On Resoluteness and Pettiness
Part 2 in the series: Art And The Trouble With Death
The following is the second of a three-part series of reflections on the possible relationship between our consciousness of impending death and our reliance on popular forms of art for making sense of death. The focus here remains on the theories of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Part II considers Heidegger’s precept to avoid popular ways of talking about the passing of life, which tend to obscure the uniqueness of one’s encounter with death in that it cannot be shared with others. This part further examines Heidegger’s call to adopt authentic attitudes of resoluteness towards death, which will be juxtaposed against Nietzsche’s teaching to overcome pettiness.
“Come one, come all to the family reunion. It might be the last time we meet.”
— Carl Story, “Family Reunion”
Part II: On Resoluteness and Pettiness
Carl Story’s sublime Appalachian folk song, “Family Reunion,” calls together “one and all” in order to honor one’s aging parents while they are still with us: “mother is sick, she’s tired and she’s weary, she can’t go another mile” — and later, “what good will the roses do daddy up yonder, why don’t we give them today?” Typically, our parents are the folks in our lives who first begin to help us understand the meaning of our transitory natures as we seek to articulate our existential anxieties. Reflecting back on Part I of this series, we can now see that The Vaughan Brothers’ Family Style project was perhaps the most appropriate setting for a song like “Tick Tock.”
With family, we become aware of ourselves and our limits. With family, we’re not totally individuated with the gravest thoughts as we struggle to express them. Part I of this series entertained the idea that popular forms of art such as music and film can effectively resound with our consciousness of death. It also considered how human self-awareness might be forged under the impress of our existential limits and concerns.
I am certainly not the first to examine this issue explicitly. G.W.F. Hegel suggested that spiritual aspirations for freedom are provoked by the natural fear of death. One even becomes properly human, according to Hegel, by working on that very fear. In a similar vein, Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, sketched a taxonomy of human character types qualitatively defining human life under the hue of finitude and freedom. According to her, the development of self-awareness compels individuals to choose how to live as we cope with the underlying, if sometimes vaguely felt, consciousness of our finite existence and newly realized levels of responsibility. For de Beauvoir, “sub-man,” “serious man,” and “the nihilist” are all-too-common examples of the ways we evade the human condition, while the best life is the one that promotes the freedom of others.
Nietzsche and Heidegger, at least in key parts of their respective corpora, also understood the individual’s becoming conscious of transitoriness and impending death to be fundamental for considerations regarding the best or proper life. And both found the all-too-typical reaction to this becoming-conscious unworthy. For Nietzsche, the all-too-human response to “learning the meaning of the phrase, ‘it was’” is frequently vengeful, self-destructive, and nihilistic — or in a word “petty” (kleinisch). The human being has developed a spirit that takes revenge on life for its transitory nature. Moreover, such pettiness has for Nietzsche seeped into the Western world’s general orientation towards existence as such — its metaphysics — and, relatedly, into its politics.
For Heidegger, typical responses to the looming possibility of death are “inauthentic,” in the sense that we are said to seek out clever but duplicitous ways of sheltering ourselves from having to think specifically (or, authentically) about what is one’s “ownmost possibility.” Both Nietzsche and Heidegger believed these adverse reactions carry with them, almost by default, the regrettable weight of inevitability, given human nature and its symbiotic evolution with the Western world’s intellectual history.
It seems to be our destiny to have to fight against pettiness and inauthenticity. However, neither philosopher believed that our initial responses to the problem of death was insurmountable. We are free to respond otherwise. For this reason, they each proposed ethical “solutions” — not to death, of course, but to these defective, and all-too-human responses. For Nietzsche, the path to living nobly involves “amor fati” — loving one’s fate — which calls upon the individual to confront the pettiness in one’s life, as and whenever it is given.
We should bear this idea in mind as we consider Heidegger’s views. It should however be noted that soon after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger turned his attention initially (and with difficulty) to the collective Dasein of the pre-war German Volk in the 1930s, and then after the war to the “history of Being” in which this Dasein seems to have been fated to suffer all the horrors of the early and mid-twentieth century. My comments here, however, primarily concern Heidegger’s analysis in 1927’s Being and Time in which he holds that surmounting inauthenticity is done with “anticipatory resoluteness” in the face of death. Is there a substantive difference between these conceptualizations of the human being’s responses to finitude and for confronting our slacker-like tendencies? I believe so. Yet, my purpose here is not to elaborate in detail the thoughts of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of human finitude.
My analysis is rather more like an argument made in a recent work by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Though it’s a popular study (critics might call it a “self-help” book), the basic point remains to be taken seriously: Western conceptualizations of “the good life” are flawed with the presumption that “finding oneself” in the interest of living “authentically” has generally been the aim of Western virtue ethics. Against this presumption, it is argued, Chinese philosophers have emphasized one’s ‘self-overcoming.’ This distinction marks precisely the core difference between the life-philosophies of Heidegger, as laid out in Being and Time, and of Nietzsche.
Heidegger’s conceptualization of the struggle against inauthenticity with anticipatory resoluteness requires the affirmation of what one discovers to be one’s authentic self. Living authentically means rushing “resolutely” towards what cannot be shared, deflected, or farmed-out. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, living nobly — he writes at times about “the virtues” of such a life — demands the “self-overcoming” of circumstances that are generated and regulated by historical pettiness.
The weaker of the two claims — Heidegger’s theory of resoluteness — requires some further comment. I will not dwell upon the clearly disturbing issues arising from Heidegger’s recently published musings on race and “the Jewish problem” in the so-called Black Notebooks, other than to point out that these musings stand in stark contrast to what is found in Nietzsche’s notebooks, which unambiguously show Nietzsche working towards and fully expressing the outright condemnation of anti-Semitism, and its politicization, as the contemporary articulation of ressentiment and petty politics. It might be said the difference suggests that Nietzsche sought to confront his petty cultural inheritances, and that perhaps the core tenants of his philosophy of self-overcoming compelled him to do so, while such a compass is lacking in Heidegger’s thought.¹
These speculations are flimsy, of course, because they presume a philosopher’s life necessarily embodies the principles established in his or her thought, which cannot be accurately said. Still, it is correct to say that in Being and Time Heidegger hints at his own “resoluteness” in working out “the fundamental question of ontology.” And his engagement with the world via his political blunders, arrogance, naïveté, and — by what is now known — his anti-Semitism, are undeniable.
While it can easily be admitted that we are all petty, flawed creatures, it also must be recognized that some are more willing than others to confront those flaws. Heidegger’s personal flaws, viewed in the light of the Black Notebooks, have been on the minds of philosophers and scholars of late, but they are not the focus of the present essay. Nor am I interested in thinking-through the differences separating Nietzsche and Heidegger, in so far as the latter believes that the human being’s fundamental challenge in the face of death and human finitude is inauthenticity, which is cultivated in the idle talk of Das Man. This would require some extensive consideration of Western philosophies of freedom — given Heidegger’s claim that we are free to be authentic or not — and time (the focus of the latter part of Heidegger’s magnum opus).
As a contribution to ethical theory, emphasizing Dasein’s existence as a “being-towards-death,” Heidegger may here be understood to provide an answer (though maybe not the best answer) to questions concerning “moral considerability” — that is, questions regarding who or what may be subject to our moral considerations and why. The answer suggested here is that entities like Dasein demand such consideration, and for reasons that Heidegger lays out in Being and Time. Such entities are free to live authentically or not. Even though this kind of freedom offers Dasein the possibility of liberation from “the illusions of Das Man” concerning one’s death, freedom thereby holds Dasein suspended and individuated in the anticipatory truth of its totality— that is, of the whole of its existence including its impending demise.
However, it is only in the resolute understanding of Dasein’s finitude that the individual will be capable of living authentically with others. In some very important respects, according to Heidegger, each of us is radically separated from everyone else. And, this radical separation is what we have in common. The understanding of this shared radical individuation seems to serve Heidegger as the ground for a proper ethos. Moreover, Heidegger suggests that only those lives lived “in the arena’s spotlight” (so to speak) and out of the anonymity and safety of the crowd are authentic. Although the “they-self” offers Dasein a “supposed freedom” in the face of the apparent arbitrariness of one’s everyday conditions — the “thrownness” of its existence— Das Man in reality denies Dasein “the courage for Angst” and would have Dasein remain “alienated” from what is its “own-most.”
Thus, there are aspects of Heidegger’s elucidations of Dasein supporting the ethical imperative of taking responsibility for being distinctly individual, apart from the masses. Each of us, individually, are beings whose actions and beliefs have ethical consequences. Perhaps Heidegger even provides grounds here for supporting the imperative that each Dasein must raise its consciousness, as this responsible being who is with others in the world. We are distinctly responsible for the time we spend on this earth, and it is our responsibility to become aware of this responsibility.
But there is also a different sort of problem baked into Heidegger’s claim that we are “free to be authentic or not to be authentic.” In philosophizing the freedom to choose authenticity, even though the inauthentic life confronts Dasein almost by default, Heidegger fails to develop a notion for why we should challenge ourselves on other issues. He aims, rather, for theorizing the simple discovery of one’s authentic self in the face of death. From a Nietzschean standpoint, one might wonder whether it would be permissible, in Heidegger’s theory of authenticity, to be resolute in one’s pettiness. That is, is it possible to be resolutely petty? We will need to investigate this question further.
Endnote 1: As Yirmiyahu Yovel notes, “[e]specially in Germany, anti-Semitism was the other Janus face of nationalism, which Nietzsche opposed as madness and neurosis.” See Yovel’s Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 133. Nietzsche was “infected” with anti-Semitism while living in Germany in the early 1870’s. However, Yovel shows with copious references to Nietzsche’s letters and critical analysis of published and unpublished materials that once Nietzsche left “the zone of the disease,” he began overcoming the “infection” and even became an anti-anti-Semite: “Self-overcoming is the key concept here. Not only is it central in Nietzsche’s philosophy in general, but it also describes what Nietzsche seems to have realized in his own personal case concerning the Jews” (Yovel, 1998, 122–23). Nietzsche’s rhetorical style, however, which sometimes employed anti-Semitic stereotypes in order to mock his anti-Semitic readers with conclusions that are intended to shock and anger them, play a “dangerous game” and open the way for later readers to abuse Nietzsche’s texts (ibid. 179–183). As Exhibit A in support of the “dangerous game” thesis, we might point to Genealogy’s ironic turn regarding the “secret black art of a truly grand politics of revenge” which was said by Nietzsche to have occurred first in the “slave revolt” of the Jewish “priestly class” of the Second Temple (GM I.8). What a shock it must have been to Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic readers devouring this red meat from the opening essay of Genealogy to discover (but how many of them had the patience and discipline as readers to do so?) in the Genealogy’s final essay that they themselves were the inheritors and practitioners today of this “politics of revenge” (GM III.14). On Nietzsche’s “anti-anti-Semitism” see also Julian Young’s Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 358. Also, Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Nietzsche, the Jews, and Ressentiment” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Richard Schacht (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994), 214–236
Part I: “Time Is Ticking Away”
