Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [98]
In his masterwork Being and Time (Harper and Row, 1962), Heidegger says that to be authentic is to “choose” yourself and “win” yourself (p. 68), to take over and bear full responsibility for the meaning of your own existence. Inauthenticity, on the other hand, means accepting for your understanding of yourself the meanings and possibilities placed upon you by an impersonal society—what Heidegger calls “das Man” (German for “the They” or “the One,” though the echoes of the American expression “the Man” shouldn’t be entirely dismissed). It’s an idea with which—terminology aside—we’re already intimately familiar as Radiohead fans. If “Fitter Happier” on OK Computer is supposed to be bleakly ironic, then this experience of inauthenticity is exactly what it’s about: “Not drinking too much / regular exercise at the gym”; “getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”; “keep in contact with old friends / (enjoy a drink now and then)”; “fond but not in love”; “an empowered and informed member of society.” The list slowly grows more menacing as the song progresses, but what are its essential contents? Platitudes. The ‘obvious’ goals of everybody in the ‘good society’; this is society’s picture of the good life. But who is “society”? “Them.” “One says it is like this.” Das Man. In choosing to become what society wants us to become, we essentially choose to abandon ourselves only to wind up high and dry: “You’d kill yourself for recognition / kill yourself to never, ever stop / You broke another mirror / you’re turning into something you are not.” And from this abandonment of self comes the feeling of powerlessness and passivity; “Drying up in conversation / you’ll be the one who cannot talk.”
Open Up Your Skull
This leads us to the other manifestation of powerlessness, the “emptying” of self. As Yorke sings in “The Bends”: “I need to wash myself again to hide all the dirt and pain / ’Cos I’d be scared that there’s nothing underneath.” “Let Down” speaks of “the emptiest of feelings.” And in “Karma Police,” the crescendo finds the narrator exclaiming, “For a minute there I lost myself.” But if the self is “emptied,” where does it “go”? Again, this is where the phenomenological account of alienation is so powerful: scientifically speaking, our thoughts are always in our heads, while the world remains apart and outside. But if you pay attention to your experience of the world, you will notice that on any average day you spend a lot of time not lost “in your head,” as we like to say, but rather absorbed in the world. This empty feeling is closely connected with a dissolution of the self into whatever activities happen to be going on. Heidegger writes that “this ‘absorption in . . .’ has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’” (p. 220). To be inauthentic is to have “fallen into the ‘world’. ‘Fallenness’ into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.”
But what happens when we “fall into the world”? Isn’t it just to “lose yourself in the moment”? (Note the two meanings of the word “lose” in play here: in getting lost in the moment, we lose—we don’t win—ourselves. Thus Heidegger’s description of authenticity as not just “choosing” yourself, but also “winning” yourself.) “Karma Police” plays nicely on the Hindu and Buddhist reference suggested by the word karma when the narrator speaks of “losing” himself: to be absorbed in the world, to be lost in the moment, is, as my yoga teacher always says, to “exist in the moment.” But what alternatives are there? We can “exist in the past,” of course, as one might say of someone constantly trying