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

The last line of The Great Gatsby is a poignant metaphor of 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 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 of 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. 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. 

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. 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.

At the very least, 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 perhaps one can 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) 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 philosophy of authenticity emphasizes personal responsibility and ethical self-commitment, yet his failure to publicly acknowledge or take responsibility or account in any way for his involvement with the Nazi regime reveal a damning contradiction between his philosophical speculations 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, I see nothing rehabilitating in 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.