Truth and Temptation Confessions and Existential Analysis

Truth and Temptation: Confessions and Existential Analysis Numquid non tentatio est vita humana super terram sine ullo interstitio? Augustine (Conf. 10. 28) Das In-der-Welt-sein ist an ihm selbst versucherisch. Martin Heidegger (SZ: 177) Heidegger’s lectures in the summer semester of 1921 contain several unmistakable, even literal anticipations of themes of the existential analysis undertaken in Being and Time, as he expands on such notions as facticity and curiosity in the course of interpreting the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessions. Overlap in the case of other themes (e.g., resoluteness, authenticity) is not as literal but no less evident. In light of the many common notes struck in the lectures and Being and Time, the discordances and omissions are also important. To be sure, these lectures present a substantial hermeneutic challenge. In the first place, confessions are one thing, existential analysis another, and commentary on the Confessions yet another. Moreover, Heidegger did not himself prepare the lecture notes for publication and they often take the form of incomplete sentences that, while perhaps sufficient as reminders to Heidegger when lecturing, or to a student (Oskar Becker) when reviewing them, are less than able guides to interpretation. There are also the perils of anachronism, of reading themes of the existential analysis back into the commentary on the Confessions or, for that matter, into lectures given five years before the final draft of Being and Time. Yet the promise of navigating among these difficulties is considerable. Review of the respective congruencies and incongruencies between the lectures and the existential analysis in Being and Time can help us to understand Heidegger’s development as a thinker. They can also amplify aspects of the existential analysis, filling out what occasionally is, by Heidegger’s own admission, a mere profile of the phenomenon in question. There are also potential benefits for rethinking the form and content of Augustine’s Confessions themselves. Finally, particularly when set against the background of Augustine’s confessions, the exercise facilitates critical evaluation of the adequacy of Heidegger’s existential analysis itself. 1. The Life of Temptation and The Sense of Historical Experience The lectures instructively begin with a review of standard approaches to Augustine. In the course of the review Heidegger mentions the theoretical concept of truth, only to emphasize that it has no application to the sort of historical experience and knowledge in question here (GA60: 165f). Why it does not apply can be gleaned, he suggests, from the sense of the access [Zugangssinn] to Augustine, evident in the otherwise different interpretations given by Troeltsch, Harnack, and Dilthey. For all their differences, these interpreters share “an objective historical attitude” towards Augustine, i.e., as someone “standing in an objectively posited, ordered historical context [geschichtlicher Ordnungszusammenhang]” (GA60: 167).1 Heidegger accordingly warns his students that “insofar as, in the following consideration, seemingly with the same slant, the talk is of an object, an understanding in this direction does not get at its sense [i.e., the sense of what is being considered]” (GA60: 170). 2 For clues to the sense of historical experience that Heidegger’s interpretation aims to convey, one need look no further than its immediate object, Augustine’s Confessions themselves. Whatever else Augustine is doing by writing his Confessions, it is not theorizing, gazing from a safe distance. Nothing like this is possible in a confession, especially by a confessor who finds himself vulnerable and questionable (quaestio mihi sum) in the deepest recesses of his own heart. A confession, after all, is an admission of failure, and in Book X Augustine admits to his beloved Truth that he continues to be tempted by other loves. Indeed, for Augustine, life on earth is a constant, daily trial (tentatio), tribulation (tribulatio), and trouble (molestia). This notion of temptation and the breakdown that it signals provides a key to the historical experience that Heidegger aims to introduce to his students in his lectures. The notion of life as a trial “everyday […] without any interruption” (cotidie […] sine cessatione) is, he asserts, “the basic sense of experience of the self as historical” (GA60: 263; Conf. 10. 37). Heidegger accordingly cites with particular approval Augustine’s observation that “a human being does not know himself unless he finds out about himself in temptation”.3 Heidegger thus focuses on a non-theoretical way of knowing yielded by historical experience – not just any historical experience, to be sure, but the sort that Augustine himself calls temptation. In the experience of temptation sans répit, we experience ourselves making and remaking choices. In this way the problem of temptation provides the context of enacting my experience of myself. Heidegger accordingly infers that “we come to the basic sense of the experience of the self as an historical experience” by approaching it from the standpoint of the problem of this trial (GA60: 280). Cognizant that his own glosses might suggest an objective characterization, he insists that it is of decisive importance to approach the problem from the outset in accordance with this basic sense of historical experience as a trial – something that, in his opinion, Augustine did not always manage to do (GA60: 230f). But why does life take the form of a relentless trial? For Augustine the key to an answer lies in his relationship to God, the Ipsa Veritas to whom he is making this confession. Aiming to confess only what he knows of himself, he notes that he is at least certain that he loves God and that when he seeks God, he seeks a blessed life, even though it remains unclear how it found its way into his memory. At issue is how, without “having” had a blessed life, we have sufficient acquaintance with it to seek it (Conf. 10. 20). Augustine then immediately and repeatedly identifies this blessed life with a “joy about truth” (gaudium de veritate). The identification is important because it helps explain why this truth is, nevertheless, not enjoyed. “The authentic truth is not loved” because people become immersed in surrogate loves that are themselves mistakenly construed as the truth, as “providing fulfilment for the concern for truth” (GA60: 199f).4 “Hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem” [what they love they want to be the truth] – what is loved at the moment, a loving into which one grows through tradition, fashion, convenience, the anxiety of disquiet, the anxiety of suddenly standing in vacuity; precisely this becomes the “truth” itself, in and with this falling enactment. The truth and its meaning are taken even into this modification – that is, one does not only retreat from the vacuity, but even more, and primarily, from the “movement” toward it (GA60: 200). ‘Falling enactment’ (Vollzugsabfall) is a translation of a variant on the term ‘Abfall’ which typically means ‘rubbish’ or ‘trash’ but in its verbal form means to ‘fall off’ and, in a connection particularly pertinent, and probably intended here, to ‘fall away from or desert the faith’ (vom Glauben abfallen). Just as we have some acquaintance with what we seek without having it, so, too, a “residuum” of the truth that we seek, the God that we love, remains as a source of bonds to something that is less than what we genuinely seek. God is truth in the primary sense of the term, and truth is instructively linked here in that primary sense with the object and motivation of love. We “know” the truth only as a function of loving it. Love is not primarily (as it seems to be for Aristotle, Brentano, and Husserl) a function of a distinct act of knowing, a “pre-amorous truth” which is an oxymoron from an Augustinian standpoint. But there is also a sense of truth in a lapsed or even decadent direction (Abfallsrichtung), as Heidegger also puts it, further anticipating the analysis of fallenness (Verfallensein) in Being and Time.5 As in that later analysis, his emphasis on the way one “grows up into these loves”, and why one does, suggests that those who fall are not fully responsible for it. Nevertheless, he adds, what keeps them in error, clinging to this ‘truth’ (placed by Heidegger in scare quotes to designate its surrogate status), is the fact that they do not have a genuine concern for truth, that they have not radically made that concern their own (GA60: 200). The result is a life of cares and worries, scattered and conflicted (zerstreut und zwiespältig) because – and this, Heidegger adds, is what alone must be understood – even in walling themselves off from the truth, they continue to love the truth more than error and to be concerned about the blessed, happy life (GA60: 201). Heidegger describes this relentless life of temptation as the troublesomeness (molestia) of human existence, “an endangering of the process of having-oneself that, as factical […] enacts this endangering itself” (GA60: 244). “The selfly Dasein, the existence, bears in different ways a molestia, is attached to it, and thus determines itself in its facticity” (GA60: 230).6 Augustine makes an analogous point about the trials and tribulations of loving when he confesses: “Late have I loved You”, acknowledging how, in a deformed state, he flung himself headlong into created beauties and became dispersed among so many things (Conf. 10. 27). Augustine knows what is necessary for him to be brought back to the One, to become “collected” (colligimur). After acknowledging that continence is both a divine command and a divine gift, he observes that, “indeed, through continence we are gathered back and redirected to the one from whom we flowed away, down into the many” (Per continentiam quippe colligimur et redigimur in unum, a quo in multa defluximus) (Conf. 10. 29). Heidegger calls particular attention to the contrast that Augustine is drawing here between being collected into the divine One and having flowed away from it into the many. With this contrast in mind, Heidegger urges that continentia be understood not as abstinence (Enthaltsamkeit), but as “keeping together [Zusammenhalten], tearing away from defluxio, standing in mistrust towards it” (GA60: 205).7 Augustine thus conceives continentia as at once a command, and a gift of restoring human existence to the unity from which it lapses. Heidegger couches his existential analysis of fallenness and authenticity in an analogous conception. Inasmuch as falling is typically not something that one does deliberately, the fallen state of being-here, though clearly something that we embody and enact, need not involve our complicity. Nevertheless, Heidegger also often characterizes fallenness as a flight, requiring our initiative. Nor is this flight or, for that matter, its overturning the work of a single, isolated decision.8 Not a single decision but resoluteness is called for, while conscience is certain, all the while, of the necessity of the call and the ongoing contingency of the response. One of the unambiguous messages of Augustine’s Confessions is the ineliminability of this ambiguity, the troublesomeness (molestia) that informs the facticity of existence. The fact that we need to exercise self-restraint or self-control (continentia) is as certain as the fact that this self-restraint is God’s gift (imperas nobis continentiam […] nemo potest esse continens, nisi deus det). In Heideggerian terms, the fact that we need to project our possibilities authentically and resolutely is as certain as the fact that, as thrown into the world, we are not the ground of those possibilities and the projection, as ours, is groundless. Existential analysis is confessional in this sense, an acknowledgment of our existential questionableness, made transparent by the constant trials that confront us with our fallen nature as long as we live – the facticity of existence itself. In this way “confession” discloses our existential finitude, our fallibility and frailty.9 Following 1 John 2:15-17, Augustine singles out three specific forms of these trials, each emerging from natural desires yet with the potential to distance him from God and, in the process, from his genuine self (GA60: 248, 283; Conf. 10. 30). Heidegger reads Augustine’s accounts of these specific temptations, as I hope to show in the following sections, with an eye to incorporating them into a different sort of analysis (later called ‘existential analysis’), demonstrating how these trials keep truth at a distance, albeit not the Divine Truth, but, allegedly, the truth of existence itself. 2. The First Form of Temptation: Keeping Truth at an Aesthetic Distance Heidegger stresses that Augustine, in confessing the first temptation (concupiscentia carnis, craving of the flesh), does not speak from “a biological-psychological theoretical attitude”, but instead relates precisely how he “factically” experiences it. This ‘facticity’ of the confession is arguably its most remarkable feature for Heidegger. What he means by the confession’s ‘facticity’ includes the way that Augustine portrays his experiences of himself in transitions that underscore both the lack of full self-possession and the inevitability of the ways that life (daily, incarnate life) pulls and tugs us in other directions, such that we fall away from our (authentic) pursuits. Thus, in the course of experiencing the hold that “the life of the sexual drive” (das sexuelle Triebleben) has on us, precisely in the transition from a chaste wakefulness to lustful dreams, we experience something quite remarkable about ourselves, namely, “that there is something […] which is not done by us […] but still takes place in us, indeed, such that we are somehow distressed about it”. As I make the transition to sleep (ad soporem transeo), I find myself divided against myself (interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum), plagued in dreams by the temptations of the flesh. In this transition, “I experience that I behaved […] in such and such a way that I was not actually [authentically/eigentlich] myself there”. Heidegger notes approvingly Augustine’s manner of depicting this molestia, this troubled way that “I have and am my life and world”, without appeal to theoretically established distinctions like soul and body” (GA60: 212f.; 241-246). Augustine also employs the term transitus to characterize the pleasure that inevitably accompanies the passage from the pangs of hunger and thirst to the repose of satiety (ad quietem satietatis ex indigentiae molestia). “In this transition”, Augustine adds, “the snare of concupiscence lies in ambush” (Conf. 10. 31). Moreover, the fact that it is often unclear how much food or drink is healthy provides the unhappy soul with an excuse to indulge. Our neediness in this case, as Heidegger puts it, becomes a source of pleasure, and the pleasure of the transition (genitivus appositivus) to the fulfilment of those needs itself becomes the purpose itself. Satisfying the very necessities of life invites this all-toohuman confusion of means and ends. Heidegger associates this tempting invitation of everyday carnal existence with its “facticity”. His use of ‘facticity’ here lends the notion a carnal dimension otherwise barely visible in the existential analysis of Being and Time, despite the otherwise considerable congruence between the uses of the term in the two contexts. There is perhaps no clearer indication of that congruence than the following remark, made by Heidegger after noting how various uncertainties provide an all too convenient excuse to indulge: “It is the facticity in which I maintain myself and give [myself] ‘existence’ which pushes itself into my ‘authentic’ existing” (GA60: 215). Heidegger’s gloss on the first temptation anticipates the role played not only by facticity but also by fallenness in the later existential analysis. The link between these two notions in the context of the first temptation is patent. The facticity of human existence is such that, in the course of securing the daily necessities of food and drink, the possibility constantly lurks of pursuing not the fulfilment of those necessities as such but instead the pleasure of the transition (the medium, the passage) to their fulfilment. Pursuing this possibility amounts to falling prey to something that is a necessary part of our facticity but not to be confused with what is actually, genuinely (eigentlich) at stake in our existence. When the pursuit of the transition’s pleasures themselves, the medium by which human needs are met, becomes paramount, then we can speak of a fallen, inauthentic existence. Heidegger links such an existence to a kind of aestheticism, toward which he shares with Augustine a patent antipathy (GA60: 201, 204, 219-222, 260). Augustine notes how “people go outside themselves following what they have made” and how “those who make and seek external beauties” endlessly pursue new fulfilment in their degenerate state. In an obvious criticism of the aestheticism of l’art pour l’art, Heidegger adds that what is significant is experienced as though it is satisfying of itself and thus takes over the role of providing a sense for facticity, where the appeal made to the sense (meaning, value) of a superordinate beauty as a measure is a ruse, since it is put in service of the business at hand (Geschäftigkeit). Those who pursue external beauties, aestheticized or not, “do not preserve the security and liveliness of the enactment of concern and of engagement for themselves in their relation to You, but they dissipate it and spend it easily in an amusing slackness and a delightful laziness” (GA60: 221). The similarity of this gloss to what Heidegger calls the sedating character (Beruhigung) of life in the crowd is patent (SZ: 177f). “It [concern] is no longer at their disposal for an authentic decision” (GA60: 221). Instead they are fakes, posing as though they had a clue to the sense of the world and the secrets of life. Yet Augustine himself falls prey, in Heidegger’s opinion, to an aesthetic beguilement in an even profounder sense. Heidegger notes that caring (curare) is the basic characteristic of life for Augustine and, indeed, by way of use (uti) and enjoyment (frui). Since “the basic characteristic of the Augustinian basic stance towards life itself is frui [to enjoy]” and the object of enjoyment is “pulchritudo” or, better, God Himself as “the Beauty so old and so new”, it contains an aesthetic component. However, “the fruitio Dei”, Heidegger claims, “ultimately stands in opposition to having oneself” (GA60: 271).10 It stands in opposition presumably because it subordinates the Truth and the experience of it to a subjective state, namely, the fulfilment of desires. Heidegger finds this assessment corroborated by what he takes to be the purpose of life for Augustine, namely, “repose” (quies) (GA60: 214, 272f). The suggestion is that Augustine construes the delight (delectatio) that is the end of care (finis curae) in a way no less tranquillizing and enervating than the aesthete, the addict of sensual form, does. Preoccupation with the dynamics of enjoyment prevents Augustine, Heidegger submits, from an adequate “breakthrough” to the phenomena at hand (GA60: 256f). This acquiescence to a fundamentally aesthetic view of life, where the beauty is, of course, not even skin-deep, has a direct bearing on Augustine’s theology. In this connection (after noting a certain traditional reading of Romans 1:20 that plays into this theological distortion), Heidegger cites Luther’s contrast of the theologus gloriae with the theologus crucis. The theologian of glory, according to Luther, calls the evil good and good evil, while the theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is. Heidegger reads this distinction as the difference between “the theologian of glory who marvels aesthetically at the world’s wonders” and the realistic “theologian of the cross who says how things are” (GA60: 282). Heidegger traces this impediment to the tradition that Augustine inherits. Yet he also guards against equating the Augustinian approach with the Greek. While stressing that this aesthetic feature is “the specifically Greek conception” at work in medieval theology and cultural history, he sharply distinguishes Augustine’s sense of this fruitio, rooted as it is in the peculiarly Christian conception of factual life, from the Plotininan notion that culminates in an intuition. Here we find a common refrain of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine’s Confessions: a respect for its distinctively Christian, existential character, not identifiable with anything in the classical Greek philosophical tradition, and yet criticism for the way Augustine allows himself to be co-opted by Greek thought (GA60: 261, 279, 298).11 Indeed, shortly after warning against conflating Augustine’s sense of fruitio with the Plotinian sense, Heidegger flags the danger of erring on the other side: “One cannot simply dismiss the Platonic in Augustine; and it is a misunderstanding to believe that in going back to Augustine, one can gain the authentically Christian” (GA60: 281). Signaling this Greek influence and, like aesthetics, evidencing a fundamental kinship with theorizing, is the axiological character that repeatedly intrudes on Augustine’s Confessions. That a specific order of things underlies Augustine’s account of the phenomenon of temptation is evident from a passage cited by Heidegger: Know the order, seek the peace. You under God, the flesh under you. What is more suitable? What is more lovely? That you are under the greater and the lesser is under you. You serve Him who made you so that what was made on account of you may serve you (in Psalm. 143. 6). Thus, we belong to God, the more valuable, but the flesh, the less valuable, belongs to us. After commenting that what matters here is not only the relation to God, but the way in which the order unfolds, Heidegger observes: It is not natural that that which is experienced in the delectatio stands in a ranking order of value. Rather, this is based on an “axiologization” which, in the end, is on the same level as the “theorization”. This ranking order of values is of Greek origin (GA60: 277). Axiologizing, Heidegger continues, is more insidious or at least “more difficult to grasp” than theorizing “because it is in fact preoccupied with what is in question” (GA60: 277). We find a similar view expressed in the first appendix: “The danger of axiologization of the connections of the phenomenon is just as fatal as the elaboration along theoretical lines for a regional domain; moreover, both [axiology and theory] go together” (GA60: 256).12 Axiologizing is, Heidegger insists, fatally inadequate to understanding facticity and existence. Among the more instructive features of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine is the way in which he articulates what he means by this inadequacy explicitly in terms of love: Preferring – spurning – being indifferent. This is basically bustling activity with God, which takes the easy path; and one only has to follow essential insights. But here there is no trace at all of the authentic sense of the enactment of love. What is precisely crucial is to constantly have a radical confrontation with the factical, and not to flee. In order to attain existence, I precisely must have it. This having precisely means living in it, but not giving in, not even overcoming it comfortably and axiologically (GA60: 26).13 The absolute love of God and oneself in believing is, as Heidegger puts it, “authentic existence”. However, the absoluteness of this manner of being is not to be reduced to universal, law-governed being, but is instead “the individual’s radical, concrete, historical being”. Heidegger then adds that “orientation to the axiologized summum bonum and so forth makes the entire comportment to a quasi-aestheticism in yet another sense: not only as attitude, but as delectatio” (GA60: 260; 278f). Once again Heidegger links axiologizing with the distance and interruption demanded not only of an attitude, a Husserlian stoppage of play, as it were, that is the hallmark of theorizing, but also with a certain kind of delight taken in things, the sort of delight typical of the aesthete. 3. The Second Form of Temptation: Keeping Truth at a Curious Distance Augustine designates the second form of temptation as “concupiscence of the eyes” (concupiscentia oculorum). Much like Aristotle and Husserl, he defends this Johanine metaphor by appealing to its customariness. We say that we “see” not only when sight is involved, but also when any sense is involved in exploring something as a matter of cognition. Within the soul there is “a vain and curious cupidity” that differs from concupiscence of the flesh by “not delighting in the body, but experiencing through the body”, all the while cloaked under the name of knowledge and science (vana et curiosa cupiditas nomine cognitionis et scientiae palliata). Curiosity is a failing because it is a desire for knowledge, not for the sake of salvation or for some good, but for its own sake (Conf. 10. 35). This desire (cupiditas) explains the draw of such things as magic, astrology, and seances or the delight that we take in horrifying events – at a safe yet visible distance, to be sure (e.g., their theatrical re-enactment). Even religion is affected by the morbidity of this desire (ex hoc morbo cupiditatis) when demands are made of God, again, not for the sake of human salvation or welfare, but solely in order to know. Augustine says that he has, by God’s grace, dispelled many such desires from his heart and yet, testifying once again to his clear appreciation of the fallibility and frailty of the human condition, he cannot dare to say that he is no longer tempted by them, so pervasive are these idle distractions in everyday life (cotidie), and so powerful their allure. Heidegger’s reading of this chapter is obviously significant, since the theme of curiosity recurs explicitly in the existential analysis of Being and Time. In the Augustine lecture Heidegger characterizes curiosity as a desire to be ‘in the know’, “the appetite of looking-about-oneself (not of dealing-with) in the various regions and fields, ‘what is going on there’” (GA60: 223). Heidegger thus makes a distinction, similar to one later at work in his existential analysis, between sheer involvement with things in the world around one (thus, “dealing with them”: Umgehen) and merely observing them (“looking around at them”: Sichumsehen). Glossing Augustine’s own words, Heidegger iterates that curiosity places on itself “the cloak of profundity and the absolute cultural necessity of particular achievements” and that it is a factical, enjoyable seeing and hearing and, indeed, “as enjoyable, so self-evident that we no longer ‘see’ it” (GA60: 223). Heidegger underscores how, in contrast to the “concupiscence of the flesh”, this “concupiscence of the eyes” is a seeing and hearing that we enjoy, a way of letting ourselves be moved on the basis of holding things at arm’s length (literally: keeping them away from the body [Sich-vom-Leibe-Halten]). This enjoyment at a distance suggests certain forms of “amusement” or entertainment and, not surprisingly, after noting that this basic stance towards objects takes many forms, Heidegger adds in parentheses: “cinema”.14 So, too, in curiosity we “fall prey” (verfallen) to magic, mysticism, and theosophy (GA60: 224). Heidegger concludes his gloss on this second form of temptation by making some suggestive remarks about the metaphorical use of “seeing” in this connection, namely, as the use of a sensation for the sake of becoming acquainted (Kenntnisnehmen) with an object. Heidegger alludes to three dimensions of curiosity here, albeit with scant elaboration: curiosity is a desire for the delight (1) not of knowing but of acquaintance; (2) of acquaintance with objects as objects, or (3) of acquaintance with objects as illuminated. He stresses that whenever concrete factical experiencing intends an acquaintance that is offset in some way, the delight at work can be a concupiscence. This manner of relating can have a will of its own (eigenwillig), setting itself above “the immanent act of interpretation, on the part of the self, of its existential relevance” and determining all factical experiences: “in curiosity, everything is in principle accessible; unconstrained” (GA60: 226). This account of curiosity, while sketchy, resembles that in Being and Time, insofar as curiosity is cast as a potential threat to coming to terms with oneself, a threat that is deeply analogous to that posed by a purely theoretical attitude.15 As such, curiosity is a desire that we have and give into and that, in the process, keeps us from the truth. 4. The Third Form of Temptation: Keeping Truth at a Vain Distance In the first two forms of temptation, what is at stake is a habit of keeping truth at a distance or, equivalently, a habit of losing oneself in carnal pleasures and idle disengagement. The third form of temptation is the temptation of pride (superbia), and Augustine characterizes it, not as concupiscentia like the others, but as an ambition of an age or a generation (ambitio saeculi). The temptation of pride is the desire to be feared and loved by men (specifically, a generation, one’s contemporaries, the Mitwelt) for no other reason than the joy, albeit false joy, that it brings – a characterization that makes him question whether pride has ever taken leave of him (Conf. 10. 36). Heidegger follows Augustine’s lead of introducing the distinctiveness of pride by detailing its differences from lust and curiosity. These first two temptations signal ways of behaving that are dominated by the surrounding world (Umwelt) and, specifically, the things within it that are sensually pleasing or gratifying to curiosity. These ways of behaving are not directed at the self as such, though each implicates a distinctive way of being oneself and a distinctive sort of shared world or intersubjectivity. In both temptations the self is swept up, i.e., into dealing with things (Umgehen: a practical dimension with an aesthetic proclivity) and into looking around (Sichumsehen: a theoretical dimension). In both temptations the self is “lived by the world” and, indeed, most intensely if the self thinks that it is living authentically. In a state of curiosity, one is neither immersed in the world as when one lusts, nor self-possessed; in fact, as Heidegger puts it, the self in curiosity “is at bottom ‘not here’ [nicht ‘da ist’]” (GA60: 228). By contrast, in pride, the primary focus is one’s self and one’s self-importance. The finis delectationis is one’s own significance (Eigenbedeutsamkeit), but it is a significance that depends on the opinions of others. Or at least it is a significance that depends on what one thinks other’s opinions should be, when the love of praise is explicitly suppressed yet sufficiently internalized that one takes credit for what is God’s doing (sibi placentas […] de bonis tuis quasi suis). Thus, while others serve as objects in facilitating our desires to immerse ourselves lustfully or curiously in the world, they do not fade into the objective landscape when it comes to pride, the validation of one’s self in intersubjective contexts. The desire to be feared and loved can express “a certain inner vehemence of existence”, but more often it is motivated by “cowardly weakness and insecurity”, by a need to lean on others and be allowed to accompany them, a “prophylactic against confrontation” (GA60: 229). “In yielding to this temptation”, Heidegger continues, “the self gets lost […] in a manner completely its own”. 16 Heidegger’s gloss on Augustine’s account of pride emphasizes pride’s dependence on a shared world and, as a result, the false preeminence attached by pride to the self-world. One pivotal phenomenon revealed in the confession of this temptation, and later occupying a prominent position in existential analysis, is human discursiveness. Heidegger links Augustine’s account of pride as a desire to be feared and loved with his observation that “our daily furnace is the human tongue”, a play on Proverbs 27: 21: “As gold is probed in the furnace, so a human being is probed in the mouth of praise” (Conf. 10. 37). In other words, the real test of the temptation of pride comes through the ways that we concretely and daily talk to one another. It is certainly worth pondering what relevance, if any, this connection between pride and discursiveness has for Heidegger’s analysis of talk (Rede) as an ‘existential’ and, in particular, to his discussion of inauthentic talk, i.e., palaver or idle gossip (Gerede), and authentic, solitary talk, i.e., conscience, in Being and Time. The closeness of the terminology suggests a considerable relevance. For example, after noting how Dasein in palaver presents itself with the possibility of losing itself in the crowd and falling prey to uprootedness, Heidegger adds, “this means that Dasein prepares for itself the constant temptation to lapse [die ständige Versuchung zum Verfallen]” (SZ: 177). At the same time it is clear that much of the content of the Augustine lectures is, from the standpoint of the existential analysis, more existentiell than existential, more a matter of “the ontic conception of authentic existence, the factical ideal of being-here” than the fundamental ontology that supposes that ideal (SZ: 310). Yet, precisely because the existential analysis presupposes as much, there is reason to think that Heidegger’s gloss in the Augustine lectures on the prideful connection between inauthentic existence (being-in-the-world and being oneself) and being with others provides an important clue to that presupposition. A further, cognate parallel between the Confessions and the existential analysis can be found in Augustine’s emphasis on the inescapability of the temptation. There is a certain inevitability to the test of pride, just as there is to das Man and the fallen state of human existence generally, given the very institutional/hierarchical nature of intersubjective life. Thus, Augustine writes, “because it is necessary for certain stations (officia) of human society to be loved and feared by men”, we find ourselves “avidly” relishing praise from others with the result that we are “uncautiously” captivated by them and “place our joy away from your truth and place it in the deceits of men” (et a veritate tua gaudium nostrum deponamus atque in hominum fallacia ponamus) (Conf. 10. 36). As Heidegger puts it, our concern (curare) here is to “attain a specific position” relative to others (Mitwelt) (GA60: 229). The operative concept, linking pride and society, is others’s praise for us, praise out of love and fear of us, a bi-directionality not unlike the concern for the distance (Abständigkeit) between ourselves and others, discussed in Being and Time (SZ: 126). The world of the prideful self is a world constituted by ambition, a desire for others’s praise or, more precisely, a desire for the even greater delight the proud person takes in that praise than in the things that are praiseworthy. As Augustine observes in this connection, God blames the person who rejoices more in the praise that he receives from others than in the God-given gifts for which he is praised. Toward the end of Book 10 Augustine speaks of “the most dangerous temptation”, stemming from love of praise (temptatio periculosissima ab amore laudis). The danger is excessive due to the insidious potency of pride, its ever-present capacity to pervert even the noblest pursuit. The pursuit and attainment of a certain goodness are a duty, but also praiseworthy, and, as a result, the danger always presents itself of delighting in the praise rather than the good that is praised. As Augustine notes, we can even find ourselves taking pride in condemning pride (a sure sign that we do not really condemn it), so insidious and perverse is this temptation (Conf. 10. 38). Indeed, it is, in Heidegger’s words, that which is genuinely “satanical” about this temptation: “In the ultimate and most decisive and purest concern for oneself lurks the possibility of the most abysmal plunge and the genuine loss of oneself” (GA60: 240). Further exacerbating the call for continentia when it comes to pride is the difficulty of determining whether we genuinely possess the self-restraint called for. In the case of lust or curiosity, how continent I am becomes apparent “when I lack these things either willfully or when they are absent. For then I ask myself how much more or less difficult [molestum] it is for me not to have them” (Conf. 10. 37). But since praise accompanies good works in one way or another, there is no way to experience the absence of praise (even if praise of one’s self), short of abandoning a good life itself. Augustine’s self-analysis in this regard includes an admission that praise increases the joy that he has in any good that he possesses. He offers love of neighbor (iustitia), i.e., rejoicing in his neighbor’s competence, as a possible excuse. Yet he remains unsure since he could be rejoicing merely in his neighbor’s agreement with him, and since qualities that he finds pleasing are even more pleasing to him if they please others as well. Moreover, if his neighbor’s praise is supposed to move him because of the good that it reveals about his neighbor, why, he asks, is he less moved when someone else is unjustly censured than when he is? Speaking for Augustine at the conclusion of this tortured selfanalysis, Heidegger writes: “I am no longer certain about myself and fall prey to the intersubjective world [verfalle der Mitwelt]” (GA60: 236). He characterizes Augustine’s search for an excuse as an attempt to escape responsibility for “falling”. Heidegger’s commentary here contains once again some potentially quite revealing parallels with his impending existential analysis. As just noted, he underscores Augustine’s acceptance of responsibility for falling; in the jargon of Being and Time, it is an existential not simply in the sense of something that I do (vollziehe) but also in the sense of complicity or, better, a complicit projection on my part. And this despite the quotidian inevitability of the fall and the constancy of the temptation, even when and to the degree that I manage to get up. But Heidegger also stresses that resisting temptation cannot be a flight from the intersubjective world or a disavowal of what is praiseworthy. In this tentatio, the direction of overcoming is precisely a genuine givingoneself-over to the communal world, but a giving enacted from the clear position of one’s own in the facticity of one’s own life; such giving can never be proven in – even the most radical – mere giving-over to the objective in every sense (GA60: 236). This commitment to the intersubjective world, moreover, is anything but a joyless exercise of duty. Heidegger takes Augustine’s remark that it is better to praise than to be praised as an indication that “behaving authentically”– or “authentic comportment” (eigentliches Verhalten) – consists in enjoying one’s genuine ability to praise, and then seeing a real gift (donum) of God, valuing it, and bringing it to validation, concerned for the good (bonum) as such. Here we have a positive account of resisting the temptation of pride, in terms central to the looming existential analysis but with invocations conspicuously absent from it but conspicuously lacking in invocations, i.e., the invocations of gifts, goods, value, and, above all, God. Finally, in this same connection, Heidegger stresses that continentia – the key to resisting temptations, it bears recalling – includes a demand for iustitia. Temptation, we now hear, is “a struggle (certamen) between two directions of loving”, and in this struggle, iustitia represents “the genuine direction of concern of love […] the authentically and primordially meaningful directedness […] in the whole of factical experience of significance” (GA60: 237).17 This talk of authentic and primordial meaning once again seems to anticipate the looming existential analysis, but if it does, it raises the question of whether this context of loving in which it is introduced in the 1921 Augustine lectures is something more than a dispensable backdrop, or a silently ontic, at best sufficient, but hardly necessary presupposition to existential analysis. 5. Conclusion By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest briefly five parallels, worthy of further study, between Heidegger’s early lectures on Augustine’s Confessions and the existential analysis in Being and Time. Perhaps the most tangential parallel is that between the three forms of temptation, and the three modes of being that figure most prominently in Being and Time, namely, being handy (zuhanden), on hand (vorhanden), or being-here (Dasein). The first two temptations correspond, as noted, to two ways of behaving (umgehen mit, sich umsehen) that are directed, respectively, at what Heidegger dubs “the handy” and “the on hand”. The first temptation, the temptations of the flesh, use of the senses as Werkzeuge, defines things in terms of their immediate, carnal utility. In the second temptation, the temptation metaphorically considered a temptation of sight, things are at a distance from the body or, more precisely, our vital, carnal existence. They are not in use but merely on hand, and we are interested merely in the way they appear to a speculative gaze.18 In the third temptation, what is at stake is not the way things are used or regarded, but the way in which we regard ourselves. This self-regard is the counterpart to the self-disclosiveness that is the defining feature of being-here, as opposed to being handy or on hand. A second, more obvious parallel concerns the notion of care. Even if Heidegger had not alerted us to this connection, we would have been able to gather as much from the early Augustine lectures (SZ: 199, n. 1). In them Heidegger characterizes experience, in particular temptations, as caring (curare) and, indeed, a care to achieve a certain delight.19 Yet, while Heidegger carefully unpacks Augustine’s account of a life of temptations in terms of the delights that constitute their respective ends, this aspect of Augustine’s account barely surfaces, if at all, in the existential analysis. Thus, Heidegger observes that what is also given in all experiencing of this sort is “the basic tendency delectatio (uti – frui), a curare that is diversely characterized, hence, always a definite appetitus, a striving towards something” (GA60: 222). What is interesting about this observation is the fact that he takes up curare, i.e., caring (Sorge), into the heart of the existential analysis as well as the procuring, possession, and use (Besorgen – uti) entailed by it, but without a comparably clear identification of the delight (delectatio) or enjoyment (frui) that are no less entailed by care. Or, if the analysis of the benumbed (benommen) character of an existence that has fallen prey to the world appeals tacitly to inauthentic delights and enjoyments, then there is at least no comparably clear identification of the delights of authentic care. A further parallel concerns the sort of necessity born of faciticity and fallenness. In the Augustine lectures, as noted above, Heidegger portrays falling prey to the world (in the sense of allowing oneself to be lived by it) as a matter of facticity (GA60: 228; SZ: 56, 222, 231).20 In a revealing passage he adds that the direction of the possibilities of temptation in each case “is also ‘here’ [da] in the facticity of being-here”. This characterization of the site of the “possibilities” of temptation is noteworthy, not only due to the use of terms so central to the existential analysis (da, facticity), but also because of the accompanying footnote which contains the two words “a necessitas” (SZ: 230, n. 8). This footnote reinforces a crucial point made in the entire passage about the sort of modality at work in Augustine’s Confessions and enlisted in the existential analysis. The irreducibly personal (today one might say “indexical”) character of the Confessions abounds in a facticity that is anything but a contingent matter-of-factness. Yet, at the same time, its necessitas or that of its being-here is not logical or a priori in the sense of analytic or synthetic a priori claims. This necessity is instead the sort that one experiences in being tempted and faced with a decision, a decision that no one else can make for you. This character of the necessity introduces a fourth parallel between the saint’s Confessions and the thinker’s analysis. In keeping with the phenomena of religious solitude and silence, there is no recourse in Augustine’s Confessions to help from any source external to the human being herself and her love – or, alternatively, any source other than the human being herself and the Truth. Heidegger includes a version of this feature in his interpretation of the facticity of existence. Referring to solitude as “a phenomenon of personal, historical existence as such”, he seizes upon Augustine’s insight into the radically individuated character of existence that is, nonetheless, concretely historical, i.e., fully worldly and troubling, demanding in its facticity (GA60: 336). In Being and Time discussion of the existential sense of solus ipse, of Dasein being utterly thrown back upon itself is meant to capture the necessity of this solitude and the facticity of being-here revealed in it. Anxiety individualizes and thus discloses being-here as “solus ipse”. This existential “solipsism”, however, hardly transports an isolated subject-thing into the harmless void of a worldless occurrence, instead bringing it in an extreme sense face to face with its world as world and thereby itself bringing being-here face to face with itself as being-in-the-world (SZ: 188).21 Thus, this existential solipsism, not to be confused with epistemological solipsism (something contradicted by the very trappings of being-here, i.e., being-in-the-world), is also of Augustinian inspiration. This existential solipsism has a direct bearing, finally, on a methodological parallel between the Confessions and the existential analysis in Being and Time. Just as Augustine must confess for himself, so the existential analysis must be an analysis of being-here by being-here itself and solely on the basis of it (SZ: 6). In Heidegger’s interpretation of Book 10 of the Confessions, the individual face of temptation is at the same time holistic. It is a seamless and, as Heidegger puts it, a “decisive” weave of esse, nosse, amare (being, knowing, loving), on the one hand, and Umwelt, Mitwelt, Selbstwelt (surrounding world, intersubjectiveworld, and world of the self), on the other, making up “the genuine prestructuring, forming fundamental experience in advance” (GA60: 242). But while life is this weave, it is also a troubled one, as the key notions of temptatio and molestia are meant to convey. A sufficiently complete and fundamental, i.e., primordial account of life must take into account this troubled web, troubled not least because of its essential incompleteness as long as it is lived. Herein lies a key source for the operative notions driving Heidegger’s later existential analysis, the demand, namely, for completeness and primordiality (Ganzheit and Ursprünglichkeit) (SZ: 231f). Heidegger’s debt to Augustine is considerable, as should now be clear. Yet that debt should also not obscure Heidegger’s disciplined way – for better or for worse – of appropriating the insights provided by Book 10 of the Confessions. Like Augustine, Heidegger identifies the trial of human existence as a matter of coming to terms with the truth. But the truth is understood in profoundly different ways in each case. The truth of existence, at least in Heidegger’s existential analysis, is not God, and a human being’s relation to the truth is not grounded, as it is for Augustine, in God’s grace and the prospect of a beata vita. The truth for Heidegger is not something fully present and integral, but instead something saturated by the fallenness of factical existence and the absence of completeness and authenticity. Whereas Divine Truth gives us the continentia in temptation, existential truth is the temptation itself, and the resoluteness required to grasp this existential truth is grounded in a radical self-possession. 1 Not coincidentally, that same attitude supposes, together with this ordered context, a chronology in which time functions as a specific object (an age) and a region for determining different matters (GA60: 168, 246f). In what amounts to a criticism of the alleged replacement of a bracketed natural attitude with the phenomenological attitude, Heidegger links a theory to an attitude (Einstellung) throughout the lectures. “To what extent is a human downfall (Abfall) construed objectively, corroboratively, normatively (by way of theorizing, in an attitude)? To what extent is it factually, in terms of oneself, existentielly, by way of the act itself” (GA60: 259)? Heidegger introduces existentials as explications of a sense originating in existence and, as such, as hermeneutic categories in contrast to categories that classify in keeping with an attitude (einstellungshafte Ordnungskategorien). See GA60 (232). 2 The very title of the lectures (‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’) belies, Heidegger acknowledges, his efforts to differentiate his reading from interpretations that would situate and explain Augustine in terms of an objective historical order. The title suggests, not only the question of the neo-Platonic influence on Augustine, but also a version of the problem of the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity. Heidegger explains that the title merely signals a point of departure, and that the aim is to work through this context to establish “certain decisive phenomena that decisively determined themselves in the situation historically consummated at that time and that in this determination still ‘carry’ us” (GA60: 171). Similarly, he observes at a later point that the interpretation is not theological but phenomenological and, indeed, historically phenomenological, not scientifically theoretical (GA60: 210). Yet Heidegger says little to clarify or justify these qualifications and it is fairly easy to read the two qualifications as inconsistent, e.g., where the historical interpretation implies the theological (the factical illumination or revelation), or where the bracketing of the theological for the sake of the phenomenological necessarily introduces the distance of a theoretical attitude. 3 See Serm. (2. 3. 3):“ Nescit se homo, nisi in tentatione discat se”; Tract. Jo. (46. 10): “In tentatione apparet, qualis sit homo”. 4 See Conf. (10. 23): “Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate. Hoc est enim gaudium de te, qui veritas es, deus, illuminatio mea, salus faciei meae, deus meus”. 5 Heidegger places Abfall in apposition to Verfall. See GA60 (272). See also GA60 (211 n. 2). 6 7 Heidegger places molestia in direct apposition to facticity. See GA60 (210). On Heidegger’s reading, Augustine is drawing a contrast between authenticity and inauthenticity, framed by the opposition, not so much of the one and the many, as of the centred and de-centred. An obvious semblance of this contrast and its particular framing resurfaces in Being and Time as Heidegger distinguishes an authentic self from a self lost to the crowd (SZ: 273). But there is an equally patent expression of its neoPlatonic resonance in Heidegger’s remark: “Alles ‘Entspringen’ im ontologischen Felde ist Degeneration” (SZ: 334). Moreover, in Being and Time resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) appears to take the place of continentia. “Resoluteness means letting-oneself-be-called-up from the state of being lost to the crowd” (SZ: 299; see, too, SZ: 296, 272f.; 296-301). However, to the extent that the analysis of resoluteness in Being and Time appears to exclude any relation to God and any role for grace, we are left to contemplate its capacity to replace or appropriate the significance of continence in the Augustinian scheme of things. 8 “The experience of God in Augustine’s sense is not to be found in an isolated act or in a certain moment of such an act, but in an experiential complex of the historical facticity of one’s own life. This facticity is what is authentically original” (GA60: 294). 9 One can sympathize with Dreyfus’s attempt to clarify Heidegger’s “confusion” by distinguishing “falling” from “fleeing” (or a structural from a psychological account of fallenness). Yet the analysis of temptation suggests that these alternatives ought not be construed as forming a disjunctive dilemma. We are naturally disposed to flee anxiety, and this flight is of a piece with our fallen state. That is to say, first, that we are not only prone by our very make-up to undertake practices that deflect us from the anxiousness of our existence but also, at any point, to find ourselves already “falling” into them; second, that while we may indeed decide to flee anxiety, the flight is something that need not take the form of a deliberate decision; and, third, the extent to which we can manage to decide to do something about anxiety, resolutely or not, is limited and tenuous. So, too, a resolute individual, far from removing the possibility of anxiety or the flight from it, supposes them both, as long as he or she lives. See Dreyfus (1991: 226, 336). 10 Heidegger notes the link between the constancy of expectation (Erwartung) and the “dominating direction of the delectatio on which everything depends” (GA60: 275). 11 Heidegger glosses Augustine’s De musica as stemming from “the neo-Platonic aesthetics” (GA60: 286). See, too, the reference to the “Greek-Christian” character of “Augustinian anthropology”(SZ: 199 n. 1). 12 According to Becker’s transcript (GA60: 281), the problem is deciding the extent to which the basic orientation “in a specific axiological system” is the result of Augustine’s own experience, and the extent to which it is determined by his historical situation. 13 See also GA60 (292, 259f, 281, 291f). Heidegger notes that the love meant here is not sensual love (amor), but dilectio, referring to something higher. 14 15 See Collingwood (1958: 85). On possible connections between curiosity and theorizing, see Dahlstrom (2001: 351355). 16 It bears noting that Augustine does not equate the desire to be feared and loved with the temptation of pride. There is a way of fearing chastely and loving maximally, each directed at the summum bonum, but the care to do so is waylaid by pride, the care to please others (GA60: 235). Heidegger’s discussion of genuine love anticipates his account of authentic Mitsein (GA60: 292). See, also, his gloss on timor castus (GA60: 293-297; SZ: 190 n. 1). 17 Heidegger’s call for a life-affirming, loving stance militates against the charge that his existential analysis is overdetermined by a gnostic-Pietist interiority that paves the way for the Seiendesvergessenheit, the ontic obtuseness and lack of existentiell criteria that might seem to plague that analysis. 18 Heidegger in fact characterizes objects of curiosity as vorhanden. See (GA60: 225). 19 See in Psalm. 7. 5. 10: “Finis enim curae delectatio est”. See GA60 (224, 232-234). 20 The trial that preoccupies care is, moreover, a permanent tension between authentic and inauthentic ways of existing, that is to say, ways of living in which someone does or does not come to herself (GA60: 236f). These formulations are echoed in the opening paragraphs of Heidegger’s treatment of fallenness in Being and Time, as he observes that “being-here has always already first fallen away from itself as authentic potential-to-be-itself and fallen prey to the ‘world’. The fallenness to the ‘world’ means the absorption in being-with-one-another, insofar as this is conducted by palaver, curiosity, and ambiguity” (SZ: 175). 21 See also SZ (254f).