I give it the maximal amount of stars, because this is the only way the hot topic of Heideggerian politics should be approached at first, but I still regret that RS didn’t really write a phenomenological book itself, and often slides between a political interpretation/clarification of late Heidegger (best parts of the book, roughly corresponding to its beginning and end), and a (sometimes too) comprehensive exposition of his thought in a systematic fashion (with the advantage, however, that RS expounds distinctions I myself hadn’t picked up on or learned to master, such as Anfänglich/Ursprünglich).
-- I would like, not to review it again, but to write down something the book triggered in me, where I think the reading ought to take us in thought:
Artificial lives
Introduction: No Way to Live
Derrida’s Specters of Marx begins with the impossibility, for one, of learning how to live. Actually, it is difficult to state this without emphasis, because what Derrida stresses, is not the impossibility, for one, of learning how to live, but the impossibility of learning it, though of course, it is easy to see how one could fall into the other, and stymie us for life. Yet, if every thing done can be done badly, if every course of action is intrinsically saddled with the possibility of misfire, it seems that life escapes this law of possible failure. But then, so does everything else: how badly does something need to be done in order not to have been done, is an absurd question. And precisely because of that, because something is always done, can’t be undone, even if it has been badly done, because, in short, badly is not a way for something not to have been done, we seem to lack the definitive criterion to ascertain how badly (or, after all, how well) we are doing, even at life. How to do well at life has long been the subject matter of ethics. But no longer, at least not here. For I want to approach this idea of sucking (at things, life e.g.) in the broadest possible sense, for I see life, and how well we live it, in a continuum with every single thing we do in it, and of which we can always (and actually do, sometimes) wonder whether we are doing it wrong, and, additionnally, how such a thing could be known, preferably by us, because that would be nice. More specifically, I want to approach the life lived by one (me, there’s no point in hiding it) who is pervaded by a feeling of not actually living it, based on the conception that something done badly is not properly done, and a life lived badly is not properly lived. While it is hardly a problem to think of what it is, for a novel, to be a bad one, it does not seem so obvious to me what a life not properly lived, the ersatz of a life, or what Hume, though in a moral sense, aptly called an ‘artificial life’, should be like.
Here we come to a first tension: on the one hand, and unlike ethics, I want to approach life like any other course of action or enterprise pursued in it, partly because I think to apply notions of doing great, or badly, at it, come from such endeavors, and it would be ambiguous to change their range of application to a broader sphere, wishfully thinking it won’t disturb the system—indeed, not even raising the question. On the other hand, I claim we lack a notion of a bad life, because such a thing has always been understood, except by novelists, from without. It is the moral philosopher who defines lives as good or bad, but each time she does that, she ignores the crushing indeterminacy within, unless, like Derrida, she defines the good life precisely as one that is constantly anxious about itself. This line of thinking tells us there is nothing beyond life as we live it; no other, more fulfilling, more stable life, if the life we live is precisely anxious about things like the possible existence of some more stable, more fulfilling way of living. The anxiety, raised to ‘the mood of ethicity par excellence’ (A. Ronell), meets itself in its quest for the supposed otherness it recoils from. The answer is(:) no answer. It wouldn’t even be nice if there was one. There have been a few made-up ones (God, the State, religion). It wasn’t nice. The paradox, of course, is that such a line of thinking is still, despite the deconstruction of it all, an ethics! Not an ethics in the pre-Kantian, antiquated sense of: This is how it (life) is done, but an ethics in the more formal sense of a radical difference between life and other things done, resting on a hypostatized notion of ‘good’ that strictly applies to life, and not to what we do with, or in it. The paradox is even more difficult to solve for me, because I really like what Derrida is saying. But I can’t buy it. So I have to think of something else.
One: I am done
To do so, I’m going to have to move the starting blocks to a very different place. Ever since Husserl, it is no exaggeration to say that transcendental phenomenology has fallen out of fashion somewhat. Except for a handful of brilliant students of his (mostly Eugen Fink), the great phenomenologists who followed him emphatically rejected Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity: Heidegger was the first one, followed by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and of course Derrida. The problem with abandoning the transcendental is: How do we know the experiences we are describing actually are experiences anyone (the reader, for instance) can perform? To put it bluntly, what if Heidegger’s anxiety is only accessible to people rather prone to melancholy, Levinassian substitution to schizophrenics, and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chair du monde’ only perceptible by more or less psychotic subjects? Well, the first thing we could say is it’s precisely the idea experience has to be performed that a lot of post-Husserlian phenomenologists would disagree with (and, more or less rigorously building on Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis, they would emphasize that experience is, if anything, more like an event, something that happens to me). What follows is a deconstruction of the idea that experience has a subject, and so the whole question of having access to it, drops as irrelevant. Such a deconstruction of experience rests on the idea that Husserl insufficiently clarified what an experience is, and his lack of scrutiny made it appear like it was a separate part of the world, in which the world itself was paradoxically mirrored (the kind of thinking Rorty became famous for criticizing as ‘representationalism’). As a consequence, the very suspicion that, after all, the experiences phenomenologists like Heidegger refer to don’t have the kind of universality they should (?) be having, becomes meaningless: not only would it be very problematic for the critic to tell us what exactly he is quantifying over when he brings the concept of ‘universality’ in, but, what is more, Heidegger never claimed anxiety was an experience that could be ‘performed’ the way an object can be picked up, or a task be achieved. That, however, doesn’t mean that it is the privilege of the happy few (though Heidegger later did start writing like he was only addressing ‘the happy few’, but that’s a different problem). Anxiety, Heidegger writes, is always lying in wait in everything we do. It is an implicit factor in all experiences, which are no private shows in the mind’s theatre, but an occasion for us to attune to the self-showing of beings. This ‘us’ doesn’t point to an identity, but to a way, for some beings, to relate to their own being (understanding it), and thereby be in a certain way (in time, in the world, or just there). The question is not: Who am I?, but: What is my being? What does it mean for me to be, especially when I (don’t really know, but acually experience, am anxious about the fact that I) will be dead? Here we come to the difficult connection between being and life for Heidegger, for being seems only to speak, or show itself purely in death. Death, Heidegger writes in his Beiträge zur Philosophie, is the greatest, highest evidence of being. We have to die, in other words, in order to be. Or rather: we have to be dying in order to be. In this sense, because we are mortals, we are always dying. To be dying is a mere pleonasm.
In this regard, it becomes difficult to understand how one (I) could be doing anything, since, quite simply, there is no I, but a being. Only being, actually, sort of ‘does’ things, and not small things: it makes beings (things) be. In close connection to it, there is the ‘doing’ of the beings we mortals are, who prepare the coming of being to being, the event of being, by attuning to presence (the presence of the present being the being of beings; we don’t turn inward to look for what we are, but to understand our being, in the verbal sense—much like we would say: our doing). This, for Heidegger, is the only ‘thing’ left for ‘us’ to do, since (even though that will sound like a poor logical justification) there is nothing else for us to do. So it’s not like Heidegger chose to embrace a form of expecting quietism, it’s only that his phenomenological reduction is so radical he doesn’t, actually, have a choice. It’s so powerful nothing else can resist it. Anyway, this is only one of the many ways in which to tear the argument of performability of experience apart. The lesson, for our question, is clear: there is no doing well, or sucking at, life, because life is not our doing. A rigorous understanding of action, and of things done, requires that we drop the idea of a ‘good’, or ‘bad’ life. There are good tools. But no good lives. It seems sometimes that Heidegger did think ‘authentic’ lives or ways of living were ‘better’ than inauthentic ones. But that is not so. They are simply different, in that they relate differently, almost as a matter of fact, to being.
Against Heidegger, we could say two things. First, maybe there is a realm outside of being, maybe not ideally conceived of, the way Husserl did, as an inner, monadological sphere (the reference to Leibniz is explicit in Husserl, but later writings on intersubjectivity tend to nuance a caricature often made by Heideggerians of Husserl as a subjectivist metaphysician), but as a ‘wild’ region (to borrow from the title of one of Tengelyi’s books) in which what ‘is’ not yet (a being) morphs into one, or, in the jargon of transcendental phenomenology, constitutes itself. That region, Heidegger would retort, is precisely that of being, in that it is where beings come to be. It is the phenomenological realm par excellence, not in the sense of a realm separated from the ontic, but as a way of looking in (Einblick) the present, for its presence. Every thing (Ding) is temporalized in this odd sense that it is phenomenologically reduced to the ‘event’ of its own coming together, self-gathering in-the-world (another pleonasm). But the transcendental phenomenologist continues to feel that it is not, actually, the same thing, for Heidegger’s much derided ‘ontological monism’ seems to overdetermine what this realm looks like: Is it not at least a bit surprising, to say the least, to find out that before being, what we find is… being? Of course it is contradictory, Heidegger could say, to ask if something else than being could not ‘be’ there, but this is just because language is built this way; we need to perform, Fink says, a phenomenological reduction of language too. And nothing, in the phenomena, tells us that being is there all the way up. Therefore, a kind of exclusive, unwarranted teleology of being begins to appear in Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology. The second thing we could say is Heidegger criticizes the notions of acting and doing things on the basis that they’re understood in relation to a subject who is doing them. But the being of action as precisely not a being, in the sense that a table is a being, does seem to escape him (unlike, say, the being of space and time, which even lead him to identify being, at some point in the evolution of his thought, with the play of space and time as that which makes what is, be). We would have to go back to Kant, Fichte, and ultimately Nietzsche, to find such an anti-ontological, because practical understanding of action, which also serves, way before phenomenology, the purpose of a kind of deconstruction of the subject, moving from: Nothing is done, because being is acting (busy with making things be), to: Everything is done (Nietzsche would say: willed), because there is no being (nothing is), and every so-called being can be ‘reduced’ to a doing (‘of’ a transcendental subject, in the tradition, but maybe we can outthink that ‘of’, using Heidegger, but not necessarily piggybacked by him—that’s, in a way, the hard part). But, on second thought, isn’t that the underlying lesson of Heidegger’s deconstruction of ontology? Being, deconstructed as Seyn, gains the fleeting, changing, seinsgeschichtliche nature of acting without principles, as Schürmann first pointed out, because it founds beings without exhausting itself in them, thus finitizing them (because being itself is finite: the absence of ground (or dare I write: (the absence) (of ground)) in which every 'thing' is grounded). But again, back to the first thing, why, any Nietzschean will ask me, express it in terms of being? Why call it being if, as Heidegger himself emphatically writes, it is not? Well, Heidegger himself didn’t like the word ‘being’ so much. He crossed it in his Zur Seinsfrage essay to Jünger, so we can’t really blame him for that. More to the point, the question these two points raise is this one: What standpoint, though it better not be (thought of as) a simple tertium quid, do we need to reach, if we want to understand the way being and acting influence each other, and make life possible or impossible?