Shipwrecks on the Shoals of Historical Accountability: 

Heideggerian Disillusionment in F. Scott Fitzgerald and TS Eliot and its Repair

Douglas B. Olds

2 October 2024

ABSTRACT

This essay contends that Heidegger’s authenticity, enthroned by facing death, is a metaphysics of solitude that modern letters both enact and resist. It reads Gatsby’s nostalgia and Eliot’s “timeless moments” as evasions, so that repositioned authenticity is covenantal trusteeship: the Golden Rule as metaphysical conation that individuates and destines through service, not solitude. This frame diagnoses our technocratic present—where simulation and informatic sociopathy scale Dasein’s deficits—before proposing curricular and archival repair. The resulting meditation asks literature to do what ontology refused: re-teach attention, responsibility, and hope.

The last line of The Great Gatsby is a poignant metaphor for a sailboat: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Distinguishing between these woody masks of servant-tended luxuries puts in relief those powered by combustion's false lure of transcendence and the spiritual reality of wasting a life. (Elon Musk, call your office.)

A question followed this introduction: "Are our lives shaped by a metaphor, or is the metaphor shaped by our lives?" Isn't the awareness of the spiritual reality of wasting one's own life it's own transcendence, or is it just another step in the process of life's ongoing process of self-discovery and endless opening to creative and ethical growth? This essay addresses these questions from the perspective of the personal and traditioned literary figure and one philosopher from the abyss.

This interrogation by the genius of contemplative art, where Fitzgerald opens a prosecutorial space of existence caught in between with no seeming way out. So to both adopt but then negate Heidegger’s contribution to living with meaninglessness—his ideology of Dasein--is just to abide “authentically” in the presence of meaninglessness in the penumbra of death. An ethics conscious of a personal death, i.e. non-existence, or at least non-commitment to traditional moral spaces. Heidegger’s infamous dictum that his philosophy entailed no ethic, indeed prohibited it. His early works disavow ethics as a regional ontic science. Hence this axiom follows: the prohibition of ethics is its own fulfillment of non-existence by transforming ethics into a simple, machined commitment to being. And thus Heidegger’s life demonstrates the moral malleability of his philosophy—its expedience solely committed to staving off as long as possible the inevitable “nichts"  [nothingness]. But in a savage irony, the nichts has already infected his program for “human nature” in an ideology of authenticity grounded in “paradox” that allows lived experience to not only divorce from ethics--that which expands lived experience-- but to actually evade it. Ethical paradox grounds beyond which no ethics inheres beyond the ego’s survival, the solipsistic metaethical promotion and sustenance of the self’s chosen identity and values.[1]

Heidegger will claim in his later work, that after the pre-Socratics, philosophy falsified and concealed a primal experience of Being—some primal human nature answerable to existence only, and thus accountable only to such primal being. His program for retrieving the original meaning of Being becomes transformed into an insipid authenticity without moral necessities--thereby to endow human nature as living outside of narratives of purpose and moral meaning-making. 

Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit (§§40–53), frames Being-toward-death as the ultimate possibility that individuates Dasein. Death, in this view, is not a biological endpoint but an existential horizon—the possibility of the impossibility of existence. It discloses the finitude of the self, not as mere limitation but as a structuring capacity for Eigentlichkeit (authenticity). Confronted with death, Dasein is called out of the anonymous das Man into owned, resolute responsibility for its Being.

But this authenticity is structured in isolation. It is a formal ontology of solitude masquerading as truth. Our task is naming the ontological heresies of the 20th and 21st centuries and offering a new metaphysical center: the Golden Rule as metaphysical conation, rooted in grace, calling, and covenantal expansion.

Christ’s Golden Rule recasts this entire horizon in explicitly relational, theological, and metaphysical terms. It dislodges the egoic enclosure of Dasein, reframing death not as the ultimate horizon of self-becoming, but as the failure of covenantal trusteeship—a severing of grace-bound accountability to the other. Metaphysical depth is not sourced in the anxiety of finitude but in the conative call of ethical relation. The Golden Rule, properly understood as metaphysical conation tethered to actualized Being(s), orders Being through accountable love, not heroic solitude.

This critique rejects the existential solipsism implicit in Heidegger’s formal analytic. Finitude is not an existential prison; it is a calling to covenantal emplacement whence human potential in trusteeship resides. The individuation of the self does not arise through facing death, but through serving life. Heidegger’s “authenticity” is inverted: true authenticity arises through service to the whole.

In this light, Dasein is substrate confusion wrought by egoism unbound from relational service. It mistakes the ground of Being—which is centered in the Golden Rule—for centripetal, recursive projections of the self and its self-curated (and AI-captured) data, distraught by its own inevitable termination. Death is mistaken for destiny when and because accountability has been refused.

Technocracy and solipsism extend this nihilism (psychopathy) into the infrastructures of late modernity. The 20th-century despair of psychologized death has metastasized into the 21st-century hijack of perceptual reality through neurochemical sorcery and informatic sociopathy. The spectral Dasein is thus scaled into systems—where dying becomes normed, not confronted.

But true substrate reality is the trusteeship of covenantal life—gifted by grace for the progress and expression of relational being. This is not merely ethical but metaphysical. The human is not a project; it is a gift-bearing trustee expression expanding inside the created whole for shalom.

Dasein sees only the inevitability of its own rooting toward death; it cannot perceive the flourishing of the covenantal whole—the very life it was rooted to serve.

Heidegger’s legacy is not merely subject to trace and critique individually, but to recognize a broader intellectual and cultural complicity. His project of "Being-toward-death," shorn of moral anchorage and relational repair, echoes in subtler forms in the literature of his time. F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot, though not philosophers, internalize and reproduce aspects of his ontological despair and aesthetic formalism in their literary works. Yet unlike Heidegger, both offer narrative or poetic traces of resistance—cracks through which metaphysical hope or prophetic renewal might still enter. What follows is an excavation of those traces.

One of the ways personalities adrift from meaning cope with the putative meaninglessness of existence is nihilist cruelty, such ‘morality’ of elites to build a static edifice to the collective is but a sublimated form of this cruelty applied to some selves for the privilege of others. Fitzgerald notes the “casual recklessness of Daisy and Tom. “Human nature” exists as an ideology, a hermeneutic of ego aggrandizement. It hypostatizes a constructed assembly of minds in service of the instrumental state’s canon, constructed to assign merit and legitimate injustices and evil in this world in service of favored stakeholders: military-industrial elites and bureaucrats of therapeutic norming.

Fitzgerald won't have it. He situates all Gatsbys ironically sailing toward the havens of wealth “authentically,” a haven in the past that deadens by denying teleology. Existing toward death. Rather than promising an escape from teleology in moral accountability that inheres in responsibility to existence alone, Fitzgerald's artistic exploration of lived experience inside meaninglessness brings forth crisis that opens up more expanses to escape from paradox than Heidegger's quicksand philosophy of a purely intellected authenticity without virtue, without moral accountability in his lived experience-toward-death.

In a more explicitly "transcendental" effort than Gatsby's destructive pursuit of the embodied past by idealizing constructs of form through Daisy and material wealth, TS Eliot attempts to root human existence in cultural and religious principles of timelessness always aware of the dangers of decay:

“What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place." Manners and customs in contrast with an archive which opens up the blood and the place to stimulus and change. 

That we've admitted this nostalgic and wistful man and his thought into the archives of our language group and canon should only be cautionary regarding form over function. There is no people without a history, and if you see history as a pattern where the timeless repeats in form, you are caught in statics, determined by statics, determined by nostalgia couched in poignant sentiment. While more artistically ranging from sentiment than this, TS Elliot often connects the decay of his traditions to a more significant history of England while projecting (dimming) hopes for the future because he foresees less and less of these patterns recurring.  But one can hope to resurrect their advantages by re-machining them—actually determining them—by embalmed and embalming data sets!

Theorizing is high-level pattern-recognition that opens to telic energies or yokes to recrudescent categories, with the latter a past-embalming hermeneutic. In contrast to theorizing, Noticing things is an idiosyncratic elevation of phenomenological bias by anecdote and story telling rejecting narratives of the repairing whole-- of the metaphysics of universal grace to instead favor stultifying traditions of blood and soil tied, in these cases, to Anglo-American chauvinism and materialism.

From TS Eliot’s Little Giddings:

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

Eliot’s fellow countryman Tolkien (Letter 154) writes of “advantage[d] superior caste[s which ever] tr[y] to stop… change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' … overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.”

By pursuing timelessness particularized in the recurrence of historicized form (rather than the telic energies of grace--the encompassing, peace driving practice of virtue established by the Golden Rule as duty to serve creation liberated from death-dealing forms: hegemonies and hierarchies), both Eliot and Gatsby seek determinism's cultural offerings--eros and religio--to materially rooted egoistic existence in time and space so to apotheosize ego. Both reveal a paralysis in obsessively identifying with recurrence, the anomie of dulled prophetic senses of men, who include Heidegger as he transmogrifies cogito to Dasein (emphasizing static being enduring time rather than intellectual self-reflection accountable to human essence in time), and whose thought seeks surcease from ethical expansion and universal community to find an eternal space in isolation.

All three 20th C figures, pursuing timeless historical form by means of distinctively different artistic and intellectual frames, will ironically find their ethical retreat in a passenger pigeoned promise of machined data sets. And, ironically at least in their literary dimensions that sought immortalities in ego, they will find a determined but receding legacy as data sets of machined, reductive, and deflating meaning seeking become their publicists. Agents that had sought extrapolation from existence in timeless forms become statues of interpolation in commodification. By other-directed ethical craft and accountability and free and open offering to critical review--rather than by instrumental rationalities of the machine--the artistic histories of Gatsby's narrative and Eliot's literary corpus may break free, by a concerted program of pedagogy setting Nietzschean against messianizing and commissioning hermeneutics as the cleansing air of cautionary deliberation amid generational change.

Such pedagogy institutes epistemological awareness that is never and cannot be devoid of the practical, and all language learning depends on experience and accountability. If a machine cannot process the data of durative character development —the "dianoia of metanoia" (as a subjective genitive, carrying the latter through into a changed ethical charge) in empathy, integrity, and ethical judgment--it cannot assist human progress and growth. The pursuit of ethical transformation--repentance--as the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) notes, begins through the ear to reestablish human essence in the heart--intentionality--first and foremost, and only then moves to the expressive soul (nephesh), effective effort (mo-ed), and culminating when Jesus adds dianoia (Matt 22:37; Mark 12: 28) to the essence of messianic mission of peacemaking and soul repair.

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[1] Heidegger’s approach to authenticity emphasizes personal responsibility and ethical commitment, yet his failure to publicly acknowledge or take responsibility or account in any way for his involvement with the Nazi regime reveals a damning contradiction between his philosophical speculations and metaphysical negations proposed as absolutes and his actions. Of course, I'm not the only one to say this, but I add my voice in solidarity with revulsion: He definitively did not live authentically according to his own principles of accountability, and his silence was a way of avoiding responsibility—thus exposing a paradox between his life and his teachings on authenticity. In this sense, the paradox may be entertained only by cordoning off the intellect from soul’s lived experience, for when they are harmonized, the paradox cannot be sustained in any way to assert an existential, cataphatic truth. In paradox a system reveals its fall and failure and may only become apophatically cautionary. Any program of 'Do as I say, not as I do' holds forth no "existential" promise or guidance.

Unlike the rehabilitating cautionaries of the art of Eliot and the figure of Gatsby I present in this essay's conclusion, nothing rehabilitates the monumental ethical failure of "de-existentialism," the grandiose, wickedly Promethean, and linguistically perverting attempt to peer back into an ontology prior to God to escape duty thereto.

"The 'they' always 'were' and yet it can be said that 'nobody' was. In the everydayness of existence, most of it is explained by that of which we must say that 'nobody was.' Everyone is the other and no one is himself."

--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927

Both the content and the form of this utterance are nihilism, the ground of cruelty and sleights-of-hand that cover cruelties. And these carry over into a sleighted destiny, where Apology silently screams, lacking words. In that is the man's Dasein, accountable at last and lasting.