The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics 
by 

Mark Lilla

 

The Obscenely Obsessive Aesthetics of Philosophers

Some weeks ago I criticised a book on scientific aesthetics by a well known scientist for its failure to adequately investigate the fundamental aesthetic drives of individual scientists and of the scientific profession.* If I had read The Reckless Mind first, I could have simply pointed to it as a model for how to carry out such an exercise. Lilla’s book is stuffed with a sensitive appreciation of what makes people who make a living with their minds tick. And his final theoretical speculations are outstandingly provocative.

The main difference in subject matter in the two books is that, while both are about famous intellectuals, Chandrasekhar’s scientists are less controversial than Lilla’s philosophers. The flaws of the latter may be more apparent; but I can’t see any plausible reason why that should make their criteria for living life substantially more visible. Lilla simply does a much better job of shifting through and filtering the mass of largely irrelevant biographical dross to reveal the likely kernel of these remarkable lives. My interpretation of Lilla’s interpretation of Heidegger in the book’s first vignette will, I hope, give a sense of the remarkable job he’s done

Heidegger was a protege of the German philosopher of phenomenology, Karl Jaspers. Heidegger and Jaspers shared an interest in so-called ‘limit situations’, those highly distressing states of severe anxiety and guilt that bring with them the possibility of an appreciation of existence itself. A psychological investigation of these men might presume that such an interest represents some kind of psychological disorder or trauma. But Lilla recognises this as an aesthetical not a psychological fact. It is a concern not originating in one’s history but one shaping one’s future. The concern is symptomatic of a positive, one might say ‘vocational’, stance to the world that hints at the aesthetic involved as an end in itself.

The growing emotional separation of Heidegger and Jaspers during the 1920’s reveals more detail about the aesthetics of each. For Heidegger a limit situation meant not one caused by any particular emotional or physical stress, but the more “primordial anxiety” of “being” itself, specifically the mode of being human. This aesthetic explicitly manifests itself in the gap between the two men when Heidegger writes a review of a book by Jaspers in 1923, and widens thereafter.

The differences between Jaspers and Heidegger were not in the first instance intellectual but aesthetic. Each had a distinctive perspective on the world. An aesthetic is not a rational theory but a filter which simultaneously screens what our experiences will be and guides our responses to them. An aesthetic is necessarily therefore ‘pre-theoretic’, although it may inspire subsequent conceptual development, which, in turn, makes the aesthetic more articulate.

Jaspers’s conception of the limit situation was one of a sort of pre- or anti-Kantian ‘thing-in-itselfness’ which focused his attention on the totality of possible expressions by the world to his consciousness. His phenomenology, however successful or unsuccessful it was, was an aesthetic of ‘sweeping in’ as many perspectives and experiences as possible. It eventually inspired some interesting variations of modern systems theory.

Heidegger’s aesthetic on the other hand accepted Kant’s dictum of the essential alienation of things, the world in general, from the human mind, including the human mind itself, and set about constructing an aesthetic strategy for dealing with this problem. For this, Heidegger created his own aesthetic: Dasein, presence, or the experience of simply being. Dasein as an aesthetic can be known because it is constructed; it does not exist unless one wills it. And it is solely what one wills it to be. Daseinis the aesthetic of one’s own self-creation. This is not a matter of playing God but of actually being divine.

Jaspers implicitly recognises that Dasein is an aesthetic not an intellectual concept, and that it is the principle source of Heudegger’s intellectual power. “He seems to notice what no one else saw,” Jaspers writes in his notebook. Indeed, the things Heidegger saw when he looked at the world were remarkable for their myopic concentration. For example, at one point Jaspers confronts him about Hitler, “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” To which Heidegger responds, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” Quite a filter indeed!

The aesthetic of Dasein seeks out and responds to ‘authenticity’. For Heidegger this does not mean honesty, sincerity, ‘being true to oneself.’ Authenticity means taking a ‘stand’ in the world, that is, making a definite choice among innumerable possibilities about who one will be, dismissing as irrelevant those concerns of daily life which inhibit or obscure that stand. Dasein is therefore purposively obsessive. There is no room in its aesthetic for judgments of relative worth of virtue, morality, or constraints, much less for political awareness. And when Dasein’s radar comes across a similarly obsessive Dasein like Hitler, it can only respond as it did: “Just look at his marvelous hands.”

Heidegger was also passionate about what he saw through this filter. Like a sommelier with attitude, he insisted on his aesthetic until many others could taste the delicate balance of his ideas and see exactly how they fit the disparate pieces of the world with a special elegance. Enthusiasm is of course the first rule of sales. What Heidegger was selling so enthusiastically was not so much a complex vocabulary but a way to experience the world. 

This is precisely what his popularizers in programmers like EST and Landmark, and other variants of the Human Potential Movement, which are run by his commercial epigones, have capitalized on so successfully. They sell the experience of the aesthetic and then themselves, over and over again. Heidegger’s ideas are a sort of tribal vocabulary that one hears from time to time in public utterances by celebrities, university presidents, and politicians who have been through these programmes.

At some point, before 1933 in any case, Heidegger’s passionately promoted aesthetic consumed its inventor. Jaspers wrires in his autobiography that “It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him.”So successful in formulating and demonstrating the power of his aesthetic for interpreting the world, Heidegger apparently forgot that Dasein was an invention, not reality. Lilla reports a conversation in 1936 between Heidegger and the historian Karl Lowith, in which Heidegger explicitly refers to the source of his Nazi sympathy as his own writings. Believing his own academic press, he joined the Nazi Party and his name remains tainted ever since. 

One conclusion I draw for Lilla’s Heidegger is that an aesthetic can have great power. In general, the more articulate it is, the more powerful, not just in its ability to organize the world of experience in some more orderly way, but also by attracting others to share in its power. Even after the war, Jaspers, despite criticising Heidegger’s conceptual intellect as authoritarian and recommending to the French war crimes committee that he be prohibited from teaching, still found his aesthetic fascinating. In a letter to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers admits that Heidegger “has knowledge of something that hardly anyone notices these days.” Jaspers’s fascination was not with His friend’s intellect but with the fact “that he lives in depths and with a passion that one dies not easily forget.”

When such a powerful aesthetic escapes from the consciousness of those who use it; as soon as it slips gently into the instinctive, and indeed primordial, parts of the mind; as soon as it is no longer a choice but an involuntary response to the world, it becomes a danger to everyone who comes into contact with it. Jaspers quotes a remark by Heidegger which could be the operational slogan for the aesthetic of Dasein: “One must get involved.” Having made one’s commitment, there are no other significant choices to be made.

And the most startling thing about Heidegger is that he knew this to be a clear danger in purely intellectual terms. Language is, as it were, the ‘ground’ of the aesthetical. An aesthetic cannot stay bottled up as mere sensory perception, it must be expressed in order to exist. And language is the most articulate means for its expression. But language becomes invisible; it hides both itself and the things it denotes. It effectively washes it hands of what it promotes or implies by claiming neutrality or objectivity - what Richard Rorty called the Mirror of Reality. All of this is captured in one of Heidegger’s best known aphorisms: “Language,” he says, “speaks man.” Having forgotten we created it, language exerts a power which is God-like in its transcendence and universal presence. Yet Heidegger entirely de-railed his rational faculty in favour of his aesthetic commitment.

Heidegger’s life is an example of what happens when an aesthetic goes rogue. He didn’t so much join fascism as pursue his criterion of what counts in the world and how what counts fits together without reflection in an insidious trap he had built for himself. The central paradox of Heidegger’s philosophy is that the conscious choice of an aesthetic stand on the world can be even more debilitating and destructive than being manipulated by the world. At least the latter allows for learning and adaptive evolution. Heidegger didn’t recognise that any fixed aesthetic, no matter how it is arrived at, is deadly and so his philosophy never addresses the issue.

Instead of shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave, what Heidegger saw was his own cave paintings flickering in the fire light. It made him giddy, drunk on his home brew, and eventually hung over and claiming he had been a victim. It’s amazing what aesthetics can do to folk, particularly really clever ones.

*https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...