The Present Age

The Present Age

III The Results of Observing the Two Ages

So here I am now at the final section, and with the difficulty the author has posed the critic by himself making as if to offer a criticism. Would the author had not done that! I say this not for my own sake, certainly, since in another respect I am happy to take the hints offered, though I shall not copy them and pass the criticism off as my own. But I think the book is the worse for that Preface, precisely because it makes it possible for quick minds and loose tongues to say straight away, ‘Is that all?’ – ‘That can be said in a page.’ Well, of course, it makes no difference at all what a voluble person says, or an impudent and naughty child. But all the same, with regard to a book with a literary signature distinguished by its honour and dignity, it is clear there is something even more to be desired, something we who are perhaps all too used to malice almost forget: that the voluble person or the naughty child simply keep quiet. What seems unimportant when it happens to others appears a significant incongruity when it happens to the exalted; and what seems bearable when it happens to oneself distresses one when it happens to the distinguished. When, because of the muddy going, a person has pulled on his rubber boots, he sets off with confidence. But if, just then, he sees a young girl, say, who has resolved without a single splash the difficult task of negotiating the not so very short way from her home, happily aware of the lightness of her own gliding gait – and then along comes some oaf who splatters her in passing, it pains him. It seems to him an injustice on the part of life to lump the heterogeneous together in time, it discomfits him that the street is for everybody instead of everybody getting out of the young girl’s way – and in Danish literature at present there is no right of way, and absolutely no police who might at least keep the pavements clear of labourers for hire, porters and louts.

The Age of Revolution

It’s not a question here of an ethico-philosophical assessment of [the age’s] validity, but of the consequences of its special character as this is reflected, and the task is to suggest such consequences only at the level of generality corresponding to the details of the author’s novelistic account.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it essentially possesses form. Even the most vehement utterance of an essential passion has eo ipso form, for that is the expression itself, and therefore it has in its form, again, an apology, something conciliatory. Only in the service of an altogether outward and indifferent dialectic is the form not the content’s own other, and thereby the content itself, but an irrelevant third something. Any written correspondence, for instance, that bears the mark of inwardness in the expression of real feeling has eo ipso form. But whether the letter is folded shapelessly is something only the altogether external dialectic could, with specious solemnity, be made to treat as a question of form.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it essentially possesses culture. For the degree of essential culture is the resilience of inwardness.^* A maidservant genuinely in love is essentially cultured; a common man with his mind vigorously and passionately made up is essentially cultured. Outward, piecemeal dressage in relation to an inner emptiness, the strutting extravagance of weeds compared to the meek bending of the blessed corn, the mechanical counting of the beat in relation to the lacklustre dance, the painstaking decoration of the binding in relation to the book’s deficiency – all this, simply as form, is affectation. In laying stress on the cultured in the first age, the novel operates also with an accidental extra, to be sure, in so far as the age of revolution is represented in Copenhagen by a remarkable small band of remarkably cultured Frenchmen.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it must be able to be violent, uncurbed, wild, ruthless towards everything but its idea. But rawness is something it is less liable to be accused of, precisely because it has at least a purpose. A person who, however much his striving is outwardly directed, is essentially turned inward owing to an essential passion that relates to an idea, is never raw. A hurricane, an earthquake, the raging elements are not what, weather-wise, one refers to as ‘raw’; to define that you would have to say, ‘It’s the cheerless lack of character.’ So too in the world of individuals: remove the essential passion, the one purpose, then everything becomes an insignificant featureless outwardness; the flowing current of ideality stops and the life that people share becomes a stagnant lake – and that is rawness.

Purely dialectically – and let us work them out dialectically without regard to any specific age – the relations are as follows. When the individuals (severally) relate essentially and passionately to an idea and, on top of that, in union essentially relate to the same idea, that relation is perfect and normal. The relation singles out individually (each has himself for himself) and unites ideally. In the essential inward directedness there is that modest reticence between man and man that prevents crude presumption. In the relation of unanimity to the idea is the elevation that again forgets the accident of the particulars in consideration of the whole. Thus individuals never come too close to each other in a brute sense, just because they are united at an ideal distance. The unanimity of the singled-out is the band playing well orchestrated music. If, on the other hand, individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (that is, without the individual, inward-directed singling out), we get violence, unruliness, unbridledness; but if there is no idea for the individuals en masse, nor any individually singling-out inward-directedness, then we have rawness. The harmony of the spheres is the unity of each planet relating to itself and to the whole. Remove one of the relations and there will be chaos. But in the world of individuals the relation is not the only constituting factor, and so there are two forms. Remove the relation to oneself, and we have the mass’s tumultuous relating to an idea; but remove this too, and we have rawness. People then push and shove, and rub up against each other in futile outwardness. There is none of that modesty of inwardness that decently distances the one from the other. There is then a stir and a commotion that end in nothing. No one has anything for himself and united they possess nothing either, so they become vexed and squabble with one another. Then, it is not even those songs of joyful conviviality that unite friends; then, it is not those dithyrambic songs of revolt that collect the crowds; then, it is not the sublime rhythm of religious fervour that under divine surveillance musters the countless generations to review before the heavenly hosts.

No, gossip and rumour and specious importance and apathetic envy become a surrogate for both this and that. Individuals do not turn in inwardness towards themselves and away from each other, nor outwards in unanimity over an idea, but towards each other in crippling and disheartened, tactless, levelling reciprocity. The idea passage is blocked. The individuals are at cross-purposes with themselves and each other, the selfish and the mutually reflected opposition is like a quagmire – and now one is sitting in it. In joy’s stead steps a kind of whimpering discontent, in sorrow’s stead a kind of stubborn, surly staying-power, in enthusiasm’s stead a loquacious worldly wisdom. But it is one thing to save one’s life by casting the spell of a story, as in A Thousand and One Nights, another to debar oneself from the spell of enthusiasm over an idea and the rebirth of passion, by being loquacious. Suppose such an age invented the swiftest means of transport and communication, unlimited ways of managing combined financial resources; how ironic that the rapidity of the transport system and the speed of the communication stand in inverse relation to the dilatoriness of indecision. The superiority of a prudence that boasts of not letting itself be carried away (which can be quite all right if one is sitting in a quagmire) is a somewhat plebeian invention.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it also has a concept of decorum. It could well have a false concept of decorum, but it does not lack the concept. One would think decorum was a category of the understanding, yet it is anything but. In this it is like the distinction between verse and prose. One would think the lyric had to be quite unconstrained, yet it is precisely the lyric that is bound, though the stanza itself is not an invention of a tight-laced understanding; on the contrary, it is the lyric’s own happy invention. Similarly with decorum. It is feeling’s and passion’s own invention, and just as prose is unconstrained speech, so prosiness is an unconcern that does not know a decorum. It is not lack of restraint that brings about that awful result, but dismal lack of character. The essential passion is in the last resort its own guarantee that there is something sacred, and it is this that gives rise to the determinant: decorum. Not even idolatry, when passion is essentially present in the pagan, is devoid of godliness; he has the concept that God is to be feared even if his concept is a false one. But prosiness lacks a concept. In the same way, if the age of revolution tolerates a relationship with a married woman, in spite of this being a false concept of decorum it does have such a concept. The permissibility of the relationship, reflected in its impermissibility, is therefore expressed by the requirement that the relationship be secret. This secrecy in turn indicates that the relationship, essentially one of passion under the seal of silence, gratifies the two parties. Remove the passion and the decorum too disappears, in which case the relationship probably does not get going, but then people talk about it. So even if the age of revolution wanted to abolish the form of marriage, it wouldn’t have abolished the intrinsic value of falling in love, for the very reason that where there is an essential passion there is also a decorum.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate and to that extent has immediacy; and yet its immediacy is not the first immediacy, and in the highest sense it is no final immediacy either but an immediacy of reaction and to that extent provisional. The latter is decisive with respect to the endurance of this passion. It may well be that in actual life any number may remain to the end true to themselves in the passion, but in terms of the idea it must end with the single individual being untrue to himself because it is a provisional idea. In terms of the idea, it is only in the highest idea, which is the religious, that a person can find definitive rest; on the other hand, it may well be that many remain true to themselves in the provisional all their lives.^* The revolutionary age’s immediacy is a restoring of natural conditions, as opposed to a fossilized formalism which by losing the originary character of the ethical has become a wizened ruination, a petty-minded custom and practice. Precisely as reaction, it can be transformed by a single deviation into untruth, which in an accidental manner accentuates the polemical, as if it came to the point of love being love only when it is adultery.

In the novel, the reactionary immediacy of the age of revolution is captured in its reflection in domestic life. It is reflected in the relationship between Madame Waller and Dalund, in that between father and son (Counsellor of Justice Waller and Ferdinand Waller); it is reflected in the political view that resonates in the dialogue and in the conversation. It wants, in the relation between father and son, in a reactionary manner to do away with the inexplicables of piety and to make nature the only determinant of the relationship: thus dependency is abolished on attaining majority, when one’s parents should be one’s equals and friends. Neither this idea, nor indeed even that of freedom and equality, constitutes lack of form so long as the idea itself is the truth essentially enthusing the enthusiasts, for inwardness is not abolished. It by no means indicates lack of form when the religious idea inspires a brotherhood to make being brothers and sisters an expression of equality, for uniformity is the essential form; nor is it any empty abstraction so long as inwardness inheres. Formlessness is simply absence of content. Thus if a woman in a fit of boredom were to get the idea of adorning herself and dressing up gorgeously, this would be lack of form for the simple reason that there would be no idea behind it. The naked Archimedes is adorned with joy over his discovery and is therefore in effect really dressed.¹ One must bear this in mind particularly in our day and age when, for instance, skill with form is on the point of becoming formless simply because nothing has essential meaning and everything so little meaning.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it is essentially revelation, revelation by a manifestation of strength that is unquestionably a definite something and does not change perfidiously with the aid of a conjectural criticism concerning what it is the age really wants.

The age of revolution is essentially passionate, for which reason it has not annulled the principle of contradiction and can become either good or evil; and whichever path is chosen, the impetus of passion is such as must be discernible – the footprint of a deed must mark its progress or its deviation. A decision has to be arrived at, but this again is the saving factor, for decision is the little magic word that existence respects. If, on the other hand, the individual will not act, then existence cannot help. To be like that king, Agrippa,² on the point of believing or of acting, is the most exhausting state imaginable if one stays in it for long. Claudine goes astray; the impetus of passion marks the decision but supports her again. Her plerophoria eis pathos³ topples but also strengthens her. One cannot accuse an age that is very reflective of being powerless, just like that and with no further ado, for there may be much power, but it goes to waste in the futility of reflection. With some illusion as support, it takes far less effort to achieve at least something than when all illusion is lost. And just as scurvy is cured by eating vegetables, perhaps a person worn out in reflection needs not so much strength as a little illusion.

It is not unusual to hear someone, confused about what to do in a certain situation, complain about the special nature of the case in hand and claim that one can safely act if the situation is a great event of the kind where there is only an either/or. This is a misapprehension and an illusion of the understanding. There is no such case. The presence of the crucial either/or lies in the individual’s own impassioned desire to act decisively, in his own competence. And a competent man longs for an either/or in every case because he won’t have more. Once the individual no longer has essential enthusiasm in his passion, on the other hand, but is spoiled by letting his understanding thwart him every time he is about to act, he never in his life comes to discover the disjunction. And even if his intellect, in its probing resourcefulness, be adequate for an entire household, he has still not understood his life in anticipation or in the moment of action; and it cannot be understood afterwards either, since essentially the action did not take place, and the coherence of his life became a loquacious continuation or a continued loquacity, a participial or infinitive phrase in which the subject has to be understood, or rather isn’t to be found at all, because it can by no means be construed from the meaning, as the grammarians say, for meaning is just what it lacks. The whole thing becomes a flux made up of a little bit of resolution and a little bit of situation, a little bit of prudence and a little bit of courage, a little bit of probability and a little bit of faith, a little bit of action and a little bit of event. Anyone who has perpetrated the swindle of gaining abnormally good sense at the cost of the capacity to will and the passion to act, is strongly disposed on that account to stiffen his spinelessness with miscellaneous deliberations beforehand which feel their way ahead, and with various deliberations afterwards that re-explain what happened. Compared with this, an action is some brief something or other, and to all appearances some poor something or other, yet in truth it is something definite. The other is more splendid, but a brilliant misery.

When a Roman emperor sits at the table surrounded by guards, it is a magnificent spectacle, but if the reason is fear the grandeur pales. So, too, when the individual dare not stand tight-lipped by his word, does not stand boldly and openly on the pedestal of a conscious act, but is surrounded by a host of considerations before and after that make it impossible for him to catch sight of the action. Just as an elderly man puts his hand to his back in support and leans on a cane, so abnormal good sense supports itself with a reflection in advance and comes to its own aid afterwards, with re-explanatory reflection – and why? Just because no action took place. Instead of that child of a god, the silent terse decision, the generation gives birth to a changeling of the understanding that has everything at its fingertips.

The Present Age

The aim as I see it, considered at a fairly general level and in the critical service of the novel, is here again to bring out just those specific elements depicted with such novelistic skill by the author.

The present age is essentially sensible, reflective, dispassionate, eruptive in its fleeting enthusiasms and prudently indolent in its relaxation.

If we had figures for the consumption of prudence from generation to generation as we do for the consumption of spirits, etc., we would be amazed to see what vast quantities are consumed nowadays, what amounts of reflection and deliberation and consideration even a small private family gets through despite its ample income, what amounts even children and young people consume; for just as the children’s crusade⁴ typifies the Middle Ages, so child intelligence typifies the present age. Is there anyone who makes even just one tremendous blunder any more? Nowadays not even a suicide does away with himself in desperation, but considers this step so long and so sensibly that he is strangled by good sense, casting doubt on whether he may really be called a suicide, seeing that it was mainly consideration that took his life. A premeditated suicide he was not – rather, a suicide by premeditation. It would be the hardest of tasks to be a prosecuting counsel in a time like this, since the whole generation has legal competence and its skill, its good sense, its virtuosity consist in letting matters reach a verdict and a decision without ever acting.

If we say of a revolutionary age that it takes a wrong turn, then we may say of the present age that it turns out badly.⁵ The individual and the generation are constantly at cross-purposes with themselves and with each other and it would be impossible for a prosecuting counsel to establish any fact, just because there is none. From abundant presumptive evidence one might conclude that something extraordinary has occurred, or is just about to, but the inference would be mistaken, for the evidence itself is all there is to the present age’s sole attempt at a show of strength; and its ingenuity and virtuosity in contriving captivating illusions, the fleeting nature of its eruptive enthusiasms, aided by the deceptive shortcut of schemes for formal changes, rate as highly in respect of calculating shrewdness and the negative use of power as the age of revolution’s achievements in respect of energetic and transformative passion. Exhausted by its chimerical exertions, the present age then relaxes for a while in complete indolence. Its condition is like that of the sleepyhead in the morning: big dreams, then torpor, then hitting on a witty or clever excuse for staying in bed.

The single individual (however well intentioned many a such may be, however much energy they might possibly have if only they could come to use it) has not bottled up passion enough in himself to tear free of the net of reflection and of reflection’s seductive uncertainty. The surroundings, contemporaneity, possess neither incident nor united passion, but in a negative union create a reflected opposition that first, for a moment, makes play with unreal prospects, and then gives the illusion of strength through a brilliant evasion,⁶ namely that one has done the wisest thing after all, by refraining from taking any action. Vis inertia⁷ is the basis of the age’s tergiversation,⁸ and every passionless person congratulates himself on being the original inventor – and becomes even cleverer. In the age of revolution weapons were freely distributed, and during the crusades the emblem of the enterprise was conferred publicly. Similarly today, we are treated freely to rules of prudence, computations of considerations, etc. If we could assume that a whole generation had the diplomatic task of keeping time at bay, so that anything at all was continually prevented from happening yet all the time it seemed as though something were happening, then our age would unquestionably be achieving something just as prodigious as the age of revolution. Were someone to try the experiment of forgetting all he knew about the age, and the factual relativities by which habit so excites our expectations, and arrive as though from another world and read some book or other, a newspaper article, or just talk to a passer-by, the impression he got would be: My God, something must be going to happen this evening – or else something must have happened the night before last!

As against the age of revolution, which acted, the present age is the age of advertisement, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens, but what does happen is instant notification. An uprising in the present age is the most unthinkable of all; such a show of energy would strike the calculating sensibleness of the age as ludicrous. A political virtuoso, on the other hand, might be able to perform a feat of artistry that was amazing in quite another way. He could word an invitation, proposing a general meeting for the purpose of deciding on a revolution, so carefully that even the censor would have to pass it. And then on the evening in question he could give the gathering an impression so deceptive that it seemed as though they had achieved the uprising; whereupon they would disperse quite peacefully, having spent a very pleasant evening. Acquiring enormously solid learning would be practically unthinkable among young people today – they would think it ludicrous. A virtuoso scholar might, on the other hand, be able to perform quite another feat: he could in a prospectus sketch a few features of a comprehensive system and do it in such a way that it gave the reader (of the prospectus) the impression that he had already read the whole system.

The age of the encyclopédistes,⁹ the time of those who wrote folios with unremitting application, is past; now it is the turn of those lightly equipped encyclopedists who dispose en passant of the whole of existence and all the sciences. A profound religious renunciation of the world, and of what is of the world,¹⁰ adhered to in daily self-denial, would be unthinkable to the youth of our time; yet every second theology graduate would be virtuoso enough to do something far more marvellous: he would be able to propose a social foundation with no less a goal than to save all who are lost. The age of great and good actions is past; the present age is the age of anticipation. No one is content with doing any definite thing; everyone fondly imagines in reflection that at the least he may discover a new continent. Ours is an age of anticipation; even recognition is accepted in advance. Just as the young man who resolves to get down to serious study for his final exams from 1 September decides to build himself up in the meantime by taking a vacation in the month of August, so the present generation – and this is much harder to understand – seems to have arrived at the serious conclusion that it is the next generation that is to tackle the job in earnest, and in order not to be disturbed or delayed, the present tackles – yes, the banquets. Except that the difference is this: the young man knows he is being irresponsible; the present age is serious – even at the banquets.

There is as little action and decision these days as shallow-water paddlers have a daring desire to swim. But just as the grown-up, tossed about delightedly by the waves, calls to his junior, ‘Come on, just jump right in’ – so the decision lies, as it were, in existence (but in the individual, naturally) and calls to the younger person not yet exhausted by reflection’s excess or overloaded with reflection’s fancies, ‘Come on, jump in without a care.’ Even if it is a reckless leap, so long as it is decisive – if you have it in you to be a man – then the danger and life’s stern judgement upon your recklessness will help you become one.

If the jewel that everyone covets lay far out on that very thin crust of ice so that mortal danger watched over it, ensuring that to go out that far would be a perilous venture, while (let’s assume this oddity, which is after all only quirky in the imagining) the ice closer to shore was quite safe and frozen to the bottom, then in a passionate age the crowd would cheer their approval of the bold one who risked himself out there. They would tremble for him, and with him, in the peril of his decision, grieve for him in his doom, idolize him should he win the jewel. In a passionless, reflective age it would be an entirely different matter. In mutual appreciation of their shared good sense, they would all sensibly agree that it was certainly not worth going out that far – indeed it would be silly and ridiculous. And then they would transform enthusiasm’s daring into a show of artistry – so as at least to do something, since ‘something must be done’. They would go out, on the safe ice, and with the look of connoisseurs judge the expert skaters who could skate just about to the edge (that is, as far as the ice was still safe and not yet into the danger zone) and then swoop to the side. Among the skaters would be one or another who had perfected his art to an exceptional degree. He would be able to perform the trick of making yet another seemingly hazardous swoop right at the very edge, causing the onlookers to cry, ‘Ye gods, he’s crazy, he is risking his life.’ But you see, he is so exceptionally adept that, right enough, he can make a sharp turn at the very edge – that is, where the ice is still quite safe and still short of the danger; just as at the theatre the crowd would shout, ‘Bravo!’ and greet their performing hero with applause, go home with him in their midst and honour him with a tasty banquet. Good sense would have so much got the upper hand that it would have transformed the task itself into an unreal feat of artistry, and reality into a theatre.

At the banquet in the evening the admiration would reverberate; and while, in the case of true admiration, the admirer is exalted by the thought of being just like the eminent person, humbled by the thought of being unable to have done this great thing himself, ethically encouraged by the ideal of following to the best of his ability this exceptional man’s example, here again good sense would have altered the situation. In the glass-clinking admiration at the banquet, even at the moment of elation of the fanfare and the ninefold hurrah, there would be a commonsensical notion that their hero’s exploit was not all that good, that really it was just a matter of chance that the party was being held for him, since with some practice at tricky turns any one of the participants could have done more or less the same. In short, instead of getting the strength, from this feast of admiration, in discernment and encouragement to do good, the glass-clinkers would rather go home more than ever prone to that most dangerous of all diseases, but also the most fashionable, admiring on the spree, as it were, what one personally considers trivial, because the whole thing has become a theatrical joke – while performing the stimulated clink-clink of admiration in the secret understanding that as near as doesn’t matter one might just as well be admiring oneself.

Or if a man did finally put himself at the forefront of an inspired undertaking, and as can easily happen (for eruptive enthusiasm and judicious apathy are always of a piece) a group of followers joined him – if now he went to the head of this troop, singing songs of victory until he approached the moment of decision and danger, and then turned to speak an inspiring word to the crowd, the whole scene would change. The participants would have judiciously transformed themselves into a crowd of spectators, who now, with the great self-satisfaction of the judicious, would put on the appearance of being themselves the ones to have cunningly and ironically tricked him into this enthusiasm, and of having joined in just to look and laugh at him. And this exceptional good sense would, in mutual appreciation, satisfy all of them infinitely, compared to any actual undertaking; to the mind of the judicious this would be brilliant. Not a word would be heard about instability, cowardice – no, one would pride oneself on delusion’s scintillating shrewdness, once again making it more difficult for oneself to be healed. Then the leader too would perhaps lose courage and the whole thing become as demoralizing as could be, because the excitement turned out to be feigned and an incentive to cowardly conceit.

Standing or falling with one’s deeds is no longer the thing; on the other hand, everybody sits around brilliantly making shift with the help of some reflection and then with the help of knowing very well what has to be done. But consider: that which people two by two in conversation, individually as readers, or as demonstrators in a general meeting, understand perfectly in the form of reflection and observation, they would be utterly incapable of understanding in the form of action. If someone went round and heard what others said ought to be done and, with a sense of irony, mir nichts und dir nichts,¹¹ then did something about it, everyone would be aghast; they would find it overhasty. But then, once they spoke together reflectively about it, they would understand that indeed it was just what ought to have been done.

The present age which, in its eruptive enthusiasm and then again in its apathetic indolence, likes so much to poke fun, is itself very close to being comical. But anyone with a grasp of comedy readily sees that the comical isn’t at all to be found where the present age fancies it is, and that in our day satire, to be at all beneficial and not cause irreparable harm, must have as its surety a consistent and well grounded ethical life-view, a sacrificing disinterestedness, and a high-born nobility that renounces the moment. Otherwise, the medicine becomes incomparably and infinitely more dangerous than the sickness. What is comical is precisely that an age like this even aspires to be witty, and to go in for the comical in such a big way, for this is quite certainly the ultimate and most eye-deceiving evasion. As for the comical, what is there to defy anyway in an age so thoroughly reflected? Lacking passion, it has no emotional collateral in the erotic, no liquid assets of enthusiasm or inwardness in politics and religion, of domesticity, piety or appreciation in daily and social life.

But however stridently the common herd laughs, life scorns the wit that possesses no assets. To aspire to wit without possessing the wealth of inwardness is wanting to be a spendthrift on luxuries yet do without life’s necessities; it is, as the proverb says, to sell one’s trousers to buy a wig. But a passionless age has no assets; everything becomes a transaction in paper money. Certain phrases and observations circulate among people, in part true and sensible, yet de-animated; for there is no hero, no lover, no thinker, no knight of faith,¹² no magnanimous person, no one in despair, who vouches for their validity by having experienced them primitively. Just as the rustle of banknotes in our business transactions makes us long to hear the ring of real coins, so we long in the present age for a little primitiveness. But what is more primitive than wit, more primitive even, or at least more surprising, than the first spring bud and the first delicate green stem? Yes, even if spring were to come by arrangement it would still be spring, but a witticism by arrangement would be an abomination. Suppose then that, in succession to the feverishness of eruptive enthusiasm, it came to the point where wit, that divine accidence (and, when it comes, that makeweight to the divine hint from the enigmatic origins of the inexplicable, that makes not even the wittiest man who ever lived dare to say ‘Tomorrow’ but, worshipfully, ‘God willing’),¹³ were changed to its shabbiest opposite, a trifling requisite of life, so that it became a profitable trade to manufacture and prepare and remake and buy up old and new witticisms – what a dreadful epigram for the witty age!

So, in the end money becomes the object of desire; indeed it too is a promissory note, an abstraction. In the present age even a young man will hardly envy a person his capacities or his skill, or the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; no, but his money, that is something he will envy. ‘Give it me,’ the young man will say, ‘that will do for me.’ And this young man will stray not into reckless actions, he will incur no debt for which repentance is the repayment. He will have nothing to reproach himself for, but he will die under the illusion that had he possessed money he would have lived, maybe even done something great.

Consider the novel. A young man in love, Ferdinand Bergland, is in love, but his prudence and reflection thwart him – and the decision he makes is a negative one. Nowadays not even the spontaneity of love is carefree as the lily of the field or in the lovers’ eyes more glorious than Solomon in all his splendour.¹⁴ Unconcern bows down under the weight of an erotic criticism and a despondent common sense, and falsifies the value – and the divine glory of the religious cannot come to its assistance – into the highest. A lover abandons his beloved from fear of financial difficulties. How different in the age of revolution when Lusard thoughtlessly, almost without a care, abandons the disgraced girl, leaving all the worries to her; for it is Claudine’s merit that she sees the task through, lives on almost nothing, thinks not about her financial difficulties but only of Lusard. But a decision was made, and it is this urge to decision that reflection drives away or wants to banish, and the individual suffers the consequences in the form of a dyspeptic, abnormal common sense. Decision in life tries in vain to catch hold of the individual, in vain the benediction awaits the moment of decision; people know well enough how to evade it, prudently and yet taken in, and if this goes on long enough, and they are eventually caught, they are like girls who have been engaged too long, who are seldom well suited to marriage.

After these observations of fact, and in disinterested service to the novel, it would seem appropriate to move from a comparison of the present age with the revolutionary age to a dialectical analysis of the former, and the attendant implications, independently of their presence or absence in the given instant. Incidentally, just as little as in the poetically creative and, if I may so put it, exemplary novel itself, so in this annotative, qua ministering, self-subordinating critique there is no question of which age is the better, or the more significant. The only question is of the ‘how’ of the age, and this ‘how’ is gained from a more universal viewpoint, the final consequences of which are arrived at by a conclusion ab posse ad esse¹⁵ and verified ab esse ad posse by observational experience.

As far as significance goes, it could certainly be that the task of reflection set for the present age will account for itself in a higher existence-form; and as for goodness, the person ensnared in reflection may indeed be just as well intentioned as one who is passionate and resourceful; just as, conversely, there can be as much to say in excuse of the person who goes astray in passion as of the one who on the sly realizes that he is letting himself be deceived by reflection while his fault never becomes public. Another hazard with reflection is not being able to tell whether it is a conclusion reached by deliberation that saves a person from evil deeds, or whether it is exhaustion brought on by the deliberation that saves him, by sapping his strength. But one thing is certain: like all knowledge, reflection too increases sorrow,¹⁶ and above all it is certain that just as for the individual, so too for the whole generation, there is no task or effort harder than to extricate oneself from the temptations of reflection. This is because these temptations are so dialectical, because a single clever invention is able to give the matter a sudden new twist, because reflection is able at any moment to put things in a new light and allow one some measure of escape; for it is possible even in the final moment of reflective decision to do it all over again – after much more exertion than someone with presence of mind needs when in the thick of things. But all this is still, after all, only reflection’s excuse, and the position as regards reflection is unchanged because it has been changed only in reflection. Even the fact that the comparison with a previous age does a disservice to the present age, inasmuch as the latter is undergoing the hardship of becoming, is still only a matter of reflection, since the very same circumstance provides it with the uncertainty of hope.

A passionately tumultuous age wants to overthrow everything, subvert everything. A revolutionary but passionless and reflecting age changes the manifestation of power into a dialectical sleight-of-hand, letting everything remain but slyly defrauding it of its meaning; it culminates, instead of in an uprising, in the exhaustion of the inner reality of the relationships, in a reflecting tension that nevertheless lets everything remain; and it has transformed the whole of existence into an equivocation which, in its facticity,¹⁷ is – whereas privately a dialectical fraud surreptitiously substitutes a secret way of reading – that it is not.

Morality is character; character is something engraved (charasso),¹⁸ but the sea has no character, nor does sand, nor abstract common sense, for character is precisely inwardness. Immorality is also character, as energy. Being neither one thing nor the other, on the other hand, is equivocation, and it amounts to equivocation in existence when the qualitative disjunction of qualities is weakened by a gnawing reflection. Passion’s uprising is elemental; equivocation’s dissolution is a quiet but busy, day-and-night sorites.¹⁹ The distinction between good and evil is enervated by a frivolous, superior, theoretical acquaintance with evil, by an arrogant judiciousness which knows that good is not appreciated and doesn’t pay in the world, so almost amounts to stupidity. No one is carried away by good into great exploits, no one is precipitated by evil into glaring sin; the one is just as good as the other; and yet for that very reason there is all the more to talk about, for equivocation is an exciting stimulant and quite otherwise verbose than is joy over the good or than is aversion to evil.

The coiled springs of life relationships, which exist only by virtue of the qualitatively distinguishing passion, lose their resilience; the qualitative expression of the distance between those who differ from each other is no longer the law for a relation in inwardness to each other, in the relationship. Inwardness is lacking, and the relationship to that extent doesn’t exist, or it is a supine cohesion. For the negative law is to be unable to do without each other, yet unable to stay together; the positive law is to be able to do without each other, yet to be able to stay together; or, still positively, to be unable to do without each other because of the cohesion. Instead of inwardness there enters another relation: the distinct does not relate to its distinctness, but it’s as if the pair stand there and keep an eye on each other, and this tension is really the ending of the relationship. This is not that cheerful, outspoken admiration which, quick to express appreciation, now doffs its hat to distinction, is now shocked by its pride and arrogance; nor is it the opposite relation, not at all – admiration and distinction become pretty well a pair of courteous equals keeping an eye on each other. This is not the burgher who with cheerful loyalty pays homage to the king and now is embittered by his tyranny; far from it – being a burgher becomes something else, it means being a third party. The burgher does not relate himself in the relationship, he is a spectator working out this problem: the relationship between a king and his subject; because time goes by in the appointment of committee upon committee – as long at least as there are still a number who want with total passion and each for himself to be this definite thing he is supposed to be. But finally it will end with the whole age becoming a committee. This is not the father who in indignation brings his fatherly authority to bear in a single curse, nor the son who defies him, a falling-out which may still end in the inwardness of reconciliation. No, the relationship in itself is irreproachable, for it is more likely to come to an end in any case, in so far as the parties do not relate essentially to each other in the relationship, the relationship itself being now a problem in which, as in a card game, the parties keep a watch on each other instead of relating to each other, count the expressions of the relationship (‘in each other’s mouth’),²⁰ instead of the resolute devotion of the relationship; because a long time passes as more and more have to renounce the modest yet so copious and God-pleasing tasks of the quieter life in order to realize something higher, in order to think over the relationships in a higher relation.

But, in the end, the whole generation becomes a representation – representing … well, there’s no saying who; a representation that thinks over the relations … well, it’s hard to say for whose sake. This is not the difficult adolescent who nevertheless quakes and trembles before his schoolmaster. No, the relation is sooner one of a certain impartiality in a mutual exchange between teacher and pupil on how to run a good school. Going to school does not mean quaking and trembling, nor does it mean just learning, but practically also interesting oneself in the problem of school education. The distinction between man and woman is not breached here in blatant dissipation, no, never – propriety is observed in such a way that it may always be said of the particular borderline case of ‘innocent’ philandering that it is a trifle. What should one call such a relation? I think ‘tension’, but not, be it noted, a tension that strains every nerve for a decisive turn of events, but a tension rather in which existence is exhausted – the ardour, enthusiasm and inwardness lost that make the chains of dependency and the crown of dominion light, that make the child’s obedience and the father’s authority happy, that make the humility of admiration and the eminence of distinction light-hearted, that give the teacher a uniquely valid meaning and thus the pupil the opportunity to learn, that unite the woman’s frailty and the man’s power in the equal strength of devotion. The relation is still there, but without the resilience to concentrate itself in inwardness so as to bring about a harmonious union. The relations announce their presence, yet as absent; not in a full-bodied way but more in a sort of shuffling, half-asleep incessancy.

Let me give quite a simple illustration to show what I mean. I was once a visitor in a family that had a clock whose mechanism was in some way out of order. But the trouble did not show in the spring suddenly whirring, the chain breaking, or even in a failure to strike; on the contrary, it went on striking but in a curious, abstractly normal but nevertheless confusing way. It did not strike twelve at twelve o’clock and then one at one o’clock, but at regular intervals struck just once. All day it went on striking in this way, yet never giving the hour. Likewise with a debilitating tension: the circumstances remain but in a state of abstract incessancy that prevents any breakdown; things appear that may be called manifestations of the circumstances, yet in their appearance they are not only imprecise but almost meaningless. The calming factor is that things stay the way they are, their facticity; what is dangerous is that this is just what encourages reflection’s subtle gnawing away. Against rebellion one can use force, and punishment awaits the demonstrably false witness, but it is hard to get rid of dialectical secretiveness; it already takes quite a sharp ear to trace the soundless tread of reflection as it steals down the secret path of equivocation.

The established order stands, but passionless reflection is calmed by the fact that it is an equivocation. One doesn’t want to abolish the monarchy, no, never; but if one could have it little by little transformed into illusion, one would gladly shout, ‘Hurrah for the King!’ One doesn’t want to have eminence brought down, no, never; but at the same time, if one could spread the knowledge that it is an illusion – then one would admire it. One can let the entire Christian terminology stand, but in the private knowledge that it is not supposed to mean anything decisive. And there will be no call to repent since, after all, one isn’t tearing anything down. One would no more want a powerful monarch than an energetic champion of freedom, or a religious plenipotentiary. No, one quite innocently wants to let the established order stand – but while being increasingly aware, in a reflective knowledge, that it isn’t standing. And one would be proud to imagine this was irony, as though in an era of negativity the true ironist weren’t the hidden enthusiast (just as the hero is the manifest enthusiast in a positive era), as though the true ironist were not self-sacrificial, seeing that the grand master himself, after all, ended by being punished by death.²¹

In the end, the tension of reflection assumes the status of a principle and, just as in a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so envy becomes the negatively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age. Yet one mustn’t straight away take this ethically as an accusation; no, reflection’s idea, if one may put it this way, is envy, and the envy is therefore twofold: a selfish envy in the individual, and then again the envy that the surroundings direct towards him. Reflection’s envy in the individual frustrates impassioned decision in him, and if it looks as if he were just about to succeed, the reflected opposition of the surroundings stops him. Reflection’s envy holds will and energy as though in captivity. The individual must then first of all break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him, and if he then succeeds he still does not stand in the open but in the vast penitentiary formed by the reflection of the surroundings; and he is related to this again through the reflection-relation in himself, from which only religious inwardness can free him, however much he sees through the falseness of that relation. But that it is a prison that reflection holds both the individual and the age in, that it is reflection that does it and not tyrants or secret police, nor priests or aristocrats – is a view of things that reflection does all in its power to prevent, maintaining the flattering illusion that the possibilities offered by reflection are something far greater than paltry decision. The selfish form of envy, in the form of desire, demands too much of the individual himself and impedes him by spoiling him, like a weak mother’s partiality; for envy in himself prevents the individual from becoming devoted. Envy in the surroundings, in which the individual himself again relates to others, is of a negatively critical kind.

But the longer this continues, the more reflection’s envy will acquire the status of ethical envy. Confined air always becomes noxious, and similarly, confinement in reflection, with no action or event to provide ventilation, develops that censorious envy. While in the tension of reflection the better energies keep each other in check, baseness rises to the surface, its impudence impressing like a kind of force and its contemptuousness becoming its protective privilege, because it allows it to escape envy’s attention.

Besides, it is deeply embedded in human nature not to be able to stay on top without a break and keep on admiring; it calls for change. Which is why even the most enthusiastic age requires an envious joke at the expense of excellence. This is perfectly in order and may be quite appropriate if someone, after the Shrovetide merrymaking with the excellent, turning his gaze once more upon it, is able to find it unchanged. For otherwise he will have lost more by joking than the joke was worth. There can be scope for envy in this way even in an enthusiastic age; and yes, envy, even if the age is less enthusiastic, so long as it still has the energy to endow envy with character and is clear in its mind what expressing it means, envy can have its own, albeit perilous, significance. Thus in Greece, for example, ostracism was an expression of envy, a kind of balance-restoring self-defence against excellence. It was practised in full consciousness ofits dialectical implication, namely that ostracism was a mark of excellence. In representing a rather earlier era in Greece it would therefore be ironic in the spirit of Aristophanes to have an utterly insignificant man sent into exile by ostracism. This irony would constitute even higher comedy than ironically, say, letting a nobody like that become ruler, simply because exile by ostracism is already the negative expression of excellence. This is why it would in turn be a still higher ironical comedy to have it all end with the people recalling the banished one because they couldn’t get on without him – which would have to be a total enigma to those he lived in exile with, since naturally they would have been unable to find any excellence in him at all. In The Knights, Aristophanes portrays the ultimate state of decay when, just as the Dalai Lama’s excrement is revered, the rabble ends by adoring, or adoringly contemplating, its reflection in the first and best of the trash – a situation that, in its degeneracy, corresponds in terms of popular government to putting imperial dignity up for auction.

But if envy still has character, ostracism is a negative honour. The man who told Aristides that he voted to banish him ‘because he couldn’t bear hearing him called the only just man’ did not deny Aristides’ excellence but was admitting something about himself: that his relation to this excellence was not that of the happy infatuation of admiration, but that of the unhappy infatuation of envy. But he did not disparage that excellence.

On the other hand, the more reflection gains the upper hand in developing lethargy, the more dangerous becomes the envy, because it then lacks the character to be aware of its own meaning; but responding to events in a characterless, evasively vacillating and cowardly manner, envy re-explains the same utterance in all sorts of ways – it wants it to be a joke, and if it sees that this doesn’t work it then says it was meant as an insult, and if that doesn’t work, then it wasn’t anything at all; it wants it to be a witticism, and if that doesn’t produce a response it explains that it wasn’t meant in that way either, it was ethical satire, something people should be concerned with; and if this miscarries, then it says it was nothing and no one’s concern. Envy assumes the status of the principle of lack of character, which wants to sneak up out of baseness to make itself into something, constantly protecting itself by conceding that it is nothing. Envy, lacking character, does not understand that excellence is excellence, does not see that it is itself a negative acknowledgement of excellence but wants to bring it down, have excellence disparaged until it is in fact no longer excellence. And envy directs itself against the excellence that is, as well as against that which is to come.

This self-establishing envy is levelling, and while a passionate age accelerates, raises and topples, extols and oppresses, a reflective, passionless age does the opposite – it stifles and impedes, it levels. Levelling is a quiet, mathematically abstract affair that avoids all fuss. While the eruptive short-term enthusiasm might look despondently for some misfortune, just to taste the strength of existence, no interruption can help the apathy that succeeds it, any more than it helps the levelling engineer. If an uprising at its peak is like a volcanic explosion in which not a word can be heard, then levelling at its peak is like a deathly stillness over which nothing can raise itself but into which everything impotently sinks down.

At the head of an uprising may be a single man, but no single man can take the lead in levelling, for then he would be the master and would have escaped the levelling. The single individual may assist in levelling, each in his own little group, but levelling is an abstract power and is abstraction’s victory over the individuals. In modern times levelling is reflection’s equivalent to fate in antiquity. The dialectic of antiquity pointed to prominence (the single great one – and then the crowd; one free and then the slaves); the dialectic of Christianity points for the time being to representation (the majority views itself in the representative; is liberated by the awareness, in a kind of self-consciousness, that it is they whom he is representing). The dialectic of the present age points to impartiality, and its most consistent if mistaken implementation is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative mutuality of the individuals.

Anyone may readily see that levelling has its deep significance in the ascendancy of the category of the generation over that of individuality. Whereas in antiquity the mass of individuals existed, as it were, to fix the price of the excellent individual, today the monetary standard has changed so that in equal proportions about so-and-so many human beings make one individual, so that it’s just a matter of getting the right number – then one has significance. In antiquity the individual in the crowd meant nothing at all – the man of excellence meant all of them. The present age points in the direction of mathematical proportionality, so that, in roughly proportional measure in all estates, so-and-so many make one individual. The eminent personage dared to allow himself everything, the individuals in the crowd nothing at all. Nowadays one understands that so-and-so many make one individual, and one quite logically counts oneself together with a few others (true, we call it uniting, but that is being polite) in the most trivial thing. For no other reason than to realize a whim one counts oneself together with a few and one does it – that is, one dares to do it. This is why in the end not even a very gifted person is able to liberate himself from reflection, for in the most trivial thing he soon realizes that he is only a fraction and loses the chance of religiousness’s infinite liberation.

Even if an association of several people had the courage to meet death, that today would not mean to say that each individual had the courage to do so. For what the individual feared more than death would be reflection’s judgement upon him, reflection’s objection to his wanting to venture something as an individual. The individual does not belong to God, nor to himself, nor to his beloved, nor to his art, nor to his scholarship; no, just as a serf belongs to an estate, so the individual realizes that in every respect he belongs to an abstraction under which reflection subsumes him. If, in our time, a group of people, each one individually, were able to decide to give all their fortune to some good cause or other, it would not follow that the individual himself could do the same; and again, not because he was in two minds about renouncing his fortune, but because much more than poverty he feared the judgement of reflection. If ten people could agree to vouch for love’s full and unqualified validity or – and without any crippling reflection – for the unlimited justification of enthusiasm, it would not follow that each of the ten could do so individually; for, even more than the bliss of love and bearing witness with their spirit,²² they would ambiguously love the judgement of reflection – so ten would have to be doing something that it is contradictory for more than one to do. The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida.²³ And to what can this be due other than to a disregard for the singling out of the religious individual before God in the responsibility of eternity? When terror begins here, one seeks comfort in company, and reflection then captures the individual for life. And those who didn’t even notice this crisis beginning fall without further ado under the relation of reflection.

Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power. Just as one calculates the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces,²⁴ so too can one calculate the law of levelling. For the individual who himself levels a few is carried along too, and so it goes on. Therefore, while the individual egoistically thinks he knows what he is doing, of all of them one has to say that they know not what they do,²⁵ for just as a something more that is not just the individuals’ emerges in the unanimity of enthusiasm, so too here a something more emerges. One conjures up a demon to which no individual is equal, and while in the brief moment of levelling’s pleasure the individual selfishly enjoys the abstraction, he is also putting his signature to his own downfall. The forward thrust of the enthusiast may end with his downfall, but the success of the leveller is eo ipso his downfall. The scepticism of levelling is something no age can halt, no age itself, nor the present age, for the very moment it wants to halt levelling it will merely confirm the law once again. Halting it is possible only if, individually singled out, the individual achieves the fearlessness of religiousness. I once saw a fight in which three men shamefully mistreated a fourth. The crowd stood and watched with indignation; its own murmurs of disapproval began to spur it to action. One or two in the crowd got together, took hold of one of the assailants and threw him to the ground, etc. That is to say, the avengers were confirming the same law as the assailants. If I can be allowed to bring my own humble person into the picture I can complete the story. I went up to one of the avengers and attempted to explain dialectically the inconsistency of their behaviour, but it was evidently quite impossible for him to enter into any exchange of the sort. All he did was repeat: ‘It serves him right: a scoundrel like that deserves to be three to one.’ There’s comedy here, to be sure, especially for someone who didn’t see how it began but heard one man say of another that he (the lone man) was three to one just when the opposite was the case: there were three against him. One thing would be the comedy of contradiction, as in when the watchman asked the solitary person to disperse, and the other is the comedy of the self-contradiction itself. But what seemed clear to me was that the better course was to abandon any hope of ending this scepticism, lest it be continued against me.

No single man – the eminent person in terms of superiority and of the dialectic of fate – will be able to halt levelling’s abstraction, for the single man’s is a negative elevation and the age of heroes is over. No congregation will be in a position to halt levelling’s abstraction, because in the context of reflection the congregation is itself in the service of levelling. Not even the individualities of nations will be able to halt it, for the abstraction of levelling reflects on a higher negativity, namely that of pure humanity. The abstraction of levelling, this spontaneous combustion of the human race produced by the friction arising when the individual, singling out inwardly in religiousness, fails to materialize, will be ‘constant’, as they say of a trade-wind; this abstraction consumes everything, but by means of it every individual, each for himself, may again be educated religiously, helped in the highest sense in the examen rigorosum²⁶ of levelling to gain the essentiality of the religious in himself. For the younger person who from the start realizes, however firmly he himself clings to what to him is admirable, that levelling is what the selfish individual and the selfish generation took for evil²⁷ but also something for the individual, each for himself, if honestly to God he wills it, can be the point of departure for the highest life – for him it will be genuinely educative to live in an age of levelling. Contemporaneity will, in the highest sense, have for him the ability to be religiously formative, and to be educational both aesthetically and intellectually, inasmuch as the comic will absolutely make its presence felt. For the height of comedy is precisely the subsuming of the single individual, with no middle term, under the infinitely abstract idea of pure humanity, inasmuch as all the organizational ways of concretizing individuality that temper the comical with relativity and provide the strength of a relative pathos, are consumed. But this again expresses the fact that salvation comes only through the essentiality of the religious in the single individual. And it will be an inspiration for him to realize that precisely this going astray gives the individual access to the highest, each for himself, if he is magnanimous enough to want it. But the levelling must go on, it has to happen, just as offence must needs come into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.²⁸

It is often said that a reformation has to begin with each person reforming himself. That, however, has not happened, because the idea of reformation has given birth to a hero, one who as such surely bought his appointment from God quite dearly. By attaching themselves to him directly, individuals acquire that costly purchase for a better, indeed a bargain, price, but they do not acquire the highest. The abstraction of levelling, on the other hand, is a principle that like the keen easterly wind enters into no intimate relation with the single individual but only into the relation of abstraction, which is the same for all. So no hero suffers for others or helps others; levelling itself becomes the strict taskmaster that looks after the rearing. And the person who learns the most from the rearing, and becomes the greatest, does not become the man of distinction, the hero, the one who stands out – this is prevented by levelling, which is consistent to the very end; and this person prevents it himself because he has grasped the meaning of levelling – no, he only becomes an essential human being in the full-bodied sense of equality. This is religiousness’s Idea. But the rearing is rigorous and the returns seemingly very meagre – seemingly, for if the individual is unwilling to learn to be satisfied with himself in the essentiality of religiousness, before God rather than ruling over the world; unwilling to be satisfied with ruling over himself, as a priest, with being his own audience, as an author, with being his own reader, etc.; if he is unwilling to learn to be inspired by this as the noblest he should achieve because it expresses equality before God and equality with all men, then he will not escape reflection; and then he may experience in respect of his talent one moment of delusion when he believes it is he who is doing the levelling, until he succumbs to the levelling himself.

It doesn’t help to appeal to or to summon a Holger Danske²⁹ or a Martin Luther. Their age is past, and it is really self-indulgence on the part of individuals to want something of that sort, the impatience of finitude that wants to have cheaply and at second hand what is bought dearly at first hand. It doesn’t help to found society upon society, for negatively something higher has been posited, even though the short-sighted society man cannot see it. In its immediate and beautiful formation, the individuality principle in the guise of the man of excellence, the man of rank, is a preliminary form of the generation, and it has the subordinate individuals form themselves in groups around the representative. In its eternal truth, this principle uses the abstraction and impartiality of the generation in levelling and in that way religiously develops the individual, with his concurrence, into an essential human being. For, impotent as levelling is with respect to the eternal, with respect to anything temporary it is overpowering. Reflection is a sling one is strapped into, but through the inspired leap of religiousness things change, and it becomes a sling that throws one into the embrace of the eternal. And reflection is, and remains, the most unyielding creditor in life. It has up until now astutely bought up all possible life-views, but the eternal life-view of essential religiousness is one that it cannot buy. On the other hand, it can tempt people away from anything else with wonderful illusions, and discourage them from anything else by reminding them of the past. But by leaping out into the depths one learns to help oneself, love all others as much as oneself, however much one is accused of arrogance and pride, for not accepting help – or of selfishness, for not wanting slyly to deceive others by helping them, by helping them to miss their chance of achieving what is highest of all.

If anyone says that what I propose here is common knowledge and something anyone can say, my answer is: So much the better, I seek no prominence, I have nothing against everyone knowing it, unless the fact that everyone knows and can say it means it is taken from me and lodged in the negative commonality. As long as I am allowed to keep hold of it, it loses none of its value for me by everyone knowing it.

The modern age has in reality tended towards levelling through many upheavals, none of which was levelling, however, since none of them was abstract enough but was still part of concrete reality. There can be an approximate levelling through one prominence bearing down on another, so that both are weakened; there can be approximate levelling through one prominence being neutralized by another, through an association of the individually weaker becoming stronger than the single prominence; there can be approximate levelling by a single estate, e.g. the clergy, the burghers, the peasantry, the people themselves; but all this is still only abstraction working within concrete relations of individuals.

For levelling really to come about a phantom must first be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage – this phantom is the public. Only a passionless but reflective age can spin this phantom out, with the help of the press when the press itself becomes an abstraction. In spirited times, times of passionate upheaval, even when a people wants to put the desolate idea of destruction and total subversion into effect, at least there is no public; there are parties and there is concreteness. The press will in such times itself assume the concrete character of the disarray. But just as sedentary professionals are especially prone to spin fantasies, so too a passionless, sedentary, reflective age, when the press, itself weak, is supposed to be the only thing that can keep life going in the prevailing torpor, will spin out this phantom. The public is levelling’s real master, for when levelling is only approximate there is something it levels with, while the public is a monstrous nothing.

The public is a concept that cannot possibly occur in antiquity. A people itself had to appear en masse, in corpore, at the scene of the action, had to take responsibility for what the single individual from its midst did, while the single individual in turn had to be there personally and, as this particular individual, had to submit to the summary court’s approval or disapproval. It is only when no energetic association gives substance to the concretion that the press creates this abstraction, the public, composed as it is of unreal individuals who are not and never can be united in the contemporaneousness of a situation or organization, and who nevertheless, it is insisted, are a whole. The public is a corps, more numerous than all the people together; but this corps can never be marshalled for inspection – indeed, it cannot have even so much as a single representative because it is itself an abstraction. And yet, if the age is passionless, reflective, erasing all that is concrete, the public becomes the whole that is supposed to include everything. But this situation again means precisely that the single individual is assigned to himself.

In the contemporaneity of the real moment and the real situation with real people, each of whom is something, there is support for the single individual. But the existence of the public makes for no situation and no assembly. The single individual who reads is, after all, not a public, and if little by little many individuals read – and perhaps everyone does – there is still no contemporaneity. The public may take a year and a day to ‘assemble’, and once it has done so it still does not exist. As you would expect, the abstraction formed paralogistically by individuals, instead of helping them, makes them recoil from one another. Someone who, with actual persons in the contemporaneity of the actual moment and situation, has no opinion of his own adopts the majority’s opinion, or, if more inclined to be combative, the minority’s. But note that the majority and the minority are actual human beings, and this is why resorting to them is supportive. The public, however, is an abstraction. To adopt the same opinion as these or those particular persons is to know that they would be subject to the same danger as oneself, that they would err with one if the opinion were wrong, etc. But to adopt the same opinion as the public is a treacherous consolation, for the public exists only in abstracto. So, while there has never been a majority so positively certain of being in the right and having the upper hand as the public, this is but little consolation for the single individual, for the public is a phantom that allows no personal approach. If someone adopts the public opinion today, and tomorrow is booed, it is the public that boos. A generation, a people, a general assembly, a community, a man – all still have a responsibility through being something, can be ashamed of being inconstant and disloyal; but a public remains the public. A people, an assembly, a human being can change in a way that allows one to say they are no longer the same; but the public can become the very opposite and is still the same – the public. The individual, however, by this very abstraction and abstract disciplining (in so far as he is not already formed in his own inwardness), will, if not destroyed in the process, be in the highest religious sense educated to be satisfied with himself and with his relationship to God, to make up his own mind instead of agreeing with the public, which eats up all the relative and concrete in individuality; and instead of keeping on counting heads will find his point of rest in himself before God. And this will be the absolute difference between the modern era and antiquity, namely that the totality is not the concretion that supports, that educates the individual though without developing him absolutely; but an abstraction which, in its abstract indifference, by repelling him helps him to become wholly educated – unless he is destroyed. What was discouraging about antiquity was that the man of distinction was what others could not be; the inspiring thing will be that the person who gains himself religiously is no more than what all can be.

The public is not a people, a generation, one’s era, nor a religious community, a society, nor such and such particular people, for all these are what they are only by virtue of what is concrete. No, not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything. You might say that a person belongs to the public for a few hours a day, that is, during the hours when he is nothing; because during the hours in which he is the definite person he is, he does not belong to the public. Composed of units like that, of individuals in the moments when they are nothing, the public is a kind of monstrous something or other, that abstract waste and emptiness that is all and nothing. But, for the same reason, anyone can commandeer a public, a public is something anyone can pick up, even a drunken sailor presenting a peep-show,³⁰ just as the Roman Catholic Church speciously expanded itself by appointing bishops in partibus infidelium;³¹ and the drunken sailor has in terms of dialectical consistency absolutely the same right to a public as the most distinguished, the absolute right to place all these many, many zeros before his number one. The public is all and nothing, it is the most dangerous of all powers and the most meaningless: one may speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, yet the public is less than even a single quite unremarkable actual human being. The category of the public is that phantom of reflection whose trickery has made individuals vain, since this monster, compared to which the concretions of reality appear trifling, is something anyone can pretend to. The public is the age of common sense’s own fairy-tale, in imagination^* it makes individuals greater than kings over a people; but then again, the public is the cruel abstraction by which individuals will be religiously educated – or destroyed.

The abstraction of the press (for a newspaper, a journal, is no political concretion and only in an abstract sense an individual), combined with the passionlessness and reflectiveness of the age, gives birth to that abstraction’s phantom, the public, which is the real leveller. This too, apart from its negative implications for the religious life, can have its significance. But the less idea there is in an age, and the more it relaxes in indolent recovery from the exhaustion of eruptive enthusiasm – if we also imagined the press becoming weaker and weaker because no big event or idea gripped the age – the more readily levelling becomes a decadent urge, a sensory stimulant that tickles for a moment and only makes bad worse, the conditions of salvation harder, and the probability of destruction greater. And if people have often portrayed the demoralization of autocracy and the decadence of revolutionary periods, the decadence of a passionless age is just as corrupt, even if its ambiguity makes it less striking. It can be of interest and importance, therefore, to give it a thought. In a state of enervated lethargy more and more individuals will aspire to be nothing – in order to be the public, this abstract whole formed, laughably, by the participant becoming a third party. This inert crowd that understands nothing itself and has nothing it wants to do, this gallery-public, tries now to pass the time, indulging in the fancy that all that anyone does happens just so as to give it something to chat about. Inertness sits there, aloof, legs crossed, and everyone willing to work – the king, the public official, the teacher of the people, the more capable journalist, the poet, the artist – will be hitched up to drag that inertness along, which aloofly believes the others to be the horses.

Were I to imagine this public as a person (for although some of the better ones belong momentarily to the public, they still possess an organizing concretion that keeps them firm, even if they fail to gain religiousness’s most high), most likely I would think of one or other Roman emperor, a large, well fed figure who suffers from boredom and therefore craves only the sensory stimulation of laughter, for the divine gift of wit is not worldly enough. So to relieve the monotony this person saunters about, more inert than evil, but negatively power-hungry. Anyone who has read the ancient authors knows the number of things an emperor could think up to make time pass more quickly. The public in the same way keeps a dog for its amusement. This dog is literary contempt. If someone superior appears, even someone of distinction, the dog is prodded and the fun begins. The snapping dog tears at his coat-tails, indulges in all sorts of unmannerly rudeness – until the public tires of it and says, ‘That will do now.’ The public has then levelled. The better one, the stronger one, has been maltreated – and the dog, well, yes, it is still a dog, which the public itself holds in contempt. Thus the levelling occurs through a third party; nothingness’s public has levelled through a third party which, in its contemptibleness, was already more than levelled and less than nothing. And the public is unrepentant, for it was not the public, it was the dog – just as one tells children the cat did it. And the public is unrepentant because what it did was not really demeaning – just a bit of fun. Now, had the instrument of levelling been some remarkable capacity, the indolent public would have been fooled, for then that instrument would have been yet another interference to be levelled. But when superiority is kept down by contemptibleness, and contemptibleness kept down by itself, then this is nothingness’s riddance. And the public will be unrepentant, for it is not really they who have the dog, they only subscribe; nor did they incite the dog directly to attack, nor was it straightforwardly they that whistled it off. In the event of a lawsuit the public would say, ‘The dog is not mine, it has no owner.’ And if the dog were picked up and sent off to the veterinary school to be put down, the public would still be able to say that, really, it was a good thing the bad dog was put down; that’s what we all wanted – even the subscribers.

Perhaps someone putting himself reflectively into a situation of this kind is inclined to focus on the superior one who suffered the maltreatment, and thinks a grave misfortune befell him. I cannot at all agree, for such experience does the person good who wants to be helped towards the most high, and it is something he rather should wish for, even if others may be upset on his account. No, what is awful is something else – the thought of the many human lives that are forfeited, or easily may be. I won’t even mention the lost or the led astray unto perdition, those who for money play the role of the dog, but the many unsettled ones, the irresponsible, the sensual, those who in their superior vapidity acquire no deeper impression of life than this foolish simpering; all the poor souls who are led into new temptation because in their small-mindedness they even derive self-importance from having sympathy for the assaulted, without grasping that it is always the assaulted who are the strongest in such a situation, without grasping that here, though with an awful yet ironic emphasis, it is a matter of: Weep not for him, but weep for yourselves.³²

This situation is the lowest kind of levelling, because levelling always corresponds to the common factor in terms of which all are made equal. Thus eternal life is also a kind of levelling, and yet it is not so; for the common factor is in the religious sense to be an essentially human being.

From these dialectical categories and their implications, independent of the actual presence or absence of the latter in the given instance, from the dialectical view of the present age itself, I now proceed to a dialectical grasp of the more concrete attributes in terms of which the present age appears in the novelistic version’s reflecting of them in domestic and social life. Here it is the shadowy side that becomes apparent, and even if there is no denying its facticity, it is nevertheless also certain that just as reflection itself is not the evil, so too may a very reflective age also have its bright side, precisely because a good deal of reflectiveness is the precondition of a meaningfulness that is greater than immediate passion – is the precondition of it if enthusiasm steps in and guides the powers of reflection into decision; and because a good deal of reflectiveness raises the average level of efficiency in the prerequisites for action – if religiousness steps in and takes over those prerequisites in the individual. Reflection is not the evil, but the reflective condition and stagnation in reflection are the abuse and the corruption that, by transforming the prerequisites into evasions, bring about regression.

The present age is essentially a sensible age, dispassionate, for which reason it has annulled the principle of contradiction. From this consideration we can deduce the variety of features that the author with his fine artistry and elevated composure has so disinterestedly rendered. For, naturally, the author’s own opinion is nowhere discernible, he merely reproduces the reflected image. One can say in general of a passionless but reflective age, compared to a passionate one, that it gains in extensity what is loses in intensity. But this extensity may become in turn the condition for a higher form, if a corresponding intensity takes over what is extensively at its disposal.

In existence, nullifying the principle of contradiction is the expression for being in contradiction with oneself. The creative omnipotence implicit in the passion of the absolute disjunction that brings the individual into the closure of agreement with himself is transformed into the extensity of common sense and reflection: through knowing and being everything possible, being in contradiction with oneself – that is, being just nothing. The principle of contradiction strengthens the individual in faithfulness to himself, so that, just as that resolute number three that Socrates speaks of so beautifully would rather endure anything than become the number four³³ or even a very large round number, he would rather be small but faithful to himself than all sorts of things in contradiction with himself.

What is it to chat? It is to have repealed the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can essentially speak; only the person who can remain essentially silent can essentially act. Silence is inwardness. Talking forestalls essential speaking, and reflection’s utterance weakens action by stealing a march on it. But the person who can speak essentially because he can keep silent will not have a whole world to speak of – just the one thing – and he will find time both to speak and stay silent.³⁴ Talkativeness gains in extensity: it has everything to talk about and goes on incessantly. In an age when individuals are not turned inwards in religious inwardness, quietly content, comfortably satisfied, but in the relationship of reflection search outwardly and for each other, when no great event ties the loose ends together in the unanimity of great change – the talking begins. The great event gives the passionate age (for the two go together) something to speak about; all want to speak about the same one thing – the poets sing about nothing else, it is alone what conversations echo, the greetings of passers-by contain references to this one thing. It is one and the same. Chatting, on the other hand, has a great deal to chat about. And so, when the important event was over, when silence returned, there was at least something to remember, something to think about, while one was silent; whereas a new generation speaks of quite different things. But chat dreads the moment of silence that would make the emptiness plain.

What proves to be the law regarding poetic production is the same, on a smaller scale, as that for every person’s life in social interchange and education. Anyone who experiences something originally also experiences, through ideality,³⁵ the possibilities of the same and the possibility of the opposite. These possibilities are his literary legal property. But his own private, personal actuality is not. His speaking, his producing, are thus borne by silence. The ideal perfection of his speaking, his producing, will correspond to his silence, and the absolute expression of that silence will be that the ideality contains the qualitatively opposite possibility. As soon as the productive artist gives up his own actuality, its facticity, he is no longer essentially productive; his beginning will be his end, and the first word already a sin against the holy modesty of ideality. A poetic presentation of this kind is therefore also, from an aesthetic point of view, a kind of private talkativeness and easily recognizable by the absence in equal measure of its opposite. For ideality is to deal fairly with the opposite. The person who is creative out of unhappiness, for example, will, if genuinely initiated into ideality, have as great a preference for writing about happiness as about unhappiness. But the silence with which he brackets off his own personal actuality is precisely the condition of his gaining ideality; otherwise, despite all precautions, such as setting the scene in Africa, etc., he will be recognizable by his one-sided preference. For an author must certainly, like everyone else, have his private personality, but this must be his aduton,³⁶ and just as one bars the entrance to a house by stationing there two soldiers with crossed bayonets, so the dialectical cross of qualitative opposites forms the equal dealing of ideality that prevents all access.

But what is true here of the larger context, where it is most clearly evident (which is why it was mentioned), is true also on a lesser scale in the smaller context. Here again, silence is the condition, in man’s conversation with man, of cultivated interchange. The more ideality and idea a person silently possesses, the more able he will be even in his daily intercourse to regenerate everyday life and the lives of everyday people in a way that makes it sound as if he speaks only from a distance, even about this or that particular fact. The less ideality and the more extroversion, the more the conversation will tend towards trivial patter and the dropping of names, ‘absolutely reliable’ private intelligence on what this and that named person has said, etc.; a chattering of confidences about what one oneself wants and does not want, now plans to achieve, would have said on that occasion, about what girl one is courting, why one nevertheless doesn’t want to get married, etc. In human intercourse the inwardness of silence is the condition of cultivated speech; to chat is inwardness’s twisting, inside-out extroversion, lack of cultivation.

In the novel one finds excellent examples of this kind of chatting, a matter of mere trifles but always about specific persons mentioned by name, whose trivial circumstances are interesting as much as anything for their names. Just as the precentor, Link,³⁷ thinks he has spoken with Sophie although all she said was ‘No’, so there are many long conversations in which it seems something was said, a great deal indeed, just because names are mentioned. A person who chats must presumably chat about something, since the aim is to have something to chat about; but this something is not something in the sense of ideality, for in that case one speaks. It is something only in the sense of being a trivial fact: that Mr Madsen has become engaged and given his sweetheart a Persian shawl, that Petersen the poet plans to write a new book of verse, that Marcussen the actor mispronounced a word last night.

Suppose a law could be enforced – we can imagine it – suppose, that is, a law was made that didn’t forbid people to speak but merely enjoined that everything spoken about had to be spoken about as though it happened fifty years ago. All the chatterers would be done for, they would despair, and yet it couldn’t interfere with those genuinely able to speak. An actor’s mispronunciation of a word can be of real interest only if there is something remarkable in the slip of the tongue itself, and in that case the fifty years would make no difference – but Miss Gusta, for example, would be miserable; she who had been to the theatre herself that very evening, had sat in the box with the commercial counsellor’s lady, Mrs Waller, who had herself detected the mispronunciation and even seen one of the chorus laughing about it, etc. But it would indeed be a pity and a cruel fate for all these talkative people who, after all, also have to live; but that of course is why the law is just a posito.³⁸

Because of this chatting the distinction between private and public is nullified in a private–public chattiness, which is just about what the public amounts to. For the public is that publicity that is interested in what is for the most part private. What no one would dare present to a meeting, what no one would be able to speak about, what even chatterers would scarcely admit to having chatted about, can very well be put in writing for the public and known by them in the guise of the public.

What is formlessness? It is the repealed passionate distinction between form and content, which therefore, in contrast to insanity and stupidity, may contain truth, but the truth it contains can never be essentially true. Formlessness will be able to expand in extensity, comprehensively, attacking on all fronts, in contrast to essential content which has the inadequate limitation of its firmness, if you will, intensively present in self-deepening. The ubiquity of formlessness in a passionless, reflective age finds expression, besides in the frivolous dallying between the most diverse people, in its opposite: a ruling penchant and desire to act ‘for the sake of principle’. Principium, as the word indicates, is what is primary, that is, the substantial, the idea in the unopened form of feeling and enthusiasm which, with its inner drive, impels the individual forward. The passionless person lacks this; for him the principle becomes something external for which he is willing to do both this and that and also the opposite. The life of the passionless person is not a principle that reveals itself and unfolds; on the contrary, his inner life is something quick, continually on the move and chasing after something to do ‘for the sake of principle’. Principle in this sense becomes an unnatural something or other, an abstraction just like the public. And although the public is a something so monstrous that even all nations assembled at one time, and even all souls in eternity, are not so numerous as the public, yet everyone including the drunken sailor has a public – and that is also how it is with principle. It is some monstrous something or other from which even the most insignificant person can tease out a most insignificant action and think himself immensely important. A harmless nobody suddenly becomes a hero ‘for the sake of principle’, and the effect of the situation is basically just as comical as if a man – or everyone, if it became the fashion – were to go about wearing a cap with a sixty-foot peak. If a man ‘for the sake of principle’ were to have a little button sewn on the breast pocket of his coat, that trivial and perfectly reasonable precaution would suddenly acquire tremendous importance – not improbably, a society would be founded on the strength of it.

Again, precisely this ‘for the sake of principle’ nullifies a passionate distinction of decorum; for decorum, as was indicated earlier, is rooted in immediacy (the first or the achieved), in feeling, in inspiration’s inner drive and in inner self-consistency. For the sake of principle one can do anything and everything and it essentially makes no difference, just as one’s life remains insignificant even if for the sake of principle one supports everything called ‘the demand of the times’; even if as a stage extra one becomes just as well known in this guise of Träger der öffentlichen Meinung³⁹ as those barrel-organ figures that appear with the bowl and bow. For the sake of principle one can do anything, take part in anything, and be oneself an inhuman neither one thing nor the other. A man can be interested for the sake of principle in establishing a brothel (indeed, many political observations to this effect have been made by the police), and the same man can for the sake of principle be interested in a new hymnal which the times are supposed to demand. And just as it would be unfair to conclude from the first that the man was dissolute, so might it be overhasty to conclude from the latter that he wanted to read or sing from the hymn-book. In this way everything becomes permissible for the sake of principle; and just as the police ‘in the line of duty’ enter many places where others are not admitted, and just as one cannot conclude from their presence there anything about a policeman’s person, so too can one do everything on principle and evade all personal responsibility. ‘For the sake of principle’ one tears down what one admires^* – which is nonsense, for any bringing forth, any creating, is always latently polemical, because it needs room; but that which pulls down is indeed nothing, and a principle of demolition is emptiness – what does it need room for? But modesty or regret or responsibility have a harder time getting a grip on such behaviour, for after all, it was done for the sake of principle.

What is superficiality and its characteristic propensity, ‘the urge to show off’? Superficiality is the repealed passionate distinction between hiddenness and revelation. It is a revelation of emptiness, which in scope does have the trickster’s deceptive advantage over essential revelation and its essential homogeneity of depth; superficiality offers a multifarious or omnifarious appearance. And the show-off tendency is the self-infatuation of a conceited reflection. The concealment of the inner life is given no time for anything essential to be deposited that can become revealed, but is much too quickly muddied up; and by way of compensation selfish reflection tries its best to draw all eyes towards this motley show, as does the commercial counsellor’s consort, Mrs Waller.

What is flirtation? It is the annulled passionate distinction between essentially loving and being essentially dissolute. Neither the essential lover nor the essential debauchee is guilty of flirting, which only trifles with possibility. Thus flirtation is the indulgence to dare brush with evil and a dispensation from realizing the good. Acting for the sake of principle is therefore also to flirt, because it contorts moral action into an abstraction. But flirtation has the advantage in scope, for one can flirt with all sorts of things while only one girl can be loved essentially; and, if understood in the proper erotic sense (even if desire in the time of moral lapse blinds the fickle person), all adding is a subtracting, and the more one adds the more one subtracts.

What does it mean to reason things out? It is the repealed passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. As abstract thought, reasoning is not deep enough dialectically; as belief and conviction, it lacks full-blooded individuality. But reasoning does have the spurious advantage when it comes to scope, for a thinker can comprehend his field of knowledge, a man can have an opinion about something pertaining to a particular discipline, hold a conviction on the strength of a particular life-view, but the person who reasons things out can reason about all things possible.

Anonymity has, in our time, a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized; it has almost epigrammatic significance. Not only do people write anonymously, they write anonymously in their own name, indeed speak anonymously. Just as an author puts his whole soul into his style, so a person essentially puts his personality into his speech, though this must be understood with the limiting exception pointed out by Claudius in a similar situation when he said that when you charm a book the spirit emerges – unless there is no spirit there.⁴⁰ Nowadays it is possible actually to be speaking with people, and to be forced to admit that what they say is exceedingly sensible, and yet the conversation leaves the impression that one has been speaking with an anonym. The same person can say the most contradictory things, can coolly utter something that, coming from him, is the most bitter satire upon his own life. The remark itself is very sensible, would go over very well at a stockholders’ meeting as part of a discussion fabricating some resolution – much as, in an actual factory, paper is made out of rags. But the sum-total of all these many remarks does not amount to personal human discourse such as can be carried on by even the most simpleminded man able to talk of very little but who nevertheless does speak.

The commercial counsellor’s consort Mrs Waller’s comment on the demonic is very true, and yet as she says it she gives one precisely the impression of being an anonymity, a barrel-organ, a musical box. The remarks become so objective, their range so all-encompassing, that in the end it is altogether incidental who says it, which in terms of speaking humanly corresponds exactly to acting for the sake of principle. And just as the public is a pure abstraction, so in the end will it be with human speech – there will no longer be someone speaking but an objective reflection will gradually impart an atmospheric something, an abstract sound that will render human speech redundant, just as machines make workers redundant. In Germany there are even manuals for lovers, so it will probably end with lovers sitting and speaking anonymously to each other. There are manuals on everything, and being educated will in general soon consist in being word-perfect in a greater or smaller compilation of observations from such manuals, excellence being measured by one’s skill in picking out the particular one, just as the compositor picks out letters.

The present age is thus essentially sensible. Perhaps it knows more on average than any previous generation; but it is devoid of passion.^* Everyone is well informed; we all know what path to take, and what paths can be taken, but no one will take them. If someone eventually overcame his reflection and acted, a thousand reflections from outside would immediately form an opposition to him, because only proposals further to consider the matter are received with a surge of enthusiasm, while proposals for action are received with lethargy. Some in their superior smugness would find the enthusiasm of those who act ridiculous; others would be envious because it was the other who made the start when they knew just as well as he what was to be done but hadn’t done it. Others would exploit the fact that at least one person had acted as an occasion for parading a host of critical observations and fetching out a stock of arguments to show how much more sensibly he could have acted. Others would be busy guessing the outcome, and if possible influencing the enterprise in the direction of their own hypotheses. There is a story about two English lords who came riding along and met a luckless horseman about to fall from his horse, which had suddenly started to gallop off while he was shouting for help. One lord glanced at the other and said, ‘A hundred guineas he falls off.’ ‘Taken,’ replied the other. They set their thoroughbreds off at a gallop and hurried ahead to get all the gates opened and all obstacles out of the way.

Similarly, the sensibleness of the present age, only with less of the impetuous millionaire heroics, could be personified as someone who, inquisitive, courteous and worldly-wise, would have the passion at most to make a bet. Life’s existential tasks have lost the interest of actuality; no illusion protects the divine growth of inwardness that matures to decisions. One person is curious about another, all wait in indecision and versed in evasion for someone to come along who wills something – so as to place their bets on him. And since in this age, in which so little is actually done, such an extraordinary amount occurs in the way of prophecies, apocalypses, hints and insights into the future, there is probably nothing for it but to join in, although I do have the advantage over the others, with their heavy responsibilities in prophesying and warning, in the free and easy certainty that no one will dream of believing me. Therefore I do not even simply ask people to mark an X on the calendar, or go to the trouble of noting whether it comes true or not. For if it does come true, they will have other things to think about than my fortuity, and if it doesn’t – well then, I will still be a prophet in the modern sense, for a modern prophet is someone who makes prophecies, nothing more. And that is understandable, for in a way a prophet can do no more anyway. It was after all Guidance that made the fulfilment tally with the ancient prophet’s pronouncements; perhaps we modern prophets, lacking Guidance’s endorsement, could add, as Thales did, ‘What we prophesy will either happen or not happen, for the gift of prophecy is one that the gods have bestowed also upon us.’⁴¹

It is so far from the truth that the age will be saved by the idea of sociality, of communion, that this idea constitutes, on the contrary, the scepticism needed for the development of individuality properly to occur, in so far as every individual either is lost or, disciplined by abstraction, finds himself religiously. The principle of association (which can at best have validity with respect to material interests) is, in our time, not affirmative but negative; it is an evasion, a diversion, an illusion, whose dialectic is this: as this principle strengthens individuals, it also enervates them; through solidarity it strengthens numerically, but this from the ethical point of view is also to debilitate. Only when the single individual has acquired in himself an ethical stance in face of the whole world can there be any question of genuinely uniting; otherwise, the union of the individually weak becomes just about as uncomely and corrupt as child marriages. Formerly, the ruler, the man of excellence, those of rank, each had his own opinion; the others had the closedness or inflexibility of not daring or of not being able to have an opinion. Now everyone can have an opinion but, in having it, they have to join forces numerically. Twenty-five signatures to the silliest notion is an opinion, the most eminent mind’s most well-considered opinion is a paradox. Public opinion is an inorganic something or other, an abstraction. When the context has become meaningless large surveys are useless; the best thing to do then is pick out the discourse’s individual parts. When the mouth gossips there is no point in wanting to say something coherent; the best thing to do is take each word by itself – similarly, with the situation of individuals.

The change-over will also be this: whereas in older formations (of relations between generation and individual) the non-commissioned officers, officers, company commanders, generals, the hero (that is, the men of excellence, the men of rank within their various hierarchies, the leaders), were recognizable, and each (according to his authority) along with his little detachment was picturesquely and organically ordered within the whole, each supported by and supporting the whole, now the men of excellence, the leaders (according to their respective rank) will be without authority precisely because they will have divinely understood the diabolical principle of levelling; they will be unrecognizable, like plainclothes police carrying their badge secretly and giving support only negatively – that is, by repulsion – while the infinite impartiality of abstraction judges every individual, examines him in his isolation.

This formation is dialectically the opposite of that of the judges and prophets, and just as the danger for them was that of not being respected for their respective authorities, so the danger for the unrecognizables is to be recognized, to be lured into acquiring respect and status as authorities, thus preventing the highest development. For they are unrecognizable, or like secret agents, not according to a private instruction from God – for that is the situation of the prophets and judges – but they are unrecognizable (without authority) because they have themselves apprehended the universal in equality before God, and because they apprehend this every moment, answerably, something which prevents them from being distracted and becoming guilty of acting inconsistently with the requirements of their life-view. This formation is dialectically the opposite of the systematizing that makes the generation anticipated in the men of excellence the supporting factor for individuals, since as an abstraction, negatively supported by the unrecognizables, it turns now polemically against individuals – so as to save every single individual religiously.

And thus, when the generation which has itself wanted to level, has wanted to be emancipated and to revolt, has wanted to do away with authority and has thereby in the scepticism of association brought about the desolating forest fire of abstraction; when this generation, by levelling through the scepticism of association, has done away with individual personalities and all the organic concretions, has got humanity in their place and made man’s relation to man a matter of numerical ratios; and when for a moment this generation has thus found diversion in the broad vista of an abstract infinity, undisturbed by the limitation of even the slightest elevation; when there is ‘only air and sea’⁴² – then begins the work in which individuals must help themselves, each on his own. For it will not be as it once was, that when things began to get a little hazy for them, individuals could look to the nearest eminence to regain their bearings. That time is now past; they must either be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be infinitely saved in the essentiality of religiousness.

Very many may cry out in despair, but that will not help, it is now too late. If authority and power have formerly been misused in the world and have brought a nemesis of revolution upon themselves, then it was in fact impotence and weakness that had aspired to stand on their own feet and that have therefore now brought that nemesis upon themselves. And not one of the unrecognizables dare presume to help directly, to speak directly, to teach directly, to make the decision at the head of the crowd (instead of helping the individual towards the decision, where he himself is, supporting him negatively). That would mean that unrecognizable’s dismissal, because he would be meddling in the short-sighted inventiveness of human sympathy instead of obeying the orders of the deity, the deity so wrathful yet so full of grace; for development is still a step forward, because all those individuals who are saved gain the specific gravity of religiousness, gain its essentiality at first hand from God. Then it will be said, ‘Look, all is ready;⁴³ look, the cruelty of abstraction reveals the vanity of the finite as such; look, the abyss of the infinite is opening up; look, the sharp scythe of levelling lets all, each for himself, leap over the blade – look, God waits! Leap, then, into the embrace of God.’ But even the most trusted of the unrecognizables, whether it was the woman who carried him in her belly he would help, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life, shall not dare, and could not, help them – they must make the leap by themselves, and God’s infinite love is not a relation at second hand for them. Yet the unrecognizables (according to their respective ranks) will have a twofold task compared with the men of distinction (in the same ranks) in an earlier formation, for the unrecognizables have to keep on working – and at the same time strive to conceal the fact that they are still working.

But the desolating abstraction of levelling will be continually kept going by its servants, in case it should end with an earlier formation’s return. These servants of levelling are the servants of the power of evil, for levelling itself is not of the deity, and every good human being will have moments when he could weep over its desolateness; but the deity permits levelling and wants to cooperate with the individuals, that is, each for himself, and to bring out the most high. The unrecognizables recognize the servants of levelling but dare not use power or authority against them, for then things would regress, because it would be instantly obvious to a third party that the unrecognizable was an authority, and then this third party would be kept from the most high. Only through a suffering act will the unrecognizable dare help levelling along, and will by that same suffering act condemn the tool. He dare not defeat the levelling directly – that would mean his dismissal, since his action would suggest authority – but he will defeat it in suffering, and express again thereby the law of his existence, which is not to rule, guide, lead, but in suffering to serve, to help indirectly. Those who have not made the leap would interpret the suffering act of the unrecognizable as his defeat, and those who have made the leap would have a notion that it was his victory; but there would be no certainty because certainty could come only from him, and for him to give certainty to one single man would mean his certain dismissal, for he would have been unfaithful to the deity and playing at authority – he would not in obeying the deity have learned to love men infinitely by constraining himself, but fraudulently, by domineeringly constraining them, even if they asked for it.

But I break off here. Naturally the only interest this can have is as a prank, for if it is true that every person is to work out his own salvation, then making prophecies about the world’s future is tolerable and admissible at best as a form of recreation, a joke, just like playing bowls or tilting at the barrel.

My thoughts, which have not for a moment forgotten Two Ages, turn back to it in grateful conclusion. The criticism I have contributed is what I have learned from the author’s novel, and this is understood in the sense that, if there is anything immature, untrue or foolish in my presentation, then that is my own doing. Anyone who finds it false should therefore look to me, but anyone who finds truth in what I have said, finds his view of life strengthened or enriched by it, is referred to the teacher – the novel’s author.

As little in the critique as in the novel has the question been one of judging or evaluating the ages – only of depicting them. The novel’s Preface explicitly points out that both approaches could be equally valid, and the novel ends with the hope for the present age expressed by the present age; which is, no doubt, as was said before, on average far more intelligent, informed and reflectively developed than was the age of revolution; and when it gets the strength it will act with far greater intensity in relation to the extensity at its disposal. For the present age admittedly has the advantage in scope but not in intensity, which is why it is true of the present age as in the novel that our men of excellence belong to an older generation,^* while among the younger ones there is more general competence but no eminence. If power and enthusiasm take over in individuals, it may become evident that really the present age stands, or has been standing, in its own light. Just as a woman when she puts on far too much finery fails to look chic because that requires tasteful proportion, so the present age seems to have decked itself out too much in the multifariousness of reflection to give harmonious balance a chance. But one must always bear in mind that reflection in, or by, itself is not something pernicious, that on the contrary its thorough working through is the condition of more intensive action.

The conditions for inspired action are these: first comes the immediate inspiration; then the time for prudence, which because immediate inspiration calculates nothing, by virtue of its calculating ingenuity takes on an appearance of superiority; and then finally, the strongest and most intensive enthusiasm, which, following upon prudence, therefore sees what the most prudent thing to do is, but disdains to do it, and for that very reason acquires the intensity of infinite enthusiasm. This most intensive enthusiasm will for the time being be completely misunderstood, and the question is whether it can ever be popular – that is, whether prudence will ever be so much a presupposition in the average man as to lose, in his eyes, its seductive charm, so that he will not only be able to be equal to it but also in the most intensive enthusiasm, so to speak, waste it, content with the satisfaction of infinite enthusiasm; for just because it goes against prudence, action arising from such enthusiasm will never be obvious.

Thus Socrates was no man of immediate enthusiasm; on the contrary, he was prudent enough to see what he should do to be acquitted, but he disdained to act accordingly, just as he refused the speech offered to him.⁴⁴ For that reason alone there is nothing obvious about his heroic death; even in death he continues to be ironical by posing to all wise people the problem of whether he really had been all that wise, seeing that he did the opposite. It is on this point that prudence gets caught in the verdict of its own, and of the surroundings’, reflection. It fears that acting contrary to prudence will be confused with acting without prudence. This danger is unknown to immediate inspiration, which is why the impetus of the most high is needed in order to break through. And this most intensive enthusiasm for the most high is not some rhetorical poppycock about a higher and still higher and a highest-of-all; it is recognizable by its category, that it acts against the understanding. Thus immediate good-naturedness knows nothing of the danger of reflection either, whereby a good nature could be confused with weakness – for which very reason a religious impetus has to follow reflection in order to set good nature afloat.

On first reading Two Ages, I thought it might have been more fitting for the author to give it another title, more in the spirit of A Story of Everyday Life, because the reflection of the age didn’t properly become clear to me in the presentation. Later I became convinced of the opposite, and have had both a rich and, for me, most welcome opportunity to admire the author’s ingenuity. Thus my position cannot be that of a hard-pressed critic who, after hastily leafing through the book, in a fit of good humour seizes his pen to draw others’ attention to the work. On the contrary, I have read the novel through several times, and wish that the esteemed unknown author would regard this perhaps excessively lengthy review as a token of my acknowledgement of the pleasure I have had in reading it, and of my having found it to accord with the memory of so many an earlier pleasure for which I am indebted to this signature. For me, at least – and I really believe this must be true for anyone who has learned to look humanly at life – the signature’s twenty years are not something that disturbs or secretly tickles an impatient curiosity for novelty – rather, they constitute something that increases our pleasure. A capital stock, as we know, doubles in twenty years. Shouldn’t the human powers of appreciation similarly increase? If so, pleasure experienced in A Story of Everyday Life and appreciation of its author should also have doubled. And so, too, will it be with a human being’s ability to appreciate, unless he inhumanly confuses himself with some abstract something or other – with the age, our age, etc. – and, rather, by himself fully grasps what it is to be a human being, finding his joy in excellence increasing with each year that passes, and thereby finding again the edification to live in appreciation of his elders.

Directing attention to the novel is not my business, and would seem to me improperly presumptuous. But if anyone were to seek my advice, I would counsel them to read it, and if they have already read it, to read it again.

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