking would subordi-
3
nate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which, after all, in terms of its own conceptual nature, it wants to be. Those united together were anti- intellectual intellectuals. They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another. What they fought for on a spiritual and in- tellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the
teachin g of higher ideals ; as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees. Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out on the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical
thought had no objective foundation but was a sub- jective deviation. People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves- in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections -as if they didn't completely believe in themselves. Today, as then, they sense the danger of losing again what they call the concrete-of losing it to that ab-
straction of which they are suspicious, an abstraction which cannot be eradicated from concepts. They con- sider concretion to be promised in sacrifice, and first of all in intellectual sacrifice. Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones. "
This was long before the publication of Sein und Zeit. Throughout this work Heidegger employed "au- thenticity," in the context of an existential ontology,
? 4
as a specifically philosophical term. Thus in philosophy he molded that which the authentics strive for less theoretically; and in that way he won over to his side all those who had some vague reaction to that philos- ophy. Through him, denominational demands became dispensable. His book acquired its aura by describing the directions of the dark drives of the intelligentsia before 1933-directions which he described as full of insight, and which he revealed to be solidly coercive.
Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminLshed tbeo1. ocical resgnance can be heard to this very day. The theological addictions of these years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where-for temporary lack of any other available authority-its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any con- sideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommo-
dates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy-although it was that-but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil ex- presses itself as though it were salvation.
In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken- even more so, written. Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once-
? ? ? ? ? 5
sub-language as superior language. The jargon extends from philosophy and theology-not only of Protestant academies-to pedagogy, evening schools, and youth organizations, even to the elevated diction of the rep- resentatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its mes- sage automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received as promptly as
Signals. "Authenticity" itself is not the most prominent of them. It is more an illumination of the ether in which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently feeds it. For a beginning, terms like "existential," "in the decision," "commission," "appeal," "encounter," "genuine dialogue," "statement," "con- cern," will do for examples. Not a few nontermino- logical terms of similar cast could be added to this list. Some, like "concern," a term still innocently used by Benjamin and verified in Grimm's dictionary, have only taken on such changed coloring since getting into this "field of tension"-a term that is also an appro- priate example.
Thus the important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function in the jargon. Certainly not all its words are noble nouns. At times it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner
6
which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements. Neo- romantic poets who drank theirfill of the precious, like George Hofmannsthal, by no means wrote their prose in the jargon. However, many of their intermediaries- like Gundolf-did so. The words become terms of the jargon only through the constellation that they negate, through each one's gesture of uniquene'ss. The magic that the singular word has lost is procured for it by manipulations-of whatever kind. The transcendence
of the single word is a secondary one, one that is de- livered ready from the factory, a transcendence which is a changeling said to be the lost original. Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigid- ity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred cere- monial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. The ether is me- chanically sprayed, and atomistic words are dressed up without having been changed. Thus they become more important than the jargon's so-called system. The jargon-objectively speaking, a system-uses disor-
ganization as its principle of organization, the break- down of language into words in themselves. Many of them, in another linguistic constellation, can be used without a glance at the jargon: "statement," where it is used in its fullest sense, in epistemology, to desig- nate the sense of predicative judgments; "authentic" -already to be used with caution-even in an adjec- tival sense, where the essential is distinguished from the accidental; "inauthentic," where something broken is implied, an expression which is not immediately appropriate to what is expressed; "radio broadcasts of
? ? ? ? 7
traditionM music, music conceived in the categories of live performance, are grounded by the feeling of as if, of the inauthentic. " 1 "Inauthentic" in that way be- comes a "critical" term, in definite negation of some- thing merely phenomenal. However, the jargon ex- tracts authenticity, or its opposite, from every such transparent context. Of course one would never criti- cize a firm for using the word Auftrag (commission), when it has been assigned a commission. But possi- bilities of that sort remain narrow and abstract. Who- ever overstrains them is paying tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.
Yet history does intrude on every word and with- holds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down. What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individ- ual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite for- mal : it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt
and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used. It takes under its own control the preconceptual, mimetic element in language-for the sake of effect connotations. "State- ment" thus wants to make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepitor (Frankfurt, 1963) p. 218.
8
with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity. The jargon makes it seem that without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be in- authentic, that the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin. This formal element favors demagogic ends. Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes
over this task and devaluates thought. That the whole man should speak is authentic, comes from the core. Thus something occurs which the jargon itself stylizes as "to occur. " 2 Communication clicks and puts forth as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of the prompt collective agreement. The tone of the jar- gon has something in it of the seriousness of the augurs, arbitrarily independent from their context or conceptual content, conspiring with whatever is sacred.
The fact that the words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean sug- gests the term "aura. " It is hardly an accident that Benjamin introduced the term at the same moment when, according to his own theory, what he under- stood by "aura" became impossible to experience. 3 As words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the terms of the jargon of authenticity
2. Later in the text Adorno refers to Heidegger's tenn Ereignis, which has been rendered as "event" in the standard translation of Being and Time. "To occur" our rendering of sioh ereignen, has been chosen for lack of an English verb corresponding to the noun "event. "
3. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Schriften I (Frankfurt, 1955), ''Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier- barkeit," p. 374. [English translation by Harry Zohn, in Il- luminations (New Y ork, 196 8 ) . ]
? 9
are products of the disintegration of the aura. The latter pairs itself with an attitude of not being bound and thus becomes available in the midst of the de- mythified world; or, as it might be put in paramilitary modern German, it becomes einsatzbereit, mobi- lized. The perpetual charge against reification, a charge which the jargon represents, is itself reified. It falls under Richard Wagner's definition of a theatrical effect as the result of an action without agent, a definition which was directed against bad art. Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues. The secret which is suggested, and from the beginning is not there, is a public one. First one can subtract the misused Dostoevski from the expressionist formula "each man is selected," which can be found in a play by Paul Kornfeld-who was murdered by the Nazis. Then the formula is good only for the ideological self- satisfaction of a lower middle class which is threatened and humbled by societal development. The jargon de- rives its own bleSSing, that of primalness, from the fact that it has developed as little in actuality as in spirit. Nietzsche did not live long enough to grow sick at his stomach over the jargon of authenticity : in the
'twentieth century he is the German resentment phe- nomenon par excellence. Nietzsche's "something stinks" would find its first justification in the strange bathing ceremony of the hale life :
Sunday really begins on Saturday evening. When the tradesman straightens his shop, when the housewife has put the whole house into clean and shining condi- tion, and has even swept the street in front of the house and freed it from all the dirt which it has collected dur-
? 10
ing the week; when, finally, even the children are bathed; then the adults wash off the week's dust, scrub themselves thoroughly; and go to the fresh clothes which are lying ready for them : when all of that is ar- ranged, with rural lengthiness and care, then a deep warm feeling of resting settles down over the people:!
Expressions and situations, drawn from a no longer existent daily life, are forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some abso- lute which is kept silent out of reverence. While those who know better hesitate to appeal to revelation, they arrange, in their addiction to authority, for the ascen- sion of the word beyond the realm of the actual, con- ditioned, and contestable; while these same people, even in private, express the word as though a blessing from above were directly composed into that word. That supreme state which has to be thought, but which also refuses being thought, is mutilated by the jargon. The latter acts as if it had possessed this state "from the beginning of time," as it might run in the jargon. What philosophy aims at, the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it, causes all its words to say more than each single one. This characteristic is exploited by the jargon. The transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of in- dividual words and propositional statements is attrib- uted to the words by the jargon, as their immutable possession, whereas this "more" is formed only by the mediation of the constellation. According to its ideal, philosophical language goes beyond what it says by
4 . Otto F rie d r ic h B ollnow, Neue Geborgenheit (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 205.
II
means of what it says in the development of a train of thought. Philosophical language transcends dialec- tically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself. The jargon takes over this transcendence de- structively and consigns it to its own chatter. What- ever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for al as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic, within language, between the individual words and their re- lations. Without judgment, without having been thought, the word is to leave its meaning behind. This is to institute the reality of the "more. " It is to scoff, without reason, at that mystical language speculation which the jargon, proud of its simplicity, is careful not to remember. The jargon obliterates the difference between this "more" for which language gropes, and the in-itself of this more. Hypocrisy thus becomes an a priori, and everyday language is spoken here and now as if it were the sacred one. A profane language
could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy, instead of by trying to imitate it. The jargon transgresses this rule blasphe- mously. When it dresses empirical words with aura, it exaggerates general concepts and ideas of philosophy
-as for instance the concept of being-so grossly that their conceptual essence, the mediation through the thinking subject, disappears completely under the var- nish. Then these terms lure us on as if they were the most concrete terms . 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-
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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.
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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.
