He had told her so openly enough, and even if she no longer remembered every detail of the
conversation
that had followed on the suspicions Hagauer had re- cently raised against her, she still found herselfbanished to a position ofwaiting between good and ill.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
The fervor of many portraits-and there are portraits, not just pictures, even of things- consists not least in that in them the individual existence opens up toward itself inwardly and closes itself off from the rest of the world.
For the independent forms of life, even if they represent themselves as relatively hermetic, always have common links with the dispersive circle of a constantly changing environment.
So when I took Agathe on my arm and we both took ourselves out of the frame of our lives and felt united in another frame, perhaps something similar was hap- pening with our emotions.
I didn't know what hers were, nor she mine, but they were only there for each other, hanging open and clinging to each other while all other dependency disappeared; and that is why we said we were outside the world and in ourselves, and used the odd comparison with a picture for this animated holding back and stopping short, this true homecoming and this becoming a unity of alien parts.
)"
"So the peculiar thought I am talking about teaches that the altera- tions and modulations of the emotion, and those of the internal and external behavior, can correspond to each other point for point with-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1269
out the emotion having to be equated with the behavior or with part of it, or without anything else having to be maintained about the emotion beyond its possessing qualities that also have their civic rights elsewhere in nature. This result has the advantage of not inter- fering with the natural distinction between an emotion and an event, and yet bridges them in such a way that the distinction loses its sig- nificance. It demonstrates in the most general fashion how the spheres of two actions, which can remain totally unlike one another, may yet be delineated in each other.
"This obviously gives the question of how, then, an emotion is sup- posed to 'consist' of other mental, indeed even of physical processes, an entirely new and remarkable tum; but this only explains how every change in the behavior corresponds to a change in the emo- tion, and vice versa, and not what really leads to such changes as take place during the entire duration of the emotion. In that case, the emotion would appear to be merely the echo of its accompanying action, and this action would be the mirror image of the emotion, so it would be hard to understand their reciprocally changing each other.
"Here, consequently, the second major idea that can be derived from the newly opened up science of the emotions begins. I would like to call it the idea of shaping and consolidating. "
"This idea is based on several notions and considerations. Since I would like to clarify it for myself, let me first go back to our saying that an emotion brings about a behavior, and the behavior reacts on the emotion; for this crude observation easily allows a better one to counter it, that between both there is, rather, a relationship of mu- tual reinforcement and resonance, a rampant swelling into each other, which also, to be sure, brings about mutual change in both components. The emotion is translated into the language of the ac- tion, and the action into the language of the emotion. As with every translation, something new is added and some things are lost in the process.
"Among the simplest relationships, the familiar expression that one's limbs are paralyzed with fear already speaks of this; for it could just as well be maintained that the fear is paralyzed by the limbs: a
1270 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
distinction such as the one between 'rigid with terror' and 'trembling with fear' rests entirely on this second case. And what is claimed by the simplest movement of expression is also true of the comprehen- sive emotional action: in other words, an emotion changes not just as a consequence of the action it evokes, but already within the action by which it is assimilated in a particular way, repeated, and changed, in the course of which both the emotion and the action mutually shape and consolidate themselves. Ideas, desires, and impulses of all sorts also enter into an emotion in this way, and the emotion enters them. "
"But such a relationship ofcourse presupposes a differentiation in the interaction in which the lead should alternate sequentially, so that now feeling, now acting, dominates, now a resolve, scruple, or idea becomes dominant and makes a contribution that carries all the components forward in a common direction. So this relationship is contained in the idea of a mutual shaping and consolidation, and it is this idea that really makes it complete.
"On the other side, the unity described previously must at the same time be able to assimilate changes and yet still have the ability to maintain its identity as a more or less defined emotional action; but it must also be able to exclude, for it assimilates influences from within and without or fends them off. Up to now, all I know of this unity is the law of its completed state. Therefore the origins of these influences must also be able to be adduced and ultimately explained, thanks to which providence or arrangement it happens that they enter into what is going on in the sense of a common development. "
"Now, in all probability a particular ability to endure and be resus- citated, a solidity and degree of solidity, and thus finally also a partic- ular 'energy,' cannot be ascribed to the unity alone, to the structure as such, the mere shape of the event; nor is it very likely that there exist other internal participatory energies that focus specifically on this. On the other hand, it is probable that these energies play noth- ing more than a secondary role; for our emotions and ideas probably also control the same numerous, instantaneous internal relationships
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 7 1
and the same enduring dispositions, inclinations, principles, inten- tions, and needs that produce our actions as well as our emotions and ideas. Our emotions and ideas are the storage batteries of these ele- ments, and it is to be assumed that the energies to which they give rise somehow bring about the shaping and consolidation of the emotions. "
"How that happens I will try to make clear by means of a widely held prejudice. The opinion is often voiced that there is some kind of 'inner relation' among an emotion, the object to which it is directed, and the action that connects them. The idea is that it would then be more comprehensible that these form a unified whole, that they suc- ceed one another, and so on. The heart ofthe matter is that a particu- lar drive or a particular emotion-for example, hunger and the instinct for food-are directed not at random objects and actions but primarily, of course, at those that promise satisfaction. A sonata is of no help to a starving person, but food is: that is to say, something belonging to a more or less specific category of objects and events; and this gives rise to the appearance of this category and this state of stimulation always being connected. There is some truth in this, but no more mysterious a truth than that to eat soup we use a spoon and not a fork.
'W e do so because it seems to us appropriate; and it is nothing but this commonplace appearing-to-be-appropriate that fulfills the task of mediating among an emotion, its object, the concomitant actions, ideas, decisions, and those deeper impulses that for the most part elude observation. Ifwe act with an intention, or from a desire, or for a purpose-for instance, to help or hurt someone-it seems natural to us that our action is determined by the demand that it be appro- priate; but beyond that it can turn out in many different ways. The same is true for every emotion. An emotion, too, longs for everything that seems suited to satisfying it, in which process this characteristic will be sometimes more tightly, sometimes more loosely, related; and precisely this looser connection is the natural path to shaping and consolidation.
"For it occasionally happens even to the drives that they go astray, and wherever an emotion is at its peak, it then happens that an action
1272 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
is merely attempted, that an intention or an idea is thrown in that later turns out to be inappropriate and is dropped, and that the emo- tion enters the sphere ofa source ofenergy, or this sphere enters that of the emotion, from which it frees itself again. So in the course of the event not everything is shaped and consolidated; a great deal is also abandoned. In other words, there is also a shaping without con- solidation, and this constitutes an indispensable part of the con- solidating arrangement. For since everything that seems appropriate to serve the directing energies can be absorbed by the unity of the emotional behavior, but only so much of this is retained as is really appropriate, there enter of themselves into the feeling, acting, and thinking the common trait, succession, and duration which make it comprehensible that the feeling, acting, and thinking mutually and increasingly consolidate and shape themselves. "
"The weak point of this explanation lies where the precisely de- scribed unity that arises at the end is supposed to be connected to the unknown and vaguely bounded sphere ofthe impulses that lies at the beginning. This sphere is hardly anything other than what is em- braced by the essences 'person' and T according to the proportion of their involvement, about which we know little. But if one considers that in the moment of an emotion even what is most inward can be recast, then it will not seem unthinkable that in such a moment the shaped unity ofthe action, too, can reach that point. Ifone considers, on the other hand, how much has to happen beforehand in order to prepare such a success as a person giving up principles and habits, one will have to desist from every idea that concentrates on the mo- mentary effect. And ifone were, finally, to be satisfied by saying that other laws and connections are valid for the area of the source than for the outlet, where the emotion becomes perceivable as internal and external action, then one would again come up against the insuf- ficiency that we have no idea at all according to what law the transi- tion from the causative forces to the resulting product could come about. Perhaps the postulation of a lopse, general unity that em- braces the entire process can be combined with this, in that it would ultimately enable a specific and solid unity to emerge: but this ques-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1273 tion extends beyond psychology, and for the time being extends
beyond our abilities too. "
"This knowledge, that in the process of an emotion from its source to its appearance a unity is indicated, but that it cannot be said when and how this unity assumes the closed form that is supposed to char- acterize the emotion's completely developed behavior (and in ana- lyzing which I used the articulation of a melody as example)-this quite negative knowledge permits, remarkably, an idea to be brought in by means of which the deferred answer to the question of how the concept of the emotion appears in more recent research comes to a singular conclusion. This is the admission that the actual event corre- sponds neither in its entirety nor in its final form to the mental image that has been made of it. This is usefully demonstrated by a kind of double negative: One says to oneself: perhaps the pure unity that theoretically represents the law of the completed emotion never ex- ists; indeed, it may not even be at all possible for it to exist, because it would be so completely cut off inside its own compass that it would not be able to assimilate any more influences of any other kind. But, one now says to oneself, there never is such a completely circum- scribed emotion! In other words: emotions never occur purely, but always only in an approximating actualization. And in still other words: the process of shaping and consolidating never ends. "
"But this is nothing other than what presently characterizes psy- chological thinking everywhere. Moreover, one sees in the basic mental concepts only ideational patterns according to which the in- ternal action can be ordered, but one no longer expects that it is re- ally constructed out of such elements, like a picture printed by the four-color process. In truth, according to this view, the pure nature ofthe emotion, ofthe idea, ofsensation, and ofthe will are as little to be met with in the internal world as are the thread of a current or a difficult point in the outer world: There is merely an interwoven whole, which sometimes seems to will and sometimes to think be- cause this or that quality predominates.
1274 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"The names of the individual emotions therefore characterize only types, which approximate real experiences without corresponding to them entirely; and with this, a guiding principle with the following content-even if this is rather crudely put-takes the place of the axiom of the older psychology by which the emotion, as one of the elemental experiences, was supposed to have an unalterable nature, or to be experienced in a way that distinguished it once and for all from other experiences: There are no experiences that are from the beginning distinct emotions, or even emotions at all; there are merely experiences that are destined to become emotion and to become a distinct emotion.
"This also gives the idea ofarrangement and consolidation the sig- nificance that in this process emotion and behavior not only form, consolidate, and, as far as it is given them, determine; it is in this process that the emotion originates in the first place: so that it is never this or that specific emotion that is present at the beginning- say, in a weak state-together with its mode of action, but only some- thing that is appropriate and has been destined to become such an emotion and action, which, however, it never becomes in a pure state. "
"But of course this 'something' is not completely random, since it is understood to be something that from the start and by disposition is intended or appropriate to becoming an emotion, and, moreover, a specific emotion. For in the final analysis anger is not fatigue, and apparently not in the first analysis either; and just as little are satiety and hunger to be confused, even in their early stages. Therefore at the beginning something unfinished, a start, a nucleus, something like an emotion and things associated with that emotion, will already be present. I would like to call it a feeling that is not yet an emotion; but it is better to present an example, and for that I will take the relatively simple one ofphysical pain inflicted externally.
"This pain can be a locally restricted sensation that penetrates or burns in one spot and is unpleasant but alien. But this sensation can also flare up and overwhelm the entire person with affliction. Often, too, at the beginning there is merely an empty spot at the place, from which it is only in the following moments that sensation or emotion
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 75
wells up: it is not only children who at the beginning often do not know whether something hurts. Earlier, one assumed that in these cases an emotion is superimposed on the sensation, but today one prefers to suppose that a nucleus of experience, originally as little a sensation as it is an emotion, can develop equally well into the one as the other.
"Also already part of this original stability of experience is the be- ginning of an instinctive or reflex action, a shrinking back, collapsing, fending off, or a spontaneous counterattack; and because this more or less involves the entire person, it will also involve an internal 'flight or fight' condition, in other words a coloration of the emotion by the kind of fear or attack. This proceeds of course even more strongly from the drives triggered, for not only are these dispositions for a purposive action but, once aroused, they also produce nonspecific mental states, which we characterize as moods of fearfulness or irri- tability, or in other cases of being in love, of sensitivity, and so forth. Even not acting and not being able to do anything has such an emo- tional coloration; but the drives are for the most part connected with a more or less definite will formation, and this leads to an inquiry into the situation that is in itself a confrontation and therefore has an ag- gressive coloration. But this inquiry can also have the effect of cool- ness and calm; or if the pain is quite severe, it does not take place, and one suddenly avoids its source. So even this example goes back and forth from the very beginning between sensation, emotion, auto- matic response, will, flight, defense, attack, pain, anger, curiosity, and being coolly collected, and thereby demonstrates that what is present is not so much the original state of a single emotion as rather varying beginnings of several, succeeding or complementing one an- other.
"This gives to the assertion that a feeling is present, but not yet an emotion, the sense that the disposition to an emotion is always pres- ent but that it does not need to be realized, and that a beginning is always present but it can tum out later to have served as the begin- ning of a different emotion. "
"The peculiar manner in which the emotion is from the beginning both present and not present can be expressed in the comparison
1276 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
that one must imagine its development as the image of a forest, and not as the image of a tree. A birch, for example, remains itself from its germination to its death; but on the other hand, a birch forest can begin as a mixed forest; it becomes a birch forest as soon as birch trees-as the result of causes that can be quite varied-predominate in it and the departures from the pure stamp of the birch type are no longer significant.
"It is the same with the emotion and (this is always open to misun- derstanding) with the action connected to the emotion. They always have their particular characteristics, but these change with every- thing that adheres to them until, with growing certitude, they take on the marks of a familiar emotion and 'deserve' its name, which always retains a trace of free judgment. But emotion and the action of emo- tion can also depart from this type and approximate another; this is not unusual, because an emotion can waver and, in any event, goes through various stages. What distinguishes this from the ordinary view is that in the ordinary view the emotion has validity as a specific experience, which we do not always recognize with certainty. On the other hand, the more recently established view ascribes the lack of certainty to the emotion and tries to understand it from its nature and to limit it concisely. "
There followed in an appendix individual examples that really ought to have been marginal notations but had been suppressed at the places they had been intended for in order not to interrupt the exposition. And so these stragglers that had dropped out of their con- text no longer belonged to a specific place, although they did belong to the whole and retained ideas that might possibly have some useful application for the whole:
"In the relation 'to love something,' what carries such enormous distinctions as that between love of God and loving to go fishing is not the love but the 'something. ' The emotion itself: the devotion, anxiousness, desire, hurt, gnawing-in other words, loving--does not admit a distinction. ''
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 77
"But it is just as certain that loving one's walking stick or honor is not 'apples and oranges' only for the reason that these two things do not resemble each other, but also because the use we make of them, the circumstances in which they assume importance-in short, the entire group of experiences-are different. It is from the noninter- changeability of a group of experiences that we derive the certainty of knowing our emotion. That is why we only truly recognize it after it has had some effect in the world and has been shaped by the world; we do not know what we feel before our action has made that decision. "
"And where we say that our emotion is divided, we should rather say that it is not yet complete, or that we have not yet settled down. "
"And where it appears as paradox or paradoxical combination, what we have is often something else. We say that the courageous person ignores pain; but in truth it is the bitter salt of pain that overflows in courageousness. And in the martyr it rises in flames to heaven. In the coward, on the contrary, the pain becomes unbearably concentrated through the anticipatory fear. The example ofloathing is even clearer; those feelings inflicted with violence are associated with it, which, if received voluntarily, are the most intense desire.
"Of course there are differing sources here, and also varying com- binations, but what comes into being most particularly are various directions in which the predominant emotion develops. "
"Because they are constantly fluid, emotions cannot be stopped; nor can they be looked at 'under the microscope. ' This means that the more closely we obseiVe them, the less we know what it is we feel. Attention is already a change in the emotion. But if emotions were a 'mixture,' this should really be most apparent at the moment when it is stopped, even if attention inteiVenes. ''
1278 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
"Because the external action has no independent significance for the mind, emotions cannot be distinguished by it alone. Innumerable times we do not know what we feel, although we act vigorously and decisively. The enormous ambiguity of what a person does who is being observed mistrustfully or jealously rests on this lack of clarity. "
"The emotion's lack of clarity does not, however, demonstrate its wealmess, for emotions vanish precisely when feeling is at its height. Even at high degrees of intensity, emotions are extremely labile; see for instance the 'courage of despair,' or happiness suddenly changing into pain. At this level they also bring about contradictory actions, like paralysis instead of flight, or 'being suffocated' by one's own anger. But in quite violent excitation they lose, so to speak, their color, so that all that remains is a dead sensation ofthe accompanying physical manifestations, contraction ofthe skin, surging ofthe blood, blotting out of the senses. And what appears fully in these most in- tense stages is an absolute bedazzlement, so that it can be said that the shaping of the emotion, and with it the entire world of our emo- tions, is valid only in intermediate stages. "
"In these average stages we of course recognize and name an emotion no differently from the way we do other phenomena that are in flux, to repeat this once again. To determine the distinction between hate and anger is as easy and as difficult as ascertaining the distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated murder, or between a basin and a bowl. Not that what is at work here is capri- ciousness in naming, but every aspect and deflection can be useful for comparison and concept formation. And so in this way the hun- dred and one kinds of love about which Agathe and I joked, not en- tirely without sorrow, are connected. The question of how it happens that such quite different things are characterized by the single word 'love' has the same answer as the question of why we unhesitatingly talk of dinner forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, rifle forks, road forks, and other forks. Underlying all these fork impressions is a
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1279
common 'forkness': it is not in them as a common nucleus, but it might almost be said that it is nothing more than a comparison possi- ble for each of them. For they do not all even need to be similar to one another: it is already sufficient if one leads to another, if you go from one to the next, as long as the neighboring members are similar to one another. The more remote ones are then similar through the mediation of these proximate members. Indeed, even what consti- tutes the similarity, that which associates the neighboring members, can change in such a chain; and so one travels excitedly from one end of the path to the other, hardly knowing oneself how one has tra- versed it. "
"But if we wished to regard, as we are inclined to do, the similarity existing among all kinds oflove for its similarity to a kind of'ur-love,' which so to speak would sit as an armless and legless torso in the middle of them all, it would most likely be the same error as believ- ing in an 'ur-fork. ' And yet we have living witness for there really being such an emotion. It is merely difficult to determine the degree of this 'really. ' It is different from that of the real world. An emotion that is not an emotion for something; an emotion without desire, without preferment, without movement, without knowledge, with- out limits; an emotion to which no distinct behavior and action be- longs, at least no behavior that is quite real: as truly as this emotion is not served with arms and legs, so truly have we encountered it again and again, and it has seemed to us more alive than life itself! Love is already too particular a name for this, even if it most intimately re- lated to a love for which tenderness or inclination are expressions that are too obvious. It realizes itself in many different ways and in many connections, but it can never let itself be detached from this actualization, which always contaminates it. Thus has it appeared to us and vanished, an intimation that always remained the same. Ap- parently the dry reflections with which I have filled these pages have little to do with this, and yet I am almost certain that they have brought me to the right path to it! "
1280
THE DO-GOODER SINGS
Professor August Lindner sang. He was waiting for Agathe.
Ah, the boy's eyes seem to me So crystal clear and lovely,
And a something shines in them That captivates my heart.
Ah, those sweet eyes glance at me, Shining into mine!
Were he to see his image there He would greet me tenderly.
And this is why I yield myself To serve his eyes alone,
For a something shines in them That captivates my heart.
It had originally been a Spanish song. There was a small piano in the house, dating from Frau Lindner's time; it was occasionally de- voted to the mission ofrounding out the education and culture ofson Peter, which had already led Peter to remove several strings. Lind- ner himself never used it, except possibly to strike a few solemn chords now and then; and although he had been pacing up and down in front of this sound machine for quite some time, it was only after cautiously making sure that the housekeeper as well as Peter was out ofthe house that he had let himselfbe carried away by this unwonted impulse. He was quite pleased with his voice, a high baritone obvi- ously well suited to expressing emotion; and now Lindner had not closed the piano but was standing there thinking, leaning on it with his arm, his weightless leg crossed over his supporting leg. Agathe, who had already visited him several times, was over an hour late. The
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 81
emptiness of the house, stemming in part from that fact and in part from the arrangements he had made, welled up in his consciousness as a culpable plan.
He had found a soul of bedazzling richness, which he was making great efforts to save and which evoked the impression of confiding itself to his charge; and what man would not be charmed at finding something he had hardly expected to find, a tender female creature he could train according to his principles? But mixed in with this were deep notes of discontent. Lindner considered punctuality an obligation of conscience, placing it no lower than honesty and con- tractual obligations; people who made no punctual division of their time seemed to him pathologically scatterbrained, forcing their more serious fellow men, moreover, to lose parcels oftheir time along with them; and so he regarded them as worse than muggers. In such cases he took it as his duty to bring it to the attention of such beings, po- litely but unrelentingly, that his time did not belong to him but to his activity; and because white lies injure one's own mind, while people are not all equal, some being influential and some not, he had derived numerous character exercises from this; a host of their most powerful and malleable maxims now came to his mind and interfered with the gentle arousal brought on by the song.
But no matter: he had not sung any religious songs since his stu- dent days, and enjoyed it with a circumspectfrisson. "What southern naivete, and what charm," he thought, "emanate from such worldly lines! How delightfully and tenderly they relate to the boy Jesus! " He tried to imitate the poem's artlessness in his mind, and arrived at the result: "If I didn't know better, I'd be capable of believing that I feel a girl's chaste stirrings for her boy! " So one might well say that a woman able to evoke such homage was reaching all that was noblest in man and must herself be a noble being. But here Lindner smiled with dissatisfaction and decided to close the lid of the piano. Then he did one of his arm exercises that further the harmony of the person- ality, and stopped again. An unpleasant thought had crossed his mind. "She is unfeeling! " he sighed behind gritted teeth. "She would be laughing! "
He had in his face at this moment something that would have re- minded his dear departed mother of the little boy under whose chin every morning she tied a big lovely bow before sending him off to
1282 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
school; this something might be called the complete absence of rough-hewn maleness. On this tall, slack, pipestem-legged appari- tion, the head sat as ifspeared on a lance over the roaring arena ofhis schoolmates, who jeered at the bow tie made by his mother's hand; and in anxiety dreams Professor Lindner even now sometimes saw himself standing that way and suffering for the good, the true, and the beautiful. But for this very reason he never conceded that rough- ness is an indispensable male characteristic, like gravel, which has to be mixed into mortar to give it strength; and especially since he had become the man he flattered himself to be, he saw in that early de- fect merely a confirmation of the fact that he had been born to im- prove the world, even if in modest measure. Today we are quite accustomed to the explanation that great orators arise from speech defects and heroes from wealmess, in other words the explanation that our nature always first digs a ditch ifit wants us to erect a moun- tain above it; and because the half-knowledgeable and half-savage people who chiefly determine the course of life are quick to proclaim nearly every stutterer a Demosthenes, it is that much easier, as a sign of intellectual good taste, to recognize that the only important thing about a Demosthenes was his original stuttering. But we have not yet succeeded in reducing the deeds of Hercules to his having been a sickly child, or the greatest achievements in the sprint and broad jump to flat-footedness, or courage to timidity; and so it must be conceded that there is something more to an exceptional talent than its omission.
Thus Professor Lindner was by no means restricted to acknowl- edging that the raillery and blows he had feared as a child could be a cause of his intellectual development. Nevertheless, the current dis- position of his principles and emotions did him the service of trans- forming every such impression that reached him from the bustle of the world into an intellectual triumph; even his habit ofweaving mar- tial and sportive expressions into his speech, as well as his tendency to set the stamp of a strict and inflexible will on everything he said and did, had begun to develop to the degree that, as he grew up and lived among more mature companions, he was correspondingly removed from direct physical attacks. At the university, he had even joined one of the fraternities whose members wore their jackets, caps, boots, insignia, and sword just as picturesquely as the rowdies
From the Posthu17UJfls Papers · 1283
whom they despised, but made only peaceful use of them because their outlook forbade dueling. In this, Lindner's pleasure in a brav- ery for which no blood need be spilled had achieved its definitive form; but at the same time it gave witness that one can combine a noble temperament with the overflowing pulse of life or, of course in other terms, that God enters man more easily when he imitates the devil who was there before him.
So whenever Iindner reproached his more compact son, Peter, as he was unfortunately often called upon to do, that yielding to the very idea of force made a person effeminate, or that the power of humility and the courage of renunciation are of greater value than physical strength and courage, he was not talking as a layman in questions of courage but enjoying the excitement of a conjurer who has succeeded in yoking demons to the service of the good. For al- though there was really nothing that could disturb his equilibrium at the height ofwell-being he had attained, he was marked by a disincli- nation to jokes and laughter bordering almost on anxiety-as an in- jury that has healed leaves behind a limp-even when he merely suspected their bare possibility. "The tickling of jokes and humor," he was accustomed to instruct his son on the subject, "originate in the sated comfort of life, in malice, and in idle fantasies, and they easily induce people to say things their better selves would condemn! On the other hand, the discipline that comes from stifling 'witty' ri- postes and ideas is an admirable test of strength and an annealing test of will, and the more you use the silence you have struggled to master in order to look into your joke more closely, the better it turns out for the whole man. 'W e usually see first," this standing admoni- tion concluded, "how many impulses to elevate oneself and demean others it conceals, how much coquetry and frivolity lie behind most jokes, how much refinement of sympathy they stifle in ourselves and others, indeed how much horrifying coarseness and mockery comes to light in the laughter we try to coax from an audience! "
As a result, Peter had to hide carefully from his father his youthful inclination to mockery and joking; but he was so inclined, and Pro- fessor Lindner often felt the breath of the evil spirit in his surround- ings without being able to spot the poisonous phantom. It could go so far that the father would instill fear in the son with a subduing glance, while secretly fearing him himself, and when this happened he was
1284 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
reminded ofsomething ineffable between his wife and himselfwhile his plump spouse was still on earth. Being lord and master in his own house, establishing its atmosphere and knowing that his family sur- rounded him like a peaceful garden in which he had planted his prin- ciples, belonged for Lindner to the indispensable preconditions of happiness. But Frau Lindner, whom he had married shortly after he finished his studies, during which time he had been a lodger at her mother's, had unfortunately soon thereafter ceased to share his prin- ciples and put on an air of being reluctant to contradict him that ir- ritated him more than contradiction itself. He could not forget having sometimes caught a glance from the comer of her eye while her mouth was obediently silent, and every time this happened he subsequently found himself in a situation that was not exactly proof against adverse comment: for instance, in a nightshirt that was too short, preaching that her dignity as a woman should preclude her finding any pleasure in the rough, loose young men who with their drunkenness and scrapes still dominated student life at that time and who accordingly were not as undesirable as lodgers as they ought to be.
Woman's secret mockery is a chapter in itself, with the most inti- mate connections to her lack of understanding for those preoccupa- tions of greatest importance to the male; and the moment Lindner remembered this, the mental processes that had until then been churning indistinctly within him uncorked the idea of Agathe. What would she be like to live with intimately? "There is no question ofher being what one might comfortably call a good person. She doesn't even try to hide it! " he told himself, and a remark of hers that oc- curred to him in this connection, her laughing assertion that today the good people were no less responsible for the corruption of life than the bad ones, made his hair stand on end. But on the whole he had already "extracted the abscessed teeth" of these "horrible views," even if every time they came up they upset him all over again, by once and for all declaring to himself: "She has no conception of reality! " For he thought of Agathe as a noble being, even though she was, for a "daughter of Eve," full of venomous unrest. The proper attitude, however certain it may be for the believer, seemed to her the most intellectually unascertainable object, the solution of life's most extreme and difficult task. She seemed to have a dreamily con-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1285
fused idea ofwhat was good and right, an idea inimical to order, with no more coherence than an accidental grouping of poems. "Reality is alien to her! " he repeated. "If, for example, she knows something about love, how can she make such cynical statements about it as that it's impossible, and the like? '' Therefore she must be shown what real love is.
But here Agathe presented new difficulties. Let him admit it fear- lessly and courageously: she was offensive! She all too gladly tore down from its pedestal whatever you cautiously raised up; and if you found fault with her, her criticism knew no bounds and she made it clear that she was out to wound. There are such natures that rage against themselves and strike the hand bringing them succor; but a determined man will never allow his behavior to depend on the be- havior of others, and at this moment what Lindner saw was the image of a peaceful man with a long beard, bending over a sick woman anx- iously fending him off, and seeing in the depths of her heart a pro- found wound. The moment was far removed from logic, and so this did not mean that he was this man; but Lindner straightened u p - this he actually did-and reached for his beard, which in the mean- time had lost a good deal of its fullness, and a nervous blush raced across his face. He had remembered that Agathe had the objection- able habit of instilling in him the belief, more than any other human being ever could have done, that she would like to share his most sublime and most secret feelings; indeed, that in her own con- strained situation she was even waiting for a special effort of these feelings in order, once he had exposed the innermost treasures of his mind, to pour scorn on him. She was egging him on! Lindner admit- ted this to himselfand could not have done otherwise, for there was a strange, restless feeling in his breast that one might have hardheart- edly compared, although he was far from thinking this, with hens milling about in a chicken coop. But then she could suddenly laugh in the most mysterious way, or say something profane and hard that cut him to the quick, as ifshe had been building him up only in order to cut him down! And had she not already done this today too, even before her arrival, Lindner asked himself, bringing him to such a pass with this piano? He looked at it; it stood there beside him like a housemaid with whom the master ofthe house had transgressed!
He could not know what motivated Agathe to play this game
1286 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
with him, and she herself would not have been able to discuss it with anyone-not even, and especially, Ulrich. She was behaving capri- ciously; but to the extent that this means with changeable emotions, it was done intentionally and signified a shaking and loosening up of the emotions, the way a person weighed down by a delicious burden stretches his limbs. So the strange attraction that several times had secretly led her to Lindner had contained from the beginning an in- subordination against Ulrich, or at least against complete depen- dence on him; the stranger distracted her thoughts a little and reminded her of the diversity of the world and of men. But this hap- pened only so that she might feel her dependence on her brother that much more warmly, and was, moreover, the same as Ulrich's secretiveness with his diary, which he kept locked away from her; indeed, it was even the same as his general resolve to let reason stand beside emotion as well as above it, and also to judge. But while this took up his time, her impatience and stored-up tension was seeking an outlet, an adventure, about which it could not yet be said what path it would take; and to the degree that Ulrich inspired or de- pressed her, Lindner, to whom she felt superior, caused her to be forbearing or high-spirited. She won mastery over herself by misus- ing the influence she exercised over him, and she needed this.
But something else was also at work here. For there was be- tween her and Ulrich at this time no talk either of her divorce and Hagauer's letters or of the rash or actually superstitious altering of the will in a moment of disorientation, an act that demanded restitu- tion, either civic or miraculous. Agathe was sometimes oppressed by what she had done, and she knew, too, that in the disorder one leaves behind in a lower circle of life Ulrich did not see any favorable sign of the order one strives for in a higher sense.
He had told her so openly enough, and even if she no longer remembered every detail of the conversation that had followed on the suspicions Hagauer had re- cently raised against her, she still found herselfbanished to a position ofwaiting between good and ill. Something, to be sure, was lifting all her qualities upward to a miraculous vindication, but she could not yet allow herself to believe in this; and so it was her offended, recalci- trant feeling ofjustice that also found expression in the quarrel with :Undner. She was very grateful to him for seeming to impute to her all the bad qualities that Hagauer, too, had discovered in her and for
From the Posthumous Papers · 1287
unintentionally calming her by the ve. ry way he looked while doing it. 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
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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
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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
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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!
"So the peculiar thought I am talking about teaches that the altera- tions and modulations of the emotion, and those of the internal and external behavior, can correspond to each other point for point with-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1269
out the emotion having to be equated with the behavior or with part of it, or without anything else having to be maintained about the emotion beyond its possessing qualities that also have their civic rights elsewhere in nature. This result has the advantage of not inter- fering with the natural distinction between an emotion and an event, and yet bridges them in such a way that the distinction loses its sig- nificance. It demonstrates in the most general fashion how the spheres of two actions, which can remain totally unlike one another, may yet be delineated in each other.
"This obviously gives the question of how, then, an emotion is sup- posed to 'consist' of other mental, indeed even of physical processes, an entirely new and remarkable tum; but this only explains how every change in the behavior corresponds to a change in the emo- tion, and vice versa, and not what really leads to such changes as take place during the entire duration of the emotion. In that case, the emotion would appear to be merely the echo of its accompanying action, and this action would be the mirror image of the emotion, so it would be hard to understand their reciprocally changing each other.
"Here, consequently, the second major idea that can be derived from the newly opened up science of the emotions begins. I would like to call it the idea of shaping and consolidating. "
"This idea is based on several notions and considerations. Since I would like to clarify it for myself, let me first go back to our saying that an emotion brings about a behavior, and the behavior reacts on the emotion; for this crude observation easily allows a better one to counter it, that between both there is, rather, a relationship of mu- tual reinforcement and resonance, a rampant swelling into each other, which also, to be sure, brings about mutual change in both components. The emotion is translated into the language of the ac- tion, and the action into the language of the emotion. As with every translation, something new is added and some things are lost in the process.
"Among the simplest relationships, the familiar expression that one's limbs are paralyzed with fear already speaks of this; for it could just as well be maintained that the fear is paralyzed by the limbs: a
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distinction such as the one between 'rigid with terror' and 'trembling with fear' rests entirely on this second case. And what is claimed by the simplest movement of expression is also true of the comprehen- sive emotional action: in other words, an emotion changes not just as a consequence of the action it evokes, but already within the action by which it is assimilated in a particular way, repeated, and changed, in the course of which both the emotion and the action mutually shape and consolidate themselves. Ideas, desires, and impulses of all sorts also enter into an emotion in this way, and the emotion enters them. "
"But such a relationship ofcourse presupposes a differentiation in the interaction in which the lead should alternate sequentially, so that now feeling, now acting, dominates, now a resolve, scruple, or idea becomes dominant and makes a contribution that carries all the components forward in a common direction. So this relationship is contained in the idea of a mutual shaping and consolidation, and it is this idea that really makes it complete.
"On the other side, the unity described previously must at the same time be able to assimilate changes and yet still have the ability to maintain its identity as a more or less defined emotional action; but it must also be able to exclude, for it assimilates influences from within and without or fends them off. Up to now, all I know of this unity is the law of its completed state. Therefore the origins of these influences must also be able to be adduced and ultimately explained, thanks to which providence or arrangement it happens that they enter into what is going on in the sense of a common development. "
"Now, in all probability a particular ability to endure and be resus- citated, a solidity and degree of solidity, and thus finally also a partic- ular 'energy,' cannot be ascribed to the unity alone, to the structure as such, the mere shape of the event; nor is it very likely that there exist other internal participatory energies that focus specifically on this. On the other hand, it is probable that these energies play noth- ing more than a secondary role; for our emotions and ideas probably also control the same numerous, instantaneous internal relationships
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 7 1
and the same enduring dispositions, inclinations, principles, inten- tions, and needs that produce our actions as well as our emotions and ideas. Our emotions and ideas are the storage batteries of these ele- ments, and it is to be assumed that the energies to which they give rise somehow bring about the shaping and consolidation of the emotions. "
"How that happens I will try to make clear by means of a widely held prejudice. The opinion is often voiced that there is some kind of 'inner relation' among an emotion, the object to which it is directed, and the action that connects them. The idea is that it would then be more comprehensible that these form a unified whole, that they suc- ceed one another, and so on. The heart ofthe matter is that a particu- lar drive or a particular emotion-for example, hunger and the instinct for food-are directed not at random objects and actions but primarily, of course, at those that promise satisfaction. A sonata is of no help to a starving person, but food is: that is to say, something belonging to a more or less specific category of objects and events; and this gives rise to the appearance of this category and this state of stimulation always being connected. There is some truth in this, but no more mysterious a truth than that to eat soup we use a spoon and not a fork.
'W e do so because it seems to us appropriate; and it is nothing but this commonplace appearing-to-be-appropriate that fulfills the task of mediating among an emotion, its object, the concomitant actions, ideas, decisions, and those deeper impulses that for the most part elude observation. Ifwe act with an intention, or from a desire, or for a purpose-for instance, to help or hurt someone-it seems natural to us that our action is determined by the demand that it be appro- priate; but beyond that it can turn out in many different ways. The same is true for every emotion. An emotion, too, longs for everything that seems suited to satisfying it, in which process this characteristic will be sometimes more tightly, sometimes more loosely, related; and precisely this looser connection is the natural path to shaping and consolidation.
"For it occasionally happens even to the drives that they go astray, and wherever an emotion is at its peak, it then happens that an action
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is merely attempted, that an intention or an idea is thrown in that later turns out to be inappropriate and is dropped, and that the emo- tion enters the sphere ofa source ofenergy, or this sphere enters that of the emotion, from which it frees itself again. So in the course of the event not everything is shaped and consolidated; a great deal is also abandoned. In other words, there is also a shaping without con- solidation, and this constitutes an indispensable part of the con- solidating arrangement. For since everything that seems appropriate to serve the directing energies can be absorbed by the unity of the emotional behavior, but only so much of this is retained as is really appropriate, there enter of themselves into the feeling, acting, and thinking the common trait, succession, and duration which make it comprehensible that the feeling, acting, and thinking mutually and increasingly consolidate and shape themselves. "
"The weak point of this explanation lies where the precisely de- scribed unity that arises at the end is supposed to be connected to the unknown and vaguely bounded sphere ofthe impulses that lies at the beginning. This sphere is hardly anything other than what is em- braced by the essences 'person' and T according to the proportion of their involvement, about which we know little. But if one considers that in the moment of an emotion even what is most inward can be recast, then it will not seem unthinkable that in such a moment the shaped unity ofthe action, too, can reach that point. Ifone considers, on the other hand, how much has to happen beforehand in order to prepare such a success as a person giving up principles and habits, one will have to desist from every idea that concentrates on the mo- mentary effect. And ifone were, finally, to be satisfied by saying that other laws and connections are valid for the area of the source than for the outlet, where the emotion becomes perceivable as internal and external action, then one would again come up against the insuf- ficiency that we have no idea at all according to what law the transi- tion from the causative forces to the resulting product could come about. Perhaps the postulation of a lopse, general unity that em- braces the entire process can be combined with this, in that it would ultimately enable a specific and solid unity to emerge: but this ques-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1273 tion extends beyond psychology, and for the time being extends
beyond our abilities too. "
"This knowledge, that in the process of an emotion from its source to its appearance a unity is indicated, but that it cannot be said when and how this unity assumes the closed form that is supposed to char- acterize the emotion's completely developed behavior (and in ana- lyzing which I used the articulation of a melody as example)-this quite negative knowledge permits, remarkably, an idea to be brought in by means of which the deferred answer to the question of how the concept of the emotion appears in more recent research comes to a singular conclusion. This is the admission that the actual event corre- sponds neither in its entirety nor in its final form to the mental image that has been made of it. This is usefully demonstrated by a kind of double negative: One says to oneself: perhaps the pure unity that theoretically represents the law of the completed emotion never ex- ists; indeed, it may not even be at all possible for it to exist, because it would be so completely cut off inside its own compass that it would not be able to assimilate any more influences of any other kind. But, one now says to oneself, there never is such a completely circum- scribed emotion! In other words: emotions never occur purely, but always only in an approximating actualization. And in still other words: the process of shaping and consolidating never ends. "
"But this is nothing other than what presently characterizes psy- chological thinking everywhere. Moreover, one sees in the basic mental concepts only ideational patterns according to which the in- ternal action can be ordered, but one no longer expects that it is re- ally constructed out of such elements, like a picture printed by the four-color process. In truth, according to this view, the pure nature ofthe emotion, ofthe idea, ofsensation, and ofthe will are as little to be met with in the internal world as are the thread of a current or a difficult point in the outer world: There is merely an interwoven whole, which sometimes seems to will and sometimes to think be- cause this or that quality predominates.
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"The names of the individual emotions therefore characterize only types, which approximate real experiences without corresponding to them entirely; and with this, a guiding principle with the following content-even if this is rather crudely put-takes the place of the axiom of the older psychology by which the emotion, as one of the elemental experiences, was supposed to have an unalterable nature, or to be experienced in a way that distinguished it once and for all from other experiences: There are no experiences that are from the beginning distinct emotions, or even emotions at all; there are merely experiences that are destined to become emotion and to become a distinct emotion.
"This also gives the idea ofarrangement and consolidation the sig- nificance that in this process emotion and behavior not only form, consolidate, and, as far as it is given them, determine; it is in this process that the emotion originates in the first place: so that it is never this or that specific emotion that is present at the beginning- say, in a weak state-together with its mode of action, but only some- thing that is appropriate and has been destined to become such an emotion and action, which, however, it never becomes in a pure state. "
"But of course this 'something' is not completely random, since it is understood to be something that from the start and by disposition is intended or appropriate to becoming an emotion, and, moreover, a specific emotion. For in the final analysis anger is not fatigue, and apparently not in the first analysis either; and just as little are satiety and hunger to be confused, even in their early stages. Therefore at the beginning something unfinished, a start, a nucleus, something like an emotion and things associated with that emotion, will already be present. I would like to call it a feeling that is not yet an emotion; but it is better to present an example, and for that I will take the relatively simple one ofphysical pain inflicted externally.
"This pain can be a locally restricted sensation that penetrates or burns in one spot and is unpleasant but alien. But this sensation can also flare up and overwhelm the entire person with affliction. Often, too, at the beginning there is merely an empty spot at the place, from which it is only in the following moments that sensation or emotion
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 75
wells up: it is not only children who at the beginning often do not know whether something hurts. Earlier, one assumed that in these cases an emotion is superimposed on the sensation, but today one prefers to suppose that a nucleus of experience, originally as little a sensation as it is an emotion, can develop equally well into the one as the other.
"Also already part of this original stability of experience is the be- ginning of an instinctive or reflex action, a shrinking back, collapsing, fending off, or a spontaneous counterattack; and because this more or less involves the entire person, it will also involve an internal 'flight or fight' condition, in other words a coloration of the emotion by the kind of fear or attack. This proceeds of course even more strongly from the drives triggered, for not only are these dispositions for a purposive action but, once aroused, they also produce nonspecific mental states, which we characterize as moods of fearfulness or irri- tability, or in other cases of being in love, of sensitivity, and so forth. Even not acting and not being able to do anything has such an emo- tional coloration; but the drives are for the most part connected with a more or less definite will formation, and this leads to an inquiry into the situation that is in itself a confrontation and therefore has an ag- gressive coloration. But this inquiry can also have the effect of cool- ness and calm; or if the pain is quite severe, it does not take place, and one suddenly avoids its source. So even this example goes back and forth from the very beginning between sensation, emotion, auto- matic response, will, flight, defense, attack, pain, anger, curiosity, and being coolly collected, and thereby demonstrates that what is present is not so much the original state of a single emotion as rather varying beginnings of several, succeeding or complementing one an- other.
"This gives to the assertion that a feeling is present, but not yet an emotion, the sense that the disposition to an emotion is always pres- ent but that it does not need to be realized, and that a beginning is always present but it can tum out later to have served as the begin- ning of a different emotion. "
"The peculiar manner in which the emotion is from the beginning both present and not present can be expressed in the comparison
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that one must imagine its development as the image of a forest, and not as the image of a tree. A birch, for example, remains itself from its germination to its death; but on the other hand, a birch forest can begin as a mixed forest; it becomes a birch forest as soon as birch trees-as the result of causes that can be quite varied-predominate in it and the departures from the pure stamp of the birch type are no longer significant.
"It is the same with the emotion and (this is always open to misun- derstanding) with the action connected to the emotion. They always have their particular characteristics, but these change with every- thing that adheres to them until, with growing certitude, they take on the marks of a familiar emotion and 'deserve' its name, which always retains a trace of free judgment. But emotion and the action of emo- tion can also depart from this type and approximate another; this is not unusual, because an emotion can waver and, in any event, goes through various stages. What distinguishes this from the ordinary view is that in the ordinary view the emotion has validity as a specific experience, which we do not always recognize with certainty. On the other hand, the more recently established view ascribes the lack of certainty to the emotion and tries to understand it from its nature and to limit it concisely. "
There followed in an appendix individual examples that really ought to have been marginal notations but had been suppressed at the places they had been intended for in order not to interrupt the exposition. And so these stragglers that had dropped out of their con- text no longer belonged to a specific place, although they did belong to the whole and retained ideas that might possibly have some useful application for the whole:
"In the relation 'to love something,' what carries such enormous distinctions as that between love of God and loving to go fishing is not the love but the 'something. ' The emotion itself: the devotion, anxiousness, desire, hurt, gnawing-in other words, loving--does not admit a distinction. ''
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 77
"But it is just as certain that loving one's walking stick or honor is not 'apples and oranges' only for the reason that these two things do not resemble each other, but also because the use we make of them, the circumstances in which they assume importance-in short, the entire group of experiences-are different. It is from the noninter- changeability of a group of experiences that we derive the certainty of knowing our emotion. That is why we only truly recognize it after it has had some effect in the world and has been shaped by the world; we do not know what we feel before our action has made that decision. "
"And where we say that our emotion is divided, we should rather say that it is not yet complete, or that we have not yet settled down. "
"And where it appears as paradox or paradoxical combination, what we have is often something else. We say that the courageous person ignores pain; but in truth it is the bitter salt of pain that overflows in courageousness. And in the martyr it rises in flames to heaven. In the coward, on the contrary, the pain becomes unbearably concentrated through the anticipatory fear. The example ofloathing is even clearer; those feelings inflicted with violence are associated with it, which, if received voluntarily, are the most intense desire.
"Of course there are differing sources here, and also varying com- binations, but what comes into being most particularly are various directions in which the predominant emotion develops. "
"Because they are constantly fluid, emotions cannot be stopped; nor can they be looked at 'under the microscope. ' This means that the more closely we obseiVe them, the less we know what it is we feel. Attention is already a change in the emotion. But if emotions were a 'mixture,' this should really be most apparent at the moment when it is stopped, even if attention inteiVenes. ''
1278 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
"Because the external action has no independent significance for the mind, emotions cannot be distinguished by it alone. Innumerable times we do not know what we feel, although we act vigorously and decisively. The enormous ambiguity of what a person does who is being observed mistrustfully or jealously rests on this lack of clarity. "
"The emotion's lack of clarity does not, however, demonstrate its wealmess, for emotions vanish precisely when feeling is at its height. Even at high degrees of intensity, emotions are extremely labile; see for instance the 'courage of despair,' or happiness suddenly changing into pain. At this level they also bring about contradictory actions, like paralysis instead of flight, or 'being suffocated' by one's own anger. But in quite violent excitation they lose, so to speak, their color, so that all that remains is a dead sensation ofthe accompanying physical manifestations, contraction ofthe skin, surging ofthe blood, blotting out of the senses. And what appears fully in these most in- tense stages is an absolute bedazzlement, so that it can be said that the shaping of the emotion, and with it the entire world of our emo- tions, is valid only in intermediate stages. "
"In these average stages we of course recognize and name an emotion no differently from the way we do other phenomena that are in flux, to repeat this once again. To determine the distinction between hate and anger is as easy and as difficult as ascertaining the distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated murder, or between a basin and a bowl. Not that what is at work here is capri- ciousness in naming, but every aspect and deflection can be useful for comparison and concept formation. And so in this way the hun- dred and one kinds of love about which Agathe and I joked, not en- tirely without sorrow, are connected. The question of how it happens that such quite different things are characterized by the single word 'love' has the same answer as the question of why we unhesitatingly talk of dinner forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, rifle forks, road forks, and other forks. Underlying all these fork impressions is a
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1279
common 'forkness': it is not in them as a common nucleus, but it might almost be said that it is nothing more than a comparison possi- ble for each of them. For they do not all even need to be similar to one another: it is already sufficient if one leads to another, if you go from one to the next, as long as the neighboring members are similar to one another. The more remote ones are then similar through the mediation of these proximate members. Indeed, even what consti- tutes the similarity, that which associates the neighboring members, can change in such a chain; and so one travels excitedly from one end of the path to the other, hardly knowing oneself how one has tra- versed it. "
"But if we wished to regard, as we are inclined to do, the similarity existing among all kinds oflove for its similarity to a kind of'ur-love,' which so to speak would sit as an armless and legless torso in the middle of them all, it would most likely be the same error as believ- ing in an 'ur-fork. ' And yet we have living witness for there really being such an emotion. It is merely difficult to determine the degree of this 'really. ' It is different from that of the real world. An emotion that is not an emotion for something; an emotion without desire, without preferment, without movement, without knowledge, with- out limits; an emotion to which no distinct behavior and action be- longs, at least no behavior that is quite real: as truly as this emotion is not served with arms and legs, so truly have we encountered it again and again, and it has seemed to us more alive than life itself! Love is already too particular a name for this, even if it most intimately re- lated to a love for which tenderness or inclination are expressions that are too obvious. It realizes itself in many different ways and in many connections, but it can never let itself be detached from this actualization, which always contaminates it. Thus has it appeared to us and vanished, an intimation that always remained the same. Ap- parently the dry reflections with which I have filled these pages have little to do with this, and yet I am almost certain that they have brought me to the right path to it! "
1280
THE DO-GOODER SINGS
Professor August Lindner sang. He was waiting for Agathe.
Ah, the boy's eyes seem to me So crystal clear and lovely,
And a something shines in them That captivates my heart.
Ah, those sweet eyes glance at me, Shining into mine!
Were he to see his image there He would greet me tenderly.
And this is why I yield myself To serve his eyes alone,
For a something shines in them That captivates my heart.
It had originally been a Spanish song. There was a small piano in the house, dating from Frau Lindner's time; it was occasionally de- voted to the mission ofrounding out the education and culture ofson Peter, which had already led Peter to remove several strings. Lind- ner himself never used it, except possibly to strike a few solemn chords now and then; and although he had been pacing up and down in front of this sound machine for quite some time, it was only after cautiously making sure that the housekeeper as well as Peter was out ofthe house that he had let himselfbe carried away by this unwonted impulse. He was quite pleased with his voice, a high baritone obvi- ously well suited to expressing emotion; and now Lindner had not closed the piano but was standing there thinking, leaning on it with his arm, his weightless leg crossed over his supporting leg. Agathe, who had already visited him several times, was over an hour late. The
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 81
emptiness of the house, stemming in part from that fact and in part from the arrangements he had made, welled up in his consciousness as a culpable plan.
He had found a soul of bedazzling richness, which he was making great efforts to save and which evoked the impression of confiding itself to his charge; and what man would not be charmed at finding something he had hardly expected to find, a tender female creature he could train according to his principles? But mixed in with this were deep notes of discontent. Lindner considered punctuality an obligation of conscience, placing it no lower than honesty and con- tractual obligations; people who made no punctual division of their time seemed to him pathologically scatterbrained, forcing their more serious fellow men, moreover, to lose parcels oftheir time along with them; and so he regarded them as worse than muggers. In such cases he took it as his duty to bring it to the attention of such beings, po- litely but unrelentingly, that his time did not belong to him but to his activity; and because white lies injure one's own mind, while people are not all equal, some being influential and some not, he had derived numerous character exercises from this; a host of their most powerful and malleable maxims now came to his mind and interfered with the gentle arousal brought on by the song.
But no matter: he had not sung any religious songs since his stu- dent days, and enjoyed it with a circumspectfrisson. "What southern naivete, and what charm," he thought, "emanate from such worldly lines! How delightfully and tenderly they relate to the boy Jesus! " He tried to imitate the poem's artlessness in his mind, and arrived at the result: "If I didn't know better, I'd be capable of believing that I feel a girl's chaste stirrings for her boy! " So one might well say that a woman able to evoke such homage was reaching all that was noblest in man and must herself be a noble being. But here Lindner smiled with dissatisfaction and decided to close the lid of the piano. Then he did one of his arm exercises that further the harmony of the person- ality, and stopped again. An unpleasant thought had crossed his mind. "She is unfeeling! " he sighed behind gritted teeth. "She would be laughing! "
He had in his face at this moment something that would have re- minded his dear departed mother of the little boy under whose chin every morning she tied a big lovely bow before sending him off to
1282 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
school; this something might be called the complete absence of rough-hewn maleness. On this tall, slack, pipestem-legged appari- tion, the head sat as ifspeared on a lance over the roaring arena ofhis schoolmates, who jeered at the bow tie made by his mother's hand; and in anxiety dreams Professor Lindner even now sometimes saw himself standing that way and suffering for the good, the true, and the beautiful. But for this very reason he never conceded that rough- ness is an indispensable male characteristic, like gravel, which has to be mixed into mortar to give it strength; and especially since he had become the man he flattered himself to be, he saw in that early de- fect merely a confirmation of the fact that he had been born to im- prove the world, even if in modest measure. Today we are quite accustomed to the explanation that great orators arise from speech defects and heroes from wealmess, in other words the explanation that our nature always first digs a ditch ifit wants us to erect a moun- tain above it; and because the half-knowledgeable and half-savage people who chiefly determine the course of life are quick to proclaim nearly every stutterer a Demosthenes, it is that much easier, as a sign of intellectual good taste, to recognize that the only important thing about a Demosthenes was his original stuttering. But we have not yet succeeded in reducing the deeds of Hercules to his having been a sickly child, or the greatest achievements in the sprint and broad jump to flat-footedness, or courage to timidity; and so it must be conceded that there is something more to an exceptional talent than its omission.
Thus Professor Lindner was by no means restricted to acknowl- edging that the raillery and blows he had feared as a child could be a cause of his intellectual development. Nevertheless, the current dis- position of his principles and emotions did him the service of trans- forming every such impression that reached him from the bustle of the world into an intellectual triumph; even his habit ofweaving mar- tial and sportive expressions into his speech, as well as his tendency to set the stamp of a strict and inflexible will on everything he said and did, had begun to develop to the degree that, as he grew up and lived among more mature companions, he was correspondingly removed from direct physical attacks. At the university, he had even joined one of the fraternities whose members wore their jackets, caps, boots, insignia, and sword just as picturesquely as the rowdies
From the Posthu17UJfls Papers · 1283
whom they despised, but made only peaceful use of them because their outlook forbade dueling. In this, Lindner's pleasure in a brav- ery for which no blood need be spilled had achieved its definitive form; but at the same time it gave witness that one can combine a noble temperament with the overflowing pulse of life or, of course in other terms, that God enters man more easily when he imitates the devil who was there before him.
So whenever Iindner reproached his more compact son, Peter, as he was unfortunately often called upon to do, that yielding to the very idea of force made a person effeminate, or that the power of humility and the courage of renunciation are of greater value than physical strength and courage, he was not talking as a layman in questions of courage but enjoying the excitement of a conjurer who has succeeded in yoking demons to the service of the good. For al- though there was really nothing that could disturb his equilibrium at the height ofwell-being he had attained, he was marked by a disincli- nation to jokes and laughter bordering almost on anxiety-as an in- jury that has healed leaves behind a limp-even when he merely suspected their bare possibility. "The tickling of jokes and humor," he was accustomed to instruct his son on the subject, "originate in the sated comfort of life, in malice, and in idle fantasies, and they easily induce people to say things their better selves would condemn! On the other hand, the discipline that comes from stifling 'witty' ri- postes and ideas is an admirable test of strength and an annealing test of will, and the more you use the silence you have struggled to master in order to look into your joke more closely, the better it turns out for the whole man. 'W e usually see first," this standing admoni- tion concluded, "how many impulses to elevate oneself and demean others it conceals, how much coquetry and frivolity lie behind most jokes, how much refinement of sympathy they stifle in ourselves and others, indeed how much horrifying coarseness and mockery comes to light in the laughter we try to coax from an audience! "
As a result, Peter had to hide carefully from his father his youthful inclination to mockery and joking; but he was so inclined, and Pro- fessor Lindner often felt the breath of the evil spirit in his surround- ings without being able to spot the poisonous phantom. It could go so far that the father would instill fear in the son with a subduing glance, while secretly fearing him himself, and when this happened he was
1284 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
reminded ofsomething ineffable between his wife and himselfwhile his plump spouse was still on earth. Being lord and master in his own house, establishing its atmosphere and knowing that his family sur- rounded him like a peaceful garden in which he had planted his prin- ciples, belonged for Lindner to the indispensable preconditions of happiness. But Frau Lindner, whom he had married shortly after he finished his studies, during which time he had been a lodger at her mother's, had unfortunately soon thereafter ceased to share his prin- ciples and put on an air of being reluctant to contradict him that ir- ritated him more than contradiction itself. He could not forget having sometimes caught a glance from the comer of her eye while her mouth was obediently silent, and every time this happened he subsequently found himself in a situation that was not exactly proof against adverse comment: for instance, in a nightshirt that was too short, preaching that her dignity as a woman should preclude her finding any pleasure in the rough, loose young men who with their drunkenness and scrapes still dominated student life at that time and who accordingly were not as undesirable as lodgers as they ought to be.
Woman's secret mockery is a chapter in itself, with the most inti- mate connections to her lack of understanding for those preoccupa- tions of greatest importance to the male; and the moment Lindner remembered this, the mental processes that had until then been churning indistinctly within him uncorked the idea of Agathe. What would she be like to live with intimately? "There is no question ofher being what one might comfortably call a good person. She doesn't even try to hide it! " he told himself, and a remark of hers that oc- curred to him in this connection, her laughing assertion that today the good people were no less responsible for the corruption of life than the bad ones, made his hair stand on end. But on the whole he had already "extracted the abscessed teeth" of these "horrible views," even if every time they came up they upset him all over again, by once and for all declaring to himself: "She has no conception of reality! " For he thought of Agathe as a noble being, even though she was, for a "daughter of Eve," full of venomous unrest. The proper attitude, however certain it may be for the believer, seemed to her the most intellectually unascertainable object, the solution of life's most extreme and difficult task. She seemed to have a dreamily con-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1285
fused idea ofwhat was good and right, an idea inimical to order, with no more coherence than an accidental grouping of poems. "Reality is alien to her! " he repeated. "If, for example, she knows something about love, how can she make such cynical statements about it as that it's impossible, and the like? '' Therefore she must be shown what real love is.
But here Agathe presented new difficulties. Let him admit it fear- lessly and courageously: she was offensive! She all too gladly tore down from its pedestal whatever you cautiously raised up; and if you found fault with her, her criticism knew no bounds and she made it clear that she was out to wound. There are such natures that rage against themselves and strike the hand bringing them succor; but a determined man will never allow his behavior to depend on the be- havior of others, and at this moment what Lindner saw was the image of a peaceful man with a long beard, bending over a sick woman anx- iously fending him off, and seeing in the depths of her heart a pro- found wound. The moment was far removed from logic, and so this did not mean that he was this man; but Lindner straightened u p - this he actually did-and reached for his beard, which in the mean- time had lost a good deal of its fullness, and a nervous blush raced across his face. He had remembered that Agathe had the objection- able habit of instilling in him the belief, more than any other human being ever could have done, that she would like to share his most sublime and most secret feelings; indeed, that in her own con- strained situation she was even waiting for a special effort of these feelings in order, once he had exposed the innermost treasures of his mind, to pour scorn on him. She was egging him on! Lindner admit- ted this to himselfand could not have done otherwise, for there was a strange, restless feeling in his breast that one might have hardheart- edly compared, although he was far from thinking this, with hens milling about in a chicken coop. But then she could suddenly laugh in the most mysterious way, or say something profane and hard that cut him to the quick, as ifshe had been building him up only in order to cut him down! And had she not already done this today too, even before her arrival, Lindner asked himself, bringing him to such a pass with this piano? He looked at it; it stood there beside him like a housemaid with whom the master ofthe house had transgressed!
He could not know what motivated Agathe to play this game
1286 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
with him, and she herself would not have been able to discuss it with anyone-not even, and especially, Ulrich. She was behaving capri- ciously; but to the extent that this means with changeable emotions, it was done intentionally and signified a shaking and loosening up of the emotions, the way a person weighed down by a delicious burden stretches his limbs. So the strange attraction that several times had secretly led her to Lindner had contained from the beginning an in- subordination against Ulrich, or at least against complete depen- dence on him; the stranger distracted her thoughts a little and reminded her of the diversity of the world and of men. But this hap- pened only so that she might feel her dependence on her brother that much more warmly, and was, moreover, the same as Ulrich's secretiveness with his diary, which he kept locked away from her; indeed, it was even the same as his general resolve to let reason stand beside emotion as well as above it, and also to judge. But while this took up his time, her impatience and stored-up tension was seeking an outlet, an adventure, about which it could not yet be said what path it would take; and to the degree that Ulrich inspired or de- pressed her, Lindner, to whom she felt superior, caused her to be forbearing or high-spirited. She won mastery over herself by misus- ing the influence she exercised over him, and she needed this.
But something else was also at work here. For there was be- tween her and Ulrich at this time no talk either of her divorce and Hagauer's letters or of the rash or actually superstitious altering of the will in a moment of disorientation, an act that demanded restitu- tion, either civic or miraculous. Agathe was sometimes oppressed by what she had done, and she knew, too, that in the disorder one leaves behind in a lower circle of life Ulrich did not see any favorable sign of the order one strives for in a higher sense.
He had told her so openly enough, and even if she no longer remembered every detail of the conversation that had followed on the suspicions Hagauer had re- cently raised against her, she still found herselfbanished to a position ofwaiting between good and ill. Something, to be sure, was lifting all her qualities upward to a miraculous vindication, but she could not yet allow herself to believe in this; and so it was her offended, recalci- trant feeling ofjustice that also found expression in the quarrel with :Undner. She was very grateful to him for seeming to impute to her all the bad qualities that Hagauer, too, had discovered in her and for
From the Posthumous Papers · 1287
unintentionally calming her by the ve. ry way he looked while doing it. 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!
