There is an abyss of the finite.1 It is temporality.
There is a beyond of reason and unreason. It is the human psyche. The abyss of conscious being, it determines the character of civilization where sufficient power has accrued to it.
The twentieth century was governed by psychopaths. They collapsed the boundaries of moral reason and refuted Kant’s analysis of consciousness.
There is no a priori of pure or practical reason. There is only the possibility of reconsidering, over and again, the harm wrought by the psyche in free fall.
One means of educating the psyche is penal law in all its dimensions, religious ones included.
But who shall punish whom? One man’s virtue is another man’s crime. Thus Hitler could feel unwaveringly, as he wiped out entire populations, the starry sky above him and the moral law within him, as stipulated by Kant; and how should one oppose the remedies of civilization to the ego-mania, the murderous appetites of such outright psycho-paths as Stalin or Pol Pot?2 And is civilization not a misleading concept in any case?
At least, when it attempts to assert an a priori of practical reason.
To begin, civilization comprises all determinants of human life in common.3 This is not to say it is accordingly inclined toward the preservation of life. Civilization consists primar-ily in an unequal distribution of power, within which the beyond of reason and unreason—the incalculability of the psyche—strives for self-assertion.
It is true that man may step past his own nature, and that of others, through the act of thinking, but freedom of thought is a fata morgana of consciousness, which must be integrated through a higher form of responsibility.4 Where the individual possesses little power, he is compelled to be modest. But this modesty abates to the extent that power is accrued.
It is true that civilization knows its golden ages as well, when attempts are made to instill the psyche with good and extirpate evil. Yet even where it appears successful, the education of the psyche is, and remains, an impossibility.
The psyche is resistant to any form of relativization. It responds exclusively to its own attunement.5 This marks the point at which it eludes calculation, and it is necessary, in order to examine it, to refer to the Dasein in terms of its absolute selfhood, the unique and nonrecurring I that I am, which remains unresolved with relation to this classification.6 The I as absolute selfhood possesses, apart from itself, the objectivity of the world, along with those aspects of itself that must be considered objective. What it does not.possess, apart from itself, and what permits its Dasein to become an experienceable reality, is the transcendent stepping-over of the objectivity of the world.7 This stepping-over is indispensable for the existence of the subject, but what the subject aims to arrive at and must arrive at remains something outside itself, something that the self, for the sake of which this stepping-over is under-taken, does not constitute.
In this way, the objectivity of the world remains eternally estranged from, even menacingly unattainable to, the I— transcendent, in a word. It can adduce no grounds whatsoever for its self-centeredness, and the unease, the endless irritation this state of affairs gives rise to, is registered by the psyche as though by a seismograph and becomes manifest in the subject’s particular mode of being attuned.8 Consciousness errs constantly with regard to clarity of perspective, to the temporal hue proper to present, past, and future. Even if the individual is capable of recognizing the horizon of his possibilities, he may, at the behest of his psychological constitution, ignore, overestimate, or reframe what he has recognized, and may do so with explicit recourse to reason, which remains in any case subject to the individual’s own conceptual world.
The psyche allows itself neither to be sublimated nor rendered objective by means of education. It is immune to reason and indeed manipulates the intellect, if it proves necessary, to legitimize abnormal inclinations. It reacts like a perpetuum mobile, affording the ego necessary validation, and can only be compelled to discipline itself according to a predetermined moral law where the ego is constrained by society. Supposing that it is itself not in a position to enact moral laws in the world.
In the Roman Empire, Caligula or Domitian were able to position their own psyche as the measure of all things with impunity; and the philosophy of history errs when it affirms that the psyche is subject to modification by history. In the twentieth century, following the abolition of the corporate state, well after the Enlightenment had strived for the ethical sublimation of the human psychological structure, a small group was able to break free from this societal discipline, and it was certainly not mere chance that setting aside their respective ideologies, Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, were indistinguishable with regard to one intention: they committed mass murder, and with.a resoluteness that Heidegger could have considered impossible.9 What goes for the abnormality of evil goes as well for the abnormality of good. There are only Epicurians, some coarse, some refined. Christ was the most refined of all. This well-known phrase from Büchner’s play Danton’s Death shows how indifferently, how archetypally, the psyche inhabits its sphere of activity, and how right Schopenhauer was to attribute the origin of ethics to that rarest but most precious of all manifestations of the psyche—namely compassion.
But where shall we seek out the metaphysics of the psyche, and why is it illusory when Heidegger attempts to derive the possibility of the conduct of life exclusively from the structure of a self-referential ontology? In its everydayness, Dasein is still delivered over, despite all effort of thought, to the incalculability of psychological forces, and even here, a glimpse at literature might offer some clarity.10 Shakespeare’s play Othello portrays jealousy culminating in intrigue, but does not clarify why a man would kill his wife, whom he loves above all else. Further, Othello makes no attempt to cast doubt on the intrigue against Desdemona. Yet precisely here, where good sense or the scientific impulse toward the empirical would be marshaled to explain why Othello behaves in this way and not in another, is where the free fall, the incalculability of the psyche, begins.
It is thoroughly conceivable that Othello, precisely because he loves Desdemona beyond all measure, may compound his love through these suspicions of infidelity, and that imagining the unimaginable, he will persevere for the sole purpose of augmenting his love for Desdemona. And this would indeed be the endless loop of jealousy, how something incompossible—namely love and the betrayal thereof—in lieu of submitting to the justifications of reason, progresses into catastrophe.
Knowledge always refers in the last instance to death, and it is here that the hunger for transcendence lurks, because the meaninglessness of our existence demands sublimation.
We disappear into the darkness of history. The facticity of conscious being changes nothing in this regard.
All else is compulsion to the experience of Being: from childhood, we are imprinted with the urge to enworld ourselves. The child wishes to grow up in order to better adapt the world to himself.11 Here, the naive illusion prevails that imprisonment or constraint within the housing of the self is something to be overcome. Childish, unevolved consciousness is not yet aware that the world merely reflects itself in the monadic Dasein. All else is indivisibility between self and world, is touch and metabolism. Without the assistance of all that I am not, my Dasein cannot realize itself.
That which I am not is a precondition of that which I am.
Consciousness struggles against this insight, or more precisely: the self only appears in consciousness as a fata morgana, and the fullness of the representational world is grounded therein.12 The knowable world appears endless. But man’s representational world is more endless than the perceptible world.
Man may step over his nature by means of thought. But he cannot change it or leave it behind.
The systematization of this point is and remains the work of thought. In general, consciousness enriches actuality through the adduction of thought-related characteristics.
Hence the mere consideration of an objectively given state of affairs itself becomes a state of affairs.13 Through illusion, in other words, consciousness may create for itself its own, objectively indemonstrable world, and in this undemonstrability, consciousness itself becomes free.
The will to change the world ends in a false promise. Man can only change the world in thought.
Freedom is an offer that is most often turned down.
Habits are established beyond good and evil, and are therefore difficult to alter.
There exists not only the will to happiness but also the will to lived delusion.14 Both are species-specific, and for two thousand years, they have left their mark on the history of culture.
Whoever wishes to make a change, must create meaning.
There is only the present, the moment in which Being realizes itself. Past and future are projections of consciousness.
Sartre’s notion of the past as the nothingness of Being proves nothing. Save that we may hold fast to elapsed Being in memory.15 The same is true for the concept of the future. The fact that we are constrained to consider our present Being as reproducible does not make the future a reality. The future is and remains a projection.
The present is fleeting being-in-the-world. It is always already past.
Of late, one calls for a spirituality without God, which casts aside the I-phenomenon as an illusion.16 But who then should spiritualize?
The transitory I is thoroughly disparaged as irrelevant, for the eternity of Being is opposed to it. And now it is supposed to redeem itself through insight into its own nullity.17 The all-one supervenes upon the one.18 A notion already put forth by Schopenhauer. But what benefit could such an idea yield?
Whether negligible or not, I too belong to the totality of beings.19 My problem lies solely in the constant process of self-generation that characterizes this totality.
A question, then: Does my existence possess a substantial nature, or is it merely a matter of form?
And who decides whether the totality of beings is not like-wise a matter of contingency?
Form arises by chance. But where does chance begin? And is there some sort of necessity that remains superordinate to chance?
What was there before the Big Bang: Being or nothingness?
Or something else, a beyond to which Being and nothing-ness belong as transitory forms?
Is it possible then that beings might affirm themselves not as something necessary but simply as an attribute of chance?
That they will someday come to an end, like every chance event, and that nothing substantial, but only the formal as a quality, may be attributed to the all-one or the one?
All that may arise, deserves its own demise.20 These words tear down the barrier between finite and infinite, outlining the logic of form, according to which the totality of beings can conjure up no further meaning.
If this is so, I myself am a chance event within chance as a whole, distinguished only by time, which gives rise to formal distinctions.
Which dies out faster, fire or smoke? Fire could not answer this question, according to the logic of succession.
Again, with respect to the problematic of the I: Heidegger writes somewhere in Being and Time that the average Dasein, thus the existential structure of its individuation, takes itself to be absolute.21 What is it that is false there? Every I is nonrecurring, hence the absolute would already be qualitatively substantiated for the individual Dasein.
But the qualitatively substantiated absolute is unquantifiable. What counts for me does not count for the others.
I am what others are not. I am (for myself) the absoluteness of the absolute—a tautology, an impossible state of affairs—and so my unfungibility, the nonrecurring nature of my existential structure, are relegated to the realm of the bewildering.
A fact that philosophy ignores: Hegel, to the extent that he posits the I-phenomenon as a fragmentary reason, which merges into reason as a whole (whatever that may mean), Schopenhauer, to the extent that he defines absolute subjective experience as illusion.22 Kant speaks contemptuously of the I in the diminutive, and Heidegger demands that man not cling to his fragile little I.23 All this betrays the arrogance of quantification. Thus it is also becomes clear why Heidegger has no acquaintance with existential despair.
In its stead, he asserts resoluteness, through which Dasein is to work off its groundless thrownness as debt.24 Curious, this sort of transcendental glossing-over: as if a compulsion toward the conferral of meaning must automatically follow from the experience of meaninglessness.25
Heidegger demands the possible from the experience of the impossible. But for him, the possible is only ever the potentiation of the Dasein.26 In this way, he impoverishes his self-understanding. He idealizes the experience of the impossible and thus ignores the impossible in the possible, and with it the grounds for despair as well as freedom of self-abnegation.
Heidegger’s spirituality is attunement. It is a felt experience of nothingness. As when the whole of being slips away from Dasein and it experiences, through this slippage, the complete indifference of all beings, itself included. It then experiences the possibility of authentic selfhood, but this is a selfhood without a representational world.27 Heidegger favors life-projection.28 He sorts the possibilities that conduce one to it according to their profitability. For him, Dasein is ever concerned to cleave to life, to the extent that such is possible.29 He ignores all the work of sublimation Dasein must carry out if this life-projection fails to succeed.
Heidegger never sets his sights on the merely represented world, but rather on the extant, known, recognizable one.
For him, all sublimation, including the ethical sort, is null and void, especially when it must be achieved not through the experience of being as a whole but through the constraints of psychopathology.
But Heidegger’s philosophy of existence remains the most valid delineation of conscious Being, so that it therefore seems inevitable to delve deeper into the Being-and-time-structure he has elaborated.
1. Abyss, Abgrund.
2. Lange’s phrase “den gestirnten Himmel über sich und das Sittengesetz in sich” is a modified quote from the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason: “Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir.” In English: “Two things fill the spirit with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect on them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”
3. Life in common, Zusammenleben. While this term appears sporadically in Heidegger’s writings, the more germane point of comparison may be his remarks on Zusammengehörigkeit in Identität und Differenz, volume 11 of the Gesamtausgabe.
4. Step past, übersteigen.
5. Attunement, Befindlichkeit. This term runs through much of Heidegger’s work from before Being and Time into the 1940s and after. I have followed Joan Stambaugh in translating it as “attunement.” Other translations include “affectedness,” “disposedness,” and “sofindingness.”
6. Selfhood, Selbstheit. Unique and non-recurring, Einmalig, literally “occurring only once.” The word occurs numerous times in the Gesamtausgabe. See Tracy Colony, “The Death of God and the Life of Being: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Nietzsche,” in Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 197–216; Krzysztof Ziarek, Language after Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 39.
7. Reality, Wirklichkeit.
8. Mode of being attuned, Gestimmtheit.
9. Resoluteness, Entschlossenheit.
10. Everydayness, Alltäglichkeit. Delivered over, Ausgeliefert 11. Experience of Being, Seinserfahrung. Enworld, Verweltlichen. Customarily translated as “secularize,” this second term appears in Edmund Husserl, Eugen Fink, and Ludwig Binswanger as the process by which transcendental subjectivity embodies itself as a human subject in the world of history, time, and nature.
12. Representational world, Vorstellungswelt.
13. State of affairs, Sachverhalt.
14. Lived delusion, Lebenslüge, literally “life-lie.” Though the term dates back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is closely associated with Henrik Ibsen’s aphorism from The Wild Duck: “Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.”
15. Nothingness of Being, Nichts am Sein, the German equivalent of Sartre’s néant d’être in Being and Nothingness: “la liberté n’est pas un être: elle est l’être de l’homme, c’est à dire son néant d’être.” In English: “Freedom is not a being: it is the being of man, that is, his nothingness of being.”
16. I-phenomenon, Ich-Phänomen. See Edmund Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07, trans. Claire Oritz Hill (New York: Springer, 2008).
17. Nullity, Nichtigkeit.
18. The all-one, Das All-eine. Also translated as “the universal one.” The term appears in the work of Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and others. All-one and alone are paranomastic in both German and English.
19. Totality of beings, Seiende. A nominalization of the present participle of Sein, “to be,” Seiende is most often translated as “beings,” and occasionally as “entities.” Here I have opted to translate Sein as “Being,” capitalized, and Seiende as “being” or “beings,” depending on whether the employment of a plural not present in the original German seemed to me to distort the meaning in the phrase in question.
20. From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: “alles was entsteht, ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.”
21. Individuation, Vereinzelung.
22. Illusion, Täuschung.
23. Fragile little I, Ichlein. In Gesamtausgabe 29–30, Grundbe-griffe der Metaphysik, 8. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker have translated this as “frail little ego” in Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
24. Groundless, Grundlos; thrownness, Geworfenheit; debt, Schuld. The two senses of this last term in German, “debt” and “guilt,” are significant for Heidegger’s analysis of the relationship between thrownness and the call of conscience, and I have used both here.
25. Conferral of meaning, Sinngebung.
26. Potentiation, Ermöglichung.
27. Authentic, eigentlich; selfhood, Selbstsein. Often the latter is rendered more precisely, but less elegantly, as “being-a- self.”
28. Life projection, Lebensentwurf. Though this particular term is not to be found in Heidegger’s work, Entwurf and entwerfen, respectively “projection” and “to project,” are basic concepts throughout his writings. Michael Inwood, in an illuminating entry in A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), writes: “An Entwurf in Heidegger’s sense is not a particular plan or project; it is what makes any plan or project possible.”
29. Concerned, in der Sorge.
Positive Nihilism
My Confrontation with Heidegger
Hartmud Lange
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