Bixler 1963 the Failure of Martin Heidegge

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Harvard Divinity School

The Failure of Martin HeideggerAuthor(s): Julius Seelye BixlerReviewed work(s):Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1963), pp. 121-143Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1508680 .

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THE FAILURE OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

JULIUSSEELYE BIXLERCENTERFORADVANCEDTUDIES

WESLEYANUNIVERSITY

MIDDLETOWN,CONNECTICUT

MARTINHeidegger,teacher and one-timerector of the Universityof Freiburgin Breisgau, is without questionone of the most mys-terious and puzzling personalities, as well as one of the most

enigmatical philosophical thinkers of our age. A spectator who

watches him come from his Black Forest hideout to enter theFreiburg university lecture hall sees him not only garbed in a

costume which is itself peculiar, but enveloped in an air of re-

moteness and even of mystery, which seems to mark him off

sharply fromthe lives and fortunesof ordinarymen. And, duringthe brief period when he ventured to leave the world of specula-tive thought, to express himself on political matters, the effort

can hardly be said to have been crownedwith success, since the

purportof his remarkswas that Adolf Hitler was a man of genius,and a worthy member of the tradition that began with Socrates

and Plato. His later retraction has been accepted by many, but

others who watched him at that periodhave found his words and

actions hard to forget or forgive. Nor are the puzzles he presentslimited to the field of politics. His philosophyitself is so difficult

that those who call themselves his followers are at odds with one

another as to just what it means, and his own frequently ex-pressed judgment is that from the start he has been completely

misinterpreted. The point on which all seem to agree is that what

he is now saying contradicts what he said earlier.

One chief reasonfor the difficulty s, of course,the elusiveness of

the extremelyabstract abstract subject matters he treats. On the

subject of time, Augustine long ago remarked: "If you don't ask

me, I know, but if you do ask me, I don't know what it is." Yet

Heidegger devotes many pages to an analysis of time, trying toexplain that Being itself, or at least, Being as we know it, is time.

"Time," he says, "is called the first name of the truth of Being."

And, in a most important sense, we ourselves are time. The



122 HARVARDTHEOLOGICAL EVIEW

"Dasein," the personal experienceron whom Heidegger's whole

philosophycenters,is that whichmakes time

and,alongwith

time,meaningand history possible. The Dasein establishes what Hei-

degger calls a "temporalhorizon" within which things come to

have meaningand so to be in time. To be a Dasein is to be in a

state of awareness of a reality which is essentially temporal, to

take an attitude toward its possibilities, and through an act of

freedom to bring the possibilities of past, present, and future

together in the unity of a special experienceof awareness which

is also a special experienceof creation. Both Being and we whotry to apprehendit are thus describedby Heidegger as in com-

munication with each other through a form of experience of

which the temporal is the most important aspect. If we are to

come to grips with Being, we must try something more basic

than thought, something which Heidegger calls "andenkende

Denken" and which he says should be translated "thinkingthat

recalls." As if all this linkage of thought with the time process

were not difficultenough in itself, Heidegger insists that our ef-forts to uncover the primal reality must go back even of Beinguntil we reachactual Nothingness! On this subject it would seem

that little could be said, but the fact is that Heidegger finds a

great deal to say - not always in ways that are easy to follow.

A second reason for his unintelligibilityis his readinessto playon words. Many of the words themselvesdo not submit easily to

translation. With some pertinence F. H. Heinemann asks: "Is

the distinctionbetween Sein (to be) and Seiendem(being) reallyof . . . basic importance . . . or is it based on a chance pecu-

liarity of the German anguage? It cannot be properlytranslated

into English, and only with difficulty into French."' But if a

philosophydependsfor its meaningon the vagariesof a particular

language, is it really philosophy?Not only does Heidegger use words difficultto translate- he

invents new ones. In his hands prepositionsbecome verbs, con-junctionsare turnedinto substantives, strangenouns are invented,

syllables are given a special status of their own, and puns assume

a new dignity. "The world worlds,"he tells us with an oracular

air, and when we have absorbed this, he confides that "Nothing

1 F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, p. 105.



THE FAILUREOF MARTIN HEIDEGGER 123

nothings." Perhaps we should think of this less as philosophythan as

poetry,with an

attemptto introducean evocative

qualitythat is lacking in more straightforwardprose. Yet if it is poetry,it is poetry masqueradingas prose, presenting itself as literal as-

sertion and claiming to be an account of what can be demon-

strated and seen as true.

What would his revered predecessor Kierkegaard have made

of this? one wonders. If he could protest so violently against

Hegel's effort to deduceexistence from ideas, what would he have

said of an attempt to reveal reality by coining new words?Wouldhe have hailed it as a new handlingof the "shockmethod"

of teaching he himself so adroitly employed? Perhaps so, yetoften in Heidegger's hands it seems not so much shocking as

tantalizing after the manner of Gertrude Stein. Possibly it can

help us to get out of the old ruts into which our thinking has

fallen. But we feel that its imaginativeness is offset by its ex-

tremely subjective individualism. Too often it seems like a cry

in the dark rather than a communicationofferedin the full lightof day. It shows how one man feels, but not why all shouldagree.

It is this fundamental arbitrarinessthat impressesus first and

last about Heidegger and that is the basis of the most serious

criticism that can be made of him. No one should deny the bril-

liance of manyof his insights. Sincehe believes that until he came

along to give it light the history of thought had been followinga

blind alley, it is surprisingto find that he is at his best when ex-

poundingthe great thinkersof the past. Yet all who haveattended

his historical seminars know that this is so. When he turns to

metaphysicsand tries to unravel the threads of Being, it must be

said, also, that, although not always convincing, he is very fre-

quentlysuggestive. There is a freshnessin his mannerof approachbecause he goes at philosophyby way of daily life and daily feel-

ings. It is because he pays so much attention to emotion that he

is called an Existentialist, though he has morethan onceprotestedthat the term does not apply, since his concern is not with ex-

istence but Being.Whatever his technical concern may be, certainly he is one

who probes human feelings and is not afraid to use what theyreveal as material for his philosophicalstructure. The trouble is




that he appeals to the wrong feelings and interprets them in the

wrongway. It is anxiety, care, and guilt that dominate his think-

ing; and when we ask why he does not choose other emotions

more closely associated with normal, healthy, and creative living,we do not find an answer. Perhaps the question is meaninglessand should not be raised. Perhaps Heidegger would reply that

anxiety and guilt are normal for him. Yet we feel instinctivelythat a philosophy beginning in gloom and ending in nihilism is

suspect. The seeming arbitrarinessof its initial premise can be

justified only if the argument becomes especially convincing asit proceeds. Yet in Heidegger'scase the obstacles thicken instead

of disappearing.One other difficulty should be noted before we go further.

Heidegger wants us to return to the springs of our Being and to

open ourselves without prejudiceto the living waters found there-

in. Since Plato, he believes, Western philosophy has interposed

logicalessences betweenBeing and man and has thus forcedBeing

to disclose itself throughman-madeforms. We must recovertheoriginal experience of immediacy which preceded sophisticated

thought. As he says, we must hark back to "the hitherto unex-

pressed nature of unconcealedness"or "overcomemetaphysics"and "recall Being itself." Metaphysics is concerned with beings,not with Being as Being. So, what we are really after is a primal

relationship,back of metaphysics, back of propositions,back of

categoriesand classifications,back of words themselves. But how

can we know it if we have no words for it, and, in particular,how

can we share it with others? Heidegger seems to have no real

answer, and this is one of his greatest weaknesses. Apparentlyhe believes that there is some primal relationbetween the human

person and ultimate reality such that, when once confronted,

reality will be recognizedfor what it is. He fails, however,to ex-

plain what the mode of recognition can be like. And because

some of hisintuitions in other

spheresof

activity,such as the

political, have been notoriously untrustworthy,we cannot help

wonderingwhetherat this point also he is takingus down an alleyfrom which all reliable signposts have been removed. We should

have moreconfidence n his leadershipin this unverbalizedarea if

his spoken words had carried more conviction.



THE FAILURE OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER 125

It is generally felt that Heidegger has never produced the

ontological theory that might have been anticipated on the basis

of what he said in his first book, Sein und Zeit (published in

1927), and so he is sometimes called a Messiah without a

message. Certainly he has been surrounded from the start bya Messianic aura. The present writer can rememberhis openinglectures at Freiburg in the fall of 1928, when it seemed as if

the eyes of all literate Germanywere focused on his classroom.

At that time his countrymenwere saying: "Yes, we have lost the

war and the peace and we are outcasts in an alien world. Butthere is one man who will lead us to the Promised Land, and

Martin Heidegger is his name." The eagerness with which stu-

dents hung on his every word increased the sense that here was

a modernprophetwith the glad tidings of salvation. But it soon

became clear that his teaching was esoteric and for the ears of

the initiated only. And, before long, unintelligibility led to what

was even worse. Heidegger turned out to be neither a Messiah

nor a real John the Baptist, for the claims of the leader he an-nounced proved to be false.

We have said that Heidegger wants to restore our original re-

lation to primal Being. His Freiburglectures of thirty-fiveyears

ago approached the problem through the immediacies of uni-

versity life and the contemporarystudent world. Philosophy, he

said, begins with the process by which we work out of ourselves

into the surroundingenvironment. Was ist philosophie?he asked.

Philosophieist philosophieren. Und was ist philosophieren? Phi-

losophierenist transcendieren. And what is it to transcend? To

transcendis to realize one's natureas a humanbeing in its bound-

togetherness-with-othersand also its independence. It is to go

directly to the object in the flash of awarenessPlato describedbythe kindling of the spark. You must find the meaning of being

by catching sight of being in yourself as you face your work,

your obligations, your common, dailylife.

Immediately we feel we must ask the question: Is Heideggeran ontologist or an epistemologist? Is he talking about Being as

such (which he insists he means to do) or about the humanbeingand the subjectivity from which he must escape? In his lectures

and in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger used the term Dasein. Literally




it means "being there." As he went on to analyze it, his hearers

and readers, in their innocence, supposed he was talking about

the conscious life of the individual human soul. But in 1949 he

wrote an essay on "The Way Back to the Ground of Meta-

physics,"2 in which he claimed that the whole meaning of Sein

und Zeit is distorted if Dasein is taken to mean "consciousness."

Dasein, he now said, as "being there" "names that which should

first of all be experienced, and subsequently thought of, as a

place- namely, the location of the truth of Being." "To char-

acterize with a single term both the involvement of Being inhuman nature and the essential relation of man to the openness

('there') of Being as such, the name of 'being there' was chosen

for that sphere of being in which man stands as man." (W.

Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 213.)

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. What Heideggerseems

to be saying is that he can avoid the question of whether he is

an epistemologistor an ontologist by choosing special words and

investing them with meaningsthat allow him to operate in eithersphere. This is certainly all right with us if he can really explainwhat he is doing and can show how his words can be made to

fit into both contexts. We may go further and say that perhaps

Heidegger's greatest contribution comes from his attack on es-

tablished categories and his ability to take a fresh view of their

limits. But a thinker who tries to blaze new trails like this must

be sure that he throws enough light for others to follow, and in

Heidegger's case the light often is darkness. At times we are

not sure whether what he is talking about is our own subjective

experienceor his, or what he thinks ours should reveal, or what

he thinks the Greeks thoughtabout Being, or what he thinks we

should think about Being, or what Being is apart from any

thoughtswe may have. The one thing that is apparentis that it

is the nature of Being as Being with which he wants to be con-

cernedand that his

descriptionsof our lot here and

now,or that

of the Greeks there and then, are all part of the attempt to

reveal the mysteriousprimal stuff which traditionalmetaphysicshas not uncovered (because it dealt with beings as beings) and

2Published in W. Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoevski to Sartre, pp.206-221.




which we can get hold of only by developinga new unverbalized

sensitiveness of our own.

So Heideggerargues that Aristotle, like the rest of the Greeks,turned from the problem of Being to that of substance, and al-

lowed Greek thought to take an unduly subjective turn by per-

mitting substance to merge with subject. Instead of examiningthe large and fruitful subject-object situation of immediate un-

critical experience, the Greeks turned to the subject-predicate

situation,which is an abstractedartificialrelationship,useful only

in a limited way. Thus, in class, Heideggerwould remarkat theblackboard, "When I say 'this crayon is white,' by raising the

problem how whiteness can be attached to the crayon, I am

using the copula 'is' only in a special sense, and as indicative

only of one aspect of being. Actually the crayon is not that to

which whiteness is attached or even that which as object is pre-sented to me as subject. It is, rather, part of a total situation

where white crayons, our understandingof them, and we our-

selves with our understanding are bound together in a largerwhole we call Being." So, the Greeksnot only had a word for it,

they had a spoken word, and that has been the source of manyof our difficulties. For it was the spoken word and the proposi-tion suggested by the spoken word that seemed to them to repre-sent the heart of the knowledgeproblem. But actually the spoken

proposition,using the word "is" as a copula, representsonly one

abstractedaspect of the world of Being in its richness.

In this way the Greeks, though they thought of philosophy as

"love of wisdom,"actually made it into an -ology, dependenton

the logos. Practically speaking, they were guilty of logomachyor a playing with words, a type of play in which, it must be

said, Heidegger himself likes to indulge. The Greeks further

confused matters by neglecting Being as such for an inquiry into

the things that Being contains. Then they went on to equate

the structure and qualities of particular things with the natureof Being, and made matters worse by identifying the overall

ontological standpoint with the human, all-too-humanpoint of

view. In the MiddleAges manemergedas a substance with appar-

ently fixed properties rather than the decisive responsible self

he is. Finally, in modern times, Being was identified with a




particular form of Being. The materialists call it physical, the

idealists mental. Man has now become an isolatedentity,

estab-

lishing connection with his world only through a miraculous

process of knowing, which it becomes the duty of philosophy to

study and explain.It is this problem of restoring man's original unity with his

environment that Heidegger returns to again and again. There

is a primal "withness"or "Sein-bei,"he says, that we have lost

and that must be recovered. Using another illustration from the

Greeks, he observes that their word for truth, aletheia, reallyconsists of the verb lanthano, to conceal, and alpha privative,or negative, so that what truth means is "taking the concealment

away" and revealing the connections that have been obscured.

The trouble with the Greeks was that they did not realize how

limited was their conception of truth as "unconcealed." Our

task is to discover in what respect truth is a character of

things themselves, not of propositions about them. So we must

see that Dasein meansin-der-Welt-sein,and in the case of humanbeings it means Miteinandersein,social being, existing togetherwith others. Heidegger now goes on to ask what togetherness

means, what a thing must be like if we can exist togetherwith it,how its sameness is apprehended by differentkinds of subjects,what kind of sharing is possible when several minds are engagedwith the same object, and how human"togetherness"differsfrom

inanimate.

There are various kinds or levels of existence. That of man is

Dasein, or Existenz as a special type of Dasein. Animals have

Leben, material things have Vorhandensein,useful things have

Zuhandensein,and for abstractionssuch as numberand space we

should use the word Bestehen. Similarsubtle distinctions are to

be found in the apparentlysimplewordFrage or question. There

is the Befragten of the Dasein or that to which the question is

directed, the Gefragtenof the Sein or that concerningwhich oneasks, and the Erfragtenof the Sinn von Sein or that to which the

question leads.

Thus, Heidegger thinks of the problemof truth as part of the

problemof Being, and yet, to help us understandBeing, he takes

us back to the human and personal world of practical relation-




ships. We are surprised, as we follow him in his quest for the

"objectivity" of Being, to find how much stress he lays on our

subjective propensities and moods. It has indeed often been

noticed that in his earlier period Heidegger's affiliations were

with idealism, and that later he became more realistic in the

technical sense, adopting a sort of natural piety toward the ob-

jects around him. In his treatment of possibilities the problembecomes most acute. Obviously he believes that human life is

definedby its possibilities,but the status of the possibilities them-

selves is not always clear. In one sense they are what man ac-tualizes; in anotherthey controlhim. In a mood that reminds us

of Kierkegaard, he remarks that the great question is whether

man will achieve Existenz or will let himself fall back into Ver-

fallenheit, i.e., the anonymouslife of the mass. Will he come to

himself or lose himself? Will he win his essential, authentic self-

hood, his eigentliches Existenz, or will he remain dominated bymass opinion,doingthe averagething and acceptingthe standards

of mediocrity? The man of the crowd is irresponsiblebecausehe is controlled by his deterministic environment. He sees and

hears for the "kick"he gets out of it, not because he really wants

to understand. Held down as he is by irresolutionand compro-

mise, the "it is said" of conventional opinion becomes his

authority. He loses his genuine selfhood because he is unwillingto stand alone.

In this way togetherness pushes us down, but, on the other

hand, individuality pulls us up. A man achieves individualityby

becoming aware of the possibilities which characterize his exist-

ence. Chief among these is the possibility of death, and the

care or anxiety it brings. Der Mensch ist Sein zum Tode. Life

is that which is lived with deathin view, andlife is made individual

by the fact that death is in the offing. This it is which separatesa man from his fellows and marks out the opportunitiesthat are

truly his. To get out of Verfallenheitor immersionin the crowdwe must feel our way into the kind of fear that accompanies

conscience, and be sensitive to the quality of evil in our own

nature. When we become aware not of the goodness or badness

of a single act but of the seriousness of life as a whole and our

responsibility to life as the container of possibilities that must




be realized in time and before death, we win Existenz. This is

achieved only by the self which, existing in time, binds past and

future together in the unity of present possibility.Whereas Kierkegaardasks how one can become a Christian,

Heidegger thus asks how one can in the fullest sense become a

man responsive to the influence of Being, aware of the various

forces in his environmentand awake to their possibilities. Man

is not merelya thinkingsubject,a spectatorand spinnerof propo-sitions. He is a participantboundup in an existence which gives

him immediaterelations of feelingand doingwith the world abouthim. It is not thoughtthat explainsexistence but existence which

contains many mansions,among them that of thought.But now we reach an interesting point in the developmentof

his argument,for Heideggerclaims that we are affectednot only

by influences from without but also by the fact that our own

nature is of a certain kind. This is worth dwelling on for a

moment because this reference to our "nature" seems to contra-

dict Heidegger's denial of "natures" or essences or qualities asdeterminantsof our knowledgeof what reality is like. Heideggerin his more Existentialist moments goes a long way to discredit

essences. Even Sartre does not keep up with him. Heidegger

agrees, for example, that Sartre'sfamous dictum "Existencepre-cedes essence," by which he means that essences are not pre-established but are made by man, may be all right for Sartre,but he insists he cannotaccept it as a descriptionof his own view.

Why not? Simply because it is a proposition, and propositions,as we have seen, are too wordy and too formal to act as repre-sentations of being. Heidegger wants us to cast aside formalism

of any sort as we approachthe primal mystery and to do what

we can to take it on its own terms.

How, then, can he appealto the "nature"of man as determiningwhat he is? Does this mean that his existence is, after all, con-

ditionedby

his "essence"?No, apparently not,

for here we face

one of those situations where Heidegger insists that words be

interpreted in a special way. Just as "Dasein" does not exactlymean human conscious existence but "that which should first of

all be experienced, and subsequently thought of, as a place"

(W. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 215), so its "Wesen"or nature is not



THE FAILUREOF MARTIN HEIDEGGER 131

really an essence, and particularly not an essence that acts to

determine in a rigid way. It is, rather, the special quality of

openness to possibility. Man is not determinedby anything now.

He is, rather, what he will become, and what he will become

dependson possibilities still in the future. Yet surely, even to be

"open"is to be determinedin a definite way.It is in his analysis of the possibilities ahead that Heidegger

is most subtle and, we must add, most elusive. In his effort to

free us from the conventional view of man surroundedby objects

he can see and touch and scientifically measure,Heidegger turnsto the relationshipsdisclosed in our feelings, our preoccupations,and our concerns. This is a world that philosophershave been

loath to explore, and at first we want to congratulatehim for his

courage in taking it on. Here, we feel, is the region where the

deepest truthswill come to light. We have worshipped oo long at

the shrine of the positivists and have accepted too readily their

warnings against straying from the realm of sense experience. A

little imaginationis what is required.But is Heidegger's imaginationable to fill the need? What he

sees is man alienated from Being, man a displaced personwith no

real hope of restoringthe intimaciesand security of the past. The

possibilities that actually interest Heidegger are those of nothing-ness and death. Overagainst us stands the awesome fact that we

have been placed here without having been asked whether we

wanted to come. Coupled with it is the responsibility imposed

by approachingdeath. There are two alternatives. We can escapethe responsibilityby falling into the ways of anonymousfaceless

man. Or we can accept it and live under the shadow of its threat.

But neither brings any suggestion of joy or creative fulfillment.

What Heidegger calls authentic personal existence is lived in the

light of (and, we would add, under the curse of) anxiety. Hei-

degger does not mean merely that we have anxious moments,

but that anxiety attends all our awareness of what it means to beplaced here and reveals our essential estrangement. So also,"Care"is the "structure"of humanexistence, and it is not loving

care, or the care which prompts us to send packages to those in

need. So again, the authentic life requires that we do not run

away from "guilt" but accept it, not in the sense that we know




we commit guilty acts, but as itself an inescapable condition.

In the same way our anxiety before death is not a passing mood

but an inevitable and constant element of the authentic life.

The knowledgethat death will come is more certain than knowl-

edge of any physical object. The indefiniteness of its time is

simply an indication that we live continually in the presence of

nothingness. In his discussion of temporality Heidegger makes

use of his famous three "ecstasies." "Ecstasy," he says, means

literally " ek-stasis" or "standingout of" or "above." Thus, we

are not immersed in the flow of time but can stand out of it,whether it be past, present, or future. In each case we face

the distinction between unauthenticand authentic: for the former

the flow of events is passive; for the latter or authentic type of

experience, resolve enters and decisions affect what happens.But again it is guilt that is at work to influencethe resolve. It is

still death that binds togetherthe possibilitiesthat appear.In Was ist Metaphysik? Heidegger wrestles further with the

problemthat had occupiedhim in Sein und Zeit, namely, how wecan get back to primal reality, only here he pays more attention

to the most elusive conceptionof all, that is, Nothing. How are

we to approach t? Canwe reasonabout it? There are difficulties,

Heidegger feels. Reason engages in the act of negating. But is

there nothing because there is negation, or is there negation be-

cause there is nothing? Reason cannot answer this question, be-

cause it is itself inseparable from the act of negating. So, if we

are to meet it or inquire into it, nothing must be not thoughtbut "given." It must present itself in a confrontation or an

encounter.

We pause briefly for word identification. The term"encounter"

is becomingmore and more popular in contemporarytheological

writing. Finding difficulty in expressing how it is that God

meets man and what form his revelation must take, our theo-

logiansare

resortingto the word "encounter"as if it offerednew

light. Godcomes to man, we are told, in an "encounter."Appar-

ently there is somethingabout the word which suggests the primal

relationshipHeidegger has been trying to express, where logicalforms are not resorted to and essences are ruled out. But does

the word live up to what is expected of it and is it really useful?



THE FAILUREOF MARTINHEIDEGGER 133

If God is met in an encounter, is he encounteredas God? And

ifso,

was theexperienced

datum notperceived, judged,

and

evaluated by the usual processes? What, then, remains for the

word "encounter"to express? On the other hand, if there is a

supernaturalelement, not reducible to human terms, just what

is it? What is encountered? We can hardly even say "That"

or "It," for to designate it at all is to use one of those human

words or forms that is supposed to be ruled out. Since he is

trying to dispense with these, Heidegger has the same problem

as the theologians. But his problem is even more complicatedbecause actually it is not a supernatural God or even primal

Being that he is discussingbut Nothingness itself! It would seem

that here indeed we do have a conceptionsuch that any attemptsto make statements about it must necessarily spoil its original

purity!But Heidegger is persistent. Accordingto ordinary language,

he says, nothing is "the opposite of everything that is." If so,

then only by facing everything that is and negating it can weencounter nothingness. We turn to metaphysics for help. What

is Das Seiende, or in English, what is "what-is"? It is what we

are in the midst of, all the time. What do we know it as? Here

Heidegger plays the trump card which was up his sleeve from

the start, or better, here he puts on the blue spectacles which he

keeps always near at hand, and affirmssolemnly that we have

a sense for the wholeness of things in the experienceof - you've

guessed it - boredom! Boredom is the great revealer. It is

true that he doffs the spectacles for a moment and admits that

when we are in the presence of a friend the world lights up. But

then they go back on, and he insists once more that it is the

lugubriousmood that truly counts. For example, there is Angst.With Angst everything slips away and nothing remains. All

attempts to say "Yes" to life are worthless under its spell. Like

Kierkegaard,Heidegger goes on at this point to describe freedomas arising against a backgroundof nothingness. Freedom means

the possibility of falling away from "what-is"as well as turningtowardit, and is grounded n the fusion of "what-is"and nothing.Andnothingness,revealedin Angst, is seen as belongingto "what-

is," while "what-is" s slippingaway into the "what-is-in-totality"




by whichwe are wholly pervaded. A mood whichdisclosestotalityin this fashion is a

"ground phenomenon"of our Dasein or

personal existence here and now. And this brings us, or at least

Heidegger, to the conclusion that it is not the act of negationthat is the source of nothing, but nothing that is the source of

the negating act.

But there is one furtherimportantstep. Just as our experienceof wholeness was colored by the feeling of boredom,so nothing-ness brings an emotional experience and, as might be expected,

it is wholly unpleasant with no cheerful overtones. Nichtung,which Werner Brock translates "nihilation," is a more funda-

mental experience than the act of logical negation, for it is an

experience of conflict, refusal, renunciation. It comes impres-

sively in the loathing that results from conflictwith those around

us. It bears witness to the pervasiveness of Angst. Angst is

always there, thoughmuchof the time it is asleep. We forget and

ignore it because in our preoccupationwith external things and

activities we turn aside from the encounter with nothingness,but our turning is merely toward an anonymous distracted ex-

istence, the existence of the mass man or the faceless crowd. Yet

this process of nihilation is what brings the Dasein, or personal

existence, face to face with "what-is" as such. To come face to

face with "what-is"means to be projectedinto nothingness.

Heidegger tries to relieve the gloom by going on to say that if

man has thecourage

to encounternothingnessand thus to realize

his essential nature as the creature who asks the metaphysical

question,he will win the truth of freedom. Just as the poet in his

ownway tries to attunehimself to the Holy, so the metaphysicianin sensitizing himself to Being expresses his sense of Being's

dignity, and commitshimself, as Heidegger says, to the preserva-tion of freedom'struth. But he reachesthis point only by passing

throughthe valley of the shadowof nothingness,whichgives each

being the warrant to be. Angst is the fundamental feeling, andnothingness is what it reveals. This is the pit before which we

recoil in dread, the Ultimate Abyss.Let us turn back for a moment to the earlier book Sein und

Zeit. In three respects, Heidegger says, man feels himself in

the presence of nothingness. First, he is set here by an act of




"Geworfenheit," that is, "thrownness" or "placedness," and

since this is involuntary, he has no ultimate control over what

he is and does. Second, his existence ends in death. Third, his

ability to realize at most only a few of the many possibilities that

confront him confirmshis essential helplessness. We start by not

being at homein the world,we continuewith a feeling of estrange-

ment, and we end in oblivion. Human life, it would appear, is

not just nothing but worse than nothing and, if possible, to be

avoided.

Now, of course, there is more to Heideggerthan has been indi-catedhere, includingmuchthat his followershave foundto be full

of brilliantpositive insights. But if this is not all of Heidegger,at

least Heideggeris all of this, and what he has to say of a positivesort must be understood n its light. Heidegger obviously does not

meanto be completelynihilistic. He leads us to the abyss in order

to get beyond it to what for him are the groundsfor freedom. But

the abyss is so abysmal,and its influence so all-encompassing, hat

once seen we cannot forget it, and Heideggerseems not to want usto forget it nor to be able to forget it himself. We can, of course,

only applaudthe effort he and other Existentialists have made to

scare us out of any smugnesswe may have left, or any tendency to

evade responsibility by taking life in a too frivolous or light-heartedway. Life is indeed serious,hard, brutal, and tragic. But

what then? In what sense does its tragedy have the last word?

When the poet observed that "life is real, life is earnest," he

coupledwith it the assertion that "the grave is not the goal." For

Heidegger, however,the grave is not merely the goal but life's all-

pervasive fact, its never-to-be-forgottencondition, the decisive

element in any assessment of its worth. "Death," William Jamesonce wrote in a personal letter, "has come to seem a very triflingincident." But for Heideggerdeath is the reality and life an inci-

dent underits spell.

What is accomplished, for either theory or practice, by treat-ing these negative conceptions as objects to be encountered or

as positive agents in their own right? Is this the vision of a

prophet or the fantasy of a dreamer? And does it lead to active

acceptanceof the challengeof life or passive acquiescencebefore

the power of death? In normal life do we brood so constantly




on approachingoblivion? Or, if we do, may it mean that we are

on the border line of ill health? Is it natural, for example, to

speak of "nothingness"as the ground of freedom? Freedom is

not a choice between "nothing"and "something,"but between

two actively beckoning possibilities. Heidegger tries to appealto the so-called Christianview of "creationout of nothing,"claim-

ing that in the Bible nothingnessis the essence of all beings apartfrom God. But even here there is room for argument. Certainlysome scholars believe that the Genesisstory, like Plato's Timaeus,

describes not creation ex nihilo but the imposition of order andform on an originalchaos. It was Augustinewho introducedthe

view of creation out of nothing in order to explain the incarna-

tion. This could have occurred,he thought, only if matter were

not evil, and it could be free from evil only if Godhad created it.

Of "nothingness"as a term for discoursewe are forced to saywhat Hume said of the word "omnipotent,"that it savors more

of panegyric than of philosophy. It is useful as a poetic fiction,

perhaps,but not as a name for what is real. We enjoy watchinga philosopher struggle with the question why there should be

Being rather than Nothing because we feel that he should dare

all and think anything once. But the conclusionhere is not con-

vincing. It is too much like playing with words and conjuring

up dark images that will not stand the light of day. Nothingnessis neither an abyss nor something from which we turn in order

to be free. It is literally nothing about which anything can be

known.

Death poses a problemof a differentkind. The individualneed

for taking account of his own approachingdeath is so personaland so acute that in many instances it has prompted poets to

allegorize death and to treat it as if it were a haunting presencehere and now. Death, Shelley tells us, has set his hand and

seal on all we are and all we feel. Says Francis Thompson: "The

fairestthings

in life are Death andBirth,

and of these two the

fairer thing is Death." More in line with Heidegger's view is

Luther's teaching that death is a test of individuality, since each

of us must learn for himself what it means to die. In the same

strain L. P. Jacks has said that daily we must die to somethingand thus win our immortalityand our freedom.




But note that for Dr. Jacks we die to win. As he goes on to

say,our

daily dyingis a continuous affirmation n the name of

the Eternal Values. We give up that we may gain; we yield that

we may achieve. The fact that my life will end must be taken

as an idea into my present experience. Why? So that I maysee more clearly what is in store for me and act more wisely in

its light. Recognition of the finitude of life is important just be-

cause life and its values are all-important.That I must die is a fact. That I must "encounter death"

either now or at the moment life ends is surely not a fact in thesame sense. To stop living is not to "experience death," as

Epicurusknewlong ago, for when life ends, there is no experience.And if there should be immortality, it would bring experiencenot of death but of somethingelse. The poetic hypostatizing of

death is, then, a justifiable device simply because it is a means

of revealingwhat life is like, what it is for, and what it can do.

Logically, death is not-life; psychologically, the idea of death

enhances the value of life. As a matter of fact, this seems to be

Heidegger's own attitude. He discusses death in order to arouse

us to our living responsibilities. But we feel that in his case the

idea has gotten out of hand and has created an atmospherenot

stimulatingbut morbid.

Our reluctanceto go with Heideggerall the way appears, then,to have two sources: first, the difficulty of finding actually ex-

perienceableor definable content for his

negative terms,and

second, the spell that these termsthemselvescast. After all, there

is something in us that resists, and resists to the end, any such

fundamentalskepticismas to the worth of life. That we are gonetomorrowcannot completely destroy the significanceof the fact

that we arehere today. If Heideggerandthe Existentialistsbelieve

that death and nothingness speak the final truth and that bore-

dom, care, guilt, dread,and despairare the most useful categories

for an interpretationof life, we feel that they have a right totell us so. But we are not compelledto agree. Gnawingsof con-

science and repentance, says Spinoza, are "deleteriousand evil

passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along better

by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscienceand re-

morse." And we know Spinoza meant that we can "get along




better" not only in the sense of meeting the daily task but also

that of exploring speculative issues. "Who canthink,"

asked

Meredith, "and not think hopefully?" To think at all is to as-

sume that thinking is good and that life which sustains thinkingis good also. As long as there is thought, value is assumed both

as a demand to be recognized and a possibility to be realized.

In this sense a reasoned nihilism is impossible."That life is worth living," said Santayana (Reason in Com-

mon Sense, p. 252), "is the most necessary of assumptionsand,

were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions." It isnecessarynot only for life but for thought,not only for our prac-tice but for our attempts to construct a philosophy. So much of

Heidegger'sphilosophizingseems to question this that his whole

system comes undersuspicion. Heideggerwould reply, of course,that he is merely trying to show what responsibleliving is like.

But the means he has chosen are inadequate and self-defeating.

"Responsibility"itself becomes ambiguous when we are so un-

sure what we are responsible to. The "authentic" life loses its

genuinenesswhen we are so vague about what constitutes it.

And it is quite clear that Heidegger's eagerness to get awayfrom all man-made value judgments where Being is concerned

has led him to a positionwherereligion goes by the board. When

we refuse to allow the finalentity to be characterizedby any pred-

icate, including any value predicate, so that whatever It is, it is

merely Itself,we make

any religiousattitude

impossible.Can

such an It be God? Can we approachsuch an It with duty, love,or homage? Heidegger feels that Ritschl and other theologianshave made a great mistake in trying to base faith on value judg-ments. Yet how can religious faith be based on anything else?

Has not Heidegger himself used value judgments? He has

not been free from the appeal to values; he has simply appealedto the wrong ones. And in doing so he has become involved in a

contradiction. For if Being is so neutral as he says, how can ithave the "dignity"he ascribes to it?

In two places Heidegger explores ideas that promise rich re-

wards for the sensitive and imaginativepioneer,and in each case

he returns empty-handed. The first we have already noticed as

what he calls "Geworfenheit,"the fact that we are placed here




without having been asked whether we wanted to come. This is

a favorite theme for many of the Existentialists, and they displaysure insight in singling it out, for certainly it offers a most allur-

ing field for speculation. It is even moretantalizingthan the ques-tion why there should be Being rather than Nothing, because it

is our own being and what is implied by our own chance appear-ance in life that is in question. But when asked: "Why am I

here?" Heidegger's real answer is: "In order to die!" Der

Mensch ist Sein zum Tode. Life is lived with death in view. And

while it is true that, as Heideggerdevelopsthis theme,he attemptsto show how Death is the great Individualizer,the attempt turns

out to be a feeble one, for the chances of overcomingour aliena-

tion, isolation,andestrangementare limited indeed. Whatwe miss

in Heidegger is any emphasis on the fact that just as thoughtmust by its very nature think hopefully, so life by its nature

must be lived with confidence. It is the essence of the situation

that our Geworfenheitor "placedness"presents a challenge that

the will must accept and, in normal circumstances,does acceptwith courage. Our original awareness of ourselves, says Gabriel

Marcel, is, and cannot help being, "exclamatory" n a somewhat

childlike way. Discovering the fact of our presence here, we

say not merely: "Here I am!" but "Here I am - what luck!"

Heidegger can only cry: "Here I am - what rotten luck!"

The second idea is that of "Miteinandersein" the fact that

our humanlot binds us togetherindissolublywith our fellow men.

No conceptioncriesout morecompellinglytodayto be treatedwith

sympathy and understanding. Of what are we more urgently in

need than a philosophy of brotherhoodthat will reveal our com-

mon humanity and help us to solve our common problems by

developinga commonwill! But, perceptiveas he is in describingthe lonely individual, Heidegger always stumbles when he tries

to come out into the world of social life. He was unable to see

that his philosophy, instead of opening the gates for universallove, would lend itself to the purposes of a group conspicuousfor its prejudice and hate. His discussion of suffering omitted

the most poignant of all - our share in the sufferingof those we

love. And his treatment of death is just as one-sided. For, actu-

ally, it is not my own approachingdeath that affects my feeling




and thought,but the death of my friend,as both a possibilityanda fact. This it is which really tempts me to a

negative judgmentbut whichalso, whenhonestly faced, reveals the moralobligationsof the will and the creative possibilities of life. Heidegger fails,in other words,where the two crucial relationshipsare concerned- our feeling for God and our feeling for man. So absorbed is

he in the individual and his privacy that he is unable to see the

outside world. Heideggermakes a point of beingclose to the earth

and to the life of the Schwarzwaldpeasant, but he uses a vocabu-

lary the peasant could hardly be expected to understand andconcepts that are alien to most men's experience. The Existen-

tialist is supposed to be one who brings us away from arid ab-

stractions and back to daily life. But, aside from its technical

difficulties,there is little in Heidegger's pages that the working,

aspiring,outreaching,loving, failing yet stubbornlypersisting in-

dividualwould recognizeas his own. If this is Existentialism,we

yearn for a returnto the values that went out when essences went

by the board, and if this is what happens when recognitiongivesway to encounter, let us return to a reason that is not seized

with such fits of despair.With the poet Hilderlin, Heideggerbelieves that the "nightof

the world"has come. God is veiled, Nothingness is revealed, life

is under the spell of death; we live in a crisis of transition between

the deities that have gone and those that are to come; there is

darknesswithout anddespair

within.So, likeKierkegaard,

he finds

man divided against himself and Being alike. But where Kierke-

gaard says that the division is bridged and the sickness healed

by the grace of a supernaturalGod, for Heidegger,the unbeliever,there is no salvation. Thus, he is infected with Kierkegaard's

Angst without the benefit of Kierkegaard'scure. He is not even

a "humanist"in the sense in which we use the term today, for

he has no faith in the authority of human values to inspire con-

duct and direct it. Of his own thought he writes: "It has no re-sult; it has no effect. It is sufficient to its own nature by virtue

of being ("indemes ist"). In spite of all its subtle sophistication,

Heidegger's philosophy has not kept him from falling into the

Abyss. Or was it insufficientlysubtle and perceptive to take ac-

count of what to the plain man is clear?




Ourconclusion must be that he is not only an enigmaas a man

and as a philosopherbut one who has been seriously frustrated

in what he tried to do. His personal foray into politics provedabortive. Instead of enlisting for righteousnessand brotherhood,he chose nationalpride and prejudice,with the resultingwar and

destruction. In his philosophy also he has failed to bring about

the reformshe desired. He wanted to bypass the traditionaldual-

ism of Western thought and to explain the artificiality of the

subject-object separation by pointing to the immediacy of the

actual relation the self has with environing Being. But instead,he has made the dualismall the more pronouncedby his extreme

emphasis on the r6le of the Dasein in "letting being be" and

bringing being to meaningfulnesswithin the Dasein's own tem-

poral horizon. So great and so all-inclusive is the Dasein's

influence that we are left asking what there is outside the

horizon and how, if anything exists, it can possibly be known.

Because of this subjectivismand his obsessionwith the "Nothing-

ness" always hovering in the background,his own distinction be-tween "authentic" and "inauthentic" becomes meaningless. For

what is "authentic"except what the Dasein - in its own spasmof creativity- decides shall be "authentic,"and what is "authen-

tic" for Heideggerexceptwhat he himself arbitrarilydecides shall

be labeledso? He offersno objectivecriteriaby whichauthenticitycan be judged. The possibility of such criteria is indeed ruled out

by the Dasein's immersionin its own subjectivity.

Heidegger'sweakness becomes conspicuousin his treatmentof

freedom, for him a conception of central importance. Just what

does he understand it to be? Is it freedom to embracethe good?

Definitely not, for, in line with a strong trend in Existentialist

thought, there is no good except as producedin the free creative

act. Freedom is the realization of possibilities which exercise

no lure to goodnessbut are, instead,contaminatedby the Nothing-

ness and Death against which they are seen. With Nothingnessin the background,man's freedom takes on a quality of creation

ex nihilowhichmakes man into a sort of Creator with a capital C,and almost a God on his own account. But since the creation

recognizesno standards,except those implicit in its own act, and

is aware of no criteriatowardwhich its act should be directedand




by which it should be governed,the creation itself is empty, and

it is hard to distinguish the divinity that accompanies it from

deviltry. This freedom in a vacuum is a characteristic idea in

the thoughtof Sartre also and is as nihilistic and confusing in the

work of the French author as it is here.

Heidegger'sfailure is especially regrettablebecause the specialtask he set himself is so worth while. Heidegger is in many re-

spects like James. His originalaim was to enliven philosophyand

thicken it up, to keep it fromdying on the vine of its own abstrac-

tions, and to bring its problemsof Being and of knowledge intothe arena of practical experienceand everyday life. Reality, he

said, is what takes on meaning within the illumination of the

temporalhorizon establishedby the Dasein. The epistemological

problemarises in a complexwhere being, knowledge,and feeling

merge so that distinctions among them are hard to draw. Let us

do justice to the emotions, then, he said in effect, particularlyto

the familiar emotionsof the daily and homely routine- the emo-

tions of artisan and farmer, mechanic and tradesman, in thepresenceof the things they use and the activities with which theyare concerned. But Heidegger became really interested in onlyone type of concern, the concern exemplified in care, anxiety,

guilt, and dread. Death and Nothingness took the central placein his theorizing. Why, we cannot help asking, this very one-

sided emphasis? What has happenedto love and loyalty, friend-

ship and

cotiperation,joy and fellow feeling, high purpose

and fruition? Where, in other words, is the interest in life as the

bearer of good things to be striven for and as potentially gooditself even thoughit is terminatedby death? Death is, of course,a most real feature of experience. But it is real only in relation

to life; it takes all its meaning from life. It cannot therefore be

set apart and given this special status. Death is a natural phe-nomenonof which we must take account, but to allow it to domi-

nate our thought is to be untrue to the instinct that leads us tophilosophy itself.

Thus, Heidegger'sattempt to personalizephilosophyand relate

it to life has been coloredby his own jaundicedview of what life

is like. In the process his ontological insight has itself been

affected. His basic aim, as we have seen, was to recovera primary




and originalrelation to Being that he believed had been lost since

the time of theGreeks,

and he used aspecial type

ofphenomeno-

logicalanalysis to uncover this relation andexplainits nature. But

even here, in an inquirywhich he meant to keep strictly objective,he becamesubjectivein an arbitraryway. In spite of all his eager-ness to keep his gaze fixed on Being as such, and to let it reveal

itself after its ownmanner,in spite also of his concernto maintain

a disinterestedand neutral view of that by which Being is known

- calling it simply and drably the "Dasein,"the "hereand now,"

- he found himself actually defining Being as it is known by avery human existent, whose receptivity is affectedby a very per-sonal kind of anxiety and care. Being, as Heideggerdescribes it,thus takes on meaning only within the temporal horizon of a

Dasein which is apprehensiveas well as apprehending,and whose

vision is clouded by guilt and despair. Understandably, Being,so approached, became hard to distinguish from Nothingness,

just as the life of the Dasein becamesignificantonly in its relation

to Death. The student must conclude that at crucial points the"hiddenness" has not been taken away, the concealed has not

been given a chance to stand forth. Instead of revealing thingsas they really are, Heidegger has more successfully displayedthis particularauthor as he actually is.

Bixler 1963 the Failure of Martin Heidegge

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