No More Learning

"Let me think about it," Ulrich proposed, "and see for myself whether I still know something about the world you move in. He brought down the last Minister ofCulture, and after the recent insult
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 5 7
he received, one has to assume that he will bring down the current one as well. But that would be, momentarily, an unpleasant distur- bance, and this has to be precluded. And, for whatever reason, he still clings firmly to the conviction that the Germans are the biggest threat to the nation, that Baron Wisnieczky, whom the Germans can't stand, is the man best suited to beat the drum among them that the government ought not to have changed course, and so on. . . . "
Stumm could have interrupted Ulrich but had been content to lis- ten, only now intervening. "But it was under him in the campaign that the slogan 'Action! ' came about; while everyone else was just saying 'It's a new spirit,' he was saying to everyone who didn't like to hear it: 'Something must be done! ' "
"And he can't be brought down, he's not in the government. And the Parallel Campaign has been, so to speak, shot out from under him," Ulrich said.
"So now the danger is that he'll start something else," the General went on.
"But what can you do about it? " Ulrich asked, curious.
'Well! I've been assigned the mission of diverting him a little and, ifyou like, also watching over him a bit-"
"Ah! A 'Report L,' you coy deceiver! "
"That's what you can call it between us, but of course it doesn't have an official name. My mission is simply to sit on Leinsdorf's neck"-this time Stumm wanted to enjoy the name too, but again he whispered it-"like a tick. Those were the Minister's own gracious words. "
"But he must have also given you a goal to aim for? "
The General laughed. "Talk! I'm to talk with him! Go along with everything he's thinking, and talk so much about it that he will, we hope, wear himself out and not do anything rash. 'Suck him dry,' the Minister told me, and called it an honorable mission and a demon- stration of his confidence. And if you were to ask me whether that's all, I can only respond: it's a lot! Our old Excellency is a person of enormous culture, and tremendously interesting! " He had given the coachman the sign to start, and called back: "The rest next time. I'm counting on you! "
It was only as the coach was rolling away that the idea occurred
1258 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
to Ulrich that Stumm might also have had the intention of render- ing him innocuous, since he had once been suspected of being able to lead Count Leinsdorf's mind off on some quite extravagant fancy.
54
NAIVE DESCRIPTION OF HOW AN EMOTION ORIGINA TES
Agathe had gone on to read a large part of the pages that followed. They did not, at first, contain anything of the promised exposition of the current development of the concept of emotion, for before Ulrich gave a summary of these views, from which he hoped to de- rive the greatest benefit, he had, in his own words, sought to "present the origin and growth of an emotion as naively, clumsily spelling it out with his finger, as it might appear to a layman not unpracticed in
matters of the intellect. "
This entry went on: 'We are accustomed to regard emotion as
something that has causes and consequences, and I want to limit my- self to saying that the cause is an external stimulus. But of course appropriate circumstances are part of this stimulus as well, which is to say appropriate external, but also internal, circumstances, an inner readiness, and it is this trinity that actually decides whether and how this stimulus will be responded to. For whether an emotion occurs all at once or protractedly, how it expands and runs its course, what ideas it entails, and indeed what emotion it is, ordinarily depend no less on the previous state ofthe person experiencing the emotion and his environment than they do on the stimulus. This is no doubt self- evident in the case of the condition of the person experiencing the emotion: in other words, his temperament, character, age, educa- tion, predispositions, principles, prior experience, and present ten- sions, although these states have no definite boundaries and lose
From the Posthumous Papers · 1259
themselves in the person's being and destiny. But the external envi- ronment too, indeed simply knowing about it or implicitly assuming it, can also suppress or favor an emotion. Social life offers innumera- ble examples of this, for in every situation there are appropriate and inappropriate emotions, and emotions also change with time andre- gion, with what groups of emotions predominate in public and in pri- vate life, or at least which ones are favored and which suppressed; it is even the case that periods rich in emotion and poor in emotion have succeeded one another.
"Add to all this that external and internal circumstances, along with the stimulus-this can easily be measured-are not indepen- dent of each other. For the internal state has been adapted to the external state and its emotional stimuli, and is therefore dependent on them as well; and the external state must have been assimilated in some fashion or other, in such a way that its manifestation depends on the inner state before a disturbance of this equilibrium evokes a new emotion, and this new emotion either paves the way for a new equalization or is one itself. But in the same way, the 'stimulus,' too, does not ordinarily work directly but works only by virtue of being assimilated, and the inner state again only carries out this assimila- tion on the basis of perceptions with which the beginnings of the ex- citation must already have been associated.
"Aside from that, the stimulus capable of arousing an emotion is connected with the emotion insofar as what stimulates, for instance, a starving person is a matter ofindifference to a person who has been insulted, and vice versa. "
"Similar complications result when the subsequent process is to be described seriatim. Thus even the question ofwhen an emotion is present cannot be answered, although according to the basic view by which it is to be effected and then produce an effect itself, it must be assumed that there is such a point in time. But the arousing stimulus does not actually strike an existing state, like the ball in the mechani- cal contraption that sets off a sequence of consequences like falling dominoes, but continues in time, calling forth a fresh supply of inner forces that both work according to its sense and vary its effect. And just as little does the emotion, once present, dissipate immediately in
1260 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
its effects, nor does it itself remain the same even for an instant, rest- ing, as it were, in the middle between the processes it assimilates and transmits; it is connected with a constant changing in everything to which it has connection internally and externally, and also receives reactions from both directions.
"It is a characteristic endeavor of the emotions to actively, often passionately, vary the stimuli to which they owe their origin, and to eliminate or abet them; and the major directions of life are those to- ward the outside and from the outside. That is why anger already contains the counterattack, desire the approach, and fear the transi- tion to flight, to paralysis, or something between both in the scream. But an emotion also receives more than a little ofits particularity and content through the retroactive effect of this active behavior; the well-known statement of an American psychologist that 'we do not weep because we are sad, but are sad because we weep' might be an exaggeration, yet it is certain that we don't just act the way we feel, but we also soon learn to feel the way we act, for whatever reasons.
"A familiar example of this back-and-forth pathway is a pair of dogs who begin to romp playfully but end up in a bloody fight; a simi- lar phenomenon can be observed in children and simple people. And is not, ultimately, the entire lovely theatricality of life such an exam- ple writ large, with its half-momentous, half-empty gestures ofhonor and being honored, of menacing, civility, strictness, and everything else: all gestures of wanting-to-represent-something and of the rep- resentation that sets judgment aside and influences the emotions di- rectly. Even the military 'drill' is part of this, based as it is on the effect that a behavior imposed for a long time finally produces the emotions from which it was supposed to have sprung. "
"More important than this reacting to an action, in this and other examples, is that an experience changes its meaningifits course hap- pens to veer from the sphere of the particular forces that steered it at the beginning into the sphere of other mental connections. For what is going on internally is similar to what is happening externally. The emotion pushes inside; it 'grabs hold of the whole person,' as collo- quial language not inappropriately has it; it suppresses what doesn't suit it and supports whatever can offer it nourishment. In a psychiat-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 6 1
ric textbook, I came across strange names for this: 'switching energy' and 'switching work. ' But in this process the emotion also stimulates the inner sphere to turn toward it. The inner readiness not already expended in the first instant gradually pushes toward the emotion; and the emotion will be completely taken over from within as soon as it gets hold ofthe stronger energies in ideas, memories, or principles, or in other stored-up energy, and these will change it in such a way that it becomes hard to decide whether one should speak of a moving or of a being moved.
"But if, through such processes, an emotion has reached its high point, the same processes must weaken and dilute it again as well. For emotions and experiences will then crisscross the region of this climax, but no longer subordinate themselves to it completely; in- deed, they will finally displace it. This countercurrent of satiety and erosion really begins when the emotion first arises; the fact that the emotion spreads indicates not only an expansion of its power but, at the same time, a relaxation of the needs from which it arose or of which it makes use.
"This can also be observed in relation to the action; for emotion not only intensifies in the action, but also relaxes in it; and its satiety, if it is not disturbed by another emotion, can proceed to the point of excess, that is to say, to the point where a new emotion occurs. "
"One thing deserves special mention. So long as an emotion subju- gates the internal aspect, it comes in contact with activities that con- tribute to experiencing and understanding the external world; and thus the emotion will be able to partly pattern the world as we under- stand it according to its own pattern and sense, in order to be rein- forced within itself through the reactive aspect. Examples of this are well known: A violent feeling blinds one toward something that unin- volved observers perceive and causes one to see things others don't. For the melancholy person, everything is gloomy; he punishes with disregard anything that might cheer him up; the cheerful person sees the world in bright colors and is not capable of perceiving anything that might disturb this. The lover meets the most evil natures with trusting confidence, and the suspicious person not only finds his mis- trust confinned on every side, but these confirmations also seek him
1262 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
out to plague him. In this way every emotion, if it attains a certain strength and duration, creates its own world, a selective and personal world, and this plays no small role in human relations! Here, too, is where our notorious inconsistency and our changeable opinions be- long. "
Here Ulrich had drawn a line and briefly reverted to the question of whether an emotion was a state or a process. The question's pecu- liarity now clearly emerged as illusory. What followed took up, in summary and continuing fashion, where the previous description had left off:
"Proceeding from the customary idea that emotion is a state that emanates from a cause and produces consequences, I was led in my exposition to a description that doubtless does represent a process if the result is obseiVed over a fairly long stretch. But if I then proceed from the total impression of a process and try to grasp this idea, I see just as clearly that the sequence between neighboring elements, the one-after-another that is an essential part of a process, is everywhere missing. Indeed, every indication of a sequence in a particular direc- tion is missing. On the contrary, it points to a mutual dependence and presupposition between the individual steps, and even to the image of effects that appear to precede their causes. Nor do any tem- poral relationships appear anywhere in the description, and all this points, for a variety of reasons, to emotion being a state.
"So strictly speaking I can merely say of an emotion that it seems to be a state as much as it is a process, or that it appears to be neither a state nor a process; one statement can be justified as easily as the other.
"But even that depends, as can easily be shown, at least as much on the manner of description as on what is described. For it is not a particular idiosyncrasy of mental activity, let alone that of emotion, but occurs also in other areas in describing nature; for instance, ev- erywhere where there is talk of a system and its elements, or of a whole and its parts, that in one person's view can appear as a state while another person sees it as a process. Even the duration of a pro- cess is associated for us with the concept of a state. I could probably not say that the logic of this double idea-formation is clear, but ap- parently it has more to do with the distinction between states and processes belonging to the way thinking expresses itself in language
From the Posthumous Papers · 1263
than it does with the scientific picture presented by facts, a picture that states and processes might improve but might also, perhaps, allow to disappear behind something else. "
"The German language says: Anger is in me, and it says: I am in anger [Ich bin in Zorn]. It says: I am angry, I feel angry [Ich fohle mich zomig]. It says: I am in love [Ich bin verliebt], and I have fallen in love [Ich habe mich verliebt]. The names the language has given to the emotions probably point back frequently, in its history, to lan- guage's having been affected by the impression of actions and through dangerous or obvious attitudes toward actions; nevertheless, language talks of an emotion as, in one case, a state embracing vari- ous processes, in another as of a process consisting of a series of states. As the examples show, it also includes quite directly in its forms of expression, various though these may be, the idea-forma- tions ofthe individual and ofexternal and internal, and in all this the language behaves as capriciously and unpredictably as ifit had always intended to substantiate the disorder of German emotions.
"This heterogeneity of the linguistic picture of our emotions, which arose from impressive but incomplete experiences, is still re- flected today in the idea-formation of science, especially when these ideas are taken more in breadth than in depth. There are psychologi- cal theories in which the T appears as the most certain element, present in every movement of the mind, but especially in the emo- tion of what is capable of being experienced, and there are other theories that completely ignore the T and regard only the relation- ships between expressions as capable of being experienced, describ- ing them as if they were phenomena in a force field, whose origin is left out ofaccount. There are also ego psychologies and psychologies without the ego. But other distinctions, too, are occasionally formu- lated: thus emotion may appear in one place as a process that runs through the relation of an T to the external world, in another as a special case and state of connectedness, and so forth: distinctions that, given a more conceptual orientation ofthe thirst for knowledge, easily press to the fore so long as the truth is not clear.
"Much is here still left to opinion, even if one takes the greatest care to distinguish opinion from the facts. It seems clear to us that an
1264 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
emotion takes shape not just anywhere in the world but within a liv- ing being, and that it is T who feels, or feels stimulation within itself. Something is clearly going on within me when I feel, and I am also changing my state. Also, though the emotion brings about a more intense relation to the external world than does a sense perception, it seems to me to be more 'inward' than a sense perception. That is one group of impressions. On the other hand, a stand taken by the entire person is associated with the emotion as well, and that is another group. I know about emotion, in distinction to sense perception, that it concerns 'all of me' more than sense perception does. Also, it is only by means of an individual person that an emotion brings some- thing about externally, whether it is because the person acts or be- cause he begins to see the world differently. Indeed, it cannot even be maintained that an emotion is an internal change in a person with- out the addition that it causes changes in his relation to the external world. "
"So does the being and becoming of an emotion take place 'in' us, or to us, or by means of us? This leads me back to my own descrip- tion. And if I may give credence to its disinterestedness, the relation- ships it discreetly illuminates once again reinforce the same thing: My emotion arises inside me and outside me; it changes from the inside and the outside; it changes the world directly from inside and indirectly, that is through my behavior, from outside; and it is there- fore, even ifthis contradicts our prejudice, simultaneously inside and outside, or at least so entangled with both that the question as to what in an emotion is internal and what external, and what in it is T and what the world, becomes almost meaningless.
"This must somehow furnish the basic facts, and can do so expedi- tiously, for, expressed in rather measured words, it merely states that in every act of feeling a double direction is experienced that imparts to it the nature of a transitory phenomenon: inward, or back to the individual, and outward, or toward the object with which it is con- cerned. What, on the other hand, inward and outward are, and even more what it means to belong to the T or the world, in other words what stands at the end of both directions and would therefore be necessary to permit us to understand their presence completely: this
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 6 5
is of course not to be clearly grasped in the first experience of it, and its origin is no clearer than anything else one experiences without knowing how. It is only through continuing experience and investiga- tion that a genuine concept for this can be developed.
"That is why a psychology that considers it important that it be a real science of experience will treat these concepts and proceed no differently from the way such a science does with the concepts of state and process; and the closely related ideas of the individual per- son, the mind, and the '1,' but also complete ideas of inward and out- ward, will appear in it as something to be explained, and not as something by whose aid one immediately explains something else. "
"The everyday wisdom of psychology agrees with this remarkably well, for we usually assume in advance, without thinking about it much, that a person who shows himselfin a way that corresponds to a specific emotion really feels that way. So it not seldom happens, per- haps it even happens quite often, that an external behavior, together with the emotions it embraces, will be comprehended directly as being all of a piece, and with great certainty.
'W e first experience directly, as a whole, whether the attitude of a being approaching us is friendly or hostile, and the consideration whether this impression is correct comes, at best, afterward. What approaches us in the first impression is not something that might perhaps prove to be awful; what we feel is the awfulness itself, even if an instant later the impression should turn out to be mistaken. And if we succeed in reconstituting the first impression, this apparent re- versal permits us to also discern a rational sequence of experiences, such as that something is beautiful and charming, or shameful or nauseating.
"This has even been presetved in a double usage of language we meet with every day, when we say that we consider something awful, delightful, or the like, emphasizing thereby that the emotions de- pend on the person, just as much as we say that something is awful, delightful, and the like, emphasizing that the origin of our emotions is rooted as a quality in objects and events. This doubleness or even amphibian ambiguity of the emotions supports the idea that they are to be obsetved not only within us, but also in the external world. "
1266 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
With these last observations Ulrich had already arrived at the third answer to the question of how the concept ofemotion is to be deter- mined; or, more reservedly, at the opinion on this question that pre- vails today.
55
FEELING AND BEHA VIOR.
THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF EMOTION
"The school oftheoretical psychology most successful at the moment treats emotions and the actions associated with emotions as an indis- soluble entity. What we feel when we act is for this psychology one aspect, and how we act with feeling the other aspect, of one and the same process. Contemporary psychology investigates both as a unit. For theories in this category, emotion is-in their terms-an internal and external behavior, event, and action; and because this bringing together of emotion and behavior has proved itself quite well, the question of how the two sides are to be ultimately separated again and distinguished from each other has become for the time being almost secondary. That is why instead of a single answer there is a whole bundle of answers, and this bundle is rather untidy. "
'W e are sometimes told that emotion is simply identical with the internal and external events, but we are usually merely told that these events are to be considered equivalent to the emotion. Some- times emotion is called, rather vaguely, 'the total process,' sometimes merely internal action, behavior, course, or event. Sometimes it also seems that two concepts of emotion are being used side by side: one in which emotion would be in a broader sense the 'whole,' the other in which it would be, in a narrower sense, a partial experience that in some rather hazy way stamps its name, indeed its nature, on the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1267
whole. And sometimes people seem to follow the conjecture that one and the same thing, which presents itself to obsexvation as a complex process, becomes an emotion when it is experienced; in other words, the emotion would then be the experience, the result, and, so to speak, what the process yields in consciousness.
"The origin of these contradictions is no doubt always the same. For every such description of an emotion exhibits components, pre- ponderantly in the plural, that are obviously not emotions, because they are actually known and equally respected as sensation, compre- hension, idea, will, or an external process, such as can be experienced at any time, and which also participate exactly as they are in the total experience. But in and above all this there is also just as clearly some- thing that seems in and of itself to be emotion in the simplest and most unmistakable sense, and nothing else: neither acting, nor a pro- cess of thinking, nor anything else.
"That's why all these explanations can be summarized in two cate- gories. They characterize the emotion either as an 'aspect,' a 'compo- nent,' or a 'force' of the total process, or else as the 'becoming aware' of this process, its 'inner result,' or something similar; expressions in which one can see clearly enough the embarrassment for want of better ones! "
"The most peculiar idea in these theories is that at first they leave vague the relation of the emotion to everything it is not, but with which it is filled; but they make it appear quite probable that this connection is in any case, and however it might be thought of other- wise, so constituted that it admits of no discontinuous changes, and that everything changes, so to speak, in the same breath.
"It can be thought of in terms of the example of melody. In mel- ody the notes have their independent existence and can be recog- nized individually, and their propinquity, their simultaneity, their sequence, and whatever else can be heard are not abstract concepts but an overflowing sensory exposition. But although all these ele- ments can be heard singly in spite of their connectedness, they can also be heard connectedly, for that is precisely what melody is; and if the melody is heard, it is not that there is something new in addition to the notes, intexvals, and rhythms, but something with them. The
1268 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
melody is not a supplement but a second-order phenomenon, a spe- cial form of existence, under which the form of the individual exis- tences can just barely be discerned; and this is also true of emotion in relation to ideas, movements, sensations, intentions, and mute forces that unite in it. And as sensitive as a melody is to any change in its 'components,' so that it immediately takes on another form or is de- stroyed entirely, so can an emotion be sensitive to an action or an interfering idea.
"In whatever relationship the emotion may therefore stand to 'in- ternal and external behavior,' this demonstrates how any change in this behavior could correspond to a change in the emotion, and vice versa, as if they were the two sides of a page. "
"(There are many model and experimental examples that confinn the broad extent of this theoretical idea, and other examples out- side science that this idea fitfully illuminates, whether apparently or actually. I would like to retain one of these. 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.