V. Anxiety as Saving through Faith
In one of Grimm’s folktales there is a story of a young man who went out in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be anxious. We will let the adventurer follow his own path without worrying whether he came across the horror on his way. I will however say this, that it is an adventure that every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
As a beast or an angel, a human being could not be made anxious. Through being a synthesis the human being can be made anxious, and the more profoundly, the greater the human being. Not, however, in the usual sense in which anxiety is about something external, about something outside a person, but in the sense that it is the person himself who produces the anxiety. Only in this sense can the words be understood when it is said of Christ that he was grieved unto death,* as well as the words Christ spoke to Judas: Do quickly what you are going to do.* Not even the terrifying verse that made Luther himself anxious when preaching on it: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”† not even these words express suffering as strongly. For what these latter signify is a condition Christ finds himself in, the former a relation to a condition that is not.
Anxiety is freedom’s possibility; this anxiety alone is, through faith, absolutely formative, since it consumes all finite ends, discovers all their deceptions. And no Grand Inquisitor has such frightful torments in readiness as has anxiety, and no secret agent knows as cunningly how to attack the suspect in his weakest moment, or to make so seductive the trap in which he will be snared; and no discerning judge understands how to examine, yes, exanimate [exanimere: dishearten], the accused as does anxiety, which never lets him go, not in diversion, not in noise, not at work, not by day, not by night.
Anyone formed by anxiety is shaped by possibility, and only the person shaped by possibility is cultivated according to his infinitude. Possibility is therefore the most difficult of all categories. It is true that we often hear the opposite, that possibility is so light, while actuality is so heavy. But from whom do we hear such words? From a few wretches who do not know what possibility is, and who, when they were shown by actuality that they were good for nothing and always would be, had mendaciously spruced up a possibility that was then ever so fine, so enchanting, and this possibility was at bottom no more than a little youthful frivolity of which one should rather be ashamed. The possibility said to be so light is usually thought of as the possibility of happiness, good fortune, etc. But this, absolutely, is not possibility; it is a lying invention that human depravity has tricked up in order to have some reason to complain at life, and at Governance, and an occasion to be self-important. No, in possibility all things are equally possible and anyone truly brought up by possibility has grasped the terrifying just as well as the smiling. So when a person like this graduates from the school of possibility, and knows better than a child knows its ABCs that absolutely nothing can be demanded of life, and that horror, perdition, and annihilation live next door to every human being, and when he has thoroughly learned that every anxiety for which he feels alarm can come upon him the very next instant, then he will give actuality another explanation. He will praise actuality, and even when it lies heavily upon him he will remember that it is still far, far lighter than possibility had been. Only in this way can possibility shape a person, because finiteness and the finite situations, in which every individual is assigned its place, whether they be small or commonplace or world historical, are only finitely formative: one can always talk them over, always get something a little else out of them, always bargain, always come a little out of their way, always keep oneself a little on the outside, always prevent oneself from learning something absolutely from them. But if the individual is to do that, the individual must again have possibility in itself, and shape by itself that from which it is to learn, even if in the next instant this latter by no means acknowledges that it is shaped by the individual but takes from the individual its power absolutely.
But for an individual to be formed thus absolutely and infinitely by possibility, that individual must be honest toward possibility and have faith. By faith, I understand here what Hegel somewhere, characteristically and very rightly, calls the inner certainty that anticipates infinity. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all finitudes but idealize them in the shape of infinity, in anxiety overwhelm the individual, until the individual again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.
What I say here may to many seem obscure and foolish talk, since they pride themselves on never having been in anxiety. To this I would reply that one should certainly not be in anxiety about persons, about finitudes; only someone who passes through the anxiety of the possible is cultivated to have no anxiety, not because this person can escape the terrible things of life, but because these always become weak by comparison with those of possibility. If, on the other hand, the speaker maintains that the great thing about him is that he has never been in anxiety, I will gladly provide him with my explanation: that it comes from his being very spiritless.
By cheating possibility, which molds the individual, an individual never arrives at faith; the faith will be a finitude’s sagacity, just as that individual’s school was one of finitude. But people cheat possibility in every way. Otherwise just by sticking their neck out of the window everyone would have seen enough for possibility to begin its maneuvers. There is an engraving by Chodowiecki representing the surrender of Calais as viewed by the four temperaments, and the artist’s task was to have the various impressions reflected in the facial expressions of the temperaments. No doubt the most commonplace life has experiences enough, but the question is that of possibility in the individuality that is honest with itself. It is told of one Indian hermit, who for two years lived on dew, that he came one time to the city, tasted wine and took to drink. As with similar stories, this one can be understood in many ways. It can be made comic, it can be made tragic. But the individuality formed by possibility needs but one such story. That individual, in that very instant, is absolutely identified with that unfortunate. He knows no finite subterfuge whereby to escape. In him the anxiety of possibility now has its prey, until, saved, it must hand him over to faith. Nowhere else can he find rest, for every other resting place is only chatter, although in people’s eyes it is sagacity.
You see then how possibility for this reason is absolutely formative. No one ever became so unhappy in actuality as not to retain a little residue, and common sense quite correctly says that if one is clever, then one knows how to make the best of it. Yet the person who followed possibility’s curriculum in misfortune lost everything in a way that no one in actuality ever lost it. But then, unless he cheated the possibility that wanted to teach him, and did not talk onto his side the anxiety that wanted to save him, he would also receive everything back* as no one else in actuality ever did, even if they received everything tenfold, for the disciple of possibility received infinity, and the soul of the other expired in the finite.
No one sank so deep in actuality as to be unable to sink deeper, or so deep that another or many others have not sunk deeper. But that person who sank in possibility, that person’s gaze became giddy, his eye became blurred so that he could not catch hold of the yardstick that Tom, Dick, and Harry reach out as a straw for the drowning man to grasp, and his ear was closed so that he did not hear what the market price for human beings was in his day, did not hear that he was just as good as most. He sank down absolutely, but then he rose up again from the abyss, lighter than all that is oppressive and dreadful in life. Except that I won’t deny that the one who is formed by possibility is exposed, not as those formed by finitude to coming into bad company, excesses of various kinds, but to downfall, and that is suicide. If, on the point of being formed, he misunderstands the anxiety, so that it leads him not to faith but away from it, then he is lost. On the other hand, someone who is already formed remains with anxiety; he does not allow himself to be deceived by its countless falsifications; he accurately remembers the past. The attacks of anxiety, even though terrifying, will then not be such that he flees from them. Anxiety becomes for him a ministering spirit that leads him, against its will, where he will.* Then, when it announces itself, when it disingenuously makes it look as though it has invented an altogether new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not draw back, and still less does he try to ward it off with noise and confusion, but bids it welcome, greets it solemnly, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he takes it in with him and says, as a patient would say to the surgeon, when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything, and frightens the finite and petty out of him, and it then leads him where he will.
When one or another extraordinary event occurs in life, when a world-historical hero gathers heroes about him and performs heroic deeds, when a crisis occurs and everything takes on meaning, then people want to have a part in it, for this is formative. Quite possibly. But there is a far handier way to become formed, and formed far more thoroughly. Take the disciple of possibility, place him in the middle of the Jutland heath, where nothing happens, or where the biggest event is a grouse noisily taking wing, and he experiences everything more perfectly, more accurately, more thoroughly than someone who was applauded on the stage of world history, that is, if he was not yet formed by possibility.
So when the individual, through anxiety, is formed to faith, anxiety will then eradicate what it itself produces. Anxiety discovers fate, but when the individual would entrust itself to fate, anxiety switches around and takes fate away; for fate, like anxiety, and anxiety, like possibility, is a witch’s letter. If the individuality is not transformed by itself with regard to fate, it will always retain a dialectical remnant that no finitude can do away with, any more than a person will lose faith in the lottery who does not lose it through himself but because he keeps on losing. Even regarding the most trivial things, anxiety is promptly on hand as soon as the individuality wants to sneak off from something, take a chance on something. In itself, this something is a triviality, and from outside, from the finite, the individual can learn nothing about it. But anxiety makes short work of it, instantly playing the trump card of infinity, of the category, and the individuality cannot take the trick. An individuality like that cannot fear fate with its vicissitudes and defeats in an outward way, because the anxiety within him has already fashioned fate and has taken away from him absolutely all that any fate could take away. In the dialogue Cratylus, Socrates says that it is terrible to be deceived by oneself, because one always has the deceiver with one. Similarly, one may say that it is fortunate to have with one a deceiver like that who piously deceives and always weans the child before finitude begins to make a mess of it. So far as, in our time, an individuality is not shaped by possibility in this way, this time of ours nevertheless has an excellent attribute for each one in whom there is a deeper nature and who desires to learn the good. The more peaceful and quiet an age, the more accurately everything follows its regular course so that the good has its reward, so much the easier it is for an individuality to deceive itself about its striving not having a goal, however beautiful it may be, that is nevertheless finite. In these times of ours, on the other hand, one need be no more than sixteen years old to see that whoever is now about to play a part on the stage of life’s theater is just like the man who traveled from Jericho and fell among robbers.*
Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite. Such a preliminary orientation is analogous to the formation by possibility, and such an orientation cannot take place other than through possibility. So when shrewdness has completed its countless calculations, when the gamble succeeds, then anxiety comes along even before the game in actuality has been lost or won, and anxiety makes the sign of the cross against the devil and shrewdness can do nothing, and its cleverest combinations vanish like a pleasantry opposite the case formed by anxiety with the omnipotence of possibility. Even in the most trifling things, once the individuality wants to make a clever turn that is only clever, wants to sneak away from something, and there is every likelihood that it will succeed, since actuality is not as sharp an examiner as anxiety, then anxiety is there. If the trifle is dismissed because it is only a trifle, then anxiety makes this trifle as prominent as that speck of a place Marengo became in the history of Europe because the great battle of Marengo was fought there. If an individuality is not weaned away from shrewdness by itself, then it will never occur properly, because finitude always explains piecemeal, never totally, and the person whose shrewdness always fails (and even this is unthinkable in actuality) may look for the reason in the shrewdness and then strive to become still shrewder. With faith’s help, anxiety educates the individuality to rest in providence. So too in respect of guilt, which is the second thing anxiety discovers. Those who learn to know their guilt only from the finite are lost in the finite, and finitely the question of whether a person is guilty cannot be determined except in an external, juridical, most imperfect sense. The person who learns to know guilt only by analogy to judgments of the police court and the supreme court, never really understand that he is guilty, for if a person is guilty, the guilt is infinite. If such an individuality, who is formed only by finitude, fails to receive a verdict from the police or from public opinion pronouncing guilt, that individuality becomes something that is the most ridiculous and pitiful of all, a model of virtue that is little better than most people but not quite as good as the parson. What help should such a man need in life, when he can retire to a cabinet collection of examples almost before he dies? From finitude one can learn much, but not how to be anxious, except in a very mediocre and corrupting sense. Anyone who has truly learned how to be anxious, on the other hand, will tread as if in a dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up, and when finitude’s apprentices lose wit and courage. Life often deceives in this way. The hypochondriac is anxious about everything unimportant but begins to breathe more easily when something important comes along. And why? Because the important actuality is not as terrible after all as the possibility he himself had fashioned, and which he used his strength to fashion, instead now of being able to use all his strength against actuality. The hypochondriac is, however, but an imperfect autodidact compared with the person who is cultivated by possibility, because hypochondria depends partly on the somatic and is consequently accidental.* The true autodidact is in exactly the same degree a theodidact,† as another author has said,‡ or to use an expression less redolent of the intellectual, he is αὔτουργοϛ τὶς τἣς φιλοσοφίαϛ [one who cultivates philosophy on his own] and in the same degree θεουργοϛ [one who tends the things of God]. Therefore the person who, in respect of guilt, is educated by anxiety will rest only in the Atonement.
Here this deliberation ends where it began. Once psychology has finished with anxiety, it is to be handed over to dogmatics.
* [Matthew 26:37; Mark 14:33]
* [John 13:27]
† [Mark 15:34]
* [Job 42:10]
* [John 21:18]
* [Luke 10:30]
* So it is with a higher meaning that Hamann employs the word “hypochondria” when he says: “Diese Angst in der Welt ist aber der einzige Beweis unserer Heterogeneität. Denn fehlte uns nichts, so würden wir es nicht besser machen als die Heiden und Transcendental-Philosophen, die von Gott nichts wissen, und in die liebe Natur sich wie die Narren vergaffen, kein Heimweh würde uns anwandeln. Diese impertinente Unruhe, diese heilige Hypochondrie ist vielleicht das Feuer, womit wir Opferthiere gesalzen und vor der Fäulniß des laufenden seculi bewahrt werden müßen [However, this anxiety in the world is the only proof of our heterogeneity. If we lacked nothing, we should do no better than the pagans and the transcendental philosophers, who know nothing of God and like fools fall in love with lovely nature, and no homesickness would come over us. This impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria, is perhaps the fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculum (century)],” I (vol. 6, p. 194).
† Thessalonians 4:9; “θεοδίδακτοί”]
‡ See Either/Or.