II. Anxiety as Hereditary Sin Progressively
With sinfulness sexuality was posited. At that very moment begins the history of the human race. Just as sinfulness in the race moves in quantitative categories, so too does anxiety. The outcome of hereditary sin, or hereditary sin’s presence in the individual, is anxiety, which differs only quantitatively from that of Adam. In the state of innocence—and it must be possible to talk of such a thing in the later human being—hereditary sin must have that dialectical ambiguity out of which guilt emerges in the qualitative leap. Anxiety in the later individual will, on the other hand, be better able to reflect itself than in Adam, because in the later individual the quantitative accumulation that the race puts behind it now takes effect. As little as ever, however, will anxiety here be an imperfection in the human being; on the contrary, one has to say that the more pristine the human being, the deeper the anxiety, because the presupposition of sinfulness that the individual life takes upon itself on entering the history of the race has to be made its own. Sinfulness has in this way acquired a greater power, and hereditary sin is growing. That there are some who notice no anxiety at all may be understood in the way Adam would have experienced none had he simply been an animal.
The later individual is, like Adam, a synthesis sustained by spirit; but the synthesis is one that is derived, and the history of the race is to that extent posited in it. Here is where the more or less of anxiety lies in the later individual. As yet this anxiety is nevertheless not an anxiety about sin, since there is no distinction between good and evil, that distinction coming only through the actuality of freedom. If present, it is there only as an intimated idea, which, again, through the history of the race can mean a more or less.
That anxiety in a later individual is more reflected due to participation in the history of the race, something that can be compared with habit, which is indeed second nature though not a new quality but only a quantitative progression, is due to anxiety having now entered the world in another sense. Sin entered into anxiety, but sin once more brought with it anxiety. The fact is that the actuality of sin is an actuality with no subsistence. Sin’s continuity is, on the one hand, the possibility that causes anxiety. On the other hand, the possibility of a salvation is once again a nothing which the individual both loves and fears, for this is always possibility’s relation to individuality. Only in that instant when salvation is actually posited is this anxiety overcome. Man’s and creation’s eager longing* is not, as has been sentimentally thought, a sweet longing; for it to be that, sin would have to be disarmed. Someone who wants truly to familiarize himself with the state of sin, and with what the expectation of salvation might be like, will doubtless recognize this and be a little ashamed of an aesthetic absence of shame. In the human being, as long as the question is only one of expectation, the power is still in the hands of sin, and sin of course conceives the expectation in a hostile manner. (This will be dealt with later.) When salvation is posited, anxiety is left behind along with possibility. This does not mean that it is annihilated but that, if rightly used, it plays another role (see Chapter V).
The anxiety that sin brings in with it is really only present when the individual itself posits sin, and yet this anxiety is obscurely present as a more or a less in the quantitative history of the race. So even here one will come across the phenomenon that a person seems to become guilty simply through anxiety about himself, something of which there could be no question in Adam’s case. It is nevertheless true that every individual becomes guilty only through himself, but here the quantitative aspect in relation to the race has reached its maximum and will have it in its power to confuse every view unless one insists on the distinction specified earlier between the quantitative accumulation and the qualitative leap. This phenomenon will be considered later. Generally it is ignored, which is of course easiest. Or it is construed sentimentally and touchingly, with a cowardly sympathy which thanks God for not having become like that,* yet without understanding that a thanksgiving of that kind is treason against both God and oneself, and without reflecting that life always has analogous phenomena in store that one perhaps will not escape. Sympathy one must indeed have, but sympathy is true only when it is admitted, deep down, that what has happened to one person can happen to all. Only then does one benefit both oneself and others. The physician at an insane asylum who is foolish enough to believe that he is eternally wise, and that his bit of reason is insured against all harm in this life, is in one way wiser than the demented, but he is also more foolish, nor is he likely to heal many.
Anxiety, then, means two things: the anxiety in which the individual posits sin through the qualitative leap, and the anxiety that comes in and enters with sin, and in that respect also enters quantitatively into the world every time an individual posits sin.
It is not my intention to write a learned work or waste time looking for corroboration in literature. Often the literary examples adduced in psychologies lack real psychological authority. They stand as an isolated fact attested notarialiter [by notary public], but just for that reason one doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep at such attempts by a lonely starched collar to form some kind of a rule. Someone who has occupied himself with psychology and with psychological observation according to some standard will have acquired a general human flexibility that enables him straightaway to construct his example which, even if it lacks factual authority, has authority of another kind. Just as the psychological observer should be more nimble than a tightrope dancer, so as to be able to unbend to others and imitate their attitudes, and just as his silence in the moment of confidence should be seductive and sensual, so that what is secret can have the pleasure of slipping out to mumble to itself in this artificially contrived obscurity and silence, so too should he possess a poetic primitiveness in his soul so as to be able straightaway to create what is whole and regular out of what in the individual is present always only partially and irregularly. Once he has perfected these, he will have no need to fetch his examples from literary anthologies and to serve up half-dead reminiscences, but will bring his observations altogether fresh from the water, wriggling and sparkling in their iridescence. Nor will he need to rush himself off his feet to become alive to something. On the contrary, he should sit quite still in his own room, like a plain clothes detective who nevertheless knows all that is going on. What he needs he can fashion straightaway. What he needs is immediately at hand by virtue of his general practice, just as in a well-equipped house one has no need to carry water from the street but thanks to high pressure has it on one’s level. He is so well oriented in human life, and his eyes are so inquisitorially sharp that should he begin to doubt, he knows where to look for and easily come upon an individuality that can serve passably for his own mental experimentation. His observation should be as reliable as anyone’s, even if unsupported by references to names and erudite quotations, such as that there once lived in Saxony a peasant girl in whom a physician observed . . . , that in Rome there was once an emperor of whom a historian relates that . . . , etc., as if such things happen only once in a thousand years. What interest can psychology have in that? No, it is everything, what happens every day if only the observer is present. If he takes the precaution of controlling his observation, his observation will have the stamp of freshness and possess the interest of the actual. To do so he apes every mood in himself, every psychic state that he discovers in another. He then sees whether he can delude the other by the imitation, whether he can draw him along into the further performance, which is his own creation based on the implication of his thought [i Kraft af Ideen—lit. on the strength of the idea]. If one wants to observe a passion in this way, one chooses one’s individual. What counts now is to be still, silent, and inconspicuous so as to discover the individual’s secret. One must then practice what one has learned until able to delude the individual. Then one composes the passion and appears before the individual in the passion’s preternatural size. If this is done correctly, the individual will feel an indescribable relief and satisfaction, just as an insane person when someone has found and poetically grasped his fixation and then proceeds to take it further. If it does not succeed, the reason may be a defect in the operation, but it can also be because the individual was a poor example.
Our use of the expression “objective anxiety” might almost lead one to think of the anxiety that belongs to innocence, the anxiety that is freedom’s reflection within itself in its possibility. It would be an inadequate rejoinder to this to object that it overlooks the fact that we now find ourselves at another juncture in the investigation. We are better served by being reminded, on the contrary, that objective anxiety’s distinctness lies in its separation from subjective anxiety, a distinction that could not be made in Adam’s state of innocence. Subjective anxiety is, in the strictest sense, that anxiety which is posited in the individual and is the outcome of its sin. Anxiety in that sense will be discussed in a later chapter. But if the term is taken in that sense, the contrast provided by objective anxiety no longer applies and anxiety appears exactly as what it is, namely the subjective. The distinction between objective and subjective anxiety belongs, therefore, to a consideration of the world and the state of innocence in the later individual. The division comes to light here insofar as subjective anxiety now signifies the anxiety present in the individual’s state of innocence, which corresponds to that of Adam but differs from Adam’s quantitatively due to the quantifying effect of the generation. By objective anxiety we understand, on the other hand, the reflection of that generational sinfulness in the entire world.
In §2 of the previous chapter we were reminded that the expression “through Adam’s sin, sinfulness entered the world” contained an outward reflection. Here is the place to return to that expression in order to recover it in its true meaning. The instant Adam has posited sin, consideration turns from him to the beginning of every later individual’s sin, for now the generation is posited. To posit the sinfulness of the human race through Adam’s sin as though in the same sense as his walking erect, etc., is to cancel the concept of the individual. This was explained earlier, where objection was also made to the experimenting inquisitiveness that would treat sin as a curiosity, and the dilemma also raised that it would be necessary to envisage either a questioner who had no idea even of what he was asking about or a questioner who knew and whose pretended ignorance became a new sin.
If all this is now adhered to, that expression will possess its limited truth. The first posits the quality and Adam then posits sin in himself but also for the human race. However, the concept of race is too abstract for the positing of so concrete a category as sin, which is posited precisely through the single individual positing it himself as the single individual. Sinfulness in the race then becomes only a quantitative approximating, though one that has its beginning with Adam. This is where Adam’s greater importance lies, above that of every other individual in the race, and this is where the truth of that expression lies. Even an orthodoxy willing to understand itself has to admit this, seeing that it teaches that nature as well as the human race fell through Adam’s sin, even if in regard to nature it will hardly do to have sin enter as the quality of sin.
Sin’s entering the world had significance for the whole of creation. The effect of this sin on the nonhuman aspect of life [Tilværelse] I have called objective anxiety.
What this means can be indicated by calling attention to the scriptural expression ἀποκαραδοκία της κτίσεωϛ [the eager longing of creation] (Rom. 8:19). Insofar as there can be talk of an eager longing, it goes without saying that creation is in a state of imperfection. One often fails to see with expressions and definitions such as longing, eager longing, expectation, etc., that these involve an antecedent state, and that this state is therefore present and simultaneously makes itself felt as that in which the longing unfolds. This state of expectancy is not one that the person has fallen into by accident, etc., thus finding himself a total stranger in it; he is producing it himself at the same time. The expression for such a longing is anxiety; for it is in anxiety that the state out of which he longs to be proclaims itself, and proclaims itself because the longing alone is not enough to save him.
In what sense creation sank into depravity through Adam’s sin, how freedom in being posited with the positing of its own misuse thus cast a reflection of possibility and a frisson of complicity over creation, in what sense this had to happen because the human being is the synthesis whose most extreme opposites were posited, and whose one opposite became precisely through the human being’s sin a still far more extreme opposite than it was before—all this has no place in a psychological deliberation but belongs to dogmatics, to the Atonement, in the explanation of which this science explains sinfulness’s presupposition.*
This anxiety in creation can indeed properly be called objective anxiety. It is not brought forth by creation but by the fact that Adam’s sin placed it in an entirely different light, and insofar as sin continues to enter the world, sensuousness is constantly degraded to mean sinfulness. One can readily see that this interpretation also keeps an eye on itself in the sense that it wards off the rationalistic view according to which sensuousness as such is sinfulness. After sin has entered the world, and every time sin enters the world, sensuousness becomes sinfulness. But what it becomes is not what it was previously. Franz Baader has protested often enough against the proposition that finitude and sensuousness as such are sinfulness. But unless care is taken here, one gets Pelagianism from quite another side. In his definition, Baader took no account of the history of the race. In the human race, quantitatively (i.e., nonessentially) sensuousness is sinfulness, but in relation to the individual not so, until by positing sin the individual again makes sensuousness sinfulness.
Some men of Schelling’s† school have paid special attention to the alteration* that creation has incurred through sin. There has also been talk of the anxiety that is supposed to occur in inanimate nature. The effect is however weakened when at one moment we are led to believe that what we have is a nature philosophy cleverly handled with help from dogmatics, and at the next moment a dogmatic definition bathing in the glow of a magical wonder from contemplation of nature.
Here, though, I break off what I have adduced just to carry us for a moment beyond the bounds of the present investigation. Anxiety, as it appeared in Adam, will never return, since it was through him that sinfulness entered the world. For that reason there are now two analogues to Adam’s anxiety: the objective anxiety in nature and the subjective anxiety in the individual, of which the latter contains a more and the first a less than the anxiety in Adam.
The more reflected one dares to posit the anxiety, the easier it may seem for anxiety to switch over into guilt. But here it is important not to let oneself be taken in by terms of approximation: a “more” cannot produce the leap, and in truth no “easier” can make it more easy to explain. If a grip is not kept on this, there is a risk of suddenly coming upon a phenomenon where everything goes so easily that the transition becomes a simple transition, or else the risk of never daring to bring one’s thought to a conclusion because purely empirical observation can never come to an end. Therefore, even if anxiety becomes more and more reflected, the guilt which emerges in anxiety through the qualitative leap retains the same accountability as that of Adam, and the anxiety the same ambiguity.
Wanting to deny that every later individual has, and must be assumed to have had, a state of innocence analogous to Adam’s would shock everyone as much as it would nullify all thought, because then there would be an individual who was not an individual but related to its species merely as a specimen, even if, identified as an individual, that individual would at the same time be considered guilty.
Anxiety can be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. It is in this way that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself. In this dizziness freedom subsides. Further, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very instant everything is changed, and in raising itself up again freedom sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. The person who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Anxiety is a feminine effeteness in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in a state of enervation. But anxiety is also the most selfish of things, and no concrete expression of freedom is as selfish as the possibility of every concretion. This is again the overwhelming factor that determines the individual’s ambiguous relation, sympathetic and antipathetic. In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but disquietens seductively with its sweet apprehensiveness.
In the later individual, anxiety is more reflective. This can be put by saying that the nothing that is the object of anxiety becomes as though more and more a something. We don’t say that it actually becomes a something, or actually means something; we don’t say that, instead of a nothing, sin or something else should now be substituted, since what goes here for the later individual’s innocence also goes for Adam’s. All of this is only for freedom and only when the single individual itself posits sin through the qualitative leap. Here the nothing of anxiety is a complex of presentiments that reflect themselves in themselves, becoming closer and closer to the individual, notwithstanding that essentially, in anxiety, they signify nothing, not indeed, be it noted, a nothing that the individual has nothing to do with, but a nothing in lively communication with the ignorance of innocence. This reflexivity is a predisposition which, before the individual becomes guilty, still essentially signifies nothing, whereas when, through the qualitative leap, the individual became guilty, it is the presupposition in which the individual goes beyond itself because sin presupposes itself, not of course before being posited (that would be predestination), but presupposes itself in being posited.
We shall now consider in a little more detail that something which the nothing of anxiety can signify in the later individual. In the psychological deliberation it truly counts for something. But the psychological deliberation does not forget that if an individual were to become guilty as a matter of course through this something, then all consideration would be brought to nothing.
This something which signifies hereditary sin stricte sic dicta [in the strict sense of the word] is:
It is obvious that we are not discussing anything that can occupy physicians, whether one is born deformed, and so on; nor is there any question of arriving at results by way of statistical surveys. Here, as everywhere, it is important that the mood be the right one. When a person has been taught that hailstones and crop failures may be attributed to the devil, this can be very well meant, but essentially it is a farfetched notion that weakens the concept of evil and introduces an almost jesting note into it, just as it is an aesthetical pleasantry to speak of a stupid devil. So when the historical aspect is given so one-sided a significance in dealing with the concept of “faith” that its primitive originality in the individual is overlooked, faith becomes in the end a finite pettiness instead of a free infinitude. The result is that faith can come to be spoken of in the manner of Hieronymus in Holberg, who says of Erasmus Montanus that his views on faith are heretical because he thinks the earth is round and not flat, as one local generation after another had believed. In that way, one might become a heretic in one’s faith by wearing wide breeches when all the locals wear tight trousers. To offer statistical surveys of the incidence of sinfulness, to draw a map of it where the color and relief help the eye to take it all in at once, is to try to treat sin as a curiosity of nature, not to be removed but to be reckoned just like atmospheric pressure and rainfall. The resulting mean, or arithmetical average, is quite otherwise nonsensical than in those purely empirical sciences. It would be a very ridiculous abracadabra should anyone seriously suggest that sinfulness averages 3⅜ inches in every person, or that in Languedoc the average is only 2¼ inches, while in Bretagne it is 3⅞. The examples here are no more superfluous than those in the Introduction, drawn as they are from the compass of the sphere within which what follows is to turn.
Through sin, sensuousness became sinfulness. This proposition has a double meaning: through sin sensuousness becomes sinfulness, and through Adam sin came into the world. These two terms must constantly hold their own against each other, since otherwise what is asserted will be something untrue. That at one time sensuousness became sinfulness is the history of the generation, but that sensuousness becomes sinfulness, that is the qualitative leap of the individual.
We were reminded (Chapter I, §6) that the creation of Eve already metaphorically prefigures the outcome of the relation of generation. In a sense, she signifies that which is derived. Something derived is never as perfect as the original.* Here, however, the difference is merely quantitative. Essentially the later individual is just as original as the first. The difference in pleno [common] to all later individuals is derivation, but for the single individual derivation may again signify a more or a less.
This derivation of the woman also contains the explanation of the sense in which she is weaker than the man, something that has been assumed in all ages, whether it is a pasha speaking or a romantic knight. The difference is not, however, otherwise than that the man and the woman are essentially alike despite the dissimilarity. The expression of the difference is that anxiety is more reflected in Eve than in Adam. This is because the woman is more sensuous than the man. Here of course it is not a matter of an empirical state, or of an average number, but of the dissimilarity in the synthesis. If in one part of the synthesis there is a “more,” a result will be that when spirit posits itself, the cleft becomes deeper and in freedom’s possibility anxiety will find greater scope. In the Genesis account it is Eve who seduces Adam. But it by no means follows that her guilt is greater than Adam’s, and still less that anxiety is an imperfection, seeing that, on the contrary, its magnitude is a prophecy of that of the perfection.
Already here the investigation has seen that the proportion of sensuousness corresponds to that of anxiety. Once the relation of generation appears, whatever was said of Eve becomes simply an intimation of every later individual’s relation to Adam, namely, that just as sensuousness has been increased in the generation, so too has there been an increase in anxiety. So the result of the relation of generation signifies a “more” such that no individual can escape it, it being a “more” to all later individuals in their relation to Adam, but never such that the individual comes essentially to differ from Adam.
However, before passing on to this, I shall first shed a little more light on the proposition that the woman is more sensuous than the man and has more anxiety.
That the woman is more sensuous than the man is immediately apparent in her physical organism. To deal more particularly with this is not my concern but a task for physiology. However, I shall present my proposition in a different way, introducing her aesthetically under her ideal aspect, which is beauty, and bringing to mind that the very fact that this is her ideal aspect itself indicates that she is more sensuous than the man. I shall then introduce her ethically under her ideal aspect, which is procreation, bringing to mind that the circumstance that this is indeed her ideal aspect indicates precisely that she is more sensuous than the man.
When beauty has to reign, it brings about a synthesis from which spirit is excluded. This is the secret of all Greek culture. There is in a sense a repose, a tranquil solemnity about Greek beauty, but for this very reason there is also an anxiety which the Greek doubtless did not notice even though his plastic beauty trembled with it. The reason for absence of concern in Greek beauty is that spirit is excluded, but for the same reason there is also a profound and unexplained sorrow. Thus sensuousness is not sinfulness but an unexplained riddle that causes unrest. This naïveté is accompanied therefore by an inexplicable nothing, which is that of anxiety.
It is true that Greek beauty conceives of the man and of the woman as similarly not spiritual, but within that likeness it makes a distinction nevertheless. The spiritual has its expression in the face. In manly beauty the face and its expression are more essential than in womanly beauty, although the eternal youthfulness of plastic art constantly prevents the deeper spirituality from emerging. To further expand on this is not my task, but I shall point to the dissimilarity with a single suggestion. Venus is essentially just as beautiful when represented as sleeping, yes, possibly at her most beautiful, yet sleeping is exactly the state that expresses the absence of spirit. For this reason, the older and the more spiritually developed the individuality, the less beautiful it is in sleep, whereas the child is most beautiful in sleep. Venus emerges from the sea, and is represented in an attitude of repose, or in an attitude that precisely reduces the expression of the face to what is inessential. In representing an Apollo, however, it would be no more appropriate to have him sleep than it would to have a Jupiter do so. Apollo would become ugly and Jupiter ridiculous. An exception might be made of Bacchus, but in Greek art he represents an indifference between manly and womanly beauty, as a result of which his forms are also feminine. With a Ganymede, however, the expression of the face is already more essential.
When beauty became something else, romanticism nevertheless repeats the dissimilarity within the essential likeness. While the history of spirit (and just this is the secret of spirit, that it has a history) dares to impress itself on the man’s countenance in a way that forgets everything if only the imprint is distinct and noble, the woman will make her effect as a totality in another way, even though the face has acquired a greater significance than in classical art. The expression must be that of a totality that has no history. Therefore silence is not only the woman’s greatest wisdom but also her highest beauty.
Viewed ethically, woman culminates in procreation. Therefore the Scriptures say that her desire shall be for her husband.* Although it is also true that the husband’s desire is for her, his life does not culminate in this desire, unless his life is worthless or lost. But the fact that woman culminates in this shows precisely that she is more sensuous.
The woman is more anxious than the man. This is not because she has less physical strength, etc., for that kind of anxiety is not at all at issue here; it is because she is more sensuous than the man and yet, like him, has essentially the character of spirit. What has often been said about her, that she is the weaker sex, is for me a matter of great indifference, because she could for that reason very well be less anxious than the man. Anxiety is constantly to be conceived here in terms of freedom. So when, in the teeth of all analogy, the Genesis story represents the woman as seducing the man, this on further reflection is quite correct; for that seduction is precisely a feminine seduction, since it was only through Eve that Adam could be seduced by the serpent.† Otherwise in matters of seduction, linguistic usage (charm, cajole, etc.) always stresses the man’s superiority.
I shall simply indicate through an imaginary situation what all experience may be assumed to acknowledge. If I imagine an innocent young girl and let a man fasten a covetous gaze upon her, she becomes anxious. She may also become indignant, etc., but first she becomes anxious. If, on the other hand, I picture a young woman fastening her covetous gaze upon an innocent young man, his mood will not be anxiety but a shamefacedness at most, mingled with disgust, precisely because he is characterized more as spirit.
Through Adam’s sin there came sinfulness into the world, and sexuality, and for him this came to signify sinfulness. The sexual was posited. There has been a great deal of chatter in the world, both spoken and written, about naïveté. Only innocence, meanwhile, is naïve. But it is also ignorant. Once the sexual is brought to consciousness, it is thoughtlessness, affectation, to speak of naïveté, and at times what is worse, a disguise for lust. But from the fact that a man is no longer naïve it by no means follows that he sins. It is only these vapid flatteries that lead people on, precisely by diverting attention from the true, from the moral.
Up until now the whole question of the significance of the sexual, and its significance in the particular spheres, has been given unquestionably poor answers and has above all very rarely been answered in the right mood. Offering witticisms about the sexual is a cheap art, admonishing is not difficult, and preaching about it in a way that avoids the difficulty is not hard; but to speak of it in a truly human way is an art. Leaving it to the stage and the pulpit to undertake the answer in a way that each is embarrassed by what the other says, so that the one explanation differs glaringly from the other, is really to abandon it all and lay upon people themselves the heavy burden—one for which they are unwilling to lift a finger*—of finding meaning in both explanations while the respective teachers continue lecturing on just the one or the other. The incongruity of this situation would have long since been recognized if in our day people had not perfected themselves in the thoughtless waste of a life so beautifully planned, and in thoughtlessly joining in noisily whenever there is talk about one or another grand, huge idea, in the fulfillment of which they unite in an unshakable faith in the power of association, even if it is a faith just as marvelous as that of the alehouse keeper who sold his beer for a penny under cost price and still counted on a profit, “since it is the numbers that does it.” Seeing this is how things are, it doesn’t surprise me that no one pays attention these days to such a deliberation. But this I do know: had Socrates lived now, he would have thought on such things and would have done it better or, if I may say so, more divinely than I can, and I am convinced that he would have said to me: “Ah! my dear fellow, in considering such things, which are well worth pondering, you do rightly; yes! one could sit and talk through whole nights and yet never finish sounding out the wonders of human nature.” And to me this assurance is worth infinitely more than the Bravo! of all my contemporaries. For this assurance makes my soul unshakable, while the applause would cause it to doubt.
The sexual as such is not the sinful. Genuine ignorance about it, when essentially present, is reserved for the beast alone, which is therefore a slave of blind instinct and moves in the dark. An ignorance, but which is also an ignorance of what is not, is that of the child. Innocence is a knowledge that signifies ignorance. Its distinctness from moral ignorance is easily shown by the fact that the latter is to be defined in terms of a knowing. With innocence there begins a knowing that has ignorance as its first attribute. This is the concept of modesty (Schaam). There is an anxiety in modesty because spirit is defined at the extremity of the difference of the synthesis in a way that identifies spirit not merely as body but as body with the sexual difference. Modesty is indeed a knowing of that difference nonetheless, though not as a relation to that difference, which is to say, the drive as such is not present. The real significance of modesty is that spirit cannot, so to speak, own up to the extremity of the synthesis. That is why the anxiety found in modesty is enormously ambiguous. There is no trace of sensuous desire and yet there is a sense of shame. Shame of what? Of nothing. And yet the individual may die of shame, and wounded modesty is the deepest pain because it is the most inexplicable of all. That is why the anxiety in modesty can awaken by itself. Yet what is the case here, naturally, is that it is not desire that plays this part. An example of the latter is found in one of Friedrich Schlegel’s tales (Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7, p. 15, the story of Merlin).
In modesty, sexual difference is posited but not in relation to its other. That occurs in the drive. But since the drive is not instinct, or simply instinct, it eo ipso [by virtue of that very fact] has a τελοϛ [end or aim], which is propagation, while the pending state is love, pure eroticism. All the time spirit is still not posited. Once it is posited, not merely as constituting the synthesis but as spirit, the erotic is over. The highest pagan expression for this is that the erotic is the comical. This must not, of course, be understood in the way that a sensualist might think of the erotic as comic and material for his lascivious wit; it is the power of intelligence and its preponderance that neutralize both the erotic and the moral relation to the erotic in the indifference of spirit. This has a very profound basis. The anxiety in modesty arose from spirit feeling alien; now that spirit has triumphed completely, it sees the sexual as alien and as the comic. This freedom of the spirit was something that modesty naturally could not possess. The sexual is the expression of the huge contradiction (Widerspruch) that the immortal spirit is defined as genus [gender]. This contradiction expresses itself in the deep Schaam that conceals this contradiction and dares not understand it. Within the erotic, the contradiction is understood in terms of beauty, for beauty is precisely the unity of the psychic and the somatic. But this contradiction, which the erotic transfigures in beauty, is for spirit at once both the beautiful and the comic. Spirit’s expression for the erotic is therefore that it is simultaneously the beautiful and the comic. Here there is no sensuous association in the direction of the erotic, for that is sensuality, in which case the individual lies far beneath the beauty of the erotic. Rather, it is the maturity of spirit. This, naturally, is something that in its purity very few people have understood. Socrates did so however. So when Xenophon has him saying that one should love ugly women, here, as with all else that Xenophon lends his hand to, he makes a repellent, narrow-minded philistinism out of those words, which is least of all like Socrates. The meaning is this, that he has reduced the erotic to indifference, and he expresses the contradiction that underlies the comic correctly in the corresponding ironic contradiction that one should love those who are ugly.* But such a view very rarely occurs in its lofty purity. It requires an unusual interplay between a fortunate historical development and primitive talent. If any such objection is remotely possible, the view is repellent and an affectation.
In Christianity, the religious has suspended the erotic, not merely through an ethical misunderstanding as the sinful, but as the indifferent, because in spirit there is no difference between man and woman.* Here the erotic is not neutralized through irony but suspended, because Christianity’s tendency is to bring the spirit further. When, in modesty, spirit becomes anxious and shy about arraying itself in the differentiation of sex, the individuality suddenly leaps off and instead of pervading the gender difference ethically, grabs hold of an explanation from spirit’s highest sphere. This is one side of the monastic view, whether further defined as ethical rigorism or as predominantly contemplation.†
Just as anxiety is posited in modesty, so is it present in all erotic enjoyment, and not because it is sinful, not at all, which is why neither is it of any help if the minister blesses the couple ten times. Even when the erotic expresses itself as beautifully, purely, and morally as possible, undisturbed in its joy by any lascivious reflection, anxiety is still present, not, however, as a disturbing but as an accompanying factor.
Undertaking observations in this matter is extremely difficult. The observer must in particular exercise the caution taken by physicians who never take the pulse without making sure that it is not their own pulse they feel but that of the patient. Similarly, one must take care that the movement one discovers is not one’s own restlessness in carrying out the observation. It is quite certain, however, that in describing love, in however pure and innocent a light they present it, all poets posit anxiety along with it. Going further into this is a matter for the aesthetician. But why this anxiety? It is because spirit cannot take part in the culmination of the erotic. I will speak in the manner of the Greeks. Spirit is indeed present, because it is spirit that establishes the synthesis, but it cannot express itself in the erotic; it feels alien. It is as though it said to the erotic: “My dear! Here I cannot be a third party, so I shall go into hiding for the time being.” But just this is anxiety, and modesty as well. For it is a great foolishness to assume that the church’s marriage ceremony or the husband’s faithfulness in keeping to his wife alone is all that is needed.* Many a marriage has been profaned even if it was not through a stranger. But when the erotic is pure, innocent, and beautiful, then this anxiety is friendly and mild, and the poets are therefore right when they speak of a sweet anxiousness. It goes without saying, however, that anxiety is greater in the woman than in the man.
Let us now return to our earlier topic, namely the result of the relation of generation in the individual, which is the “more” that every later individual has with regard to Adam. In the moment of conception, spirit is furthest away and for that reason the anxiety at its greatest. In this anxiety, the new individual comes into being. In the moment of birth, anxiety culminates a second time in the woman, and that instant the new individual enters the world. That giving birth is anxiety is well known. Physiology has its explanation, and psychology must have its explanation too. In childbirth the woman is again at the edge of one extreme of the synthesis, and spirit therefore trembles, for in that moment it does not have its task, it is as if suspended. Anxiety, however, is an expression of the perfection of human nature; it is therefore only among lower peoples that one finds the analogue of the easy delivery of animals.
But the more anxiety, the more sensuousness. The procreated individual is more sensuous than the original, and this “more” is the common “more” of the generation for every later individual with regard to Adam.
But this “more” of anxiety and sensuousness for every later individual in relation to Adam may of course signify a more and less in the particular individual. Here lie differences that are in truth so terrible that surely no one dares to ponder them in a deeper sense, that is, with genuine human sympathy, unless convinced with an unshakable firmness that never in the world has there been, or ever will be, a “more” such that by a simple transition it transforms the quantitative into the qualitative. What Scripture teaches, that God punishes the children for the iniquity of their fathers to the third and fourth generations,* life proclaims loudly enough. Wanting to talk oneself out of this dreadful fact by explaining the saying as a Jewish teaching does not help. Christianity has never consented to privileging each individual to make a fresh start in an outward way. Each individual begins in a historical nexus and nature’s consequences are still as valid as ever. Except for this, that Christianity teaches each individual to lift itself above that “more,” and it condemns the individual who does not do that for not being willing to do so.
Just because sensuousness here is defined as a “more,” spirit’s anxiety in assuming responsibility for it becomes a greater anxiety. The maximum here is the dreadful fact that anxiety about sin produces sin. If we let evil desire, concupiscence, etc., be innate in the individual, we lose the ambiguity in which the individual becomes both guilty and innocent. In the faintness of anxiety, the individual swoons and is for that very reason both guilty and innocent.
I shall not cite detailed examples here of this infinitely fluctuating more and less. To have any significance they would need to be given an extensive and painstaking aesthetic-psychological treatment.
If I were to express here in one clause the “more” that every later individual has in relation to Adam, I would say it is: that sensuousness can signify sinfulness, that is, this obscure knowledge of it, along with an obscure knowledge of whatever else sin can signify along with a misunderstood appropriation of the historical de te fabula narratur [the story is told about you], in which the point, the individual primitivity, is excluded, and the individual without further ado mistakes itself for the human race and its history. We say not that sensuousness is sinfulness, but that sin makes it sinfulness. If we now consider the later individual, then every such individual has a historical environment in which it can become apparent that sensuousness can signify sinfulness. For the individual itself, sensuousness does not signify this, but this knowing gives anxiety a “more.” So spirit is posited in relation to the opposite not only of sensuousness, but also of sinfulness. Of course, as yet the innocent individual does not understand this knowing, for it can only be understood qualitatively, but this knowing is again a new possibility, such that freedom as it relates in its possibility to the sensuous becomes still more anxiety.
That this common “more” can indicate a more and a less for the particular individual goes without saying. Attention is thus drawn to a grand differentia. After Christianity had come into the world and redemption was posited, sensuousness was cast in an oppositional light that was not to be found in paganism, and which of all things serves to confirm the proposition that sensuousness is sinfulness.
Within the Christian differentia, this “more” may again signify a more and a less. This lies in the particular innocent individual’s relation to its historical environment. The most dissimilar things may produce the same effect in this respect. Freedom’s possibility announces itself in anxiety. A reminder may now be enough to bring an individual to collapse in anxiety (remember that I speak as always only psychologically and never nullify the qualitative leap), and this despite the reminder naturally being intended to do just the opposite. Sight of the sinful may save one individual and ruin another. A joke may have the same effect as seriousness and vice versa. Speech and silence can both produce an effect that is the opposite of that intended. There are no limits in this respect. So here again one observes the correctness of the attribution that this is a quantitative more or less, for after all, the quantitative is precisely the infinite limit.
I shall not pursue this with any further experiential projections here, since that would detain us. But life is rich enough if one only knows how to see. There is no need to travel to Paris and London—and it does not help if one cannot see.
As for that, anxiety has the same ambiguity here as it has always. At this point a maximum may appear corresponding to the one just mentioned, that the individual in anxiety about sin produces sin, in this case: the individual, in anxiety not about becoming guilty but about being seen as guilty, becomes guilty.
The ultimate “more” in this respect, furthermore, is that from its earliest awakening an individual is placed and influenced in such a way that sensuousness has become identical with sinfulness, and this ultimate “more” will appear in the most painful form of a collision if in the whole surrounding world absolutely no support is found. If to this ultimate “more” is added the confusion that the individual mistakes itself for its historical knowledge of sinfulness, and in the pallor of anxiety straightaway places itself qua individual under the same category, forgetting freedom’s “If you do likewise”—then we have that ultimate “more.”
What has been briefly suggested here, that it takes a fairly rich experience to grasp how much has been said, and said definitely and clearly, is something that has been discussed often enough. The discussion is commonly called: “On the power of the example.” Unquestionably, much has been well said on this matter, if not exactly in these recent superphilosophical times. But what is often missing is a psychological middle term, namely, the explanation of what it takes for the example to have such power. Moreover, the subject is sometimes treated in these circles a little too carelessly, and without noticing that a single little mistake in the smallest detail can throw the huge balance sheet of life into confusion. Psychological attention is fixed exclusively upon the particular phenomenon and doesn’t have its eternal categories ready at the same time, and is not sufficiently cautious about saving mankind through saving each single individual into the race whatever the cost. The example is supposed to have had its effect on the child. One lets the child be a regular little angel, and then the depraved environment plunged it into depravity. Over and over again one is told how bad the environment was, and then, well then, the child became depraved. But if this happens in a simple quantitative process, then every concept comes to nothing. This is something people fail to notice. [Or] the child is made out to be so basically wicked that it derives no benefit at all from the good example. No doubt care is taken not to let the child become so wicked as to acquire the power to make fools not only of its parents but of all human speech and thought, just as the rana paradoxa [paradoxical frog] mocks and defies the naturalists’ classification of frogs. There are many who indeed understand how to view the particular but are at the same time unable to keep the totality in mind. But whatever its other merits, every such view can only cause confusion. Or, the child, like most children, was neither good nor bad but then came into good company and became good, or into bad company and became bad. Middle terms! Middle terms! One comes up with a middle term that has the ambiguity which rescues the thought (and without it the salvation of the child is an illusion), namely, that the child, however its situation may have been, can become both guilty and innocent. Unless one has the middle terms prompt and clear, the concepts of hereditary sin, of sin, of race, and of the individual are lost, and the child with them.
Sensuousness then is not sinfulness, but through sin being posited and continuing to be posited, the sensuousness becomes sinfulness. That sinfulness means something else too goes without saying. But what else it signifies does not concern us here, where the task is to absorb oneself psychologically in the state that precedes sin.
Through eating the fruit of knowledge there entered the differentia between good and evil, but also the sexual difference as a drive. How this happened no science can explain. Psychology comes closest and explains the last approximation, which is freedom’s showing-itself-for-itself in the anxiety of possibility, or in the nothing of possibility, or in the nothing of anxiety. If the object of anxiety is a something, we have no leap but a quantitative transition. The later individual has a “more” in relation to Adam, and again a more or less in relation to other individuals. But it remains true, regardless, that the object of anxiety is a nothing. If its object is something such that, when viewed essentially, that is, in terms of freedom, it signifies something, then we do not have a leap but a quantitative transition that confuses every concept. Even if I say that sensuousness for an individual prior to the leap is posited as sinfulness, it remains true that it is not essentially posited as such, for essentially the individual does not posit or understand it. Even if I say that a “more” of sensuousness is posited in the procreated individual, this in terms of the leap is nevertheless an invalid “more.”
But if science should have any other psychological middle term that has the dogmatic, the ethical, and the psychological advantages possessed by anxiety, then that is what people prefer.
That in any case the present account lends itself excellently to the explanation commonly given of sin, namely, that it is selfishness, is easy to see. But by concentrating on that definition one does not engage the antecedent psychological difficulty at all, just as one also defines sin too pneumatically [spiritually] and takes too little note of the fact that, in being posited, sin posits just as much a sensuous as a spiritual consequence.
The fact that sin is so often explained in the newer sciences as selfishness makes it incomprehensible that no one has seen that just here lies the difficulty of finding a place for its explanation in any science. For selfishness is of all things the particular, and what this means is something only the single individual, as the single individual, can know, because when viewed under general categories it may mean everything in such a way that everything here means absolutely nothing. So this definition of sin as selfishness may be quite right precisely when the additional claim is made that it is so empty of scientific content that it means nothing at all. Finally, in the definition of sin as selfishness, no account is taken of the distinction between sin and hereditary sin, along with the sense in which the one explains the other, sin explaining hereditary sin and hereditary sin explaining sin.
Once one begins talking scientifically about this selfishness, everything dissolves into tautology, or else one becomes clever and everything is confused. Who can forget that it was Naturphilosophie that found selfishness in all creation, found it in the movement of the stars which are nevertheless bound in obedience to the laws of the universe, and found that the centrifugal force in nature is that of selfishness. If a concept has been widened that much, it may just as well lie down to sleep off its drunkenness and become sober again if it can. In this respect our age has been untiring in its efforts to make each thing signify everything. How cleverly and doggedly do we not see at times one or another mystagogue prostitute a whole mythology in order with his falcon eye to have every single myth become a caprice for his jew’s harp? Cannot an entire Christian terminology sometimes be seen to degenerate into perdition at the hands of one or another speculator’s pretentious treatment?
If one fails first to make clear to oneself the meaning of “self,” it is of little use saying of sin that it is selfishness. But “self” signifies precisely the contradiction of positing the universal as the particular. It is only given the concept of the particular that there can be talk of selfishness; but although there have lived countless millions of such “selves,” no science can say what the self is without again stating it quite generally.* And this is the wonder of life, that each human being mindful of itself knows what no science knows, since one knows who one is oneself, and this is the deep meaning of the Greek saying γνϖθι σαυτόν [know yourself],† which has for too long been understood in the German way as pure self-consciousness, the airiness of idealism. It is high time we understood it in the Greek way, and then again as the Greeks would have understood it had they possessed Christian presuppositions. But the genuine “self” is posited only by the qualitative leap; there can be no question of it in the prior state. So when sin is explained in terms of selfishness, one gets entangled in indistinct ideas, because it is, on the contrary, through sin and in sin that selfishness comes into being. If we are to say that selfishness occasioned Adam’s sin, this explanation is a game in which the interpreter uncovers what he himself has first hidden. If selfishness is supposed to have brought about Adam’s sin, the middle term is skipped over and the explanation has assured itself of a suspect facility.
Moreover, it tells us nothing about the significance of the sexual. Here I am back with my old point. Sexuality is not sinfulness; but, to speak foolishly for a moment and by way of accommodation, if Adam had not sinned, then the sexual would never have come into being as a drive. A perfect spirit cannot be conceived as sexually characterized. This also agrees with the teaching of the Church about the nature of the Resurrection,* with its representation of angels, and with the dogmatic definitions that have to do with Christ’s person. Although, and just to throw a hint, Christ is tried in all human ordeals,† there is never any mention of temptation in this respect, which may be explained exactly by his having withstood all temptations.
Sensuousness is not sinfulness. Sensuousness in innocence is not sinfulness; nevertheless sensuousness is there. Adam did of course need food and drink, etc. The gender difference is posited in innocence but is not posited as such. Only in the instant that sin is posited is the gender difference also posited as a drive.
Here, as everywhere, I must decline every uncomprehending implication, as if, for instance, the true task were now to abstract from, that is, in an outward sense annihilate, the sexual. Once the sexual is posited as the extremity of the synthesis, all abstraction is of no avail. The task is of course to bring it under the attribute of spirit (here lie all the moral problems of the erotic). Realization of this is the victory of love in a person in whom spirit has so triumphed that the sexual is forgotten and recollected only in forgetfulness. When this happens, sensuousness is transfigured in spirit and anxiety is driven out.
If this view, whether we call it Christian or by any other name, is now compared with the Greek view, then I believe that more has been gained than lost. Doubtless we lose something of the plaintive erotic Heiterkeit [cheerfulness], but a spiritual category has also been gained that was unknown to Greek culture. Those who truly lose are the many who constantly live on as though 6,000 years had gone since sin entered the world, as if it were a curiosity that did not concern them. They do not gain the Greek Heiterkeit, which precisely cannot be won but only lost, nor do they gain the eternal attribute of spirit.
* [Romans 8:19]
* [Cf. Luke 18:10–14]
* Here is how to deploy dogmatics. Each science must have above all a robust sense of its beginning and not live in promiscuity with others. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness, or by wanting to explain sin’s actuality, nothing “dogmatic” will ever come out of it, and the whole existence of dogmatics will become problematic and diffuse.
† In Schelling himself there is often talk of anxiety, wrath, anguish, suffering, etc. But talk of this kind should always be treated with a little suspicion so as not to mistake what follows sin in the creation for what Schelling also characterizes as states and moods in God. What he designates by these expressions are, if I may say so, the deity’s creative birth pangs. Such figurative expressions are in part what he himself called the negative and in Hegel became the negative more closely defined as the dialectical (το ἓτερον). The ambiguity is evident also in Schelling because he speaks of a melancholy spread over nature as well as of a heaviness of spirit in the deity. But above all, Schelling’s main thought is that anxiety and the rest characterize in particular the sufferings of the deity in coming to create. In Berlin he expressed the same more definitely by comparing God with [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe [(1749–1832), the German poet, dramatist, statesman, and natural scientist] and Johannes von Müller [(1752–1809), a Swiss historian and political journalist], both of whom felt well only when producing, and also by calling attention to the fact that a bliss of this kind that cannot declare itself is unhappiness. I mention this here because his remark has already appeared in print in a pamphlet by [Philipp Konrad] Marheineke [(1780–1846), a Protestant theologian whose lectures Kierkegaard had attended when in Berlin in 1841–42]. Marheineke wants to ironize it. This one ought not to do, for a vigorous and full-blooded anthropomorphism has considerable merit. The mistake is however a different one, and here we can see an example of how strange everything becomes when metaphysics and dogmatics are corrupted by treating dogmatics metaphysically and metaphysics dogmatically.
* The word alteration in Danish expresses the ambiguity very nicely. Alterere is used in the sense of changing, distorting, bringing out of its original state (the thing becomes another), but one also speaks of becoming altereret in the sense of becoming frightened, just because this is basically the unfailing first accompaniment. As far as I know, the Latin scholar doesn’t use the word at all but oddly enough uses adulterare [to commit adultery, to adulterate or debase]. The Frenchman says altérer les monnaie [to counterfeit the money] and être altéré [to be frightened]. With us, the word is used in everyday speech only in the sense of being frightened, and thus one hears the ordinary person say, “Jeg ble ganske altereret [I was quite scared].” I have at any rate heard a basket woman say it.
* This, of course, applies only to the human race, because the individual is qualified as spirit. In animal species every subsequent specimen is, on the contrary, just as good as the first, or, more correctly, being the first here means absolutely nothing.
* [Genesis 3:16]
† [Genesis 3:6, 12]
* [Matthew 23:4]
* This is how we must understand what Socrates said to Critobulus [a student of Socrates’s] about the kiss. I think it must be obvious to everyone that it would have been impossible for Socrates in all seriousness to have spoken with such pathos about the danger of the kiss, and also that he was no anxious ninny who dared not look at a woman. No doubt in southern countries and among more passionate peoples the kiss means more than here in the north (on this one may look up [Erykias] Puteanus [(1574–1646), a Dutch historian] in a letter to John Bapt. Saccum [a secretary in the Milan council]: nesciunt nostrae virgines ullum libidinis rudimentum osculis aut osculis inesse, ideoque fruuntur. Vestrae sciunt [our (Belgian) maidens do not know that a kiss or a glance of the eye can be the beginning of lust, and therefore abandon themselves to it. Your Italian maidens know it]. Cf. [Martin von] Kempius [Kempen (1642–1683)], Dissertatio de osculis, in Bayle). Still, it is unlike Socrates both as an ironist and as a moralist to speak in this way. To come on too heavily as moralist is to awaken desire and tempt the pupil almost against his will to become ironical toward the teacher. Socrates’s relation to Aspasia points the same way. He associated with her quite unconcerned about the ambiguous life she led. He wanted only to learn from her (Athenaeus [Naucratita (c. 200 BC), a grammarian]), and she seems to have had talent in that way, since it is told that husbands brought their wives along to Aspasia to learn from her. But then Socrates, as soon as Aspasia wanted to impress him with her loveliness, has presumably explained to her that one ought to love ugly women, and that she should not exert her charms any further since, for his own purposes, he had enough in Xantippe (cf. Xenophon’s account of Socrates’s view of his relation to Xantippe [Socrates’s reputedly shrewish wife]). Regrettably, since people repeatedly approach their reading of everything with preconceived opinions, it is no wonder that everyone has a fixed notion that a Cynic is more or less a profligate. Yet here too it might be possible, exactly among the Cynics [forerunners of the Hippies, who rejected regulation and sought to live naturally], to find an example of that view of the erotic as the comic.
* [1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28]
† However strange it may seem to someone unused to facing the phenomena boldly, there is nevertheless a perfect analogy between Socrates’s ironic view of the erotic as comical and a monk’s relation to mulieres subintroductae [women brought in secretly]. The abuse naturally concerns only those who have a liking for abuse.
* [Cf. Genesis 2:24]
* |Exodus 20:5]
* This is well worth further consideration, for here above all it must become apparent how far the recent principle that thought and being are one extends if one doesn’t sprain it through misplaced and partly foolish misunderstandings, but also, on the other hand, doesn’t want a highest principle bound up with thoughtlessness. Only the universal is by being thought, and lends itself to thought (not merely experimentally, for what can one not think?) and is as it lends itself to thought. The point in the particular is precisely its negative in-itself relation to the universal, its repellent relation, but as soon as it is thought away it is canceled, and no sooner is it thought than it is changed, so that either one does not think the particular but only imagines that one does so, or one thinks it and merely imagines that it is taken along in thought.
† The Latin saying unum noris omnes [if you know one, you know all] is a light-hearted expression of the same, and actually expresses the same, if by unum is understood the observer himself and one doesn’t search inquisitively for an omnes but earnestly holds fast to the one that actually is all. In general, people don’t believe this and it is even thought to be too proud. No doubt the real reason is that they are too cowardly and fond of ease to venture to understand and acquire an understanding of true pride.
* [Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:45ff; Luke 30:34]
† [Cf. Hebrews 4:15]