No. 2 AWord on the Relation of My Work as an Author to “the Single Individual”
No. 283 [XIII 599]
A Word on the Relation of My Work as an Author to “the Single Individual”*
A triviality, as is known, leads a disdained and disregarded life—then in turn it has its revenge. At the base of a misunderstanding, especially if it is vehement and malicious, there naturally is a triviality—otherwise it of course would not be a misunderstanding but an essential disagreement. What constitutes a misunderstanding is that what the one regards as significant the other regards as insignificant, yet in such a way that basically it is a triviality that comes between them, and that in the misunderstanding the disagreeing parties have not first taken the time to understand each other. At the base of all actual disagreement, there is an understanding; the baselessness of misunderstanding is that the preliminary understanding is lacking, without which both agreement and disagreement are a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding, therefore, can be removed and become agreement and understanding, but it can also be removed and become actual disagreement. That two people are actually in disagreement is no misunderstanding—they are actually in disagreement simply because they do understand each other.
I surely am not far wrong when I assume that what has caused and is causing the disagreement between quite a few of my contemporaries and myself with regard to my work as an author is in part this: that single individual. Undoubtedly quite a few people would read my books if it were not for this, and certainly the crowd would leave me alone entirely if it were not for this.
Now, if this matter of that single individual were a triviality to [XIII 600] me, I could, of course, drop it—indeed, do it with pleasure, and shame on me if I was not willing to do it most courteously. But this is by no means the case. To me, not personally but as a thinker, this matter of the single individual is the most decisive. Thus there remains only the possibility of removing the misunderstanding—if I could succeed in making it obvious to the individuals that it truly is no triviality. In that case the disagreement would indeed be removed. What is disturbing is, namely, that it is regarded as a triviality—and that I then want to make such a big fuss about a triviality. Consequently, one of two alternatives: either the others are right, that it is a triviality and I ought to give it up, or that it is, as I understand it, something very essential. Then there is indeed no reason to take exception to my making such a big fuss—about the essential; there is, however, good reason to dwell a little on it earnestly and thoughtfully. What ought not to be neglected on my side has not been neglected. At one time (in a little article by Frater Taciturnus* in Fædrelandet84) I carried the issue as close to eccentricity as possible—certainly not out of eccentricity. On the contrary, I was very well aware of what I was doing, that I was acting responsibly, aware of my responsibility, that not to do it would have been irresponsible. I did it (and precisely in a newspaper, and precisely in a newspaper article that made contact with town gossip from start to finish), because to me it was very important to provoke attention upon this point, which is achieved neither by ten books that develop the doctrine of the single individual nor by ten lectures on the subject, but in these days is achieved simply and solely by getting the laughter aimed at oneself,** by making people somewhat angry, and then by getting them mockingly to reproach one again and again and continually for that—precisely for that [XIII 601] which one wants inculcated and, if possible, brought to the knowledge of all. This is unconditionally the surest kind of tutoring. But anyone who is to effect something must know his age—and then have the courage to risk the danger of using the surest means.
86 These I have used, although the dialectic of the single individual has continually been made equivocal in its double movement. In every one of the pseudonymous books, the subject of the single individual appears in some way, but there the single individual is predominantly the single individual esthetically, defined in the eminent sense, the outstanding individual, etc. In every one of my upbuilding books, the subject of the single individual appears, and as officially as possible, but there the single individual is someone every human being is or can be. In other words, the point of departure of the pseudonymous writers is the difference between person and person with regard to intelligence, culture, etc.; the point of departure of the upbuilding discourses is in the upbuilding, that is, in the universally human. But this doubleness is precisely the dialectic of the single individual. The single individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can mean everyone. Now if one desires to stimulate attention dialectically, one will always use the category the single individual in a double stroke. The pride in the one thought incites a few; the humility in the other thought repels others, but the confusion in this doubleness dialectically provokes attention, and, as stated, this doubleness is precisely the idea of the single individual. I believe, however, that for the most part people have taken notice of the individual of the pseudonymous writers and have promptly associated me with the pseudonymous writers—hence all the talk about my pride and arrogance, by which judgment one actually manages only to inform on oneself.
So the subject of that single individual has been inculcated almost to the point of becoming a byword—and I, poor fellow, have had to put up with the laughter. If I had tearfully pleaded and beseeched everyone for heaven’s sake to pay attention to this idea, which is eternity’s, practically no one would have paid any attention to it.
Now since it has been inculcated, I shall make an attempt, and in it do my best, to try to remove at least part of the misunderstanding, which, however, can actually exist only for those who have not made themselves familiar with the writings in a deeper sense—and it could occur only to a stripling to want to preclude all misunderstanding entirely when one intends to undertake something. One must beware of misunderstanding—that is, one must beware of wanting to prevent it entirely. There is nothing that so easily gets out of hand and so easily becomes [XIII 602] misunderstood as misunderstanding; even if one were to attempt to do nothing whatever except to preclude misunderstanding—well, he very likely would become misunderstood more than ever.
__________
87 That from the beginning I have had more than one reader, I do of course realize. “Denmark is a little country.” Its people, who have a language of their own, are not numerous; the literary setting is so small that there is not or for a long time there has not been even a literary journal, but literature was reduced (in absurdum) to the attention that the daily newspapers, wholesale merchant Nathanson in particular, according to his own words, “bestow upon it.”88 As an author I have worked unusually hard and unusually fast. In the service of the truth, I have continually used part of my energy and ingenuity not to prevent the circulation of the books but to prevent their being circulated misunderstood—commensurate with that, I am even widely read. I am well aware of this, and, knowing it, I am not unappreciative and perhaps have shown my appreciation more honestly and sincerely by never misusing this as a means to attract buyers or readers. Therefore, that from my side there would be any hindrance to wanting to have my more popular books read and understood by everyone, if possible, is something that only foolishness and spite could have hit upon89 and only envy could utilize in order to confuse the confused even more, which succeeds easily and occurs by itself, and in order, if possible, to make the right-minded, the better people, the more insightful, indignant toward me, which does not occur by itself and which, praise God, failed far beyond my expectations, inasmuch as the very opposite happened, truly an upbuilding joy to me.
Every more earnest person who has an eye for the condition [XIII 603] of these times will readily perceive how important it is to oppose boldly an immoral confusion that philosophically and socially wants to demoralize the single individuals by means of humanity or fantastic social categories, to oppose it, basically and observing all consistency, under the weight of an enormous responsibility but also unto every true ultimate—a confusion that wants to teach an ungodly contempt for what is the first condition of all religiousness: to be an individual human being. This confusion can be opposed, if possible, only by getting hold of people individually—but every human being is indeed an individual human being! Every more earnest person who knows what upbuilding is, everyone, whatever else he or she is, high or low, wise or simple, male or female, anyone who has ever felt built up and felt God as very present, will certainly agree with me unconditionally that it is impossible to build up or to be built up en masse, even more impossible than to “fall in love en quatre [in fours]” or en masse—upbuilding, even more decisively than erotic love, pertains to the single individual. The single individual, not the single individual in the sense of the outstanding and the especially gifted, but the individual in the sense in which every human being, unconditionally every human being, can be and should be an individual, should place his honor—but will also truly find his salvation—in being an individual. Every individual of the many who have read my upbuilding books, and for upbuilding, everyone whom I as an upbuilding author may have influenced—if he privately and honestly asks himself (and he owes this to himself, the one judging, and perhaps even also to me, who frequently enough have had to bear the brunt in those places where it is not exactly wisdom that judges) the question whether I deceived him with this talk about the single individual, whether I deceived him by exposing myself* for a time, for the sake of this idea (so I could get that tightened up properly and, if possible, make him properly aware of it), to the laughter of the many and to [XIII 604] whatever uses envy could make of this laughter—will certainly rather confess, if not to me, which is not required, then to himself, that what ails him is simply that he still has not really become the single individual, which I myself do not pretend to be, although I have struggled, but as yet have not grasped it, and am struggling, but as one who does not forget that according to the supreme criterion the single individual is beyond a human being’s powers.
__________
90 The single individual is the category through which, in a religious sense, the age, history, the human race must go. And the one who stood at Thermopylae was not so secure as I, who have stood, in order at least to bring about an awareness of it, at this narrow pass, the single individual. His particular task was to keep the hordes from pressing through the narrow pass; if they pressed through, he would have lost. My task at least exposes me far less to the danger of being trampled down, since it was as a lowly servant (but, as I have said from the beginning and repeat again and again, without authority) to prompt, if possible, to invite, to induce the many to press through this narrow pass, the single individual, through which, please note, no one presses except by becoming the single individual; the opposite is indeed a categorical impossibility. —And yet, yes, if I were to request an inscription on my grave, I request none other than that single individual; Even if it is not understood now,* it surely will be.
With the category the single individual, the pseudonymous writers took aim at the system** in a day when everything here [XIII 605] at home was system and system; now the system is scarcely mentioned anymore,* at least not as the shibboleth and as the demand of the times. With the category the single individual, I marked the beginning of the writing bearing my signature; it remains as a uniformly repeated formula—therefore this matter of the single individual is not a later invention of mine, but my first. —My possible ethical significance is unconditionally linked to the category the single individual. If this was the right category, if all was in order with this category, if I perceived correctly here, understood correctly that this was my task, even though by no means pleasant or appreciated, to bring about awareness of it, if this was bestowed on me, although involving inner sufferings such as probably are seldom experienced, although involving external sacrifices such as a person is not every day found willing to make—then I stand and my writings with me.
This category, having used this category, moreover so decisively and personally, determines the outcome ethically. Without this category and without the use of it that has been made, the reduplication of the entire work as an author would be missing. Just because the books said, presented, developed, and expressed all that they expressed, and perhaps with imagination, dialectic, psychological insight, and other such qualities—from this it would by no means follow summarily that the author had understood, and had understood how to express altogether decisively with a single phrase, also to express in action, that he had understood his age and was himself aware: that it was an age of disintegration.**91
This is why the author does not call himself a truth-witness—no, oh no, far from it! By such a term is not actually understood everyone who says something true. Thank you, no; then we would have truth-witnesses enough. No, in a truth-witness the personal existing must be seen ethically in relation to what was said, whether the personal existing expresses what was said—a consideration that, it is entirely right to say, the systematizing and the didacticizing and the characterlessness of the age have most wrongly abolished. The author’s life has indeed fairly accurately expressed what was ethically accentuated: to be the single individual; he has associated with countless people, but he has always stood alone, in his striving also striving to be allowed to [XIII 606] stand alone, while in the surrounding world almost everything was the setting up, down, and aside of committees. For the sake of his category, he has also made more than one sacrifice, exposed himself to one and another danger—and, note well, to precisely the kind of danger that categorically corresponds to the single individual—exposed himself to “the crowd” and “the public.”
But even if there was no other hindrance, he has not been obliged to work for a living. That alone is enough, is a preferential position that ethically places him down in a lower class. But in addition he has also had too much imagination and much too much of the poet to dare to be called a truth-witness in the stricter sense. He himself has been far from having an overview of everything from the beginning; so he has only successively become aware of having apprehended correctly. He has so often had occasion to take to heart Lessing’s felicitously expressed wise advice, “Lasz uns nicht weise seyn wollen, wo wir nichts als glücklich gewesen [Let us not pretend to be wise when we have only been lucky],”93 or has had occasion to be reminded of the duty to give God what is God’s.94 He has had too much to do with the ethical to be a poet, and in that regard recalls the esthete’s first and later repeated words in Either/Or* concerning not wanting to be a poet and the ethicist’s** stressing this as right, because a person should move from being a poet and into the existential, the [XIII 607] ethical;† but he is still too much of a poet to be a truth-witness. He is a confinium [border territory] in between, which is, however, properly related categorically to the future of history.
__________
The single individual is the category of spirit, of spiritual awakening, as diametrically opposite to politics as possible. Earthly reward, power, honor, etc. are not involved in its proper application. Even when it is used in the interest of the established order, inwardness does not interest the world; and when it is used cataclysmically, it still does not interest the world, because to make sacrifices, to be sacrificed—which must indeed become the consequence of not seeking to become a power in the external world—does not interest the world.
__________
98The single individual—from the Christian point of view, this is the decisive category, and it will also become decisive for the future of Christianity. The fundamental confusion, what could be called the fall of Christendom, is: year after year, decade after decade, century after century, to have insidiously wanted—almost half-unconscious of what it wanted to do and essentially unaware of what it did—to trick God out of his proprietary right to Christianity and has taken into its head the idea that the race, the human race, has itself invented or has itself at least as good as invented Christianity. As in the state, property falls to the state when it has been left for a certain number of years and no owner has claimed it, just so the human race, spoiled by knowing in a banal sense that Christianity does after all exist, has thought something like this, “It is a very long time since God has let anything be heard from him qua owner and master; so Christianity has fallen to us, whether we want either to abolish it totally or to modify it ad libitum [as desired] and treat it more or less as our possession and invention.” This is treating Christianity—not as something that in the submission of obedience under God’s majesty shall be believed, but as something that in order to be accepted must seek with the help of “reasons” to satisfy “the times,” “the public,” “this distinguished assembly,” etc. Every [XIII 608] rebellion in science and scholarship: against discipline, every rebellion in society: against obedience, every rebellion in politics: against secular rule—is connected with and derived from this rebellion of the human race against God in regard to Christianity. This rebellion—the abuse of the category of “human race”—is not, incidentally, reminiscent of the rebellion of the Titans but is the rebellion of reflection, the insidious rebellion, continued from year to year, from generation to generation.
Reflection continually takes only a very little bit at a time, and of this very little bit we are always able to say, “After all, one can compromise on small things”—until reflection will have taken everything, something one would not become aware of because it happens little by little and “one can easily compromise on little things.” Therefore people must become individuals in order to receive the Christianly pathos-filled impression of Christianity. The single individual, every individual, will surely guard against wanting to initiate a lawsuit against God regarding which of the two unconditionally and to the very last jot has the proprietary right to Christianity. God must again become the thoroughly decisive middle term, but the single individual corresponds to God as the middle term. If “the human race” is to be “the authority” or even the middle term, then Christianity is abolished, if in no other way, then by the wrong, unchristian form that is given to the Christian communication. Not even the most sagacious and most trusted spy of the police can vouch more confidently for the correctness of the content of his report than I, a poor private operator, a spy, si placet [if you please], will vouch for the correctness of this.
__________
The single individual—with this category the cause of Christianity stands or falls, now that the world-development has gone as far as it has in reflection. Without this category pantheism would be unconditionally victorious. No doubt there will be those who know how to tighten this category dialectically in a completely different way—without having had the labor of bringing it forth—but the category the single individual is and remains the fixed point that can hold against pantheistic confusion, is and remains the weight that can be put on, except that those who are to work and operate with this category must be more and more [XIII 609] dialectical accordingly as the confusion becomes greater and greater.99 One can promise to make a Christian of every individual one can get in under this category—insofar as one person can do this for another—and therefore, more correctly, one can assure him that he will become that. As the single individual he is alone, alone in the whole world, alone—face-to-face before God—then he will no doubt manage to obey. All doubt (which, noted in parenthesi [parenthetically], is nothing but disobedience to God if it is regarded ethically and a scholarly fuss is not superiorly made about it) ultimately has its haunt in temporality’s illusion that there are quite a few of us, or all humanity as such, which as such can finally intimidate God, itself even be Christ. And pantheism is an acoustical illusion that confuses the vox populi [voice of the people] and the vox dei [voice of God], an optical illusion, a vaporous image formed out of the fog of temporality, a mirage formed by its reflexion, which claims to be the eternal. But the fact is that this category cannot be taught directly; it is a being-able [Kunnen], an art [Kunst], an ethical task and art, the practice of which at times may claim the lives of its practitioners. The self-willed race and the confused crowds regard the highest, divinely understood, as high treason against “the human race,” “the crowd,” “the public,” etc.
__________
100The single individual—this category has been used only once, its first time, in a decisively dialectical way, by Socrates,101 in order to disintegrate paganism. In Christendom it will be used a second time in the very opposite way, to make people (the Christians) Christians. It is not the missionary’s category with regard to the pagans to whom he proclaims Christianity, but it is the missionary’s category within Christendom itself in order to introduce Christianity into Christendom. When he, the missionary, comes, he will use this category. If the age is waiting for a hero, it surely waits in vain; instead there will more likely come one who in [XIII 610] divine weakness will teach people obedience—by means of their slaying him in impious rebellion, him, the one obedient to God, who would still use this category on an even much greater scale, but also with authority. But nothing further on this; grateful to Governance, I continue both in the one sense and in the other, in my obviously and in every respect infinitely subordinate role—to make aware of this category.102