The imposition of form makes it both justified and unjustified to reduce negation to what it negates, to the social phantasm which is its source. Because of the fact that this ‘lifting [Aufhebung] of repression’ - as Freud called it, using a Hegelian term - simultaneously denies and maintains both the repression and the repressed, it allows for a doubling of profits; the profit of saying and the profit of denying what is said by the way of saying it. Il is clear that the opposition between 'authenticity' (Eigenilichkeit) and ‘inauthenticity’ (Un-eigendichkeit), which Heidegger calls the ’primordial modes of Dasein' and around which his whole work is organized (even from the viewpoint of the most strictly internal readings), is simply a particular and particularly subtle form of the general opposition between the 'elite' and the 'masses’. ‘They’ (das Man. literally ‘one’) are tyrannical (the dictatorship of the ’they’), inquisitorial (the ‘they’ gets involved in everything) and reduce everything to its lowest level: they’ shirk responsibility, opt out of their freedom and slide into a tendency to take things easy and make them easy; in short they’ behave like irresponsible welfare recipients who live off society.
One could list the commonplaces of academic aristocratism which recur throughout this oft-cited passage,7 replete with topoi on the agora as an antithesis of scholt. leisure versus school; the horror of statistics (the notion of the ‘average’), which symbolizes all the ‘levelling-down’ operations which threaten the ‘person’ (here called Dasein) and its most precious attributes, its ‘originality’ and its ‘privacy’; contempt for all the ‘levelling’ forces (which others have termed ‘massifying’), first and foremost the egalitarian ideologies which threaten what is achieved through effort (‘the fruits of hard work'), meaning culture (which is the specific capital of the man-
darin, who is the son of his works), ideologies which encourage the easy-going attitudes of the 'masses’; a rejection of social mechanisms like public opinion, the philosopher's hereditary enemy, and which is conveyed once more by the play on offentlich and Offentlichkeit, on ‘public’ and ‘publicness’, and of all the things symbolized by ‘social assistance’, like democracy, political parties, paid holidays (which threaten the monopoly of schole and meditative seclusion in nature), 'culture for the masses', television and paperback editions of Plato.* Heidegger was to put all this much better in his inimitable pastoral style when, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, written in 1935, he tried to show how the triumph of the spirit of science and technology in Western civilization is accomplished and perfected in ‘the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative’ ('die Flucht der Gotter, die Zerstbrung der Erde. die Vermassung der Menschen, der Vorrang des Mittelmdssigen')?
But it is equally clear that among philosophically distinguished minds the opposition between the distinguished and the vulgar cannot take on a vulgar form. Academic aristocratism distinguishes between the distinguished and the vulgar forms of aristocratism. Il is this sense of philosophical distinction1" which frustrates the attempts of Heidegger's critics to find blatantly Nazi theses in his works and political writings, and which Heidegger’s supporters will always call upon to prove his wish to distance himself from the most marked forms of contempt for the masses." What may be called this 'primary' (in both senses) opposition can function in his work only in the form in which it was initially and permanently introduced, and which constantly transforms itself as his otherwise static system evolves, taking on new but always highly sublimated forms.
