Transcription
Our uh, second lecture will be on Heidegger and the rejection of humanism. Uh, many of you uh, may know Heidegger by reputation, and I think that it's always nice, and of course, on the self in the 20th century, to uh, present at least one lecture uh, by a thinker who's extremely profound and raises the issue of the self in the modern era and also happens to be a fascist. And again, I always have to put in these disclaimers: this is not an endorsement of fascism, but but uh, in a way I almost regret that I had to start with that snotty remark because Heidegger's account of finding meaning in the 20th century is one of the most profound and powerful that we get in the 20th century.
Uh, before I proceed to it, I'd like to say though just a few brief summary remarks about the rather scattered out first lecture. Uh, what what I was the basic point that I wanted to set up for the for the rest of the course uh, so that we can now proceed to look at various narratives about what the self might be or how it might be constructed in the 20th century uh, was to point out that the self is under the siege of two different sorts of factors. One one are the famous cultural critiques of uh, that were produced in the 19th century, and this doesn't mean that that just a handful of pedants got us confused. The critiques launched by Nietzsche and Marx are certainly products of the profound changes in the 19th century, so on and uh, similarly with Freud's uh uh project. So in a certain way what we're looking at are the problems that were that have been thrust upon us by modernity, by modern life, life and arguably uh, since we're speaking and we be speaking about what this means to us in the late 20th century, about the uh, the problems of postmodern life. In any case, I wanted to show that their challenge cut to the heart of one traditional way of understanding the self, and that was the self in relation to God, but it cuts another way too; it cuts in regard to the self's understanding of the self. In other words, it also shows us that what we think we know about ourselves may be driven by economic motives of which we're unaware consciously, by the motives of desire of which we are unaware consciously, but they appear systematically in certain contexts. We may be pushed by a certain resentment, a certain kind of deformed will that is the product of a culture of which we are not large conscious. In any case, I wanted to present this dark side of modernity as the kind of suspicion under which the self becomes problematic. I also wanted to to present it in conjunction with some of the obvious changes: the huge and increasing flow of information, the incredible uh uh change in the complexity of social systems, the enormous and still ill-understood changes in the relation between peoples, cultures, men, women, and the planet, and so on. And these changes uh, which now here in the late 20th century have reached a magnitude of of uh of complexity that I think uh leaves us stunned in our attempts to build some small uh place within which our self, our if you will authentic self, since we'll be discussing Heidegger in this lecture, might dwell.
Heidegger's uh account of the human situation begins by rejecting, and I mean I mean before I've said he's a fascist, so now I guess all of you aren't going to listen to me. No, see that would be a a a philosophical fallacy. People who make terribly tragic political decisions and even very evil people can hold views that are interesting and can say things that are true. We call this the ad hominem fallacy. It doesn't work just to go, well that must be wrong because the ACLU is for it; that will only work with Jesse Helms. In that case, the ad hominem is not a fallacy, but otherwise it is. And in Heidegger's case, I I want you to withhold judgment just because you know he has this. For a while I'd like for you to play along and and uh follow this narrative. I'm going to attempt to do it in 45 minutes. Now, for a Heidegger scholar, this is an obscenity, but I mean we're trying to cover a lot of material in a short while, and we're also trying to cover it in a way where uh what you might call the non-footnoting public—I don't want to call them non-scholarly because many people read many more books than academics; academics when they're through with their meetings don't have time to read, you know, a little Althusser—I mean I don't know very many people that teach anymore— uh and so uh I'm talking about the non-footnoting public, you know, people who haven't footnoted every article on Heidegger. We're going to try to make the account popular in that sense. I have no problem with that. I also want it to be as accurate as I can. Heidegger attempts to recast, and he's he's he's very aware that the very term that I've used for my lecture is no longer adequate, namely the self, the human. So in his most famous work, *Being and Time*, Heidegger recasts it as an interpretation of what he calls in German *Dasein*, and I'm going to translate that now into West Texas English: that's something like human being there in the world, something like that. Now, why does he coin this in German? It's a it's a very ordinary term; it means being there. We made a movie over here about it, you know, it's based on a novel, *Being There*. Why did he want to uh reject the language of self? Because he wanted to get rid of all the baggage that I've just discussed that has come under the mark of suspicion and give a new narrative. And if you you'll have to forgive me for not using *Dasein* throughout the lecture and instead talking about the self because what Heidegger is trying to do is give a new narrative of the self but without using that term so that he can distance himself from the philosophical tradition, at least the modern one, in order to give an account of the human subject.
Well, uh, Heidegger's account has influenced uh, I think it's been in in some ways the most influential account all the way up to the late 20th century. You may, and I will be talking about later uh, the French philosopher Derrida, for whom Heidegger is the most influential figure. Heidegger is a very influential figure for Sartre and many others, so uh we we have to spend a little time with his uh with his position uh in terms of his position and uh philosophy. Heidegger is the one who introduces the term the deconstruction of philosophy. By it he doesn't mean to uh the kind of deflationary remarks I made in the first lecture to deflate philosophy. No, he wants as it were to destroy, destroy its project in the way that one would sort of destroy a mound of junk in order to dig down to what might be called its sort of archaeological roots to find out if there's anything there that will help us in this project of understanding what it means to be in the world. Okay, and I think I have uh uh some remarks about that that I would like to make here. Heidegger begins with in in a very odd way for philosophers; uh most philosophers begin by ensuring their knowledge with some kind of uh method or fiat. You know, they they begin in a way uh by assuring you they won't fall into error, but along with Hegel, Heidegger believes that this fear of falling into error is error itself. So he does something very odd for a philosopher: he begins by beginning, and no he just he starts writing, and I think that's very nice. He doesn't begin with a series of methods that will give us the single and and correct interpretation of the self, which is sort of an obsession that I think only philosophers really have, and I don't want to I mean hell, it's what I used to do for a living, so I shouldn't rag on it too much, but it's a kind of obsession. I mean it's an obsession with being right all the time. And one nice thing about Heidegger that comes is is that what he offers us is what he calls a hermeneutic of *Dasein*, and now I use the English equivalent, which means something like a story or narrative of the self, a kind of story about the self. Now, the nice thing about a story as opposed to a method is that you don't approach them the same way. You don't, for example, about someone's life story, if it is powerful, interesting, and it grabs you and you can find meaning in it. It's not the best question to ask about a narrative, is it true or false? That's the best question to ask about an argument, but believe me, I'm from Texas, and when you hear a good story you don't go, is that true? Because that takes all the fun out of it. I mean, the story that Heidegger has to tell has a lot of the the power in it.
Well, Heidegger is, and again I'm going to try to summarize *Being and Time* here now in about 30 minutes. In *Being and Time*, Heidegger wants to look at what the self is in its structure as a being that lives through a period of time and a being as opposed to Being, because one of Heidegger's central points is one that I've already been through in terms of the Masters of Suspicion. Classically in philosophy there was a distinction drawn between Being with a capital B, which is a philosophical way of writing the word God or fundamental entity, Being big B, and beings, entities like one among which is *Dasein*. However, and I don't want to mislead you here because many readers have been misled, Heidegger is no humanist. Heidegger looks around for what entity, what being would be the best being to interrogate on the issue of *Dasein*, on human being in the world. So uh, the the being that he chooses to interrogate turns out to be a sort of obvious selection: he wants to interrogate or interpret that being that raises the question of Being, and that happens to be us. We do that; salamanders don't go, what does it all mean? Why should there be something rather than nothing? What am I about? So he goes instead of investigating salamanders, NES, or analytic philosophers, he tries to investigate human beings. I think that's a good, you know, that's sort of a reasonable place to to start.
His uh account is fascinating, and and I I can advise you to read it. I'm going to try to go through it very quickly. You take the three-fold structure of *Dasein*; it won't surprise any of you, and it's not particularly profound. The three-fold structure of of the self in time is that you have a past and a present and the future that is structured. But when I've said this, I've made a structural remark. You follow me? That's the structure, the temporal structure of how we tell our lives. We tell about our past, our present, about our plans and so on. For Heidegger, it is care, and this is the early Heidegger; I won't go into the late what he thought later, but for the early Heidegger it is the word care. And many of you will like this word: care, concern is another word that could be used here. The German is *Sorge*. Care is what uh Heidegger interprets as what is fundamental to the being of *Dasein*, so for example, or the self. So for example, if you want to know what was interesting to a culture, what they cared about—I'll use my example: I got the chance to go to Florence, Italy. Okay, it's a great place to get a chance to go to. I got to see Florence, and you can see that how powerful his interpretation is when you visit a place like that because you can see what it is that those selves, those *Daseins*, cared about by what they built. You go, wow, they didn't care that their malls aren't still open, you know, they don't care that the Ponte Vecchio is now run—you are all green and mucky, and the Ponte Vecchio is just a little gold shop. They don't care; I mean, they've got the Duomo, they've got the Uffizi; they just—that's what they care about. That shows their care, their concern, the structure of their being and so on. Uh, and you can—this is not a bad interpretation of human beings in the world—you can look at what people construct, what they build, what they make, what they cherish, and this is supposed to be, and I think it's not an unreasonable interpretation of human being in terms of the past. Care reveals something that you all already know by the time that you showed up here today: you were already a being in the world. It's an interesting structural feature of all of you; you were, you know, barring the possibility which we will reach by the time these lectures are over that at least some of your replicants, cyborgs, that that's possible. I mean it's even I think technically possible, but in any case, barring that last little note of suspicion, uh the the human structure as uncovered by Heidegger is care, and it in terms of the past it shows that we are beings already in the world, which means that the philosophical project of starting without prejudices, starting without biases, starting without interpretations would be as stupid as to have someone start speaking Shakespeare without having a language. In a way, the the deep and powerful blow that that Heidegger lays against the against philosophy is as a discipline that can start from scratch and tell us who we are, that can just start with a clean slate and build it up. No, the way we experience our lives as we wake up and hell, we're already here; we are, in his phrase, thrown into the world. You were born somewhere, some when, some race, some class, some gender, and all of that's already comes along, and from the minute you begin to speak a language and learn a culture, and learning a culture, contrary to what analytic philosophers say, is not like learning to pick out patches of blue or being sure that this is your hand. Learning a culture, to live in it, is more like learning how to dance the Virginia reel than it is learning how to pick out patches of blue. It involves many complex steps before you're in one, and I mean even in a crude and vicious culture like West Texas, that's true, the one I come from. I mean, there there's a lot of subtle little machismo rituals that if you don't know they will beat you to death; you just have to learn them. They're complex; they're much more complex than the standard philosophical examples, which are picking out patches of blues and so on. So Heidegger says we're, in terms of the past, we're already in a world. In terms of the present, care reveals us as trying to be at home in the world. See, you may notice this home, this sort of homey language of Heidegger's; this the fact that he turns out to be a fascist, this has made me to this day wary of language that's overly homey, sort of that's why I don't like *Grand Canyon*; it's too homey as a movie. But anyway, care reveals us that being at home among or being among or trying to feel that you're in the right place, you know that you belong in a place. In terms of the future, we are always, according to Heidegger, ahead of ourselves. Have you ever—and this is I think another profound part about the narrative of the self—in a certain way what our plans and projects are are not a part of our future but a part of our present. We're always ahead of ourselves, and we always—it's like, well, you know, lunch later; let's see what do we want—uh, Big Mac, booyah, Basset—it depends on your class I guess more than anything else—and like that, and even in terms of like college, what what what are my kids going to do for college? What about my retirement? This is a characteristic, and again what I'm telling you here from Heidegger—remember we just started with a story about the self and now we're just telling one, and it's supposed to capture sort of the general features of selfhood, being a self—and uh so that's that's what he sees there in that structure. *Dasein* reveals itself in terms of the past as being thrown into a world, in terms of the present as being able to try to articulate our place within it, and in terms of the future in terms of projecting ourselves forward and so on.
Now here's the bad part: Heidegger realizes that you can't just simply abandon this old philosophical project and then just tell this story and hope to capture its universal features; in other words, the features that are shared by *Dasein* wherever we happen to bump into *Dasein* or to the self, ourselves, being-there-type creatures like us that asks these questions about Being without looking into what he calls moods. It's very interesting; Heidegger is one of the few philosophers to discuss something that's very important to people: moods. I mean, most most analytic philosophers have no interest in moods. It's funny; I mean, I think this is why when you read these Continental philosophers like some that I'm discussing today, they're they're considered a bit feminine because this mood talk is is not really macho, you know, like I'm in a bad mood, I have a headache, or I—mood talk is is sort of unsettling to men. Continental philosophy appears even in the discourse of the profession of philosophy as being softer, and so there all these nouns that you know give it a certain characteristic. But in any case, it's clear to me that uh that mood is an important characteristic when you discuss the self, what selfhood is. So what, and this is I think one of the most profound parts of the analysis that the young Heidegger gives, the mood that he thinks that reveals what *Dasein* really is, and if this will connect with my first lecture about the Masters of Suspicion, is anxiety; that is the mood that will reveal as it were the formal existential character of *Dasein* is anxiety. Anxiety. Now, when I say here you could easily misunderstand me: all the the account Heidegger is giving, while it's a story about the human self, this this account of the anxi—of the mood of anxiety I'm about to give you briefly is not the kind of anxiety for which you run to the doctor or the psychiatrist and you take a Valium or talk it out or get on a damn 12-step program, because it is an anxiety before the fear of nothingness; it's an anxiety in the face of death. Don't want to make it sound, you know, too scary, but I've already said it is a democratic institution; it is something you need to deal with. And again, we're looking for universal structures; one of the structures of all stories about the selves, even the ones we tell ourselves, no matter how disconnected they may be, they end in this rather interesting institution that death—very interesting institution.
Well, he he examines the mood of anxiety then not as a mere mood that just comes upon you once in a while, but is an underlying structure of what it means to be human. In other words, if you remove this anxiety, you would also remove the self; the same view Kierkegaard holds of despair. I mean, not to dep—we're not depressing people here; we're not trying to depress people, but these are structures of the self. These aren't symptoms that Dr. Donahue or Oprah Winfrey freaking fix—to be asked to be cured of your fundamental despair, your anxiety is to ask to be cured of what little self you may have. It is a stupid thing to even want in a way, because it is our anxiety that makes us look at what at how we came up from the past. The way that that's described by Heidegger is that we were abandoned to the *they*, to *das Man*. What does he mean by that? Well, he means we grew up in a in a place like West Texas or Cleveland, Ohio, or Bangladesh, where the way we grew up in and the way our past is structured, we didn't learn our moral theories from Kant or Mill; we learned them because our mama spanked our butts, said don't steal, whap, you know, this—we were thrown in into that; we were abandoned to those values as it were. It's not it's not a scary thing; that's how we learn. See, this is a way to try to redirect our attention to the concreteness of being a self as opposed to giving a philosophical account. This was Heidegger's attempt. You're abandoned to to the *they*, and the reason I like that phrase, the *they*, is you're all familiar with remarks like, well, they say, or they say—well, that's exactly the spirit in which Heidegger is using the concept here, you know. If you if you violate certain restrictions of your culture, somebody's going to go, well, but you know, they say that. Well, that's the way in which Heidegger sees us relating to our past. Anxiety reveals that to us. Now, why is it anxiety? Well, if we want to make our lives a project, and Heidegger thinks fundamentally we do, think that's part of the structure of *Dasein* is to want to make, make your story a story, a story not just about a bunch of disconnected junk and debris that happened to happen to you, but a story, a project. If that's true, then our relation to the past is filled with anxiety because we all started from this moment of or from this time of abandonment to the values of others, to the *they*. It's not an evil thing; this is just means the culture around you, means the opinion of people—well, you know, they say that, that you know, you're wearing your hair like that—it's just—and so it's not unusual stuff. This is the common way in which we're brought up. Anxiety reveals our present state, and Heidegger doesn't like to talk about this as either a—it's it's a fleeing away from—now this is where Heidegger brings in the way in which that we try to fill our life up with busyness to flee away from, and I admit that this can't—I don't think this could be universalized as an account; let me admit that right now. I just think it is an interesting account, not the account. There is no such thing as the account; that's one of the underlying themes of this course, but this is an interesting one. Well, what are we fleeing away from, falling away from? Well, Heidegger thinks that, and I mean this is sort of again, these have all become general cultural possessions of people, Heidegger thinks until we face nothingness, our own nothingness, that we tend to fill our lives with busyness. We flee into this and flee into that; we fall away from our own best insights about what we should be doing and so and so on. Anxiety would reveal about the future: if you can free yourself from the *they* to a certain extent—you can't completely—and if you can stop fleeing from the present and trying to live in it, you can see why this account was popular in the 60s, right? You remember beatniks used to like Heidegger. Okay, well, this is why you try to live in the present. If you try to do that, the future will begin to look like a project, which Heidegger characterizes as being free for and from—being free for your projects and being free from your sort of attempt to get away from yourself. Okay, and uh someone during break mentioned this to me; I think it's true: being free in this sense is not an easy thing to want to be. Let me let me just say that right away. I mean, being free from the *they* is already a problem for most folks, right? I mean, how many people want to live, you know, on in Banbridge Drive and have the only red, white, and blue house? I mean, even that tiny little transgression could make some people into a nervous wreck. Not—I mean, sure, some people are afraid of death, and other people are afraid of being seen carrying *People* magazine. I mean, we live in a society that may be far too superficial for the account I'm giving, so I'm hoping to try to make some sense out of it. I mean, different things bother different people. I mean, the culture that really scares me is the one in which death has no significance for our projects; that's the culture that in in which the self is under siege. As long as Heidegger, when he was young, could write this narrative of the self, this rather dramatic existential narrative about I'm going to realize that I will die, and then I will choose an authentic project and carry it out, and I will free as many constraints as I can from the *they*; I will stop fleeing from my self.
He even has a a word in here for what he would probably call this lecture, which is Chatter. You know, I'm going to free myself from the chatter of every day and talk Deep Thoughts in the Black Forest. Well, I I've sort of sketched the account for you, and the sad part about it is it all sounds rather quaint, and it would make a nice mini-series.
I mean, we are living in a in a situation where even these basic accounts of the self, like High Diggers, have become sort of ironies. I'm not trying to put it down too quickly; I'm just trying to explain why anybody would listen to it today. You'd listen to it today only because it is an interesting story from a period not too long ago. I mean, after all, the beatnick the beatnicks love this account; they they used to say, oh, I I've read High Digger, by which they meant they had there's a famous little set of notes where you could pick all this stuff up without actually reading Being in Time, and it was quite popular. The book itself, I I only know a couple of other people that have read it. Who cares, right? You know, they get it from The Cliff Notes.
But in any case, uh uh let me let me give you the uh what I think is the power of the account and then it's criticism, the the final sort of punchline of it. With Heidegger, we choose this; we choose a project in full awareness that being is always being towards death. For Heidegger, this doesn't determine our action, but it makes us see that just like if we wanted to write a beautiful poem, we would plan an incredibly Grand last stand, or whatever. When we choose a project, we want to choose one that will make of our life a complete thing, a thing with meaning, a connected story, a story worth telling. So that's the idea: is that the recognition of One's Own nothingness in one's own death is the ultimate possibility. This recognition and acceptance frees us for our projects. It allows us, for one thing, to engage in a bit of what I consider—if you wanted to sum up the wisdom of the East, you know, Oriental wisdom in a s in in just one sentence—it might be something like, don't sweat the small stuff. I mean, that that there was a real well-known Buddhist who told me I could sum up the da and the gaita and all that for you quickly; it's this: don't sweat the small stuff, you westerners; you spend all your time sweating the small stuff. Heidegger here says, look, if you really internalize as a part of your self-Story the knowledge that you too will be dead, gone, nothing, that that will be a freeing and liberating experience, but you have to be able to like work through it, at as it were, to use a psychoanalytic phrase, to work through it.
What does it allow us to escape from? Well, I actually have to say that this moment in existentialism has certainly been good for me. I think it's just been a healthy thing for me; it cut short therapy. I I went to a therapist once; I went three times, and on the third visit I went, Oh, by the way, I have a question: why are we born to suffer and die? And and she went—that was the end of therapy for me. I figured that if she couldn't help me with like my fundamental problem, she wasn't going to do much good on the trivial problems. I mean, you know, I had a big problem: why are we born to suffer and die? She just went—I mean, you know, she said, well, I can write your prescriptions for some Valium. And I said, no thanks, I drink; don't don't need it. I belong to a large club; I'm a drunkard. No, anyway, uh, what it does is this: it makes you—it, for me, it's it's made it easier to talk to groups, to to teach classes and to talk to groups of students and not to be afraid of cameras and stuff like that, because I mean, in the end we're all dead. In the end, Johnny Carson, his body will like, you know, turn into dust, and in the end the Earth will shrivel up like a cinder and fall into the Sun, and in the end it's not the big buying anymore. Now they call it—I think I'm going to feel free to engage in my project without worrying about what they told me about about how I should do philosophy. So I think there's a Moment of Truth or a moment of interest in Heidegger's account. Also, it's made me rather short and sharp with small talk; it it really does. I mean, it makes me—where people go, gee, you know, the weather today is just, you know—Ian, I'm sorry, but I prefer conversations about sex, religion, politics—of course, being a man—sports, but if it's not something, you know, grabs me, I I feel perfectly free to go, well, it's chatter; I don't haven't got time for it; be dead soon; can't do it now.
The most pathetic example of fleeing from sort of came up on my way out of the lecture. I happen to be a smoker; I don't advocate it for anyone in here or watching me on uh on the tape. I don't advise smoking. We have a culture now where the most obvious example of fleeing from Death is this utter obsession with being young until it's obscenely too late for it, until it is—this is fleeing from yourself in such a way that it's Madness. Who wants to be the world's best-looking 111-year-old person? I mean, what is the point in that, for God's sakes? I just—you know, this is something that I don't follow. I mean, my grandfather was a good man; he died at 78. I think that's good luck and plenty long enough. Suit the hell out of me. But why do we have 90-year-olds running up steps wearing Nikes and dating 17-year-olds? I mean, this is not working; it's not working. And I'm not telling old people to go away; hell, I'm getting there myself. It's ridiculous. You take 30-year-olds; they're trying to look like 11-year-olds. You know, I mean, it it it works all the way up and down the Spectrum. Every 40-year-old housewife wants to have a baby like Demi Moore, be beautiful, naked, with her stomach out. I mean, it's just not working for us. In a way, it's fleeing from death. And and and what I'd like to say about it is this: you can eat all the tofu you want and jog as long as you like, and compared to geologic time, your life's going to be gone like that anyway. Geologic time's a long time, and you can jog your butt off, and you're still going to die. That's what I like about death; it's Democratic. It would irritate me if you could jog and live forever and I got to, you know, got stuck here smoking and having a good time and died over it. No, you'll die too. You know, you'll have 34 more years to run up and down the StairMaster.
Now, what in the world could be a better example of Heidegger's account of fleeing from our authentic projects than to imagine some poor sap who spends three hours a day running up and down just stairs that are just—in what kind of culture—this is my question to you: is there a human self left in a culture that produces people who run in place for hours doing nothing? Is there is there any reason to talk about humans like that? I mean, Heidegger is old-fashioned, I admit, and I certainly I don't advocate his politics. I think fascism is a drastic solution. What it what it sort of steers you away from this fleeing business, this StairMaster business—to make it a very contemporary example—is an authentic life. I mean, this is for for Heidegger what you want to achieve; you don't want to to—you want to achieve a life with authenticity, and this is the key word for him. An authentic life is one in which you don't flee from your destiny, but one in which you shape it as far as you can. And Heidegger is no romantic about it; he knows that you'll be given certain historical conditions to deal with, limitations that belong to All Humans. But authentic life is one in which you try as best you can to make your life at least something worth talking about in the same sentence with the word destiny. And I think my example of the StairMaster—if if you go compare that to the uh to Odysseus, you know, I mean that that's a pretty far far gap for civilization to move, isn't it? From Odysseus, you know, goes from Island to Island and then comes home, kills a bunch of people, takes his wife back; big story; killed the Cyclops and made fun of gods and did all these tricky wonderful things that belong to our Western past. And I think it is interesting, but I bet Odysseus wouldn't have had time to do that if he'd stayed in shape about four hours a day on that StairMaster. Just wouldn't have worked out for it. I mean, the very thought shows you that uh the theory of evolution may not work in the case of doing, you know, I mean there might be creatures that uh and I don't mean just the ones in Jurassic Park; there may be other creatures that are not headed in the right direction.
In any case, uh uh this uh this project is one to try to get away from empty Conformity and to live authentically. Now here is its tremendous drawback, and this is the one that becomes obvious in my remarks about fascism. The trouble with leaving the account of Being Human this abstract, you know, we we come from a culture; we flee from Conformity; we try to get authentic. The trouble with leaving it that abstract is that you can be an authentic anything. Follow me. I mean, it turns out that you could be authentically a member of the Third Reich, authentically a member of the Reagan Administration—just leave those two together for a while in your minds—authentically a friend of Richard Nixon. Now wait a minute; that's logically absurd. No, it isn't; I guess that that's possible. You could be a—the trouble with the with this authenticity business is that, trying as hard as he can to give a more concrete primordial account of what it means to be human and trying to avoid, you know, the traditional accounts, he has ended up giving us an abstract account again at another level. Now admittedly, we've learn—I hope we've learned something from it. I mean, I do think there are important things in it about fleeing from ourselves, but for God's sakes, I mean uh we don't want a narrative about ourselves that's based merely on authenticity, because I mean we know too many authentic swine or at least semi-authentic swine to want that. So that's that's a I think a powerful uh criticism.
On the other hand, I'd like for you to remember at least some of the positive uh things I've said about Heidegger. One is that his account of human being in the world does free us from the philosophical Prejudice that we just start a project from nowhere almost and carry it out rationally or whatever. Heidegger has a much more concrete sense of the world and also a much more—a very important, I think—account of what it means to be fleeing from oneself, and I think that's the important part. So if you get a chance to read Being in Time, which I don't entirely recommend because it's very long and life is very short, and it might be your kind of StairMaster, you know, I mean I don't know; there's a difference uh difference sometimes between what uh what bores some people and what bores others; I admit that. But in any case, uh uh Heidegger uh uh does not succeed in uh in bringing the self out from under siege or out out of its problems, but he does point out at least one thing about it. So if we're going to be interested in the self at all, we should be interested in in in trying to have some degree of authenticity; we should be interested in that, in having a project more interesting than getting skinny and Rich and dying at a as the best-looking 125-year-old person on the Block. There ought to be something—not in a strong sense—but there ought to be something more interesting to say about your life than that I had a nice car and I died as the best-looking 125-year-old jogger in Venice Beach, California. I just I I hope that there's more to say, and uh in fact I think there is. Being a Texan uh I know uh you know I think the people that that uh died at the Alamo, I mean they were, you know, from the standpoint of some, they're imperialist swine; from the standpoint of others, they're Heroes. But there's one thing for sure: their lives were an interesting story. I mean, I mean I don't want to always rely on the Odyssey. Davy Crockett was an interesting guy; ran for congress, you know, got in all these tall tales about him, then showed up and tried to steal a lot of land in Texas, ended up, you know, fighting, and now we remember it. It would be almost fair to say of him that he had a Destiny, and as corny as that may sound, it's not something we're going to say about David Letterman or Richard Simmons. Follow me. There's been a shift; it's been a shift. The self is under siege, and I've talked about Heidegger and his rejection of a certain form of the older accounts, and I'll talk about a famous uh uh account of Being Human in the next lecture on SRA. But uh for now that's all, except uh be sure you know and uh fear death. I mean, that's that's imparted to Being Human—fear death, that realized that.