Theodor Adorno
Our critique of the ontological need brings us to an immanent critique of ontology itself. We have no power over the philosophy of Being if we reject it generally, from outside, instead of taking it on in its own structure—turning its own force against it, in line with Hegel’s desideratum. The motivations and results of Heidegger’s thought movements can be construed even where they are not uttered; there is hardly a sentence of his without its positional value in the functional context of the whole. In that sense he is a successor to the deductive systems. Their history is already full of concepts spawned by cogitative progress, even if we cannot put a finger on the corresponding facts; the need to form these concepts is the source of philosophy’s speculative element. The thought movement that congealed in them must be reliquified, its validity traced, so to speak, in repetition.
It is not enough to demonstrate to the philosophy of Being that what it calls Being does not exist, that there is no such thing. For it does not postulate this sort of “being there.” Instead, such a blind Being would have to be deduced in reply to the irrefutable claim that exploits the blindness. The very senselessness whose establishment elicits yells of positivistic triumph is plausible from the viewpoint of philosophical history. Because the secularization of theological contents once deemed objectively binding is irrevocable, the apologist for those contents must strive to rescue them through subjectivity, The religious doctrine of the Reformation virtually did so; it surely was the thought figure of Kantian philosophy. Enlightenment has since made irresistible strides, with subjectivity itself drawn into the demythologizing process. This reduced the chances of rescue to a borderline value. Paradoxically, the hope for it has been ceded to its relinquishment, to an unreserved and at the same time self-reflecting secularization.
Heidegger’s approach is true insofar as he accepts that and denies traditional metaphysics; he becomes untrue where—not unlike Hegel—he talks as if the contents we want to rescue were thus directly in our minds. The philosophy of Being fails as soon as it claims a sense in Being, a sense which its own testimony shows to have been dissolved by the thought to which Being itself, since its conception, is still attached as a conceptual reflection. The senselessness of the word “Being,” at which common sense finds it so easy to sneer, cannot be laid to either thinking too little or irresponsibly thinking too fast. It is the sediment of the impossibility of grasping or producing any positive sense by the thought that was the medium of the objective evaporation of such sense. If we try to accomplish Heidegger’s distinction of Being from the concept that circumscribes it logically, we are left—after deducting entity as well as the categories of abstraction—with an unknown quantity which nothing but the pathos of its invocation lifts above the Kantian concept of the transcendent thing-in-itself. Yet this makes the very word “thinking,” which Heidegger will not renounce, as unsubstantial as the thing to be thought: thinking without a concept is not thinking at all.
The true philosophical task, according to Heidegger, would be to conceive Being, yet Being resists any cogitative definition. This makes the appeal to conceive it a hollow one. Heidegger’s objectivism, the interdict he hurls against the thinking subject, is its faithful reverse image. Lines that a positivist finds bereft of sense present a promissory note to the eon; those lines are false only because they claim to make sense, because they sound like the echo of a substance. It is not sense that inhabits the inmost core of Heidegger’s philosophy, Expounded as a knowledge of salvation, it is what Scheler called a “knowledge of dominion.”
Heidegger’s cult of Being, his polemics against the idealistic cult of the mind, does of course presuppose a critique of the deification of Being. But Heidegger’s Being, all but indistinguishable from its antipode, the mind, is no less repressive than the mind. It is only less transparent than the mind, whose principle was transparency, and therefore even less capable of critical selfreflection on the nature of dominion than the philosophies of the mind had ever been. The electric charge of Heidegger’s word Being goes well with the praise which a neutralized culture bestows upon the devout or faithful as such— as if their devotions and beliefs were merits in themselves, regardless of the truth of what they believe. This neutralization comes into its own in Heidegger: faith in Being strikes out all the substance that had been noncommittally dragged along in the half or fully secularized religions. Heidegger drills in religious customs, but all that he retains of them is the general confirmation of dependence and submissiveness as surrogates of the objective formal laws of thought. Like logical positivism, the structure clings to the initiate while permanently eluding him. With the facts stripped of all that makes them more than facts, Heidegger seizes upon the waste product, so to speak, of the evaporating aura. He assures philosophy of something like a post-existence, provided it will make the ἔν και πᾶν its specialty.
The expression of Being is nothing but the feeling of this aura. It is an aura without a light-giving star, of course, one in which the indirect element becomes isolated and thus direct. But indirectness can no more be hypostatized than can the poles of subject and object; it is valid only in their constellation. Transmission is transmitted by what it transmits. Heidegger overstretches it into a sort of nonobjective objectivity. He settles in an imaginary realm between the obtuse facta bruta and the twaddle about weltanschauung. The concept of Being, whose transmissions are not to be put into words, becomes the “nonessence” which Aristotle recognized in the Platonic idea, the paragon of essence. It becomes a repetition of entity, from which Heidegger takes away whatever he gives to Being.
With the emphatic claim of Being to be purely essential thus voided, entity—indelibly inherent in Being without, in Heidegger’s version, having to admit its ontical character—shares as a parasite in that ontological claim. That Being shows, and that the subject should accept it passively, is borrowed from the old epistemological data which were supposed to be factual, ontical in character. However, in the sacral domain of Being this ontical character simultaneously sheds the trace of contingency that used to permit its critique. By virtue of the logic of the philosophical aporia, and without waiting for the philosopher to add his ideology, Heidegger transposes the empirical superiority of the way things are into the realm of essence.
The idea of Being as an entity whose cognitive definition would inevitably miss the thought by dissecting and thus, to use the current political term, subverting it—what this idea amounts to is conclusiveness, as in the one-time closed Eleatic system and in today’s closed world. Unlike the systems’ intent, however, the conclusiveness is heteronomous: beyond achievement by either the rational will of individuals or that total social subject which has not been realized to this day. In the statically renewed society we see ahead, no more new motives seem to swell the stockpile of apologetic ideology. Rather, the current motives are diluted and rendered unrecognizable to such an extent that actual experience is hard put to refute them. If the flashbacks and other tricks of philosophy project an entity upon Being, the entity is satisfactorily justified; if it is treated with disdain, as “a mere entity,” it may go on making mischief outside, without hindrance. There is little difference from the sensibility of dictators who avoid visits to concentration camps whose staff is honestly carrying out their directives.
The cult of Being lives by the age-old ideology of the idola fori, by that which thrives in the darkness of the word “being” and of the forms derived from it. “Is” establishes a context of existential judgment between the grammatical subject and the predicate, thus suggesting something ontical. Taken purely by itself, however, as a copula, it means at the same time the general, categorical fact of a synthesis, without representing anything ontical. Hence it can be entered straightways on the ontological side of the ledger. From the logicity of the copula, Heidegger gets the ontological purity that suits his allergy to all things factual, and from existential judgment he gets the memory of things ontical—which will permit the categorial achievement of the synthesis to be hypostatized, then, as given.
Even the word “is,” of course, has a “state of facts” corresponding to it. In every predicative judgment, “is” has its meaning, as have the subject and the predicate. But the “state of facts” is a matter of intentionality, not of being. The copula, by definition, is fulfilled only in the relation between subject and predicate. It is not independent. Heidegger, in misplacing it beyond the sole source of its meaning, succumbs to that reified thought to which he took exception. His definition of that which is meant by “is” as the absolute, ideal “in itself”—in other words, as Being—would give the same right to the things represented by the judgment’s subject and predicate, once detached from the copula. To both, synthesis by the copula would happen as a mere external occurrence; this was precisely what the concept of Being was thought up against. Once again, as in an obsolete logic, subject, copula, and predicate would be conclusive, completed details after the model of things.
In truth, however, predication is not an adjunct. In coupling the subject and the predicate it is also that which both would be in themselves if there were any way to conceive this “would be” without the synthesis of “is.” Hence the ban on extrapolating from the copula, either to a preordained “being” or to a “becoming,” a pure synthesis. This extrapolation rests on a confusion in the theory of meanings: the general meaning of the copula “is,” the constant grammatical token for the synthesis of the judgment, is confused with the specific meaning acquired by “is” in every judgment. The two coincide by no means. In that sense, “is” might be likened to occasional expressions. Its generality is a promissory note on particularization, the general form in which to carry out particular acts of judgment. Nomenclature takes this into account by reserving the scientific term “copula” for that generality—and for the particular job required in each judgment it reserves the “is.”
Heidegger ignores the difference. As a result, the particular job of “is” comes to be merely something like a phenomenal mode of the generality. The difference between the category and the substance of the existential judgment is blurred. The substitution of the general grammatical form for the apophantic content transforms the ontical task of “is” into an ontological one, a way of Being to be. Yet if the task that is postulated, transmitted, and transmitting in the sense of “is” were neglected in the particular, that “is” would retain no substrate of any kind; there would be nothing left but the abstract form of transmission in general. This “pure Becoming,” in Hegel’s word, is no more a primal principle than any other, unless one wishes to drive out Parmenides with Heraclitus.
The word Being has an overtone that can be missed in arbitrary definition only; it is what lends Heidegger’s philosophy its timbre. Every entity is more than it is—as we are reminded by Being, in contrast to entity. There is no entity whose determination and self-determination does not require something else, something which the entity itself is not; for by itself alone it would not be definable. It therefore points beyond itself. “Transmission” is simply another word for this. Yet Heidegger seeks to hold on to that which points beyond itself, and to leave behind, as rubble, that beyond which it points. To him, entwinement turns into its absolute opposite, into the πρώτη οὐσία. In the word “Being,” the totality of that which is, the copula has become an object.
We could, of course, not talk of an “is” without Being any more than we can talk of Being without an “is.” The word points to the objective element which in each predicative judgment qualifies the very synthesis required for its own crystallization. Yet Being is no more independent of the “is” than that state of facts in a judgment is independent of it. The dependence of the forms of language—which Heidegger rightly takes to be more than mere signification—bears witness against the things he will squeeze out of language. If grammar couples the “is” with the substrate category “Being” as its asset—that something is—it will reciprocally use Being only in relation to all there is, rather than in itself. True, the appearance of ontological purity is strengthened by the fact that every analysis of judgments leads to two moments of which neither one can be reduced to the other—no more than, metalogically, subject and object can be so reduced.* A thought fascinated by the chimera that anything is absolutely “first” will eventually tend to claim that even this irreducible thing itself is the “last.” The reduction to irreducibility vibrates in Heidegger’s concept of Being. But it is a formalization that does not jibe with what it formalizes. Taken by itself, it means no more than a negative: that whenever we judge, the moments of judgment will not go into each other on either side—in other words, that they are not identical. Outside this relation of the moments of judgment, irreducibility is nothing; there is nothing we can mean by it. Hence our inability to impute to it an ontological priority over the moments. The paralogism lies in the transformation of that negative—that one of the moments cannot be reduced to the other—into something positive.
Heidegger gets as far as the borderline of dialectical insight into the nonidentity in identity. But he does not carry through the contradiction in the concept of Being. He suppresses it. What can somehow be conceived as Being mocks the notion of an identity between the concept and that which it means; but Heidegger treats it as an identity, as pure Being itself, devoid of its otherness. The nonidentity in absolute identity is covered up like a skeleton in the family closet. Because “is” is neither a merely subjective function nor a thing, an entity—because to our traditional way of thinking it is no objectivity—Heidegger calls it “Being,” that nonsubjective, nonobjective third. The transition ignores the intent of the term as whose humble interpreter Heidegger regards himself. The insight that “is” can be called neither a mere thought nor a mere entity does not permit its transfiguration into something transcendent in relation to those two definitions. Every attempt to conceive the “is” at all, even in the palest generality, leads to entities on the one side and to concepts on the other. The constellation of moments is not to be reduced to a singular essence; what is inherent in that constellation is not an essence. The unity promised by the word “Being” lasts only so long as it is not conceived, as its meaning is not analyzed in line with Heidegger’s own method; any such analysis will bring to light what disappeared in the abyss of Being. But if the analysis becomes taboo, aporia turns into subreption. We are to conceive Being as the absolute, but it is to be the absolute only because we cannot conceive it. It shines beyond the moments only because it magically blinds our cognition of moments. A rationality that cannot do its best strikes itself as the worst.
Contrary to the linguistic atomization practiced by Heidegger, the believer in entirety, there is already a kind of coadunation between all single concepts in themselves and the judgments neglected by a classifying logic. The old tripartition of logic into concept, judgment, and conclusion is a relic like the system of Linné. Judgments are not a mere synthesis of concepts, for without judgment there is no concept—a fact which Heidegger overlooks, possibly under the influence of scholasticism. Yet within the indirectness, of Being as well as of “is,” the subject lies hidden— another moment (idealistic, if you will) which Heidegger discards, thus enhancing subjectivity into the absolute that precedes all subject-object dualism. Every analysis of a judgment takes us to a subject and an object, but this fact does not create a region beyond those moments, a region that would be “in itself.” The analysis results in the constellation of those moments, not in a third that would be superior, or at least more general.
One might, of course, say in Heidegger’s sense that “is” is not a thing, not τὰ ὄντα, not an entity, not what we usually mean by objectivity. For “is” has no substrate without the synthesis; in the state of facts that we mean, there is no corresponding τόδε τι we might interpret it as being. Therefore, we conclude, “is” must indicate that third, which is Being. But our conclusion is wrong, a tour de force of self-sufficient semantics. The paralogism is evinced by the fact that we cannot conceive such a supposedly pure substrate of “is.” Every attempt to do so runs into transmissions of which the hypostatized Being would be relieved. To Heidegger, however, its very inconceivability yields a profit, an addition to the metaphysical dignity of Being. Its refusal to submit to human thought is said to make it the Absolute. Because, in the best Hegelian manner, it cannot be reduced to either a subject or an object without leaving a remainder, it is regarded as beyond subject and object—although, independently of them, it would indeed not be at all. In the end, human reason, which cannot conceive Being, is itself disparaged—as if there were any way to separate thought from reason.
Undeniably, Being is not simply the totality of all there is, of all that is the case. With this anti-positivistic insight we do justice to the concept’s surplus over factuality. No concept would be thinkable, indeed none would be possible without the “more” that makes a language of language. But what cchoes in the word “Being” as opposed to τὰ ὄντα—that everything is more than it is—means entwinement, not something transcendent to entwinement. This is what Heidegger makes of it: something added to the individual entity. He pursues dialectics to the point of saying that neither the subject nor the object are immediate and ultimate; but he deserts dialectics in reaching for something immediate and primary beyond subject and object.
Thinking becomes archaistic as soon as whichever scattered entity is more than entity will be transfigured into a metaphysical ἀρχή. Heidegger reacts to the loss of the aura1 by arranging its function, turning the fact that things point beyond themselves into a substrate, and thus making that fact itself like a thing. He prescribes a repristination of the shudder caused, long before the mythical nature religions, by intermingling: Mana2 is raised up under the name of Being, as if our dawning impotence resembled that of pre-animistic primitives during a thunderstorm. Secretly, Heidegger obeys the law that the advancing rationality of their constantly irrational society makes men reach farther and farther into the past. Cautioned by trouble, he shuns the romantic Pelagianism of Klages and the powers of Oskar Goldberg; from the region of tangible superstition he flees to a dusk in which not even such mythologemas as that of the reality of images will take shape any longer. He eludes criticism, but without letting go of the advantages of originality: the origin is placed so far back that it will seem extratemporal and therefore omnipresent.
It does not work, however.3 There is no other way to break out of history than regression. Its goal, the most ancient of goals, is not truth but absolute semblance, dull imprisonment in a nature we do not see through, a mere parody of the supernatural. Heidegger’s transcendence† is an absolutized immanence, obdurate against its own immanent character. That semblance needs an explanation: how Being, flatly deduced and transmitted, can commandeer the insignia of ens concretissimum. The semblance rests upon the fact that the two poles of traditional epistemology and metaphysics, the pure, present object and pure thought, are both abstract, both removed from so many definitions that little more is to be said about them if we want our judgment to go by what we judge. Thus the two poles seem indistinguishable from each other, and this permits the unnoticed substitution of one for the other, depending on what is to be proved. The concept of entity at large, ideally without any category, is stripped of all qualifications, so it need not let itself be confined to any particular entity and may call itself Being. Yet Being, as an absolute concept, need not legitimize itself as a concept: by any definition it would delimit itself and violate its own meaning. Hence it may as well be garbed in the dignity of immediacy as the τόδε τι in that of essentiality.
Heidegger’s entire philosophy is set between these two extremes which are indifferent to one another.‡ Against his will, however, entity comes to the fore in Being. Being gets its life from the forbidden fruit, as if the fruit were Freya’s apples. Being, for its aural absoluteness’ sake, must not be contaminated with any entity; yet nothing but such contamination can give Being the immediacy that furnishes the legal title for the claim of absoluteness: that “Being” always means also as much as “entity” pure and simple. As soon as the talk of Being adds anything to pure invocation, the addition will come from the ontical sphere. Heidegger’s rudiments of material ontology are temporal; they have come to be, and they will pass as Scheler’s did before.
We fail to do justice to the concept of Being, however, until we also grasp the genuine experience that effects its instauration: the philosophical urge to express the inexpressible. The more anxiously a philosophy resists that urge, which is its peculiarity, the greater the temptation to tackle the inexpressible directly, without the labor of Sisyphus—which, by the way, would not be the worst definition of philosophy and does so much to bring ridicule upon it. Philosophy itself, as a form of the mind, contains a moment deeply akin to the state of suspense which Heidegger assigns to the topic of meditation—and which prevents meditation. For philosophy is form in a far more specific sense than the history of its concept leads us to suspect. In that history (except in a Hegelian stratum) it is rare for philosophy to incorporate in its reflection the qualitative difference that sets it apart from science, from the theory of science, and from logic, for all its coadunation with all three of them.
Philosophy consists neither in vérités de raison nor in vérités de fait. Nothing it says will bow to tangible criteria of any “being the case”; its theses on conceptualities are no more subject to the criteria of a logical state of facts than its theses on factualities are to the criteria of empirical science. Its detachment adds to its fragility. It will not be nailed down. Its history is one of permanent failure insofar as, terrorized by science, it would keep searching for tangibility. It has earned the positivists’ criticism by claiming to have a scientific approach—a claim rejected by science; but these critics are wrong when they confront philosophy with unphilosophical criteria as soon as these criteria are even slightly in line with the philosophical idea. Philosophy will not dispense with truth, however, but will illuminate the narrowness of scientific truth. The determinant of its suspended state is that even while keeping its distance from the verifying type of cognition it is not noncommittal—that the life it leads has a stringency of its own. Philosophy seeks stringency in that which it is not, in its opposite, and in the reflection on what, with a poor sort of naïveté, is viewed as binding by positive cognition.
Philosophy is neither a science nor the “cogitative poetry” to which positivists would degrade it in a stupid oxymoron. It is a form transmitted to those which differ from it as well as distinguished from them. Its suspended state is nothing but the expression of its inexpressibility. In this respect it is a true sister of music. There is scarcely a way to put the suspension into words, which may have caused the philosophers—except for Nietzsche, perhaps—to gloss it over. It is more the premise of understanding philosophical texts than it is their succinct quality. It may have sprung forth historically and may fall silent again, as music is in danger of doing. Heidegger has innervated this and literally transformed that specific trait of philosophy—perhaps because it is on the point of extinction—into a specialty, an objectivity of quasi-superior rank: a philosophy that knows it is judging neither facts nor concepts the way other things are judged, a philosophy that is not even sure what it is dealing with, would seek a positive content just the same, beyond facts, concepts, and judgments.
The suspended character of thought is thus raised to the very inexpressibility which the thought seeks to express. The nonobjective is enhanced into the outlined object of its own essence—and thereby violated. Under the weight of tradition, which Heidegger wants to shake off, the inexpressible becomes explicit and compact in the word “Being,” while the protest against reification becomes reified, divorced from thinking, and irrational. By treating the inexpressible side of philosophy as his immediate theme, Heidegger dams up philosophy all the way back to a revocation of consciousness. By way of punishment, the well he wants to excavate dries up. It is a buried well, in his conception, oozing a scantier trickle then ever came from the insights of the allegedly destroyed philosophy that inclines indirectly to the inexpressible. What Heidegger attributes to the poverty of our time is the poverty of a thought that fancies itself beyond time. The direct expression of the inexpressible is void; where the expression carried, as in great music, its seal was evanescence and transitoriness, and it was attached to the process, not to an indicative “That’s it.” Thoughts intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought falsify the inexpressible. They make of it what the thinker would least like it to be: the monstrosity of a flatly abstract object.
If it were not too ontical-psychological for them, functional ontologists might argue that every child asks about Being. Reflection cures him of that habit, and as always in idealism, reflection on the reflection seeks to compensate for the cure. But the doubled reflection will hardly ask directly, as the child does. With the anthropomorphism of an adult, so to speak, philosophy pictures the conduct of the child as that of the childhood of the species, as before and above time. The child has trouble with his relation to words, which he appropriates with an effort that can scarcely be imagined any more at a later age; he has far less trouble with the world that is fairly familiar to him, in his early phases, as made up of objects of action. He wants to find out what the words mean, and the occupation with them—as well as an impish, nagging, psychoanalytically explicable stubbornness, perhaps—leads him to the relation of words and things. He may get on his mother’s nerves with the awkward problem why a bench is called a bench. His naïveté is un-naïve. As language, culture has invaded his stirring consciousness very early, mortgaging the talk of originality. The meaning of the words and their truth content, their “attitude toward objectivity,” are not yet sharply distinguished from each other. To know what the word “bench” means and to know what a bench really is—which does include an existential judgment—is one and the same to that consciousness, or not differentiated, at least. Besides, in countless cases, the distinction takes an effort.
It is thus precisely the childlike directness that is indirect in itself, with the acquired vocabulary for its orientation. The boring for the “why,” for the first cause, is pre-formed. Language is taken for granted; it is experienced as φύσει, not as θέσει. At the outset there is fetishism, and the hunt for the outset remains always subject to it. That fetishism is hard to see through, of course, since whatever we think is also a matter of language. Unreflective nominalism is as wrong as the realism that equips a fallible language with the attributes of a revealed one. It is in Heidegger’s favor that there is no speechless “in-itself”—that language, therefore, lies in truth, not truth in language, as something merely signified by language. But the constitutive share of language in truth does not establish an identity of truth and language.
The test of the power of language is that the expression and the thing will separate in reflection.4 Language becomes a measure of truth only when we are conscious of the nonidentity of an expression with that which we mean. Heidegger refuses to engage in that reflection; he halts after the first step of language-philosophical dialectics. His thinking is repristinative also in its aim to restore the “power of the Name” by a ritual of nomenclature. Yet in our secularized languages this power is not present in a way that would let the subject accomplish the restoration. By secularization, the subjects have withdrawn the Name from the languages, and the objectivity of language needs their intransigence, not a philosophical trust in God.
Language is more than a sign only where it shows significative strength, where it most exactly and succinctly covers what is meant. It “is” only insofar as it comes to be, in the constant confrontation of expression and thing—this was the premise Karl Kraus proceeded on, though himself probably leaning toward an ontological view of language. Heidegger’s procedure, on the other hand, is a “Teutonizing cabbalism,” in Scholem’s phrase. He treats the historic languages as if they were those of Being, as romantically as any violent anti-romanticist. His kind of destruction halts before philological erudition—which he does not consider, but does suspend at the same time. Such a consciousness will affirm its environment, or will put up with it, at least; but a genuine philosophical radicalism, no matter what the form of its historical appearance, is a product of doubt. The radical question that will destroy nothing but the doubt is itself illusory.
The fundament beneath Heidegger’s emphatic expression of the word “Being” is an old category of his, one which later on goes all but unmentioned: authenticity. The transcendence of Being, as opposed to concept and entity, is to redeem the desideratum of authenticity as that which is not illusory, neither artificial nor moot. Protested against, with good reason, is the fact that the historic evolution of philosophy has leveled the distinction between essence and appearance, the inherent impulse of philosophy as θαυμάζειν, as discontent with the façade. Unreflecting enlighteners have negated the metaphysical thesis of essence as the true world behind the phenomena with an equally abstract counter-thesis: that essence, as the epitome of metaphysics, is itself mere appearance—as if appearance, therefore, were the same as essence. Because of the dichotomy in the world, its authentic element, the law of dichotomy, is hidden. The positivist who adjusts to this by deleting as myth and subjective projection whatever is not a datum, whatever is hidden, adds as much to the illusiveness as was once added by doctrines that consoled men for their suffering in the mundus sensibilis by avowing the noumenal.
Heidegger did sense some of this mechanism. But the authenticity he misses will promptly recoil into positivity, into authenticity as a posture of consciousness—a posture whose emigration from the profane powerlessly imitates the theological habit of the old doctrine of essence. The hidden essence is rendered proof against the suspicion of being pure mischief. No one, for example, dares consider that the categories of the so-called mass trend—expounded in Being and Time as well as in Jaspers’ paperback on the intellectual situation of our time5—may themselves be categories of that hidden mischief which makes men what they are; and they must let philosophy chide them to boot, then, for having forgotten the essence. The resistance to the reified consciousness, tremors of which linger in the pathos of authenticity, has been broken. The remaining criticism is unleashed against the phenomenon—in other words, against the subjects. The essence, whose self-reproducing guilt is merely represented by that of the subjects, remains undisturbed.
While refusing to be distracted from the θαυμάζειν, fundamental ontologists cut themselves off from an answer by the form in which they put the question what is authentic. Not for nothing is it dressed in the disgusting technical term “question of Being.” This is mendacious because the appeal is to every individual’s bodily concern—to the naked concern of Hamlet’s soliloquy, whether in death the individual is obliterated absolutely or has the hope of the Christian non confundar—but what Hamlet means by being or not being is replaced by pure essence, in which existence is swallowed up. By making things thematical in accord with phenomenological custom, with a full array of descriptions and distinctions, existential ontology satisfies the concern and distracts from it. “The question of Being,” says Heidegger, “aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.”6
What such lines, in complicated phenomenological fashion, rig up as the question of Being is so overstretched it will lose whatever can be conceived under the word; and the conception is further devalued, if possible, into so engrossing a bustle that the failure will commend itself as higher truth, as an authentic answer to the question that has been begged. Lest it be insufficiently authentic, the so-called question of Being condenses into a zero-dimensional point: into what it admits as the sole true-born meaning of Being. It turns into a ban on any step beyond this, and finally into a ban on any step beyond the tautology whose manifestation in Heidegger’s prose is that time and again the self-uncovering Being says nothing else but “Being.”7
If possible, Heidegger would pass off the tautological nature of Being as something superior to the rules of logic. But it can be derived from aporetics. As Husserl before him, Heidegger will blithely bow to desiderata of thinking which he juxtaposes although they have proved incompatible in the history of the metaphysics he withdrew from circulation, in overly sovereign fashion: to purity, the freedom from empirical admixtures that makes for absolute validity, and to the immediacy of flatly given things, irrefutable because they lack any conceptual adjunct. Thus Husserl combined his platform of a “pure”—i.e., eidetic— phenomenology with the postulate of a self-given phenomenal object. The title “Pure Phenomenology” is already a confluence of the contradictory norms. That it was to be no theory of knowledge but a position to be assumed at will, rather, relieved this phenomenology of the need to think through the interrelation of its categories. In this regard Heidegger differs from his mentor only insofar as he removes the contradictory program from consciousness, which was its stage for Husserl. Heidegger moves it into the transcendence of consciousness—a conception, by the way, that was already preformed in the preponderance of the noema in Husserl’s middle period.
Yet the incompatibility of the pure and the visual compels us to choose the substrate of their unity so indefinitely that it will no longer contain any moment in which one of the two postulates might belie the other. Hence Heidegger’s Being must be neither entity nor concept. The price it has to pay for thus becoming unimpeachable is its nihility—the fact that it defies fulfillment by any thought and any visuality, leaving us empty-handed but for the self-sameness of the mere name. Even the endless repetitions that abound in Heidegger’s publications should not so much be laid to his garrulity as to aporetics. Definition alone brings a phenomenon beyond itself. What remains quite indefinite will compensate by being said over and over—just as a gesture that fails to impress its object will be made over and over, as an absurd ritual. The philosophy of Being shares this ritual of repetition with the mythus it would so much like to be.
The dialectics of Being and entity—that no Being can be conceived without an entity, and no entity without transmission—is suppressed by Heidegger. Moments that are not without one transmitting the other are to him directly one, and this one is positive Being. But the figures do not come out even. Categories also will be sued for debt. Though driven out with a pitchfork, entity returns: a Being purged of entity is a primal phenomenon only so long as the excluded entity lies nonetheless within it. Heidegger copes with this in a strategic masterpiece that is the matrix of his thinking as a whole. The term “ontological difference” permits his philosophy to lay hands even on the insoluble moment of entity. “What we are to understand by such a ‘Being’ alleged to be quite independent of the ontical sphere— this, of course, has to remain unsettled. Definition would involve it in the dialectics of subject and object, in the very thing from which it is to be exempt. This indefiniteness at the probably most central point of Heidegger’s ontology is the reason why the extremes ‘Being’ and ‘entity’ must necessarily stay undefined toward each other as well, so that we cannot even say what the difference consists in. Talk of the ‘ontological difference’ comes down to the tautology that Being is not entity because it is Being. Thus Heidegger himself makes the mistake for which he upbraids Western metaphysics: that it always left unsaid what is meant by Being as distinct from entity.”8
The breath of this philosophy turns entity into an ontological state of facts,⸸ a dimmed and hypostatized expression of the impossibility to conceive Being without entity—just as entity, according to Heidegger’s basic thesis, cannot be conceived without Being. This is how he loops the loop. The exigency that ontology cannot do without its opposite, the ontical—the ontological principle’s dependence on its counterpart, the inalienable skandalon of ontology—becomes an element of ontology. The ontologization of the ontical is Heidegger’s triumph over the other, less artful ontologists. The fact that there is no Being without entity is brought into the form that the being of entity is of the essence of Being. Thus a truth becomes an untruth, entity turns into essence. Being takes over what in the dimension of its being-in-itself it would not wish to be; it takes possession of entity, whose conceptual unity is always a connotation in the literal sense of Being.
The whole construction of the ontological difference is a fake, a “Potemkin’s village.” It is erected solely to permit a more sovereign rejection of doubts about absolute Being, by means of the thesis of entity as a mode of Being to be. As each individual entity is reduced to its concept, to the concept of the ontical, that which makes it an entity as opposed to the concept will disappear. The formal, generally conceptual structure of all talk of the ontical, and of all equivalents of this talk, takes the place of the substance of that concept, a substance heterogeneous to the conceptuality. What makes this possible is that the concept of entity—not at all unlike Heidegger’s celebrated one of Being—is the concept which encompasses out-and-out nonconceptuality, that which is not exhausted by the concept, yet without ever expressing its difference from the encompassed. Because “entity” is the concept for all entities, entity itself becomes a concept, an ontological structure that is convertible without a break into the structure of Being. In Being and Time, the ontologization of entity is brought into a succinct formula: “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.”9 The outcome of the definition of entities in Dasein, of existents qua existents, by the concepts of Dasein and existence is that precisely what is not essential in Dasein, precisely what is not ontological in it, is ontological. The ontological difference is removed by means of a conceptualization of the nonconceptual into nonconceptuality.
The only time the ontical does not bother ontology is when it is of a kind with ontology. The subreption establishes the precedence of ontology over the ontological difference: “But here we are not dealing with an antithesis of existentia and essentia, because these two metaphysical definitions of Being, let alone their relationship, are not yet in question at all.”10 Heidegger, his assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, puts the alleged antecedent of the ontological difference on the side of essence: as the difference expressed in the concept of entity is denied, the concept is exalted by the nonconceptuality said to be beneath it. Another passage in the Plato tract makes this comprehensible There Heidegger shifts the question of existence away from existence and transforms it into one about essence: “The statement, ‘Man exists,’ does not answer the question whether or not man is real; it answers the question about the ‘essence’ of man.”11
The talk about “not yet,” in the same passage in which the antithesis of existence and essence is rejected,12 is not an accidental temporal metaphor for something other than temporal. Actually it is archaic thinking, Ionian hylozoistic far more than Eleatic; the scarce philosophemes of the former type that have come down to us show a murky mixture of existence and essence. The toil and trouble of the metaphysicists of Antiquity—from Parmenides, who had to split thinking and Being so that he might identify them, down to Aristotle—consisted in forcing the division. Demythologization is division; the myth is the deceptive unity of the undivided. But the primal principles did not suffice to explain the world which they always denoted also. It is because this insufficiency led to analysis—with the result that the magical extraterritoriality of Being as a vagrant between essence and fact was caught in the web of concepts—that Heidegger, to save the privilege of Being, must condemn the concept’s critical labors as a history of decay, as if philosophy might occupy a historical standpoint beyond history while on the other hand obeying a history that is ontologized itself, as is existence.
Heidegger is anti-intellectualist under compulsion of the system and anti-philosophical on philosophical grounds, just as the present religious revivals do not get their inspiration from the truth of their doctrines but from the philosophy that religion would be good to have. As far back as we can trace it, the history of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment. This is why Heidegger, resolutely enough, refuses to halt at any one stage of history, as he might perhaps have been tempted to do in his youth; it is why he takes a Wellsian time machine, rather, to plunge into the abyss of archaicism in which everything can be everything and mean everything. He reaches out for mythology, but his mythology too remains one of the twentieth century. It remains the illusion unmasked by history, an illusion made striking by the utter impossibility of reconciling the myths with the rationalized form of reality with which every possible consciousness is entwined. Heidegger’s type of consciousness presumes to mythological status as if it could have that status without being mythological in kind.
Showing up, along with Heidegger’s concept of Being, is the mythical concept of fate: “The advent of entity rests upon the fate of Being.”13 The eulogized undividedness of existence and essence in Being is thus called by name as what it is: the blind context of nature; the doom of concatenation; the absolute negation of the transcendence whose tremolo notes quiver in the talk of Being. The illusion in the concept of Being is this transcendence; but the reason for it is that Heidegger’s definitions—deducted from Dasein, from the miseries of real human history to this day—dispense with the memory of those miseries. His definitions turn into moments of Being itself, and thus into things superior to that existence. Their astral power and glory is as cold to the infamy and fallibility of historic reality as that reality is sanctioned as immutable. The celebration of senselessness as sense is mythical; so is the ritualistic repetition of natural contexts in symbolic individual actions, as if that made these contexts supernatural. Categories such as Angst—of which, at least, we cannot stipulate that they must be everlasting—are transfigured into constituents of Being as such, into things superior to that existence, into its a priori. They are installed as the very “sense” which at the present state of history cannot be positively and immediately named. Absurdities are invested with sense, on the theory that the sense of Being will appear precisely in the form of its antithesis: in the form of mere existence.
Hegel anticipated the special ontological position of Dasein by means of the idealistic thesis that the subject takes precedence. He exploited the fact that the nonidentical on its part can be defined only as a concept. To him it was thereby removed from dialectics and brought to identity: the ontical was ontologized.
Shadings of language in the Logic make this quickly apparent. As the third Note to “Becoming” expounds, space and time are “explicitly defined as indefinite—which, to go back to its simplest form, is Being. Yet this very indefiniteness of Being is what makes out its definiteness; for indefiniteness is opposed to definiteness; so, as the opposite, it is itself defined as the negative, and as the purely, wholly abstractly negative at that. This indefiniteness or abstract negation, which Being has in itself, is what external as well as internal reflection expresses by equating Being with nothingness, by declaring it to be an empty thought figure, to be nothing.—Or one may express it thus: because Being is what lacks definition, it has not the (affirmative) being of definiteness; it is not Being, but nothingness.”14
Tacitly, indefiniteness is used as a synonym for the undefined. Vanishing in the concept of indefiniteness is what it is the concept of; the concept is equated with the undefined as its definition, and this permits the undefined to be identified with nothingness. Thus the absolute idealism which logic would have to demonstrate first is in truth already presupposed. This is the point also of Hegel’s refusal to begin with “something” rather than with Being. That the nonidentical is not immediate, that it is a matter of transmission, is trivial; but at central points Hegel fails to do justice to his own insight. The insight says that even though the nonidentical is identical—as self-transmitted—it is nonetheless nonidentical: it is otherness to all its identifications. Hegel does not carry the dialectics of nonidentity to the end, although his intention elsewhere is to defend the pre-critical usage against that of the philosophy of reflection. His own concept of nonidentity—to him a vehicle for turning it into identity, into equality with itself—inevitably has its opposite for its content; this he brushes aside in a hurry. What he explicitly stated in the tract on “difference,” and promptly integrated in his own philosophy, becomes the most serious objection to that philosophy.
Hegel’s absolute system, based upon the perennial resistance of the nonidentical, negates itself, contrary to his own understanding. There is truly no identity without something nonidentical—while in his writings identity, as totality, takes ontological precedence, assisted by the promotion of the indirectness of the nonidentical to the rank of its absolute conceptual Being. Theory, instead of bringing the indissoluble into its own in concepts, swallows it by subsumption under its general concept, that of indissolubility. Identity’s dependence on the nonidentical, as Hegel almost achieved it, is the protest against any philosophy of identity. The Aristotelian category of steresis is the trump card of that protest, and its doom. The abstract concept necessarily lacks the ability to be nonconceptual, and Hegel credits this lack to it as a merit, as something loftier, as the spirit—as opposed to that from which he unavoidably abstracts. What is less is supposed to be truer, as later on in Heidegger’s self-righteous ideology of splendid homeliness.
The apologia for dearth is not merely one for a thinking that has once more shrunk to a point. It has its precise ideological function. The aflfectation of august simplicity warms up the dignity of indigence and frugal living; it suits the absurdity that real want is continuing in a society whose state of production no longer admits the plea that there are not enough goods to go around. Philosophy, barred from naïveté by its own concept, helps over this absurdity by flirting with the Rhenish Home Companion: in its history of Being, want has the radiance of superiority as such—at least ad kalendas Graecas. Hegel already gave a rating of greater substantiality to the results of abstraction. Under the same topos he deals with matter, also with the transition to existence.15 That its concept is indefinite, that as a concept it lacks precisely what is meant by it, is supposed to be why all light is cast on its form. Hegel fits this into Western metaphysics, at its outermost limits; Engels saw that, but came to the opposite, equally undialectical conclusion: that matter is the first Being.16
Dialectical criticism is due the concept of the first Being itself. Heidegger repeats the Hegelian sleight-of-hand maneuver, except that Hegel’s is practiced openly while Heidegger, not wanting to be an idealist, shrouds and beclouds the ontologization of the ontical. The mainspring for dressing up the deficiency of the concept as its surplus is in each case the old Platonic austerity: that whatever is nonsensual is more elevated. Logic achieves the utmost sublimation of the ascetic ideal and makes a fetish of it at the same time, devoid of the tension with the senses from which the ascetic ideal derives its truth as against the delusion of an authorized fulfillment. The concept, purified as its rejects its content, functions in secret as the model of a life that is arranged so no measure of mechanical progress—the equivalent of the concept—may ever, under any circumstances, do away with poverty.
If ontology were possible at all, it would be possible in an ironic sense, as the epitome of negativity. What remains equal to itself, the pure identity, is the worst. The mythical doom is timeless. Philosophy has been its secularization, in thrall to the doom insofar as its gigantic euphemisms would reinterpret the immutable as the good, down to the theodicies of Leibniz and Hegel. If one were drafting an ontology in accordance with the basic state of facts, of the facts whose repetition makes their state invariant, such an ontology would be pure horror. An ontology of culture, above all, would have to include where culture as such went wrong; a philosophically legitimate ontology would have more of a place in construing the culture industry than in construing Being. Good would be nothing but what has escaped from ontology.
The ontologization of the ontical is the primary goal of the doctrine of existence. According to the age-old argument, existence cannot be deduced from essence; hence it is said to be essential in itself. It is raised above Kierkegaard’s model, but this very elevation blunts the cutting-edge it has for Kierkegaard. In the temple of existence, even the Bible word that “by their fruits ye shall know them” sounds like a profanation and must be silenced. As Being’s mode to be, existence is no longer the antithetical opposite of the concept. Its poignancy has been removed. It is awarded the dignity of the Platonic idea, but also the bulletproof character of something that cannot otherwise be conceived because it is no conception, because it is simply there. On this point Heidegger is in accord with Jaspers, who guilelessly admits the neutralization of existence against Kierkegaard: “In his negative choices… I sensed the very opposite of everything I loved and wanted, of everything I was willing or unwilling to do.”17
Though not infected by the pater subtilis in his construction of the concept of Being, Jaspers’ own existentialism was understood from the outset as a “search for Being.”18 Without breaking faith with themselves, Jaspers and Heidegger both could make the sign of the cross at what was done in Paris in the sign of existence—at the phenomenon which all too quickly, for their taste, spread from the lecture halls to the bistros19 where it sounded far less respectable. Of course, a critique confined to the thesis that the ontical cannot be ontologized will itself remain a judgment on invariant structural relations. It will remain too ontological, so to speak; this was the philosophical motive behind Sartre’s turn to politics. There was something strengthless, something shadowy about the post-World War II movement that adopted the name “existentialism” and the bearing of an avant-garde. The existentialism which the German Establishment suspects of subversive leanings resembles the beards of its adherents. The beard is the oppositionist costume of juveniles acting like cavemen who refuse to play along with the cultural swindle, while in fact they merely don the oldfashioned emblem of the patriarchal dignity of their grandfathers.
What is true in the concept of existence is the protest against a condition of society and scientific thought that would expel unregimented experience—a condition that would virtually expel the subject as a moment of cognition. Kierkegaard’s protest against philosophy was also one against the reified consciousness in which, as he put it, subjectivity has been extinguished: he opposed philosophy for philosophy’s own sake. In the French existentialist schools this is anachronistically repeated. The subjectivity that has been really incapacitated and internally weakened in the meantime is isolated and—complementing Heidegger’s hypostasis of its counter-pole, Being—hypostatized. Unmistakably in the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, the severance of the subject amounts, like that of Being, to the illusion that transmission is immediacy. As Being is transmitted by the concept, and thus by the subject, so is the subject transmitted by the world it lives in, and so powerless and merely inwardly is its decision. Such impotence helps the reified mischief to triumph over the subject.
The concept of existence impressed many as a philosophical approach because it seemed to combine divergent things: the reflection on the subject—said to constitute every cognition and thus every entity—and the concrete, immediate individuation of each single subject’s experience. To the subjective approach, the divergence was an irritant in toto: the constitutive subject could be chided as a mere deduction from the empirical one, unfit to establish the empirical subject and any kind of empirical Dasein, while the individual could be upbraided as an accidental bit of the world, lacking the essential necessity required to encompass and, if possible, to establish entity. Existence—or man, in the demagogic jargon—seems to be both universal, the essence common to all men, and specific in the sense that this universal can be neither imagined nor even conceived otherwise than in particularization, in its distinct individuality.
Before all cognitive critique, however, in the simplest reflection on the concept of man in intentione recta, this eureka will lose its evidential character. We cannot say what man is. Man today is a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant—except perhaps for the defenselessness and neediness in which some anthropologies wallow. He drags along with him as his social heritage the mutilations inflicted upon him over thousands of years. To decipher the human essence by the way it is now would sabotage its possibility. A so-called historical anthropology would scarcely serve any longer. It would indeed include evolution and conditioning, but it would attribute them to the subjects; it would abstract from the dehumanization that has made the subjects what they are, and that continues to be tolerated under the name of a qualitas humana. The more concrete the form in which anthropology appears, the more deceptive will it come to be, and the more indifferent to whatever in man is not at all due to him, as the subject, but to the de-subjectifying process that has paralleled the historic subject formation since time immemorial. That man is “open” is an empty thesis, advanced— rarely without an invidious side glance at the animal—by an anthropology that has “arrived.” It is a thesis that would pass off its own indefiniteness, its fallissement, as its definite and positive side. Existence is a moment. It is not the whole it was conceived against, the whole from which, severed, it seized the unfulfillable pretension of entirety as soon as it styled itself philosophy. That we cannot tell what man is does not establish a peculiarly majestic anthropology; it vetoes any anthropology.
While Kierkegaard nominalistically plays off existence against essence, as a wagon of theology against metaphysics, he does lend to existence in the sense of the immediate individual a symbolic character, if only in accordance with the dogma of the person as created in God’s image. He polemicizes against ontology, but the attributes of ontology are absorbed by entity—by “that individual,” in the realm of Dasein. The exaltation of existence in Being and Time differs little from that in the initial reflections of The Sickness Unto Death. Consciousness, Kierkegaard’s “transparency” of the subject, is the legal authority for ontologizing existence: “That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call ‘existence,’”20 or, literally: “Dasein is in itself ‘ontological,’ because existence is thus determinative for it.”21
The concept of subjectivity oscillates no less than that of Being; so it can be attuned at will to the concept of Being. Its ambiguity permits Heidegger to equate Dasein with a mode of Being to be, and it lets him remove the ontological difference by analysis. Dasein is then called ontical by virtue of its spatial-temporal individuation, and ontological as the logos. The dubious part of Heidegger’s inference from Dasein to Being is the “simultaneity” implied in his talk of a “multiple precedence” of Dasein “before all other entity.” The subject is determined by consciousness, but that part of it from which consciousness cannot be split is not, for that reason, fully conscious as well. It is not transparent and “ontological.”
In fact, nothing but propositions could be ontological. The conscious individual (whose consciousness would not exist without him) remains in space and time, a factuality, an entity; he is not Being. In Being—since it is a concept, no immediate datum—lies something of the subject; but in the subject lies the individual human consciousness, and thus something ontical. That this entity can think is not enough to strip it of its definition as an entity, as if it were directly essential. It is precisely not “in itself” that it is “ontological,” for selfhood postulates the very onticality that is eliminated in the doctrine of ontological precedence.
But criticism is not only due to the fact that the ontological concept of existence extirpates the nonconceptual by exalting it into a concept. There is also the positional value which the nonconceptual moment conquers in the concept. Nominalism, one of the roots of the existential philosophy of the Protestant Kierkegaard, gave Heidegger’s ontology the attractiveness of the nonspeculative. Just as the concept of existence is a false conceptualization of existing things, the complementary precedence which these things are given over the concept allows the ontological concept of existence to profit in turn. If the individual is a socially transmitted phenomenon, so is his form of theoretical epistemological reflection. It is unfathomable why “my” individual consciousness should take precedence over anything else. By using the pronoun “my,” the speaker of the moment presupposes the linguistic generality he would deny by the primacy of his particularization. What turns for him into a basis of necessity is the pure accident of having to start with his consciousness, with the consciousness he happens to have grown into.
And yet, as Hegel recognized quite early, the relation to the other, which the limitation to “my” is intended to exclude, is implied in the limitation. Society precedes the subject. That the subject mistakes itself for an antecedent of society is its necessary delusion, a mere negative statement about society. In the word “my,” the proprietary relationship has been perpetuated in language, has all but turned into a logical form. Without the universal element to which this “my” points by setting itself apart from it, the pure τόδε τι is as abstract as the universal which the isolated τόδε τι brands empty and void.
What Kierkegaard’s philosophical personalism—and perhaps Buber’s distillate of it as well—sensed in nominalism was the latent chance for metaphysics. But where consistent enlighteners absolutize nominalism—instead of dialectically penetrating the nominalist thesis too—they recoil into mythology. Their philosophy becomes mythology at the point where, believing in some ultimate datum, they cut reflection short. To break off reflection, to take a positivist’s pride in his own naïveté, is nothing else but thoughtless, stubbornly conceptualized self-preservation.
The concept of “existential” things—Heidegger prefers the already ontologized noun existentialia (Dasein qua Being)—is governed by the idea that the measure of truth is not its objectivity, of whichever kind, but the pure being-that-way and acting-that-way of the thinker. The subjective reason of the positivists is ennobled by divesting it of its rational element. Jaspers goes right along with Kierkegaard in this respect; the objectivist Heidegger would scarcely subscribe to the proposition that subjectivity is truth, and yet the analysis of existentialia in Being and Time has distinct overtones of that proposition. Contributing to its German popularity is the combination of radical bearing and sacred tone with a personality-directed ideology of genuineness and grit— qualities which individuals in the spirit of privilege have the doltish cunning to reserve to themselves. If subjectivity by its very nature, which Kant called functional, dissolves the preordained solid substances, its ontological affirmation dispels the fear of those substances. Subjectivity, the functional concept κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν, becomes the one absolute solid—as already outlined, by the way, in Kant’s doctrine of transcendental unity. But truth, the constellation of subject and object in which both penetrate each other, can no more be reduced to subjectivity than to that Being whose dialectical relation to subjectivity Heidegger tends to blur.
What is true in the subject unfolds in relation to that which it is not, by no means in a boastful affirmation of the way it is. Hegel knew this, but it bothers the repristinative schools. If truth were indeed subjectivity, if a thought were nothing but a repetition of the subject, the thought would be null and void. The existential exaltation of the subject eliminates, for the subject’s sake, what might become clear to the subject. It thus falls prey to the relativism to which it is deemed superior, and it brings the subject down to an opaque accidentality. The exponent of such an irrational existentialism will throw out his chest and agitate against the intellectuals by confessing that he is one, too: “But the philosopher will brave this sea of talk that knows no objective dividing line between genuine, originally philosophical parlance and empty intellectualism. While the man of science always has universally valid criteria for his results and derives his satisfaction from their inescapable validity, the philosopher has nothing but the ever-subjective criterion of his own being to tell empty talk from the talk that will awaken Existenz. The ethos of theoretical endeavors in the sciences and in philosophy is radically different.”22
Devoid of its otherness, of what it renders extraneous, an existence which thus proclaims itself the criterion of thought will validate its mere decrees in authoritarian style, as in political practice a dictator validates the ideology of the day. The reduction of thought to the thinkers halts the progress of thought; it brings to a standstill what thought would need to be thought, and what subjectivity would need to live in. As the solid ground of truth, subjectivity is reified. In the ring of the old-fashioned word “personality” all this was heard already. Thinking becomes what the thinker has been from the start. It becomes a tautology, a regressive form of consciousness.
The utopian potential of thought would be, rather, to be conveyed by reason as embodied in the individual subjects, and to break through the narrowness of that other thinking. The best energy of thought is to outstrip the feeble and fallible thinker. This energy is paralyzed—since Kierkegaard, to obscurantist ends—by the existential truth concept. Obtundity is advertised as the strength for truth, which is why the existence cult thrives in the backwoods of all countries.
Ontology has long cashiered the resistance to idealism which the concept of existence used to offer. Entity, once called upon to bear witness against the sanctity of the man-made idea, has been equipped with the far more ambitious sanctity of Being itself. This ether ennobles it from the outset, as compared with the conditions of material existence—the kind which the Kierkegaard of The Present Age meant when he confronted the idea with existence. What happens when the concept of existence is absorbed in Being, indeed what happens as soon as it is philosophically processed into a general concept fit for discussion, is another spiriting away of history—which Kierkegaard, who did not take a dim view of the left-wing Hegelians, had introduced into speculation under the theological sign of a paradox, the fusion of time and eternity. The ambivalence of the doctrine of Being, the fact that it deals with entity and at the same time ontologizes it—in other words, deprives it of all its nonconceptuality by resorting to its characteristica formalis—this ambivalence also determines the doctrine’s relation to history.⹋
On the one hand, when history is transposed into the existentiale of historicality, the salt of the historical will lose its savor. By this transposition the claim of all prima philosophia to be a doctrine of invariants is extended to the variables: historicality immobilizes history in the unhistorical realm, heedless of the historical conditions that govern the inner composition and constellation of subject and object.*† This, then, permits the verdict about sociology. As happened to psychology before, under Husserl, sociology is distorted into a relativism extraneous to the thing itself and held to injure the solid work of thinking—as if real history were not stored up in the core of each possible object of cognition; as if every cognition that seriously resists reification did not bring the petrified things in flux and precisely thus make us aware of history.
On the other hand, the ontologization of history permits one without a glance to attribute the power of Being to historical powers, and thus to justify submission to historical situations as though it were commanded by Being itself. This aspect of Heidegger’s view of history has been stressed by Karl Löwith.*‡ That history can be ignored or deified, depending on the circumstances, is a practicable political conclusion from the philosophy of Being. Time itself, and thus transiency, is both absolutized and transfigured as eternal by the existential-ontological drafts. The concept of existence as the essentiality of transience, the temporality of temporal things, keeps existence away by naming it. Once treated as the title of a phenomenological problem, existence is integrated. This is the latest type of philosophical solace, the type of mythical euphemism—a falsely resurrected faith that one might break the spell of nature by soothingly copying it.
Existential thinking crawls into the cave of a long-past mimesis. In the process it is nonetheless accommodating the most fatal prejudice from the philosophical history which it has laid off like a superfluous employee: the Platonic prejudice that the imperishable must be the good—which is to say no more than that in permanent warfare the stronger is always right. Yet if Plato’s pedagogy cultivated martial virtues, the Gorgias dialogue still made these virtues answerable to the highest idea, to the idea of justice. In the darkened sky of the existence doctrine, however, no star is shining any more. Existence is sanctified without the sanctifying factor. Of the eternal idea in which entity was to share, or by which it was to be conditioned, nothing remains but the naked affirmation of what is anyway—the affirmation of power.
* A rigorous distinction has to be made, first, between the purely logical subject-object relation in a judgment and the relation of subject and object as an epistemological-material one. What the term subject means in the two cases is almost contradictory. In the theory of judgments it is the basic assumption of which something is predicated, as opposed to the act of judgment and to what is judged in the synthesis of the judgment; in a sense, it is the objectivity upon which thinking works. Epistemologically, however, “subject” means the thinking function, and frequently also the entity which thinks and cannot be excluded from the concept “I” except at the price of ceasing to mean what it means.
In spite of this, the distinction involves a close kinship of the things distinguished. The constellation of a state of facts covered by the judgment—“the judged as such,” in the language of phenomenology— and of the synthesis, of which that state of facts is the basis as much as the product, recalls the material constellation of subject and object. These differ in the same way, cannot be brought to pure identity with one side or the other, and mutually qualify each other because no object is determinable without the subject, the determinant that makes an object of it, and because no subject can think anything it does not confront, not even that subject itself. Thinking is tied to entities.
The parallel between logic and epistemology is more than a mere analogy. The purely logical relation between fact and synthesis, a relation known irrespective of existence, of spatial-temporal factuality, is in truth an abstraction from the subject-object relation. It is on this abstraction that pure thought focuses, neglecting all particular ontical subject-matter, and yet the abstraction has no power over something that occupies the vacant place of the subject-matter—something which, however generally it may designate that vacant place, means substantive things and requires substantive things to become that which it means.
The methodological procedure of abstraction has its limit in the sense of what we imagine to have in our hands as a pure form. There is no extinguishing the trace of entity in the formal-logical “something.” The form “something” is shaped after the model of material, of the τόδε τι; it is a material form and thus, after its own purely logical meaning, in need of that metalogical element for which epistemological reflection strove as the counter-pole of thought.
† “Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. S. Robinson, p. 62.)
‡ The fact that this philosophy detours around dialectics, despite its contact with Hegel, lends it the appeal of having reached transcendence. It is proof against dialectical reflection, though incessantly touching upon it; it makes do with traditional logic and follows the model of predicative judgment in procuring a solid and unconditional character for things which dialectical logic would consider mere moments. For example, according to an early phrasing (cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie-Robinson, p. 33) “Dasein” is to be that ontical, existential thing which has the paradoxical—unadmittedly paradoxical—advantage of being ontological.
“Dasein” is an abashed German variant of subject. It did not escape Heidegger that it is both direct and the very principle of indirectness, that as a constituens it presupposes the constitutum, factuality. The state of facts is dialectical; Heidegger proceeds at any cost to translate it into the logic of noncontradictoriness. The mutually contradictory moments of the subjects are turned into two attributes which he attaches to the subject as to a substance. But this is helpful to the ontological dignity: the undeveloped contradiction will assure a superiority as such, because it defies the conditions of discursive logic, the language into which it has been translated. By virtue of this projection, the substance called Being is to be something positive above both concept and fact. Such positivity would not withstand its dialectical reflection.
All fundamental ontology has schemata of this sort for its τόποι. Transcendence, both beyond thinking and beyond facts, is derived by this ontology from the undialectical expression and hypostasis of dialectical structures—as if these structures were simply to be named.
⸸ Heidegger’s doctrine of the distinction of Dasein as ontical and ontological at the same time—of the ‘presence-at-hand’ of Being— hypostatizes Being from the start. Unless Being is independent as preceding Dasein, as he would like it to be, Dasein will not become that transparency of Being which is supposed to uncover Being in turn. In that sense too, the alleged conquest of subjectivism has been surreptitious. In spite of Heidegger’s reductive plan, the doctrine of the transcendence of Being served to smuggle back into entity the very same ontological primacy of subjectivity which the language of fundamental ontology abjures. Heidegger was consistent later, when he changed the course of the analysis of Dasein in the sense of an undiminished primacy of Being, a primacy that cannot rest on entity because, precisely in this sense, Being “is” not. With that, of course, all that had made Heidegger effective fell by the wayside, but the effect was already part of the authority of his later works.
⹋ “Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical ‘there’ by shattering itself against death—that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for ‘its time.’ Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p. 437.)
*† The linguistic form of fundamental ontology convicts it of a historical and social moment which in turn could not again be reduced to the pure essentia of historicality. The language-critical findings in the “jargon of authenticity” are therefore arguments against the philosophical content. The random nature dragged along in Heidegger’s “draft” concept, a direct legacy of phenomenology since its transition to a material discipline, grows flagrant in the results: Heidegger’s specific definitions of Dasein and existence, the things he attributes to the human condition and views as the key to a true doctrine of Being—these are not stringent, as he assumes, but deformed by accidental private factors. The false tone drowns that out and, by the same token, admits it.
*‡ “The quotation marks in which Heidegger frames ‘its time’ in the above excerpt are presumably to indicate that what he is here referring to is not a random ‘commitment’ to a contemporary ‘today’ momentarily thrust upon us, but the decisive time of a genuine instant whose decisive character results from the difference between vulgar and existential time and history. Yet how can we tell unequivocally in a given case whether the time of decision is a ‘primordial’ moment or just an obtrusive ‘today’ in the course of world events? A resolve that does not know what it has resolved upon cannot answer this question. It has happened more than once that very resolute men would commit themselves to a cause that claimed to be fateful and decisive and yet was vulgar and not worth the sacrifice. How, in the framework of thoroughly historical thinking, should one be able at all to draw the line between ‘authentic’ events and those that happen ‘vulgarly,’ and to make an unequivocal distinction between man’s self-chosen ‘fate’ and the unchosen ‘vicissitudes’ that befall him and lure him into momentary choices and decisions? And has not vulgar history avenged itself clearly enough for Heidegger’s contempt of today’s ‘mere presence-at-hand,’ when it induced him at a vulgarly decisive moment to assume the presidency of the University of Freiburg under Hitler, to transform his resolute ‘ownmost Dasein’ into a ‘German Dasein’ and to practice the ontological theory of existential historicality on the ontical ground of really historical, i.e., political events?” (Karl Löwith, Heidegger, Denker in dürftiger Zeit, Göttingen 1953, p. 49.)
1. Developed by Walter Benjamin, Schriften I, Frankfurt 1955, pp. 366ff., 426ff.
2. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam 1947, p. 26–Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, Herder and Herder, New York 1972.
3. “Das geht aber/Nicht.” Hölderlin, Works 2, ed. Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart 1953, p. 190.
4. Cf. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, “Studien über die Heiderggersche Sprachtheorie,” in Archiv für Philosophie, 7 (1957), p. 304.
5. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, Berlin 1931–Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, Routledge, London 1933.
6. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 11
7. Cf. Part One, p. 70.
8. Karl Heinz Haag, Kritik der neueren Ontologie, Stuttgart 1960, p.71.
9. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 42.
10. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, p. 68.
11. Ibid., p. 70f. {Pathmarks p. 276}
12. Ibid., p. 68.
13. Ibid., p. 75. {Pathmarks p. 276}
14. Hegel, Works 4, p. 110.
15. Cf. Werner Becker, “Die Dialektik von Grund und Begründetem in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik” (Ph.D. diss., University of Frankfurt, 1964), p. 73.
16. Cf. Alfred Schmidt, “Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx,” Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, 11 (Frankfurt 1962), p. 22f.
17. Jaspers, Philosophie, 1932, 1955, vol. I, p. xx—Philosophy, trans. E.B.Ashton, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1969.
18. Ibid., p. 4.
19. Ibid., p. xxiii, and Heidegger, Uber den Humanismus, Frankfurt am Main 1947, p. 17f.–“Letter on Humanism,” trans. Edgar Lohner, in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3.
20. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 12.
21. Ibid., p. 13.
22. Jaspers, Philosophie, vol. I, p. 264.
Theodor Adorno - Being and Existence
From Negative Dialectics (1966).
Original PDF.