The Black Circle
Page 33
In these cases and in others, like those of Friedrich Schelling and Vladimir Soloviev, the primary move is an identification of evil with the unwillingness to overcome a predominating concern with oneself, with what amounts to one’s embodied “animal” interest in the here and now. One is so attached to one’s particularity that whatever is other to that particularity takes on importance or interest only to the extent it can benefit that particularity. My individual existence trumps all other considerations.
It is perhaps easy to see the connection between these notions of evil and the immolation of the self that takes place in Kojève’s end of history. For the persistence of error is the inability to overcome the self. It is, in Kojève’s terms, the slave’s inability to free himself from the imperative to self-preservation that is the most powerful expression of the devotion to the particular, to “my” one life, my individuality. The slave remains a slave as long as he refuses to overcome his own attachment to his own life as “my” life. As long as the slave considers his life unique, unrepeatable, and especially worthy on those counts alone, the slave must remain a slave, unable and unwilling to enter into any other contexts, for to do so requires the kind of astonishing journey provided in G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Kojève’s commentary.
Every step in the Phenomenology and in Kojève’s commentary requires that one relinquish one’s attachment to one’s particular perspective. As Kojève suggests, merely reading the Phenomenology and understanding it compels a profound self-transformation from the isolated and contradictory individual to the totalizing subject that has become one with substance by letting go of itself.12 Only by letting go of oneself, in the sense of taking on the kind of universal identity possible for the citizen of the universal and homogeneous state, may the individual open herself to the whole, to a vision that corrects every partial vision by running through all of them. In this respect, the Phenomenology is a parable of the emptying of the self, of de-individualization, of death, that brings one to a perspective utterly beyond the partial views that it both incorporates and overcomes. The reader of the Phenomenology who reads and understands becomes every reader of the Phenomenology, a universal subject that is fearfully abstract, perhaps, but is the combination of all particular individuals (subjects), combined in the process of its own self-constitution.
The only way to overcome evil is by willing oneself free of oneself, a most ironic enterprise whereby the particular or individual will empties itself in the communal identity which no longer is will or intellect. This emptying of the particular will into the communal identity is a description of the process and final end of negation.
ERROR AND ERRANCY
To persist in error, however, is a governing dogma of our time. We do not celebrate finality but rather the plenitude of the future, infinite possibility, the never-ending play of inexhaustible possibility. This way of thinking has its roots in Nietzsche and its greatest flowering in the thought of Martin Heidegger, who raises error or errancy to an exalted status as die Irre (or die Irrnis).13 Let me examine, then, the foundations of this propensity to dispense with finality in favor of error in both Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Nietzsche’s most direct statements of this position may be found in Beyond Good and Evil, which he published, at his own expense, in 1886. The first of the eight main sections of the text, entitled “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers,” provides a critique of the “will to truth” that seeks to grasp the function or value of truth. Nietzsche, rather than simply accepting the commitment to truth as unquestionably correct and good, engages in what he considers a more fundamental questioning about what truth means for us in the first place. This in itself is a very interesting move because Nietzsche in effect calls into question the apparent need for finality, of which the striving for truth is merely one manifestation. “Truth” is a term for finality. To the extent one does not have the truth, one does not have the final account, the final view of whatever it is to which the truth relates. If the central issue turns on how one is to live or act, then the acquisition of the final view is an acquisition of the truth, immutable and irrefutable. One may only reject this truth by insisting on error, by sticking one’s tongue out at the Crystal Palace, like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s underground man.
So Nietzsche is interested in discovering why finality in the guise of truth is significant. He divulges his guiding concerns in the fourth subsection of the first main section:
The falsehood of a judgment is for us no objection to a judgment; here our new language sounds perhaps strangest. The question is: to what extent is the judgment life-promoting, life-sustaining, perhaps even species-cultivating; and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (to which belong synthetic a priori judgments) are the most indispensable, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditioned, self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through number, human beings would be unable to live—that renouncing false judgments would be renouncing life. To admit untruth as a condition of life: that is to resist conventional feelings about value in an admittedly dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares to do so, for that reason alone, places itself beyond good and evil.14
Here in condensed form is the core of Nietzsche’s own contribution to the discussion about evil. Nietzsche explains that those judgments which delimit, define, and thus orient us in an otherwise inscrutable world are necessary because it would be impossible to live without them. Truth is important not because it is true itself or a final account of things but rather because that finality fulfills a vital function; it allows one to live, to negotiate the world, to find one’s way. Persistence in this error of truth is life-giving because it hides from us what is least acceptable about our existence, that any judgment we make can only be finally false—or, better, no more true than false—because no judgment can be true in the sense of correspondence to a final or ultimate order. The revelation of the fiction of the eternal leads to a potentially horrific loss of bearings that may only be averted by another fiction or myth of the eternal. Truth is an error without which it would be literally impossible to live.
This reading of Nietzsche as exposing the conventional or fictional nature of what we take for the truth or reality itself merely expresses one of the modern commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy. The irony is precisely that the truth Nietzsche claims we must conceal for our own good—the ultimately inscrutable nature of the whole—has become a salubrious truth, transformed by Nietzsche’s many acolytes into an essential condition of the properly free existence, the existence not fettered by the illusions of order foisted on us by those who would exploit us or deceive us for their own profit.
Heidegger’s transformation of philosophy is even more radical than Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche still seems to have held that the truth of the impossibility of finality in human affairs was a truth so dangerous that it had to be veiled in various fictions or falsehoods. He is utterly clear on the elitism inherent in his assumption that the many wish nothing so much as certainty, that they seek nothing more avidly than to be liberated from their freedom. In the words of Dostoevsky’s grand inquisitor, who shares so many traits with Nietzsche, “Nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom.”15 Nietzsche realizes this statement and reserves freedom to the few.
While Heidegger also holds to an inveterate elitism, his expression of the inevitability of freedom, of the fundamental incompletion of the whole, is much more far reaching than that of Nietzsche. Heidegger too admits that one of the possibilities inherent in Dasein, in existence, is inauthenticity—put crudely, the possibility of foreclosing possibility based on blind adherence to convention—but he also asserts in this way the more fundamental possibility that is openness to possibility itself. Put differently, Dasein may choose not to exercise its essential freedom, but Dasein cannot thereby discard its freedom once and for all, finally.
Dasein cannot be final in any way other than by hiding from itself. Dasein’s lack of finality, however, does not consist in a declaration, such as Nietzsche’s, of the absolute openness of the whole; rather, Heidegger takes an utterly ingenious course by focusing on death. Dasein cannot know finality in itself—as long as I am alive, I am not at a final point. I may see others that have reached their final point, but I cannot live their final point myself, nor can I live my own final point itself. The one thing that resists finalization, that is not transferrable, not capable of being shared communally, is my death.16
Heidegger claims, then, that we simply cannot know an end for ourselves. Neither individuals nor societies can claim finality as long as that final point has not been met, and that final point can never be met. In the case both of individuals and societies, finality must be declared from “outside.” As long as I am alive or my society continues, it cannot declare itself complete or finished, other than by a fiction of completion that, in the end, cannot but fall into perplexities and contradictions.
Nowhere does Heidegger make this point more clearly, succinctly, and suggestively than in the short essay “On the Essence of Truth.” This essay is of fundamental significance not only because it showcases Heidegger’s reinterpretation of finitude but also because it sharply formulates a definition of truth that is radically different from that which we have discussed so far. Heidegger decisively rejects the notion of truth as a standard—a final standard, or Richtmaß—against which phenomena should be judged. In its place he develops a notion of truth that emphasizes incompletion, invention. Heidegger creates a notion of truth that encourages creation and discourages finality, absolute limits.
He does so by calling into question the model of truth typically referred to as the correspondence model. An object is truly what it is when it correctly corresponds to a mental picture (idea, Vorstellung) or image (eidos, Bild) one may have of it. This picture may be grounded in the mind of God or in one’s own mind; the point is that there exists a final picture that dictates what that object is and can be. The final truth of that picture (its ultimate finality) is guaranteed, thus, either by the deity or by another agency whose final authority is not questioned. Heidegger’s strategy is precisely to call this picture into question by examining the origin of its authority. Like Nietzsche and his many followers, Heidegger engages in a sort of genealogy, and he does so in order to suggest that the truth associated with the picture is not absolute, not in the order of things, but rather the result of an operation that Heidegger refers to as “disclosure.”
As soon as one asks Whence this idea?, a problem emerges. If an idea comes into being, then it is not eternal, and if it is not eternal, it must be in some way contingent. If it is contingent, then it could have been different or it could have not been. In either case, one can at least imagine a different outcome. And if one can consistently imagine a different outcome, then the outcome that became canonical loses its authority as the sole outcome. In other words, the outcome that has become canonical has to conceal its contingency at the risk of not giving the complete story that is necessary for a full and final assertion of the truth. Yet a full and final assertion of the truth is not at hand; all assertions of truth rely on a notional moment of disclosure.17 The more primordial truth then has more in common with error than truth; the essence of truth is error, die Irre, or errancy. Error is, however, not merely the result of one operation or another—errancy is what is. We live in errancy or error, just as Nietzsche showed.
FINALLY UNFINISHED?
Heidegger’s is arguably the boldest attempt to argue for the unfinished quality of experience—not as leading to a destructive skepticism but as an affirmative impetus to creation, which masters that skepticism by transforming it into transformative action. But what does this notion of transformation entail? What does it mean to be finally unfinished? The contemporary dogma that praises the incomplete and unfinished as the proper precondition of the human being, arguing that to be human is to embrace one’s unfinishedness both as a sign of humility and as a task to be fruitfully engaged in, must itself be questioned, if for no other reason than as an example of that openness itself.
If unfinishedness does not take its bearing from some finite point or set of criteria, then the notion of the unfinished itself comes into question as not being capable of describing itself as such. If there are no full final ends to meet or by which one may orient oneself, then one has to ask what it means to be at all—one becomes completely unknown to oneself other than as a fiction that calls on minimal fixed standards so as to avoid the incoherence that attends the alternative.
But here we appear to return to Nietzsche, not Heidegger. For here we contemplate a picture of human being as reliant on fictions in order to make any sense of itself. Otherwise, we risk the predicament of the underground man, who talks endlessly, acts furtively, and can do nothing more and nothing less because there are no restrictions at all that he can convincingly apply to himself or steer himself by. The underground man is perhaps the foremost ahistorical or post-historical figure, because he uses a language fashioned in the conventions of finite discourse to pull that discourse apart. He thus engages in the activity that Hannah Arendt associates positively with thinking: he unravels whatever cloth of talk or action he wove the night before.18 But one may compare this, and the numbing repetition it implies, more to Sisyphus than to the liberating hero of the intellect, the philosopher who never ceases to think.
This philosopher, like the underground man, cannot know himself or his world. He is the reductio ad absurdum of the ancient philosophic identification of knowledge with self-knowledge, as we noted in chapter 1. Surely, as a political doctrine, this fundamental ignorance cannot seem very persuasive—we bind ourselves together in a community based on a communal failure of identity that we may refer to as cosmopolitan. Or we end up arguing for a “provisional” identity that seems correct or is at least as comprehensive as we can make it at a given time. But the problem remains that we are fully aware that we are provisional, that we have no access to a real or final story. We are in this sense no different from the madmen Kojève describes, for there is no fully convincing reason to adapt oneself to one identity or another. There are no convincing reasons at all, and discourse thus loses one of its signal advantages over force as a mode of creating a community. We might say, then, that we have returned to a condition where there is no alternative to force, discourse having proven singularly unhelpful.
Still, the central argument that underscores this open attitude to identity is that the humility of thought and action imposed by our not having access to a final truth has to lead to a willingness to cooperate, to fashion meaning together, to create a semblance of wholeness that knows it is delicate and fraught with imperfection—like all human things. Two basic alternatives threaten this open attitude that derives an assumption of equality from the impossibility of finality: violence and bureaucracy.
As I have noted, the failure of discourse to orient us in the world otherwise than through fictions leads to the possibility that the authority of discourse is itself a fiction, that all attempts to establish authority in another world or by reference to hidden or unseen powers are essentially forms of deception. Nietzsche’s famous argument in this respect suggests that the otherworld is the creation of the slave who seeks final power over his master by convincing the master that there is a fount of authority not based in the threat of force.19 The ancient argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus about the origin of justice is thus reprised and decided in favor of Thrasymachus, though not without irony, since Nietzsche makes his argument in the guise of an authoritative discourse, a treatise, that itself reinforces the authority of discourse. There is thus, here as elsewhere, a formative irony in Nietzsche’s writings, since they point to their own fictional quality and, in that respect, to the fictional quality of all discursive constructions to the extent that they persuade one to lay down one’s arms without having to use force to d
o so. Nonetheless, the absence of discursive authority opens the possibility for affirmation of the most simple and strenuous form of authority, force, to which Kojeve otherwise denies authority.20
The other response to this openness is the closure provided by bureaucracy or the tools of bureaucratic management that most contribute to the imposition of a sole system of regulation of life that completely submerges questioning, especially to the extent that questioning addresses the bureaucratic regulatory mechanisms themselves. Heidegger’s tenacious argument against technology, against the closure of apparently open human possibility in one overwhelming system of regulation of the human, is in this sense an argument against the deepest tendency of bureaucracy and bureaucratization of human life. Heidegger shares this concern with his most dogged critics on the left, like Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, who make a similar argument against bureaucracy as being the full and final reification of the human being that emerges with the victory of capitalism.21 Reification, of course, has to do with the transformation of all human relations into commodity relations that may be fixed, once and for all, in a calculus of exchange, in which the fundamental unit of exchange is monetary. The market becomes a bureaucracy regulating all aspects of human life.
The critique that I have associated with Nietzsche and Heidegger finds its correlate on the Marxist side with the essential difference that Marxism is still imbued with a teleology, with an end point at which certain fundamental issues will be resolved so that human beings may be free to do as they like, to create freely, as opposed to the basic resistance to material necessity that is the essential bar to human self-creation. In this sense, the final Marxist state, as ill-defined as it has always been, seems to bear some resemblance to the community created in absence of finality that I discussed above. In both cases, the final end is a freedom from all ends, a freedom to self-creation that seems not to be limited by nature or history.22