PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE QUESTION OF THE GOOD LIFE

Heidegger's influence on psychotherapy in the English-speaking world has followed a convoluted path. The Swiss physician and therapist Medard Boss tells us that Heidegger expressed the hope that “his thinking would escape the confines of the philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular to a large number of suffering human beings.” His participation in Boss's seminars for medical students and therapists from 1946 on was motivated by this concern. Yet when his writings became more widely known among professionals in the field, it was less through this route than through the impact of existentialism in the fifties and sixties. As a result, though Heidegger's thought is often treated as the cornerstone of existential psychotherapy, what one usually finds is a Heidegger refracted through the lens of the far more accessible writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus. In the mouth of this “existentialized” Heidegger, the ideal of authenticity is pictured as the stance of the rugged individualist who, upon experiencing anxiety in the face of the ultimate absurdity of life, lives intensely in the present and creates his or her own world through leaps of radical freedom.

Heidegger's thought was from the start deeply interwoven with religious and theological concerns. We have recently learned from the searching historical investigations of Hugo Ott the details of Heidegger's early upbringing and education in the Catholic church. Heidegger was born in the conservative, Catholic farmlands of southern, central Germany, and his father was a sexton in St. Martin's Church, which stood across a quaint little courtyard not fifty yards from the Heidegger house. The Heidegger family was steadfastly loyal to the church in the controversy that followed the First Vatican Council when “liberal” Catholics rejected the proclamation of papal infallibility. The youthful Heidegger, brilliant and pious, was marked from the start for the Catholic priesthood. Through a series of scholarships funded by the church, one of which was intended for students seeking to do doctoral work on Thomas Aquinas, the poor but gifted young man was lifted out of these rural farmlands into the eminence of a German university career. Hugo Ott has discovered that Heidegger's earliest publications appeared in 1910-12 in Dei Akademiker, an ultraconservative Catholic journal that toed the line of Pope Pius X.

Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, is usually considered the culminating work in a tradition called existential philosophy. The first person to call himself an existential thinker was Soren Kierkegaard, and his influence is clearly evident in Heidegger's thought. Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, which goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is through our involved action. The way things show up for a detached thinker is a partial and distorted version of the way things show up to a committed individual.

Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. That means that who I am depends on the stand I take on being a self. Moreover, how I interpret myself is not a question of what I think but of what I do. I have to take up what is the given or factical part of my self and, by acting on it, define who I am. I understand myself as being a student, a teacher, the lover of a specific person, or the follower of a specific cause. Thus, the self defines itself by taking up its past by means of present actions that make sense in terms of its future. For Kierkegaard, then, the self can be understood as a temporal structure.

The closing decades of this century have been marked by a wideranging, multidisciplinary exploration of the theory of interpretation and its practical implications. To speak of a revolution in the history of thought is perhaps too grand, but certainly there has been a general movement that can be called the “hermeneutic turn.” This turn has taken various forms, including poststructuralist cultural studies, deconstructive literary studies, interpretive anthropology and social science, and critical legal studies. Of course, the specific turns taken in each of these fields are reactions to older ways of practicing each discipline. But in each case the emphasis on interpretation is used as an antidote, usually to objectivistic conceptions of the discipline's methods. However, none of these particular turns would have been imaginable without a dramatic change earlier in this century, the change brought about in philosophy by Martin Heidegger in 1927 in Being and Time. Heidegger's hermeneutic turn is taken most explicitly in Sections 31 and 32 of that book, where Heidegger makes interpretive understanding the central mode of human existence (or Dasein).

Modern philosophy turns away from things in the world and zeroes in on the human self that grasps them in thought and transforms them in action. The self becomes the repository of both their truth and their ultimate purposes. By the same token, the human self is given the status of the self-grounding ground of reality. In this new and exalted status, the self ceases to be viewed as part and parcel of some independent order of things. Beginning with Descartes's cogito, the self withdraws from the world and falls back on its own experiences and thoughts. The subjectivity of the self supplies both the point of departure and the validating ground for various philosophical attempts at a reconstruction of our knowledge of the world.

One of Heidegger's aims in Being and Time was to question and to overcome this subjectivist tradition of modern philosophy. I hope to show, however, that in Division II of Being and Time Heidegger reveals himself as an heir to that tradition and to its model of the human self.

THE END OF A CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHER

It was just before Christinas Eve - Monday, December 23, 1918 - when the young Mrs. Heidegger, eight months pregnant, decided to brave Freiburg's bitterly cold weather, travel across town, and break the bad news to Father Krebs. Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March 21, 1917.

At the time of that wedding Father Krebs had already been skeptical. It was a confessionally “mixed” marriage - Elfride Petri was a Lutheran, Martin Heidegger a Catholic - and even though the bride had solemnly declared her intention to convert to Catholicism and raise her children in the Roman faith, Father Krebs had had his doubts. Therefore, he was not entirely surprised when, a year and a half later, the 24-year-old mother-to-be sat across from him in his office and poured out her feelings:

Many commentators have remarked on the affinities between Heidegger's thought and East Asian traditions such as Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism. In this essay, I shall examine critically some aspects of the apparent rapport between Heidegger's thought and Mahayana Buddhism. One reason for recent interest in Heidegger's thought and in Buddhism is that both are critical of and claim to offer an alternative to the anthropocentrism and dualism that some critics say is responsible for today's environmental crisis. According to such critics, Western humankind is particularly anthropocentric. Regarding humanity as the source of all meaning, purpose, and value, humans justify doing anything they want with the natural world. Western humanity also thinks in terms of dualisms and binary oppositions, such as mind versus body, reason versus feeling, man versus nature, male versus female.

Coming very near the end of Austen's last novel (1818), this sharp observation on the gender biases inherent in literary discourse has often been taken as a characteristically oblique expression of her feminism as well as a defense of her singular craft. Notwithstanding the truth that the passage reveals considerable self-reflection, the ironies (the pen is after all in Austen's hand) attending that traditional reading are manifold: it demands that we accept at face value what is, both in the novel and life, knowingly, wittily, undercut.

Prose fiction had and has an uncertain place in Romantic literature. During the Romantic period itself, from the last decade or so of the eighteenth century to the 1830s, most prose fiction was considered subliterary, suitable for children, women, and the lower classes. A few works were cherished by readers in all classes as childhood reading or “popular classics,”including centuries-old chapbooks such as Jack and the Giants, Valentine and Orson, and The Fair Rosamund and longer works such as The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and The English Hermit. Don Quixote and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were regarded as important works of literature, but were only commercialized as “classics,” along with certain poets, dramatists, and belletrists, after the ending of perpetual copyright in 1774. Most novels published during the period were dismissed by critics and even readers as “the trash of the circulating library,” to be rented, read quickly, and forgotten. Those “novels of the day” that did cause a stir were quickly cut down to sixpenny chapbooks for the new lower-class market in cheap fashionable novelties, founding the modern market for “romances”of all kinds.

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The current preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopaedia, Johnson's Dictionary, even, seemingly almost as long, Richardson's Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelley's own?

When the elegant exercises of Hume's skeptical empiricism woke Kant from the dogmatic slumbers of his continental rationalism, surely no one could have predicted the prodigious symphonies of German Transcendental Idealism to follow. Not, of course, that these were composed by Kant himself, but his “Copernican revolution” in epistemology prepared the way for them, as surely as the German compositions of the later Mozart prepared the way for Beethoven and Brahms - and, eventually, for the monstrous syntheses of Wagner. David Hume's secure place in the history of philosophy rests not on the construction of any philosophical system: quite simply, his essays constitute the most thorough job of deconstruction in modern intellectual history. (It is a pity, attributable, perhaps, to the French origins of the critical school - in French tradition, Locke has always been respected, Hume ignored - that modern deconstructionists have so neglected Hume, There are so many lessons available there, not only in the elegant simplicity of his arguments, but in the admirable lucidity of his Enlightenment prose.)

Which first, the good news or the bad news? In honor of optimists who test their commitments by rising above the worst, I submit a three-part package of disheartening wisdom. W. J. T. Mitchell on pictures and words: “The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has access.” John Barrell on recent efforts to shelter the two arts of picturemaking and wordmaking under one critical label:“'Romanticism' has never become a well-established term in the discussion of English painting, and art historians do not seem, on the whole, to have found the term of great explanatory power even when applied to such obvious subjects as Turner, Palmer, or Blake himself.” And finally, the most quotable line ever written about all relations among all arts, Susanne Langer's heartstopping proclamation that “there are no happy marriages in art - only successful rape.”These warnings open suitably dark themes that we would be mistaken to bypass, because they are fundamentally true to life.

Romanticisms and Enlightenments

The readers of this volume will find Lovejoy's famous essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” amply confirmed: Romanticism cannot be defined. To include an essay called “Romanticism and Enlightenment” seems to be an impossibility compounded. On any reasonably comprehensive view the eighteenth century was not dramatically more uniform than the early nineteenth. Indeed, in one crucial respect it was less so, for no fact so inescapably galvanized the Enlightenment mind as that of revolution did the mind of Romanticism. There are many versions of Enlightenment - aristocratic and bourgeois, rationalist and empiricist, modernist and classicist, mercantilist and laissez-faire, urban and pastoral, religious and secular. Properly speaking, this chapter should be entitled “Romanticisms and Enlightenments,” a multiplicity that leaves the student no hook except the little word “and” to hang a hat on.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century social historians and historical critics have been cautiously developing a language for studying the arts that breaks out of a narrowly aesthetic vocabulary. We have become interested not so much in literature or art or music, not even in “the arts” altogether, but in a given society's cultural production. The full consequences for our sense of how individual arts or artists operated at any particular point in time will take a very long time to absorb.

Part of the problem here is that old-style “literary history” and “art history” constructed a continuous narrative with claims, which now seem remarkably fragile, to explain where art came from. Powerful figures within the art world were held to wield the influence of despots. In order to understand younger artists it was enough to show who they copied and who they reacted against. Cultural history is of course far more impersonal than this. It also registers types of event, and of historical change, held by literary history to be of secondary significance, such as the passing or the repeal of laws affecting state censorship or copyright, and the two or three major advances in the technology of book-production. During the eighteenth century a combination of legal, financial and industrial factors produced a huge expansion in the bulk and influence of print culture, working one of those transformations that truly deserves the term revolutionary: yet the century in which it took place is notorious for being one of the quietest on literary-historical record.