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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger, Adorno & death « Previous | |Next »
July 4, 2004

Trevor,
I started re-reading the section in Adorno's Negative Dialectics on Heidegger this afternoon. It is all too familiar. The Heidegger in this text is about the Absolute, he returns to the pre-critical philosophy; is archaic; he does not accept the critical turn of Kant; he is dogmatic; he crosses the line into irrationalism; embraces mythology; he is authoritarian and so on.

Page after page drives home a central point: Heidegger's ontology is one big failure. He abolishes reason. Hence Heidegger demands a rational critique. Fair enough. Yet what we get in 'The Ontological Need' is a onesided tirade about Being. The conservative critique of the Enlightenment is treated as a return to pre-Kantian mythology.

Let me try and recap my response to this.

There is some recognition in Adorno that Heidegger is critical of scientism, (that science is the whole truth about everything and that it is the ground of its own legitimation); and less recognition that Heidegger was critical of the program to gain complete technological mastery of the physical and social environment. It is this conception of the Enlightenment in modernity was originally formulated by French philosophes in the last half of the eighteenth century, was preserved by positivist movements in the nineteenth century, and has dominated universities in the twentieth century.

In this context Heidegger develops post-theological discourse following on modernity's eclipse of God. Sure, there is a theological legacy there, but Heidegger's world is strictly extra-theological. For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche before him, God is dead, or at least mortally wounded and departed from the world.

Now Adorno sees Heidegger as filling the vacuum/void left by God's departure with irrationalism. There is little recognition in Adorno that Heidegger is arguing that an understanding of Being is always already included in everything we apprehend. It is only humans who can question Being, can endeavour to "think Being", and then voice what is thought. And that questioning of Being is far from being scientific. It can be undertaken by philosophy.What this shows is that human being qua Dasein is literally a "being-there" (Da = "there," Sein = "being"). The Da signifies the already interpreted world into which humans are "thrown." Who we are as human beings is a product of existence, of being-in-the-world. That is to say the public world of social norms and rituals.

This "publicness," this "being-with-one-another," has devastating consequences for human beings, since in our "thrownness" into the groupthink of society, we come to exist not on our own terms but on those of what Heidegger calls das Man (German for the generic subject)-the "they" whose beliefs and behaviors make up the "average everydayness" of human existence. Most of us prefer and "fall" into this tempered mode of existence. We are are happy not to think for ourselves, but to follow instead the routines and fashions of those around us.

Now in in your earlier post on Adorno Heidegger and Death you say that there are such huge flaws in Heidegger that his metaphysics of everydayness ('edifice' in your language) collapses. Here is what you say:


"As people become aware that they have not really lived, death becomes more frightening, taking on the guise of a misfortune. ‘It is as if, in death, they experienced their own reification: that they were corpses from the first… The terror of death today is largely the terror of seeing how much the living resemble it. And it might therefore be said that if life were lived rightly, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in its innermost composition… Death and history form a constellation.’ This brings to mind the title of Céline’s book, Death On The Installment Plan, an image of death as average everyday life."

I presume that this means that a reified everydayness is akin to being a zombie. We drift through life like the walking dead, too terrified to confront how much like death everydayness is. So it is an 'inauthentic' existence. There is a better mode of living.

So how is that different from what Heidegger was saying about publicness, idle talk and group think? What you are saying is more extreme than Heidegger. All that Heidegger is saying is that inauthentic Dasein is most at home in the world of publicness-the world of rules, rituals, and conventions that disburdens existence of its personal responsibility for choice. In such a world, "everyone is the other and no one himself."

It is a diagnosis of everydayness in modernity. The therapy is that we must turn from living by the other's rules and habits and project a world of particular significance to ourselves. We must insist upon our right to be creative and free in our questioning and articulating of Being.

What then is the problem here that you discern? It is not the confusion around the social mode of existence and the individual mode of existence? The problem you discern one of death not being mentioned in this account of everydayness? It would appear to be so.

You go on to connect your account of living corpses to Heidegger's interpretation of the relationship between death and authentic life. You say that:


"It is this constellation of death and history that is missing from Heidegger’s theory and necessarily so because once it is taken into account the whole edifice of his metaphysics collapses. Without the historically untarnished experience of death there is no way of defining authentic existence, and whether this is fleshed out in terms of inward withdrawal or social interrogation it matters not. There is just the same nothing other than reified history dressed up as existential categories."

So what does Heidegger actually say about death? This article can act as out guide. It indicates that in Being and Time Heidegger is dealing with our understanding of death, something that was not explored in Japanese Story.

One understanding is that since our own death can not be experienced, the
death of others is the only phenomenon open to us. The death of others-- a friend--- therefore must serve as the basis of our understanding. Heidegger objects that this gives us no basis at all for what is wanted, namely an understanding of our own death. So what is happening here is that Heidegger positions himself firmly in the perspective of favoring a certain type of understanding, a certain mode of being. This is one whose understanding is "grounded" in one's own experience in the world. Understanding that seeks to find the primordial source; the 'about' which brings one to a meaningful grasp of entities and contexts. What a Japanese Story showed was the possibility of death from being stranded in the Pilbara desert.

It is this experience of death that opens up the existential possibilities in everyday life; possibilities that involve the active, future-oriented concerns and possibilities. These possibilities can never be fully specified, nor can they all be actualized.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:15 PM | | Comments (0)
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