Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature- with a Christian Answer [1 ed.]

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Its Origin and Nature with

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES DITED

BY RUTH

NANDA

ANSHEN

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by Helmut Thielicke In this book Helmut Thielicke lays bare the root of the moral and cultural crisis of our times. Beneath the outward symptoms of confusion and disorder today lie the empti¬ ness, the loss of meaning, the collapse of value which Nihilism feeds upon. Here is a profound new perspective on a basic threat —and an unprecedented opportunity—for the spirit of man.

A dvance Comments From Robert E. Fitch, Pacific School of Religion: “Not in several years have I read a book of such power and penetration. Thielicke treats Nihilism in all its phases—personal, political, economic, and cultural—with clarity, force and profundity.” *

*

*

From Donald Macleod, Princeton Theo¬ logical Seminary: “An excellent and incisive work on one of the most important phenomena of our times. Required reading for all who want to understand the relevance of Christianity to modern culture.” '7V'

*7v*

From Kyle Haselden, Managing Editor of the Christian Century: “The spirit of our age has been captured by the last ‘ism’—Nihilism. To help free his generation Helmut Thielicke addresses this dreadful void with the respect due a worthy opponent and the seriousness owed a deadly foe. To the task he brings, not (Continued on back flap)

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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NIHILISM Its Origin and Nature with a Christian Answer —

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES Planned and Edited by

RUTH NANDA ANSHEN

BOARD OF EDITORS

W. H. Auden Karl Barth Martin C. D’Arcy Christopher Dawson C. H. Dodd Mircea Eliade Muhammad Zafrullah Khan Alexandre Koyre Jacques Maritain James Muilenburg Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Gershom Scholem D. T. Suzuki Paul Tillich

t

RELIGIOUS

PERSPECTIVES

*

VOLUME

FOUR

NIHILISM Its Origin and Nature

—

with a Christian Answer

by Helmut Thielicke TRANSLATED BY JOHN W. DOBERSTEIN

Harper 8c Brothers, Publishers • New York

MAY 5, igs? vf NIHILISM: Its Origin and Nature—with a Christian Answer Copyright © 1961 by John W. Doberstein Printed in the United States of America All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N. Y. FIRST EDITION C-L

Originally published in German as Der Nihilismus, copyright 1951 by Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 61-7351

CONTENTS Religious Perspectives: Its Meaning and Purpose Preface to the American Edition I

7 13

The Absolutization of Nothingness

17

Nihilism—The Lonely “Ism”

27

III

Nihilism—Overt and Disguised

30

IV

Nihilism as a Psychiatric Phenomenon

41

II

V The Breakdown of Selfhood and the Break¬ down of the World VI

55

Nihilism in Law and in Medicine

61

VII

The Political Form of the World’s Breakdown

88

VIII

The Human Form of the World’s Breakdown

96

IX X

XI

XII

The Destruction of the Self

105

The Anxiety of Life 1. The Present Situation 2. The Ground of Anxiety 3. Self-Help Against Anxiety 4. The Overcoming of Anxiety

116 116 129 137 140

Fractured Nihilism 1. “Naive” Nihilism 2. “Reflective” Nihilism

148 148 159

Where Do We Go from Here? 1. Existentialism—A Critique 2. Epilogue

167 167 175

Notes

179

Index

181

Religious Perspectives VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED

I. The Historic Reality of Christian Culture

by Christopher Dawson II. International Conflict in the Twentieth Century

by Herbert Butterfield III. The Limits of Reason

by George Boas

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES Its Meaning and Purpose

represents a quest for the rediscovery of man. It constitutes an effort to define man’s search for the essence of being in order that he may have a knowledge of goals. It is an endeavor to show that there is no possibility of achieving an understanding of man’s total nature on the basis of phenomena known by the analytical method alone. It hopes to point to the false antinomy between revelation and reason, faith and knowledge, grace and nature, courage and anxiety. Mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology and religion, in spite of their almost complete independence, have begun to sense their interrelatedness and to become aware of that mode of cognition which teaches that “the light is not without but within me, and I myself am the light.” Modern man is threatened by a world created by himself. He is faced with the conversion of mind to naturalism, a dog¬ matic secularism and an opposition to a belief in the trans¬ cendent. He begins to see, however, that the universe is given not as one existing and one perceived but as the unity of subject and object; that the barrier between them cannot be said to have been dissolved as the result of recent experience in the physical sciences, since this barrier has never existed. Confronted with the question of meaning, he is summoned to rediscover and scrutinize the immutable and the permanent which constitute the dynamic, unifying aspect of life as well as the principle of differentiation; to reconcile identity and diversity, immutability and unrest. He begins to recognize that just as every person descends by his particular path, so he is able to ascend, and this ascent aims at a return to the source of creation, an inward home from which he has become estranged. It is the hope of Religious Perspectives that the rediscovery of man will point the way to the rediscovery of God. To this end a rediscovery of first principles should constitute part of the quest. These principles, not to be superseded by new dis¬ coveries, are not those of historical worlds that come to be and perish. They are to be sought in the heart and spirit of 7 Religious Perspectives

8

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES

man, and no interpretation of a merely historical or scientific universe can guide the search. Religious Perspectives attempts not only to ask dispassionately what the nature of God is, but also to restore to human life at least the hypothesis of God and the symbols that relate to him. It endeavors to show that man is faced with the metaphysical question of the truth of religion while he encounters the empirical question of its effects on the life of humanity and its meaning for society. Religion is here distinguished from theology and its doctrinal forms and is intended to denote the feelings, aspirations and acts of men, as they relate to total reality. Religious Perspectives is nourished by the spiritual and intellectual energy of world thought, by those religious and ethical leaders who are not merely spectators but scholars deeply involved in the critical problems common to all re¬ ligions. These thinkers recognize that human morality and human ideals thrive only when set in a context of a transcen¬ dent attitude toward religion and that by pointing to the ground of identity and the common nature of being in the religious experience of man, the essential nature of religion may be defined. Thus, they are committed to re-evaluate the meaning of everlastingness, an experience which has been lost and which is the content of that visio Dei constituting the structure of all religions. It is the many absorbed everlastingly into the ultimate unity, a unity subsuming what Whitehead calls the fluency of God and the everlastingness of passing experience. These volumes seek to show that the unity of which we speak consists in a certitude emanating from the nature of man who seeks God and the nature of God who seeks man. Such certitude bathes in an intuitive act of cognition, participating in the divine essence and is related to the natural spirituality of intelligence. This is not by any means to say that there is an equivalence of all faiths in the traditional religions of human history. It is, however, to emphasize the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal which all religions acknowledge. For duration of thought is composed of instants superior to time, and is an intuition of the permanence of existence and its metahistorical reality. In fact, the symbol* itself found on cover and jacket of each volume of Religious Perspectives is the visible sign or representation of the essence, immediacy and timelessness of religious experience; the one immutable center, which may be analogically related to Being * From the original designed by Leo Katz.

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES

9

in pure act, moving with centrifugal and ecumenical necessity outward into the manifold modes, yet simultaneously, with dynamic centripetal power and with full intentional energy, returning to the source. Through the very diversity of its authors, the Series shows that the basic and poignant con¬ cern of every faith is to point to, and overcome, the crisis in our apocalyptic epoch—the crisis of man’s separation from man and of man’s separation from God—the failure of love. The authors endeavor, moreover, to illustrate the truth that the human heart is able, and even yearns, to go to the very lengths of God; that the darkness and cold, the frozen spiritual misery of recent time, are breaking, cracking and beginning to move, yielding to efforts to overcome spiritual muteness and moral paralysis. In this way, it is hoped, the immediacy of pain and sorrow, the primacy of tragedy and suffering in human life, may be transmuted into a spiritual and moral triumph. Religious Perspectives is therefore an effort to explore the meaning of God, an exploration which constitutes an aspect of man’s intrinsic nature, part of his ontological substance. The Series grows out of an abiding concern that in spite of the re¬ lease of man’s creative energy which science has in part accom¬ plished, this very science has overturned the essential order of nature. Shrewd as man’s calculations have become concerning his means, his choice of ends which was formerly correlated with belief in God, with absolute criteria of conduct, has be¬ come witless. God is not to be treated as an exception to meta¬ physical principles, invoked to prevent their collapse. He is rather their chief exemplification, the source of all potentiality. The personal reality of freedom and providence, of will and conscience, may demonstrate that “he who knows” commands a depth of consciousness inaccessible to the profane man, and is capable of that transfiguration which prevents the twisting of all good to ignominy. This religious content of experience is not within the province of science to bestow; it corrects the error of treating the scientific account as if it were itself meta¬ physical or religious; it challenges the tendency to make a religion of science—or a science of religion—a dogmatic act which destroys the moral dynamic of man. Indeed, many men of science are confronted with unexpected implications of their own thought and are beginning to accept, for instance, the trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature of events and of matter itself. Religious Perspectives attempts to show the fallacy of the apparent irrelevance of God in history. The Series submits that

10

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES

no convincing image of man can arise, in spite of the many ways in which human thought has tried to reach it, without a philosophy of human nature and human freedom which does not exclude God. This image of Homo cum Deo implies the highest conceivable freedom, the freedom to step into the very fabric of the universe, a new formula for man’s collaboration with the creative process and the only one which is able to protect man from the terror of existence. This image implies further that the mind and conscience are capable of making genuine discriminations and thereby may reconcile the serious tensions between the secular and religious, the profane and sacred. The idea of the sacred lies in what it is, timeless exist¬ ence. By emphasizing timeless existence against reason as a reality, we are liberated, in our communion with the eternal, from the otherwise unbreakable rule of “before and after.” Then we are able to admit that all forms, all symbols in religions, by their negation of error and their affirmation of the actuality of truth, make it possible to experience that knowing which is above knowledge, and that dynamic passage of the universe to unending unity. The volumes in this Series seek to challenge the crisis which separates, the crisis born out of a rationalism that has left no spiritual heirs, to make reasonable a religion that binds and to present the numinous reality within the experience of man. Insofar as the Series succeeds in this quest, it will direct mankind toward a reality that is eternal and away from a preoccupation with that which is illusory and ephemeral. For man is now confronted with his burden and his great¬ ness: “He calleth to me. Watchman, what of the night? Watch¬ man, what of the night?”1 Perhaps the anguish in the human soul may be assuaged by the answer, by the assimilation of the person in God: “The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.”2 Ruth Nanda Anshen

1 Isaiah 21:11. 2 Isaiah 21:12.

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION This little book has had a rather remarkable history. When the universities were reopened after the German capitulation in 1945 they were filled with ragged figures. Sitting in the lecture rooms were former officers, dressed in the remnants of their uniforms from which they had torn the badges of their rank, refugees from the Eastern territories who had lost every¬ thing and often did not know where their immediate families wTere or even whether they were still alive, and also many who came from prison camps. All of them—including the professors—were hungry, for the blessed stream of American CARE packets had not yet reached us, and since we delivered our lectures in unheated rooms we stood at our lecterns in our overcoats as the students took notes with fingers stiffened by the cold. Intellectually, however, it was a glorious time. Before us sat a generation of youth which had been shrewdly and cruelly misled by the holders of power. And now they faced a world of rubble and ruins; not only their homes, but also their ideal¬ ism, their faith, their concepts of value were shattered. But the vacuum in their hearts cried out to be filled. At the same time these young people were profoundly skeptical. Whatever we professors said they turned it about in their minds ten times before they would accept it: these burnt children dreaded the fire, because it might contain the coals of fresh seductions. It was in this situation that I delivered my lectures on nihilism in the largest auditorium in the ancient University of Tubingen, and always I had difficulty getting to my lectern because the young men packed the room to the doors. A loud¬ speaker carried the lectures to two other lecture rooms. Stand¬ ing there before these men, whose expectancy came at one like a breath of warm air, it was impossible to deliver a refined, 11

12

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

detached academic lecture. Here one could not be content to give instruction; here there was an intellectual and spiritual hunger that needed to be satisfied; here there were wounds that needed to be bound up. It was a situation that called for tender consolation and firm, forthright direction. Some time later, when the Free University in West Berlin was opened with American aid, I was asked to repeat the lectures in the sorely tried capital city and its youngest uni¬ versity. The students, from both the East and the West, crowded into a poverty-stricken hall which was more like a catacomb than a cultic center of scholarship. For this was still the time of first improvisation, and the comfort of a proper educational building was out of the question. It was wonderful and stimulating to the lecturer to see before him the many young faces and to sense the eagerness with which they listened. The runes of overwhelming fate were written upon those faces and made them serious beyond their years. When the lectures were published they received a broad circulation. I considered them to be so bound to the time and place of their origin, however, that I did not expect that this particular book could possibly be of interest in other countries. I was therefore surprised when it was translated into Japanese and found numerous readers in Japan. I have since observed that often it is the very books which have come out of a specific historical crisis that do not lose their interest beyond the time and place of their origin. I have often thought about why this is so and I have arrived at the following explanation. In times of dreadful catastrophe and great despair—like those we went through in the years after 1945—the speaker and author almost involuntarily speaks in more elementary and aggressive terms. His utterances are freed of all orna¬ mental accessories and the comforts of style. At such times all that is wanted is the pure, hard metal. And that which at other times lies hidden and smoldering beneath the surface—like nihilism and spiritual emptiness—erupts volcanically in times of upheaval. The effect is that the intellectual situation is seen in sharper profile. This, I believe, is the reason why what

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

13

is said in such an hour continues to have validity in later times, so that even the topicality of many of the illustrations and the coloration of the milieu are not felt to be disturbing but are rather the life blood that banishes the pale cast of thought. In any case, these lectures were understood in Japan exactly as they were among the youth of my own country, and later when I was there to give some addresses many people spoke to me about them. I also wrote a special introduction to this book for my Japanese readers and I should have liked to append it to this American edition, but I have lost the original text. So it is my fond wish that this book may also perform its task of criticism, clarification, and constructive help in the country in which I have so many good friends and which is always represented in my classes in Hamburg by a number of students (whom I join in a merry round-table celebration every Monday). I have repeatedly discussed the problems dealt with in this book with my young American friends and in this way—as well as through my sojourn as a visiting professor—I know that the threat of anxiety, boredom, and emptiness is just as prevalent there as everywhere else in the world. Just to state this can be a help in itself. But the real therapy appears when one begins to realize that this world is loved by an everlasting Heart and that therefore we are summoned to say Yes to life. So may God prosper the way of this book as it now moves within the triangle of Germany, Japan, and the United States. That this book should have found so distinguished a trans¬ lator as Professor Doberstein, who has so kindly and success¬ fully espoused other productions of mine, I regard with gratitude as a special providence. Despite the Babel confu¬ sion of our tongues, which he knows how to disentangle with his skill, we bear the same yoke and we strive for the same goal. Helmut Thielicke

Hamburg, April 1960

NIHILISM

Its Origin and Nature with a Christian Answer —

As I fell down and peered into the shining cosmos, I beheld the uplifted coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about the universe. And then the coils began to writhe and wound themselves around the universe twice as tightly as before; they entwined all nature in a thousand folds, they crushed the worlds together and compressed and reduced the infinite temple into a little churchyard chapel. Everything grew narrow, constricted, somber, dreadful. And an immensely prolonged toll of a bell was about to strike the last hour of time . . . when I awoke. My soul wept for joy that I was again able to worship God—and the joy and the weeping and the faith in Him were my prayer. —Jean Paul, Dream of a World Without God

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. —Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

I The Absolutization of Nothingness

WE MAY BE PERMITTED TO BEGIN WITH THE rather banal statement that the word “nihilism” is derived from nihil“nothing,” and the even more obvious statement that the word ends with “ism.”1 It is evident that these two facts account for the dubious reputation this word has of being really modern and realistic, so that it is considered to be the representation of the whole spirit of our age. As a rule, every author and every movement that succeeds in constructing a word ending in “ism” will be assured of a hearing from the “ism” addicts. And in a certain way we all belong to that group. For an “ism” is always a sign that some¬ body is making an absolute of a principle, or, more precisely, that somebody considers it possible to construct a co-ordinated system under which one can more or less subsume all of the phenomena of life and arrange them in a certain order. When a person speaks of Bolshev-“ism” he is saying that one can start with a very definite principle, in this case the material, economic structure of society, and thus understand the whole of human existence, including its intellectual and spiritual aspects. When a person talks about surreal-“ism” he is saying that human existence cannot be understood on the basis of sta¬ tistically graspable objectivity. In other words, he is saying that you cannot understand my existence when you know that I receive such and such a monthly salary, that I am healthy or 17

18

NIHILISM

sick, that constitutionally I am a phlegmatic or a volcanic per¬ sonality type. On the contrary, surrealism asserts that I am beset and beleaguered by impalpable and for the most part very sinister powers, which are constantly projecting them¬ selves from the outside into my existence. Somewhere there is a knocking on the door, as in Kafka’s story “Knock at the Farm Gate,” and this mere nothing of a knock, which perhaps may not even be answered, produces all kinds of strange and spectral phenomena. Or I am enclosed by the anonymous ap¬ paratus of a bureaucracy in which I am only a cog—Kafka de¬ scribes it in The Trial Or I may be caught in the grip of the “organization”; I am merely the repository of “public opinion,” opinion which has been suggested to me and therefore a “man¬ aged” opinion at which I have no idea how I arrived. Or I am stricken by the disease of inscrutable anxiety and go flounder¬ ing out of it into the realm of the miraculous or the twilight world of the occult. (We have only to remind ourselves that we are living in a time in which there is a resurgence of miracle doctors, of astrology and its highly lucrative press.) Thus surrealism, no matter what its breed, always asserts the same thing. It is best described in negative terms. Sur¬ realism asserts that we do not find out what man is by starting from the center of his being, as if the star of his destiny could actually be found within his breast, as if, in other words, we could get at him psychologically by penetrating into the core of his personality. The classical novel of development still held that it was possible to get at man in this way; thus Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Keller’s Gruner Heinrich develop, so to speak, from their own entelechy. Surrealism, however, asserts that man can be explained only by the forces outside his own center, only on the basis of that into which he has been “thrown,” of what surrounds and besets him. It is here, in the extra me, that we discover the hidden principle which sur¬ realism has made into an absolute. Naturally, we could go on enumerating such examples of

THE ABSOLUTIZATION OF NOTHINGNESS

19

making an idol out of a principle. We could say precisely the same things about scientific material-ism, or Caux-ism,* or vegetarian-ism, the passion for green vegetables. (For anybody who is a proper vegetarian also has a philosophy of history which is sustained by this passion; he regards history’s fall into sin and the emergence of the beast as being quite adequately explained by the fact that men eat meat.) However, I shall not bore my readers by prolonging the list of “isms.” Our purpose has been merely to indicate with a few strokes that the plethora of “isms” provides eloquent testimony that no notion is too petty and no idea too odd for somebody to fabricate from it an “ism” and a philosophy. This permits us to make three observations: First, a linguistic observation. The degree to which this tendency to make an absolute of a single notion as it is ex¬ pressed in the “isms” is apparent in the very fact that the adjectives applied to them usually end in “istic.” It would never occur to even the most mild of communists to say that he was “Bolshevish” or “communish,” if we may coin such bar¬ barisms. Likewise it would be difficult to imagine an art his¬ torian who would say that Picasso was genuinely “surreal.” What would one think was meant by a “Bolshevish” man? Well, perhaps you would think of someone who, besides a lot of other things, also has some interest in social questions, some¬ one who is not too capitalistic or too liberal and yet is not willing to allow the concern for a certain amount of economic control to go by the board altogether.f Adjectives which are robbed of their “istic” endings are immediately emasculated philosophically; they lose all punch and potency. For Bolshevism is by no means content merely to take into account certain mild “concerns.” Above all, it refuses * The reference is to Moral Rearmament with headquarters at Caux, Switzerland. (Trans.) f What is meant here may perhaps be more precisely conveyed by the terms “pinkish*' and “pinko.” (Trans.)

NIHILISM

20

to allow its central thesis of the materialistic foundations of history and a socialistically planned economy to be considered merely as one point of view among many others. Bolshevism would consider anything like this a counterfeit which should be labeled Titoist, bourgeois, or some other opprobrious term. It regards this thesis as the absolute foundational principle. Therefore one cannot accept this thesis that the structure of history is economic and materialistic merely as one element in a synthesis; it must be taken as one element in an alternative in which an uncompromising decision is demanded. One can¬ not merely have a “Bolshevish” attitude (for this would mean that one could at the same time also be a bit of a capitalist and a bit Western-minded too) and, what is more, justify it by saying that life simply cannot be subsumed under a single idea which claims to be an absolute, but that, ideologically, life is rather a weblike structure of ideas playing upon one another and correcting one another by friction. One can only be Bolshevistic or non-Bolshevistic. And the same is to be said concerning surrealism and all the other “isms.” The adjectives ending in “istic” are, as it were, the guardians of this tendency of principles to become totalitarian. They are exclusive and one cannot think of them except as also imply¬ ing an anathema. They are so intolerant that by comparison medieval burnings at the stake seem like peace bonfires. In¬ tolerance is inherent in the very concept of an “ism.” “Isms” refuse to be domesticated. They insist upon being the lords of the steppe, the masters of the world. A second observation. Whatever it is that is thus made into an absolute is a part of the created world. A particular area of creation is separated from the total context of created things, taken by itself, and made into an absolute. We think of such creaturely magnitudes as “nation,” “spirit,” or “economics,” all ideas which have been set up as absolutes and thus made the vehicles of entire philosophies. This explains why it is that when we make an absolute of

i

THE ABSOLUTIZATION OF NOTHINGNESS

21

one part of creation we then cannot rightly understand large areas of the rest of creation. For example, if the collective is thought of as the sole way in which man should exist, man as an individual is ruled out. Large areas of his personality—for example, the solitariness of his guilt, his suffering, his death— fail to find a place under the basic principle of the world-view; these areas are left without any guidance or they atrophy. On the other hand, if one makes an absolute of man as an indi¬ vidual, the resulting cult of personality allows the potentialities of community to lie uncultivated and the day comes when it provokes reactions toward the opposite tendency: Goethe’s Werther is mainly concerned with a personality which is infat¬ uated with itself and suffering because of self-love. This kind of encapsulated self-world, though it may have a certain grandeur, inevitably contributes toward making the world ripe for the collective which arises later. In any case, the tendency to make absolutes of relatives produces areas which are non-subsumable and to that extent left unbound and unregulated. They consti¬ tute zones of rebellion and remain foci of unrest. A third observation. All this accounts for the fact that philo¬ sophies (world-views) are subject to severe wear and tear. Every philosophy created by making an absolute of a relative can maintain itself for only a short time before it succumbs to the opposing forces which it has itself provoked. In this sense the history of modern thought with its succession of “isms" is like a gigantic parade of idols. And how comical the idols that have just marched past look from behind! In any case we are sure of this: the usurpation of the Creator’s throne by the creature brings its own retribution in the sense that broad areas of life are no longer understood by this upstart and he is finally crowded out by the powers of the other areas of existence and stripped of his pretended absoluteness. This weird and increasingly delirious abuse of absolutes compels us to ask: Are not all these supposed foundations for

22

NIHILISM

life merely pseudo-absolutes? And this question in turn sets off, like a chain reaction, the further question of whether existence has any substantial foundations at all if the alleged foundations are constantly giving way and sucking us into ever new abysses. Has not almost everybody who is sixty years old switched “isms” and thus changed the essential foundations of his life about three times during his lifetime? And have not the twenty-year-olds been quick to see this and developed a skep¬ ticism that clouds their youthful brows and has already im¬ parted to their faces something that is not to be found in the youthful portraits of earlier generations and sometimes upon the physiognomies of the youth of neutral and happier coun¬ tries? I would think that we might learn from association with the younger generation that they regard any proclamation of an absolute, whether it be by political parties or the forces of tradition—including Christianity—with a skepticism that fil¬ ters out any such claim even before one approaches them at all. There are two such filters. The first is represented by a question asked by youth: “Does this man himself believe what he is saying?” For the younger generation know that words, in their modern degenerate propaganda form, have been robbed of their specific gravity as vehicles of conviction. In the managerial age most words are merely parroted. And there are few persons who are any¬ thing more than mere functionaries of the on dit. Heidegger has described this very precisely in his phrase “lapsing into anonymity” (Verfallensein an das Man)* Thus what has taken the place of speech, which is avowal and confession and there¬ fore charged with personal conviction, is a kind of ventrilo¬ quism, which obliges us to ask, “Who is talking through him? Whose mouthpiece is he?” Often it is his party that is speaking * Where this phrase or related terms like Verfallenheit and Uneigentlichkeit occur the translator has striven with the notorious difficulty of putting Heidegger into English and attempted to be lucid rather than literal. In each case, however, the German has been left in parentheses. (Trans.)

THE ABSOLUTIZATION OF NOTHINGNESS

23

through him. This is betrayed by what may often be heard over the wine and cigars after an election speech: “As a private individual I am convinced that. . . . You will understand that I took the official position.” Or you may hear a cabinet member begin his speech by saying, “If I were not an official, but were expressing my own opinion. . . .” Even at the risk of provoking displeasure I may say that frequently enough the ventriloquists are to be found among the lords and masters of the universities. The probability is, however, that the danger of unpopularity is not very great, for when this comment is made everybody tends to think that it is the man sitting next to him that is meant. In any case, all too often words are not vehicles of convic¬ tion, but a foamy crest on the ocean of the impersonal. This is apparent also in the very mechanism of word-building. For not only political parties but also many academic schools and re¬ ligious as well as philosophical movements have a tendency to construct a definite vocabulary, which those who have mastered it can use almost mechanically, setting it spinning without any personal involvement whatsoever. The more extreme the de¬ velopment of depersonalization, the more arbitrary does lan¬ guage become. A journalist for a strictly party newspaper, and particularly a totalitarian party newspaper, has only to reel off his phraseology without the slightest effort of thought; he has only to allow himself to be carried along, as it were, by setting his motorized nomenclature into motion. For it is not he that is speaking; an it is speaking. More precisely, the “ism” is speaking. The consequence of the fact that it is possible to detach the words from the person who utters them is that we question the credibility of the person who speaks in this way and ask whether his existence is bound up with his words. This is one of two filters employed by that frequently burnt child, the man of the younger generation who has grown skeptical. The second filter consists in the question “In which direction

24

NIHILISM

am I being influenced?” Today when a young man buys a newspaper on a trip, he has no intention of ‘‘naively” immers¬ ing himself in the lead article and allowing himself to be instructed by its truths. The first thing he does is to try to determine by careful study of the masthead or other par¬ ticulars—perhaps by a skeptical and suspicious analysis of the text of the newspaper itself—what financial powers or ideo¬ logical dictators are back of the newspaper, prescribing its policies. In other words, he knows quite well that very fewT people, and likewise very few published utterances, are concerned with the truth; interests have taken the place of truth. But the ex¬ pansion of power does not by any means operate merely with brute force or hypnotic slogans or the appeal to blind emo¬ tionalism. On the contrary, the strongest fulcrum is the other man’s reason. Once one succeeds in persuading reason that it finally thinks it is in possession of a conviction, one is then fairly sure of having the other fellow in hand. Hence one must create an intellectual alibi. One “hires” editors, so to speak, with whose help reason can be captured and held. It was in this sense that Luther called reason a “whore.” What he meant was that reason is a woman who will throw herself at anybody for money, a whore who in this case sup¬ plies, not sex appeal, but arguments. One may say not only that we soon believe what we desire but that what we desire we also believe has foundation in reason. In any case, as soon as truth ceases to be a binding authority that stands above a man, it becomes a merely servile function whose purpose is to give some kind of legitimacy to his inter¬ ests. Therefore skepticism is quite in order when one reads an unfamiliar newspaper. One must ask, How am I supposed to be influenced by this so plausible-sounding, opinion-building editorial? The truth has become a mere G string to cover up one’s shame and often enough a sheepskin beneath which quite

THE ABSOLUTIZATION OF NOTHINGNESS

25

different, and generally lupine, powers are concealed. Thus we have arrived at a first basic conclusion. We have seen that, for the reasons given above, the “isms” are subject to rapid change and soon grow threadbare, and that this raises the skeptical question whether we are not dealing here with pseudo-absolutes. The next question then must necessarily be whether there is any alternative whatsoever to these pseudo-philosophies. Are not all the world-views including the Christian ultimately nothing more than tendentious fictions, invented for the pur¬ pose of controlling men ideologically and rendering them amenable by means of sham convictions? Since the ends change —after all, they are always determined by the concrete situa¬ tion—the “isms” and the world-views, which legitimate and provide the ideological undergirding for these ends, must also change, quite unlike the truth, which is constant and timeless, and which for this very reason (the skeptic assumes) does not exist, because nowhere in all the flux of phenomena and the flight of idols is there any evidence of a constant and abiding factor. In other words, in a world that is saturated and infested with pragmatism the question inevitably arises whether everything is not “pseudo,” whether everything is not—at best—a produc¬ tive lie, and thus whether at the tail end of this parade of idols there is Nothing, a Nothing which is always dressed up in some new ideology, but still nothing but nothingness. We see, therefore, that the last “ism” must necessarily be nihilism. It is not a term of abuse, but rather an end result, a discovery. But like all discoveries, even when they are dreadful, it can drive men into orgies and frenzies of passion. We under¬ stand all too well that the statement “Everything is bluff” is not to be met with the nonchalance of a snob. The coffeehouse nihilist with his conceited smile is not a nihilist at all, but only a parrot. The real nihilist has suffered in his very existence. He has tasted and swallowed the pseudo-absolutes. But con-

NIHILISM

26

scious suffering can mature a man and teach him to love the illness as a mother of knowledge. Hence the real nihilist is frequently a man who is wallowing in his wounds in a self-tormenting masochism. He does not keep silent about his dreadful secret; he talks about it. And he talks about it with exclamation points and with a smile that one may well dread. He gazes into the abyss until the abyss gazes into him;* he is intoxicated by its vertiginous fascination. He actually seeks out the lonely, echoing mountain walls from which he hears the echo of the agonizing mockery of his own laughter. And because there is no such thing as making a calm, tran¬ quil diagnosis that “everything is bluff/' the result is a passion for Nothingness. And therefore Nothingness then gives birth to a new “ism,” namely, nihilism, the last god. Or perhaps it is not a god at all, like those that marched ahead of it in the parade. May we not perhaps be deceived by the “ism”-mask which it wears? * Cf. F. Nietzsche: “Gaze not too deeply into the abyss lest the abyss gaze back into you.” (Trans.)

II Nihilisim ■The Lonely ffIsm NIHILISM IS A UNIQUE “ISM.” THERE ARE IN FACT two immediately apparent differences that distinguish it from all previous “isms.” The first is that, whereas the “isms” were pragmatically directed toward certain ends, nihilism is completely without any end or purpose. Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, the truth that ultimately Nothingness pre¬ vails and the world is meaningless. We shall disregard for the time being the question whether even the ability to state such a “truth” does not in itself imply a meaning and thus whether nihilism is not caught in a self-contradiction. In any case, nobody can do any business with such a “truth,” least of all any political business, particularly since politics seems to require certain productive illusions. Hence nihilism also tends to be an esoteric, secret attitude. Outward appear¬ ances are maintained; a man may say, “Religion must be up¬ held for the sake of the people,” while he himself looks back, wistful or blas£, to the vanished mythology of the happier days of childhood. Or a man may say, “The people’s belief in democracy must be maintained,” while he himself has only contempt for humanity and considers parliaments to be ac¬ cumulations of stupidity, but, of course, a stupidity that can be manipulated. The nihilistic doctor—one could go through all the professions—also has his esoteric secret: he makes people well but has no idea why he does so. He may perhaps know the 27

28

NIHILISM

reason, but he despises it, because ultimately it is no good anyhow. At the sickbed he practices a kind of therapeutic hypocrisy. He says nothing about the nihilistic hopelessness of the world to which he is restoring the sick person. He keeps quiet in order not to “cripple the patient's will to live.” He talks about restoring his interest and joy in his work, though he himself is convinced that all work is ultimately meaningless, something “for the birds.” He tells the patient that he must get better for the sake of his family, though it would be more consistent with his own attitude to reproach him for having produced a family at all and thus sacrificed other lives to the Moloch of Nothingness. Erich Kastner, like many others, has betrayed the secret with painful frankness in his Lyrische Hausapotheke: We toil and love and live and eat And yet can never tell The purpose of it all.*

And yet, no matter how cynical the nihilist may be, he still has a kind of negative “will to truth” and for himself at least he does not shut his eyes to the terrible Nothingness that yawns behind this realm of ends and aims. The second difference that separates nihilism from all other “isms” consists in the fact that it is not a program but a value judgment. Communism, fascism, aestheticism all have a well-defined conception of life, that is to say, of a life that should be com¬ pletely submitted to the dictatorship of an entity which has broken away from the context of creation and made into an absolute. An “ism” always expresses the will to do something. Nihilism, however, always expresses the feeling that one is caught in something. • Man schuftet, liebt und lebt und frisst und kann sich nicht erklaren, wozu das alles notig ist. (Trans.)

NIHILISM—THE LONELY “iSM”

29

The “ism” always proposes to be a physician; it always has at hand a program to cure and reconstruct the world. Nihilism, however, recognizes that one is a patient, that one has been infected by a consumptive bacillus. The “isms” look upon man as the subject, that is, the creator and achiever of a program; they think of man as the Demiurge, whom they place at the center of glowing escha¬ tologies. Nihilism, on the other hand, sees man as an object. He cannot escape the creeping process of self-disintegration, which is all too euphemistically called the history of the human mind, the process which one day will expose the sounding brass of the philosophies and the tinkling cymbals of poetry and religion and with a tragic inevitability bring to light the fact that the whole history of the human mind is nothing but a journey through a field of corpses, that it consists only of graves garlanded with ideologies, but that beneath this camou¬ flage is nothing but dung and dead bones, and that therefore we are gazing at nothing but Nothingness. Therefore we declare that nihilism is not a program but rather a value judgment. It is the last of all conceivable value judgments—at least in any logical series—and to that extent a judgment of death. Nihilism has no other will or purpose; it is content to draw a line and call it quits.

Nihilism Overt and Disguised

WE MUST, OF COURSE, PROCEED TO DISTINGUISH between two different value judgments discernible within nihilism. The first value judgment consists in the very fact that some¬ one should make the assertion and utter it in the form of a confession of faith: “Everything is meaningless. The world is being swept along by a storm which nobody controls, simply because there is nobody who could control it." ‘ Mad, un¬ reasoning chance" and “cold, iron Necessity (Jean Paul) : these and nothing else are the anarchic elements of the world’s foundations. In so far as one may use the example of a man of antiquity at all, Job appears to have dwelt in a forecourt of this void of meaninglessness, at least for a certain time. Edwin Erich Dwinger in the title of his book And God Is Silent * like numerous others of his brethren in catastrophe in our century, also dwells in the central depths of this emptiness. And this is precisely the point where it becomes clear that nihilism is a symptom of disease. It is resignation caused by psychic and somatic exhaustion. Thus it is also a state of paralysis. The extent to which it is recognized to be such is evident in the propaganda that nations are accustomed to employ in * Und Gott schweigt. (Trans.) 30

NIHILISM-OVERT AND DISGUISED

31

times of war. Statesmen and their professional propaganda aides usually concentrate the thrust of their psychological at¬ tempts to influence people strictly upon one single point: they try to prove, persuade, and keep people conscious of the “fact” that the war that is going on has a definite purpose and meaning, that it must be waged for the sake of justice or for the sake of some wide-ranging political and social plans, and so on. They know very well that if the impression of meaning¬ lessness should ever prevail all their efforts would be paralyzed —indeed, killed before they were born. Nobody will sacrifice life and property willingly when the sacrifice is meaningless and when he is not stirred by the tragic urgency of higher ends which will reward him for all his sacrifice. “Meaning” is the most stirring of all spiritual impulses, just as “meaninglessness” is an absolutely effectual bacillus for producing paralysis. Of course, historical feats can also be accomplished with people whose wills have been paralyzed, provided that they are used as sheep to be led to the slaughter and they have been driven to that point beyond fear and hope where they blindly—and thus “hopelessly”—allow anything to be done to them that one may wish to do to them. This is the activity of the paralyzed— the kind of activity that the totalitarian system always strives to breed in the form of its hordes of slaves. The paralysis that spread through broad areas after the German catastrophe of 1945, for example, had its origin only in small part in biological exhaustion. It may well have been due far more to the fact that a whole world-view that gave meaning to life suddenly collapsed, that all national life seemed hopelessly leached out, and that when there seemed to be no more future then meaninglessness became an overwhelm¬ ing force. In such moments time ceases to be an extension directed toward a goal; it becomes a sum of discontinuous moments which must be endured here and now. One lives from hand to mouth. And this is no longer life at all; at best it is mere vege-

32

NIHILISM

tating. It is of the very essence of human life to ask the ques¬ tions Why? and Whither? Only the animal is imprisoned in the present moment. We may well call this kind of nihilism, which thus openly confesses the meaninglessness and emptiness of the world, “confessory nihilism.” The second value judgment which appears within nihilism and must be sharply distinguished from the first occurs when one says of another person, “He is a nihilist,” or when one says of a movement, “It is nihilistic,” as Hermann Rauschning says, for example, in his well-known book on National So¬ cialism when he calls it a “revolution of nihilism.” One may make such a value judgment upon a person or a movement even when they do not call themselves nihilistic. For example. National Socialism quite emphatically did not think of itself as a revolution of nihilism. On the contrary, it affirmed certain absolutes. For instance, it made the people (Volk) the absolutely normative court of appeal for all ethics (“What is good for my people is good”) and declared the biological bases of history to be the one constant, abiding, and absolute quantity. It was therefore in complete accord with the basic principle of all “isms” in that it made an absolute of certain aspects of creation. If, then, we declare with regard to such a movement that it is nihilistic, we are saying not only that what it calls an absolute is a pseudo-absolute, a pragmatic composition, but also that the responsible representatives of the movement are quite aware that this is what it is—without, however, betraying the secret. In this case we speak of a camouflaged or “ciphered nihilism.” If we may use recent German history as an illustration, this means that the really dedicated National Socialists knew very well that “people and race” are not the ultimate forces of reality. Nor did they really believe in the idea of personality which is connected with and emphasized in the Fuhrerprinciple. For all mass leaders are very definitely cynics and

NIHILISM-OVERT AND DISGUISED

33

despisers of humanity, since the mass is after all only a con¬ glomeration of disconnected and depersonalized individuals. This contempt for humanity expresses itself in the knowl¬ edge that one can no longer appeal to a man's personal center, his “reason" and “conscience," but that one must control his instincts or, in physiological terms, control his nerves and play upon them. But this is contempt for humanity par ex¬ cellence. In such a view man is no longer a person or even a mind, but only an automaton: certain elementary rhetorical sounds, certain gestures, and finally the charged magic of cer¬ tain catchwords constitute the standardized coins which need only be dropped into the slot of the sense organs in order to elicit the desired reactions. But this attitude toward the masses is precisely the thing which must not be revealed. It must remain an esoteric secret. For the masses always want to be considered and treated as an accumulation of personalities and holders of convictions. Just as the worst insult in a lunatic asylum is for one idiot to say to another, “You’re crazy," so in the era of the masses there is no worse affront I can inflict upon an electrified bundle of nerves than to say to him, “You are a mass man.” Woe to the politician—even in the most totalitarian of states—who would dare to say: “You are nothing but a nerve-strung piano. Now look at how I play upon you; watch me put on the pedal pres¬ sure and all the rest of the chicanery and see how you squawk the desired tones. Watch me make this Tempelhof field wave like a field of corn in the wind.” No, the masses want to be addressed in terms of conviction or sham conviction; they do not want to be taken as a collec¬ tive. Hitler and his instructor in propaganda, Le Bon, knew this. The cynicism of the genuine mass leader can therefore go so far as to inveigh against the masses in the presence of the masses themselves. Then the masses never feel affronted. They do not have the vaguest notion that they are yelling against themselves when they react with applause. So once more, these men themselves do not believe in the

34

NIHILISM

ideas which they disguise as convictions in order to give them the value of spiritual suggestion. But they have a definite po¬ litical program which can be carried out only if the masses are fanaticized—meaning that they fall victim to a fixed idea and through it become monomaniacal. This kind of monomaniacal obsession possesses a tremendously sweeping historical striking power, and a fanaticized mass allows itself to be utilized, so to speak, as one conglobated charge. But how does one bring about this fanaticism? Or, to change the form of the question, how can one infiltrate the masses with fixed ideas? Obviously, only by sanctifying certain ideas that are in the air—in a time of nationalism they would properly be nationalistic ideas, in a time of social regrouping they would be equally expedient ideals of social order—and then making them the basis of ultimate religion-like commit¬ ments. For, from the psychological point of view, the religious is the commitment to the power that sustains our existence and therefore the commitment from which weal or woe, con¬ tinuance or chaos, is expected. If this sanctification of ideas succeeds, then on the subjective side the condition of fanatical possession which is utilized politically has also been produced. For one is possessed when it is a question of the Ultimate. Upon this diagnosis of the political point of view we base our judgment that this kind of world-view bears the brand of nihilism. And there are two reasons why we say this. First, these fixed ideas rest upon lies of expedience. The in¬ ventors of the lies do not believe in them; they have been invented as productive illusions by means of which to realize a definite purpose. In fact, therefore, there is nothing behind them but Nothingness. The esoteric circle of those who are “in the know” consists of nihilists. The launching of ideals and fixed ideas is performed with the aid of a propaganda machine which is controlled by nihilistic managers. One must, of course, immediately add that this kind of cynical management need not be there at the beginning and

NIHILISM-OVERT AND DISGUISED

35

that it may also evolve from quite genuine beliefs. Perhaps we may say that the pragmatism of management and manipu¬ lation is very often a genuine conviction which has passed over into decay. And the process that leads to this decay comes about as follows. To begin with, one can say without fear of contradiction that religious faith (Christianity, for example) quite apart from everything else also possesses a tradition-building, organizing power. The fact that faith actually possesses this power may be demonstrated by pointing to its opposite: “without God, everything is lawful.” (Dostoievski). Then chaos rules. Jakob Burckhardt once said of Napoleon (since he thought of him as the prototype of the untrammeled man) : “He was in¬ security personified”; thus he was a ferment of rebellion and breakdown. Exactly the same statement can be made with respect to the tradition-building and organizing power of an ethos: to be honorable is not only normal and to that extent good, but to be honorable is also the most enduring thing. Religion and ethos thus serve purposes, but only inci¬ dentally, in the form of by-products. For faith the main thing is peace with God and for ethos it is conformity to the norms. Now one may become fascinated by these purposes—and thus by what is actually incidental—and this quite surrepti¬ tiously may bring about a total reversal of values, though the external vocabulary remains the same. In other words, whereas at first religion and the external ordering of the world stand in a relationship in which religion is the chief thing and worldly order a by-product, this relationship is now changed under¬ hand into a relationship of means and end. This is quite evident in the history of ethics. There have been periods in which ethics did not revolve around absolute values but was merely a matter of social contracts. In Hobbes’ ethics, for example, one wolf-man contracts with another not to gobble him up because this would be equally painful and un-

36

NIHILISM

pleasant to both. The product of this compact is ethics and its institutional precipitate is the state. Ethics thus becomes simply an agreed-upon order, a set of traffic rules (of the kind to be found in all contract theories). We find a parallel phenomenon in the history of modem Christianity. The talk we hear about “Christian culture" and “the Christian West," which must be listened to with respect but also regarded as suspect, frequently carries the implication that Christianity is to be understood as an intellectual and moral ideology of culture and that it is to be applied more to the relationship of men to each other than to the relationship of men to God. Sometimes even theologians do no better when they derive their ethical norms from a philosophical analysis of the con¬ science or a system of values and then think of Christ merely as a great personality from whom one derives the power to measure up to the norms which have been thus discovered. This is not really a religious “foundation" at all, but rather a kind of utility building or administration building, erected on other foundations, which is necessary in order to direct and control life and keep it in order. The viciousness of this nihilistic inversion consists in the fact that it takes place behind an unchanging facade, and that so “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" and appears, not in attack upon the house of God, but within the house of God itself. Here again we are dealing with camouflaged nihilism, not with “confessory” nihilism. One must therefore not allow one¬ self to be deceived by the vocabulary. When we make a judg¬ ment that this or that is nihilism it is always the result of a process of decipherment. One can never, or almost never, de¬ tect it at first sight. Permit me to point to an unusually pregnant model of this development in which all the significant features can be seen. After the collapse in 1945 the Evangelical Church in Ger-

NIHILISM-OVERT AND DISGUISED

37

many, in the well-known document called the “Stuttgart Con¬ fession of Guilt," confessed the culpability of the church and the German people for all the terrible things that had hap¬ pened among our people and had been committed by our people. The tone of the document was to this effect: We have believed too little, confessed too little, loved too little; other¬ wise all this could not have happened. This confession was undoubtedly honest in intention, and at the time it actually had the effect of creating a tremendous sense of relief. It re-established the world-wide ecumenical fellowship of the church. The accusations of the other side ceased, and under the influence of this confession people began to beat their own breasts. What happened was the incompre¬ hensible miracle that in the midst of a feuding and self-accusing world something like a fellowship of sinners dependent upon forgiveness came into being. But no sooner was this event viewed from the outside and divorced from the situation in which it was a personal concern than it took on the character of something that was done for a political purpose or, even more harshly, a psychological trick. The only possible chance of escaping the hatred and the accu¬ sations of the rest of the world and even becoming the object of its material assistance seemed to lie not in denying the in¬ dictment of one’s former enemies but rather in intercepting it, so to speak, deep in its own territory, in acknowledging it and throwing oneself upon the angrily uplifted horn of the accusation. Then one discovered with amazement that one’s own con¬ fession of guilt stopped the mouths of the accusers—indeed, not infrequently even turned them into defenders. Conse¬ quently, in a number of humiliating cases, that which orig¬ inally had been only a by-product of the confession of guilt— namely, that the other person began to beat his own breast and throw off all his Pharisaism—became the chief thing and people sought, consciously or unconsciously, to regain the lost

38

NIHILISM

fellowship, and sometimes material gain also, by resorting to confessions of guilt. They turned the mea culpa into a trick. This transition from truth to expediency, from confession to strategy, from God to the idol is often almost imperceptible and not infrequently it occurs behind the same facade. Faith and nihilism can be, as it were, identical twins. In any case, one must divest oneself of the notion that they are sworn enemies from different families. Second, the diagnosis that nihilism exists in a particular situation applies by no means only to the manager; it is char¬ acteristic also of the suggestible masses themselves. For it must be admitted that such infiltration with a synthetic religious concoction is possible only when genuine religious ties have al¬ ready been lost and a vacuum exists into which this stuff can flow. This is the reason totalitarian ideologies, the foremost representatives of these synthetic concoctions, always find their most receptive customers among decadent, leached-out, and ex¬ hausted cultures in which the traditional values—especially the religious values—have become incredible and unacceptable and thus the necessary vacuum is furnished. What we generally characterize as the masses’ lack of discrimination is really loss of ability to discern what is merely pragmatic and artificial. A person who no longer has any contact with real stones naturally has no criteria by which to recognize synthetic stones. This is why it is really a hopeful sign when youth becomes skeptical and asks the doubting questions of which we spoke above, “Does the man himself believe what he is saying?” and “What kind of influence is being put upon me?” It may seem strange that a theologian, of all people, should make this statement, when, after all, he ought by reason of his calling to cherish the desire that people should not be skeptics but rather believers. But I say it precisely because I am a theologian; for this skep¬ ticism is a sign that our young people have a nose for what is spurious and that there is still some substance left by which they can discriminate and which they are not willing to throw away for some charlatan.

NIHILISM-OVERT AND DISGUISED

39

Among the profounder spirits of our time who discern nihilistic tendencies in the undercurrents of our age there are also those who do not by any means consider it depreciative to say that a point of view is nihilistic. On the contrary, they tell us that the presentment of Nothingness need not be paralyzing at all and need not drive a person to resignation, but that it can be a stimulus to the greatest kind of constructive accomplishment. It is in this sense that Gottfried Benn, the poet, once said, “All the great spirits of the white peoples have sensed that they had but this one task, to cover up their nihilism creatively.” In this exceedingly significant quotation we have a full acceptance of the basic reality of nihilism—and Gottfried Benn is, after all, one of the most exciting figures in the debate with nihilism. Moreover, it declares that the great philosophical, artistic, and political accomplishments have had the quality of “covering up” something; one might also say, the quality of veiling, for no man can endure the confrontation with pure Nothingness and therefore he seals it off with an insulating layer. But the “cover-up,” in Gottfried Benn’s opinion, is a factor that should be ranked as a creative achievement. Even though its motivation may be dread, anxiety, or horror vacui—• Christian Morgenstern in similar vein once said that a piece of sandwich paper achieves a mind, takes on spirit, because of fear*—what comes out of it is nevertheless imposing. In a cer¬ tain sense there is nothing more productive than Nothingness, or rather, than confrontation with Nothingness. We shall have occasion later to point out that Nothingness (das Nichts) generates dread (Angst), and anxiety in turn has a peculiar affinity to intellectual and artistic accomplishments. In existential philosophy too, especially in Heidegger and Sartre, there is a similar recognition of the productive signifi¬ cance of Nothingness. I shall never find my way out of “im¬ personal, anonymous being” (Verfallenheit an das Man) an “unauthentic being” (Uneigentlichkeit) and be free to exist * See p. 128 for Morgenstern’s poem Das Butterbrotpapier. (Trans.)

40

NIHILISM

unless I have first seen through the nothingness of my previous false bonds and thus been confronted with Nothingness in a way that excites anxiety. However, we return to our main line of thought. We said that one could call another person (or a movement or even a whole epoch) nihilistic even if he thinks of himself as being an advocate of an absolute. This is why we have spoken of masked or ciphered nihilism. Then the statement “This is nihilism” is like a physician’s diagnosis which is not in accord with the patient’s own subjective opinion and against which therefore the patient rebels. The physician says, “You have become infected,” and all the patient can say, with sur¬ prise, is, “I feel stimulated.” At any rate, this diagnosis may be challenged—quite unlike the first instance, confessory nihilism, in which, so to speak, the patient himself declares and confesses that all his values have been shattered and he is gazing into the yawning abyss of Nothingness. Hence, if we are going to make the diagnosis more convinc¬ ing, we shall have to substantiate it in more detail. And since we are dealing with a disease which affects the total man, as we deepen our diagnosis we shall be obliged quite properly to listen for a moment to the medical profession.

IV Nihilism as a Psychiatric Phenomenon

WE SHALL ATTEMPT TO EMPLOY A SPECIFIC CLINIcal case history as a model in which it is possible to recognize specific phenomena that are important for our particular in¬ vestigation. We owe this model, as well as certain outlines of its interpretation, to the psychiatrist Joachim Bodamer. A thirty-eight-year-old woman is admitted after four un¬ successful suicide attempts. The diagnosis is depression or melancholia. The mental illness was preceded by the death of the patient's only child, for which the patient herself was to blame. Through her carelessness the one-year-old child had gotten hold of a bottle of hydrochloric acid, drunk it, and in a short time died in misery before her eyes. Since then the woman has been changed, dejected, hopeless, depressive with this tendency to suicide, which has now made it neces¬ sary to intern her behind die walls of a security ward. You will think that, after all, there is nothing more natural than this woman with her distress over a lost child. From the point of view of normal psychology, all this is quite under¬ standable and there is nothing else back of it. But the natural aspect is deceiving, as it frequently is. The very fact that the accident happened two years ago and there has obviously been no sign of the natural process of overcoming the pain and returning to life and its responsi¬ bilities is in itself not quite comprehensible. A thorough exploration of the patient disclosed a com41

42

NIHILISM

pletely different situation. She said nothing whatsoever about being distressed by the loss of her child, not a word about guilt feelings, self-accusations, genuine despair, grief, or anything else which would be the natural reaction of a person in such a case. On the contrary, she was troubled in a vague way by the fact that she had had none of these human reactions. The fact was that, after the reflex-like shock of the first seconds had disappeared, she felt no grief when the child died. Instead of grief and guilt, she felt nothing but emptiness within her and all her efforts to fill up this void were futile. “My misery is that everything inside of me was dumb, and when I clasped the dead child to my breast, I knew very well that I was only putting on a show of despair, and perhaps I pretended to despair in order to bring on real despair, and then also because people expected me to react this way.” Her suicide attempts were not understandable acts of des¬ pair; they no longer had any direct relationship at all to the loss of the child, but were committed in reaction to the dread of this bottomless emptiness which was spreading farther and farther and dissolving all her human relation¬ ships. In order to escape from her personal Nothingness she attempted through suicide to leap into eternal Nothingness and, since she was already partially obliterated, destroy her¬ self totally. In order to dispose of the diagnosis at once, we may say that this was not a depressive illness, but rather the first stage of a schizophrenia, and thus the mental illness par ex¬ cellence. The illness had already set in secretly and imper¬ ceptibly. The accident with the child was only the flash of lightning that illuminated a mind which had already be¬ come a dark and desolate landscape, a mind whose structural elements were now beginning progressively to fall into decay. The experience had merely set in motion the process of the illness.

Schizophrenia is characterized by the fact that it sets in destructively at the ego-center itself, that it breaks down “self-

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

43

activity, self-feeling, and self-consciousness” and leaves behind a vacuum. “I feel myself to be nameless, impersonal; my eyes stare like the gaze of a dead person; my mind is vague and general, like Nothingness or the Absolute. I am floating; I am as if I did not exist.” The patients say: “I am only a machine, an automaton. It is not / who feels, speaks, eats, not I who sleeps. I don't even exist any more. I am not. I am dead. . . .” One patient said that she was not living, that she could not move, that she had no understanding and no feelings. Nor had she ever existed, people only believed that she existed. Another patient de¬ clared, “The worst is that I am not. I am so far gone in noth¬ ingness that I cannot wash myself and cannot drink.” She was not Nothing, but she did not exist. She was only acting as if she were Nothing. Everything she did she was not doing out of an “I-am.”2 This human “I” (Ich, self, ego) which in schizophrenia makes itself felt in its absence cannot be defined as such, even with metaphysical terms. The “I,” for example, which in Descartes’s view is contained within the act of thinking itself and to that extent constitutes an ultimate, indubitable, given datum, cannot be described in this givenness in which it exists. It is itself the non-objective background of that which thinks and doubts, and in both cannot itself be doubted. The same non-objectivity is present in Kant: The self, as subject, forms the objective world with the help of its categorical structure. But because the self reflects upon itself epistemologically and discovers this categorical structure—as Kant himself does in the Critique of Pure Reason—the structure is again involved cognitively and reflectively in the process and is therefore in¬ herent in the act of thinking. There is not a single moment in which the self is able to see itself apart from this structure and thus discover itself as it exists “in itself” (an sich). It remains, so to speak, immured in a background which cannot be illu¬ minated. It cannot itself be defined because it is always the

44

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one that is doing the defining and is therefore in action (in actu), which is to say that it never appears as the agent in itself (Agens an sich). As a matter of fact it may be possible that schizophrenia, which is loss of selfhood, a dwindling of the “my-world” (MeinWelt), can give us certain indirect information about the self, even though only by means of a kind of via negationis, by means of a kind of negative anthropology. In this sense schizo¬ phrenia shows us that the “I” is a center or delivery point for all the actions of the individual, which “assembles them struc¬ turally and puts upon them the stamp of being mine’'* (Bodamer). Philosophically, in Kant’s language this would mean that the “I” is the bearer of transcendental apperception. The loss of selfhood expresses itself first as a feeling of emptiness, as what was described above as the burnt-out land¬ scape of the mind. In fact, however, the “I” is never empty, dumb, and passive; it is constantly emerging from itself in incessant activity: one walks and talks, dresses and undresses, meets other persons or at least one’s own four walls. Even the patient cannot go on denying this agent-character of the “I" but must proceed to interpret it: because the impression made by this activity relates itself to the impression of loss of self¬ hood, there arises the feeling that all this is being done and experienced by someone else. Because the concept of “own¬ ness has disappeared, all reception and action is experienced as something “alien.” Thoughts are no longer felt as being thought by oneself, but are “inspired” or dictated from the outside. One actually hears them as other voices, as “auditions.” As an actor, one is simply the transit point and function of an alien activity. But this alienation must itself be subjected to further, more searching interpretation and its source must be defined. We know that in more advanced stages of the illness the feeling of alienation is interpreted by the patient as being the presence • Meinhaftigkeit, “my-ness.”

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

45

and activity of sinister demonic powers which have taken pos¬ session of the empty field of self and assumed control of it against the will of the real—or better, the former—owner. This is the source of the schizophrenic persecution mania, which stubbornly defies all rational and empirical refutation and thus makes the disturbed self a battlefield in a further sense: the rational part of the self is split off from the manic sector and finds itself in constant conflict with it, even though the struggle always results, with an absolute certainty, in the victory of the manic sector. “The machine of formal intelli¬ gence goes futilely clattering on as if the sick person were still living wholly and vitally in all his relationships to a self which is nevertheless no longer there at all” (Bodamer). Schizophrenia is therefore in a very precise sense a “loss of the center.” Hans Sedlmayer, in his widely known book,* has characterized the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with this catchword and, despite the many biases of his inter¬ pretation, one must admit that he has touched the nervus rerum. The fact is that the case of schizophrenia which has been described above contains some essential characteristics of the structure of modern man, not merely as an individual but above all as representative of the cultural and political mani¬ festations of life in our times. Increasingly, certain constitu¬ tional characteristics of the human self are disappearing, chiefly his religious ties, or more precisely, his relationship to God. Instead of thinking of himself as the image of God, modern man increasingly conceives of himself as the image and repre¬ sentation of subaltern this-worldly powers, for example, eco¬ nomic or biological forces. Whereas God made him to be an original, a unique individual, and whereas God was his Lord and his God, the this-worldly gods come into his existence as alien powers that turn him into a thing which is driven and determined. Then too we note the vanishing of the meta* Verlust der Mitte, Salzburg, 1948. (Trans.)

46

NIHILISM

physical sense of guilt and with it the loss of another essential, constitutive mark of the self as a person. The normative char¬ acter of good and evil breaks down and becomes a pragmatic, utilitarian rule, or—when there is still some effort made to hold on to it—it is regarded as a sign of decadence in Nietzsche’s sense. And when the God relationship disappears it is more than ever impossible to understand that evil is sin, that it is separation from God. The immediate I-Thou relation in the form of love also breaks down and becomes a calculating rational relationship or an affect of the nerves in the sense of a purely psycho¬ physical and purely egoistic Eros, or a “retreat into anony¬ mity" (Verfaliensein an das Man). Finally, the possibility of any original conviction and de¬ cision also disappears. One has nothing but collective opinions and one lives under the dictatorship of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times in all the forms in which it expresses itself, rang¬ ing from the prevailing ideology to the prevailing fashion. And here again schizophrenia presents us with a powerfully sym¬ bolic model; for here again we realize how the vacuum in the self is being controlled and manipulated by alien powers, how one must necessarily lose the feeling of being a self and simply think of oneself as an object, an effect, a product. This understanding of the self, this evaluation of the self— this is nihilism, though, of course, we must remember the dis¬ tinction we have made between “confessory" and “ciphered" nihilism. We shall not be able to expect—and in fact it does not occur—that people will simply confess or openly declare nihilism. Frequently enough it will be covered up with the kind of creative impulses and accomplishments which the con¬ frontation with Nothingness tends to produce. At this point we shall let Bodamer speak again, since his in¬ terpretation, made from the psychiatric point of view, is largely in accord with ours. “Nihilism"—in our terminology we should have to say “confessory" nihilism—“is only one of the many reaction-formations which modern man has devel-

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

47

oped with increasing intensity and almost breathless obsession to combat his obscurely felt, unadmitted loss of self and loss of feeling. In exactly the same way that in a schizophrenic there grows out of his altogether similar basic disturbance a superstructure of secondary symptoms which are to be regarded as reactions to this basic disorder,” so our collective schizo¬ phrenia likewise generates these overlying structures. Follow¬ ing this line, it is more than legitimate “to label the great social religions of the century, fascism and communism, as genuine mental diseases of the Zeitgeist. The schizophrenic individual delusion and the no less schizophrenic mass delusion have the same characteristic forms: immovable certainty [we called it fanaticism], pseudo-rational argumentation, hatred and dis¬ trust of the seemingly hostile environment, violation and distortion of the real world and a sham faith in itself. . . .” This interpretation then quite rightly leads us to ask the following question. In the case referred to, the patient is driven toward suicide in order to exchange her emptiness for the nothingness of death, or better expressed, in order to con¬ firm the Nothingness evoked by the illness through an act of physical annihilation and turn the passive state of emptiness into one final act of her own by this active intervention. Could it not be that this law, which is so obviously demonstrated in individual schizophrenia, also accords, on the level of super¬ individual forces, with the fact of the two World Wars? Are these anything but collective suicide attempts, expressions of a deep-seated obsession with self-destruction? Is it merely speculation in the realm of the philosophy of history, merely rash toying with the concept of “the strategy of the Idea,”* to venture the interpretation that the discovery of the atom bomb * List der Idee—Hegel’s phrase, used in his philosophy of history to describe the way in which the World Spirit (the Idea) utilizes great his¬ torical individuals (e.g., Napoleon) for its own purposes. These masters of history imagine they are pursuing their own ends, but actually are only numbers in the master plan of the World Spirit; they are pawns in “the strategy of the Idea.” (Trans.)

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is not to be regarded simply as the end-result of the operation of technological development? May we not suggest that it was not accidental that it occurred at the very moment when empty modern mankind was seeking this kind of physical con¬ firmation of its feeling that it had come to the end of its tether, the very moment when Nothingness was thrusting it toward annihilation? It would not be the first case in history of such underlying, hidden synchronisms. Leibnitz's doctrine of “pre-established harmony” would find its corroboration in a gruesomely accurate negative way. Over against the above psychiatric interpretation we must now introduce a number of qualifications. The following question is put to me chiefly by the medical profession: This analysis of our era by means of the idea of schizophrenia and “loss of the center” may be very plausible; but can it be the last word? Must we not point out that there are limits to this parallel between mental disease and the dis¬ ease of a whole era? If this parallelism had no limits, what has been said would practically amount to a death sentence upon our whole civilization and would mean that Spengler’s thesis of “the decline of the West” would be not only proved on the basis of the morphology of cultures, as Spengler proved it, but actually equated with the inevitability of the schizo¬ phrenic process of disease and decline. I answer as follows: Naturally, one must realize that there are limits to such a parallel, and the very subtitle of this book, which also includes the overcoming of nihilism, should indicate that we do not consider nihilism to be, as it were, an automatic disease process that simply happens to a person and which he must simply endure as a victim—as Spengler’s soldier of Pompeii endures the power of nature as the lava and ashes pour down upon him. Nihilism is no more an event of nature than any other specifically “human” phenomenon. There are no really serious phenomena in life which merely happen to a person, which are merely executed upon him; we ourselves are

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

49

always participants and executors. We can never simply say: Nihilism “has” us; but only: We “are” nihilists. That this is so can easily be made clear when one considers the inner vacuum that characterizes the mass men, who are so hopelessly susceptible to the ideologies that flow into them, or are infiltrated into them, that they become the raw material of modern dictators. The physical metaphor must not mislead us into thinking of this “inflow” as a value-free process of natural law which one can observe as a spectator in oneself and others, in the same way that a man may observe a pustule on his skin, for which he never asked, for which he has no responsibility, and which he cannot get rid of by an act of will. Later on we shall have to deal with Camus, who in his well-known novel The Plague attempts to make war, violence, and other ways of committing human injustice value-free and natural by throw¬ ing them into the strictest kind of analogy with the biological effect of the plague bacillus. The fact is rather that one must understand this vacuum, one’s own emptiness, as guilt, if you please, as metaphysical guilt. By metaphysical guilt I mean guilt which lies not in the realm of our acts but in the source of our being. In the realm of our acts we are dealing with morality; in the realm of our being, however, we are dealing with that form of becoming guilty which Christianity calls original sin. The term “original sin” is intended to express the super-personal char¬ acter of guilt; it says that what we are now is not what we re¬ ceived from the hands of God. In this sense the nihilist is guilty: he has squandered and lost something that he received. And everything that is related to this, the anxiety, the cover¬ ing up of nothingness with false gods, the suffocating loneliness (and much else!), is therefore not to be sought merely upon the psychological level where it has the character of a mere sequela, concomitant, or overlay. It is rather a judgment. We are thinking far too superficially—or better, too moral-

50

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istically—if we think that guilt is incurred only when we do something as a matter of free choice and decision and, on the other hand, all too quickly dismiss as fate everything that subjects us to the natural operation of a law. No; it is of the very nature of metaphysical guilt that it seizes hold upon us with what seems to be a fateful necessity, but that it is never¬ theless the result of our act, our deed. It is not only the Bible that is aware of this; in a different way Greek tragedy knows it too. In the Oresteia the chorus will not allow the queen Clytaemnestra to exonerate herself of the murder of Agamemnon by shoving it off into the autonomous realm of “super-per¬ sonal” guilt and thus washing herself clean of “personal” guilt. She tries to excuse herself by saying that it was “that cursed spirit, whose ghostly tread haunted the house of Pleisthenes”—in other words, something “super-personal”— who set his fatal, cursed law in motion and compelled the bloody act. But “No,” the chorus cries: Go to: that thou art innocent of this blood What witness will avouch? Though it may be. That Old Destroyer wove with thee the mesh.

The dialogue that is here employed means something like this when we interpret it: Clytaemnestra is saying: I am only a passive instrument in the hands of the gods and the powers of fate. The chorus then counters with this argument: The opposite is just as true! The misdeed is yours. You are the subject! And the sins of the fathers, which hang like a mortgage upon your existence and are always “ahead” of you, serve only to release the act that you yourself perform. They only provide the plane of devel¬ opment, the chance, the spiritual and psychic climate for the heinous impulses that spring from Clytaemnestra’s corrupted character. In his De servo arbitrio (“The Bondage of the

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

51

Will"), Luther poses the question of responsibility in a similar way. Here too the responsibility of man appears to be in danger of being compromised by this appeal to super-personal forces, for Luther thinks of man as a battlefield between God and Satan. Furthermore, God’s purposes are being carried out even in that which is evil. Evil is never only pure opposition to God. If it were, then one really would find it possible to evade the sovereignty of God. But this would be utterly incompatible with God’s omnipotence. No; “God carves the rotten wood and rides the lame horse’’; he is always actuosus and he is at work even in Pharaoh’s hardened heart. But then, since man is subject to higher cogencies, his re¬ sponsibility immediately becomes a problem. Is not freedom a necessary part of responsibility? How can I be responsible for an act which I perform under the compulsion of a law that enslaves me, an act that I commit in the captivity of an unfree will? Luther answered that by distinguishing between two different kinds of compulsion: first, external force (coactio), which pushes a man from behind against his will, as a police¬ man shoves a drunkard ahead of him; and second, inner neces¬ sity (necessitas), which determines a man in accordance with the constraints of his nature, with what he is, with the direc¬ tion of his will and accordingly compels him to accept re¬ sponsibility for his acts and for himself as he is—in other words, to say, “It is I who am what I am and I who do what I am doing.” This kind of necessity is identical with the freedom to be “myself.” Such identification, by the way, is by no means a special theological privilege. One need only be reminded of Goethe’s idea of entelechy to rediscover it on a quite different level: the dictum “Become what you are” is an appeal to the freedom we have to take hold of ourselves. But this freedom is only the reverse side of that dark necessity in accord with which one must nevertheless become what one is, in accord with which there is nothing left, so to speak, except to be oneself. Not only

52

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does this ancient Orphic dictum remind one of the dialectic of freedom and necessity; the words of Mephistopheles say the same thing: Set wigs of million curls upon thy head, to raise thee; Wear shoes an ell in height—the truth betrays thee. And thou remainest—what thou art. In any case, freedom is not the opposite of necessity, but rather a definite kind of necessity itself. Freedom is being my¬ self, or more precisely, the way in which I understand and ful¬ fill myself. And to that extent, necessity and responsibility are not simply mutually exclusive antitheses. Thus we can by no means simply equate the nihilistic schizophrenia of our culture with schizophrenia in the psychi¬ atric sense. For the latter is a disease that takes hold of us quite impersonally and in which we are simply objects. This, after all, is what basically distinguishes it from other psycho¬ pathic illnesses—the neuroses, for example; the therapeutic treatments of neuroses consists, characteristically, in an appeal to the patient to “co-operate,” to deal with his illness respon¬ sibly. The schizophrenic cannot co-operate, and here the paral¬ lelism reaches its limit. With respect to man’s attitude toward himself as the subject and his responsibility, our cultural situ¬ ation is more like the clinical picture of the psychopath than of the schizophrenic. There is still another limitation upon the parallel. Schizo¬ phrenia has somatic foundations, even though we still do not know too much about them. Here again it follows that some¬ thing happens to the “I” of the patient, simply because he does not have any power to control the somatic processes. This somatic basis of schizophrenia naturally drops out of the pic¬ ture when we are dealing with the super-personal schizophrenia of an entire culture. But psychiatry, too, recognizes not only an endogenous

NIHILISM AS A PSYCHIATRIC PHENOMENON

53

schizophrenia but also a kind of exogenous schizophrenia. In other words, there is also a kind of superinduced disease which bears schizophrenic features. It has even been established that some diseases which present an altogether different clinical picture—such as manic-depressive psychosis or paralysis—have for about thirty years been increasingly showing schizophrenic features and to such an extent that again and again wrong diagnoses are made, and sometimes only after a post-mortem does it turn out that this was not a case of schizophrenia but a clear case of paralysis. So pronounced are the schizophrenic characteristics in the clinical picture.3 Such schizophrenic “overlays"—if I may use such a term— manifestly emerge in a spiritual and psychic milieu which has been conditioned and saturated by the loss of selfhood, de¬ personalization, and their corresponding concomitants (anx¬ iety, loneliness, etc.). It is only this kind of schizophrenia that can have any relevance to the point we are making here. And “overlaid" or “induced" schizophrenia is obviously susceptible to therapy. For here is it a question of recognizing an intellec¬ tual process in which I play a very considerable part and to which I must say “I." I should actually wish to have the thoughts which are pre¬ sented in this book considered an exercise in self-knowledge. I am not much concerned about what may be called a “general description of the situation." Everything that comes up for discussion from that quarter—and naturally it comes up pro¬ fusely—including our later discussion of existence-philosophy, has no other purpose than to show that in this whole situation it is we ourselves who are being objectified. I should like to lend a hand toward overcoming nihilism, or, more precisely, not nihilism in itself but rather the actual nihilism of the individuals who hear and read these thoughts, if I may be permitted to speak in a personal and pointed way. The intent of these reflections and observations will be understood only if they are taken as they are meant: in other words, only if

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they are accepted as a constant and very personal appeal. The fact that this appeal does not operate with exclamation points and spiritual soft soap, but is rather clothed in sober, matterof-fact statements which demand some thinking, and that this involves a lot of literary and philosophical questioning, should not be allowed to conceal its pointedness. The author is quite willing to have the reader understand that the ultimate intent of these chapters is pastoral, a pastoral concern that starts with a definite intellectual assessment of the state of our times and of how it can be improved and employs the available intellec¬ tual means in order to make both understandable. The decisive point is not only that nihilism asserts the vacuum, the nihil, the nothing, but that the assertor himself is oppressed and afflicted by his own nothingness; in psychiatric terms, he is oppressed by the breakdown, the decay of his “selfworld,”* his loss of the center. And at this point we may antici¬ pate and say that there is an essential connection between the breakdown of the “objective world” and the breakdown of the “self-world.”4 * Ich-Zerfall.

The Breakdown of Selfhood and the Breakdown of the World THE BREAKDOWN PROCESS IS MOST EASILY OBSERVable in the objective world itself. Because nihilism looks upon the world as a kind of autarchy of this-world,* an autonomous, self-contained entity, and therefore divorced from its divine foundation, virtually only two possible interpretations of the foundation of the world remain (logically, each requires the other). One thinks of the world either as “immanent teleology” or as an accumulation of “accidents.” In the first case one sees it as being shot through with laws which originate within itself and which hold it in balance. Among these, for example, are the laws of nature. But among them are also the so-called laws of history, as described by Hegel in his doctrine of dialectical development or by Oswald Spengler in the law of the meta¬ morphosis of cultures. Then one must include among the laws of history those compulsions which are called the autonomies of the individual areas of life—especially when one subjects the whole content of history to the rule of a single one of these autonomies, as is done in Marxism. The autonomy of the economic permeates and governs every area of life and makes it merely a function of that autonomy. The economic develop¬ ment itself proceeds with the inflexibility of a law of nature; it gives to the total course of history its decisive caesuras or breaks which lead from one stage to another (primitive com* Autarkic des Diesseits. 55

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munism, the age of the class struggles, classless society) and seems to permit predictions of future developments which have all the certainty of calculations of solar eclipses. The man who lives in this “self-sufficient finitude”* there¬ fore sees himself surrounded by an iron law, by an ananke (“Necessity”) which in both Greek and Teutonic mythology is expressed in such a way that even the sovereignty of the gods is superseded by the impersonal inevitability of fate. Periods of twilight of the gods are always followed by periods of belief in fate. This is a mythic indication that men in a godless world suddenly and agonizingly find themselves left all alone, facing impersonal law. One immediately blunts the sharp edge of this situation of lonely abandonment to the law by proceeding to turn romantic and talk about struggling against fate; in other words, by act¬ ing as if fate, the powerful forces of cosmic law, were simply to be matched with the freedom of defiant, heroically active man, who pits himself against it. As we have said, this is a very late romanticism which crowns the terror with garlands and covers up the world, now become a grave, with a floral display of tragi-heroic illusions. In this world of decay and corruption masked with the fragrance of flowers it may be proper enough to utter Sartre’s phrase from The Flies, in which Orestes declares, “I am my freedom!” But this point we must substantiate more fully later when we discuss existentialism. Here we may confine ourselves to saying that late Teutonic man did not romanticize fate by appealing to freedom. Walter Baetke has correctly pointed out that the Germanic ethos did not develop really active, individualistic virtues with a stress upon freedom over against fate, but spoke rather of enduring fate. The attitude of the pagan Teuton is “not really that of the aggressor, but rather of one who would assert himself in a world filled with hostile powers. The Germanic idea of the * Paul Tillich’s term. (Trans )

THE BREAKDOWN OF SELFHOOD AND THE WORLD

57

struggler is not aggressive, but defensive_”5 The tragic con¬ cept of amor fati undoubtedly comes closer to the inner plight of this world situation than the modern romantic attempt to pit freedom against fate. We have said that in a world in which there is no god, in an autarchy of this-world, there is virtually nothing left but the law of fate, the power of moira. But one can also speak of blind chance, as for example, when we say, “Haphazard strikes the lightning, or when we see confirmation of haphazard blind¬ ness in an air raid in which a cathedral collapses while a cabaret is spared. What do we mean by the word “chance” which we use so often in our everyday speech? We would completely misunder¬ stand chance and its whims if we were to see in it something like an infraction of the law of causality, as if there were an area of reality in which completely underivabie phenomena appear. It is true, of course, that our first feeling about an acci¬ dent is usually in accord with this impression. The brick that falls from a scaffold upon the head of a passer-by and destroys a precious life seems like a “causeless” invasion of a meaning¬ ful, personal world. If two Americans travel separately to India and just happen to visit some obscure, remote village on the same day and there fall in love with each other and marry, and it all results in a wonderful and happy family life, again, one may be inclined to marvel that meaning can come out of meaninglessness, that a life relationship which is so permeated with purpose can be founded upon an unrelated accident— just as the same chance, say, an auto accident, can suddenly end it again. A man of my acquaintance, who with his family has gone through many terrible experiences, lost his last and especially gifted son through the rather rare accident of a stroke of lightning in an open field. Whereas hitherto he had borne everything with calmness of spirit, now he cried out again and again in despair, “Why did this happen to me?” He

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knew that his Why?, his question as to the cause, could not receive an answer; he felt that he was delivered over to the inexplicable, underivable whim of chance. But the fact is that this “underivable" accident is not simply contrary to the law-abiding character of fate, at any rate not contrary to it in the sense that the accident was an infraction of the law of fate. The accident is rather the “other side" of fate itself. For obviously a law is at work even within this “accidental" event. The circumstance that this young man was at the precise place struck by lightning at that particular moment was the product of a chain of causes made up of many individual events: his setting out from home (of which he was the cause), the speed with which he walked, his stopping on the way, and so on. And the bolt of lightning which struck at that particular place and at that particular moment was likewise the product of very definite meteorological causes. This being struck by lightning was therefore the product of the intersection of a number of chains of causality, two main chains and innumerable subordinate chains. If it were possible to determine all of the factors that led to the critical point of intersection, it would be evident that underlying the seemingly underivable, meaningless contingency of the catastrophe was an inflexible, uninterrupted chain of law. Therefore we can¬ not think of chance as being simply an infraction or interrup¬ tion of the operation of law and, consequently, we cannot interpret it as the opposite of fate and its necessity. Rather we call accident only a particular aspect of fate, that is, in so far as this fate is blind to the value of a person, blind to all associations of meaning, and thus—to formulate it in the most abstract way—blind to “qualities." The father we mentioned above did not cry out, “Why did the lightning strike?" That question could have been answered by explaining the mechanics and chemistry of meteorological processes. What he said, significantly, was: “Why did this hap¬ pen to me?" What he was saying was: In a meaningful world—

THE BREAKDOWN OF SELFHOOD AND THE WORLD

59

that is, in a world that takes account of values—regard would have been given to the fact that the measure of my suffering is full and that a valuable, promising life like that of my son must be spared. His question Why? therefore had no bearing upon the mechanics of the thunderstorm; it rather related to the problem of why there should be any such value-free con¬ catenation of causalities over against valuable structures like living persons at all; why a quantitative mechanism is permit¬ ted to have control over qualitative entities such as humans are. This is why Jean Paul spoke of “mad” and “blind” chance. He could equally well have spoken of the mad and blind law of fate. For madness does not mean that the causality of physi¬ ological processes—say, of brain functions—is disturbed. After all, even a lunatic who stupidly and stubbornly declares that two times two is five or that he is the emperor of China arrives at these statements only by way of brain and other processes which are naturally causally conditioned and the causality of which could actually be demonstrated if we possessed sufficient insight into the details of the factors concerned. No; madness means only blindness to the value associations—for example, to arithmetical values like the number “5,” or to logical values like the “truth” of a conclusion, or to historical values that make a distinction between a crazy plebeian and the emperor of China. In this sense, therefore, fate is “mad”: in its quantitative mechanism it is blind and indifferent to value associations. Even if Oswald Spengler is right in his idea that civilizations are fated to go through metamorphoses, and if there is an in¬ evitable necessity inherent in the processes of history, fate be¬ comes blind, mad chance at that moment when, say, at the final stage of the mass era—and therefore a stage of culture that arrives by a fatal necessity!—there appears a man who possesses a Goethean breadth of personality but is no longer able to develop in such an epoch of soulless collectivism. Be¬ cause the iron necessity of metamorphosis simply ignores him,

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because it is indifferent to him, it strikes him as being malicious chance. Fate and chance are the same thing, only seen from different sides. Both in their own way become representative of meaninglessness, that is, of blind mechanism, a frightening, oppressive loneliness and abandonment, and therefore suck the “I” itself into the wake of futility and meaninglessness.

VI Nihilism in Law and in Medicine

THE RESULTING BREAKDOWN OF REALITY, OR, TO express it in another way, the resulting plunge into nihilistic mechanism, can be traced in various individual areas of reality. Having already employed psychiatry as an example, I should like to explain the ideas that follow by using jurisprudence as a model and illustrate the effects of the breakdown of reality in juridical positivism. The term “positivism” is customarily interpreted as “the standpoint of the given.” That is to say, here we are dealing with a philosophical view which confines the content of its statements only to the concrete given, that which is factual and therefore capable of being experienced. As soon as the world loses the Father of the world, as soon as it is deprived of God, it must necessarily be stripped of the invisible. And among invisibles, naturally, are norms such as justice and also the ethical laws of value that determine good and evil. Max Stirner, who in his remarkable book The Ego and His Own has probably drawn the most radical conclusions from this approach, goes so far as to include “humanity” among the invisible magnitudes which must be eliminated. For humanity is an abstraction, an idea which has no demonstrable givenness. What is concretely given, however, is man himself, or more precisely, the individual man, and again, not as an ethical personality or in any other way a bearer of value—for values are after all, invisible—but man in puris naturalibus. He and ✓

61

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only he is the sole and absolutely incontrovertible fact: a final, monstrous consequence drawn from Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum. This means that after the hands that hold the world have been argued away and God, who binds together all the rela¬ tionships of the world, has been relegated to the realm of fable or—what is even more offensive to the positivist—the realm of metaphysics, positivism is incapable of understanding the world as a continuous whole in which man and things and values possess the meaningful and, so to speak, organic place which has been allotted to them. ror one can conceive of the wholeness of the world, and therefore its continuity, only if one recognizes that this world has a limit and that there is a transcendence that begins at this limit. The wholeness of a thing always consists in limited¬ ness. Only as we see the “limits of humanity” (Goethe) do we see what man is, that is, not what this or that man is, but man as such. Anyone who has ever crossed a geographical boundary or the border of his own country knows what I mean. He knows that here for the first time he begins to experience fully the real nature of his own country, because he begins to see it in contrast with another; that only here is he raised to a deep¬ ened self-consciousness as a representative of his homeland be¬ cause this consciousness is then related to the whole. But we also learn to know ourselves in our wholeness only when we arrive at our limits. We come to know the fullness of our abilities and their radius of action at the very point where we come to the limit of our ability, at a definite point where we are obliged to say: This I cannot do, this is the limit of my knowledge, this I do not understand. What we are as physical beings we experience when we climb a mountain and are brought close to utmost exhaustion, or when we swim out into the ocean and on the way back are scarcely able to cope with the undertow of the outgoing tide. We experience it at the limits of our strength.

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And so it is with the real nature and wholeness of the world. This too we learn to know only at the boundaries. Joseph Wittig once said that a biography should really begin with the death of a man rather than with his birth, because only from this point can we see the limits and therefore the wholeness of a man’s life. And we could quite rightly say the same thing of a biography or history of the world. It too can be compre¬ hended in its wholeness and thus in its meaning only from the vantage point of its end. But on its part this limit can be con¬ ceived of only from the vantage point of the other side of the limit. For the limit always delimits the frontier to something else. The limit is something “between,” and both of the con¬ tiguous areas are needed to describe this “between.” In passing, I may point out that any Christian understanding of history must be determined by these facts. There can be no Christian understanding of history except as we recognize transcendence, and here this means knowing Him who was “before the founda¬ tion of the world,” who will come again “to judge the quick and the dead,” and who also stands in the “midst” of history as the Incarnate One there represents, as it were, the incarna¬ tion of all that which transcends history itself and, in transcend¬ ing it, makes manifest the limit. But when this realm of transcendence, this realm beyond the limit, is taken away from us or when we deny it, then the wholeness also crumbles away in our hands and we can no longer think of the world as a continuum. That is why it breaks down into a mere sum of disconnected data which we are obliged to establish piece by piece. This basic scientific attitude and method which regard the fragmentary, discon¬ tinuous data of the world as the only facts available to scien¬ tific knowledge we call positivism. It is therefore always com¬ bined with a nihilistic view of the world. But again nihilism appears in its “ciphered” form; that is to say, it makes a virtue of the breakdown of reality. By no means does the positivist confess: For me the divine foundation of

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the world’s unity has vanished; so for me existence collapses into a rubble heap of discontinuous individual facts (just as all the individual elements can still be found in houses de¬ stroyed by bombs, but, because of the explosion, they remain only as individual elements). The positivist sees the individual elements, but not the fact that in this form they are only the remains of a terrible destruction, that, in fact, they represent a catastrophe. Actually, the positivist says just the opposite: Now at last I have discovered what reality is; now I know that it consists in the sum of demonstrable individual facts and their objective relationships, unclouded by any prejudice whatsoever, and I have arrived at this insight precisely by ruling out the realm of the invisible, the “beyond,” which nobody can ever test and verify. Only in this way did I break through metaphysical and religious superstition to find reality. Curiously enough, in all this the positivist agrees with the Christian on one point, namely, the conclusion that God, who holds the world in his hands and thereby makes it a continuum, cannot be found in the world itself. I cannot handle him as an object and therefore I also cannot make him the object of a proof that God exists. This is the assertion, not only of the positivist, but also of Christian theology. But, naturally, they each mean their statements in different ways. The positivist says: What is not demonstrable as an individ¬ ual fact for instance, the miracle of the resurrection in which God’s presence manifests itself—is not real. The Christian says: God is beyond our power of perception, not because he is unreal, but because he is himself the upholder of reality. He is not a positive, individual fact, because he establishes the whole of the world. He therefore is not to be found within the world, because he is the Lord of the world. He is not a link of the world-continuum—not even the first one!—because this continuum is the creation of his own hands. This Christian position can be illustrated by Kant’s theory

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of knowledge. It is true that the forms of sense-apprehension (space and time) make experience possible, but they are not in themselves the content of experience. That is to say, we can never know space and time objectively, namely, as parts of the world-continuum which is available to us. The nihilism of the positivist is covered up and ciphered for two reasons. First, the consequences of what we have called loss of center” do not become apparent at once, because it is °nly gradually that the breakdown of reality becomes apparent. The nihilism which would be the logical intellectual attitude concomitant with this breakdown of reality may therefore re¬ main for some time. Second, the positivist is thus the victim of a grotesque self-delusion in that he considers the separate ele¬ ments of reality, which have been divorced from their center and therefore from their continuity, to be the actual reality, indeed, reality itself. And the reason lies in the fact that he refuses to recognize that the cause of this disintegration and discontinuity is the loss of God, and actually insists that the loss of God is an emancipation. Thus he considers this dis¬ integrated, fragmented reality the essence of reality and does not realize that he is carrying the message of nihilism about with him in his sealed brief case. The fact that positivism is actually nihilistic can be seen with particular clarity in the sphere of law. It appears in many different varieties in this realm and we need not go into them here. We shall content ourselves with the selection of a charac¬ teristic model. Thus, for example, Paul Laband, a positivist student of law his Public Law of the German Kmpire appeared in the eighties—complained that the jurists were always quite wrongly searching for the purpose of individual institutions of law, always inquiring after the total context in which the law itself was incorporated and within which it performed a useful function. He jeered at this and said that it was improperly

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allowing one’s attention to wander off into the distance, that it was really searching for something that transcends the law and therefore not sticking to the “real business” of the law, and that those who do this are nothing more than metaphysi¬ cians disguised as lawyers. For, he said, if one goes on searching for the purpose of a legal institution sooner or later one arrives at questionable, nebulous “ultimate purposes” which come very close to putting us back in the “beyond” again. For example, if you ask what the legal purpose of divorce is, you arrive at something like this: divorce is necessary because when one partner behaves as a notorious adulterer the other partner can no longer be expected to go on living with him. But this conception of what can or cannot be expected of a person as being the purpose of the divorce law is itself founded upon something deeper. For what is asserted here is the opinion that a particularly barbaric and immoral way of conducting a marriage is an offense to a person’s dignity and that therefore under certain circumstances the marriage must be dissolved for the sake of this personal dignity (again, for the sake of a purpose!). Naturally, personal dignity in turn has a basis too. That basis is to be found either in God, who created men in his image and thus gave them a share in his own majesty and dignity (which is my own conviction), or in some intelligible world (mundus intelligibilis) in which man shares, or in an idea of humanity of which he is the incarnation. Thus the “purpose” of personal dignity would again be either the glory of God or some nebulous metaphysical idea. And it would constitute the ultimate purpose, the metaphysical basis of all legal institutions. And this would mean that their ultimate purpose would lie in—the unknown. In the face of such consequences, which would incorporate the institution of law into the totality of the world-continuum and thus force it to judge the law by metaphysical end-purposes and other intangible, mythological purposes, Laband sees with horror the whole science of jurisprudence go swimming off into

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the unsubstantial reaches of a metaphysical, theological ocean. But if one is to prevent its voyaging off into the blue (and for the logical positivist everything that has to do with heaven and ultimate reality is always hot air’’ and, in his opinion, immediately colors and contaminates the dependability of the scientist concerned), one must radically and at once banish from jurisprudence any thinking about ends. It was in this sense that Laband thought it possible to define precisely and completely the essential features of every legal concept without saying a word about the purpose of the law. For example, one could give an exact definition of a mortgage without having to add the comment that its purpose is to furnish security for a claim. Likewise, one could give a legally perfect definition of the monarch, the law, disciplinary punishment, and so on, without losing oneself in a discussion of the purpose of these institutions. Applying this principle to the definition of a table, one therefore could not say: A table is a level surface which serves the purpose of making it possible to place objects upon it and work or play or sit at it. One would rather be obliged to define it simply by saying: A table is an object with x legs and a horizontal surface. At this point we look for a moment at the other faculties or professions in which the same problems emerge—for example, medicine. Here too there are schools of thought which can be described as nihilistic, as a kind of nonpurposive medicine, interested only in biological facts and biological laws. Naturally, a medi¬ cal man of such a school—I intentionally avoid the word physician —will not deny that the purpose of his treatment is the health of the patient. But what he means by this is only the intactness of the organic functions and at best the person's ability to work and face life which it provides. He refuses to go beyond this and ask the further question: What is the purpose

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of health? or more precisely: What is the meaning of health in the whole context of being a man? For in order to answer, he would have to make statements based upon faith; but this would contradict his concept of exactitude and his idea of his dignity as a scientific medical man. Consequently, the whole man never comes within his purview. He therefore ignores or intercepts, for example, the whole process, equally essential for diagnosis and therapy, in which the patient is dealing with his sickness, in the sense, say, of whether he wants to get well at all or not. For he can in fact refuse to get well. To cite an extreme case, a suicide, who has laid hands upon himself be¬ cause of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of his life but has been revived, will often refuse to get well, because now he is actually tormented by the question: “What good for us, this endlessly creating?—What is created then annihilating?”* But this tormenting question is nothing else but the question of the purpose of his health. And this is precisely the question that a certain school of thought in medicine declares does not fall within its competence, or it simply farms out the whole area in which the question occurs to the minister of the church and his professional department, as if this were merely a matter of an odd, special case and a specialized institution, as if this were not the real concern of every man and one that carries through into all faculties and professions. In any case, “What is created then annihilating?”—that is what his restoration looks like to the nihilistic suicide. So he goes on a strike against his own health or he undertakes another act of sabotage against his life. I am thinking further of the area of neuroses, in which the patient’s mental struggle and involvement with his suffering is markedly evident. It is now common knowledge that many apparently somatic illnesses are actually neurotic in origin. We need only be reminded of those who suffered from what was called “battle fatigue” in the First World War and the # Goethe, Faust, Part II, Modern Library edition. (Trans.)

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“gastro-duodenal neurotics” of the Second World War. Or we may consider the following model, which is especially charac¬ teristic for our problem. Here is a country girl with a great deal of self-reliance and energy who plays a very responsible part with her brother in the management of their inherited farm. When her brother marries she suddenly feels that she has been robbed of her responsible position and pushed into a secondary role. She thereupon acquires all kinds of somatic complaints in the form of stomach and heart troubles, her unconscious purpose being to regain the center of attention at least as a sufferer who re¬ ceives pity and care. The result is an illness which can no longer be compre¬ hended at all by the means available to an exclusively posi¬ tivistic medicine and which undoubtedly cannot be combated with drops, injections, and electrical treatment. It is therefore impossible to treat the individual fact of the illness, understood positivistically, with a positivistically understood individual drug—even if positivistic medical science actually arrived at such a diagnosis. And why not? After all, positivistic medicine has its theory of neurosis too! Positivistically oriented therapy cannot cope with this illness for the simple reason that, if this woman is to have a purpose for getting well, she must now actually and, surely, under the guidance of the physician come to terms with the meaning of her life, and therefore with the ultimate purpose. Her recovery of health will depend on the solution of this question which is inseparably connected with the ultimate purpose. In other words, if she sees the meaning of life in the will to power, in her own development and self-centeredness, then she cannot get well, since, after all, she can satisfy her urgent need for recognition and play the leading role of a tragic heroine only by holding on to her illness, whereas if she became well, she would immediately sink to the minor role of a glori¬ fied servant—unless the physician succeeded, with the help

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of an employment agency, in securing an executive position for her. But I suppose that one would not wish to call good contacts with employment agencies a specifically medical treat¬ ment. Or the girl might be brought to the point where she would seek the meaning of her life in a totally different direction— let us say, in service, in fulfillment through love, in willingness to sacrifice. Then, and only then, would she be put in the position where she wanted to get well at all. We see, therefore, that it is not only the patient who can be sick; medicine itself can become infected, in so far as it clings only to the positivistically understood facts of health and disease and thus dismisses as professionally irrelevant the ques¬ tion of meaning and ultimate purpose. An anecdote which I have recounted elsewhere may serve as a further illustration. Two intimately acquainted medical professors were saying that another friend—a distinguished philosopher in the same uni¬ versity—was very definitely a neurotic and was worrying him¬ self with all kinds of “imaginary," that is, psychogenic, illnesses. I asked them somewhat teasingly why then they did not cure their friend. They both answered as with one voice, “Then he would stop philosophizing.” The seriousness of the joke un¬ doubtedly lies in the fact that this man’s illnesses have an affinity to his philosophizing and that his vocational work is thus a way of coming to grips with his illness. Naturally, it is debatable whether one really should or ought to say that the productivity of such an illness is preferable to a cure and thus stultify the phlosophy. But this is immaterial here. The only point that concerns us is the fact that illness can be rooted in the total thrust of a person’s life. Quite certainly, we shall not attempt to deduce a metaphysics of medicine from this some¬ what pointed anecdote and thus lay too great claims upon it. Nevertheless, it possesses the truth of caricature and we shall be justified in saying that here we are confronted in a very positive way with the question of health and its relation to

NIHILISM IN LAW AND IN MEDICINE

the meaning of life philosopher.

71

in this case the life of a particular

At this point we may turn our attention back again to juridical positivism. We have seen that when medicine accepts the positivist view its whole area of concern, namely, all that happens in connec¬ tion with health and sickness, becomes fragmented, atomized. The object of diagnosis, the sick body, breaks down into a sum of individual pathological phenomena which are no longer seen in relationship to the whole person. And then the means of therapy in turn become a sum of highly specialized individ¬ ual measures. In precisely the same way the sphere of law breaks down when the meaningful “ultimate purpose” is left out of consideration. Legal institutions crumble into a sum of theses, decrees, and ordinances which are simply enacted posi¬ tively and are no longer required to legitimate themselves, that is, prove themselves with respect to their grounds and their authority. Then a law has validity simply because it has been decreed, simply because is has been promulgated by a tyrant (like Hitler) or a dictatorial group (like the Communist Party)! To lay down laws that have no norms is lawlessness. This we see today in a way that positivistic law did not see at the time when it was developing its program and probably still cannot see. We find ourselves in the midst of the excesses of legalistic nihilism. But we had better look to our own household. The insinu¬ ation that whatever is laid down as law is legally right led us to the point where in the Third Reich we simply obeyed com¬ mands. We need only to recall the numerous war-criminal trials that occurred after the Second World War. The fact that many of them were nothing more than unprecedented scandals against justice and the fact that we can only speak with strong emotion of this dreadful obstruction to any inner new begin-

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ning among our people must not prevent us from seeing that the frequent appeal of the accused that they were simply acting upon orders is nothing less than a manifestation of the pro¬ found nihilistic illness of our ethos and our sense of law and justice. For a deeper interpretation of this state of affairs will inevitably meet with the following attitude of mind. When commands or laws are regarded as sufficiently legitimate simply because the government has issued them, this in itself is an admission that one no longer has any higher criterion by which to judge the law but is simply accepting without question the given positive fact. More precisely, it means that a person simply accepts the “authority” of the lawgiver or the com¬ mander because he is the one who actually holds the power, and then he feels that he has been dispensed from asking the question whether and to what extent the power to issue decrees is legitimate at all or whether and to what extent the decrees are legitimate. But to accept this “authority” is to undermine all genuine authority. For all genuine authority is always au¬ thority which has itself been authorized, authority that must prove that it has been authorized. Within Protestantism this problem is one that frequently became acute—in dealing, for example, with Luther’s position in the history of the church. Luther’s authoritative position as a kind of “church father” is by no means simply a “given fact” because of his historical rank or the high level of his spirituality or intellect. According to his own estimate of him¬ self, Luther absolutely refused to be regarded as a church father in this sense, much less as the theological dictator of his church. On the contrary, in the really decisive parts of his utterances he is the exegete. That is to say, he proves himself before the higher authority of the Holy Scriptures and, so far as he himself is concerned, he desires his listeners and readers to judge him by this authority. Here we may stop only to point out that Luther did not accept even the Holy Scriptures in a wholesale sense as being an unquestionable, authoritative

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given, but rather that he gave a great deal of thought to the question of the criteria by which the Scriptures verified them¬ selves in their evidence and by which, on the other hand, they indicated that certain parts of the Scriptures were less binding or had ceased to be binding. Thus for him the figure of Christ, and theiefore the question of whether and to what extent the Scripture proclaims Christ" (Christum treibet), constitutes the final court of appeal in all questions of the bindingness and authority of the Scriptures. In order, therefore, to recognize an authority, one must know and accept the magnitude that authorizes it. In the realm of law this authority is justice. The authoritative instance or court and its subordinates are thus, as it were, conjointly re¬ sponsible. The relation between them is by no means a relation of pure and absolute subordination. Rather both are related to a superordinate tertium—in the religious realm, let us say, the Holy Scriptures; in the realm of law, justice—from which they receive their legitimacy for instruction and compliance. Even if the act of referring back to and reverifying the author¬ ity may not be constantly repeated, it must nevertheless be executed at least once and then perhaps it may continue to have its effect for a considerable time. This “aftereffect” con¬ tinues to operate, so to speak, under the protectorate of a confi¬ dence and trust that the authority has been tested and verified in certain “samplings” or test cases. Trust is always the result of an authority whose authorization has been recognized. Therefore genuine authority cannot degrade those who are subordinated to it; rather it actually elevates and dignifies them. In other words, it does not make them objects of authori¬ tarian precepts but upholds their independence as subjects in that it appeals to their conviction and trust and thus makes it clear that it is dependent upon their sanction and recognition. In this sense, genuine authority requires a twofold legitima¬ tion: first, with respect to the “cause” (Sache), which it repre¬ sents and which it must have on its side (and here it is assumed

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that it is a genuine “cause” and not a phantom, as, for example, in the pragmatic ideologies of modern “authoritarian” states) ; and second, with respect to those for whom it represents the cause and to whom it comes with the claim of authority. If I throw out the criteria by which authority is judged, then the authority necessarily becomes a dictatorship. In every dic¬ tatorship there is the element of usurpation, which means the presumption that it does not need to legitimate itself but re¬ gards the possession of power itself as legitimation. Thus power is no longer something that is used for “service”; it is an end in itself. Therefore, in the last analysis all dictatorship is coupled with nihilism; or more precisely, it is coupled with the posi¬ tivistic form of nihilism, with that form of it which bases itself upon the de facto givenness of the possession of power and repudiates the invisible court of appeal by which all actions and therefore all acts of power are to be judged, and before which action is either obedience or disobedience. Consequently, Machiavelli has probably been the most con¬ sistent advocate for all dictators; for he regarded the great wielders of power as dwellers in a zone beyond good and evil, a zone where there are no measures or limits and nobody and nothing can authorize them, and then proceeded to prove his thesis by pointing to the actual law that operated in politics. Thus Rudolf Stadelmann says of Machiavelli:6 “He takes his own love-adventures as an expression of the innocent creature, with the same ingenuousness with which he accepts a tyrant’s acts of violence as the necessary [i.e., amoral, non-responsible] outflow of his power-political nature. No con¬ flict of conscience troubles him, no anxious sense of sin divides him, no superterrestrial yearnings ennoble him,” because for him everything that goes beyond the immediate givenness of his power simply does not exist. The sole super-personal ele¬ ment that appears in Machiavelli’s picture of history is, not a norm, not a God, but the process of decay, the great twilight

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of the gods and history that casts its shade upon all our actions. Politics and constitutions, the history of culture and morals are unceasing attempts to check and hold back the flood of decay. In the later phases of the development it is only the individual of genius who appears as the subduer of the un¬ leashed urges and conquers fate by learning from cunning fortune how to use the weapons. History to its end is an eternal Titanic struggle between survival and ruin, and the last struggler against the downfall is [as Jakob Burckhardt said later] necessarily a cunning monster whose malignity is proportionally equal to the magnitude of the decay.” This cunning monster is, so to speak, the ultimate incarnation of power without law, the given fact of power that is no longer subject to any norms.7 Connected with tnis nihilistic point of view is still another phenomenon that concerns us directly because it is connected with the German catastrophe after the Second World War and therefore is not only an illustration but also an acute, existen¬ tial application of what has been said. We must return to the so-called war-criminal trials. The term “criminal” obviously predicates that the person is one who has renounced all obligation to any law that binds him_ whether it be God’s law or that of society—and more or less uninhibitedly follows his own impulses. Now, one simply cannot say of the higher German military, some of whom must undoubtedly be saddled with a heavy load of guilt, that they are “criminals” in this sense. For one cannot deny at the outset that even those among them who are ques¬ tionable had an ethos: they were bound to a nonpolitical mili¬ tary tradition which had disastrous potentialities or which in any case would inevitably have disastrous effects after serious sovereignty was replaced by the rule of crooks. One would not wish to deny that this tradition was imbued with rigorous standards of duty and an ethos that altruistically subordinated the individual to the community. It was quite in line with this

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ethos that in the Second World War the German generals should have paid a toll of blood on the battlefield that was unusually high in the annals of war. (The toll of blood paid at the hands of the hangman is, of course, quite a different story.) It would therefore be altogether inappropriate simply to deny that this profession which bore top responsibility pos¬ sessed an ethos. On the contrary, we shall have to say that a profound illness of this ethos had run rife among not a few of the top military group. A diagnosis of the illness would probably show that these men had fallen into a one-sided ethos of objectivity, or better, taken flight into this kind of objectiv¬ ity. What we mean will immediately be apparent. In the first place, it is not hard to understand the reason for the flight. For every responsible person, especially on the mili¬ tary level and particularly in case of war, the question “Whose wagon am I hitched to; is the man in the driver’s seat a criminal; and is he not steering us into the abyss?” must neces¬ sarily be fraught with severe conflict. What would happen if he were compelled to answer the last two parts of this question in the affirmative? All his accomplishments and sacrifices would be, so to speak, stripped of their value and suddenly, despite his best intentions, he would have become an accomplice in an atrocious crime and co-executor of the impending catastrophe. Could he disengage himself? In the neo-barbaric age of im¬ prisonment in tribalism this question evoked problems that were almost insoluble. And they became even more difficult when the person realized that his possible desertion meant that the soldiers entrusted to him would be abandoned to a worse leader or to downright destruction and that the very honesty of his and his fellow conspirators’ decision must inevitably mean that he was delivering his country to its foes and, above all, to the specters in the East. If he continued to perform his job with this dreadful knowl¬ edge in his heart, he delivered himself over to a lacerating self-

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contradiction that would result in his bleeding to death in¬ ternally. In how many hearts of people we know, and how many we do not know, who appear to us today like staring masks, was not this conflict endured! One understood, therefore, that one was evading this mur¬ derous conflict, that is, shutting his eyes to the question of responsibility for his own acts and the fate of his country and withdrawing into the ghetto of objectivity and detachment. This meant that in practice one simply tackled the objective, strategic job in hand and tried to accomplish it as tidily and decently as possible, throwing oneself into it with all he had. Correspondingly, the outstanding engineer no longer asks himself: For whom am I building (or blowing up) this bridge? What he asks is. How can I build this bridge so precisely and so correctly that it will not collapse and pitch people into the chasm? Only occasionally—and probably more generally only since the discoveiy of the atomic bomb—do we find influential scien¬ tists and technicians who feel they can no longer be content with mere laboratory competence but are agonizingly aware that they are facing the question of whose hands they are putting the results of their research into and under whose aegis they are doing their work. The espionage affairs occurring in con¬ nection with atomic research make it plain that this is not merely a matter of “objectivity” and therefore of scientific truth which belongs to everybody, but that it can be a crime to give information about the research to the wrong person. Here the whole question of whom one is working for assumes a national and therefore a very limited aspect. Nevertheless, we return to the decisive point we have been making: It is quite possible to take flight into objectivity. That the problem of who it is we are working for is capable of pitch¬ ing us into the most grievous and humanly insoluble conflicts must not be allowed to disguise the fact that this is purely and solely a matter of flight. Therefore we cannot simply reproach

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those who have taken flight into the territory of objectivity by telling them they have no sense of ethical responsibility. This will not do, because objectivity is also a form of ethos. There¬ fore the morally condemnatory style of most of the warcriminal trials is altogether out of place. The point is that the ethos of isolated objectivity is itself a sick ethos—indeed, a mortally sick ethos. For those who have fallen victim to the disease sink from the level of personal responsibility for making

decisions into an objective responsibility for carrying out orders. Personal responsibility for making decisions means willing¬ ness to examine the situation in which one lives and works. To this extent the Jewish leaders were completely right—at least in the way they put their question—when they approached Christ and asked him in whose name and by what authority he performed his healings, whether by the Spirit of God or by Beelzebub. There was no question about the healings, the per¬ formances themselves. But the importance and the reality of this objective sphere was altogether secondary to the question whether demonic or divine powers were at work in what he was doing, whether he was speaking in the name of Eternity or had sold himself to magic. They would never have said, as our generation is always inclined to say: We are quite satisfied as long as his healings are objective performances and we have positive facts. No; the nature and rank of objectivity is deter¬ mined entirely by the regime in whose hands it is found. The devil is an efficient and productive power of the first rank. Precisely his Luciferian quality indicates that the demonic character originally possessed a majesty—in

this case

the

majesty of the angels—and that the transition from divine character to demonic character does not lie in a diminution of proficiency and attainment and therefore in the area of objec¬ tivity but solely in changing the masters who are being served. Again we say, personal responsibility for making decisions as distinguished from objective responsibility for carrying out

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orders means willingness to take this into account. In this question it is true that the general in high position bears a degree of responsibility that is different from that of a subor¬ dinate officer. But when he deserts this kind of personal re¬ sponsibility for his own decisions, when he shoves it upon the author of the command, quite rightly the blame for our col¬ lapse should be placed not merely upon the supreme power but also upon the “functionaries,” the “loyal ones,” those who accepted the responsibility for carrying out orders. For in the last analysis what these latter did was to renounce the final court of appeal; they lapsed into ethical defeatism and became what Ernst Jiinger once called “apporteurs.” If it is really certain—and it is certain—that here is where the real destructive forces in our great national downfall are located, then this is truly an indictment of political and juridical positivism. For, as we have seen, this consists in blind faith in the given fact, above all the fact of power. The positivism that expresses itself here is not knowledge of reality at all, as it pretends to be, but simply blind faith that is actually blind to reality. It takes its stand on the so-called “basis of the facts”; in the present context this means on the basis of the given power-situation. But facts are no basis at all; for they them¬ selves rest on some other basis or float unreally above an abyss of Nothingness. Faith that is blind to reality has lost its author¬ ity and thus becomes a mere functionary of dictatorship. It leads quite logically to the rule of the functionaries, which is identical with the rule of pure objectivity. It brings with it confinement to a department where the person in the depart¬ ment has no responsibility for how it is used in the whole con¬ cern above it and exploited by the administration. When a general in high position during the Third Reich inquired about Niemoller’s confinement in a concentration camp it was suggested to him that he confine himself to his own “depart¬ ment”; that there were others who had competence in the “concentration camp department.”

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The rule of the functionary is in turn identical with the rule of the professionals, the so-called “specialists”—even though it is only the subordinate kind of rule exercised by those who carry out orders. The specialist is the prisoner of his depart¬ ment; he lives in the ghetto of objectivity. He is “utilized”— the term itself is characteristic; he is assigned his role in the termite state. He is the distinctively “disengaged” man and is therefore liable to become the tool of a degenerate humanity. Perhaps this can be better formulated the other way around. It is not dictatorship that produces functionaries—just as it is inconceivable in a community of well-grounded “persons”— but rather, the functionaries evoke the dictatorship. Where standards no longer prevail, where divine authority has been expelled, reality disintegrates, the continuum crumbles into individual centers of power that build fields of force around themselves and then subject all who move within these fields to the danger of sinking to the level of functionaries. Dictatorship is the result of the functionary type and at the same time produces more functionaries. Wherever the divine command is stripped of its authority it is the loudest voice of command that rules, and nobody can oppose it, because then there is no Name by which one could challenge this command. We talk so much about the courage of one’s convictions and the lack of it. We certainly ought not to think that this is be¬ cause we are lacking in pluck or vitality and potency, that this is a matter of physical and intellectual impotence. It is not muscles and brain convolutions that are involved. “Cursed is the man who . . . makes flesh his arm” (Jer. 17:5). Those who give up the ultimate commitments and those who give up the name of the Lord finally have no power to resist at all and the potency they do possess can ultimately be only the power to carry out orders but not the power to make decisions. Bismarck once said, “We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world.” If we are honest about it, we shall have to say that this was rather big talk, and certainly it must be under-

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stood in the context of the time and situation in which it was uttered. And there it certainly had more the character of an optative than an indicative. But the reverse is definitely truer Those who no longer fear God fear everything in the world. For when the Father is not there this world becomes something that is utterly incalculable. When it has become a great reposi¬ tory of the incalculable, loaded with explosive and immeasur¬ able possibilities, it begins to radiate fear and anxiety: fear of the monster contingency. Then it triggers in man a kind of counterreaction in which he resorts to magical formulas with which he seeks to ward off the threat. Thus in the very midst of the cool, objective precincts of this post-rationalist world, in the very structures made of glass and concrete, the architectonic symbols of objectivity, there flickers the murky light of super¬ stition and all its rank tropical growths. But it is not only magic that is used as a protective charm against the uncanny unknown; man resorts to still another aid. Because he is so afraid, he seeks a demonic security in the posi¬ tive power which relieves him of his own responsibility, which, indeed, forbids him to take responsibility. In this sense, too, the nihilist eventually becomes a functionary. The functionary is a deserter from responsibility. He is afraid of it, because the Magnitude to whom we are accountable has vanished and without that Magnitude the world has become a weird and haunted place in which one can hardly dare to accept re¬ sponsibility—even though the term itself is taking on an in¬ flationary meaning that is directly proportional to its progres¬ sive inner deflation. And to tell the truth, it is not the only word that retains a mummified, spectral, and specious existence in a religionless world, the smell of whose decay is covered up with the perfume of idealistic pathos. We are not denying the possibility of certain nihilistic “virtues,” for example, the virtue of courage or of loyalty. But this is always merely the courage of the functionary, for whom civil courage is unattainable. For courage of conviction pre-

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supposes that a man is actually a person—presupposes too a personal and responsible confrontation with the ultimate court of appeal. It presupposes a freedom that is incompatible with our ever being slaves of men and mere functioning, performing “organs.” And his loyalty, which we do not gainsay, will nec¬ essarily be the loyalty of the Titan’s retainers, which not only holds on in the midst of chaos but actually induces chaos—in the sense of that gloomy point of view from which Machiavelli saw the end of history. We insist that all this can be clearly seen in certain manifestations in the area of jurisprudence. And we recognize them again in extremely vivid form in cer¬ tain show trials which have been staged in the totalitarian East, but, unfortunately, not only there.8 The sinister, or better, the demonic thing about this perver¬ sion of the law is that the routine operation, the “mechanism” of the law remains intact. Lynch law is not practiced; this would be detrimental to the prestige of a civilized nation. Rather a juridical alibi is employed. So the great political trials roll on in the disguise of a due process of law. The rou¬ tine operation proceeds in orderly fashion, to the extent that a proper verdict is handed down on the basis of actual de¬ nunciations

(even though falsified)

and actual confessions

(even though extorted), perhaps even a verdict which is actu¬ ally appropriate to these facts. Only the starting point is a lie, because these confessions of guilt are induced by force or fabri¬ cated; or again—expressed in a deeper way—because the law has been misused as a means for the purpose of an alibi. One need not even imply that the whole crew of examiners, accusers, and judges consisted of sadists and liars. In some fu¬ ture revisions of history, which may well put them before the bar, they will all have at their disposal the plea that they wanted to do justice to their country or their philosophical ideology or—as can be the case in Western countries—to public opinion. When the transcendence of the law is wiped out it inevitably

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sinks to the level of relativity and expediency, and it does so quite independently of whether the violators of the law are criminals or upright, respectable citizens. Positivistic objec¬ tivity is able to disengage itself only temporarily from the ultimate purpose and from the idea of purpose as a whole. The things that have been left masterless then go seeking a new master! And as masterless things they become elements which the managers of an atheistic world assemble into new syntheses, new “wholes.” When the divine end-purpose is lost the bru¬ tality of temporal ends reigns. At long sight, the last chapter of positivism is always pragmatic. This is the unintended irony of its own emphasis upon value-free thinking. In all this we see how much everything depends upon the objective foundation of the law; there is no point whatsoever in simply applying moral categories to the legal corruptions, sham trials, and judicial murders we have described and saying that the managers and executors of these trials were “crimi¬ nals.” To do this is erroneously to take something that actually has to do with the basic, objective order and disorder of the world and make it merely a question of character and a sub¬ jective problem. The managers of these tribunals may have been very decent, respectable men in their private life. It is precisely this dis¬ quieting observation that can help us to look for the real dilemma and uncertainty, not in the sphere of character, but rather in the way that people understand the structure of the world itself. The fact is that in all-areas of the modern world and in every ideological climate we find the same phenomenon of the type of man who listens to Mozart from five to six o'clock, as Heydrich did in Prague, or risks danger to save the life of a kitten and then signs his name to a death sentence of a bloody assize. The fact is that we do face a crisis in the whole concept of “character.” In the long run, subjective respectability and

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even the sincerest willingness to “do what is right and fear no man’' is not enough, if one moves in the framework of a world¬ view which has emptied the image of man and removed the ultimate foundations. Once a man ceases to recognize the in¬ finite value of the human soul—and this he cannot do once the relationship to God is extinguished and thus man’s char¬

acter indelebilis, which God has stamped with eternity, is smashed—then all he can recognize is that man is something to be used. But then he will also have to go further and recognize that some men can no longer be utilized and he arrives at the concept that there are some lives that have no value at all. Nobody can be preserved from this ultimate conclusion by a peaceable character or because he can’t stand to see blood. Far more important than the legs of character on which a man stands (in other words, far more important than his moral and legal stance) is the ground on which he stands. We find our¬ selves on a fatally wrong path when we simply call evildoers, criminal judges, and hangman’s assistants miserable characters. They may be very “respectable” by nature, though continued sojourn in those twilight regions may in time destroy a man’s character and unleash the instincts of power madness and sadism. If we simply call them criminals and thus shift the whole lot of these operations on to a moralistic track, we shall be walk¬ ing away from it with the pompous gesture of the Pharisee: “God, I thank thee that I am not like them.” But in the moment when our conscience perceives that everyone can be¬ come a murderer—no, must become one when he has forsaken the absolute ground of all things—it will make us beat our own breast and compel us to face the question of what may not happen to our own respectability when it is exposed to the frictions of public opinion, to the terror, or simply to the in¬ sidious atmosphere of a philosophy of life that surrounds us on all sides. When Luther was able to say, “Here I stand, I cannot do

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otherwise,” this was not primarily a sign of an upright, decent character, but rather the sign of a foundation upon which that character was built. It is not enough merely to be legally minded in order to administer the law; it is not enough merely to be a philanthropist in order to become a physician; it is not enough to love one’s country in order to be qualified for the work of a statesman. Sentiment, love of humanity, and patri¬ otic enthusiasm can in the next moment become subservient to purposes that engender judicial murder, pogroms against the insane and feeble-minded, and power madness. Law, medi¬ cine, and politics live by that which transcends them; they live by the Unconditioned or they die. This is expressed by the picture which may still be found hanging in many of our courtrooms, depicting the return of the Lord to “judge the quick and the dead.” The picture ex¬ presses that ultimate solidarity in which both judge and ac¬ cused are summoned before the last judgment. Here the superiority of the judge over the accused ends, simply because he is not the one who determines what is to be called good or evil, just or unjust here and now, because he himself cannot escape the relationship to the ultimate authority that over¬ arches him also. He is authorized as a judge who himself has his judge and thus is related to an authority over which he has no power but is himself in the hands of its majestic power. But the picture of the last judgment has a still deeper mean¬ ing. It bears witness to that Figure who refuses to be taken as a historical figure of the past but rather declared that he would come again and appear as the lightning shines from the east to the west on the horizon of our world, our world which is going on to its end. He himself intends to be the judge. We may make two basic statements. First, history is a succession of triumphs and defeats, of false sovereignties and their downfall. Over and over again in his¬ tory the laughter of the triumphant prevails; but he who laughs last laughs best and he who is crowned last is king. So

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the view of the end of all things is bound up with the question we spoke of before: In the name of whose laughter and whose crown is triumph celebrated in our world, and cannot the whole world be gained—in the sense of a mere summation of factual achievements—while life itself is lost? Second, the last judgment is something that a man must naturally fear, for he himself is in the dock. But whenever a man is afraid he is tempted to resort to repression, which in this case means to escape into illusion. Seen from this point of view, does not the attempt to establish the law positivistically and make the law serve ideas, and in this roundabout way make it serve power and revenge, take on an ultimate “theo¬ logical” purpose? Is not the purpose of this illusionary act of repression to set oneself up as the subject of the law and be the master of the law instead of becoming its object and sitting in the dock before the ultimate court of appeal? This fear, this dread of the Ultimate deprives us of the possibility of being objective and of taking the law seriously. It deprives us of the willingness to be its victim—for nobody can endure the last judgment—and seduces us into trying to become its master. The gospel answers this question by telling us that the world’s judge is He who is our brother and comrade. When we sit in the dock we are His brethren and that changes every¬ thing. Instead of the judge a loving face gazes upon us. Only as we are freed from fear because we know we are in fellowship with and vindicated in the light of the ultimate Power can we be really objective and face the facts squarely. For the first requirement of objectivity is fearlessness, or better, the condi¬ tion of having been delivered from fear. As such we can gaze into the abyss—even the abyss of our own self of which we have been speaking. For then we have escaped ourselves; and therefore we no longer sing De profundis, but Gloria in

excelsis. It is no accident that this should strike the note of the

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Christmas message. For it speaks of the world s lostness—“The world was lost”—and bids us see the Eternal in a Child. We said that when transcendence is denied the world-continuum, and with it every area of life, crumbles and falls to pieces. But here transcendence is no longer understood as a “beyond” that begins on the farther side of the horizon of our world but as something that has entered into our midst in a Figure whom we can love. Relating oneself to transcendence is therefore no longer thought of as an act of speculation or a philosophical assumption. Rather it is conceived of as a way of love which is equally accessible to poor shepherds and wise men. The strained effort to penetrate the ultimate meaning of the world becomes the peace in which one is able to live with this Figure. And the horror vacui is resolved because the Christmas field is filled with the sound of angels calling: “Be not afraid!”

VII The Political Form of the World’s Breakdown AFTER THIS EXCURSUS WE SHALL NOW ATTEMPT to push our analysis of the chaos further and examine it with respect to its political and its human relevance. We have already seen that nihilism forces man into the role of the functionary. The political stage upon which this role can be played out, furnished with settings and lighting effects, is provided by the termite state. Toynbee has pointed out in his Study of History that po¬ litical forms of existence recur again and again in the history of the world, that they present themselves in classically pure form, for example, among the Eskimos,

the nomads,

the

Osmanlis, and the Spartans, and that therefore—stating it perhaps somewhat boldly—we can find forerunners of nihilism in every era. On the other hand, he also points out how acute is the stage represented by the termite state into which modern collective man is about to enter. According to Toynbee, the chief characteristic of the termite state is that they “achieve what they achieve by discarding as far as possible the infinite variety of human nature and assum¬ ing an inflexible animal nature instead. Thereby they have set their feet on the path of retrogression. Biologists tell us that animal species which have adapted themselves too nicely to highly specialized environments are at a dead end and have no future in the evolutionary process. That is exactly the fate of the arrested civilizations. Parallels with such a fate are fur88

%

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nished both by the imaginary human societies called Utopias and by the actual societies achieved by the social insects. If we enter into the comparison we shall find in the ant-heap and in the bee-hive, as well as in Plato’s Republic or in Mr. Aldous Huxley s Brave New World, the same outstanding features as we have learnt to recognize in all the arrested civilizations— caste and specialization. The social insects rose to their present social heights, and came to a permanent standstill at those altitudes, many millions of years before Homo Sapiens began to emerge above the mean level of the rank and file of the vertebrate order.”* The experience of history appears therefore to substantiate the thesis that historicity expires in the situation of the termite state ana tnat life becomes a kind of natural, instinctual form ot existence which, though it need not necessarily lead to death, nevertheless ceases to be effective in the total structure of history and no longer possesses any generative power. Therefore anybody who says that the termite state is coming must realize what he is saying. He is saying that the end of history itself is coming and is, as it were, uttering a diabolical imitation of that cry, “Back to nature!” which is attributed to Rousseau. But, after all, for Rousseau this was a matter of the return of a kind of denatured man to his real nature and thus to human nature. The nihilistic prognosis, however, can only mean by this a subsidence into bios, and what is more, the bios of insects, and into nonhuman nature. We are confronted with the exciting question whether it is even possible that this state can be realized among human beings. That certain approxima¬ tions to it are conceivable back in the dim stages of human consciousness, that it has actually been demonstrated in the peoples adduced by Toynbee, and that it may still be possible today among the dull, precivilized tribes of Asia probably can* Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. I (abridgment of Vols. I-VI, by D. C. Somervell) , New York, Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 182. (Trans.)

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not be disputed. But this is not at all what we are concerned with here. For us the far more urgent question is whether it is possible for the man who has once been awakened—let us say, the Western, Christian man—to retrogress to the insect. I do not hesitate to call this problem the fateful question of our time. We may say right at the start that every answer to this ques¬ tion has the character of a statement of faith. An empirical answer is impossible, because the phenomenon which we have called “awakened man” simply cannot itself be empirically grasped. Here the question is what we think of man. If we consider him to be someone who is characterized by the biological or historical group in which he lives, he becomes the product of his environment and the moment the environment becomes a termite state he will sink to the level of an insect. In an age of technics like ours the chances that this retrogression was actu¬ ally beginning would then be depressingly clear. For—to con¬ sider only the area of industry—increasing industrialization demands increasingly rigorous rationalization of the processes of labor and therefore increased emphasis upon the anonymous and impersonal. The assembly line which requires nothing more than a few simple mechanical manipulations hardly per¬ mits any relationship to the whole of the labor product and the labor process—just as the ant can have no vision of the whole termite state and is unable to fit itself meaningfully into this whole. Correspondingly, its instinct impels it to perform “mechanical” partial functions. The technological age demands increasingly comprehensive organizations; in extreme cases it tends toward making the state itself the dominant employer. This too eliminates indi¬ vidual initiative and, along with it, the individual's responsi¬ bility and name, so that all the conditions are provided in the industrialized mass era for rendering a man anonymous and making him an insect—if man is determined by his environ¬ ment.

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On the other hand, if one believes that man is a being who is immediately responsible to the imperium of God, quite apart from his environment, then the conscience, which is awakened to this direct responsibility to God, is absolute and uncondi¬ tional; or to put it negatively, it is not conditioned by any secondary powers, such as superiors, institutions, or the pres¬ sure of circumstance. Then and only then can you have the situation which, quite apart from its “confessional” side, ranks as a classical paradigm for the direct responsibility of the conscience to God, namely, the words of Luther already cited: Here X stand, I cannot do otherwise. ’ For what we see here is a man who, in spite of the complete hopelessness of his enter¬ prise and the opposition of his “environment” in the world, is responsible only to the truth. He is the exact opposite of the type of man who can only be compared to a fountain pen: technically a highly qualified writing instrument, but empty and writes equally well with brown, red, or black ink, depend¬ ing upon what is pumped into it. Every prognosis of the future course of history depends upon which of these “philosophical” positions is taken. If the first definition is accepted, it can only be a matter of assimilation to the emerging “termitic” tendencies in the modern world. If one accepts the second definition, however, one may say that man possesses an indelible character. There is no neutral prognosis which can be made apart from this fundamental decision. Everybody who does any thinking about future devel¬ opments ought to be clear about it. The question penetrates far more deeply into the center of our world than all the political and military considerations of the East-West problem. For these considerations always have reference merely to a coming phase of history, which will again be superseded by other phases. The problem of man’s indelible character, however, poses the question in such a way that what we are really asking is: What is the destiny of man himself? In the long view, the con¬ test between the Eastern collective idea and the Western cul-

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ture of tradition and personality will revolve exclusively around this question of the possible destiny of man. If it is possible to change man in substance, if there is a real possi¬ bility that Homo Sapiens can become inhuman, then the con¬ test must be considered settled already. In any case, here is one of the clearly visible points where a fact of faith occupies the key position for determining what we must consider the real possibilities in the future course of history. This question of faith will, of course, also have to be illus¬ trated by numerous empirical facts. An inventory of empirical facts would have to include, for example, the question of how the younger generation really exists in an atheistic state after a decade or more of this environment. Does it show evident signs of incipient or actual termitic development? Or is the personal character of man still expressing itself as it did before, for example, in the relation between the generations (parentschildren) and between man and wife, and in friendships? Are there certain areas which cannot be collectivized and pragmatized? As far as I can see, there have been almost no serious investigations of this question. To be sure, such investigations could not alter the fact that the decision demanded of us has the character of an act of faith and substitute for it empirical demonstrability, but, like any genuine confrontation with reality, they could give more depth to our questions and bring us down to essentials. In any case, since for the present we lack any pertinent literature on this most essential question of the West, and perhaps of mankind itself, we can only proceed by groping and

questioning as we

go

along.

Indeed,

much

would be gained if even these very provisional reflections were to provide the impulse for some basic (and empirical) investigations. When we look at what has been called post-Christian paganism, we believe that we can almost “see” that once man has been awakened to self-consciousness he is actually stamped with a kind of indelible character, though we are frank to ad-

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mit that here we are proceeding in accord with a decision of faith and that theiefore all this can be interpreted altogether differently. What we are referring to is the fact that post-Christian paganism is fundamentally different from pre-Christian pagan¬ ism. Pre-Christian paganism recognizes genuine gods, in whom it believes. Think, of the world of Homerj think of Aeschylus and in some respects even Sophocles. But anybody who has once passed through the crisis in which Christ stripped the gods of their power—even if it involved only his living in a culture that was permeated with this Christian knowledge— henceforth lives in a world from which the gods have vanished and he cannot go back to that early mythical childlike inno¬ cence with its belief in Olympus and its happy gods. True, there may be an occasional homesickness for the lost world in some individuals—I am thinking of Holderlin—a homesick¬ ness so intense that the lost home of the gods is transformed into a graphic and almost palpable vision.* But even here the disparity between the homesick vision and the original pos¬ session is defined by that distinction which Schiller made be¬ tween “naive” and “sentimental” literature. In any case, such a vision is always a gift which is given only to isolated indi¬ viduals. Man as such—I do not even venture to say the average man—lives in a world in which the gods are gone. It is true, of course, that man proceeds to fill the world with gods again. But these are no longer representatives of genuine powers of existence, as were Apollo or Dionysus. They are synthetic fabrications, pragmatic substitute sanctions. They are made of plastic. It is not a revelation, not the whispering of Pallas Athene or the shining presence of Aphrodite, that presides at the birth of the pragmatic myth. No, what is there is a practical expedient, namely, the shrewd purpose of render¬ ing the masses governable with the aid of ideological bonds. Once the gods have been exploded, we can never return to * Cf. Holderlin’s elegy “Homecoming.” (Trans.)

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that former innocence. If we try to do so nevertheless, we en¬ counter only the sanctified or deified expedients. Once the myth has been lost, says Ernst Jiinger in his Heliopolis, the utopia has been lost, which means a glorified image of a goal or purpose which one needs and which one sets up as a model for his own constructions. The utopia is therefore an artificial imitation of myth, a kind of synthetic myth. Rationality strives to express itself in a futuristic picture language. If it is true on the one hand that one can never get back to the state existing before the gods of the myths were exploded, it is also true that one can never return to the state prevailing before the Disarmer of the gods appeared. Post-Christian paganism will always burn with a deadly hostility to the Galilean, because it was from him that it received its stigma and never again can it face him with disinterested tolerance. As we have said, this would appear to be an example, noth¬ ing more than an example, of how a person who has once been called by his name, who has once been his, receives a kind of character indelebilis and can never expunge with any lixivium, chemical or philosophical, the name which he was given. This would mean, then, that the freedom to become an insect has not been given to him or that it is no longer given to him. It would mean that his conscience and his humanity—his con¬ science once awakened and his humanity once delivered—must rebel again and again against becoming an insect or rend themselves subterraneously in repressions. To this extent, the political aspect of nihilism, insect ex¬ istence, is chaos. Man is drawn into an elemental feud with himself. Ernst Jiinger describes this feud in his Heliopolis as two parties facing each other in that future state and con¬ stantly irritating each other. The general says: “We are living in a state in which the old sanctions have long since disappeared, in short, a state of anarchy.” “Two schools” [are being formed], “one of which is trying to or-

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ganize life from below and the other from above. The first school in Heliopolis, which is gathering around the governor and his central office, bases itself on the ruins and hypotheses of the old people’s parties and is planning a government of absolute bureaucracy. The doctrine is very simple. It looks upon man as a biological organism and thinks of technology as the means which gives form and power to this organism, and also holds it in check. This organism is only an instinct which has risen to the level of the rational. Hence, their ef¬ forts are aimed at the formation of states composed of intel¬ ligent insects.. .. The second school is ours. It is based on the ruins of the old aristocracy and the senate party.... The governor [the chief of the first school] wants to lift a collec¬ tive to the level of a state outside of history. We are striving toward an historical order. We want man’s freedom, his being, his spirit, and his property, and we want the state only in so far as these goods can be protected. This explains the difference between our means and methods and those of the governor. He is thrown back upon the levelling proc¬ ess, the atomization and equalization of the human stock, in which abstract order is to rule. Among us, on the other hand, it is man who is to be the ruler. The governor is striving for the perfection of technology; we are striving for the perfec¬ tion of man.”

In the light of what we have been saying, however, we should have to take what Ernst Jiinger here presents in the form of two parties and see that it also represents what is going on in man himself. In man himself there are two antagonists, the I and the It, the person and the functionary, the human being and the insect. Man’s indelible character struggles with the powers that would delete it, the powers which enter into our life through the awakened insect. This is the self-disintegrating world, the self-consuming world as we see it on the nihilistic landscape of life and as it manifests itself especially in the political realm.

VIII The Human Form of the World’s Breakdown WE SAID THAT THIS CHAOS HAS A POLITICAL aspect and a human aspect, that it has its consequences in politics and in the human being. Having considered the po¬ litical form which the breakdown of the world takes, we now turn to its human aspect. In order to show this side of the breakdown of reality we can set aside our own analyses and point to the name of one writer: Albert Camus and his novel The Plague. The city of Oran in which the plague breaks out is rep¬ resentative of the world as a whole. What is being dealt with here is the absurdity, the meaninglessness of the world itself, which celebrates its wildest excesses especially in war. The world that Camus is talking about is therefore not a cosmos at all, but a grotesque structure, diseased in its innermost fabric, into which man feels he has been thrown as a stranger, a world in which there is no security, no humor, no homely familiarity, and which, taken all in all, represents the exact opposite of that cozy, intimate world of God in which Matthias Claudius, for example, felt at home. It is also the opposite of that world in which air castles are built and many empty arts are pursued, the world in which we stray farther and farther from the goal, but which is nevertheless upheld by kindly, fatherly hands, filled with familiar goals, and repeatedly brought back into line with higher thoughts. To step out of this familiar world into the landscape of 96

THE HUMAN FORM OF THE WORLD'S BREAKDOWN

97

Camus s novel is like listening to Bach's Christmas Oratorio when your small son has fumblingly turned the knob slightly and allowed the jazz rhythm of a jam session to come yowling into the world of angels and shining skies. Oran is a picture of the complete confusion of the world. Its phenomena can no longer be explained, for every explanation presupposes an order whose structure and coherence it is pos¬ sible to discover and demonstrate. But there is no such order any more, so the phenomena of the world can only be counted statistically. Its atmosphere can somehow be sensed in the form of impressions, but nothing more than this. Thus the world becomes a materialized absurdity. For when meaning is lost, then not only the goal of all history but any kind of ordering of life toward a goal, and thus all coherence whatsoever, dis¬ appears. In our analysis of positivism we have already pointed out in another context that when the ultimate purpose is given up the world-continuum also breaks down. In Camus’s novel the absurdities of this incoherent world are all gathered together in the symbolical figure of Sisyphus —represented by the doctor, Rieux—whose task is to roll a huge stone up a hill till it reaches the top only to have it roll back in the next moment. We are reminded also of Hermann Kasack’s City Beyond the River, in which the same symbol of meaninglessness appears in the form of two factories: one grinds up stones and the other bakes them together again, only to send them back to the first factory to be ground up once more. So it is with the raging plague in Oran and all the attempts to combat it: it keeps on coming and every medical attack launched against it is basically empty, meaningless Sisyphean toil. Dr. Rieux does his duty in the face of the plague. But actu¬ ally he cannot cure at all; he can only combat the wildest out¬ breaks of the disease. His only therapy is symptom therapy. He erects barrack hospitals and quarantine camps, he establishes crematories and laboratories to search out vaccines. Finally,

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when the plague dies out, just as strangely and unfathomably as it came—nothing can be explained in this world; one can only note a sum of contingencies—the crowds give him an ova¬ tion. But he himself knows very well that the plague is not “gone,” for the plague bacillus lives on; and even though ‘‘it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests, one day it will break loose again and the whole thing will start over. Meaningless suffering is immortal. Rieux is a Sisyphus. The stone rolls down again; the manufactured stone is delivered back to the grinders. So life is. We do not move ahead; we keep revolving on a carousel, the carousel of meaninglessness. These symbols of meaninglessness, such as the Sisyphus sym¬ bol and the parable of the two factories working against each other, are alarmingly frequent in current literature and their prevalence indicates that far more is involved here than the isolated perversities of a few individual writers. The situation is rather that the compressed atmosphere of meaninglessness itself creates the symbols, and the poet, acting vicariously in dreadful mimicry of sacred priesthoods, discloses for many who cannot express themselves in words the dreadful secret of the modern world in the symbols which it has created. Naturally, this fragmentation of reality into individual, dis¬ connected drops of quicksilver has its immediate practical consequences. It simply compels us to ask the utterly primitive question: Is such a Sisyphean life worth living at all? For Camus this is the only question that counts; all the others are secondary. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories_ comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”* Camus’s solution of the fateful question is a bleak one. That is to say, it does not proceed by putting this crazy world back into ordered regime—something, indeed, that cannot be done * Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. by Justin O’Brien, N.Y., Alfred A. Knopf, 1955, p. 3. (Trans.)

THE HUMAN FORM OF THE WORLD'S BREAKDOWN

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because what is lacking is the Archimedean point outside this world from which it might be moved. For here the world is a closed caldron, actually a witch’s caldron. Even Schiller’s recipe: “Know that the sublime spirit puts the great things into life; he does not seek them there,” no longer works in a world like this. After all, the spirit of man has forfeited sub¬ limity, by which it might impart itself and give of itself. Camus is consistent enough to regard not only the world but also man’s reason as confused and stricken with blindness. Man’s mind, the reason, which a world divested of order re¬ gards as an objective, material thing, has itself been robbed of its light and is no longer capable of shedding light in this darkness. So what remains is the solution which actually we find in all nihilism: amor fati, the love of fate, the affirmation and accept¬ ance of hopelessness. For when one affirms fate, be it ever so mad, one is no longer simply its object, but rather an “act-or” who carries out that fate. One is no longer simply pitched into the abyss; one allows oneself to fall. And by co-operating af¬ firmatively in this headlong fall, a man becomes “someone”; then he is no longer a mere “it,” tossed hither and yon on the wild waves of fortune. Sisyphus knows and embraces the ab¬ surdity of his labor of heaving and rolling the rock. That is his greatness, says Camus. So it would seem that at least one con¬ stant point had been found in the meaningless round of things, namely, the “I” that plays the game and accepts the absurdity, but in doing so is no longer a mere victim but an “act-or”—or thinks that he is. Nietzsche extricates himself from the difficulty in the same way when he deals with the fate of death: One must turn the stupid physiological fact, the inevitable biological law, of death into a moral necessity. One must seize one’s death in freedom; one must embrace it and not leave the initiative to the jailer, the physical bios. “One must stop eating onself when one tastes best.”

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I should say that a person to whom this seems a solution to the problem of life cannot be helped, at least by any human aid. In any case, it is nothing but a desperate, hopeless struggle for existence while all the time the life of a world which has gone out of joint keeps pulling the ground from under my feet. The most important point, the most vital theologically, it seems to me, is the fact that Camus never faces the question of where this disjointedness of the world came from; it never even occurs to him that the world of men must necessarily become disjointed and absurd when man himself is dislocated and out of order. Instead, if I understand him rightly, Camus argues the other way around: Because the world is out of joint man too is out of joint; his reason is confused and, instead of being an ordered organism, becomes a mere organ of perception, a mere antenna for receiving incoherent impressions. That this is the direction of Camus’s thinking is evidenced by the fact that he is completely indifferent to the question of guilt. It is absurd to try to combat an epidemic with moral arguments. It is simply an event of nature. The world and everything that happens in it—war, for example—is accord¬ ingly seen in analogy to natural events. War is a matter of bacilli and not of guilt; it is a matter of phenomena which are to be understood biologically and not morally, much less re¬ ligiously. War, as David Friedrich Strauss once said, is a storm that explodes from atmospheric tensions. So for him the com¬ petent authority here is the scientific discipline of meteorology and not morality. Camus likewise consistently carries out this reduction of historical, human reality to a natural process. The autonomism of the plague symbol leads him to a complete “biologization” and thus a complete dehumanization of the world. In other words, man is no longer responsible for his world. How could he be, since it simply opposes him, since it simply

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happens to him, since, basically, he is merely thrown into it like a stranger and experiences it basically only as an alien? (This alienness of man and his dissociation from the world finds similar expression in existential philosophy.) Here the world has ceased to be man's world. It was still man’s world even for such a thinker as Hobbes. He thought of the state, whose purpose was to hold in check the wolfish band of men, as the all-engulfing Leviathan which is possessed of a coherent will, a kind of super-dimensional person (!) with absolute power. Even though this Leviathan might approach the individual as a kind of enemy, or at any rate as a restrainer, it was nevertheless spirit of man’s spirit. Here man was con¬ fronted as it were by himself, in a heightened personal-super¬ personal form. But precisely because this was so, the world still remained man’s world. It was stamped by man himself. It was, so to speak, the macrocosmic reflection of himself, just as the great Babylons are, according to Francis Thompson, only copies and objectifications of the human heart.* Still man must say of this world: Tat-tvam-asi, this is “I.” Expressed in modern terms, one could say: The technicization of our world is an expression of “my” will to power and the sacred egoism (sacro egoismo) of the political world is the reflection of “my” will to self-assertion. All this is characteristic of a world which is still human. But this is no longer so for Camus. And therefore man is no longer responsible for this world, any more than he is re¬ sponsible for the world of bacilli. He cannot tame the bacillus; he can only be infected by it. So he finds himself in a world which has no relation to the self and is therefore beyond good and evil, and thus is amoral in character. In other words, the world is a physiological phenomenon, not a moral, human one. * Francis Thompson’s sonnet “The Heart”: “Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.” (Trans.)

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It is not difficult to visualize how this basic attitude reflects itself in other areas of human life and how, for example, the realm of sexuality must then inevitably be determined, not by a personal I-thou encounter, but simply by the functioning of the endocrine glands. The bacillus theory of war has its parallel in the “glass-of-water theory” on the level of sexuality.* But now the question is: What makes the world so inhuman? And the only answer is that it is because man has lost his “self.” Because man has given up his “self,” the world too becomes inhuman; it becomes—fate. Here for the first time we are confronted with the deepest question of all, the really theological question: How can nihilism be overcome? We cannot answer the question of how to escape meaning¬ lessness, how to escape the fate of Sisyphus by recommending some other interpretation of the world than that of nihilism and thus saying: “Come, my dear fellow, don’t be so pessi¬ mistic. After all, the world is so beautiful, or at any rate, there is beauty in it. Just look at it the way the nature poets did: re¬ joice in the beauty of human faces. Rejoice in the peace of eve¬ ning shadows. Rejoice in the laughter of children. Sense the goodness and the joy that comes streaming in upon you from the world beyond and try to feel that surely there must be a loving Father up there above the stars.” The question of how nihilism can be overcome cannot be answered by recommending a more optimistic interpretation of the world. The people who reject this recommendation are usually very honest people and they deserve our respect. We quite understand and we have respect for a person who says: “I’ll stick to this fractured modern music or I’ll hang Picasso’s monsters on my walls and I'll dispense with Mozart and Rem* The theory held by some materialists that sexual intercourse has no more significance than the drinking of a glass of water to satisfy thirst. (Trans.)

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brandt, because these men lived in a world that is no longer my world, because they may seduce me into dishonesty and romantic sentimentality and tear me away from the hardheaded realism of my self-assertion. True, all that may be great, but it’s not my greatness. I may admire Gregorian music; but I could get something out of it only if I were a fallen angel, yearning and crying for something lost. But it’s just dishonest and romantic to go on lingering in a lost world. I propose to stick to the hopelessness of my world and also to the aesthetic expression of that hopelessness.” We therefore cannot try to flee into a “better world” in order to escape from nihilism. No, the only legitimate way I can pose the question of how to overcome nihilism and—now we can also say—how to regain the world as our home is to ask myself: How can I become a man again? How can I regain the only relationship in which existence is possible? How can I re¬ cover the peace that was lost? How can I find my way to Him before whom I am responsible, to Him whom I must answer because he has asked me, “Man, where are you?” How can I regain Him whose image I am, the only image that insures the contours of humanity, since without it, those lineaments be¬ come only a staring mask or dissolve into unreality? When I get straight at this point, and only then, will I also regain a relationship to the world. Then its ghastly discon¬ tinuity will have to yield to an order that is secure in His hands. I cannot regain the world unless I regain my self. And I can¬ not regain my self unless I regain God. In any case, that is the order in which I must proceed. A program of restoration by means of a new philosophical interpretation of the world or by means of an active, organizational reconstruction of the world could only mean that we should be trying to put the cart before the horse. Here is the point where we must strictly observe the order of precedence. But the very fact that we are capable of asking this

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ultimate question at all is in itself a tremendous comfort. For it means that we are not alone in our search for order, that we are not alone in a buried cellar, trying to dig our way out; we can hear a hammering and a knocking on the other side, and this is a sign that we are not forlorn, but somebody is seeking us. Our whole situation, in the midst of our seeking, however lost and hopeless, cannot be expressed in terms more profound and beautiful and comforting than are found in that comforting saying of Pascal: “We should not be able to seek thee, O God, if thou hadst not already found us.”* * Pascal (Pensees, sect, vii, 553) says: “Comfort yourself, you would not seek me if you had not found me.” The author’s variation is, of course, the truer statement. (Trans.)

IX The Destruction of the Self

NATURALLY, ONE MUST EXPECT—AND WE HAVE already touched upon this in the preceding chapter—that the self will be drawn into this breakdown of the objective world. Actually, we ought to put it the other way around: The frag¬ mentation of reality is only a reflection of the catastrophic con¬ flagration that is going on deep down in the world of the self. Because the “I” has lost itself, it necessarily loses its world. Loss of the world then reflects back into the ruined landscape of the self in a kind of demonic reciprocal action which is completely destructive. But in what sense has the “I" lost itself? Above all it has lost itself by giving up its ultimate foundation, by ceasing to be un¬ conditional and becoming a conditioned, relative thing, a func¬ tion. We said earlier that man, even the outstanding man, is tending more and more to become a functionary. Here we say that the tendency is only an outgrowth of the deeper change in the ground of existence by virtue of which he has become a mere function. Now, precisely what do we mean? When we pursue this ques¬ tion we encounter certain problems which are presented to us by the Christian conception of man. In the first place we must clearly understand that the human “I,” or, to express it better and with more philosophical precision, the human person, is always determined by a relationship to a magnitude outside of himself. Man always relates himself to something. 105

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For example, he has a relation to his fellow men, to his par¬ ents, to the other sex; he has a relation to his job, to nature, to the things around him—his house, his room, his fountain pen, his bed. Of course, he can also say, “I have no relation* to a person or a thing; I don’t have anything to do with music, or within the realm of music with Wagner or Hindemith or jazz.” When¬ ever I use the phrase “I don't have any relation to . . .,” I am not actually making a statement about the object in question, I am not making an explicit value judgment upon Wagner, but simply leaving quite undecided the question whether he may mean something to others or whether he may have any objective importance at all. When I say, “I have no relation to . .

I am always making a statement about myself. I am,

so to speak, declaring or “confessing” something. It may be simply an acknowledgment that something is lacking in me, that there may be certain blind spots in my mind and character. Thus the human person is always characterized by a “rela¬ tion to. . . .” This applies even to Narcissus, for he, after all, is absorbed in a relationship to himself. Allow me to quote two famous examples in which the self is spoken of as the bearer of such a relationship. First, the famous conclusion of Kant’s Critique of Practical

Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increas¬ ing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” d nis statement indicates two geometrical lines and says that the human self stands at the place where they intersect and that it is profoundly and essentially determined by them. * The idiomatic phrase Ich habe kein Verhaltnis zu ..., on which this illustration depends, has no idiomatic counterpart in English, except per¬ haps in the sense of “Nothing relates me to..or “I don’t connect with-" (Trans.)

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One line is the line of the cosmos. The fact that the human self is a point that lies on this line means that it is an infinitely insignificant quantity. What is even the whole earth compared with the planetary system with which it is co-ordinated, and what is this planetary system compared with cosmic space, which is measured in light-years? Within this tiny earth-point in turn, man himself is an almost unimaginable trifle. One look at the cosmos shatters him in so far as he is a quantity. The other line is represented by the intelligible world

(mundus intelligibilis): since man is a member of that in¬ telligible world and therefore the bearer of the moral law, he suddenly becomes a qualitative magnitude of absolute unique¬ ness and can no longer be described quantitatively as a mere “component’’ of the universe. On the contrary, seen from this point of view he is capable of opposing the whole cosmos in¬ stead of merely incorporating himself in it as a diminutive particle. For the tremendous cosmic quantities—the planets and the fixed star systems—move according to immutable mathematical laws; they are unfree; but man moves in freedom, obeying the voice of practical Logos within him, and is there¬ fore exempt from bondage to the necessity of natural law. Therefore he can face the causally bound immensity of the whole universe in free self-determination. Here again we observe the highly characteristic fact on which everything depends for us in this connection, namely, that man is determined by a “relation to. . . .” At the point of his in¬ feriority and his superiority to the cosmic world we see who he is. His secret, therefore, is a relation. Second, we turn to a similar example, in this case Kierke¬ gaard’s definition of man as a relation. The self acquires a new quality or qualification in the fact that it is the self directly in the sight of God. This self is no longer the merely human self but is what I would call, hop¬ ing not to be misunderstood, the theological self, the self

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directly in the sight of God. And what an infinite reality this self acquires by being before God! A herdsman who (if this were possible) is a self only in the sight of cows is a very low self, and so also is a ruler who is a self in the sight of slaves —for in both cases the scale or measure is lacking. The child who hitherto has had only the parents to measure himself by, becomes a self when he is a man by getting the state as a measure. But what an infinite accent falls upon the self by getting God as a measure.* Here we have a thoroughly consistent attempt to take seri¬ ously the fact that man can be defined only as a being in rela¬ tionship, that he must possess a measure. But then everything depends on the content of that relationship. In this quotation from Kierkegaard two entirely different factors which may form the content of the relationship are specified. First are the factors which are under the man—in this case the cows

(under the herdsman)

and the slaves

(under the

ruler). If a man who is a herdsman by vocation were to be distinguished only by the fact that he could say of himself, “I am more than a cow; in the cow-man relationship I therefore have the precedence,” we would hardly have arrived at a defini¬ tion of what is specifically human. After all, the lion is also more than a cow; at any rate, this would be the opinion of all who are not philosophical-minded vegetarians or devotees of certain specialized ideologies. Second is the factor which is above man: God. Only through God does man attain his real dignity. There is no higher dignity and there is no greater inviolability than that of a child of God. These two differing orientations of the human relationship —upward or downward—can be illustrated by reference to two * Spren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, quoted from Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Garden City, Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company, 1954, p. 210. (Trans.)

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SELF

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famous literary documents, Psalm 8 and the well-known hymn of the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone. The chorus says: a

Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none More wonderful than man; the stormgrey sea Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high; Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven With shining furrows where his plows have gone Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions *••••••• Words also, and thought as rapid as air. He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his. And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow, The spears of winter rain: from every wind He has made himself secure—from all but one: In the late wind of death he cannot stand.

Here the greatness of man is expressed in the relationship he bears to the elements, the beasts, and the wildernesses he has conquered. His power as a bearer of reason and will, as a cre¬ ative planner and organizer of the world is demonstrated in his power to tame chaotic forces and incorporate them into his order. In Kierkegaard’s terms, here the greatness of the human self is constituted by his downward relationship. There is, how¬ ever, a certain qualification which we shall have to deal with a little later. First let us set over against this way of defining man’s rela¬ tionship the totally different way in which Psalm 8 defines the essence of man: When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him a little less than God,

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and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.... Here too the theme is the greatness of man. Here too man’s mastery of the rest of creation plays a part. Here too the world lies at man’s feet, or more correctly, it has been put under his feet. But he cannot hold this position of dominion, he cannot carry out this “downward relationship” unless he is incorpo¬ rated in an order in which he is granted the pre-eminent place in the hierarchy of creation. It is not an autonomous act of subjection and conquest that puts him at the top. It is not at all his immanent qualities that make him the ruler of the world. On the contrary, these immanent qualities point in the opposite direction: What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? The answer to this rhetorical question can only be: Man is

nothing. It is utterly impossible to discover what could have moved God to interest himself in man, considering that he is such an insignificant quantity in the universe. The objection is one frequently raised against Christianity: that it is a religion of pride because it teaches that man can come to God with all his trifling concerns and assume that God is interested in him—in him, who is, after all, only a “disease on the skin of the earth” (Nietzsche). This objection is echoed in the psalm itself, though it is put in a totally dif¬ ferent bracket: it is by no means whatsoever because of man's immanent qualities that the “infinite accent” of which Kierke¬ gaard speaks falls upon him. His greatness rests solely on the fact that God in his incomprehensible goodness has bestowed his love upon him. God does not love us because we are so valuable; we are valuable because God loves us.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SELF

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The primary, controlling relation that leads to the definition of what is, is therefore the relation to God. Everything that can be said of the pre-eminence of man within the realm of creation, everything that constitutes the downward relation¬ ship, in the sense of Sophocles’ concept of man, is embedded in this other, controlling relationship. The opposing definitions of man in these two documents may also be the reason why their train of thought arrives at different destinations. Sophocles’ hymn to man begins with an apotheosis of his greatness; and the portrayal of this great¬ ness ends by pointing to the death to which he must capitu¬ late. The psalm, on the other hand, begins what it has to say about man with a reference to his pitiful wretchedness and concludes with a triumphant exaltation of the greatness that has been bestowed upon him and his elevation to the peak of the pyramid of creation. If we speak of the dignity of man in the sense of this psalm and of the Bible as a whole, we can speak of it only as a bor¬ rowed dignity, an alien dignity. This is strongly portrayed in picture form by the Gothic painters, who show man against the background of a golden heaven. Clothing and faces are severely conventionalized. The distinctiveness of man is not depicted by means of immanent characteristics, either in faces that reveal individual character or in distinctive dress. Man’s distinctiveness consists rather in his standing beneath this golden heaven, in his being related to the glory of God and the fact that a borrowed, “alien” dignity is reflected upon his countenance. This “alien dignity” is symbolically expressed also in the figure of the Lord holding the world in his hand in the form of a golden orb, in this case the dignity bestowed upon the world of man as a whole. For here again the golden gleam of the orb does not originate from the immanent qualities of the world. In other words, it is not that the world itself is “golden” and we are caught up on a wave of optimism when we contem-

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plate it. These men were thoroughly aware of the somber valleys of shadow; they knew the world’s dark, mysterious de¬ files in which men seemingly wander in meaningless circles. But they also knew that this dark, enigmatic world is in the hands of God and therefore none of its abysses are ultimate and none of its defiles can ever lead beyond the range of where God is thinking his “higher thoughts” (Isa. 55:9) . In this sense the world too acquires a borrowed dignity and it demands our affirmation even when the golden heaven and the protecting hand is lost to view and we are left to the mercy of the specters of anxiety optimism.

or

a strained

and

superficial

In any case, because man—and along with him his world— acquires such alien, conferred dignity, he is inviolable. He is protected by the supreme patron. He is the apple of God’s eye and dare not be touched. He was “bought with a price”; “Jesus Christ died for him”

(Paul). He who touches him

touches the supreme Majesty. He possesses this sacrosanctity quite independently of his immanent qualities, and he pos¬ sesses it not only in principle, by reason of his being a “human being,” but also as an individual. Even if his life is “worth¬ less” from a sociological point of view, even if he is completely “unproductive” and perhaps even represents a hampering burden who must be dragged along by the healthy, he is never¬ theless the bearer of that alien dignity that delivers him from the throttling clutches of those who think only in economic terms and makes him the secret holder of an unapproachable majesty. In this sense the old hymn says, “To the weak He is kind.”* On the other hand, if man is oriented downward, if he sees himself and thinks of himself only in his superiority over the waves of the sea, the plagues he controls with his medical skills, and the earth which he cultivates, then he becomes what * Hymn by Johann Gramann (Poliander) , “Now to the Lord sing praises,” paraphrase of Psalm 103. (Trans.)

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113

Kierkegaard calls the base self/' Perhaps this can be expressed in clearer and more modern terms by saying that he becomes a “functional self.” Naturally, we must not impose this conclusion upon Sopho¬ cles’ Antigone, since there the inference had not yet been drawn from the basic premise. For there the world—as repre¬ sented in the form of the individual (Antigone) as well as in the form of the state (Creon) —is still founded upon the nomos of the gods of Hades and hence is still rooted in transcendental sanctions. The conclusion of the chorus points out very explicitly that the capacity which underlies man's grandeur can lead not only to “good and evil” but also to out¬ rageous acts, and thus that nobility and destruction lie close together. Which of the two eventuate depends upon man’s relation to the higher, holy powers. O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure! O fate of man, working both good and evil! When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands! When the laws are broken, what of his city then? Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth, Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts.

Nobody would wish to deny that here we have really solemn affirmation of dependence upon the gods. Yet this is a differ¬ ent spirit from that evident in Psalm 8, which sees the great¬ ness of man, not in his superior capacities, but rather in his “alien dignity.” It sees man’s greatness only in the fact that he stands in relationship to God and that he lives, and there¬ fore stands or falls, by this relationship—and thus by some¬ thing that stands “outside” of himself. Compared with the psalm’s emphasis upon absolute de¬ pendence, reverence for the gods has more the effect of being a corrective, which human greatness needs lest it succumb to the threat of hubris. But it is greatness in any case, even

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though ambivalent; here the divine power has become a cor¬ rective authority rather than a constitutive one. Consequently, the chorus could never have opened with a cry to the gods like that of the psalm: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” However that may be, in the Antigone the downward rela¬ tionship is not the sole relationship in which human existence is grounded, though it may be the sustaining relationship. As soon as the greatness of man is set forth phenomenologically —and this is, after all, what is being done in this Greek hymn —it cannot be otherwise; for all phenomenology must neces¬ sarily be intentional, must be intent upon establishing im¬ manent, demonstrable qualities. Thus in the panegyric to human power uttered in this Sophoclean chorus—power over something beneath it—it would appear that we have a first suggestion of a line leading inevitably to secularization, to emancipation from the gods of Hades, to a concept of man which is oriented downward. Then the “functional self'’ that emerges at the end of this line is no longer characterized by “infinite value” but simply by the “utilizable value” of man, his power to produce, to fight, and to labor. The downward relation must end in the concept of utilizable value and there¬ fore in making human value completely relative. But then, inevitably it also engenders the concept of non¬ value; some human beings will have no value that can be utilized. Under the dreadful “protectorate” of this concept, the annihilation, liquidation, elimination of men is a neces¬ sary inference, and hard upon it looms the ghastly vision of modern gas chambers. Even our language changes and exhibits the telltale signs of this concept’s influence; men are spoken of as things and more and more are described in material terms. We speak of the labor force and labor potential, even of human material. And he who was a “little less than God” becomes the vehicle of an economic potential or the possessor of a reproductive apparatus.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SELF

115

This is the place to return to the thought which we have touched upon before, namely, that the annihilation of man, the wicked gambling with man’s destiny, the transportations and mass muiders have basically nothing to do with questions of moral character. A man may be an idealist, even a veritable angel, but once he has surrendered to this way of thinking about man, once he has arrived at the idea of utilizable value —and he must end there once he gives up the living God or even the gods of Hades—he cannot do anything else but set in motion the process of liquidation. It would actually be out of character and a sign of moral weakness if he were unwilling to be consistent and unwilling to proceed. Thus nihilism, which means the separation of the world from its absolute relation to God, leads to the destruction of the self. The self is “unselfed,” in Kierkegaard’s sense, and becomes merely a representation of a thing or an energy, with all the consequences of self-annihilation that this involves.

X The Anxiety of Life 1. The Present Situation

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE SELF IS MANIFESTED IN still another phenomenon, which existential philosophy espe¬ cially has made its own particular subject of study and which we must regard as a ferment of disintegration and decay, even though Heidegger seeks to interpret it as a positive energy releasing and giving birth to existence—namely, the phenome¬ non of anxiety. We have already indicated a direct approach to the nature of anxiety. It is actually man’s untrammeled fear of himself and his own kind. In his emancipation he has become unpre¬ dictable and unreliable. The bearer of the will to power who is no longer bound and restrained by an ultimate authority inevitably becomes sinister and undependable. Every bridge of confidence that would lead to him has been broken down. Consequently, within every community in which this type rules a centrifugal tendency sets in and there is sure to be a repetition of the fate of the men who lost their God at the tower of Babel. “Without God, everything is lawful,” and everybody becomes uneasy about everybody else; nobody can depend upon anybody. This is the reason why all atheistic state systems necessarily become police states: the people can be held in check only by stronger controls and by terror. But even the police force itself is ultimately undependable if it is made up of such uncon¬ trolled individuals. The setting up of a second police system to oversee the first is necessary. Men of force who inevitably keep expanding their power can no longer be held in check by the commandments of God but only by one another. The 116

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police state and the dual police system are necessary conse¬ quences of nihilism. One of the roots of anxiety lies in this realm of human undependability. But the real root of anxiety goes still deeper. It is not only man s fear of himself but dread of the abyss of Nothingness that yawns on the horizon of an atheistic world. To show what is involved in this anxiety we shall have to go into some detail. Not long ago, in a poll which employed methods similar to the well-known Gallup procedure, a number of questions were addressed to young people, especially students. One of the questions read: What is the basic feeling you have toward life? Sixty per cent of all who were questioned answered with a shocking straightforwardness: fear. How is it that people who give no impression whatsoever of being anxious or afraid should give this astonishing answer? If the question had been pursued and the individuals had been asked what they were afraid of, the answers would prob¬ ably have varied widely. Some would have said they were afraid of the threat of unemployment, others of an East-West conflict, others of the atom bomb, and some would doubtless have confessed that they were afraid of their examinations. But none of these would have been the real answer. They would all be simply giving a name to a much deeper feeling of being threatened: the feeling of being menaced by the sin¬ isterness of life itself, which is full of dangerous possibilities, charged, as it were, with some uncanny, alien power. But this uneasy attitude toward the future expresses itself only in ciphered form. Other signs are interposed. The pri¬ mary anxiety never shows itself directly but conceals itself in coded signs. One who does not know the code would conclude that the present generation is beseiged by an unusual mass of dangers since the reasons put forward for this feeling of anxi¬ ety are legion and exceed in an alarming way all the statistics we have concerning the dangers and catastrophes about which earlier generations felt anxious.

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Nevertheless we must ask whether it is not possible that this sense of sinisterness may be overdeveloped in our generation, so that we “quail before blows that never fall” and tremble before “fire, water, poison, steel” (Goethe) and that therefore the reason for the anxiety lies within man himself and is by no means situated in some objectively demonstrable danger point in the outside world. Luther, the medieval monk, was consumed with the anxiety of guilt before the divine Judge and the question that broke from his lips was “How can I get a gracious God?” but people today are shaken by the anxiety of fate, the fear of life itself. And this is the real problem; where once the God of judgment stood there is now a vacuum. Perhaps it is precisely this nothingness that arouses within us the terrible horror vacui, the anxiety of emptiness. And in¬ stead of asking, “How can I get a gracious God?” perhaps one asks, Where is God? Where is he in the face of these recurrent times of catastrophe that sweep so cruelly through our world? Where is he in the face of the autonomy of technical develop¬ ment which seems to be moving toward the self-destruction of mankind, including the ‘innocent’? Where is he in the host of meaningless things in individual lives?” Today in place of guilt and fear we have a different com¬ bination of concepts: fear and fate, the hidden trauma of our generation. It is important from the outset that we have a clear etymo¬ logical understanding of the term “anxiety.” The word comes from the Latin angustia, which means shortness of breath, the feeling of not having enough room to breathe. It is present in a maximal state of anguish, for example, in an attack of angina pectoris. Anxiety, it may be said, is a symptom of existence in a bottleneck. True, other examples which argue an opposite cause for anxiety can be adduced. It may be said that it is caused by exposure to limitless distances; it is the feeling of being lost in infinite space where there are no contours and no fixed points which one can approach. The Russian land-

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scape has often had this effect. In both cases, however, anxiety is a state in which the question of what is producing the fear in this concrete instance recedes into the background or does not appear at all. Anxiety is therefore related to the “indefinable.” This is the sense in which Heidegger makes a fundamental distinction between anxiety and fear. “Fear,” he says, “relates to some¬ thing that exists within the world,” whereas “the object of anxiety is ‘being-in-the-world’ as such.” The object of anxiety cannot be fixed concretely because' it includes the totality of all the situations in which I find myself in this world. It is therefore characteristic that words like “to be fright¬ ened” and “to be bored” are often related to the impersonal pronoun “it”: “it” frightens me; “it” bores me. In the strict sense, therefore, boredom cannot be defined in the sense that a particular book, a definite person, a definite movie bores me. Rather, I have a definite stock of boredom, a definite inner ennui, within myself. This is then brought into relationship with all the objects, people, and situations with which I come in contact. Things and situations are merely objects in con¬ nection with which the ennui within me becomes manifest, acquires objective symbols. Thus they are not actually the causes of boredom but only the subsequent symptoms in which and through which boredom becomes apparent. The “it” of anxiety is similar. The concrete things which I may name are only the occasions or provocations through which the stock of anxiety within me makes itself felt. That which I fear concretely is never identical with that which gives me anxiety; when I specify concrete things I am not really indicating the cause of the anxiety but merely the way in which the anxiety manifests itself, the projections of anxiety. For anxiety is constantly seeking to find a way out of its tormenting non-objectiveness by specifying the objects of fear; in other words, it is always seeking to become definite and definable. But the definitions are false; for the objects are not

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causes but substantiations of subsequent projections. They are objectifications which come to us wearing the mask of causalities. The situation is thoroughly familiar to medical psychology. Sigmund Freud, for example, recognized a kind of anxiety— in the form of persecution mania, for instance—which had no basis in the outside world and which he therefore called neurotic, that is, a pathological alteration of the self, a “pro¬ jection/’ Thus Oskar Liebeck in his book The Unknown and Anxiety* speaks quite correctly of “the quality of unknown¬ ness in anxiety.” But we still have not plumbed the depths of the mystery of anxiety as long as we think of it as merely the individual’s feeling of constriction. It is by no means merely a matter of my own personal breathing-space in which I feel that I am confined and constricted by this mysterious “it.” What we are dealing with here is rather the breathing-space of the whole world. This sense of cosmic oppression and constriction is ex¬ pressed in Germanic mythology by means of the symbol of the Midgard serpent: the great serpent which encircles and holds our world in its grip. Everything we experience in life, the soaring festive moments and also the tribulations and suffer¬ ings, all of it together is enclosed and confined within this tremendous constriction. Not only the negative but also the positive forces and events in our existence are characterized by the fact that they exist and occur within this confinement. There is a certain parallel in Greek thinking in so far as the ocean constitutes the boundary, the horizon of the human world. Mythologically speaking, Oceanus was one of the Titans overthrown by the Olympians gods. This means that the Olympian gods were able to push back the menacing elemental forces to the horizon of the world. Within the horizon is the Olympian dominion, the “cosmos.” Here are houses and culti¬ vated fields. Here things are measurable, even though they are uncultivated forests and deserts, for it is still possible to walk * Das Unbekannte und die Angst, 1928. (Trans.)

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around them—they are enclosed within an order. Beyond the ocean lies the boundless and measureless and therefore the incomprehensible. But what is incomprehensible has no ex¬ istence; no Greek mind would have been able to think of it as having being. In other words, back of the ocean lies Noth¬ ingness. However, we probably would not be doing justice to this ancient conception of the cosmos if we described Nothing¬ ness in arithmetical terms as being merely a zero. The very fact that the Titan is thought of as being overthrown, or rather cast out and driven to the rim of the cosmos, where he encloses “being” and constitutes the boundary of “non-being,” and therefore that “being” does not simply cease but has a limit, ought to show us that here Nothingness is not merely the result of radical substraction but something that counter¬ vails the cosmos, that it is the enemy, the representative of that which is monstrous and unnatural. “Ocean was one of the imagined realizations of that measureless world ‘beyond the boundaries,’ in which there is essentially no form, of which there is no concept. The man who would penetrate it under¬ took not only the impossible, but the impious.”* For then he wanted to do more than the gods and desired to give respect to something more than and something different from the limits set by the gods and reached only by the gods. So when we realize that in the Greek conception the meas¬ ureless nothing is a world in opposition to this world, we also understand that here again there was a consciousness of being surrounded by something dreadful, an alien and incompre¬ hensible dominion which can suddenly come flooding into the ordered world. For some day the protecting dam may break and one day the Olympians, the creators and warders of the dam, will be forced to depart. One day the twilight of the gods must come. And at last we begin to realize fully what anxiety can be. As long as I am merely afraid—that is, as long as I fear * C. F. v. Weizsacker, The World View of Physics, translated by Marjorie Grene, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, p. 142. (Trans.)

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something definite—I continue to cherish hopes. I fear, for example, that I have cancer, but “perhaps" it is only a harm¬ less swelling. I fear that my missing son was killed long ago, but “perhaps" he is being detained in a secret prison camp and some day he will return. As a soldier I fear the deadly bullet, but, after all, “not every bullet finds its billet." But all this is different in the world-view symbolized by the Midgard serpent. There the whole world, including all its fears and hopes, is in jeopardy. The Greek man or the Teu¬ tonic man could entreat the gods, but in so far as he did so they were for him symbols of hope in the midst of all that he feared. There was always the realization, however, that one day the twilight of the gods would ensue, that Olympus and Valhalla would vanish, and the great serpent or fate would strangle the gods and the symbols of hope. In times of great catastrophe the serpent draws its coils tighter. The contraction of living space (brought on by two lost wars in Germany) and the limiting of our sense of time still left to live (we never know when the button will be pressed which will release fresh onslaughts of catastrophe)— all this engenders the feeling of tightening constriction. Now, of course we no longer live in a mythological age in which it was possible to speak of such conceptions as the Midgard serpent as actual realities. In order to rediscover what it conveys in terms of our own real life we must, as it were, demythologize this rather gruesome imagery. The fact is, of course, that even the Teutons did not think of it as something that could be seen and touched. It was rather something immediately beyond the horizon of the world, something just beyond the point where it can be seen. But that which cannot be seen and has about it the quality of non-objectivity is nevertheless mysteriously present and be¬ trays itself in our anxiety. To this extent the Midgard serpent possesses exactly the same quality of being an “it" which we have spoken of: it is intangible, but it is there. Indeed, it can even be—and here we make connection with

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modem thought—Nothingness. Kierkegaard is capable of say¬ ing that anxiety is engendered by Nothingness and that Noth¬ ingness “confronts man as a something This Nothingness generates anxiety in two ways, and we may illustrate them by reference to the death of Faust and espe¬ cially the role which Mephistopheles plays in that scene. Faust’s basic feeling toward life is that of anxiety—even though one will never find it so interpreted in any commen¬ tary on Faust. Nowhere does he ever discover the uncondi¬ tioned. None of the faculties (“philosophy and jurisprudence, medicine, and even, alas! theology”) was able to show it to him. Faust is afraid of Nothingness. Fie never finds the inner bond that holds the world together. We shall understand Faust only if we see his fruitless search and final frustration as ciphered forms of the threat of Nothingness. Therefore the solution lies in a renunciation of any discover¬ able structure of meaning in life, and the act of constant striving as such becomes the meaning. Not the achievement of a goal—which cannot be demonstrated as such at all—but rather the struggle toward the goal is what is really meaning¬ ful. This is the significance of the dike symbol: the meaning is not the land which the dam protects (as if the faculty of agriculture were in possession of a formula for the world, which philosophy, jurisprudence, and, unfortunately, even theology did not possess). Rather the dike represents the meaning of life in the sense that it requires action and strug¬ gle to build it and guard it and shore it up and thus repre¬ sents, not a goal in itself, but creative action: He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew....

In the death scene Mephistopheles then proceeds to show the dubiousness of this attempt to give meaning to life:

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Past and pure Naught, complete monotony! What good for us, this endlessly creating?— What is created then annihilating? ‘And now it’s past!’ Why read a page so twisted? ’Tis just the same as if it ne’er existed. Yet goes in circles round as if it had, however: I’d rather choose, instead, the Void forever.

Mephistopheles saw the same reality that Faust saw: he saw the world of action in which the efforts and struggles of man should be meaningful. But he saw it from another point of view. He saw that at bottom this whole attempt to find the meaning of life in action and struggle is futile because the world simply goes on revolving in a circle. One never arrives because there is no goal, so nothing comes of mans efforts. This is perhaps the briefest way to sum up the Mephistophelian view. Life just goes on revolving. Expressed in terms of the category of time, one could say that life is not a line that moves toward a goal but a circle. It never gets a man anywhere but just keeps whirling him around on a whirligig. He may think that “this endlessly cre¬ ating,” this constant activity amounts to something, but in reality it is nothing, because it moves, not in the realm of meaning and purpose, but in “the Void.” Nothingness therefore expresses itself only in ciphered form; it acts “as if” it were something. Mephistopheles unmasks it; or, if that is putting it too strongly, Mephistopheles is the constant, gnawing doubt, the shadow that Faust can never get rid of. And the question remains where the greater truth lies in Faust’, in this death scene or in the liturgical closing scene of glorification in which Goethe resolves the dualism of Faust and Mephistopheles and asserts that there are higher, “trans¬ cendental vindications. But the question is whether a person who himself remains bound to this dualism and is obviously objectifying himself in the poetic presentation of it can legiti-

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mately take refuge in transcendentalism. This is the question that always remains in the concluding scenes of Faust. In any case, Mephistopheles’ point of view, which asserts that time is empty, seems to succeed quite generally among us. Why else do we speak of “passing away the time” or “killing time,” or “consuming time”? Who else does one kill except an enemy? Time as a cyclic movement empty of content is that which threatens the meaning of my life. Therefore it is an enemy. In time Nothingness rises up to challenge me. Consequently, though nothingness smites a man with op¬ pressing anxiety, one cannot say that it is something definite that makes him anxious. As we have already suggested, it is the other way around: what appears to be frightening him is nothing else than the projection of what is thus feared upon the great, empty, white screen of Nothingness. In this sense Faust’s path is dogged from beginning to end by one of the four gray hags, Care. Care at the bottom of the heart is lurking [note that it is not outside!] •

••••••«

In newer masks her face is ever drest [that is, it always expresses itself in ciphered form!]. By turns as house and land, as wife and child, presented,— As water, fire, as poison, steel: We dread the blows we never feel. And what we never lose is yet by us lamented!

This anxious care, therefore, is not the result of some disas¬ trous incursion from the outside world; it is simply expressing a feeling about life which the person already has toward the outside world. This is probably the place to correct a common misappre¬ hension that the anxious person is always a depressed, lowspirited person. On the contrary, he may be extremely active.

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at least in many cases. Usually he is on a constant hunt for artificial ways of filling up his time. Anxiety is intolerable and therefore it must be constantly repressed and constantly di¬ verted. The more quiet things are, the more the yawning void appears and the more anxiety creeps in. This is what Albert Schweitzer was speaking of when he said (in his book The Decay and the Restoration of Civiliza¬ tion) , “For two or three generations many, many individuals have been living only as workers, not as human beings.” And Werner Leibbrand, the physician-philosopher, says in his book The Divine Staff of Aesculapius, A Metaphysics of the Physi¬ cian* that this kind of obsession with work is actually flight

in fact, a kind of addiction: if one forces these persons to face themselves even for a few seconds, they react like a morphinist who has been deprived of his drug. Naturally the question arises: Why does the person refuse to face himself and come to himself? And the only answer one can give is that he himself is no longer there—at any rate he is no longer there so far as the ground and goal and meaning of his existence are concerned—and that therefore he is gazing into the Void, in the way that this sometimes happens in demonically intensified form in a prison camp where there is nothing to do, no change of scene and sound, nothing to divert one’s mind. After all, one can compose oneself and concentrate only if he has a center upon which to concentrate. If no such center exists, then one must divert himself and seek stimulations, one must fill up the void with exciting im¬ pressions. And modern life furnishes abundant opportunity and elaborate means to do this. We have asserted that even art can perform the function of providing escape. This statement may appear at first to be depreciative, though it is by no means intended as a verdict upon art as such. On the contrary, it only reveals one of the * See note 4 in the author’s notes, p. 179. (Trans.)

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profoundest mysteries of art, namely, that it is precisely the blows and abysses of life that produce the deepest impulses to artistic creation: When the man within grows voiceless in his pain A god bestows the gift to speak my suffering. * One can detect this side of the artistic mind particularly in Greek art. Whereas Goethe and Winckelmann interpreted Greek art as a “naive” expression of harmonious humanity, Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche taught us to under¬ stand it differently—“sentimentally,” in Schiller’s sense—and discovered in it inner dimensions which were virtually un¬ known to earlier interpreters. They pointed out that the Greeks created the beautiful because they had a dread of the horrible. The Greek was able to bear the Dionysian depths of life only as he fabricated above them the Apollinian dream¬ world. “Greek art has taught us,” said Nietzsche, “that there are no truly beautiful surfaces without dreadful depths.” “Every Greek statue can teach us that the beautiful is only negation.” It is precisely this last thought that suggests the conjecture that Greek art may well be based upon an act of exorcism, the intent of which is to curb and tame the onrush of chaos, the confusion and disorder of stark matter by subjecting it to the cosmos of plastic structure, and therefore that art is something launched against very definite hostile forces. It would then be a kind of repetition of the Olympian act by which the gods cast out the chaotic, titanic primeval forces. Christian Morgenstern, in his profoundly meaningful poem “The Scrap of Paper” [Das Butterbrotpapier], included among the Gallows Songs, goes so far as to attribute the origin of the mind to anxiety: • Goethe. (Trans.)

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A scrap of paper in the wold Beneath the falling snow feels cold ... In its dread, though before it never Would have thought of thinking, ever, Because it was a thing, of course, Composed of rags and trash perforce, Commenced, began, through bitter dread, To think, to think—that’s what I said. Think what that means, through dread, I said. Achieved, acquired—a mind—through dread! And thereupon the scrap of paper resolved to act and flew off like a butterfly and finally fell to earth again. What was Morgenstern trying to say in this bit of obscure banality which is so typical of him? I have learned that it is possible to achieve a mind by oberving many a candidate for examination, who ordinarily was far from fluent, suddenly develop an argument, see relation¬ ships, and achieve feats of memory that one would never have expected of him. This is a caricature, of course, but it does illustrate how a person’s mind expands when he needs it to escape the menacing fangs of the examiner. Basically, Morgen¬ stern is alluding to the same phenomenon. Life is dreadful. The mind is a means of evading this dreadfulness through flight, and when a man is afraid his mind grows. Perhaps the reader who is more optimistically inclined may object that it is also possible to think of the mind as the ability to stand up to life and meet it combatively, and possibly even to attack it positively. But immediately the question arises: What does this heroic activism actually signify? Does not heroism too have some connection with repressed fear, or, if you prefer, with overcoming fear? In any case, when a soldier performs some foolhardy act in a blind fury or is unimaginably stolid and phlegmatic, we are not inclined to call him heroic. We feel there is something inhuman about him and we have often noted this in some soldiers despite their very considerable

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soldierly accomplishments. Heroism is present only when a man knows the power of fear. Therefore every act of heroic conquest in life has “another side,” seen from Mephistopheles' point of view, namely, fear and the urge to take flight. From all of this we can draw an important conclusion. We said that anxiety is related to the undefinable and non¬ objective. We can now add that anxiety is itself non-objective and intangible. Nobody says: I am afraid; that’s why I am so nervous and restless. All that we can actually see is the out¬ ward ascertainable manifestations of what we have evaluated as flight, such as the frenzied movement of the dance, the accomplishment of a piece of work, or a heroic act. The evalu¬ ation itself cannot be empirically demonstrated, except in ex¬ treme psychopathic cases. It is based upon a particular way of understanding and evaluating life itself. But if we are going to assume the right to call play and work and struggle manifestations of flight from anxiety, we must be able to say in what dimension of reality this statement is valid. To this end we proceed to inquire into the ground of anxiety. 2. The Ground of Anxiety

We may be permitted to explore this ground of anxiety, not by approaching it theoretically, but rather by illustrating it with several quotations from Jean Paul’s profoundly moving and macabre “Dream of a World Without God.” This is the vision experienced by a man who falls asleep on a quiet hill¬ side and dreams that he awakes in a cemetery, finding himself in a world in which there is no God. There was but one of them still lying on his pillow, and he was one who had just been buried in the church; he lay at peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream upon his smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of the living), his sleep broke; he awoke, and smiled no more; with painful

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effort he raised his heavy eyelids.... He raised his hands, folded as if for prayer; but then his arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the folded hands came off and fell away.... And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down .. . and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead cried out, “Christ! is there no God?” He answered, “There is none_” And Christ spake on, saying, “I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky-ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried.

Father, where art thou?” But answer came there

none, save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none.... Then the dead children, who had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into the temple, and fell down before the noble form ... and cried, “Jesus, have we no Father? He made answer, with streaming tears, “We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no Father_” Then he, sublime, loftiest of finite beings, raised his eyes toward the nothingness and boundless void, saying, “Oh, dead, dumb nothingness! necessity endless and chill! Oh, mad, unreasoning Chance! when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and me too? ... Every soul in this great corpse-trench of a universe is utterly alone! I am alone—none by me— O Father! Father! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I may rest upon it? Alas! if every soul be its own creator and father, why shall it not be its own destroying angel, too?.. *

The dreamer awakes at the moment when the tension is at its highest and the great serpent on the horizon of the world • Translation from Wit, Wisdom, and Philosophy of Jean Paul Fred.

Wftm (Trans^

P* HaWl