5  On the Fundamentals of the Coca-Cola Bottle

On receiving the news of Martin Heidegger’s death, Italian cultural critics, with rare exceptions, were quick to offer new proof of a certain persistent poverty. For a few days, newspapers and magazines treated us to a succession of canned obituaries, thoughtful exhortations, and academic litanies. There was talk of negative and positive existentialism (the latter a comical subspecies on which Italy has a monopoly), of Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism, and of Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco as notable examples of the philosopher’s influence; nor were allusions lacking to a certain obsolete quality in Heidegger as far as present-day problems are concerned. One seemed to be witnessing a series of dutiful and hasty farewell gestures to a glorious old figure who had always been secretly hated and whose exploits people had trouble remembering.

So it came as a real surprise when an article by Massimo Cacciari, fresh and vigorous in its approach, appeared in the magazine Rinascita. Not only did Cacciari not apply to Heidegger the stupid rigmarole (“irrationalistic alignment . . . objectively reactionary . . . decadence . . . exponent of the monopolistic bourgeoisie”) to which we have been inured for decades by our vaguely Marxist culture (“an increasingly misleading expression,” as Cacciari correctly observes), but he also recognized these stupidities for what they were and swept them away with a gesture of impatient contempt, along with their even more disgusting secular Enlightenment equivalents (“lack of faith in man . . . mystical attitude . . . disintegration of values”). Once this salutary disinfestation has been carried out, and we find ourselves in the void—that exhilarating void, the one place where thought can operate—we may finally begin to commemorate Heidegger while rediscovering the shadow of his thought projected all around us. For even before we get to the Pastures of Being, Heidegger’s thought can and should lead us to an understanding of the metaphysical fundamentals of a Coca-Cola bottle.

But there is another controversial image of Heidegger, one much stronger than that raised by the inadequate objections always raised against him in Italy. More than by any other, this image has been put forth by the one adversary who could measure up to Heidegger in a Germany ultimately forsaken by philosophy: Theodor W. Adorno. In a little book, admittedly not one of his best, Adorno furiously attacked Heidegger as the incarnation of the “jargon of authenticity.” What is this jargon? In the cultural pages of conservative German newspapers and the inaugural lectures of Nazis hiding out in universities, in appeals to sound German customs and the praise of ecstatic mountain climbing, in the condemnation of foreign words and the recourse to “dialogue,” “hierarchies,” and the “spirit,” all threatened by mass society, Adorno’s unfailing ear detected dire words and expressions that had their origin somewhere in the romantic tradition and were now wandering adrift, like pernicious messengers and revenants, in the Germany of Bonn: “Sacral without sacral substance, frozen emanations, the clichés of the jargon of authenticity are the waste products of aura.”

Thus, behind the terrorism of Heidegger’s philosophical language, Adorno, like a shrewd dog sniffing for truffles, detected those treasures of profound banality that had nourished Germany since the Biedermeier years in the first half of the nineteenth century, protected the rise of Nazism, and created a pedestal for Konrad Adenauer and that still inspire the slogans of the German Christian Democrats. In Adorno’s view, Heidegger in the end was to blame for having concocted a complex speculative plot to justify the acceptance of the norm. And we know that for critical theory, to whose tradition Adorno belongs, the worst disgrace of thinking is to renounce Marxian “criticism of what exists.”

All this would no doubt be praiseworthy were it not fundamentally false. Not that the “jargon of authenticity” is not alive and well, often in a sinister way, in Heidegger’s writings. But to take it as a key to everything is no less a blunder than the blatant error committed by those seeking to demolish the great composer Richard Wagner on the basis of the unmitigated rubbish he sometimes uttered. Despite all the alluring mythology usually associated with Heidegger’s person—the forest hut, the paths in the fields, the “interrupted paths”—his fearful philosophical machine is operated by something quite different from that Teutonic bigotry that crops up at times in some of his writings. In each of Heidegger’s phases, from that of Sein und Zeit to that of his last oracular fragments, we feel that the game is upheld by a cold, lucid, implacable power, quintessence of the modern: The monumental nihilism that has guided Western thought since its origins toward a glorious self-destruction here celebrates its twilight of the gods.

Like a Tibetan monk endlessly spinning his prayer wheel, Heidegger, with prodigious virtuosity, goes over and over the whole history of thought from the Greeks to Nietzsche, dropping down into abandoned gorges and irrevocably twisting the meanings of accepted terms. The history of metaphysics, a history that is a destiny, has never attained such terrifying clarity as in Heidegger’s analyses. It is, to be sure, a clarity gained at the price of much violence and injustice; it is a destiny retouched by a masterful cosmetician so that its line leads directly to the threshold of Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest. There he would like to take it by the hand and carefully guide it beyond itself, over “slender little bridges” to the “overcoming of metaphysics.”

But even those who, with constant suspicion, follow this trail of the destiny of metaphysics must admit that it involves an original and illuminating design. No one has succeeded in reconstructing with such compelling exactitude the cage within which Western thought has fatally operated from Plato to our own day, repeatedly doomed to call itself into question until all its possibilities are exhausted. This limit, Heidegger states, may be said to have been reached with Nietzsche, last thinker in metaphysics and its closing sign, who evoked that devastating and intoxicating “will to will” that governs us today. (The subtle revenge inflicted by Heidegger at this point is clear: He sends the most elusive philosopher of the West back to the garden of Armida,¹ from which he had always tried to escape; this is already a good example of Heidegger’s strong-arm tactics.)

What happens to thought after Nietzsche? Here I must return to the fundamentals of the Coca-Cola bottle, which I mentioned at the beginning. Besides being a fascinating interpreter of classical philosophical texts, as well as a surprising contriver of strings of verbal associations, Heidegger was an indispensable guide to the present. To verify this, one need only turn to two of his essays: “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Overcoming of Metaphysics.”² How many congresses, how many vexed reflections on the evils and blessings of technology we have had to put up with throughout the twentieth century! How many vacuous disputes between “scientists” and “humanists”! How many recommendations of different ways of using technology! As though any of it actually depended on our will! When technology has already set its stamp on our will! Technology, to all intents and purposes, means metaphysics, Heidegger suggests. Having run off the tracks of history, the West synchronically relives the destiny of metaphysics in the eloquent silence of its own operation. It is impossible to account for the Coca-Cola bottle without going back to Plato’s Ideas. It is impossible to speak of the Coca-Cola bottle as a thing without explaining that it could only appear in a world that “has already destroyed things as things.”

All this may seem abstruse. But it is an attempt to approach the supreme abstruseness of what surrounds us. If very few in our midst feel the need for metaphysics (a word now almost always used in a derogatory sense), it is because everything is already metaphysics. And—ultimate joke!—philosophy has now become primarily a useful fact. Useful for what? For Ge-Stell. I will skip the usual ironic remarks about Heidegger’s linguistic acrobatics and abuses and merely specify that this word, ordinarily used in the sense of “scaffolding” as well as “bookshelf,” becomes in the late Heidegger the black sun around which he arranges, in eccentric harmony, compounds of the verb stellen (to put), from the vorstellen (to represent) of classical metaphysics to the bestellen (to order, in the commercial sense) that is heard every day in the business world. And what, finally, is Ge-Stell? Ge-Stell indicates above all the appearance of all that exists (and therefore including man) as availability, material to be used, exploited. Man becomes “the most important raw material,” capable of being ravished ad libitum, and is employed as such. In a vein of metaphysical irony, it then turns out that the employee is the figure corresponding in every sense to this state of the world. And so—and it may come as a surprise to many—only Heidegger could have come up with a definition of Hitler as first among employees. And it is significant how the obscure Ge-Stell accords perfectly with the analyses of the visionary Marx in the first book of Capital, which depicts the world as a “warehouse of commodities,” a place of total availability and exchange.

In considering further variations on Ge-Stell, we see that they also throw light on Heidegger’s foremost enemy, Adorno. Adorno’s dialectic of the Enlightenment is superimposed, in its crucial features, on the destiny of nihilism as recounted by Heidegger in his Nietzsche and in many of his later writings. Thus, Adorno’s theories on industry and on the culture industry find a natural place among the many applications of Ge-Stell.

How do these collisions and coincidences among hostile thinkers happen? Because beyond all the obvious things that make them mutually incompatible, they are united by something much deeper, allowing us to pass from one to the other as from one knot to another in the same network (of secret agents?): the fact that they drive nihilism to its most radical forms while trying at the same time to look at it from outside, an enigmatic and fleeting outside that Heidegger called the “overcoming of metaphysics,” Adorno called “utopia,” and Marx highlighted as the end of prehistory. Nihilism is the great funnel of Western thought. The closer one gets to its mouth, the more the incompatible elements are forced to mix. This may produce a sense of vertigo. But without that vertigo, thought is now impossible.