The Sleepwalkers (87 page)

At first sight it might seem irrelevant whether the individual or the general prevailed in Hanna’s memories. But in an age when the general is everywhere so obviously dominant, where the social bonds of humanity that are spun only from individual to individual have been loosened in favour of collective concepts of hitherto undreamed-of unities, where a de-individualized state of ruthlessness prevails such as is natural only to childhood and old age, in such a time the memory of an individual cannot escape subjection to the general law, and the isolation of a highly insignificant woman, be she ever so pretty and ever such an excellent bedfellow, cannot be explained simply as the result of an unfortunately
complete deprivation of sexual intercourse, but forms a part of the whole and mirrors, like every individual destiny, a metaphysical necessity that is laid upon the world, a physical event, if one likes to call it that, and yet metaphysical in its tragedy: for that tragedy is the isolation of the ego.

Can this age, this disintegrating life, be said still to have reality? My passivity increases from day to day, not because I am exhausted by struggling with a reality that may be stronger than myself, but because on all sides I encounter unreality. I am thoroughly conscious that the meaning and the ethos of my life can be found only in activity, but I begin to suspect that this age no longer has time for the contemplative activity of philosophizing, which is the sole real activity. I try to philosophize—but where is the dignity of knowledge to be found to-day? Is it not long defunct? Has Philosophy itself not disintegrated into mere phrases in face of the disintegration of its object? This world without Being, this world without repose, this world that can find and maintain its equilibrium only in increasing speed of movement, this world’s mad racing has become the pseudo-activity of mankind and will hurl it into nothingness—is there any resignation deeper than that of an age which is denied the capacity to philosophize? Philosophy itself has become an æsthetic pastime, a pastime that no longer really exists but has fallen into the empty detachment of evil and become a recreation for citizens who need to kill time of an evening! nothing is left us but number, nothing is left us but law!

It often seems to me as if the state I am now in, the state that keeps me here in this Jewish house, is beyond resignation and is rather a kind of wisdom that has learned to come to terms with a completely alien environment. For even Nuchem and Marie are alien to me, even these two on whom I had set my last hope, the hope that they were my creations, the sweet, unrealizable hope that I had taken their fate into my own hands and could determine it. Nuchem and Marie are not my creatures and never were so. Treacherous hope, to take the liberty of shaping the world!

Does the world have an independent existence? No. Do Nuchem and
Marie have an independent existence? Certainly not, for no being exists in itself. But the moments that determine destinies lie far beyond the range of my thinking or my powers. I myself can only fulfil my own law, supervise my own prescribed business; I am in no case to penetrate farther, and even although my love for Nuchem and Marie is not extinguished, even though I do not relax in the struggle for their souls and their fate, yet the moments by which they are determined are beyond my reach, remain hidden from me, as hidden as the white-bearded grandfather whom I meet, to be sure, now and then in the hall, but who takes on his real shape only in the living-room from which I am always excluded, and who treats with me only through his delegate Litwak; they remain as hidden from me as the white-bearded General Booth whose picture hangs in the reception-room of the hostel. And when I consider it objectively, it is not a combat that I am engaged in, neither with the grandfather nor the Salvation Army General, rather do I strive to see justice done to them, and my wooing of Nuchem and Marie applies also to them; yes, sometimes I believe that my aim is exclusively to win through my actions the love of these old men, to win their blessing so that I may not die lonely. For reality is to be found in them that have laid down the law.

Is this resignation? Is it a revulsion from all æsthetic? Where did I stand of yore? My life is darkening behind me and I do not know if I have lived or if my life was a tale told to me, so far has it sunk in remote seas. Did ships bear me to the shores of the farthest east and farthest west? was I a cotton-picker in American plantations, was I the white hunter in the elephant jungles of India? Everything is possible, nothing, not even a castle in a park, is improbable; heights and depths, all are possible, for nothing permanent has survived in this dynamic activity that exists for its own sake, this activity that is manifest in work, in quietness and serene clarity: nothing has survived—flung to the winds is my ego, flung into nothingness; irrealizable my yearning, unattainable the Promised Land, invisible the ever-brightening but constantly receding radiance, and the community that we grope for is devoid of strength yet full of evil will. Vain hope, and often groundless pride—the world has remained an alien enemy, or even less than an enemy, merely an alien entity whose surface I could explore but into which I could never penetrate, an alien entity into which I shall never penetrate, lost as I am in ever-increasing strangeness, blind in ever-increasing blindness, failing and falling asunder in yearning remembrance of the night of home, to
become at last merely a vanishing breath of what has been. I have traversed many ways to find the One in which all the others are conjoined, but they have only diverged more and more from each other, and even God has not been established by me but by my fathers.

I said to Nuchem:

“You are a suspicious people, an angry people; you are jealous even of God and are constantly pulling Him up even in His own Book.”

He answered:

“The law is imperishable. God is not until every jot and tittle of the Law has been deciphered.”

I said to Marie:

“You are a brave but a thoughtless people! You believe that you need only be good and strike up music in order to draw God near.”

She answered:

“Joy in God is God, His grace is inexhaustible.”

I said to myself:

“You are a fool, you are a Platonist, you believe that in comprehending the world you can shape it and raise yourself in freedom to Godhood. Can you not see that you are bleeding yourself to death?”

I answered myself:

“Yes, I am bleeding to death.”

Epistemological Excursus.

Can this age be said still to have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its existence is preserved? Is there a reality for the non-meaning of a non-existence? In what haven has reality found its refuge? in science, in law, in duty or in the uncertainty of an ever-questioning logic whose point of plausibility has vanished into the infinite? Hegel called history “the path to the liberation of spiritual substance,” the path leading to the self-liberation of the spirit, and it has become the path leading to the self-destruction of all values.

Of course the question is not whether Hegel’s interpretation of history has been overthrown by the World War; that had been done already by the stars in their courses; for a reality that had grown autonomous through
a development extending over four hundred years would have ceased in any circumstances to be capable of submitting any longer to a deductive system. A more important question would be to inquire into the logical possibilities of this emergent anti-deductive reality, into the logical grounds for such anti-deductiveness; in short, to examine “the conditions of possible experience” in which this development of the spirit has become inevitable—but a contempt for all philosophy, a weariness of words, are themselves inherent in this reality and in this development, and it is only with a complete mistrust of the coercive suasion of words that we can pose the urgent methodological questions: what is an historical event? what is historical unity? or, to go still further: what is an event at all? what principle of selection must be followed to weld single occurrences into the unity of an event?

Autonomous life is as indissolubly and organically knit to the category of value as autonomous consciousness is knit to the category of truth,—one could find other names for the phenomena of truth and value, but as phenomena they would remain as irrefutable as
Sum
and
Cogito
, both of them drawn out of the isolated autonomy of the Self, both of them activities as well as surrounding products of that Self; thus value can be split up into the value-making activity, which in the widest sense creates worlds, and into the formed, spatially discernible and generally visible value-product, and the concept of value splits into the corresponding categories: into the ethical value of the activity and the æsthetic value of the product, the obverse and reverse sides of the same medal, and it is in combination and only in combination that these give the most general concept of value and the logical co-ordinates of all life. And, indeed, this is borne out by history: for the writing of history in antiquity was already governed by its concepts of value, the moralizing historians of the eighteenth century applied theirs with full deliberation, and in Hegel’s scheme the concept of an absolute value is most clearly revealed in the ideas of a “World-spirit” and a “High Court of History.” It is not surprising that the post-Hegelian philosophy of history occupied itself chiefly in considering the methodological function of the concept of value, bringing about incidentally the fateful splitting-up of the whole realm of knowledge into a philosophy of nature unaffected by values and a philosophy of spirit conditioned by values—which, if one likes, may be considered the first declared bankruptcy of philosophy, since it confined the identity of Thought and Being to the
realm of logic and mathematics, allowing all the rest of knowledge to dispense with what is the main idealistic task of philosophy or to relegate it to the vagueness of intuition.

Hegel levelled against Schelling the (justified) reproach that he had projected the Absolute into the world “as if it were a bullet from a pistol.” But that applies with equal force to the concept of value projected by Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy. Simply to project a concept, of value into history and summarily to describe as “values” all that history has preserved may be permissible at a pinch for the purely æsthetic values of the creative arts, but is otherwise so sweepingly false that it drives one in contradiction to maintain that history is a conglomeration of non-values, and to deny outright that there is any value-reality in history.

First Thesis:

history is composed of values, since life can be comprehended only in the category of value—yet these values cannot be introduced into reality as absolutes, but can only be thought of in reference to an ethically-motived value-positing subject. Hegel’s absolute and objectified “world spirit” was such a subject introduced into reality, but the all-embracing absoluteness of its operation could not but result in a
reductio ad absurdum.
(This is another example of the impassable limits imposed on deductive thinking.) These values are not absolutes, but only finite postulates. Where a concrete and
a priori
finite subject comes into question, that is to say, an actual person, the relativity of values, their dependence on the subject, becomes immediately clear; the biography of any person is composed of all the value-contents which have been important to him. In himself he may be a person of no value, even a destroyer of values, such as a bandit leader or a deserter, but as the centre of his own system of values he is yet a ripe subject for biography and history. And the same is true of the fictive centres of value such as a state, or a club, or a nation, or the German Hanseatic League, historically considered; indeed, even the histories of inanimate objects, as for instance the architectural history of a house, are made up from a selection of those facts which would have been important to the respective subjects if they had had a will to create values. An event without a value-positing centre dissolves into nebulosity—the battle of Kunersdorf consists not of an army list of the Grenadiers who took part in it, but of the reality-formations which were determined by the plans of the
commander. Every historical unity depends on an effective or fictive centre of value; the “style” of an epoch would not be discernible unless a unifying principle of selection were assumed at its centre, or a “spirit of the age” which serves as a standard for judging the value-positing and style-creating forces in operation. Or, to fall back on a hackneyed expression, culture is a value-formation, culture can be conceived of only in terms of style, and in order to be conceivable at all it needs the assumption of a style- and value-producing “culture-spirit” at the centre of that circle of values which it represents.

Does this mean that all values are made relative? That one must abandon all hope of the logical Absolute ever manifesting itself in reality through the unifying of thought and being? that one must abandon all hope of ever even drawing near to the path that leads to the self-liberation of the spirit and of humanity?

Second Thesis:

the ripeness for history or for biography of the value-positing action is conditioned by the absoluteness of the Logos. For the actual or fictive value-positing subject can be imagined only in the isolation of its selfhood, in that inevitable, complete, and Platonic isolation whose pride it is to depend exclusively on the precepts of logic, and whose compulsion it is to state all activity in terms of logical plausibility; but this means that one must postulate, in the complete Kantian sense, not only the good will which shapes the work for the work’s sake, but also the rule that all consequences must be drawn from the autonomous code of the Self, so that the work, uninfluenced by any dogma, shall spring from the pure originality of the Self and of its law. In other words, whatever does not arise purely in accordance with its own laws vanishes out of history. But however contemporary this individual force of law may be in any age, that is to say, however it may be conditioned by the spirit and style of its age, it can never be anything else than a reflection of the superposed Logos, of that Logos which is active to-day and which is thought itself, a merely earthly reflection, it is true, even in our day, but a reflection through which there gleams that which has a lasting claim to transcend all ages and alone makes it possible for stylized thinking to be projected into another ego. And this formal ultimate unity is continuously and with complete clearness revealed again and again in the narrower sphere of created work and of generally applied æsthetics, for instance in all art, but most obviously in the undying persistence of art forms.