The Life of the Mind (62 page)

Finally there is the concept of the
Self,
and it is this concept whose change in the "reversal" is the most unexpected and the most consequential. In
Being and Time,
the term "Self" is the "answer to the question Who [is man]?" as distinguished from the question of What he is; the Self is the term for man's existence as distinguished from whatever qualities he may possess. This existence, the "authentic being a Self," is derived polemically from the "Them." ("Mit
dem Ausdruck 'Selbst' antworten wir auf die Frage nach dem Wer des Daseins. . . . Das eigentliche Selbstsein bestimmt sich als eine existenzielle Modifikation des Man
.")
⁸⁰
By modifying the "They" of everyday life into "being oneself," human existence produces a "
solus ipse,
" and Heidegger speaks in this context of an "existential solipsism," that is, of the actualization of the
principium individuations,
an actualizing we have encountered in other philosophers as one of the essential functions of the Will. Heidegger had originally ascribed it to Care, his early term for man's organ for the future.
⁸¹

To underline the similarity of Care (before the "reversal") and Will in a modem setting, we turn to Bergson, who—certainly not influenced by earlier thinkers but following the immediate evidence of consciousness—had posited, only a few decades before Heidegger, the co-existence of two selves, the one social (Heidegger's "They") and the other "fundamental" (Heidegger's "authentic"). The Will's function is "to recover this fundamental self" from "the requirements of social life in general and language in particular," namely the language ordinarily spoken in which every word already has a "social meaning."
⁸²
It is a cliche-ridden language, needed for communication with others in an "external world quite distinct from [ourselves], which is the common property of all conscious beings." Life in common with others has created its own kind of speech that leads to the formation of "a second self ... which obscures the first." The task of philosophy is to lead this social self back "to the real and concrete self ... whose activity cannot be compared to that of any other force," because this force is sheer
spontaneity
of which "each of us has immediate knowledge" obtained only by the immediate observation of oneself by oneself.
⁸³
And Bergson, quite in line with Nietzsche and also, as it were, in tune with Heidegger, sees die "proof' of this spontaneity in the fact of artistic creativity. The coming into existence of a work of art cannot be explained by antecedent causes as though what is now actual has been latent or potential before, whether in the form of external causes or inner motives: "When a musician composes a symphony, was his work possible before being real?"
⁸⁴
Heidegger is quite in line with the general position when he writes in volume I of his
Nietzsche
(i.e., before the "reversal"): "To will always means: to bring oneself to one's self.... Willing, we encounter ourselves as who we are authentically...."
⁸⁵

Yet this is as much of an affinity between Heidegger and his immediate predecessors as can be claimed. Nowhere in
Being and Time
—except for a peripheral remark about poetic speech "as possible disclosure of existence"
⁸⁶
—is artistic creativity mentioned. In volume I of the
Nietzsche
, the tension and close relationship between poetry and philosophy, the poet and the philosopher, is twice noticed but not in either the Nietzschean or the Bergsonian sense of sheer creativity.
⁸⁷
On the contrary, the Self in
Being and Time
becomes manifest in "the voice of conscience," which calls man back from his everyday entanglement in the "
man
" (German for "one" or "they") and what conscience, in its call, discloses as human "guilt," a word
(Schuld)
that in German means both being guilty of (responsible for) some deed and having debts in the sense of owing somebody something.
⁸⁸

The main point in Heidegger's "idea of guilt" is that human existence is guilty to the extent that it "factually exists"; it does not "need to become guilty of something through omissions or commissions; [it is only called upon] to actualize authentically the 'guiltiness' which it is anyhow."
⁸⁹
® (It apparently never occurred to Heidegger that by making all men who listen to the "call of conscience" equally guilty, he was actually proclaiming universal innocence: where everybody is guilty, nobody is.) This existential culpability—given by human existence—is established in two ways. Inspired by Goethe's "One who acts always becomes guilty," Heidegger shows that every action, by actualizing a single possibility, at one stroke kills all the others among which it had to choose. Every commitment entails a number of defaults. More important, however, the concept of "being thrown into the world" already implies that human existence
owes
its existence to something that it is not itself; by virtue of its very existence it is indebted:
Dasein—
human existence inasmuch as it is—"has been thrown; it is there, but
not
brought into the there by itself."
⁹⁰

Conscience demands that man accept that "indebtedness," and acceptance means that the Self brings itself to a kind of "acting"
(handeln)
which is polemically understood as the opposite of the "loud" and visible actions of public life—the mere froth on what truly is. This acting is silent, a "letting one's own self act in its indebtedness," and this entirely inner "action" in which man opens himself to the authentic actuality of being thrown,
⁹¹
can exist only in the activity of thinking. That is probably why Heidegger, throughout his whole work, "on purpose avoided"
⁹²
dealing with action. What is most surprising in his interpretation of conscience is the vehement denunciation of "the ordinary interpretation of conscience" that has always understood it as a kind of soliloquy, the "soundless dialogue of me and myself." Such a dialogue, Heidegger maintains, can be explained only as an inauthentic attempt at self-justification against the claims of the "Them." This is all the more striking because Heidegger, in a different context—and, it is true, only marginally—speaks of "the voice of the friend that every
Dasein
[human existence] carries with it."
⁹³

No matter how strange and, in the last analysis, unaccounted for by phenomenological evidence Heidegger's analysis of conscience may prove to be, the tie with the sheer facts of human existence implicit in the concept of a primordial indebtedness certainly contains the first hint of his later identification of thinking and thanking. What the call of conscience actually achieves is the recovery of the individualized (
verein-zeltes)
self from involvement in the events that determine men's everyday activities as well as the course of recorded history—
Vicume des choses.
Summoned back, the self is now turned to a thinking that expresses gratitude that the "naked That" has been given at all. That the attitude of man, confronted with Being, should be
thanking
can be seen as a variant of Plato's
thaumazein,
the beginning principle of philosophy. We have dealt with that
admiring
wonder, and to find it in a modem context is neither striking nor surprising; we have only to think of Nietzsche's praise of the "Yes-sayers" or turn our attention from academic speculations to some of this century's great poets. They at least show how suggestive such affirmation can be as a solution for the apparent meaninglessness of an entirely secularized world. Here are two lines by the Russian Osip Mandelstam, written in 1918:

 

We will remember in Lethe's cold waters
That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.

 

These verses can easily be matched by a number of lines by Rainer Maria Rilke in the
Duino Elegies,
written at about the same time; I shall quote a few:

 

Erde du liebe, ich will. Oh glaub es bedürfte
Nicht deiner Frühlinge mehr, mich dir zu gewinnen.
Einer, ach ein einziger ist schon dem Blute zu viel.
Namenlos bin ich zu dir entschlossen von weit her,
Immer warst du im recht....

Earth, you darling, I will. Oh, believe me, you need
Your spring-times no longer to win me; a single one,
Just one, is already more than my blood can endure.
I've now been unspeakably yours for ages and ages.
You were always right....

Ninth Elegy

 

And finally, as a reminder, I cite again what W. H. Auden wrote some twenty years later:

 

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?

 

Perhaps these examples of non-academic testimony to the dilemmas of the last stage of the modern age can explain the great appeal of Heidegger's work to an elite of the intellectual community despite the almost unanimous antagonism it has aroused in the universities ever since the appearance of
Being and Time.

But what is true of the coincidence of thinking and thanking is hardly true of the merging of acting and thinking. With Heidegger, this is not just the elimination of the subject-object split in order to desubjectivize the Cartesian Ego, but actual fusion of the changes in the "History of Being"
(Seinsgeschichte)
with the activity of thinking in the thinkers. "Being's History" secretly inspires and guides what happens on the surface, while the thinkers, hidden by and protected from the "Them," respond and actualize Being. Here the personified concept whose ghostlike existence brought about the last great enlivenment of philosophy in German Idealism has become fully incarnated; there is a Somebody who
acts out
the hidden meaning of Being and thus provides the disastrous course of events with a counter-current of wholesomeness.

This Somebody, the thinker who has weaned himself from willing to "letting-be," is actually the "authentic Self" of
Being and Time,
who now listens to the call of Being instead of the call of Conscience. Unlike the Self, the thinker is not summoned by himself to his Self; still, to "hear the call authentically signifies once again bringing oneself into factually acting"
("sich in das faktische Handeln bringen").
⁹⁴
In this context the "reversal" means that the Self no longer acts in itself (what has been abandoned is the
In-sich-handeln-lassen des eigensten Selbst
⁹⁵
) but, obedient to Being, enacts by sheer thinking the counter-current of Being underlying the "foam" of beings—the mere appearances whose current is steered by the will-to-power.

The "They" reappear here, but their chief characteristic is no longer "idle talk" (
Gerede
); it is the destructiveness inherent in willing.

What has brought about this change is a decisive radicalization of both the age-old tension between thinking and willing (to be resolved by the "Will-not-to-will") and of the personified concept, which appeared in its most articulate form in Hegel's "World Spirit," that ghostly Nobody that bestows meaning on what factually, but in itself meaninglessly and contingently,
is.
With Heidegger, this Nobody, allegedly acting behind the backs of acting men, has now found a flesh-and-blood incarnation in the existence of the thinker, who acts while he does nothing, a person, to be sure, and even identifiable as 'Thinker"—which, however, does not signify his return into the world of appearances. He remains the "
solus ipse
" in "existential solipsism," except that now die fate of the world, the History of Being, has come to depend on him.

Thus far we have been following Heidegger's own repeated demands to pay due attention to the continuous development of his thinking ever since Being
and Time,
despite the "reversal" that took place in the middle thirties. We have relied, too, on his own interpretations of the reversal during the later thirties and early forties—interpretations closely and coher-ently borne out by his numerous publications of the fifties and sixties. But there is another, perhaps even more radical, interruption in his life as well as his thought to which, as far as I know, no one, Heidegger included, has paid public attention.

This interruption coincided with the catastrophic defeat of Nazi Germany and his own serious difficulties with the academic community and the occupation authorities immediately thereafter. For a period of roughly five years he was so effectively silenced that among his published works there exist only two longer essays—the
Letter on Humanism,
written in 1946 and published in Germany and France in 1947, and "The Anaximander Fragment"
("Der Spruch des Anaximander"),
also written in 1946 and published as the last essay of
Holzwege
in 1950.

Of these, the
Letter on Humanism
contains an eloquent summing-up and immense clarification of the interpretive turn he had given the original reversal, but "The Anaximander Fragment" is of a different character: it presents an altogether new and unexpected outlook on the whole posing of the problem of Being. The main theses of this essay, which I shall now try to outline, were never followed up or fully explicated in his later work. He does mention, in a note to its publication in the
Holzwege,
that the essay was taken from a "treatise"
(Ab-handlung)
written in 1946, which unfortunately has never been published.

To me it seems obvious that this new outiook, so isolated from the rest of his thought, must have emerged from another change of "mood," no less important than the change that happened between the first and the second volumes of the work on Nietzsche—the turn from the "Will-to-Power" as Will-to-will to the new
Gelassenheit,
the serenity of "letting-be" and the paradoxical "Will-not-to-will." The changed mood reflected Germany's defeat, the "point zero" (as Ernst Jünger called it) that for a few years seemed to promise a new beginning. In Heidegger's version: "Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone...? [Or] do we gaze into the evening of a night which heralds another dawn?...
Are
we the latecomers ... at the same time precursors of the dawn of an altogether different age, which has already left our contemporary historiologi-cal representations of history behind?"
⁹⁶