2 Equilibrium Between The Aesthetic And The Ethical In The Development Of Personality

2 Equilibrium Between The Aesthetic And The Ethical In The Development Of Personality

2 EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC

AND THE ETHICAL IN THE DEVELOPMENT

OF PERSONALITY

My friend!

What I have said to you so often I say once more, or rather I shout it to you: either/or; aut/aut. A single aut offered as a caution does not make matters clear, since the question here is too important for one to be satisfied with a part and too internally consistent not to be grasped in the whole. There are situations in life to which it would be ridiculous, or a kind of insanity, to apply an either/or; but also, there are people whose souls are too disjointed to grasp what such a dilemma implies, whose personalities lack the energy to be able to say with feeling: either/or. These words have always made a strong impression on me and they still do, especially when I mention them by themselves in this way and out of context; the most frightful conflicts can now be set in motion. Their effect on me is that of an incantation; I become exceedingly serious, sometimes well-nigh shaken. I think back to an early youth when, without properly grasping what it means to make a choice in life, I listened with childlike trust to the talk of my elders and for me the moment of choice became solemn and august, notwithstanding that in choosing I was only following another’s instructions. I think of the moment when, later in life, I stood at the crossroads, when my soul was matured in the hour of decision. I think of the many less important, yet for me not indifferent, occasions in life where choice was what mattered. For although there is only one situation where this phrase has its absolute meaning, namely where it points on the one hand to truth, righteousness, and holiness, and on the other to desire and susceptibility, and to dim passions and perdition, it is important to choose rightly even when the choice in itself is harmless; to test oneself so as never to have to begin a retreat to the point one started out from, and thank God for having nothing worse to reproach oneself for than wasting time. I use these words in daily speech as others use them, and it would be foolish pedantry to stop doing so; but there can be times when I catch myself having used them of things that are altogether indifferent. They then take off their humble attire. I forget the insignificant thoughts they disjoin, they appear to me in all their dignity, in their robes. Just as in everyday affairs an official appears in civilian clothes and mingles with the crowd unremarked, so too with those words in everyday speech; for when instead he appears in authority he sets himself apart from everyone else. Like an official of that kind whom I see usually only on solemn occasions, these words appear before me and my soul always becomes serious. And although to some extent my life has its either/or behind it, I know very well that there may still be many a situation, in which its full meaning is yet to be encountered. I hope, however, that these words may at least find me in a worthy state of mind when they make me pause on my way, and that I shall succeed in choosing the right course. But I shall strive in any case to choose with unfeigned seriousness, and then at least I shall dare to comfort myself that I shall return all the sooner to the right path.

And now for you – you certainly use this phrase often enough, indeed with you it has almost become a byword – what does it mean to you? Nothing at all. For you it is, according to your own expressions, a twinkling of the eye, a snap of the fingers, a coup de main, an abracadabra. You can produce it at every opportunity, nor without effect. Its effect on you is that of a strong drink on a neurasthenic. You become totally intoxicated in what you yourself call the higher lunacy. ‘In it is contained all life’s wisdom, but never has anyone expounded it so pithily – as if a god in the guise of a bogle were talking to suffering humanity – as that great thinker and true philosopher of life, who said to a man who had tossed his hat onto the floor. “If you pick it up, you’ll get a beating, if you don’t pick it up you’ll also get a beating, now you can choose!”’ You take great delight in ‘comforting’ people when they appeal to you in moments of crisis. You listen to their explanations and then say, ‘Yes, I see quite plainly now, there are two possibilities, one can either do it or not do it; my honest opinion and my friendly advice is as follows: do it or don’t do it, you will regret both.’ But he who mocks others mocks himself, and it is not a trivial matter but a deep mockery of yourself, a sad proof of how loose the joints of your soul are, that your view of life focuses on a single sentence, ‘I say merely either/or.’ If you were really serious there would be nothing to be done with you; one would have to put up with you as you were and regret that melancholy or frivolity had weakened your mind. Since, however, one knows very well that that isn’t the case, it is tempting not to pity you but to wish, indeed, that the circumstances of your life may some day strap you on their rack and force you to come out with what really dwells within you, that the more rigorous examination that is not satisfied with talk and witticisms should begin. Life is a masquerade, you tell us, and this, for you, is an inexhaustible source of amusement, yet still no one has succeeded in knowing you; for all your revelations are constantly illusions; that is the only way you can breathe and make sure people do not press in on you and prevent you drawing breath. Your activity is designed to keep yourself hidden, and in that you succeed, your own mask is the most enigmatic of all; for you are nothing and exist merely in relation to others, and you are what you are in this relation. To an affectionate shepherdess you languidly offer a hand and, instantly, are masked in every kind of pastoral sentimentality; you deceive a venerable spiritual father with a fraternal kiss, etc. You yourself are nothing, an enigmatic figure, on whose brow is written ‘either/or’ – ‘for that is my slogan, and these words are not, as grammarians think, disjunctive conjunctions; no, they belong inseparably together and should therefore be written as one word, seeing that together they form an interjection which I shout at mankind, as one shouts “Hip” at a Jew’.¹ Now although nothing you say in this vein has any effect upon me, or if it does, the most it can do is provoke a righteous indignation, nevertheless for your own sake I will answer you. Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this? And does it not dismay you? I have seen people in real life who deceived others for so long that in the end their true nature could not reveal itself; I have seen people play hide-and-seek for so long that finally, through them, madness forced their secret thoughts upon others as distastefully as hitherto they had proudly kept them to themselves. Or can you imagine anything more frightful than that it might end with your nature dissolving into a multitude, with your really becoming many, becoming, like that unhappy demoniac, a legion,² and in that way losing the innermost, the most holy thing in a man, the unifying power of personality? Truly, you should not trifle with what is not only serious but terrifying. There is, in every person, something which to some degree prevents him from being completely transparent to himself; and this can be on such a scale that he is so inexplicably woven into the circumstances of life which lie outside him that he is almost unable to reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the unhappiest of all. And you do the same wantonly, you train yourself in the art of being a riddle to everyone. My young friend! what if no one bothered to guess your riddle? What pleasure would you get out of it then? But, first of all for your own sake, for the sake of your salvation – for I know of no state of the soul that better deserves to be called perdition – stop this wild flight, this passion for destruction, which rages in you; for that is what you want to do, you want to destroy everything; you want to sate the hunger of doubt upon life. It is to this end that you cultivate yourself. It is for this that you steel your mind. For this much you gladly admit, that you are good for nothing, that all that gives you pleasure is marching seven times round life and blowing on the horn,³ and then letting the whole thing come tumbling down so that your soul may find peace, yes, sad that you are able to summon forth Echo, for Echo is heard only in emptiness.

However, I doubt if I can make any progress with you in this direction; besides, my head is, if you like, too weak to put up with, or as I prefer it, too strong to find pleasure in, things constantly swirling before my eyes. So I shall start from another angle. Imagine a young man at an age when life really begins to have meaning; he is healthy, pure, joyful, mentally gifted, full of hope and himself the hope of all who know him; imagine that, yes, it’s hard to say this – imagine that he was mistaken about you, that he believed you were a serious, tried and experienced person, in whom one could safely seek enlightenment on life’s riddles; imagine that he appealed to you with that endearing trust which is the ornament of youth, with that ungainsayable right of claim that is the privilege of youth – how would you answer him? Would you answer, ‘Yes, I say only either/or’? Hardly. Would you, as you are wont to put it when you want to indicate your disgust at others’ inconveniencing you with their personal problems, stick your head out of the window and say, ‘Try next door’? Or would you treat him like others who wish to seek advice or enlightenment from you, whom you dismiss as you would those who come for the priest’s offering, with the words that you are ‘only a lodger in life’, not a householder and paterfamilias? You wouldn’t do that either. A young person, mentally gifted, is something you set too much store by. Yet your relation to him would not be quite as you wished, it wasn’t an accidental encounter that had brought you into contact with him; your irony was not tempted. Although he was the younger one, you the older, still, with his noble youthfulness he had made the moment serious. You yourself would like to be young, would you not? To feel that there is something beautiful in being young yet also something very serious, that it is by no means a matter of indifference how one uses one’s youth, that one has a choice, a real either/or. You would feel that what is important is not so much cultivating his mind as maturing his personality. Your good nature, your sympathy would be set in motion; it is from this that you would speak to him; you would invigorate his soul, confirm his trust in the world, you would assure him that there is a power in a man which is able to defy the whole world, you would impress very strongly upon him the importance of making good use of time. You can do all this, and when you want to, you can do it handsomely. But mark well what I am going to say to you, young man – for although you are not young, one is always obliged to call you that. What was it you did here? You acknowledged what you otherwise will not acknowledge, the importance of either/or. And why? Because your soul was moved by love for the young man; and yet you deceived him in a way, for it may be that he wants to meet you on other occasions when it is not at all convenient to make this acknowledgement. Here you see a sorry consequence of the inability of a man’s nature to reveal itself harmoniously. You thought you were doing what was best, and yet you may have caused him injury; perhaps he would have held out better if confronted with your distrust of life than by finding comfort in the subjective, deceitful trust you imparted to him. Now imagine you met that young man again after a lapse of several years. He was lively, witty, active in thought, bold in expression; but your refined ear could easily detect the doubt in his soul, you formed a suspicion that he, too, had arrived at the questionable wisdom. ‘I say only either/or’. You would be sorry for him, would you not? You would feel he had lost something, and something essential. But you would not feel sorry for yourself; you are satisfied, indeed you are proud of your questionable wisdom, yes, so proud of it that you cannot let another share in it, you want it for yourself. And yet in another respect you find it deplorable, and it is your sincere opinion that it is to be deplored that this young man has arrived at the same wisdom. What a monstrous contradiction! Your whole nature is in contradiction with itself. But you can only get out of this contradiction with an either/or; and I, who love you more genuinely than you loved that young man, who have experienced in my life the importance of choice, congratulate you on still being young enough, even if there will always be something you miss, young enough, if you have the energy (or rather if you want to have it), to win what is the main thing in life: to win yourself, to take possession of yourself.

Now, if a man could constantly balance on the tip of the moment of choice, if he could stop being a person, if in his inmost being he were only an empty thought, if personality meant no more than to be a goblin which, while going through the motions, remained nevertheless unchanged, if that is how it was, it would be foolish to say it might be too late for a man to choose, for in a deeper sense there could be no question of a choice. Choice itself is decisive for a personality’s content; in choice personality immerses itself in what is chosen, and when it does not choose it wastes consumptively away. For a moment it can seem, for a moment it can look as if what the choice is between lies outside the chooser; he has no relation to it, he can sustain an indifference in the face of it. This is the instant of deliberation, but like the Platonic instant, it really has no existence,⁴ least of all in the abstract sense in which you would hold on to it. And the longer one stares at it the less it exists. What is to be chosen stands in the deepest relationship to the chooser, and when the choice concerns a problem of life the individual must naturally go on living at the same time; so the longer he postpones the choice the easier it is to modify it, even though he keeps on deliberating and deliberating and thinks, because of that, that he is holding the alternatives properly apart from one another. When one looks at life’s either/or in this way, one is not easily tempted to trifle with it. One sees, then, that the inner activity of the personality has no time for thought-experiments, that it hastens constantly on and in one way or another is positing either the one or the other, making the choice in the next instant more difficult because what has been posited has to be retracted. If you imagine a helmsman in his ship when it is just about to tack, then he may be able to say, ‘I can either do this or that’, but unless he is a pretty poor helmsman he will also be aware that the ship is still maintaining its normal headway, and so there is only an instant when it is immaterial whether he does this or that. Similarly with a human being; if he forgets to take that headway into account, the moment eventually comes when there is no longer any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has refrained from choice, which can also be expressed in another way: because others have chosen for him, because he has lost himself.

You will also see from this why my view of a choice differs from yours, in the event that I can speak of your having such, for the difference is precisely that yours prevents a choice. The moment of choice is for me very serious, less on account of the rigorous pondering of the alternatives, and of the multitude of thoughts that attach to each separate link, than because there is a danger afoot that at the next moment it may not be in my power to make the same choice, that something has already been lived that must be lived over again. For it is a delusion to think one can keep one’s personality blank, or that one can in any real sense arrest and interrupt personal life. The personality already has interest in the choice before one chooses, and if one postpones the choice the personality makes the choice unconsciously, or it is made by the dark powers within it. Then when at last the choice is made, if, as I remarked earlier, one has not gone into complete dissolution, one discovers that there is something that must be done over again, that must be retracted, and that is often very difficult. Fairy-tales tell us of human beings whom mermaids and mermen captivated with their demonic music. To break the spell, says the story, they had to play the same piece backwards without a single mistake.⁵ The thought here is very profound but very difficult to put into action, and yet it is so; the errors one has incurred must be eliminated in this way, and every time a mistake is made one must make a fresh start. See, then, how important it is to choose and to choose in time. You, however, have another method – for I know full well that the polemical side you expose to the world is not your true nature. Yes, if deliberation were the task for a human life you would be close to perfection. I will take an example. To encompass your case the alternatives will naturally have to be bold ones; either priest/or actor. Here is the dilemma. All your passionate energy now awakens; reflection with its hundred arms grasps the thought of being a priest. There is no peace for you, day and night you think about it; you read all the publications you can lay your hands on, go to church three times every Sunday, make the acquaintance of priests, write sermons yourself, deliver them to yourself; for half a year you are dead to the whole world. Then you are ready. You are now able to talk with more insight, and as if you had greater clerical experience, than many who have been priests for twenty years. Your indignation is aroused when you meet with such people because they cannot unburden their hearts with greater eloquence. ‘Is this enthusiasm?’ you say, ‘I who am not a priest, who am not dedicated to that calling – compared with them I speak with the voice of angels.’ And that could well be true, but you have not become a priest. Then you proceed in the same manner with the other problem, and your enthusiasm for art almost outdoes your ecclesiastic eloquence. Now you are ready for the choice. However, one may be sure that, in the immense activity of thought you have been engaged in, much has gone to waste, many small comments and observations. So just when you are to make the choice, this refuse begins to come to life, a new either/or presents itself: lawyer; or perhaps barrister, for that has something in common with both of the alternatives. Now you are done for. For at that moment you are, without further ado, barrister enough to be able to show the propriety of taking the third possibility into account. So your life goes on. After a year and a half wasted on these deliberations, having exerted with admirable energy all the strength of your soul, you have come not one step further. Then the thread of thought snaps, you become impatient, passionate, you ravage with sword and fire, and then you go on, ‘Or a hairdresser, or a bank teller, I say only either/or.’ Little wonder, then, that for you this phrase has become ‘a stumbling-block and a foolishness’,⁶ that to you it seems ‘like the arms of the iron maiden whose embrace is death’. You look down on people. You make a mockery of them, and you have become what you despise most of all – a critic, a universal critic in all departments. At times I can hardly forbear smiling at you, and yet it is sad that your truly excellent intellectual gifts are dissipated in this way. But here again we have that same contradiction in your nature. For you see the ludicrous very clearly, and God help the one who falls into your hands if he is in a similar case; yet the only difference is that while he may be dejected and broken, you become cheerful and erect and livelier than ever, beatifying yourself and others with the gospel:⁷ vanitas vanitatum vanitas, hurrah! But that is no choice, it is a case of ‘Drop it!’,⁸ or a mediation, like letting five become an even number. You now feel free, you bid the world farewell:

Thus I retire into the back of beyond

Above my cap only stars.⁹

There, now you have chosen – not indeed the better part, that you will agree; but really you have made no choice at all, or you have chosen only figuratively. Your choice is an aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice is no choice. In general, the act of choosing is a literal and strict expression of the ethical. Wherever it is a matter of an either/or in a stricter sense, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or there is is the choice between good and evil, but it is also absolutely ethical. The aesthetic choice is either wholly immediate, thus no choice, or it loses itself in multiplicity. Thus if a young girl follows the choice of her heart, this choice, however beautiful, is not a choice in the stricter sense since it is wholly immediate. A person who aesthetically considers a whole range of life-tasks, like you in the above, is more likely to arrive at a multiplicity than an either/or, because here the factor of self-determination in the choice is not given an ethical emphasis, and because, if one does not choose absolutely, one chooses for that moment only and can, for that reason, choose something else the next instant. The ethical choice is therefore in a certain sense far easier, far simpler, but in another sense infinitely more difficult. A person who wants to determine himself ethically in his life’s task has usually an insignificant selection to choose from; on the other hand, the act of choice itself signifies far more for him. If you will understand me aright, I could quite well say that in choice it is less a matter of choosing correctly than of the energy, earnest and feeling with which one chooses. The personality thereby proclaims itself in its inner infinitude, and the personality is thereby consolidated in turn. So even if a person chose what was wrong, he would still, because of the energy with which he chose it, discover that what he had chosen was wrong. For inasmuch as the choice is undertaken with all the personality’s inwardness, his nature is purified and he himself is brought into immediate relation to the eternal power whose omnipresence interpenetrates the whole of existence. This transfiguration, this higher initiation, is never discovered by someone who chooses merely aesthetically. The rhythm in his soul, despite all its passion, is only a spiritus lenis.¹⁰ […]

What is it, then, that I separate in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I simply want to bring you to the point where that choice truly acquires meaning for you. It is on this that everything hinges. Only when one can get a person to stand at the crossroads in such a way that he has no expedient but to choose, does he choose what is right. So if you should happen, before you have a chance to read the whole of this somewhat lengthy inquiry, which again is being sent to you in the form of a letter, if you should happen to feel that the moment of the choice has come, throw away the rest, do not bother with it at all, you have not lost anything – but choose, and you shall see what validity there is in it; yes, no young girl can be as happy in the choice of her heart as a man who has known how to choose. Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically. In this, as I have said, there is no question yet of a choice in a stricter sense; for someone who lives aesthetically does not choose, and someone who, once the ethical has become apparent to him, chooses the aesthetic, does not live in the aesthetic sphere for he sins and comes under the category of the ethical, even if his life must be described as unethical. […]

My either/or does not denote in the first instance the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them. The question here is, under what categories one wants to contemplate the entire world and would oneself live. That someone who chooses good and evil chooses the good is indeed true, but this becomes evident only afterwards, for the aesthetic is not evil but indifference, and that is why I said that it is the ethical that constitutes choice. It is less a matter, then, of choosing between willing good or evil than of choosing to will but, with this latter, good and evil are posited once again. Someone who chooses the ethical chooses the good, but the good here is wholly abstract; choosing the ethical merely posits it, and from that it does not follow that the chooser cannot choose evil again, notwithstanding he chose good. Here, again, you see the importance of choosing, and that what is crucial is not so much deliberation as the baptism of choice by which it is assumed into the ethical. The more time goes, the more difficult the act of choice becomes, for the soul always finds itself on one side of the dilemma, and it therefore becomes harder and harder to tear oneself away. And yet that is necessary if there is to be a choice, and also of supreme importance if a choice is to mean anything, as I shall show below that it does. […]

Although I am no philosopher, I am obliged at this point to hazard a little philosophical reflection, which I would ask you not so much to criticize as to bear in mind. For the polemical outcome echoing through all your hymns of victory over life bears a remarkable resemblance to the pet theory of recent philosophy, that the principle of contradiction is annulled.¹¹ I know well enough that the standpoint you adopt is an abomination to philosophy; yet it strikes me that philosophy itself is guilty of the same error; yes, that the reason why this has not been noticed from the start is that philosophy is even less well placed than you are. Your situation is the domain of action, philosophy’s is that of contemplation. As soon as one transfers that to the practical domain it must come to the same result as you, though not expressing itself in the same way. You mediate oppositions in a higher lunacy, philosophy does so in a higher unity. You turn to the future, for action is essentially future-oriented: you say, ‘I can either do this or do that, but whichever I do is equally wrong, ergo I do nothing at all.’ Philosophy turns to the past, to the whole of world-historical experience, it shows how the separated elements come together in a higher unity. […] For the philosopher world history is concluded, and he mediates.¹² Thus in our age it is part of the order of the day to be confronted with the distasteful sight of young men able to mediate Christianity and paganism, able to play with the titanic forces of history, yet who are unable to tell a plain man what he has to do here in life, and who do not know any better what they themselves have to do. […]

As truly as there is a future, just as truly is there an either/or. The time in which the philosopher lives is not absolute time, it is itself an element in that, and one should always have misgivings when a philosopher bears no fruit; indeed it should be considered a dishonour, just as in the East it is considered a disgrace to be barren. So time itself is an element, and philosophy itself is an element in time. Our own age in its turn will appear to a later age as a discursive moment and a philosopher of a later age will again mediate it, and so on.¹³ To that extent philosophy is within its rights, and it should be considered an accidental error on the part of the philosophy of our own time that it mistook our age for absolute time. But this clearly means that the category of mediation has suffered a significant blow, and that absolute mediation is only possible when history is finished, in other words that the System is in constant process of becoming. But recognition that an absolute mediation exists is what philosophy has retained. This, naturally, is of the utmost importance, since if one abandons mediation one abandons speculation. On the other hand, one has scruples about admitting it, for if mediation is admitted there is no absolute choice, and then there is no absolute either/or. This is the difficulty, yet I believe it to be due partly to a confusion between two spheres, those of thought and freedom. For thought the opposition has no substance, it goes over into the other and the opposites thus come together in a higher unity. For freedom the opposition does have substance, because the one opposite now excludes the other. I am not by any means mistaking liberum arbitrium¹⁴ for the true positive freedom, for even the latter has for all eternity evil outside itself, if only as an impotent possibility, and its way of perfecting itself is not by increasingly accepting evil but by increasingly excluding it, and exclusion is precisely the opposite of mediation. Later I shall show that I do not mean by this to assume the notion of a radical evil.

The spheres that are properly the concern of philosophy, those that are properly spheres for thought, are logic, nature and history. Here necessity rules and so mediation has its validity, That this is true of logic and nature nobody will deny; but with history there are difficulties, for here freedom is said to rule. However, I believe that history is viewed incorrectly and that this is the source of the difficulty. For history is more than a product of the free actions of free individuals. The individual acts, but this action enters into the order of things which sustains the whole of existence. What its outcome will be the agent does not really know. But this higher order of things, which, so to speak, digests the free actions and kneads them together in its eternal laws, is necessity, and this necessity is the movement in world history; it is therefore quite right for the philosopher to use mediation, that is to say relative mediation. If I consider a world-historical individual, I can distinguish between the ‘works’ of which the Scripture says that they ‘do follow’ him¹⁵ and the works through which he belongs to history. With what might be called inward works philosophy has nothing whatever to do; but inward work is the true life of freedom. Philosophy looks at the outward work and sees it not in isolation but as it is absorbed into and transformed by the world-historical process. It is this process that really forms philosophy’s object and philosophy looks at it under the category of necessity. Therefore it keeps at a distance the reflection which would point out that everything might have been otherwise. It looks at world history in a way in which there can be no question of an either/or […] though it cannot occur to any philosopher to deny there is one for the acting individual. Hence the lack of concern, the conciliation, with which philosophy regards history and its heroes, for it considers them under the category of necessity. Hence, too, its helplessness at getting a man to act, its tendency to let everything come to a standstill, for what it really demands is that one act from necessity, and that is a contradiction.

Thus even the humblest individual has a dual existence. Also, he has a history, and this is not just a product of his own free actions. But the inward work belongs to himself and will belong to him in all eternity; this neither history nor world history can take from him, it follows him either to his joy or to his sorrow. In this world there rules an absolute either/or, but it is a world philosophy has nothing to do with. If I imagine an elderly man looking back on an eventful life, he can get a mediation out of it for thought since his history was woven into that of the time. But deep inside he gets no mediation; an either/or is still constantly separating what was separated when he made his choice. If one were to talk here of a mediation, one might say it was repentance; but repentance is no mediation, it does not look with longing upon that which should be mediated, that thing is consumed in its wrath; but this is much like exclusion, the opposite of mediation. Here it is also evident that I do not assume a notion of radical evil when I admit the reality of repentance. Repentance is indeed an expression of conciliation, but it is also an absolutely unconciliatory expression. […]

So it is freedom I am fighting for (partly in this letter, partly and foremost in myself), for the future, for either/or. That is the treasure I plan to bequeath to those whom I love in the world; yes, if my little son were at this moment of an age that he could understand me and my last hour had come, I would say to him, ‘I leave you no fortune, no title and honours, but I know where a treasure lies buried which can make you richer than the whole world; and this treasure belongs to you, and you are not even to thank me for it, so no injury is done to your soul through owing a man everything; this treasure is deposited in your own inner being: it is an either/or which makes a man greater than the angels.’

Here I will break off this reflection. Perhaps it does not satisfy you. Your greedy eye devours it without you getting your fill, but that is because the eye gets its fill last,¹⁶ especially when, like you, one is not hungry but merely suffering from an unappeasable craving of the eye.

What stands out in my either/or is the ethical. So far, then, it is not a matter of the choice of some thing, not a matter of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of choosing. It is this, though, that is decisive and what I shall try to awaken you to. To reach this point it is possible for one man to help another, but once he has reached it the importance the one can have for the other becomes more subordinate. I have remarked in a previous letter that the experience of having loved gives to a man’s nature a harmony that is never entirely lost; now I want to say that choosing gives to a man’s nature a solemnity, a quiet dignity, that is never entirely lost. Many people set extraordinarily great store by having seen one or another remarkable world-historical personage face to face. The impression is one they never forget, it has given to their souls an ideal picture which ennobles their natures. Yet even that instant, however significant, is nothing compared with the instant of choice. When around me all has become still, solemn as a starlit night, when the soul is all alone in the world, there appears before it not a distinguished person, but the eternal power itself. It is as though the heavens parted, and the I chooses itself – or, more correctly, it accepts itself. The soul has then seen the highest, which no mortal eye can see and which never can be forgotten. The personality receives the accolade of knighthood which ennobles it for an eternity. He does not become someone other than he was before, he becomes himself; consciousness unites. Just as an heir, even if he inherits all the world’s treasures, does not own them before coming of age, even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand, even what might be called the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that, but to be oneself; and every person can be that if he wants.

That in a sense it is not a matter of a choice of something, you can see from the fact that what appears on the opposite side is the aesthetic, which is indifference. Yet it is a matter of a choice, yes, an absolute choice; for only through choosing absolutely can one choose the ethical. Through the absolute choice, then, the ethical is posited, but from that it by no means follows that the aesthetic is excluded. In the ethical the personality is centred in itself; the aesthetic is thus excluded absolutely, or it is excluded as the absolute, but relatively it always stays behind. The personality, through choosing itself, chooses itself ethically and excludes the aesthetic absolutely; but since it is, after all, he himself the person chooses, and through choosing himself does not become another nature but remains himself, the whole of the aesthetic returns in its relativity.

So the either/or I have presented is in a sense absolute, for the options are choosing and not choosing. When the choice confronting one is thus absolute, either/or is also that. In another sense, however, the absolute either/or first appears with the choice, for it is now that the options of good and evil appear. But this choice posited by and in the first choice need not detain me here, I would merely press you to the point where the choice proves necessary and after that consider life under ethical categories. I am no ethical rigorist inspired by a formal abstract freedom; once the choice is posited the whole of the aesthetic returns, and you shall see that only then is life beautiful, and that only in this way can a person succeed in saving his soul and gaining the whole world, in using the world and not abusing it.

But what is it to live aesthetically, and what is it to live ethically? What is the aesthetic factor in a person, and what the ethical? To this I would answer: The aesthetic factor in a person is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical factor is that by which he becomes what he becomes. Someone who lives in and by and of and for the aesthetic factor in himself lives aesthetically.

It is not my aim here to enter into a more detailed consideration of all that this definition of the aesthetic implies. It would also seem superfluous to want to enlighten you on what it is to live aesthetically, you who are a practitioner of such virtuosity in that area that it is rather I who am in need of your help. Nevertheless, I shall sketch several stages so that we can work our way up to the point where your life really belongs, which is of importance to me if you are not to elude me at too early a stage with one of your favourite digressions. Besides, I do not doubt that there is much I can indeed enlighten you on in regard to what it is to live aesthetically. Although I would send anyone wanting to live aesthetically to you as the most reliable guide, I would not refer to you if, in a higher sense, he wanted to gain insight into what it is to live aesthetically; on that you would not be able to enlighten him because you are yourself caught up in it; it could only be explained to him by someone who stands a step higher, or by someone who lives ethically. You might be tempted for just a second to come up with the quibble that neither could I give a reliable explanation of what it is to live ethically, since I am caught up in that. This, however, would merely give me the opportunity to offer further enlightenment. The reason why someone who lives aesthetically cannot, in a higher sense, give any enlightenment is that he lives constantly in the moment, that his knowing is after all confined constantly to a certain relativity, within a certain boundary. It is not at all my purpose to deny that living aesthetically, when such a life is at its peak, can call for a multiplicity of intellectual gifts, even, indeed, that these may be developed to an unusual degree; but they are fettered and transparency is lacking. Thus one often finds species of animals with senses much keener and of far greater intensity than those of man, but they are bound to the animal’s instinct. I would gladly take you as an example. I have never denied your outstanding intellectual gifts, as you will see from the fact that I have often enough reproached you for abusing them. You are witty, ironic, observant, a dialectician, experienced in pleasure, you can calculate the instant, you are sentimental, heartless, all depending on the circumstances. But beneath all this you are all the time only in the moment, your life therefore disintegrates and it is impossible for you to explain it. Now if someone wanted to learn the art of pleasure, it would be quite right to go to you; but if he wants to understand your life, he is addressing himself to the wrong person. With me he would perhaps sooner find what he seeks, although I by no means possess your intellectual gifts. You are caught up, and have as it were no time to tear yourself away; I am not caught up, either in my judgement of the aesthetic or in that of the ethical, just because within the ethical I am raised above the instant, I am in freedom; but it is a contradiction to suggest that one can be caught up in being free.

Every man, however modest his talents, however subordinate his position, feels a natural need to form a view of life, a conception of life’s meaning and aim. A person who lives aesthetically has that too, and the general description heard in all ages and from the most diverse stages is this: one must enjoy life. It has, of course, very many variations, accordingly as conceptions of pleasure vary, but in this expression, that one must enjoy life, they are all united. But the person who says that he wants to enjoy life always posits a condition which is either outside the individual or in the individual but not posited by the individual himself. I would beg you, regarding this last point, to keep a fairly good hold of the expressions used, since they are chosen with care.

Let us now review these stages quite briefly in order to catch up with you. You are perhaps already a little annoyed at my proposal for a general description of living aesthetically; still, you can hardly deny its accuracy. One hears you often enough scoffing at people for not knowing how to enjoy life, while you think that you, for your part, have studied it from top to bottom. It is quite possible they do not understand it, but in the expression itself they none the less agree with you. Perhaps, then, you suspect that, in this inquiry, you are to be teamed up with people who are otherwise an abomination to you. Maybe you think I should be courteous enough to treat you as an artist and pass over in silence those dabblers you have trouble enough with in life and with whom you wish to have nothing in common. However, I cannot help you here, for there is something that you have in common with them after all, and something very essential at that – namely, a view of life; and in my eyes that in which you differ from them is unessential. I cannot help laughing at you; do you not see, my young friend, that it is a curse that accompanies you, these many brothers in art that you acquire but whom you have no intention at all of acknowledging? You are prone to poor and vulgar company, you who are so superior. I don’t deny it must be very disagreeable to have a life-view in common with every carouser or sportsman. Nor, indeed, is that altogether the case; for you are placed to some degree beyond the aesthetic domain, as I shall show later.

Great as the differences within the aesthetic sphere may be, all stages have the essential similarity that spirit appears not in the form of spirit but in the form of immediacy. The differences may be extraordinary, from plain philistinism to the greatest intellectual refinement, but even at the stage where such refinement appears the spirit has the form not of spirit but of talent.

I will describe each particular stage quite briefly and dwell only on what, in one way or another, fits your case, or that I could wish you would apply to yourself. In its immediate guise, personality has the form not of the spiritual but of the psychic. Here we have a life-view which teaches that health is the most precious good, that on which everything depends. The same view is given a more poetic expression when beauty is said to be the highest thing. Beauty, however, is a very fragile good, and it is seldom that one sees this view of life enacted. One comes across a young girl, often enough, or a young man, who for a brief period set great store by their beauty, but it soon lets them down. I remember, however, in my student days, […] sometimes on my holidays I went to the residence of a count in one of the provinces. In his younger days he had had a diplomatic post, but was now elderly and lived quietly on his country estate. The countess had been exceptionally beautiful as a young girl; even in her old age she was the most beautiful lady I have seen. […] Both of them were highly cultivated, yet the countess’s life-view was concentrated on the thought that they were the most beautiful couple in the whole land. I still recall quite vividly an occurrence which convinced me of this. It was a Sunday morning and there was a little festival at the nearby church. The countess did not feel well enough to attend; but the count betook himself there in the morning, dressed up in all his finery, his uniform of gentleman-in-waiting, decorated with his orders. The windows of the great hall opened upon an avenue which led up to the church. The countess was standing at one of them. […] Far down the avenue the count appeared […] and when he came near enough to see the countess through the window, with grace and decorum she threw him a kiss, then turned to me and said ‘Little Vilhelm, isn’t my Ditlev the handsomest man in the whole kingdom? Yes, I can see he looks a little sunken on one side, but no one notices it when I’m walking with him, and when we walk together we are surely the handsomest couple in the whole land.’ No little miss of sixteen could be as blissfully happy over her fiancé, the handsome gentleman of the bedchamber, as her ladyship over the already aged lord-in-waiting.

Both life-views agree that one must enjoy life. The condition for doing so lies in the individual, but not in a way that it is posited by the individual.

We proceed. We come across views of life which teach that one must enjoy life but place the condition for doing so outside the individual. This is the case with every life-view which makes wealth, glory, nobility, etc., life’s task and content. Here I would also speak of a certain kind of infatuation. Were I to imagine a young girl head-over-heels in love, whose eye knew no pleasure but to see her beloved, whose soul had no thought but for him, whose heart had no desire but to be his, for whom nothing, nothing at all in heaven or on earth, had meaning except him, then here again we have an aesthetic view of life in which the condition is placed outside the individual itself. You, of course, find it foolish to love in that way; you think it is something that only occurs in novels. It is conceivable, however, and one can at least be sure that in the eyes of many, such a love would be regarded as something exceptional. I will explain later why I cannot approve of it.

We proceed. We meet views of life which teach that one must enjoy life but the condition for doing so lies in the individual, though not posited, however, by the individual. In this case personality is presented in general under the category of talent, a practical talent, a mercantile talent, a mathematical talent, a poetic talent, an artistic talent, a philosophical talent. Satisfaction in life, pleasure, is sought in the development of this talent. Perhaps one does not remain with one’s talent in its state of immediacy, one can educate it in all manner of ways, but the condition for satisfaction in life is the talent itself, a condition not posited by the individual. Those people in whom one finds this life-view are often among those accustomed to being the constant object of your scorn because of their tireless activity. You think you yourself live aesthetically and will in no way admit it of them. That you have a different view of what it is to enjoy life is undeniable, but this is not what is essential; the essential thing is that one wants to enjoy life. Your life is far superior to theirs, but theirs is also far more innocent than yours.

Now just as all these views have in common that they are aesthetic, so too they resemble one another in having a certain unity, a certain coherence, that is, one definite thing on which everything depends. What they build their lives on is something inherently simple, and so their lives do not split up as those that are built on what is inherently diverse. The latter is the case with the life-view I shall now dwell on a little more closely. It teaches: ‘Enjoy life’, and interprets this as: ‘Live for your desire.’ Desire, however, is inherently diverse; it is thus easy to see that a life built on desire splits into an endless diversity, except where in some particular individual desire has, from childhood, become determinate in the form of some particular desire, which then deserves rather to be called a propensity, a bent, for instance for fishing, or hunting, or keeping horses, etc. Inasmuch as this view of life splits into a diversity, it is easy to see that it lies in the sphere of reflection; this reflection, however, is nevertheless always a finite reflection and the personality remains in its immediacy. In desire itself the individual is immediate, and however cultivated or refined the desire, however artful, the individual is nevertheless in it qua immediate, in the enjoyment he is in the moment, and whatever diversity he has in this respect, he is still always immediate because he is in the moment. Now, living for the satisfaction of one’s desire is to enjoy a very exclusive position in life, and God be praised we seldom see it practised, due to the tribulations of earthly life which give man something else to think about. If that were not so, I do not doubt but that we would be frequent enough witnesses to this terrible spectacle; at least one often hears people complain that they feel inhibited by the prosaic life, which often only means that they long to let themselves go in all the wild folly that desire can whirl a man into. For in order to put this view into practice, the individual must be in possession of a diversity of outward conditions, and this good fortune, or rather misfortune, seldom falls to a man’s lot – misfortune because it is certainly not from the merciful gods, but the gods of wrath, that this good fortune comes.

One seldom sees this life-view enacted on any significant scale. On the other hand, one not infrequently sees people who dabble at it a little, and when the conditions cease to exist they think that if only the conditions had been under their own control, then they would certainly have achieved the happiness and joy they craved for in life. In history, however, now and then one meets examples. And since I believe it may be useful to see where this life-view leads, precisely when everything favours it, I will present such a figure, choosing for this end that all-powerful man, the emperor Nero, to whom a world did homage, and who always found himself surrounded by an innumerable host of willing emissaries of pleasure. Once, with your usual recklessness, you said that one could not blame Nero for setting fire to Rome in order to get some idea of the conflagration of Troy, but that one might question whether he really had enough of the artist in him to know how to enjoy it. Now it is one of your imperial pleasures never to shrink from any thought, never to let it appal you. For that one needs no imperial guard, not gold and silver, not all the world’s treasures; one can do it quite alone and consummate it privately; it is therefore a wiser pleasure, but no less appalling. Your aim was not to conduct a defence of Nero, and yet there is a kind of defence in your fixing attention not on what he does but on how he does it. Still, I know very well this recklessness of thought is something one often finds in young people, who try it out, as it were, on the world at such moments, and are then easily tempted to extol it themselves, especially when others are listening. I know very well that you and every person, yes, that Nero himself would shrink from such wild folly, and yet I would never recommend that any person credit himself in the strictest sense with enough strength not to become a Nero. For when, to describe Nero’s nature, I mention what in my view was its main constituent, it may well strike you as much too mild a word for that, and yet I am certainly no mild judge, even though there is another sense in which I never judge another person. But believe you me, the word is not too mild, it is the right one, but it can also show how near a person is to such a lapse; indeed it can be said that there comes a moment, for every person who does not pass his whole life like a child, a glimpse, if only in the distance, of such a damnation. Nero’s nature was melancholy. Nowadays it has become something big to be melancholy; in a way I can well see why you find this word too mild; I subscribe to an earlier Church doctrine which counted melancholy among the cardinal sins. If I am right, this to be sure will be very bad news for you, for it turns your whole view of life upside down. But to avoid misunderstanding, I will remark at once that a person can be in sorrow and distress to such an infinite degree that perhaps it pursues him all his life; and although that may be well and true, a person becomes melancholy only by his own fault.

So I imagine the imperial voluptuary. […] I imagine him a little on in years, his youth is past, the lightheartedness has gone out of him, and he is already conversant with every conceivable pleasure, gratified by it to the full. This life, however dissolute, has nevertheless matured his soul, though in spite of all his worldly understanding, his experience, he is still a child, or a youth. The immediacy of spirit cannot break through yet demands a breakthrough, a higher form of existence. But if that is to happen there will come a moment when the splendour of the throne, his power and might, pale, and for this he lacks the courage. So he grabs at pleasure, all the world’s ingenuity must think up new pleasures for him, for it is only in the moment of pleasure he finds peace, and when it is over he yawns in ennui. […] He does not have himself; only when the world shivers for him is he appeased, for then at least there is no one who dares seize him. Therefore this anxiety for people, something Nero has in common with every such personality. […] He burns down half of Rome but his torment is the same. Soon such things no longer amuse him. There is an even higher desire; he wants to make people anxious. To himself he is a riddle, and anxiety his being. Now he wants to be a riddle for everyone and to revel in their anxiety. […] And this anxiety amuses him. He doesn’t want to impress, he wants to unsettle. […] He does not enter proudly, with imperial dignity; weak, impotent, he slinks forward stealthily, for this powerlessness is even more disquieting. […] He could have the child hewn down before its mother’s eyes if only her despair might give passion a new expression that could amuse him. Were he not the Emperor of Rome he might end his life with suicide; for really it is only another expression of the same: that Caligula should want all men’s heads on one neck so the whole could be annihilated with one stroke, and for a man to take his own life. […] Whether this was the case with Nero I do not know, but in personalities of this kind one sometimes finds a certain good-naturedness, and if Nero had that, I have no doubt that his circle were ready to call it condescension. This gives the matter a peculiar twist, but it also provides new proof of the immediacy which through its repression constitutes genuine melancholy. […]

What, then, is melancholy? It is hysteria of the spirit. There comes a moment in a man’s life when immediacy is as though ripened and when the spirit demands a higher form in which it will apprehend itself as spirit. In its immediacy spirit coheres, as it were, with the whole of earthly life, and now the spirit wants to gather itself out of this dispersion, and make itself self-transparent; the personality wants to be conscious of itself in its eternal validity. If this does not happen and the movement halts and is pressed back, melancholy sets in. One can do much to bring it into oblivion, one can work, one can seize more innocent expedients than a Nero, but the melancholy remains. There is something unaccountable in melancholy. A person in sorrow or distress knows why he sorrows or is distressed. If you ask a melancholic what reason he has for his condition, what it is that weighs down on him, he will reply, ‘I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it.’ Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude. The reply is perfectly correct, for as soon as he knows what it is, the effect is removed, whereas the grief of the griever is by no means removed by his knowing why he grieves. But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin as great as any, for it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely, and this is a mother to all sins. This sickness, or more properly, this sin, is extremely common in our time, and accordingly it is under this that the whole of German and French youth groan. I will not provoke you, I would treat you as considerately as possible. I gladly admit that being melancholy is in a sense not a bad sign, for as a rule only the most gifted natures are afflicted by it. […] People whose souls have no acquaintance with melancholy are those whose souls have no presentiment of metamorphosis. These I do not concern myself with here, for I am writing only of and to you, and to you I think this explanation will be satisfactory, for you scarcely assume, as many physicians do, that melancholy is a bodily ailment, though for all that, remarkably enough, physicians cannot cure it; only the spirit can cure it, for it lies in the spirit, and when the spirit finds itself all small sorrows vanish, those reasons which in the view of some produce melancholy – that one cannot find oneself in the world, that one comes to the world both too late and too early, that one cannot find one’s place in life; but for the person who owns himself eternally, it is neither too early nor too late that he comes to the world, and the person who possesses himself in his eternal validity will surely find his significance in this life.

This, however, has been a digression, for which I hope you will forgive me, since really it arose for your sake. I now return to the life-view which thinks one must live to satisfy desire. A prudent common sense readily perceives that this cannot be carried through and that it is therefore not worth starting on. A refined egoism perceives that it misses the point in pleasure. Here, then, we have a life-view which teaches ‘Enjoy life’, and then expresses itself again thus: ‘Enjoy yourself; it is you yourself in the enjoyment that you must enjoy.’ This is a higher reflection. Naturally, however, it does not penetrate into the personality itself; this remains in its accidental immediacy. After all, here too the condition for enjoyment is external and not within the individual’s control; for although he, as he says, enjoys himself, he still only enjoys himself in the enjoyment, but the enjoyment itself is tied to an external condition. The only difference is that his enjoyment is reflective, not immediate. So even this Epicureanism depends on a condition over which it has no control. A certain callousness of reason then teaches a way out: ‘Enjoy yourself in constantly discarding the conditions.’ But self-evidently, the person who enjoys himself in discarding the conditions is just as much dependent on them as the one who enjoys them. His reflection turns constantly back on himself, and since his enjoyment consists in the enjoyment’s being given as little content as possible, he is, as it were, hollowing himself out, since naturally such a reflection is incapable of opening the personality.

I believe these observations of mine have now given you at least a recognizable outline of the territory of the aesthetic view of life. All stages have in common that one lives for that in which one is immediately what one is; for reflection never grasps high enough to reach beyond that. I have provided no more than a very hasty glimpse, but I have not wished to give more; for me the different stages are not important, only that movement which is unavoidably necessary, as I shall now show, and it is on this I would beg you fasten your attention.

Let me assume, then, that our man who lived for his health was, to use your expression, as quick as ever when he died; that our noble couple danced at their golden wedding and a whisper ran through the hall, just as when they danced on their wedding day; I assume that the rich man’s gold mines were inexhaustible, that honours and esteem marked the happy man’s pilgrimage through life; I assume that the young girl got the one she loved, that with his connections the mercantile talent hitched all five continents together, and kept all the world’s exchanges in his own exchange, that the mechanical talent joined together heaven and earth – I assume that Nero never yawned but a new pleasure surprised him every moment, that every instant our astute Epicurean could enjoy himself by himself, that the Cynic always had conditions [of enjoyment] to discard so as to take pleasure in his own lightness – I assume this, and so all these people were happy. You would probably not say that; the reason why I shall explain later. But this you will readily admit: that many people would in fact think this way, yes, that this or that person would fancy he had said something extremely clever if he added that what they lacked was that they did not appreciate the fact. I will now assume the opposite. None of this happens. So what? They despair. No doubt you would not do that either. Perhaps you will say it isn’t worth the trouble. Why you will not admit despair I shall explain later; here I ask only that you recognize that a fair number of people find it right and proper to despair. Let us now see why they despaired. Because they discovered that what they had built their lives on was transitory? But is that, then, a reason to despair, has what they built their lives on changed in any essential? Is it an essential change in what is transitory that it prove to be so? Or is it not rather the case that if it does not prove to be so, then that is what is accidental and unessential? So nothing new has come about that could provide the basis for such a change. If they do despair, then, that must be because they were in despair beforehand. The difference is just that they did not know it, but that indeed is an altogether accidental difference. It turns out, then, that every aesthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives aesthetically is in despair whether he knows it or not. But if one does know it, and you indeed do, then a higher form of existence is an inescapable requirement. […]

It might seem, then, that the correct thing was to undertake the movement by which the ethical emerges. But there is still one stage, however, an aesthetic life-view, the most refined and exclusive of them all, which I shall discuss with the greatest of care, for now it is your turn. Everything I have explained in the above you can calmly go along with, and in a way it is not you I have been addressing; also it would be of little use talking to you thus or informing you of the vanity of life. That is something you know very well and have indeed tried in your own way to adjust to. The reason I have presented it is this: that I want to cover my rear, I want to prevent you from suddenly leaping back. This last life-view is despair itself. It is an aesthetic life-view, for the personality remains in its immediacy; it is the last aesthetic life-view, for it has to an extent admitted to itself a consciousness of the nothingness of such a life-view. However, there is despair and despair. Were I to imagine an artist, a painter, for example, who becomes blind, then if there was any depth in him he might perhaps despair. What he despairs over, then, is this particular thing, and if his sight returned the despair would cease. This is not the case with you. You are far too gifted mentally, and your soul is in a sense too deep for this to happen to you. Nor, in outward respects, has any such misfortune befallen you. You still have in your power all the requirements of an aesthetic life-view. You have wealth, independence, your health is unimpaired, your mind is still vigorous, and you have not yet been made unhappy by a young girl not wanting to love you. Yours is no current despair but a despair in thought. Your thought has hurried on ahead, you have seen through the vanity of everything but you have not come any further. On occasion you duck down into it and in abandoning yourself for a single moment to pleasure you discover also, in your consciousness, that it is vanity. You are thus constantly beyond yourself, that is to say, in despair. This is why your life lies between two huge antitheses: sometimes you are intemperately energetic, at others just as immoderately indolent. […]

Here, then, I have your life-view, and believe me, much in your life will be explicable to you if, with me, you regard it as thought-despair. You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity life must have continuity, and this your life lacks. You occupy yourself with your studies, that is true, you are even industrious. But it is only for your own sake and is done with as little teleology as possible. Otherwise you are unoccupied; like those workers in the Gospel, you stand idle in the market-place.¹⁷ You stick your hands in your pockets and observe life. Then you rest in despair, nothing occupies you, you don’t step aside for anything: ‘If someone were to throw a tile down from the roof I wouldn’t get out of the way.’ You are like someone dying, you die daily, not in the profound, serious sense in which one usually takes that word, but life has lost its reality and ‘you always reckon your lifetime from one day’s notice to quit to the next’. You let everything pass you by, it makes no impression, but then suddenly something comes which grips you, an idea, a situation, a smile from a young girl, and then you are ‘in touch’; for just as on some occasions you are not in touch, so at others you are in touch and of service in every way. Wherever something is going on you are ‘in touch’. You conduct your life as it is your custom to behave in a crowd, you ‘work your way into the thickest of it, trying if possible to be forced up above the others so as to be able to lie on top of them’; if you manage to get up there you ‘make yourself as comfortable as possible’, and this is also the way you let yourself be carried along through life. But when the crowd disperses, when the event is over, you stand once more at the street corner and look at the world. A dying person possesses, as you know, a supernatural energy, and so too with you. If there is an idea to be thought through, a work to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little adventure to be experienced – yes, a hat to be bought, you take hold of the matter with an immense energy. According to circumstance, you work untiringly for a day, for a month; you are happy in the assurance that you still have the same abundance of strength as before, you take no rest, ‘no Satan can keep up with you’. If you work together with others, you work them into the ground. But then when the month or, what you always consider the maximum, the six months have gone, you break off and say, ‘and that’s the end of the story’. You retire and leave it all to the other party, or if you have been working alone you talk to no one about what you were doing. You then pretend to yourself and others that you have lost the desire and flatter yourself with the vain thought that you could have kept working with the same intensity if that is what you desired. But that is an immense deception. You would have succeeded in finishing it, as most others, if you had patiently willed it so, but you would have found out at the same time that it needs a kind of perseverance quite different from yours. […]

You are always hovering above yourself, but the higher ether, the more refined sublimate into which you are vaporized, is the nothing of despair and you see below you a multitude of areas of learning, insight, study, observation which for you, though, have no reality but which you quite randomly exploit and combine so as to adorn as tastefully as possible the palace of mental profusion in which you occasionally reside. […] [What] you see below you is a multitude of moods and situations which you use to make interesting contacts with life. You can be sentimental, heartless, ironic, witty; in this respect one must admit you have learning. Thus as soon as something can rouse you out of your indolence you are fully active, with all your passion, and your activity does not lack art, as you are only too well equipped with wit, resilience, and all the seductive gifts of the mind. You are, as you yourself with such complacent presumption put it, never so discourteous as to put in an appearance without bringing with you a small, fragrant, freshly plucked bouquet of wit. The more one knows you, the more one must be astonished at the calculating shrewdness that permeates everything you do in the short time you are moved by passion; for passion never blinds you but only makes you more clear-sighted. You forget your despair and everything else that weighs upon your soul and thought; the accidental contact you have made with a person absorbs you completely. […] [You] exist in the instant, and in the instant you are of supernatural size; you invest your whole soul in it, even by an effort of will, since in the instant your being is absolutely in your power. Someone who sees you only in such an instant is very easily deceived, while someone who waits for the next instant can easily come to crow over you. You may recall the well-known legend from Musaeus about Roland’s three pages.¹⁸ One of them acquired from the old witch they visited in the forest a thimble which made him invisible. With it he made his way into the chambers of the beautiful princess Urraca and declared his love for her, which made a strong impression upon her since she saw no one and so presumed it must be a fairy prince, at least, who honoured her with his love. However, she required him to reveal himself. This is where the difficulty lay: as soon as he became visible the fascination had to vanish, and yet he would have no pleasure of his love if he could not reveal himself. As it happens, I have Musaeus’s fairy-tale to hand and will transcribe a little passage from it which I would beg you to read for your own true good. ‘He agreed, it seemed reluctantly, and the princess’s fantasy projected the picture of the most beautiful man whom she thought with eager expectation she was about to see. But what a contrast between the original and the ideal when all that appeared was a common, everyday visage, an ordinary person whose physiognomy betrayed neither the glance of genius nor the soul of sentiment.’ What you wish to achieve through these contacts with people, you do achieve, because since you are considerably shrewder than that page, you readily see that it cannot pay to reveal oneself. Once you have passed off an ideal picture of yourself on someone – and one has to admit you are able to appear ideal in any circumstance whatsoever – you carefully withdraw and so have then the pleasure of having fooled someone. What you attain besides is a break in the coherence of your view, and one more point from which to start all over again.

In theoretical respects you are through with the world, the finite cannot sustain itself in your thought; in practical respects, too, you are to some extent through with it, in an aesthetic sense, that is. Nevertheless you have no view of life. You have something resembling a view and this gives your life a certain composure which must not, though, be confused with a secure and refreshing confidence in life. You are composed only in contrast to one who still pursues the prestidigitations of pleasure, per mare pauperiem fugiens, per saxa, per ignes.¹⁹ In relation to pleasure you have an absolutely superior pride. That is quite as it should be, for indeed you are through with the whole of finitude. And yet you cannot give it up. You are content compared with those who chase after contentment, but what you have become content with is absolute discontent. To see all the world’s glories does not concern you, for in thought you are beyond them, and if the chance were offered you would say, as always, ‘Yes, one might well devote a day to them.’ It does not trouble you that you have not become a millionaire, and if the chance of that were offered, you would no doubt reply, ‘Yes, it might have been really interesting to be that and one could well spend a month on it.’ Were it possible to offer you the love of the most beautiful girl you would still reply, ‘Yes, for half a year that would be really fine.’ I shall not join in the plaintive cry often directed at you, that you are insatiable; I will say rather: in a sense you are right, for nothing finite, even the whole world, can satisfy the soul of one who feels a need for the eternal. Were one able to offer you honour and glory, the admiration of your contemporaries – and that, after all, is your weakest point – you would reply, ‘Yes, for a short while it wouldn’t be too bad.’ You do not really want it and you would not take one step to acquire it. You would perceive that for such recognition to have any meaning your gifts would have to be so outstanding that you deserved it; here, too, your thought sees even in the highest degree of intellectual talent something transitory. So your polemics provide you with an even more extreme expression when, in your inner resentment at the whole of life, you could wish you were the most foolish of men and yet admired and worshipped by your contemporaries as the wisest, for that would be a far more profound mockery of the whole of existence than if the genuinely most capable man were honoured as such. So you desire nothing, wish for nothing, for the only thing you might wish for is a divining-rod which could give you everything, and then you would use it for scraping out your pipe. Thus, you are through with life and ‘have no need to make a will since you have nothing to leave’. But you cannot hold out on this extremity, for indeed your thought has taken everything from you but it has given you nothing in its stead. The next instant some little triviality captivates you. You look upon it, indeed, with all the superiority and pride your overbearing thought gives you, you despise it as a worthless toy, you are almost bored with it before you take it in your hand; but still it preoccupies you, and even if it is not the thing itself that preoccupies you – as always – you are still preoccupied with your being willing to stoop to it. In this way, once it is people you have to do with, your nature exhibits a high degree of faithlessness, for which one cannot blame you morally, however, since you are outside the category of the ethical. Fortunately for others you participate very little, so one does not notice it. You come often to my house, and you know you are always welcome, but you know also that it never occurs to me to invite you to participate in the least thing. I would not even take a drive in the woods with you, not because you cannot be very gay and entertaining but because your participation is always a falsehood, for if you really take pleasure one can always be certain it is not in something we others are taking pleasure in, or in the drive, but in something you have in mente; and if you do not take pleasure it is not because something unpleasant happens that puts you out of sorts, for that could also happen to the rest of us, but because the moment you climb into the carriage you have already seen the vacuity of this amusement. I am ready to forgive you, for your mind is always too active, and it is true what you often say of yourself, that you are like a woman in confinement and when one is in that ‘condition’ it is no wonder one is a little different from others.

Yet the spirit is not to be mocked, it takes its revenge on you, it fetters you in the chains of melancholy. My young friend, this is the way to become a Nero, if in your soul there was not an original seriousness, if there was not an innate depth in your thought, if there was no magnanimity in your soul – and if you had become Emperor of Rome. Yet you go another way. There now appears before you a life-view which seems the only one that can satisfy you: it is to immerse your soul in sadness and sorrow. Yet your thought is too healthy for this life-view to stand its test, for to an aesthetic sorrow of this kind existence is just as vain as it is to any other aesthetic view of life. If a person cannot sorrow more deeply, then it is true to say that the sorrow passes just as much as the joy, for everything that is merely finite passes away. And if many find it comforting that sorrow passes, this thought seems to me just as comfortless as the thought that joy passes. So this life-view, too, your thought annihilates, and when one has annihilated sorrow one does indeed retain joy; in place of sorrow you choose a joy which is sorrow’s changeling. This is the joy you have now chosen, this laughter of despair. You return again to life, and under this illumination existence acquires a new interest for you. Just as you take a great delight in talking with children in a way they excellently, easily and naturally understand, though for yourself what you say means something quite different, so you delight in deceiving people with your laughter. When you can get people to laugh and shout for joy and be delighted with you, you triumph over the whole world; you say to yourself, ‘If only you knew what you are laughing at!’

Yet the spirit is not to be mocked, and the darkness of melancholy thickens about you, and the lightning flash of an insane wit only reveals it to you the more strongly, the more horribly. And there is nothing that distracts you, all the world’s pleasure has no importance for you, and though you envy simple people the foolish enjoyment of life, you yourself do not pursue it. Pleasure does not tempt you; and however lamentable your condition, it is truly providential that it does not. It is my intention to praise not the pride in you that scorns pleasure but rather the moderation that holds your thought firm, for if you were tempted by pleasure you would be done for. But the fact that it does not tempt you shows what path you must take, that you must go forward and not turn back. There is another false path no less dreadful, and here again I rely not on your pride but on the moderation that constantly holds you upright. It is true you are proud, and that it is better for a person to be proud than vain; it is true there is a fearful passion in your thought, that you look on it as a claim you have no intention of renouncing, that ‘you would rather consider yourself an unpaid creditor in the world than cancel it’ – and yet all human pride is but a fragile security.

Take note, then, my young friend, this life is despair; hide it from others if you will, from yourself you cannot hide it, it is despair. And yet in another sense this life is not despair. You are too frivolous to despair; and you are too melancholy not to come in contact with despair. You are like a woman giving birth and yet you are forever putting off the moment and remain constantly in pain. Were a woman in travail to get the idea that she might give birth to a monster, or were she to wonder what it really was she was about to give birth to, her case would be not unlike yours. Her attempt to stay the course of nature would be unavailing, but yours indeed can succeed; for what a person gives birth to in a spiritual sense is a creative urge of the will, and that is in man’s own power. What then is it you are afraid of? You are not going to give birth to another human being, you will give birth only to yourself. And yet, as I know well, there is a gravity in this which perturbs the whole soul; to be conscious of oneself in one’s eternal validity is a moment more significant than everything in the world. It is as though you were caught and trapped and now could never again escape, either in time or eternity; it is as though you lost yourself, as though you ceased to be; it is as though the next moment you would rue it and yet it cannot be undone. It is a grave and significant moment when one binds oneself for an eternity to an eternal power, when one receives oneself as the one whose memory no time shall efface, when in an eternal and unfailing sense one becomes aware of oneself as the person one is. And yet, one can still let it be! Look: here, then, is an either/or. Let me talk to you in a way I never would if another were listening, because in a sense I have no right to do so and because really I am speaking only of the future. If this is not what you will, if you want to keep on diverting your soul with the vanities and vacuities of wit and esprit, then do so; leave your home, travel, go to Paris, give yourself up to journalism, court the smiles of voluptuous women, cool their hot blood with the breeze of your wit, let it be the proud task of your life’s activity to drive away an idle woman’s boredom or the gloomy thoughts of a flagging sensualist, forget that you were a child, that there was piety in your soul and innocence in your thought, deaden every higher voice in your breast, drowse your life away in the petty brilliance of the soirée, forget that there is an immortal spirit in you, torment your soul to the last farthing; and when wit falls silent there is water enough in the Seine and gunpowder in the general store and travelling companions for any hour of the day. But if you cannot do that, if you will not – and you neither can nor will – then pull yourself together, stifle every rebellious thought that would presume high treason against your better nature, despise all the pettiness that would envy you your intellectual gifts and which itself desires them in order to put them to even worse use, despise the hypocritical virtue which bears life’s burdens unwillingly yet still wants to be honoured for bearing them; but do not despise life itself on that account, respect every honourable effort, every modest activity which conceals itself in humility, and above all show a little more respect for woman; believe me, it is from her that salvation comes, as certainly as depravity comes from the man. I am a husband and to that extent partial, but it is my conviction that if ever a woman plunged humanity into depravity she has also fairly and honestly made up for it, and still does; for of a hundred men who go astray in the world ninety-nine are saved by women, one by a direct divine grace. And since I also believe that it is man’s nature to go astray in one way or another, that this is as true of the man’s life as it is true of the woman’s that she should remain in the pure and innocent peace of immediacy, you readily perceive that in my view the woman gives ample requital for what she has done.

What then are you to do? Another person might say: ‘Get married; then you’ll have something else to think about.’ Certainly, but the question remains whether that would be to your advantage, and whatever you think of the opposite sex, at least your thoughts are too chivalrous for you to wish to marry for that reason, and besides, if you cannot maintain yourself, you will hardly find another capable of doing that. Or one might say, ‘Apply for some office, throw yourself into business life, that’s a distraction, and you will forget your melancholy; work, that’s the best thing.’ You might manage to reach the point where it seems as though forgotten, but forgotten it is not; now and then it will still erupt, more dreadfully than ever; it might then be able, as hitherto it has not, to take you by surprise. Besides, whatever you think of life and its affairs, you will think too chivalrously of yourself to choose a position for that reason, for it is, after all, a kind of falsehood, just as marrying on that account. What then are you to do? I have only one answer: ‘Despair!’

I am a married man, my soul clings surely and unwaveringly to my wife, my children, to this life whose beauty I shall always acclaim. So when I say ‘Despair!’ it is no overwrought youth who would have you whirled off into a maelstrom of passions, no mocking demon shouting out this comfort to the shipwrecked; I shout it to you not as a comfort, not as a state in which you are to remain, but as an action requiring all the soul’s strength and gravity and self-command, as sure as it is my conviction, my triumph over the world, that any person who has not tasted the bitterness of despair has missed the meaning of life, however beautiful and joy-filled his life has been. You do not commit any fraud upon the world you live in, you are not lost to it, for you have conquered it, as surely as I can count myself an honourable married man even though I, too, have despaired.

When I look at your life in this way I would call you fortunate, for truly it is of the utmost importance that a person does not look amiss at life in the moment of despair; it is just as crucial for him as for someone giving birth that things should not go wrong. The person who despairs over something in particular runs the risk of his despair not being true and profound, of its being a disappointment, a sorrow in that particular respect. You will not despair in that way for you have not suffered any deprivation, you still have everything. If the despairer makes a mistake, if he believes the misfortune lies in the complex world outside him, his despair is not true and it will lead him to hate the world and not to love it; for no matter how much the world gets in your way because it seems as if it wanted to be something else than it can be for you, once you have found your own self in despair you will love it for being the world that it is. If what brings a person to despair is some guilt and offence, a troubled conscience, he may perhaps have difficulty in regaining his good cheer. So, despair, then, with all your soul and mind; the longer you put it off, the harder the conditions become and what is required remains the same, I shout it out to you, like the woman who offered Tarquin a collection of books for sale and, when he refused to pay the sum she asked, she burnt a third of them and demanded the same sum, and when again he refused to give the sum asked, burnt another third and demanded the same sum, until he finally gave the original sum for the remaining third.

The condition for despair in your case is therefore excellent, and yet there is an even better. Imagine a young man, gifted like you. Let him love a girl, love her as much as himself. Let him once ponder in a quiet hour what he has built his life on, and on what she has built hers. The love is something they have in common, and yet he will feel there are differences. She, perhaps, has the gift of beauty, yet for him this is of no importance and is after all so fragile; maybe she has the joyful disposition of youth, yet for him this joy has no real meaning. But the intellectual authority is his and he feels its strength. He truly wants to love her, so it will not occur to him to give that to her and her humble soul will not demand it, and yet there is a difference and he will feel that it must vanish if he is truly to love her. He will then let his soul sink into despair. He despairs not for his own sake but for hers, yet it is also for his own sake, for he loves her as much as himself. The power of despair will then consume everything until he finds himself in his eternal validity, but then he has also found her and no knight will return happier and more joyful from the most hazardous exploits than he from this conflict with flesh and blood and the empty distinctions of the finite, for he who despairs finds the eternally human being and in that we are all equal. The foolish thought of wanting to bring about likeness by deadening his own mind or neglecting its cultivation will not occur to him; he will preserve his mental gifts but in his innermost heart he will be conscious that someone who has them is like someone who does not have them. Or imagine a person with a deeply religious disposition who from a true and inner love of his fellow humans cast himself into the sea of despair until he found the absolute, that point where it is indifferent whether a brow is low or arches more proudly than the heavens, that point which is not indifference but the absolute validity.

You have several good ideas, many odd notions, a mass of silly ones; keep them all. I do not insist, but there is one idea I would beg you to hold on to, an idea which assures me that my own spirit is in kinship with yours. You have often said you would rather be anything else in the world than a poet since a poet-existence is, as a rule, a human sacrifice. I, for my part, would by no means deny there have been poets who have gained their selves before they began to write; on the other hand, it is also certain that a poet-existence as such lies in the obscurity that results from despair’s not being carried through, from the soul’s constantly shivering in despair and the spirit’s being unable to gain its true transparency. The poetic ideal is always an untrue ideal, for the true ideal is always what is actual. So when the spirit is not allowed to vault up into its own eternal world it remains en route and revels in the pictures reflected in the clouds and weeps over their transience. A poet-existence is therefore, as such, an unhappy existence, it is higher than the finite and yet not the infinite. The poet sees the ideals but he has to flee the world in order to take pleasure in them; he cannot carry these divine images within him in the midst of life’s confusion, cannot quietly proceed on his way unaffected by the caricature appearing all around him, not to speak of having the strength to attire himself in those images. The poet’s life is, therefore, often the object of a petty sympathy on the part of those who think themselves safe because they have remained in the finite. You once said in a moment of despondency that no doubt there were already people who had privately made up their accounts with you and were willing to settle on the following condition: that you were recognized as a bright fellow, in return you sank from sight and did not become a useful member of society. Yes, there undeniably exists in the world a pettiness of this kind, which will triumph in this way over everything that protrudes just an inch. But do not let it disturb you, do not defy them, do not scorn them; I would say here, as you usually do, ‘It isn’t worth the trouble.’ But if you do not want to be a poet there is no other way for you than the one I have shown you: Despair!

So then choose despair, since despair is itself a choice, for one can doubt without choosing to, but despair one cannot without choosing to do so. And when one despairs one chooses again, and what then does one choose? One chooses oneself, not in one’s immediacy, not as this contingent individual, one chooses oneself in one’s eternal validity.

I shall endeavour to cast a little more light on this point in your connection. In recent philosophy there has been more than enough talk about speculation beginning with doubt; on the other hand, so far as I have been able occasionally to occupy myself with questions of that kind, I have looked in vain for information on how doubt differs from despair. Here I shall try to clarify that distinction, in the hope that it will contribute to orienting you and facing you in the right direction. I am far from presuming any real philosophical competence, I do not have your virtuosity in playing with categories, but what in the deepest sense is the meaning of life, that after all must surely be comprehensible to a more simple-minded person. Doubt is a despair of thought, despair is a doubt of the personality. That is why I keep such a tight hold on the category of choice, that being my watchword, the nerve of my life-view, and that is something I indeed have even if I make no claim at all to a system.²⁰ Doubt is the inner movement in thought itself, and in my doubt I conduct myself as impersonally as possible. Assume now that, doubt having been applied, thought finds the absolute and rests in it; it rests in it not as the result of a choice but following the same necessity according to which it doubted; for doubt itself belongs to the category of necessity, and rest likewise. It is the sublime aspect of doubt, the reason why doubt has so often been praised and extolled by people who scarcely understood what they were saying. But this fact, that it belongs to the category of necessity, shows that it is not the whole personality that is in motion. So there is something very true in a person’s saying, ‘I’d like to believe it, but I can’t; I have to doubt.’ That is also why one often sees how a doubter can still possess something positive in himself which lives apart from all communication through thought, that he can be a highly conscientious person who has no doubts whatever about the validity of duty and about the maxim for his action, no doubts whatever about a multitude of sympathetic feelings and moods. On the other hand, especially in our own time, one sees people who have despair in their hearts but have still conquered doubt. This has particularly struck me in considering certain of Germany’s philosophers. Their thought is composed, the objective logical thought is brought to rest in its corresponding objectivity, and yet they are in despair even though they distract themselves with objective thinking, for there are many ways a person can distract himself and scarcely any sedative is more effective than abstract thinking, since there it is a matter of conducting oneself as impersonally as possible.

Doubt and despair therefore belong to two quite different spheres, different sides of the soul are set in motion. Still, I am not at all content with this, because doubt and despair would then rank equally and that is not the case. Despair is a far deeper and more complete expression, its movement far more comprehensive than doubt’s. Precisely, despair is an expression of the whole personality, doubt only of thought. The reputed objectivity of doubt, what makes it so distinguished, is precisely an expression of its incompleteness. Doubt, therefore, lies in difference, despair in the absolute. It requires talent to doubt, it requires no talent at all to despair; but talent as such is difference and what needs talent to make it effectual can never be the absolute, for it is only for the absolute that the absolute can be absolute as such. The lowliest, least talented person can despair, a young girl who is least of all a thinker can despair, while it is easy for anyone to sense the foolishness of saying of these that they are doubters. The reason why a person’s doubt can be assuaged and he can still be in despair, and that this can go on, is that he does not in a deeper sense will despair. In general, one cannot despair at all unless one wants to, but in order truly to despair one must truly want to, but when one truly wills despair one is truly beyond it; when one has truly chosen despair one has truly chosen what despair chooses, namely oneself in one’s eternal validity. It is only in despair that the personality is assuaged, though not with necessity, for I never despair necessarily, but with freedom, and only in despair is the absolute attained. I think in this respect our age will make progress, so far as I am entitled to an opinion about our age – that is, seeing I know it only from reading newspapers and the occasional pamphlet, or from our conversations. The time won’t be far off when, perhaps at some cost, we will learn that the true point of departure for finding the absolute is not doubt but despair.

But I return to my category, I am not a logician, I have only one such but I assure you it is the choice of both my heart and my mind, my soul’s desire and my salvation – I return to the significance of choice. In choosing absolutely, then, I choose despair, and in despair I choose the absolute, for I myself am the absolute, I posit the absolute and am myself the absolute. But, as amounts to exactly the same, I must say: I choose the absolute which chooses me, I posit the absolute which posits me. For unless I bear in mind that this second expression is just as absolute, my category of choice is false; for that category is precisely the identity of both. What I choose I do not posit, for if it were not posited I could not choose it, and yet if it were not posited through my choosing it I would not choose it. It is, for if it was not I could not choose it; it is not, for it only comes to be by my choosing it, otherwise my choice would be illusory.

But what, then, do I choose? This thing or that? No, I choose absolutely, and I choose absolutely precisely through having chosen not to choose this thing or that. I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in my eternal validity. Anything other than myself I cannot choose as the absolute, for if I choose something else I choose it as something finite, and therefore do not choose it absolutely. Even the Jew who chose God did not choose absolutely, for although he chose the absolute he did not choose it absolutely, and so it ceased to be the absolute and became something finite.

But what, then, is this self of mine? If it is to be a matter of a first glance, a first shot at a definition, my answer is: it is the most abstract thing of all which yet, at the same time, is the most concrete thing of all – it is freedom. Let me here make a small psychological observation. One often hears people giving vent to their discontent by complaining of life, one often hears them making wishes. Imagine such a poor devil, but let us hop over wishes that do not throw light on anything here because they belong entirely to the contingent. He wishes, ‘If only I had that man’s mind, or his talents,’ etc. Yes, at the farthest extreme, ‘If only I had that man’s firmness.’ One hears wishes like this frequently enough, but have you ever heard a person seriously wish that he could become someone else? So far is that from being so, that it is precisely typical of what are called unfortunates that it is they who cling most tightly to themselves, that despite all their sufferings they would not for all the world want to be someone else; which has its reason in the fact that such individuals are very near the truth and have a sense of the eternal validity of personal existence, not in its blessings but in its torment, even if they have kept to themselves this perfectly abstract expression of joy in their eternal validity which says they would rather be themselves than anyone else. As for the man with many wishes, he still thinks of always remaining himself though everything were changed. So there is something in him that is absolute in relation to everything else, something whereby he is the one he is, even if the change he obtains through his wish were the greatest possible. That he is labouring under a misunderstanding I shall show later; here I want merely to find the most abstract expression for this ‘self’ which makes him what he is. And that is nothing else than freedom. Really it would be possible in this way to offer a highly plausible proof of the eternal validity of personal existence; yes, even a suicide does not really want to do away with his self; he, too, has a wish, he wishes he had another form of his self, and there could well be a suicide, therefore, who was convinced in the highest degree of the immortality of the soul but whose whole being was so confused that he thought to find in this way the absolute form of his spirit.

But the reason why it can seem to an individual that he could constantly change yet remain the same, as if his inmost being were an algebraic entity that could stand for whatever it might be, is to be found in the fact that he has the wrong attitude; he has not chosen himself, he has no conception of doing so, and yet even in his lack of understanding there is an acknowledgement of the eternal validity of personal existence. For someone with the right attitude, on the other hand, things go differently. He chooses himself, not in a finite sense, for then this ‘self’ would be something finite along with other finite things, but in an absolute sense. And still he chooses himself and not another. This self he thus chooses is infinitely concrete, for it is himself, and yet it is absolutely different from his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. This self did not exist previously, for it came into existence through the choice, and yet it has been in existence, for it was indeed ‘he himself’.

The choice here makes the two dialectical movements at once: what is chosen does not exist and comes into existence through the choice, and what is chosen exists, otherwise it would not be a choice. For if the thing I chose did not exist but became absolute through the choice itself, I would not have chosen, I would have created. But I do not create myself, I choose myself. Therefore while nature has been created out of nothing, while I myself qua my immediate personal existence have been created out of nothing, as free spirit I am born of the principle of contradiction, or born by virtue of the fact that I chose myself.

He now discovers that the self he chooses contains an infinite multiplicity inasmuch as it has a history, a history in which he acknowledges identity with himself. This is history of a different sort, for in this history he stands in relation to other individuals of the race and to the race as a whole, and in this history there is something painful, yet he is only the one he is, with this history. Therefore it needs courage to choose oneself, for just when he seems to be becoming most isolated, he is entering more deeply than ever into the roots through which he is linked with the whole. It alarms him, and yet that is how it has to be, for when he awakens to the passion of freedom – and that has been awakened in the choice, just as the choice presupposes it – he chooses himself and fights to possess it as though for his blessedness, and it is his blessedness. He can let go of none of this, not the most painful things, not the most grievous, and yet the expression of this fight, of this acquiring, is – repentance. He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God. Only on these terms can he choose himself and he wants no others, for only thus can he absolutely choose himself. What, after all, is a human being without love? Yet there are many kinds of love. I love a father in a different way from a mother, my wife in still another way, and every different love has its different expression, but there is also a love wherewith I love God, and there is only one expression for this in language: repentance. If I do not love Him thus I do not love Him absolutely, not from my inmost being; any other love for the absolute is a misunderstanding since – to take what people usually praise so highly and I myself have respect for – when thinking clings to the absolute with all its love it is not the absolute I love, I do not love absolutely since I love necessarily; as soon as I love freely and love God, I repent. And were there no other reason for repentance being the expression of my love of God, there is this reason: that he loved me first. And yet this is an incomplete account, for it is only if I choose myself as guilty that I choose myself absolutely, if ever my choosing myself absolutely is not to be identical with creating myself. And if the sins of the father were inherited by the son, this too he repents, for only in this way can he choose himself, choose himself absolutely. And if the tears are just about to efface him completely, he still keeps on repenting, for only thus does he choose himself. It is as though his self is outside him and is to be taken possession of, and the repentance is his love of it, because he chooses it absolutely, from the hand of the eternal God.

What I have stated here is no rostrum-wisdom, it is something every person who wants to can propound, and which every person can want to when he will. I have not learnt it in the auditorium, I have learnt it in the living-room, or in the nursery if you will, for when I see my little son running across the floor, so joyful, so happy, I think, ‘Who knows, perhaps I’ve had a very damaging influence on him? God knows I take all possible care of him, but that thought doesn’t put me at ease.’ Then I say to myself, ‘There’ll come a moment in his life when his spirit too will be matured in the instant of choice, then he will choose himself, then he will also repent whatever guilt of mine may rest upon him. And there’s something pleasing about a son’s repenting his father’s sins, though he won’t do it on my account but because it is only in this way that he can choose himself. So let things go as they will; often what one considers best has the most damaging consequences for a person, but all this is nothing after all. I can do a lot for him, that’s what I’ll strive for, but the highest he can only do for himself.’ You see why people have such difficulty in choosing themselves: here absolute isolation is identical with the deepest continuity, and as long as one has not chosen oneself it is as if there was a possibility of becoming something different, in one way or another.

Here, then, you have my humblest opinion on what it is to choose and to repent. It is unseemly to love a young girl as though she were one’s mother, or one’s mother as though she were a young girl. Every love has its peculiarity; love of God has its absolute peculiarity, its expression is repentance. […] A theologian will be able to base a host of reflections on this point. These I shall not go into further since I am only a layman. I shall try only to throw light on the foregoing with the comment that it is in Christianity that repentance first found its true expression. The pious Jew felt the sins of the fathers weigh upon him, yet he did not feel it nearly as deeply as the Christian, because the pious Jew could not repent it, for he could not choose himself absolutely. The guilt of the fathers weighed upon him, brooded over him, he sank beneath this burden, he sighed, but he could not lift it; only the one who chooses himself absolutely can do that, through repentance. The greater the freedom the greater the guilt, and that is the secret of blessedness, and if not cowardice, it is at least faintheartedness not to want to repent the sins of the fathers; if not to be despised, it is at least petty and devoid of magnanimity.

So then the choice of despair is ‘my self’, for although when I despair I despair over myself as over all else, the self I despair over is a finitude as every other finite thing, while the self I choose is the absolute self or my self according to its absolute validity. That being so, you will again see why I kept on saying in the above that the either/or I proposed between living aesthetically and ethically is not a perfect dilemma, because there is really only one option. Through choosing it I do not really choose between good and evil, I choose the good, but by virtue of choosing the good I choose the option between good and evil. The original choice is constantly present in every subsequent choice.

So despair, then, and your frivolity shall never more cause you to roam like an inconstant spirit, like a ghost among the ruins of a world which is yet lost to you; despair, and your spirit shall never more sigh in melancholy, for the world shall become beautiful and joyous to you once more, though you now look at it with different eyes, and your spirit, now liberated, shall vault up into the world of freedom.

Here I could break off, for I have now brought you to the point I wished. For this, should you yourself wish it, is where you are. My aim was for you to tear yourself away from the illusions of the aesthetic, and from a dream of half despair, in order to awaken to the earnest of spirit. However, I have no intention of doing that, since I want now to give you, from this vantage-point, a way of looking at life, an ethical life-view. It is only a frugal offering, partly because my talents are in no way commensurate to the task, partly because frugality is a prime characteristic of everything ethical, a characteristic which can be arresting enough for someone coming from the abundance of the aesthetic. Here what matters is nil ad ostentationem, omnia ad conscientiam.²¹ Breaking off at this point might also seem questionable for another reason: one might easily get the impression that I had ended up in a sort of quietism,²² where the personality necessarily comes to rest as thought does in the absolute. What then would be the good of having gained oneself, what would be the good of getting a sword which could conquer the whole world if one did nothing with it but thrust it into the scabbard?

But before going on to present such an ethical view of life in more detail, I will indicate in a few words the danger that lies before one in the moment of despair, the reef one can run aground on and be totally shipwrecked. The Scriptures say, ‘What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and suffer harm to his own soul?’²³ […] But the expression ‘suffer harm to his own soul’ is an ethical one, and the person who thinks he has an ethical life-view must also presume to be able to interpret it. One hears the phrase frequently, yet any person who wants to understand it must have felt deep commotions in his soul; yes, he must have despaired, for what are really set before us here are the motions of despair: on the one hand the whole world, on the other one’s own soul. You will readily perceive that, if one pursues this phrase, one arrives at the same abstract definition of ‘soul’ which, in our psychological consideration of the desire to become another, though without becoming another, we reached earlier as the definition of ‘self’. For when I can gain the whole world yet suffer harm to my soul, the phrase ‘whole world’ must also include all the finitudes I possess in virtue of my immediacy. My soul then proves impervious to these. When I can lose the whole world without suffering harm to my soul, the phrase ‘the whole world’ again includes all those determinations of finitude that are mine in virtue of my immediacy, and yet my soul remains unharmed; it is accordingly impervious to them. I can lose my wealth, my esteem in the eyes of others, my mental powers, and still not suffer harm to my soul. I can gain all these and still suffer harm. What then is my soul, what is this inmost being of mine that can remain unaffected by this loss and suffer harm with this gain? This movement is manifest to the despairer, it is no rhetorical phrase but the only adequate one when, on the one hand, he sees the whole world and, on the other, himself, his soul. In the moment of despair the distinction makes itself apparent, and now it is a matter of how he despairs, for, as I explained above in connection with every aesthetic view of life, it is despair to gain the whole world and gain it in such a way that one suffers harm to one’s soul; and yet it is my heartfelt conviction that it is a man’s true salvation to despair. Here, again, we have the importance of willing one’s own despair, willing it in an infinite sense, in an absolute sense, for such willing is identical with absolute self-surrender. If, on the other hand, I will my despair in a finite sense I suffer harm to my soul, for then my inmost being does not attain its breakthrough in despair; on the contrary, it isolates itself, it is hardened, so that finite despair is a hardening, absolute despair an infinitization. If in my despair I gain the whole world, I suffer harm to my soul by making myself finite, I have my life in that world; when I despair over losing the whole world I suffer harm to my soul, for I make it finite in exactly the same way, since here again I see my soul as posited with finitude. […] Every finite despair is a choice of the finite, for I choose it as much when I lose it as when I gain it; for what lies in my power is not whether I gain it, but my choosing it. Finite despair is therefore an unfree despair. Really despair is not the aim, but finitude, yet that is despair. A person can now hold out at this point, and as long as he stays there I cannot really bring myself to say to him that he has suffered harm to his soul. He stands at a highly dangerous point. At every moment there is the possibility of its happening. The despair is there but it has not yet attacked his inmost being. Only when in a finite sense he hardens himself in the despair, only then does he suffer harm to his soul. His soul is as if anaesthetized in despair, and only when, on coming round, he chooses a finite way out of his despair, only then does he suffer harm to his soul; he has isolated himself, his rational soul is stifled and he is transformed into a beast of prey that shuns no means since everything for him is self-defence. There lies a dreadful anxiety in this thought that a person has suffered harm to his soul, yet everyone who has despaired will have had a presentiment of this false path, this perdition. That a person can suffer harm to his soul in this way is certain; whether it is actually the case with a particular person is impossible to tell, and no one ventures here to judge another. A man’s life may look strange and one may be tempted to believe it of him, yet he himself may have quite a different interpretation which assures him of the opposite; on the other hand, a person may have suffered harm to his soul without anyone suspecting it, for this harm lies not on the outside but in the person’s inmost being. It is like the rot in the core of the fruit: while the outside can look appetizing, it gives no hint of the inner hollowness.

So when you choose yourself absolutely you easily find out that this self is not an abstraction or a tautology; at the most it may seem so in the moment of orientation when one separates to the point of finding the most abstract expression of this self, but it is still just an illusion that it is altogether abstract and without content, for after all it is not the consciousness of freedom in general, since that is a determination of thought; it is the product of a choice and is the consciouness of this determinate free being which is himself and no other. This self contains a rich concretion, a multitude of determinate qualities, of characteristics; it is, in short, the whole aesthetic self which is chosen ethically. Therefore the more you become absorbed in yourself, the greater sense you will have of the significance even of the insignificant, not in a finite but in an infinite sense, because it is through you that it is posited, and when one chooses oneself in an ethical sense it is not just a reflection upon oneself. To characterize this act, one might recall the word of the Scriptures about giving account of every idle word that men shall speak.²⁴ For when the passion of freedom is awakened, freedom is jealous of itself and by no means allows it to remain thus indeterminate as between what does and does not belong to it. So while in the first instant of choice the person proceeds apparently as naked as the child from its mother’s womb, the next instant it is concrete in itself, and it is only by an arbitrary abstraction that someone can remain at that point. He becomes himself – quite the same as he was before, down to the least significant peculiarity – and yet he becomes another, for the choice permeates everything and transforms it. Thus is his finite personality now made infinite in the choice in which he infinitely chooses himself.

So now he owns himself as posited by himself, that is, as chosen by himself, as free; but when he owns himself in this way, an absolute difference appears, that between good and evil. So long as he has not chosen himself this difference remains latent. How in general does the difference between good and evil emerge? Can we think it – that is, is it something for thought? No. Here the point comes up again that I touched on above, how philosophy could seem actually to have abolished the principle of contradiction, the reason being that it has not yet reached it. Whenever I think, my relation to what it is I am thinking is one of necessity, but that is exactly why the difference between good and evil does not arise. Think anything you like, think the most abstract categories of all, think the most concrete, you never think in the category of good and evil; think the whole of history and you think the necessary movement of the Idea, but you never think in the category of good and evil. You always think relative differences, never the absolute difference. Philosophy, so far as I can judge, may well be justified in claiming it cannot think an absolute contradiction, but it by no means follows that the latter does not exist. In thinking, I make myself infinite, but not absolutely, since I disappear into the absolute; it is only when I choose myself absolutely that I make myself infinite absolutely, for I myself am the absolute, for it is only myself that I can choose absolutely, and this absolute choice of myself is my freedom; only when I have absolutely chosen myself have I posited an absolute difference, namely that between good and evil.

In order to abolish the element of self-determination in thought, philosophy says, ‘The absolute is by virtue of my thinking it.’ But since philosophy itself sees that this implies free thought (not necessary thought, which is the one it usually acclaims), it replaces this expression with another, namely that my thought of the absolute is the ‘absolute’s self-thinking’ in me. This expression is not at all identical with the previous one, but on the other hand it is entirely appropriate. For here my thought is an element in the absolute, that is where the necessity of my thought lies, that is where the necessity with which I think the absolute lies. Things are different with the good. The good is by virtue of my willing it, and otherwise it has no existence. This is the expression of freedom; similarly with evil, it is only by virtue of my willing it. This is in no way to belittle the categories of good and evil or to reduce them to merely subjective determinations. On the contrary, it is to assert the absolute validity of these categories. The good is the in-and-for-itself posited by the in-and-for-itself, and that is freedom.²⁵

My use of the expression ‘choosing oneself absolutely’ may seem questionable, for it might be taken to imply that I chose good and evil equally absolutely, and that both good and evil belonged to me equally essentially. To prevent this misunderstanding I used the expression ‘repenting myself out of the whole of existence’. For repentance is the expression of the fact that evil is an essential part of me, and at the same time the expression of the fact that it is not essentially a part of me. If evil were not an essential part of me I could not choose it, but if there were something in me that I could not choose absolutely, then there would be no question of my choosing myself absolutely; I would not be the absolute myself, but only a product.

Here I will break off these reflections in order to show how an ethical life-view looks at the person and life and its meaning. For form’s sake I return to some observations made earlier about the relation between the aesthetic and the ethical. We said that every aesthetic life-view was despair; this was because it was built upon what may or may not be. That is not the case with the ethical life-view, for this builds life upon what has being as its essential property. The aesthetic, we said, is that in which a person is immediately what he is; the ethical is that whereby a person becomes what he becomes. This in no way implies that someone who lives aesthetically does not develop, but he develops with necessity, not with freedom; there occurs no metamorphosis in his case, no infinite movement whereby he arrives at the point from which he becomes what he becomes.

When an individual considers himself aesthetically, he becomes conscious of this self of his as a multiple concretion inwardly determined in many ways, but in spite of all the inner diversity it is all still his nature, everything has just as much right to come to light, is just as entitled to demand satisfaction. His soul is like soil from which there spring all kinds of herbs, all equally entitled to thrive; it is in this diversity that his self lies, and he has no self higher than this. Now, if he has what you so often speak of, namely aesthetic seriousness and a little worldly wisdom, he will see that it is impossible for everything to thrive equally. So he will choose, and what decides his choice is a more-or-less, which is a relative difference. Let us now suppose someone were able to live without coming in contact with the ethical; he would then be able to say, ‘I have it in me to be a Don Juan, a Faust, a robber chief; I shall now cultivate this trait since aesthetic seriousness demands that I become something definite, that I let the seedling planted in me develop fully.’ Aesthetically, that way of looking at personality and its development would be perfectly proper. From this you see what an aesthetic development means: it is a development like that of the plant, and although the individual becomes something, what it becomes is what it is immediately. For someone who regards personhood ethically there is, from the very first, an absolute difference, namely that between good and evil, and if he finds more evil than good, that still does not mean that evil is what has to come to the fore, but that evil is to be suppressed and the good allowed to come to the fore. So when the individual develops ethically, he comes to be what he becomes; for even when he gives rein to the aesthetic in him (which for him means something else than for the one who lives merely aesthetically), it has nevertheless been removed from its throne. […]

It takes much ethical courage not to be distinguished by difference but to be content with the universal. […] Everyone who lives merely aesthetically […] has a secret dread of despairing, for he knows very well that what despair brings out is the universal, and at the same time he knows that his life is based on difference. The higher the individual stands, the more differences he has done away with or despaired over, but he always retains one difference which he will not do away with, on which his life is based. It is curious to see the admirable assurance with which even the most simple-minded discover what one might call their aesthetic difference, however insignificant that may be, and one of life’s miseries is the foolish controversy carried on about which difference is more significant than another. Aesthetic minds also express their aversion to despair by saying it is a break. This expression is quite appropriate so far as one supposes life’s development to consist of a necessary unfolding of the immediate. If that is not the case, then despair is no break but a transfiguration. Only a person despairing over something in particular suffers a break, but that is just because he does not despair to the full. Aesthetes are also afraid that life will lose the diverting multiplicity it has so long as one looks at it as though every single individual lived under aesthetic categories. Once again, this is a misunderstanding, no doubt fostered by a number of rigoristic theories. In despair nothing is destroyed, all a person’s aesthetic qualities remain, it is just that they become ancillary and are preserved for that very reason. Yes, it is indeed true that one does not live in the aesthetic as one did, but it by no means follows that one loses it. It may be true that one uses it otherwise, but it does not follow that it has gone away. All the ethicist does is to carry to its conclusion the doubt which the higher aesthete had already set in motion but which he broke off arbitrarily; for, however great his difference, it is still only relative. And when the aesthetician himself admits that the difference which gives his life meaning is also transitory, but adds that it is still always best to enjoy it as long as one has it, this is really a cowardice in love with a certain kind of enjoyment of ease, under not too high a ceiling, and is unworthy of a human being. It is as though someone were to rejoice in some relationship based on a misunderstanding which, sooner or later, would have to come into the open, and lacked the courage to be cognizant of this or to admit it, but rejoiced in the relationship as long as possible. However, this is not the case with you; you are like someone who has admitted the misunderstanding, broken off the relationship, but then wants to be forever taking leave of it.

The aesthetic view also considers personal existence in its relation to the environment, and the expression of this in its impact on the individual is pleasure. But the aesthetic expression of pleasure in its relation to personal existence is mood. For the person is present in the mood but present only in a shadowy way. A person living aesthetically tries as much as possible to be completely taken up in the mood; he tries to hide himself totally within it, so that there is nothing in him which cannot be bent into conformity with it, for any residue always has a disturbing effect, it is an element of continuity that tries to hold him back. The more his personal being merges into mood, the more the individual is in the moment, and again this is the most adequate expression of aesthetic existence: it is in the moment. Hence the huge oscillations to which the person who lives aesthetically is exposed. A person living ethically also knows mood, but for him it is not the most important thing; because he has chosen himself infinitely he sees the mood beneath him. The remainder that will not fit into the mood is exactly that continuity which is for him what is most important. Someone living ethically has […] a memory of his life, a person living aesthetically certainly has not. Someone living ethically does not do away with mood, he sizes it up for an instant, but this instant saves him from living in the moment, this instant gives him mastery over desire, for the art of mastering desire consists not so much in doing away with it, or giving it up altogether, as in determining the instant. Take any pleasure you like, its secret, its strength, consists in its being contained absolutely in the moment. True, one often hears people saying that the only way is to abstain altogether. That is a very mistaken way and only succeeds for a while. Take someone who has become addicted to gambling. Desire is aroused with all its passion, it is as though his life were at stake if the desire is not satisfied. If he can say to himself, ‘Not just now; in an hour’s time’, he is cured. This hour is the continuity that saves him. For someone living aesthetically the mood is always eccentric, because he has his centre at the periphery. Personal being has its centre in itself, and someone who does not have himself is eccentric. Someone living ethically, however, has his mood centralized, he is not inside the mood, he is not the mood itself, he has mood and has the mood in him. What he works for is continuity and that is always master over mood. His life does not lack mood, indeed it has a total mood, but it is acquired; it is what one could call equability, but this is no aesthetic mood, and no one has it by nature or immediately.

But he who has now infinitely chosen himself – can he say, ‘Now I own myself, I ask nothing more, and to all the world’s vicissitudes I oppose the proud thought: I am the one I am’? By no means! If anyone were to express themselves in that way one could easily see they had gone astray. The basic mistake would also lie in his not having chosen himself in the strictest sense; choose himself he may have done, but he has done it from outside himself; he had understood quite abstractly what it was to choose and had failed to grasp himself in his concretion; he had not so chosen himself that, in the choice, he came to be within himself, had not clothed himself in himself; he had chosen himself in respect of his necessity, not of his freedom; he had taken the ethical option in vain, aesthetically. The more truly meaningful the outcome that emerges, the more dangerous are the false paths, and here too, accordingly, there appears a dreadful false path. Once the individual has grasped himself in his eternal validity, this overwhelms him with all its fullness. The temporal vanishes from sight. At first it fills him with an indescribable bliss and gives him a sense of absolute security. If, then, it is this that he begins to gaze one-sidedly upon, the temporal presses its claims. They are rejected. What the temporal has to offer, the more-or-less that presents itself here, is for him so very unimportant compared with what he owns eternally. Everything stops short for him, it is as though he had reached eternity before his time. He becomes lost in contemplation, he gazes at himself, but his gazing cannot fill up the time. It then seems to him that time, the temporal, is his ruin, he demands a perfect form of life, and here again appears a fatigue similar to the languor attending pleasure. This apathy can rest so broodingly over a person that suicide seems the only way out. No power can wrest his self from him, the only power is time, yet neither can this wrest his self from him, but checks and delays him, it detains the spiritual embrace in which he grasps himself. He has not chosen himself; like Narcissus, he has fallen in love with himself.²⁶ It is certainly not seldom such a situation has ended in suicide.

The mistake lies in the fact that he has not chosen in the right way, not just in the sense that he has been insensible of his errors, but he has seen himself in the category of necessity. Himself, this person with all these multiple characteristics, he has seen as part of the way of the world, he has seen his self over against the eternal power, whose fire has permeated it but without consuming it. But he has not seen himself in his freedom, has not chosen himself in that. If he does that, the very moment he chooses himself he is in motion; however concrete his self is, he has still chosen himself in respect of his possibility, he has purchased his freedom in order to stay in it, but he can only stay in his freedom by constantly realizing it. It is for that reason he has chosen himself, by virtue of that fact he is active.

Here might be the place to say a few words about a life-view which you find most agreeable, particularly as teacher, sometimes also as practitioner. What it amounts to is nothing less than that the real meaning of life, after all, is sorrow, and being the unhappiest is the happiest thing of all. At first glance this does not look like an aesthetic view of life, for its slogan can scarcely be pleasure. Neither, however, is it ethical, but it lies at the dangerous transition between the aesthetic and the ethical, where the soul is so easily seduced by one or another version of the theory of predestination. You proclaim a number of false doctrines, and this is about the worst, but you know also it is the one most fitted for sneaking your way in upon people and drawing them to you. You can be as heartless as any, you can joke about everything, even about man’s pain. You are not unaware that young people are tempted by this, yet this conduct puts you at some distance from them, for such behaviour repels as much as it attracts. If it is a young woman you want to deceive in this way, you cannot but notice that a womanly soul has too much depth to be captivated permanently by such things; yes, even if you engaged her attention for a moment, she will soon end up wearying of it and forming something close to an aversion to you because her soul is in no need of such titillation. The method is then changed; in isolated enigmatic outbursts, which only she can understand, you let it be hinted that it can all be explained by a remote melancholy. You open yourself only to her, but with such caution that she really never gets to know anything more; you leave it to her imagination to depict the details of the profound sadness you hide within you. Shrewd, one cannot deny you are that, and it is true what a young girl said about you, that probably you will end up a Jesuit. The more subtly you can pass them the thread that leads deeper and deeper into the secrets of sadness, the more joyful you are, the more sure of drawing them to you. You do not make long speeches, you do not protest your pain in firm handclasps, or by ‘gazing romantically into the romantic eyes of a kindred soul’; you are too smart for that. You avoid witnesses, and only occasionally let yourself be taken by surprise. At a certain age, there is no more dangerous poison to a young girl than sadness; you know that, and this knowledge may, like any other, be all very well in itself; your use of it, on the other hand, is not something I shall praise. […]

It is part of the whole development in modern times that people are more disposed to feel sorrow than joy. It is considered a higher view of life, and so it is, inasmuch as it is natural to want to be joyful, and unnatural to sorrow. On top of that there is the fact that being joyful does after all impose a certain obligation on the individual to be thankful, even if his thoughts are too confused for him to know just whom he should thank; sorrow absolves one from that and vanity is then better satisfied. Besides, our age has experienced the vanity of life in so many ways that it does not believe in joy, and as it still has to have something to believe in, it believes in sorrow. Joy passes away, it says, but sorrow lasts and anyone who bases his view of life on it builds on a solid foundation.

If we ask now more explicitly what sort of sorrow it is you are talking about, you are shrewd enough to evade ethical sorrow. It is not repentance you mean; no, it is aesthetic sorrow, reflected sorrow in particular. It is based not on guilt but on misfortune, on fate, on a sad disposition, the influence of others, etc. It is something with which you are all too familiar from novels. When you read it there you laugh at it, if you hear others talk of it you mock them; but when you yourself discourse on it, it makes sense and there is truth in it.

Now although the view that takes sorrow to be the meaning of life can seem itself to be sorrowful enough, I cannot neglect to show you, from an angle you perhaps would not expect, that it offers no comfort. […] Someone who says that sorrow is the meaning of life has joy outside him in the same way that someone who wants to be joyful has sorrow outside him. Joy may take him by surprise in exactly the same way that sorrow can take the other. So his life-view is tied to a condition which is not under his control, for it is really just as little under someone’s control to refrain from joy as to refrain from sorrow. But any life-view with a condition outside it is despair. And so wanting to sorrow is despair in exactly the same sense as wanting to seek joy, since it is always despair to have one’s life centred in something whose nature it is to cease to be. […]

The deeper the source of sorrow, the more it can seem that one might preserve it all one’s life, as if there was indeed nothing one need do to make it so, it will stay as a matter of course. If it is some particular event, that will prove very difficult. You yourself are fully aware of that, and so when you want to pronounce on the meaning of sorrow for the whole of life you think mainly of unhappy characters and tragic heroes. It is a feature of the entire spiritual disposition of the unhappy character that he is unable to be happy or joyful, a fate broods over him, and similarly over the tragic hero. So here you are perfectly justified in saying that sorrow is the meaning of life; and this has brought us to plain fatalism, which always has something seductive about it. Here also you encounter your allegation which amounts neither more nor less to the claim that you yourself are the unhappiest man. And yet it is undeniable that this thought is the proudest and most defiant that can arise in a man’s brain.

Let me answer you as you deserve. First of all, you do not sorrow. This you know full well, for it is your favourite saying that the unhappiest is the happiest. But this is a falsification more appalling than any other; it is a falsification which turns against the eternal power that governs the world, it is a rebellion against God, like wanting to laugh when you should weep; and yet there is a despair that is capable of it, there is a defiance that pits itself against God. But that is also treason against the human race. True, you too distinguish between sorrows, but you think there is a difference so great as to allow a kind that it is impossible to bear. But if such a sorrow exists, it is not for you to decide which it is, one difference is as good as another, and you have betrayed man’s deepest and most sacred right or grace. It is treason against what is great, a mean envy, for what it comes down to is that the great men have not been subjected to the most dangerous trials, have slipped easily into their honours, and that they would also have succumbed had the superhuman temptation you speak of come their way. And is this the way you intend to honour what is great, by belittling it? You mean to bear witness to it by denying it?

And do not misunderstand me now. I am not the kind that thinks one should not sorrow, I despise that petty common sense, and if this is all the choice there is, then I choose sorrow. No, I am aware that to sorrow is beautiful, and that there is mettle in tears; but I also know that one shall not sorrow as one who has not hope. There is an absolute opposition between us that can never be abolished. I cannot live in aesthetic categories, I feel what I hold most sacred is destroyed; I need a higher expression and the ethical gives me that. And this is where sorrow first acquires its true and profound meaning. Do not be shocked by what I am about to say here, do not hold it against me that, while speaking of sorrows which need heroes to bear them, I can talk of children.

It is a sign of a well-behaved child that it is disposed to ask permission without pondering too deeply whether it is in the right or not; and so it is a sign of a magnanimous man of profound soul that he is disposed to repent, that he does not go to law with God but repents and loves God in his repentance. Without that his life is nothing, merely like foam on water. Yes, I assure you that if my own life, through no fault of my own, were so fraught with sorrows and sufferings that I could call myself the greatest tragic hero, revel in my pain, and appal the world by calling attention to it, my choice is made; I divest myself of the hero’s apparel and of tragedy’s pathos, I am not the afflicted one who can be proud of his suffering, I am the humble one who is aware of his sin. I have only one expression for what I suffer – guilt; one expression for my pain – repentance; one hope before my eyes – forgiveness; and if I find this difficult, ah! I have but one prayer, I will throw myself to the ground and implore the eternal power that governs the world for one grace, early and late, that I be allowed to repent. For I know only one sorrow which can bring me to despair and plunge everything down into it – the sorrow that repentance was a delusion, a delusion not in respect of the forgiveness it seeks, but in the accountability it presupposes.

And do you think that this conduct shows that I fail to give sorrow its due, that I am running away from it? By no means! I deposit it within my being and for that reason I never forget it. By and large it is mistrust of the validity of spirit not to dare to believe that I can have something within me without looking at it at every instant. In everyday life whatever one most wishes to set aside one deposits in a place one does not come to every day; so too in a spiritual sense. I have sorrow within me, and I know that it will continue to be part of my being. I know it far more surely than someone who from dread of losing it takes it out every day.

My life has never been so agitated that I felt tempted by the chaotic wish to throw all existence into confusion, but in my daily life I have often discovered how profitable it is to give sorrow an ethical expression, not to erase the aesthetic factor in sorrow but to master it ethically. As long as sorrow is quiet and humble, I do not fear it; if it becomes vehement and passionate, sophistical so that it deludes me into despondency, I arise, I brook no rebellion, I will have nothing in the world cheat me of what I have from God’s hand as a gift of grace. I do not chase sorrow away, do not try to forget it, I repent. […]

Perhaps you see now why I take up this life-view here. Personal being is here again viewed under the category of necessity, and there is only enough freedom left constantly to keep the individual half awake, as in a restless dream, and to lead him astray into the labyrinth of suffering and dispensation where he sees himself everywhere yet cannot come to himself. It is incredible how irresponsibly one sees problems like these dealt with. Even systematic thinkers treat [freedom] as a natural curiosity they have nothing more to say about, but can only describe, without it ever occurring to them that, if there were such a natural curiosity, all the rest of their wisdom is nonsense and illusion. That is why one feels helped quite otherwise by the Christian view than by all the wisdom of the philosophers. It assigns everything to sin, something philosophy is too aesthetic to have the ethical courage to do. And yet this courage is the only thing that can save life and man, unless one is to break off one’s scepticism at a whim and join forces with some like-minded persons on what to count as true.

The first form the choice takes is a complete isolation. For in choosing myself I sever myself from my relationship to the whole world until, in this separation, I end in an abstract identity. When the individual has chosen himself in respect of his freedom he is by that very fact active. Yet his action has no relation to any surrounding world, for the individual has completely done away with the latter and is only for himself. The life-view here presented is, however, an ethical view. In Greece it was expressed in a single individual’s endeavour to develop himself into a paragon of virtue. As later with the anchorites in Christendom, one withdrew from life’s activities, not to steep oneself in metaphysical musings, but to act, not outwardly, but within oneself. This inner action was at once the individual’s task and satisfaction, for it was no part of his purpose to cultivate himself the better to be able to serve the State later on; no, in this cultivation the individual was sufficient unto himself and abandoned the life of the State, never to return to it. Really, then, one didn’t withdraw from life; on the contrary, one remained within its diversity because contact with it was pedagogically necessary for one’s own sake; but civic life as such had no significance for one – through some or other sorcerer’s spell one had rendered it harmless, indifferent, unimportant. So the virtues the individual developed were not civic virtues (as the virtues in paganism really were, corresponding to the religious virtues in Christianity), they were the personal virtues: courage, perseverance, temperance, moderation, etc. Naturally, in our own times one very seldom sees this life-view put into practice, since everyone is too much affected by the religious to stay with such an abstract specification of virtue. It is easy to see what the defect is with this life-view. The error is that the individual has chosen himself altogether abstractly, and so the perfection he desired and attained was similarly abstract. It was for that reason I stressed that choosing oneself and repenting oneself are identical, for repentance puts the individual into the most heartfelt connection, and the most intimate cohesion, with the surrounding world.

Analogies to this Greek view have often been seen, even occasionally in the Christian world, except that in Christianity a seasoning of mystical and religious elements makes it richer and more beautiful. Whatever heights of virtuosity a Greek who developed himself into a perfect compendium of all personal virtues might attain, his life is still no less mortal than the world whose temptation his virtue conquered; his blessedness is a lonely self-contentment, transient as everything else. Now, the life of a mystic is far deeper. He has chosen himself absolutely, for although a mystic is less often heard to express himself in this way, although he generally uses the seemingly opposite expression that he has chosen God, it comes to the same as was shown above. For unless he has chosen himself absolutely he is not in any free relationship to God, and the characteristic of Christian piety lies in freedom. In the language of the mystic this free relationship to God is often expressed by saying that He is the absolute Thou. The mystic has chosen himself absolutely, according therefore to his freedom, and consequently is by that very fact active, but his action is inner action. The mystic chooses himself in his complete isolation; for him the whole world is dead and done away with and the weary soul chooses God, or itself. This expression, ‘the weary soul’, must not be misunderstood, not misused to demean the mystic as if there were something dubious about the soul’s choosing God only when it had become weary of the world. No doubt what the mystic is conveying through this expression is his repentance at not having chosen God earlier, and his weariness should not be regarded as the same thing as boredom with life. Here already you will see how little the mystic’s life is given to the ethical, since the highest expression of his repentance is to repent that he had not chosen God earlier, before he became concrete in the world, while his soul was merely abstractly defined, that is, as a child.

The mystic, in having chosen, is by that very fact active. But his action is inner action. Inasmuch as he is active his life has a movement, a development, a history. However, a development can be metaphysical or aesthetic to such a degree that it is doubtful whether in any proper sense one should call it a history, since one thinks of that as a development in the form of freedom. A movement can be haphazard to such a degree that one can doubt whether it should be called a development. Thus, if the movement consists in the same factor occurring again and again, undeniably we have movement, indeed one can perhaps discover a law of its motion; but we have no development. The repetition in time is without meaning, and continuity is lacking. This is very largely true of the life of the mystic. A mystic’s meanings about the moments of dullness make appalling reading. But when the dull moment has gone there comes the moment of light, and so his life is constantly changing, it has movement indeed, but no development. His life lacks continuity. What really provides that in the life of the mystic is a feeling, namely longing, whether this longing is directed at what has gone or at what is to come. But the fact that what makes up the interval is a feeling shows precisely that cohesion is lacking. A mystic’s development is metaphysically and aesthetically determined to such a degree that one can hardly call it history, except in the sense in which one speaks of the history of a plant. For the mystic, the whole world is dead, he has fallen in love with God. The development of his life is then the unfolding of this love. Just as there are instances of lovers bearing some resemblance to one another, even outwardly, in their expression, their physiognomy, so is the mystic absorbed in the contemplation of the Deity, and the latter’s image is more and more reflected in his loving soul; thus the mystic renews and revives the lost divine image in man. The more he contemplates, the more clearly this image is reflected in him, the more he comes himself to resemble this image. His inner action consists not, then, in the acquisition of the personal virtues but in the development of the religious or contemplative virtues. Yet even this is too ethical an expression for his life, and his real life is therefore prayer. That prayer is also part of an ethical life I will not deny, but the more ethically a man lives, the more the prayer has the character of an intention, so that there is an element of intention even in the prayer of thanksgiving. With the mystic’s prayer it is otherwise. For him prayer means all the more the more erotic it is, the more it is inflamed by a burning love. The prayer is the expression of his love, the only language in which he can address the Deity with whom he has fallen in love. As in earthly life the lovers long for the moment when they can breathe their love to one another, let their souls fuse in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in his prayer he can, as it were, steal into the presence of God. As the lovers experience in that whisper their greatest bliss when really they have nothing at all to talk about, so the mystic in his prayer is all the more blessed, his love all the more happy, the less content there is in it, the more nearly in his sigh he vanishes from before his own very eyes.

Perhaps it would not be too much of a diversion here to bring out more clearly what is untrue in such a life, especially since a person of any profundity is always liable to be impressed by it. Thus you yourself are by no means lacking in what it takes to be a mystic, at least for a while. This is, in general, the area where the greatest contrasts meet, the purest and most innocent souls and the guiltiest, the most gifted and the most simple-minded.

First I will state, quite simple-mindedly, what really offends me in such a life. This is my personal judgement. Later I shall try to show the accuracy of my indications of its dubious sides, as well as the reasons for these and the fearful false paths that lie so close.

In my opinion one cannot exonerate the mystic from a certain importunity in his relationship to God. That a man should love God with all his soul and with all his mind, and not merely should do so but that his actually doing so is blessedness itself, who could deny? However, from this it by no means follows that the mystic should disdain the existence, the reality, in which God has placed him; for in that case he is really disdaining God’s love, or demanding another expression of it than the one God wants to give. Here Samuel’s serious saying applies: ‘To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.’²⁷ But this importunity can occasionally take on an even more questionable form, as when a mystic justifies his relationship to God on the grounds of being the very person he is, and thinks that it is due to some accidental trait that he is the object of God’s partiality. For here he debases the Deity and himself: himself because it is always a debasement to be essentially distinguished from others by something accidental; God because he makes the Deity a false god and himself into a favourite at his court.

What next I find displeasing in a mystic’s life is the softness and weakness from which one cannot exonerate him. That a man wishes to be assured in his inmost heart that he loves God truly and sincerely, that he many a time feels the need to be properly convinced of this, that he can pray God to let his Spirit bear witness that he does so,²⁸ who would deny the beauty and truth in that? But from this it by no means follows that at every moment he will repeat this attempt, that at every moment he will put his love to the test. He wants to have greatness of soul enough to believe in God’s love, but then he should also have the confidence to believe in his own love, and to continue happily in the situation assigned to him, precisely because he knows that this continuation is the surest expression of his love, of his humility.

Finally, a mystic’s life displeases me because I consider it a deceit against the world in which he lives, a deceit against those with whom he is associated or with whom he could enter into relationships had it not pleased him to become a mystic. Generally the mystic chooses the solitary life, but that does not clarify the situation, for the question is whether he has a right to choose it. Inasmuch as it is something he has chosen, he does not deceive others, for this is to say in effect, ‘I will have no relationship with you’, but the question is whether he has a right to say that, a right to do this. It is especially as a husband, as a father, that I am an enemy of mysticism. My household has also its adyton,²⁹ but if I were a mystic I would also have to have yet another all for myself, and then I would be a bad husband. Now since in my view, as I shall explain later, it is every man’s duty to marry, and since it cannot possibly be my view that one should marry in order to become a bad husband, you will easily see that I must have an aversion to all mysticism.

In the end someone who devotes himself one-sidedly to a life of mysticism becomes so much a stranger to everyone that he becomes indifferent to every relationship, even the tenderest and most heartfelt. It is not in this sense that one is to love God more than father and mother;³⁰ God is not that self-loving, nor is he a poet who wishes to torment men with the most fearful collisions, and you could hardly conceive anything more fearful than that there indeed existed a collision between love of God and love of those human beings our love of whom He has lodged in our hearts. You have surely not forgotten young Ludvig Blackfeldt, with whom we both had so much contact a few years ago, particularly myself. Certainly he had great mental gifts, but his misfortune was to become one-sidedly absorbed not so much in Christian as in Indian mysticism. Had he lived in the Middle Ages, he would undoubtedly have found refuge in a monastery. Our own age has no such expedients. If a person loses his way now he must needs go under unless he is completely cured; we have no such relative salvation to offer him. You know he ended by taking his own life. […] Poor Ludvig was not indeed religiously affected, but he was affected mystically nevertheless; for what is peculiar to the mystical is not the religious but the isolation in which the individual, not heeding any relation with the given reality, would put himself into immediate rapport with the eternal. The fact that the word ‘mysticism’ naturally and immediately calls something religious to mind has to do with the fact that religion has a tendency to isolate the individual, as the most simple observation can convince you. Maybe you attend church rather infrequently, but you are likely to be all the more observant. Have you noticed that although in a sense one gets the impression of a congregation, the individual still feels isolated? People become strangers to each other, and it is as though one were united again only by way of a long detour. And to what is this due if not to the individual’s feeling his God-relationship so strongly, in all its inwardness, that his earthly relationships lose their importance beside it? For a healthy man this instant will not last long, and a momentary distancing of this kind is so far from being a deceit that, rather, it increases the inwardness of the earthly relationships. But what can be healthy as a constituent becomes a most critical sickness when developed one-sidedly.

Not having a theological background, I do not consider myself capable of elaborating on the subject of religious mysticism any further. I have considered it only from my ethical standpoint, and have therefore, correctly I believe, given the word ‘mysticism’ a much broader meaning than usual. That there is very much that is beautiful in religious mysticism, that the many deep and serious natures who have devoted themselves to it have experienced much in their lives, and were thus qualified to provide counsel and directions and hints of service to others who would venture upon this dangerous path, of that I have no doubt; yet this path is notwithstanding not merely a dangerous path but a false one. There is always an inconsistency implicit in it. Since the mystic has no respect at all for reality, it is not evident why he does not treat with the same distrust that moment in reality when he became affected by higher things.

So the mystic’s fault is not that he chooses himself, for in my opinion he does well to do that, his mistake is that he does not choose himself properly; he chooses in respect of his freedom and yet he does not choose ethically. One can only choose oneself in respect of one’s freedom when one chooses oneself ethically; but one can only choose oneself ethically by repenting oneself, and it is only by repenting oneself that one becomes concrete, and it is only as a concrete individual that one is a free individual. The mystic’s mistake does not lie in something later but in the very first movement. If one takes that to be correct, then every withdrawal from life, every ascetic self-torment is simply a further and proper consequence. The mystic’s mistake is that in the choice he does not become concrete for himself, and not for God either; he chooses himself abstractly and therefore lacks transparency. For if you believe that the abstract is the transparent, you are mistaken; the abstract is the opaque, the indistinct. Therefore his love for God has its highest expression in a feeling, a mood; in the evening twilight, in the season of mists, he melts with vague movements into one with his God. But when one chooses oneself abstractly, one does not choose oneself ethically. Only when one has taken possession of oneself in the choice, has attired oneself in one’s self, has penetrated oneself so totally that every movement is attended by the consciousness of a responsibility for oneself, only then has one chosen oneself ethically, only then has one repented oneself, only then is one concrete, only then is one, in one’s total isolation, in absolute continuity with the reality one belongs to.

I cannot return often enough to this proviso that choosing oneself is identical with repenting oneself, however simple in itself it may be. For upon this everything turns. The mystic too repents, but he repents himself out of himself, not into himself, he repents metaphysically, not ethically. To repent aesthetically is detestable because it is effeminate; to repent metaphysically is a misplaced superfluity, for the individual has not created the world after all, and so need not take it so much to heart if the world should really turn out to be vanity. The mystic chooses himself abstractly and therefore has to repent himself abstractly too. This can best be seen from the mystic’s judgement upon existence, the finite reality in which he lives. For the mystic teaches that it is vanity, illusion, sin; but every such judgement is a metaphysical judgement and does not define my relation to existence ethically. Even when he says that finitude is sin, what he says is just about the same as when he calls it vanity. If, on the other hand, he were to keep hold of the ethical sense of the word ‘sin’, he would define his relation to it not ethically but metaphysically, for the ethical expression would not be to run away from it but to enter into it, to abolish it or to bear it. Ethical repentance has but two movements; either it abolishes its object or it bears it. These two movements also indicate a concrete relation between the repenting individual and the object of his repentance, whereas fleeing expresses an abstract relation.

The mystic chooses himself abstractly, and one can therefore say that he constantly chooses himself out of the world; but the consequence is that he cannot choose himself back again into the world. The true concrete choice is that in which in the very moment I choose myself out of the world I choose myself back into it. For when I choose myself repentantly I gather myself together in all my finite concretion, and in thus having chosen myself out of the finite I am in the most absolute continuity with it. […]

The greatest significance [the mystic] can assign to the temporal is to see it as a period of probation in which one must be repeatedly tested without any real result or getting any further than at the beginning. This, however, is to misjudge the temporal, for although it does always retain something of an ecclesia pressa,³¹ it is at the same time the possibility of the finite spirit’s glorification. It is precisely the beauty of the finite that within it infinite spirit and finite spirit are separated, and it is precisely the greatness of the finite spirit that the temporal is assigned to it. So the temporal does not exist, if I may be so bold, for God’s sake so that in it He can, mystically speaking, test and try the one who loves; it is there for man’s sake and is the greatest of all gifts of grace. For the eternal dignity of man lies in the fact that he can acquire a history, and the divine element in him lies in the fact that he himself can impart to this history a continuity if he will; for it acquires that not by being the sum of all that has happened to or befallen me, but by being my own work, so that even what has befallen me is transformed in me and translated from necessity to freedom. The enviable thing with a human life is that one can come to the aid of the Deity, can understand Him, and again the only way of understanding Him worthy of a man is freely to appropriate all that has fallen to one, both the joyful and the sorrowful. Or does it not seem so to you? That is how it strikes me; yes, I think one would only have to say it aloud to a man to make him envious of himself.

The two standpoints indicated here [the Greek and the mystical] might be regarded as attempts to realize an ethical view of life. The reason why they do not succeed is that the individual has chosen himself in his isolation or has chosen himself abstractly. This can also be put by saying that the individual has not chosen himself ethically. He is therefore not connected with reality, and in that case no ethical life-view can be put into practice. On the other hand, a person who chooses himself ethically chooses himself concretely as this definite individual, and he achieves this concretion by the choice being identical with the repentance which sanctions the choice. The individual is then aware of himself as this definite individual, with these aptitudes, these tendencies, these instincts, these passions, influenced by these definite surroundings, as this definite product of a definite outside world. But in becoming self-aware in this way, he assumes responsibility for it all. He does not pause to consider whether to include some particular trait or not, for he knows there is something far higher that he stands to lose if he does not. At the instant of choice, then, he is in the most complete isolation for he withdraws from the surroundings, and yet is at the same instant in absolute continuity for he chooses himself as product; and this choice is freedom’s choice, so that in choosing himself as product he can just as well be said to produce himself. At the instant of choice, then, he is at the conclusion, for his personhood forms a closure; and yet in the same instant he is precisely at the beginning for he chooses himself in respect of his freedom. As product he is pressed into the forms of reality, in the choice he makes himself elastic, he transforms the whole of his outwardness to inwardness. He has his place in the world, with freedom he himself chooses his place, that is, he chooses this place. He is a definite individual, in the choice he makes himself into a definite individual, that is to say, into the same, for he chooses himself.

The individual thus chooses himself as a diversely determined concretion, and chooses himself therefore in respect of his concretion. This concretion is the reality of the individual, but since it is in respect of his freedom that he chooses it, one can also say that it is his possibility, or, to avoid such an aesthetic expression, that it is his task. For the person who lives aesthetically sees only possibilities everywhere; for him it is these that form the content of the future, whereas the person who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere. It is then this real concretion of his that the individual sees as his task, his goal, his aim. But the fact that it is his own possibility that the individual sees as his task expresses precisely his sovereignty over himself, which he never surrenders even though he does not enjoy the highly unencumbered sovereignty that a king without a country always has. This gives the ethical individual a sense of security which someone living merely aesthetically altogether lacks. The person who lives aesthetically expects everything from outside, hence the sickly anxiety with which many speak of the dreadful circumstance of not having found one’s place in the world. Who would deny the satisfaction in being fortunate in this respect? But such an anxiety is always an indication that the individual expects everything from the place and nothing from himself. The person who lives ethically will try to choose his place rightly, but if he notices that he has chosen wrongly, or that obstacles arise over which he has no control, he does not lose courage for he never surrenders his sovereignty over himself. He at once sees his task and is therefore instantly active. Similarly, one often sees people afraid that if ever they fall in love they will not get a girl who is exactly the ideal that suits them. Who would deny the satisfaction in getting such a girl? On the other hand, it is after all a superstition that what lies outside a person is what can make him happy. The person who lives ethically also wants to be happy in his choice; however, should the choice prove not quite in accord with his wishes, he does not lose courage, he at once sees his task and knows that the art is not to wish but to will. Many who do, after all, have some conception of what a human life is, wish to be contemporary with great events, to be involved in important situations in life. Who would deny that such things have their validity? It is a superstition, on the other hand, to think that events and situations as such make a man into something. A person who lives ethically knows that in any situation it is a question of what one sees and with what energy one regards it, and that the person cultivating himself in this way in the least significant situations in life may experience more than the person who has been a witness to, indeed a participant in, the most notable events. He knows that everywhere there is a dance floor, that even the lowliest man has his own, that when he himself so wishes, his dance can be just as beautiful, just as graceful, just as expressive, just as moving as that of those who have been assigned a place in history. It is this fencing skill, this suppleness, which is properly the immortal life of the ethical. To the person who lives aesthetically the old saying, ‘to be or not to be’, applies and the more aesthetically he is allowed to live, the more demands his life exacts, and if only the least of them is not fulfilled he is dead; the person who lives ethically always has a way out even when everything goes against him, even when the storm-filled clouds brood over him so darkly that his neighbour cannot see him, he has not perished, there is always a point he keeps hold of, and it is – himself.

Just one thing I would insist upon: that as soon as the ethicist’s gymnastics become an experimentation he has ceased to live ethically. All such gymnastic experimenting is nothing but what counts, in the realm of knowledge, as sophistry.

I want now to recall the definition of the ethical I gave earlier, that it is that whereby a man comes to be what he becomes. So it wants not to make the individual into another but into himself; it wants not to do away with the aesthetic but to transfigure it. To live ethically it is necessary for a person to become aware of himself, so totally that no accidental feature escapes him. The ethical does not want to erase this concretion but sees in it its task, sees from what it must build and what is to be built. People generally consider the ethical altogether abstractly and therefore they have a secret horror of it. The ethical is then looked upon as something alien to personal being, and one shrinks from abandoning oneself to it, for one cannot quite be sure what it may lead to in the course of time. Many are also afraid of death in the same way, because they entertain obscure and confused ideas about the soul passing over in death into another order of things, where laws and customs prevail which are altogether different from those they have learnt to recognize in this world. The reason for such a fear of death is the individual’s reluctance to be transparent to himself, for provided one is willing it is easy to see the absurdity of this fear. Similarly with the ethical; a person who fears transparency will always shun the ethical, for really the ethical wants nothing else.

Opposed to an aesthetic view of life which would enjoy life, one often hears talk of another life-view in which the meaning of life is to live for the fulfilment of life’s duties. This is meant to be an ethical life-view. However, that is a very imperfect expression of it, and one might almost believe it was invented to discredit the ethical. At all events, nowadays one often sees it used in a way that almost causes a smile. […] The mistake is this, that the individual is placed in an external relation to duty. The ethical is defined as duty, and duty again as a mass of particular propositions, but the individual and duty stand outside each other. A life of duty in this sense is naturally very unattractive and tedious, and if the ethical did not have some much deeper connection with personal being, it would always be very difficult to defend it against the aesthetic. That there are many people who come no further than this I will not deny; but that has to do with the people, not with duty.

It is rather strange that the word ‘duty’ [Pligt] can bring to mind an external relation when the derivation of the word indicates it is an internal relation. For surely what it is incumbent upon me to do, not as this contingent individual but in respect of my true nature, stands in the most intimate relation to me. For duty is not an imposition [Paalœg] but something which imposes [paaligger]. Seeing duty in this way is a sign that the individual has found his bearings within himself. Duty will then not be split up into a multiplicity of particular directives, for that always implies that the individual stands only in an external relation to it. He has invested himself in the duty, for him it is the expression of his inmost nature. When he has thus found his bearings within himself, he is steeped in the ethical and will have no need to urge himself breathlessly on into fulfilling his duties. The truly ethical individual has, therefore, an inner calm and assurance because he does not have duty outside him but inside him. The more deeply a person imparts an ethical structure to his life, the less he will feel the need to talk every instant of duty, to be anxious every instant that he is fulfilling it, to confer every instant with others about what his duty is. Viewed rightly the ethical makes the individual infinitely secure within himself; when it is not viewed rightly it makes the individual completely insecure, and I can imagine no unhappier and more agonizing life than that of someone who has got his duty outside him and yet is constantly wanting to realize it.

If the ethical appears to lie outside one’s personal being and to be in external relation to it, one has given everything up; one has despaired. The aesthetic as such is despair, the ethical is the abstract and as such incapable of bringing about the slightest thing. So when occasionally one sees people with a certain honest zeal struggling and straining to realize the ethical, which like a shadow keeps running away as they try to take hold of it, it is both comic and tragic.

The ethical is the universal and as such the abstract. In its complete abstraction the ethical is therefore always interdictory. The ethical thus presents itself as law. As soon as the ethical specifies directives it already contains something of the aesthetic. The Jews were the people of the Law. So they had an excellent understanding of most of the commandments in the Laws of Moses; but the commandment they seem not to have understood was the one with which Christianity most closely associated itself: ‘Thou shalt love God with all thine heart.’ Nor is this a negative commandment, and it is not abstract, it is positive in the highest degree and concrete in the highest degree. When the ethical becomes more concrete it passes over into the specification of moral behaviour. But the reality of the ethical in this respect lies in the reality of a popular identity, and here the ethical has already assumed an aesthetic element. Nevertheless the ethical is still abstract and cannot be fully realized because it lies outside the individual. Only when the individual himself is the universal, only then can the ethical be realized. This is the secret of conscience, it is the secret the individual life shares with itself, that it is at one and the same time an individual life and also the universal, if not as such in its immediacy, at least according to its possibility. The person who regards life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses his life in the universal; he makes himself into the universal man, not by divesting himself of his concretion, for then he would be nothing at all, but by clothing himself in it and permeating it with the universal. For the universal man is not a phantom, everyone is the universal man – that is to say, everyone is shown the path along which he becomes the universal man. Someone who lives aesthetically is the accidental man, he thinks he is the perfect man through being the only man. The person who lives ethically works at becoming the universal man. Thus the accidental plays an enormous part for a man who is aesthetically in love, and it is of importance to him that no one has loved with just the nuances that he has. If the person who lives ethically marries, he realizes the universal. Therefore he does not become a hater of the concrete but has one more expression, deeper than any aesthetic expression, inasmuch as he sees in the love a revelation of the universal human. So the person who lives ethically has himself as his task. His self in its immediacy is accidentally specified and the task is to work the accidental and the universal together.

So the ethical individual does not have duty outside him but inside him; this first appears in the moment of despair and then works its way forward through the aesthetic, in and with the latter. One can say of the ethical individual that he is like those still waters that run deep, whereas the person living aesthetically is simply agitated on the surface. So once the ethical individual has completed his task, has fought the good fight,³² he has reached the point of having become the only man – that is, there is no man just like him – and at the same time of having become the universal man. Being the only man is in itself nothing so great, for that is something all men share with every natural phenomenon. But being it in such a way that at the same time he is the universal, that is the true art of living.

So one’s personal being does not have the ethical outside it but inside it, and it breaks forth from this deep. What matters then is, as I said, that it does not do away with the concrete in an abstract and empty storming, but assimilates it. Because the ethical lies deepest in the soul it is not always visible, and someone living ethically can behave exactly like someone living aesthetically so that one can be deluded for a long time; but eventually there comes a moment when it becomes apparent that the person who lives ethically has a boundary not recognized by the other. In this assurance that his life is structured ethically the individual rests securely confident and so does not pester himself or others with captious fears about this or that. For I find it just as it should be that someone living ethically retains a blank space for what is ethically indifferent, and it is precisely a veneration of the ethical not to press it upon every insignificant detail. The attempt to do so, which always fails, is also only to be found among those who do not have courage to believe in the ethical and who lack inner confidence in a deeper sense. There are those whose faint-heartedness is discernible precisely in their inability ever to be finished with the totality just because for them this is a manifold, but these, too, lie outside the ethical, for no other reason of course than weakness of will, which like every other spiritual weakness can be regarded as a form of insanity. The lives of such people are spent in straining at a gnat.³³ They have no conception either of the pure and beautiful earnest of the ethical or of the unconcerned joy of the indifferent. But of course, for the ethical individual the indifferent is dethroned and he can set its boundary at any moment. Thus one believes also in a providence, and the soul rests securely in this assurance, yet one would never think of applying this thought to every accidental happening, nor is one conscious of this belief every minute. Willing the ethical without being disturbed by the indifferent, believing in providence without being disturbed by the accidental, is a healthy condition which can be acquired and preserved if a man himself so wills it. Here, too, the thing is to see the task, to see that when someone tends to be distracted, that task is to summon up resistance, to keep hold of the infinite and not go on a wild goose chase.

Anyone who chooses himself ethically has himself as a task, not as a possibility, not as a plaything for his caprice to sport with. He can only choose himself ethically when he chooses himself in continuity, and so he has himself as a multiply specified task. He does not try to erase the multiplicity or to disperse it; on the contrary, he repents himself firmly into it because this multiplicity is himself, and only by repentantly steeping himself in it can he come to himself, since he does not assume that the world begins with him or that he creates himself. Language has itself branded that idea with contempt and it is always contemptuously that one says of a man: ‘he gives himself airs’ [han skaber sig: lit. ‘creates himself’]. But when he chooses himself repentantly he is active, not in the direction of isolation but of continuity.

Now let us compare an ethical and an aesthetic individual. The main difference, on which everything turns, is that the ethical individual is transparent to himself and does not live ‘out in the blue’ as does the aesthetic individual. From this difference everything else follows. The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, permeates his whole concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to fuss around in him, nor tempting possibilities to distract him with their legerdemain; he himself is not like a witch’s letter which, depending on how you turn the pages, gives you first this image, then that.³⁴ He knows himself. The expression gnothi seauton is repeated often enough and one has seen in it the aim of all human striving.³⁵ Quite right, too, but it is equally certain that it cannot be the goal unless at the same time it is the beginning. The ethical individual knows himself, but this knowledge is not mere contemplation, for then the individual would be specified in respect of his necessity; it is a reflection on himself, which is itself an action, and that is why I have been careful to use the expression ‘to choose oneself’ instead of ‘to know oneself. In knowing himself the individual is not complete; on the contrary, this knowledge is highly productive and from it there emerges the true individual. Were I to be clever I could say here that the individual knew himself in the same way that, in the Old Testament, it is said that Adam knew Eve. Through the individual’s intercourse with himself the individual gets himself with child and gives himself birth. The self that the individual knows is at the same time the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside him as an image in whose likeness he has to form himself, yet which he has, on the other hand, within him since he is that self. Only within himself does the individual have the goal he must strive for, though in striving for it he has that goal outside himself. For if the individual believes the universal man is situated outside him and will come to meet him from outside, then he is disoriented, he has an abstract conception, and his method will always be an abstract annihilation of the original self. Only from within himself can the individual obtain information about himself. Therefore the ethical life has this twofold nature, that the individual has himself outside himself within himself. However, the typical self is the imperfect self, for it is only a prophecy and therefore not the actual self. However, it constantly attends him; but the more he realizes it the more it disappears into him, until finally, instead of appearing in front of him, it lies behind him as a faded possibility. This image behaves like a man’s shadow. In the morning he casts a shadow in front of him, at noon it goes beside him almost unnoticed, and in the evening it falls behind him. When the individual knows himself and has chosen himself, he is on the way to realizing himself, but since he must realize himself freely he must know what it is he would realize. Certainly what he would realize is himself, but that is his ideal self which he can acquire only from within himself. If one does not insist that it is within himself that the individual has the ideal self, one’s thoughts and aspirations will be abstract. The person who copies another and the person who would copy the normal man both become, though in different ways, equally affected.

The aesthetic individual looks at himself in his concretion and then distinguishes one thing from another. He sees one thing as belonging to him accidentally, another as belonging essentially. This distinction is, however, extremely relative, for so long as a person lives merely aesthetically everything belongs to him equally accidentally, and if an aesthetic individual insists on the distinction it is only for lack of energy. The ethical individual has learnt this in despair, so he has another distinction because he too distinguishes between the essential and the accidental. Everything posited with his freedom belongs to him essentially, however accidental it may seem; everything else he sees as accidental, however essential it may seem. However, for the ethical individual this distinction is not the product of whim, making it look as though he had absolute power to make himself into whatever he wanted. For although the ethical individual might refer to himself as his own editor, he is at the same time fully aware of his editorial responsibility to himself, in so far as what he chooses has a decisive influence on him personally, to the scheme of things in which he lives, and to God. Looked at in this way I think the distinction is correct, for after all what belongs to me essentially is only whatever I undertake ethically as a task. If I refuse to undertake it, that refusing of mine belongs to me essentially. When a person looks at himself aesthetically he might make the distinction as follows. He says, ‘I have a talent for painting, I consider that an accident; but I have wit and acuity, I consider that the essential thing that cannot be taken away from me without my becoming someone else.’ To that I would reply, ‘This whole distinction is an illusion, for if you do not take this wit and acuity upon yourself ethically, as a task, as something you are responsible for, it does not belong to you essentially, and that is mainly because, so long as you only live aesthetically, your whole life is totally unessential.’ The person living ethically abolishes to some extent the distinction between the accidental and the essential, for he takes over every inch of himself as equally essential; but it comes back again since, after he has done that, he makes a distinction, but in such a way that what he excludes as accidental he takes an essential responsibility for in respect of his having excluded it.

In so far as the aesthetic individual sets a task for his life with an ‘aesthetic seriousness’, really this is absorbing himself further in his own contingency, becoming an individual the like of whose paradoxical and irregular conduct one has never seen, a grimace of a man. The reason why one rarely comes across such figures is that one rarely comes across people with a conception of what it is to live. On the other hand, since many have a decided partiality for talking, one does come across – in the street, at parties, and in books – a great deal of chatter that bears unmistakably the stamp of the craze for originality which, when put into practice, would enrich the world with a mass of artefacts each more ludicrous than the next. The task the ethical individual sets himself is to transform himself into the universal individual. Only the ethical individual renders to himself a serious account of himself and therefore is honest with himself, only he has this paradigmatic dignity and this decorum which are more beautiful than all else. But to transform oneself into the universal man is only possible if I already have this within me kata dunamin.³⁶ For the universal can very well subsist with and in the singular without consuming the latter; it is like the fire that burned in the bush without consuming it.³⁷ If the universal man is situated outside me only one method is possible, and that is to divest myself of all my concretion. One often finds this straining for unbridled abstraction. There was a sect among the Hussites who thought that being the normal man really meant going about naked like Adam and Eve in paradise.³⁸ In our own time one not infrequently encounters people offering the same teaching in spiritual respects, that one becomes the normal man by becoming stark naked, which one can do by divesting oneself of all one’s concretion. But that is not how things are. The universal man emerged in the act of despair and is then behind the concretion and breaks out through it. A language has many more paradigm verbs than the ones used as examples in grammars. It is a matter of accident that any particular one is offered; any other regular verb would have done as well. So too with men. Everyone can, if he wants, become a paradigm man, not by wiping out his contingency but by remaining in it and ennobling it. But he ennobles it by choosing it.

You will now have perceived that in the course of his life the ethical individual goes through the stages we have previously shown to be distinct. In the course of his life he will develop the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life proceeds through his constantly translating himself from one stage to the next. Whenever a person thinks that one of these stages is sufficient and is prepared to gather himself one-sidedly in that, he has not chosen himself ethically but has overlooked the importance either of isolation or of continuity, and above all has not grasped that the truth lies in the identity of these.

The person who has chosen and found himself ethically has himself as specified in all his concretion. He has himself, then, as an individual who has these abilities, these passions, these inclinations, these habits subject to these external influences, and who is influenced thus in one direction and thus in another. He has himself, then, as a task in a way in which the task in essentials is that of ordering, tempering, kindling, repressing – in short bringing about a proportionality in the soul, a harmony that is the fruit of the personal virtues. The aim of his activity here is himself, though not arbitrarily specified, for he has himself as a task which is set for him even though it has become his through his having chosen it. But although he himself is his aim, this aim is nevertheless at the same time something else, for the self that is the aim is not an abstract self which fits in everywhere, and so nowhere, but a concrete self which stands in living interaction with these determinate surroundings, these conditions of life, this order of things. The self which is the aim is not just a personal self, but a social, a civic self. So he has himself as a task for an activity through which, as this determinate personal being, he intervenes in the affairs of life. Here his task is not to mould himself, but to exert an influence, and yet he does at the same time mould himself, for, as I remarked above, the way in which the ethical individual lives is by constantly translating himself from one stage to another. Unless the individual has originally apprehended himself as a concrete personality in continuity, he will not acquire this later continuity either. If he thinks the knack is to begin as a Robinson Crusoe, he will remain an adventurer all his life. But if, on the other hand, he sees that unless he begins concretely he will never get round to beginning, and that if he doesn’t begin he will never end, he will be in continuity simultaneously with the past and the future. From the personal life he translates himself into the civic, from the latter into the personal. The personal life as such was an isolation and therefore incomplete, but by his coming back to his personal being through the civic life the personal life is manifested in a higher form. Personal being proves to be the absolute that has its teleology in itself. Those who take the task of human life to be the fulfilment of duty have often been reminded of the sceptical view that duty itself vacillates, that the laws can be changed. You see readily that with the latter one is thinking mainly of the fluctuations to which the civic virtues are always liable. Still, this scepticism does not apply to negative morals, for they remain unchanged. On the other hand there is another sceptical consideration that applies to every duty, namely that I am quite unable in principle to do my duty. Duty is the universal, what is required of me is the universal, but all I can do is the particular. The great significance of this sceptical argument, however, is that it proves that one’s personal being is itself the absolute. But this must be specified in rather more detail. It is interesting that this consideration is highlighted in language itself. I never say to someone that he does duty or duties; I say that he does his duty, I say that I do my duty, that you are to do yours. This shows that the individual is at once the universal and the particular. Duty is the universal, it is required of me; consequently if I am not the universal I cannot do it. On the other hand, my duty is the particular, something for myself alone, and yet it is duty and hence the universal. This is where personal being is manifested in its highest validity. It is not lawless, nor does it give itself its laws, for the category of duty remains, but personal being proves to be the unity of the universal and the particular. That this is the situation is clear, it can be made intelligible to a child, for I can perform duties without doing my duty, and I can do my duty without performing duties. I am quite unable to see why the world should sink into scepticism on that account, for the difference between good and evil always remains, responsibility and duty likewise; even though it is impossible for another man to say what my duty is, it will always be possible for him to say what his duty is, and that would not be the case unless the unity of the universal and the particular were posited. It might perhaps be thought that all scepticism has been removed by making duty into something external, fixed and definite, of which it can be said: ‘This is duty.’ However, this is a misunderstanding, for it is in the external that the doubt lies, not in the internal, not in my relation to the universal. As a particular individual I am not the universal, and it would be absurd to require it of me. So if I am to be able to perform the universal, I must be the universal at the same time as I am the particular, but in that case the dialectic of duty is within me. As I have said, this view implies no danger for the ethical; on the contrary, it emphasizes it. If this is not assumed, the personality will be abstract, its relation to duty abstract, its immortality abstract. Nor does it abolish the difference between good and evil, for I doubt if there has ever been anyone who maintained it is a duty to do evil. That he did evil is another matter, but he tried at the same time to convince himself and others that it was the good. It is inconceivable that he should be able to retain this conviction, since he is himself the universal and so does not have the enemy outside him but inside him. If, on the other hand, I suppose duty to be something external, then the difference between good and evil is indeed abolished, for if I am not myself the universal I can only come into an abstract relationship to it and the difference between good and evil is incommensurate with an abstract relation.

Precisely when one’s personal being is perceived to be absolute, to be its own aim, the unity of the universal and the particular, precisely then will every scepticism which takes the historical as its point of departure be overcome. Freethinkers have often tried to introduce conceptual confusion by drawing attention to how people have sometimes held sacred and legal what in the eyes of others was repellent and criminal. Here one has allowed oneself to be dazzled by the external, while in the case of the ethical it is never a question of the external but of the internal. However much the external may change, the ethical content of the action can still be the same. Thus it is certain there have never been people who thought that children should hate their parents. However, to foster doubt, attention has been directed at the fact that, while all cultivated nations have made it a duty for children to care for their parents, it has been the custom among primitives to put their aged parents to death. Perhaps so, but it takes us no further, for the question remains whether in doing this the primitives actually thought they were doing something evil. Ethical consideration lies always in this consciousness, while whether one is accountable for lack of knowledge is another question. The freethinker sees very well that the easiest way to volatilize the ethical is to open the door to historical infinity. And yet there is some truth in his procedure, for if in the final analysis the individual is not the absolute, empirical reality is the only road open to him, and as for where it issues that road has the same property as the river Niger in respect of its source: no one knows its location. If I am shown the road to the finite, it is gratuitous to remain stationary at any particular point. On that road, then, one never arrives at the point of beginning, for in order to begin one would have to have reached the end and that is impossible. When personal being is the absolute it is itself the Archimedean point from which one can lift the world. It is easy to see that being conscious of this cannot lead the individual into wanting to cast off reality, for if that was how he wanted to be the absolute he would be nothing at all, an abstraction. It is only as the particular that he is the absolute, and his awareness of that will save him from all revolutionary radicalism.

Here I will break off my theorizing; I feel keenly that I am not fit for the part, nor wish that I were, but will be quite content if I may be thought an acceptable practitioner. Besides, all theorizing takes so much time. What I can accomplish in an instant as an active agent, or set about straightaway, calls for much fuss and ado before it can be put into words and described. Now I have no mind to expound a doctrine of duty to you and to talk in the customary way of duties to God, oneself and one’s neighbour. Not that I by any means repudiate this classification, nor would I have it that what I have to say is too profound to be linked with Balle’s textbook,³⁹ or presupposes more background knowledge than that textbook presupposes; not at all for that reason, but because I believe that what matters with the ethical is not the multiplicity of duty but its intensity. When one has felt in one’s personal being the full strength of duty’s intensity, one is ethically mature and duty will then break out in one. The main thing, then, is not whether someone can count on his fingers how many duties he has, but that he has had that once-and-for-all experience of the intensity of duty so that his consciousness of it is his assurance of the eternal validity of his being. So I do not at all applaud a strong sense of duty, any more than I would recommend being a bookworm, and yet it is certain that someone to whom the importance of duty has never, in all its infinity, come to light is just as mediocre as the scientist who thinks, after the manner of the people of Mol,⁴⁰ that one hits upon wisdom mir nichts und dir nichts.⁴¹ Let the casuists be engrossed in hitting upon the multiplicity of duty; the main thing, the only saving thing, is that always, in relation to his own life, a man is not his uncle but his father.

Let me illustrate what I mean through an example. For this I take an impression I have retained from my earliest childhood. When I was five years of age I was placed in a school. That such an event always makes an impression on a child is natural, but the question is what impression. Childish curiosity is absorbed by its various confused conceptions of what this event can really mean. Quite reasonably, that was also the case with me; however, the main impression I received was a quite different one. I made my appearance at school, was presented to the teacher, and was then given as homework for the following day the first ten lines of Balle’s textbook, which I was to learn by heart. All other impressions were now wiped from my soul, the only thing that stood out vividly before it was my assignment. As a child I had a very good memory. I soon learned the lines. My sister had heard me several times and assured me that I knew them. I went to bed and before falling asleep tested myself once more. I fell asleep with the firm intention of reading them over again next morning. I awoke at five o’clock, I put on my clothes, got hold of my textbook and read again. Everything still stands before me in that moment so vividly, as though it were yesterday. For me it was as though heaven and earth would collapse if I were not to learn my lines, and on the other hand it seemed as though even if heaven and earth did collapse, that would in no way exempt me from my assignment once I had it, to learn my lines. At that age I had very little idea of my duties; after all, I still had not learned them from Balle’s textbook. I had just one duty, to learn my homework, and nevertheless from this impression I can derive the whole of my ethical view of life. I may smile at a small urchin of five like that tackling something with that passion, and yet I assure you, I have no higher wish than that, at any time of life, I may take on my work with the same energy, the same ethical seriousness, as then. It is true that later in life one gets a better idea of what one’s work is, but the main thing is still the energy. That this event made such an impression on me I owe to my father’s serious-mindedness, and if I owed him nothing else, this would be enough to put me eternally in his debt. In education what matters is not that the child learns this or that, but that the spirit is matured, that energy is aroused. You often talk of how splendid a thing it is to have a good mind. Who will deny the importance of that? And yet, I almost think one makes that for oneself if one wants. Give a man energy, passion, and he has everything. Take a young girl, let her be silly, hysterical, a real chatterbox, imagine her falling deeply and sincerely in love and you will see that the good mind comes of itself, you will see how shrewd and cunning she becomes in finding out if her love is requited; let her be happy in love and you will see ardour bloom on her lips; let her be unhappy and you will hear the cool reflections of wit and understanding. […]

So what matters is the energy with which I become ethically conscious, or rather, without energy I cannot become ethically conscious. I can therefore never be ethically conscious without becoming conscious of my eternal being. That is the true proof of the immortality of the soul. Of course, it is only a fully-fledged proof when the task is congruent with the commitment, but that to which I am eternally committed is an eternal task. The circumstance that the first ten lines of Balle’s textbook were given me as an assignment from which nothing else in the world could ransom me was then, in a sense, the first proof produced for me of the immortality of my soul. The incompleteness of the proof lay not in my energy but in the accidental nature of the task.

So I have no intention of initiating you into a consideration of the multiplicity of duties; if I were to express duty negatively that would be easily done; if I were to express it positively it would be very difficult and tedious, indeed beyond a certain point impossible. What has been my intention, on the other hand, and what I have tried to the best of my ability to do, is to illuminate the absolute importance of duty, the eternal validity of the relationship of duty for personal being. For as soon as one’s personal being finds itself in despair, chooses itself absolutely, repents itself, one has oneself as one’s task under an eternal responsibility, and thus duty is posited in its absoluteness. Since, however, one’s personal being has not created itself but chosen itself, duty is the expression of the identity of its absolute dependency and absolute freedom. One will teach oneself the particular duty and seek enlightenment on it from any other man in vain, and yet here too he will be autodidact by virtue of being theodidact,⁴² and vice versa. In any case, duty for him will not be something abstract, partly because it is not something outside him, for in that case it is always abstract, partly because he is himself concrete, for in choosing himself ethically he chose himself in all his concretion and renounced the abstraction of the arbitrary.

It remains to show what life looks like when regarded ethically. You and all aestheticists are quite prepared to go shares, you admit the ethical has its importance, you say it is respectable for a man to live for his duties, that it is commendable, indeed you even let fall some innuendos about its being right and proper that there are people who live for their duties, that it is as well the majority do that, and you sometimes run across men of duty good-natured enough to find sense in this talk, in spite of the fact, of course, that like all scepticism it is nonsense. You yourselves, on the other hand, have no wish to embark upon the ethical; that would deprive life of its meaning and above all of its beauty. The ethical is something quite different from the aesthetic, and once it emerges it altogether destroys the latter. – Now, if that were so I would still be in no doubt which to choose. In despair it appears to be like that for an instant, and the despair of someone who has not so felt it has been fraudulent all along and he has not chosen himself ethically. But that is not how it is, and therefore, in the next instant, despair proves not to be a breach but a metamorphosis. Everything returns, but transfigured. So only when life is regarded ethically does it acquire beauty, truth, meaning, substance; only when one lives ethically does one’s own life acquire beauty, truth, meaning, security; and only in the ethical view of life can self-directed or other-directed doubts about the meaning of a life be put to rest. Doubts of either kind can only be appeased by one and the same thing, since essentially they are the same doubt. For autopathic doubt is not a manifestation of egoism but a requirement of the self-love that has the interest of its own self at heart in just the same way as it has that of any other. This, I think, is of great importance. If it were not the case that an aestheticist is an egoist, and all conceivable favours were to fall to his lot, he would have to say, ‘What my happiness is due to is something another person can’t be given in the same way, and something no other person can acquire on his own account.’ He would have to be anxious, indeed, in case someone asked him what it was he sought happiness in, since he would in fact have achieved it in order that everyone else should feel that they could not. If such a person had any sympathy he would spare himself no rest until he had found for his life some higher point of departure. Having found it, he would not be afraid to speak of his good fortune, for then if he were to give proper voice to it, he would say something that reconciled him absolutely with every human being, with the whole of humankind.

Let us nevertheless stay a moment with the category which aesthetics always champion – beauty. Life, you say, loses its beauty once the ethical comes into its own. ‘Instead of the joy, happiness, unconcern, beauty that life has when we regard it aesthetically, we get conscientious effectiveness, commendable industry, tireless and unremitting zeal.’ If you were here with me now, I would ask you for a definition of the beautiful so as to get started. Seeing you are not, I will permit myself to draw on a definition that you are in the habit of giving: ‘The beautiful is that which has its teleology within itself.’ You take a young girl, you say, ‘She is beautiful, she is joyful, carefree, happy, in perfect harmony, complete in herself, and it is foolish to ask why she exists, for she has her teleology within her.’ I won’t quibble by objecting that it might not really be to the girl’s advantage to have her teleology within her, all alone in this way, or that, if granted the opportunity to expound your view of the divinity of her existence, you might well flatter yourself that she would eventually fail to appreciate the fact and believe she only existed to listen to your ingratiations. You look upon nature and find it equally beautiful, and are ready to anathematize every finite view of it. Neither shall I vex you here with the observation that it might be an essential property of nature to be for-another. You look upon the works of art and poetry and cry out with the poet: ‘Procul o, procul este, profani’,⁴³ and understand by profani those who would degrade poetry and art by giving them a teleology that lies outside them. As far as art and poetry are concerned I will remind you of what I have remarked previously, that they give only an imperfect reconciliation with life, and also that when you fix your gaze on poetry and art it is not reality you are looking upon, and that is what we should really be talking about. We return again to that, then, and since you yourself presumably perceive that were you to apply the requirements of art in all their strictness, you would most likely find precious little beauty in life; you are giving the beautiful another meaning. The beautiful you talk of is the individually beautiful. You see each single individual as a little element in the whole, see him precisely in his particularity, and in this way even the accidental, the insignificant, acquires significance and life itself the imprint of beauty. So you look on each person as an element. But the beautiful was supposed to be that which had its teleology in itself, yet when a man is just an element his teleology is indeed not inside but outside him. So even if the whole is beautiful, the parts in themselves are not. […]

When you define the beautiful as that which has its teleology within it and then offer as examples a young girl, or nature, or a work of art, I feel forced to conclude that all this talk of their having their teleology within them is an illusion. To talk of teleology at all there must be a movement, for whenever I think of a goal I think of a movement, and even if I think of someone who has reached the goal I still always think of a movement, for I think of his having got there through a movement. What you call beautiful manifestly lacks movement, for the beautiful in nature exists all at once, and when I look at a work of art and penetrate its thought with mine, really the movement occurs in me, not in the work of art. So you may well be right in saying that beauty has its teleology within it, but in the way you grasp this and apply it, it is really only a negative expression indicating that the beautiful does not have its teleology in something else. Therefore you will not be able, either, to use an apparently synonymous expression, that the beautiful you talk about has an inner teleology or an immanent teleology. For as soon as you use it you require movement, history, and you have thereby gone beyond the spheres of nature and art and are in that of freedom, and so of ethics.

If I say now that the individual has his teleology within him, this cannot be misunderstood as implying that I take the individual to be the central thing, or that the individual in an abstract sense is sufficient unto himself, for after all if he is grasped abstractly I get no movement. The individual has his teleology within him, has an inner teleology, is himself his own teleology, and his self, then, is the goal for which he strives. This self of his is not, however, an abstraction, but absolutely concrete. In the movement towards himself he cannot relate himself negatively to the world around him, for his self would then be an abstraction and remain such. He must open his self in respect of his whole concretion, but to that concretion also belong those factors specifically to do with taking an active part in the world. So his movement will be from himself, through the world, to himself. Also, the movement here is a real movement, for this movement is the work of freedom but at the same time immanent teleology, and it is here, therefore, that there can first be any question of beauty. In that case, the individual comes in a sense to stand higher than any relationship, but it does not at all follow that he is not in this relationship; nor can anything tyrannical be discerned in this, since after all the same applies to every individual. I am a married man and you know I have the deepest respect for this relationship, and I know that with all love I humble myself before it; yet I know that in another sense I am higher than this relationship but I also know that exactly the same applies to my wife. […]

Therefore only when I look upon life ethically do I see it with regard to its beauty, only when I look upon my own life ethically do I see it with regard to its beauty. And if you say that this beauty is invisible, I reply, ‘In a sense it is, in another sense it is not since it can be seen in the trace of the historical, seen as when it is said, Loquere ut videam te.’⁴⁴ True enough; what I see is not the consummation but the struggle, but I do see the struggle all the same, whenever I want to if I have the courage, and without courage I see nothing eternal at all, and consequently nothing beautiful either.

When I look upon life ethically I look at it in respect of its beauty. To me life then becomes rich in beauty, not poor, as it really does for you. I do not have to travel all over the country to discover beauties, or scrape around for them on the streets, I do not have to size up and reject. Well, that is natural, I do not have as much time as you either, for when I have a regard – with pleasure though also with seriousness – for the beauty in my own life, there is always enough for me to do. If occasionally I have an hour free I stand at my window and look at people, and I have a regard for the beauty of each one. However insignificant and humble he may be I see him with a view to his beauty, for I see him as this individual person who is at the same time the universal man; I see him as the one with that concrete task in life; he is not there for the sake of any other person, even if he were the humblest hired waiter; he has his teleology within him, he realizes that task – he triumphs, that’s what I see; for the man of courage does not see ghosts, on the contrary he sees conquering heroes; while the coward does not see heroes but only ghosts. He is bound to conquer, of that I am certain, therefore his struggle is beautiful. I am not as a rule much disposed to struggle, not at least with others than myself. But you may be sure that for this faith in the victory of the beautiful I will engage in mortal combat, and nothing in the world can wrest it from me. Even if one wished to wrest it from me through prayer, to snatch it from me by force, not for anything in the world would I let myself be deprived of it, for if I lost that faith I would lose the whole world. Through this faith I see the beauty of life, and the beauty I see does not have the sadness and melancholy that are inseparable from all beauty in nature and art, inseparable even from the eternal youth of the Greek gods. The beauty I see is joyful and triumphant, and stronger than all the world. And this beauty I see everywhere, even where your eye sees nothing. […]

Let us now come a little closer to some real-life situations, especially of the kind where the aesthetic and the ethical come into contact with each other, so as to consider how far the ethical view deprives us of any beauty or see if it does not rather bestow on everything a higher beauty. I am thinking of some definite individual, in a sense like anyone else, but in another sense concrete in himself. Let us be quite prosaic. This person has to live, clothe himself, in short has to be able to exist. Suppose he turned to an aesthete to find out how to manage his life. Then information will at least not be something he goes short of. The latter might say to him, ‘When one is single one needs three thousand dollars a year to live comfortably, if one has four thousand so much the better; if one wants to get married one needs at least six thousand. Money, after all, is and remains the motivation for doing things, the true that-without-which […] It is the absolute condition of life. As soon as one has no money one is and remains excluded from the numbers of the patricians, one is and remains a plebeian.’ […]

If he were to say to the aesthete, ‘That’s all very well, but I have neither three thousand nor six thousand a year, I have nothing, either in capital or in interest, I have absolutely nothing at all, hardly a hat’, the latter would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s another matter, then there’s nothing for it but to put up with the workhouse.’ Were he extremely good-natured the aesthete might perhaps beckon again to the poor devil and say to him, ‘I wouldn’t have you driven to despair without my hazarding the most extreme measures; there are a few makeshifts one shouldn’t leave untried before bidding farewell to joy for ever and signing the pledge and putting on the straitjacket. Marry a rich girl, play the lottery, travel to the colonies, spend some years scraping together some money, curry favour with an old bachelor so that he makes you his heir. For the moment our ways separate, get the money and you will always find in me a friend who knows how to forget there was a time when you had none.’ But there is something dreadfully heartless after all in such a view of life – murdering in cold blood all joy in life for everyone who has no money. And that is what a moneyed person of this kind does, for at least it is his opinion that there is no joy in life without money. […]

[But] let us now hear how an ethicist would reply to him. His answer would be as follows: ‘It is every man’s duty to work in order to live.’ Had he nothing more to say, you would presumably reply, ‘Here we have the same old talk again of duty and duty, everywhere duty; anything more tedious than this astringent which dispirits and amputates everything is unimaginable.’ Please recall that our hero had no money […] and unless he wanted simply to think of what he would have done if he did have some, he would have had to be prepared for some other expedient. Note, too, that the ethicist addressed him with all politeness, he did not treat him as an exception, he did not say: ‘Good Lord! How unfortunate, you must try to put up with it.’ On the contrary, he made the aesthete an exception, for he said, ‘It is every man’s duty to work in order to live.’ In so far, then, as a man need not do so, he is an exception, but […] there is nothing great, only inferior, in being an exception. Therefore if someone wants to look at the matter ethically he will see that having money is a humiliation, for every special favour is a humiliation. […] One could wish that in this respect people had rather more courage, and the reason why one often hears so much of this contemptible clamour about money being the main thing is partly that those who have to work lack the ethical energy to acknowledge the significance of working and have no ethical conviction of its significance. Marriage is not harmed by seducers but by cowardly husbands. So too here. That contemptible talk does no harm, but the good cause is harmed by those who, being compelled to work in order to live, at one moment want their life to be recognized as deserving compared with that of idlers, the next complain and sigh and say, ‘The finest thing, after all, is to be independent.’ […]

The question whether one might not imagine a world in which it was not necessary to work in order to live is really an idle one, since it concerns not given reality but a fiction. Asking it, however, is always an attempt to belittle the ethical view. For if it were a perfection on the part of existence that work was unnecessary, the most perfect life would be that of someone who did not have to work. It could then only be by attaching to the word ‘duty’ the sense of a lamentable necessity that one could say it was a duty to work. Duty would then express not the universally human but what is general, and here duty would not express perfection. Therefore I would reply quite properly that it would have to be considered an imperfection on the part of existence that man had no need to work. The lower the level of human life, the less the necessity of work is apparent; the higher, the more obvious it becomes. The duty of working in order to live expresses the universally human, and expresses the universal in another way too because it expresses freedom. It is precisely through work that man makes himself free, through work he becomes master of nature, through work he shows he is higher than nature. […] [What] struggle could be more formative than that of making ends meet! […] I shall not insist so adamantly on my rights as to challenge you to make clear just where in your aesthetics you deal with this matter; I merely leave it to you to consider whether in this struggle life loses its beauty if one does not will it so, or whether it does not gain a higher beauty. To deny that such a struggle exists is madness; to forget it because it passes you by is thoughtlessness, and inasmuch as one pretends to a view of life, callousness or cowardice. […]

So the ethical view that it is every man’s duty to work in order to live has two advantages over the aesthetic view. In the first place, it accords with reality and explains something universal in the latter, while the aesthetic proposes something accidental and explains nothing. Second, it construes man in the light of his perfection, sees him in view of his true beauty. This must be regarded as being all that is necessary and more than sufficient on this subject. […]

[But] perhaps [our hero] cannot yet make up his mind to have recourse to the ethicist. He ventures one more attempt. He meets a man who says, ‘One must work in order to live, that’s just the way life is.’ Here it looks as if he had found what he was looking for, since that is just what he thinks too. So this is talk he will listen to: ‘One has to work in order to live, that’s just the way life is, it is the threadbare side of existence. One sleeps seven hours a day, that’s time wasted but it can’t be helped. Five hours’ work a day gets you your livelihood and once you have that you start living. So one’s work had better be as dull and meaningless as possible, as long as one gets a living from it. If one has some special talent one must never commit the sin against it of making it one’s means of livelihood. No, one coddles one’s talent, it’s something one has for one’s own sake, and one has greater joy of it than a mother has of her child. One cultivates it, develops it, in the twelve hours of the day, sleeps for seven, is a non-human for five, and so life becomes pretty bearable after all – yes, even quite nice, since the five hours’ work don’t matter so much, seeing that when one’s thoughts are never on the work one is gathering strength for the pursuit in which one’s pleasure lies.’

Our hero is again no nearer his goal. In the first place he has no talent with which to fill up the twelve hours at home; second, he already has a more attractive view of what it is to work which he will not give up. So probably he will resolve once more to seek help from the ethicist. The ethicist speaks briefly: ‘It is every man’s duty to work in order to live.’ More he cannot say, for the ethical as such is always abstract and there is no such thing as an abstract vocation for all men; on the contrary, he assumes every person has a special vocation. […] The life-views of the aesthete are always based on difference: some men have talent, others not, yet what distinguishes them is a more-or-less, a quantitative specification. In a way it is arbitrary on the aesthete’s part to stop at any particular point, and yet it is precisely in this arbitrariness one finds the nerve of [this] life-view. It therefore divides existence against itself in a way [the aesthetes] find themselves unable to resolve, and in return they seek irresponsibly and callously to arm themselves against it. The ethicist, on the other hand, reconciles man with life, for he says, ‘Everyone has a vocation.’ He does not do away with differences but says, ‘Behind all differences there remains the universal, and it is a vocation. The most eminent talent is a vocation, and the individual who possesses it cannot lose sight of reality, he doesn’t stand outside the universally human for his talent is a vocation. The least significant individual has a vocation, he won’t be cast out, or sent to live next to the beasts, he doesn’t stand outside the universally human, he has a vocation.’

So the ethical proposition that everyone has a vocation implies a rational order of things in which every person, if he wants, fills his place in such a way that he expresses the universally human and the individual simultaneously. Does existence become the less beautiful for this view? One has no aristocracy to rejoice in, whose significance is based on accident and based on that accidentally; no, one has a kingdom of gods. […]

Our hero, then, has got what he was looking for: a work by which to live. At the same time he has got a more significant expression of its relation to his personality: his work is his vocation, consequently accomplishing it is bound up with a satisfaction of his whole personal being. At the same time he has got a more significant expression of the relation of his work to others, for since his work is his vocation he is put essentially on the same footing with all other men, so that in carrying on his work he is doing essentially the same as all others. […]

So the ethical view that everyone has a vocation has two advantages over the aesthetic theory of talent. In the first place what it makes transparent is not something accidental in existence but the universal; second, it displays the universal in its true beauty. Talent is beautiful only when it becomes transparent in a vocation, and existence is beautiful only when everyone has a vocation. That being so, I will beg you not to sneeze at a simple empirical observation which so far as our main topic is concerned you will have the goodness to regard as gratuitous. If a person has a vocation he generally has a standard outside him which, without making him a slave, nevertheless prescribes to some extent what he is to do, apportions his time for him, gives him frequently the opportunity to begin. If for once he should not succeed in his job, he hopes to do it better next time, and this next time is not too far distant. On the other hand, someone who does not have a vocation, if he sets himself a task at all, will usually have to work without a break. He gets no respite that is not also an interruption brought about in himself. If he fails, everything fails, and because the occasion to do so is not there he has extreme difficulty getting going again. So he is easily tempted to become a pedant, unless he becomes a loafer. It is such common practice to denounce people who perform definite functions as pedants. As a rule such a person simply cannot become a pedant. On the other hand, there is a temptation for someone without any definite function to become one in order to put up at least some resistance to that all too great freedom in which he can so easily lose his way. One may therefore be generally inclined to forgive him his pedantry, for it is a sign of something good. On the other hand, it has still to be considered a punishment, because he has wanted to emancipate himself from the common practice. […]

[The ethicist] says, ‘What every man does and can accomplish is to do his job in life. For if it were the case that there were some people who accomplished something and others who didn’t, and the reason for this lay in their contingent abilities, then scepticism would again have the upper hand.’ One can therefore say, ‘Essentially everyone accomplishes as much as anyone else.’ I am by no means preaching indolence, but on the other hand one must be careful how one uses the word ‘accomplish’; it has always been a butt of your ridicule. Which is why, as you once put it, you have ‘studied integral, differential and infinitesimal calculus in order to reckon what part of the whole was accomplished by a junior Admiralty clerk, reckoned by the whole office a competent worker’. Use your ridicule only upon those who would affect importance in life; never misuse it to confuse people.

The word ‘accomplish’ indicates a relation between my action and something else outside me. Now it is easy to see that I have no authority over this relation and, to that extent, one can say of the most talented person that he accomplishes nothing, just as one can of the least able. There is no implicit distrust of life in this, on the contrary there is an implicit recognition of my own insignificance and a respect for the significance of every other person. He who has the greatest talent can complete his job, and so also can the least able. Neither can do more. Whether they are to accomplish anything is not in their power, whereas it is indeed in their power to prevent themselves from doing so. I therefore disclaim all that self-importance that calls so much attention to itself in life; I do my job and do not waste my time calculating whether I accomplish anything. So what I accomplish as a result of my work is my good fortune, in which I might well dare to rejoice but which I do not impute altogether to myself. A growing beech forms its crown of leaves and men enjoy sitting in its shade. Were it to become impatient, if it were to say, ‘Here where I stand there hardly ever comes a living being, so what good is it that I grow, that I spread out my branches, what do I accomplish by that?’, it might merely delay its own growth and perhaps one day there might come a wayfarer who said, ‘If, instead of being stunted, this tree had been a leafy beech I could have been resting now in its shade.’ Think if the tree had been able to hear! […]

So our hero works for his living; this work is also his pleasure; he follows his vocation, he does his job; in one word, and it is a word that seizes you with dread – he has a living […] What then? You smile, you think I have something up my sleeve. You shudder already at the thought of my unimaginative common sense, for ‘now it’s going to end up for sure in nothing less than getting him married, yes, please, go ahead, publish the banns for him, I shall have no objection to raise against his and your divine intention. What an incredible rational consistency there is in life […]; with a living comes a wife.’ […] [But] you can still hold out hope for a while, just as long as I must remain anxious. Since our hero is no different from anyone else he has some inclination towards the uncommon; he is also a little ungrateful. So before taking refuge with the ethicist he wants to try his luck once more with the aesthetes. He also knows how to put a good face on his ingratitude; he says, ‘The ethicist really did help me out of my confusion, I am completely satisfied with the way he got me to look at the reality of my life, its seriousness uplifts me. But as far as love is concerned, there I could well wish to enjoy my freedom, simply follow the impulse of my heart; love does not love this seriousness, it demands the levity and charm of the aesthetic.’ […]

Although you never replied to my previous letter, verbally or in writing, you no doubt remember its content, and how I tried there to show that marriage was, by virtue of the ethical, precisely the aesthetic expression of love. Presumably, then, you will give me credit for what was expounded there, in the assurance that to the extent I have succeeded in making it intelligible to you, I will be able, if need be, to explain it to our hero. He has resorted to the aesthetes and he has departed from them none the wiser what he should do but rather what he should not. For a little while he has been witness to a seducer’s cunning, has listened to his fawning talk, but has learnt to despise his art, has learnt to see through him, to see that he is a liar, a liar when he feigns love, when he puts fresh paint on feelings which perhaps once had some truth in them when he belonged in them to another, that he deceives doubly, her to whom he pretends to cherish them and her to whom they rightly belong, a liar when he pretends to himself that there is something beautiful in his desire. He has learnt to despise the clever ridicule that would turn love into a childish prank at which one should only smile. […] For a while he has let himself be lulled by the distrust of life that would teach him that everything is transitory, that time changes everything, that one dare not build on anything and therefore never form a plan for one’s whole life. A latent indolence and cowardice found this talk quite acceptable, it was a comfortable costume to assume and in other people’s eyes not unbecoming. Nevertheless, he has looked closely at this talk, he has seen the hypocrite, seen the pleasure-lover who came in humble dress, the beast of prey that came in sheep’s clothing, and he has learnt to despise this talk. He has perceived that it was an insult and therefore ungracious to want to love a person on the basis of what in his own nature was obscure and not of what was conscious, to want to love in such a way that he could imagine it possible that this love should cease and then that he could bring himself to say, ‘So there’s nothing I can do, a man has no power over his feelings.’ He has perceived that it was an insult and therefore ungracious to want to love with one part of the soul but not with all of it, to treat one’s own love as one element and yet take the whole of another’s love, to want to be something of a riddle and a secret. He has perceived that it would be unseemly if he had a hundred arms so that he could simultaneously embrace many; he has but one embrace and wants to embrace only one. He has perceived that it was an insult to want to attach himself to another person in the way one attaches oneself to finite and accidental things, conditionally, so that if difficulties later arose one could make a change. He does not believe it possible that a man who loves can change, except for the better, and if it did happen he believes in the power of the relationship to make all well again. He recognizes that what love demands is, like the temple tribute, a holy tax which is paid in its own currency, and that one does not accept all the world’s riches as release from the slightest demand if the stamp is false.

Our hero, you see, is on the right path, he has lost his faith in the aesthetes’ callous common sense and in their superstitious belief in obscure emotions that are supposed to be too delicate to be expressed as duty. He has gratefully accepted the ethicist’s statement that it is every man’s duty to marry; he has understood this correctly, not as saying that it is a sin not to marry, unless it is one’s own fault, for then he sins against the universally human with which he is also presented as a task, but as saying he who marries realizes the universal. Further the ethicist cannot bring him, for as we have said, the ethical is always abstract and it can only tell him what the universal is. So, in this case, it can by no means tell him whom he should marry, for that would require close familiarity with all his aesthetic characteristics, but the ethicist does not have that, and if he did he would still be careful not to make nonsense of his own theories by making the choice for him. So when he has made his own choice, the ethical will sanction it and elevate his love, and to some extent it will also help him in his choice by saving him from a superstitious belief in the accidental. […]

However, there is still a sharp corner we must turn before we are safely home. For our hero has heard a man, whose judgement and opinion he respects, express the view that since in a marriage one ties oneself to a person for the whole of one’s life, one must be careful in one’s choice, it must be an uncommon girl whose uncommon qualities are just those needed to give one security for the whole of one’s future. Do you not feel inclined to have some hopes for our hero for just a little longer? I at least feel anxious for him.

Let us deal thoroughly with this question. [Suppose] in the solitary stillness of the forest there dwells a nymph, a being, a girl. Very well then, this nymph, girl, this being, abandons her solitude and turns up here in Copenhagen […] and our hero becomes the lucky man upon whom she bestows her love. […] [He] is in a critical position. About the girl there is but one opinion: this is an uncommon girl. I myself, a married man, say with Donna Clara, ‘Here rumour has not exaggerated, she is a prodigy of a child, the beautiful Preciosa.’⁴⁵ It is so tempting to lose sight of the common and float in fairy-tale waftings. Yet he has perceived what is beautiful in marriage. What, then, does marriage do? Take something from him? Take from her some of her beauty? Abolish one single difference? Not at all. What it does, however, is make all these look accidental so long as marriage is something outside him; it is only when he gives the difference the expression of the universal, it is only then that he is secure in his possession of it. The ethical teaches him that the relationship is the absolute, for the relationship is the universal. It deprives him of the vain joy of being uncommon in order to give him the true joy of being ordinary. It brings him into harmony with all existence, teaches him to rejoice in it, for as an exception, as the uncommon, he is in conflict with it. Since in this case it was what counted as uncommon that gave him his good fortune, he must feel that his existence vexes what is common, provided there was truth in his good fortune; though surely it must truly be a misfortune to be fortunate in a way that, viewed essentially, one’s own good fortune differs from that of all others. For what he does then is win the accidental beauty and lose the true beauty. This he will realize and he will return to the ethicist’s principle that it is every man’s duty to marry, and he will see that it has not just truth on its side but beauty too. Suppose he gets this prodigy of a child. He need fear no misfortune from gazing too long at the difference. Her beauty, her charm, the wealth of her intelligence and the warmth of her feeling will give him genuine joy in his heart; he will count himself lucky, but essentially he will say, ‘I am no different from any other married man, for the relationship is the absolute.’ Suppose he gets a less gifted girl. He will be happy in his good fortune, for he will say, ‘Even if she is far inferior to others, essentially she makes me just as happy, for the relationship is the absolute.’ He will not fail to appreciate the importance of the difference, for as he realized there was no abstract vocation but that each person had his own, so he will realize that there is no abstract marriage. Ethics tells him simply that he must marry; it does not tell him with whom. Ethics makes the universal transparent to him in the difference, and he makes the difference transparent in the universal.

So the ethical view of marriage has several advantages over any aesthetic understanding of love. It highlights the universal, not the accidental. It does not show how two altogether particular people in all their uncommonness could become happy, but how every married couple can become happy. It sees the relationship as the absolute and so does not grasp the differences as guarantees but interprets them as tasks. It sees the relationship as the absolute and therefore looks on love with a view to its true beauty, that is, with a view to its freedom; it understands historical beauty.

Our hero lives, then, by his work; his work is at the same time his vocation and therefore he works with pleasure. Its being his vocation puts him in association with other people, and in carrying out his job he accomplishes what he could wish to accomplish in the world. He is married, content in his home, and time passes excellently for him – he cannot comprehend how time could be a burden for anyone, or be an enemy of his happiness; on the contrary, it seems to him that time is a true blessing. In this respect he admits that he owes a tremendous amount to his wife. It is true – I’m afraid I forgot to mention it – there was a misunderstanding with the nymph from the forest, he did not become the lucky one, he had to make do with a girl just like any other, just as he was a person just like any other. However, for all that, he is very happy, yes, he once confided to me that he thought it rather a good thing he didn’t get that prodigy, the task would have been too much for him; where everything is so perfect before one starts it is all too easy to cause harm. But now, however, he is full of courage and confidence and hope, his enthusiasm is complete, he says fervently, ‘After all, the relationship is the absolute.’ He is convinced more firmly than of anything else that the relationship will have the power to develop this ordinary girl into everything that is great and beautiful; his wife is, in all humility, of the same opinion. […]

My hero – or would you deny him the right to the title? do you not think a courage that dares to believe that it can transform an ordinary girl into a prodigy is truly a hero’s courage? – my hero thanks his wife especially for the fact that time has acquired such a beautiful meaning for him, and he attributes this in turn to some extent to the marriage, and in that he and I, we two married men, entirely agree. If he had got that nymph from the forest and had not married, he fears their love would have flared up in single beautiful moments which then left vapid intervals between them. Then maybe they would only have wanted to see each other on properly meaningful occasions: had that failed several times he fears the whole relationship might gradually have dissolved into nothing. The humble marriage, on the other hand, which made it a duty for them to see each other daily, for richer or poorer, had spread an equitableness and evenness over the whole relationship which makes him so very pleased with his marriage. In its lowly incognito the prosaic marriage had concealed a poet who not only transfigured life now and then but was always at hand and thrilled even the poorer hours with his tones. […]

It happens sometimes that I sit down and inwardly collapse. I have taken care of my work, I have no desire for diversion, and something melancholic in my temperament gains the upper hand. I become much older than my actual years, I become a stranger to my domestic life almost; I see quite well how attractive it is, but I look at it with different eyes than usual; to me it is as if I were an old man, my wife a young sister who was happily married and in whose house I was now sitting. In such hours time itself naturally begins to drag. Now, were my wife a man perhaps the same would happen to her, and maybe both of us would come to a standstill. But she is a woman and on good terms with time. Is it a perfection on the part of woman, this secret rapport with time? Is it an imperfection? Is it because she is a more earthly being than man? Or more because she has eternity within her? You answer, for you have a philosophical mind. When I sit thus abandoned and lost, I look at my wife walk about in the room with light and youthful tread, always occupied, always with something to attend to, involuntarily my eyes follow her every movement and I join in everything she does, and it ends with my finding myself once more in time, with time acquiring meaning for me, the moment again moving swiftly. […] Yes, my good wise man, it is incredible what a natural virtuoso a woman is, she clarifies in the most interesting and beautiful way [this] problem [of time] that has cost many a philosopher his reason. A problem for which in many philosophers, for all their prolixity, one searches for enlightenment in vain, she clarifies without further ado at any time of the day. She clarifies it as she clarifies many others, in a way that arouses the deepest admiration. Though not a husband of any long standing, I believe I could write a whole book on this topic. However, I won’t do that, but will recount a story to you which says a great deal to me.

Somewhere in Holland there lived a scholar. He was an orientalist and married. One afternoon he fails to appear at mealtime in spite of being called. His wife waits expectantly with the food, she knows he is at home, and the longer this continues the less she can explain his absence. Finally she decides to go along to him herself and urge him to come. There he is, sitting alone in his study, nobody with him. He is absorbed in his oriental studies. I can picture it. She has bent down over him, put her arm round him, looked down at his book, then looking up at him, said, ‘Dear friend, why don’t you come along and eat?’ The scholar perhaps hardly had time to heed her words, but on seeing his wife he presumably replied, ‘Well, my girl, there can be no question of dinner, here is a diacritic I have never come across before – I have often seen the passage quoted but never in this way, and yet my edition is an excellent Dutch edition. Look at this dot here, it’s enough to drive one mad.’ I can imagine his wife looked at him half smiling, half deprecating, at such a little dot disturbing the domestic order, and the tale recounts that she replied, ‘Is that anything to make such a fuss of? It isn’t worth wasting one’s breath on.’ No sooner said than done. She blows, and behold, the diacritic vanishes, for this remarkable dot was a grain of snuff. The scholar hastens happily to the dinner-table, happy that the vowel point had disappeared, even happier in his wife.

Need I draw out the moral of this story? Had that scholar not been married he might have gone crazy, and maybe taken several orientalists with him for I have no doubt that he would have raised an outcry in the literature. That, you see, is why I say one should live on good terms with the opposite sex, for, between ourselves, a young girl clarifies everything and gives not a fig for the whole Academic Senate, and if one is on good terms with her, one is happy in her enlightenment, but if not she makes fun of one. But this story also teaches how one can live on good terms with her. Had the scholar not been married, had he been an aestheticist with all the resources at his disposal, he might have been the lucky one to whom that child prodigy wished to belong. He would not have married; their feelings would have been too exclusive for that. He would have built her a palace and spared no refinement to make her life rich in enjoyment, he would have visited her in her castle, for that was how she wished it to be; with erotic coquetry he would have made the journey to her on foot while his valets followed in a carriage, bringing rich and costly gifts. In his oriental studies he would also have stumbled upon that remarkable diacritic. He would have stared at it without being able to explain it. However, the moment had come to visit the beloved. He would have cast aside this care, for how could he fittingly visit one who loved him with thoughts of anything but her charm and his own love? He would have made himself all amiability, he would have been more fascinating than ever, pleased her beyond measure, because his voice bore the faint echo of many passions, and he had to make gaiety the victor over his despondency. But when at dawn he left her, when he had thrown her the last kiss and sat now in his carriage, his brow was darkened. He came home. The shutters in his study were closed, the lamps lit, he declined to be disrobed but sat on and stared at that dot that he could not explain. Indeed, he had a girl whom he loved, yes, maybe worshipped, whom he could visit when his soul was rich and strong, but not a spouse who came in and called him to dinner, not a wife who could blow the dot away.

Woman has, all in all, an innate talent and a primitive gift for clarifying finiteness, an absolute virtuosity. When man was created he stood there, lord and master of all nature’s pomp and splendour, the entire wealth of finiteness awaiting his beck and call, but he did not know what to do with it all. He looked at it, but it was as though everything would vanish at the glance of the spirit, it was as if all would have gone by him were he to take just one single step. Thus he stood, an imposing figure, inwardly thoughtful but comic, for one must indeed smile at this rich man who did not know how to use his wealth, but also tragic because he could not use it. Then woman was created. She was in no embarrassment, she knew straightaway how to tackle the matter, and without fuss or preparation she was ready straightaway to begin. This was the first comfort to be bestowed upon mankind. She drew near to the man, happy as a child, humble as a child, wistful as a child. She wanted only to be his comfort, alleviate his need, a need she did not understand and had no idea she was meeting, the need to make the interval shorter. And lo and behold, her humble comfort became life’s richest joy, her innocent pastimes life’s beauty, her childlike play life’s deepest meaning. […] Woman clarifies finiteness, man chases after infinity. So it should be, and each has his and her pain; for the woman bears children in pain, but the man conceives ideas in pain, and it is not for woman to feel the anxiety of doubt or the torment of despair. Not that she stands outside the idea, but she has it at second-hand. Yet because woman clarifies finiteness in this way, she is man’s deepest life, but a life that must be concealed and clandestine as is always the life of the root. For this reason I hate all that contemptible talk of the emancipation of women. God forbid that it should ever happen. […] But it will not, it must not and cannot. Let evil spirits try it, let stupid people who have no idea what it is to be a man, of what is great or poor in that, no inkling of woman’s perfection in her imperfection! Could there really be one single woman simple-minded and vain and pitiable enough to believe that within the category of man she could be more perfect than man, not to perceive that her loss would be irreparable? No base seducer could come up with a more dangerous doctrine for woman, for once he has got her to believe this she is entirely in his power, at the mercy of his caprice, she can be nothing for man but be a prey to his whims, whereas as a woman she can be everything for him. But the poor devils know not what they do, they themselves do not have what it takes to be men, and instead they would corrupt woman and be united with her on condition of remaining what they are, half-men, with woman promoted to the same miserable condition. […]

Let man give up his claim to be lord and master of Nature, let him yield his place to woman; she is its mistress, it understands her and she understands it, it is obedient to her beckoning. That is why she is everything for man, for she bestows finiteness upon him; without her he is an unstable spirit, an unhappy being who cannot find rest and has no place to go. I have often rejoiced to see woman’s significance in this light; for me she then becomes a symbol of the congregation in general, and the spirit is greatly embarrassed when it has no congregation in which to dwell, and when it dwells in the congregation it becomes the spirit of the congregation. That is why […] it does not say in the Scriptures that the maiden shall leave the father and mother and cleave unto her husband, as one might expect seeing woman is after all the weaker of the two and seeks protection in the man; no, it says, ‘A man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife’, for inasmuch as she gives him finiteness she is stronger than he. Therefore nothing can provide as beautiful an image of the congregation as a woman. If one saw it in this way I really believe many a prospect for the beautification of divine worship would open up. Yet what lack of taste it shows in our churches that the congregation, so far as it does not represent itself, is represented by a deacon or a bellringer! It ought always to be represented by a woman. […]

But here I sit and preach, forgetting what I should really be talking about, forgetting that it is to you I should be talking. That’s because my new friend [ – our hero – ] had put you completely out of my mind. With him, you see, I would happily talk about such things – for one thing he is no mocker, and for another he is a married man and only someone with an eye for the beauty of marriage will be able also to see the truth in my remarks.

So I return to our hero. The title is one he certainly deserves, nevertheless from now on I shall not use it but prefer another designation more dear to me, in that with a sincere heart I call him my friend, just as it is my pleasure to call myself his. So life, you see, has provided him with that ‘article of luxury known as a friend’. Perhaps you thought I would pass over the subject of friendship and its ethical validity in silence. Or rather, that the topic of friendship is one I would be unable to get round to, seeing it has absolutely no ethical significance and falls entirely within aesthetic categories. Perhaps you are surprised that in discussing it at all I should do so here, for surely friendship is the first dream of youth. […]

You are an observer, and so you will allow the justice of my observation that a familiar character-distinction is marked by whether the period for friendship falls in very early youth or only at a later age. More volatile natures have no difficulty in adjusting to themselves, their selves are currency from the very start and so trade begins at once. For those of a more profound disposition it is harder to find themselves, and so long as they have not done so they cannot wish anyone to offer them a friendship they cannot requite. People of this disposition are partly self-absorbed, partly observers; however, an observer is no friend. […] To those who seek the relationship of friendship at a very early age it not infrequently happens that, when love begins to assert itself, friendship fades completely. They find that friendship was an imperfect form, break off their earlier relations and focus their whole soul exclusively upon marriage. Others have the opposite experience. Those who have tasted the sweetness of love too early, savoured its joys in the intoxication of youth, perhaps acquired a false view of the opposite sex. Perhaps they became unjust towards the opposite sex. Maybe their frivolity cost them dear, perhaps they believed in feelings on their own part which proved not to be lasting; or believed in the feelings of others which vanished as in a dream. So they gave up love, for them it was both too much and too little, for they had touched upon the dialectic in love without being able to resolve it. So then they chose friendship. Both these configurations must be regarded as abnormal.

My friend is in neither situation. He had made no youthful experiments in friendship before he learnt to know love, but nor had he harmed himself by enjoying the unripe fruit of love too early. […] Precisely because it was in and through his marriage that he learnt to see what is beautiful about having a friend or friends, neither has he for an instant been undecided as to how to regard friendship, or doubted that it loses its significance if not regarded ethically. […]

You treat friendship as you do everything else. Your soul is so little centred in the ethical that from you one can receive opposite accounts of the same thing, and your utterances bear clear witness to the truth of the proposition that sentimentality and callousness are one and the same. Your view of friendship is best compared with a witch’s letter and anyone adopting it is bound to become as crazy as one must assume that someone proposing it already is to a degree. When one hears you propounding – should the humour so take you – the divinity of the love of young people, the beauty of the meeting of kindred souls, one almost fears that your sentimentality will cost you your young life. At other times to hear you talk one might almost believe you were an old hand well versed in the hollowness and emptiness of the world. ‘A friend,’ you say, ‘is an enigmatic thing; like fog, he can only be seen at a distance, for it is only when one becomes unhappy that one notices one has had a friend.’ It is easy to see that you base such a judgement upon friendship on a different requirement from the one you made previously. You spoke earlier of intellectual friendship, of the beauty of a spiritual eroticism, a common passion for ideas; now you are talking of a practical friendship in everyday affairs, of mutual help in the hardships of earthly life. There is some truth in both requirements, but if one cannot find a point of unity for them the best thing is no doubt to conclude in your main result that friendship is nonsense, a conclusion you extract in part from each of your propositions, in part from them both in their mutual opposition.

The absolute condition for friendship is full agreement in life-view. If one has that, one will not be tempted to base one’s friendship on obscure emotions or unaccountable sympathies. Consequently, one will not experience those ridiculous reversals, having a friend one day but not the next. One will not give unexplained sympathy less than its due, for one does not have a friend in the strict sense in everyone with whom one shares a life-view, but neither will sympathy in its mysterious ways by itself be the basis of one’s friendships. A true friendship always requires consciousness and that saves it from being infatuation.

The life-view in which one is united must be a positive life-view. As for my friend and I, we do have such a positive view in common. So when we look at each other we do not laugh like those Augurs, we become serious. It was quite proper for the Augurs to laugh since their common life-view was a negative one. That you understand very well, because it is one of your quixotic wishes ‘to find a kindred soul with whom you can laugh at it all’; and ‘the awful thing, what causes one almost to be worried about life, is that practically no one notices how miserable it is, and of those few who do, it is only a quite rare exception that knows how to hold on to his good humour and laugh at it all’. If your wish isn’t satisfied you know how to make the best of that, for ‘it is in line with the idea that only one person should laugh; such a one is the true pessimist, there being more of the kind would be proof that the world wasn’t completely wretched’. Your thought is now in full swing and knows no limit. You think ‘even to laugh is only an imperfect expression of the real ridicule of life. For it to be perfect one ought properly to be serious. The most perfect mockery of life would be if the person who propounded the deepest truth were not a dreamer but a doubter. And that isn’t inconceivable, for no one can propound the positive truth as excellently as a doubter, except that he himself doesn’t believe in it. If he were a hypocrite the joke would be on him; if he were a doubter who perhaps wanted to believe what he doubted, the mockery would be entirely objective, existence would be mocking itself through him; he would be propounding a doctrine able to explain everything and the whole race could repose in it, but this doctrine could not explain its own founder. Were a person clever enough to conceal the fact of his own madness, he could make the whole world mad.’ You see how difficult it is, if this is how you look at life, to find a friend with whom to share a common life-view. Or perhaps you have found such friends in the mysterious society of Symparanekromenoi you sometimes speak of? Could it be that you are an association of friends who mutually esteem one another precisely for being clever enough to know how to hide your madness? […]

So friendship requires a positive view of life. But a positive life-view is inconceivable unless it contains an ethical factor. Certainly, in our own time one often meets people who have a system in which there is no room for the ethical. Let them have a system ten times over, they do not have a life-view. In our own time such a phenomenon can be explained very readily, for as it is in so many ways back-to-front, that is what it is in the case of one’s being initiated into the great mysteries before being initiated into the lesser ones.⁴⁶ So really the ethical factor in the life-view is the starting-point for friendship, and only when one sees friendship thus does it acquire truth and beauty. If one is content with sympathy as something of a mystery, friendship finds its most complete expression in the relation between those lovebirds whose solidarity is so heartfelt that the death of one is also the death of the other. Yet while such a relation is beautiful in nature it is ugly in the world of the spirit. Unity in life-view is what constitutes friendship. If that is present it endures even if the friend dies, for the transfigured friend lives on in the other; if it ceases, the friendship is over even if the friend goes on living.

If one looks at friendship in this way, one looks at it ethically and therefore in the light of its beauty. It thus acquires both beauty and significance. Ought I to cite an authority in my support against you? Very well! How did Aristotle understand friendship? Did he not make it the starting-point of his whole ethical view of life? For with friendship, he says, the concepts of justice are so broadened that friendship and justice come to the same. So he bases the concept of justice on the idea of friendship. Consequently his category is, in a way, more perfect than the modern one which bases right on duty, on the abstract categorical;⁴⁷ he bases it on the social. From that one sees that the idea of the State becomes the highest idea, but that again is what makes his category imperfect.

However I shall not presume here to enter into such investigations as the relation between the Aristotelian and the Kantian concepts of the ethical. I cited Aristotle only to remind you that he, too, perceived that friendship contributes to one’s winning reality ethically.

The person who looks at friendship ethically sees it as a duty. I might say, therefore, that it is every man’s duty to have a friend. But I would rather use another expression which simultaneously conveys the ethical both in friendship and in everything else elaborated in the foregoing and, in addition, brings out sharply the difference between the ethical and the aesthetic: ‘It is every man’s duty to become revealed.’ The Scriptures teach that ‘it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement’ when everything shall be revealed.⁴⁸ Ethics says it is the meaning of life and reality that man be revealed. So if he is not, the revelation will take the form of punishment. The aesthete, on the other hand, does not wish to give reality meaning, he remains forever concealed because, however often and however much he abandons himself to the world, he never does it totally; there is always something he holds back; if he were to do it totally he would be doing it ethically. But wanting to play hide-and-seek in this way always avenges itself; it does that, of course, through one’s becoming a mystery to oneself. Hence all mystics, in not recognizing reality’s demand that one be revealed, stumble against difficulties and trials no other knows of. It is as though they discovered quite another world, as though their nature acquired a replica of itself inside. The person who will not fight with reality gets phantoms to contend with.

With that I am through for this occasion. It was never my intention to propound a theory of duty. What I wanted was to show how, in the mixed regions, far from depriving life of its beauty, the ethical precisely imparts beauty to it. It affords to life peace, assurance and security, for it is constantly crying out to us: quod petis, hic est.⁴⁹ It saves one from all infatuations that would exhaust the soul and it brings to it health and strength. It teaches us not to overvalue the fortuitous or to idolize good fortune. It teaches one to be happy in good fortune, and this is something the aesthete is incapable of, for good fortune in itself is an infinite relativity. It teaches one to be happy in misfortune.

Just look on what I have written as a trifle, think of it as notes on Balle’s textbook; it’s of no consequence, yet it has an authority which I hope you will respect. Or do I perhaps seem to have usurped such authority, improperly implicated my official position in this settlement of accounts, behaved as judge and not party? I happily renounce any such claim, I am not even the party opposed to you, for while I readily admit that aesthetics could well give you power of attorney to appear on its behalf, I am far from crediting myself with the qualifications needed to speak on behalf of ethics. I am nothing but a witness, and that is the only sense in which I meant that this letter had some authority; for a person who speaks of what he has experienced always has authority. I am just a witness, and here you have my sworn testimony in legally appropriate form. […]

I perform my services as judge, I am glad to have such a vocation, I believe it is in keeping with my abilities and my whole personal being, I know it makes demands on my powers. I try to mould myself more and more to it, and in doing so I feel that I am developing myself more and more. I love my wife, am happy in my home. […] My work has importance for me, and I think it also has some for others, even though that is something I cannot determine and exactly measure. I feel joy in the fact that the personal life of others has importance for me, and desire and hope that mine also has some for those with whom I am in sympathy in my whole view of life. I love my native country, I cannot imagine thriving properly in any other. I love my mother tongue which liberates my thought, find it an excellent means for expressing what I have to say in the world. Thus my life has importance for me, so much so that I feel joyful and content with it. Meanwhile I live a higher life and when in the respiration of my earthly and domestic existence I occasionally inhale this higher life, I count myself blessed, art and grace come together for me. Thus I love existence because it is beautiful, and hope for one that is more beautiful still.

Here is my testimony. If I were in doubt as to whether to present it, it would be from concern for you, for I fear almost that it will hurt you to hear that life in its simplicity can be so beautiful. However, accept my testimony, let it cause you a little pain, but let it also have a joyful effect on you; it has a property which your life unfortunately lacks – dependability. You can safely build upon it.

Recently I have frequently talked with my wife about you. She is really very fond of you […] and I sympathize with her feelings in this respect, all the more since I believe that part of the reason she is kindly disposed to you is that she sees your weaknesses. She sees clearly that what you lack is some degree of womanliness. You are too proud to be able to give yourself up to anyone. She is not at all attracted by your pride, for she thinks the truly greatest thing is to be able to devote oneself to others. You may not believe it, but I actually plead in your defence against her. She maintains that you reject everyone because of your pride; I try to explain that perhaps it is not quite as she thinks, that you reject people in an infinite sense, that it is the restlessness with which your soul strives for the infinite that makes you unfair to people. That is something she refuses to grasp, and I can well understand that, because when someone is as easily contented as she is – and just how easily contented you can gather from the fact, among other things, that she feels indescribably happy in being tied to me – it is hard not to condemn you. So my marriage, too, has its conflict, and in a way you are to blame for that. We shall get over it and my only hope is that you never become another kind of occasion for marital strife. But you yourself might help to decide the dispute between my wife and me. Do not think I wish to intrude on your secrets, but I have just one question to put to you, which I think you can answer without making too free with yourself. Answer me honestly and without evasion: do you really laugh when you are alone? You know what I mean – I do not mean whether you ever, or even often, happen to laugh when alone, but whether you find this lonely laughter satisfying? If not, I have won the day and I am sure I can convince my wife.

Now whether in fact you do spend your time laughing when alone I do not know; still, it strikes me that it would be rather more than a little strange. Your life may well have evolved in a way that makes you feel a need for solitude, but not, so far as I can judge, a need to laugh. Even the most cursory observation shows that your life is planned to an unusual standard. You seem not at all content to follow the highways but prefer to strike out on your own. One can easily forgive a certain adventurousness in a young man, but it is another matter when this takes the upper hand to such an extent as to make it out to be the normal and the real. One owes it to a person who has gone astray in this way to shout: ‘Think of the end!’ and to explain that the word ‘end’ does not mean death, for even that is not a person’s hardest task, but life; to explain that the moment comes when the real question is that of beginning to live, and that therefore it is a dangerous thing to be compelled so to split oneself up that it involves the greatest of difficulty to gather oneself together again, yes, that one must do that in such a hurry and haste that one cannot pick it all up, and instead of being a person out of the ordinary one ends up being a defective specimen of humanity.

In the Middle Ages one tackled this matter differently. One broke off life’s development abruptly and went into a monastery. What was wrong with that was not going into a monastery but the erroneous conceptions associated with that step. For my part, I can very well reconcile myself to a person’s making that decision, indeed I can see something rather attractive in it; but on the other hand I require of him that he can be clear what it means. In the Middle Ages it was thought that in choosing the monastery one was choosing something uncommon and became oneself an uncommon man; from the heights of the monastery one looked down proudly, almost compassionately, upon ordinary people. No wonder people flocked to the monastery when it was possible to be an unusual man at such a reasonable cost! But the gods do not sell the unusual at a bargain price. If those who withdrew from life had been honest and sincere with themselves and others, if they had loved being a human being more than all else, if they had felt with passion all the beauty that lies in that, if their hearts had not been unacquainted with the true, deep feeling for humanity, perhaps they might still have withdrawn into the solitude of the monastery, but they would not have foolishly imagined they had become unusual people except in the sense that they were less perfect than others; they would not have looked down with compassion on the ordinary, but regarded them sympathetically, in wistful joy at having succeeded in perfecting the beautiful and the great in a way that they themselves were not capable of.

In our own time the monastic life has fallen in price; so one rarely sees someone make a clean break with the whole of existence, with all the universally human. On the other hand, if one has some knowledge of people one occasionally finds in a particular individual a heresy which calls the monastic theory vividly to mind. For the record, I will now give you my view of what a man out of the common is. The truly extraordinary man is the truly ordinary man. The more of the universally human an individual is able to realize in his life, the more extraordinary he is. The less of the universal he is able to assume, the less perfect he is. Uncommon he may be, but not in a good sense.

So if a person who wants to realize the task that everyone is assigned – that of expressing the universally human in his individual life – stumbles on difficulties, if it looks as though there is something of the universal that he is unable to assume into his life, what does he do? If the monastery theory haunts his mind, or some aesthetic view quite analogous to it, he will be happy; from the very first moment he feels in all his exclusiveness that he is an exception, an uncommon person, it makes him vain, as childish as if a nightingale which had a red feather in its wing were to rejoice because no other nightingale had the like. If, on the other hand, his soul is ennobled by love of the universal, if he loves man’s existence in this world, what then does he do?

He deliberates how far it is true. A man may have himself to blame for this imperfection, or he can have it quite blamelessly, but it can still be true that he cannot realize the universal. If people were in general more energetically self-aware then perhaps many more would arrive at the same conclusion. He will also know how laziness and cowardice can make a person fancy it is true, and make the pain of it into a thing of no consequence by transforming the universal into the particular and preserving an abstract possibility in relation to the universal. For the universal exists nowhere as such, and it is up to me, to the energy of my consciousness, whether I see the universal in the particular or merely the particular.

Perhaps such a deliberation will not strike him as being enough, and he will risk an experiment. He will realize that if the experiment leads him to the same conclusion, the truth will be impressed upon him all the more emphatically, and if he wants to coddle himself perhaps he would do better to desist, since he will come to groan more than ever. He will know that nothing particular is the universal. In order not to delude himself, then, he will transform the particular into the universal, he will see in the particular much more than is contained in it as such; for him it is the universal. He will come to the aid of the particular and give it significance as the universal. Then if he notices that the experiment is failing, he will have arranged everything so that what wounds him is not the particular but the universal. He will watch over himself so that no mix-up occurs, so that it is not the particular that comes to wound him, for its wound will be too light and he will love himself in too serious a way for the most pressing thing to be to receive a light wound; he will love the universal too sincerely to want to replace it with the particular so as to slip away unscathed. He will be on his guard not to smile at the impotent reaction of the particular, he will take care not to look at the matter irresponsibly even though the particular as such tempts him to do so; he will not let himself be distracted by the strange misunderstanding that in him the particular has a greater friend than it has in itself. Having done that, he will go calmly to meet the pain; however much his consciousness is shaken, it does not waver.

Now if it happens that the universal he cannot realize is just the thing he wants, then in a sense, if he is a magnanimous person, that will make him glad. Then he will say: ‘I have fought under the most unfavourable conditions possible. I have fought with the particular, I have set my desire on the side of the enemy, and to make it complete I have made the particular into the universal. That all this will make the defeat harder for me is true, but it will also strengthen my consciousness, it will give it energy and clarity.’

Thus he has emancipated himself from the universal on this point. Not for an instant will he be unclear what such a step means; after all, it was he himself who made the defeat complete and gave it meaning, for he knew where he was vulnerable and how, and he brought the wound upon himself; which the particular in itself could not do. He will then be assured that there is something of the universal that he cannot realize. With this assurance, however, he is not through, because it will engender a deep sorrow in his soul. He will rejoice in the others to whom it was granted to accomplish this thing, he will see perhaps better than they do how beautiful it is, but he himself will sorrow, not in a cowardly and dispirited way, but deeply and frankly, for he will say: ‘After all, I love the universal. If it were the happy lot of others to bear witness to the universal by realizing it, very well then, I bear witness to it with my sorrow, and the deeper I sorrow the more significant my witness.’ And this sorrow is beautiful, is itself an expression of the universally human, a beating of its heart within him, and will reconcile him with it.

With this assurance that he has won he is still not through, for he will feel that he has laid a great responsibility upon himself. ‘At this point,’ he says, ‘I have put myself outside the universal, I have deprived myself of the guidance, the security and reassurance which the universal gives. I stand alone, without sympathy, for I am an exception.’ But he will not become faint-hearted and disconsolate, he will walk his lonely path with poise, for after all he has produced the evidence of the rightness of what he did, he has his pain. He will not be unclear concerning this step, he possesses an explanation which he will be able to proffer at any time; no tumult can confuse it for him, no absence of mind; if he awoke in the middle of the night he would still be able instantly to render himself an account of everything. He will feel that the upbringing that has fallen to his lot is hard, for the universal is a severe master when one has it outside one; it is constantly holding over him the sword of justice, saying, ‘Why do you want to be outside?’, and even though he says, ‘It is not my fault’, it still makes him accountable for it and makes its claims on him. He will then return to the same point from time to time, produce the evidence again and again, and then go cheerfully on. He reposes in his hard-earned conviction and will say, ‘What in the last resort I rely on is that there exists a righteous rationality and I will place my trust in its compassion, that it is compassionate enough to show justice, for it would not be so dreadful to suffer a punishment I had deserved because I did wrong, but it would be dreadful if I were able to do wrong in such a way that no one punished it, and the dreadful thing would not be that I awoke in my heart’s delusion with anguish and terror, but that I could delude my heart in a way that no one could awaken it.’

This whole struggle, however, is a purgatory, of whose horror I can at least form a conception. People should therefore not be so eagerly ambitious to become something out of the common, for being that means something else than a capricious satisfaction of one’s arbitrary desire.

The person who, on the other hand, was convinced in pain that he was an uncommon man is reconciled with the universal again through his sorrow at being so; one day he may experience the joy that what caused him pain and made him lowly in his own eyes proves to be an occasion for his being lifted up again and becoming an uncommon man in a nobler sense. What he lost in compass perhaps he gained in inward intensity. For not every person whose life expresses the universal indifferently is for that reason uncommon, for that would be to idolize triviality. For him truthfully to be called uncommon one must first inquire about the intensive power with which he does it. Now, the person we were speaking of will possess that power at the points where he can realize the universal. His sorrow will thus vanish again, it will dissolve into harmony, for he will realize that he has reached the boundaries of his individuality. He knows indeed that every man develops himself with freedom, but he also knows that a man does not create himself from nothing, that he has himself as a task in his concretion; he will be reconciled again with existence in that he perceives that in a sense everyone is an exception, and that it is equally true that everyone is the universally human and at the same time an exception.

Here you have my opinion on what it is to be an uncommon man. I love existence and being a human being far too much to believe that the path to becoming an uncommon man is easy or without temptations. But even if someone is out of the common in this more noble sense, he will nevertheless always admit that it would be more perfect still to take possession of the whole of the universal.

So receive my greetings, accept my friendship, for although I wouldn’t go so far as to characterize our relation in that way in the strictest sense, at least I hope that sometime my young friend will be that much older and that I might truthfully use that word. Be assured of my sympathy. Receive a greeting from her whom I love and whose thoughts are concealed in mine, receive a greeting which is inseparable from mine, but also receive one specially from her, friendly and sincere as always.

When you were here a few days ago, probably you didn’t think I had such a long letter ready once again. I know your aversion to having people talk to you about your inner history. That’s why I chose to write, and I shall never speak to you about it. That you have received such a letter will remain a secret, and I wouldn’t want it to have the effect of altering your relationship with me and my family. I know that you have the virtuosity to prevent that if you want, and beg you therefore to do so for your sake and mine. I have never wanted to intrude upon you, and can very well love you at a distance, even though we see one another often. Your nature is too reserved for me to believe that it would help to talk to you, but on the other hand I hope my letter will not be without significance. So when you set to work on yourself in the closed machinery of your person, I thrust in my contributions and am convinced they will join in the operation.

Since our correspondence remains a secret, I observe all the formalities: I wish you farewell as though we were far removed from one another, albeit I hope to see you at my house just as often as before.

↑ Back to top