In the last session I offered an example of how modish concepts are often indices for the absence of the things they are supposed to concern and suggested that all this talk of ‘man’ and the ‘centre’ that he allegedly occupies is an indication that man certainly no longer stands in this position today.1 I am not claiming of course that every concept that arises in philosophy and is expressly thematized as such is invariably an index of absence in this sense, although I believe that this thesis has a greater validity, and is capable of far broader application, than we would commonly imagine. Thus one might plausibly argue, for example, that the thematic which was so important in seventeenth-century philosophy – namely the problem of the relation between the inner world and external world and how they influence or interact with each other – is directly connected with the demise of the medieval cosmos in which inner and outer experience were still articulated in terms of a single principle. Or again we might claim – and this is by no means an original idea, but one that has cropped up quite frequently in modern discussions of the history of philosophy – that the Platonic theory of Ideas itself and the hierarchical social structures connected with it were conceived in a spirit of restoration. In other words, they are an attempt to re-create the feudal order of social classes that had existed in Greece before the advent of democracy and the rise of the Greek enlightenment, now that enlightened Greece had become entangled in the Peloponnesian War and all those difficulties which are so clearly reflected in the philosophy that subsequently emerged. Indeed there is something to be said in general for the idea that the owl of Minerva not only begins its flight with the falling of dusk2 but still hovers over history, as it were, seizing upon precisely what falls from the chariot of world history (if you will permit me the rather involved metaphor). Nonetheless, I believe that we are talking about something more specific in this case. For here we find that a series of concepts which possess a certain aura, to use this word once again, and seem to cast a very particular metaphysical glow, like the concept of ‘man’ which we talked about last time, are emphatically treated in abstracto precisely when these same concepts realiter have suffered considerable disenchantment already. I believe that the phenomenon I have in mind, and which is nonetheless quite specific, as I say, is perhaps easiest to grasp when you think about the rather striking fact that people always talk about tradition, always appeal to tradition or invoke the concept of tradition itself, when the tradition can longer be presupposed, once it has become weaker or problematic in some way or other. It is really only after the advent of revolutions, and especially in the wake of the French Revolution, that we witness the emergence of a philosophy which undertakes to justify the monarchy and the old order of ‘estates’, as in thinkers such as de Bonald and de Maistre.3 When the feudal order is still unbroken, for example, the sheer presence of tradition suffices to make the idea of challenging such a system seem impossible. Such things are not done, we simply say, and the idea is effectively eliminated if it even emerges. But once the living power of tradition is no longer present, people begin to call upon it explicitly, to transfigure the tradition itself into a kind of substantial essence. And then they say: Yet tradition tells us that we have to behave this way rather than that. At that point we may even develop a metaphysics or doctrine of tradition precisely to try and find some justification for what cannot otherwise be justified. I have already tried to explain why the concept of man has moved into the very centre of philosophy in the way that it has. Now what is called the ‘philosophy of life’, which is usually traced back to Nietzsche and would later find its most famous representatives in Dilthey, Simmel and Bergson, also reveals something similar, for the concept of life was only transformed into a metaphysical entity when life in its immediate character was no longer self-evidently accessible to us through the ever-increasing impact of technological rationalization. In the great periods of metaphysical speculation, on the other hand, life itself is never glorified – for the very simple reason that life in itself belongs in the realm of what just is, or represents the dynamic context of beings, while philosophy was then specifically attempting to explain the dynamic context of beings as more than what merely is in this context. It is only once something like immediate life had become a problem in an increasingly technical world that people began to consider that life has a ‘value’, as they loved to say, and to create a whole philosophy out of this idea. Although it has to be said that Simmel's thesis that life is more than life essentially revives the classic idealist thesis that the complete context of things in immanence transcends this immanence itself. In this regard, Simmel's philosophy belongs to a traditional form of thought.4
In touching on this here I am perhaps just reminding you of something that may have occurred to you at various points already and that has actually often been pointed out before. And this is that existential ontology, the philosophy of existence as a whole, is to a certain extent the successor and inheritor of the philosophy of life – although it regards itself as higher or perhaps deeper because the underlying substance of the philosophy of life, namely the idea of life itself, remains bound up in the context of beings, whereas the philosophy of existence claims to uncover the constitutive factors behind the context of beings themselves. Yet many of the characteristic motifs of the philosophy of life can be found in Scheler in particular, but also in Heidegger and in existential ontology. And in a certain sense the entire philosophy we are talking about here – above all in its irrationalism, which we have touched upon on several occasions already – is a kind of attempt to continue the philosophy of life by stripping it of its positivist element – the element that identifies life with the context of mere beings – and turning it into something which its arbitrary hypostatization of the biological principle of life had prevented it from becoming. But existential philosophy is by no means as radically new or as radically different in relation to the philosophy of life as it likes to present itself. In material terms the categories it employs go back to the philosophy of life, and precisely in the distinctive complementary fashion we have indicated. For philosophy, which has relinquished more and more of the areas and regions for which it was once responsible to the realm of the special sciences, nonetheless believes it can find a little garden for itself as long as it discovers some interest which can no longer be accommodated within an entirely technologized and standardized world. And this little garden takes on different names in accordance with the specific situation in which it finds itself – in the times of great industrial expansion and economic growth it will assume the accents of the philosophy of life, whereas in dark times, in times of war, in times when it is obvious that our actual lives hardly correspond with the promise of life itself, it will assume the gloomier accents of the philosophy of existence, for which death is ultimately more significant than life. Yet the horizon within which the respective questions are raised remains the same in both cases. You can also see this very clearly when you consider the importance of the concept of time in Heidegger, for precisely through its intimate relationship to Dasein time becomes the category in which Dasein, and thus beings in general, are constitutively related to being, and vice versa. And this relationship between beings and the metaphysical principle, a relationship which is here grounded in time, is connected extraordinarily closely with that immanent transcendence – if I can put it in this way – which belongs to life. Now I believe that my view of this lucus a non lucendo, my view that these concepts emerge specifically when their own substrate is no longer available to experience, applies with particular force to the concept of time. Now of course you may immediately object that all of us exist in time, and that without some awareness of time something like the unity of consciousness and thinking itself could never arise in the first place. And that was indeed Kant's view, and Heidegger's defence of the centrality of time, as specifically expressed in his book on Kant,5 is based on the idea that the ontological substrate in Kant's philosophy of knowledge, the dimension relevant to being, is to be found in the priority which is here ascribed to time. For it is time, as the medium of all the relations of consciousness, that makes knowledge possible in the first place. (This is the basic idea, expressed my own terms, behind Heidegger's book on Kant.)
Now it is of course perfectly true that we cannot deny the continuing significance of time or the actual existence of our consciousness of time. But I believe it is essential, if we are to understand what we mean by the inner life, and if we are to grasp the inner form or connection of philosophical categories, that we do more than simply indicate these constituent elements in abstracto and point out that they cannot be thought away. For they assume the distinctive character and quality that they do only in the broader context of the life in which they present themselves. It may well be that no human experience can even be envisaged without reference to the horizon of time. In fact I would not dream of denying this. But what time actually means, precisely how time is experienced, and above all the mode in which we specifically reflect upon how we come to experience time – this is something entirely different. And I would think that these historical variations in the actual experience of categories such as ‘time’, or indeed ‘the individual’, are so central that you can no longer really isolate or extract the seemingly immutable substrate that appears to be involved here, namely time as such or the individual qua singular biological entity. For these things can only be experienced insofar as they are configured in specific social and historical contexts. And, in this rather more subtle and more sublimated sense, I believe that something has decisively changed in our consciousness of time, even if the formal character of this consciousness remains the same. This is in part connected with the structure of labour, and especially industrial labour, the technically rationalized character of which basically consists in the repetition of ideally identical processes and operations on the part of the labouring individuals and the machines which are involved, a development to which human beings are simply supposed to adapt. And I specifically want to draw your attention to the distinctive sociological fact that these changes which occur in the form of labour itself – in the actual state of the productive forces, as we say in the social sciences – also reach far beyond this particular sphere. In other words, the fact that something like experience, in the sense of genuine temporal continuity, is no longer needed at the heart of our telling concepts of labour now extends its influence upon every conceivable area of life, albeit in ways that are still largely unrecognized, which admittedly makes this claim sound in turn rather mystical and dogmatic. So let me try and demonstrate what I mean here, since it may be far from obvious to you precisely what I am driving at, with a very simple example. Thus I believe that, if someone were to describe an older person to you these days as wise, you would either have no idea of what that was supposed to mean, or you would just smile and imagine they were talking about a poseur (perhaps rightly) who has managed to live for so long, far longer than the statistical average at least, that he is now also privileged to enjoy much greater insight or whatever than anyone else. But the concept of wisdom itself has become an anachronism. It has become anachronistic because what we properly understand by wisdom – if we still possess an ear for such things and we really wish for a moment to do phenomenology in the good old sense of the word – is not merely intelligence in the sense of cognitive capacity, or even in relation to particular objects of one kind or another, and not merely experience as such. Rather, it is the capacity to appropriate experience, the capacity to realize the continuity of an entire life in terms of the actual consciousness that an individual has attained over time. I am talking here about the achieved unity between experience itself and the mental and spiritual capacities that develop and unfold in response to this experience. And that is what is no longer available today. For mental and spiritual capacity today consists more in the ability of human beings to adapt to constantly changing situations, to be flexible, to earn a living in different ways, to exploit the opportunities that present themselves, than it does, for example, in the ability to acquire knowledge and experience of some particular discipline over a period of many years, in such a way that their life continues to reveal the structure of this knowledge and experience. The fact that today the type of well-educated worker or craftsman has largely given way in social terms to the uneducated or merely trained worker also belongs in this context, from which you can infer that something has also changed with respect to the experience of time, that something specific has happened here. And this is particularly evident, in a very blunt way, when we consider something that has often been analysed (especially by Heimpel). I am talking about the peculiar loss of any sense of historical continuity which emerged in Germany after the end of the Second World War, and the impact of which can be traced in terms of specific research methods. Thus we find that young people today, unless they have an academic background of some kind or other, hardly have any awareness of who Bismarck or Wilhelm I was,6 whereas in my youth, for example, the awareness of this whole era in which the German Empire was founded, and everything connected with it, was probably still very much alive to everyone. It also has to be said, incidentally, that these German phenomena, which have so often been pointed out and are indeed constantly encountered here, are hardly unique when we consider how in America, which in capitalist terms is the most advanced country in every respect, this loss of a sense of historical continuity has long been evident. For in America, at least outside the specifically academic context, there is a prevailing suspicion, indeed almost an aversion, with regard to history in general as a sphere of traditionalism7 which expressly contradicts the dominant principle of exchange rationality. And Henry Ford's famous remark that ‘history is bunk’ seems a perfect expression of this.8 There is a very widely shared general feeling in America that, if all something can say for itself is that it has arisen historically, and that is ‘there’, then it really belongs in the rubbish bin. And the American passion for antiques and similar things that can be snapped up in Europe is merely the other side of this general sentiment. Thus these processes that we observe here in Germany are little more than than a confirmation to this global tendency.
Now I just mentioned the antiques business and, when we read the effusions of fundamental ontology on the subject of time, it is indeed sometimes hard to avoid the impression that we are dealing with a kind of sublimated antiques business. In other words, it is precisely when the consciousness of time, understood as the consciousness of the continuity of life, has faded away that we are consoled, as it were, with the idea that something like time, something like continuous life, still exists. You need only to consider how utterly remote it seems when the Bible tells us that Abraham died in good old age, an old man, and full of years,9 to appreciate something of the nostalgia that clings to this experience of time as a fundamental, and I am almost tempted to say rural, dimension of life. And this yearning for time itself, once our consciousness of time has been shattered or destroyed, is exploited by the philosophy of being which confidently assures us that time is irredeemably essential to us even when we no longer have any genuine experience of time. It then goes on to present the entirely abstract consciousness of time that is naturally all that is left to us as an attribute of being itself that is manifest to us in Dasein as if it were the ens realissimum. And I believe we also find a similar complementary relationship at work when we consider the highest concept in Heidegger, namely the concept of being itself. Just consider for a moment all of the associations which arise for you when you hear the word ‘being’. And this suggestion is quite legitimate, for we are assured, after all, that ‘being’ is not a concept but is being itself. And in order to apprehend such trans-conceptual being we must obviously appeal to something more than a set of simply authoritative definitions. Now I believe that there is very little to object to in this method once the concept of being has been interpreted in this way. Thus if you explore what happens when you hear a word such as ‘being’, and simply consider the gratifying effect which is produced by such talk, then you will surely feel a certain sense of security, of reliability, of dependability in this regard – and you must forgive me if I express myself in such vague terms, but this vagueness is appropriate to the stratum of experience we are dealing with here. Thus when people say, ‘That is someone who speaks to me in his very being’, we have a sense of what was once described by words such as ‘character’ – in other words, the impression of something solid, reliable and substantial. I think the slightly elevated term ‘substantial’ perhaps captures this best. And it is perhaps particularly characteristic of the highly conservative climate of this philosophy that, whereas Kantian thought essentially dissolved the concept of substance in the ontological sense and transformed substantiality into a category, into something first constituted through subjectivity,10 this concept of substance is hypostasized in our contemporary ontological forms of thought. In other words, it is expressly turned into something over which the process of subjective constitution exercises no power whatsoever. I believe there is a peculiar need which finds expression here too, for it belongs to the essence of our contemporary society – and I think this goes beyond relatively external aspects such as the increasingly technological character of life and touches on the very principle of society itself – that it no longer contains anything which really exists in its own right, that exists for its own sake. Kant already alluded to this in the Critique of Practical Reason when he claimed that everything has either price or intrinsic worth,11 where ‘worth’ belongs to what exists for its own sake, whereas ‘price’ is what exists only in relation to something else, or something that is valued only insofar as one gets something else for it – in other words, something subjected to the principle of exchange. In this sense, we could describe the concept of being as the attempt to restore the idea of worth or dignity. At the same time it actually ignores the worth or dignity of humanity, even though the idea of worth or dignity is itself bound up with that of humanity. For if anyone now tried to ascribe worth or dignity to us as the constantly buffeted and increasingly powerless individuals that we have become, this would surely be met with the kind of derision that I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, and to which Heidegger himself, I would suggest, was particularly sensitive. I would almost say that the attempt to avoid such derision, while developing concepts which would instantly provoke this reaction if they were nakedly presented as such, is an art which this philosophy understands perfectly.
In other words, we live in a state of society which can be described as one of universal fungibility, where the prevailing principle of exchange ensures that nothing exists for itself, for its own sake, but exists only insofar as it possesses exchange value, and we are elevated and consoled in such a world by this concept of being. For it would like to convince us that there is something else beyond this principle of fungibility, something more weighty and reliable – and interestingly enough it seems we need rather old-fashioned words to capture this: something ‘sterling’, as they say in English, or pfundig as they say in South German dialect. And it is precisely this aura of reliability which lends the concept of being its incomparable and anachronistic contemporaneity. The very way it eludes direct confrontation makes us feel that this sterling quality, this well-crafted durability and reliability, will never be lost but can somehow survive in a realm beyond all criticism. For this philosophy avoids all contact or confrontation with the current state of experience. If I may just recall the thought I adumbrated a few moments ago: if we were actually to replace ‘being’ with the concept of worth or dignity – the particular attributes of which correspond perfectly to that aura which I have suggested attaches to ‘being’ – then the intimate connection between the concept of worth or dignity and the experience of real human beings would itself reveal the anachronistic and misleading character of this thinking. For instead it confers worth or dignity upon something entirely abstract, which certainly possesses all the power of this solidity, of this impenetrability, of this ‘thereness’, but is also supposed to be something more than mere existence, namely something higher which is thereby protected from the disenchantment of mere existence. In this way we somehow manage to preserve all these things while simultaneously protecting them from any kind of controversy, from any kind of possible criticism. If you wish to maintain an autonomous consciousness of your own – and this is what I am trying to encourage in these lectures – if you want to develop the power to resist the very powerful temptations which clearly spring from this philosophy, then I believe it would almost be better for you to think through these connections, and thus explore the dispositions within yourselves to which such thinking responds, than simply to content yourselves with a merely intellectual analysis of the implications of these concepts. That is precisely why I have tried to bring out these particular aspects of the concept of time and the concept of being. And I should just say here that there is another concept which plays a significant and ambiguous role in Heidegger, namely the concept of meaning, which derives from the specifically phenomenological approach to the analysis of meaning. For this concept also plays a similar complementary role in relation to the phenomenon that Max Weber famously described in terms of the ‘disenchantment of the world’.12 The more disenchanted the world becomes, the more philosophy reacts by presenting you with meaning precisely as a complementary ideology. Yet since philosophy is incapable of furnishing such substantial meaning on its own, here too it performs what I call a volte face. In other words, it behaves as if the analysis of meaning, the analysis of concepts – that is, of words such as the word ‘being’, the word ‘Dasein’, the word ‘existence’ – as if the analysis which furnishes the meaning of these words were the same as that meaning, whatever it may be, which has fallen victim to the disenchantment of the world. Whereas the simplest human understanding would object that, while we may very well grasp the meaning of concepts such as being, Dasein, existence, time, that we may perfectly understand what they signify, our insight into this meaning still has no power over the process of disenchantment itself. Yet Heidegger's entire philosophy characteristically suggests that, if we only attend to these concepts carefully enough, if we ‘behold’ them in a spirit of veneration, this suffices to reverse the disenchantment of the world. In other words, to repeat what I argued earlier, the thematization of these categories is already taken as a kind of fulfilment, and this makes it appear as if the real need in the face of the disenchantment of the world, a need which is generated by suffering under this disenchantment, had already been dispelled – as if the thing in question were ultimately guaranteed by appealing to the concepts which generally conceal it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that you will have derived something from these analyses. For when we are talking about this philosophy in its most recent form, or perhaps in the light of our analysis today, let me say, when we are talking about this ideology in its most recent form, you should be very clear that this ideology is also extraordinarily clever. Thus we are not invited to contemplate some divine meaning; we are not regaled with stories about the eternity or immutability of being; we are not reassured in concrete terms that something of our actual life in time will never utterly be lost. Rather, the power of this philosophy lies in the way it actually manages to fulfil all the functions that I have analysed for you, even though it accomplishes all these things – and the concept of being is eminently well suited to ensure this, as I shall presently show – by exploiting invariant elements which enjoy the cachet of such invariance without ever really being tied down as such. Yet we have to say that these invariants, that the archaism and the relationship to certain obsolescent phases of social development which have already been condemned to the past, are nonetheless much stronger and more evident in this philosophy than it is itself prepared to concede. You are all well aware that Heidegger's philosophy likes to claim two things in particular. In the first place, it regards language itself as the organ of ‘being’ rather than simply, with nominalism, as a system of signs that lets us bring humanly defined and determined things to light θέσει [thesei] or ‘in accordance with convention’. This is one particularly emphatic claim on Heidegger's part. And the other equally emphatic claim is that the thinking of being is really at home in an area that we might describe as prior to or indifferent to the distinction between poetry and philosophy as it has come to be established. And Heidegger certainly drew the ultimate conclusion from this idea once in his life, when he published a little volume containing what I am not exactly sure we should call poems or maxims and aphorisms. He would almost certainly reject such descriptions and prefer instead to speak of manifestations of being or something of the kind. Now in view of the extraordinary significance which falls to language and the poetic word, and in view of my own claim about the concealed but powerful historical archaism and anachronism of this style of thinking, I think it would be worth looking at this particular text a little more closely. The book in question, From the Experience of Thinking, was written in 1947 and published by Pfullingen about six years ago now, in 1954. I imagine that a few of you at least will have seen the text already. Now I cannot resist reading some of it out to you here in order to give you some sense of the specific place this philosophy occupies. Thus we find things like ‘When the early morning light quietly / grows above the mountains’, or again, ‘The darkening of the world never reaches / to the light of beyng.’ Here I would just remind you of my remarks about the affirmative character of this philosophy: thus the darkening of the world – here it is just immediately blurted out – is supposed to be weaker than ‘the light of beyng’. Or here is another motto from the book: ‘When under a torn rain-clouded / sky a ray of sunlight glides suddenly / across the darkling meadows’ – we are immediately offered the image of a mountain landscape, and then we are told: ‘We never come to thoughts. They come / to us. / That is the fitting hour of dialogue.’ Or we even hear: ‘When at summer's threshold solitary narcissi / bloom secretly in the meadow and the / rock rose gleams beneath the maple.’ And the motto that immediately follows is simply: ‘The splendour of the simple’. Or just listen to this: ‘When the mountain brook in night's / stillness tells of its plunging / over the boulders’ or ‘when the cowbells tinkle from / the slopes of the mountain valley / where herds slowly wend their way.’ Or the final poem of the collection: ‘Forests spread / Streams plunge / Rocks endure / Rain runs / Meadows tarry / Springs well / Winds dwell / Blessing muses.’13 Now you all laughed, ladies and gentlemen, and I take this laughter extremely seriously. For it actually shows, it seems to me, how you reacted to the massive contradiction between the emotional claim of such lines and the language in which it finds expression. And this contradiction springs from its appeal to a particular stock of images, to a particular linguistic and imaginative world, which has long since been overtaken both by the development of language as a poetic medium and by the development of the world itself. Hence you simply have the feeling here that one is trying to speak about the gravest and most profoundly touching things, although the effect is rather like asking Max Jungnickel or Cäsar Flaischlen to act as authorities on the most difficult philosophical questions.14 Now you may say it is unfair of me to insist on these things in the way I have. And I almost expect the objection on the part of common sense, which is always ready to defend things that are bad, and in this case would probably say, Well, he is a philosopher after all, and you cannot really hold it against him if he writes bad poetry. But my reply would be this. Since as a philosopher he expressly claims to be at home in a sphere beyond conceptuality, a sphere of ‘saying’ which is ἀδιάφορον [adiaphoron] or indifferent to the distinction between poetry and philosophy, he must submit to the criteria which the poetry and language which he loves also set for him. Otherwise the whole thing appears as arbitrary as I actually suspect that it is, although I am slightly wary of putting this quite so bluntly. In other words, if it turns out that our specific linguistic formulation, if the specific relation between language and what it is we have to say, is indistinguishable from stale provincial kitsch, then I would think that this tells us something decisive about the truth content of this philosophy itself.