The judgment of sense Book

Part of the continuingly relevant subgenre of fascists wtf, this text works in parallel with Loewenthal's work on rightwing agitators in the US during the 40s and Neumann's analysis of the Third Reich and Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason arguments, here focusing on rightwing language as it appears in the academic work of right-existentialism, particularly Heidegger (with asides about Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and others).

We should cross-reference this critique, also, with JLN's Banality of Heidegger and Derrida's Of Spirit and Aporias, which crush the H-Bomb under his own weight; Adorno is similarly effective in this argument. The editor's introduction finds that Adorno's reconstruction of Heidegger's philosophy attempts to show that it becomes an ontology that retreats behind, rather than overcomes, the tradition of transcendental philosophy. In the universalization of transcendental subjectivity into Dasein, the empirical is totally lost and, as Adorno claims, an essence-mythology of Being emerges. This is exemplified in the claim that the primacy of Dasein is a realm beyond fact and essence and yet one which maintains itself as an identity. (xvi)Adorno himself notes that it's "nothing new to find that the sublime becomes the cover for something low" (xxi)'the goal of all coarse propaganda, in particular for the Third Reich. He explains however that "Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones" (id.), which is similar to the analysis in Neumann's Behemoth. Rather, "socially necessary Schein, appearance" (id.) is what matters. This necessity is borne out by an abiding kierkegaardian practice: "they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth content of revelation, than in conviction" (3); those who "hesitated before Kierkegaard's leap" were insufficiently "authentic" (id.). ("The old Protestant theme of absurd belief, grounding itself in the subject, converted itself from Lessing to Kierkegaard into the pathos of existence" (29).)

Right existentialists are "anti-intellectual intellectuals" (4), the "authentic ones" (id.), laden with "dark drives" (5) prior to 1933, but also with a "sacred quality" (id.) in their colloquy'a "cult of authenticity" (id.)'their "thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority" (id.), which is similar to the Frankfurt analysis of Luther's 'freedom,' which allegedly exists internally despite the severity of external constraint. That is, Dasein arises out of the testifying of the human, which is authentic when occurring "through the freedom of decision" (128). However, "apart from the right to come into one's own, self-control is hypostasized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the controls are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Idealism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical to duty" (129). This culminates in the phrase "sacrifice shall make us free" (132).

Their method is linguistic, relying not only on "noble nouns" but also "it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements" (6-7). It further "uses disorganization as its principle of organization" (7).The objective is to "make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity" (8-9), a basic cultish mechanism: "without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be inauthentic" (9)'appealing to the aristotelian ethos almost exclusively, uninterested in the rigor of logos. This should sound very familiar in the Age of Trump, incidentally. Ultimately "nihilism turns into farce, into mere method, as has already happened to Cartesian doubt" (28).

Right existentialism prefers a "theatrical effect" (10), achieved through use of figures "drawn from a no longer existent daily life," which are "forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some absolute which is kept silent out of reverence" (11)'an indication that eidos zoe that are long overcome by events have been summoned from the ancient world for redeployment. The overall process "defames the objectivity of truth" (16)'"communication turns into that transpsychological element which it can only be by virtue of the objectivity of what is communicated; in the end stupidity becomes the founder of metaphysics" (id.).

And we see the class basis for all of it: "jargon likewise supplies men with patterns for being human [i.e., Agamben's eidos zoe], patterns which have been driven out of them by unfree labor" (17). We see further that "through this delusion [that the proletariat, threatened by immediacy of losing their jobs, is something special in class society] the superstructure made them toe the bourgeois line, while in the meantime, thanks to a lasting market boom, that superstructure has become the universal ideology of a society which mistakes itself for a unified middle class" (20).

We see Griffin's concern from Modernism and Fascism in the notion of a "Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should 'make for himself' such a space" (34)'which signifies when one is concerned with "the fear of unemployment, lurking in all citizens of countries of high capitalism" (id.). "Everyone knows that he could become expendable"; "everyone sees that his job is disguised unemployment" (id.)'this leads to everyone feeling "threatened by what sustains them" (35). He both has "nothing to lose" and is subject to the "overadministrated world of today" (id.); it is the conjunction of "Jaspers' 'existence welfare' and social welfare'administered grace" (id.). The normal fascist inclination is present here: "set back the clock politically and socially, to bring to an end the dynamism inherent in society which still, through the administrative measures of the most powerful cliques, appears to be all too open" (36)'familiar from Neumann's Behemoth.

All that said, Heidegger's complaining about 'metaphysics' rests upon a fatal ambiguity: "On the one hand metaphysics means involvement with metaphysical themes, even if the metaphysical content is contested; on the other hand it means the affirmative doctrine of the transcendent world, in the Platonic model" (31); when the "theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization" (id.), it is easy to see how Heidegger's complaint registers unhelpfully across the board. This secularization is eerily familiar: "jargon becomes surprisingly similar to the habitual practices of advertising" (43)'and we should recall the use of Le Bon's work made by the fascists.

Perhaps the most important insight here is the placing of Heidegger in relation to the ancients: With the assertion of meaning at all costs, the old antisophistic emotion seeps into the so-called mass society. Ever since the victory of Plato and Aristotle over the Socratic left, that emotion has dominated the official position of philosophy. Whatever refused subjection to it was pushed off into powerless undercurrents. Only the more recent positivism has made sophistic motives reputable by its alliance with science. The jargon struggles against this alliance. Without judgment it hands down the judgment of tradition. The shame of the sophists, opposed by Plato, was the fact that they did not fight against falsity in order to change the slave society, but rather raised doubts about truth in order to arm thought for whatever was. (44) The 'socratic left' is a cool idea, but Adorno doesn't develop it further, instead focusing on the antisophistic ideas of right existentialism: the antisophistic movement misuses its insight into such misconstructions of free­ wheeling thought--misuses them in order to discredit thought, through thought. This was the way Nietzsche criticized Kant, raising the charge of over-subtle thinking in the same tone as that adopted magisterially by Hegel, when he spoke of 'reasoning.' In the modish antisophistic movement there is a sad confluence: of a necessary critique of isolated instrumental reason with a grim defense of institutions against thought. The jargon, a waste product of the modern that it attacks, seeks to protect itself--along with literally destructive institutions--against the suspicion of being destructive: by simultaneously accusing other, mostly anticonservative, groups of sinful intellectuality, of that sin which lies deep in the jargon's own unnaive, reflective principle of existence. Demagogically it uses the double character of the antisophistic. That consciousness is false which, externally, as Hegel says, without being in the thing, places itself above this thing and manages it from above; but criticism becomes equally ideological at the moment when it lets it be known, self-righteously, that thought must have a ground. (45) Helpful to conceive of right existentialism as a waste product of the bourgeois society that it attacks. Meanwhile, the "authentic ones defame sophistry, but they drag its arbitrariness along in their programs" (46). This is no mistake, insofar as "the bourgeois form of rationality has always needed irrational supplements, in order to maintain itself as what it is, continuing injustice through justice" (47)'this is "the working atmosphere of authenticity" (id.).

One such supplement is that "the liberalism that hatched the culture industry produced forms of reflection that are encountered indignantly by the jargon of authenticity, although it is itself one of them" (49). It is in these regards a critique of capitalism from the Right: liberalism's 'leveling' in exchange relations is "described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that 'prerogative' for themselves" (104). We note that the development of communication industries is merely "innumerable technical intermediations" (76), prostheses that shorten "routes between the whole and atomized individual subjects" fashioned by power (id.).

Heidegger is needlessly pedantic, of course: philosophy, to him, "is a danger to thought. But the authentic thinker, harsh toward anything so modernistic as philosophy, writes: 'When in early summer isolated narcissi bloom hidden in the meadow, and the mountain rose glistens under the maple tree'" (52); Adorno identifies in this "outmoded language" an "expressive ideal" in intentional archaism (id.). Heidegger contends that philosophical work "belongs right in the midst of the labor of farmers" (54), though Adorno quips that "one would like at least to know the farmers' opinion about that. Heidegger does not need their opinion" (54). We see the proto-NSDAP ideas, similar to Gobineau's, regarding Heidegger's opinion that "one's own work's inner belonging, to the Black Forest and its people, comes from a century-long Germanic-Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable" (id.). Adorno replies that "The small farmer owes his continued existence entirely to gracious gifts from that exchange society by which his very ground and foundation, even in appearance, have been removed" (55). That the farmers are forced to remain in specific 'rooted' conditions "gladly makes a virtue out of necessity" (56); Heidegger "praises them in the name of a false eternity of agrarian conditions" (56)'a jargon of 'rootedness' easily exposed as fascism's attempt to fix an extinct eidos zoe as an eternal condition.

A similar term of art in Heidegger is 'Man' (which is something we note in Ayn Rand's similarly dreadful work): "In that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalienable possibility. Man is the ideology of dehumanization" (59). To wit, "past forms of societalization, prior to the division of labor, are surreptitiously adopted as if they were eternal" (59). It's just warmed over bourgeois false consciousness'what obtains today must obtain forever: This is what debases the appeal to an inalienable essence of Man which has long been alienated. It was not Man who created the institutions but particular men in a particular constellation with nature and with themselves. This constellation forced the institutions on them in the same way that men erected those institutions, without consciousness. (62) Easy enough to see that "such universal humanity, however, is ideology" (66). Plenty more, such as an analysis of the jargon terms commitment (69 ff.), encounter (78 ff.), cooperation (79 ff.), commission (83 ff.), inter alia.

A cool critique that presages Derrida a bit: Latently, the salvation formulas of the jargon are those of power, borrowed from the administrative and legal hierarchy of authority. The bureaucratic language, seasoned with authenticity, is therefore no merely decadent form of the appropriate philosophical language [cf. JLN here about H's introduction of a banality into philosophy], but is already pre­formed in the most notable texts of that philosophy. Heidegger's favorite "first of all," that has its roots as much in didactic procedure as in a Cartesian first-and-then, leads thoughts along on a leash […] The pedantry, in addition, is repaid by a side result: that it simply never arrives at what philosophy promises. That all goes back to Husserl, in the course of whose extensive preliminary considerations one easily forgets the main thing though critical reflection would first come to grips with the very philosophemes that fastidiousness pushes along in front of it. […] The administrative offices, in Kafka's world, similarly shirk decisions, which then, ungrounded, suddenly catch up with their victims. The reciprocity of the personal and apersonal in the jargon; the apparent humanization of the thingly; the actual turning of man into thing: all this is the luminous copy of that administrative situation in which both abstract justice and objective procedural orders appear under the guise of face-to-face decisions. It is impossible to forget the image of those SA-men from the early period of Hitler's rule. In them administration and terror found themselves visibly joined; the folder of documents above, and below the high boots. (82-83) That may be the knockout punch, maybe. Though "fussy attention to individual words, as they were lexically handled in the days of pre-Heideggerian idol-phenomenology, was already a harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking" (86-7), we also see that "intangible administrative purpose" slips into official discourse, which "acknowledges that administration is its essence" (91); attentive readers of Agamben will note the conjunction with the fifth volume of Homo Sacer. For right existentialists, "all content is bracketed, as it goes in administrative German" (92)'Husserlian reduction as the philosopheme suited to the heavy hand of the state.

As though all that were not bad enough, we know "in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts" because "Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything" (102). Adorno diagnoses this as what "came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand, that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse" (103)'Dasein critically as one long state of exception, within the meaning of Schmitt, and then Benjamin, and now Agamben.

Two philosopher's objections, both individually fatal: "The concept of the ontological cannot be attached to a substratum, as if ontological were its predicate. To be a fact is no predicate which can attach itself to a concept; and, since Kant's criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, any philosophy should be careful not the affirm this" (118), and "Heidegger secretly reinstates the creator quality of the absolute subject, which was supposedly avoided, as it were, by starting with mineness in each case. The notion of the double character of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger's disguised idealism" (120-21)'simultaneously begging the question and falling into absurdity, Heidegger's original contribution to the history of logic. But Heidegger has other errors: Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as 'that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole,' wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Dasein a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. (145) It gets dumber insofar as "death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being" (147): this is because death is irreducibly one's own, for which there may be no subrogation, "the impossibility of having a proxy in death" (148)'Heidegger as a death cultist, then. It is perhaps similar to Moretti's thesis that the German tragic vision considers crisis as the moment of truth. That said, "insofar as death is absolutely alien to the subject, it is the model of all reification" (152), which in Heidegger's hands "becomes an exegesis of the futile joke: Only death is free and that costs your life" (id.). Adorno thinks that the "protestation against the sublimating of death would have its place in a criticism of liberal ideology" (155)'but instead "Heidegger does the same thing as fascism: he defends the more brutal form of Being, negative as it may be" (id.). In a "philosophical Freudian slip, Heidegger himself defines the ontologizing of death insofar as death, in its certainty, is qualitatively superior to other phenomena" (156)'becoming "an accomplice of what is horrible in death." Right existentialism's jargon of authenticity advances the "dignity of being, and not of men" (161)'and "in dignity a feudal category is mediated which bourgeois society presents posthumously for the legitimation of its hierarchy" (162), and "Kantian dignity finally disintegrates into the jargon of authenticity" (id.).

Plenty more. Recommended for Frankfurt Marxist types.