Sober philosophical guidance about New Year’s Eve seems unsuited to a holiday marked by a champagne buzz and celebratory gunfire. But many of us at the end of 2019 will mark the turning of the year as something significant—as a time for resolutions, change, even rebirth. “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference,” writes the English writer Charles Lamb in his 1821 essay “New Year’s Eve.” “It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.”
Is this tendency worthwhile? On December 31, 1954, in an essay that resurfaced last year in German magazine Neue Rundschau, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that we should temper such grandiose thoughts about the turning of the calendar. Using the pseudonym Axel Colly, Blumenberg offered to the readers of a Düsseldorf newspaper a more modest philosophy of New Year’s Eve.
The event, as Blumenberg points out, is supposed to decide some things for us; everything must be different with the new year. Blumenberg calls this impulse “the dictatorship of circumstances.” The new year imposes obligations. Well before December 31 rolls around, the media will have unloaded the usual articles prefiguring the next 365 days. Will the next year be the Year of the Shoulder? The Year of the Merger? The Year Our Moon Is Monetized? What are the most anticipated films of 2020? What books must be read? Which shows will be bingeworthy? We will be told what, where, and who will demand our attention in the Roaring 20s.
On New Year’s Day, brimming with good intentions, we will awaken to “a Copernican temptation,” Blumenberg writes. “The Copernican route is the conversion of everything, the conversion of the given, a permanent revolution . . . everything has to start from scratch.”
Like an Etch A Sketch, we plan on New Year’s Eve to shake ourselves up, to erase the screen containing the old picture of our life in order to savor the blank space awaiting a fresh, improved image. But it’s not so simple, Blumenberg says: “What lies ahead of us at such a turn of the year, what can lie ahead of us, is never quite the old, but never quite the new either. Let us not pretend it were one or the other.”
Instead of fixating on the future, Blumenberg urges his readers to remember that their lives are already under way. The new year lures us into thinking we have been prisoners in the waiting rooms of our own lives, as if our “real” lives will begin later. “Never will our own lives lie before us,” he writes. “Many people live by waiting for this real life and by getting ready for it. When I start earning X, then it should really start, they say. Or: when the children are grown up. Or: when I have time to go to the theatre and to read good books.”
The projected “real” (eigentlich) life Blumenberg scorns carries some baggage. In the original German, “real” means “authentic.” The word’s root is the verb “eigen,” to own or possess—akin to the English idiom “to own it.”
By placing the phrase “real/actual/authentic life” in quotation marks five times in the last portion of the essay, Blumenberg anticipates the derision of “The Authentic Ones” by Theodor Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964). That group consists of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Martin Buber, and their followers—the kind of people who bathe in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic waters and dine on the symbol-ridden images of Terrence Malick’s films. The so called “cult of realness” persists in pop culture, and retains elements criticized by Adorno. The Authentics “set themselves up as the elite,” Adorno claims. This group made authenticity a religion and worshipped Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism. However, Kierkegaard invoked authenticity to preserve Christianity by severing it from inauthentic Christianity, while the Authentics, according to Adorno, use pseudo-theological language as a shibboleth to distinguish themselves from their inferiors. If you don’t buy into The Authentics’ lingo, you’re labeled inauthentic, or told “you don’t get it.”
By 1954, Heidegger, whom Carl Schmitt thought had betrayed Kierkegaard’s thought, had eclipsed the Danish existentialist in importance among the Authentics. In Being and Time, Heidegger linked “authentic” existence to politics: “In communication and in battle the power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Dasein.” Ingrid Anderson glosses Heidegger’s passage as follows: “One is authentic when one is fully committed to and engaged in achieving the destiny of one’s Volk.”
In opposition to Heidegger’s dangerous fever dream, Blumenberg rejects an embattled authenticity that’s around the corner and tethered to some group destiny in favor of a focus on ordinary life and commitments people already have. Blumenberg’s advice for those motivated by the unavoidable appointment with the New Year is to ignore destiny and the future: “We reserve ourselves for possibilities that never become real. The illusion that real life has not yet begun makes every new year annoying for us as a supposed future that still hasn’t happened.”
Blumenberg proposes a New Year of “tiny resolutions.” Rather than projecting a richer, more influential, more productive, healthier, demonless, extraordinary, in-better-circumstances you, Blumenberg wants you to accept the everyday, “average” you. Blumenberg champions the present: “Today, always only today do we live ‘authentically.’” Today is our “chance” to be human, to smile. Rather than aiming for a histrionic completion of a philosophical destiny, Blumenberg suggests realizing a “small selection of possibilities.”
In this way, Blumenberg complements Charles Lamb’s elemental gleefulness about New Year’s Eve: “I am alive. I move about. I survive, a jolly candidate [for the coming year].”
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
