362 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeWe suppress the prospect of death and the passage of time, by deliver-
ing ourselves over to one diversion aft er another. Each diversion is an
instance of false transcendence, a selling of ourselves short.
From this self- infl icted damnation, we begin to escape by making
against ourselves the terrorizing argument that we will die, lost in what
appears to be a vast and frightening void. What we do next, in this ac-
count, is to throw ourselves into the hands of a remote and voiceless
God, who looks into our hearts from behind an impenetrable cloud.
Only he can give us what we most want: eternal life. Th e consequence of
our self- terrorization is to show all our diversions for what they are and
to subordinate all our eff orts, aft er the terror, in this brief passage through
the world, to the single- minded aim of fi nding favor in the eyes of him
who holds the keys to life eternal.
For Heidegger, the terrorization and its sequel are addressed in diff er-
ent moments of the evolution of his thinking. Being and Time delivers,
without qualifi cation or compensation, the message of the terror. We are
lost in dispersal or distraction: Zerstreuung here plays the role of diver-
tissement. Our existence is inauthentic: we surrender our thoughts and
experiences to the collective formulas of society and culture.
Th ese collective automatisms rob us of ourselves, submitting our
cares and powers to their tropes. Th ey confront, however, a limit in our
foretaste of death. Each man’s experience of death, and of his march to
death, remains his own. As we pursue the implications of this fact, and
begin to reread being in the light of human existence and human exis-
tence in the shadow of death, our willingness to hand ourselves over to
an inauthentic life is shaken.
Once again, as in Pascal, the focus falls on the fi rst and most terrible
of the defects in human life: the fear of death in the context of
groundlessness. What is to follow this arousal? For a moment, in
Heidegger’s trajectory, it seemed that the awakening to the truth about
the human condition— and about being, grasped from the all-
important vantage point of our existence— would be followed by
politics. It turned out to be a species of violent po liti cal romanticism
with no close connection to the preceding analysis of existence
(other than an affi nity of attitudes and of symbols) and with no defi -
nite institutional content (other than the anti- institutional biases of
the romantic imagination).