No More Learning

Lindner, who thus, in Agathe's judgment, had never come to terms with himself, had now begun to pace restlessly back and forth in his room, subjecting the visits she was paying him to a severe and detailed examination. She seemed to like being here; she asked about many details of his house and his life, about his educational principles and his books. He was surely not mistaken in assuming that one would express so much interest in someone's life only i f one were drawn to share it; of course, the way she had of expressing her- self in the process would just have to be accepted as her idiosyncrasy! In this vein he recalled that she had once told him about a woman- unpardonably a former mistress of her brother's-whose head al- ways became "like a coconut, with the hair inside" when she fell in love with a man; and Agathe had added the observation that that was the way she felt about his house. It was all so much of a piece that it really made one "afraid for oneself! " But the fear seemed to give her pleasure, and Lindner thought he recognized in this paradoxical trait the feminine psyche's anxious readiness to yield, the more so as she indicated to him that she remembered similar impressions from the
beginning of her marriage.
Now, it is only natural that a man like Lindner would more readily
have thoughts of marriage than sinful ones. And so, both during and outside the periods he set aside for the problems of life, he had sometimes secretly allowed the idea to creep in that it would perhaps be good if the child Peter had a mother again; and now it also hap- pened that instead of analyzing Agathe's behavior further, he stopped at one of its manifestations that secretly appealed to him. For in a profound anticipation of his destiny, Agathe had, from the beginning of their acquaintance, spoken of nothing with more pas- sion than her divorce. There was no way he could sanction this sin, but he could also not prevent its advantages from emerging more clearly with eve. ry passing day; and in spite of his customary opinions about the nature of the tragic, he was inclined to find tragic the lot that compelled him to express bitter antipathy toward what he him- self almost wished would happen. In addition, it happened that Agathe exploited this resistance mostly in order to indicate in her offensive way that she did not believe the truth of his conviction. He might trot out morality, place the Church in front of it, pronounce all
1288 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the principles that had been so ready to hand all his life; she smiled when she answered, and this smile reminded him of Frau Lindner's smile in the later years of their marriage, with the advantage that Agathe's possessed the unsettling power of the new and mysterious. "It's Mona Lisa's smile! " Lindner exclaimed to himself. "Mockery in a pious face! " and he was so dismayed and flattered by what he took to be a meaningful discovery that for the moment he was less able than usual to reject the arrogance ordinarily associated with this smile when she interrogated him on his belief in God. This un- believer had no desire for missionary instruction; she wanted to stick her hand in the bubbling spring; and perhaps this was precisely the task resezved for him; once again to lift the stone covering the spring to permit her a little insight, with no one to protect him ifit should tum out otherwise, no matter how unpleasant, even alarming, this idea was to himself! And suddenly Lindner, although he was alone in the room, stamped his foot and said aloud: "Don't think for a minute that I don't understand you! And don't believe that the subjuga- tion you detect in me comes from a creature subjugated from the beginning! "
As a matter of fact, the story of how Lindner had become what he was was far more commonplace than he thought. It began with the possibility that he, too, might have become a different person; for he still remembered precisely the love he had had as a child for geome- try, for the way its beautiful, cleverly worked out proofs finally closed around the truth with a soft snap, delighting him as ifhe had caught a giant in a mousetrap. There had been no indication that he was par- ticularly religious; even today he was of the opinion that faith had to be "worked for," and not received as a gift in the cradle. What had made him a shining pupil in religion class was the same joy in know- ing and in showing off his knowledge that he demonstrated in his other subjects. His inner being, of course, had already absorbed the ways in which religious tradition expressed itself, to which the only resistance was the civic sense he had developed early. This had once found unexpected expression in the single extraordinary hour his life had ever known. It had happened while he was preparing himselffor his final school examinations. For weeks he had been driving himself, sitting evenings in his room studying, when all at once an incompre-
From the Posthumous Papers · z:. z89
hensible change came over him. His body seemed to become as light toward the world as delicate paper ash, and he was filled with an unutterable joy, as if in the dark vault of his breast a candle had been lit and was diffusing its gentle glow into all his limbs; and before he could come to terms with such a notion, this light surrounded his head with a condition of radiance. It frightened him a lot; but it was nevertheless true that his head was emitting light. Then a marvelous intellectual clarity oveiWhelmed all his senses, and in it the world was reflected in broad horizons such as no natural eye could encompass. He glanced up and saw nothing but his half-lit room, so it was not a vision; but the impetus remained, even if it was in contradiction to his surroundings. He comforted himself that he was apparently expe- riencing this somehow only as a "mental person," while his "physical person" was sitting somber and distinct on its chair and fully occupy- ing its accustomed space; and so he remained for a while, having alJ ready got half accustomed to his dubious state, since one quickly grows used to the extraordinary as long as there is hope that it will be revealed as the product, even if a diabolical product, of order. But then something new happened, for he suddenly heard a voice, speak- ing quite clearly but moderately, as if it had already been speaking for some time, saying to him: "Lindner, where are you seeking me? Sis tu tuus et ego ero tuus," which can be roughly translated: Just become Lindner, and I will be with you. But it was not so much the content of this speech that dismayed the ambitious student, for it was possible that he had already heard or read it, or at least some of it, and then forgotten it, but rather its sensuous resonance; for this came so independently and surprisingly from the outside, and was of such an immediately convincing fullness and solidity, and had such a different sound from the dry sound of grim industriousness to which the night was tuned, that every attempt to reduce the phenomenon to inner exhaustion or inner overstimulation was uprooted in ad- vance. That this explanation was so obvious, and yet its path blocked, of course increased his confusion; and when it also happened that with this confusion the condition in Lindner's head and heart rose ever more gloriously and soon began to flow through his entire body, it got to be too much. He seized his head, shook it between his fists, jumped up from his chair, shouted "No! " three times, and, almost
1290 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
screaming, managed to speak the first prayer he could think of, upon which the spell finally vanished and the future professor, mortally frightened, took refuge in bed.
Soon afterward he passed his examinations with distinction and enrolled at the university. He did not feel in himself the inner calling to the clerical class-nor, to answer Agathe's foolish questions, had he felt it at any time in his life-and was at that time not even entirely and unimpeachably a believer, for he, too, was visited by those doubts that any developing intellect cannot escape. But the mortal terror at the religious powers hiding within him did not leave him for the rest of his life. The longer ago it had been, the less, of course, he believed that God had really spoken to him, and he therefore began to fear the imagination as an unbridled power that can easily lead to mental derangement. His pessimism, too, to which man appeared in general as a threatened being, took on depth, and so his decision to become a pedagogue was in part probably the beginning of an as it were posthumous educating of those schoolmates who had tor- mented him, and in part, too, an educating of that evil spirit or ir- regular God who might possibly still be lurking in his thoracic cavity. But if it was not clear to him to what degree he was a believer, it quickly became clear that he was an opponent of unbelievers, and he trained himself to think with conviction that he was convinced, and that it was one's responsibility to be convinced. At the university, it was also easier for him to learn to recognize the weaknesses of a mind that is abandoned to freedom, in that he had only a rudimen- tary notion of the extent to which the condition of freedom is an in- nate part of the creative powers.
It is difficult to summarize in a few words what was most charac- teristic of these weaknesses. It might be seen, for instance, in the ways that changes in living, but especially the results of thinking and experience itself, undermined those great edifices of thought aimed at a freestanding philosophical explanation of the world, whose last constructions were erected between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries: without the fullness of new knowledge the sciences brought to light almost every day having led to a new, solid, even if tentative way of thinking, indeed without the will to do so stirring seriously or publicly enough, so that the wealth of knowledge has become almost as oppressive as it is exhila-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1. 291
rating. But one can also proceed quite generally from the premise that an extraordinary flourishing of property and culture had risen by insidious degrees to a creeping state of crisis, which, not long after this day-when Lindner, recuperating from the more stressful parts of his personal reminiscences, was thinking about the errors of the world-was to be interrupted by the first devastating blow. For as- suming that someone came into the world in 1871, the year Germany was born, he would already have been able to perceive around the age of thirty that during his lifetime the length of railroads in Europe had tripled and in the whole world more than quadrupled; that postal service had tripled in extent and telegraph lines grown seven- fold; and much else had developed in the same way. The degree of efficiency of engines had risen from 50 to go percent; the kerosene lamp had been successively replaced by gaslight, gas mantle lamps, and electricity, producing ever newer forms of illumination; the horse team, which had maintained its position for millennia, was re- placed by the motorcar; and airplanes not only had appeared on the scene but were already out of their baby shoes. The average length of life, too, had markedly increased, thanks to progress in medicine and hygiene, and relations among peoples had become, since the last warring skirmishes, noticeably more gentle and confiding. The per- son experiencing all this might well believe that at last the long- awaited progress of mankind had arrived, and who would not like to think that proper for an age in which he himself is alive!
But it appears that this civic and spiritual prosperity rested on as- sumptions that were quite specific and by no means everlasting, and today we are told that in those days there had been enormous new areas for farming and other natural riches that had just been appro- priated; that there were defenseless colored peoples who had not yet been exploited (the reproach of exploitation was excused by the idea that it was a means of bestowing civilization upon them); and that there were also millions of white people living who, defenseless, were forced to pay the costs of industrial and mercantile progress (but one salved one's conscience with the firm and not even entirely unjustified faith that the dispossessed would be better off than before their dispossession). At any rate, the cornucopia from which physical and spiritual prosperity poured forth was so large and un- bounded that its effects were invisible, and all one could see was the
1292 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
impression of increase with every achievement; and today it is simply impossible to conceive how natural it was at that time to believe in the permanence ofthis progress and to consider prosperity and intel- lect something that, like grass, springs up wherever it is not deliber- ately rooted out.
Toward this confident bliss, this madness of growth, this fatefully exultant broad-mindedness, the pale, scrawny student Lindner, tor- mented even physically by his height, had a natural aversion, which expressed itself in an instinctive sensing of any error and an alert re- ceptivity for any sign of life that gave evidence of this aversion. Of course, economics was not his field of specialization, and it was only later that he learned to evaluate these facts properly; but this made him all the more clairvoyant about the other aspect of this develop- ment, and the rot going on in a state of mind that initially had placed free trade, in the name ofa free spirit, at the summit ofhuman activi- ties and then abandoned the free spirit to the free trade, and Lindner sniffed out the spiritual collapse that then indeed followed. This be- lief in doom, in the midst of a world comfortably ensconced in its own progress, was the most powerful of all his qualities; but this meant that he might also possibly have become a socialist, or one of those lonely and fatalistic people who meddle in politics with the greatest reluctance, even if they are full of bitterness toward every- thing, and who assure the propagation of the intellect by keeping to the right path within their own narrow circle and personally do what is meaningful, while leaving the therapeutics of culture to the quacks. So when Lindner now asked himself how he had become the person he was, he could give the comforting answer that it had hap- pened exactly the way one ordinarily enters a profession. Already in his last year at school he had belonged to a group whose agenda had been to criticize coolly and discreetly both the "classical paganism" that was half officially admired in the school and the "modem spirit" that was circulating in the world outside. Subsequently, repelled by the carefree student antics at the university, he had joined a frater- nity in whose circles the influences of the political struggle were al- ready beginning to displace the harmless conversations ofyouth, as a beard displaces a baby face. And when he got to be an upperclass- man, the memorable occurrence applicable to every kind of thinking had dictatorially asserted itself: that the best support offaith is lack of
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 9 3
faith, since lack of faith, observed and struggled against in others, always gives the believer occasion to feel himself zealous.
From the hour when Lindner had resolutely told himself that reli- gion, too, was a contrivance, chiefly for people and not for saints, peace had come over him. Between the desires to be a child and a servant of God, his choice had been made. There was, to be sure, in the enormous palace in which he wished to serve, an innermost sanc- tum where the miracles reposed and were preserved, and everyone thought of them occasionally; but none of His servants tarried long in this sanctum: they all lived just in front of it; indeed, it was anxiously protected from the importunity of the uninitiated, which had in- volved experiences not of the happiest sort. This exerted a powerful appeal on Lindner. He made a distinction between arrogance and exaltation. The activity in the antechamber, with its dignified forms and myriad degrees of goings-on and subordinates, fi. lled him with admiration and ambition; and the outside work he now undertook himself, the exercise of influence on moral, political, and pedagogic organizations and the imbuing of science with religious principles, contained tasks on which he could spend not one but a thousand lives, but rewarded him with that enduring dynamism harnessed to inner unchangeability which is the happiness of blessed minds: at least that is what he thought in contented hours, but perhaps he was confusing it with the happiness of political minds. And so from then on he joined associations, wrote pamphlets, delivered lectures, vis- ited collections, made connections, and before he had left the uni- versity the recruit in the movement of the faithful had become a young man with a prominent place on the officers' list and influential patrons.
So there was truly no need for a personality with such a broad base and such a clarified summit to allow itself to be intimidated by the saucy criticism of a young woman, and on returning to the present, Lindner drew out his watch and confirmed that Agathe had still not come, although it was almost time when Peter could return home. Nevertheless, he opened the piano again and, if he did not expose himselfto the unfathomableness ofthe song, he did let his eyes roam again over its words, accompanying them with a soft whisper. In doing this he became aware for the first time that he was giving them a false emphasis that was far too emotional and not at all in accord
1294 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
with the music, which for all its charm was rather austere. He saw before him a Jesus child that was "somehow by Murillo," which is to say that in some quite vague way, besides the black cherry eyes of that master's older beggar boys, it had their picturesque beggar's rags, so that all this child had in common with the Son ofGod and the Savior was the touchingly humanized quality, but in a quite obviously overdone and really tasteless way. This made an unpleasant impres- sion on him and again wove Agathe into his thoughts, for he recalled that she had once exclaimed that there was really nothing so peculiar as that the taste which had produced Gothic cathedrals and passion- ate devotion should have been succeeded by a taste that found plea- sure in paper flowers, beading, little serrated covers, and simpering language, so that faith had become tasteless, and the faculty for giv- ing a taste and smell to the ineffable was kept alive almost solely by nonbelievers or dubious people! Lindner told himself that Agathe was "an aesthetic nature," meaning something that could not attain the seriousness of economics or morality but in certain cases could be quite stimulating, and this was one of them. Up to now Lindner had found the invention of paper flowers beautiful and sensible, but he suddenly decided to remove a bouquet of them that was standing on the table, hiding it for the time being behind his back.
This happened almost spontaneously, and he was slightly dis- mayed by this action, but was under the impression that he probably knew how to provide an explanation for the "peculiarity" remarked on by Agathe, which she had let take its course, an explanation she would not have expected of him. A saying of the Apostles occurred to him: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cym- bal! " And glancing at the floor with puckered forehead, he consid- ered that for many years everything he had done stood in relationship to eternal love. He belonged to a wondrous community oflove--and it was this that distinguished him from the ordinary in- tellectual-in which nothing happened for which an allegorical con- nection to the Eternal could not have been given, no matter how contingent and yoked to things earthly: indeed, nothing in which this connection would not have taken root as its inmost meaning, even if this did not always result in one's consciousness always being pol- ished to a shine. But there is a powerful difference between the love
From the Posthumous Papers · 1295
one possesses as conviction and the love that possesses one: a distinc- tion in freshness, he might say, even if, of course, the difference be- tween purified knowledge and muddy turbulence was certainly just as justified. Lindner did not doubt that purified conviction deserved to be placed higher; but the older it is, the more it purifies itself, which is to say that it frees itself from the irregularities of the emo- tions that produced it; and gradually there remains not even the con- viction of these passions but only the readiness to remember and be able to use them whenever they might be needed. This might explain why the works of the emotions wither away unless they are freshened once again by the immediate experience of love.
Lindner was preoccupied with such almost heretical considera- tions when suddenly the bell shrilled.
He shrugged his shoulders, closed the piano again, and excused himself to himself with the words: "Life needs not only worshipers but workers! "
57
TRUTH AND ECSTASY
Agathe had not finished reading the entries in her brother's diaries when for the second time she heard his steps on the gravel-strewn path beneath the windows, this time with unmistakable clarity. She made up her mind to penetrate his lair again, without his knowledge, at the first opportunity that presented itself. For however alien this way of viewing things was to her nature, she did want to get to know and understand it. Mixed in with this, too, was a little revenge, and she wanted to pay back secret with secret, and so did not want to be surprised. She hastily put the papers in order, replaced them, and erased eve. ry trace that might have betrayed her new knowledge. Moreover, a glance at the time told her that she really ought to have left the house long since and was no doubt being awaited with some
1296 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
irritation elsewhere, something Ulrich might not know about. The double standard she was applying suddenly made her smile. She knew that her own lack of candor was not really prejudicial to loyalty, and that this lack was, moreover, much worse than Ulrich's. This was a spontaneous satisfaction that enabled her to part from her discov- ery notably reconciled.
When her brother entered his study again he no longer found her there, but this did not surprise him. He had finally wandered back in, the people and circumstances he had been discussing with Stumm having so filled his mind that after the General left he had strolled about in the garden for some time. After long abstinence, a hastily drunk glass ofwine can bring about a similar, merely alcoholic vivac- ity, behind whose colorful scene changes one remains gloomy and untouched; and so it had not even crossed his mind that the people in whose destinies he was again apparently so interested lived no great distance from him and could easily have been contacted. The actual connection with them had remained as paralyzed as a cut muscle.
Still, several memories formed an exception to this and had aroused thoughts to which there were even now bridges of feeling, although only quite fragmentary ones. For instance, what he had characterized as "the return of Section ChiefTuzzi from the inward- ness of emotion to its external manipulation" gave him the deeper pleasure of reminding himself that his diaries aimed at a distinction between these two aspects of emotion. But he also saw before him Diotima in her beauty, which was different from Agathe's; and it flat- tered him that Diotima was still thinking ofhim, although with all his heart he did not begrudge her her chastisement at the hands of her husband in those moments when this heart again, so to speak, trans- formed itself into flesh. Of all the conversations he had had with her, he remembered the one in which she had postulated the possibility ofoccult powers arising in love; this insight had been vouchsafed her by her love for the rich man who also wanted to have Soul, and this now led him to think of Amheim as well. Ulrich still owed him an answer to the emotional offer that was to have brought him influence on the world of action, and this led him to wonder what could have become of the equally magniloquent and no less vague offer of mar- riage that had once enraptured Diotima. Presumably the same thing: Amheim would keep his word if you reminded him of it, but would
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1297
have no objection if you forgot. The scornful tension that had emerged on his face at the memory of Diotima's moment of glory relaxed again. It really would be quite decent of her not to keep a hold on Amheim, he thought. A voice speaking reasonably in her overpopulated mind. At times, she had fits of sobriety and felt herself abandoned by the higher things, and then she would be quite nice. Ulrich had always harbored some small inclination for her in the midst of all his disinclination, and did not want to exclude the possi- bility that she herself might finally have realized what a ridiculous pair she and Amheim made: she prepared to commit the sacrifice of adultery, Amheim the sacrifice of marriage, so that again they would not come together, finally convincing themselves of something heav- enly and unattainable in order to elevate themselves above the at- tainable. But when Bonadea's story about Diotima's school of love occurred to him, he finally said to himself that there was still some- thing unpleasant about her, and there was nothing to exclude her throwing her entire energy of love at him at some point.
This was, more or less, how Ulrich let his thoughts run on after his conversation with Stumm, and it had seemed to him that this was how upstanding people had to think whenever they concerned them- selves with one another in the traditional way; but he himself had got quite out of the habit.
And when he entered the house all this had disappeared into noth- ingness. He hesitated a moment, again standing in front of his desk, took his diaries in his hands, and put them down again. He rumi- nated. In his papers a few observations about ecstatic conditions fol- lowed immediately after the exposition of the concept of the emotions, and he found this passage correct. An attitude entirely under the domination of a single emotion was indeed, as he had oc- casionally mentioned, already an ecstatic attitude. To fall under the sway of anger or fear is an ecstasy. The world as it looks to the eyes of a person who sees only red or only menace does not indeed last long, and that is why one does not speak of a world but speaks only of suggestions and illusions; but when masses succumb to this ecstasy, hallucinations of terrifying power and extent arise.
A different kind of ecstasy, which he had also pointed out previ- ously, was the ecstasy ofthe uttermost degree offeeling. When this is attained, action is no longer purposeful but on the contrary becomes
1298 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
uncertain, indeed often absurd: the world loses its colors in a kind of cold incandescence, and the self disappears except for its empty shell. This vanishing of hearing and seeing is doubtless, too, an im- poverishing ecstasy-and incidentally, all enraptured states of soul are poorer in diversity than the everyday one-and becomes signifi- cant only through its link with orgiastic ecstasy or the transports of madness, with the state of unbearable physical exertions, dogged ex- pressions of will, or intense suffering, for all of which it can become the final component. For the sake of brevity, Ulrich had, in these examples, telescoped the overflowing and desiccating forms oflosing oneself, and not unjustly so, for if from another point of view the distinction is indeed a quite significant one, yet in consideration of the ultimate manifestations, the two forms come close to merging. The orgiastically enraptured person leaps to his ruin as into a light, and tearing or being tom to pieces are for him blazing acts of love and deeds of freedom in the same way that, for all the differences, the person who is deeply exhausted and embittered allows himself to fall to his catastrophe, receiving salvation in this final act; in other words, he too receives something that is sweetened by freedom and love. Thus action and suffering blend on the highest plane on which they can still be experienced.
But this ecstasy of undivided sovereignty and of the crisis of an emotion are, of course, to a greater or lesser degree merely mental constructs, and true ecstasies-whether mystical, martial, or those of love groups or other transported communities-always presuppose a cluster of interrelated emotions and arise from a circle of ideas that reflects them. In less consolidated form, occasionally rigidifying and occasionally loosening up again, such unreal images of the world, formed in the sense of being particular groupings of ideas and feel- ings (as Weltanschauung, as personal tic), are so frequent in every- day life that most of them are not even regarded as ecstasies, although they are the preliminary stage of ecstasies in about the same way that a safety match in its box signifies the preliminary stage of a burning match. In his last entry, Ulrich had noted that a picture of the world whose nature is ecstatic also arises whenever the emo- tions and their subservient ideas are simply given priority over sobri- ety and reflection: it is the rapturous, emotional picture of the world, ecstatic life, that is periodically encountered in literature and to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 99
some extent also in reality, in larger or smaller social communes; but what was missing in this enumeration was precisely what for Ulrich was most important, the adducing of the one and only condition of soul and world which he considered an ecstasy that would be a wor- thy coequal of reality. But his thoughts now digressed from the sub- ject, for if he wanted to make up his mind about evaluating this most seductive of exceptions, it was absolutely necessary-and this was also brought home to him in that he had hesitatingly alternated be- tween an ecstatic world and a mere picture of an ecstatic world-to first become acquainted with the link that exists between our emo- tions and what is real: that is to say, the world to which we, as op- posed to the illusions of ecstasy, impart this value.
But the standards by which we measure this world are those of the understanding, and the conditions under which this happens are likewise those of the understanding. But understanding~ven ifin- creasingly greater discrimination of its limits and rights places great obstacles in the path of the intellect-possesses a peculiarity in spe- cific relation to the emotions that is easily perceived and character- ized: in order to understand, we must put aside our emotions to the greatest extent possible. We block them out in order to be "objec- tive," or we place ourselves in a state in which the abiding emotions neutralize each other, or we abandon ourselves to a group of cool feelings that, handled carefully, are themselves conducive to under- standing. We draw upon what we apprehend in this clearheaded condition for comparison when in other cases we speak of "delu- sions" through the emotions; and then we have a zero condition, a neutralized state: in short, a specific situation of the emotions, the silent presupposition of experience and thought processes with whose aid we consider merely as subjective whatever other emo- tional states used to delude us. A millennium's experience has con- firmed that we are most qualified to consistently satisfy reality ifwe place ourselves in this condition again and again, and that whoever wants not merely to understand but also to act also has need of this condition. Not even a boxer can do without objectivity, which in his case means "staying cool," and inside the ropes he can as little afford to be angry as he can to lose his courage if he does not want to come out the loser. So our emotional attitude too, if it is to be adapted to reality, does not depend solely on the emotions governing us at the
1300 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
moment or on their submerged instinctual levels, but depends simul- taneously on the enduring and recurrent emotional state that guar- antees an understanding of reality and is usually as little visible as the air within which we breathe.
This personal discovery of a connection that is usually not often taken into account had enticed Ulrich to thinking further about the relation of the emotions to reality. Here a distinction must be made between the sense perceptions and the emotions. The fanner also "deceive," and clearly neither the sensuous image of the world that sense perceptions represent to us is the reality itself, nor is the men- tal image we infer from it independent ofthe human way ofthinking, though it is independent of the subjective way of thinking. But al- though there is no tangible similarity between reality and even the most exact representation of it that we have-indeed, there is, rather, an unbridgeable abyss of dissimilarity-and though we never get to see the original, yet we are able in some complex way to decide whether and under what conditions this image is correct. It is differ- ent with the emotions: for these present even the image falsely, to maintain the metaphor, and yet in so doing fulfill just as adequately the task of keeping us in harmony with reality, except that they do it in a different way. Perhaps this challenge of remaining in harmony with reality had a particular attraction for Ulrich, but aside from that, it is also the characteristic sign of everything that asserts itself in life; and there can thus be derived from it an excellent shorthand fonnula and demonstration ofwhether the image that perception and reason give us of something is correct and true, even though this fonnula is not all-inclusive. We require that the consequences of the mental picture of reality we have constructed agree with the ideational image of the consequences that actually ensue in reality, and only then do we consider the understanding's image to be correct. In con- trast to this, it can be said of the emotions that they have taken over the task of keeping us constantly in errors that constantly cancel one another out.
And yet this is only the consequence of a division oflabor in which the emotion that is served by the tools of the senses, and the thought processes that are heavily influenced by this emotion, develop and, briefly stated, have developed into sources of understanding, while the realm of the emotions themselves has been relegated to the role
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 3 0 1
of more or less blind instigator; for in primeval times, our emotions as well as our sense sensations sprang from the same root, an attitude that involved the entire creature when it carne into contact with a stimulus. The division of labor that arose later can even now be ex- pressed by the statement that the emotions do without understand- ing what we would do with understanding if we were ever to do anything without some instigation other than understanding! If one could only project an image of this feeling attitude, it would have to be this: we assume about the emotions that they color the correct picture of the world and distort and falsely represent it. Science as well as everyday attitudes number the emotions among the "subjec- tivities"; they assume that these attitudes merely alter "the world we see," for they presume that an emotion dissipates after a short time and that the changes it has caused in a perception of the world will disappear, so that "reality" will, over a shorter or longer time, "reas- sert" itself.
It seemed to Ulrich quite remarkable that this sometimes para- lyzed condition of the emotions, which forms the basis of both scientific investigation and everyday behavior, has a subsidiary coun- terpoint in that the canceling of emotions is also encountered as a characteristic of earthly life. For the influence our emotions exercise on the mind's impartial representations, those things that maintain their validity as being true and indispensable, cancels itself out more or less completely over a long enough period of time, as well as over the breadth of matter that gets piled up; and the influence of the emotions on the mind's non-impartial representations, on those un- steady ideas and ideologies, thoughts, views, and mental attitudes born out ofchangeable emotions, which dominate historical life both sequentially and in juxtaposition, also cancels itself out, even if it does so in opposition to certainty, even ifit cancels itselfout to worse than nothing, to contingency, to impotent disorder and vacillation- in short, to what Ulrich exasperatedly called the "business of the emotions. "
Now that he read it again, he would have liked to work out this point more precisely but couldn't, because the written train of thought that ended here, trailing off in a few further catchwords, re- quired that he bring more important things to a conclusion. Forifwe project the intellectual image of the world, the one that corresponds
1302 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
to reality (even if it is always just an image, it is the right image), on the assumption of a specific state of the emotions, the question arises of what would happen if we were to be just as effectively controlled not by it but by other emotional states. That this question is not en- tirely nonsensical can be seen in that every strong affect distorts our image of the world in its own way, and a deeply melancholy person, or one who is constitutionally cheerful, could object to the "fancies" of a neutral and evenhanded person, saying that it is not so much because of their blood that they are gloomy or cheerful as on account of their experiences in a world that is full of heavy gloom or heavenly frivolity. And so, however an image of the world may be imagined based on the predominance of an emotion or a group of emotions, including for instance the orgiastic, it can also be based on bringing emotions in general to the fore, as in the ecstatic and emotional frame of mind of an individual or a community; it is a normal every- day experience that the world is depicted differently on the basis of specific groups of ideas and that life is lived in different ways up to the point of obvious insanity.
Ulrich was not in the least minded to consider that understanding was an error, or the world an illusion, and yet it seemed to him ad- missible to speak not only of an altered picture of the world but also of~otherworld, ifinstead ofthe tangible emotion that serves adap- tation to the world some other emotion predominates. This other world would be "unreal" in the sense that it would be deprived of almost all objectivity: it would contain no ideas, computations, deci- sions, and actions that were adapted to nature, and dissension among people would perhaps fail to appear for quite some time but, once present, would be almost impossible to heal. Ultimately, however, that would differ from our world only in degree, and about that pos- sibility only the question can decide whether a humanity living under such conditions would still be capable of carrying on with its life, and whether it could achieve a certain stability in the coming and going of attacks from the outer world and in its own behavior. And there are many things that can be imagined as subtracted from reality or replaced by other things, without people being unable to live in a world so constituted. Many things are capable of reality and the world that do not occur in a particular reality or world.
Ulrich was not exactly satisfied with this after he had written it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1303
down, for he did not want it to appear as if all these possible realities were equally justifi. ed. He stood up and paced back and forth in his study. Something was still missing, some kind of distinction between "reality" and "full reality," or the distinction between "reality for someone" and "real reality," or in other terms, an exposition of the distinctions of rank was missing between the claim to the validity of reality and world, and a motivation for our claiming a priority depen- dent on conditions impossible to fulfill for what seems to us to be real and true under all conditions, a priority that is true only under cer- tain conditions. For on the one hand an animal, too, adapts splen- didly to the world, and because it certainly does not do so in complete darkness of soul, there must be even in the animal some- thing that corresponds to human ideas ofworld and reality without it having to be, on that account, even remotely similar; and on the other hand we don't possess true reality but can merely refine our ideas about it in an infinite, ongoing process, while in the hurly-burly of life we even use juxtaposed ideas of quite varying degrees of pro- fundity, such as Ulrich himself had encountered in the course of this vexy hour in the example of a table and a lovely woman. But after having thought it over in approximately this fashion, Ulrich was rid of his restlessness and decided that it was enough; for what might still be said about this subject was not reserved for him, and not for this hour, either. He merely convinced himself once more that there was presumably nothing in his formulation that would be expected to im- pede a more precise exposition, and for honor's sake he wrote a few words to indicate what was missing.
And when he had done this he completely interrupted his activity, looked out the window into the garden lying there in the late-after- noon light, and even went down for a while in order to expose his head to the fresh air. He was almost afraid that he could now assert either too much or too little; for what was still waiting to be written down by him seemed to him more important than anything else.
1304
ULRICH AND THE TWO WORLDS OF EMOTION
"Where would be the best place to begin? " Ulrich asked himself as he wandered around the garden, the sun burning his face and hands in one place, and the shadow of cooling leaves falling on them in an- other. "Should I begin right away with every emotion existing in the world in binary fashion and bearing within itself the origin of two worlds as different from each other as day and night? Or would I do better to mention the significance that sobered feeling has for our image of the world, and then come conversely to the influence that the image of the world born from our actions and knowledge exer- cises on the picture ofour emotions that we create for ourselves? Or should I say that there have already been states of ecstasy, which I have sketchily described as worlds in which emotions do not mutu- ally cancel each other out? '' But even while he was asking himself these questions, he had already made up his mind to begin with ev- erything at the same time; for the thought that made him so anxious that he had interrupted his writing had as many associations as an old friendship, and there was no longer any way of saying how or when it had arisen. While he was trying to put things in order, Ulrich had moved closer and closer to this thought-and it was only on his own account that he had taken it up-but now that he had come to the end, either clarity or emptiness would have to emerge behind the dispersing mists. The moment when he found the first decisive words was not a pleasant one: "In every feeling there are two funda- mentally opposed possibilities for development, which usually fuse into one; but they can also come into play individually, and that chiefly happens in a state of ecstasy! "
He proposed to call them, for the time being, the outer and the inner development, and to consider them from the most harmless side. He had a crowd of examples at his disposal: liking, love, anger,· mistrust, generosity, disgust, envy, despair, fear, desire . . . , and he mentally ordered them into a series. Then he set up a second series:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1305
affability, tenderness, irritation, suspicion, high-spiritedness, anxiety, and longing, lacking only those links for which he could not Bnd any name, and then he compared the two series. One contained specific emotions, chiefly as they are aroused in us by a specific encounter; the second contained nonspecific emotions, which are strongest when aroused by some unknown cause. And yet in both cases it was the same emotions, in one case in a general, in the other in a specific state. "So I would say," Ulrich thought, "that in evexy emotion there is a distinction to be made between a development toward specificity and a development toward nonspecificity. But before doing that, it would first be better to list all the distinctions this involves. "
He could have toted up most of them in his sleep, but they will seem familiar to anyone who substitutes the word "moods" for the "nonspecific emotions" from which Ulrich had formed his second se- ries, although Ulrich deliberately avoided this term. Forifone makes a distinction between emotion and mood, it is readily apparent that the "specific emotion" is always directed toward something, origi- nates in a life situation, has a goal, and expresses itself in more or less straightforward behavior, while a mood demonstrates approximately the opposite of all these things: it is encompassing, aimless, widely dispersed, and idle, and no matter how clear it may be, it contains something indeterminate and stands ready to engulf any object with- out anything happening and without itself changing in the process. So a specific attitude toward something corresponds to the specific emotion, and a general attitude toward everything corresponds to the nonspecific emotion: the one draws us into action, while the other merely allows us to participate from behind a colorful window.
For a moment Ulrich dwelt on this distinction between how specific and nonspecific emotions relate to the world. He said to himself: "I will add this: Whenever an emotion develops toward specificity, it focuses itself, so to speak, it constricts its purposiveness, and it finally ends up both internally and externally in something of a blind alley; it leads to an action or a resolve, and even if it should not cease to exist in one or the other, it continues on, as changed as water leaving a mill. If, on the other hand, it develops toward non- specificity, it apparently has no energy at all. But while the specifi- cally developed emotion is reminiscent of a creature with grasping arms, the nonspecific emotion changes the world in the same way the
1306 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
sky changes its colors, without desire or self, and in this fonn objects and actions change like the clouds. The attitude of the nonspecific emotion to the world has in it something magical and-God help me! -in comparison to the specific attitude, something feminine! " This is what Ulrich said to himself, and then something occurred to him that took him far afield: for of course it is chiefly the develop- ment toward a specific emotion that brings with it the fragility and instability of the life of the soul. That the moment of feeling can never be sustained, that emotions wilt more quickly than flowers, or transform themselves into paper flowers if one tries to preserve them, that happiness and will, art and conviction, pass away: all this depends on the specificity of the emotion, which always imposes on it a purposiveness and forces it into the pace of life that dissolves or changes it.
On the other hand, the emotion that persists in its non- specificity and boundlessness is relatively impervious to change. A comparison occurred to him: "The one dies like an individual, the other lasts like a kind or species. " In this arrangement of the emo- tions there is perhaps repeated in reality, even if very indirectly, a general arrangement oflife; he was not able to gauge this but did not stop over it, for he thought he saw the main argument more clearly than he ever had before.
He was now ready to return to his study, but he waited, because he wanted to mull over the entire plan in his head before putting it down on paper. "I spoke of two possibilities of development and two states of one and the same emotion," he reflected, "but then there must also be present at the origin of the emotion, of course, some- thing to initiate the process. And the drives that feed our soul with a life that is still close to animal blood actually demonstrate this bipar- tite disposition. A drive incites to action, and this appears to be its major task; but it also tunes the soul. If the drive has not yet found a target, its nebulous expanding and stretching become quite appar- ent; indeed, there will be many people who see precisely this as the sign of an awakening drive-for example, the sex drive-but of course there is a longing of hunger and other drives. So the specific and the nonspecific are present in the drive. I'll add," Ulrich thought, "that the bodily organs that are involved when the external world arouses an affect in us can on other occasions produce this af-
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1307
feet themselves i f they receive a stimulus from within; and that's all it takes to arrive at a state of ecstasy! "
Then he reflected that according to the results of research, and especially after his discussion ofthese results in his diaries, it was also to be assumed that the impulse for one emotion can always serve for another emotion, too, and that no emotion, in the process ofits shap- ing and strengthening, ever comes to an entirely specifiable end. But if that was true, then not only would no emotion ever attain its total specificity, but in all probability it would not attain perfect non- specificity either, and there was neither an entirely specific nor an entirely nonspecific emotion. And in truth it almost always happens that both possibilities combine in a common reality, in which merely the characteristics of one or the other predominate. There is no "mood" that does not also include specific emotions that form and dissolve again; and there is no specific emotion that, at least where it can be said to "radiate," "seize," "operate out of itself," "extend it- self," or operate on the world "directly," without an external emo- tion, does not allow the characteristics of the nonspecific emotion to peer through. There are certainly, however, emotions that closely approximate the one or the other.
Of course the terms "specific" and "nonspecific" involve the disadvantage that even a specific emotion is always insufficiently specified and is in this sense nonspecific; but that should probably be easy to distinguish from significant nonspecificity. "So all that re- mains is to settle why the particularity of the nonspecific emotion, and the whole development leading up to it, is taken to be less real than its counterpart," Ulrich thought. "Nature contains both. So the different ways they are treated are probably connected with the ex- ternal development ofemotion being more important for us than the inner development, or with the direction ofspecificity meaning more to us than that of nonspecificity. If this were not so, our life would truly have to be a different one than it is! It is an inescapable pecu- liarity of European culture that every minute the 'inner world' is pro- claimed the best and most profound thing life has to offer, without regard for the fact that this inner world is treated as merely an annex of the outer world. And how this is done is frankly the secret balance sheet of this culture, even though it is an open secret: the external
1308 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
world and the "personality" are set off against each other. The as- sumption is that the outer world stimulates in a person inner pro- cesses that must enable that person to respond in an appropriate fashion; and by mentally setting up this pathway leading from a change in the world through the change in a person to a further change in the world, one derives the peculiar ambiguity that permits us to honor the internal world as the true sphere of human grandeur and yet to presuppose that everything taking place within it has the ultimate task of flowing outward in the form of an orderly external action. "
The thought went through Ulrich's mind that it would be reward- ing to consider our civilization's attitude toward religion and culture in this sense, but it seemed to him more important to keep to the direction his thoughts had been following. Instead of "inner world," one could simply say"emotions," for they in particular are in the am- biguous position of actually being this inwardness and yet are mostly treated as a shadow of the world outside; and this of course was in- volved with everything that Ulrich thought he could distinguish as the inner and nonspeciflc development of emotions. This is already shown in that the expressions we use to describe inner governing processes are almost all derived from external processes; for we obvi- ously transpose the active kind ofexternal happening onto the differ- ently constituted inner events even in representing the latter as an activity, whether we call it an emanation, a switching on or off, a tak- ing hold, or something similar. For these images, derived from the outer world, have become accepted and current for the inner world only because we lack better ones to apprehend it. Even those scien- tific theories that describe the emotions as an interpenetration or juxtaposition on an equal footing of external and internal actions
make a concession to this custom, precisely because they ordinarily speak of acting and overlook pure inwardness's remoteness from act- ing. And for these reasons alone, it is simply inevitable that the inner development of emotions usually appears to us as a mere annex to their external development, appears indeed to be its repetition and muddying, distinguishing itself from the outer development through less sharply defined forms and hazier connections, and thus evoking the somewhat neglected impression of being an incidental action.
But of course what is at stake is not simply a form of expression or
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1309
a mental priority; what we "really" feel is itself dependent on reality in hundreds of ways and is therefore also dependent on the specific and external development of emotions to which the development of inner and nonspecific emotions subordinates itself, by which the lat- ter are, as it were, blotted up. "It shouldn't depend on the details," Ulrich resolved, "yet it could probably be shown in every detail not only that the concept we create for ourselves has the task of service- ably integrating its 'subjective' element into our ideas about reality, but also that in feeling itself, both dispositions merge in a holistic process that unites their outer and inner development in very un- equal fashion. Simply stated: we are acting beings; for our actions we need the security of thinking; therefore we also need emotions capa- ble of being neutralized-and our feeling has taken on its character- istic form in that we integrate it into our image of reality, and not the other way around, as ecstatics do. Just for that reason, however, we must have within us the possibility of turning our feeling around and experiencing our world differently! "
He was now impatient to write, feeling confident that these ideas had to be subjected to a more intense scrutiny. Once in his study, he turned on the light, as the walls already lay in shadow. Nothing was to be heard of Agathe. He hesitated an instant before beginning.
He was inhibited when he recollected that in his impatience to take shortcuts in laying out and sketching his idea he had used the concepts "inner" and "outer," as well as "individual" and "world," as if the distinction between both agencies-of-the emotions coincided with these representations. Tilis was of course not so. The peculiar distinction Ulrich had made between the disposition for and the pos- sibility of elaboration into specific and nonspecific emotions, if al- lowed to prevail, cuts across the other distinctions. The emotions develop in one and the other fashion just as much outwardly and in the world as they do inwardly and in the individual. He pondered over a proper word for this, for he didn't much like the terms "spe- cific" and "nonspecific," although they were indicative. "The original difference in experience is most exposed and yet most expressive in that there is an externalizing of emotions as well as an inwardness both internal and external," he reflected, and was content for a mo- ment, until he found these words, too, as unsatisfactory as all the oth- ers, when he went on to try out a dozen. But this did not change his
1310 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
conviction; it only looked to him like a complication in the discussion he was embarking on, the result oflanguage not having been created for this aspect of existence. "If I go over everything once more and find it correct, it won't matter to me ifall I end up talking about is our ordinary emotions and our 'other' ones," he concluded.
Smiling, he took down from a shelf a book that had a bookmark in it and wrote at the head of his own words these words of another: "Even if Heaven, like the world, is subjected to a series of changing events, still the Angels have neither concept nor conception of space and time. Although for them, too, everything that happens happens sequentially, in complete harmony with the world, they do not know what time means, because what prevails in Heaven are neither years nor days, but changing states. Where there are years and days, sea- sons prevail, where there are changes of state, conditions. Since the Angels have no conception of time the way people do, they have no way of specifying time; they do not even know of its division into years, months, weeks, hours, into tomorrow, yesterday, and today. If they should hear a person speak ofthese things-and God has always linked Angels with people-what they understand by them is states and the determination of states. Man's thinking begins with time, the Angels' with a state; so what for human beings is a natural idea is for the Angels a spiritual one. All movement in the spiritual world is brought about through inner changes in state. When this troubled me, I was raised into the sphere of Heaven to the consciousness of Angels, and led by God through the realms of the firmament and conducted to the constellations of the universe, and all this in my mind, while my body remained in the same place. This is how all the Angels moved from place to place: that is why there are for them no intervals, and consequently no distances either, but only states and changes in state. Every approach is a similarity of inner states, every distancing a dissimilarity; spaces in Heaven are nothing but external states, which correspond to the internal ones. In the spiritual world, everyone will appear visible to the other as soon as he has a yearning desire for the other's presence, for then he is placing himself in the other's state; conversely, in the presence ofdisinclination he will dis- tance himself from him. In the same way, someone who changes his abode in halls or gardens gets where he is going more quickly if he longs for the place, and more slowly if his longing is less; with aston-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · I 3 I I
ishment I saw this happen often. And since the Angels are not able to conceive of time, they also have a different idea of eternity than earthly people do; they understand by it an infinite state, not an infi- nite time. "
A few days earlier, Ulrich had accidentally come across this in a selection of the writings of Swedenborg he owned but had never re- ally read; and he had condensed it a little and copied down so much of it because he found it very pleasant to hear this old metaphysician and learned engineer-who made no small impression on Goethe, and even on Kant-talking as confidently about heaven and the an- gels as if it were Stockholm and its inhabitants. It fit in so well with his own endeavor that the remaining differences, which were by no means insignificant, were brought into relief with uncanny clarity. It gave him great pleasure to seize on these differences and conjure forth in a new fashion from the more cautiously posited concepts of a later century the assertions--dryly unhallucinatory in their premature self-certainty, but with a whimsical effect nevertheless- of a seer.
And so he wrote down what he had thought.
ALTERNATE DRAFT VERSIONS
The following/our chapters, in correctedfair copy, are alternate ver- sions o f the preceding "galley" chapters. (Alternates 47 and 4J have been omitted because the first differs in only minor details from gal- ley chapter 57, and the second closely parallels galley chapter 4J. ) Musil was working on these during the last two years ofhis life, up to his sudden death on April15, 1942.
49
CONVERSA TIONS ON LOVE
Man, the speaking animal, is the only one that requires conversation even for his reproduction. And not only because he is always talking does he speak while that is going on too, but apparently his bliss in love is bound root and branch to his loquacity, and in so profoundly mysterious a fashion that it almost calls to mind those ancients ac- cording to whose philosophy god, man, and things arose from the "logos," by which they variously understood the Holy Ghost, reason, and speaking. Now not even psychoanalysis and sociology have had anything of consequence to say about this, although both these mod- em sciences might well compete with Catholicism in intervening in everything human. So one must construct one's own explanation, that in love, conversations play an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most garrulous ofall emotions, and it consists largely of loquaciousness. If the person is young, these conversations that
From the Posthumous Papers · 13 13
encompass everything are part of the phenomenon of growing up; if he is mature, they form his peacock's fan, which, even though it con- sists only of quills, unfolds the more vibrantly the later it happens. The reason might lie in the awakening of contemplative thinking through the emotions of love, and in its enduring connection with them; but this would only be putting off the problem for the mo- ment, for even ifthe word "contemplation" is used almost as often as the word "love," it is not any clearer.
Whether, moreover, what bound Agathe and Ulrich together can be accused ofbeing love or not is not to be decided on these grounds, although they spoke with each other insatiably. What they spoke about, too, turned around love, always and somehow; that is true. But what is true of every emotion is true of love, that its ardor ex- pands more strongly in words the farther off action is; and what per- suaded brother and sister, after the initial violent and obscure emotional experiences that had gone before, to give themselves over to conversations, and what seemed to them at times like a magic spell, was above all not knowing how they could act. But the timidity before their own emotions that was involved in this, and their curious penetration inward to this emotion from its periphery, sometimes caused these conversations to come out sounding more superficial than the depth that underlay them.
so
DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR
How do things stand with the example, as celebrated as it is happily experienced, oflove between two so-called people ofdifferent sexes? It is a special case of the commandment to love thy neighbor without knowing what kind of person he is; and a test of the relationship that exists between love and reality.
1314 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
People make of each other the dolls with which they have already played in dreaming of love.
And what the other thinks and really is has no influence on this at all?
As long as one loves the other, _and because one loves the other, everything is enchanting; but this is not true the other way around. Never has a woman loved a man because ofhis thoughts or opinions, or a man a woman on account of hers. These play only an important secondary role. Moreover, the same is true ofthoughts as ofanger: if one understands impartially what the other means, not only is anger disarmed, but most of the time, against its expectation, love as well.
But, especially at the beginning, isn't what plays the major role being charmed by the concord of opinions?
When the man hears the woman's voice, he hears himself being repeated by a marvelous submerged orchestra, and women are the most unconscious of ventriloquists; without its coming from their mouths, they hear themselves giving the cleverest answers. Each time it is like a small annunciation: a person emerges from the clouds at the side of another, and everything the one utters seems to the other a heavenly crown, custom fitted to his head! Later, of course, you feel like a drunk who has slept off his stupor.
And then the deeds! Are not the deeds of love-its loyalty, its sac- rifices and attentions-its most beautiful demonstration? But deeds, like all mute things, are ambiguous. Ifone thinks back on one's life as a dynamic chain of actions and events, it amounts to a play in which one has not noticed a single word of the dialogue and whose scenes have the same monotonous climaxes!
So one does not love according to merit and reward, and in anti- phony with the immortal spirits mortally in love?
That one is not loved as one deserves is the sorrow of all old maids ofboth sexes!
It was Agathe who gave this response. The uncannily beautiful where-does-it-come-from oflove rose up from past loves in conjunc- tion with the mild frenzy of injustice and even reconciled her to the lack of dignity and seriousness of which she sometimes complained because of her game with Professor Lindner, and which she was al- ways ashamed of whenever she again found herself in Ulrich's vicin- ity. But Ulrich had begun the conversation, and in the course of it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1315
had become interested in pumping her for her memories; for her way of judging these delights was similar to his.
She looked at him and laughed. "Haven't you ever loved a person above everything, and despised yourself for it? "
"I could say no; but I won't indignantly reject it out of hand," Ul- rich said. "It could have happened. "
"Have you never loved a person," Agathe went on excitedly, "de- spite the strangest conviction that this person, whether he has a beard or breasts, about whom you thought you knew everything and whom you esteem, and who talks incessantly about you and himself, is really only visiting love? You could leave out his thinking and his merits, give him a different destiny, furnish him with a different beard and different legs: you could almost leave him out, and you would still love him! . . . That is, insofar as you love him at all! " she added to soften it.
Her voice had a deep resonance, with a restless glitter in its depths, as from a fire. She sat down guiltily, because in her uninten- tional eagerness she had sprung up from her chair.
Ulrich, too, felt somewhat guilty on account of this conversation, and smiled. He had not in the least intended to speak of love as one of those contemporary bifurcated emotions that the latest trend calls "ambivalent," which amounts to saying that the soul, as is the case with swindlers, always winks with its left eye while pledging an oath with its right hand. He had only found it amusing that love, to arise and endure, does not depend on anything significant. That is, you love someone in spite of everything, and equally well on account of nothing; and that means either that the whole business is a fantasy or that this fantasy is the whole business, as the world is a whole in which no sparrow falls without the All-Feeling One being aware of it.
"So it doesn't depend on anything at all! " Agathe exclaimed by way ofconclusion. "Not on what a person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does. "
It was clear to them that they were speaking of the security of the soul, or, since it might be well to avoid such a grand word, of the insecurity, which they-using the term now with modest imprecision and in an overall sense-felt in their souls. And that they were talk- ing of love, in the course of which they reminded each other of its changeability and its art of metamorphosis, happened only because it
1316 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
is one ofthe most violent and distinctive emotions, and yet it is such a suspicious emotion before the stem throne ofsovereign understand- ing that it causes even this understanding to waver. But here they had already found a beginning when they had scarcely begun stroll- ing in the sunshine of loving one's neighbor; and mindful of the as- sertion that even in this gracious stupefaction you had no idea whether you really loved people, and whether you were loving real people, or whether, and by means of what qualities, you were being duped by a fantasy and a transformation, Ulrich showed himself as- siduous in finding a verbal knot that would give him a handhold on the questionable relationship that exists between emotion and un- derstanding, at least at the present moment and in the spirit of the idle conversation that had just died away.
"This always contains both contradictions; they form a four-horse team," he said. "You love a person because you know him; and be- cause you don't know him. And you understand him because you love him; and don't know him because you love him. And sometimes this reaches such a pitch that it suddenly becomes quite palpable. These are the notorious moments when Venus through Apollo, and Apollo through Venus, gaze at a hollow scarecrow and are mightily amazed that previously they had seen something else there. Iflove is stronger than this astonishment, a struggle arises between them, and sometimes love-albeit exhausted, despairing, and mortally wounded-emerges the victor. But if love is not so strong, it be- comes a struggle between people who think themselves deceived; it comes to insults, crude intrusions of reality, incredible humiliations intended to make up for your having been the simpleton. . . . " He had experienced this stormy weather oflove often enough to be able to describe it now quite comfortably.
But Agathe put an end to this. "Ifyou don't mind, I'd like to point out that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are for the most part much overrated! " she objected, and again tried to find a comfortable position.
"All love is overrated! The madman who in his derangement stabs with a knife and runs it through an innocent person who just happens to be standing where his hallucination is-in love he's normal! " Ul- rich declared, and laughed.
LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE
A comfortable position and lackadaisical sunshine, which caresses without being importunate, facilitated these conversations. They were mostly conducted between two deck chairs that had been not so much moved into the protection and shade of the house as into the shaded light coming from the garden, its freedom modulated by the morning walls. One should not, of course, assume that the chairs were standing there because brother and sister-stimulated by the sterility of their relationship, which in the ordinary sense was simply present but in a higher ~ensewas perhaps threatening-might have had the intention of exchanging their opinions concerning the de- ceptive nature oflove in Schopenhauerian-Hindu fashion, and of de- fending themselves against the insane seductive workings of its drive to procreation by intellectually dismembering them; what dictated the choice of the half-shadowed, the protective, and the curiously withdrawn had a simpler explanation. The subject matter of the con- versation was itself so constituted that in the infinite experience through which the notion of love first emerges distinctly, the most various associative pathways came to light, leading from one question to the next. Thus the two questions of how one loves the neighbor one does not know, and how one loves oneself, whom one knows even less, directed their curiosity to the question encompassing both: namely, how one loves at all; or, put differently, what love "really" is. At first glance this might seem rather precocious, and also an all-too- judicious question for a couple in love; but it gains in mental confu- sion as soon as one extends it to include millions of loving couples and their variety.
These millions differ not only individually (which is their pride) but also according to their ways of acting, their object, and their rela- tionship. There are times when one cannot speak of loving couples at all but can still speak of love, and other times, when one can talk of loving couples but not of love, in which case things proceed in rather
1317
1318 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
more ordinary fashion. All in all, the word embraces as many contra- dictions as Sunday in a small country town, where the farm boys go to mass at ten in the morning, visit the brothel in a side street at eleven, and enter the tavern on the main square at noon to eat and drink. Is there any sense in hying to investigate such a word all the way around? But in using it one is acting unconsciously, as if despite all the differences there were some inherent common quality! Whether you love a walking stick or honor is six of one and half a dozen of the other, and it would not occur to anybody to name these things in the same breath if one weren't accustomed to so doing every day. Other kinds of games about things that are different and yet one and the same can be addressed with: loving the bottle, loving tobacco, and loving even worse poisons. Spinach and outdoor exercise. Sports or the mind. Truth. Wife, child, dog. Those only added to the list who spoke about: God. Beauty, Fatherland, and money. Nature, friend, profession, and life. Freedom. Success, power, justice, or simply vir- tue. One loves all these things; in short, there are almost as many things associated with love as there are ways of striving and speak- ing. But what are the distinctions, and what do these loves have in common?
It might be useful to think of the word "fork. " There are eating forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, gun forks, road forks, and other forks, and what they all have in common is the shaping charac- teristic of "forkness. " This is the decisive experience, what is forked, the gestalt of the fork, in the most disparate things that are called by that name. Ifyou proceed from these things, it turns out that they all belong to the same category; if you proceed from the initial impres- sion offorkness, it turns out that it is filled out and complemented by the impressions ofthe various specific forks. The common element is therefore a form or gestalt, and the differentiation lies first in the variety of forms it can assume, but then also in the objects having such a form, their purpose, and such things. But while every fork can be directly compared with every other, and is present to the senses, even if only in the form of a chalk line, or mentally, this is not the case with the various shapes of love; and the entire usefulness of the example is limited to the question ofwhether here, too, correspond- ing to the forkness of forks, there is in all cases a decisive experience, a loveness, a lovebeing, and a lovekind. But love is not an object of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1319
sensory understanding that is to be grasped with a glance, or even with an emotion, but a moral event, in the way that premeditated murder, justice, or scorn is; and this means among other things that a multiply branching and variously supported chain of comparisons is possible amongvarious examples ofit, the more distant ofwhich can be quite dissimilar to each other, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected through an associ- ation that echoes from one link to the next. Acting from love can thus go as far as hate; and yet the cause is not the much-invoked "am- bivalence," the dichotomy of emotions, but precisely the full totality of life.
Nevertheless, such a word might also have preceded the develop- ing continuation of the conversation. For forks and other such inno- cent aids aside, sophisticated conversation knows nowadays how to handle the essence and nature of love without faltering, and yet to express itself as grippingly as if this kernel were concealed in all the various appearances of love the way forkness is contained in the ma- nure fork or the salad fork. This leads one to say-and Ulrich and Agathe, too, could have been seduced into this by the general cus- tom-that the important thing in every kind oflove is libido, or to say that it is eros. These two words do not have the same history, yet they are comparable, especially in the contemporary view. For when psy- choanalysis (because an age that nowhere goes in for intellectual or spiritual depth is riveted to hear that it has a depth psychology) began to become an everyday philosophy and interrupted the middle classes' lack of adventure, everything in sight was called libido, so that in the end one could as little say what this key and skeleton-key idea was not as what it was. And much the same is true of eros, except that those who, with the greatest conviction, reduce all physical and spiritual worldly bonds to eros have regarded their eros the same way from the very beginning. It would be futile to translate libido as drive or desire, specifically sexual or presexual drive or desire, or to trans- late eros, on the other hand, as spiritual, indeed suprasensory, ten- derness; you would then have to add a specialized historical treatise. One's boredom with this makes ignorance a pleasure. But this is what determined in advance that the conversation conducted be- tween two deck chairs did not take the direction indicated but found attraction and refreshment instead in the primitive and insufficient
1320 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
process ofsimply piling up as many examples as possible ofwhat was called love and putting them side by side as in a game: indeed, to behave as ingenuously as possible and not despise even the least judi- cious examples.
Comfortably chatting, they shared whatever examples occurred to them, and how they occurred to them, whether according to the emotion, according to the object it was directed at, or according to the action in which it expressed itself. But it was also an advantage first to take the procedure in hand and consider whether it merited the name oflove in real or metaphorical terms, and to what extent. In this fashion many kinds of material from different areas were brought together.
But spontaneously, the first thing they talked about was emotion; for the entire nature oflove appears to be a process offeeling. All ~e more surprising is the response that emotion is the least part oflove. For the completely inexperienced, it would be like sugar and tooth- ache; not quite as sweet, and not quite as painful, and as restless as cattle plagued by horseflies. This comparison might not seem a mas- terpiece to anyone who is himself tormented by love; and yet the usual description is really not that much different: being tom by doubts and anxieties, pain and longing, and vague desires! Since olden times it seems that this description has not been able to specify the condition any more precisely. But this lack of emotional specific- ity is not characteristic only of love. Whether one is happy or sad is also not something one experiences as irrevocably and straightfor- wardly as one distinguishes smooth from rough, nor can other emo- tions be recognized any better purely by feeling or even touching them. For that reason an observation was appropriate at this point that they might have fleshed out as it deserved, on the unequal dis- position and shaping of emotions. This was the term that Ulrich set out as its premise; he might also have said disposition, shaping, and consolidation.
For he introduced it with the natural experience that every emo- tion involves a convincing certainty of itself that is obviously part of its nucleus; and he added that it must also be assumed, on equally general grounds, that the disparity of emotions began no less with this nucleus. You can hear this in his examples. Love for a friend has a different origin and different traits from love for, a girl; love for a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 3 2 1
completely faded woman different ones from love for a saintly, re- served woman; and emotions such as (to remain with love) love, ven- eration, prurience, bondage, or the kinds of love and the kinds of antipathy that diverge even further from one another are already dif- ferent in their very roots. If one allows both assumptions, then all emotions, from beginning to end, would have to be as solid and transparent as crystals. And yet no emotion is unmistakably what it appears to be, and neither self-observation nor the actions to which it gives rise provide any assurance about it. This distinction between the self-assurance and the uncertainty of emotions is surely not tri- fling. But if one observes the origin of the emotion in the context of its physiological as well as its social causes, this difference becomes quite natural. These causes awaken in general terms, as one might say, merely the kind of emotion, without determining it in detail; for corresponding to every drive and every external situation that sets it in motion is a whole bundle of emotions that might satisfy them. And whatever of this is initially present can be called the nucleus of the emotion that is still between being and nonbeing. If one wanted to describe this nucleus, however it might be constituted, one could not come up with anything more apt than that it is something that in the course of its development, and independently of a great deal that may or may not be relevant, will develop into the emotion it was in- tended to become. Thus every emotion has, besides its initial disposi- tion, a destiny as well; and therefore, since what it later develops into is highly dependent on accruing conditions, there is no emotion that would unerringly be itself from the very beginning; indeed, there is perhaps not even one that would indisputably and purely be an emotion.