No More Learning

The General grasped this immediately but did not take offense. "Yes, that's the way she used to talk, your cousin, before she started investigat- ing the proclamations of love in, as it were, too great detail. " With this explanation he turned to Agathe.
Agathe was silent, but smiled.
Stumm again turned to Ulrich. "I don't know whether Leinsdorfhas perhaps said it to you too; at any rate, it's marvelously right: he maintains that the most important thing about a belief is that one always believe the same thing. That's something like what I'm calling single-minded- ness. 'But can civilians do that? ' I asked him. 'No,' I said. 'Civilians wear different suits every year, and every few years there are parliamentary elections so they can choose differently every time; the spirit of single- mindedness is much rather to be found in the military! ' "
"So you convinced Leinsdorf that a strengthened militarism is the true fulfillment of his aims? "
"God forbid, I didn't say a word! We merely agreed that in the future we would do without Feuermaul because his views are too unusable. And for the rest, Leinsdorf has given me a whole series of assignments for you-"
"That's superfluous! "
"You should quickly get him access to socialist circles-"
"My gardener's son is a zealous member of the party-that I can do! " "That's just fine! He's only doing it out of conscientiousness, because
he once got the idea in his head. The second thing is that you should go see him as soon as possible-"
"But I'm leaving in a few days! "
"Then as soon as you get back-"
"It doesn't look as if I'm ever coming back! "
Stumm von Bordwehr looked at Agathe; Agathe smiled, which en-
couraged him. "Crazy? " he asked.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders indecisively.
"Well, let me summarize once more-'' Stumm said.
"Our friend has had enough philosophy! " Ulrich interrupted him.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1489
"You certainly can't say that about me! " Stumm angrily defended himself. "It's just that we can't wait for philosophy. And I don't want to lie to you: ofcourse whenever I visit LeinsdorfI have orders to influence him in a certain way if it's possible, that you can imagine. And when he says that the most important thing about a belief is that one always be- lieve the same thing, he's thinking above all of religion; but I'm already thinking of single-mindedness, for that's more comprehensive. I don't hesitate to assert that a truly powerful philosophy of life can't wait around for reason; on the contrary, a true philosophy of life must be absolutely directed against reason, otherwise it would not get into the position of being able to force its submission. And the civilian world seeks such a single-mindedness in constant change, but the military has, so to speak, an enduring single-mindedness! Madame," Stumm inter- rupted his ardor, "you should not believe that I'm a militarist; quite the contrary, the military has always been even a little on the raw side for my taste: but the way the logic ofthese ideas grabs hold ofyou is like playing with a large dog: first he bites for fun, and then he gets carried away and goes wild. And I would like to grant your brother, as it were, one last opportunity-"
"And how do you connect that with the proclamation of power and love? " Ulrich asked.
"God, in the meantime I've forgotten," Stumm replied. "But of course these eruptions ofnationalism that we're now experiencing in our fatherland are somehow eruptions of the energy of an unhappy love. And also in this area, in the synthesis ofpower and love, the military is, in a certain sense, exemplary. A person has to have some kind of love for his fatherland, and ifhe doesn't have it for his fatherland, then he has it for something else. So you just need to grab hold of that something else. As an example that just occurs to me, take the term conscript-volunteer. Who would ever think that a conscript is a volunteer? That's the last thing he is. And yet he was and is, according to the sense of the law. In some such sense people have to be made volunteers again! "
ON THE YOUNG SOCIALIST SCHMEISSER
Conversations with Schmeisser
It was not the first time that Count Leinsdorf had expressed the opinion that a practitioner of realpolitik had to make use even of socialism in its search for allies against progress as well as nationalism, for he had re- peatedly begged Ulrich to cultivate this connection, since out of political considerations he did not just now wish to be caught doing it himself. He advised starting by approaching not the leaders but the young up-and- comers, those who were not completely corrupted and whose vitality permitted the hope that through them one might acquire a patriotically rejuvenating influence over the party. Then Ulrich remembered cheer- fully that there lived in his house a young man who never greeted him but looked away disdainfully whenever they met, which happened rarely enough. This was Schmeisser, a doctoral student in technical sciences; his father was a gardener, who had already been living on the property when Ulrich took it over and who had since, in exchange for free lodging and occasional gifts, kept the small old grounds in order partly with his own hands and partly by indicating and supervising any work that be- came necessary. Ulrich appreciated the fact that this young man, who lived with his father and earned the money for his studies by tutoring and doing a little writing, regarded him as one of the idle rich, who was to be treated with contempt; the experiment of inaction to which he was subject sometimes made him regard himself in this fashion, and he found pleasure in challenging his faultfinder when, one day, he stopped to talk with Schmeisser. It turned out that the student, who, moreover, seen from closer up, might already be twenty-six years old, had also been waiting for this moment, and immediately discharged the tension of the encounter in violent attacks, which ended between an attempt at con- version and the proffering of personal contempt. Ulrich told him about the Parallel Campaign, and thought he was doing the right thing by mak- ing his assignment out to be as ridiculous as it was while at the same time indicating the advantages a determined person might be able to draw from it. He was expecting Schmeisser to fall in with this scheme, which then with God's help might develop in rather strange directions; this
•schmeisser (the name means "flinger" or "hurler. . ) is the left-wing counterpart to the proto-Fascistic Hans Sepp. Peter Lindner seems to represent apolitical, amoral youth. - TRANs.
0
From the Posthumous Papers · 1491
young man, however, was no bourgeois romantic and adventurer, but listened with a crafty look around the mouth until Ulrich ran out of things to say. His chest was narrow between broad-boned shoulders, and he wore thick glasses. These really thick glasses were the beautiful part of his face, which had a sallow, fatty, blotchy skin; these thick glasses, made necessary by hard nights over his books and assignments and made stronger by poverty, which had not permitted him to consult a doctor at the first sign that he needed them, had become for Schmeisser's simple emotions an image ofself-liberation: when he spied them in the mirror, shining over his pimpled countenance with its sad- dle nose and sharp proletarian cheeks, it seemed to him like Poverty crowned by Intellect, and this had happened especially often since, against his will, he had come to admire Agathe from afar. Since then he had also hated Ulrich, to whom he had previously paid scant attention, for his athletic build, and Ulrich now read his damnation in these glasses and had the impression ofchattering away like a child playing in front of the barrels of two cannons. When he had finished, Schmeisser answered him with lips that could barely separate themselves for satisfaction at what they were saying: "The party has no need ofsuch adventures; we'll arrive at the goal in our own way! "
That was really giving it to the bourgeois!
After this rebuffit was hard for Ulrich to find more to say, but he went straight at his attacker and finally said with a laugh: "If I were the person you take me for, you ought to pour poison in my water pipes, or saw down the trees under which I stroll: why don't you want to do something of that sort in a case where it might really be called for? "
"You have no idea what politics is all about," Schmeisser retorted, "for you are a social-romantic member of the middle class, at most an indi- vidual anarchist! Serious revolutionaries aren't interested in bloody revolutions! "
After that, Ulrich often had briefconversations with this revolutionary who didn't want to start revolutions. "I already knew when I was a cav- alry lieutenant," he told him, "that in the short or long run mankind is going to be organized according to socialist principles in some form; it is, as it were, the final chance that God has left to it. For the fact that mil- lions of people are oppressed in the most brutal way, in order for thou- sands of others to fail to do anything worthwhile with the power that derives from this oppression, is not only unjust and criminal but also stu- pid, inappropriate, and suicidal! "
Schmeisser responded sarcastically: "But you've always settled for knowing that! Haven't you? There's the bourgeois intellectual for you! You've spoken to me a few times about a bank director who's a friend of
1492 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
yours: I assure you, this bank director is my enemy, I'll fight him, I'll show him that his convictions are only pretexts for his profits; but at least he has convictions! He says yes where I say no! But you? In you every- thing has already dissolved, in you the bourgeois lie has already begun to decompose! "
Ulrich objected peaceably: "It may be that my way ofthinking is bour- geois in origin; to some extent it's even probable. But: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur-why not our opinions as well? What does that prove against their correctness? "
Every time Ulrich spoke this way, reasoning politely, Schmeisser could not contain himself and exploded anew. "Everything you're saying springs from the moral corruption of bourgeois society! " he would then proclaim, or something similar, for there was nothing he hated more than that form ofgoodness opposed to reason which is found in amiabil- ity; indeed, all form, even that of beauty, was for him an object of suspi- cion. For this reason he never accepted even one of Ulrich's invitations, but at most let himself be treated to tea and cigarettes, as if in Russian novels. Ulrich loved to provoke him, although these conversations were completely meaningless. Since the year of liberation in '48 and the founding of the German Empire, events that only a minority now per- sonally remembered, politics probably seemed to the majority of edu- cated people more an atavism than an important subject. There was next to no sign that behind these external processes that plodded along out of habit, intellectual processes were already preparing for that deforma- tion, for that propensity for decline, and for the suicidal willingness aris- ing from self-loathing, which undermine a state of affairs and apparently always form the passive precondition to periods of violent political change. Thus his whole life long Ulrich, too, had been accustomed to expect that politics would bring about not what needed to happen but at best what ought to have happened long since. The image it presented to him was mostly that of criminal neglect. The social question too, which formed the whole of Schmeisser's universe, appeared to him not as a question but merely as an omitted answer, though he could list a hun- dred other such "questions" on which the mental files had been closed and which, as one might say, were waiting in vain for manipulative treat- ment in the Office of Dispatch. And when he did that, and Schmeisser was in a gentle mood, the latter said: "Just let us first come to power! "
But then Ulrich said: "You're too kind to me, for what I'm asserting isn't true at all. Almost all intellectual people have this prejudice that the practical questions they understand nothing about would be easy to solve, but when they try, of course it turns out that they just haven't thought of everything. On the other hand-here I agree with you-if
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1493
the politician were to think of everything, he would never get around to acting. Perhaps that's why politics contains as much ofthe wealth ofreal- ity as of the poverty of spirit (lack of ideas)-"
This gave Schmeisser the opportunity for a jubilant interruption, with the words: "People like you never get around to acting because they don't want the truth! The bourgeois so-called mind is in all its works only a procrastination and an excuse! "
"But why don't people like me want? " Ulrich asked. "Why couldn't they want? Wealth, for example, is certainly not what they really desire. I hardly know a prosperous man who doesn't have a small weakness for it, myself included, but I also don't know a single one who loves money for its own sake, except for misers, and greed is a disturbance of personal conduct which is also found in love, in power, and in honor: the patho- logical nature of greed really proves that giving is more blessed than re- ceiving. By the way, do you believe that giving is more blessed than receiving? " he asked.
"You can raise that question in some aesthete's salon! " was Schmeisser's response.
"But I fear," Ulrich maintained, "that all your efforts will remain pointless as long as you don't know whether giving or receiving is more blessed or how they complement each other! "
Schmeisser crowed: "You no doubt intend to talk mankind into being good? Besides, in the socially organized state, the proper relationship of giving and receiving will be a foregone conclusion! "
"Then I will maintain"-Ulrich completed his sentence with a smile-"that you will just come to grief on something else, for instance that we are capable ofcursing someone as a dog even when we love our dog more than our fellowmen! "
A mirror calmed Schmeisser by showing him the image of a young man wearing thick glasses under a stubborn forehead. He gave no answer.
Ulrich had picked out this young man for the General and proposed that they go with the General to visit Meingast, for Schmeisser knew about this prophet, and even ifhe was a false one, still it was nothing new for Schmeisser to visit the gatherings of opponents; but Ulrich had cor- rectly guessed about his friend Stumm that at various times he was se- cretly gathering impressions from Clarisse, and through her had also made the acquaintance ofthe Master, who had made no small impres- sion. But when Ulrich told Agathe about his plan, she didn't want to hear about it.
1494 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich began to jest. - 1 bet that this Schmeisser is really in love with you-he maintained-and it's no secret that Lindner is. Both are for- men. Meingast, too, is afor-man. You'll end up winning him over too.
Agathe naturally wanted to knowwhatfor-men were.
-Lindner is a good person, isn't he? Ulrich asked.
Agathe confinned it, although for a long time she had not been as
enthusiastic on this count as she had been at the beginning.
-But he lives morefor religion than in a religious state?
Agathe didn't contest this at all.
- T h a t ' s j u s t w h a t a f o r - m a n is, U l r i c h e x p l a i n e d . - T h e e x t e n s i v e a c -
tivity he bestows upon his faith is perhaps the most important example, but it's just one example of the technique that's always used to make ideals tenable and available for everyday use. So he explained to her in detail his spontaneously invented notion oflivingfor and in something.
Human life appears to be just long enough so that in it, if one livesfor something, one can accomplish the trajectory from neophyte to Nestor, patriarch, or pioneer; and in doing so it matters less for human satisfac- tion what one lives for than that one can livefor something: a Nestor of the German brandy trade and the pioneer of a new worldview enjoy, besides similar honors, the same advantage, which consists in the fact that life, despite its fearful wealth, contains not a single problem that would not be simplified by being brought into contact with a worldview, but would be simplified just as much by being brought into contact with the production of brandy. Such an advantage is precisely what one calls, using a fairly recent term, rationalization, except that what is rational- ized is not skilled actions but ideas, and who today would not already be able to survey what that implies? Even in the slightest case this life for something is comparable to owning a notebook in which everything is entered and things that have been disposed of are neatly crossed out. Whoever does not do this lives in a disorderly fashion, never finishes things, and is bothered by their comings and goings; whoever, on the other hand, has a notebook resembles the thrifty paterfamilias who saves every nail, every piece of rubber, every scrap of material, because he knows that someday such a stock will come in handy in his household economy. But this solid, civicfor something, as it was handed down from one's father's generation as the height ofworthy endeavor, often too as a hobbyhorse or a secret detail one always keeps one's eye on, represented at that time something which was already somewhat old-fashioned; for a propensity for the broad scale, a yen for developing the living-for-some- thing in mighty associations, had already replaced it.
By this means what Ulrich had begun in jest took on, as he uttered it, more serious significance. The distinction he had hit upon tempted him
From the Posthumous Papers · 1495
with its inexhaustible prospects, and became for him at this moment one of those views that make the world fall asunder like a split apple under the knife, exposing what lies within. Agathe objected that one also often says that a person is completely subsumed by something, or lives and breathes it, although it was certain that according to Ulrich's nomencla- ture such ardent livers and breathers were doing it for whatever their affair might be; and Ulrich conceded that it would be more precise to proceed by distinguishing between the notions of"flnding oneselfin the state ofone's ideal" and "flnding oneselfin the state ofworking for one's ideal," but in which the second "in" was either unreal and in truth a "for," or the claimed relationship to working/or it would have to be an unusual and ecstatic one. Language, moreover, has its good reasons not to be so precise about this, since livingfor something is the condition of worldly existence, in, on the contrary, always that which one imagines and pretends to live, and the relation ofthese two states to each other is extremely refractory. People, after all, do secretly know, without, of course, being able to admit it, ofthe miraculous fact that everything "ifs worth living for" would be unreal if not actually absurd the moment one bied to immerse oneself in it completely. Love would never again arise from its lair; in politics, the slightest proofofsincerity would necessarily lead to the mortal destruction of one's opponent; the artist would spurn all contact with less perfect beings, and morality would have to consist not of perforated prescriptions but of taking one back to that childlike condition of love of the good and abhorrence of the bad which takes everything literally. For whoever really abhors crime would not flnd it too little to hire trained professional devils to torture prisoners as in old paintings of hellfue, and whoever loves virtue with his whole life ought to eat nothing but goodness until his stomach rises into his throat. What's remarkable is that at times things really do go that far, but that such periods of Inquisition or its opposite, gushing over the goodness of man, are in bad odor I bad memories I remain memories.
That is why it is simply to preserve life that mankind has succeeded in inventing, in place of"what it's worth living for," livingfor it or, in other words, putting its idealism in place of its ideal condition. It is a living before something; now, instead ofliving, one "sbives" and is henceforth a being that with all its energies presses on just as much toward fulfill- ment as it is exonerated from arriving at it. "Living for something" is the permanent principle of the "in. " All desires, and not just love, are sad after they are fulfllled; but in the moment in which the activityfor the desire fully takes the place of the desire, it is canceled out in an inge- nious way, for now the inexhaustible system of means and obstacles takes the place of the goal. In this system even a monomaniac does not
I 496 • T H E M A N W I T H 0 U T QU A L I T I E S
live monotonously but constantly has new things to do, and even who- ever could not live at all in the content of his life-a case that is more frequent today than one thinks: for example, a professor at an agricul- tural college who has set the management of stall wastes and dung on new paths-lives for this content without complaint, and enjoys listen- ing to music or other such experiences, ifhe is a capable person, always, as it were, in honor of managing stables. This doing something else "in honor of something" is, moreover, somewhat further removed from the "something" than from the "for" and consequently is the method most frequently applied, because it is as it were the cheapest, ofdoing in the name of an ideal all those things that cannot be reconciled with it.
For the advantage of all "for" and "in honor of" consists in the fact that through serving the ideal, everything which the ideal itself excludes is again brought to life. The classic example of this was furnished by the traveling knights of chivalric love, who fell like mad dogs upon every equal they encountered in honor of a condition in their heart that was as soft and fragrant as dripping church wax. But the present, too, is not lacking in small peculiarities ofthis kind. Thus, for example, it organizes luxurious festivals for the alleviation ofpoverty. Or the large number of strict people who insist on the carrying out of public principles from which they know themselves exempt. Then, too, the hypocritical admis- sion that the end justifies the means belongs here, for in reality it is the always active and colorful means for whose sake one usually puts up with ends that are moral and insipid. And no matter how playful such exam- ples Iflay appear, this objection falls silent before the disturbing observa- tion that civilized life doubtless has a tendency toward the most violent outbursts, and that these are never more violent than when they take place in honor of great and sacred, indeed even of tender, emotions! Are they then felt to be excused? Or is the relationship not rather the opposite?
Thus, by many interrelated paths, one arrives at the conclusion that people are not good, beautiful, and truthful, but rather would like to be, and one has a sense ofhow the serious problem ofwhy this is so is veiled by the illuminating pretense that the ideal is, by its very nature, unattain- able. This was more or less what Ulrich said, without sparing attacks on Lindner and what he stood for. Right thinking that was the effortless result of this. It was certain, he maintained, that Lindner was ten times more convinced oftwo-times-two or the rules ofmorality than he was of his God, but by working for his conviction about God, he largely evaded this difficulty. For this purpose he put himself into the condition of be- lief, an attitude in which what he wanted to be convinced ofwas so inge-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1497
niously combined with what he could be convinced of that he himself was no longer able to separate them-
Here Agathe noted that all acting is questionable. She reminded her- self of the paradoxical assertion that the only people who remain real and good in their hearts are those who do not do many good deeds. This now seemed to her extended, and thus confirmed, by the agreeable pos- sibility that the condition of activity was fundamentally the adulteration of another condition, from which it arose and which it pretended to serve.
Ulrich affirmed this once more. 'We have on the one side," he re- peated by way of summary, "people who live for and, without taking the word too literally, in something, who are constantly on the move, who strive, weave, till, sow, and harvest, in a word the idealists, for all these idealists of today are really livingfor their ideals. And on the other side are those who would like to live in some fashion in their gods, but for these there is not even a name--"
"What is this 'in'? " Agathe asked emphatically.
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders and then gave a few indications. "One could relate 'for' and 'in' to what has been called experiencing in a con- vex and experiencing in a concave way. Perhaps the psychoanalytic leg- end that the human soul strives to get back to the tender protection of the intrauterine condition before birth is a misunderstanding of the 'in,' perhaps not. Perhaps 'in' is the presumed descent of all life from God. But perhaps the explanation is also simply to be found in psychology; for every affect bears within it the claim of totality to rule alone and, as it were, form the 'in' in which everything else is immersed; but no affect can maintain itself as primary for long without by that very fact chang- ing, and thus it absolutely yearns for opposing affects in order to renew itself through them, which is pretty much an image of our indispensable 'for'- Enough! One thing is certain: that all sociable life arises from the 'for' and unites mankind in the aim of apparently living for something; mankind mercilessly defends these aims; what we see today by way of political developments are all attempts to put other 'for's in place of the lost community of religion. The living 'for something' of the individual person has lagged behind with the paterfamilias and the age of Goethe. The middle-class religion of the future will perhaps be satisfled with bringing the masses together in a belief that might have no content at all but in which the feeling of beingfor it together will be that much more powerful-"
There was no doubt that Ulrich was evading a decision (about the question), for what did Agathe care about political development!
ON AGATHE
Agathe at Lindner's
During this entire time Agathe was continuing her visits to Lindner. This made extravagant claims on his Account for Unforeseen Loss of Time, and all too often this overdraft meant a reduction in all his other activities. Moreover, empathy for this young woman also demanded a
great deal of time when she was not there:
Thus Lindner had found a soul, but deep tones of discontent were
intermingled with it and kept him in a state of constant irritation. Agathe had simply ignored his forbidding her to visit.
"Does my visiting embarrass you? " she asked the first time she
showed up again.
"And what does your brother say to this? " Lindner replied earnestly
every time.
"I haven't told him anything about it," Agathe confided in him, "be-
cause it might be that he wouldn't like it. You've made me anxious. "
Of course one cannot withhold a helping hand from a person seeking
help.
But every time they made an appointment Agathe was late. It was no
use telling her that unpunctuality was the same as breaking a contract or as lack ofconscience. "It indicates that the rest ofthe time, too, your will is in a slumbering state, and that you're dreamily giving yourself up to things that turn up by chance, instead of breaking away at the right time with collected and focused energy! " Lindner conjectured severely.
"Ifonly it were dreamily! " Agathe replied.
But Lindner declared sharply: "Such a lack of self-control makes one suspect every other kind of undependabilityl"
"Apparently. I suspect that too," was Agathe's response. "Don't you have any will? "
"No. "
"You're a fantasist and have no discipline! "
"Yes. " And after a short pause she added, smiling: "My brother says that I'm a person of fragments; that's lovely, isn't it? Even if it's not clear what it means.
One might think of an unfinished volume of unfinished poems. "
Lindner was resentfully silent.
"My husband, on the other hand, is now impolitely asserting that I'm pathological, a neuropath or something like that," Agathe went on.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1499
And thereupon Lindner exclaimed sarcastically: "You don't say! How pleased people are today when moral tasks can apparently be reduced to medical ones! But I can't make things that comfortable for you! "
The only pedagogical success that Lindner was able to achieve he owed to the principle that five minutes before the end of each visit, which was always set and agreed upon beforehand, without regard to its delayed start and however much the conversation might absorb him, he began to fall silent and gave Agathe to understand that he now needed to devote his time to other obligations. Agathe not only greeted this rude- ness with smiles; she was grateful for it. For such minutes of the conver- sation, framed on at least one side as if by a metal edge and ticking sharply, also imparted to the remainder of the day something of their incisiveness. After the extravagant conversations with Ulrich, this had the effect ofleanness or tightly belted straps.
But when she once said this to Lindner, thinking to be nice to him, it immediately made him miss a quarter of an hour, and the next day he was quite indignant with himself.
In these circumstances he was a strict teacher for Agathe.
But Agathe was an odd pupil. This man, who wanted to do something to help her, although most recently he was having difficulties himself, still gave her confidence and even consolation whenever she was on the point of despairing of making any progress with Ulrich. She then sought Lindner out, and not only because, for whatever external reasons, he was Ulrich's adversary, but also and even more because he revealed as clearly as he did involuntarily the jealousy that came over him at the mere mention of Ulrich's name. It was obviously not personal rivalry, for Agathe was aware that the two men hardly knew each other, but rather a rivalry between intellectual species, the way species of animals have their particular enemies, whom they already recognize when they meet them for the first time and whose slightest approach makes them agi- tated. And remarkably, she could understand Lindner; for something that might be called jealousy was also among her feelings toward Ulrich, a not being able to keep up, or an offended fatigue, perhaps too, simply put, a feminine jealousy of his masculine pleasure in ideas, and this made her happy to listen, shivering with pleasure, whenever Lindner contested some opinion or other that could be Ulrich's, and this he espe- cially loved to do. She could go along with this the more safely in that she felt closer to Lindner's level than to her brother's, for however militant Lindner appeared, indeed even though he might intimidate her, there always remained working within her a secret mistrust, which was really I sometimes of the kind that women feel against the endeavors of other women.
1500 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Agathe still felt her heart beating whenever she sat alone for a mo- ment in Lindner's surroundings, as if she were exposed to the rising of vapors that enchanted her mind. The temptation, the unease she felt at making herself feel at ease, the illusive possibility that it might happen, always evoked in her the story ofan abducted girl who, educated among strangers, changed places as it were within herself and became a differ- ent woman: this was one of the stories that, reaching back to her child- hood and without being especially important to her, had sometimes played a role in the temptations of her life and their excuses. But Ulrich had given her a particular interpretation of these stories, from which otherwise it would be easy to deduce merely a deficient spiritual consti- tution, and she believed more passionately in his interpretation than he did himself. For in the length and breadth of time, God has created more than this one life that we happen to be leading; it is in no way the true one, it is one of His many hopefully systematic experiments, into which He has placed no compulsion of necessity for those of us who are not blinded by the light of the passing moment, and Ulrich, talking this way about God and the imperfection of the world and the aimless, meaningless facticity ofits course, stripping away its false order to reveal the true vision of God that represented the most promising approach to Him, also taught her the meaning of the tentative claim of this way of understanding how one could, in a shadowy figuration alongside oneself, also be another.
So as she attentively observed Lindner's walls, which were equipped (hung) with pictures ofdivine subjects, Agathe felt that Ulrich was hov- ering in the vicinity. It occurred to her that she found Raphael, Murillo, and Bernini in individual engravings on the walls, but not Titian, and nothing at all from the Gothic period; on the other hand, there predomi- nated in many of the pictures present-day imitations of that style ala Jesuit Baroque that had sucked up vast quantities of sugar like a puffy omelet. If one followed only these pictures around the walls, the piling up of billowing robes and vacant, uplifted oval faces and sweetish naked bodies was disquieting. Agathe said: There is so much soul in them that the total effect is of a monstrous despiritualization. And look: the heav- enward gaze has become such a convention that all the irrepressible human vitality has taken refuge in the less prominent details and hidden itself there. Don't you find these garment. hems, shoes, leg positions, arms, robe folds, and clouds loaded down by all the sexuality that isn't openly recognized? This isn't too far removed from fetishism!
Well, Agathe ought to know about this phenomenon of being loaded down. This yearningly leaning out from a balcony into the void. Or it's really the other way around: an infinite pressing inward. With horror,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 0 1
one could see it right here on the borderline between pathological crotchet and exaltation.
Lindner had no inkling of this. But the reproach dismayed him, and he first tried speaking of this beauty in a belittling way. The artist must make use of the material and the fleshly, and clings to it; this leads to a lower order ofart. Agathe overestimated it. Art might well propagate the great experiences of mankind but could not turn them into experience.
Agathe then angrily accused him of having too many such pictures. The freedoms that, according to what he said, had to be conceded to the lower humanity in the artist still seemed by that measure to have some meaning even for him. -What? Agathe asked.
Cornered, Lindner gave his views on art. True art is spiritualization of matter. It can represent nakedness only when the superiority of soul over matter speaks from the representation.
Agathe objected that he was mistaken, for it was the superiority not of soul that was speaking, but of convention.
Suddenly he burst out: Or did she think that could justify to a serious person painters' and sculptors' cult of nakedness? - I s the naked human really such a beautiful thing? Something so scandalous! Aren't the trans- ports ofaesthetes simply ridiculous, even ifone doesn't even try to apply serious moral concepts (to them)?
Agathe: - T h e naked body is beautiful! . . . This was a lie, for heaven's sake, whose only purpose was to enrage her partner. Agathe had never paid any attention to the beauty of male bodies; women today regard a man's body for the most part only as an armature to support the head. Men are accustomed to pay somewhat more attention to beauty. But let one gather all the naked bodies with which our museums and exhibitions are filled and put them in a single place, and then seek out from among this confusion of white maggots those that are truly beautiful. The first thing one would notice is that the naked body is usually merely naked: naked like a face that for decades has worn a beard and is suddenly shaven. But beautiful? That the world stops in its tracks whenever a truly beautiful person appears reveals beauty to be a mystery; because beauty-love and love are a mystery, it is true for the whole. Likewise that the concept of beauty has been lost (assembly-line art). So she sits there, and Ulrich speaks through her mouth.
But Lindner immediately jumps at the challenge. -Well! he ex- claimed. -Oh, of course, the modem cult of the body! It excites the imagination in just one direction and inflames it with claims that life can't fulfill! Even the exaggerated concern with physical culture that the Americans have wished on us is a great danger!
-Y ou're seeing ghosts, Agathe said indifferently.
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Lindner to this: -Many pure women, who welcome and participate in such things without a deeper lmowledge of life, don't consider that in doing so they are conjuring up spirits that might perhaps destroy their own lives and the lives of those closest to them!
Agathe retorted sharply: -Should one bathe only once every two weeks? Bite off one's nails? Wear flannel and smell of chilblain oint- ment? . . . It was an attack on these surroundings, but at the same time she felt imprisoned and ridiculously punished for having to argue over such platitudes.
Their conversations often took the form of Agathe's mocking and irri- tating him so that he would lose his temper and ''bark. " This was how she was acting now, and Lindner took on the adversary.
- A truly manly soul will regard not only the plastic arts but also the whole institution of the theater with the greatest reservation, and calmly suffer the scorn and mockery of those who are too effeminate to rigor- ously forbid themselves every tickling of the senses! he asserted, imme- diately adding novels with the remark that most novels, too, unmistakably breathe the sensual enslavement and overstimulation of their authors and stimulate the reader's lower aspects precisely through the poetic illusion with which they gloss over and cover up everything!
He seemed to assume that Agathe despised him for being inartistic, and was anxious to show his superiority. "It is after all dogma," he ex- claimed, "that one must have heard and seen everything in order to be able to talk about it! But how much better it would be if one would be proud of one's lack of culture and let others prattle! One shouldn't con- vince oneself that it's part of culture to look at filth under electric light. "
Agathe looked at him, smiling, without answering. His observations were so dismally obtuse that her eyes misted over. This moist, mocking glance left him uncertain.
-All these observations are not, ofcourse, directed at great and true art! Lindner qualifled I assured her I he retreated.
Since Agathe continued her silence, he yielded another step.
"It's not prudery," he defended himself. "Pruderywould itselfbe only a sign of corrupted imagination. But naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner person and, at the same time, spiritual powers, which the tragic strives to absolve and unbind: do you understand what I'm feel- ing? " He stopped before her. He was again captivated by her. He looked at her. "That's why one must either conceal nakedness or so associate it with man's higher longings that it isn't enslaving and arousing but calm- ing and liberating. " This was what had always been attempted at the high points of art, in the figures of the frieze on the Parthenon, in Ra- phael's transcendent figures-Michelangelo associates transfigured
From the Posthumous Papers · 1503
bodies with the suprasensual world, Titian binds covetousness through a facial expression that does not stem from the world of natural drives.
Agathe stood up. "Just a minute! " she said. "You have a thread in your beard," and she reached up rapidly and seemed to remove something; Lindner could not make out whether it was real or pretended, since he spontaneously and with signs of chaste horror fell back, while she imme- diately sat down again. He was extremely upset at his clumsy lack of self- control, and attempted to mask it through a blustering tone. He rode around like a Sunday rider on the word "tragic," which suited him so badly. He had said that naked beauty evokes the tragic in the inner man, and now supplemented this by saying that this tragic sense repeats itself in art, whose powers in spite of everything did not suffice for complete spiritualization. This was not very illuminating, but it quite clearly amounted to saying that the soul of man is not a protection against the senses but their powerful echo! Indeed, sensuality acquired its power only in that its false pretenses conquered and usurped man's soul!
"Is that a confession? " Agathe asked dryly, unabashed.
"How so, a confession? " Lindner exclaimed. And he added: "What an arrogant way of looking at things you have! What megalomania! And be- sides: What do you think of me? " But he fled, quit the field, he actually physically retreated before Agathe.
One discovers nothing so quickly as another's inner insecurity, and pounces on it like a cat on a grubbing beetle: it was really the capricious technique of the girls' boarding school, with its passions between the admired "big ones" and adoring smaller ones, the eternal basic form of spiritual dependency, which Agathe was using against Lindner by ap- pearing to respond understandingly and ardently to his words as often as she fell upon him coldly and frightened him just when he thought he was secure in a shared feeling.
From the corner of the room his voice now boomed like an organ, with an artificially fearless bass; he acted as ifhe were the aggressor by proposing: "Let's talk about this, for once, freely and frankly. Realize how inadequate and unsatisfying the entire process of procreation is as a mere natural process. Even motherhood! Is its physiological mechanism really so indescribably manrelous and perfect? How much horrible suf- fering it involves, how much senseless and unbearable contingency! So let's just leave the deification of nature to those who don't know what life is, and open our eyes to reality: the process of procreation is ennobled and raised above apathetic servitude only by being endowed with loyalty and responsibility, and subordinated to spiritual ideals! "
Agathe seemed to be reflecting silently. Then she asked relentlessly: "Why are you talking to me about the process of procreation? "
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Lindner had to take a deep breath: "Because I am your friend! Scho- penhauer has shown us that what we would like to think of as our most intimate experience is the most impersonal of arousals. But the higher emotions are exempted from this deception of the drive to procreate: loyalty, for instance, pure, selfless love, admiration and serving. "
"Why? " Agathe asked. "Certain feelings that suit you are supposed to have some supernatural origin, and others to be mere nature? "
Lindner hesitated; he struggled. "I can't marry again," he said softly and hoarsely. "I owe that to my son Peter. "
"But who's asking that of you? Now I don't understand you," Agathe replied.
Lindner shrank back. "I meant to say that even if I could do it, I wouldn't," he said defensively. "Moreover, in my opinion friendship be- tween man and wife demands an even more elevated frame of mind than love! " He made another try: "You know my principles, so you must also understand that in accord with them I would like nothing better than to offer to serve you as a brother, even to awaken, so to speak, in the woman the counterweight to the woman: I'd like to reinforce the Mary in the Eve! " He was close to breaking out in a sweat, so strenuous was it to pursue the strict line of his reasoning.
"So you're offering me a kind of eternal friendship," Agathe said qui- etly. "That's lovely of you. And you surely know that your present was accepted in advance. "
She seized his hand, as is appropriate at such a moment, and was a little taken aback at this epidermal piece ofstrange person that lay in the lap of her hand. Lindner was not able to withdraw his fingers either: it seemed to him that he should, and yet also that he didn't have to. Even Ulrich's lack of resolution sometimes exercised this natural impulse to flirt with her, but Agathe also despaired if she saw that she was doing it successfully herself, for the power of flirtation is united with the notion of bribery, cunning, and compulsion, and no longer with love; and while she was reminded of Ulrich, she looked at this unsteady creature, who was now bobbing up and down inwardly like a cork, in a mood, shot through with evil thoughts, that was close to tears.
"I would like you to open your refractory and taciturn heart to me," Lindner said timorously, warmly, and comically. "Don't think of me as a man. You've missed having a mother! " ·
"Fine," Agathe responded. "But can you stand it? Would you be pre- pared to entrust me with your friendship"-she withdrew her hand- "even if I were to tell you that I had stolen and that I had incest on my conscience? " therefore (or) something on account of which one is ruth- lessly expelled from the community of others?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1505
Lindner forced himself to smile. "What you're saying is strong, of course; it's even extremely unfeminine to venture such a jest," he scolded. "Honestly! Do you know what you remind me of at such mo- ments? Of a child who's made up its mind to annoy a grownup! But this isn't the moment for that," he added, offended because he was just now reminding himself of it.
But suddenly Agathe had something in her voice that cut through the conversation to the bottom when she asked: "You believe in God; reveal to me: In what way does He answer when you ask Him for advice and a decision about a heavy sin? "
Lindner rejected this question with the appalled severity that a decor- ous palace employee shows I puts on when asked about the married life of the Royal Couple.
Agathe: God in association with crime, specifically the Augustinian God, the abyss. Maybe really as Augustinian as possible: I see no possi- bility of being good on my own. I don't understand when I am doing good or evil. Only His grace can tear me away, or something similar. Seems to assume that she had recently been worrying about this. For the moment remains open.
Lindner did feel something of the passion of her words, therefore his answer gentle and father-confessorial: I don't know your life, you've only given me a few hints. But I consider it possible that you could act in a way similar to the way a bad person would act. You haven't learned in the small things to take life seriously, and therefore you perhaps won't hit it right when it comes to big decisions. You're probably capable of doing evil and disregarding all standards for no other reason than that it's a matter of indifference to you what the other person feels, but that only because, while you feel the impulse to the good, you don't know how much wisdom and obedience it involves. He seized her hand and asked: "Tell me the truth. "
"The truth is more or less what I've already told you," Agathe re- peated soberly and emphatically.
"No! "
"Yes. " There was something in this simple "yes" that made Lindner suddenly push away her hand.
Agathe said: "You wanted to make me better, didn't you? If I'm like a gold piece twisted out of shape that you'd like to bend back, I'm still a gold piece, aren't I? But you're losing your courage. The challenge (from God? ) presented to you in my person collides with your conventional division of actions into light and darkness. And I say to you: to identify God with a human morality is blasphemy! "
The voice in which she exclaimed this had, at least for Lindner, the
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sound of trumpets, something oddly arousing; he also felt Agathe's wild youthful beauty, and suffered enough as it was, whenever he reproached her, from an unuttemble anxiety and insinuation. For his principles, where were his principles? They were round about him, but far off. And in the empty space whose innermost vacuum was now his breast, some- thing stirred that was despicable but as alive as a basket full of puppies. Certainly, the only reason he wanted to strike to the heart of this obdu- mte young woman was in order to do her a seiVice, but the heart he was aiming at looked like a piece offlower flesh. Since Lindner had become a widower he had lived ascetically and avoided prostitutes and frivolous women on principle, but, to say it straight out, the more ardent he was about saving Agathe, the more grounded his fear became that in the pro- cess he would one day experience himself in a state of impermissible arousal. For this reason he often rapidly counted to fifty inwardly, in moments of anger as well as love. But his success was a remarkable one: the more this enabled him to drive his arousal from the point of threat- ened breach, the more it gathered in his whole body, until his body seemed to shine inside. He chose words of blame, but inwardly they were, ultimately, as soft as dying candles. He himself simply no longer believed what he was saying, for while externally he separated good from evil, inwardly everything was as mixed up together as it had been in Par- adise before the Fall. And with a horrifying clarity for which there are no words, he was reminded of that grimly edifying experience which, in his adolescence, had warned him once and for all against the power of the emotions. Lindner felt punished by a bitter self-contempt when he had to think that what at that time had clothed itselfwith devilish cunning in the appearance of God was now emerging in his mature years as com- mon lust ofthe flesh, precisely in the way that the Enlightener's shallow view had said it would.
-Get away from me with this lie! he begged.
-The will? Agathe said.