Hartmut Lange is a German writer of prose, essays and plays. In 2003 he was awarded by the Italo Svevo Prize and in 2004 by the LiteraTour Prize. His book, Positive Nihilism. My confrontation with Heidegger – written in 2012 and translated in English by Adrian Nathan West in 2017 – is the result of a lifetime of reading Heidegger’s Being and Time.

This book is a useful pocket companion by means of which readers will be enabled to reevaluate central issues of Being and Time. It offers a series of reflections that are aphoristic, poetic, and, sometimes, obscure. Lange argues that Heidegger’s philosophy of existence is a valid delineation of conscious Being, so that it therefore seems inevitable to delve deeper into the Being-and-time structure he has elaborated.

Hence, the author poses countless questions to the Heideggerian philosophy: questions about being an individual, about death, about our understanding of time. Thanks to these questions, Lange wrestles with the Heideggerian philosophy and challenges it. He speaks both with and against Heidegger in this personal confrontation with Heidegger’s earlier thinking.

In the first chapter, Lange beings with abyss, the abyss of temporality where past and future are projections of consciousness. The present is fleeting being-in-the world. It is always already past. For Heidegger, time is comprehensible through lived experience, which means that the person who lives exclusively in the present knows that the present proceeds from having-been and must be projected forward into a future. Primordial temporality is always finite, because it is real. Since Dasein, and hence the understanding of Being, is only ever present to experience in a concrete way as finitude, the concept of infinity can only exist as a mental variation of the finite. The phenomenon of the infinite is confined to imagination, whereas actuality necessarily gives evidence of its authentic finitude. Thus, finite time is primordial; infinity is only a mental derivation of the same. Dasein reacts to the world emotionally. It is indeed emotionally that accompanies man’s futile attempt to constitute himself once and for all, with all consequences. The Being of the Dasein occurs. That this can be understood as an occurrence in time is a category of perception, and the subjectivity of time-sensation is delineated along.

Then, Lange analyses the psyche, the absolute selfhood, and the concept of civilization. He affirms that civilization is a misleading concept because psyche cannot be civilized, it eludes calculation, and it is necessary, in order to examine it, to refer to the Dasein in terms of its absolute selfhood, the unique and not-recurring I that I am, which remains unresolved with relation to this classification. The psyche allows itself neither to be sublimated nor rendered objective by means of education. It is immune to reason and indeed manipulates the intellect. For that reason, Shakespeare’s play Othello portrays represents the psyche. Othello kills his wife because of the incalculability of the psyche.

Lange highlights some failures in Heidegger’s thinking. According to Heidegger, one can discover the being-in-itself of the world without concrete interest in the world. Hence, the boundary between subject and object is vanished. However, according to Lange, the world is indeed objective, independent of consciousness.

Moreover, what Heidegger does not puzzle out is the phenomenon of absolute selfhood, which is qualifiable, but not quantifiable. Heidegger’s concept of individuation is missing its ultimate consequence: that no individuation can ever be stripped of the form of its absoluteness. The absolute I, according to Max Beckmann and Lange, is the greatest secret in the world: one can never unravel oneself.   

The premises Heidegger employs to define such an understanding of Being could be derived from the vocabulary of depth psychology: angst, the uncanniness of Dasein in the experience of its individuation, the silence that occurs when Dasein can find no grounds for asserting its existence.

Heidegger distinguishes between Dasein’s authentic and inauthentic possibilities for the concrete expression of life. Authentic possibility arises through the achievement of a perspective over the temporally bounded whole of experience. Dasein obtains this perspective through the mental anticipation of death. Inauthentic being-toward-death arises from the forgetfulness of being. It is the lostness of Dasein in the they-self, and in the situation of inauthenticity, the they-self elaborates an understanding of Being rooted in average public idle talk.

Lange remarks that Heidegger’s understanding of Being is nihilistic. His nihilism discloses the groundlessness in the structure of Being in which all Being is submitted to the conditions of its finitude.

Heidegger dedicated a whole series of lectures to the problem of “nihilism”. His definition of “nihilism” embarks on a positive vision of truth, because he argues that the process whereby the existing world of the extrasensory, such as God, ethical law, the authority of reason, loses its power is nihilism. Hence, it follows that a reflection on the essence of nihilism is, at the same time, a reflection on truth, in which being stands in the whole.

The crucial problem of this nihilism is that the philosophy of Heidegger was designed to describe an authentic way of being human in a nihilistic culture and in that sense Heidegger cannot be interpreted as a nihilist. Nihilism in this sense is a positive experience of the world, but it is no longer anthropocentric or humanistic. Nihilism, thus, is not a merely negative phenomenon. It also entails a positive account of man’s place in the world.

© 2018 Verbena Giambastiani

Verbena Giambastiani, University of Pisa