Heller’s
The Disinherited Mind, a seminal work published in 1952 (U.S. ed., expanded, 1957), earned him a following among intellectuals. The project of
The Disinherited Mind was to analyze the disappearance of Truth from the immediate environment of man, and the ensuing compulsions of Art to fill the void. Such an intervention on the part of Art, in the circumstances, results in the impoverishment of the world, not in its enrichment. It entails the loss of ‘significant external reality’.
The Disinherited Mind was first published in Britain; two years later it was issued under the title
Enterbter Geist by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. An Italian translation followed in 1965, and a Japanese rendering in 1969.
Formulating the 'Creed'
For Heller, Truth could be defined in the terms proposed by Paul Roubiczek in
Thinking in Opposites, a book that appeared in the same year as did
The Disinherited Mind: Truth must be
embodied in external reality. (Heller says the same in
The Disinherited Mind when he points out that the question, What is Truth? becomes irrelevant 'in the face of its embodiment'.) Roubiczek's grasp of the meaning of Truth is more philosophical than Goethe's, according to whom Truth is 'a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality...'
Heller saw Truth as the first casualty of the mechanistic theory of nature, set on its course by Darwin and others, which in alliance with applied sciences roots out the intrinsic meaning of things in favour of the 'how?' of their causal interrelatedness. The thing in itself is forgotten, and with it the meaning of Reality as such. Such theories succeed merely in feeding 'the body of superstitious beliefs that had grown rampant ever since medieval scholasticism suffered its final defeat at the hands of Francis Bacon'.
This process, of Reality's being eviscerated of deeper meaning in the course of being 'explained' by modern science, constitutes the main charge that Heller laid against supporters of what he called the
Creed of Ontological Invalidity. The practical result of its implementation is that nothing can exist in and of itself: things' scientific explanation deprives them of their individual
being as entities and reduces them to the position of mere links in a much more broadly conceived chain. Here there are echoes — and indeed a defence — of Martin Heidegger's
das Sein des Seinden, although Heller would probably have rejected these. This state of affairs leads to spiritual perdition, he felt, whereby man's own true significance as a higher being (his 'ontological mystery') is obscured, and whereby any attempt at a meaningful response to the world is stymied. For such a response can only take place
vis-à-vis the question of what the world fundamentally
is, not simply how it works.
The meaningful response that the fully-realized human being makes to the world differs from the attitude of the frog-in-the-well scientist in the most fundamental of ways: the former — through his theorizing, which is the 'highest intellectual achievement' — actually shapes the Reality, rather than passively 'recording' it in the manner of the latter whose mere 'looking at a thing is of no use whatsoever'. Heller's best-known quotation is: "Be careful how you interpret the world; it
is like that." The admonition is not addressed to those who 'find and accept' (as he put it), but to those who through the 'intuitive, visionary faculty of... [their] genius' essentially
create the world we know.
Objections
An objection levelled against
The Disinherited Mind (and registered in the Postscript, Part 4 of the essay entitled "The Hazard of Modern Poetry," which Heller appended to the U.S. edition of 1957) was that the
Weltanschauung at the heart of its critique was in some aspects excessively
Holocaust-centric. (Heller took exception to this term, preferring the English word 'genocide', or the Semitic words
sho'ah and
hurban (Hebrew, 'annihilation’), to 'Holocaust'.)
Heller chose not to contest this charge. However, the book itself throws some light on this question. In the chapter 'Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy', a non-Jewish philosopher of stature, Karl Jaspers, is quoted on Goethe's having become — in an important sense — obsolete after 1945. This is on account of his inadequate grasp of the problems of theodicy, that is, chiefly, of the problem of the existence of Evil. The question posed is not whether the Holocaust was central to Erich Heller (as it was to all the Jews who survived), but whether any human being can avoid being conscious of its centrality.
For Heller, the Body was central to human identity. The Body was the
principium individuationis (in the sense in that Nietzsche understood or misunderstood that expression, which was good enough for Heller). He once confessed privately that it is precisely because religions like Christianity offered a redemption that, for him, entailed the greatest sacrilege — a divestiture of the Body in Paradise in favour of some 'transfigured' entity that seemed to merge the individual personhood, eschatologically speaking, into a single collective state of all the blessed — it is for this reason that he was not interested in those religions. The Holocaust had a theological dimension for him, also. With its mass destruction of bodies it violated the principle of the sacred, of the spiritual, as manifested in the world. For Heller, the spiritual was never not a tissue of 'vague abstractions': it was always incarnate. The spiritual needed the Body in exactly the same measure in which it needed transcendence: the spiritual had to be 'known and felt to be real'. ‘Genius’ alone, he once wrote, 'is never the whole man'.
On Nietzsche
Heller points out that Nietzsche's and Rilke's opposition to
valid distinctions — in particular Nietzsche's
relativization of Good and Evil — was an overreaction. It took against what both writers diagnosed as the 'barbarism of concepts' of a 'crudely interpreted world' (the expression is Nietzsche's), whereby the dual aspects of immanence and transcendence — closer to each other than human thought has been prepared to allow over the centuries — open the floodgates to a series of specious distinctions. Pre-eminent among the latter is the false distinction between thought and feeling. But, in their zeal to uncover the fraud of such bifurcations, the two thinkers carry their denunciation too far: Nietzsche, in particular, overstates his case when he links Good with Evil.
Borrowing
In a critique of T. S. Eliot's views on Shakespeare — who supposedly modelled himself on Montaigne in formulating the character of Hamlet — Heller took a commonsensical approach to
literary borrowing. His position has broader applications. Eliot — Heller writes —
suggests that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet think in the manner of Montaigne, did not think himself, but merely 'used' thought for dramatic ends. This sounds true enough, and would be even truer if it were possible to 'use' thought without thinking in the process of using it. For thought is not an object, but an activity, and it is impossible to 'use' an activity without becoming active. One can use a table without contributing to its manufacture; but one cannot use thinking or feeling without thinking or feeling. Of course, one can use the results of thought in a thoughtless fashion. In this case, however, one does not use thought, but merely words that will, more likely than not, fail to make sense.
Heller adduces another case in point: 'If Dante's thought is Thomas Aquinas's, it is yet Dante's: not only by virtue of imaginative sympathy and assimilation, and certainly not as a reward for the supply of an "emotional equivalent" [
sc. in its unique capacity as poetry]. It is Dante’s property by birthright. He has reborn it within himself —— poetically.’
The argument preempts criticism of Heller's philosophy, based on its roots in Nietzsche and Rilke, and (
mutatis mutandis) of Kafka. The title itself of
The Disinherited Mind might have been suggested by Rilke’s Seventh Elegy.