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Daimon Life
Heidegger and Life-Philosophy
By David Farrell Krell Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1992 David Farrell Krell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33147-2
CHAPTER 1
"I Call It Death-in-Life ..."
Reading Being and Time
"Life" is not an existential structure of Dasein. Yet Dasein dies. Indeed, it is even born to that end: birth is one of the two ends of an end-like or finite existence — Dasein natal, Dasein fatal. In this regard Heidegger entertains the testimony of a medieval Bohemian peasant, one who has recently become a widower, and who therefore has a complaint against Death. However, Heidegger follows the lead of his anonymous medieval predecessor by allowing Death to have the last word. Der Ackermann aus Böhmen begins:
Grimmiger tilger alter leute, schedelicher echter alter werlte, freissamer morder alter menscben, ir Tot, euch sei verfluchet!
Malevolent subverter of all the people, thoroughly malignant to all the world, murderous devourer of all mankind, thou Death, my curse upon you!
Death, offended by the farmer's vituperation, replies:
Weistu des nicbt, so wisse es nu: als balde ein mensche geboren wird, als balde hat es den leikauf getrunken, das es sterben sol. Anefanges geswisterde ist das ende. ... [A]ls schiere ein mensche lebendig wird, als schiere ist es alt genug zu sterben.
If you knew it not before, know it now: as soon as a human being is born it has drunk from the proffered chalice, and so it is to die. The end is akin to the beginning. ... The instant a human being comes to be alive it is old enough to die.
In an early lecture course at Freiburg, Heidegger cites Luther's commentary on Genesis to similar effect: Statitn enim ab utero matris mori incipimus. "For as soon as we abandon our mother's womb we begin to die" [61, 182).
We, who? How many of "us" are there? How many mother's sons and mother's daughters? How many peasant men and women? How many living creatures? If the classical and perdurant definition of human being is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "the living being that is essentially determined by its capacity to speak," Heidegger nevertheless resists "life" as an earmark of Dasein. The birth and death of Dasein will have to be interpreted in a way that does not depend on the unclarified, unexamined categories of traditional ontologies, especially the category of the "living." For, as Dominique Janicaud writes,
"The definition of man as living [contnte vivant] is ontic." Almost always, "life" will appear in "scare-quotes" in Being and Time. Almost always, "life" will have to be shooed away — for example, in the following moments of the analysis, which we will want to examine quite closely:
(1) Section 10, where the fundamental ontology of Dasein is demarcated or delimited over against anthropology, psychology, and, a fortiori, biology;
(2) Section 12, where human being as embodied being is affirmed, albeit in a way that leaves the human body, the body of Dasein, largely undetermined;
(3) Sections 35–38, on the "falling" of Dasein, which is the very animatedness {Bewegtheit) of existence;
(4) Sections 40–42, where anxiety and manifold care define what it is to be human, even though they spill over into other receptacles of life;
(5) Subsections 43b–c, where the principal ontological problem of "reality" is the being of nature and of the sort of thing we call life;
(6) Sections 47–49, where the death of Dasein is set in relief against the perishing of animals and the mere demise of a forlorn, inappropriate Dasein;
(7) Subsection 68b, where the ecstatic temporalizing of having-been, mood, and anxiety is made to bedazzle an already bedazzled and benumbed life;
(8) Sections 78–81, in which the path of the life-giving sun rises once again (as it did in section 22), in order to pose the timely question of life to Dasein and eventually to beings as a whole.
(Sections 72–74, where Dasein finally turns to the "end" of its birth, as to its destiny, heritage, and history in the world-historical fate of a "generation" and a "nation," I shall hold in reserve for chapter 5, on the politics of daimon life.)
In each of these locations in Heidegger's Being and Time "life" proves to be both essential to existential analysis and utterly elusive for it, quite beyond its grasp. Life falls into the gap that yawns between beings that are of the measure of Dasein and beings that are altogether unlike Dasein. Life neither precedes nor succeeds existential analysis but remains outside it, being both necessary to it and inaccessible for it. In short, life supplements Dasein, and like all supplements it is the death of Dasein. Fundamental ontology discovers a kind of being-there that is born and that dies, an existence it "fixes" terminologically as Dasein; what it is unable to determine is whether such a being is ever properly alive, or what such "life" might mean.
THE FACTS OF LIFE
Needlessness, heedlessness. Lack of need, lack of heed. Why heed the question of being? Who needs it? Why heed it, and how? A perverse, remorseless reflexivity and recoil characterize oblivion, as though oblivion were the very air we breathed. If the question of being makes no sense it is because we have never even had to remember to forget it. Oblivion replicates itself and achieves a lethal perfection by which we have always already forgotten being. Oblivion seems to seal the fate of Dasein as unneeding, unheeding. Like Nietzsche's herd of cows at pasture and child at play, like Kafka's ape roaming the rainforest before the circus troupe captures him, oblivious Dasein is indifferent to the question of being. A remarkable complacency (Bedürfnislosigkeit) surrounds the question with an impenetrable fog; a remarkable lack of need (Unbedürftigkeit) characterizes the "they" in their quotidian concerns (SZ, 177, 189). The tradition of philosophy exhibits such complacency in its neglect of the question of being (21, 46); it is as though philosophers too were Cartesian extended substances (92), more like mindless, indifferent stones and animals than vital thinkers.
However much Dasein declines to heed and neglects to need the question of being, it moves within and is animated by something like an "understanding of being." Not a theoretical observation of entities or a scientific comprehension of their being, to be sure, but an understanding (in) which Dasein lives. Being is not only the most universal and undefinable concept, but also the most evident one: "That we in each case already live in an understanding of being and that the meaning of being is at the same time veiled in obscurity demonstrates the fundamental necessity of fetching back again [wiederholen] the question concerning 'being'" (4).
What does it mean to "live" (in) an understanding of being? Can we ever understand such "living," if the living itself encompasses (parenthetically) understanding? Can living leap over its own shadow?
Whether or not we can ever understand it, such living within an understanding of being, Heidegger assures us, is a fact (5: ein Faktum). Thus the formal structure of the question concerning being yields a particular facticity and a certain movement or motion. We move (wir bewegen uns) in a vague and average understanding of being, not insofar as we theorize and construct ontologies, but simply by being alive. Such animation or, better, animatedness (the passive form of Bewegtheit, "movedness," is not to be overlooked) is Heidegger's principal preoccupation both before and after Being and Time, from the period of his hermeneutics of facticity (roughly 1919 to 1923) to that of his theoretical biology (1929–1930) and well beyond. Moreover, our factical animatedness within an understanding of being, which is an understanding (in) which we live, directs us to something very much like being. Nietzsche, in a note that will become important for both Heidegger and Der-rida, writes as follows: "'Being' — we have no other notion of it than as 'living.' — For how can something dead 'be'?"
If the earliest form of Being and Time is a hermeneutics of facticity, the fact of facticity (to repeat, the facticity by which we understand something like being, which is something like being alive) is a fact of life. Heidegger's project sprouts (in part, but in good part) from the soil of Dilthey's philosophy of factical-historical life. We know that already from the references to Dilthey in sections 10, 43, and 72–77 of Being and Time. However, the early Freiburg and Marburg lecture courses demonstrate the point even more forcefully.
For example, during his lecture course on the hermeneutics of facticity in the summer semester of 1923, Heidegger says, "Facticity designates the character of the being of 'our' 'own' Dasein" (63, 7). Why the quotation marks or "scare-quotes" around "our"? Because Dasein lingers or tarries there in each case as this particular Dasein: Jeweiligkeit is under way to what Being and Time will call Jemeinigkeit, Dasein whiling away its hour of existence as in each case "my own." Why the scare-quotes around "my" or "our" "own"? Because what may seem to be the property of Dasein is swept away in the larger questions of life, being, and (not quite yet, but lingering on the horizon, as the horizon) time. For the moment it is being alive that captivates Heidegger: "Sein — transitiv: das faktische Leben sein!" Being is to be understood transitively: it means that we are factical life — not as a soporific solipsism but as active vigilance (Wachsein). "If we take 'life' as a way of 'being,' then 'factical life' means our own Dasein [now without scare-quotes] as 'there' in every sort of ontologically explicit manifestation of the character of its being" (63, 7).
Yet the larger questions posed to "our" "own" factical Dasein will not disperse, not even in Being and Time. If fundamental ontology appears to be constructed on the axis of the proper and the improper, the appropriate and the inappropriate (Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit), the quotation marks around "own" have in fact already replaced more drastic question marks, or, rather, as we shall see, a single, drastic, ironic exclamation point (!). The scare-quotes and exclamation point cause the axis to tremble and perhaps even to shatter. Any reading of Being and Time in terms of "authenticity" would be put to riot by this catastrophe, inasmuch as the only authentic Dasein would be a dead Dasein. And yet such trembling, such shattering of the axis of propriety, would be a sign of life.
Hermeneutics is not the chilly science of facticity, not a methodology that allows us coolly to approach life matter-of-factly; rather, hermeneutics is factical life surprised in the act, vigilantly caught in the act of interpreting itself. Hermeneutics of facticity is not like the botanies of plants (63, 15; cf. SZ, 46), whereby vegetable life is the object of botanical science; rather, to say facticity is to say interpretation — as though Dasein were goldenrod or dill catching itself going to seed. In a sense, the genitive in "hermeneutics of facticity" is subjective as well as objective: factical life does the interpreting as well as the living. Yet what does factical life include? What does it exclude? These questions Heidegger does not raise, perhaps because of a certain solidarity of life, solidarity with life, or perhaps because of insufficient vigilance. Nevertheless, we gain some insight into the sort of life Heidegger means when we hear him say, toward the end of his lecture course, "Life addresses itself in a worldly way whenever it takes care" (102.: Das Leben spricht sich im Sorgen weltlich an). Life, the sort of life that fascinates Heidegger, is what has a world, relates to drawn to him as towards a woman a world. In his remarks on theoretical biology in 1930, nothing essential will have changed with regard to the world-relation of life. And if among the scattered pages of notes for the 1923 lecture course on the hermeneutics of facticity we find a potpourri of names — Aristotle, the New Testament, Augustine, Luther, Descartes, and Kierkegaard — two names stand out, to wit, Dilthey and Husserl. What Heidegger wishes to pursue is a phenomenological hermeneutics of factical historical life, a task that he reduces to two words: Dilthey destruiert (63, 106–107), "Dilthey deconstructed."
Factical life receives even fuller treatment in the 1921–1922 lecture course, a course whose title ("Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research") does not do justice to its extraordinary contents. The entire third part of the course is devoted to "factical life" (61, 79–155). These pages would amply repay the most meticulous reading. For the moment, I shall recall only a few of the most striking theses on factical life, theses that are well under way to Being and Time.
The overarching theme of the course is the imbrication of phenomenological research and factical life. Research cannot extricate itself from its situation; nor should it ever desire to do so. For if it did it would only succeed in being uprooted, after the manner of the neo-Kantian schools of the day, with their doctrines of epistemology, values, and worldviews. Nor can philosophical research simply force its way into life; it must wait upon a maturation or temporal unfolding of its own access to life {61, 37: Zeitigung des Zugangs). Indeed, phenomenological research is cast adrift on the seas of factical life. Its life is the life of Ishmael:
Our situation is not that of the rescuing coast; it is a leap into a drifting boat. Everything depends now on our taking the sails' tack into our hands and looking to the wind. It is precisely the difficulties that we must see: illuminating them will first disclose the proper horizon of factical life. Only by appropriating to myself the structure of my having to decide; only by realizing that it is within and upon such having that I shall come to see; only in this way can illumination sustain the fundamental motivation for the temporal unfolding of philosophizing. (61, 37)
In this regard, life-philosophy seems to offer phenomenological research some hope, even if its own situation is duplicitous, even hazardous.
On the one hand, Heidegger seems to criticize "modern Lebensphiloso-pbie" precisely in the way his mentor, Heinrich Rickert, did in Die Phitosophie des Lebens. The tendency of Rickert's book is betrayed by its subtitle and its dedication: A Presentation and Critique of the Fashionable Philosophies of Our Time, "dedicated to the life of philosophy," rather than to the philosophy of life. Rickert spares none of the enthusiasts of life-philosophy: Schelling, Scheler, Simmel, Dilthey, Bergson, Nietzsche, Spengler, William James, and even Husserl are tainted with it and are accordingly excoriated; all have surrendered rigorously defined concepts and principles for the sake of "the intuitive," "the ingenious" (28). It may well be that some of Heidegger's own polemics against Lebensphilosophie (for example, those in the Nietzsche lectures of 1936–1940 and the 1936–1938 Contributions to Philosophy) owe something to the tract of his former mentor. Yet for the moment Heidegger champions Scheler, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey against their stodgy detractor. He cites the penultimate page of Rickert's monograph, where the relationship of research to life touches on the crucial word "repetition," Wiederholung. I cite Rickert's text (194) somewhat more fully than Heidegger does (at 61, 80): "One should finally give up trying to see this philosophizing about life as a mere repetition [ein bloßes Wiederholen] of life; one should give up trying to measure the value of philosophizing on the basis of its vitality. To philosophize is to create." Heidegger interjects at this point, in good Nietzschean fashion: "Is not creation life?" Rickert's text continues:
Insight into the distance that separates what is created from the life that is merely lived must leave both life and philosophy content. For even the life-philosophy of our own day has in its own way contributed a great deal to this separation, in spite of its unscientific life-prophecies and the antitheoretical bias of its value accents. Only one who has understood that living life diverges from knowing it can be a philosopher of life — one who both loves life and thinks about it.
Heidegger repudiates such a complacent, not to say smug, separation of living from knowing. In so doing he points to the "repetition" that will characterize his own conception of fundamental ontology. "Repetition" is vigilance, Wach-sein, somehow fetching itself back from oblivion and complacency. It rescues life from degeneration and decrepitude, "properly" restoring life to itself:" 'Repetition': everything depends on its sense. Philosophy is a fundamental 'how' of life itself [ein Grundtvie des Lebens selbst], so that in each case it properly retrieves life, snatching it back from decrepitude [es eigentlich je wieder-holt, aus dent Abfall zurücknimmt]. Such snatching back, as radical research, is life" (61, 80). In Rickert, cognition and the concept are "sheer ghosts," says Heidegger; and Rickert's philosophy of values and Weltanschauungen is as vapid as his anemic life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Daimon Life by David Farrell Krell. Copyright © 1992 David Farrell Krell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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