Chapter II The Dissimilarity of My Personal Existing Corresponding to the Dissimilar Nature of the Writing
CHAPTER II
The Dissimilarity of My Personal Existing Corresponding to the Dissimilar Nature of the Writing
In these days and for a long time now we have utterly lost the idea that to be an author is and ought to be a work and therefore [XIII 544] a personal existing. That on the whole the press, representing abstract, impersonal communication, is demoralizing, especially since the daily press, purely formally and with no regard to whether what it says is true or false, contributes enormously to demoralization because of all the impersonality, which in turn is more or less irresponsibility and impenitence; that anonymity, the highest expression for abstraction, impersonality, impenitence, and irresponsibility, is a basic source of modern demoralization; that on the other hand anonymity would be counteracted most simply, that a very beneficial corrective to journalism’s abstraction would be provided if we turned back once again to antiquity and learned what it means to be an individual human being, no more and no less, which also an author certainly is, no more and no less—this is self-evident. But in our day, when that which is the secret of evil has become wisdom—namely, that one is not to ask about the communicator but only about the communication, only about “what,” about the objective—in our day what does it mean to be an author? It means, often even when he is identified, to be an x, an impersonal something that, by means of printing, addresses itself abstractly to thousands upon thousands but itself is unseen, unknown, living as secretly, as anonymously, as impersonally as possible, presumably so that the contrast between the enormous means of communication and being an individual human being does not become obvious and glaring, perhaps also because he fears the supervision that life actually should have over everyone who wants to instruct others, that one sees him, his personal existing, and its relation to the communication. But with all this, to which someone who wanted to study the demoralization of the modern state should give great attention—with all this I cannot become further involved here.