Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 13

3,270 words

Part 13 of 15 (Read all parts here)

The Will is Evil

The foregoing may lead the reader to ask whether Heidegger’s negative will, which gives rise to the metaphysics of presence, is evil. It is difficult to escape this conclusion, especially given that, historically, it issues in the present “dispensation of being,” which is das Gestell (“enframing”), modern technological civilization’s metaphysical conviction that all that exists, including humanity, is nothing more than raw material for exploitation. Despite Heidegger’s alleged “historicism,” he quite clearly sees this standpoint as perverse, and yearns for a different, healthier orientation towards being (a topic to which I will return later).

Bret Davis provides convincing evidence that Heidegger did regard the will as evil, and he states that in the later Heidegger “the problem of evil is rethought as the problem of the will itself.”[1] A key piece of evidence for this claim is Heidegger’s posthumously published dialogue, written in 1945, titled “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man.” The two men are trying to make sense out of the “devastation” (Verwüstung) of the war, but they come to the position that the war was only the latest manifestation of an insidious phenomenon born long before.

At the end of the dialogue, Heidegger gives the date on which he imagines it to have taken place as May 8, 1945: the day on which the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany. And Heidegger adds, “On the day the world celebrated its victory, without yet recognizing that already for centuries it has been defeated by its own rebellious uprising” – a “rebellious uprising” (Aufstand) that has led to the devastation of the modern world. The older man states that this devastation “is in no way a consequence of the World War, but rather the World War is for its part only a consequence of the devastation that has been eating away at the earth for centuries.”[2]

The following exchange is also highly significant:

Older Man: And that which inflicts [this devastation] hides itself behind something insidious, something which announces itself in the form of the purportedly highest ideals of humanity: progress, unrestrained escalation of achievement in all areas of creating, equal employment opportunities for everyone, and above all the allegedly highest rationale – the uniform welfare of all workers.

Younger Man: What is really devastating, and that means what is malicious, consists here in the fact that these goals for humanity lead the various realms of humanity to become obsessed with devoting everything to their realization, and so with unconditionally driving the devastation onward while increasingly reinforcing it in its own consequences.[3]

Here, progressivism is unmasked as yet another manifestation of das Gestell – and thus yet another manifestation of will and its metaphysics of presence. There are similar passages in the text. For example: “The malice of this devastation reaches its extreme when it settles into the appearance of a secure state of the world, in order to hold out to the human a satisfactory standard of living as the highest goal of existence [Daseins] and to guarantee its realization.”[4] Modern devastation is thus present even where buildings do not lie in rubble, and even where men seem to flourish. In one exchange between the interlocutors, America is clearly referenced, without being explicitly named:

Younger Man: Because one day, from a more clarified insight into the essence of the devastation, we will recognize that the devastation reigns also and indeed precisely there, where country and people have not been affected by the destruction of the war.

Older Man: And so there, where the world shines with the gleam of advancement, advantages, and fortune; where human rights are respected, where civil order is maintained; and above all where the supply for the continual repletion of an undisturbed contentment is secured, so that everything remains overseeable and arranged and accounted for so as to be useful.[5]

One Heidegger commentator remarks, correctly, that “Heidegger’s central point [in these passages] was that these efforts to improve life, arising as they do out of a high regard for life, belong to the annihilation of the human essence insofar as they take life as the ultimate value.”[6] Here, taking life as the ultimate value means thinking that human beings can be satisfied, ultimately, by meeting their material wants and needs. But as Aristotle taught us, a life devoted to the satisfaction of such desires is not a properly human life. For Aristotle, only the life of contemplation, a life devoted to the intellect, affirms the human essence.

For Heidegger, on the other hand, the human essence consists in being the being for whom being is an issue. We are the beings to whom being becomes present, and we “register” being in all sorts of ways – but preeminently through language. Heidegger says that “to be human means to be a sayer.”[7] A sayer of being. Modernity, however, reduces humans more to destroyers of being than sayers: we regard all that exists as material to be destroyed or made over in the satisfaction of our desires.

In the dialogue, the older man identifies the devastation of modernity as evil:

Yet because the essence of the devastation is deeper and comes from farther away, our reflections return to it again and again. In so doing, we may recognize ever more clearly that the devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human essence that goes with it are somehow evil [das Böse] itself.[8]

And because the root of this devastation, as we argued earlier, is Heidegger’s “negative will” and its metaphysics of presence, the younger man identifies the will as evil also: “Perhaps in general the will itself is what is evil.”[9] Further, the two interlocutors agree that by “evil” they are not referring to the “morally bad,” but rather to “malice” (das Bösartige).

Presumably, what is intended here is a distinction between “bad” and “evil” such as I made earlier in this series: evil is not simply doing that which is “morally bad.” Evil is most definitely “bad,” but it is a kind of willful badness that intends the bad for its own sake. It is the choice of chaos and devastation. However, the younger man suggests that what the world takes to be “morality” (die Moral) itself, including the “progressive” agenda discussed earlier, might be “only a monstrous offspring of evil.”[10] (A point that must surely remind us of Nietzsche.)

Heidegger’s identification of evil with malice makes good linguistic sense, given that Bösartige is clearly related to Böse. In English, needless to say, there is only a conceptual connection between “malice” and “evil.” Interestingly, the identification of evil with malice seems to enter Heidegger’s work with the 1936 Schelling lectures. Several times, mainly in expounding Schelling’s conception of evil, Heidegger refers to “malice,” using Bosheit instead of Bösartige (both of which can be correctly translated as “malice”).[11] (Schelling himself only uses Bosheit once in the Freiheitsschrift, and never uses Bösartige.)[12]

Earlier, we referred to how will can creatively transform otherness, as when a sculptor produces a sculpture from a block of marble. Is such an activity “evil”? This cannot be the case, for then any act of transforming our surroundings would count as evil, even baking a cake. No, will is evil when it is moved by malice. To better understand what Heidegger means by “malice” consider these words spoken by the younger man:

Malice is insurgency [Aufruhr], which rests in furiousness [Grimmige], indeed such that this furiousness in a certain sense conceals its rage [Ingrimm], but at the same time always threatens with it. The essence of evil is the rage of insurgency, which never entirely breaks out, and which, when it does break out, still disguises itself, and in its hidden threatening is often as if it were not.[13]

German Aufruhr, here translated by Bret Davis as “insurgency” can also be rendered as “revolt” (it is actually cognate, surprisingly, with English “uproar”). But what does malice revolt against? Essentially, against all that is. Heidegger does indeed seem to have in mind something very much like Schelling’s characterization of evil as a lashing out at otherness, which is simultaneously an attempt to exalt the self, or to turn it into the “reversed god.”

Consider the wording of this passage from Heidegger’s 1936 lectures on the Freiheitsschrift, in which he is expounding Schelling’s views: “Evil is the insurgency [Aufruhr] that consists in inverting the ground of the essential will into the reverse of God’s.”[14] Malice is an uprising or revolt against what exists, especially insofar as it limits or has some kind of power over the self. It is an exalting of the self above the world; the making of the self absolute.

The Wasteland

What does Heidegger recommend as an answer to the insurgency of the will? The dialogue between prisoners of war addresses this question by setting up an opposition between the forest (Wald) and the desert (Wüste). We must consider this opposition carefully. The forest is introduced at the opening of the dialogue:

Younger Man: As we were marching to our workplace this morning, out of the rustling of the expansive forest I was suddenly overcome by something healing. Throughout the entire day I meditated on wherein this something that heals could rest.

Older Man: Perhaps it is what is inexhaustible of the self-veiling expanse that abides in these forests of Russia.[15]

In the context of reading Heidegger, “the forest” immediately causes us to think of “the clearing” (see part eleven). This association is confirmed by the older man’s description of the forest as “self-veiling,” for Heidegger describes the clearing too as “self-veiling” (or, as Heidegger scholars normally put it, “self-concealing”).[16] Recall that the clearing is that in virtue of which things display themselves to us in their being. But because such display always happens within the clearing, the clearing itself is never displayed. In a sense, it “absents itself,” or conceals itself, so that beings can presence themselves.

Notice that the younger man states that in his reaction to the forest he was “overcome by something healing.” This suggests that a proper relation to the clearing can have a healing effect. Heidegger believes that not only is the clearing “self-concealing,” but that in the modern era – and, in fact, throughout the entire metaphysical tradition – the clearing has been “forgotten.” This is what he means by the famous phrase “forgottenness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit). The suggestion in the dialogue may be that unforgetting the clearing can heal. One commentator writes that “what is distinctive about the world epoch in which we belong is the closure of the dimension of healing.”[17]

The two interlocutors go on to juxtapose the forest to “the desert,” which they speak of as follows:

Older Man: Yet what then is the desert? With this name we associate the idea of a waterless sandy plain and a process of increasingly turning to sand, although one also speaks of the “watery desert” of the ocean, by which is probably meant its immeasurable surface as a plain of lifelessness.

Younger Man: The desert is the wasteland [die Öde]: the deserted [verlassene] expanse of the abandonment [Verlassenheit] of all life. And this abandonment extends to such depths that the wasteland allows for nothing that emerges [aufgeht] of itself, in its emergence unfolds itself, and in unfolding calls others into a co-emerging. The desolation [Verödung] extends so far that it no longer even allows any perishing [Untergehen].

The description of the desert as “the wasteland” may remind us of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem of the same name – and both Heidegger and Eliot are talking about the desolation of modern life (or, in the words of Heideggereans, “modern technological civilization”). A clearing is an opening or space in the forest. It is an absence of trees, ringed by the presence of trees on its periphery. All manner of things appear in the clearing: birds, squirrels, grass, bugs, and strolling philosophers. Life appears in the clearing, and on its periphery. By contrast, the desert is, mostly,  a vast absence of life, stretching so far that we forget the life that exists beyond it. It is a vast expanse, in fact, of death, filled with uniform particles of arid, lifeless sand.

For Heidegger, the parallel to technological modernity could not be more exact. The metaphysics of modernity, of das Gestell, regards all beings as raw material to be made over according to human designs. The spirit of technology becomes so totalizing that finally human beings themselves are “requisitioned” and integrated as subsidiary mechanisms within the vast modern machine. Beings become replaceable, recyclable “commodities” desired by humans who have themselves been made over into desirable commodities – desirable to producers, and to all those who seek to manipulate populations. Men have become mere “consumers” who want just what other consumers want; and as consumers they are entirely replaceable. Everywhere, there is a will toward uniformity – just as the desert is a “process of increasingly turning to sand.”[18]

Heidegger plays on the connection between the adjective verlassen, “deserted,” and the noun Verlassenheit, “abandonment” (or “desertedness”). He refers to the “deserted expanse of the abandonment of all life.” The younger man explains that in their discussion they are “thinking the word ‘life’ . . . in such breadth that its sphere of meaning coincides with that of the word ‘being.’”[19] Then, a few lines later, the “abandonment of being” (Verlassenheit des Seins) is referenced.

The abandonment of being is the flipside of the forgottenness of being. We have forgotten being/the clearing – or, viewed from the other (non-subjective) end, being/the clearing has abandoned us. It has deserted us and now we live in a desert, in the wasteland. In this desolation, nothing “emerges of itself”; no vital, new living phenomena emerge. All is rendered unform, “useful,” and average. Our desert “no longer even allows any perishing”: nothing ever really “dies,” because all that exists is endlessly replaceable and recyclable. An eternal recurrence of the same.

How did we “forget” the clearing? Or: how, and when, did being abandon us? To answer this question, we must first try to understand the clearing a bit better. It is extremely tempting to construe the clearing, the “space” in which beings display their being to us, as something “subjective.” In other words, it is tempting to think that it is something we “have”; something that we “carry around with us” at all times, like the twelve categories and other mental apparatus described by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason. But Heidegger rejects such a “subjectivist” understanding of what bestows meaning, and he does so for sound phenomenological reasons.

Human beings have no experience of carrying the clearing around inside them, and still less do they have any experience of creating it. Rather, the clearing seems, for all intents and purposes, to be something that transcends individual human subjectivity and human designs. We always find ourselves within the clearing – “thrown” into the clearing we should say. I make sense out of things within a space of meaning that preexisted my own life. And I know that others are in the same position.

We may be tempted to speak of the clearing as a product of “culture” – and there is a certain sense to this given that the meanings things display in the clearing are undeniably culturally and historically situated. But it does not follow from this that human beings have “created” the clearing, for, in fact, we do not experience our culture as a deliberate creation. We always find ourselves thrown into a culture which, to a great extent, rules our thoughts and determines the range of choices of which we can conceive. I argued earlier that we can loosely understand Heidegger’s “event,” Ereignis, as a change in the clearing, and that we can understand such events, equally loosely, as “cultural shifts.” But, as I also argued, we do not experience ourselves as effecting these either.

It thus emerges that far from the clearing being something that we “have,” it seems to have us. If Heidegger is right about the clearing and Ereignis, then human beings are not fundamentally in control of meaning. The clearing is forgotten, or it abandons us, when we imagine that we are. From all that has been said so far about Heidegger’s way of conceiving the clearing, the conclusion is inescapable that our experience of meaning depends upon something that is extra-human (though, as a phenomenologist, Heidegger will not engage in metaphysical speculations about just what that is). “Humanism” denies the extra-human and insists that men and men alone are the bestowers of meaning; that meaning is something “subjective,” in the sense of “contained within subjectivity” or “a product of subjectivity.”

In our next installment, we will begin to explore Heidegger’s answer to the malice of evil: Gelassenheit (“letting beings be”).

Notes

[1] Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 121.

[2] Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (henceforth CPC) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 136.

[3] CPC, 136.

[4] CPC, 138.

[5] CPC, 139.

[6] Robert Bernasconi, “Being is Evil: Boehme’s Strife and Schelling’s Rage in Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 7 (2017): 164–181; 166.

[7] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 86.

[8] CPC, 133.

[9] CPC, 134.

[10] CPC, 135.

[11] See, for example, Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (henceforth ST) (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 143.

[12] In the “Letter on Humanism” (1946), Heidegger writes that “The essence of evil does not consist in the mere baseness of human action, but rather in the malice of rage.” See Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 272. Essay translated by Frank A. Capuzzi.

[13] CPC, 134. Note that the younger man, clearly speaking for Heidegger, insists that when malice does “break out” it “still disguises itself.” In other words, will as evil, as exhibiting malice, is usually covert. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s characterization of the slave revolt in morals: clearly an example of malice, the malice of the slave types against their betters. Davis comments as follows: “In his demand for an honest recognition of the ubiquity of the will to power, Nietzsche was himself the sharpest critic of covert-willing. He sought to expose, for example, the covert-willing of ressentiment, and the hidden thirst for revenge, at work in such ideas as the ‘kingdom of God’ wherein ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’” Davis, 19.

[14] Heidegger, ST, 106. I have altered Stambaugh’s translation of Aufruhr to make it agree with Davis’s. See also Bernasconi, who makes the same connection, p. 169.

[15] CPC, 132.

[16] Bernasconi writes “In Heidegger’s metaphorics (if one were allowed to speak of such a thing, which of course Heidegger resists), the forest is associated with the clearing.” See Bernasconi, 166.

[17] Bernasconi, 167.

[18] Compare this passage from What is Called Thinking?: “The African Sahara is only one kind of wasteland. The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men. Devastation can be the same as both, and can haunt us everywhere in the most unearthly way – by keeping itself hidden. Devastation does not just mean a slow sinking into the sands. Devastation is the high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne [N.B.: The goddess of memory – C.C.]. The words, ‘the wasteland grows,’ come from another realm than the current appraisals of our age. Nietzsche said, ‘the wasteland grows’ nearly three quarters of a century ago. And he added, ‘Woe to him who hides wastelands within.’” Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968), 30.

[19] CPC, 137.