Chapter 10: The Time Is Out of Joint
10
The Time Is Out of Joint
On Social Ontology and Criticism in Kierkegaard and Heidegger
Introduction
Despite several affinities between certain aspects of Heidegger’s early fundamental ontology of human existence (or Dasein), brought officially to public attention in Being and Time (1927), and Kierkegaard’s analysis of the present age in A Literary Review (1846), there is a widespread and, we think, an unfortunate tendency among commentators to interpret their respective endeavors along categorically discrete lines. This is no doubt due partly to Heidegger’s own explicit, and often misleading and self-serving, assessment of Kierkegaard’s influence upon his own early work, which involves a (dubiously) sharp contrast between ontic inquiry, on the one hand, and ontological investigation, on the other,471 combined (on the side of Kierkegaard) with a skeptical attitude, facing the ostensibly systematic ambitions that underwrite Being and Time.472
Charles Guignon, for instance, in an insightful analysis of Heidegger and Kierkegaard on the topic of death (which plays a central role in their respective efforts to illuminate human existence as a whole, and to comment on a chronic failure to be honest about our mortal condition), insists right from the start that “we should take seriously Heidegger’s claims that Kierkegaard’s reflections were always limited to . . . the domain of inquiry called ‘theology,’ and that his insights pertained solely to the ‘existentiell’ and never to the ‘existential.’”473 Assertions of this sort do not always play out in Heidegger’s favor, even among those otherwise partial to the self-described fundamental ontologist. At the end of his contribution to Kierkegaard and Death, Guignon (himself a prominent Heidegger scholar) concludes that “the power and beauty of Kierkegaard’s writings depend in part on his ability to put in question such grandiose projects [as Heidegger’s] and to insist on the intensely ‘subjective’ and personal nature of the truth we are seeking about life-defining matters.”474
Heidegger’s own early work is, in its own way, preoccupied with the problem of individuation and the various forces that stand in the way of the normative task of becoming eigentlich (achieving, in Kierkegaard’s terms, a life that belongs properly to a particular individual: in Danish, to achieve Eiendommelighed), which Heidegger takes to be an essential ingredient in, and perhaps even the aim of, the work of philosophy itself. His ontology, both early and late, is informed throughout by concrete ideals of human existence and, especially in the later work, often involves engagement with highly individualized poetic and literary texts (the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl come readily to mind). On the topic of truth (in opposition to Guignon’s tidy contrast), Heidegger is able to write, in a prelude to his first sustained account of primordial truth as αλήθεια in its various modes, drawn from Aristotle’s ethics but echoing Climacus: “something can indeed be true which is not binding for everyone but only for the single individual.”475
On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s various contributions to ontic or existentiell inquiry, often poetic or literary, and animated by questions concerning how to live (or how to become properly subjective, perhaps Christian), frequently open onto broader ontological territory. Kierkegaard, like Heidegger, was deeply interested in, for instance, the temporal constitution of human existence as such (this concern stands, arguably, at the center of the two works assigned to Johannes Climacus, the Philosophical Crumbs and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) and dissatisfied with the philosophical tradition’s tendency to privilege abstract conceptions of being that involve the idea of completeness and stasis (i.e., being “finished”), or what Heidegger calls an ontology of the merely “present-at-hand” or a “metaphysics of presence.”476
Kierkegaard’s various efforts to stress the importance and the difficulty of becoming a Christian in an age of Christendom cannot be readily disentangled from serious engagement with the metaphysical tradition, and often provide philosophical alternatives (on truth, agency, decision, subjectivity, being, and the like) to the very tradition he or his pseudonyms call into question.477 And both thinkers frequently turn to ancient Greek philosophical paradigms as potential correctives to the truncated, anemic, and anxious epistemological concerns and ideals of academic philosophy in the modern European era.478
Heidegger might appear to have systematic intentions, at least in the period leading up to the publication of Being and Time, and Kierkegaard throughout the pseudonymous corpus to oppose The System. But complaints about systematic thought or the absence of systematic concerns are too often offered without much thought about what it means to be systematic, or what form systematic thought should assume. If the systematic impulse is best understood in the light of Spinoza’s ambition to advance strictly more geometrico, viewing things aeterno modo, then neither Kierkegaard nor Heidegger reveals much interest in pursuing systematic philosophy. Some ways of setting up contrasts and oppositions require more careful and detailed explication and defense. And on this score, at least, the controversy between the two thinkers may show itself to be more spurious than real. If “being systematic” means something like “taking an interest in the whole,” where by “whole” is meant the “interconnected aspects of a life-view,” or the overarching sense of what is meant by being and by being human, then Kierkegaard and Heidegger are both systematic thinkers in this attenuated sense.
Kierkegaard and Heidegger might be said to begin, then, at opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum (although this too may prove debatable): the former taking as his point of departure the failure of individuals to become individuals, the latter fundamentally troubled by our contemporary failure to say what being as such means. But their distinctive projects converge in several interesting and, we think, fruitful areas of philosophical concern, organized, for our purposes here, around the idea of social ontology and criticism (or, more accurately, social ontology as criticism, and social criticism as a form of ontology) and the complex relationship between philosophical concept-formation and what early Heidegger calls “facticity” (in an ancient register, the relationship between philosophical speech [logos] and concrete way and ongoing shape of life [bios]). At the very least, we hope to show that any tidy separation of the ontic and the ontological constitutes a misunderstanding of their respective projects. But more importantly, if ambitiously, we offer here the beginnings of a lengthier argument that the compartmentalization in question represents an egregious philosophical error.
It would be another sort of (related) mistake to whitewash important differences between the Danish thinker and his German counterpart. Philosophical work that draws nourishment from both Kierkegaard and Heidegger should not ignore the consequential fact that the former’s most influential studies of human existence are themselves literary productions, attributed to a series of pseudonymous authors. This aspect of his authorship makes it notoriously difficult to decide where Kierkegaard’s own voice is to be located, where a thought-possibility or literary experiment in the presentation of a “life-view” ends and a serious commitment to a particular way of life begins.479 Even the critique of the present age offered in the final part of A Literary Review, and signed, importantly, in Kierkegaard’s own name, is presented as a critical interpretation of a Danish novel (Gyllembourg’s Two Ages [1845]), which still allows its author to distance himself from the criticism.480 Similarly, Heidegger’s overarching interest in the Seinsfrage (the question of being), which is officially claimed in Being and Time to motivate the ontic inquiry into specific aspects of human existence, should not be flippantly ignored, even if the Heideggerian question concerning what being means can be shown to have ontic (specifically ethical) origins. The aim of an essay of this sort is not to create superficial harmony among possibly (and productively) dissenting voices. Heidegger was himself interested, for good historical and philosophical reasons, in establishing neglected polemical differences between the extant philosophers whose work he found himself moved to engage with—in opposition to, for instance, neo-Kantian philosophical historians such as Natorp who tried to make Plato over in an image of contemporary epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. And Kierkegaard’s work is clearly moved by polemical intentions, too: most obviously, by an ambition to distinguish between Hegelian reconstructions of Christian belief, which leave uncertainty and the work of salvation in “fear and trembling” behind, and the proper concerns of Christian faith and piety, apart from what can be decided in abstract, systematic, and spuriously reassuring terms.
And yet there are, we think, sufficient similarities between the two existential thinkers to avoid the worry, announced playfully by Michael Forster in his study of Hegel and skepticism, that the story we have to tell is of the “Laurel and Hardy” variety, where the combination of characters and voices X and Y has something arbitrary about it.481 Ultimately, our interest is not so much philological or exegetical but substantive: we mean to draw from both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, where the texts themselves allow the fruitful comparison, and to explore in a philosophical spirit the relationship between conceptual universality and the particular concerns of finite human beings that animate philosophic inquiry and the demand for more universal claims in the first place. Both thinkers ask, controversially but usefully, how philosophy itself gets underway in the life of particular philosophizing individuals; and what, more generally, it means for philosophy to be answerable to its time and to the concerns of particular individuals who are moved to think within, and often against, the prevailing tendencies of the age. Although both authors are attentive to the factical circumstances out of which philosophy arises, each attempts to describe the universal conceptual form of a more adequate (or truthful) mode of inhabiting the human world. Both Heidegger and Kierkegaard begin with a religious way of life in view, as one that needs to be renewed in the modern era; and it is in their polemical critique of the modern age that we find most obviously their contributions to what might be called “political theology,” as we shall elaborate further.
Philosophy and Facticity
How and where and for whom, then, does philosophy begin? That philosophy gets started, at least as a formal pursuit, in the midst of a (personal) life already underway, seems to be an innocuous statement of fact, and irrelevant to the very nature of philosophy itself. If philosophy could be made over in an image of such hard sciences as mathematics, where the cares and concerns and passions of the thinker can be safely ignored as having no real bearing upon her intellectual orientation and problem-solving competence, it would be unimportant and harmless enough. In the form of a true if obfuscating slogan: The biography of a philosopher is not philosophy. As Heidegger himself was once moved to write, in a lecture course devoted to the basic concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy: “The personality of a philosopher has only the following interest: he was born then and there, he worked and died.”482
There are, to be sure, philosophers, past and present, who maintain that philosophy ought to begin where the personal dimension ends, in light of an ostensibly more objective “view from nowhere.” The story of one’s becoming interested in the problem of other minds, for instance, or moved to demonstrate the reality of the external world, belongs not to philosophy proper, but to the social and personal psychology of a particular student of philosophy. What matters on this view are the abstract arguments in favor of a certain resolution of the problem and the adequacy of its conceptual foundations. (It isn’t often asked what provides foundations for the concepts that lie at the basis of the philosopher’s solutions. It is no accident that early Heidegger often poses questions concerning the Bodenständigkeit of philosophic concept-formation.) If experience comes into play, it is in any event certainly not supposed to be personal. The principles of logical analysis that underwrite the evaluation of philosophical arguments are timelessly, impersonally valid—and various forms of disinterested (usually perceptual) experience can serve as useful points of departure in the philosophical work of generalization, regardless of how we find ourselves disposed or moved, and what sorts of things, broadly construed, we find moving. To define philosophy as an expression of the personal would be to confuse philosophy with the articulation of an individual’s Weltanschauung. If particular philosophers have their personal views of life (secular, Christian, vaguely religious, and so on), that’s their own (non-philosophical) affair.483 It is the results, allegedly, that matter, and the disembodied reasons that buttress our abstract intellectual assent.484
Both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, echoing a Socratic conviction, insist by contrast that the sort of philosophy an individual pursues cannot be cleanly divorced from what we might call the “existential situation” of the philosopher in question, where this embraces, inter alia, ethical ideals and political and intellectual goals, so-called irrational phenomena (mood, emotion, passion), historically and socially informed experiences of human existence, and obscure background conditions of understanding and interpreting human life and its various worlds that give shape to the philosophical problems that seem relevant and the concepts, judgments, and arguments that appear plausible. The inescapable fact that philosophy begins in medias res is itself an important philosophical problem. If it is a fact, it is certainly not neutral but comes with crucial normative implications. (This helps to explain why social and moral criticism, beyond the criticism of arguments divorced from life-concerns, belongs for both thinkers to philosophy proper, about which more below; and why the phenomenon of history and what early Heidegger calls the “historical I” play a central role in their respective projects.)485
But this insistence on the personal in Kierkegaard and what early Heidegger names “facticity,” is somewhat elusive and easy to misunderstand and it raises several important questions: What should the philosopher’s responsibility be to her own personal life? How should one write, in light of the acknowledged claims of concrete human existence? And what does the interest in facticity mean for philosophy itself?
Critics of Heidegger inspired by Kierkegaard occasionally fault the fundamental ontologist for falling victim to the temptations of systematic philosophy, as if taking an interest in the personal should eschew all forms of philosophic generality and the task were comparable to the writing of a memoir or composing poems. The same readers often fail to acknowledge the highly abstract and generalizing character of the pronouncements on truth, subjectivity, and becoming inward in the Postscript and often ignore Climacus’s own insistence that those who ask about truth ought to consider “what is meant by ‘being.’”486 Those who approach Heidegger with more conventional systematic ambitions often fail to discern important connections (more evident, to be fair, in the lecture courses) between the fundamental ontology of Being and Time and the “ontic” ideals and ways of life that, by Heidegger’s own reckoning, enable the more abstract philosophical theses.487 And some readers of early Heidegger purport to discover good reasons to think that early Heidegger himself is an opponent of philosophy who favors the mysterious play of pre-philosophical life against its conceptual articulation and freezing.488
But the work of both thinkers hardly sustains a tidy distinction between the ontic and the ontological, which seems to underwrite and pervade several influential but misleading interpretations of their respective projects. Heidegger’s earliest work in Freiburg (1919–1923) and Kierkegaard’s entire literary production, beginning officially with the pseudonymous Either/Or, move artfully back and forth between the concrete details of a particular form of life-in-the-making and the more general ontological structures embedded in the details. In what scholars of early Heidegger often see as his breakthrough (KNS 1919), Heidegger insists that despite the differences in perception between a university professor, a peasant from the Black Forest, and a native of Senegal, each experiences objects (such as a lectern) under the aspect of significance; and so “universally valid propositions are [nonetheless] possible.”489
Although the Judge speaks in the second volume of Either/Or in the personal mode of epistolary communication and address, and singles out his own married life as an example, his advice to the young man known as “A” amounts to a philosophy of the nature of ethical commitment and its structural superiority to the uncommitted, sentimental, and self-absorbed mode of being he associates with his younger friend and interlocutor. It is the aesthete, by the Judge’s reckoning, who pays too little attention to the general conditions of becoming a self and who lacks a compelling organizing idea of human existence “for which,” in Kierkegaard’s own words, one ought to be “willing to live and die.”490 The general reflections on chatter, the public, apathy, leveling, and the like that conclude A Literary Review are preceded by a series of detailed considerations of a novelistic treatment of two ages (called, respectively, the revolutionary age and the present age), rich in concrete poetic detail: it is, after all, the lives of the characters, as portrayed by the author of The Two Ages, that enable the cultural critic’s more abstract assessments. And while philosophically inclined readers may ignore the first two parts, Kierkegaard himself insists upon the close connection between abstract philosophical reflection and the more concrete poetic configurations: “It’s not a question here of an ethico-philosophical assessment of [the age’s] validity, but of the consequences of its special character as this is reflected, and the task is to suggest such consequences only at the level of generality corresponding to the details of the author’s novelistic account.”491
In a similar vein, Heidegger’s earliest sustained account of authenticity in the summer semester of 1921 unfolds as a critical appropriation of themes in Augustine’s Confessions, itself a rich narrative of a particular individual’s journey toward the Christian life, but in a way that makes ample room for non-Christian appropriations of the same and serves to justify certain ways of conceptualizing possibilities of concrete human existence in the abstract.492 A careful reading of the course in question would, we think (if we had space to argue for it here), show that Heidegger’s more abstract views on, for instance, temptation and distraction, curiosity, and the pursuit of the good, anchor themselves in concrete readings of a highly individualized narrative of religious concern—and, moreover, that the abstract concepts themselves have purchase only as structural formalizations of a particular ideal of living well, with ways of going astray also clearly in view.
Each of these texts, then, can be seen to embody a particular individual’s way of living up to the ideals at stake in the presentation, along with detailed accounts of what the corresponding way of life looks like in the concrete (the Judge, for example, does not only diagnose, in the abstract, his correspondent’s failure to treat people in a certain way, but speaks to “A” as a specific person whose existence matters); but they also offer conceptualizations and abstract remarks on what it means to live in those ways. (The aesthete, too, has a philosophy of crop rotation on offer in the first volume of Either/Or, as well as general theories of tragedy and modern life and the meaning of music, love, and death.) If the work of each reveals suspicion about the tendency toward generalization, it is the sort of suspicion that comes to voice in Blake’s paradoxically generalizing assertion, in his marginal comments on Reynolds’s Discourses: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”
The Postscript, which many take to be the canonical formulation of Kierkegaard’s hostility to philosophy or philosophical generalization, in the name of the particular individual who falls outside of the system, is dominated by abstract reflections on decision and choice, freedom, the nature of inwardness and appropriation, existential truth and untruth, and what Climacus calls “essential knowing,” all in the name of rethinking the general structure of ethical (and religious) life.493 It would do the work no injustice to read it as a contribution to the philosophical theory of finite subjectivity and what it means, generally speaking, to inhabit a concrete situation of choice with an awareness of ethical urgency. Similarly, when Heidegger brings up the experience of his table in the Black Forest in SS 1923 (a course that makes several passing remarks on Kierkegaard), in contrast to the table as reconfigured in modern epistemological terms, the point is not, or at least not exclusively, to rehearse the meaning of the table for Heidegger, but to offer a richer experiential foundation for more general claims about the nature of the contexts of Bedeutsamkeit (significance) within which each of us dwells, before certain epistemological theories disfigure the phenomena that are in philosophical question. In both cases, the failure is not merely a failure to live up to some parochial tradition of human concern but a failure to own up to the general characteristics of being human as such.
Heidegger himself addresses the error we have been discussing explicitly in an important course of lectures held in 1921–22 (GA 61). He held Kierkegaard clearly in view as an ally. In a lengthy account of the (question-worthy) nature of philosophy, he takes issue with several misunderstandings of the nature, or task, of philosophical concept-formation and definition. On the one hand, we are tempted to overestimate the possibilities of defining our concepts, in ways that detach themselves from the living conditions and existential aims that motivate a philosophical interest in human life. Philosophy, on this view, begins to look (suspiciously) like an attempt to arrive at universally binding definitions that culpably ignore the concrete circumstances of philosophizing individuals, in favor of organizing things away in conceptual cabinets. The universals that emerge here relate indifferently to any possible object of its kind: the best definition of poetry, for instance, need not take into serious consideration questions concerning the worth of particular expressions of the poetic impulse, or personal ways of having been moved by the poetic statement. All that matters is whether something can be classified as a poem. Once we know what, in general, makes for a poem, we need not trouble ourselves much further.
On the other hand, there are stances toward definition, or refusals to conceptualize, that insist that philosophy (if we can call it that) is entirely a matter of personal experience; that the point is to live intensely or to work concretely, without regard for the principles that make life and thought possible. Philosophy, Heidegger insists, is conceptual cognition worked out in a principled fashion. And in case we might be in danger of thinking that adherence to principles is an entirely abstract affair, Heidegger informs his students (while mentioning Kierkegaard by name) that genuine principles of philosophical research are to be acquired “only in the basic experience of passion.”494 The corresponding passage in A Literary Review runs: “Principium, as the word indicates, is what is primary, that is, the substantial, the idea in the . . . form of feeling and enthusiasm which, in its inner drive, impels the individual forward.”495
Despite Heidegger’s own eventual efforts to distance himself from Kierkegaard—on the grounds that the latter fails to raise the Seinsfrage, and so remains confined to the ontic or existentiell—we conclude that both thinkers are engaged in an ontological project, broadly construed; and, just as importantly, that the interest in developing certain general (Heidegger prefers to say “formal”) categories of human existence accurately embodies a concern for the particular individuals whose lives (as both thinkers insist) are perennially at issue in philosophy. In the absence of the formalizing ambition—what Heidegger calls “formal indication” and what Climacus names “double reflection”—the particularizing emphasis runs the risk of deflecting the reader’s attention away from her own life, in favor of morally irrelevant preoccupation with the particular life of another. The point of reading Heidegger and Kierkegaard is not to become interested in two idiosyncratic authors, but to become genuinely interested in what interested them. And this interest shows up on a decidedly conceptual plane. There is, to be sure, always some risk inherent in the conceptual enterprise. One could, as Aristotle once complained, get sidetracked in the conceptual tasks, at the expense of the personal work of forming virtuous habits and so fail to form those states or dispositions of character that serious ethical reflection and philosophical theory in its service demand. But it is a risk that both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, following in Aristotle’s footsteps, are willing to take.
And so while it is true that both thinkers pay careful and critical attention to the concrete situation out of which philosophy emerges—the factical life from which and back into which philosophical discourse moves—each tries, in his own way, to capture the universal conceptual structures of a more adequate (authentic) mode of inhabiting the human world. Once again, if both begin with a decidedly religious way of life clearly in view, as a form of existence that needs to be renewed in the modern era, their respective criticisms of the present age, their contributions to political theology convey, as we shall see shortly, certain failures in human life.496 And it is precisely this capacity of their ontological and moral criticisms of modern everyday life to move beyond the Danish Hegelian culture and spurious Christianity of the nineteenth century (Kierkegaard) and the perceived complacency of the Weimer era (Heidegger) which allows their work to shed critical light on the conditions of ethical life in the globalized twenty-first century.
Social Criticism and the Ontology of Sociopolitical Existence
Because of the ways in which Kierkegaard and Heidegger examine both the concrete details of particular forms of life and the more general ontological structures of cultural life as such, we ought to look for instances in which what appears to be social criticism aimed at aspects of a particular culture also has a relevance beyond that local context. Even Hannay, one of Kierkegaard’s most capable Anglophone translators and a compelling interpreter in his own right, tends to see A Literary Review as a largely topical affair, in an important essay that brings Heidegger’s more formal analyses into the discussion as well.497 To begin our more concrete exploration, we can borrow an example from another author—one who (like Kierkegaard) can easily be misread as a merely “existentiell” critic, philosophically unconcerned with outlining universal structures of political ontology—to illustrate what we have in mind. The following passage is from Thoreau’s Walden, and is all the more striking, in light of Heidegger’s use of das Man (the They) and Kierkegaard’s interest in the role of public modes of discourse in shaping or distorting the individual’s sense of her tasks and commitments: “When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, ‘They do not make them so now,’ not emphasizing the ‘They’ at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates.”498
As the subsequent elaboration of his dissatisfaction with the seamstress makes clear, Thoreau’s criticism is not aimed at the attitudes of a particular individual in Concord (sister to Emerson’s neighbor, as it turns out), or if so only proximally and indirectly. His point, rather, is about the kind of attitude represented by this seamstress and how typical it is—of his contemporaries, to be sure, but also of human beings more generally—to defer to public opinion or “conventional wisdom,” to honor Fashion and repeat whatever “They” happen to be saying at the moment. The stance of the tailoress embodies in concrete, exemplary shape a widely shared tendency of human life that needs combatting, in Thoreau’s view, throughout the various stations of human existence. The notion of the public, the concept of the “They,” is of an abstract and impersonal power that takes responsibility away from specific individuals, offering ready-made opinions that are available to be taken up as if they were one’s own: what they say has the authority granted to whatever people en masse, based on hearsay, allegedly think.499 Despite Thoreau’s Kierkegaardian insistence in the opening pages of Walden that it is, after all, always only the first person speaking, his work means to address problems that afflict human beings in their mortal condition more generally, as creatures for whom things matter. All three thinkers (we could add Nietzsche here, too, and Emerson also) worry, centrally, about the tendency of human life to be lived by impersonal forces and powers embedded in widely circulating social customs and norms, in the name of an abstract and dubious ideal of conformity. In Heidegger’s terse formulation: “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they . . . is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always surrendered itself.”500
Kierkegaard—not exclusively, but especially, in A Literary Review—develops a set of concepts that, while most clearly exemplified in distinctively modern forms of existence, is meant to capture generic existential tendencies in social life. These include idle talk (or “chatter”), the public (sometimes “public opinion”), and the all-important leveling—which is described as a monstrous, desolating abstraction, “an abstract power [which] is abstraction’s victory over individuals.”501 Idle talk, public opinion, and leveling are terms that function much like Thoreau’s or Heidegger’s They. They are put forward in specific shapes, but in the long run as having existential, and not only existentiell, pertinence to the sociopolitical aspects of human life as such, and so mean to apply concretely to individuals across various social, political, and economic boundaries.
Likewise, ontological claims about the structure of public life per se may originate in, and so be relevant to, an author’s parochial situation or her broader yet still “ontic” historical moment. There is an implied comparison between his own time and other actual or possible historical moments underlying Heidegger’s Kierkegaardian point in Being and Time that “the they” has “various possibilities of concretion” such that “the extent to which its dominance becomes penetrating and explicit may change historically.”502 In texts written at least a decade later, and with his own political situation more obviously on display, what is pejoratively named “Americanism” or “the American” is a localized manifestation of what Heidegger still seeks to understand as a metaphysical tendency, transcending specific and readily identifiable political and social limits. Similarly, in an earlier course of lectures on Plato’s Sophist, held in the winter semester of 1924/5, Heidegger sees the problem of Gerede (usually translated as “idle talk”) as operative not only in the modern era—where the human being, he playfully suggests in the summer term of 1924, should be defined as “the animal who reads newspapers”—but also, and just as importantly, in ancient Greece. On Heidegger’s view, idle talk is a permanent possibility of human existence, anchored in the essential, structural (ontological) detachability of words from lives, things, and issues. Again, it would be a mistake to see the critique of Gerede as little more than localized moral criticism, representing Heidegger’s own dissatisfaction with the political situation in the Weimer era. What prompted Heidegger to make idle talk thematic is, of course, inseparable from his own place and time. But philosophy, in Heidegger’s own reckoning, is no merely local affair. In a related vein, Heidegger’s own explicit views on why Destruktion of the philosophical tradition is important are, to be sure, rooted in culturally specific anxieties about the reception of ancient Greek philosophy in the academic community of German philosophy in the early decades of the twentieth century; but they are just as often tethered to a generic claim about the historical nature of human existence as such and what philosophy, throughout the ages, is called upon to do—to think freshly about what being might mean.503
To dismiss analyses of this kind as examples of warmed-over social critique of parochial historical phenomena, arguably located in certain decades of the nineteenth or twentieth century,504 is to imply that a philosopher, strictly speaking, should not stoop to attend to the merely contingent—and that, insofar as she does so, she is temporarily leaving aside philosophical tasks in order to dabble in ephemeral political journalism. In fact, if Kierkegaard and Heidegger can both be seen to be offering what Charles Taylor (echoing Nietzsche) might call a “moral ontology” of human existence, then failure to weigh in on the ontological significance of culturally specific ways of failing would be a fatal misstep—one that runs the risk of offering fruitless generalities in a conceptual vacuum, ungrounded in specific worries and animating passions. It ought to matter (to us, today) that idle talk, as a general category of human life, is enabled and encouraged by the modern press and other forms of distinctively modern technologies.
It would be a mistake, then, to assume that what we find in either The Present Age or Being and Time (see esp. §§25–27 and §§35–38) is only about flaws in a particular culture or era—yet, as we also wish to stress, it would also be mistaken, as we have just begun to argue, to assume that these texts must disavow any such ontic applicability in order to earn their credentials as philosophy. Heidegger and Kierkegaard both insist that philosophy, even in its more generic modes and generalizing moods, should not attempt to disburden future generations and individuals of the specific tasks they will face. While they both take issue with Hegel’s social and political philosophy, their work can be read as an attempt to think through the present age, with the history of philosophy in the West clearly in mind. There are temporally and historically specific ways in which the problems of philosophy show up that individuals called to philosophical reflection of a certain sort should not avoid, in favor of an easy view of philosophia perennis and problems descending from the unchanging heavens. The fact that the perennial temptation of idle talk or chatter shows up for us today (see, e.g., Heidegger on Heute) in the shape of Internet pressures is all the more reason to think through the specific temptations presented by current media. Demagoguery may be a perennial problem in political life, but there are specific forms of it, enabled by certain phenomena of the so-called digital age, that call for careful temporally specific analyses. (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave doesn’t suffice to illuminate fully the concrete conditions of life with and within the Internet, even if Plato’s Socrates can sometimes seem a prescient interpreter of our contemporary pathologies.)
As philosophers, we are always enmeshed in a specific set of factual circumstances: to neglect this in thought would be make a Cartesian mistake (as when, in the Third Meditation, he says that his being as a thinking thing owes nothing to parental upbringing). The philosophical reflection that leads one to conclude that the prevailing habits of thought will always offer ready-made answers to difficult questions, “disburdening” Dasein of its existence by making everything easy,505 or that a crowd in its very concept is untruth,506 ought to begin with and return to a diagnostic evaluation of the distinct failures of one’s own age. And a certain dissatisfaction with the present age (of one’s own particular life) might prove to be the best way to begin thinking about the more generic failures to live up to the human condition that tempt or afflict philosophizing individuals across time.
Both thinkers have powerful things to say, in culturally specific registers, to be sure, about the general human failure to take seriously the shape and significance of a life of one’s own, but also (the two go hand in hand) to own up to the conditions of mortal human life as such. (Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit is suggestively ambivalent: it can suggest the personal achievement of becoming an individual, with a life of one’s own, led on one’s own terms, but also a failure to own up to the human condition überhaupt. This comes out most clearly, perhaps, in the moral ontology of death in the second division of Being and Time.) The philistine or the inauthentic person, complacently immersed in trivial everydayness, will in each instance appear in a culturally specific guise, but at the same time will necessarily exemplify general features that both Kierkegaard and Heidegger are struggling to conceptualize. They may be wrong to generalize in the way they do; but the generalizing ambition should not be ignored. The fact that few of us are alehouse keepers or prime ministers does not diminish the force, at once moral and ontological, of the following passage from The Sickness Unto Death, which centers on a generic failure of the imagination and its constricting sense of the possible (note, too, the “always”):
Bereft of imagination, as the philistine-bourgeois always [our emphasis] is, whether alehouse keeper or prime minister, he lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to how things go, what is possible, what usually happens. . . . The philistine-bourgeois mentality reassures itself with the trite and obvious and is just as much in despair whether things go well or badly.507
Similarly, the particular modes of enjoyment and the novels and plays that might attract attention or shock will, of course, vary from time to time, but the structural tendency on display in the following passage from Being and Time should be discernible, if with some effort, throughout a variety of empirical instances in distinctive historical climes and individual lives:
We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also . . . find “shocking” what they find shocking. . . . The they [das Man, also “the One” or “Anyone”] maintains itself factically in the averageness of what is proper, what is allowed, and what is not.508
What is especially problematic in the present age, according to A Literary Review, is that individual human beings have no sustaining passions and are somehow stifled into inaction and conformity rather than being moved to act decisively. (Heidegger lodges a similar complaint about indecisiveness in more explicitly ontological terms in Being and Time.) But we can conceptually account for what sort of tendency is particularly bad, here and now, as Kierkegaard proceeds to do in his book-review-turned-project-in-social-ontology. In the process of comparing an earlier age favorably to the present one, he gains leverage to show that (1) how things are is worse than how things might be, the latter evidenced, at least in part, by the comparison between the age of revolution and the present age of leveling reflection (again, Heidegger’s frequent comparisons between modern philosophical tendencies he finds dubious and more fruitful ancient modes of philosophizing are meant to make a similar point), and (2) although they may be particularly hazardous and pervasive today, phenomena such as idle talk are not uniquely characteristic of the modern era, but represent permanent temptations, woven structurally into human existence as essential possibilities of what Heidegger calls Dasein. The first is an ontic, the second an ontological point. And both perspectives, the ontic and the ontological, are mutually illuminating: our conception of what idle talk is, or what it is to chatter [at snakke] gets enriched by philosophical reflection on, for example, the modern press; and, conversely, an otherwise isolated phenomenon such as the newspaper reveals something like an essence, and so takes up residence in a powerful conceptual account of human existence, when the ontology of idle talk comes more clearly into view.
In opposition to a mutually exclusive disjunction advanced by Pattison,509 among others, both perspectives (the ontic and the ontological) are essential to the ethical tasks at issue explicitly in Kierkegaard throughout the corpus, and strongly implied by Heidegger’s distinctive approach to fundamental ontology in the period culminating in Being and Time. The ontic perspective helps rescue us from political apathy, while the ontological standpoint can prevent us from succumbing to utopian fantasies that various undesirable aspects of contemporary life in the polis could in principle be eliminated. It makes sense to be critical of what current media (in whatever form they may take) happen to convey, but also to recognize that a tendency toward leveling and chatter will be present in any shared life within which people talk—which is to say, in any mode of human existence. General, structural tendencies toward what Heidegger calls Verfallen will, presumably, give birth to ever-new occasions to go astray. So, even as A Literary Review identifies in contemporary public life some of the abstract, self-forgetting tendencies of “speculation, which is indifferent to existence” as identified in The Concluding Unscientific Postscript,510 it also describes how a specific culture can itself express, and thus encourage in each of its members, a tendency toward what in Either/Or is named the “aesthetic” mode of life. Aesthetic modes of life do, after all, seem more prevalent in a culture that values the spectator over the participant—a tendency warned about in A Literary Review. But Heidegger’s readings of ancient Greek philosophy reveal a tendency toward spectatorship, at the expense of uncertain and fallible praxis, in premodern societies and philosophies as well. Although “every person [must] work out his own salvation,” as Kierkegaard affirms late in A Literary Review, the “desolating abstraction of leveling” makes this more difficult for each of us when its dominion is especially penetrating and explicit.511 If human beings have a natural tendency to avoid social engagement—as Kant observed, ours is an “unsocial sociability”—certain communities and cultures may have specific instruments and institutions in place that aid and abet a more generic tendency to withdraw, thereby making detachment a more pressing problem than it might otherwise be. The problem of anonymity, for instance, is unlikely to show itself prominently in a rural community of farmers and peasants in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In the age of anonymous posting in cyberspace, the difficulty of assigning responsibility to particular individuals is pervasive and chronic. We are not ancient Greeks, to be sure, or medieval peasants, but our world and theirs is sufficiently alike to make fruitful philosophic generalizations possible.
We can and should, then, distinguish gainfully, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger both do, between a form of dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of a particular culture or community, on the one hand, and a refusal to accept any concrete limits within a shared life among others, on the other. In A Literary Review, Kierkegaard speaks of a mode of life defined by “aesthetic” detachment as one in which “the individual becomes alien to the actual world” by becoming absent from it.512 In this mode of life, one’s estrangement is based not upon an intelligible revolt against surrounding values, but by a refusal to be bound by finite human existence under any conditions. In Either/Or, the essay “Rotation of Crops” gives voice to the logical culmination of this attitude. Its author notes that accepting a definite identity means limiting oneself to specific concerns, and concludes that we should refuse to accept this kind of limitation and vulnerability—by avoiding friendship or marriage, or entering a profession.513 It isn’t just the specific examples of commitment but the kind of commitment represented in these relationships and institutional practices that the aesthete seems to be rejecting. Or, more generally still, it is the very idea of commitment against which the aesthete rebels.
Yet alienation from surrounding values and practices, if it is not a prejudice against contingent existence as such but a plausible response to one’s own political situation, may deserve to be taken seriously. The ability to recoil from what seems unacceptable shows a moral imagination in touch with the possible, beyond the actual conditions of a degraded mode of life, and expecting something better. It prevents a person from complacently accepting the status quo just as it is—whether good or evil, significant or utterly vacuous.514 And the dissatisfaction with political reality as one encounters it, a hesitation to take any of the available paths, could be nothing other than the response of an individual who has not yet found a context in which to realize worthy aspirations.515 The terms used by Kierkegaard in his own voice in A Present Age echo those employed by the aesthete in the pseudonymous Either/Or, when the latter protests that the goals pursued by his contemporaries do not appeal to his need for meaning. Surveying his age, he observes that people are dull, their activities trivial, and their passions lethargic.516 Thus, seeing no reason to lower himself into a charade of quiet desperation, the aesthete protects his integrity by holding back from social and political engagement. Such a person’s hesitancy in coming to terms with public standards of evaluation is, on a charitable reading, based in a refusal to be reconciled to a life of trivial conformity, combined with the concomitant wish for something other than the present state of things. In a culture whose basic orientation is dubious, being a participating citizen does not guarantee attaining moral integrity or personal authenticity—and it seems that this is one way of explaining what’s wrong with any “passionless and reflecting age,” which subtly empties everything of significance and undermines possibilities for meaningful engagement.517
If his own sociopolitical situation is, like that of “the present age” as characterized in A Literary Review, one of passionlessness, erupting in brief and fleeting enthusiasms, none of which is taken seriously for long,518 then it is unsurprising to find that Either/Or’s aesthete in the same condition of dissatisfaction. It is at least conceivable that the aesthete is hindered not because he is a beautiful soul who categorically rejects the finite world, but by legitimate doubts about the values of a particular civilization. Again and again, the aesthete emotionally revolts against “reality” as represented in his immediate surroundings:
When I opened my eyes and saw reality, then I began to laugh and since that time I haven’t stopped. I saw that the meaning of life was to get an income, its goal to become a counselor-at-law, that the rich desire of love was to catch a well-off girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to make a speech, that courage was to risk losing ten dollars, that kindness was saying “You’re welcome” after dinner, and that piety was going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.519
Here, the speaker relies upon a tacit belief that love, friendship, courage, kindness, and so on, could be something greater than what they are presently taken to be. And, just as importantly, that there is something about the human condition as such that makes love, friendship, and the like worthwhile for creatures like us. The political situation under analysis in The Present Age is to be understood not only for its own sake, but as providing an opportunity to investigate how any “with-world” can accomplish the stifling of human possibilities in this manner.520 At the same time, if Dasein must always find itself initially surrounded by inauthentic habits of idle talk, ambiguity, and everydayness, then what appears to be a particularized social critique may have the merit of delineating what it’s like to find oneself in one of the many historical shapes that a life among others may take. The ontic project has unavoidably ontological implications, and so ought to contribute to any ontology of social existence as such.
Conclusion
As we noted above, it would be a mistake to overlook or deny revealing differences in method between Kierkegaard and Heidegger, differences we have largely ignored in this essay, in order to explore and to stake out possible shared terrain. We did not, for instance, develop an interpretation of the relationship between the first two parts of A Literary Review and the third, neglecting thereby an important exegetical task that might have moved us to qualify some of our comparisons between the two thinkers, and to modify our interpretation of what we take to be Kierkegaard’s social criticism and ontology. Nor did we present in any detail Heidegger’s youthful reading of Augustine’s Confessions, which, we suggested, prepares the ontic soil, so to speak, out of which emerge several early generalizations on the structure of human existence as such. The present chapter has moved, for the most part, on an abstract conceptual plane (even in explaining the need for philosophical attention to concrete life), in a way that runs the risk of overlooking fruitful differences between certain aspects of their respective projects and working methods. These differences help to explain why those of us interested in philosophy in an existential key often seek nourishment in both thinkers, beyond the harmonizing ambition that is more evident above.
It might appear to more careful readers of Heidegger and Kierkegaard that we have tried to make the latter over, suspiciously, in an image of the former. No reader of A Literary Review and Being and Time, however careless, can fail to perceive at least formal differences between the two texts. Nothing in Heidegger’s vast philosophical output resembles in form the well-known Seducer’s Diary in the first volume of Either/Or or the dialogical Stages on Life’s Way or the (arguably, sometimes philosophical) commentaries on specific passages of Scripture that make up Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses.521
While it is true, as we have tried to argue above, that any tidy distinction between the ontic and the ontological in Kierkegaard and Heidegger is difficult to sustain—that both thinkers are engaged in ontological or existential interpretation of certain ontic (or existentiell) phenomena—it is also worth noting that Heidegger’s basic question (What does being as such mean?) is not foundational for Kierkegaard and, conversely, that the task of becoming inward and achieving true selfhood stands more discernibly at the center of Kierkegaard’s authorship. This is not to say that questions concerning individuation that engage with the phenomena of a particular world of human concern are foreign to the Seinsfrage, or that a preoccupation with the single individual ought to shun ontological reflection. But distinctive accents in their respective projects do make for palpable stylistic differences between them, with noteworthy philosophical implications that ought to matter to those of us who take seriously the pressing problem of how to speak and write—as individuals at once profoundly shaken, for example, by the recent death of a close friend and philosophical interlocutor, but also invested in the project of clarifying the general structure of what Heidegger calls “being-toward-death” and looking to philosophy to say something, in the more generalizing mood, about the nature of loss and its shadow grief, beyond the painful absence of this one here and now. (The question of how to write, and what to keep silent about, troubled both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and forms another point of contact between them.)
To carry the example further: one might, to be sure, still try to argue that the concrete experience of loss properly prompts the more poetic or personal statement, while the latter should be more strictly discursive and impersonal. As grieving individuals, we compose poems, remember the dead in conversation and formal ceremony, and sign our names to sympathy cards addressed to particular individuals; as philosophers we write dispassionate essays on the condition of mortality and our shared responsibilities to the dying, the dead, and to those the deceased leaves behind. But we have already found at least a few formal reasons to suspect that such easy partitioning of intellectual labor—factical, on the one hand, philosophical on the other—will not hold up, at least not for those of us moved to conceptualize on the basis of personal experience, and in ways that refuse to leave the personal dimension altogether behind.522 This concern to preserve the personal, or to carry it forward in philosophical speech, does not obviously entail that a grieving response to someone’s death in thoughtful poetic lines amounts to a philosophical account of death and dying (cf. Tennyson’s In Memoriam), but it does prompt us to ask: what forms of discourse are appropriate for creatures like us—always underway and unfinished, chronically afflicted with uncertainty, caring about particular individuals, landscapes, projects, etc., but capable of (and sometimes, perhaps, all too tempted by) the generalizing perspective and the organizing power of universals? If, following Kahn again (who himself follows Arendt), we agree that “the political formation of the experience of the sacred is the subject of political theology,” then political theology like existential philosophy must be “a matter of life and death.”523
To single out several of the more consequential differences between our two philosophical authors on this score would require another essay—to spell them out, in convincing detail, a book-length study in its own right. We conclude by mentioning just one, which bears directly on the themes we’ve been tracking here, and as a signpost for future investigations.
Heidegger’s early ontology reveals far less patience facing what we might call ontic detail than Kierkegaard’s contributions to existential and ontological inquiry. While Heidegger’s early lecture courses are, as we noted in passing, usually more forthcoming about the ontic roots of ontology, Being and Time pays scant attention to some of the details embodied in the way of life (the ontic ideal of human existence) that enables the fundamental ontologist’s bold generalizations on the ontological constitution of “authentic Dasein.” Even the more ontic orientations and starting-points of the early lecture courses (see, in addition to the course on Augustine, the course of lectures held in WS 1919/20) leave something to be desired. This may prove consistent with Heidegger’s philosophical desire to leave room for the individual’s own work of appropriating the philosophical concepts on display, but may just as readily invite the reader to lose herself in an abstract web of concepts. That contrasts rather sharply with Kierkegaard’s approach: his work often lingers over the particular details of, say, an aesthetic or an ethical mode of existing before proceeding to offer formal indications of the general structure of living in a certain way. This is as true of The Sickness Unto Death as it is of Either/Or, although the latter more clearly is (as its subtitle claims) “a fragment of life.” And from this point of view, Guignon might still be right to conclude that Kierkegaard’s project has certain advantages over Heidegger’s early philosophy: ontic inquiry without ontological generalization may be (philosophically) blind, but ontological concept-formation without detailed ontic investigation runs the risk of appearing empty.524
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471. There are only three references to Kierkegaard in Being and Time, none of which is particularly illuminating. The most relevant to the present study comes in a note which reads, in part: “In the nineteenth century, S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way. But the existential problematic is so foreign to him that in an ontological regard he is completely under the influence of Hegel and his view of ancient philosophy.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 407. Kierkegaard never figures in Heidegger’s later accounts of what he calls “the history of being,” and more or less drops out of focus after Being and Time. The most extensive later references appear in a course of lectures devoted to the metaphysics of German idealism, held in 1941, and are ancillary to Heidegger’s interest in Schelling.
472. For those new to the terminology, the distinction between the ontic and the ontological can be illustrated by the difference between saying something about, say, the blue color of an object, or its specific position in space, and focusing on what it means to be colored, or to be the sort of thing that takes up space, regardless of the thing’s specific color and particular location: the former is an ontic statement, the latter an ontological one.
473. Guignon, “Heidegger and Kierkegaard,” 185.
474. Ibid., 201.
475. Heidegger, Plato’s “Sophist,” 17, emphasis added.
476. It is worth noting, if only in passing, that Heidegger sees in the Aristotelian conception of being an emphasis on being-finished (Fertigkeit)—in an important course of lectures held in SS 1924. It would do Climacus no philosophical injustice, we think, to interpret his polemic in ontological terms, as an expression of dissatisfaction with the idea of finality at work in the philosophical traditions that come under critical scrutiny in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 91, 103, 160–62.
477. Again, it is worth pointing out, if only to motivate our inquiry on textually faithful grounds, that early Heidegger seems to have interpreted his own philosophical project as part of an effort to detach what he calls “primordial Christianity” from certain metaphysical tendencies derived from the influence of Greek philosophy on early Christian piety.
478. Both thinkers place anxiety at the center of their philosophical, or moral, psychologies, Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety and Heidegger in, among other places, §40 of Being and Time, where Angst is claimed to be a “fundamental attunement” of Dasein and, unlike fear, a mood that reveals a basic and ineradicable aspect of human life, which is unavoidable insecure and unheimlich. On Kierkegaard’s appeal to classical philosophy, see Furtak, “Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy.” The critique of (modern) philosophy as predominantly epistemology is also echoed by Nietzsche, especially in Twilight of the Idols.
479. The demand for a “life-view,” presented by Kierkegaard as early as From the Papers of One Still Living, is also prominent in A Literary Review. See Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 15–16.
480. It is interesting that both Kierkegaard and Heidegger seem interested in dissociating themselves from the moralizing tone of their respective criticisms of human life. Kierkegaard writes, in what reads like an anachronistic echo of Heidegger, that in his account of the present age “there is no question of which age is the better, or the more significant.” See Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 67–68. Heidegger prefaces his account of the falling of Dasein in Being and Time by observing: “Our interpretation has a purely ontological intention and is far removed from any moralizing critique of every Dasein and from the aspirations of a ‘philosophy of culture.’” See Heidegger, Being and Time, 156 (SZ, 167).
481. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism, 1.
482. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter GA) Band 18/5. Translations of Heidegger in what follows are our own, unless otherwise noted. The standard edition is published by Vittorio Klostermann, under multiple editors.
483. Again, Heidegger himself frequently dismisses the idea of philosophy as construction of a worldview. See, for instance, GA 56/7, 7–12.
484. Climacus, for instance, praises Lessing for producing no clear-cut results in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 55; Heidegger dismisses the philosophical ambition to achieve disembodied results throughout his early lecture courses.
485. Kierkegaard’s dissertation on the concept of irony places the notion of history at the center of his polemic against what he perceives to be the empty conception of the “I” in post-Kantian philosophers such as Fichte; and in lecture courses from the first Freiburg period (1919–1923), Heidegger insists that the self is a historical phenomenon and that philosophy is charged with the task of dismantling inauthentic historical traditions, in order to recover its proper mission to make human life meaningful again. See especially the course of lectures devoted to the phenomenology of intuition and expression held in SS 1920 (GA 59).
486. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 159.
487. In Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Blattner attempts to detach Heidegger’s ontological theses from Heidegger’s own insistence that ontological insights are enabled by authentic ways of existing.
488. This is the gist of John Van Buren’s influential Young Heidegger.
489. Heidegger, GA 56/7, 72.
490. From the 1835 Gilleleje writings, see Kierkegaard, Pap. I A 75.
491. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 53, 60.
492. Heidegger, GA, 60.
493. On this polemic, see Furtak, “Kierkegaardian Ideal.”
494. Heidegger, GA, 61, 24.
495. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 90.
496. Paul Kahn, for instance, points out that “political theology understands politics as an organization of everyday life” which is focused upon ways of imagining or experiencing what he calls “the sacred.” According to this conception, political theology could be said to concern both Kierkegaard and (early and late) Heidegger conspicuously. See Kahn, Political Theology, 22–23.
497. Hannay, “Kierkegaard’s Present Age and Ours.” As the title of the volume would lead us to expect, Hannay’s target is Dreyfus’s influential reading of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, coauthored with Jane Rubin and published as an appendix to Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I.
498. Thoreau, Walden, 23–24.
499. For more on the relationship between personal interest and philosophical generality in Thoreau, see Reid, “Speaking Extravagantly,” 44–47.
500. SZ, 128 (§27).
501. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 74–80 and 98.
502. Heidegger, Being and Time, 121. SZ §27. On “Americanism” and “the American,” see for instance “The Age of the World Picture” (in Holzwege) and Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (GA 53) from 1938 and 1942, respectively.
503. For details on Destruktion, ethics, and the project of ontology in early Heidegger, see Reid, “Ethical Criticism.”
504. Taylor Carman, e.g., gives some credence to this oft-repeated complaint; then, in seeking to offer a partial defense of Heidegger against it, he seeks to separate the project of Being and Time from that of A Literary Review, to our mind unconvincingly. See Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, 139–42.
505. Heidegger, Being and Time, 120. SZ §27.
506. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 106–11.
507. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 41.
508. Heidegger, Being and Time, 118–19. SZ §27. The discussion continues into accounting for these tendencies of Das Man in terms of “publicness” and “leveling.”
509. In Pattison’s own words: “What interest could someone persuaded by Johannes Climacus’s characterization of the subjective, interested, passionate approach to existence have in developing a universal ontology? . . . If one of the complaints levelled against the system by Climacus was that it had and could have no place for ethics, it is striking that the broad (if not total) consensus of Heidegger commentators is that Heideggerian ontology is similarly lacking in ethical interest in the very precise sense that the philosopher’s interest in his own personal ethical choices has no place within the project of fundamental ontology. Qua philosopher, [he] is duty-bound to look away from himself—which is just what the Kierkegaardian individual should never do. Which of the two, the fundamental ontologist or the existential thinker, has chosen the better part is, of course, a whole other matter.” See Pattison, Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 86–87.
510. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 211.
511. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 97–98.
512. Ibid., 17.
513. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1:295–99.
514. On passion for what is “actually” insignificant, see Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 124.
515. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 93–94.
516. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1:27–28.
517. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 68–69.
518. Ibid., 60.
519. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1:34; SV 2.36. This is a modified translation, as provided in Furtak, Wisdom in Love, 85.
520. Heidegger, Being and Time, 114–15, 162. SZ §§26, 37. Cf. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1541 (Pap. I A 340).
521. The closest Heidegger comes to providing commentary on Scripture comes in a course of lecture on the phenomenology of religious life in WS 1920/1 (GA 60), which centers on Paul’s eschatological letters. But his comments are almost culpably abstract, and far removed from anything Kierkegaard has to offer in the Discourses, which are more obviously meant to address human beings in states of affliction and personal concern.
522. For more on poetry’s relation to philosophy, see Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, and Reid, Being Here Is Glorious.
523. Kahn, Political Theology, 22–23, emphasis added.
524. We dedicate this essay in loving memory, and in friendship, to Matthew W. Geiger (1972–2016).