The
expression
"one dies" spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the "they.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
Furthermore, it would seem to him too blasphemous to consider even the possibility of doing away with death; Being-unto-death, as an existentiale, is explicitly cut off from the possibility of any mere [sic1 ontic doing away with it.
Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon.
There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military matters.
Now, as ear- lier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's.
She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better.
Death and Dasein are identified; death becomes pure identity, as in an eixstent which can absolutely not happen to any per- son other than oneself.
The analysis of existence glides quickly over the most immediate and trivial aspect of the relation between death and Dasein, their simple nonidentity; the fact that death destroys Dasein truly negates it.
Yet for all that, the analysis of existence
does not disengage itself from triviality: "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. " 118 Secondary school teachers speak thus in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening. The characteristica universaHs of
1I7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. I lB. Ibid. , pp. 294 if.
? ? ? Dasein, as in the Dasein of a mortal, takes the place of what must die. Thus death is manoeuvered into the position of the authentic; Dasein is "distinctive"119 through the ontological, which it is anyway; and the analytical judgment becomes the precipitous philos- opheme, the empty generality becomes the specific element in the concept-while to death, as "something distinctively impending," 120 a medal of honor is given. Formerly, the cultural-historical experience of the ab- sence of ontological meaning inspired the movement of Heidegger's philosophizing; but now such absence, the blindness of the inescapable, becomes exactly that which is lacking to Heidegger's theory of death. In that way his thought brings out the hollowness which re- sounds from the jargon as soon as one knocks on it. Tautology and nihilism bind themselves into a holy alliance. Death is to be experienced only as something meaningless. That is alleged to be the meaning of the experience of death and, since death constitutes the essence of Dasein, such is also the meaning of Dasein. Hegel's metaphysics, which cannot be brought back again, and which had its positive absolute in the totality of negations, is here interiorized to a dimen- sionless point. In such a construction it is reduced to the Hegelian "fury of disappearance,"121 to the un- mediated theodicy of annihilati9'n.
Throughout history, identity thinking has been something deathly, something that devours everything. Identity is always virtually out for totality; the One as
II9. Cf. p. 294.
120. Ibid. , p. 295.
121. Hegel, Werke, II, 453.
139
the indeterminate point, and the All-One-equally in- determinate, because it has no determination outside of itself-are themselves one. In Heidegger, as in idealism, that which tolerates nothing beyond itself is understood to be the whole. The least trace which went beyond such identity would be as unbearable as anyone who insists on his own individuality is to the fascist-no matter in what remote corner of the world. Therefore, not after all does Heidegger's ontology
aspire to exclude every kind of facticity. Facticity would give the lie to the identity principle, would not be of the nature of the concept, which for the sake of its omnipotence would like precisely to gloss over the fact that it is a concept; dictators imprison those who call them dictators. Nevertheless, that identity, which strictly would be identical with nothing more than with itself, annihilates itself. If it no longer goes forth to an other, and if it is no longer an identity of something, then, as Hegel saw, it is nothing at al. Thus totality is also the moving principle of Heidegger's observa- tions about death. They apply to wholeness, as that which is constitutively preestablished over its parts;122 that wholeness which Heidegger's predecessor Scheler had already transplanted into metaphysics from a Gestalt psychology which was at first rather unpre- tentious. In prefascist Germany, wholeness was the motto of all the zealots who were opposed to the nine-
teenth century, which they looked on summarily as old- fashioned and done away with. The attack was par-
122. Occasionally Heidegger refers condescendingly to the concept of totality in other writers, but does so only to prove the superiority of his own concept.
? ? ticularly directed against psychoanalysis; it stood for enlightenment in general. In those years, around the time of the first publication of Sein und Zeit, the doc- trine of the precedence of the whole over its parts was the delight of all apologetic thinking-just as today it delights the adepts of the jargon. Heidegger directly and openly repeated that view of the then current hab- its of thought. That the task of philosophy is to sketch out the whole was for Heidegger as much an article of faith as the duty of system-making once was to the idealist :
Thus arises the task of putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having. This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity's po- tentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the "end" itself belongs. The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to
the potentiality-for-Being-that is to say, to existence- limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. 123
The thought model for this was in particular the "good Gestalt" of Gestalt theory : a forerunner of that under- standing agreement between inner and outer that is to be destroyed by "consciousness as fate. " In its turn the conception bears with it the marks of the same scientific division of labor against which its own anti- mechanistic attitude polemicizes. In that attitude the inwardness of individuals remains intact, without re- gard to society. Whether a rounded unity exists be-
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 276.
? tween subject and the surrounding world would be said to depend on the subject. It could only be whole- ness insofar as it sets itself in opposition to reality, nonrefiectingly. Therefore, accommodation, social compliance, is the goal even of a category like that of wholeness, which appears to be so anthropological or existential. An a priori partisanship toward the subject as such is exercised by the jargon in the name of man. Through this partisanship, attention is re- moved from the question of whether reality, with which men must be unmediately at one in order even to become wholes themselves, of whether this reality deserves being at one with; of whether in the end this reality, as heteronomous, does not deny them whole- ness; of whether the wholeness ideal does not in fact contribute to their oppression and to the progressive atomization of those who are without power. As an ex- pression of the whole situation the atomization of man is also the truth; the point would be to change the truth along with this situation, and not, within this situation,
to wrest the truth away, and to charge it up to the for- getfulness of being, to the forgetfulness of those who recognize the truth. Heidegger felt a slight discomfort about an optimism that was secretly proud of having proven God in the laboratory; proud of having done so by the discovery of the Gestalt which is structured prior to all thinking preparation. But Heidegger's discom- fort hid itself away in the rhetorical, and involuntarily comic, question of whether in view of death we can speak of wholeness. The thesis about immediately pre- discovered, objective structuredness came just at the time when he needed it. With the help of a makeshift
? thought construction, he brought together the obliga- tion toward wholeness-accepted without question- and the experience of our literally discontinuous life. This was an experience needed by the expression of in- corruptible earnestness. This is precisely the broken- ness of existence, he says-following a Hegelian schema which, alas, he stuck together almost mechan- ically. Presumably, death would make this brokenness into a whole. Finitude, the infirmity of existence, would enclose it as its very principle. Since negativity, for all the brow-wrinkling, is taboo, Heidegger thinks past his goal. If philosophy could define the structure of Dasein at al, it would become for her two things at once: broken and whole, identical with itself and not identical-and that would of course drive one on to a dialectic which broke through the projected ontology of Dasein. But in Heidegger, thanks to that doctrine, it becomes more evident than anywhere else that the negative, as the essence, simply and undialectically turns into the positive. He channeled into philosophy the scientifically and psychologically circumscribed doctrine of wholeness; the antithesis between the dis- persed existent and Eleatically harmonic being is si- lently totted up to the debit of mechanistic thinking-
the primal scapegoat here being Aristotle. That this thought should be "overcome"-as one of the most sus- pect expressions tirelessly continues to proclaim-was not for a moment doubted even by Heidegger; such an attitude created, for him, the double halo of the modern and the supratemporal. The irrationalistic lackey- language of the twenties prattled on about "body-soul unity. " The connection of existent elements to their
? 143
whole is supposed to be the meaning of people in real life-as it is in art; in the fashion of the jugendstil, consolation is spread aesthetically over the harsh em- pirical world. To be sure, Heidegger's analysis of death carefully contents itself with applying the wholeness category to that of Dasein, instead of to individuals. The borrowing from the psychological theory of whole- ness pays off after all. Its grammatical character is the renunciation of any causal argumentation, a re- nunciation which removes the alleged wholenesses from nature, and transfers them to the transcendence of Being. For this transcendence is really none at all; it does not, in the Kantian way, go beyond the pos- sibility of experience, but rather behaves as though ex- perience is itself unmediated, incontrovertible, aware of itself as if it were face to face with itself. A fictive bodily contact with phenomena aids this anti-intel- lectualism. The pride in controlling phenomena in their undisfigured state bases itself inexplicitly on a certain judgmental claim: that the world is divided up into thingly pieces through an unraveling thought-process, not through the structure of society. Still-in accord with the then reigning ! ules of the trade of philosophy
-there is some talk of analysis; but this trade would already prefer to do no more analyzing.
The central chapter of Sein und Zeit treats "Da- sein's possibility of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards- Death. " 124 The question is raised-merely in a rhetor- ical fashion, as we can see at once-"whether this entity, as something existfng, can ever become acces-
124. Ibid. , p. 278. 144
sible in its Being-a-whole. " 125 It is obvious that a "pos- sibility of this entity's Being-a-whole" 126 could contra- dict the self-preservation which has been ontologized into "care. " Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as "that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole," 127 wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Da- sein-a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. We can anticipate, as immanent in Hei- degger, what he later announces with so much aplomb : that the fact of mortality does not a priori exclude the possibility that man's life should round itself out to a whole, as in the Biblical and epic conception. Hei- degger may have been forced to the effort to ground existential wholeness by the undeniable fact that the life of individuals today does without wholeness. 128 Wholeness is supposed to survive despite historical experience. For this purpose the whole-being of the eixstent, toward which Heidegger's theory is heading -and out of which "concern" emerges in the jargon-
the whole-being is distinguished, in the approved man- ner, from the merely cumulatively existent, "for which anything is still outstanding. " 129 The latter is said to have "the same kind of Being as those which are ready- to-hand"; 130 to it is contrasted the totality raised into
125. Ibid. , p. 279.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Cf. the introduction to Benjamin, Schriften I, p. xxii. 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 286.
130. Ibid.
145
an existential wholeness apart from the empirically individual life.
The togetherness of an entity of the kind which Dasein is "in running its course" until that "course" has been completed, is not constituted by a "continuing" piec- ing-on of entities which, somehow and somewhere, are ready-to-hand already in their own right. That Dasein should be together only when its "not-yet" has been filled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer. Any Dasein always exists in just such a manner that its "not-yet" belongs to it. l3l
That only applies to the extent that mortality is already thought together with the concept of Dasein- to the extent, that is, that Heidegger's philosophy is presupposed. For the ontologist, whole-being cannot be the unity of the whole content of real life but, qualita- tively, must be a third thing; and thus unity will not be sought in life as something harmonious, articulated, and continuous in itself, but will be sought at that point which delimits life and annihilates it, along with its wholeness. As a nonexistent, or at least as an ex- istent sui generis, outside life, this point is once again ontological. "But this lack-of-togetherness which be- longs to such a mode of togetherness-this being- missing as still-outstanding-cannot by any means de- fine ontologically that 'not-yet' which belongs to Dasein
as its possible death. Dasein does not have all the kind of Being of something ready-to-hand-within-the world. " 132 Removed from facticity, death becomes the ontological foundation of totality. Thus it becomes a
131. Ibid. , p. 287? I32. Ibid. , pp. 286 ff.
? meaning-gIVIng element in the midst of that frag- mentation which, according to ontological topography, characterizes the atomized consciousness of the late industrial age. This is done according to a habit of thinking, unquestioned by Heidegger, which imme- diately equates a structural whole with its own mean- ing-even if it were the negation of all meaning. Thus death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being. 133 Insofar as death is the ontological constituent of Dasein, death alone can
give existence the dignity of totality : "death as the end of Dasein, is Dasein's ownmost possibility-non-rela- tional, certain and as such indefinite, not to be out- stripped. " 131 Thus Heidegger gives a negative answer to his own starting question; the question which is only posed in order to be refuted :
So if one has given an ontologically inappropriate Inter- pretation of Dasein's "not-yet" as something still out- standing, any formal inference from this to Dasein's lack of totality will not be correct. The phenomenon of the "not-yet" has been taken over from the "ahead-of- itself'; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of cm existent Being-a-whole; indeed this "ahead-of-itself" is what first of all makes such a Being- towards-the-end possible. The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of us is, is a correct one if care, as Dasein's basic state, is "con- nected" with death-the uttennost possibility for that
entity. " 135
I33. Cf. above pp. I42 if.
I34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. I35. Ibid.
? ? 147
Ontologically, existence becomes a totality by means of death, which disrupts Dasein ontically. Death, how- ever, is authentic because it is removed from the They, which in turn is justified by the fact that there cannot be a proxy in death. Heidegger criticizes all thinkable real attitudes toward death as manifestations of the They. For, according to his own verdict, only the They speak of "death as a regularly occurring state of af- fairs. " 136 Thus he singles out his authentic death as something that is extremely real and at the same time beyond all facticity. Since there cannot be a proxy in death it becomes as unconceptual as the pure Diesda (haecceitas). Its concept would precede it and would become its representative, as is the case in the relation of any concept to that which is its content. In the same breath, however, Heidegger slanders facticity, which alone allows him to speak of the impossibility of hav- ing a proxy in death. The reason for this lies in the fact that death as a general concept designates the death of all and not of each individual one. Death as event, factual death indeed, is not to be the authentic death. Thus ontological death is not all that terrible.
In the publicness with which we are with one an- other in our everyday manner, death is "known" as a mishap which is constantly occurring-a "case of death. " Someone or other "dies," be he neighbour or stranger [Niichste oder Fernerstehendel . People who are no acquaintances of ours are "dying" daily and hourly. "Death" is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the in- conspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered
136. Ibid. , p. 297.
? ? ? in an everyday fashion. The "they" has already stowed away . . . an interpretation for this event. It talks of it . . . expressly or else in a way which is mostly in- hibited, as if to say, "One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us. " 137
In his eagerness to distinguish between death as an event and death as something authentic, Heidegger does not turn his back on sophisms.
The analysis of the phrase "one dies" reveals un- ambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to every- day Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for one- self, and is therefore no threat.
The expression "one dies" spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the "they. " In Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that "one dies," because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that "in no case is it I myself," for this "one" is the "nobody. " 1 38
To say that death affects the They already presup- poses, as it were, Heidegger's hypostasis of the ex- istentiales, the dark side of which is always the They. Such an interpretation neglects and falsifies the truth in that talk, threadbare as it may be. This truth is the fact that death is a general determination which com- prehends the alter ego as well as one's own. If some- one says, "one dies," he includes himself euphemis-
1 37. Ibid. , pp. 296-97. I3B. Ibid. , p. 297.
149
tically at best. However, the adjournment of death, criticized by Heidegger, takes place: the one who speaks is actually still allowed to live-otherwise he wouldn't speak. Besides, such argumentation, set in motion by Heidegger, necessarily takes place in the sphere of nonsense; and in turn gives the lie to authen- ticity, which is to crystallize itself in this sphere as if it were the philosopher's stone. If anything fits the They, then it is such a pro and contra. The "occurrence" which "belongs to nobody in particular" 139 and which is not highly valued by Heidegger, definitely belongs to someone, according to the usage of language. It be- longs to him who dies. Only a solipstistic philosophy could acknowledge an ontological priority to "my" death over and against any other. Even emotionally, someone else's death is easier to experience than one's own. The Schopenhauer of the fourth book of the World as Will and Idea did not miss this fact :
In him, too, as in the unthinking animal, there prevails a sense of security as a permanent state, a security which springs from the innermost conscious-that man is nature, that he himself is the world. Because of this security no man is noticeably bothered by the thought of a certain and never distant death; but everyone con- tinues to live as if he were to live eternally. This goes so far, that one could say that no one actually has a living conviction about the certainty of his death. Otherwise there could not be such a great difference between his mood and that of the convicted criminal. Each man, however, recognizes this certainty theoretically and in abstracto but like any other truth, which is not usable in
139. Ibid. 150
practice, puts it aside without taking it into his living consciousness. 140
For Heidegger the They becomes a cloudy mixture of elements which are merely ideological products of the exchange relationship. The mixture contains the idola fori of condolence speeches and obituaries, as well as that humanity which does not identify the other, but identifies itself with the other, breaks through the circle of abstract selfness and recognizes the latter in its mediation. The general condemnation of that sphere, which philosophy dubiously enough called in- tersubjectivity, hopes to overcome reified consciousness by means of a primary subject that is supposedly un- touched by reification. Yet in truth such a subject is as little something immediate and primary as is anything else. Heidegger's key sentences run in the following maner :
Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost po- tentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue. Here it can become manifest to Dasein that, in this distinctive possibility of its own self it has been wrenched away from the "they. " This means that in anticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the "they" already. 141
Death becomes the essence of the realm of mortality. This occurs in opposition to the immediate, which is characterized by the fact that it is there. Death thus
140. Arthur Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke in funf Biinden, Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausgabe (Leipzig, n. d. ) , Vol. I : Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, p . 376.
141. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 307.
151
becomes something that is artificially beyond the ex- istent. Saved from the They it becomes the latter's sublime counterpart; it becomes the authentic. Au- thenticity is death. The loneliness of the individual in death, the fact that his "non-relatedness singles out Dasein unto itself," 142 becomes the substratum of self- ness. This attitude of total self-sufficiency becomes
the extreme confirmation of the self; it becomes an Ur- image of defiance in self-abnegation. As a matter of fact, abstract selfness in extremis is that grinding of the teeth which says nothing but I, I, 1. Thus it is characterized by the same nothingness that the self becomes in death. But Heidegger's language blows up this negative element into that which is substantial. This, then, is the content from which was taken the stenciled model for the formal procedure of the jargon. Involuntarily, Heidegger's doctrine becomes an exege- sis of the futile joke : Only death is free and that costs your life. He is smitten with death as that which is
supposed to be absolutely removed from the universal exchange relationship. Yet he does not realize that he remains caught up in the same fatal cycle as the ex- change relationship which he sublimates into the They. Insofar as death is absolutely alien to the subject, it is the model of all reification. Only ideology praises it as a cure for exchange. This ideology debases exchange into the more despairing form of eternity, instead of
getting rid of proper exchange by letting it fulfil itself properly. For Heidegger, Dasein is not sufficiently able to justify itself, because of its shameful historical form.
142. Ibid. 152
? ? It redeems itself only in its destruction, which it itself is to be. The highest maxim of such an attitude results in saying that "it is so," that one has to obey- or, in positivistic terms, that one has to adapt oneself. This is the pathetic commandment that he must obey that which is. It is not even really obeying, for in any case Dasein does not have a choice. Precisely for this rea- son death is so ontological in regard to Dasein. If one were to call nonideological a kind of thinking which re- duces ideology to the zero limit, then one would have to say that Heidegger's thinking is nonideological. But his operation once again becomes ideology because of his claim that he recovers the meaning of Dasein. This happens after the fashion of today's talk about the loss of ideology-talk which tramples down ideology but would like to trample down the truth.
By saying "the 'they' does not permit us the courage in the face of death," 143 Heidegger actually lays bare certain elements of ideology, such as the attempt to integrate death into just that societal immanence which has no power over death. A similar development can be seen in Evelyn Waugh's parody The Loved One. Some of Heidegger's formulas come very close to the mechanism of sublimating death. "But temptation, tranquillization, and alienation are distinguishing marks of the kind of Being called 'falling: As falling, everyday Being-towards-death is a constant fleeing in the face of death. " 14l Alienation, however, deSignates a social relationship, even if it is the relationship to death. Man and the institutions of piety reproduce
143. Ibid. , p. 298. 144. Ibid.
? 153
commercially the unconscious will to forget what one has to fear. Fundamental ontology and its nomencla- ture are not necessary for insights like the following :
In this manner the "they" provides a constant tranquil- lization about death. At bottom, however, this is a tran- quilation not only for him who is "dying" but just as much for those who "console" him. And even in the case of a demise, the public is still not to have its own tran- quillity upset by such an event, or be disturbed in the carefreeness with which it concerns itself. Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social in- convenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded. 145
In the same manner Ibsen's assessor Brack already concluded, about Hedda Gabler's suicide, "One doesn't do that sort of thing. " Heidegger, who does not want to have anything to do with psychology, has seen through the reactionary nature of the integration of death. He has himself done this in a psycholOgical fashion. The message is coded in Sein und Zeit:
But in thus faling and fleeing in the face of death, Dasein's everydayness attests that the very "they" itself already h as the definite character of B eing-towards- death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in "think- ing about death. " Even in average everydayness, this ownmost potentiality-for-Being which is non-relational and not to be outstripped, is constantly an issue for Dasein. This is the case when its concern is merely in the mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence. 14S
145. Ibid. , pp. 298 1? . 146. Ibid. , pp. 298 99.
? 154
In spite of that, he does not go far enough. Heidegger cannot make us feel and respect the despair embodied in that cramped ''Enjoy life" and in that stupid com- monplace, "One will die sometime, but not quite yet" 147_a commonplace which he rightly despises. The commonplace represses our despair. The protesta- tion against the sublimating of death would have its place in a criticism of liberal ideology. That criticism
would proceed to remind us of the naturalness which is denied by culture. For in domination culture itself propagates this naturalness. It does it by means of that which mistakes itself for the antithesis to nature. Instead of this, Heidegger does the same thing as fascism; he defends the more brutal form of Being, negative as it may be. It is possible to think of a social state in which men would no longer have to sublimate death and might be able to experience it in another form than fear. To experience death in fear is a mark
of the crude natural state that Heidegger's doctrine has eternalized in supranaturalistic terms. Death is sub- limated because of a blinded drive for self-preservation ; its terror is part of the sublimation. In a life that is no longer disfigured, that no longer prohibits, in a life that would no longer cheat men out of their dues-in such a life men would probably no longer have to hope, in vain, that this life would after all give them what it had so far refused. For the same reason they would not have to fear so greatly that they would lose this life,
no matter how deeply this fear had been ingrained in them. From the fact that men sublimate death, one
147. Ibid" p. 299,
? ? ? ISS
cannot conclude that death is itself the authentic. Heidegger is least of all in a position to do this, as he is careful not to attribute authenticity to people who do not sublimate death.
By means of a kind of philosophical Freudian slip, Heidegger himself defines the ontologizing of death insofar as death, in its certainty, is qualitatively su- perior to other phenomena. 'We have already charac- terized the everyday state-of-mind which consists in an air of superiority with regard to the certain 'fact' of death-a superiority which is 'anxiously' concerned while seemingly free from anxiety. In this state-of- mind, everydayness acknowledges a 'higher' certainty than one which is only empirical. " 148 The "higher," in spite of the quotation marks, has the proving force of a confession : theory sanctions death. The partisan of authenticity commits the same sin of which he accuses the minores gentes, the lesser people, of the They. By means of the authenticity of death as he flees from it. Whatever announces itself as "higher" than mere em- pirical certainty, in this attitude, falsely cleanses death from its misery and stench-from being an animalistic kicking of the bucket. This cleansing occurs in the same manner as a Wagnerian love- or salvation-death. Al this is similar to the integration of death into hygiene, of which Heidegger accuses the inauthentic. By means of that which is kept silent in the high stylization of death, Heidegger becomes an accomplice of what is horrible in death. Even in the cynical ma- terialism of the dissection room, this horribleness is
148. Ibid. , p. 302.
? ? recognized more honestly and denounced more strongly than in the tirades of ontology. The latter's kernel is nothing but the supraempirical certainty that death is something that has been existentially preordained to Dasein. Purity untouched by experience plays over into that which it once was unmetaphorically: purity untouched by dirt. But by no understanding can death be said to be pure. Neither is it anything apodictic. Otherwise, all the salvation promises of religion would simply be forgetful of Being. However, they are by no means needed. Some lower organisms do not die in the same sense as the higher, individuated ones. Thus, in light of our potential, and growing, control over organic processes, we cannot do away a fortiori with the thought that death might be eliminated. Such an elimination of death may be highly improbable; yet it can be thought of, and according to existential ontol- ogy that should be impossible. The affirmation of the ontological dignity of death, however, is already re-
duced to nothing by the possibility that something can change it ontically-according to Heidegger's lan- guage. Insofar as Heidegger cuts off these hopes at what inquisitors probably call the root, the authentic one speaks for all-for all those who j oin , as soon as they hear of this possibility, in the refrain that nothing would be worse than the disappearance of death. It seems legitimate to assume that those are the adepts of the jargon. The eagerness toward the eternity of death prolongs the continuing use of death as a threat. On a political level death advertises the necessity of wars. Kant, who subsumed immortality under the Ideas, did not let himself fall to those depths in which
? 157
nothing else flourishes but the affirmation of what is all too familiar. If Heidegger had made the transition from the inorganic to the organic, the existential hori- zon of death would have been thoroughly changed. His philosophy, and everything that floats with it, down to the last sewers of German faith unto being, could no- where be more vulnerable than in this transition. That understanding with the existent which motivates the elevation of the existent to being thrives on the com- plicity with death. In the metaphysics of death there comes to a head all that evil to which bourgeois society has physically condemned itself, by means of its own process of development.
The doctrine of anticipation, which is the authentic Being unto death, the "pOSSibility of taking the whole of Dasein, in advance . . . in an existentiell manner; that is to say, it includes the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-for-Being," 149 underhandedly be- comes a mode of behavior. Thus it becomes what Being-unto-death did not want to be and yet has to be if anything more than a tautology is thereby to be ut- tered. Although nothing is said about the difference of this mode of behavior from the fact that one has to die, this behavior is expected to acquire dignity by ac- cepting such a necessity speechlessly and without re- flection.
Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic Being-to- wards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free
149. Ibid. , p. 309.
? fOT one's own death, one is liberated from one's lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Antici- pation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibil- ity lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one's tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. 150
Only rarely do Heidegger's words contain as much truth as these last ones. Man's thinking about himself as nature would simultaneously mean a critical re- flection on the principle of self-preservation: the true
life would be one that does not insist on "tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. " In his doc- trine of death, however, Heidegger extrapolates such a mode of behavior from Dasein, as the positive mean- ing of Dasein. He affirms self-abnegation as an in- stance of the self, and he spoils the insight he has gained. Resignation becomes an obstinacy which turns the dissolution of the self into an inflexibly stoic posit- ing of the self. By means of relentless identification, of the dissolution of the self with the self, self becomes the absolute positihg of the negative principle. Al the categories that Heidegger then uses to explain Being unto death are linked with obstinacy: the possibility of death is supposed to be "put up with. " 151 That which should be different from domin ation a n d in- flexibility raises domination to its extreme. The sub- ject is never so authentic for Heidegger as in that
I SO. Ibid.
151. Ibid. , p. 305.
159
holding out in which it endures an extreme of pain, following the example of the ego. Even the elements with which he contrasts the stiffening of the self carry linguistic traces of the domination of the self : he calls it a "breaking. " 152 In the same way that Dasein-subject is actually identified with death, Being-unto-death be- comes subject, pure will. Ontological decisiveness must not ask what it dies for. The last word is spoken by a selfness that remains unmoved. "This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience-this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety-we call 'resoluteness. ' '' 153 The real ideological life would be this : the courage to be afraid
only when this courage would no longer have to dis- sipate into all that which has to be feared.
The jargon of authenticity is ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content.
does not disengage itself from triviality: "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. " 118 Secondary school teachers speak thus in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening. The characteristica universaHs of
1I7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. I lB. Ibid. , pp. 294 if.
? ? ? Dasein, as in the Dasein of a mortal, takes the place of what must die. Thus death is manoeuvered into the position of the authentic; Dasein is "distinctive"119 through the ontological, which it is anyway; and the analytical judgment becomes the precipitous philos- opheme, the empty generality becomes the specific element in the concept-while to death, as "something distinctively impending," 120 a medal of honor is given. Formerly, the cultural-historical experience of the ab- sence of ontological meaning inspired the movement of Heidegger's philosophizing; but now such absence, the blindness of the inescapable, becomes exactly that which is lacking to Heidegger's theory of death. In that way his thought brings out the hollowness which re- sounds from the jargon as soon as one knocks on it. Tautology and nihilism bind themselves into a holy alliance. Death is to be experienced only as something meaningless. That is alleged to be the meaning of the experience of death and, since death constitutes the essence of Dasein, such is also the meaning of Dasein. Hegel's metaphysics, which cannot be brought back again, and which had its positive absolute in the totality of negations, is here interiorized to a dimen- sionless point. In such a construction it is reduced to the Hegelian "fury of disappearance,"121 to the un- mediated theodicy of annihilati9'n.
Throughout history, identity thinking has been something deathly, something that devours everything. Identity is always virtually out for totality; the One as
II9. Cf. p. 294.
120. Ibid. , p. 295.
121. Hegel, Werke, II, 453.
139
the indeterminate point, and the All-One-equally in- determinate, because it has no determination outside of itself-are themselves one. In Heidegger, as in idealism, that which tolerates nothing beyond itself is understood to be the whole. The least trace which went beyond such identity would be as unbearable as anyone who insists on his own individuality is to the fascist-no matter in what remote corner of the world. Therefore, not after all does Heidegger's ontology
aspire to exclude every kind of facticity. Facticity would give the lie to the identity principle, would not be of the nature of the concept, which for the sake of its omnipotence would like precisely to gloss over the fact that it is a concept; dictators imprison those who call them dictators. Nevertheless, that identity, which strictly would be identical with nothing more than with itself, annihilates itself. If it no longer goes forth to an other, and if it is no longer an identity of something, then, as Hegel saw, it is nothing at al. Thus totality is also the moving principle of Heidegger's observa- tions about death. They apply to wholeness, as that which is constitutively preestablished over its parts;122 that wholeness which Heidegger's predecessor Scheler had already transplanted into metaphysics from a Gestalt psychology which was at first rather unpre- tentious. In prefascist Germany, wholeness was the motto of all the zealots who were opposed to the nine-
teenth century, which they looked on summarily as old- fashioned and done away with. The attack was par-
122. Occasionally Heidegger refers condescendingly to the concept of totality in other writers, but does so only to prove the superiority of his own concept.
? ? ticularly directed against psychoanalysis; it stood for enlightenment in general. In those years, around the time of the first publication of Sein und Zeit, the doc- trine of the precedence of the whole over its parts was the delight of all apologetic thinking-just as today it delights the adepts of the jargon. Heidegger directly and openly repeated that view of the then current hab- its of thought. That the task of philosophy is to sketch out the whole was for Heidegger as much an article of faith as the duty of system-making once was to the idealist :
Thus arises the task of putting Dasein as a whole into our fore-having. This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity's po- tentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the "end" itself belongs. The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to
the potentiality-for-Being-that is to say, to existence- limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. 123
The thought model for this was in particular the "good Gestalt" of Gestalt theory : a forerunner of that under- standing agreement between inner and outer that is to be destroyed by "consciousness as fate. " In its turn the conception bears with it the marks of the same scientific division of labor against which its own anti- mechanistic attitude polemicizes. In that attitude the inwardness of individuals remains intact, without re- gard to society. Whether a rounded unity exists be-
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 276.
? tween subject and the surrounding world would be said to depend on the subject. It could only be whole- ness insofar as it sets itself in opposition to reality, nonrefiectingly. Therefore, accommodation, social compliance, is the goal even of a category like that of wholeness, which appears to be so anthropological or existential. An a priori partisanship toward the subject as such is exercised by the jargon in the name of man. Through this partisanship, attention is re- moved from the question of whether reality, with which men must be unmediately at one in order even to become wholes themselves, of whether this reality deserves being at one with; of whether in the end this reality, as heteronomous, does not deny them whole- ness; of whether the wholeness ideal does not in fact contribute to their oppression and to the progressive atomization of those who are without power. As an ex- pression of the whole situation the atomization of man is also the truth; the point would be to change the truth along with this situation, and not, within this situation,
to wrest the truth away, and to charge it up to the for- getfulness of being, to the forgetfulness of those who recognize the truth. Heidegger felt a slight discomfort about an optimism that was secretly proud of having proven God in the laboratory; proud of having done so by the discovery of the Gestalt which is structured prior to all thinking preparation. But Heidegger's discom- fort hid itself away in the rhetorical, and involuntarily comic, question of whether in view of death we can speak of wholeness. The thesis about immediately pre- discovered, objective structuredness came just at the time when he needed it. With the help of a makeshift
? thought construction, he brought together the obliga- tion toward wholeness-accepted without question- and the experience of our literally discontinuous life. This was an experience needed by the expression of in- corruptible earnestness. This is precisely the broken- ness of existence, he says-following a Hegelian schema which, alas, he stuck together almost mechan- ically. Presumably, death would make this brokenness into a whole. Finitude, the infirmity of existence, would enclose it as its very principle. Since negativity, for all the brow-wrinkling, is taboo, Heidegger thinks past his goal. If philosophy could define the structure of Dasein at al, it would become for her two things at once: broken and whole, identical with itself and not identical-and that would of course drive one on to a dialectic which broke through the projected ontology of Dasein. But in Heidegger, thanks to that doctrine, it becomes more evident than anywhere else that the negative, as the essence, simply and undialectically turns into the positive. He channeled into philosophy the scientifically and psychologically circumscribed doctrine of wholeness; the antithesis between the dis- persed existent and Eleatically harmonic being is si- lently totted up to the debit of mechanistic thinking-
the primal scapegoat here being Aristotle. That this thought should be "overcome"-as one of the most sus- pect expressions tirelessly continues to proclaim-was not for a moment doubted even by Heidegger; such an attitude created, for him, the double halo of the modern and the supratemporal. The irrationalistic lackey- language of the twenties prattled on about "body-soul unity. " The connection of existent elements to their
? 143
whole is supposed to be the meaning of people in real life-as it is in art; in the fashion of the jugendstil, consolation is spread aesthetically over the harsh em- pirical world. To be sure, Heidegger's analysis of death carefully contents itself with applying the wholeness category to that of Dasein, instead of to individuals. The borrowing from the psychological theory of whole- ness pays off after all. Its grammatical character is the renunciation of any causal argumentation, a re- nunciation which removes the alleged wholenesses from nature, and transfers them to the transcendence of Being. For this transcendence is really none at all; it does not, in the Kantian way, go beyond the pos- sibility of experience, but rather behaves as though ex- perience is itself unmediated, incontrovertible, aware of itself as if it were face to face with itself. A fictive bodily contact with phenomena aids this anti-intel- lectualism. The pride in controlling phenomena in their undisfigured state bases itself inexplicitly on a certain judgmental claim: that the world is divided up into thingly pieces through an unraveling thought-process, not through the structure of society. Still-in accord with the then reigning ! ules of the trade of philosophy
-there is some talk of analysis; but this trade would already prefer to do no more analyzing.
The central chapter of Sein und Zeit treats "Da- sein's possibility of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards- Death. " 124 The question is raised-merely in a rhetor- ical fashion, as we can see at once-"whether this entity, as something existfng, can ever become acces-
124. Ibid. , p. 278. 144
sible in its Being-a-whole. " 125 It is obvious that a "pos- sibility of this entity's Being-a-whole" 126 could contra- dict the self-preservation which has been ontologized into "care. " Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as "that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole," 127 wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Da- sein-a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. We can anticipate, as immanent in Hei- degger, what he later announces with so much aplomb : that the fact of mortality does not a priori exclude the possibility that man's life should round itself out to a whole, as in the Biblical and epic conception. Hei- degger may have been forced to the effort to ground existential wholeness by the undeniable fact that the life of individuals today does without wholeness. 128 Wholeness is supposed to survive despite historical experience. For this purpose the whole-being of the eixstent, toward which Heidegger's theory is heading -and out of which "concern" emerges in the jargon-
the whole-being is distinguished, in the approved man- ner, from the merely cumulatively existent, "for which anything is still outstanding. " 129 The latter is said to have "the same kind of Being as those which are ready- to-hand"; 130 to it is contrasted the totality raised into
125. Ibid. , p. 279.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Cf. the introduction to Benjamin, Schriften I, p. xxii. 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 286.
130. Ibid.
145
an existential wholeness apart from the empirically individual life.
The togetherness of an entity of the kind which Dasein is "in running its course" until that "course" has been completed, is not constituted by a "continuing" piec- ing-on of entities which, somehow and somewhere, are ready-to-hand already in their own right. That Dasein should be together only when its "not-yet" has been filled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer. Any Dasein always exists in just such a manner that its "not-yet" belongs to it. l3l
That only applies to the extent that mortality is already thought together with the concept of Dasein- to the extent, that is, that Heidegger's philosophy is presupposed. For the ontologist, whole-being cannot be the unity of the whole content of real life but, qualita- tively, must be a third thing; and thus unity will not be sought in life as something harmonious, articulated, and continuous in itself, but will be sought at that point which delimits life and annihilates it, along with its wholeness. As a nonexistent, or at least as an ex- istent sui generis, outside life, this point is once again ontological. "But this lack-of-togetherness which be- longs to such a mode of togetherness-this being- missing as still-outstanding-cannot by any means de- fine ontologically that 'not-yet' which belongs to Dasein
as its possible death. Dasein does not have all the kind of Being of something ready-to-hand-within-the world. " 132 Removed from facticity, death becomes the ontological foundation of totality. Thus it becomes a
131. Ibid. , p. 287? I32. Ibid. , pp. 286 ff.
? meaning-gIVIng element in the midst of that frag- mentation which, according to ontological topography, characterizes the atomized consciousness of the late industrial age. This is done according to a habit of thinking, unquestioned by Heidegger, which imme- diately equates a structural whole with its own mean- ing-even if it were the negation of all meaning. Thus death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being. 133 Insofar as death is the ontological constituent of Dasein, death alone can
give existence the dignity of totality : "death as the end of Dasein, is Dasein's ownmost possibility-non-rela- tional, certain and as such indefinite, not to be out- stripped. " 131 Thus Heidegger gives a negative answer to his own starting question; the question which is only posed in order to be refuted :
So if one has given an ontologically inappropriate Inter- pretation of Dasein's "not-yet" as something still out- standing, any formal inference from this to Dasein's lack of totality will not be correct. The phenomenon of the "not-yet" has been taken over from the "ahead-of- itself'; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of cm existent Being-a-whole; indeed this "ahead-of-itself" is what first of all makes such a Being- towards-the-end possible. The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of us is, is a correct one if care, as Dasein's basic state, is "con- nected" with death-the uttennost possibility for that
entity. " 135
I33. Cf. above pp. I42 if.
I34. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. I35. Ibid.
? ? 147
Ontologically, existence becomes a totality by means of death, which disrupts Dasein ontically. Death, how- ever, is authentic because it is removed from the They, which in turn is justified by the fact that there cannot be a proxy in death. Heidegger criticizes all thinkable real attitudes toward death as manifestations of the They. For, according to his own verdict, only the They speak of "death as a regularly occurring state of af- fairs. " 136 Thus he singles out his authentic death as something that is extremely real and at the same time beyond all facticity. Since there cannot be a proxy in death it becomes as unconceptual as the pure Diesda (haecceitas). Its concept would precede it and would become its representative, as is the case in the relation of any concept to that which is its content. In the same breath, however, Heidegger slanders facticity, which alone allows him to speak of the impossibility of hav- ing a proxy in death. The reason for this lies in the fact that death as a general concept designates the death of all and not of each individual one. Death as event, factual death indeed, is not to be the authentic death. Thus ontological death is not all that terrible.
In the publicness with which we are with one an- other in our everyday manner, death is "known" as a mishap which is constantly occurring-a "case of death. " Someone or other "dies," be he neighbour or stranger [Niichste oder Fernerstehendel . People who are no acquaintances of ours are "dying" daily and hourly. "Death" is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the in- conspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered
136. Ibid. , p. 297.
? ? ? in an everyday fashion. The "they" has already stowed away . . . an interpretation for this event. It talks of it . . . expressly or else in a way which is mostly in- hibited, as if to say, "One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us. " 137
In his eagerness to distinguish between death as an event and death as something authentic, Heidegger does not turn his back on sophisms.
The analysis of the phrase "one dies" reveals un- ambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to every- day Being-towards-death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for one- self, and is therefore no threat.
The expression "one dies" spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the "they. " In Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that "one dies," because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that "in no case is it I myself," for this "one" is the "nobody. " 1 38
To say that death affects the They already presup- poses, as it were, Heidegger's hypostasis of the ex- istentiales, the dark side of which is always the They. Such an interpretation neglects and falsifies the truth in that talk, threadbare as it may be. This truth is the fact that death is a general determination which com- prehends the alter ego as well as one's own. If some- one says, "one dies," he includes himself euphemis-
1 37. Ibid. , pp. 296-97. I3B. Ibid. , p. 297.
149
tically at best. However, the adjournment of death, criticized by Heidegger, takes place: the one who speaks is actually still allowed to live-otherwise he wouldn't speak. Besides, such argumentation, set in motion by Heidegger, necessarily takes place in the sphere of nonsense; and in turn gives the lie to authen- ticity, which is to crystallize itself in this sphere as if it were the philosopher's stone. If anything fits the They, then it is such a pro and contra. The "occurrence" which "belongs to nobody in particular" 139 and which is not highly valued by Heidegger, definitely belongs to someone, according to the usage of language. It be- longs to him who dies. Only a solipstistic philosophy could acknowledge an ontological priority to "my" death over and against any other. Even emotionally, someone else's death is easier to experience than one's own. The Schopenhauer of the fourth book of the World as Will and Idea did not miss this fact :
In him, too, as in the unthinking animal, there prevails a sense of security as a permanent state, a security which springs from the innermost conscious-that man is nature, that he himself is the world. Because of this security no man is noticeably bothered by the thought of a certain and never distant death; but everyone con- tinues to live as if he were to live eternally. This goes so far, that one could say that no one actually has a living conviction about the certainty of his death. Otherwise there could not be such a great difference between his mood and that of the convicted criminal. Each man, however, recognizes this certainty theoretically and in abstracto but like any other truth, which is not usable in
139. Ibid. 150
practice, puts it aside without taking it into his living consciousness. 140
For Heidegger the They becomes a cloudy mixture of elements which are merely ideological products of the exchange relationship. The mixture contains the idola fori of condolence speeches and obituaries, as well as that humanity which does not identify the other, but identifies itself with the other, breaks through the circle of abstract selfness and recognizes the latter in its mediation. The general condemnation of that sphere, which philosophy dubiously enough called in- tersubjectivity, hopes to overcome reified consciousness by means of a primary subject that is supposedly un- touched by reification. Yet in truth such a subject is as little something immediate and primary as is anything else. Heidegger's key sentences run in the following maner :
Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost po- tentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue. Here it can become manifest to Dasein that, in this distinctive possibility of its own self it has been wrenched away from the "they. " This means that in anticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the "they" already. 141
Death becomes the essence of the realm of mortality. This occurs in opposition to the immediate, which is characterized by the fact that it is there. Death thus
140. Arthur Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke in funf Biinden, Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausgabe (Leipzig, n. d. ) , Vol. I : Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, p . 376.
141. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 307.
151
becomes something that is artificially beyond the ex- istent. Saved from the They it becomes the latter's sublime counterpart; it becomes the authentic. Au- thenticity is death. The loneliness of the individual in death, the fact that his "non-relatedness singles out Dasein unto itself," 142 becomes the substratum of self- ness. This attitude of total self-sufficiency becomes
the extreme confirmation of the self; it becomes an Ur- image of defiance in self-abnegation. As a matter of fact, abstract selfness in extremis is that grinding of the teeth which says nothing but I, I, 1. Thus it is characterized by the same nothingness that the self becomes in death. But Heidegger's language blows up this negative element into that which is substantial. This, then, is the content from which was taken the stenciled model for the formal procedure of the jargon. Involuntarily, Heidegger's doctrine becomes an exege- sis of the futile joke : Only death is free and that costs your life. He is smitten with death as that which is
supposed to be absolutely removed from the universal exchange relationship. Yet he does not realize that he remains caught up in the same fatal cycle as the ex- change relationship which he sublimates into the They. Insofar as death is absolutely alien to the subject, it is the model of all reification. Only ideology praises it as a cure for exchange. This ideology debases exchange into the more despairing form of eternity, instead of
getting rid of proper exchange by letting it fulfil itself properly. For Heidegger, Dasein is not sufficiently able to justify itself, because of its shameful historical form.
142. Ibid. 152
? ? It redeems itself only in its destruction, which it itself is to be. The highest maxim of such an attitude results in saying that "it is so," that one has to obey- or, in positivistic terms, that one has to adapt oneself. This is the pathetic commandment that he must obey that which is. It is not even really obeying, for in any case Dasein does not have a choice. Precisely for this rea- son death is so ontological in regard to Dasein. If one were to call nonideological a kind of thinking which re- duces ideology to the zero limit, then one would have to say that Heidegger's thinking is nonideological. But his operation once again becomes ideology because of his claim that he recovers the meaning of Dasein. This happens after the fashion of today's talk about the loss of ideology-talk which tramples down ideology but would like to trample down the truth.
By saying "the 'they' does not permit us the courage in the face of death," 143 Heidegger actually lays bare certain elements of ideology, such as the attempt to integrate death into just that societal immanence which has no power over death. A similar development can be seen in Evelyn Waugh's parody The Loved One. Some of Heidegger's formulas come very close to the mechanism of sublimating death. "But temptation, tranquillization, and alienation are distinguishing marks of the kind of Being called 'falling: As falling, everyday Being-towards-death is a constant fleeing in the face of death. " 14l Alienation, however, deSignates a social relationship, even if it is the relationship to death. Man and the institutions of piety reproduce
143. Ibid. , p. 298. 144. Ibid.
? 153
commercially the unconscious will to forget what one has to fear. Fundamental ontology and its nomencla- ture are not necessary for insights like the following :
In this manner the "they" provides a constant tranquil- lization about death. At bottom, however, this is a tran- quilation not only for him who is "dying" but just as much for those who "console" him. And even in the case of a demise, the public is still not to have its own tran- quillity upset by such an event, or be disturbed in the carefreeness with which it concerns itself. Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social in- convenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded. 145
In the same manner Ibsen's assessor Brack already concluded, about Hedda Gabler's suicide, "One doesn't do that sort of thing. " Heidegger, who does not want to have anything to do with psychology, has seen through the reactionary nature of the integration of death. He has himself done this in a psycholOgical fashion. The message is coded in Sein und Zeit:
But in thus faling and fleeing in the face of death, Dasein's everydayness attests that the very "they" itself already h as the definite character of B eing-towards- death, even when it is not explicitly engaged in "think- ing about death. " Even in average everydayness, this ownmost potentiality-for-Being which is non-relational and not to be outstripped, is constantly an issue for Dasein. This is the case when its concern is merely in the mode of an untroubled indifference towards the uttermost possibility of existence. 14S
145. Ibid. , pp. 298 1? . 146. Ibid. , pp. 298 99.
? 154
In spite of that, he does not go far enough. Heidegger cannot make us feel and respect the despair embodied in that cramped ''Enjoy life" and in that stupid com- monplace, "One will die sometime, but not quite yet" 147_a commonplace which he rightly despises. The commonplace represses our despair. The protesta- tion against the sublimating of death would have its place in a criticism of liberal ideology. That criticism
would proceed to remind us of the naturalness which is denied by culture. For in domination culture itself propagates this naturalness. It does it by means of that which mistakes itself for the antithesis to nature. Instead of this, Heidegger does the same thing as fascism; he defends the more brutal form of Being, negative as it may be. It is possible to think of a social state in which men would no longer have to sublimate death and might be able to experience it in another form than fear. To experience death in fear is a mark
of the crude natural state that Heidegger's doctrine has eternalized in supranaturalistic terms. Death is sub- limated because of a blinded drive for self-preservation ; its terror is part of the sublimation. In a life that is no longer disfigured, that no longer prohibits, in a life that would no longer cheat men out of their dues-in such a life men would probably no longer have to hope, in vain, that this life would after all give them what it had so far refused. For the same reason they would not have to fear so greatly that they would lose this life,
no matter how deeply this fear had been ingrained in them. From the fact that men sublimate death, one
147. Ibid" p. 299,
? ? ? ISS
cannot conclude that death is itself the authentic. Heidegger is least of all in a position to do this, as he is careful not to attribute authenticity to people who do not sublimate death.
By means of a kind of philosophical Freudian slip, Heidegger himself defines the ontologizing of death insofar as death, in its certainty, is qualitatively su- perior to other phenomena. 'We have already charac- terized the everyday state-of-mind which consists in an air of superiority with regard to the certain 'fact' of death-a superiority which is 'anxiously' concerned while seemingly free from anxiety. In this state-of- mind, everydayness acknowledges a 'higher' certainty than one which is only empirical. " 148 The "higher," in spite of the quotation marks, has the proving force of a confession : theory sanctions death. The partisan of authenticity commits the same sin of which he accuses the minores gentes, the lesser people, of the They. By means of the authenticity of death as he flees from it. Whatever announces itself as "higher" than mere em- pirical certainty, in this attitude, falsely cleanses death from its misery and stench-from being an animalistic kicking of the bucket. This cleansing occurs in the same manner as a Wagnerian love- or salvation-death. Al this is similar to the integration of death into hygiene, of which Heidegger accuses the inauthentic. By means of that which is kept silent in the high stylization of death, Heidegger becomes an accomplice of what is horrible in death. Even in the cynical ma- terialism of the dissection room, this horribleness is
148. Ibid. , p. 302.
? ? recognized more honestly and denounced more strongly than in the tirades of ontology. The latter's kernel is nothing but the supraempirical certainty that death is something that has been existentially preordained to Dasein. Purity untouched by experience plays over into that which it once was unmetaphorically: purity untouched by dirt. But by no understanding can death be said to be pure. Neither is it anything apodictic. Otherwise, all the salvation promises of religion would simply be forgetful of Being. However, they are by no means needed. Some lower organisms do not die in the same sense as the higher, individuated ones. Thus, in light of our potential, and growing, control over organic processes, we cannot do away a fortiori with the thought that death might be eliminated. Such an elimination of death may be highly improbable; yet it can be thought of, and according to existential ontol- ogy that should be impossible. The affirmation of the ontological dignity of death, however, is already re-
duced to nothing by the possibility that something can change it ontically-according to Heidegger's lan- guage. Insofar as Heidegger cuts off these hopes at what inquisitors probably call the root, the authentic one speaks for all-for all those who j oin , as soon as they hear of this possibility, in the refrain that nothing would be worse than the disappearance of death. It seems legitimate to assume that those are the adepts of the jargon. The eagerness toward the eternity of death prolongs the continuing use of death as a threat. On a political level death advertises the necessity of wars. Kant, who subsumed immortality under the Ideas, did not let himself fall to those depths in which
? 157
nothing else flourishes but the affirmation of what is all too familiar. If Heidegger had made the transition from the inorganic to the organic, the existential hori- zon of death would have been thoroughly changed. His philosophy, and everything that floats with it, down to the last sewers of German faith unto being, could no- where be more vulnerable than in this transition. That understanding with the existent which motivates the elevation of the existent to being thrives on the com- plicity with death. In the metaphysics of death there comes to a head all that evil to which bourgeois society has physically condemned itself, by means of its own process of development.
The doctrine of anticipation, which is the authentic Being unto death, the "pOSSibility of taking the whole of Dasein, in advance . . . in an existentiell manner; that is to say, it includes the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-for-Being," 149 underhandedly be- comes a mode of behavior. Thus it becomes what Being-unto-death did not want to be and yet has to be if anything more than a tautology is thereby to be ut- tered. Although nothing is said about the difference of this mode of behavior from the fact that one has to die, this behavior is expected to acquire dignity by ac- cepting such a necessity speechlessly and without re- flection.
Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic Being-to- wards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free
149. Ibid. , p. 309.
? fOT one's own death, one is liberated from one's lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Antici- pation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibil- ity lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one's tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. 150
Only rarely do Heidegger's words contain as much truth as these last ones. Man's thinking about himself as nature would simultaneously mean a critical re- flection on the principle of self-preservation: the true
life would be one that does not insist on "tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. " In his doc- trine of death, however, Heidegger extrapolates such a mode of behavior from Dasein, as the positive mean- ing of Dasein. He affirms self-abnegation as an in- stance of the self, and he spoils the insight he has gained. Resignation becomes an obstinacy which turns the dissolution of the self into an inflexibly stoic posit- ing of the self. By means of relentless identification, of the dissolution of the self with the self, self becomes the absolute positihg of the negative principle. Al the categories that Heidegger then uses to explain Being unto death are linked with obstinacy: the possibility of death is supposed to be "put up with. " 151 That which should be different from domin ation a n d in- flexibility raises domination to its extreme. The sub- ject is never so authentic for Heidegger as in that
I SO. Ibid.
151. Ibid. , p. 305.
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holding out in which it endures an extreme of pain, following the example of the ego. Even the elements with which he contrasts the stiffening of the self carry linguistic traces of the domination of the self : he calls it a "breaking. " 152 In the same way that Dasein-subject is actually identified with death, Being-unto-death be- comes subject, pure will. Ontological decisiveness must not ask what it dies for. The last word is spoken by a selfness that remains unmoved. "This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience-this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety-we call 'resoluteness. ' '' 153 The real ideological life would be this : the courage to be afraid
only when this courage would no longer have to dis- sipate into all that which has to be feared.
The jargon of authenticity is ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content.
