Williams, Heidegger, and Others
Raymond Williams’s entry for “community” in Keywords1 is straightforward enough, though it is characteristically succinct, comprehensive, and subtle. He gives a brief history of the etymology of the word and of the different meanings the word has had since it entered the English language in the fourteenth century. He also sets “community” against two French and German words, commune and Gemeinde. He refers to Tönnies’s influential contrast (1887) between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: an organic community, on the one hand, and an impersonal organization or corporation, on the other. Though Williams distinguishes five senses of “community,” the essence of his definition is expressed in the following phrases: “a sense of common identity and characteristics,” and “the body of direct relationships” as opposed to “the organized establishment of realm or state.” A community is “relatively small,” with a “sense of immediacy or locality.” Williams stresses the affective aspect of the word and its performative power: “Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.”
What Williams meant by “community” is developed more circumstantially in The Country and the City, especially in Chapters 10, 16, and 18 of that book: “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” “Knowable Communities,” and “Wessex and the Border.”2 The last two are on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, respectively. Williams does not wholly admire George Eliot, nor Jane Austen, whereas Hardy gets his more or less complete approval. What is the difference? “Jane Austen,” says Williams, “had been prying and analytic, but into a limited group of people in their relations with each other” (168). Eliot, according to Williams, was, like Jane Austen before her, more or less limited in her comprehension of people to members of the gentry. The latter formed her “knowable community.” She did not really understand the common people: rural farmers, laborers, servants, and tradesmen. They and their community were “unknowable” to her. In Williams’s view, Eliot projected her own inner life into working class people in her novels. She was consistently condescending to such people. “George Eliot,” says Williams, “gives her own consciousness, often disguised as a personal dialect, to the characters with whom she does really feel; but the strain of the impersonation is usually evident—in Adam, Daniel, Maggie, or Felix Holt” (169).
The latter judgment, by the way, seems questionable. Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, for example, seems to me a plausible characterization of someone to a considerable degree unlike George Eliot herself. Like Williams, I come from a rural background, though at the distance of an extra generation, so, like Williams, I too can speak from direct experience about this. Can it be that there is a trace of misogyny in Williams’s put-down of Austen and Eliot, in favor of male novelists like Hardy and Lawrence? “Prying and analytic” is a really nasty epithet, and what worse can one say of a supposedly objective realist novelist than that all her protagonists are versions of herself? Eliot, it happens, had had a lot of direct experience with rural people as a child, for example by traveling around the neighborhood with her father in his carriage. He was an estate agent, neither peasant nor aristocrat, but located at an in-between class site well suited to comparative observation by an astute and sharp-eyed daughter who shared his class placement. In my judgment, Williams is, as we say, shooting from the hip in his put-down of Eliot.
Williams’s judgment of Hardy is quite different. Hardy, he says, truly understood the rural personages and communities he represents in his novels. He understood them because he had experienced rural life first hand as a child. He also had a sharp eye for what rural life is really like. Hardy’s “essential position and attribute” are his “intensity and precision of observation” (205). Hardy’s great subject is the displacement of such rural people by education or migration, or both. More precisely, Hardy focuses on the resulting alienation, even if such displaced persons try to go home again, as Clym Yeobright does in The Return of the Native. Hardy’s goal was “to describe and value a way of life with which he was closely yet uncertainly connected” (200). The perspective expressed in his novels is that of someone who was inside and outside at once (just like George Eliot, by the way!). This is because such a position was Hardy’s own life situation:
In becoming an architect and a friend of the family of a vicar (the kind of family, also, from which his wife came) Hardy moved to a different point in the social structure, with connections to the educated but not the owning class, and yet also with connections through his family to that shifting body of small employers, dealers, craftsmen, and cottagers who were themselves never wholly distinct, in family, from the laborers. (200)
Nowhere does Williams say in so many words why it is better to describe accurately a rural community than to describe accurately the disasters of courtship and marriage among the gentry, as Eliot did in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, or as did Henry James, whom Williams also does not much like. He just takes it for granted that Hardy’s subject matter is better, perhaps because Williams thought “real history” was taking place among rural people, not among the gentry. His panoramic chapter in The Country and the City, on “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” supports that view. For Williams, the essential action of English history from the eighteenth century to the present is the gradual rise of capitalism and its destruction of rural community life. He calls this the “increasing penetration by capitalist social relations and the dominance of the market” (98). His view of this is quite different from that of Americans today, such as Francis Fukuyama, or George W. Bush, or Paul Ryan. Williams sees the rise of capitalism as pretty much an unmitigated disaster, a “crisis.” Industrialization, he argues, is only part of the story. “By the late eighteenth century,” he asserts, “we can properly speak of an organized capitalist society, in which what happened to the market, anywhere, whether in industrial or agricultural production, worked its way through to town and country alike, as parts of a single crisis” (98). The increasing dominance of the capitalist system led to mass displacement and alienation, as rural laborers and tenant farmers were forcibly dispossessed and large landed estates established. Enclosure was only one aspect of this process. An equally important factor was the importation of a rigid class system whose material sign was the immense number of large country houses built during the period.
A true community, Williams assumes, is classless. He celebrates the precarious remnants of such communities in remote villages that have no local country house, for example on the Welsh border where Williams himself grew up. He recognizes, however, that even there some invidious class structure exists. It will not do, he recognizes, to idealize these communities, but they are the nearest thing we have in these bad days to true communities. An attractive warmth and enthusiasm pervades Williams’s description of such communities:
In some places still, an effective community, of a local kind, can survive in older terms, where small freeholders, tenants, craftsmen and laborers can succeed in being neighbors first and social classes only second. This must never be idealized, for at the points of decision, now as then, the class realities usually show through. But in many intervals, many periods of settlement, there is a kindness, a mutuality, that still manages to flow. (106)
The only alternative to these rapidly vanishing communities, Williams holds, is those groups of the oppressed bonding together to fight capitalism and the evils of an “ownership society,” as George W. Bush called it, in what for him was a term of praise. The last sentence of Williams’s chapter is: “Community, to survive, had then to change its terms” (107). This is another way of saying, I take it, “Comes the Revolution!” I share Williams’s utopian hope, his belief in what Jacques Derrida calls “the democracy to come,” for which we all should work, however distant its horizon, or however much it may even be permanently over the horizon, always still à venir, to come.
Several basic features of Williams’s assumptions about community emerge in The Country and the City. One is the assumption that a true community is not just a relatively small group of people living together in the same place and sharing the same immemorial assumptions in kindness and mutuality. A true community must also be classless. Class structures, particularly those generated by capitalism, destroy community.
A second, crucial, assumption, never stated in so many words, but fundamental to Williams’s thinking about community, is that the individual is and should be his social placement, with no residue or leftover that is not determined by the surrounding culture. A small freeholder is a small freeholder through and through. I am my subject position. I raise wheat or brussel sprouts, or make shoes, or work as a carpenter, or milk cows, therefore I am. I am the Archdeacon of Barchester Cathedral, therefore, I am. Among the things that must be represented accurately in good realist fiction, according to Williams, is the way the nature and fates of the characters are determined more or less completely by their relations to the surrounding community or lack of it. “As in all major realist fiction,” says Williams, “the quality and destiny of persons and the quality and destiny of a whole way of life are seen in the same dimension and not as separable issues” (201). This is, of course, a version of Marxist materialist determinism.
Williams’s third essential assumption is that the warmth and mutuality of a true community depends on the ways I know my neighbor. My social placement exposes me entirely to other people, with no corner of private subjectivity hidden away from them. I understand my neighbor or am understood by him or her, in kindness and mutuality, because he or she is, through and through, his or her social role in a small group. This happy intersubjectivity works because all members of the group have in common a set of traditional habits and beliefs that thoroughly determines what they are. This makes the ideal classless rural community a true Gemeinschaft.
Williams, for the most part, takes it for granted that belonging to a community is proper and good. For him, a genuine community, if there ever were such a thing, would be characterized by a “tolerant neighborliness” and “traditional mutuality” among equals. The polemical side of Williams’s book is the argument that the rise of capitalism, including agrarian capitalism in rural places all over England, has made community there less and less possible. Community may perhaps still remain only in remote pockets sequestered from the landowners’ big country houses. In those hidden places, a genuine community of laborers, tenant farmers, craftsmen, and small free-holding farmers may even now still exist.
Agrarian capitalism, not enclosure as such, Williams argues, more or less completely destroyed the possibility of community in England: “The economic system of landlord, tenant and laborer, which had been extending its hold since the sixteenth century, was now [by the early nineteenth century, with the walls, fences, and “paper rights” of enclosure] in explicit and assertive control. Community, to survive, had then to change its terms” (107). What Williams means by that last sentence, as other earlier remarks in the chapter make clear, is that community can now only exist as the coalition, the solidarity, of the oppressed in opposition to their masters. Though I accept Williams’s picture of the evils of the capitalist system in England, it is still reasonable to ask why a small village where everyone accepts class distinctions, goes to the same church, takes care of the sick and the poor, lives by the same laws, and accepts the same social conventions, inequitable though they may be, should be denied the name “community,” even though we might call it a bad one. Williams would probably respond by asking,
What true sharing, or having in common, or mutuality, or neighborliness, or kindness can there be between the rich landlord and the tenant farmers he rack-rents and oppresses? Only a small group of families living in the same place in a more or less classless society, or a society in which class distinctions are minimized, can justifiably be called a community.3
Little or no countenance is given by Williams to the idea that a novel may be an imaginary world, a counter world, a heterotopia with its own somewhat idiosyncratic laws and features. Such a heterotopia is made, no doubt, by a transformation into words of the “real world” as the author saw it. This transformation is brought about through the performative felicity of fictive language. It is, however, by no means a mirror image to be judged solely by the accuracy of its reflection of the phenomenal world, including social phenomena, according to a mistaken ideological assumption that Williams shares with so many critics and teachers of the novel. Nor does Williams give much value to the margin in subjectivity of independence, individuality, idiosyncrasy, or secrecy. Such singularity detaches fictive characters, and perhaps real persons, in part at least, from their circumambient communities. That, for example, is one of Hardy’s main assumptions.
Williams disvalues such detachment under negative names like “alienation,” “separation,” and “exposure.” Destructive uprooting is the result of social changes brought about by the triumph of capitalism and its concomitants: the rise of literacy, the displacement of small farmers and agrarian workers, migration to cities, and the imposition of capitalist means of farming. “The exposed and separated individuals,” says Williams, “whom Hardy puts at the centre of his fiction, are only the most developed cases of a general exposure and separation. Yet they are never merely illustrations of this change in a way of life. Each has a dominant personal history, which in psychological terms bears a direct relation to the social character of the change” (210). Each character’s dominant personal history, however individual, reflects and embodies in a special way for that person, according to Williams, the large-scale social change of which the character is to a considerable degree the helpless victim.
A wide variety of other theories of community roughly contemporary with Williams’s ideas have been developed and may be compared to his. Some come before Williams’s The Country and the City (originally published in 1973), and some are more recent. It is unlikely that Williams had read any of these writers, or they he, when he wrote his book. Such theorists of community include Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, Alphonso Lingis, Jacques Derrida.4 These writers are by no means all singing the same tune. A full account of what they say about community would take a big book. Nevertheless, a preliminary sketch, beginning with a more extended discussion of Heidegger’s concept of community, can be made.
Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), asserts that Mitsein, “being together,” is a primordial feature of Dasein, his name for human “being there.” Nevertheless he, notoriously, condemns the discourse of everyday, shared experience as Gerede, “idle talk.” He most prizes those moments when a Dasein becomes aware of itself in its uniqueness and finitude, its Sein zum Tode, “being toward death.” Such a Dasein may then decide to take responsibility for itself by “wanting to have a conscience.” What is for Williams the bad alienation of a character like Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native, is for Heidegger the essential condition of authenticity. Authenticity means taking possession, in solitude, of one’s own Dasein, rather than living in submission to das Man, “the they.” Heidegger’s valuation is exactly the reverse of Williams’s. Heidegger, it may be, is closer to the Protestant tradition of valuing private spiritual life than Williams. Williams gives short shrift to the Protestantism of his rural Welsh border villagers. He sees the local vicar as part of the oppressive class structure. He values the dissenting chapels that were a resistance to the hegemony of the Church of England (The Country and the City, 105), but says nothing about the forms of private spirituality those chapels promoted—for example, private prayer. In the Marxist millennium, one will not have a private subjective life. One will not need to have such a thing.
How different are Martin Heidegger’s assumptions! As far as I know, Heidegger never in his life made a comment on a novel, though perhaps somewhere and at some time he did. Perhaps he never read any novels, though perhaps he read them secretly all the time and was ashamed of that, as many people are and have been since novel-publishing began, just as some people today are ashamed of being addicted to video games. In nineteenth-century England, reading novels was often seen as a frivolous, and even morally dangerous, practice, especially for women, though for men, too. Both Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Conrad’s Lord Jim were brought to bad ends by reading too much popular romantic fiction. Heidegger, in any case, was a poetry man. He greatly valued certain poets, Hölderlin above all, but also Rilke, Trakl, and Sophocles. He could relate these poets directly to his own philosophical thinking. It would be interesting to know what he might have thought of The Return of the Native.
In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), his masterwork, Heidegger makes a sharp distinction between Dasein lost in the “they,” das Man, and, opposed to that, authentic Dasein. Human beings, for Heidegger, are “there,” “da,” in ways animals, plants, and stones are not. Daseins are “rich in world” and are “there” in their world. Animals are for Heidegger “poor in world,” and stones, pace Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of “prehension,”5 have no world at all.
Heidegger distributes the positives and negatives in a way exactly opposite to Williams’s valuations. What Williams praises Heidegger detests. What Williams deplores Heidegger celebrates. Heidegger insists that terms “das Man,” or “idle talk,” are descriptive, neutral, not evaluative: “The expression ‘idle talk’ [Gerede] is not to be used here in a ‘disparaging’ [herabziehenden] signification.”6 Being “lost” in the “they,” or “fallen” into it, or “thrown” into it (Verloren, Verfallen, Geworfen), Heidegger insists, is a normal, “primordial” condition of humankind. Nevertheless, his actual description of Dasein’s lostness in the “they” hardly looks neutral. The terms “lost,” “fallen,” and “thrown,” with their theological overtones, are anything but purely descriptive. They are also strikingly figurative. Human beings are not lost, as in “lost in the woods,” nor fallen, in the sense of “he tripped and fell,” nor thrown in the sense of “thrown over a cliff.” They are lost, fallen, and thrown in the way evil-doers are in the Christian view of human existence. Heidegger professes to dislike figures of speech. He tries to persuade his readers that his terms are meant literally. Nevertheless, they are figures of speech. They are examples of that strange trope called “catachresis,” terms transferred from their normal uses to name something, in this case the human condition, for which no literal terms exist. A somewhat lurid and violent background story of being thrown down, then lost and suffering a fall (as in “the fall of Man”), gets told by these terms, however neutral and “philosophical” Heidegger wants them to be.
Here is part of Heidegger’s powerfully ironic description of what it means to be lost in the “they.” It comes in paragraph 27, the title of which is translated as Everyday Being-one’s-Self and the “They” (Das alltägliche Selbstsein und das Man) (BT, 163; SZ, 126):
We have shown earlier how in the environment which lies closest to us, the public “environment” [“Umwelt”] already is ready-to-hand and is also a matter of concern [mitbesorgt]. In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein] dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of “the Others,” in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. [In dieser Unauffälligkeit und Nichtfeststellbarkeit entfaltet das Man seine eigentliche Diktatur.] We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they,” which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.… Thus the “they” maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “leveling down” [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being.… By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.… Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. [Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst.] (BT, 164–5; SZ, 126–8)
Though Heidegger insists that his analysis is “far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein, and from the aspirations of a ‘philosophy of culture’ ” [“kulturphilosophischen”] (BT, 211; SZ, 167), if what he says is true, it would have deep implications for a philosophy of culture, or for present-day cultural studies, or for my readings of Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes. Heidegger’s angry condemnation of the “they” is echoed in present-day condemnations of the leveling of indigenous cultures everywhere by global economic imperialism and by the increasing worldwide domination of mass media. Soon everyone all over the world, such denunciations assert, will dress alike, eat the same food, drink coffee at a Starbucks, watch the same movies and television news, listen to the same talk shows, and think alike, in a worldwide triumph of the “they.” The difference is that Heidegger, apparently, would consider an indigenous culture, for example the sequestered backwater rural community of The Return of the Native, as much an example of the “they” as the urban noncommunities of those who go to the cinema, watch television network news, and surf the Web. We must go carefully here in measuring just where my novelists stand on the continuum from Williams to Heidegger.
Heidegger opposes to Dasein’s everyday lostness in the inauthenticity of the “they,” another possible human condition. This he calls “authentic Dasein.” How can Dasein possibly wrest itself from its lostness and become “authentic”? What does that mean, “authentic” (eigentlich)? A long and intricate development much further on in Being and Time describes this process of freeing oneself from the “they.” Being and Time tells a dramatic story. It is the story of Dasein’s possible rescue of itself from having fallen or having been thrown (two rather different images) into das Man. The initial assumption is that each Dasein is actually unique, singular, idiosyncratic, however much it may be primordially lost in the “they.” A given Dasein is not like any of the “Others,” not even like those closest to it, members of the same family or of a local, “indigenous,” community with whom a given Dasein might be thought to share assumptions, customs, ways of living. The reader will remember that for Williams, on the contrary, individuality is inseparable from its surroundings, except through its alienation in “separation” and “exposure,” which is seen as a bad thing.
Heidegger calls Dasein’s confrontation of its own individuality an experience of the uncanny, das Unheimlichkeit. I cite the German word here, “un-at-home-ness,” because it suggests the way Dasein in its singularity is not at home in any house, family, or community. Like a homeless ghost, Dasein is an intruder or stranger who has invaded the home, though, as Freud says of the uncanny, that stranger seems familiar, something already seen before. When I confront myself in my individuality I feel that this is me and yet not me, not the everyday me that is lost in the “they,” but a different more unsettling me that is a misfit, as we say. I recognize myself as strange, in short, as uncanny:
In the face of its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief which comes with the supposed freedom of the they-self. This fleeing has been described as a fleeing in the face of the uncanniness which is basically determinative for individualized Being-in-the-world. Uncanniness reveals itself authentically in the basic state-of-mind of anxiety [Angst]; and, as the most elemental way in which thrown Dasein is disclosed, it puts Dasein’s Being-in-the-world face to face with the “nothing” of the world [das Nichts der Welt]; in the face of this “nothing,” Dasein is anxious with anxiety about its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. What if this Dasein, which finds itself in the very depths of its uncannniness, should be the caller of the call of conscience [der Rufer des Gewissensrufes wäre]?… Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up. (BT, 321, 322; SZ, 276, 277)
What brings about this confrontation of my potentially authentic self by my everyday inauthentic self? Here things get very strange in Heidegger, even uncanny in their singularity, though what he says seems oddly familiar after all. One might say that Heidegger’s greatness as a philosopher is to have said things that no one had ever said in just that way before but that nevertheless seem strangely familiar, as if I knew them already without knowing that I knew them. They therefore may strike me as plausible, persuasive. They seem not entirely off the wall.
Heidegger hypothesizes that each Dasein is endowed with what, in a characteristically barbarous phrase, he calls its “ownmost potentiality for being.” Dasein is not yet what it could be or should be. What it could be or should be is “ownmost” (eigentlich), that is, something that belongs uniquely to that one Dasein alone and to no other. No one else has the same potentiality for being as I do, just as no one but me can die my own death. My ownmost potentiality for being is, for Heidegger, essentially a “being towards death” (Sein zum Tode) (BT, 378; SZ, 329). It is an essential feature of each Dasein that however much it is now a “being there,” it is mortal—that is, some day it will cease to “be there.” Paradoxically, though Heidegger never puts it this way, my “ownmost potentiality-for-Being” incorporates as one of its essential features a potentiality for one day not being there, for being dead, the possibility of an impossibility, as Derrida calls it.
How in the world can I come to confront my uncanny individuality with its built-in penchant toward death? The answer is that I must answer what Heidegger calls “the call of conscience” (der Ruf des Gewissens) (BT, 317; SZ, 272). Conscience essentially calls Dasein to accept a primordial being guilty, Schuldigsein. I am not guilty of this or that sin or crime, but originally guilty through and through as a fundamental feature of my Dasein. Through the call of conscience Dasein “has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself—that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being [zu seinem eigensten Seinkönnen].… Conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the ‘they’ [aus der Verlorenheit in das Man]” (BT, 318, 319; SZ, 273, 274). This sounds strangely familiar. It is the language of Christian theology and Christian ethics, with its notion of original sin, and with its appeal to conscience as the still small voice of God within the soul, calling the soul to mend its ways. Heidegger insists, however, that his discourse is not a theology. The call of conscience, he says, does not come from God. Heidegger’s genius is to have taken the terminology of Christian theology and redefined all the traditional key terms for the relation of the soul to its “ground” in God, Who has created it. Heidegger has twisted all these terms so that they express a secular ontology. He does this by a kind of doubling of the self within itself, or of each Dasein within itself. When Dasein heeds the call of conscience it is lifting itself, as it were, by its own bootstraps. This happens without any help from God or from anything transcendent. It happens only through the doubling immanence of Dasein to itself. “In conscience,” says Heidegger, “Dasein calls itself.” (Das Dasein ruft im Gewissen sich selbst.) (BT, 320; SZ, 275). He goes on to specify what this means: “Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘It’ calls [‘Es’ ruft], against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me. [Der ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich.]” (BT, 320, SZ, 275).
A “call,” the reader should note, is a special kind of performative utterance, as in Louis Althusser’s famous example of the call society makes when it interpellates me to assimilate myself to the surrounding ideology with all its ISAs, or “Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser’s call occurs when, for example, a policeman hails me with a “Hey you!” The call of conscience in Heidegger, however, is just the reverse of the policeman’s call in Althusser’s example. Conscience calls me to extricate myself from the community and to become my authentic self, not, as in Althusser, to accept my place within a dominating ideological community or national construct. When someone or something calls me, I cannot simply ignore the call. The call is a felicitous performative utterance not in the sense that it preprograms my answer, but in the sense that it puts me in the position of having to respond in some way or other. I must say yes or no. Even not responding is a response.
The circularity involved in dividing Dasein into a deeply grounded caller, inside and outside me at once, and the ungrounded, superficial inauthentic one-who-is-called is indicated in the opposition between two often-repeated terms in this part of Sein und Zeit. On the one hand is the call of conscience, which comes unbidden from the depths or heights of Dasein and demands an answer, a yes or a no. On the other hand is what Heidegger calls “wanting to have a conscience.” The call of conscience comes unbidden, involuntarily, and yet I will not hear the call of conscience unless, for some mysterious reason, I am seized by the desire that Heidegger names with a marvelous compound term (in German) implying conscious will, that is, “wanting to have a conscience” (Gewissen-haben-wollen) (BT, 334; SZ, 288). That is what I mean by calling the Heideggerian process of becoming an authentic, solidly grounded Dasein a lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps. “What if this Dasein,” asks Heidegger in a portentous rhetorical question, “which finds itself in the very depths of its uncanniness [im Grunde seiner Unheimlichkeit], should be the caller of the call of conscience?” (BT, 321; SZ, 276). He answers the question in a set of formulations that sums up the distinction, for Heidegger, between being in a community, that is, lost in the “they,” and detaching oneself from the community for the sake of becoming what one already secretly potentially is, that is, authentic Dasein:
In its “who,” the caller is definable in a “worldly” way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-home” [als Un-zuhause]—the bare “that-it-is” in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they,” lost in the manifold “world” of its concern, than the Self that has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? “It” calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear [das besorgend neugierige Ohr] nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public. But what is Dasein even to report from the uncanniness of its thrown Being [seines geworfenen Seins]? (BT, 321–2; SZ, 276–7)
My everyday Dasein, it appears, is inhabited at its deepest levels by something, an “it,” that is wholly alien to me, wholly “other,” and yet that is more myself than I am. (I borrow that phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest and a Scotist. It is significant that Heidegger’s doctoral dissertation was on the medieval Catholic theologian, Duns Scotus. Scotus, as opposed to Aquinas, believed in the “equivocity of being”; that is, he believed that everything from God on down to the least created thing has “being” in the same way. Heidegger’s ubiquitous “Being,” one might hazard, is a secularized echo of Scotist equivocity.) One more important feature of the call of conscience is implicit in the passage just cited and made explicit further on in Sein und Zeit. A “call” is implicitly a mode of discourse, even though it is a performative utterance, not a constative one, as for example in the Althusserian policeman’s peremptory “Hey you!” or in God’s call to Abraham, in Genesis: “And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am” (Gen. 22:1). Heidegger’s call of conscience, however, is in the mode of silence: “The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent [Modus des Schweigens]” (BT, 322; SZ, 277). The response of Dasein to the silent call of conscience must also take the form of keeping silent. It is not the sort of thing one talks about to other people. To talk about it or even to express it in language would be to traduce it, to betray it by formulating it in public language, the “idle talk” (Gerede), of the “they.” The call and the answer to the call are incommensurate with ordinary language, the language I share with the other members of my community.
Though Heidegger does not give any specific examples, the model here might be Abraham’s response, shared not even with his wife, to God’s command that he sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as interpreted by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent, as Wittgenstein said. Of course, in an essential and inescapable paradox, the Biblical authors, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger all speak in public language. They write and publish the silent secrets. The Bible is the archetype or paradigm of public language, the esoteric turned exoteric, a discourse all with ears to hear can hear. It is available to all everywhere in every language, as in all those Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms. These various discourses give away what is secret; otherwise we would know nothing about what happened silently. This paradox belongs especially to this region of thought.
In a somewhat similar way, novelists, or rather the narrators invented by novelists, by way of an uncanny species of telepathy, penetrate and then give away to every reader the secrets of their characters. They reveal precious things that the characters keep in their hearts and about which they keep silent to everyone around them, family, friends, the whole community. The Return of the Native presents many cases of this. An example is the process by which Eustacia tires of her love for Wildeve and then shifts to Clym Yeobright as the object of her desire and fascination. Eustacia in her self-consciousness of course knows about this shift. The narrator tells the reader about it, but no one among the novel’s characters but Eustacia knows. It is a secret, but also in a peculiar way an open secret because the narrator and every reader of the novel know it.
One obvious problem with the call of conscience is that it is unverifiable to another person. It carries its own verification, even for the one who hears it. “Jehovah told me to sacrifice my son. I heard a voice telling me to do so.” That would not stand up well in a court of law as an excuse for a father’s murder of his son. Three great world religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, take the story of a father’s willingness to sacrifice his son as their founding story, while the other great strand in our tradition, the Graeco-Roman one, takes instead Oedipus’s actual, though inadvertent, murder of his father.
No two positions could be in starker contrast than those of Williams and Heidegger, as stark as the opposition between Oedipus and Abraham. What is good for Williams, belonging to an egalitarian community, is bad for Heidegger. It is given the dyslogistic name of being lost in the “they.” What is bad for Williams, alienation from any organic community, is good for Heidegger because only by such detachment can Dasein become an authentic self. Which authority has it right? It is not all that easy to decide, though much is at stake in making a decision. It is somewhat easier to focus on examples that will at least permit understanding further just what is at stake.
I now turn briefly to some other modern theorists of community.
Nancy’s thinking about community, in the two books listed in endnote 4, is complex. It is not at all easy to summarize in a phrase or two.7 For Nancy, to compress violently, each individual is at once unique, singular, and at the same time plural, “exposed,” in the etymological sense of “set outside,” to others. Those others remain, however, fundamentally other, alien, strangers each enclosed in his or her singularity. What we most share is that we shall all die, though each singularity will die its own death. This means that each community, at all times and places, is désoeuvrée, “unworked.”
For Agamben, the “coming community” will be agglomerations, not necessarily malign, of “whatever [quodlibet] singularities.”
The title of Lingis’s book on community names this agglomeration “the community of those who have nothing in common.” Lingis’s book emphasizes the encounter with the stranger as essential to human life today.
Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable is a small book commenting on Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée in its relation to Bataille’s “acephalic” (headless) community. Blanchot describes communities that are inavouable. They are unavowable in the sense of being secret, hidden, and shameful, but also in the sense of being incompatible with the “felicitous” public speech acts. Such public “avowals” found, support, and constantly renew the communities we all would like to live in or even may think we live in. In unavowable communities, such performative speech acts are impossible or, in J. L. Austin’s term, “infelicitous.” They do not work to make something predictable happen.
Jacques Derrida, finally, is deeply suspicious of Heidegger’s Mitsein, and of the validity of anything like Williams’s celebration of a community of people who share the same assumptions and live in kindness and mutuality. Derrida’s last seminar (2002–2003) is on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, an odd couple! In the first session of this seminar Derrida intransigently asserts that each man or woman is marooned on his or her own island, enclosed in a singular world, with no isthmus, bridge, or other means of communication to the sealed worlds of others, or from their worlds to mine. The consequence is that since “the difference between one world and another will remain always unbridgeable [infranchissable],” “the community of the world [la communauté du monde],” including animals and human beings of different cultures, is “always constructed, simulated by a set of stabilizing apparatuses [dispositifs], more or less stable, then, and never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces [les codes de traces] being designed, among all living beings, to construct a unity of the world always deconstructible [une unité du monde toujours déconstructible], nowhere and never given in nature.”8 In some remarkable pages in “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida posits a suicidal tendency in each community that he calls a form of “autoimmunity”:
Community as com-mon auto-immunity [com-mune auto-immunité]: no community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact [du maintien de l’intégrité intacte de soi]), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival.9
I conclude that assumptions about the nature of individuality and intersubjectivity largely determine one’s ideas about community. Williams’s community is only one possibility within a wide spectrum of recent concepts of community. These concepts are incompatible. They cannot be synthesized or reconciled. Il faut choisir. How do I choose? I wish with all my heart I could believe in Williams’s classless communities, but I fear that real communities are more like the communities of self-destructive autoimmunity Derrida describes. Certainly, the United States these days, if you think of it as one immense community, is a better example of Derrida’s self-destructive autoimmune community than of Williams’s community of kindness and mutuality. Such Gemeinschaften may nevertheless still exist in small pockets here and there in the rural United States, though often with distressing ideological prejudices, racist or xenophobic ones. The new media, however—iPhones, Facebook, the Internet, video games, e-mail, and the rest—are fast destroying those remnants, however problematic they are.
The chapters that follow, in asking, as a basis for careful reading, whether this or that novel represents a “true community,” presuppose this complex and often contradictory tradition of thinking about community.