Narrative Ontology 1509543937, 9781509543939

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Narrative Ontology

Narrative Ontology Axel Hutter

Translated by Aaron Shoichet

polity

Originally published in German as Narrative Ontologie © Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG Tübingen, 2017 This English edition © Polity Press, 2022 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4391-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4392-2 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hutter, Axel, 1961- author. | Schoichet, Aaron, translator. Title: Narrative ontology / Axel Hutter ; translated by Aaron Schoichet. Other titles: Narrative Ontologie. English Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2021] | “Originally published in German as Narrative Ontologie, Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG Tübingen, 2017.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An original work of philosophy that highlights the connection between self-understanding and narrative form”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021016361 (print) | LCCN 2021016362 (ebook) | ISBN

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Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is any riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life as much of a riddle as our present life? Wittgenstein

Foreword Markus Gabriel

According to a widespread conception which might as well be called a worldview, reality is intrinsically meaningless. By its very nature, it is utterly foreign to our human desire to find meaning in our lives, an opaque in itself, at best explainable in terms of causal, natural-scientific models. Yet this very worldview raises the issue of how to conceive of our experience of meaning and value that seems to be constitutive of what it is to be someone, a subject or a self. Axel Hutter’s magnificent book questions this worldview by putting our quest for meaning centre stage. To be someone is not some kind of illusion hovering over the meaningless ocean of physical reality. Rather, being someone, a self, is inextricably bound up with our capacity to tell and understand stories in which we are involved. In short, Hutter rediscovers the depth of narrations without falling into the trap of accepting the meaninglessness of the universe only in order to confront it with the desperate attempt to cover up an existential void with mere myth. In that important sense, Hutter’s narrative ontology resists the romantic temptation of accepting the disenchantment by wishing to re-enchant nature. His starting point is a precise and astonishingly revealing, innovative analysis of the idea of repetition, so prominent in the existentialist tradition. He bases his insight on a philosophical reading of one of the most difficult modern novels, Thomas Mann’s late magnum opus, Joseph and His Brothers. In Narrative Ontology, he manages to demonstrate how we can overcome nihilism by way of drawing on Mann’s insight that we always have to tell and retell stories that are transmitted to us so as to resonate with the core of human subjectivity, i.e., our capacity to lead a life in light of a conception of ourselves. Subjectivity is the indispensable starting point of every enterprise of making sense of what it means for us to exist, which includes the incoherent attempt to reject the very idea of meaningfulness. Hutter’s book not only offers a convincing and, in many respects, pathbreakingly novel account of a narrative ontology of the self, but at the same time provides the reader with an account of normative self-

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constitution, of what we call ‘Geist’ in our neck of the woods. Narrative Ontology is a mature and important piece of contemporary philosophy in Germany, a work that equally addresses issues in the theory of subjectivity, normativity and general ontology. Given the importance of the issues dealt with in the pages that follow and the innovative way of dealing with them, I hope that the book will receive the reception it deserves also in the English-speaking world.

Preface

The present enquiry devotes itself critically to the three ideas that have belonged since time immemorial to the heart of philosophical reflection: freedom, God and immortality. Their inherent connection has disappeared from our thought. We barely pay attention to the latter two, and the inflationary use of the first one (as compensation, as it were) has made it as vacuous as the others. This enquiry’s critical aim is thus to remind philosophy of its genuine task: only in understanding itself as a mode of human self-knowledge that articulates itself in these three ideas will philosophy do justice to its own concept. For the critical discussion of the central ideas of self-knowledge, the book sees in Thomas Mann an ally whose novel Joseph and His Brothers has more to say about freedom, God and immortality than does academic philosophy of the present era. The enquiry places itself between all positions so that anyone who picks it up can, without difficulty, identify what it is not. The professional philosopher who expects an academic treatise on ontology will find fault in the fact that it deals for long stretches with Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel. The scholar of German studies who expects an academic treatise on Thomas Mann will find fault with the fact that it pursues for long stretches speculative – indeed metaphysical – thoughts. For these reasons, the present work will deliberately refrain from an explicit treatment of secondary literature. This is because the philosophical enquiry does not aim to talk about Thomas Mann but, rather, in a narrative manner, about that which he himself talks about: the thought that the meaning of human freedom consists in living in similitude. This thought is admittedly not easy to understand, for understanding it requires having a justified judgement whether it is true or not. Such an insight can be gained, however, only within the framework of a philosophical enquiry.

Contents

Foreword by Markus Gabriel vii Prefaceix Introduction The Art of Self-Knowledge Self-Knowledge – The Intangibility of the I – Who’s Speaking? – Narrative Meaning – Meaning and Being – The Project of a Narrative Ontology – The Truth of Art – Thomas Mann as Model – The Enigma of Human Being – Freedom – Selfhood as Character

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Part One  The Stories of Jacob 1 The Ambiguity of the I  The Leitmotif – The Original Scene – Readings – The Unrest of the Blessing – Identity of Form and Content – The Narrative Decentring of the I – Coined Archetypes – Isaac’s ‘Blindness’ – Selfhood as Self-Understanding

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2 The World Theatre The Thought-Model of the Actor – The World as Stage – History – Meaning of Life? – The Author as Narrator and Reader – Meaning as Happiness or Happiness as Meaning – Connecting Thoughts – Cain and Abel – The Role of Human Being – The Dignity of Universality – Humanity in Each Person

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3 Narrative Irony Deception and Disappointment – Leah – Day and Night – Nonsense – Jacob’s Four Deceptions – The Denied Sacrifice – Dialectic of Spiritual Inheritance – Hope – Joseph’s Gift – Mercy of the Last Deception

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Part Two  Time and Meaning 4 The Well of the Past Ontology of Egoism – Self-Respect – Descent into Hell – Wandering – The Abyss of Time – Desperation of Passing Time – Memento Mori – Promise and Expectation – Time that Cannot Be Enumerated – The Feast of the Narrative

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5 How Abraham Discovered God Where to Begin? – The Adventure of Self-Knowledge – In the Image of God – Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of God – The Courage for Monotheism – Not the Good, but the Whole – God’s History? – Model and Succession – Theology of Narration

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6 What Are Human Beings, that You Are Mindful of Them? Higher Echelons – Human Reason and Language – Evil – On the Economy of Morality – The Narratable World of What Happens – Who Narrates? – The Novel of the Soul – Very Serious Jokes – In Praise of Transience

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Part Three  The Stories of Joseph 7 The Future Self-Love – Wit in Language – Ambiguity of the Talent – Knowledge of the Future? – Being on One’s Way – Sympathy – Certainty of Death – The Dreamer of Dreams – The Catastrophe

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8 The Dying Grain The Oracle – The Simile of the Dying Grain – Joseph’s Awakening – Compassion – The Illusory Character of Individuality – The Truth of Illusion – At the Empty Grave – The Other Simile – History in Becoming

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9 Only a Simile Joseph in Egypt – Historical and Narrative Attentiveness – Laban’s Realm – Huya and Tuya – Egypt as Symbol – The Sphinx – Interpreting Dreams – Pharaoh – Letter and Spirit of Understanding – Interpretation of God – Historical and Narrative Truth – Play and Allusion

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Conclusion Making Present Diagnosis of Time – Nihilism as Human Self-Belittlement – Abraham’s Legacy

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Notes280 References287 Index290

Introduction

The Art of Self-Knowledge

Self-Knowledge – The Intangibility of the I – Who’s Speaking? – Narrative Meaning – Meaning and Being – The Project of a Narrative Ontology – The Truth of Art – Thomas Mann as Model – The Enigma of Human Being – Freedom – Selfhood as Character

Self-Knowledge ‘Know thyself!’ The commandment of the Delphic Oracle has defined the intellectual development of humanity like no other. To be sure, the enigmatic adventure that it calls for has long ago disappeared behind a nearly impenetrable veil of supposed familiarity and self-­evidence, such that the commandment was able to sink into a mere facet of general education, into a formula one is fond of quoting. For this reason, an introductory attempt will be made to regain the original radicality and enigmatic character of the question of self-­ knowledge, of human beings enquiring into their s­elves – ­a character that fundamentally distinguishes this question from all other epistemic ­questions. Self-­knowledge by no means follows the familiar paths of ‘normal’ knowledge, which is at home in our everyday dealings in the world. Rather, self-­knowledge distinguishes itself specifically from our usual knowledge, and the enigmatic singularity of this knowledge is concealed when it is conceived of in analogy to the allegedly familiar knowledge of ­objects – ­and thus misunderstood from the ground up. At first glance, nothing appears to speak against grasping the ‘self’ in ‘self-­knowledge’ as if it simply designated the object of this knowledge. Just as knowing can aim at a tree, a house or a stone, in the case of self-­knowledge it could aim quite analogously at the self. The expression ‘self-­knowledge’ would simply pick out a particular piece of knowledge from the multitude of all possible knowledge by specifying more precisely the object of knowledge.

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Seen from this perspective, self-­knowledge would be comparable (in accordance with its form) to all other kinds of human knowledge, all of which would differ from each other with respect to their different objects (in accordance with their content). Knowing would then be similar to a telescope, itself remaining unchanged and serving as a means, in always the same manner, to behold diverse objects and to bring them ‘closer’. Knowledge of a tree looks at the tree, knowledge of a house at the house, and self-­knowledge, accordingly, at the self. Yet the self at issue in self-­knowledge is the self that puts itself in question. The self that makes self-­knowledge into a unique and enigmatic kind of knowledge is not the object but rather the subject of knowledge. Herein lies precisely the radical difference between knowledge of something other and knowledge of oneself; when understood appropriately, this difference opens up in the first place the possibility of genuine self-­knowledge by making us aware of its incompatibility with other kinds of knowledge. The tree that is the object of knowledge is obviously not the subject of this knowledge; by contrast, the self that is to know itself in self-­knowledge is very much indeed the subject. For this reason, the Delphic commandment aims at a quite peculiar form of knowledge that, as self-­knowledge, distinguishes itself specifically from the usual knowledge of objects or knowledge of something other. In self-­knowledge, the self ought to know itself precisely as itself, that is, as ­subject – a­ task that would be misguided from the start if the subject sought to know itself only as object, and thus precisely not to know itself. A knowledge that takes into account the self only as an object of knowledge can learn a lot, but none of what it learns may be regarded as genuine self-­knowledge. This difference between knowledge of something other and knowledge of oneself, which is far from self-­evident, is what first makes clear why ‘Know thyself!’ is uttered as an imperative: the imminent and always present possibility of fundamentally misunderstanding oneself as a mere object of knowledge makes self-­ knowledge into a normative demand, which one can satisfy but also fall short of satisfying by misunderstanding oneself as an object among objects and forgetting oneself as subject. Self-­knowledge is for this reason not primarily characterized by a certain ‘what’, but rather a certain ‘how’ of knowledge, from which the ‘what’ (the enigmatic reality of the self) results in the first place. One can violate the commandment of self-­knowledge not merely by failing to follow it, but just as well by confusing the ‘how’ of knowledge of oneself with the ‘how’ of the knowledge of something other, without knowing to distinguish between the two. This art of distinguishing, demanded by the Delphic commandment, becomes clear in the classical model in which the striving for self-­ knowledge in the history of human spirit takes shape. The exemplary pioneer in embarking on the adventure of a radical distinction between knowledge of oneself and knowledge of something other is Plato’s



The Art of Self-Knowledge 5

Socrates, speaking in Phaedo: ‘I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous (γελοῖον), when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things’ (1914, 229e–230a). Obviously, Socrates distinguishes here very precisely between self-­ knowledge as it is demanded by the ‘Delphic inscription’, and knowledge of everything else that is not the subject but the object of knowledge. And this fundamental difference is understood as a radical difference in rank: self-­knowledge is for Socrates so important and singular that it would be ‘ridiculous’ to be interested in any knowledge of objects as long as the commandment to know oneself has not been satisfied (which does not mean that only few people commit such a ‘ridiculous’ mistake, as Socrates does not tire of pointing out to his fellow citizens). It is indeed remarkable and highly characteristic of Socrates’ thought that he understands self-­knowledge as the highest form of knowing, but at the same time emphasizes that he does ‘not know’ himself. In Socratic not-­knowing, maximum and minimum, positing and negating, interlace in a way that is not easy to understand: on the one hand, self-­knowledge is the most important form of knowledge, and human beings have to seek it above all else; on the other hand, Socrates is distinguished from his fellow citizens precisely by his peculiar non-knowledge – that is, by the knowledge of not knowing what or who he is. Socratic non-­knowledge is thus by no means non-­knowledge with respect to any objects, but, rather, quite pointedly a non-­knowledge with respect to the self. It is, then, a forerunner and ironic place-­maker of the self-­knowledge that is sought after.

The Intangibility of the I The Socratic insight that self-­knowledge is a quite peculiar form of knowledge, distinct from ordinary knowledge of objects while constituting its blind spot, has indeed never been developed into a lasting achievement in the further course of the history of human thought. This is because the basic orientation of everyday consciousness to ‘graspable’ things proved overpowering, pushing itself in front of the enigmatic exceptional nature of self-­knowledge, which consequently fell again into obscurity. Yet, precisely for this reason, the Delphic commandment of self-­ knowledge constitutes the secret source of unrest and irritation in human thought. Moreover, it is in the exceptional moments of our intellectual history that the enigmatic non-­objectifiable nature of the I is rediscovered in always original ways and its intangibility brought into paradoxical or ironic concepts that seek to do justice to the ‘ungraspable’ character of the I in human self-­knowledge. Such a rediscovery finds expression with David Hume. ‘There are some philosophers’, Hume writes, ‘who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence.’ Of all the possible objects of knowledge,

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the I, it appears, is a very special one. It is the one that is closest and most familiar to us, the one that is easiest to comprehend and is immediately present: there is nothing that we know better than our own self. Of all the possible kinds of knowledge, self-­knowledge would be the one, then, that we need not demand of anyone since everyone has already achieved it. Hume’s critique sets a powerful Socratic question mark suitable for tearing the overly confident human self-­consciousness out of its dogmatic slumber: ‘Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d.’ It must ‘be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression.’ Consequently, ‘there is no such idea’ (2007, 164). The I that underlies all grasping as the condition of possibility withdraws itself (precisely for that reason?) from our conceptual grip. As Hume observes, it does not allow for a real impression of an objective thing to which we could trace our conception of an I. In the case of the I, there is, then, precisely no reference given to an objectively ‘given’ object that ordinarily lends our everyday knowledge and language a solid foundation. From this it follows, however, that everything that the I grasps is the object of a knowledge, so that it itself as the subject of knowledge becomes a blank space of knowledge. The Delphic project of self-­knowledge must, for this reason, highlight anew time and again this peculiar ‘blank space’ of the kind of knowledge sought here (Socratic non-­knowledge). The first ‘result’ that appears in the attempt at self-­knowledge is thus an astonished puzzlement about oneself, which one also finds in Hume’s Treatise: ‘But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent’ (398–9). For this reason, the specific peculiarity of self-­ knowledge cannot initially at all be elucidated directly and positively, but rather only indirectly and negatively, and indeed by means of the critical demonstration, carried out as concisely as possible, that all knowledge of a self or an I­ – u ­ nder the presupposition that we are dealing here with an ‘object’ of ­knowledge – ­necessarily remains empty, leading into a confusing labyrinth of contradictions. In this negative manner, Schopenhauer, too, formulated the critique of the dogma of a positive comprehensibility of the human I in an especially compelling thought experiment. If the self were, namely, a special object among other objects of knowledge, then ‘it would be possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves and independently of the objects of knowing and willing. Now we simply cannot do this, but as soon as we enter into ourselves in order to attempt it, and wish for once to know ourselves fully by directing our knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe, and since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with



The Art of Self-Knowledge 7

a shudder nothing but an insubstantial ghost’ (1969a, 278 explanatory note). Here, Schopenhauer takes alleged human ‘self-­knowledge’ oriented to knowledge of objects at its word: it misunderstands the self as a special object of knowledge and, as a consequence, seeks this self ‘inwardly’ in human beings. He thus inspects the concrete accessibility of a graspable self that would lend to self-­knowledge that objective ‘footing’ (Hume: impression) that ordinary object knowledge invokes. This thought experiment leads again to the critical result that a self-­knowledge carried out in the mode of object k ­ nowledge – ­so long as it does not deceive i­tself – ­necessarily leads to a ‘bottomless void’ that reveals negatively to knowledge that the required self-­knowledge cannot have the form of ‘other knowledge’, i.e. knowledge of a graspable object. The commandment of self-­knowledge leads in this way into a labyrinth of aporias, which question from within the overly naïve and uncritically accepted paradigm of everyday knowledge that is primarily interested in stable objects. They are thus suitable to wake human consciousness out of its dogmatic slumber of self-­forgetfulness that it enjoys in the arms of familiar object knowledge. So long as human beings orient themselves in self-­knowledge unquestioningly and uncritically to the mode of knowledge of comprehensible objects, they face the unsatisfactory alternative of either alienating themselves into an object of knowledge or else dismissing the peculiar ‘ungraspable’ I as a mere illusion, because it cannot be sensually objectified. Human beings are threatened with their own I becoming a comprehensible yet foreign object, in which their subjectivity is forgotten, or an incomprehensible nothing that is not knowable in the way we know ­things – t­ hus vanishing into a ‘ghost’. The I, the self that is to each our own, is for us not the closest and most familiar, but rather the most distant and most alien. As fitting as it was at the outset to call object knowledge a ‘knowledge of something other’ because it does not concern our selves, it is now fitting to designate self-­ knowledge in a completely different sense as ‘other knowledge’, because it demands of us a form of knowledge that is entirely distant and alien to us: in everyday life, only knowledge of objects is familiar and close to us. Yet the peculiar otherness of the knowledge required here frees the project of self-­knowledge from the suspicion of pursuing only a narrow and selfish ‘self-­interest’. This is because the selfish character of an overly narrow self-­interest consists ­precisely – ­as will still need to be ­shown – ­in the self-­deception that one is closest and most familiar to oneself. If the self is the radically other and unfamiliar, then the effort to understand oneself is not the effort of a narcissistic home-­body, not a lazy self-­absorption, but rather an adventure of abandoning the familiar shores of object knowledge in order to venture out onto the open sea of self-­knowledge.

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Who’s Speaking? As the introductory reflections have made clear, emancipation of human self-­ knowledge from the monopoly of object knowledge cannot be achieved simply with the ‘wave of a hand’. This is also evident in how inappropriate the concepts are that have been used thus far, for talk of a ‘subject’ that distinguishes itself from the objects that it knowingly faces is at least prone to being misunderstood. By facing the objects, the subject itself seems to become a ‘special object’ in relation to the other object, so ultimately the I would only be another object, rather than something completely different from an object. For a human self-­knowledge rich in content, it is, then, not adequate to define the peculiarity of the self only negatively, because in this way the I threatens to wither into vagueness, the indeterminacy of which is then once again (out of embarrassment) filled with objective determinations, alienating the I into an object. For this reason, for a human self-­understanding rich in content it is necessary that one find in each case a concretization of one’s own selfhood that enables a determinate and concrete self-­knowledge without thereby alienating the I into an object. For this purpose, Schopenhauer’s reflection quoted above contains an important cue, for it m ­ entions – ­in passing as it were – language as the ultimate limit which humans come up against in their attempt to become comprehensible to themselves: ‘we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness out of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe.’ The question of human self-­ knowledge thus takes on a more determinate form because it relates to the concrete primordial phenomenon of language: ‘What or who is actually speaking when a voice is speaking in me?’ To be sure, this turn of attention only makes explicit what was already implicitly at work in the considerations up to n ­ ow – ­namely, language. In the word ‘I’ that has so far been used as a matter of course, the basic and ineluctable self-­consciousness of human b ­ eing – ­namely, of being a self or a ­subject – fi ­ nds expression in language. Human self-­consciousness articulates itself in saying I, for which the ‘I’ performs a linguistic concretization of the I, without thereby alienating it immediately into an object, for the expression ‘I’ does not designate h ­ ere – a­ s will need to be s­ hown – a­ graspable being, an object. For this reason, the question is to be specified: ‘Who is actually speaking when I am speaking?’ Turning to language makes it necessary to exhibit the ambiguity of the I (as both the object and subject of knowledge), which has thus far been discussed primarily in epistemological concepts, in an equally succinct manner as a linguistic ambiguity of the expression ‘I’. In other words, if it is true that language offers human self-­knowledge an outstanding medium in which this knowledge may articulate itself concretely, then it must be possible for the distinction that has been elaborated thus far between knowledge of something other and knowledge of oneself to be



The Art of Self-Knowledge 9

defined in terms of philosophy of language: as a concrete distinction between the use of the word ‘I’ as object and as subject. The fundamental difference between the objects of knowledge, on the one hand, and the subject of knowledge on the other, would thereby acquire support in language and provide a basis for further considerations. The sought-­after difference between an objective and a subjective use of the word ‘I’ is made clear by Wittgenstein in an exemplary manner: ‘There are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or “my”) which I might call “the use as object” and “the use as subject”. Examples of the first kind of use are these: “My arm is broken”, “I have grown six inches”, “I have a bump on my forehead”, “The wind blows my hair about”. Examples of the second kind are: “I see so-­and-­so”, “I hear so-­and-­so”, “I try to lift my arm”, “I think it will rain”, “I have toothache”’ (1958, 66–7). At first glance, Wittgenstein’s distinction may appear innocuous. It becomes more serious, however, once one brings to mind the following situation in order to clarify the use of ‘I’ as object. Photos of people are shown to me and I name the respective name as soon as I recognize the person: ‘That is P. M.’; ‘That is K. S.’ In this series, I can then also say: ‘That’s me there!’ What is remarkable here is that I can always also be mistaken: ‘That’s me there! – oh no, it is K. S., who looks deceptively similar to me in the photo.’ In contrast to this use of ‘I’ as object that is fundamentally open to error, the use of ‘I’ as subject is distinguished precisely in that the possibility for error towards objects is categorically ruled out. According to Wittgenstein, ‘there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask “are you sure that it’s you who have pains?” would be nonsensical. Now, when in this case no error is possible, it is because the move which we might be inclined to think of as an error, a “bad move”, is no move of the game at all’ – in this unique language game, that is, in which ‘I’ is used not as object but, rather, as subject (67). Wittgenstein does not tire of pointing out that usual speech veils the strong difference between the use as object and the use as subject, since it is primarily directed at weak – that is, ‘objective’ – differences within the world of objects. For this reason, according to Wittgenstein, we should take note: ‘The difference between the propositions “I have pain” and “he has pain” is not that of “L. W. has pain” and “Smith has pain”’ (68). The difference between ‘L. W.’ and ‘Smith’ designates an objectifiable difference (analogous to the difference between two different stones or photos), whereas the difference between ‘I’ and ‘L. W.’ marks in the medium of language the incomparably more radical difference between knowledge of oneself and knowledge of something other. The ­fact – w ­ hich at first glance may seem p ­ erplexing – i­s summarized by Wittgenstein in two sentences: ‘The word “I” does not mean the same as “L. W.” even if I am L. W.’; ‘But that doesn’t mean: that “L. W.” and “I” mean different things’ (67). The first sentence makes once again clear the strong difference between the use of ‘I’ as subject and its use as object:

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it emphasizes that the meaning of ‘I’ when used as subject may not be confused with the meaning of a name that refers through identification to the I in the objective sense. For this reason, the second sentence warns against misunderstanding the strong ­difference – ­between that which the enigmatic meaning of ‘I’ indicates linguistically when it is used as subject and that which can be recognized and identified as an ­object – ­as a weak difference between different things or objects of knowledge. This is the mistake made by the widespread opinion that, for each of us, our I is our closest and most familiar object of knowledge, for it confuses a relative difference within the world of objects with the absolute difference between subject and object, between ‘I’ and ‘L. W.’ That I cannot err in the use of ‘I’ as subject should not be ascribed to a wondrous capacity to never make a wrong move in the game of objectification, but rather grasped as the enigmatic phenomenon that no wrong move can be made because the use of ‘I’ as subject does not even participate in the game of object knowledge. The I of the individual human being as the subject of knowledge is for this reason not simply a different object of knowledge; in fact, it demands a completely different form of ­knowledge – ­namely, self-­knowledge. The I cannot be known like a tree or a s­ tone – ­but also not like a psychological state. Wittgenstein’s decisive place in contemporary thought rests, above all, on the fact that he has renewed for the present age the Socratic idea of philosophy as self-­knowledge in an original way in the medium of language analysis. The ordinary understanding of language tends to overlook the enigmatic unique character of the I and self-­knowledge, for in language countless distinctions can easily be articulated (white or black, even or odd, he or she), leading one to overlook the incomparably more difficult distinction between weak and strong distinctions, which is itself a strong distinction. At the same time, the circumstance that language threatens to blur certain distinctions can l­ ikewise – a­ s Wittgenstein s­ hows – ­be expressed in language, even if this requires a special effort to articulate and understand appropriately this critique that thinks with language against language. In the end, Wittgenstein’s critique of language remains faithful, however, to the primarily negative character of Socratic non-­knowledge: ‘The kernel of our proposition that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature is only that the word “I” in “I have pains” does not denote a particular body, for we can’t substitute for “I” a description of a body’ (74). Yet now the question arises: how is one to recognize the truth of this negative insight, and at the same time move beyond it? While the insight into the intangibility of the I is indeed the indispensable beginning of all genuine self-­knowledge, it c­ annot – f­ or the reasons just alluded t­ o – ­represent already the whole of a concrete self-­knowledge rich in content.



The Art of Self-Knowledge 11

Narrative Meaning The unrest caused by the Delphic commandment of self-­knowledge arises from the antinomy of a double impossibility: the impossibility of defining the I in positive terms like an object, and the impossibility of being satisfied with a purely negative definition. The second impossibility should not tempt one simply to ignore and push aside the critical insight into the fundamental ‘intangibility’ of the I from Socrates to Wittgenstein. This insight must, on the contrary, remain permanently present in human self-­ knowledge. More specifically, the task consists precisely in finding a form of expression and representation that is appropriate to the unrepresentable character of the I, a form of concretely addressing the self and articulating its radically non-­objectifiable character. For this purpose, one can draw on the insight recently outlined, namely, that there is a peculiar reciprocal dependence between the I and language. While it is indeed correct that the predominantly objective orientation of our everyday understanding of language leads us to conceive of the meaning of ‘I’ in analogy to the meaning of words such as ‘stone’ or ‘house’, it is nonetheless possible, by means of a critical effort of thought, to become aware that there is a double aspect to the meaning of the word ‘I’, which is overlooked in the superficial understanding of language. Language has available an alternative dimension of meaning that cannot be understood as reference to an object and that, for this very reason, may offer a means to express and represent self-­knowledge concretely. This alternative dimension of meaning of language can be clarified quite ­precisely – ­and here is the main thought of the following ­investigation – ­by attending to the overall meaning of a text, as opposed to attending to isolated words. What this means for human self-­knowledge, then, is that this knowledge is accordingly not concerned with an isolated reality, but rather with the peculiar overall meaning or unity of meaning of human existence: not with isolated events, but rather with the whole of the life story. The peculiar context of meaning of a life story cannot be fixed purely as a present ‘object’, but rather can only be narrated within the epic extension of time and understood in this genuinely narrative form. Human striving for self-­knowledge is, for this reason, to be grasped concretely as a basic striving to understand oneself, the meaning of one’s individual life story in which the self articulates itself temporally, in the same way in which we understand a narrative, in which a narrative meaning unfolds. Yet the fact that we seek this self-­understanding makes unmistakably clear that, in our life story, we firstly and for the most part do not understand ourselves. Thus, standing since Socrates at the beginning of all self-­knowledge is the honest admission that we do not know o ­ urselves – t­hat is, that we do not understand the meaning of our individual life story. If one admits, however, that one does not understand oneself in one’s individual life story, then one must at least have some idea of what it

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means to understand oneself. Otherwise, the non-­understanding would not appear as a deficiency to the one who lacks understanding, and the unrest of self-­knowledge could not be awakened. It is language that displays for human beings this important initial clue of the self-­understanding that is sought, the ‘preschool’, as it were, of self-­knowledge that understands: seeking to understand oneself in the entirety of one’s life story means having trained one’s desire to understand with the understanding of narrative contexts of meaning. It is just as impossible to understand narrative meaning as it is to understand the life story of a person in a simple, instantaneous ­grasp – i­ ndeed, narrative meaning can only be understood by patiently examining the unity of narration in its genuinely temporal organization. What does it mean, though, to understand the narrative meaning of a narrative or a story? How is narrative understanding itself to be understood? These questions make clear that the understanding of linguistic meaning is by no means so ‘simple’ and self-­evident as it may appear at first glance, and in the usual context of a well-­rehearsed communication. It also holds here that one can find, lying behind the veil of presumed familiarity and self-­evidence, an enigmatic adventure. Corresponding directly to the art of self-­knowledge is thus an art of understanding. The peculiar elective affinity between self-­knowledge and understanding stems from the fact that understanding a complex narrative unity of meaning and the understanding of one’s own life sought in self-­knowledge are in agreement: what they are directed at can be articulated only in time. Thus, the usual account of understanding a word, according to which one is able to point to the object to which the word refers, is of little help for the art of understanding that is sought here.1 If the context of meaning of a complex text evidently means more, and something other, than the sum of its single words, what, then, does it refer to? Important for the concrete context of meaning is how the words in the sentence, and the sentences in the text, follow each other temporally. This peculiar dimension of meaning of language that is articulated in the temporal organization of its parts may, for good reason, be called the narrative dimension of meaning of language, for the narrative represents, as it were, the primordial form of a linguistic context of meaning. In this form, the meaning that is to be understood comes down, above a­ ll – ­besides and independent of all particulars in their ­isolation – ­to their temporal composition and sequence.2 Now the same holds, though, for the life story of a human being, for understanding single actions and events is only one aspect of our life, while it is a thoroughly different and more important aspect to understand the narrative unity of one’s own life story. For this reason, it is precisely the narrative-­historical dimension of meaning of our life that we actually seek to understand and about which we are in the first place clueless, as versed as we may be in ‘understanding’ individual events of our life. The fact that the unity of meaning means something more and something other than the sum of all its particulars must not lead to divorc-



The Art of Self-Knowledge 13

ing the context from its particulars entirely. In both cases, in the case of a narrative and in the case of a life story, the following holds: we must first learn to spell before we can read. This is immediately clear when we do not have a good command of the language in which a text (for instance, a novel) is written. Here, we are still struggling so much with the details of the language that w ­ e – ­to use a telling p ­ hrase – ­do not ‘enter into’ the actual story, that is, into the overarching narrative unity of meaning. Similarly, it is not until later in life, once the single ‘letters’ of human existence are sufficiently familiar for the question concerning the overarching unity of meaning to be awakened, that the Socratic need for self-­knowledge stirs in us. Yet one can also observe how the initial inability to understand the meaning of one’s own life story can lead one to devote new, exaggerated and cramped attention to the single letters in order to distract oneself from the daunting emptiness and meaninglessness of the life as a whole that one has still not understood. Successfully spelling out a text, correctly comprehending the individual linguistic components, is necessary for properly understanding its context of meaning, but by no means to be equated with it. Quite the contrary, one can say that we have not really understood a particular episode, a particular detail of a narrative, until we have understood the story as a whole. For this reason, it is questionable whether we can really understand a single event of our life appropriately if we remain clueless concerning the meaning of our life story as a whole. This cluelessness characterizes, however, the starting place of human self-­knowledge because we precisely do not understand ourselves, our own existence in its temporal-­ narrative dimension as a life story. We believe, indeed, to understand this or that in life, but what this actually means in the context of our life s­ tory – ­that we do not understand (which means we do not actually understand this or that, either). Socratic non-knowledge concerning the Delphic commandment of self-­ knowledge can, for this reason, be grasped more concretely and determinately as non-understanding concerning the peculiar dimension of meaning of one’s own life story. Just as the art of self-­knowledge responds to an initial human non-­knowledge about what or who one is, so the art of narrating reacts to the initial cluelessness of human being concerning how the story of one’s life is to be understood. For this reason, what is to be understood in self-­knowledge is in a sense understanding itself. In understanding, the non-­objectifiable form of being of the subject manifests itself exemplarily. Being a subject means being able to understand a­ nd – p ­ erhaps even more ­fundamentally – ­wanting to understand. Self-­knowledge is thus an understanding of understanding. Wanting to understand oneself means wanting to understand not merely one’s own existence in time but, equally, the enigmatic capacity of self-­understanding as such, which guides self-­knowledge and makes the questioning subject into a subject or an I in the first place.

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Meaning and Being What hinders us from grasping the basic thought pursued h ­ ere – o ­ f understanding narrative meaning as a systematic guide for the enlightenment of human self-­knowledge – ­is the prejudice that the originary phenomenon of understanding meaning is not only unnecessary for knowledge of reality, but even misleading. The crucial difference between reality and a fictional narrative, so it seems, is that only the latter is characterized by the necessity of being meaningful. If fictional contexts were not meaningful, they would not exist at all. In stark contrast to fiction, factual reality (thus, also, one’s own life reality) is characterized precisely by having no meaning. For the common understanding of being, this is their fundamental difference: fiction has meaning; reality, not. When one says ‘that is too good to be true’, one commonly means it is too meaningful to be real. If we perceive a purpose, a recognizable meaning, in reality, then we are immediately suspicious that we are dealing not at all with ‘objective’ reality but instead merely a ‘subjective’ enactment. One senses purpose and it makes one cross. Because of the traceable meaning, one is compelled to suspect that one is dealing not with solid, meaningless being but, rather, with beingless m ­ eaning – ­that is, mere fiction. For reality is precisely that which is meaningless: what is meaningless is reality. If being is identified in this way with what is meaningless, then the question of course remains how it is possible in the first place for there to be an irritation by meaning. If what is real is meaningless in being real, then it is not clear how, under this condition, the irritating illusion of meaning is at all possible. How does the illusion of meaning enter being that is taken in itself to be meaningless? The answer ordinarily reads as follows: by human being. We ourselves are the ones, then, who introduce the illusion of meaning into the solid, objective, thoroughly meaning-­free reality of being, whether it be by psychic projection, social construction or other means. In each case, it is the very dubious privilege of human beings to infuse reality with the appearance of meaning and, at the same time, to be the lonely consumer of their own product they call ‘meaning’, for objective being is defined in being strictly separated from meaning and fully indifferent towards it. Such meaningless being can at best be known, but ­not – l­ ike the meaning of a ­narrative – ­be understood. Both dimensions of human existence, being and meaning, are in this way dualistically torn apart. The one half forms the basis of a knowledge of being exonerated of the demand of understanding, while the other half, in turn, forms the basis of the market of illusory meanings, exonerated of the demand of truth. Yet a meaning projected by a human being onto the meaningless world can in the end be nothing more than an ineffective consolation, or even an ideological concealment of the incurable despair that an ontology of meaningless being necessarily has ready for someone who, in understanding, is oriented towards meaning.



The Art of Self-Knowledge 15

In the context of an ontology of meaningless being, humans must appear to themselves as incomprehensible strangers in the midst of a reality radically indifferent to them. The meaning they refer to in ­understanding – ­in listening as in s­ peaking – ­may be grasped more specifically as a moral postulate, as an existential self-­assertion, as a social construct or as a move in the games of language. Viewed in terms of the whole, this meaning always forms an entirely ungraspable, and for this reason illusory, exception in a reality indifferent to the human capacity for meaning, degrading it to an affair purely between humans. But such an exception to the rule of meaningless being is itself meaningless. Humans must accordingly grasp their own existence as an absurd chance event, while their demand for a comprehensive understanding of the world and themselves shrivels to a resigned attempt to arrange themselves as successfully and comfortably as possible in a world without meaning and significance. To be sure, they simply express thereby their despair, for an existence oriented only towards comfort is itself as insignificant as the world in which this existence arranges itself. Remarkably, a science exonerated of the demand of understanding leads to the same result. Such a science attempts to pursue in knowledge the paradigm of meaningless being as systematically and rigorously as possible. For this reason, it cannot confer even an exceptional position to human being within reality, for a human being, according to a strictly ‘objective’ consideration, is only an object among objects, a meaningless single case in the middle of meaningless being. One can attribute ‘subjectivity’ or a distinct ‘dimension of meaning’ to such an object, but at most in the form of a folkloric figure of speech, since subjectivity and meaning literally have no place in an objectivistic ontology of meaningless being, and thus ought to be exposed as ultimately untenable and illusory ways of speaking. Both half-measures – t­he production of convenient meanings exonerated of the demand of truth, and the production of useful knowledge exonerated of the demand of u ­ nderstanding – ­are simply two variants, then, of the one ontology that identifies reality with meaninglessness. The first half-­measure gets tangled up in the inconsistencies of a position seeking to establish meaning within an ontology of meaninglessness without changing the presupposed ontology itself from the ground up. Insisting on ‘meaning’ thus takes on the obscuring and ideological character of an illusionism that elicits, constantly anew and quite rightly, the critical enterprise of a naturalist disillusionment. The second half-­measure expresses bluntly the meaninglessness, emphasizing openly the ‘objective’ character of human beings as objects among objects and drawing the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the presupposed ontology. Admittedly, the consistent striving for a truth free of illusions in the midst of a meaningless reality is itself meaningless, and must therefore in the final analysis itself become an illusion, so that science too, in the end

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(like illusionism), is only a means for human beings to suppress their own despair and to arrange themselves as conveniently as possible in a meaningless world. For fundamental reasons, neither half-­measure can gain a view of the whole of human existence. Or, to put it differently: both half-­measures in which the human unity of being and meaning is divorced dualistically cause the sting and the commandment of self-­knowledge to slide into oblivion. In the context of an ontology of meaningless being that asserts itself in both half-­measures in their own ways, human self-­knowledge in the Socratic sense is impossible from the outset. Yet the separation of meaning from being must necessarily lead to a radical depletion of human self-­ understanding; a life that cannot understand itself in the context of an ontology of meaningless being is an entirely unfree life. One may still skilfully conceal the ontological inconsequence of conceding to the human understanding of meaning an ‘exception regulation’ in the middle of meaningless being; one may deliberately restrict one’s horizon to the moral or social ‘world’ in order to not have to address the icy meaninglessness of the world as a whole. Yet, in the end, the consequence of a thinking that can no longer ignore the question concerning the meaning of being as a whole overtakes such a provincialism of meaning. Genuine self-­knowledge is only possible if it succeeds in grasping being and meaning as a unity differentiated in itself, so that human beings can discover and understand themselves as twofold beings characterized by being and meaning.

The Project of a Narrative Ontology The despair that results from an understanding of the world and of oneself that, as a consequence of an ontology of meaningless being, uncritically accepts the schism between meaning and b ­ eing – ­this despair has been brought to our attention again and again in the history of philosophy. For Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, this critique finds its classical expression in striking formulations seeking to outdo one another. With sober precision, Kant depicts the basic features of a world that is entirely indifferent towards the human demand for meaning, making human being into a being ‘that, after having for a short time been provided (one knows not how) with vital force, must give back again to the planet (a mere dot in the universe) the matter from which it came’ (2002, 203). In spite of human beings’ peculiar dignity, it is such that ‘nature, which pays no attention to that, will still subject them to all the evils of deprivation, disease, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on the e­ arth . . . ­until one vast tomb engulfs them one and all (honest or not, that makes no difference here) and hurls them, who managed to believe they were the final purpose of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were taken’ (1987, 342).



The Art of Self-Knowledge 17

Schopenhauer radicalizes Kant’s thought: ‘In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is the empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither’ (1969b, 3). And Nietzsche adds: ‘After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. – One might invent such a fable, and yet he would still not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature’ (1990, 79). Thus, notwithstanding the many differences between their thinking, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are evidently in agreement on this significant fundamental p ­ oint – n ­ amely, that one must not avoid the view of the whole of being in order to locate freedom and the meaning of human existence in the ‘exception’ of a remote ontological province. They c­ riticize – w ­ ith a clear consciousness and with polemical ­intent – ­the inconsistency of a strategy that seeks to save the demand of human dignity and of a free understanding of meaning without breaking the hegemony of an ontology of meaninglessness. Instead, they emphasize, each in his own way, the radical meaninglessness and purposelessness inherent in the dominant understanding of being, and they emphasize the ‘precarious position’ in which a thinking being, which does not want to deceive itself from the outset, sees itself having been placed. In this way, they awaken consciousness from the dogmatic slumber of its lazy compromises and convenient inconsistencies. Kant confronts the demand of humans to be ‘the final purpose of creation’ with the whole of being understood as nature (the cosmos), so that the earth becomes a ‘mere dot in the universe’ and reality as such becomes a ‘vast tomb’ that engulfs all life, ‘the abyss of the purposeless chaos’ in which every demand of meaning and reason perishes. And yet this radical questioning and disillusionment of the human demand for freedom, meaning and dignity is not presented in the tone of a sceptical resignation that seeks to arrange itself as conveniently as possible in that which cannot be altered. On the contrary, Kant’s entire thinking is coloured by the critical protest against an ontology of meaninglessness, a protest which he himself calls a revolution of the way of thinking. Schopenhauer joins Kant explicitly: ‘I admit entirely Kant’s doctrine that the world of experience is mere phenomenon’, and ‘I add that, precisely as phenomenal appearance, it is the manifestation of that which appears, and with him I call that which appears the thing-­in-­itself. Therefore, this thing-­in-­itself must express its inner nature and character in the world of experience.’ Accordingly, for Schopenhauer, ‘philosophy is nothing but the correct and universal understanding of experience itself, the true interpretation of its meaning and content. This is the metaphysical, in

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Narrative Ontology

other words, that which is merely clothed in the phenomenon and veiled in its forms, that which is related to the phenomenon as the thought or idea is to the words’ (1969b, 183–4). Thus, humans adopt two positions towards reality, which, in turn, exhibits a fundamental double aspect. On the one hand, they objectify reality into the world of experience of nature, in which there is a multitude of knowable objects and states of affairs in time and space. On the other hand, they read the world of experience as text in order to understand the meaning that is spelled out in experience. What is designated in the tradition of philosophy somewhat misleadingly as ‘meta-­physics’ can be renewed critically in the wake of Kant and Schopenhauer by conceiving it as the meaning that lies not beyond but, rather, within the human experience of the world and of the self, waiting to be interpreted and understood. The idea of a meta-­physical ‘beyond’ may be crucially corrected in light of the model of the meaning of a text that is located not beyond, behind or above it, but rather ‘in’ it. Talk of a meaning that lies ‘in’ the literal fabric of the text may be misleading, though, if it is understood dualistically, so that again being and meaning (like outer husk and ‘inner’ kernel) are dualistically divorced. Here, spatial differentiations (beyond, behind, above, in) are fundamentally mistaken, for the meaning does not lie, strictly speaking, in the text, but rather the text itself is meaningful. When we understand a text, we understand the text itself and not something beyond, behind, above or in it: it is one and the same text that we on one occasion (without understanding) spell out, and on another occasion read for its meaning with understanding. Accordingly, Kant defines the crucial point of his transcendental critique of reason to be ‘the distinction between things as objects of experience and the very same things as things in themselves, which our critique has made necessary’. The point of the critique of reason, Kant continues, lies in ‘that the object should be taken in a twofold meaning, namely as appearance or thing in itself’ (1998, 115–16). Kant’s critical fundamental distinction does not imply, then, any dualism (whatever kind that may be), but rather the double aspect of one reality that can be known in a twofold ­form – ­as being and as ­meaning – ­so that both aspects belong strictly together, and only together do they constitute and make intelligible what it is as one meaningful reality. The line of thinking up to now has already made clear how this fundamental transcendental distinction is to be understood more concretely and determinately. The demand to take the object in ‘a twofold meaning’ means more precisely, on the one hand, recognizing it as literal being (appearance) and, on the other, understanding it as the meaning of the literal being (thing in itself). Kant’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ is understood here more specifically as a Copernican turn in the relation between being and meaning, which is no longer grasped as a dualist separation: the empirical reality of being, which one adheres to uncompromisingly, is at the same time the transcendental ideality of ‘precisely the



The Art of Self-Knowledge 19

same’ being. Yet, in this way, the critical path is opened to a transcendental realism of meaning. This systematic foundation of the transcendental critique of reason admittedly reveals itself to still be clearly shaped by precisely that logic of objectifying knowledge of something other, to which Kant wants to draw a limit with his critique. The distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing in itself’, which Schopenhauer adopts from Kant, makes use, of all expressions, of ‘thing in itself’ precisely for that which is to be critically demarcated from the level of objects as the mere letters of the ­text – ­as if the meaning of the letters of a text were merely the ‘letter in itself’ rather than something entirely different from a letter. Nietzsche responds by explicitly distancing himself from the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing in itself’. ‘“Appearance” is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible’ (1990, 86). He understands the distinction between being and meaning instead in terms of language as a difference between dead and living metaphors. Indeed, ‘we believe we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things’ (82–3). Being, which, according to common prejudice, is abstractly opposed to meaning and presupposed by it, is thus itself a form of meaning and, indeed, a ­derivative – ­more specifically, a dead and o ­ ssified – o ­ ne. The seemingly ‘objective’ being of reality is thus for Nietzsche the essence of those ‘metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins’ (84). But, precisely for this reason, the illusion emerges that we are dealing here with ‘objects’ whose being has nothing in common with meaning and language. Nietzsche opposes this illusion with his own critique of reason as a critique of language that articulates itself as a critical destruction of an ontology of meaningless and speechless being. That which we grasp as the ‘naked’ objectivity of things, preceding the subject and its language and independent of both, turns out to be a product of the subject and its faculty of speech, indeed a product of the mode of f­orgetting – f­or the human being, according to Nietzsche, ‘forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves’ (86). The origin of being in meaning, the rootedness of the fiction of a firm objectivity in the dynamic of the happening of language, is ordinarily forgotten and suppressed by human beings because they seek to evade the unrest of self-­knowledge, the desperate cluelessness one faces in view of one’s own life story: ‘only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self-­consciousness” would be immediately destroyed’ (86).

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Nietzsche’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ consists, then, in the reversal of the questionable character of meaning and being. He no longer asks how meaning (as exception) comes into being (the rule), but, on the contrary, how the dead rigidity of being comes into the primordial liveliness of meaning. His answer is that being is the product of a forgetting, of a self-­forgetting of the subject. As soon as the subject forgets itself in its original ability to understand and create language, this subject is faced with the foreign object in the fictional context of a meaningless reality. For this reason, Nietzsche places the ‘self-­consciousness’ of such a self-­ forgotten human being in quotation marks, since this subject no longer understands itself as subject, but rather as object among o ­ bjects – t­ hat is, it precisely does not understand itself. In order to awaken this self-­ forgotten non-­ understanding from its comfortable sleep, Nietzsche, following Kant and Schopenhauer, invents that ‘fable’ of the meaninglessness of being, which he places at the beginning of his reflections. It is supposed to make clear the existential and intellectual task, as understanding self and meaning, placed before every human being in self-­knowledge – t­hat is, the task of remembering oneself as the living subject of language and of understanding and thus of breaking the hegemony of a dead ontology of meaningless being. The truth in the understanding of meaning and the possibility of human self-­ knowledge can be rescued only by opposing the hegemony of an ontology of ­meaninglessness – ­and not by acknowledging this hegemony, openly or secretly. Such a genealogy of meaningless being with a critical intent lays open the ground that accounts for why humans forget themselves as subjects: a pusillanimous willingness to renounce one’s own freedom for the sake of greater security. Meaningless being may be dead and ossified, but in its dead rigidity nonetheless offers timid humans a solid footing. Nietzsche sets against it the distinct freedom of a linguistic thinking that bestows to meaning its fitting primacy over ‘rigid’ being: ‘We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind u ­ s – ­indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us’ (1974, §124, 180). Nietzsche opposes such an understanding of the world and the self that is oriented to the ideal of ‘statement’ – that is, the idea of a ‘fixed’ knowledge of objects, thereby forgetting the adventure of self-­knowledge. He opposes at the same time, however, a meta-­physics that rigidifies what is intelligible to a ‘higher’ objectivity. Against both forms of a ­fixed – a­ nd, for this reason, ­meaningless – ­being, he emphasizes the radical temporality of a ­linguistic – ­and thus ­meaningful – b ­ eing. He thus accepts, of course, the risk of misunderstanding: that what he articulates metaphorically and in ever new approaches is merely an illusion without binding force, a subjective projection that slips away powerlessly from the ‘hard’ facts of reality. This is why Kant and Schopenhauer emphasize by contrast the objective being of what is intelligible as the ‘thing in itself’ – out of suspicion that that which is intelligible, to which no ‘object that experience can



The Art of Self-Knowledge 21

give’ could ever be ‘congruent’, might be misunderstood as a ‘figment of the brain’, that is, as a beingless illusion (Kant 1998, 395–6). In this way, they avoid the misunderstanding that Nietzsche faces, but only to expose themselves to the other misunderstanding that Nietzsche seeks to avoid: the misunderstanding that the transcendental distinction between appearance and the thing in itself results in a two-­world doctrine that withdraws from the world. The project pursued here, of a narrative ontology, attempts to navigate between the dangers of both misunderstandings. As narrative ontology, it takes up Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s project of a critical transcendental ontology, protecting itself at the same time, however, from the seductions of the expression ‘thing in itself’ by choosing the non-­objective, temporally articulated, historical dynamic of the narrative form as its systematic leitmotif. As narrative ontology, it connects to Nietzsche’s transformation of the critique of reason into the critique of language, while protecting itself, however, from the seductions of elegant aphorisms by emphasizing the strict logic unique to the narrative unity of meaning, selecting it as the sober, universally accessible reference point for its line of thought. Kant’s Copernican turn and his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason is in this way taken up, and at the same time thought anew as the primacy of meaning before being.

The Truth of Art The present enquiry takes up and transforms the Socratic aim of philosophy, the striving for self-­knowledge, and defends it against misunderstandings that amount to a forgetting of its original impetus. This enquiry looks to make a contribution to a critical ontology of meaning following Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. For this reason, it chooses ­art – ­specifically, the art of language – as an ally to help to remind philosophy of its central question and task. The initially exposed dualism of being and meaning is a threat also to the unique truth of art. According to the common understanding of reality, art has only to do with semblance, the beautiful appearance of meaning, which nonetheless is regretfully only appearance and not being. Thus, the artist works on beautiful illusions, and art prepares at best a nice hiatus from the hopeless despair of existence so that one may forget for a moment one’s factually meaningless existence. But, strictly speaking, this is no more than an impotent c­ ompensation – ­ultimately, a withdrawal from the world. The meaning of art constitutes, then, its own realm of beautiful ‘appearance’, which may not be confused with the ‘severity’ of meaningless reality. This strict separation of meaning and being (and thus also of art and truth) is, as has already been shown, characteristic of the essence of everyday c­ onsciousness – ­which, for this reason, may indeed admire art,

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may even find in it a ‘respite’, possibly an ‘exaltation’, but it cannot really understand it under the conditions of an ontology of meaningless being. So long as one draws a division between being as meaningless and meaning as beingless, one is at most in a position to talk about art but not about that which art itself talks about, because then art cannot be conferred its own claim to knowledge and truth. A genuine claim to knowledge and truth in art would reveal that knowledge and truth do not refer exclusively, in the mode of object knowledge, to literally ‘naked’ being, but, equally in the mode of self-­knowledge, to the complex double aspect of r­ eality – ­that is, to the unity of being and meaning that is differentiated in itself. If such a strict division is drawn between both dimensions of human existence, between being and meaning, as required by a consistent ontology of meaninglessness, then art (like human being) becomes an absurd exception to the rule of meaningless being, and cannot be authoritative for the understanding of reality because this understanding must orient itself to the ‘normal case’ of the meaninglessness of being. That in this way both art and human being appear, under the hegemony of an ontology of meaninglessness, as ‘exceptions’, which may briefly jar thinking but must remain in the end insignificant for the universal understanding of being and the world, forges between them a peculiar relationship. One may presume that the enigma of the human double essence of ­being – ­that one is at home both in being and in ­meaning – ­reappears in the enigma of art. For this reason, one can anticipate that a deeper understanding of the specific truth of art will open up our understanding of the specific truth and dignity of human existence. One can illustrate the extent to which aesthetic experience deviates from the norm of an ontology of meaninglessness again with the primordial phenomenon of understanding a text. When reading a poem or a novel, one is occupied primarily with the meaning of what is read. While the meaning is indeed accessible only by means of the being of a certain book with certain physical properties, by means of certain pages of paper with letters formed in such and such a way, competent reading may emancipate itself from these literal starting conditions to devote itself entirely to the adventure of understanding the meaning. No less a figure than Paul Valéry compared for this reason the essence of poetry with the peculiar art of reading. Poetry suffers the fate, namely, of being ‘judged by many people who have not the slightest idea of the musical qualities of speech, and who do not know how to read [qui ne savent pas lire]’ (1960, 176). To counter this, Valéry refers to the fundamental difference between the text that is merely looked at and the text that is actually read (le texte vu, le texte lu): ‘These two modes of looking are independent of each other. The text looked at and the text read are two completely different things, for the attention given to the one excludes the attention given to the other’ (1957/60, 1247).3 Whoever looks at a text directs attention to its objective properties: colour and the quality of the paper, the spatial shape of the black figures,



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including their arrangement in smaller and larger groups. While much is accessible to this person, one thing is not: the meaning of the text, which discloses itself only to the one who does not look at the text but rather reads it, and thus ‘annihilates’ the objective properties of the text, as Valéry says. This is because readability is the ‘quality of a text that prepares and facilitates its consumption, its annihilation by the spirit, its transubstantiation in events of the spirit’ (1247).4 Empirical particulars of a text, each of which I can consider and recognize separately, are in the first instance, on the literal level of r­ eality – t­ hat is, isolated from an overarching unity, nothing more than what they are. In such a consideration and recognition, they make no sense, because everything isolated is meaningless in its isolation. Meaning always entails an overarching unity of meaning because the unity determines the meaning of the individual, while meaning is what it ­is – ­that is, it means what it ­means – ­only in and through this unity. The art of reading in the sense of understanding thus presupposes the power to emancipate oneself from the literal immediacy of the visually given details in order to place them in a context. And so the adventure of freedom and of understanding may begin. It is important to point out here that the literal being of the world is not simply crossed out in reading once this being is understood within the scope of a narrative ontology of meaning. Rather, letters are precisely the things that need to be interpreted and understood in the context. The meaning of the text is its meaning in its literalness. Letters thus constitute the empirical reality of a text. They must be carefully considered, and at the same time transcended, in order for one to become aware of the meaning manifest in a fundamental change in aspect of reality, in becoming transparent towards meaning. Not only is empirical reality of being compatible with the transcendental reality of meaning (which implies a transcendental ideality of being); more than that, literalness and meaning stand in a strict relation to one another. In this way, the fatal dualism of being and meaning is overcome. Meaning is certainly distinct from being, yet at the same time, in this distinction, strictly related to being; meaning does not lose its unique character in the self-­differentiated identity of meaning with being, but rather gives its character shape to begin with. The freedom of reading consists in the deeply enigmatic, and thus deeply human, capacity to grasp being meaningfully and to make the dead letter transparent in terms of the living spirit, which articulates itself in it and thereby makes itself intelligible. Attention to the narrative ontology of freedom, which is implicit in every act of reading, opens up the possibility in the first place of a truly appropriate understanding of poetry. Such an attention opens the prospect of freeing artistic talk from the misunderstanding that it is illusory talk about nice illusory worlds without thereby promoting the opposing misunderstanding, according to which aesthetic language is simplistically related to the empirical ‘letters’ of reality or to the p ­ sychological

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e­ xperiences of the subject. The art of language is thus no longer misconstrued as a successful or unsuccessful form of object knowledge, but rather correctly understood as a form of self-­knowledge. A philosophy that grasps itself as a coherent form of self-­knowledge can for this reason form an alliance with art. In clear consciousness of its own task and tradition, philosophy may talk not only about art and literature (which art science and literary studies also do), but rather, and above all, about that which art and literature themselves talk a­ bout – ­namely, about the meaning of selfhood.

Thomas Mann as Model Each human lives his or her life in the concrete temporal form of a life story. We can understand ourselves only when we understand the respective story that is our life. If this is true, then philosophical self-­knowledge must, as it were, ‘take measure’ from the great masters of narrative art. Thus, the present enquiry chooses not only language art as such as its ally, but rather a specific language artist and an exemplary work of narrative art. The project of a narrative ontology should not only be displayed conceptually on a general meta-­level, but at the same time carried out in the interpretation of a narrative artwork. The remainder of the introduction will clarify why the choice fell upon Thomas Mann, while only the body of the investigation can provide a justification for having chosen Joseph and His Brothers. The first reason a philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with Thomas Mann is that he himself accommodates a reciprocal illumination of philosophy and literature by situating his own way of thinking and working in explicit proximity to philosophy. Accordingly, in one of his earlier essays, one reads: ‘The eighteenth, the actual literary century, loved to distinguish the “philosopher” from the “scholar” – a dry and cantankerous ­being – ­and it seems that what was meant by this was more or less what we today understand by a literary figure.’ The essential affinity between philosophy and literature is based, then, for Thomas Mann on their common opposition to the ‘scholar’, on a critical alliance against everything dry and pedantic: ‘Everything academic is to be excluded’ (1993, 158–9). What is meant by this becomes clear once one brings to mind the model Thomas Mann pursues in his essay. In his inaugural lecture in Jena from 1789, Schiller characterizes and defends university freedom in terms of the distinction between the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophical mind: ‘Quite different are the plans of study which the bread-­and-­butter scholar and the philosopher lay out for themselves.’ The former ‘puts his intellectual ability to work only in order to improve his material position and to gratify his petty craving for recognition’. For this reason, his most important concern is ‘to separate as completely as possible the fields of



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study which he calls “professional” from all those which attract the intellect purely for their own sake. Every moment spent on the latter he counts as taken away from his future profession, and never forgives himself this theft’ (1972, 322). Schiller argues that the bread-­ and-­ butter scholar abuses university freedom for private purposes of comfort: ‘How pitiable the man who wants and makes nothing higher with the noblest tools, science and art, than what a day-­labourer does with the most common! Who in the realm of perfect freedom carries with him the soul of a slave!’ (323). In the revolutionary spirit of 1789, Schiller opposes such a self-­imposed immaturity with the ‘philosopher’, who is distinguished from the scholar not firstly by the content, but rather by the form, of his knowledge: ‘Not what he does but how he does it distinguishes the philosophical mind’ (325). It is remarkable that Thomas Mann, more than a hundred years later, considers it advisable to use Schiller’s programmatic distinction between scholarship and philosophy as a model for understanding his own intellectual profile. Thomas Mann’s ‘man of letters’, modelled upon the philosophical mind, is accordingly designated as an ‘intellectual buccaneer’ who rebels against the pedantic narrow-­mindedness associated with Schiller’s ‘scholar’. Thomas Mann’s most elegant, and at the same time most fitting, expression for the philosophical mind is certainly ‘artist of knowledge’ (1993, 159). An artist of knowledge is demarcated from two sides. The literary philosopher or philosophical literary figure, on the one hand, whom Thomas Mann takes as a model in his own thought, is distinguished critically, as an artist of knowledge, from the academic pedantry of the scholar; on the other hand, this figure is distinguished just as clearly, however, as an artist of knowledge, ‘from art in the naïve and trusting sense’ – indeed ‘by means of consciousness, spirit, moralism, critique’ (159). The ‘literary gift’ is thus, for Thomas Mann ‘formulated most succinctly’ with the following properties: ‘the will for the unconditional, the disgust for admission and corruption, a derisive or solemnly accusatory and judgemental insistence on the ideal, on freedom, on justice, reason, the good and human dignity’ (158). While Thomas Mann may thus take as model in his thinking and writing the ‘philosophical’ protest against the textbook figure, the ‘disgust for admission’, the question nonetheless remains concerning why philosophy today for its part may find an ally in the literature of Thomas Mann. Why should the concept of an artist of knowledge, which Thomas Mann develops at the beginning of the twentieth century in the original adaptation of a thought from the eighteenth century, be taken as a model for philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-­first century? The answer lies close at hand, for philosophy is never immune to the pedantry of the academic figure, to the self-­righteous narrowness of a banality in conformity with rules. For this reason, it is an ongoing duty for philosophy to take measure, again and again in a new and original way,

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from the artists of knowledge, in order to be reminded of its own original task. Thomas Mann is a model, moreover, because he at all times maintains an ironic distance from the scholars and the specialists of academic philosophy: ‘I do not know the specialized bourgeois philosopher, I have not read him. I have not got beyond Schopenhauer and ­Nietzsche – ­and by my honour, they were not bourgeois’ (1987, 101). Yet the bourgeois specialism of academic philosophy from which Thomas Mann distances himself ironically and critically stands in a hidden alliance with the hegemony of an ontology of meaningless being. The narrow-­minded insistence on things according to the rule and the academic is beholden to silent and meaningless being, which, while it may not be understandable, can be categorized. For this reason, the bourgeois philosopher (like Schiller’s bread-­and-­butter scholar) is instinctively hostile to the ‘artist of knowledge’ since the latter is devoted to the intellectual adventure of freedom and meaning, which by nature can hardly be ‘fixated’, and thus cannot become an object of a regulated school lesson. Precisely for this reason, the alliance with a ‘literature of knowledge’ can remind philosophy of its original form and task. Kant characterizes this form and task as the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy, which he distinguishes from its mere academic concept. According to its cosmopolitan concept, ‘philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae)’. In other words, ‘A cosmopolitan concept here means one that concerns that which necessarily interests everyone’ – and this is ‘nothing other than the entire vocation of human beings’ (1998, 694–5). Philosophy in accordance with its cosmopolitan concept is thus essentially human self-knowledge. Schopenhauer’s famous polemic against the philosophical bread-­and-­ butter scholar and university instructor of his time takes up this central fundamental Kantian distinction by accusing the academic philosopher of being indifferent towards the specific austerity of human self-­knowledge required by the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy: ‘For normally a teacher of philosophy would be the last person to whom it would occur that philosophy could in effect be dead earnest.’ The actual earnestness of philosophy lies for Schopenhauer, however, not in fixating a being, but rather in the interpretative understanding of a meaning: ‘in seeking a key to ­our – ­as enigmatic as it is ­precarious – ­existence’ (2014, 127). Precisely because the ‘bread-­ and-­ butter scholar’ grasps everything intellectual from the bourgeois viewpoint of success, of social recognition and convenience, subjectivity cannot appear in his science since he grasps this science from the outset not in the Socratic sense of self-­knowledge but, rather exclusively in the selfish sense of private narrow-­mindedness, and thus obscures it. As an intellectual buccaneer, Nietzsche sticks his finger right in this wound of bourgeois scholarship when he characterizes his own philosophy by the freedom of self-­knowledge – t­hat is, by the ‘lack of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible tendency to see what no one wants to ­see – ­himself’ (1986, 44). Precisely



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this ‘irresponsibility’ is the only responsible way to follow the Delphic commandment and to leave the bridge behind – or, still more, to leave the land behind. Thomas Mann, who places importance on not having ‘got beyond’ Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, can for this reason serve as a model for a philosophy that seeks to emancipate itself from its mere academic concept. He is a model artist of knowledge less as a result of what he does than of how he treats what he does. A philosophical critique of reason and language can achieve its aim of fundamentally shifting our understanding of the world and ourselves only insofar as it first succeeds, as a precondition for everything further, in shifting how something is understood to begin with. For this reason, the decision to turn to Thomas Mann for orientation is by no means extrinsic to the philosophical path of thought, but rather a methodological consequence of the intent to revolutionize a ‘way of thinking’ by orienting to the ‘how’ of the linguistic and narrative understanding of meaning.

The Enigma of Human Being The second reason this philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with Thomas Mann is that he accommodates a narrative ontology of meaning by contemplating, in his way, the same fundamental question. That is why the present essay will have less to say about Thomas Mann and his work and more about what Thomas Mann himself seeks to speak about: critical resistance to an ontology of meaningless being and the project of a narrative ontology of meaning in the interest of human self-­knowledge. On numerous occasions, he declares that there is one question around which his thinking and writing constantly revolve. As prepared as he is, though, to address this one question as a ‘question of faith’, he maintains a distance to the traditional concepts of belief and disbelief: ‘Belief? Disbelief? I barely know what the one is and what the other is’; ‘Deepest scepticism regarding both, so-­called belief and so-­called disbelief, is my only identification if one catechizes me’ (1994, 297). One can see here a fundamental feature of Thomas Mann’s intellectual physiognomy. He maintains equal sceptical distance to belief and disbelief because he suspects that both lack sceptical distance by taking their own matter, whether it be disbelief or belief, too literally. In this way, they fail to gain that peculiar freedom of understanding which always presupposes a sceptical and ironic distance to what is literally given. For this reason, Thomas Mann believes this belief, which distances itself equally from ‘so-­called’ disbelief and ­belief – ­both of which, in their unfree fixation on the literal, fail entirely to understand what they ‘disbelievingly’ deny or ‘believingly’ ­affirm – ­is to be found precisely in this freedom of understanding. The sceptical and ironic freedom towards literal being, characteristic for Thomas Mann, is made exemplarily clear in his decisive rejection of

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every ‘piety’, starting from the given world: ‘But what does one demand that I believe? A “God” that the Einsteinian universe created and for this demands prostration, worship, unlimited subjugation? Why indeed. The Einsteinian universe could be still much greater and more complicated as it obviously is and would still allow me a posture completely free of enthusiasm towards its creator’ (297). According to Thomas Mann, God does not reveal Himself in any being of any kind, however great and complicated it may be. God reveals Himself at most in meaning, and indeed not in this or that meaning but rather in meaning as ­such – t­ hat is, in the primordial phenomenon of being intelligible and in the enigmatic capacity of humans being able to distance themselves sceptically and ironically from all being in the desire for understanding. In other words, God reveals Himself at best in that enigmatic freedom that allows what is sensually given to become a question to human beings, to become the letter of a text that they are not to affirm or deny blindly, but rather to understand. Thomas Mann expresses this conviction as follows: ‘We are so densely surrounded by the eternal enigma that one would have to be an animal to drive it out of one’s mind merely for one day’ (297). The sentence is at the same time an example of the fact that Thomas Mann’s remarks can be understood correctly only when one succeeds in allowing the string on which the respective remark is ‘tuned’ to resonate in the resonance body of the history of spirit and philosophy. In the present case it ­is – a­ s it often ­is – ­a comment by Schopenhauer that Thomas Mann varies and adapts. Schopenhauer’s comment reads as follows: ‘No beings, with the exception of man, feel surprised at their own existence’ (1969b, 160). The difference between human beings and animals consists, then, precisely in this enigmatic ­freedom – ­that is, that human beings do not simply accept the self-­evidence of being as given, but instead become themselves a question, an enigma. And yet human being is no ordinary enigma that does not know, itself, that it is one; on the contrary, the enigma of human being consists precisely in that human beings become an enigma to themselves, that they wonder at their capacity to wonder, that they want to understand their desire to understand. The wonder with which Schopenhauer, like Plato and Aristotle, situates the beginning of philosophy is not directed at an enigma separate from the wonder; rather, the wonder itself is the enigma. The enigma of human beings is a capacity to wonder, which radically distinguishes them from all natural beings. In the enigmatic capacity to wonder at being in general and at one’s own existence in particular, there lies an ironic distance to being. This freedom awakens the question concerning the meaning of being, and with it the almost even more enigmatic capacity of humans for language, to interpret, to read the literal with a view to understanding the meaning. It is now possible to articulate much more definitely the thesis mentioned at the beginning that the human self is no object but rather a



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subject: I, as a human being, am what I am as an ‘I’ by relating to myself, becoming an enigma to myself and seeking to interpret myself. Or, in other words, the enigma of human being consists in the fact that we are beings who seek to understand themselves, and yet in the first instance fail to understand themselves. For this reason, for Thomas Mann, the question of humans concerning themselves is the clear sign for the fact ‘that humans are beings that share in spirit and that the religious element lies enacted in them, in their duality of nature and spirit. Their position in the cosmos, their beginning, their origin, their ­aim – ­that is the great mystery, and the religious problem is the human problem, the question of humans concerning themselves’ (1994, 297). Human being’s unique position in the cosmos consists precisely in that this position is a position towards the cosmos. Human being is not only an object within the world, but equally a subject that faces the world as such insofar as the world is an enigma and the meaning of the world is something one enquires into. The peculiar dialectic in the way human being takes an ironic distance towards the literal being of the world consists, however, in that it is firstly in this distance from being that the possibility of a genuine proximity towards being is opened up: the proximity of understanding. The enigmatic freedom of the human desire to understand, together with the sceptical and ironic distance to the literal being of nature, is for this reason the question that occupies Thomas Mann in his thinking and writing: ‘If I call a conviction or a religio my own, then it is the conviction that there has never been a stage at which humans were only nature and not yet spirit. The fashionable tendency to “trace them back” to such a stage, the mockery of ideas of the time, is most deeply abhorrent to me. Humans have never begun and never stopped to take aim at the absolute, the idea, out of the antinomies of their spiritual and carnal double being’ (298). Distance to all being, which distinguishes human beings in their linguistic freedom, finds expression, then, for Thomas Mann, especially in one’s ironic self-­distancing from ‘carnal’ being as thus and so; this self-­distancing makes human being into a carnal–spiritual or being–meaningful double being that, in the free understanding of meaning, takes aim at that which there is to understand in the understood meaning: the idea or the absolute. For this reason, the tendency ‘to trace back’ the human double being to the literal being of nature is for Thomas Mann at the same time a mockery of ideas and a mockery of human ­being – ­that is, fundamentally inhuman, indeed the actual root of all inhumanity. An ontology of meaningless being that traces the fundamental double aspect of reality, the inherently differentiated unity of being and ­meaning – ­as it is experienced in each interpretation, each act of reading and ­understanding – ­one-­sidedly to the dead letter thus amounts to destroying human being. And, given that such an ontology of meaningless being can itself be drafted by humans as the ‘meaning’ of being, it is the unsettling proof of the human capacity for self-­alienation from oneself, going as far as self-­destruction.

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But concrete resistance to the inhumanity of an ontology of meaningless being consists, as has already been shown, precisely not in securing for human beings a small, meaningful ‘niche’ in a still meaningless cosmos of being. Rather, the ironic distancing of human beings has to prove itself not only in the face of its own existence, but just as well in the face of the natural being of the cosmos, in order to initiate a revolution in the way of thinking, which leads from the inhumane ontology of meaninglessness to a humane ontology of meaning. The thought and work of Thomas Mann, which is dedicated in general to the ‘religious problem’ as a ‘question of humans concerning themselves’, gains clarity also in a formal or compositional respect. It sets for itself in the concrete artistic shaping of language the central task of making the seemingly meaningless reality transparent for spiritual ­meaning – ­that is, of making intelligible literal being as a symbol of the idea. For this reason, Thomas Mann says that the art of his main narratives ‘employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It constantly passes beyond realism by symbolic intensification and by making realism transparent for spiritual and ideal elements’ (1999a, 726). In order to understand properly the narrative unity of meaning of his texts, he thus adds: ‘Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy the musical and ideal complex of relations. The first time, the reader learns the theme; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards’ (725). Thomas Mann’s narratives and novels aim at the spiritual, the meta-­physical that cannot be ‘traced back’ to literal nature, not so much in isolated passages and lessons but, rather, through the ‘musical and ideal complex of relations’, through the narrative unity of meaning of the whole text. Yet the reader must already be familiar with the metaphysical ‘themes’ of the narrative text so that he or she is able to interpret appropriately the ‘symbolic and allusive formulas’.

Freedom Appearing as a motto at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is the Delphic commandment ‘Know thyself!’ as formulated by Goethe: ‘Compare yourself; recognize what you are.’ As much as Thomas Mann as narrator sees his main task to consist in addressing the enigmatic question of human being concerning its self in the form of a genuine narrative of self-­knowledge, he likewise strives in the Reflections to account for the philosophical–metaphysical fundamental conviction guiding him with regard to human being. For this reason, one finds in Reflections a passage that amounts to a philosophical confession. He recalls in that happy-­serious hour in which he grasped Schopenhauer’s ‘Kantian-­based teaching on free will: the truth about freedom, he said, is precisely the opposite of what one has long believed: it does not lie in the operari, but in the esse – thus absolute necessity and determination rule in



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action, but being is originally and metaphysically free: the human being who commits a crime has of necessity, as an empirical character under the influence of certain motives, acted in this way, but he could have been ­different – a­ nd the pangs of conscience, too, aim at being, not at action. This is the deepest thought I could ever ponder, or rather: it belongs to those I had reflected upon before they were expressly thought out for me, before I had read them’ (1987, 94). This ‘deepest thought’ that Thomas Mann could ever ponder condenses in a complex manner many motifs of the previous reflections in a concise formulation, which, at first glance, is indeed barely understandable. The task of understanding consists in conceptually working out the single moments and relating them to the idea pursued here, in order to finally comprehend the whole thought in which Thomas Mann, mediated through Schopenhauer, adopts the ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ that began with Kant. The widespread understanding of freedom that Thomas Mann, with Schopenhauer, takes as his point of departure, is freedom as freedom of action: human beings are free insofar as they are not hindered in doing what they want. Since they often (still) do not know, however, what they want, they understand freedom moreover as ‘leeway’ for options to act: they feel freer when they can choose between five rather than two options, even when they can only perform the one action that they in the end want to perform, and in fact perform. One ascribes to oneself an action that is understood as free in this sense as my action. One finds oneself in the action; one ‘understands’ the action and believes to know why one acted in this way and not in another. By the same token, one doubts whether it was really one’s own action when one can no longer understand the action in retrospect. This is indicated by typical figures of speech: ‘I don’t understand what came over me at the time’; ‘I was not myself when I did this.’ Here, again, the close link between understanding and freedom becomes explicit: one regards oneself as free in those actions one believes to understand, and one believes to understand those actions in which one regards oneself as free. Admittedly, the narrow horizon of attention with which human beings aim at freedom and self-­understanding must be apparent, for they take into account isolated actions and, at best, certain consequences of actions. For this reason, Schopenhauer says that freedom is placed in the operari – that is, in the action and production that is oriented to a particular work: namely, an opus. Freedom in the sense of freedom of action is nothing more than a modus operandi. If attention is directed, however, to the single actions, then the whole of human existence gets pushed to the sidelines. For this reason, one will ordinarily admit, even after some reflection, that one may ‘understand’ this or that action or episode of one’s life, but not one’s life as ­whole – ­that is, one’s life story. This also holds, however, quite analogously for the universally widespread understanding of freedom. While one may say of single actions that they are freely chosen, one will not be able to say

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in the same way, of being, of the character of the actor, that it is freely chosen. This is easily demonstrated with the ‘formula’ of the freedom of action: one is free insofar as one is not hindered in doing what one wants. Or, to put it more succinctly: I am free insofar as I can do what I want. Evidently, everything depends here on the last word, on wanting. Supposing that I want to do this or that, then I am free if I can also do it. But why do I want this or that? Am I free to want to want this or that? My character determines what I want: am I free to choose my character, my own concrete selfhood? What would it even mean to be f­ ree – i­n this respect, and not in action? One does not become immediately aware of this fundamental difference between the freedom of action and the freedom of the will, because one is easily misled by language that makes ‘doing’ and ‘wanting’ appear equally as particular human actions: I can do this or that; I can want this or that. That the case is in truth quite different is also indicated, to be sure, by language. If, in place of the ‘doing’, one places the ‘wanting’ in the formula of freedom of action (I am free if I can do what I want), then one arrives at the paradoxical formula: I am free insofar as I can want what I want. What results is evidently an idle circular movement that everyday consciousness does not ordinarily make clear, for this movement indicates the blind spot of its understanding of freedom. The blind spot of the alleged freedom of action is thus the freedom of the will, for the freedom of action presupposes a freedom of wanting, which cannot, however, for fundamental reasons, be understood within the paradigm of the freedom of action. Here, the bridge is formed in a systematic sense to the distinction between object knowledge and self-­ knowledge. Just as humans cannot recognize themselves as subjects so long as they alienate themselves as objects of knowledge in accordance with that paradigm of knowledge, neither can they understand themselves in their freedom so long as they misunderstand freedom as a property of objectifiable single actions in accordance with the paradigm of the operari. But if one misunderstands one’s freedom, one is not free. Freedom does not concern an objectifiable property of human being, which one may have without understanding i­t – ­indeed, without knowing anything about it. Rather, freedom concerns the selfhood of human being as subject or I, which is what it is only insofar as one performs it with (self) understanding. For this reason, human beings are free only insofar as they understand their freedom. As equal as they are in being inherently free, they differ in terms of how they each understand concretely their freedom for themselves. Their respective being is their respective self-understanding. Precisely for this reason, they are free not in operari, but rather in esse.



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Selfhood as Character In contrast to their actions, the selfhood of human beings is designated as their character, which, as we say, ‘shows’ itself in one’s actions. We can recognize our character only on the basis of our concrete actions, yet we act the way we act because we have this character and not another ­character – t­ hat is, because we are this human and not some other human. A human being’s character thus shows itself not in the changing ‘what’ of the diverse actions but, rather, in the ‘how’ of acting, which remains the same so long as one’s understanding of oneself and of freedom remains the same. In light of a human being’s character, the blind spot in the conception of freedom of action becomes particularly clear. Anyone who believes to understand freedom on the basis of freedom of action will concede that one’s character cannot be conceived as though one chose it or brought it forth ‘freely’. In fact, it is immediately clear that a human being’s character recedes from the operational access of that person’s actions, for the character always precedes each single action. At the same time, the actions through which the character finds expression are ascribed not simply as free actions; rather, they are ascribed to the individual in a more distinctive way, precisely because the individual’s character shows itself in them. Yet accountability implies liability. The idea of freedom of action justifies human liability in the fact that the guilty individual could have also acted differently. Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s critical philosophy of the freedom of the will, which shows clearly the illusory and thus unfree nature of a mere freedom of action, understands liability, by contrast, as the possibility for the guilty party of also having been different. That is, the guilty party could have changed his or her ­character – ­which would show itself, in turn, in changed actions in which the character necessarily expresses itself. Regret and ‘the pangs of conscience’, according to Thomas Mann, following Schopenhauer, aim for this reason ‘at being, not at action’. Here, the enigma of human being comes to a head in the enigma of the freedom of the will and the freedom of character. It is just as clear that one can speak seriously of freedom only where it bears not merely on action but, firstly and above all, on character, on the actual willing and selfhood of the actor, as it is unclear at first glance how a ‘free’ change of character should be possible, since the character that always precedes every single action eludes being objectified for precisely this reason. How can one change freely one’s being, the selfhood that one designates with the word ‘I’? The question in which the being of human being becomes a question reveals clearly that a critical understanding of freedom requires an equally critical ontology. Yet it is precisely this ­insight – a­ s should now be ­clear – ­that underlies Kant’s doctrine of the double aspect of being.

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This can be known in its double form, as empirical literalness and as intelligible meaning, such that both aspects belong strictly together, thus allowing us to understand the being of concrete reality in the first place. A consequence of the double aspect of existence as being and meaning for the selfhood of human being is that here, too, one must distinguish between the empirical character and the intelligible character, as letter and as spirit of the one, inherently differentiated reality of human being. Since the empirical character always stands under the ‘influence of certain motives’, any freedom attributed to it in its literalness that has not been understood would be a mere fiction. Instead, human freedom manifests itself in the capacity of humans to understand their empirical character, and thus to develop an intelligible character. The free selfhood of human beings is rooted in their concrete self-­ understanding in such a way that it is called ‘character’. Human lived existence is never mere literal being; rather, it is selfhood that is interpreted and understood always anew. For this reason, one’s being changes when one’s understanding of oneself changes, for one realizes one’s freedom concretely in understanding. Human freedom is a dependent, finite autonomy. It is dependent on being in a literal sense, which lies before this freedom and underlies it. But this being does not exhaust the essence of human existence, for human beings are able, in understanding mere literalness, to emancipate themselves from being blindly caught up in what is given and prescribed. The empirical–intelligible double aspect of human personality must, then, more specifically be understood as the double aspect of being and meaning, of empirical literalness and intelligible interpretation. For this reason, Kant states that ‘The human being who is conscious of having character in his way of thinking does not have it by nature; he must always have acquired it’ (2006, 194). It therefore ‘does not depend on what nature makes of the human being, but on what the human being makes of himself, for the former belongs to temperament (where the subject is for the most part passive), and only the latter enables one to recognize that he has a character’ (192). Yet the ‘acquisition’ of a character cannot ensue in steps since the character designates the whole of human selfhood that always lies before all the single actions and operations. ‘Wanting to become a better human being in a fragmentary way is a futile endeavour, since one impression dies out while one works on another; the grounding of character, however, is absolute unity of the inner principle of conduct as such’ (194). Forming a character, which implies at the same time changing the inner principle of the past way of life, can take place only in human beings waking up with a jolt out of the dream of their previous existence. They wake up by becoming aware that their s­ ettled, ­as it were, ‘natural’, understanding of their selves and the ­world – w ­ hich makes them understand this or that but not the whole of their e­ xistence – i­s akin to the instinct of an animal, rather than the character of a free human being. The acquisi-



The Art of Self-Knowledge 35

tion of a character, that is, the beginning of a true self-­understanding can for this reason, according to Kant, not be achieved ‘gradually, but only, as it were, by an explosion which happens one time as a result of weariness at the unstable condition of instinct. Perhaps there are only a few who have attempted this revolution before the age of thirty, and fewer still who have firmly established it before they are forty’ (194). Kant’s last remark is especially insightful for the line of thought pursued here, for it draws attention to the extent to which human beings, in their self-­understanding, are dependent on having a past that serves as a basis, as it were, as a ‘text’ of understanding. Right here, a new definition of human freedom as narrative can b ­ egin – n ­ amely, by opposing the erroneous idea that human beings are free, at most, despite their past, which they can no longer change through action; on the contrary, human beings are free purely on the basis of their history and thanks to their past. If human beings had no past, then they would not be free from the outset, because they would not at all know how to understand themselves. This also renders intelligible the conclusion of Thomas Mann’s ‘philosophical confession’ that the ‘deepest thought’ that he could ever ponder ‘belongs to those I had reflected upon before they were expressly thought out for me, before I had read them’ – for the ‘deepest’ thinking is here evidently understood as reflecting, because it is always already walking in traces that have been thought before, in ‘footsteps’ and models of the past. But the point of this concluding expression is that thinking loses no freedom or originality through its reference to the past in its reflecting, but on the contrary gains ‘depth’ in the first place. Actual contemplation and understanding begins for Thomas Mann in becoming aware of how that which always seemed plausible to him in an unclear way had already been thought by Schopenhauer. Originality is for him not only the marking of the first understanding, but e­ qually – a­ nd even more s­ o – t­ he marking of the later understanding. It is thus appropriate to provide a reflective interpretation of that which so pointedly calls for o ­ ne – w ­ hich ought to ensue in the present enquiry by reflecting upon Thomas Mann’s narrative reflection in a philosophical manner and with a philosophical intent. This enquiry thus sets for itself the goal of clarifying the peculiar narrative self-­knowledge that underlies his thought and work. This is only possible, t­ hough – ­as the introduction has ­shown – ­when one at the same time makes explicit the conception of a narrative ontology that enables such a self-­knowledge in the first place.

Part One The Stories of Jacob

1 The Ambiguity of the I

The Leitmotif – The Original Scene – Readings – The Unrest of the Blessing – Identity of Form and Content – The Narrative Decentring of the I – Coined Archetypes – Isaac’s ‘Blindness’ – Selfhood as Self-Understanding

The Leitmotif The leitmotif of the following line of thought is a sentence from Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel. It reads: ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it’ (166). The phrase ‘anyone can say I’ points in its peculiar ambiguity to the central philosophical problem. With the little word ‘I’, we ­mean – ­whatever else we might want to say with ­it – ­firstly and above all ‘I’ and no one else: we mean ‘I’ as this particular individual, here and now, distinguished from the rest of the world. The fact that literally anyone can say this little word, with which we so emphatically seek to express individuality and singularity, points, to be sure, to a fundamental question about the human I, giving rise to manifold confusions. The leitmotif responds to this ambiguity of the I by explicitly highlighting, in its second part marked with a ‘but’, the particularity that is implicitly claimed in saying ‘I’. The sentence does not remain, then, with the indifference of saying ‘I’; rather, what really matters is who says ‘I’. Thus, it appears at first glance as though the demanded particularity of the I that matters stood in opposition to the undifferentiated universality of saying ‘I’. It seems that it is first by demarcating from what everyone can equally ­say – ­that is, from the ­universal – ­that the I is made into a particular, individual or personal I. Here, the leitmotif is initially grasped in this, as it were, ‘natural’ meaning that immediately imposes itself, and which at first glance the sentence and the word ‘I’ seem to exhibit. In the following, it will emerge,

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however, that the specific meaning of the I that matters is not in opposition to universality, but instead exhibits precisely the specific form of a self that, each in its own existence, succeeds in doing justice to the demand of universality that articulates itself in saying ‘I’.

The Original Scene The leitmotif links the subjectivity of human being, which manifests itself linguistically in saying ‘I’, with the thought that something matters, that not everything is equally important (and thereby unimportant); rather, it is necessary to distinguish between the unmeaningful and the meaningful, between what does not matter and what matters. In the Joseph novel, what matters is more specifically taken up as blessing. Of course, the more specific meaning of ‘blessing’, just like the deeper meaning of the ‘I’, will emerge in due course. Here at the start it cannot be a matter, then, of immediately specifying exactly what is to be understood by ‘blessing’, for it is not that the correct understanding of ‘blessing’ is the precondition for an understanding of the narrative, but the other way round: the better we understand the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, the more clearly we will see how to understand ‘blessing’ and the ‘I’. Due to the close connection between the ‘I’ and ‘blessing’, it is no coincidence that the sentence that has been selected as the leitmotif appears in that central scene of the Joseph novel in which blessing, or rather the passing on of the blessing, is at issue in a dramatic climax. In this original scene of the novel, the inner connection with the ambiguity of the I becomes immediately evident, for it matters very concretely and very urgently who says the little word ‘I’. In the novel, the recounting of the original text reads: Jacob came ‘to his father’s tent, put his mouth to the curtain, and said, “It is I, my father”. From deep within the tent came Isaac’s peevish voice, asking, “But who are you? Are you not perhaps a thief on the prowl who has come to my tent saying I? For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.”’ Jacob replied, ‘“It is your son who says I.” “That is another matter”, Yitzchak replied from inside. “Then come in.” So Jacob entered the twilight of the tent.’ Yitzchak ‘asked again, “So who are you then?” And in a breaking voice Jacob replied, “I am Esau”’ (165–6). What happens in this original scene? Isaac (Yitzchak) feels his death is near and wants to pass on to his firstborn son Esau the blessing that he himself received from his father Abraham. He has already sent out Esau to prepare a meal to give the father strength for the impending blessing of his chosen son.1 Yet Isaac is nearly blind and in the tent it is dark. Thus, he has every reason to respond to Jacob’s ‘It is I’ with the question: ‘Who’s speaking?’, ‘Who is it, that says I?’ Jacob, on the other hand, who (incited by his mother) wants to stage, in the darkness of the tent, the interplay of



The Ambiguity of the I 41

identity and the cunning theft of the blessing, has every reason to answer the question ‘Who are you?’ evasively with the simple ‘I’, in whose universality he can conceal his particularity. The Joseph novel stages the original scene, taking pleasure in narrative detail and in a way that is almost blatantly o ­ bvious – ­more obvious at least than in the original text, even if all the crucial motifs are already present in the Bible. Psychologically, the scene is highly plausible: Jacob, who has a guilty conscience, seeks to avoid as far as possible the actual crime, the pronounced lie. Thus, he announces himself with the simple and ambiguous ‘It is I, my father’ in order to answer the second question ‘Who are you?’ with the simple: ‘It is your son who says I.’ It is striking that both utterances are entirely correct according to the letter. Just like Esau, Jacob is a son of Isaac. Up to this point, he is entirely ‘innocent’ in his I-­saying and is presumably hoping desperately not to be interrogated further and so to avoid the explicit lie. But then he is asked a second time, and Jacob answers: ‘I am Esau.’ And now it has happened.

Readings An adequate understanding of the original scene will first have to make clear to what extent there is, according to the letter, something wrong going on. There is deception, lying, betrayal, so that the story seems to come down to the blessing going to the ‘wrong’ son. Whether in this injustice and betrayal there is, according to the meaning and spirit, right and t­ ruth – i­ n short, ­blessing – ­this is what the Joseph novel will contemplate again and again. To be able to raise seriously, however, the ultimately decisive question whether the betrayal in the end is to be seen in an altered light, in a different meaning, one must highlight in the beginning with just as much seriousness that, proximately, a deception and a lie occur. An adequate understanding of the narrative must equally take into account the proximate appearance on the surface and the depth of the concealed intent. A reading that pushes forward too rashly to a presumable ‘depth’ without honouring the letter misses the specific narrative meaning, just as one that remains on the ‘surface’ confuses the letter with the spirit. One might think that taking seriously the biblical narratives that the Joseph novel re-­narrates – ­i.e. ‘believing’ t­hem – ­consists above all in the conviction that the sacred stories literally took place in reality, just as they are told. But the conviction that something happened contributes very little to the understanding of what happened, to what the actual meaning of the narrated events is. For this reason, attention to the ­specifically narrative meaning of the sacred stories can be facilitated by an ­‘unbelieving’ reading that, from the outset, understands the narratives as a literal ­presentation of meaning and not as a representation of being.

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Thus, one finds towards the end of the Joseph novel the pointed remark ‘that unbelief is almost more important than belief. Belief requires a great deal of unbelief, for how can anyone believe what is true as long as he believes nonsense?’ (1181). Belief must accordingly internalize disbelief’s scepticism and spirit of contradiction in order to guard against the danger of naïveté and dogmatic laziness of thinking. A critically reflected belief that seeks to understand what it believes is distinguished not so much by the conviction that the stories of the Bible literally took place in this (and not another) way, but rather by the quite different conviction that the sacred stories are meaningful in an exceptional way: that they convey a specifically narrative meaning that by no means exhausts itself in a mere report of isolated facts and events. A believer, t­ oo – o ­ r especially a b ­ eliever – w ­ ill not want to disregard the fact that the sacred texts present their message for the most part in the narrative form of stories. This means, however, that the Geschichtliche itself, in its narrative form as story, is important and is to be taken as important. It will thus be important to direct attention to this specifically narrative dimension of meaning, which must not be confused with a report of external facts. The narrative form of sacred stories is therefore no mere husk that must be discarded in order to arrive at the contentful kernel. Rather, the constitution of the narratives as geschichtlich itself belongs to the content that is to be understood. The biblical stories must not be grasped as more or less simple ‘reports’ of factual or fictional events, for then the immanent complexity of the story itself, its narrative composition, would not be given adequate attention and its specifically narrative meaning would be missed. So, it is one of the essential tasks of reflectively re-­narrating the original text in the Joseph novel to sharpen and bring to awareness the fundamental difference between attention to the letter, on the one hand, and attention (through the letter) to the meaning of the story, on the other. In this sense, in his essay on Joseph and His Brothers, which is an additional elucidation of the novel, Thomas Mann says the following: ‘I still remember how amused I was, and how much of a compliment I considered it, when my copyist in Munich, a simple woman, brought me the typewritten copy of the first volume, “The Stories of Jacob”, and said: “Now we know at last how all this actually happened.” That was ­touching – ­for, after all, it did not happen. The exactness, the realism are fictional; they are play and artful illusion, realization and visualization forcibly brought about by all the means of language, psychology, presentation and, in addition, critical comment; and humour, despite all human seriousness, is their soul’ (1996, 186). This illustrates very well the true reason why the Joseph novel expressly notes that right b ­ elief – ­and this means in this context, firstly and above all, right reading – entails nearly more disbelief than belief. Reaching the right understanding of the relations of meaning requires having already



The Ambiguity of the I 43

freed oneself in part from captivation by the mere literalness of a narrative, from sole attention to the ‘realistic’ depiction of relations of being. The true seriousness of understanding manifests itself precisely in the ironic distance of humour, which undermines an overly literal reading of the narrative, paving the way for the required understanding of meaning. What is narrated must not simply be accepted naively as something given. Rather, it requires the critical courage to pose questions: what is the meaning of the narrated particulars? What do the sometimes surprising turns in the narrative actually mean? How is one to understand the individual in the narrative unity of meaning? It may be that the disbeliever, rather than the believer, is inclined to raise such questions; by contrast, a believer may be more likely to muster up the resolute patience for ever new readings and thereby succeed in breaking through the surface of the habitual ways of reading and thinking.

The Unrest of the Blessing What must stand out in the story of Isaac’s blessing and give reason for reflection is the fact, rarely addressed in traditional religious education, that we are actually dealing here with an outrageous story of betrayal. One maliciously takes advantage of an old father’s blindness in order to deceive him about his most intimate ­concern – ­his concern to pass on the divine blessing to the ‘right one’, to the chosen son. Although the deception is discovered quickly, precisely that which every ‘meaningful’ – that is, ‘pedagogically valuable’ – story would have to demand does not happen. The blessing, stolen in the obscurity of saying ‘I’ under the pretence of a false identity against the intention of the father, is not revoked, and a second blessing is not delivered to Esau, the ‘right’ son. Such an avenging or correcting justice is absent. The story acquires its specific meaning not only by what happens in it but, just as much, by what does not happen in it. After the mistakenly blessed Jacob leaves the dimly lit tent, and after Esau arrives with his meal and the entire betrayal is brought to light, Esau understandably complains and asks his betrayed father what is to become of him. In the original text, Isaac answers dryly and laconically: ‘“Your brother came with deceit and has taken away your blessing”’ (Gen. 27: 35). Apparently, the blessing was to be awarded only once, and even if it was stolen through cunning, it is lost for Esau. Whoever seeks to understand the meaning of this story must become suspicious here and notice what is striking, what is at first glance nonsensical and in need of explanation in order to be understood. In fact, it is characteristic of many stories of Genesis that God intervenes to make things right, making clear which events He condemns, which misdeeds He may expunge with the superior power of water or fire. Yet Jacob’s betrayal of Isaac summons no correction, so that by implication

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one might well suspect that God secretly approves of the course of the story, that He is in secret the true author of the story that appears at first glance so nonsensical. Jacob has the blessing and will keep ­it – i­rrespective of the drawn-­out suffering that he must still ­endure – ­in order that he himself at the end of his life may pass it on to one of his sons. The theft of the blessing is thus an integral link in the larger story of the blessing, which forms the overarching unity of meaning of the sacred story from Abraham up to Joseph and his brothers. Contrary to the first appearance, this context makes clear that Jacob is the rightful heir of the blessing, for only in this way can he also be the one who passes it on rightfully. Ultimately, the entire Joseph story is held in suspense by the question concerning who in the end will inherit Jacob’s blessing. The great story from Abraham up to Joseph and his brothers is organized essentially as the narrative of the repeated act of distinguishing an individual through the reception and passing on of the blessing. God distinguishes Abraham at the beginning in saying to him: ‘I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing’ (Gen. 12: 2). The ‘chain of blessing’ that begins here holds the story together and pushes it forward. Those who receive the blessing carry the story forward, and those who do not – they drop out. The blessing keeps the blessed in the story, and by the same token being kept in the story means being blessed. Blessing thus has a narrative dimension, by linking the scattered and isolated into a temporally organized whole and selecting who will be in the narrative, and who will not. What the Joseph novel as a reflective recounting of Abraham’s blessing story in general, and of Jacob’s theft of the blessing in particular, marks as striking and remarkable is the absence of the question of guilt. This absence is so striking to the narrator of the novel that a great effort is made in the exposition of the story to explain why, in contrast to first appearances, everything is nonetheless correct: that Jacob is not guilty but, rather, blessed. The concrete task for the narrative understanding consists, then, in making clear why Jacob’s literal betrayal is actually no betrayal, and the literal lie is actually no ­lie – ­that is, why the cunning exchange of identities under the spurious pretext of saying ‘I’ was not a deception. That is why the story and its enigmatic central point, I-­saying, is much more complex and multi-­layered than it appears at first glance according to the letter. To be sure, one becomes aware of this complex deeper dimension of the story only if one knows how to read it correctly. However, reading it correctly means not merely considering the isolated episode where one is lingering at the moment, but rather viewing the single scene, the single formulation, in the context of the entire narrative, for this is what makes a story into a story in the first place: that the single event does not stand isolated for itself but, rather, in a context. Accordingly, the reader is expected



The Ambiguity of the I 45

to remember what has already happened, and to form an expectation of what is yet to happen. The inattentive reader differs from the attentive reader precisely in that the former always reads only what is offered in the narrow horizon of the immediate present, and for this reason does not read the story as a story; by contrast, the attentive reader possesses, as it were, a resonant space of recollection and expectation, allowing each scene to resound with other, related scenes, in which a network of relationships emerges that pervades the story and constitutes its actual meaning.

Identity of Form and Content The last thought prepares the way for understanding an important sentence of the Joseph novel, though its significance for the narrative composition as a whole does not, to be sure, immediately catch one’s eye. It reads as follows: ‘A stupid, uneducated man of a meaningless soul might doltishly utter such a word free of any relation, thinking only of the immediate and actual reference’ (71). Like every sentence, this sentence has in the first instance a literal or immediate, isolated meaning. The context in which it is embedded by the earlier line of thought lends it, however, a less ‘doltish’ meaning, for it no longer appears ‘free of any relation’, that is, as a single sentence, but rather becomes intelligible as an important link in an overarching unity of meaning. The phrase that bemoans the absence of a narrative sounding board in the ‘stupid, uneducated man’ has been made to resound through the previous remarks, for it now makes sense why, for the Joseph novel, the ‘stupid, uneducated man’ is in a very precise and sober sense meaningless – that is, without meanings. The stupid man experiences and recognizes no meanings since he does not recognize any ‘relations’ that make up the peculiar fabric (Latin: text) through which the meaning of language and the narrative is constituted. Instead, the ‘meaningless soul’ remains invariably stuck to what is closest and most graspable, without the power to raise itself above immediate being to mediated meaning. Attention to the narrative dimension of meaning of ‘relations’ is not only demanded, then, of the reader of the novel, but appears pointedly within the novel itself. The narrative form of the novel corresponds in this way precisely to its narrative content: the formal perspective of the narrator, which in the case of the Joseph novel is also and above all the perspective of a reflective reader of the original text, coincides with the narrated content. The novel itself is that of which it narrates.2 To be sure, the identity of form and content would not be complete if the attention to the meaning that makes the narrator into a narrator appeared in the narrative itself only in the mode of ­negation – ­that is, as inattentiveness. The ‘stupid, uneducated man of a meaningless soul’ represents for this reason, in the Joseph novel, only the obscure background

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against which the meaningful figures of Jacob and Joseph can stand out, gaining their meaning precisely by being two narrative figurations of the attentive ‘meaningful soul’. In this way, in the Joseph novel, an essential character trait of Jacob’s is formed by his specific gift of being attentive to the resonating harmonics of words and stories: ‘For Jacob was not a man to avail himself of such a curse merely as a feeble allusion. His mind had the power to merge the present most dreadfully into the past, to reestablish the full force of that prior event’ (71). Jacob’s ‘dignity and spiritual solemnity’ is thereby concisely outlined and traced back to its ground, its true source. The ‘blessed one’ is no longer trapped within the narrow confines of the immediate present and, for precisely that reason, lives in a story (and not merely in a Now without relations, or in a meaningless series of single now-­points). The blessed one experiences a past and a future in that distinguished and ‘meaningful’ sense which sets itself apart from the banal superficiality with which we all somehow know that there was a yesterday and there will be a tomorrow. A central aspect of the ‘blessing’ that Thomas Mann understands as Abraham’s legacy consists, then, in the gift of being acquainted with time in its fullness, in the talent of being able to link the present with the past and future. The one who is blessed with a sense for narrative relations links the present with the past such that the present becomes a citation, a repetition of an original model that foreshadows a final end. This characterizes how Thomas Mann, as author and as a narrator who re-­narrates, reads the original text. The manner of his reading is articulated, in fact, in the Joseph novel itself, for it is nothing other than a very specific way of reading the original text: in its reflective reading, the novel highlights and translates precisely those narrative references to earlier and later that are contained in the original story itself. Thus, a complex intertwining of narrative levels of meaning emerges: the inner meaning of the original story consists in a narrative ontology in which being is u ­ nderstood – i­n a sense that is still in need of e­ lucidation – ­narratively and historically: as (hi)story. For an adequate understanding, this original story is re-­narrated by Thomas Mann himself with the explicit intention of raising the original meaning of the story, its narrative ontology, more clearly into consciousness. He does this by consistently highlighting and thoroughly reflecting the narrative ­relations – ­that is, the echoes of the single events in the story’s temporal resonance chamber.

The Narrative Decentring of the I Of Reuben, Joseph’s oldest brother, the Joseph novel narrates: ‘He was not unique in this world in misjudging the importance of the question that asks who someone is, in whose footsteps he walks, on what past he bases his present, in order thereby to establish his real identity’ (53). Here the



The Ambiguity of the I 47

question concerning oneself, the striving for self-­knowledge, takes on the shape of the genuinely narrative question: in whose footsteps does one walk? To which past does one, or ought one, to relate one’s present, in order to be able to designate and understand it as reality? In the life stories narratively unfolded by the Joseph novel in time and language, there is a clear awareness of a narrative and historical dimension that enables the I to gain distance to its respective here and now: the horizon of its immediate experiences expands and it gains the capacity to experience a unity of meaning that reaches beyond ‘the immediate and actual reference’. This narrative decentring opens, then, the possibility of relating one’s own respective present to an underlying past, and of understanding it as a meaningful reality in the double aspect of being and meaning. This leads, however, as the narrator of the Joseph novel expressly discusses and highlights, to the central question that has the power of fundamentally challenging our everyday understanding of the world and ourselves: ‘Is the human I something closed sturdily in on itself, sealed tightly within its own temporal and fleshy limits? Do not many of the elements out of which it is built belong to the world before and outside of it? And is the notion that someone is no one other than himself not simply a convention that for the sake of good order and comfortableness diligently ignores all those bridges that bind individual self-­awareness to the general consciousness?’ (94). This central question is to be pursued here in the form of a philosophical interpretation of the Joseph novel that, again, sets itself the task of speaking not so much about the novel but, rather, about that of which the novel itself speaks. In other words, an attempt will be made to reflect primarily not upon Thomas Mann and his texts, but rather upon what he himself reflects upon in his texts. To the same degree that there are differences between the genuine logic of literary reflection and the genuine logic of philosophical reflection, so there is agreement between both forms of reflection in their critical approach to putting into question conventions for ‘good order and comfortableness’ of everyday consciousness. The reflections pursued here seek in this way to unfold a­ rgumentatively – ­step by step, in an independent ­manner – ­the exceedingly complex thought of a narrative decentralized I in Thomas Mann’s novel, so that not only its manifold aspects are made conceptually explicit but, beyond that, the reasons for a radically changed self-­interpretation of human being become clear. The human self in the Joseph novel turns out not to be ‘solidly encompassed, but, as it were, stood open to the rear, overflowed into earlier times, into areas beyond his own individuality’ (94). To adequately understand this thought, it will be crucial to elaborate its partly explicit, partly implicit, philosophical background. Only in this way will this thought be protected from the convenient deception that we are dealing merely with a ‘poetic’ – and, thus, theoretically ­insignificant – i­ dea.

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Taking the place of the usual interpretation of the world and the self, which objectifies the human I into a ‘graspable thing’ sealed in on itself, there will have to be a new interpretation of the self and the world in which the previously closed and isolated I now recollects the manifold ‘relations’ that lead it beyond its narrow ‘temporal and fleshy limits’. Since every human self-­understanding is accompanied, however, by a corresponding understanding of the world, a narrative critique of everyday consciousness leads not only to a new temporal and historical conception of the human I, but, equally, to a ‘revolution’ in the understanding of being.

Coined Archetypes Now the conditions have been prepared for understanding adequately the answer that the Joseph novel gives to the question why Jacob’s mistaking of the I, in the end, is not a betrayal: ‘In truth, no one was betrayed, not even Esau’ (160). For the narrator of the novel, the betrayal takes place, then, only on the literal surface; in t­ruth – t­hat is, for a reading that is attentive to the deeper ­meaning – ­there can be no talk of betrayal (so that there is also no reason for a ‘higher’ correction of the events). The justification for this interpretation that no one, not even Esau, was betrayed is introduced with a fundamental remark: ‘For if it is our ticklish task to tell of people who did not always know precisely who they ­were’, then ‘­this occasional lack of clarity really only affected what was individual and time-­bound and was itself the direct result of the fact that each of them had an excellent understanding of who he was in his e­ ssence – ­that is, outside of time, mythologically, ­typologically – i­ncluding Esau, of whom it has been said, and not without good reason, that in his way he was as pious a man as Jacob’ (160). So the narrator of the Joseph novel first considers the deeper dimension of the story of Esau and Jacob with a profound, far-­reaching reflection on the double-­layer form of human identity, which is of fundamental significance for the novel and has already been touched upon in the leitmotif of the ambiguity of saying ‘I’. While the protagonists who essentially determine the narrated events do not always know exactly who they are, this uncertainty always concerns, according to the narrator, only the individual and temporal, and thus the unessential. Even more, this uncertainty is to be understood as a consequence of their exceptional certainty regarding the essential. They are, in fact, entirely certain with regard to a different ­identity – ­and precisely because, in the end, solely the identity they are certain of really matters, they can allow an occasional uncertainty with regard to their unessential identity as an individual in time. The essential I-­identity of human being is to be characterized, then, in a first approach, as what someone is ‘outside of time, mythologically, typologically’. Yet every protagonist of the sacred story knows this iden-



The Ambiguity of the I 49

tity very well, even Esau, so that he is to be considered ‘as pious a man as Jacob’. The significance of this last point for the question of how far Jacob’s ‘I-­mistake’ is to be understood as betrayal becomes patent immediately following the passage on Esau’s ‘piety’ just quoted: Esau ‘wept and raged after he had been “betrayed” and laid snares in his blessed brother’s path more deadly than those Ismael had laid in Isaac’s’. ‘But he did it all because it was part of his character’s role, and because in his piety he was perfectly aware that everything that happens is a fulfilment, that what had happened had happened because it had to happen according to a coined archetype. Which meant: this had not been the first time; it had happened as part of a ceremony and according to the model, had gained its reality in the present, like a feast, and had reoccurred just as feasts reoccur’ (160). The protagonists of the Joseph novel, the persons who say ‘I’, do what they do because it lies in their respective character role. Esau, too, plays such a role, and his ‘piety’ consists not least in that he knows his role very well. It may be that it is not the best role of all, not the one he may have wished for, but that is not what matters: he plays his role as the solemn repetition of a coined archetype and model as best he can. Thus, the Joseph novel asks the reader to consider the t­ hought – w ­ hich appears at first glance quite o ­ bjectionable – t­hat Esau’s plans to murder his brother Jacob are harboured ‘ceremonially’, that all actions of the narrative, the ‘good ones’ like the ‘evil ones’, follow a coined archetype that reoccurs in the here and now of the present. The reoccurrence, as the narrator succinctly adds, is ‘like a feast’ in which, indeed, something past is recalled in a lively manner and in this way gains a renewed present. The actions and the persons narrated about are, for this reason, not merely what they are in the immediate present, in the here and now, but rather the citing repetition of a model, the staging that makes present a character role coined in the past. One can reproach an actor who plays the role of a murderer for playing his role badly, but not for playing the role of a bad person. One cannot accuse him of acting as cunningly and malevolently as his role requires. On the contrary, an actor who plays a bad person as a ‘good person’ would be a bad actor. An actor’s action knows, then, its genuine norms for distinguishing between good and bad, but these norms do not pertain to what is done but solely to how it is done. Esau knows this very well and, as a consequence, seeks his brother’s life in the here and now with the clear consciousness that he does it because it is expected of him as ‘character’. He finds himself in the role of the betrayed brother and, as a result, wants to play his character role with propriety and care: ‘But Esau, damned to the d ­ esert . . . ­wept because tears were his due, because they fit his role’ (104). Yet this is not enough: he is also angry and out for revenge, as the model requires. The coined archetype that thereby guides him is the ‘model’ of Ismael, whose name is thus linked with Esau in the passage just quoted. Ismael,

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Isaac’s older half-­brother, had been sent into the desert by his father Abraham (not without support from Isaac’s mother), in order to prevent him from someday raising claims to the father’s inheritance against the younger brother. In this version of the original story, the red colour of the desert is thereafter linked with the image of the outcast brother, so that Esau is often simply called ‘the Red One’. Esau is thus sufficiently ‘pious’ to play well the role of the evil one. Nevertheless, the forcefulness of the narrative’s language reaches a climax where no longer Esau’s, but rather Jacob’s, self-­understanding comes into view. Jacob’s soul was ‘weighty and p ­ ondering . . . ­for all the stories rose up again before him and were present in spirit, just as they had once again been present in flesh moulded according to their coined archetype. And it seemed to him as if he were walking on transparent ground made up of infinite layers of crystal leading down into fathomless depths and brightly lit by lamps hung in between. But here above them he walked in the stories of his own flesh, was present as Jacob, and he looked at Esau, cursed by means of cunning, who was also walking now in his archetypal ­mould – a­ nd his name was Edom the Red One’ (149–50). In such sentences, the narrative style and language of the Joseph novel comes fully into its own. The solemn and ponderous tone justifies itself aesthetically by the strict unity of form and content, for the ‘mood’ of the narrative is Jacob’s ‘mood’, the attunement of a ‘weighty and pondering’ soul, which understands itself and the world in a ‘characteristic’ manner, and for which being and meaning are identical. Thomas Mann’s own narrative and language hereby form a late echo that varies the original text, seeking to make present the original meaning solemnly and to let it resonate in the reader of the Joseph novel.

Isaac’s ‘Blindness’ How does Isaac, the father, deal with the fight of his sons? What role is assigned to him in the solemn variation of the already coined models? The answer to this question is given in a longer passage in which the motives of the last reflections are once again narratively celebrated: ‘Esau matured early like a young animal. While still a boy, one might say, he married again and again: daughters of Canaan, Chetites and Hivites, as we have heard, first Judith and Adah, then Aholibamah and Basemath as well. He settled them in tents in his father’s camp, and was fruitful with them, and with total insensitivity allowed them and their brood to pursue their traditional and idolatrous worship of nature before his parents’ very eyes. Lacking any sense whatever for Abram’s lofty inheritance.’ All of this, ‘as the song later put it and as can still be found in the traditional text, was a “grief of mind” to Isaac and Rebekah’ (159). In this way, the life stories re-­narrated in the Joseph novel gain not only depth and meaning by linking present and past and understanding each



The Ambiguity of the I 51

one’s I as a ‘character role’, but also gain their very own coining, as the model of the past can never be copied exactly into one’s individual life but must instead always be adopted anew and in this sense repeated (wiederholt). The latter is invariably risky, since no variation of the original theme can rule out the possibility of changing into the exact opposite of the model. Thus, Esau is what he is because he lacks ‘any sense whatever for Abram’s lofty inheritance’, which is why he becomes the counter-model of the Abrahamic model.3 Of course, this cannot remain concealed from Isaac, the father; he nonetheless evades the ensuing consequences as far as possible. Thus, it reads in the novel that Isaac ‘was silent, and when he spoke it was in words to this effect: “Mine is the red one. He is the firstborn, and I love him.” But ­Isaac – b ­ earer of the blessing, keeper of the idea of God that Abram had struggled to win, the man whom his spiritual family saw as the son and reincarnation of the ­Chaldean – s­ uffered greatly from what he was forced to see, or to close his eyes to in order not to see, suffered, too, from his own weakness, which prevented him from putting an end to this mischief by suggesting Esau take to the desert, as had been done with Ismael, his savagely beautiful uncle’ (159). Isaac is the blessed one. He is the ‘keeper of the idea of God that Abram had struggled to win’, ­which – ­this much can already be ­said – i­s essentially linked with a spiritual aversion to the worship of nature and of images that is so close at hand for human being. Yet this Abrahamic aversion to the immediate is foreign to Esau. He is a ‘natural lad’ and the narrator of the Joseph novel does not pass up the pleasure of making this blatantly clear: with shaggy skin, having matured early, fruitful. In his cheerful worship of nature and images, he does not have the ‘weighty and pondering’ concerns of Jacob, and lives his life without a care. The absence of the blessing cannot be brought out more explicitly. This must actually cause grief to Isaac, the blessed one, and cause him concern. What he sees also causes him pain, but he remains silent and takes flight in the role of a father who sticks by his firstborn while ceding the opposing role to his wife, who takes the side of the younger son. Both adopt, then, as father and mother, pre-­coined roles in a play that is surely as old as humanity. Isaac insists defiantly on his role as father: ‘Mine is the red one. He is the firstborn, and I love him.’ Still, it cannot remain entirely concealed to him that Esau is not blessed. But he closes his eyes before the obvious and refuses to see the character roles that have been assigned to Esau and Jacob. What prevents him? On this point, the novel is very subtle: ‘The “small” myth prevented it, Esau’s actual priority of birth prevented it’; ‘And so Isaac complained of his eyes’ (159). Here, a small myth and a great myth, a small model and a great model, are in conflict. In this way, the narrative decentring of human existence, which makes the I walk in the ‘footsteps’ of past models, gains new complexity. It becomes patent that, to the human self that lives and understands its own

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present in the light of the past, it is not clear from the outset which coined model it ought to identify with. Isaac’s tragedy consists, namely, in that he is conflicted about which model he wants to understand as authoritative and as worth pursuing. In the end, as a father who ‘naturally’ sticks to the firstborn, he pursues the small model; and he closes his eyes before the obvious in order not to see the great model that is embodied anew in his two sons. The inner refusal to understand expresses itself externally in him becoming blind, in lamenting the weakness of his eyes. At the same time, it is his weak eyes (in an outward sense) that make possible the original scene in the first place, in which Jacob wins the blessing ‘deceptively’ and the great myth prevails over the small m ­ yth – ­which Isaac, too, wants to bring about unconsciously through his ailing eyes. Isaac, according to the novel, ‘sought out darkness. Are we claiming that Isaac became “blind” in order not to see the idolatry practised by his daughters-­in-­law? Ah, that was the least of what it pained him to see, of what made the loss of sight ­desirable – ­for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’ (159). The narrator of the Joseph novel interprets, then, the weakness of Isaac’s eyes ‘psychosomatically’. Isaac is working unconsciously towards undermining his conscious loyalty to the ‘small myth’, so that it does not in the end stand in the way of the big model of the blessing. The original scene in which the blessing is deceptively obtained under false pretences is thus desired just as much by ­Isaac – ­albeit ­unconsciously – ­as by Jacob and his mother. It can only be staged, however, if Isaac can barely see. Thus, he contributes his part in the success of the scene and suffers because of his eyes: ‘for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’. Can one, then, in the end, still speak here of betrayal? Evidently not, for Isaac is deceived only insofar as he deceives himself by adhering ‘blindly’ to the small myth of the firstborn. The deception through Jacob is in truth, then, only the correction of a misunderstanding that Isaac himself wishes and unconsciously induces.

Selfhood as Self-Understanding In the story of Jacob, the narrative sounding board, which is caused to resonate through the isolated events on the surface and which links them meaningfully through a common deeper dimension, acquires a first concrete elaboration. The protagonists of the narrative are shaped in their own self-­ understanding by precisely that fundamental distinction between meaning and being, significant model and temporal–individual repetition ‘in the flesh’, which for Thomas Mann is the principle of all narration and thus also the principle of narrative understanding. This principle is not only a principle of readings and texts, but in the first instance a life principle. Thomas Mann makes this explicit in his talk ‘Freud and the Future’, which contains in an important part a commentary on the Joseph novel.4



The Ambiguity of the I 53

He speaks of ‘the schema in which and according to which the supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naïve pride in being first and unique, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod it before him. His character is a mythical role which the ­actor . . . ­plays in the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality, that he, as it were, has invented it all himself, with a dignity and security of which his supposed unique individuality in time and space is not the source, but rather which he creates out of his deeper consciousness in order that something which was once founded and legitimized shall again be represented and once more for good or ill, whether nobly or basely, in any case to conduct itself, in its own way, according to models’ (1947, 374–5). It belongs essentially to the form of a genuine human life that it first gains its genuine reality where it ‘plays’ – that is, where it r­ epeats – ­past models by interpreting and varying them, and then presents them on the stage of its present. If one misunderstands oneself exclusively as a unique individual, then one lives, according to Thomas Mann, clueless in one’s ‘naïve pride in being first and unique’. One first gains one’s own reality and character through the specific ‘role’ that one also plays when one plays ‘in the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’. Human action and speech is only possible and understandable because it repeats coined models. Literally unique action or speech is impossible for human beings because it is not understandable: ‘Actually, if his existence consisted merely in the unique and the present, he would not know how to conduct himself at all; he would be confused, helpless, unstable in his own self-­regard, would not know which foot to put foremost or what sort of face to put on. His dignity and security lie all unconsciously in the fact that with him something timeless has once more emerged into the light and become present; it is a character; it is native worth, because its origin lies in the unconscious’ (375). Accordingly, the life of the protagonists in the original story re-­narrated by the Joseph novel means understanding their own being ‘of the flesh’ as the citing repetition of a coined model. One can therefore say that the condition of the possibility of being able to narrate them in a distinguished way consists precisely in that they understand their own being in the sense of a narrative ontology. Their mode of understanding, their attentiveness or inattentiveness to the meaning of the stories in which they live, makes them into what they are. Each makes explicit, in his or her own way, that human beings are precisely what they understand themselves to be. Yet human self-­understanding, which defines human selfhood, articulates itself concretely in the narrative unity of meaning of the story, which one repeats in one’s own self-­understanding in various ways, thereby gaining an understanding of one’s own life story. This means the narrative decentring that one achieves by realizing the importance of the question who one actually ­is – ­that is, in whose ‘footsteps’ one ­walks – ­is far from putting into question the reality of the human I; on the contrary,

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it is in this questioning that the human I gains in the first place the narrative form of reality that is characteristic of human selfhood, and that relates each one’s own present to a particular past in order to recollect it and understand it as the reality of one’s own life story. The decisive point of the Joseph novel is that the narrative view of human identity is not an arbitrary external perspective on the human I. Rather, it describes the inner perspective of those distinguished persons whom the novel narratively brings into view. Esau and Jacob, to stay with these two ‘pious men’, understand themselves in the double-­layer manner mentioned above: on the one hand as a small I in the being of the here and now, and on the other hand as a great I in the narrative fabric of meaning that reaches far back into the past, and likewise far ahead into the future.

2 The World Theatre

The Thought-Model of the Actor – The World as Stage – History – Meaning of Life? – The Author as Narrator and Reader – Meaning as Happiness or Happiness as Meaning – Connecting Thoughts – Cain and Abel – The Role of Human Being – The Dignity of Universality – Humanity in Each Person

The Thought-Model of the Actor ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The leitmotif of the line of thought has given rise to the following question: how are we to understand more specifically what matters in saying ‘I’? In a first approach, the question was answered by linking the contentful I-­saying with the phenomenon of linguistic and narrative meaning: the I of I-­saying has content so far as it means something. The I gains meaning by becoming receptive to ­meanings – ­that is, by being attentive to meaning and seeking to understand it. In this way, the I opens up to the experience and understanding of meaning by transcending its ­present – ­which, taken in itself, is m ­ eaningless – a­ nd becoming aware of a temporally organized unity of meaning that reaches beyond the I of the immediately given here and now into the past and the future. A contentful ­I – ­or, as the Joseph novel says, a ‘meaningful soul’ – builds a space of recollection and expectation. What is immediately experienced is interwoven through this space into a narrative unity, becoming meaningful and understandable as a repeating variation of a model. According to the novel, the I that is in this way receptive to meanings is walking on transparent ground made up of countless layers of crystal descending into fathomless depths, in which the opacity of being becomes transparent and readable for the meaning articulated in the literal. There exists, then, an inner connection between the human I in the distinguished sense that matters and the primordial phenomenon of experience of meaning in which the I realizes the meaningful aspect of

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being. From this arises, however, a fundamental consequence for the narrative ontology of personal being: the ‘I’ as person cannot be something individual and unique, because the strictly unique is always meaningless. A ‘meaningful soul’ exists only in a unity – a unity in which it has stood all along, but to which it must become explicitly attentive in order to overcome its meaningless isolation. In the Joseph novel, this central insight for the understanding of self and world is made explicit by the concept of a ‘character role’. Helpful in understanding this important concept is the thought-­model indicated by this ­concept – n ­ amely, the model of the actor on stage. Every conscious performance of a role is enabled firstly by the basic fact, necessarily soberly described, that the actor makes his own being transparent and understands it in terms of a unity of meaning. Nothing ‘mystical’ is meant by this, but rather the elementary fact that Mr Hutter the actor appears as Hamlet by letting his Hutter-­being become transparent so that Hamlet (and not Hutter) can appear. It would be fatal, then, if Mr Hutter only played what he is ­anyway – t­hat is, Mr Hutter. Then he would not be playing at all, but merely being. It is not something obscure for the actor but rather a completely clear and matter-­of-­fact condition that he gains distance to himself, to his own being, and thereby understands himself as actor of a role, as reincarnation of a coined model. This decentring of one’s own being in the course of becoming transparent for the overarching unity of meaning of the theatre play evidently does not lead to the actor acting less realistically on the ­stage – ­less in the flesh. Quite the contrary, on the stage, putting one’s own literal being into service for the purpose of portraying a meaning augments and intensifies the physical presence of a facet of human existence. What it means for one’s own being to become transparent may be understood using a distinction that has already been m ­ ade – n ­ amely, as changing the point of view from the small I in the here and now, to the great I in the fabric of meaning of a story. The great, trans-­individual I is not exclusive and discriminating (like the small I) but rather general and connecting: the actor who is not his own small I but rather plays Hamlet takes part in an overarching s­ ubjectivity – a­ nd likewise, insofar as the spectator understands the play, the spectator takes part in this great I (which makes up the essence of the distinct aesthetic pleasure and experience). To gain access to Thomas Mann’s narrative ontology, the relations in the small theatre must simply be transferred to the great theatre of the world. In the reality that we ordinarily understand as meaningless being, being becomes transparent as meaning as soon as the acting persons decentre their usual I-­standpoint, along with their ‘naïve pride in being first and unique’, gaining distance to themselves by learning to understand themselves as variations of a narratively coined model, whose inheritance they accept. The persons whose stories the Joseph novel narrates and discusses reflectively understand themselves as the repetition of an archetype; they



The World Theatre 57

gain their own meaning due to the self-­understanding that they are ­heirs – ­that is, the varying repetition of a coined model.

The World as Stage The stage on which the ‘characters’ in the Joseph novel play their roles is not the theatre stage in contrast to the world, but rather the world as stage. ‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.’ Shakespeare’s verses express in a classical form the understanding of world and self that the novel unfolds in its own way. Humans who understand themselves as character roles understand themselves as being placed into a unity of meaning. This establishes the link to the figure of thought of the actor, for the actor is what he is because he acts out of the knowledge of a unity of meaning: he knows the play in which he appears, has more or less accurate insight into the meaning of the scene (what has already happened and what is yet to happen), and contributes his part to the meaningful whole in his portrayal of the role. The ‘meaningless souls’ of which the Joseph novel speaks are, then, those who do not understand themselves as fellow actors in a play or as fellow actors in a story. They are akin to ‘persons’ who appear on the world stage without realizing that they are appearing on a stage and have a character role to play. Unsurprisingly, they behave ‘meaninglessly’ on the stage of life. In their ignorance (in their ‘stupidity and lack of education’), they stick only to what is closest and most graspable. They do not understand that the setting and props on the stage are not merely what they appear to be at first glance, but rather part of a greater unity of meaning that one ought to direct one´s interpretative attention to. If we enquire into who Hamlet is, then we inquire into what Hamlet means in the unity of meaning of a particular play. We are enquiring into a specific ‘position’ in a greater unity of meaning that first assigns every individual a place, and thus a meaning. ‘Hamlet’ the person is not a particular being but rather a particular meaning. Or, better still: the being of the person is the person’s meaning, for meaningless being is never personal being, and personal being is always meaningful. This insight gained with the thought-­model of the actor can be generalized in an ontological respect as soon as we, together with Thomas Mann, understand the stage (or narrative) no longer as separated from reality, but rather the world itself as stage or narrative. Then the following holds without reservation: the human as person is not something, but rather means something; the life of a person is not the person’s being but rather the person’s meaning. By implication, the following holds: if the i­nsight – ­that persons are not something, but rather mean ­something – ­becomes unintelligible and forgotten, then its place is taken by the prejudice that persons are to be understood by analogy to objects, whereby a human

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being would be a person in the way a tree is a tree, a stone a stone. And self-­knowledge of humans as persons would not differ fundamentally from knowledge of a tree or a stone.1 Such human self-­forgetfulness is, in fact, reminded by language of the only appropriate understanding of personal being by means of the word ‘person’, which for the most part is employed rather thoughtlessly in everyday language. The Latin expression ‘per-­sona’ means: that through which something can resonate, through which something can ­speak – ­that is, the mask, the theatrical mask. Thus, still today in the theatre, there are persons – more specifically, dramatis personae – who are listed on the first page of the dramatic text and on the cast list of every performance. The original etymology of the concept points, then, to the fact that ‘person’ means a complex double-­layered structure, differentiated in itself. The thought of the world as a stage does not mean, of course, that everything that occurs on the stage of reality is already a ‘person’. But every ­particular – ­the setting, the ­props – ­makes sense in some way, otherwise it would not be on the stage. Everything real thus takes part in the overarching purpose of the whole, in the world as a divine comedy, and is in this sense part of a unity of meaning that can be understood with respect to the story of persons. This is given classical expression by a sentence of Seneca´s: ‘Quomodo fabula, sic vita: non quam diu, sed quam bene acta sit, refert’ (ep. 77, 20). Life is like a play: what matters is not how long it lasts, but how well it is performed. Though the context of meaning (fabula) that represents human life requires a certain duration in order to articulate itself, mere duration is not yet meaningful, but first the event of meaning that plays out in time. For this reason, human life is meaningless if it strives solely to live as long as possible without realizing that it is the ‘performance’ that matters, and, above all, that it must be done well for it to be understandable and meaningful.

History Insight into theatre’s similarity to human existence implies a fundamental critique of the dichotomy of being and meaning that underlies the everyday ontology of meaningless being. This critique will gain persuasive power as soon as it succeeds in highlighting phenomena that show how everyday consciousness is discordant with itself and thus points beyond itself. The critique need not approach the prejudice from outside, but can instead make use of an internal insecurity of everyday consciousness in order to loosen up from the inside the fixed prejudice that being is meaningless. Along these lines, a central phenomenon through which everyday consciousness reveals its insecurity is the phenomenon of history – a phenomenon that is crucial for determining our understanding of world and



The World Theatre 59

self. It is unavoidable in understanding what ‘history’ actually is that the differentiated unity, the double aspect of being and meaning, comes into effect. For every interpretative account of a genuinely historical reality, the dimensions of being and meaning, which are cleanly separated in everyday consciousness, interleave with each other: a historical event is an event only if it in fact took place; the event is historical, however, only if it stands in an overarching context that lends the event historical meaning. The insecurity of everyday consciousness thus consists in whether it should take history as meaningless insofar as it is ­real – i­n order to do justice to its ­reality – o ­ r take history ultimately as meaningful insofar as it is more than mere facticity. Here, talk of the ‘meaning’ of history would have to be more than a convenient phrase that degrades the meaning of history to an act of giving a fictional meaning to what is m ­ eaningless – t­ o an individual or collective illusion that remains external to the ‘objective’, meaningless being of the world. It is no coincidence, then, that the central thought of the Joseph ­novel – ­namely, the ‘character role’ that humans are to play r­epeatedly – i­s made fruitful for the concept of history: ‘History is what has happened and what continues to happen on and on through time. But it is also stages and storage that lie beneath the ground we walk upon, and the deeper the roots of our being reach down into those fathomless layers of ­history – ­which lie beyond and below the fleshly confines of our I and yet determine and nourish it, so that in less precise hours we may speak of them in the first person and as if they belonged to our ­flesh – ­the more weighed down with meaning is our life and all the more dignity attaches to the soul of our flesh’ (147). Walking on transparent ground composed of infinite layers of crystal descending into the fathomless becomes the stages and storage of history that carries ‘our being’, giving it dignity and making it understandable as meaning. But the crucial point of the quoted passage consists in the historical decentring of human b ­ eing – a­ decentring of human being out of its narrow ‘fleshly confines’, which does not by any means alienate humans but, quite the contrary, makes them into what they, as human beings, are and ought to be. Characteristic for a living self ‘weighed down with meaning’, as Thomas Mann narratively unfolds it in Joseph and His Brothers in ever new variations in time and language, is precisely the constitutive mediation of a historical ‘stage’ that is not identical with the I in the narrower sense. In another passage of the novel, characterizing Joseph’s understanding of world and self in succession to Jacob’s, the narrator finds an especially succinct formulation for the transformation of meaningless being from its opacity and isolation into historical meaning: ‘The transparency of being, its character as repetition and return of the a­ rchetype – t­ his fundamental creed was flesh and blood also in Joseph; and every dignity of spirit and meaning seemed to him bound to that same self-­awareness’ (472). The

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‘dignity of spirit and meaning’ of human being as person is grounded ­accordingly – ­as Joseph knows and the Joseph novel e­ xposes – i­n a historical transparency of being, which can be narrated because it makes being meaningful and narratable.

Meaning of Life? Our insecurity towards the being and meaning of history is not the only indication that the thought of a narrative ‘transparency of being’ – in which the opacity of mere factual being becomes understandable and m ­ eaningful – ­is not as alien to human being as the prejudice of meaningless being suggests. There is another notion, which is peculiarly shaky and thoroughly commonplace in everyday life, that reveals consciousness’s inner dissatisfaction with its own separation of being and meaning: the question concerning whether life has meaning. It is often raised in a lamenting and resigned tone and, in general, answered in the negative. But even if human life is believed to be meaningless on the whole, it is nonetheless striking that, regardless of how one ultimately answers the question whether human life has meaning, most humans understand at least the question. If one understands what is meant with this question, then one has gained already an initial understanding of what in the Joseph novel is called the transparency of being. Whoever enquires into the meaning of life can at least conceive of the possibility that, in analogy to a novel or a theatre p ­ lay – ­that is, in analogy to something that, so to speak, inherently has meaning and can be u ­ nderstood – l­ife too is meaningful and understandable. Whoever enquires in this way can at least imagine his or her life, person or I to be meaningful and mean something. Yet this often goes without realizing that such a conception of meaningful life implies placing one’s own life in a greater context, and understanding oneself in analogy to the ‘person’ of a novel or a theatre ­play – f­or that, indeed, is what it means to ‘have meaning’. Those who, as it were, ‘routinely’ bemoan the meaninglessness of life are generally incapable or unwilling to notice this obvious implication of their complaint. They do not notice that focusing in some way on the meaning of life means being ready to understand oneself as a fellow actor in a play, as a figure in a novel. And the incapacity or unwillingness to distance oneself from one’s own being, from one’s own I that stubbornly insists on itself, may be precisely the reason one cannot experience the dimension of meaning of one’s own life story. What is missing is the sceptical and ironic distance towards one’s own being that every actor on the stage has to display in order to become the performer of a character role and to make his or her own being transparent to an overarching context of meaning. This incapacity to distance oneself from oneself is what, according to the Joseph novel, makes inattentive, thoughtless human beings with a ‘meaningless soul’ into what they are: they persevere in their isolated



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being, unwilling to place it in a narrative unity of meaning that would decentre their individual being. They are thus not in a position or not willing to take heed of the unities of meaning, of the echoes and allusions, through which their own existence is woven into a greater story.

The Author as Narrator and Reader Once identified, the theme of the linguistic and narrative decentring of the subject out of the hardened confines of its too narrowly conceived identity can be detected on widely different levels of the Joseph novel. And it can be detected, to be sure, not only with regard to the novel’s content, but likewise with regard to its form. Now it becomes clear how important it is for an adequate understanding of the novel that Thomas Mann appears in it as the author who, in writing, narrates by reading. The author decentres his traditional position as sovereign producer of texts by shaping his production as a form of reflective text reception. Thomas Mann reads the original text in order to be able to narrate it anew; he narrates it, however, also in a new and reflected form to be able to read it anew and, possibly, to read it better. Many of the especially meaningful passages of the novel are motivated by the author’s assiduous attempt to read the original text more closely than it is commonly read. An adequate understanding of the content of the Joseph novel thus takes its direction from a formal aspect: that the text explicitly presents itself as a re-narrating, as a re-­narrating that, in fact, is the result of careful reflection. The narrator of the novel reflects persistently and explicitly upon what a particular passage of the original text may have meant ‘in truth’, how to understand the point appropriately, whether it is more reasonable to grasp it in a literal or in a figurative sense. In other words, in reading the novel, we are ourselves following a reading. The Joseph novel is one of the peculiar narratives in which the narrator, himself seeking to understand something in reading, thereby assigns to the reader something to understand. Upon closer examination, the decentring of the narrator who himself appears as reader just repeats a decentring that already appears on the level of reading as soon as one acquires a new and better understanding of a text. This can happen only when the reader is prepared to place his or her ‘natural’, habitual and prized convictions up for discussion. Frequently, a correct understanding of a text is hindered not by a simple lack of understanding but rather by a misunderstanding arising from the reader’s prejudices and preferences. That is why the attentive reader must be alert and prepared to relativize his or her own presupposed opinions and expectations concerning the text. Every genuine understanding in which some pre-­understanding is revised is nothing other than a decentring of the reader, who gives up

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and corrects his or her own prejudice in order to honour the meaning of the text, thereby self-­critically distancing from the meaning that he or she previously would have liked to give to the text.

Meaning as Happiness or Happiness as Meaning In view of the original scene between Isaac and Jacob, the familiar understanding of the text has initially been called into question. Attention has been drawn to the surprising, and at first glance incomprehensible, fact that Jacob’s lie that he is Esau is not corrected over the further course of the narrative. This sceptical hesitation, which is not happy simply to go along with the common understanding of the text, first prompted, then, the farther-­reaching attention to the greater unity of meaning that grounds the understanding of the single scenes. The overarching unity of meaning makes clear, however, that the I-­ mistake, Jacob’s deception scene itself, presents a correction of being through meaning. In being, Jacob deceitfully passes himself off as the right son. Yet, in the end, this is no deception because, according to the meaning, he is the right son, so that the lie with regard to being is at once the truth with regard to meaning. That is why the Joseph novel goes to such pains to make being transparent for the subtext of meaning by explaining how Isaac himself unconsciously advances the betrayal in becoming ‘blind’. The novel demonstrates in detail that Esau, too, is not betrayed, because he is likewise ‘pious enough’ to recognize his own role in the great game of deception and truth. Esau must act and suffer, according to his role, which he knows already at bottom before he is factually betrayed in being, because he understands that this betrayal ­is – ­according to the ­meaning – n ­ o deception but, rather, the correction of a deception. The natural distinction in being between the firstborn Esau and the later-­born Jacob is corrected for the benefit of the spiritual distinction in meaning between both. Furthering our understanding thus essentially depends on how well this central distinction is understood with regard to the meaning. In other words: how can the fundamental difference in Esau’s and Jacob’s understanding of meaning be made intelligible from a still more fundamental distinction in their respective understandings of understanding? This crucial difference in how to understand understanding comes to light clearly when the two brothers meet again after many years. Jacob, first having had to flee following the theft of the blessing, served Laban for many years to marry Rachel before he finally returned. Now, much older, he encounters Esau, which ­is – ­despite the elapsed ­time – ­a delicate, if not life-­threatening, situation for Jacob. Upon seeing each other in their advanced years, Esau’s character now stands out fully in contrast to Jacob’s, as Esau says to him: ‘I’ve reconciled



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myself to my fate and am content. Do you think we underworlders down below are the sort who mope about our whole life long? Ho-­ho-­ho and pshaw! You’re badly mistaken there. True, we don’t strut about and roll our eyes with blessings on our head, but we live life, too, and right lustily in our own way, believe me. We too find it sweet to sleep with a woman, and we too have our share of love in our hearts for a bevy of children. Do you suppose that the curse for which I have you to thank, dearest rascal, turned me into a scabby, starving beggar?’ ‘I have more wine than water, and honey to spare, and oil and fruits, barley and wheat, more than I can eat’ (116). It’s not difficult to see here a caricature pushed to an unambiguous extreme. The passage sketches a man and places a character role on the stage of the narrative: someone interested in comfort and satisfaction, for whom achieving his goals is a g ­ iven – t­ hat is, who is successful in the aspirations that define his life, by following his heart’s content. Yet in the Joseph novel, this is precisely the unmistakable sign of not being blessed. Proudly parading the unwillingness to concern oneself with the concealed meaning of human being is the immanent and self-­ imposed reason for being meaningless. Esau is nothing less than proud that he has ‘resigned’ himself well to the misfortune of his life, the unfavourable affair of the blessing, having navigated his life happily into the harbour of bourgeois contentment. In fact, Esau goes so far as to offer to his brother, from out of the full feeling of the comfortable, cheerful life that he currently leads, to forget the past: ‘Ah, dearest ­brother . . . ­and now not one word more of the old shabby misdeed! . . . from now on we’ll not think of it. Let us live henceforth together as brothers and as twins before the Lord, and dip hands in the same bowl and never depart from one another again our whole life long. So come, let us journey now toward Seïr and there we shall dwell side by side.’ Esau holds out his hand for reconciliation by inviting his brother to share his way of life as ‘twin’. It appears as a generous offer of peace: the betrayed brother wants to forget the betrayal. Tellingly, Jacob remains silent concerning the offer a­ nd – i­n the words of the n ­ ovel – h ­ as his own thoughts on the matter: ‘Thanks but no thanks, Jacob thought. Am I supposed to become a flute-­playing goat in Edom as well, and hole up there forever, you dolt? That is neither God’s intention, nor my soul’s. Everything you say is excruciatingly asinine to my ears, for what happened between us cannot be forgotten. You mention it yourself with every twitch of your tongue. Yet your feeble mind deludes you into thinking that you can forget and forgive?’ (117). The ‘character role’ that appears to aim at reconciliation but actually aims at convenience is played by Esau; by contrast, the hard, unforgiving, proud role is played by Jacob, and with him lies the blessing. Jacob is the one who is aware of the uniqueness of the blessing, sensing in his brother’s offer a ploy of convenience, the will to neutralization, an attack

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on the distinction that is posited with the blessing. It is entirely characteristic of Jacob to hold on tightly to this distinction and reproach Esau for not appreciating its value, for wanting to forget the unforgettable. Esau knows that the blessing is at issue, but, in his mind, it is not sufficiently important to make too great an effort for its sake. Thus, he quickly consoles himself with the comfort and satisfaction granted by the neatly arranged being of the world. For the overarching unity of meaning of the Joseph novel, it is very instructive how the narrator posits an irreconcilable contrast between Jacob’s alert attentiveness to the blessing and Esau’s indolent comfort. More specifically, the contrast concerns the question of the meaning of human life. Esau and Jacob give two fundamentally different answers to the central question ‘What is human being?’ And these two, irreconcilably opposing answers make them into the two ‘models’ in the struggle for the blessed or unblessed self-­understanding of human being. For Esau, the meaning of life ultimately consists in being happy; he is satisfied with life and considers it ‘meaningful’ to the extent he succeeds in achieving comfort. Jacob, by contrast, as has already become clear, understands the meaning of life entirely differently from his older ­brother – n ­ amely, as transparent intelligibility in an overarching unity of meaning and not as the meaningless narrow-­mindedness of self-­serving satisfaction. Mistaking meaning for happiness and satisfaction is precisely what separates the two brothers irreconcilably: for Esau, happiness is the true meaning that matters in life; for Jacob, by contrast, the experience of meaning is true happiness. Whereas Esau is the cheerful natural lad who finds his meaning in happiness, Jacob is the blessed figure who finds his happiness in meaning.

Connecting Thoughts It is in the stories of Jacob, then, where the Joseph novel narratively forms a person who is blessed, who finds his happiness in meaning, in contemplating the meaning of the immediately given. Jacob reveals he is receptive to meanings in an exceptional manner: ‘Jacob’s power of expression, however, as well as the movement in his voice, the elevation of his speech, the solemnity of his person in general, were all connected with the same predisposition and tendency that explained why he could so often be found in such strong and picturesque expression of meaning. This was his gift for connecting thoughts, which governed his inner life to such a degree that it really shaped it’ (70). In the figure of Jacob, the novel makes exemplarily clear what it means for the being of a person to consist in the way he understands. More specifically, understanding is a peculiar gift for connecting thoughts, through which the given is no longer taken in its immediate isolation and, thus, precisely not understood. Rather, the individual is freed from his



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meaningless isolation, which was brought about by thoughtlessness, and restored to a narrative unity of meaning with past and future. In this light, one reads further about Jacob that ‘he thought almost exclusively in such associations. At every step, echoes and correspondences struck hard at his soul, diverted and abducted it into the wide, mixing within the present moment both what was past and what was promised, creating the distortion and refraction of vision so typical of brooding’ (70). Jacob does not project a unity generated by himself into reality that inherently lacks unity, but is instead made to be affected in his thinking by echoes and correspondences that constitute the essence of the unity of reality. Herein lies the nearness of what is ‘meaningful’ to spirit and to the brooding which, with regard to Jacob, is emphasized over and over. The penchant for connecting thoughts exhibits, in fact, an intimate kinship to contemplative or reflective thinking, which underlies all activities of spirit, which belong to spirit because they distance themselves from being tied through the senses to what is isolated in the here and now, paying attention instead to the overarching meaning that is traced in thought and made explicit. Yet spirit’s distinct attention to meaning applies above all to the accompanying unity, since meaning and unity are closely related. That is why the gaze of someone contemplating the unity of meaning is deflected, for he is constantly transported out of the immediacy of the here and now. In the novel, Jacob is repeatedly depicted standing still and (similar to the Platonic Socrates) starting to ponder, while those standing around, speechless and in awe, aren’t entirely sure what to do with the curious figure, raised from the isolated circumstances of everyday life into the solemnity of connecting thoughts. To be sure, as the Joseph novel knows very well, the awe of those standing around is rarely free of unease, mockery and resentment for the lack of understanding: ‘For even if fear and awe before such overwrought expression were deeper and darker in those days than in ours, even back then, the ordinary fellow, if threatened by such expressive reactions, was filled with a lowbrow desire to keep them at b ­ ay – ­which might best be put in words as “For heaven’s sake, this could get serious!”’ (70). Resonating in this formulation may be experiences that Thomas Mann himself could have had often enough: ordinary people encounter a meaningful man, who, like Jacob, is blessed with a penchant for connecting thoughts, with amazement and awe, but at the same time with the lowbrow desire to keep him at bay. This is readily clothed in disconcertment expressed in a low voice: ‘Why so splendid and solemn? Couldn’t one be more modest and humble?’ Here the knot of the drama, which keeps the Joseph novel in suspense, is tied. The meaningful I in which the inner essence of a narrative ontology is brought to expression, and also consciousness, of itself evokes a peculiar antipathy among those who feel neglected by the one who is

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distinguished and ­blessed – ­an antipathy that, as the Joseph novel will show, can escalate to hatred and bloodlust towards one’s own brother.

Cain and Abel Jacob’s stories are also exemplary for the complex narrative unity of meaning of Genesis, which is re-­narrated in the Joseph novel, in that the true deeper dimension only becomes accessible once it is placed in the context of other stories, reminding one of the coined model that repeats itself variously in the later events. The model that is varied in the central story of the dispute between Esau and Jacob concerning Isaac’s blessing is the narrative of the very first brother pair of human history: the story of the original dispute between Cain and Abel. The pattern is strikingly similar. Cain is the older firstborn son, Abel the younger later-­born. Moreover, in their story the decisive preference falls upon the younger brother before the older. Both brothers sacrifice for God, yet God turns only to one of the two. The original text is completely silent about any reasons for this preference: ‘And the Lord respected Abel and his offering, but he did not respect Cain and his offering. And Cain was very angry’ (Gen. 4: 4–5). The central theme of blessing and preference that will determine the further story up to Joseph and his brothers is already discernible, then, in the original dispute of the first brother pair. It is, as it were, a ‘familial’ theme, for it is not uncommon among siblings for one to feel that the other is preferred. This is how it was with the two original brothers: the one was ‘angry’ because God (here taking the place of the father) prefers the other. And this preference or blessing is the sole motive for Cain murdering his brother: he is offended and envious, so he slays his younger brother in order to undo the preference conferred upon him. A bit of ‘unbelief’ – which is deemed necessary by the Joseph novel for an adequate understanding of the sacred s­ tories – i­ s needed in order to raise explicitly the, rather obvious, question: in the story of Cain and Abel, is not God the one responsible, the actual murderer? Presumably, had God not let Himself get carried away into preferring the one so absolutely and groundlessly, no murder at all would have taken place. It seems confirmation of God’s ‘responsibility’ for what happened is provided in the immediate resumption of the story. God punishes Cain remarkably not in the sense of an ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’, but rather by ‘cursing’ him and granting him a fickle and fleeting life. Not only does Cain remain alive, but God even threatens everyone with death who seeks Cain’s life: ‘And the Lord said to him, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him’ (Gen. 4: 15). To understand the later stories, one must take note, then, that the rivalry between the brothers, which escalates to a deadly hatred, arises solely out



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of disappointed love, for it is in the end solely a matter of the blessing, the love of the father. But only one is blessed, leaving the other with aggrieved anger and envy towards the preferred one. The motif of the ambiguity of the blessing will appear again and again in the novel in various forms before finally culminating in Joseph and his difficult relationship with his brothers, which likewise amounts to plans of murder. Upon closer examination, the motif is visible in the title of the novel: Joseph and his brothers. Here, the troubling preference of the one before the others is articulated succinctly. The one who matters is designated first, with a proper name, and the nameless others are distinguished from him and appear after him, in the plural. Thus, the profound disquiet that holds the novel as a whole in suspense, the blessing that distinguishes and prefers and that is bestowed upon certain individuals, is, as it were, written on its cover. Understanding the narrative meaning of the novel means understanding the meaning of the blessing: why are some preferred? Where do guilt and responsibility lie in the deadly dispute between those preferred and those neglected? Is the blessing itself perhaps the true ‘mistake’? The complex unity of meaning of the Joseph novel is devoted to finding an answer to these questions, which will diverge from Cain’s answer.

The Role of Human Being The peculiarly ambivalent meaning of the blessing, which the Joseph novel seeks to unravel, may be elucidated from yet another a­ ngle – n ­ amely, in the context of the theatrical understanding of the world as stage. Here, the thorn associated with the preference and the accompanying feeling of neglect take on the form of the question why there are such diverse roles in the Divine Comedy. Isn’t it unjust that there are, appearing on the stage of the world theatre, beggars and kings, the wise and the stupid, the good and the evil, the unhappy and the ­happy – ­even once one appreciates this, it is by no means clear from the outset whether the king or the beggar, the evil one or the good one, plays the more meaningful role in the unity of meaning of the comedy. Moreover, the analogy of the world theatre demands of the understanding that it consider the thought addressed ­above – ­appearing at first glance thoroughly ­objectionable – ­that human actions (for instance, Esau’s plans of murder) are committed ‘ceremoniously’, as the novel formulates it: that they take place according to the pre-­figurations of a coined archetype, repeated in the here and now of the present, ‘like a feast’. This thought seems objectionable because, considering that the individual must play a certain character role in his life, the question immediately arises: in the role-­like character of his existence, does he not lose his personal freedom, the individual responsibility for his life? Interestingly, the concept of ‘role’ is by no means foreign to everyday thought, though

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it is characteristic of the common understanding of ‘person’ and ‘role’ that they mutually negate each other: where there is a ‘role’, there is no ‘person’, and vice versa. Everyday thought does concede the importance in human life of performing certain ­roles – ­that the world is, then, at least partly or periodically like a stage. On this stage, we play the role of the teacher and the pupil, of the salesperson and the customer, of the prosecutor, the defendant and the judge. It is essential to the everyday understanding of world and self, which Thomas Mann criticizes in the Joseph novel, that it takes the role play to be externally imposed on the person, specifically by the conditions of the social public sphere. According to the common understanding, what makes the public sphere into the public sphere is that we can enter it only by adopting a role. The everyday understanding definitely recognizes this public sphere with its offices, ceremonies and general rules of ­behaviour – ­but it regards it as the inauthentic, impersonal sphere. When humans appear in the public sphere, taking on a social role or commitment, they are precisely not themselves. They are not ‘genuine’, not ‘persons’, but rather merely playing a role. This conviction defines, more or less, the ‘bourgeois’ understanding of world and self, and is thus most familiar from typical everyday expressions and mediocre novels. This conviction accompanies the bourgeois life at every turn as a routine sigh at the necessity to represent this or that in the public sphere, and as a gratefulness for the ‘freedom’ of being allowed to be entirely oneself in private, no longer having to satisfy any demands of the general public.2 While the bourgeois self-­understanding notices indeed the role character of our life, it understands it as alienated artificiality, as an unfortunate distraction from the true ‘kernel’, from the true ‘being’ of human being, and precisely this true kernel is supposed to be the person. Human beings are f­ree – t­hat is, completely ­themselves – ­if they do not play a role. By contrast, the theatre is a metaphor for unfreedom and self-­alienation. The thought-­model of the actor reveals how not to understand oneself. But then it becomes entirely incomprehensible why the theatre and the actor have so greatly fascinated humanity since time immemorial. Does one really attend a play to see how humans as actors become ‘enslaved’ through the model of their role and ‘alienated’ from their actual being? Do we congratulate actors when they succeed in breaking free of Shakespeare’s dictatorial stipulations, and in spontaneously reciting their own text? That we cannot seriously answer these questions in the affirmative reveals that the bourgeois understanding of the person and freedom is by no means as self-­evident as it may initially appear. With the analogy of the theatre, the self-­knowledge emerges that, for us, ‘being human’– in a sense that still needs to be ­clarified – ­is a task, a role. In a demanding, ‘solemn’ sense, we are humans not simply by being what we are anyway, but rather in attempting to do justice in the first place to something pre-­ given, the demand of a role that is not up to our free choice.



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That the celebration of the play has fascinated humans in an existential manner since time immemorial can only be explained in that theatre is a school of human self-­knowledge. Its most important teaching lies not so much in what is played, but rather in how it is played. One can see that what is ordinarily called ‘freedom’ (the choice to act in this or that way) appears on the stage just as the clumsiness of falling out of the role. By contrast, one may also learn that on the stage what is ordinarily called ‘unfreedom’ (the determinateness of a coined character, that one ought to act this way and not another way) is the basis for the ‘solemn’ freedom of the actor. This makes clear once again that we realize our freedom concretely not primarily in choosing, but rather in understanding: it is not those who simply choose something who are called free, but rather, firstly, those who understand what they are doing. Or, put differently: human freedom is not realized in what one does, but rather in how one understands what one does. That is why those who have at their disposal all possibilities of action may be unfree, for they do not understand themselves in acting, while those who are given a model for their action (like an actor) can be free, for they understand their action and perform it from out of this understanding.

The Dignity of Universality ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ Up to now, the leitmotif has appeared almost on its own in a certain reading. This ‘common’ reading understands what matters in terms of an isolating demarcation towards all others who likewise say ‘I’. What anyone can say is thus unimportant, average and boring, so that what matters is the exceptional human in his or her singularity and apartness. Average universality (‘commonality’) stands on the one side, and the divergent and interesting individual (the ‘hero’) on the other. The common reading understands the particular, special human, then, as the one who knows how to distinguish him- or herself and who matters in his or her unique individuation. What distinguishes him or her is the demarcation from the universal. Particular and special is the one who is apart, who represents something unusual by not being what anyone is. Earlier reflections have made clear how misleading this initial reading would be for an adequate understanding of the Joseph novel. In fact, the exact opposite holds for the understanding of self and world that underlies the novel: what matters is not what makes one special in contrast to the universal, but rather precisely the opposite, esteeming one’s internal universality, taking it seriously and attempting to do justice to it in one’s concrete life story. What matters lies precisely in what anyone can do. Thus, it is correctly and profoundly expressed in the universal I-­saying: anyone can say I. The often neglected fact that anyone can say ‘I’ indicates that we are all human ­beings – ­in a sense that still needs to be clarified.

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The ‘I’ that anyone can say is something more and something other than what each individual can be in his or her isolated apartness, precisely because anyone can say ‘I’ with the same justification. Universal human being, which expresses itself in I-­saying, demands of every one not just to be what one is for oneself but rather to display one’s human b ­ eing – i­n other words, to shed the ‘simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’ and overcome one’s ‘naïve pride in being first and unique’. What results from this seems at first glance ­paradoxical – ­namely, that humans succeed in acquiring knowledge of their own universality only in special, rare moments of their lives, for it is generally difficult for me to reflect upon what is not my very own. Attending to what is common to all is a rare achievement because it requires looking beyond the narrow confines of one’s own egocentric individuality. From time to time, single individuals may stand out: by taking that which most succeed at only in exceptional moments and turning it into the principle of their consciousness and existence. The peculiar dialectic of human existence manifests itself clearly in the peculiar fact that the distinction of particular humans consists precisely in the capacity to recollect what distinguishes every ­human – ­namely, being human. Ordinarily, humans give little regard to the infinite dignity that each one as human being possesses and therefore equally shares with every other (like I-­saying), and consequently strive for something ‘higher’ – that is, something ‘apart’. While the universal essence of human being is in this way accessible and knowable to every individual, the self-­knowledge demanded by human being is not trivial precisely for this reason: because one ought to recognize oneself not, as is common, in one’s particular individuality, in one’s specialness, but rather in one’s universality. Such a reversal of perspective succeeds only rarely, for it fundamentally contradicts the natural everyday consciousness that is fixated on each person’s own individuality. This capacity to change perspective, which makes humans into humans, is what is paradigmatically shown by the actor. As an actor, one first becomes what one is by understanding how to dissociate oneself from one’s own particular being in order to display what the meaning of one’s role demands. In the diversity of roles the human being has to play on the stage of the world, always one and the same is displayed for the understanding eye: human dignity, which exhibits itself in the freedom to understand oneself in each role as a representative of universal human being.3 Cain is capable of seeing only the difference between his own role and Abel’s role because he is not able to raise himself above himself to see his own existence as a ‘character role’. The difference on the stage of the world is thus an insult to his self-­love, without him realizing that this insult could help him to know himself in his humanity. Instead, he murders his brother in order to annihilate the insulting difference,



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showing that he has already despised his own humanity that would have allowed him to recognize that, across the difference of roles, he and his brother are essentially the same – namely, brothers.

Humanity in Each Person Understanding Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel substantially as a project of philosophy is based not only on the idea that the universal essence of human being can be determined narratively and illustrated literarily, but also on the idea that human being can be reflected philosophically and explicated argumentatively. Time and again, and specifically at eminent turning points of its history, philosophy has found formulations to conceptualize the pathos of the universality of human being. Art, religion and philosophy thus agree in their marvelling respect of the enigmatic experience that human being, in its universal humanity, ought to be understood not as something ordinary, but as something extraordinary. For this enigmatic experience, Kant found what is presumably the most important formulation, which is supposed to guarantee all others. It is connected with the pathos of the absolute claim that results for every individual human from the infinite dignity of his or her universal humanity. Kant’s categorical imperative knows numerous formulations, though the most profound one is the following: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (1997, 38). It is notable that Kant’s phrasing does not read: ‘So act that you use each person not merely as a means but also as an end.’ Kant’s categorical imperative relates, then, not directly to persons. What we ought to honour, according to Kant, is not the individual person as such, but humanity in the other (and one’s own) person; not the person in its isolation, but humanity in its universality. With the categorical imperative, the individual person thus becomes a representative of universality, which literally means a mask through which the universal can speak and ought to gain reality on the stage of the world. And that which ought to articulate itself through our personhood and be represented through us as p ­ ersons – ­Kant calls it by its name: humanity. For this reason, we act ‘out of duty’ (and no longer ­egoistically – ­that is, at most, ‘according to duty’) precisely to the extent to which we make our individuality transparent to the universal human model that we display in our individual person, and which we each ought to respect in the person of others. According to Kant, human beings who act out of duty no longer worry about their individual ‘apartness’ because they pursue a higher and more demanding concept of their human being, which consists in being a representative of humanity in their individual person: ‘the duty to oneself consists’, for Kant, precisely ‘in preserving the dignity of humanity in

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one’s own person’ (2007, 476). One can, according to Kant, ‘value oneself by a low as well as by a high standard, depending on whether one views oneself as a sensible being (in terms of one’s animal nature) or as an intelligible being (in terms of one’s moral predisposition)’ (2017, 201). In other words, one can understand oneself as a low (individual) or high (universal) I. To be sure, the central self-­knowledge that leads to the understanding of oneself as a representative of universality is designated by Kant as an imperative, as a duty. It is also clear that in everyday existence we mostly do precisely the opposite of what is demanded of us, for we ordinarily use humanity, both in our person and in the person of each other, only as a means. We instrumentalize the capacities that we, as human beings, have in common with every other human being (language and thought, knowledge, action and hope), in order to attain something distinctive with them, something specifically advantageous and pleasant for us. We employ language, thought and other gifts solely for self-­serving gains; we use our spirit, our superiority over the world, only as a means to pursue private aims within the world. It is particularly instructive in the formulation of the categorical imperative that first one’s own person is mentioned, and only subsequently the ‘person of any other’. It is, indeed, characteristic for Kant’s understanding of human being that one is committed not only to others (and put to the test by others), but also and primarily to oneself. It is precisely with regard to themselves that human beings can fall short of the demand connected with the absolute dignity of universal human b ­ eing – ­namely, by understanding themselves only as accidental individual beings, disregarding humanity in their own person and degrading themselves to mere means. The true antithesis to egoism of the individual is not the ‘many’ of a social ‘community’, since the social can and may lay no claim to representing humanity. Thomas Mann expresses this important thought by saying that ‘what characterizes the human being as a social being is not what is actually appreciable in him. The human being is not only a social but also a metaphysical being.’ That is, ‘he is not only an individual but also a personality. It is therefore wrong to confuse the supraindividual with the social, to place it completely in the social sphere: one thereby neglects the metaphysically supraindividual; for the personality, not the mass, is the actual bearer of the universal’ (1987, 179). Selfishly misusing the gifts that make us into personal representatives of ­humanity – ­that is, into ‘personality’ – by understanding the gifts not as ends but rather merely as means in the private striving for happiness, is accompanied in the end by a silent resignation and self-­contempt that no ‘social recognition’ could ever compensate. Such humans understand themselves merely as individual beings, or social beings that are a­ part – ­which ultimately amounts to the same thing because, in both cases, they understand themselves as separated from the metaphysical whole of reality.



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As a result, such an isolated life is necessarily meaningless and must satisfy itself with the ‘substitute meaning’ of private happiness (or social recognition). By the same token, in resigning oneself to having no aspirations, one obstructs the possibility of seeing that each human as human not only is something but also means something, because each human takes part in the (hi)story of humanity, w ­ hich – ­in a way that, admittedly, still needs to be ­clarified – ­is interwoven with the meaning of being as a whole.

3 Narrative Irony

Deception and Disappointment – Leah – Day and Night – Nonsense – Jacob’s Four Deceptions – The Denied Sacrifice – Dialectic of Spiritual Inheritance – Hope – Joseph’s Gift – Mercy of the Last Deception

Deception and Disappointment The preceding reflections have shown how helpful the analogy of the theatre is in illuminating human self-­knowledge. Yet this deepening of human self-­understanding also raises the new question concerning how far human existence can be compared to playing a part in a play, for it differs from the thought-­model of the actor by an additional complexity that is ordinarily missing from theatre. In theatre, the roles of the play are usually well known in advance, and it is clear how they are assigned in a particular performance: Mr Hutter knows that today he is playing Polonius and not Hamlet. He may play him poorly, mediocrely or well, but he always knows which role he is attempting to portray as well as possible. This is precisely not the case in real life. Not only is it not easy for humans to recognize at all in their life stories that they are playing a role, but they also have difficulty recognizing concretely which role they are (or ought to be) playing. Isaac oscillates between his natural father role (the ‘small myth’) that prefers the firstborn, and his role in the story of the Abrahamic blessing (the ‘great myth’), which must prefer the evidently blessed one even if he was born later. It is thus characteristic for the central figures of the Joseph novel that, while they possess a clear consciousness of the general role-­like character of their life, they nonetheless err and delude themselves again and again in understanding their concrete role. In this respect, they are exemplary for the mode of existence of human being: no one can be certain that the part he or she subjectively means to portray in life is indeed the part that he or she in fact plays on the stage of the world theatre. Over the course



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of our life story, it may happen that we become attentive to our true role precisely when our life plans fail and our real life takes a turn that is completely different from what our understanding of our role had previously led us to expect. This is clear already in the original scene in which the leitmotif is articulated: ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The point of the scene is that the prudent precaution expressed in the sentence is not successful. Isaac intends to protect himself as he received, in response to his question ‘Who is there?’, Jacob’s deeply ambiguous answer: ‘It is I.’ He attempts to prepare himself for the confusions in the maze of I-­saying: with the sentence, he makes himself attentive to the danger of the ambiguity of the ‘I’. But it belongs to the deeper narrative dimension of the original scene that the prudent and precautious sentence, intended to protect one from mistake, is uttered precisely in a situation in which this precaution fails. In this way, the narrative meaning of the original scene turns against the subjective intent of Isaac, whose mistaken understanding of the roles is corrected by the unity of meaning of the story. A consequence of the identity of narrative form and content is that the reader of the story is confronted with a difficulty very similar to the one narrated in the story. The reader must cultivate an understanding of the original scene of the novel without knowing for certain whether this understanding, over the further course of the story, will not prove to be mistaken and be corrected. And, indeed, it has already been shown that we have not adequately understood the meaning of the story of Esau and Jacob until we have revised the first understanding, oriented to the letter of the story. The unity of meaning of the whole story revealed that Jacob’s deceptive I-­saying does not amount to betrayal. The crux of this change of perspective was made clear more specifically by the double aspect of being and meaning: what begins as a mistaken identity in the struggle between Esau and Jacob for Isaac’s blessing is in fact no mistaken identity in the end, for the wrong one in being, namely, Jacob, is the correct and right one in meaning, whereas the correct and right one in being, namely Esau the firstborn, is the false one in truth, in the meaning of the story. Subverting the initial appearance in this way may be called narrative irony, for every story becomes a story (narrative) only when meaning prevails over being. In the story of Esau and Jacob, this means concretely that the one who is blessed in meaning prevails in the end also in being, even though this is in opposition to the literally given sequence of birth. The genuinely narrative composition of the story consists, then, precisely in that the opaque being of what is factually given gradually becomes transparent to the meaning meant in it. Just as readers understand a story only by cultivating an expectation of meaning, which, over the course of the story, is modified, often even revised, so is the narrative reality of the Joseph novel substantially coloured by how the persons that it tells about deceive themselves in key

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climactic scenes. Only through disappointment do they obtain a true understanding of self and world. Yet deception is only possible when a certain understanding of being and meaning is ­cultivated – a­ nd then disappointed. That is why the meaning of the whole within the story of the Joseph novel becomes patent especially in those moments when the protagonists of the story trust in a particular understanding of meaning, which is then suddenly disappointed by the progress of the story and corrected by the subversive irony of the unity of meaning. Scenes of deception and disappointment constitute key scenes of the novel’s narrative. Literal being not only becomes transparent to its meaning, but the distinctive narrative meaning of the story prevails ironically and subversively over a merely subjectively meant meaning.

Leah By means of the important aspect of human suffering, the second key ­scene – ­which in this sense may complement the first original s­cene – ­will deepen the idea of a temporally and narratively formed subjectivity. In this scene, it is Jacob who is deceived. In the Joseph novel, Jacob is not only the knowing director, who arranges a cunning I-­mistake grounded in the fact that anyone can say ‘I’; he is also the unknowing victim of a precisely analogously staged I-­mistake in which he must suffer the bitter experience that anyone can say ‘I’. The scene in question appears in the original story, which the Joseph novel reflectively re-­narrates, and it constitutes, together with the first scene in Isaac’s tent, an intriguing and also startling composition: he who is distinguished by an I-­mistake, rich in blessing, is betrayed by an exact mirror-­image I-­mistake and hurt in his innermost self. That both forms of ­deception – t­he actively staged and the passively s­uffered – ­appear in Jacob’s stories is perhaps the clearest sign that the ‘blessing’ at issue does not mean what Cain and Esau take it to. The blessed one is not simply the uncontested ‘victor’ who succeeds at everything; rather, the one who seeks happiness in understanding meaning often experiences the bitter suffering of believing to understand, only to discover, in fact, not to understand. Here, the scene at issue is that of Jacob’s wedding night. Jacob, who hired himself out to Laban for seven years as a servant so that he could marry Rachel whom he passionately loves, believes to have reached the goal of his hopes and ­wishes – ­yet he is deceived. The Joseph novel frames the events of the tragic wedding night in such a way that the reader cannot help but think back to the scene in the dark tent between the blind Isaac and Jacob dressed as Esau. The cunning Laban explains to the astonished Jacob that it is traditional custom for the bride to be veiled during the wedding night and led into



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the matrimonial chamber in total darkness. Once again, darkness, the suspension of identifying sight, the dependence on hearing and the language distinguished in hearing, play a decisive role: ‘the veiled bride was inside the room, let in by Laban, who at once shut the door again; and they were alone in the dark’ (245). In the darkness of the matrimonial room, Jacob asks: ‘Is that you, Rachel?’ The reader’s attentive recollection connects the here and now of the wedding scene with the earlier original scene in the tent in which Isaac, in the dark, asked Jacob: ‘Who are you?’ The one who was asked at that time now asks himself with similar trepidation. There is a cruel precision in the narrative irony with which Jacob now experiences the deception and disappointment that Isaac had to experience. Just like Isaac’s earlier question, Jacob’s question seeks to make sure that the person who is unrecognizable in the dark is in fact the person whom he expects: ‘Is that you, Rachel?’ Back then, Jacob, who was taken to be Esau, was cunningly evasive in his response to Isaac: ‘It is I.’ And now Leah, who is taken to be Rachel, in the darkness of the tent says: ‘I am yours, my dear lord, in bliss.’ Just as with Isaac in the past, the highly ambiguous ‘I’ of the response cannot reassure Jacob, for anyone can say ‘I’. With Thomas Mann, this culminates in a masterly staged climax in which the confusing reversal of the earlier blessing scene is highlighted with full poetic intent, making clear the deep ambiguity of Jacob’s being blessed. After Leah responds with her evasive ‘I am yours in bliss’, Jacob says into the darkness: ‘Leah, your older sister, could have said that.’ Not ‘the sense of it, but the way of speaking it, as is understandable. The voices of sisters are surely similar, and the words from their mouths have a similar’ sound; ‘Behold, I am a little afraid of my blind words, for it was easy for me to say that the darkness has no power over our speech, and yet I sense how this gloom thrusts itself into my words and drenches them so that they frighten me a little’ (247). Jacob’s self-­ assurance, appearing as trust in the triumphant sovereignty of language, is beginning to unravel. His trust that darkness has no power over the inner light of speech begins to fade, for he notices that the meaning of language is ambiguous and open to misunderstanding. Does the ‘It is I’ refer to Leah according to the way of speaking ­or – ­as Jacob suddenly ­fears – ­also according to being, which is not illuminated by any word? The darkness of opaque being penetrates Jacob’s words and frightens him. What follows is the actual blindness scene, much more tragic and drastic than in the original scene in the dark tent of the father. In the earlier scene, Isaac said: ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ He was being careful, trying to get things clear, but it was of no use. Now Jacob says to Leah, whom he takes to be Rachel: ‘Let us praise the difference, and the fact that you are Rachel and I am Jacob and, for instance, not Esau, my red brother. Both our forefathers and I have p ­ ondered many times

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beside the sheepfold just who God is, and our children and children’s children will ponder after us. But may my words be bright in this hour so that the darkness retreats before them, and I say: God is the difference! And therefore I shall now lift your veil, my beloved, so that I may see you with seeing hands’ (247). Here, where the meaning of the story is getting at something other than what each individual means in his own role, the Joseph novel shapes the finitude of human precaution and prudence once more, now elevating it to the extreme. Jacob is proud of having been given the role of the blessed one, that he is Jacob and not Esau. And he says this in precisely that scene of the story where, according to the meaning, he is E ­ sau – t­ hat is, the one who lacks understanding, who is betrayed and deceived. The seemingly fixed lines drawn between the persons become porous in an enigmatic and irritating way, for Jacob likewise errs when he self-­ assuredly draws a line between the two sisters, happily reassuring himself that Rachel and not Leah is facing him: ‘Let us praise the difference.’ How bitter and uncompromising the narrative irony of the scene is in light of the concrete situation in which these exultant and imploring sentences are spoken. One may be tempted to abstract the striking sentence ‘God is the difference!’ from the narrative context of the scene and to make it, as an isolated sentence, into the message of the Joseph novel. Yet this would miss the true meaning of the scene and the sentence, which is thoroughly ironic: the sentence appears in a situation in which the blessed one, despite his greatest effort, precisely does not succeed in getting right the difference that is most urgent for him, so that the unsettled self-­reassurance ‘God is the difference’ is compromised by the narrative irony of the unity of meaning. Had the story resumed with Jacob invoking the God of his fathers as God of the differences, followed by light so that he could have discovered the betrayal in time, the meaning of the sentence and the scene would have been entirely different. Then everything would be fine, and Jacob would have been narrowly saved by the bestowed ‘difference’; then God would have demonstrated His ‘power of differences’, which Jacob praisingly attributes to Him. But this is not how the story resumes. Instead, the meaning of the story consists precisely in that Jacob, the blessed one, deceives himself in his understanding of being and meaning. This is its ironic-­narrative meaning.1 Again, it is not easy to understand what the deeper meaning of the deception specifically consists in. Why is it meaningful that Jacob is betrayed and deceived in the way he is? In fact, he is betrayed twice at once: once by Laban’s undetected switching of Leah for Rachel under the pretext of the confusing fact that anyone can say ‘I’ without difference; then, so it seems at least, also by ‘God the difference’, who precisely does not reveal the invoked difference in a moment when it was most urgently needed.



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It is necessary, however, to raise the question about the meaning concealed here. This story must not simply be taken as a curious, ununderstood fact. It is evidently meaningful that the one who obtained the ­blessing – ­and also obtained it rightfully – through the deception of the I-­mistake is, at the same time, the one who must suffer what he committed as a perpetrator likewise, as victim: the cunning I-­mistake in the dark. It thus belongs essentially to the meaning of the scene that there is no saving ‘intervention’ in the tragic wedding night (just as little as in the scene in Isaac’s tent). Again, what does not happen is at least as important as what does. As the story progresses, it confirms the peculiar ‘validity’ of the I-­mistake, since neither the fraudulent marriage nor the fraudulent blessing is revoked. After the discovery the next morning of the deceitful substitution of his bride, Jacob expresses his outrage to Laban. Yet Laban remains absolutely calm and very soon both men begin to haggle about the improved conditions under which Jacob may acquire Rachel in addition to her sister Leah. After some back and forth, they agree to a longer period of service and a shortened period until the second marriage with Rachel. The chapter concludes with a laconic sentence, which is distinctive precisely in its unaffected terseness: ‘“Yes, man, it shall be so”, Jacob said and went back to Leah’ (253). Still fully affected by the egregious shock of disappointment and the subsequent anger, Jacob now resigns himself astoundingly fast to the disappointment of his e­ xpectation – ­and returns to Leah. Jacob does not draw the conclusion, then, that he should reverse in some way retrospectively the suffered deception. Leah remains his wife. Only in this way can the story resume in its enigmatic distinctive meaning, for Leah is initially the one who is fruitful, bestowing Jacob with sons: Reuben, Jacob’s firstborn, is conceived in the dark of the confused wedding night. Rachel, by contrast, is the one to whom the ‘blessing’ of fruitfulness is long denied. To be sure, even more important for an adequate understanding of the narrative unity of meaning of the story is the ending of Jacob’s and Joseph’s stories. In the end, Jacob will pass on the blessing not to Rachel’s son Joseph, but to Leah’s son Judah. Is Leah, then, the ‘right one’ according to the ­meaning – ­in the same way that Jacob was the ‘right one’ according to the meaning? Is Rachel, whom Jacob loves profoundly, the ‘wrong one’ according to the meaning, which is why Joseph, Jacob’s favourite son who was born to Rachel, is denied the blessing in the end even though it was originally intended for him by his father? Is Judah the ‘right one’, Joseph the ‘wrong one’? This is, at least, how it seems. Whether Jacob’s and Joseph’s stories from the Joseph novel will actually be understood and narrated in this sense cannot be decided, however, until we arrive at the end of the step-­by-­ step reconstruction of the narrative unity of meaning, which was merely anticipated here in its questionableness.

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Day and Night In the Joseph novel, the narrator is not content to re-­narrate Jacob’s tragic wedding night in an extended and exaggerated form compared to the original version; rather, the narrative is preceded by an episode that does not appear in the original version and, thus, is especially suitable for distinguishing the narrator’s own understanding of the narrative. At issue is a dream of Jacob’s in which he ­anticipates – i­ n an alienated ­way – ­his impending deception on his wedding night, without knowing, however, that that is what he is doing: ‘I cannot exactly tell the difference’, Jacob says to the other person in the dream, ‘between what I know on my own and what I am experiencing from you.’ And he receives the obscure and fitting response: ‘If you did not know it’, then ‘I could not tell it to you’ (232). Thereupon, the insight is disclosed to Jacob that he anticipates in his dream without really knowing it in his waking consciousness: ‘Even in her indifference, night knows the truth, and the awakened prejudices of day are nothing to her. For one female body is like another, good for loving, good for conceiving. Only the face marks the difference between  one and the other, making us think that in conceiving we want the one and not the other. For the face belongs to day, which is full of awakened illusions, but it is nothing to night, which knows the truth’ (233). Obviously, it is the precise poetic intent to have Jacob dream before his wedding night of the ‘indifference of the night’ in which all female bodies are equally good for loving and for conceiving, for he will undergo what he dreamingly anticipates. To be sure, he does not know what he anticipates, and precisely for this reason he must undergo and suffer it. Here, Freud’s relevant insight, which the Joseph novel orients itself towards in content and language, notes that, while the dreamer knows what his dream means, ‘he does not know that he knows it and for that reason thinks that he does not know it’. Thus, there are, according to Freud, ‘things in a man’s soul which he knows without knowing that he knows them’ (1961, 101). The waking consciousness of the human I is thus always already decentred by a knowledge reaching down to the depths of the night that supports and nourishes the isolated I in its narrow here and now, without knowing during the day that it knows more than the narrow confines of its bourgeois identity suggest. Thus, the I caught in the here and now does not know (though knows dreamingly) that it stands in the ­unconscious – ­as the novel formulates it, ‘open to the rear, overflowed into earlier times, into areas beyond his own individuality’. The I knows this truth half-­consciously, but does not raise it to the clear consciousness of daylight. It prefers to repress the truth, which may fundamentally call into question the alleged autonomy of its isolated existence. According to Freud, the nocturnal truth of the unconscious keeps ready for the bourgeois consciousness of self and freedom the ‘major blow’ that it is ‘not even master in its own house, but remains dependent on scanty



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information of what is going on unconsciously in the life of its soul’ (1963, 285). The dreaming Jacob thus responds to the grievous affront that calls into question ‘the awakened prejudices of day’ with outraged resistance: ‘What crude and unfeeling words’ – and the Joseph novel expressly notes how ‘tormented’ this outrage is (233). Yet precisely for this reason, this raw affront represents a challenge to human self-­knowledge, for the truth of the night may not be repressed and pushed to the side in outrage simply because it is crude and without feeling. Just as little may it be downplayed to a gentle and sentimental truth, for this again would amount to repressing it. But least of all may the crude and unfeeling truth be glorified in its nonsensicality just because it constitutes a ‘blow’ to the naïve idea of a day without night, exposing it as bourgeois ideology. It is, then, no coincidence that two of Thomas Mann’s texts on Freud not only coincide temporally with the work of the Joseph novel but also, each in its own way, revolve around the central question underlying it. The lecture ‘Freud’s Position in the History of Modern Thought’, which Thomas Mann held in 1929 in Munich, concludes with a characterization of psychoanalysis in which one can straightforwardly discern his characterization of himself and the sketch of his Joseph project. When measured ‘by its method and its aims’, psychoanalysis ‘may be called enlightenment according to its means and ends; but its enlightenment is too experienced to be open to any charges of blithe superficiality. It might be called irrational, since it deals, in the interests of research, with the night, the dream, drive, the pre-­rational; and the concept of the unconscious presides at its beginnings. But it is far from letting those interests make it a tool of the obscurantist, romanticizing, backward-­ shaping spirit’ (1933, 198). Accordingly, in a speech Mann delivered in Vienna in 1936, ‘Freud and the Future’, he says that the basic insight of psychoanalysis is comparable to the basic insight of Schopenhauer, who teaches ‘the primacy of drive over spirit and reason’, though ‘not in antihuman spite, the evil motif of the spirit-­hostile doctrines of today, but in the stern love of truth of the century which combated idealism out of idealism’ (1999b, 283). Enlightenment is ‘shallow’, then, when it forms its focal concept of rational spirit according to the model of the isolated human day-­ consciousness, of a day without night. Such a ‘blithe’ concept of spirit is powerless from the outset in the face of night, which rules in the meaninglessness of human destiny and is experienced in human transience, in suffering, in sickness and death. In the face of meaningless being, reason must, out of inner necessity, resign its claim to freedom, meaning and dignity and degrade itself to a fiction. If humanity becomes in this way a ‘well-­meant’ ideology of a naïve idealism, then it helplessly remains at the mercy of a counter-­ideology that is hostile to spirit and meaning, for this is the inner consequence of an ontology of meaningless being that promotes, as it were, a night without day,

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being without meaning. The antihuman mockery of an overly blithely conceived spirit reinforces, merely in a crude and unfeeling form, what is already inherent in a superficial enlightenment as a resigned self-­denial, suppressing the night of human suffering because it is incapable of doing justice to it. The re-­ narration of the stories of Jacob and Joseph is accordingly guided by a contemporary interest arising from the mesh of problems that Thomas Mann considers characteristic of his own time. The narrative self-­knowledge that is a theme of the Joseph novel in terms of content and form ought to serve as a model for the present. The novel’s central figures, who stand ‘open to the rear’ and in the ‘footprints’ of coined models, themselves become models for a time in w ­ hich – T ­ homas Mann is ­convinced – t­ his peculiar narrative wisdom that his novel seeks to critically recollect risks disappearing. To be able truly to fight an enemy, one must recognize the enemy’s strength and, if possible, apply it against the enemy. But, as Thomas Mann explains in his essay on the Joseph novel, the relative justification of the antihuman hostility towards spirit lies in the emphasis of the night side of reality that is suppressed by a naïve day enlightenment. This night side is often called ‘myth’ and has ‘been abused as a means of obscurantic counter-­revolution’. In the Joseph novel, Thomas Mann explicitly opposes this with a ‘repurposing of myth’ – that is, a process that is ‘similar to what happens in a battle when a captured gun is turned around and directed at the enemy. In this book, the myth has been taken out of Fascist hands and humanized into the last recess of l­anguage – ­if posterity finds anything remarkable about it, it will be this’ (1996, 658).2 For this reason, Thomas Mann seeks to defend ‘the idea of human being’ from the malicious antihuman hostility towards spirit, which means defending it equally against a shallow idealization and a crude naturalization. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is a dialectic of day and night, of the conscious and the unconscious, leads in this way to the defence and ‘the conception of a future humanity that has passed through the profoundest knowledge of sickness and death’ (1999a, 729). It will be no small task for an adequate understanding of the Joseph novel to elucidate this conception of a dialectic of day and night as a dialectic of meaning and being in the context of a narrative ontology.

Nonsense The conception ‘of a future humanity that has passed through the profoundest knowledge of sickness and death’ contains the insight that the meaning that humans seek, as speaking and understanding beings, is firstly experienced by them as nonsense. Setting themselves the task of understanding and self-­ knowledge, they discover that firstly they do not understand. The spiritual happiness of understanding accord-



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ingly rests on a dark ground: the suffering of not understanding and of misunderstanding. In the Joseph novel, this is clearest in the stories of Jacob. If one understands Jacob’s distinction in being blessed with the understanding that connects thoughts in a ‘blithe’ ­way – ­namely, as simple and uncontested superiority over inferior r­ ivals – t­hen one must ask in light of the tragic wedding night, in light of Rachel’s premature death and in light of his long mourning for the son whom he believed to be dead: what did Jacob actually get from his blessing? Would he not have been better off having renounced it? Would it not have been cleverer to have withdrawn into the story’s obscurity and oblivion and, like Esau, got through life ‘happily’ and comfortably? A re-­narrating of the original story that is as reflective as the Joseph novel cannot help but expressly raise and answer the question to which its own intensification of the narrative unavoidably leads. Thus, one reads in the novel: ‘Did it have to be that way? Might not peace and good cheer have reigned in the tribe of Jacob and everything have followed a smooth and steady course in equitable concord?’ (270–1). The narrator pauses, as it were, with this question and reflectively steps out of the narrative in order to articulate an unease that must be unsettling for the reader, just as it must be unsettling for the reader of the original text: must it all really be this way? Must there be so much suffering? Precisely if the premise is correct and remains ­correct – ­that the life story of human being is meaningful and u ­ nderstandable – t­he question concerning why disappointments and suffering in the life story are necessary or ‘meaningful’ arises all the more gnawingly and unsettlingly. Wouldn’t the narrative meaning of human history be visible instead in that everything follows ‘a smooth and steady course in equitable concord’, well sheltered as it were by a Lord of meaning and (hi)story? Why must Jacob, who is blessed by God, suffer so intensely? In order to be meaningful and blessed, wouldn’t his life story have to follow a peaceful course ‘in equitable concord’? The question must be raised and the ‘unbelief’ articulated, for only by stubbornly raising unbelieving questions, for the love of truth against the mainstream of traditional understanding, can a more profound understanding of the story be disclosed. ‘Might not peace and good cheer have reigned in the tribe of Jacob?’ The short answer, which the Joseph novel offers to its own question and which is in need of explanation, shows the way for understanding the novel: ‘Unfortunately n ­o – n ­ ot if what happened was meant to happen, not if the fact that it happened is likewise proof that it ought and had to happen’ (270–1). This is a pithy short form of the narrative ontology that the Joseph novel is concerned with in general. Only on the condition that being and meaning, being and ought, are not absolutely separate from each other is there reason at all to ask: ‘Did it have to be that way?’ By contrast, if that

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which happens were simply the meaningless, blind being that merely happens because it happens (not because it ought to happen), then one would simply have to come to terms with it and not ask at all: does it have to be that way? Strictly speaking, meaningless being is never meaningful or ­nonsensical – ­it is simply what it is. The seeming meaninglessness of being that one would simply have to accept, since it cannot be measured against an ought, must be clearly distinguished, then, from any nonsensicalness of being, which is possible only because being is aimed at ­understanding – ­and the understanding fails. So the question about the relation of being and meaning arises only if what happens ought to have a meaning. This is why the Joseph novel conceives of the dialectic interleaving of being and meaning as an interleaving of being and ought: something happening ought to be at the same time proof that it ought to happen. And this is where the actual complication arises. If one can justifiably bring up the supposition of meaning in relation to the story, then the understanding of being, the self-­knowledge in understanding one’s own life story, becomes not simpler, but rather more difficult and more complicated. Knowing that something should be understood does not mean one has understood it. Herein lies the intellectually interesting, challenging point of a narrative ontology. Reconciling oneself to a meaningless, factual happening is surely not simple, but this is solely because one must discard the illusory hopes that have been placed in being in order to come to terms resignedly with what is meaningless and unalterable. This is Esau’s ‘solution’. He did not receive the part in the story that he had hoped for in the beginning, but he makes the most of it: he takes things as they come, acquiring the comfortable satisfaction in resigning himself to not understanding and not wanting to understand. This is precisely what Jacob and the other ‘heroes’ of the Joseph novel do not content themselves with. Like Job, they insist on asking: ‘Why, then, must it be that way?’ They do not content themselves with the fact that what happens is what happens. Rather, they question with probing doubt: it has happened, but why should it happen? What is the meaning of what has happened? So the central complication is alluded to, which enters into human understanding of self and world by means of a narrative ontology. With the claim of a ‘meaning’ of being, the critical revolution against an ontology of meaningless being makes human life and self-­understanding by no means easier or more comfortable; on the contrary, it becomes more demanding, more challenging and more uncomfortable. In the continuation of the passage quoted above, with which the narrator seeks to make understandable, also for the reader, the peculiar struggle and tension that comes into reality through narrative meaning, the Joseph novel articulates how the meaning that is the theme of a narrative ontology is not the immediate ‘good cheer’ of a ‘smooth and



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peaceable’ harmony; on the contrary, it must first be reclaimed from an immediate nonsense: ‘How great the happenings of this world, and since we cannot wish them to remain peacefully unhappened, we ought not curse the passions that cause ­them – ­for without guilt and passion nothing would ever move ahead’ (271).3 The history as world is great and mighty. As such it implies suffering and passion, and we cannot wish, according to the narrator of the Joseph novel, that these great, mighty, passionate happenings of the world be omitted for the sake of peace and happiness. We cannot wish that nothing at all would happen, rather than something that causes suffering and struggle. This is the narrative answer to the fundamental ontological question: why is there something rather than nothing?

Jacob’s Four Deceptions The narrator of the Joseph novel opposes the sluggish comfort of an understanding of being that resigns itself to not understanding and not wanting to understand with the suffering and passion of history, that is, with the narrative irony of a story, w ­ hich – ­also, and above all, for its ‘heroes’ – is precisely a story of deceptions and disappointments. Following the leitmotif that ‘anyone can say I’, we have thus far observed two deceptions, presented as I-­mistakes: Isaac mistaking Jacob for Esau, and Jacob mistaking Leah for Rachel. Thus, Jacob is involved in both. Yet while he actively stages the first identity mistake, he passively suffers the second. This difference is l­inked – s­ o it seems, at l­east – w ­ ith the advantage and disadvantage of a deception. Jacob sets the first deception in motion and is therefore aware of the true circumstances. It is no surprise, then, but rather the point of the whole enterprise that he acquires an advantage (the blessing) through the success of the deception. This plausible coupling of activity and advantage is conversely confirmed by the second story of mistaken identity: Jacob, the cunning protagonist in the scene of mistaken identity with Isaac, i­s – ­so it ­seems – ­ultimately ‘punished’ in that he must now suffer what he had staged. Here, Laban is the perpetrator and director of the deception, and precisely because Jacob does not stage the identity mistake but instead falls victim to it, he does not gain but, rather, loses through the story. To be sure, it seems hardly worth pointing to this fact, for both stories, in dispensing activity and success, passivity and failure, are entirely in line with everyday consciousness and its expectations. The ‘moral’ of both stories of mistaken identity could thus read: if deceptions must happen, then better to stage them oneself in order to stand, so to speak, on the ‘knowing’, and hence ‘winning’, side. The perpetrator of a deception wins, while the victim loses. It is not superfluous, however, to bring to mind this everyday logic of deception, for only against its background does the unusual and p ­ rofound

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form of two more of Jacob’s deceptions become visible, in which the usual logic is turned on its ­head – ­and the genuine logic of narrative irony fully comes to light for the first time. In particular, they form the two possible exceptions to the rule that the director of the deception is always the winner and the one suffering always the loser. The two remaining deceptions obey, then, this counter-­logic: in the third deception, Jacob stages an identity mistake but is not the winner, and, similarly, in the fourth deception he is the victim and not the loser, but the winner. Both of these possibilities sound as improbable as the first two appear probable and common. Precisely for this reason, Jacob’s third deception leads deeper into the inner meaning of the Joseph novel, while the fourth deception encompasses the overall meaning of the novel from beginning to end.

The Denied Sacrifice The third deception is less a scene and more a conversation. In the non-­ chronologically ordered sequence of the narrative, the Joseph novel places it before the two scenes of mistaken identity already discussed, even though, chronologically, it takes place in fact later than the deception of the blessing and the wedding night. It concerns a conversation between Jacob and his son Joseph. This scene, which is not recorded in the original text of the Bible, is fashioned by the narrator of the novel in order to clarify the narrative ontology that the narrator believes underlies the original text. For the overall logic of the novel, this conversation is especially revealing. Joseph appears here for the first time, and indicates in which w ­ ay – ­despite the essential similarities between him, the favourite son, and his blessed ­father – h ­ e is different from his father: that is what his special gift consists in. This gift does not statically repeat the ‘character role’ of the father but, rather, meaningfully varies it in repetition. In the middle of a casual conversation between father and son, Jacob is suddenly frightened, is ‘enraptured’, lost in thought: a connection of thoughts has caught him, as it were, from behind. In a concrete I-­mistake, it becomes clear to him that God, Who guarantees that being means meaning, represents for human beings who experience being in meaning not a relief, but rather much more a burden and cause for concern. The meaning that God guarantees in the story is at least as disturbing as it is elevating, and this is what makes Jacob into a seeker and knower of God: that he takes this frightening side of God very seriously. Jacob explains how he was ‘lost in thought’ by recounting to his astonished son that he had placed himself in the position of someone else: ‘I thought of God, and it was frightening.’ ‘It was as if my hand were the hand of Abraham lying upon Yitzchak’s head. And as if His voice had called to me and commanded.’ ‘Commanded and ­instructed – ­you know it, for you know the stories’ (79). Here, the motifs of the earlier line



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of thought come together in a new, especially intensive connection of thoughts. Jacob brings to mind his past so vividly that he literally places himself in the position of Abraham: ‘It was as if my hand were the hand of Abraham.’ He experiences the old, well-­known story as if it were the current, pressing present. Two conflicting determinations are joined together into an internally tensed unity: the story is past and known (‘for you know the stories’); at the same time, its content, its ‘pattern’, becomes a vivid reality through intense recollection. Jacob experiences his own I uncompromisingly as the I of ­Abraham – ­that is, he understands himself in the present as a narrative variation of the pattern established by Abraham in the past. Is this vivid ­consciousness – w ­ hich, as the bearer of the blessing, is to walk in Abraham’s ­footprints – ­not, rather, happiness and an advantage that is suited to reassure Jacob in the consciousness of his privilege? Let us listen further to Jacob: ‘And when we came to the place, I built a table of sacrifice with stones and laid the wood on it and bound the child with ropes and laid him on top. And took the knife and covered both your eyes with my left hand. And when I drew out the knife and put the knife blade to your throat, I faltered before the Lord, and my arm fell from above my shoulder, and the knife fell, and I tumbled to the ground, falling on my face’. And ‘I cried, “Slay him, You slay him, O Lord and Destroyer, for he is my one, my all, and I am not Abraham, and my soul falters before You!”’ (80). The ‘familiar’ story takes its course and steers towards the climax. The father is supposed to sacrifice his beloved son, the late-­born, long-­awaited son. But in the decisive moment, Jacob fails to find the strength, and must confess: I am not Abraham. That Jacob’s I is ‘only’ Jacob and not the I of Abraham is experienced by Jacob as existential failure. Jacob’s agonized self-­knowledge is a confession of guilt: I cannot be Abraham, for I am merely Jacob. This, again, is a profoundly disturbing scene, yet the shock of disappointment does not reach Jacob from ­outside – ­as in the scene with ­Leah – ­but rather from within, in the form of a confession of guilt and of self-­knowledge: Jacob must recognize that he is not the one he wants to be and ought to be, namely, an I like Abraham. His soul falters. In the renewing repetition, he cannot find the courage that Abraham had once found. Here, then, in an I-­mistake, which Jacob himself commits, the ambiguity of the I leads to Jacob’s failing and ‘losing’. With clear, drastic words, the Joseph novel explains the loss that Jacob suffers in his failure. Precisely in the moment in which Jacob’s soul falters. he must, in his own words, experience how ‘thunder from above the place rolled across the heavens, and its rolling died far off in the distance. And I had the child, but I had the Lord no longer, for I could not do it’ (80). Abraham found the courage to risk the loss of his ­son – ­and in this way saved him. Jacob’s soul falters in the repetition: he wants to save his beloved son, and thereby loses him.

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An understanding of the scene that falls short could stop here. It would be impressed by the ‘psychological’ subtlety with which the Joseph novel traces Jacob’s inner drama. It would acknowledge the passionate seriousness with which Jacob measures himself against the meaning of the story and ­fails – ­yet only as an ‘inner’ seriousness, as a fictional imagination, corresponding to nothing in reality, that is, in the ‘full seriousness’ of being. After all, Jacob’s beloved son Joseph is sitting in front of him, full of life in the here and now, if somewhat disturbed. He, too, possesses the gift of connecting thoughts, so he immediately understands that, if Jacob is Abraham, then he is Isaac. He himself is the son that is to be sacrificed. (Thus, Jacob actually says to Joseph when speaking of Isaac’s eyes and throat: your eyes, your throat.) But, fortunately, it is not meant entirely in ‘earnest’. Past history and present being are, so it seems, sharply separated. Thoughts are connected only in the ‘imagination’ of humans, not in real being. It is Isaac, not Joseph, who is (almost) sacrificed. Yet such an understanding misses entirely the narrative meaning of the scene because it does not place it in the overall unity of the overarching story. Just as Abraham’s stories are ‘known’ to Jacob and Joseph, so are Jacob’s and Joseph’s stories known to the reader of the Joseph novel. Thus, the reader knows that Jacob, in his horror that the faltering of his soul leads to the loss of his beloved son, is speaking as a prophet reaching backwards – to be sure, without knowing it. He expresses, in a scrutinizing, recollecting retrospection of the past, what the future will actually have in store for him and Joseph in the being of the real story: Joseph, too, will (almost) be sacrificed. In this scene, Jacob and Joseph still do not know this, and yet at the same time do know this. They anticipate it without being able to give clear expression to their obscure foreknowledge. They do not know, then, that the calamity is already being prepared, turning Jacob’s vision of fear into reality by wresting the child from his father, leading him to believe his child has died. And yet the premonition that this will happen lends their conversation depth, which the reader must listen to in order to understand fully the narrative meaning.

Dialectic of Spiritual Inheritance Thus far, only the first half of the scene has been considered, in which Jacob reports of his failed self-­examination. In the second part of the scene, there is a conversation between Joseph and Jacob in which the diverse dimensions of the narrated self-­examination are reflected upon. Here, Joseph takes on the part of someone seeking to mitigate the horrible situation. In a first approach, he asks reassuringly: at the last moment ‘your soul faltered within you? Yet in the next ­moment . . . ­in the very next moment, the voice would have sounded and called out to you, “Do not



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lay your hand upon the boy and do him no harm!” and you would have seen the ram in the thicket’ (80). Joseph uses his knowledge of the ‘old’ story, of the coined pattern, to reassure himself, and advises Jacob to do the same. Ultimately, ‘the later ones’ know that in the end things will turn out all right. Why, then, should one fear at any point in the story, for the good end is certain from the very beginning and the ram is standing ready in the thicket as a substitute sacrifice? Jacob answers: ‘I did not know that’, ‘for it was as if I were Abraham, and the story had not yet happened’. In a ‘contemplation’ that is as subtle as it is intense, the narrator of the Joseph novel escalates the complex abysmalness of the circumstance that a person ‘knows’ which role is to be played, like a figure in a story who (just like an actor) knows the story in advance. This gives rise to the question: is knowledge of the coined model of the past the knowledge that essentially everything has already happened, that the ‘re-­enactor’ knows no insecurity, no fear, no freedom of responsibility? Or does it, rather, mean that the re-­enactor really repeats the role only if he also repeats and appropriates the insecurity, the fear, the responsibility of the original scene? Does it, then, belong to the ‘knowledge’ demanded in adopting a character role that one also, and above all, accepts the fact that the figure one is playing did not know what later times know? This reflection makes immediately clear the kind of abyss that lies concealed in what appears at first glance to be a simple conception of a repetition of the past. The past cannot ‘simply’ be repeated, for what comes later knows about the earlier so that a ‘simple’ copy of the earlier is impossible from the outset: what the earlier consciousness does not know about the consequences is precisely not repeatable by the later consciousness that knows about the consequences. Ought Jacob, then, as the blessed heir to Abraham, in his self-­ examination be Abraham to such a degree that he does not know the outcome of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac that God commanded? Or ought he be Abraham to such a limited degree that he knows the story and its outcome in advance? What does it mean for the one who is later truly to be Abraham? As the spiritual heir to Abraham, is he obliged to repeat the repeatable, or rather to repeat the unrepeatable? This is the real question at issue between Joseph and Jacob. Joseph seeks to lessen the drama with the clever comment that, for Jacob, in placing himself in Abraham, the appropriate ‘understanding of the role’ consists in not fearing, for the fortune of the later-­born was bestowed upon him of knowing the story and its good outcome: ‘But that is the advantage of these later days, that we know the great rounds in which the world rolls ever on, and the stories in which it all comes to pass and that the fathers established. You could have trusted the voice and the ram’ (81). The son, as clever as he is careless, sees then absolutely no reason for concern. The fortune and cheerfulness of the ‘later days’ consist precisely

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in knowing the score, which means there is no room for Jacob’s deep ­anxiety – f­or an anxiety arising from an insecurity in understanding the story while at the same time being responsible for finding in this insecurity the right understanding. Joseph wants to console his father by pointing to the repetitive character of time, to the great cycles that appear to offer security in their strict lawfulness, for we can know in advance how things will proceed. One can use the old stories to one’s advantage and for reassurance. Jacob objects to carelessly instrumentalizing the inherited stories in this way and responds to his son with a clear reproach: ‘Your answer is clever, but false.’ ‘First, you see, if I was Jacob and not Abraham, I could not be certain that it would turn out as it had that day, and I did not know if the Lord might not want to allow what He had once prevented to proceed to its ending’ (81). Forgetting ‘his pain in the heat of argument’, Jacob has noticeably changed his tone of voice. With ‘first, second, third’, he wants to help his son to understand correctly the narrative being. The first point concerns the ambiguity in the supposed fortune of the ‘later ones’. If Jacob has the good fortune of not being Abraham in the full sense, since he already knows from the familiar stories what Abraham did not know, then this presumed reassuring non-­identity of the personal identity may lead to an unsettling non-­identity of the respective story. The good end of Abraham’s story could give way to a bad end of Jacob’s story because God may ‘want to allow what He had once prevented to proceed to its ending’. Here Jacob reveals, almost incidentally, his understanding of God as the Lord of the story, the author of the narrative events. On the one hand, God is the creator, the author of natural being, which is reliable and predictable for the knowing subject by virtue of its inner lawfulness. On the other hand, God is the Lord of what happens precisely in being able to impede what happens naturally, according to its own logic, and thus need not allow it ‘to proceed to its ending’. Both of ­these – t­he genuine logic of the happenings, and the possibility of impeding and transforming these ­happenings – c­ onstitute the specific narrative meaning that is to be understood. Jacob’s instruction for his son subsequently proceeds to the second and crucial point: ‘What would have been my strength before the Lord if it had come from my counting on the angel and the ram rather than from my great obedience and the faith that God can let the future pass through fire unscathed and burst the bars of death and is the Lord of resurrection?’ (81). Had Jacob counted on things turning out well, he would not have repeated Abraham’s character role, for the crucial point of the role consists in Abraham’s proverbial faith: Abraham trusted God even in the extreme insecurity of not knowing how things would end, even in expecting death. This can hardly be repeated by someone who already knows the story and may trust from the outset that it will end well, for then there can no longer be any talk of faith in Abraham’s sense.



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The antinomy that becomes evident in the conversation between Joseph and Jacob may be formulated as follows: is it not a significant relief to know fully the pattern of our existence in ‘later times’? Are we not freed from the insecurity and anxiety of existence because we know how the story unfolds? This is Joseph’s point: we know, after all, that it ends well, so why the anxiety? In contrast is Jacob’s antithesis: knowing which models are given to us is rather a burden on our existence, for, in repeating the model, it does not become easier but rather more difficult to do justice to it. The demand on human being in ‘later times’ has become more ­complex – ­certainly not simpler. The inherited blessing by no means bestows upon Jacob the clear security of being conscious that he ‘only’ has to play a role that is known in advance in its essential features. Understood correctly and seriously, spiritual inheritance for him is a source of anxiety because the role he has to play demands precisely that he not understand it as a guide to security. For this reason, while Jacob understands himself as a repetition of Abraham, he understands himself as a vulnerable repetition. He is overcome with the anxiety of not living up to the spiritual inheritance of the blessing in repeating it in the present.

Hope In Jacob’s words invoked above, something else resonates unmistakably in the Joseph novel, which does not lead back behind the immediate present of the narrated story into its past, but rather anticipates well beyond it in its future, such that one may speak of a deliberate anachronism. Thomas Mann interprets the story of Abraham and his heirs not only in terms of their models in the past but equally in terms of their models in the future. While the faith invoked by ­Jacob, t­hat ‘God can let the future pass through fire unscathed and burst the bars of death and is the Lord of resurrection’, may already be implicitly at work in the stories of Genesis, it will be a much later development that will raise it explicitly to the light of clear l­ anguage – a­ light that, to be sure, places one in a position to discover its pre-­history in the earlier texts. Jacob’s sentences give expression to the hope that God can preserve the possibility of the future even if it seems to be destroyed in the fire of death. The view oriented to the fateful death of natural life, according to which everything finite heads towards its inexorable annihilation, is an illusion, for the God discovered by Abraham can suspend natural fate, not allowing it ‘to proceed to its ending’. He thus bursts ‘the bars of death’ and proves to be the Lord of (hi)story and ‘Lord of resurrection’. The God of Abraham is accordingly a God of hope and of the future in the very sober, absolutely matter-­of-­fact sense that for Him death does not have the last word, and thus the oldest pattern of birth and death

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need not repeat itself inexorably. Abraham’s faith represents, then, not the reign of fateful repetition, but rather the hope that this reign may be overcome. In being, everything can be repeated. Nature’s essence rests upon repeatability, in substance (since the reign of the laws of nature leads to repeating events) as in knowledge (for knowledge of nature must pass the test of repeatability). In spirit, by contrast, nothing can be repeated, for everything in spirit has its own peculiar historical orientation, its genuine capacity for recollection. This capacity means that something past cannot be repeated in a strict sense, since later consciousness possesses knowledge of the past that the past itself lacked. A narrative ontology of historical meaning draws attention to this central difference between nature and spirit. Whereas repetition is the rule in nature, it becomes for spirit its true task, where it o ­ ccurs – a­ t ­most – ­in exceptional cases. Repetition in spirit is a repetition not of what is repeatable, but rather of what is unrepeatable. Spirit’s repetition of the unrepeatable is thus always original, for the present can do justice to the spirit of the past only in a new way. Genuinely historical repetition of spirit is an overcoming of the deadly irony of fate that allows only something seemingly new to emerge, leaving it in the end inevitably to one and the same annihilation. In the Joseph novel, this narrative-­historical constitution of spirit introduces the understanding of God in terms of hope. Hope that God can ‘burst the bars of death’ is not a hope for salvation of what is salvable, but rather for a salvation of human life that has fallen hopelessly to death. The narrative ontology of the Joseph novel thus takes up a counter-­logic to the logic of monotonous repeatability, a counter-­time to the time of perpetually recurring death in which what is repeatable inevitably repeats itself perpetually. In the Joseph novel’s interpretative re-­narrating, hope constitutes the crucial subtext of Abraham’s denied sacrifice. It is the hope of overcoming the natural compulsion of repetition that leads all life towards its death. The subtext reveals that God in the end does not want death imposed. In contrast to the merciless fate of nature, He does not consider it right that everything that originates must perish. Rather, He can ‘suspend’ the inner logic of natural happenings, and in this way grant true hope and future.

Joseph’s Gift Let us return to the conversation between Jacob and Joseph. It will be instructive to see how the reproved Joseph helps his father in his anxiety concerning God, showing him that the antinomy of spiritual inheritance is solvable. Joseph pleads for a third possibility, between self-­satisfaction and self-­remorse. Discovering and unfolding this possibility is Joseph’s unique gift for the future.



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Joining Jacob’s two objections to Joseph’s carelessness that have already been invoked is a third corrective that Jacob advances against his son: ‘And ­third – ­was God testing me? No, he tested Abraham, who stood fast. I, however, tested myself with the test of Abraham, and my soul faltered within me.’ This is, indeed, an important difference: Abraham is tested, whereas Jacob tests himself with Abraham’s test. He tests himself and thereby gets to know the abysmalness of his I. He experiences the extent to which he is capable of raising his I to Abraham’s height and the extent to which his soul falters. Imposing upon oneself, by way of trial, a test that someone else has passed m ­ eans – i­n an especially emphatic m ­ anner – w ­ alking in the footsteps of someone else. Joseph, who is rebuked by his father three times, does not give up. He acknowledges the blithe superficiality of his first words and undertakes a new attempt: ‘Most certainly I have spoken nonsense.’ ‘My reply to your embarrassing rebuke will be no more enlightened, but it does seem to this stupid child that if you were testing yourself, you were neither Abraham nor Jacob, b ­ ut – ­how fearful to say ­it – ­you were the Lord, who was testing Jacob with the test of Abraham, and you had the wisdom of the Lord and knew which test He intended to inflict upon Jacob, that is, the one that He had no intention of letting Abraham endure to the end’ (81). This is a striking move, in which Joseph’s genius gift of interpretation flashes for the first time. According to Jacob’s rebuke, Abraham is tested by the Lord and he passed the test, whereas Jacob was tested by himself and failed. Joseph responds to this rebuke with a version of the original model: as the person being tested, Jacob, in the self-­test, was indeed Jacob, but as tester in the self-­test he was someone else: ‘how fearful to say ­it – ­you were the Lord, who was testing Jacob with the test of Abraham’. With this move, Joseph gains the starting point for a new argument in order to justify the salutary effect of knowledge of the good ending. Joseph makes the following point: while someone like Jacob who decentres his own self in the self-­test according to the established models of the past may not ‘fully’ become a repetition of the past (this was Jacob’s point), he nonetheless gains a radically changed understanding of himself and the world by decentring from the immediate here and now. With this understanding, he may become conscious of the meaning of the story without this consciousness of meaning thereby serving as a comfortable reassurance. In this way, Joseph’s own gift of understanding and interpretation emerges for the first time. Jacob understands the stories as an occasion to critically test his own present by measuring it against the past; by contrast, Joseph understands the stories as the revelation of God. By means of the traditional stories, we may become attentive to what God is ultimately aiming at, such that we – ‘how fearful to say it’ – receive a pointer from God concerning how to understand the overarching meaning of the stories. Thus, for Joseph, understanding the distinctly narrative meaning

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of the stories means nothing other than understanding what they are aiming at; this means understanding what the stories are supposed to say, by the Lord of what happens, to the individual in the immediate here and now. Joseph is distinguished by the peculiar talent of understanding the meaning of the divine story and thus of God Himself. He explains this to his father by having God speak to Abraham: ‘Am I Molech, bull-­king of the Baalites? No, rather I am Abraham’s G ­ od . . . ­and what I commanded I did not command so that you would do it, but that you might learn that you should not do it, because it is nothing but an abomination in My sight, and here, by the way, is a ram’ (81–2). In the Joseph novel, this is the first piece of Joseph’s peculiar hermeneutics, which extract from the familiar stories an entirely new meaning: the meaning of what is new. In contrast to Jacob’s understanding, the story of Abraham and Isaac is not in the first instance about human being and the test to determine the father’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son in faithful trust in the Lord of what happens. According to Joseph, such an understanding of the story, which understands it for the sake of human being and in terms of human being, is not adequate to its meaning. An adequate understanding must understand the story as a ­whole – ­above all, in terms of its end. At the end of the story, there is, however, an ironic reversal of the initial supposition of meaning: in retracting His command of sacrifice, God shows that the meaning of the original command consisted not in being obeyed but rather in not being obeyed. Joseph no longer understands the story for the sake of human being and in terms of human being, but rather for the sake of God and in terms of God. Its meaning reveals God in contrast to all other gods. Gods, and not God, demand sacrifices. For God, sacrifices are ‘nothing but an abomination’. That is why Jacob’s ‘failure’ does not point for Joseph to a distance, but rather to his closeness to God: ‘My dear papa was diverting himself by testing whether he might be able to do what the Lord forbade to Abraham, and is now fretting because he has discovered that he could never, ever do it’ (82). According to Joseph, the impossibility for Jacob to repeat in spirit Abraham’s sacrifice lies, then, not in Jacob’s individual weakness of faith, but rather in the rejection of the sacrifice by God Himself. In this way, the supposed weakness of faith in failing to obey the commandment of sacrifice proves to be a true strength of faith and closeness to God: he can no longer consider as valid the commandment that God Himself negated. To be sure, the true point of this reflection is again the identity of form and content. God not only demands something different from what the gods demand, but also demands it differently. He shows that sacrifices are ‘an abomination’ to Him not simply through a direct counter-­command, but rather through the indirect suspension of the command of sacrifice, which was given at the beginning only to be retracted in the end. God thus reveals Himself not in direct commands and commandments (like



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the gods), but rather in stories that require an attentiveness of understanding to their narrative irony – an understanding attentiveness that radically differs from immediate obedience, which is demanded by direct commands and commandments. What is not to be obeyed immediately as a command or a direct instruction, but rather interpreted and understood like a story or an analogy, makes one free in an entirely sober sense. A special act of understanding and interpretation becomes possible only (and is, then, also required) where human behaviour is not already determined by the unambiguous power of circumstances. For this reason, the absolute power of God reveals itself not in absolute violence that one must simply obey, but rather in absolute non-­violence that one can answer to. God does not command; rather, He wants to be understood and interpreted. Blind obedience without understanding is for Him an abomination because such an obedience is a sacrifice: the sacrifice of the intellect. Thus, it is an erroneous idea that the absolute power of God, because nothing can resist it, must manifest itself immediately and directly – instantaneously, as it were. God’s power, which nothing can oppose, withdraws itself, mediates itself, imposes upon itself the slowness of time in the sense of a narrative temporality. Interpretation and understanding are equally twinned with time, and are thus always in need of time, and certainly impeded wherever hasty impatience rules. Abraham’s God withdraws Himself by granting humans time and the possibility of understanding, which is grounded in time. God speaks and waits for humans’ response and understanding. For this reason, He manifests Himself in the narratable and re-­narratable slowness of stories, in a temporally and linguistically articulated being that can be conceptualized and understood in a narrative ontology. Now how does Jacob respond to Joseph’s new interpretation of the old stories? This is his response: ‘You speak like an angel near to the throne, Jehosiph, my child of God!’ ‘Only half the truth is in your words, and the other half remains with what I said, for I proved weak in my trust. But you clothed your part of the truth with grace, anointing it with the oil of wit, so that it is a delight for the understanding and a balm for my heart’ (82). With these words, Thomas Mann ends the conversation in which Joseph’s peculiar ‘witty’ gift of interpretation flashes for the first time, in which he begins to transcend Jacob’s spiritual horizon. Joseph has (in both a bad and a good sense) a special talent for the genuinely linguistic phenomena of irony and wit. He discovers, if one may say so, the vivid ‘wit’ in God’s stories. So, one reads in the novel ‘that Joseph, however much his own flaws hurt him, had a better sense of this living God and was far more adept at taking Him into consideration than the father who begot him’ (257). Jacob knows, above all, the horrible, serious God Who commands and tests. Joseph discovers a new aspect in God that connects to the

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understanding discovered by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but adds a new dimension. Joseph sees in God something different because he sees God differently from how He was seen in the past. With Joseph, a new chapter is opened in the history of the relationship between God and human being. To be sure, Joseph’s ‘progress’ beyond the religion of his fathers is peculiarly ­fractured – a­ nd will remain fractured to the end of the novel. Only ‘half the truth’ lies with the new interpretation, the other half with the gravity of its origin. Joseph’s gift for bringing to life with wit the unconditioned gravity of his origin again and again threatens to turn into a carelessness that fails to take in and transcend this gravity, instead falling behind it. Jacob rightfully criticized this carelessness in his conversation with Joseph, and in Joseph’s stories it will lead again and again down wrong paths that must be corrected with great pains. Yet this seriousness, which can rapidly degenerate into sombre remorse, does not hold the last word, but rather only half the truth. Despite all culpable carelessness, Joseph represents the very serious and meaningful possibility of an imminent sublation of seriousness in irony that does not retract seriousness, but rather raises it beyond its own limits. Such a ­seriousness – ­which, out of a love for truth, in the end turns against its own ­seriousness – ­leads to an irony that appeals to the wakefulness of an interpretative attentiveness, which threatens to get lost in the overly literal nature of seriousness. Joseph’s interpretative receptivity for the ironic multifacetedness of language is able to derive a different meaning from the story and to reveal a living God, distinguished not simply by the absolute seriousness of His demand, but even more so by an omnipotence that ‘suspends’ the seriousness of all happenings by granting hope and mercy.

Mercy of the Last Deception Jacob’s fourth and last deception follows the second possibility of a counter-­logic to the usual equation of activity with success, work with merit. In the end, it is no longer about the paradox that Jacob deceives himself and loses (as in his mistaking himself for Abraham), but rather the even greater paradox that Jacob wins after having been deceived. Jacob’s paradoxical deception and disappointment constitutes, as already indicated, the background of Joseph’s stories. Over the course of Joseph’s stories, Jacob will have to experience what Abraham was spared from: Jacob will have to believe that his most beloved son is really dead, so that all hope and all future is lost. The brothers who seek to take Joseph’s life by throwing him in the pit will show Joseph’s bloody robe to the horrified father and tell him the made-­up story of a murderous predator to shift attention away from their own guilt.



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Jacob believes the news of Joseph’s death, and from this time on no longer chooses Abraham as the model for his life and thought, but ­rather – ­here again the Joseph novel frames a deliberate a­ nachronism – ­a model known from stories that appeared much later, as Job’s mourning and grievance: ‘Jacob had found a place on a dust heap littered with shards and located in an out-­of-­the-­way, totally unshaded corner of the settlement; and there he sat naked, clutching the veil’s tatters in his hands, strewing hair, beard, and shoulders with ashes, and from time to time picking up a loose shard of pottery to scrape his body as if he were afflicted with boils and ­leprosy – a­ purely symbolic procedure, for there was not the least sign of boils, and the scraping was part of his performance intended for that other witness’ (515). Jacob persists in his mourning and complaint to God (in a ‘performance intended for that other witness’), because he felt deceived and betrayed by God. Is he not the blessed one? Has not God promised him assistance and prosperity? Why, then, is Joseph ­dead – ­his only hope for the future? With Joseph’s death, his story has become meaningless for Jacob. Yet at the end of the story, meaninglessness and death turn out to be illusion and deception. Jacob has been deceived, and yet he ­wins – ­like Job later, he wins everything back that he believed he had lost for good. Here, the scene with Jacob and Leah, which itself is the reflection of another deception scene, is mirrored once more. The last deception is thus a deception that God stages. The disclosure of the deception of death corresponds, however, to the hope for the future addressed above: death will not have the last word, so there is a real future. This hope resonates in the concluding words of the second part of the Joseph novel: ‘Ah, pious old man! Could you ever have imagined what bewildering goodwill is hidden yet again behind the silence of your curiously majestic God, and, by His counsel, with what incomprehensible rapture your soul is to be mutilated? When you were young in the flesh, morning revealed to you that your most ardent happiness was deception and illusion. You will have to grow very old in order to learn that, by way of compensation, your bitterest suffering was also deception and illusion’ (538).

Part Two Time and Meaning

4 The Well of the Past

Ontology of Egoism – Self-Respect – Descent into Hell – Wandering – The Abyss of Time – Desperation of Passing Time – Memento Mori – Promise and Expectation – Time that Cannot Be Enumerated – The Feast of the Narrative

Ontology of Egoism ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The line of thinking up to now has made clear how the meaning of the leitmotif is to be understood. What matters is human self-­knowledge: that a human being, as an isolated I that can say ‘I’, should not persist in this isolation but rather take seriously the universality that manifests itself in I-­saying insofar as anyone can say ‘I’. With this insight, the isolated private I frees itself from the unfreedom of an existence that cannot understand i­tself – f­ or everything isolated is ­meaningless – a­ nd participates in an overarching, temporally articulated unity of meaning. The I that understands itself in this way from out of a universal unity grasps itself more specifically as a person. As a person, each individual human on the stage of the world represents the human being as ­such – ­that is, universal humanity. For this reason, the personal I is less what it is in its literal isolation, and more what it means in its position within the temporal-­historical unity. The I as person receives its distinct meaning out of a narrative unity of meaning in which it always already stands and which extends beyond its isolated private existence into the past and the future. Thus, the expression ‘my I’ is askew and false from the outset, visible in the similarly askew expressions ‘my reason’ and ‘my truth’. A truth that were only my truth would cease being truth, and reason that were merely my private reason would cease being reason. Likewise, one could not speak of an ‘I’ anymore if it were exclusively my I. Humans as individuals each partake in the one reason and that is precisely what makes them

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r­easonable. Accordingly, as isolated beings, they partake in the human I in its h ­ istory – t­hat is, in humanity – and are thereby persons who can say ‘I’. Since for each concrete human self-­understanding there is a corresponding, equally concrete understanding of the world, the meaninglessness of the isolated private I can be conceptualized as an ontology of egoism. Corresponding to the self-­centred egoism of the isolated and meaningless I is an understanding of the world that grasps its reality as equally meaningless being. The unity of meaning of reality is necessarily made to vanish as soon as only one meaning ­counts – t­he private meaning of the respective I. Common talk of the ‘meaninglessness’ of the world does not mean for the egoist that everything is meaningless, but, rather, everything except for the egoist himself. The egoist is the meaningful centre of a meaningless world and precisely because he understands (and wants to understand) himself as its meaningful centre, the world taken by itself must be meaningless, which means: serving as a mere means for his private interests. In this way, the ontology of egoism is an ontology of meaningless being, which, in its meaninglessness, is subject to individual purposes. Here, the concealed meaning in talk of a meaningless reality reveals itself: the egoist tolerates no meaning besides himself, so that everything that obstructs his own arbitrariness is degraded to meaningless ‘being’, so that it can become the material of his meaning, the object of his arbitrariness, the space of his rule. Egoism and non-­understanding are alternating concepts: the egoist understands nothing because, in his self-­centredness, he does not want to understand anything other than himself; and because it is only himself that he wants to understand, he does not even understand himself.

Self-Respect Historical, narratively articulated time is the condition of the possibility of truly overcoming egoism because it enables each individual I to expand out to humanity in the medium of understanding that is mediated by language. The narrowness of the individual I is not merely the narrowness of its spatial fixation on its own bodily limits, but more so the narrowness of its temporal fixation on its own present. The ‘narrower’ and ‘shorter’ the (hi)story is out of which we understand ourselves, the more narrow-­ minded and narrow-­hearted we are; the ‘further’ our (hi)story stretches into the past and the future, the more we understand humanity in our own person, and likewise in the person of every other. In this way, the insight that appeared paradoxical at first glance becomes understandable: the meaningless egocentricity of narrow-­minded egoism is not overcome by disregarding the I, but solely by augmenting self-­respect by taking oneself truly seriously for the first time as human being. The



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egoist persists in his self-­referential narrowness because he considers himself unimportant in relation to the whole, and for this reason justified to ‘concentrate’ on himself, to draw back into his contingent corner of the ­world – ­where he wants (as compensation, as it were, for his own irrelevance) to be the absolute ruler. The ‘modesty’ for which he loves to praise himself because he does not take himself ‘overly seriously’ is no softening of egoism but, rather, egoism’s very essence. Thus, the leitmotif may be varied as follows: anyone can say I, but what matters is how one says it. What matters for each individual is to realize concretely the commitment articulated in saying ‘I’ and to become attentive to the infinite dignity that lies in the fact that being human is not a self-­evident fact. We are to take ourselves infinitely ­seriously – n ­ ot as this or that individual, but as human being. In this spirit, Thomas Mann formulates his personal conviction ‘that everything that seems good and noble to m ­ e – s­ pirit, art, ­morality – ­comes from human beings taking themselves seriously’. He believes that taking oneself seriously as a representative of humanity underlies every meaningful manifestation of human spirit. He takes the commandment of human self-­respect as a guideline also for his own understanding of self and world, immediately adding to the statement just invoked the ‘clear insight that everything I have accomplished and brought about, indeed the charm and value of every single part of it, every line and expression of my life’s work up to n ­ ow . . . ­can exclusively be traced back to my taking myself seriously’ (1987, 6). Thomas Mann’s thinking thus exhibits a critical distance to a human self-­misunderstanding in which humans make themselves smaller and do not take themselves seriously as humans. He is convinced that such a ‘modest’ demand on oneself does not express a true modesty but, rather, the false modesty of a comfortable unconcern, which seeks to avoid having its ‘modest’ comfort disturbed by an overly demanding self-­understanding. Thomas Mann counters with an adage: ‘All pain concerning things is self-­torment, and the only person tormenting himself is the one who takes himself seriously’ (6). The self-­knowledge and self-­respect demanded of all humans must direct attention, then, to universal human being, to the nobility and dignity of humanity. What matters is not what ‘I’ am in my respective isolation and particularity (the small, private I: first name, last name, born on this day in this place); what matters is what ‘I’ am as a human being, what ‘I’ have in common with all humans (the great, universal I). It is precisely with this question that the enigmatic and mysterious fact of human existence is opened up at all, and also that which lends force and meaning to human language, to human action and thought. This infinite dignity of universal human being may be experienced wherever the word ‘human’ possesses some norm-­grounding ­universality – ­that is, in concepts such as ‘human rights’, ‘human history’ and ‘humanity’. Here, the word ‘human’ is evidently not used in the same way as it is

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in expressions like ‘making mistakes is human’ or ‘we’re all only human’ – expressions representing popular forms of making oneself small and of false modesty, which Thomas Mann’s critical humanism opposes. Evidently, the comfortable modesty of such expressions is not what is meant in demanding of humans a humanity that is not already realized in the mere fact of their individual human existence. What is addressed with the demanding concept of human being, then, is not self-­evident but, rather, enigmatic and mysterious: how does infinite human dignity relate to the human capacity to say ‘I’? Why must humans be explicitly called upon to be human? W ­ hat – ­in this s­ ense – i­s a human being?

Descent into Hell These reflections allude to the conceptual ‘sounding board’, which is required in order to understand adequately the famous beginning of the Joseph novel and its peculiar emphasis: ‘Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it fathomless? Indeed, perhaps only if it is solely human being whose past is spoken about and is put into question: this enigmatic being that comprises our own naturally lusty and preternaturally wretched existence and whose mystery, quite understandably, is the alpha and omega of all our speaking and questioning, lending pressure and fire to all speech, insistence to all questions’ (3). For Thomas Mann, the fathomlessness of the well of the past, often cited as an isolated and non-­binding adage, comes into view ‘only if’ the essence of human being is ‘spoken about and is put into question’. With its title ‘Descent into Hell’, the introduction to the Joseph novel builds the ‘anthropological overture to the complete work’ (1996, 190). Or, put differently: the ‘descent into hell’ that opens the narrative exercitation of the novel is a descent into the hell of human self-­knowledge. This is because the pressing nature of the Joseph novel, the fire of its narrative language and thought, stems ‘solely’ from one single question: what is human being? This question concerning our self is what makes our thought and speech demanding in the first place. This question confronts us with the duty to decentre the egocentrism of our natural existence and to gain a liberating distance to the undemanding nature of our everyday understanding of self and world. It is thus the question of human self-­knowledge that underlies the speech and thought of art, religion and philosophy, and which lends this speech and thought the peculiar insistence of human self-­respect. It is, however, the question concerning human being that matters first of all, and not some premature answer. This is underscored by the overture of the Joseph novel, which addresses human being as the ‘enigmatic being’, ‘whose mystery, quite understandably, is the alpha and omega of



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all our speaking and questioning’. What does the enigma of human being mean more specifically? What is the true meaning of this question of human being concerning the ‘mystery’ of human existence? Evidently, the meaning of the question aims at the enigma of the double aspect of human existence, of comprising a ‘naturally lusty and preternaturally wretched existence’. With this peculiar expression, the Descent into Hell makes clear from the outset that the mystery of human being at issue consists neither solely in its naturalness nor solely in its preternaturalness, but rather in the doubling, in the difference and unity of both aspects. That is why the beginning of the Descent into Hell shows that, in wanting not merely to accept one’s natural existence but to understand it, we become attentive to time and to the meaning of the question of whose ‘footsteps’ we walk ­in – ­that is, to which past we relate our own present. To be sure, we become a true enigma where our effort to understand ourselves initially fails because the ‘well of the past’ that is supposed to nourish our understanding of self and world proves, upon closer examination, to be fathomless. Precisely when human being is at issue, it happens that ‘the deeper we delve and the farther we press and grope into the underworld of the past, the more totally fathomless become those first grounds of humankind, of its history and ethical life, for again and again they retreat farther into the bottomless depths, no matter to what extravagant temporal lengths we may unreel our plumb line’ (3). The human enterprise of self-­understanding is for this reason antinomic from the ground up: on the one hand, self-­understanding is dependent on time, on the well of the past; and on the other hand, the well proves to be bottomless. What the past promises with the one hand, it refuses with the other. Thus, it is not clear from the outset whether time promotes self-­understanding or, rather, impedes it. Meaning that is made possible through time seems precarious, perhaps even deceptive. Human self-­ understanding gets lost in a labyrinth of illusion, ‘because the inscrutable fools our striving for scrutiny; it offers us illusory stations and destinations, behind which, once they are reached, new stretches of the past open ­up – ­much like a stroller at the shore whose wanderings find no end, because behind each backdrop of loamy dunes that he strives to reach lie new expanses to lure him onward to another cape’ (3). That is why the beginning of the Joseph novel designates the natural existence of human being as ‘lusty’, and the preternatural by contrast as ‘wretched’. In our natural existence, we are determined (like animals) not to be astonished about our own being. Everything is self-­evident, and in this reflectionlessness we go on living a ‘lusty’ life with no concern, if it were not for the other aspect of our double being, consisting in the fact that we are astonished about our own being because not everything is self-­evident. Yet this genuinely spiritual reflection leads to the confusing, indeed terrifying, insight into the incomprehensible nature and ‘bottomlessness’ of our own, thoroughly temporal existence.

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Spirit, the preternatural aspect of human being, is for this reason the agitator par excellence: it disturbs the illusory peace of natural groundedness. According to the Joseph novel, spirit is the ‘reminder, the principle of taking offence, of contradiction and wandering, which stirs up the uneasiness of preternatural misery within the breast of one individual among all the lustily complacent’, and ‘drives him out of the gates of the grown and given into the adventure of uncertainty’ (35–6). The spiritual adventure of human self-­knowledge is akin, then, to a descent into hell because the alleged ‘footing’, which we believe, through habit, to have found in our familiar dealings with objects grown and given, is renounced without being immediately replaced with a new ‘ground’. Human spirit is distinguished instead by the courage to make an exodus out of the community of ‘the lustily complacent’, leading us on an uncertain ‘wandering’ to explore what can be discovered in the well of the past, if we are prepared to renounce the illusory security of the ‘natural’ ground of the grown and given.

Wandering Grown being, in its vanity, offers no ‘footing’ for the self-­knowledge of humans, who likewise exist in time, stooping questioningly over the well of the past. Nevertheless, we ordinarily accept certain fixed points as ‘given’, which appease our questioning because our factual existence is always already based on a certain understanding of self and world that we have not consciously tested and chosen, but were, rather, born into. The Descent into Hell at the beginning of the Joseph novel accounts for this by hinting at the fact that, ordinarily, humans are hardly bothered by the fathomlessness of the well of the past, because they do not question certain points of reference in their understanding of self and world: ‘Thus some origins are of a conditional sort, marking both in practice and in fact the primordial beginning of the particular tradition kept by a given community, people, or family of faith, but in such a way that memory, even when taught that the well’s deeps can in no way be considered earnestly plumbed, may find national reassurance in the primordial and come to historical and personal rest there’ (3). Ordinarily, the necessity of everyday life, ‘both in practice and in fact’, means that one is content with points of reference and convictions ‘of a conditional sort’, even though one knows very well at bottom that these resting points of understanding of self and world ‘can in no way be considered earnestly’ as unquestionable. One finds a relative footing in the ‘particular tradition kept by a given community’ to which one has a subjective sense of belonging and objectively belongs, by sharing the same language and form of life. The fact that one is always already born into a ‘people, or family of faith’ ensures a ‘national’ reassurance of self-­ knowledge which may easily ‘come to historical and personal rest’.



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Thus, the principle of taking offence and of wandering, which is inherent to spirit as a ‘spirit of contradiction’, and which disturbs the illusory peace of natural groundedness, cannot be understood radically enough. ‘Sedentariness’ is by nature inherent to human being, ordinarily shaping human existence from the ground u ­ p – ­both in the literal and the figurative sense. The principle of wandering, articulated in the name of spirit in the Descent into Hell at the beginning of the Joseph novel, does not take offence at this or that feeling of community of the ‘lustily complacent’, at this or that groundedness, but rather at the comfortable sedentariness of human being as such, by putting into question all merely relative points of reference in its understanding of self and world. The unity of content and form that underlies the composition of the Joseph novel proves itself anew in a modified shape. The wandering of the spirit that the novel narrates is likewise the inner drive of the narrator: ‘And this narrator’s ­star – ­is it not the moon, the Lord of the Way, the wanderer, who, in his stations, frees himself from each to move on? Whoever narrates, wanders through many stations in his adventures, but only pitches a tent at each, waiting for further directions’, according to ‘the will of the restless spirit’ (38). Only by reading in its stories also a self-­description of the narrator and the narration, a spiritual elective affinity to the wandering ‘heroes’ of the novel, can one understand the Joseph novel. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his brothers are shepherds who live in light tents without a fixed dwelling, nomads viewing the firmly constructed cities of sedentary citizens with the irony of spiritual superiority: ‘It had to be that way because one served a God whose essence was not rest and comfortable repose, a God of future plans, within whose will indefinite, great, far-­reaching things were in the making, who, along with His brooding will- and world-­plans, was Himself actually in the making and thus a God of unsettling uneasiness.’ He was ‘a God of concern, who wanted to be sought out and for whom one had to keep oneself free, movable and ready at all times. In one word: It was the ­spirit . . . ­that forbade Jacob from living a city-­grounded settled life’ (38). For reasons that cannot be articulated in detail until later, the narrator of the Joseph novel narrates the story of the genesis of spirit, whose principle is a wandering that contradicts the illusory security of sedentary life. Yet he narrates this story of genesis in the clear consciousness of himself belonging to it, as a later heir and a recollecting repetition. As narrator, he is moved by the same spirit that also moved the original story. This is what makes the renewed re-­narrating of the original story of the genesis of spirit possible in the first place. Yet the re-­narrating remains faithful to the spirit of wandering by understanding the original story not as a fixed ‘point of reference’ through which the narrator would have a fixed anchor point. For this reason, the Joseph novel is suspicious not only of origins of a conditional sort that constitute the ‘primordial beginning’ of a particular tradition, but equally

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of the original shapes in language, of the primordial or original texts. This is because an original was ‘itself not actually an original, not the original if viewed correctly. It was itself already a transcript of a document from God knows what ancient time, upon which, therefore, one might, without precisely knowing where one is, come to rest, declaring it the true original.’ ‘And so we might continue on and on, were it not for the hope that our listeners already grasp what we have in mind in speaking of coastal backdrops and the gorge of the well’ (12). Similarly, an interpretation of the Joseph novel remains faithful to the spirit of narration only by being developed out of the clear consciousness that it likewise must let itself be moved by the spirit that already moved the novel and its model. This means, in turn, nothing less than the commitment to speak not only about the novel but also, and even more, about what the novel itself speaks about.

The Abyss of Time At the beginning of the Joseph novel, the solid ground that is naturally required by knowledge is radically withdrawn. The Descent into Hell makes clear that we are ‘fooled’ when scrutinizing the well of the past because everything we can state in our questioning back into the origins of our existence inevitably turns out to be only some provisional, intermediary footing. We can always ask again ‘why?’ or ‘whence?’ so that everything stated leads not only, upon closer examination, to a ‘deeper’ ground, an ‘earlier’ beginning, but literally to somewhere bottomless. But this abysmalness of the well of the past must be thought together with the essence of time itself. In every ‘past’, we are confronted with the transience of everything grown, and thus also the transience of our own being. The fathomlessness of the past makes visible to us the footinglessness of time that knows no ‘first foundations’. Time itself is what radically lacks footing: in time, we find no ground underfoot, so the well of the past is not only fathomless, but literally bottomless. The ‘sedentary’ human, who trusts the seemingly self-­evident ground of having acquiesced to his surroundings and made himself at home in them, discovers the factual bottomlessness and footinglessness of his existence above all in experiencing time, without obstruction, as the abysmalness that withdraws every ground. Underlying all human groundedness is the forgetfulness of time, while the wandering of spirit is nourished by time’s unsettlingness. For this reason, the Joseph novel describes and discusses in depth the human experience of ­time – ­specifically, the unobstructed experience of the horrifyingly abysmal time, which is not really alien to sedentary and grounded humans, but which they nonetheless ordinarily suppress. The novel connects its reflection on time with an interesting side aspect of the story of Jacob. From the original text, it is known that for Jacob the



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seven years which he had to serve for Rachel passed by like seven days (Gen. 29: 20). According to the Joseph novel, this is perfectly plausible once one takes into account the enigmatic nature of ­time – e­ vident in that one can hardly determine with certainty how long (or short) a lived time span actually is. This fact is the starting point for a general reflection on time. How is it possible and plausible for seven years to be experienced like seven days? In the novel, it initially reads: ‘At work here is not some “seven-­sleeper” enchantment or any other sort of enchantment other than that of time itself’ (214). It is not a matter, then, of time somehow being enchanted; rather, time itself is the enchantment that matters. What does this enchantment consist in? The novel answers this question with a remarkable reflection that markedly characterizes the nature of time, which humans only reluctantly take into account: ‘greater units pass just as do the smaller ­ones – ­neither quickly nor slowly, but simply pass’. ‘Whether a man is cheerful or irresolute as he climbs into the flood, nothing lives that must not give itself over to ­it – n ­ or is anything more than that necessary. It carries us along, rushingly and ragingly, without our even noticing, and when we look back, the point where we first climbed in is now “long ago” – seven years, for example, which passed the way days pass. Yes, it cannot even be stated or discerned how man actually gives himself over to time, whether happily or hesitantly; the necessity of doing so overwhelms such differences and undoes them’ (214–15). This meditation on the essence of time is certainly not a euphoric reflection on the temporal constitution of human existence. Time is what passes ragingly – basically so fast that, retrospectively, we have no idea whether it was a matter of years or of days. The ragingness of time ordinarily escapes our attention because we are most reluctant to focus on its uncanny force. To be sure, it belongs likewise to time to be entirely indifferent to our inattention and to our attention. Whether we surrender ourselves to time happily or anxiously is all the same to time, for the necessity that is peculiar to t­ime – ­according to the novel’s incisive formulation – overwhelms such differences. From this side, we experience time as a frightening ruling power because it levels differences and annihilates the meaning that depends on such differences. In the face of time, everyone seems equal, equally unimportant, equally meaningless. Time makes everything equal. The necessity for everything grown to be subject to the power of time overwhelms differences and undoes them. It is no wonder that we are reluctant to attend to this nonsensical power of time, for it poses a deeply frightening threat to our selfhood. The ruling power of time does not stop with the overwhelming levelling of distinctions, but rather escalates to literal annihilation: what has grown passes, and humans perish. Schopenhauer, likewise a point of orientation here for the Joseph novel, finds clear words for human existence under the ruling power of time.

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He calls human existence an ‘unimpeded fall of the present into the dead past, a constant dying’ (1969a, 311). In the Descent into Hell, the narrator varies the theme in his own way: ‘When as narrating adventurers we plunge into the past, we taste death and the knowledge of i­t – t­ he source of both our desire and our ashen-­faced apprehension. But desire has more ­life – a­ nd we do not deny that it is bound up in the flesh. The object of desire is the first and last of all our speaking and questioning, of all that matters to us: human being, for which we shall search in the underworld and in death’ (39). While Schopenhauer sees horror and dismay prevailing over temporal and transient human existence, in the Joseph novel a peculiar double movement can be observed. Certainly here, too, the time of transience is inextricably linked with the nocturnal underworld of death, before which humans experience an ‘ashen-­faced apprehension’; at the same time, the ‘narrating adventurer’ is out to ‘taste death and the knowledge of it’. Thus, narrating does not simply confront time and death defensively, but rather gains its own knowledge precisely from the courage, indeed the desire, to search for ‘human being’ through the descent into hell, to the underworld of death. In the Joseph novel, the nonsensical aspect of time, which seems to lead necessarily to indifference, vanity and death, is joined by a second aspect of the same time that does not contradict meaning, but rather, on the contrary, makes it possible. Death is not only (in one regard) the end of all knowledge; it also makes possible (in another regard) new knowledge: human self-­knowledge. Thus, the double aspect of human being corresponds precisely to a double aspect of time, which one must understand if one wants to know oneself.

Desperation of Passing Time Time’s nonsensical aspect entices one to take no notice of time as ­such – ­indeed, to forget it as thoroughly as possible. But what does someone do who, unable to solve the riddle of time’s double aspect and thus unable to escape the nagging fear of time, wants to face time as little as possible? Such a person kills time. The Joseph novel reflects upon the questionableness and abysmalness of the universal tendency of human life to kill time: ‘It is debatable which kills time better and more swiftly: uniformity or articulating ­variety – ­the upshot, in any event, is that we kill our time. Alive, we strive onward, strive to put time behind us, strive in reality towards death, all the while thinking we are striving for life’s goals and turning points. And though a man’s time be articulated and divided into epochs, it is nevertheless uniform precisely as his time, slipping by under the immutable preconditions of his I, so that as he passes his time, passes his life, both beneficial ­forces – u ­ niformity and ­articulation – ­are simultaneously at work.’



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In passing and killing time, life strives to put time behind. Life as we ordinarily live it, in the mode of a non-­understanding understanding, possesses in this way an orientation within time that grounds everything: we live ‘forwards’ into the future because we want to ‘put time behind us’. The novel makes us aware of this alleged self-­evidence, and at the same time lends it an unsettling interpretation. Life that puts time behind by passing and killing time is striving after death. Life is not merely the passing of time, but also and even more so the passing of life. Thus, life that does not understand itself is in secret inimically disposed towards itself; it passes life, thereby working in secret towards its own death. This insight may be formulated in another way: what time has in store in the ‘future’ for everything living is death. We believe to be striving in life after goals and perfection, yet in reality we are heading solely towards our death. According to the Joseph novel, this happens to us not simply from outside, for the death wish as the passing of life is already inscribed in our compulsively laboured passing of time. By constantly repressing death and passing time, we secretly seek and expect death. Moreover, in believing we are able to cover up the abyss of time through the groundedness of our existence and the grasped identity of our I, we take after death already in advance, in our sedentary, unmoved existence. If life strives in secret after death, then it strives after an old acquaintance, for the alleged novelty of its ‘future’ is what is past and always the same. Life that does not live but simply falls in time thus has no true future; it constantly falls back to its beginning. Since time immemorial, the classical simile for this fact has been circular motion (the snake that bites its own tail). In the circle, the supposedly advancing movement in the end simply reaches once again its beginning: one believes to have reached the end, but the end ‘fools’ life and turns out to be the age-­old beginning. A life subjected solely to the ruling power of empty, nonsensical time, strives ‘in reality towards death’, all the while thinking it is ‘striving for life’s goals and turning points’. Correlating to the already much-­discussed enigmatic ambiguity of the human I is an equally enigmatic ambiguity of life in time: in passing time in order to live, we are in truth passing life. Life lacking understanding, organizing itself in time on the basis of its lack of understanding, is not living: it is an accomplice of death, executing its command. The dialectic of a desperate passing of time, in which we seek to conceal the meaninglessness of our life that we do not understand, explicitly integrates the human I. The true reason that all changes to our life, all its distinctions, articulations and epochs, ordinarily make no difference and have no meaning in the end is that they take place ‘under the immutable preconditions’ of our I. According to the Joseph novel, an unchanging I whose ‘life’ can consist solely in persisting identically with itself as long as possible is not the model of a fulfilled life, but rather another picture of death: ‘For endurance is dead, and only death endures’ (919).

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Schopenhauer describes this dialectic of a life that takes after death in its striving for endurance, identity and persistence as a dialectic of life-­assurance and boredom: ‘The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them moving. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, “to kill time”, in other words, to escape from boredom. Accordingly we see that almost all men, secure from distress and cares, are now a burden to themselves, after having finally cast off all other burdens. They regard as a gain every hour that is got through, and hence every subtraction from that very life, whose conservation as long as possible has till then been the object of all their efforts’ (1969a, 313). A book or a play that we do not understand inevitably bores us soon. Likewise, our own life inevitably bores us if we do not understand it. The existential listlessness that afflicts us in boredom is grounded in our inability to understand our existence, which emerges clearly once it is no longer suppressed by external distress or the ‘passing of time’ that is specifically sought for this purpose. Life that is not understood and that is not meaningful is recognizable precisely in this self-­deception: mistaking the successful suppression of the meaninglessness of life with a truly meaningful life, thus contenting itself with suppression and, like Esau, finding ‘happiness’.

Memento Mori The Joseph novel opposes the forgetting of time in a desperate passing of time with the ‘descent into hell’ into the well of the past, which becomes a memento mori in the passage quoted above: ‘When as narrating adventurers we plunge into the past, we taste death and the knowledge of ­it – t­ he source of both our desire and our ashen-­faced apprehension. But desire has more ­life – ­and we do not deny that it is bound up in the flesh. The object of desire is the first and last of all our speaking and questioning, of all that matters to us: human being, for which we shall search in the underworld and in death.’ In the well of the past, the descent into hell seeks a counter-­time to the continuous ­time – ­which means firstly that it seeks a different past from the past that is familiar to everyday consciousness. Why else does the narrating adventurer ‘turn pale’ upon going ‘deep into that well of the past whose gorge has never been plumbed’? ‘Is not the past the narrator’s element, the air he breathes, the tense to which he takes like a fish to water? Yes, true enough. But why does our curious and cowardly heart refuse to be calmed by these words of reason? Surely because the element of the past, by which we are customarily carried farther, ever farther, is a different past from the one into which we now begin our trembling descent: life’s past’ (39).



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Obviously, life’s past does not mean a past within the familiar time continuum of past, present and future, for this would be a past we ‘customarily’ live in. The questionable life’s past reaches deeper into the well of the past than every conceivable past within the familiar time continuum. In a sense, it is ‘older’ than every past, for it is the pre-­history of transience. That is why the ‘descent’ into the original past of mortal life is comparable to a descent into the underworld of death, for death is the basis of transience. We die not because we are transient, but rather we are transient because we are subject to the unprethinkable reign of death. Yet the memento mori of the Descent into Hell indicates at the same time that the essence of human being is ‘older’ than death and transience, for human being itself brought death and transience into the world in the first place with ‘the Fall’. On this point, the novel is succinct: ‘It was not here, not at the beginning of time and space, that the fruit of the Tree of Lust and Death was plucked and tasted. That lies before.’ Time and ­space – ­that is, the forms of finitude and transience as we know t­ hem – h ­ ave a human pre-­history, a ‘before’, which points ahead, perhaps, to an ‘after’. Since man willingly caused the Fall, he is in each case ‘older’ than everything in time and space: ‘The history of man is older than the material world that his will has worked, older than the life that rests upon his will’ (27). That is why the memento mori shows us not only our vanity and transience but, likewise, the possibility of a modified understanding of time. According to the novel, ‘to die is to lose time and drive out of it, but it means in return to gain eternity and omnipresence, and t­hus – ­all the ­more – ­life’ (39). Evidently, mortality and finitude of human being is taken seriously and placed at the beginning; but at the same time the loss implied at first glance by the passing by in time should be understood as the gain of something new, which ‘all the more’ deserves to be called ‘life’. Thus, one should make note that time is an ally of this new understanding of life, not an opponent. ‘Dying’ means losing time, whereas true life gains time by gaining ‘eternity’ and an ‘omnipresence’. Here, eternity is conceived as genuinely temporal, as a perfect form of time, since the novel connects it with the ‘omnipresence’ that is evidently temporally constituted. The Joseph novel does not, then, set its sights on an imaginary timelessness beyond time (that would, indeed, mean ‘driving out of time’ – i.e. falling prey to death), but rather on a new aspect of time itself. The idea, then, of an ‘eternity’ and of an ‘eternal’ life, in the sense of not being able to die, is inadequate for the Joseph novel. Human death is not an illusory death, and even less something that concerns only a part of human being such that the other part would remain untouched, having been protected from death from the outset. Both conceptions are alien to the Joseph novel’s narrative ontology because they exhibit solely a negative, defensive relationship towards the time of transience. Yet, evidently, the Descent into Hell of the narrative seeks not simply to negate, deny or skip the death of human being as a whole; quite the contrary, the essence of human being is explicitly sought in death and nowhere else.

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The possibility of ‘eternity’ and ‘omnipresence’ is to be gained, then, not outside of time but rather in time, not in spite of transience but rather on account of transience. What is meant becomes clear in light of the liberating aspect of transience. Clear consciousness of the finitude of one’s own ­existence – ­that is, of the short period of time that is granted to every ­life – c­ an become a powerful motive of resistance to the habits and ‘self-­evident facts’ of a sedentary existence: are the relative ‘stations’, in which I have arranged my life more or less comfortably, really worth my short, and therefore precious, time? Awareness of one’s own mortality can encourage one to renounce the alleged securities that ultimately fail in the face of death, and to embark on a wandering ‘according to the will of the restless spirit’. That is why the Joseph novel’s formulation for Jacob’s faith is chosen carefully: ‘that God can let the future pass through fire unscathed and burst the bars of death and is the Lord of resurrection’. That which passes through the fire of transience ‘unscathed’ is initially not life, but rather an aspect of time itself: the future. According to the Joseph novel, it makes sense to speak of ‘eternity’ and ‘resurrection’ only if what is meant by these expressions is not something beyond time, but rather a new aspect of time itself. In contrast to a life that merely passes time and thus passes ­itself – a­ nd thus does not truly live at a­ ll – ­the novel presents the narrative constitution of a life that truly lives because it is on friendly terms with time, and thus possesses a true future, past and present. A more precise and more profound understanding of this new, and at first glance strange, conception of time can be gained, then, only by paying attention to time itself in its inner differentiation as past, future and present.

Promise and Expectation If there is a past or a pre-­history that is ‘older’ than the transience of empty time, then a corresponding future or post-­history may be assumed, which is ‘younger’ than every future within this transience and which likewise belongs to the time that is sought: the counter-­time to the empty time of our ordinary dealings within the world. Of the three concrete dimensions of the living time, the Joseph novel attributes a primacy to the future: ‘The past is dreadful and the present is powerful, for it springs up before our eyes. But without doubt what is greatest and most holy is the future, and it comforts the hard-­pressed heart of him to whom it is promised’ (201). How is this to be understood more specifically? In everyday life, we are constantly reaching out to the future, the seemingly familiar object of our busy talking and planning. Meanwhile, the fact that there is the future at all is viewed as unremarkable, for it appears to be ‘given alongside’, as it were, the given fact of the consistently passing world time. In our planning and talking, we presuppose the dimension of



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the future as a self-­evident triviality, as an empty space that must first be filled with content and ‘meaning’ through our planning and acting. Yet it is not possible, against the background of such a thoughtless conception of time and the future, to understand the sentences quoted from the Joseph novel. Whoever understands the future in this way, as simply given alongside time, must think that the narrator has expressed himself carelessly and even incorrectly. Formulated correctly, it should read: what is greatest and most holy is without doubt the future, which consoles the hard-­pressed heart of him to whom something is promised in the future. This indeed, it seems, is what it must be about: the future as such is always already given, so that not the future itself but only something in the future can be promised and can serve as consolation. Yet the narrator of the Joseph novel knows exactly what and how he narrates. His formulation is precise: the consoling promise actually consists in that there is a future at all that deserves the name. If the future as such can be the object of a special promise, then the future at issue is evidently not something that is already ‘given alongside’ in every form of temporality. Promise and consolation consist, then, in there being a future different from the one already given with the continuous time of nature, which, sooner or later, ‘over the course of time’, will have become the past. It was made clear already in the analysis of the passing of time that the future we inevitably count on and plan for in everyday life is in truth no future at all. Yet the uniformity and monotony of a boring experience of time that was brought to our attention in that analysis must remain clearly present in order to ‘hear’ and understand correctly the peculiar ring of those significant sentences of the Joseph novel in which the future is no longer something self-­evident and trivial. It is this clear insight into the temporal dimensionlessness of a desperate existence that lacks understanding, which knows time only to pass it, that confers to the new concept of the future the utopian tone of promise. This tone is particularly present in what is perhaps the most beautiful sentence of the Joseph novel, and which highlights precisely the understanding of the future that sustains the entire novel: ‘For the future is hope, and out of goodness time was given to human being, so that he may live in expectation’ (793). Such hope and expectation is directed at a future other than the ordinary future within empty time, for it is not directed at an event that, in passing time, could at some point become present and then past. The novel ventures to say that the counter-­time that becomes accessible to human being in such hope and expectation is given from goodness. The experienced ‘eternity’ or ‘omnipresence’ frees us from the domination of a nonsensical time and thus opens the possibility of a narrative understanding of self and world. We are indeed subjected to transient time, but we do not belong solely to this time, because we stand at the same time in another time and

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history that points behind and beyond the time of nature. That is why the essence of human being comprises a ‘naturally lusty and preternaturally wretched existence’. The doubling enables us to distance ourselves from nature and to understand ourselves in it. By contrast, if a creature were at home solely in the time of nature, it could not perceive at all the material world and its peculiar form of time, because it would lack the necessary distance. For this reason, the Joseph novel calls the history of human being ‘older than the material world’, because the essence of human being is rooted in a history that is the pre-­history of the material ­world – ­and in this way keeps alive the promise and expectation of a post-­history of the world of transience. This history of human being is narrated and re-­narrated by the Joseph novel to make it accessible to reflection and understanding. In this way, the special property of the history of human being must be taken into consideration at all times: the fact that each human being always already partakes in this history, which underlies in turn all their particular efforts of understanding as a condition of their possibility. Human self-­ knowledge is hence essentially the understanding of this ­history – ­that is, the understanding of its past and future as well as of its concrete present, which is the present of each individual’s own life.

Time that Cannot Be Enumerated A life that does not understand itself bores itself because reality as such must appear to it as meaningless, banal and indifferent. This indifference also coins its experience of time: each point in time is at bottom like every other. For a boring existence, the three concrete dimensions of the living time are levelled to the one continuity of time in which every future point of time will eventually become past, with the same certainty that every past point of time was once future. Our everyday conception of transient and empty time is thus peculiarly indifferent to the three dimensions of time. Ordinarily, we can only conceive of points of time that have either already passed through all three dimensions of time, are passing through them now or at some point will have passed through them. This builds the core of our conception of a uniform and indifferent continuum of empty, passing time. This desperate experience of time as an endless and indifferent series of uniform points of time is why the Joseph novel can say that a life that, as a matter of course, lives ‘forwardly’, striving to ‘put time behind’, is striving ‘in reality toward death’. The equalizing of the three dimensions of past, present and future belongs essentially to a life that does not understand itself: its inherent temporality allows time to elapse as uniformly as the monotonous ticking of a ­clock – ­a symbol of empty time and vanity. Life that in this way does not really live, but instead secretly takes after death, has no true future, nor does it have a true past or present. This is



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precisely what constitutes the desperation of humans who do not understand themselves, and thus literally bore themselves to death because their uniform life-­time passes by ‘under the immutable preconditions’ of their I. The emptiness of a time continuum of uniform and indifferent points is essentially conditioned by the anxious egocentrism of an I seeking to remain identical with itself and to remain ‘always the same’. Its life story knows no (hi)story, only the meaningless duration of empty, dead time. If life takes after death, then the historical liveliness of a fulfilled time must, by the same token, appear like death from the perspective of an unlived life. For this reason, the Descent into Hell seeks human being expressly in ‘the underworld and in death’. Experiencing a historically fulfilled time means, in a certain way, tasting ‘death and the knowledge of it’. Our life story becomes meaningful and vivid for us only when our I does not remain alone but is rather prepared to die, like the grain, in order to be fruitful. The essential feature of a counter-­time in contrast to the empty time continuum is a distinction between past, present and future that, in a living and fulfilled time, does not let itself be made indifferent, into a monotonous continuum of empty time. For this reason, the Joseph novel sets its sights expressly on the narrative exploration of such a counter-­ time to the time of our usual dealings with the world: ‘Our concern is not time that can be enumerated, but rather its sublation’ (21). By this point in the discussion, it is clear that we are not dealing with a sublation of time as such, but rather with the sublation of a certain, inauthentic form of t­ime – n ­ amely, time that can be enumerated. What is sublated, then, is the emptiness and uniformity of a meaningless form of time, the symbol of which is the monotonous ticking of a clock. Taking its place is the experience, previously suppressed by this form of time, of a fulfilled time that cannot be enumerated. The more specific characterization of the counter-­time as not ‘enumerable’, in contrast to the time of the uniform continuum, is thus apt and immediately plausible. Time appears to be ‘enumerable’ when humans believe they are able to ‘get a grip’ on ­it – ­by arranging it spatially and enumerating it. They make themselves at home in a space of time, its empty future appearing to make room for their interests and actions. In fact, though, they flee into an egoism that can understand neither reality nor itself since it tolerates no meaning other than itself. Time mutates into the time of boredom in which the meaninglessness of one’s own existence makes itself so unbearably manifest that, in the end, one must pass and kill the time that can be enumerated. In the Joseph novel, narratively formed human self-­ knowledge explores, then, not time that can be enumerated, but rather the more fundamental time that cannot be enumerated, which is a theme in the novel’s diverse stories and narratives. At issue is not the derivative time that humans believe they can measure, but rather the primordial time that lends human existence measure and meaning in the first place.

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The Feast of the Narrative The other time that opposes empty t­ime – ­and in which everyday time is sublated and f­ulfilled – i­s experienced in the peculiar elevated and elevating time of the feast. It is essential to every feast as an event to make a cut in the form of a pause within the indifferent passing of the time continuum. The time of the feast is the time that cannot be enumerated of a making present in which both the past is recollected and the future is hoped for. Thomas Mann conceives of this celebratory, historically fulfilled time as theatric time, as the sublated time of staged repetition. Thus, one reads in the Joseph commentary from his lecture on Freud: ‘The feast is the sublation of time, an event, a solemn act played out according to a coined archetype, which takes place not for the first time, but ceremonially and according to a model. It achieves presentness and comes back, as feasts do.’ ‘In antiquity each feast was essentially a theatric matter, a play of masks; it was the scenic staging, performed by the priests, of stories about the gods.’ ‘It only lacks that this view passes over into the subjectivity of the performers themselves, present to them as a consciousness of play, a festival and mythical consciousness, for an epic to be achieved that is as curious as the one in Joseph and His Brothers’ (1999b, 293–4). Life in a historically fulfilled time is a ‘solemn’, ‘ceremonial’ life in the very precise, sober sense that the empty time of boredom and of not understanding is sublated in the solemn consciousness of a meaningful repetition. Feasts repeat themselves because repetition is celebrated in them. In contrast to the dead repetition that is soon boring and torturous, in the repetition that is celebrated something unrepeatable is repeated, sublating the time that can be enumerated. In this way, playful repetitions in dance, theatre and narration become a celebration in which something takes place ‘not for the first time, but ceremonially and according to a model’. But what is particularly solemn is a narrative that appears not merely pointedly as ­repetition – ­that is, as the re-­narrating of a known ­story – ­but which is furthermore narrated by the ‘performers’ in whose subjectivity there is the solemn self-­understanding of role-­playing. Thus, in ‘the performers themselves’ arises ‘a consciousness of play, a festival and mythical consciousness’, which the narrative itself performs once again. Here, content and form agree precisely in the ‘Feast of Narration’ (40). Yet the fulfilled time of the feast is more specifically a living interleaving of past and future in the respective solemn present of ceremonial repetition. The Joseph novel makes this clear in its explanation of the sublation of time that can be enumerated, from which only the beginning has thus far been quoted: ‘Our concern is not time that can be enumerated, but rather its sublation in the mystery of the transposition of tradition and prophecy, lending the word “once” its double meaning of past and future and thus its charge as potential present’ (21–2).



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This present is a present other than the present of a point in time on the ‘line’ of a continuously passing empty time. Such a point is barely real because it immediately becomes past as soon as it is no longer future. The present of the feast is the result of a making present of past and future that makes ceremonial consciousness into what it is. Its peculiar happiness consists especially in knowing that it is making present neither for the first nor for the last time. This distinction between the banal now point within the empty time continuum and the solemn moment of a ceremonial making present must be thought together with the ‘mystery’ of the human double being with which the Descent into Hell begins, ‘the alpha and omega of all our speaking and questioning, lending pressure and fire to all speech, insistence to all questions’. Human being’s natural–preternatural double being finds expression above all in its twofold experience of the present. On the one hand, we experience the present as the time that is ‘given’ in the respective now, which comes and goes without us having to do something for it or being able to do something against it. On the other hand, the present is also experienced as the solemn success of a genuinely historical making present, which we must expressly achieve so that it is repeated in time as always new, thus becoming a ceremonial event. For the solemn character of repetition of the ceremonial making present, the Descent into Hell offers an example, which, as the further course of the Joseph novel will show, is much more than a mere example: ‘That is the meaning of the solemn rite, of the feast. Every Christmas the child who is to save the world, who is destined to suffer and die and rise again, is born on earth in a manger once more’ (22). One must be reading attentively to get the point of this formulation. The Joseph novel does not say that it is remembered at every Christmas that ‘the child who is to save the world’ was ‘born on earth in a manger’. It states instead that, every Christmas, ‘the child who is to save the world’ is ‘born on earth in a manger once more’. In other words, the feast is a true making present in which the ‘once’ of the tradition and the ‘once’ of the prophecy come together in a peculiar manner and lend the feast ‘its charge as potential present’. The point of this thought consists, however, in that what is made present in the theatrical feast-­play is itself already a ceremonial staging, for the further life story of the child that is born on earth in a manger is ‘determined’ from the outset. The child will represent and fulfil a role in a greater unity of m ­ eaning – ­a role to whose predetermination it belongs essentially that one ‘suffer and die and rise again’. Such an understanding of the Christmas story may be contrary to a ‘religious’ understanding, for which what matters is, above all, the conviction that the holy stories report an ‘original’ and ‘unique’ happening that literally took place just as it is narrated. By contrast, the Joseph novel points out that what matters is understanding the meaning of the narrated stories. For this purpose, a narrative critique of ‘the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’ is necessary, because everything

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that is literally unique and original is not understandable. Meaning and understanding are made possible by a historical context of repeating and varying models, assigning to the individual its meaning and ‘determination’ within the whole. For this reason, what distinguishes the Christmas story for the Joseph novel is that something not simply happens in it, but rather happens in it in order to fulfil a determination. The child who ‘is born on earth in a manger’ stands, then, at the beginning of a life story that is predetermined for the child. But the distinguished character of this life story that is exemplary for human being reveals itself in the fact that Jesus, in a radically and entirely self-­conscious way, lives a life whose meaning is to fulfil a coined ­model – ­that what ‘is written must yet be accomplished in me’ (Luke 22: 37).1 That is the future, though, when viewed from the stories of the Joseph novel. The novel narrates in a celebrating-­ceremonial manner the beginning of the great holy story, which leads to Christmas, Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost. It is, to be sure, peculiar to the feast of this narrative, as for every true feast, that its meaning and essence become understandable only by partaking in it. The feast of the narrative cannot be summarized with a simple formula or substituted with a scholarly commentary. One must have patience, but also the necessary solemnity, to follow and understand the concrete course of the story. Yet the story that the Joseph novel narrates concretely is the story of Abraham and his blessing that is handed down to his descendants. In the peculiarly timeless omnipresence of this story, the tradition of the figure of Abraham is joined with the prophecy of the blessing that is not only promised to Abraham but to all his heirs.

5 How Abraham Discovered God

Where to Begin? – The Adventure of Self-Knowledge – In the Image of God – Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of God – The Courage for Monotheism – Not the Good, but the Whole – God’s History? – Model and Succession – Theology of Narration

Where to Begin? ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The preceding reflections have not only made clear how to understand the leitmotif but have also directed our attention to a dialectical fact: what everyone can do and what is common to all is realized concretely only rarely and can, for this reason, become a special achievement of exemplary human beings. In this spirit, the Joseph novel tells of Jacob as an exemplary human whose singularity consists in being attentive to the universal, pointing beyond the private horizon of each individual. It also soon becomes very clear, however, that Jacob’s exemplary status itself follows a model and walks in the footsteps of a past that is vividly made present. Jacob understands the meaning of his existence in light of an overarching unity of meaning, and interprets his own life according to a model that he seeks to repeat varyingly in his own present. Directing thought-­linking attention to the coined archetype of one’s own existence inevitably faces the confusing difficulty identified at the beginning of the Descent into Hell. If every present must refer to a model of the past in order to become living and itself a model, then the very same applies to the model of the past: this model, too, requires a model of the past so that it can itself be a model for the future. But if every model presupposes a model, how can the regression into a more and more remote past ever be brought to a close? Right here, in the threatening interminability of this recollecting regression into the past, one experiences the radical bottomlessness of the past. The well of the

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past is not only deep; seen from this perspective, it gains an enigmatic fathomlessness that makes us dizzy in our existence. The Descent into Hell makes this clear with the ‘desire’ of the young Joseph, ‘to put a beginning to the events of which he was part’. For he was met ‘with the same difficulty that confronts every such e­ ndeavour – ­the difficulty that everyone has a father and nothing is first, comes of itself, or is its own cause, but rather everything has been engendered and points backward, deeper into the first foundations, the grounds and abysses of the well of the past’ (2005, 10). Evidently, it is not sufficient for human attentiveness to discover a model in the past to which one’s own present can refer and designate itself in this way as a reality. The series of models conditioned by earlier models must have a beginning, and indeed an unconditioned or absolute ­beginning – ­in other words: the tradition must have its origin in a model that is itself without model. But how is such a beginning, a model without model, possible? ‘At this point the young Joseph grew dizzy, just as we do when leaning over the edge of the well’ (11). In the continuum of natural time, there are only relative beginnings that always refer back to something earlier, for ‘everyone has a father and nothing is first, comes of itself, or is its own cause’. If an unconditioned or absolute beginning is nonetheless possible, it will pose special challenges to understanding. In the beginning, the complex fact that one particular beginning is an absolute beginning cannot at all be recognized and adequately understood. Understanding requires time, the narrative unfolding of meaning, in order to free itself from being caught up in the literal. That is why the literal always stands at the beginning. But when applied to the problem of an unconditioned beginning, this means that even an absolute beginning appears at the outset to be merely a relative beginning. The Joseph novel takes this into account by initially arranging the absolute beginning that underlies the novel according to the model of a relative beginning. This relative beginning constitutes ‘the primordial beginning of the particular tradition kept by a given community, people, or family of faith’, which we are born into by chance: ‘The young Joseph, for his part, was accustomed to seeing the beginning of all things, that is, of all his personal things, in a southern Babylonian city called Uru’ (4). This sounds as though only an arbitrary ‘example’ should be invoked, as though we ordinarily understand the unity of meaning of our concrete life circumstances from a highly relative ‘primordial beginning’ that we hardly understand as binding for all humans, but rather only as the legitimizing original story of the personal life world of each of us. But the incidental tone changes once the novel recalls more exactly, as it were, the beginning in question through the person of Joseph. Concerning the city of ‘Uru’, it continues: ‘It was from there that long ago (Joseph himself was not always clear about just how far in the past it lay) a man, pondering and inwardly restless, had set out together with his wife and



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other members of his family and, in imitation of the moon, the divinity of Ur, began to wander, thinking this the most proper thing to do, appropriate to his disgruntled, doubt-­filled, indeed tormented state’ (4–5). Of course, this could still be the relative beginning of a particular people or religious community. Yet it is obvious that Abraham’s beginning consists in abandoning the state of sedentary security in order, by wandering, to expose himself to a ‘disgruntled, doubt-­filled, indeed tormented state’. In the beginning is not settledness, but rather unsettledness; not the comfort of a satisfying answer, but rather the dissatisfaction with all previous answers. The novel takes great care to highlight the special character of Abraham’s beginning: ‘What had set him in motion was spiritual restlessness, a God-­need; and if prophecies were made to ­him – ­and of that there can be no legitimate ­doubt – ­these referred to the wider resonance of his novel and personal experience of God, for which he had sought to gain participation and adherence from the very beginning’ (7). In the beginning is a ‘No’: Abraham leaves his familiar homeland and breaks with the ethical and religious consensus of his surroundings. He ‘sets himself in motion’, and his wandering is the symbol not of positive knowledge, but of doubt and scepticism. It is not a scepticism that joggles at this or that conviction only to leave untouched the fundamental understanding of self and world, but rather a scepticism that abandons all relative resting points and grounded sedentariness to set out on the spiritual adventure of self-­knowledge.

The Adventure of Self-Knowledge In Abraham’s new radicalness in saying no, a new kind of saying yes announces itself: a ‘novel and personal experience of God’. Abraham will discover God because he seeks Him in the absolute restlessness of spirit, the simile of which is wandering. To understand why the Joseph novel associates Abraham, the ‘primordial wanderer’ (276), with what is new in the cut in history that is binding for all humans, it is necessary to understand the specific nature of his discovery of God. The key passage in the Joseph novel devoted to Abraham’s discovery begins with the terse remark that Abraham was ‘the man who had discovered God’. The narrator adds that ‘The discovery had proceeded along a very arduous, indeed agonizing pathway’ (344). This formulation is significant. God did not come to Abraham of His own accord, nor did Abraham discover God by an unexpected accident. Rather, the discovery was ‘arduous’ and ‘agonizing’. Not until God had been sought by Abraham in this way did God respond. The movement that can be narrated clearly proceeds from human being and the human effort to gain ­knowledge – ­even if it is God in the end who leads this effort to its destination.

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The adventure of self-­knowledge that Abraham sets out on ‘along a very arduous, indeed agonizing pathway’ consequently begins with a new kind of human self-­consciousness. Abraham’s ‘endeavours and strivings had been determined and driven by an idea peculiar to him: the idea that it was supremely important whom or what things a man served’ (344). Thus, the central thought guiding Abraham has been articulated. What matters is recognizing ‘who or what things’ are worthy of being served by humans. Humans seek a standard in terms of which they are able to understand themselves, while the standard that is sought is itself measured in terms of its conformity with human dignity. This ‘peculiar idea’ is the inner restlessness that leads Abraham to set out on the adventure of wandering, and is the guiding star that accompanies him along the way. The Joseph novel further highlights its special character by interrupting Abraham’s story with the following remark: ‘That impressed Joseph, he understood it at once, and especially the aspect of taking oneself seriously. If one was to gain any sort of repute and significance before God and man, it was necessary to take things ­seriously – ­or at least one thing’ (344). So the question of human self-­knowledge concerning what matters in human life, what humans ought to (and ought not to) take seriously, is first answered with the insight that what matters above all is taking anything seriously in the first p ­ lace – ­and, indeed, not merely in a relative, conditioned sense, but in an absolute sense. One must be capable of taking something seriously in order to take oneself seriously. This is immediately evident to Joseph (and to the Joseph novel). The coined archetype of someone who took himself seriously in this new and radical kind of intensity is Abraham, whom humanity remembers to this day: ‘The first father took unconditionally seriously the question of whom humans ought to serve’ (344). In taking the question unconditionally seriously, Abraham takes himself unconditionally seriously. And also the other way round: by taking himself unconditionally seriously, his concern inevitably leads him to ask what is so unconditionally serious as to justify humans serving it and devoting their brief lifetime to it. An adequate understanding must consider a nuance that is easily overlooked. Abraham is not unsettled by the question whom he, as a private I, ought to serve; rather, he asks expressly ‘whom humans ought to serve’. He does not take himself seriously as an individual human in his isolated suchness, but rather succeeds in understanding himself as ­person – ­that is, as a representative of humanity. In this way, the question concerning the highest is taken seriously by Abraham in such an unconditional and radical sense that one can say, with Kant, that he understands humanity in his own person not merely as a means, but as an end. He does not ask whom he, as an isolated and private I, ought to serve, but rather whom he, as universal ­I – ­that is, as a human b ­ eing – ­ought to serve. Abraham’s spiritual restlessness and wandering, his radical questioning, is depicted by the Joseph novel as a model for human self-­knowledge.



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Even more of a model for the novel is the answer that Abraham gives to his question, for ‘his remarkable answer had been: “Only the highest.” Remarkable indeed!’ Abraham’s answer is remarkable not because it is strange or far-­fetched, but because it is note-­worthy – t­ hat is, worthy of being noted and of being remembered. The more specific explanation of the ‘remark-­able’ nature of Abraham’s answer, which is emphasized with the exclamation mark, is representative of the fundamental guiding thought of the Joseph novel: ‘That answer spoke of a sense of self that one might have called almost arrogant and intemperate. The man might have said to himself: “What am I, of what value am I and, in me, is humankind! It is enough that I serve s­ ome . . . ­idol, some lesser or demi-­god, it does not matter.” It would have made things easier for him. But he said: “I, Abraham, and, in me, humankind, may serve only the highest.” That’s how it all began’ (344). The line of thought up to this point has prepared the ‘sounding board’ to understand the reason for the novel’s incisive formulation that it all began with Abraham. Abraham’s concern and inquisitive search are set in motion in particular by the repeatedly discussed motif that diametrically opposes ordinary human consciousness and thus introduces something new into the story, and into history. Usually, a ‘comfortable’ modesty belongs to human being, allowing us to ask defensively: what am I and what am I good for? What good am I? I’m going to withdraw into a corner and cultivate my private happiness. For that, it’s sufficient that I select for myself, and serve, a ‘modest’ life goal. The multitude of potential life goals available to such a limited human self-­respect may be described as a multitude of ‘idols, some lesser or demi-­gods’, from which one selects one (or several) to which one devotes one’s peaceful life. For this reason, Abraham’s parting at the beginning is necessarily an exodus out of the grounded sedentariness of social ­conventions – ­which may be many things, but not the highest. The mediocre lesser or demi-­ gods of a family, neighbourhood, community or society, which are only relatively valid, are fixed points of a settled understanding of self and world. In leaving his home with his people, Abraham breaks with the rehearsed life world he was born into in order to go wandering in search of the highest that is initially unknown – equipped solely with the immense demand of taking humanity in his own person infinitely seriously. This demand is evident in Abraham’s I-­saying: ‘I, Abraham, and, in me, humankind’. Whoever enquires into the highest in this way has a formal condition (it should be the ‘highest’), without yet knowing the highest; he knows only that what is inscribed in the familiar life world as a rehearsed practice of ‘values’ does not satisfy the criterion. That is why Abraham’s search for God is so arduous: as certain as he is in negating what is evidently not the highest, he is initially uncertain in the positive determination of what is sought. ‘Whom or what thing ought one to serve?’ It is not even clear whether he is seeking ‘someone’ or ‘something’.

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The Joseph novel depicts Abraham’s novel and personal experience of God as the experience of a path of thought, because he seeks the highest along the path of knowledge: ‘It began with Abram’s thinking that mother earth alone was worthy of service and worship, for she brings forth fruits and sustains life. But then he noticed that she needed rain from the sky. And so he looked about in the sky, saw the sun in its splendour, in its power to bless and curse, and was at the point of deciding in its favour. But then the sun set, and he persuaded himself that surely it could not be the highest. And so he looked to the moon and the stars.’ ‘But when the morning star rose, both Shepherd and sheep vanished, and Abram concluded: “No, even these are not worthy gods for me.” His soul was weary from his efforts, and he concluded: “Might they, high as they are, not have above them yet a Lord who directs their courses, the rising and setting of each? It would be ill suited for me, as a human being, to serve them and not the one who rules over them”’ (344–5). Abraham’s very own guiding idea of the highest, beyond which nothing greater can be conceived, leads him to examine the being of the world to determine whether something or someone in it may satisfy this idea. In his adventurous search, an extraordinarily liberating force can be observed from the o ­ utset – e­ ven where it has not reached its goal. Various natural powers and world powers are evidently more powerful than us, attracting and threatening us in manifold ways, so that it is quite natural to ‘serve’ them. But we begin to emancipate ourselves from these natural and political dependencies and allegiances as soon as we attempt to seek the highest, against which everything pales in comparison, however great it may appear at first glance.1 Thus, the ‘primordial wanderer’ becomes a model for the liberation of human being from a dispersal into the multitude of possible life plans that are all equally insignificant and comfortable. He takes himself infinitely seriously and follows the novel experience of God, which is grounded by this unconditioned self-­respect: ‘I, Abraham, and, in me, humankind, may serve only the highest.’ What is new in Abraham’s I-­saying and his self-­knowledge is that he reflects on what is absolutely important for him as human being – so that serving it is not degrading, but rather ennobling. This thought guides Abraham in his unprecedented adventure of self-­ knowledge. Everything the Joseph novel has to narrate emerges from this, as from an inconspicuous grain.

In the Image of God As a liberating critique of what is only relatively and conditionally valid, Abraham’s wandering and his search for God is distinguished by a specific honesty, which the Joseph novel underscores as exemplary: ‘To honour truth was Abram’s heritage’ (426). The radical interest in truth and the search for the highest belong together, and their belonging



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together becomes a narrative event in the stories of Abraham: ‘And so great was Abraham’s sincere affliction and concern for the truth, that God the Lord was deeply moved’ (345). God, the goal of the search, is impressed by Abraham, but not because Abraham immediately reaches the goal, but because Abraham’s ‘affliction and concern for the truth’ is so great. Truth shares with God a remarkable property, such that they reciprocally refer to each other. This property grounds the fundamental relationship, characteristic of Abraham’s thinking, between knowledge and the experience of God. Truth is interesting for human beings not because it is comfortable (which it rarely is), but because ­it – ­like Abraham’s ­God – ­is the highest. Human thinking ought not to content itself with anything less, even if it often does. Thus here, too, the following holds: only by honouring truth, by honouring that which is the highest in an epistemic respect, does one also honour oneself by refusing to content oneself in the act of knowing with a comfortable compromise. The compelling description of Abraham’s discovery of God is also the passage in the Joseph novel that depicts with particular urgency what it means for us in an archetypal sense to take ourselves seriously as humans. Abraham brings not only a novel understanding of God into the world but also a novel self-­understanding of human being and I-­saying, which is conferred to Abraham’s spiritual descendants as model and example: the exemplary consciousness of what it means to be human. For this reason, self-­knowledge and knowledge of God do not stand separately and indifferently side by side, but are rather mediated reciprocally through negating and affirming determination. Negatively, it holds that neither God nor the human self is an empirical object whose being can be conceived in isolation. Corresponding to this is the positive  essential determination that God and human being are to be understood as two kinds of selfhood, which must be strictly distinguished from every form of objective being. The selfhood of human being sets human being apart from the realm of things, making human being into the ‘image’ of God. From this, it follows that the human I knows the true God only in knowing itself, and it knows itself only in knowing the true God. This is the central insight discovered by Abraham and bequeathed to the future. That is why the novel takes great care to work out meticulously the interleaving of self-­knowledge and knowledge of God, and to demarcate it from the common understanding of God that is shaped by the erroneous idea that God could be experienced or known, like a thing, without appealing to one’s own selfhood. Thus, one reads about Abraham’s knowledge of God: ‘For in some measure Abraham was God’s father. He had discovered Him and thought Him into being. Those mighty attributes that he ascribed to Him were surely God’s original property, Abram was not their originator. But by recognizing them, teaching them, and realizing them through thinking, was he not His father in a certain sense?’ (346).

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This is a ­bold – ­yet in its boldness precisely the ‘appropriate’ – theology of the true and only God, for Abraham’s monotheism is peculiarly dialectic: God is the absolute highest, the infinitely exalted and ungraspable one and only; and precisely as the highest, which is raised above the whole world, God is familiar and near. In the negativity of one’s own selfhood, insofar as one cannot grasp oneself as an object, one may discover a fundamental kinship with the highest, invisible and ungraspable. The moment we attempt to grasp our own being directly, we experience our own inaccessibility. Only in the presence of God can we experience our own selfhood: ‘God’s powerful attributes were, to be sure, something actually given outside of Abraham, but at the same time they were also in him and from him; at certain moments the power of his own s­ oul – ­shrinking and melting into one with them through k ­ nowledge – ­was scarcely to be differentiated from them. Here lay the origin of the covenant that the Lord then made with Abraham and that was merely the explicit confirmation of an inner fact’ (346). With this sentence, the Joseph novel formulates a dialectical logic of similarity, which provides the systematic clue to understanding the novel’s theological ideas in their inner unity. The human I discovers itself as an I­ – t­hat is, as selfhood in contrast to ­objecthood – b ­ y discovering God at the same time. By the same token, Abraham’s discovery of God is at the same time a self-­discovery of human being as a figure of selfhood. In discovering God, Abraham discovers human being in God. And the reversal, likewise, is true: in discovering himself as human in his unique and enigmatic selfhood, he discovers God in himself. In this way the dialectical kinship between archetype and image, articulated in the logic of similarity, entails that the one cannot be thought and understood without the other. That is why the narrator of the Joseph novel is convinced that we cannot honour God if we have too little respect for ourselves as humans. As images of God, we honour and recognize God only when we recognize our own greatness as humans, for it is in the specific greatness and dignity of humanity that God reveals Himself to human being in human being.

Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of God In articulating the novel self-­knowledge and knowledge of God that gains shape in Abraham, the language of the Joseph novel acquires a particular solemnity: ‘God was there, and Abraham walked before Him, his soul made holy by God’s closeness outside it. They were two, an I and a Thou, each of whom said “I”, and to the other “Thou”’ (348). Here, the unique interleaving of intimacy and enormity in self-­knowledge and knowledge of God finds its appropriate expression, for Abraham and God are not as radically separate from each other as the difference between creature and creator suggests. Rather, Abraham (and humanity in him) can truly



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encounter God because, in Abraham and God, two kinds of selfhood meet. They are two, essentially related in saying ‘I’: an I that says ‘Thou’ and a Thou that says ‘I’. We may now articulate, step by step, the dialectical dynamic of human self-­knowledge and knowledge of God. On a first level, Abraham ‘discerned God’s attributes with the help of his own greatness of s­ oul – ­without it he would not have known how to discern or name them, they would have remained in darkness’ (348). On this level, God is conceived anthropomorphically: only by taking our own selfhood as a guide for knowledge can we know God. Yet anthropomorphic thought reaches its limit from within once we realize the enigmatic negativity and incomprehensibility of our own selfhood, facing us in the discovery of God as ‘Thou’. Yet the kinship of similarity does not entail a non-­dialectical identification of God with the human I. Rather, the correspondence that Abraham discovered between human and divine selfhood is the basis upon which one can understand adequately in the first place the difference between the finite and the infinite: ‘That, however, is also why God remained a powerful I-­saying Thou apart from Abraham and apart from the world’ (349). God is close to Abraham, but His closeness means concretely a highly dialectical ‘closeness from outside’, which is further complicated by the fact that God is not only at the same time ‘in’ and ‘outside’ of Abraham, but, in another sense, also ‘in’ and ‘outside’ of the world. For God ‘was in the fire, but not the ­fire – ­which is why it would have been a very serious blunder to worship the fire’. Since God is the highest, He is the all-­encompassing: nothing is ‘beside’ or ‘outside’ of Him. He is ‘in’ every worldly single object, but He is not this or that thing, however great and overwhelming He may be: ‘God created the world, in which there were things of powerful greatness, like the whirlwind or the Leviathan. One had to consider these things in order to have some picture, or if not a picture, some idea of His outside greatness. He was of necessity much greater than all His works, and it was equally necessary that He be outside His works. He was called makom, the space, because He was the space of the world, but the world was not His space’ (349). God is ‘in’ the world and ‘in’ all worldly things insofar as He created them. For this reason, He is ‘of necessity much greater than all His works, and it was equally necessary that He be outside His works’. It is hardly possible to imagine adequately this dialectical tension of ‘in’ and ‘outside’; it is only possible to cognize it, for imaginations invariably aim at something delimited. For fundamental reasons, something that can be imagined cannot be the highest or the all-­encompassing that transcends all limits. It would be a ‘serious blunder’ to mistake God, who can be known but not imagined, with the imaginable, the creator with His works, the spirit with the letters. Abraham’s knowledge of God gives rise, then, to the central insight that his guiding ­thought – ­that God is the ­highest – ­leads not only to

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God’s strict singularity, but equally to His strict shapelessness (invisibility). A visible God, as a shape limited in space, necessarily has other shapes next to it, for this is dictated by the laws of space, which is a logic of next-­to-­one-­another. A visible God shaped in space would not be the highest. The invisible, shapeless God would be comparable at most to space itself, making possible all spatial shapes but, by the same token, not Himself being a shape. Everything visible is ‘in’ space, but space itself is invisible. That is why God can be called the ‘space of the world’, but ‘the world was not His space’, for space as such must be clearly distinguished from everything ­spatial – ­that is, from the individual shapes in space. A spatial object is in space, but space itself is not. Space encompasses all spatial particulars, yet these particulars do not comprise space. That is why, in every spatial representation, there is something that the representation itself does not and cannot represent: the condition of the possibility of every concrete spatial representation. Pure space, which lies behind, as it were, every representation of space, does not possess any spatial shape, but can take on every shape. Abraham, too, is firstly a bodily individual thing in space, but at the same time somebody who can say ‘I’ and know God. That is why the way God is ‘in’ Abraham without being Abraham is radically different from the way God is ‘in’ the fire without being the fire: God ‘was also in Abraham, who knew Him thanks to His power in him’ (349). The decentring of the individual I in true self-­knowledge is expressed masterfully with few words. Abraham knows God firstly only by taking his own selfhood as a guide, yet such a self-­knowledge and knowledge of God is for its part possible only in virtue of God (‘thanks to His power’). Now the initial relation is reversed: human selfhood recognizes itself as having always been borne by God’s selfhood, and human knowledge of God proves to be a shape of God’s self-­knowledge. In this way, the anthropomorphic knowledge of God is corrected by the central insight into the theomorphic character of human selfhood, and at the same time justified in a reflected form. If, on the first level, there was the danger of God’s selfhood merging with human selfhood, now there is the threat of human selfhood being drowned out by God’s selfhood. Hence, Abraham’s self-­knowledge and knowledge of God reaches its consummation on a third level where the similarity of human selfhood and God’s selfhood leads to a conscious and courageous human stepping back from God. The fact that human knowledge of God is a shape of God’s self-­knowledge ‘strengthened and fulfilled the original father’s I-­saying; in no way was this God-­filled and courageous I inclined to vanish into God, to be one with Him and no longer be Abraham. Instead he very alertly and clearly held himself erect opposite ­Him – ­at a vast distance from Him, to be sure, for Abraham was only a man, a clod of earth, but bound to Him by knowledge and made holy by God’s sublime Thou- and There-­ness’ (349).



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In one respect, human being is merely ‘a clod of earth’ – that is, a thing among things in the natural world. But this respect neglects the fact that it is a clod of earth capable of saying ‘I’. And Abraham discovers that this I-­saying is the echo or reverberation of an exalted and absolute I-­saying with which human selfhood is ‘bound’ thanks to human self-­knowledge.2 In virtue of this covenant, the true reality of the human double being emerges in the first place. Human selfhood discovers itself for the first time in the Thou- and There-­ness of God. On the one hand, this Thou is an external other, but it ­is – ­in contrast to the being of the object ­world – ­no mere thing, but rather an other who says ‘I’ to itself and ‘Thou’ to the other. In God, being as such becomes transparent in terms of its meaning to human being for the first time. Or, in the words of the Joseph novel: God is the There-­ness that is, at the same time and firstly, a Thou-­ness. Abraham’s ‘God-­filled and courageous I’ now proves its God-­courage by not misunderstanding the meaning of its being (the bond of its own dependent selfhood to God’s absolute selfhood) as an incitement to disregard or even renounce its own finitude and bodily nature. The meaning of an image means not merely similarity to the archetype, but ­also – ­and even more – distance to it. The closeness to God that Abraham discovered by no means leads, then, to the seriously mistaken view that the height of religious connection consists in ‘becoming one’ with God, in which the human I along with its bodily nature is supposed to disappear as much as possible. Circumventing one’s own humanity in this way, bound as it is to its bodily and finite nature, is for Thomas Mann precisely a sign of unbelief. Abraham’s true belief in God manifests itself, by contrast, in his courage to insist ‘alertly’ on his human I. He does this not out of the egoism of an isolated private existence, but rather for the sake of dialogue with G ­ od – ­that is, out of the insight that God wanted the human Thou in its distance to God, and that one would not conform to the meaning of the There-­ness and Thou-­ness if one sought simply to ‘dissolve’ in God. The dialectical tension applies also to human being: one ought to be ‘in’ God and, at the same time, ‘outside’ of God. ‘Thus Abraham had discovered God, out of a desire for the highest, had continued to shape Him in his thoughts and teaching, which proved to be of great ­benefit . . . ­in preparing the way for His actualization in the knowledge of humans’ (345). This formulation invites the objection: isn’t this a rather flimsy ‘actualization’ if it takes place in human knowledge? Wouldn’t it be ‘more solid’ and more appropriate to God’s overwhelming greatness if He actualized Himself in overwhelming phenomena of ­being – ­for instance, in the sun or lightning and thunder? Is it not disparaging to say of the highest that He actualizes Himself ‘only’ in human knowledge? Once again, in the concerned question, an ontology manifests itself that assigns a fundamental primacy to the positive being of objects before ­meaning – ­that is, before language and the knowing spirit. According to the logic of such an ontology, an ‘actualization’ in knowledge would be

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at most a second-­class actualization, for meaning and consciousness are less real than being. Thus, Abraham’s discovery of God in human selfknowledge is at the same time the discovery of the untruth of an ontology of meaningless being. The true and only God reveals Himself exclusively in the medium appropriate and similar to Him: in the understanding of human self-­knowledge.3 The sentence that Abraham’s beginning is an absolute beginning because it has no model can now be formulated more precisely. Abraham’s beginning lacks, indeed, a model in the ­past – ­namely, a human model. This does not mean, however, that he is entirely isolated and that he has no model at all. Abraham’s absolute beginning is a beginning in the presence of the absolute, or, put differently: his beginning is an absolute beginning because it has no model in the continuum of the relativizing world ­time – ­yet, indeed, a model and image in the living time of eternity.

The Courage for Monotheism The new familiarity of humans with God that is ‘expressly confirmed’ as an ‘inner fact’ in God’s covenant with Abraham is a characteristic feature of Abrahamic monotheism. This familiarity is thoroughly dialectical because it exists not despite, but rather in virtue of, God’s absolute sublimity. It is grounded in God, as He transcends every imaginable and graspable objectivity. He is a sublimity that brings about a kinship, a similarity between the finite selfhood of human being and the infinite selfhood of God. This distinguishes God’s covenant with Abraham, which is a covenant between archetype and image, essentially from God’s earlier covenant with Noah ‘and with all the living animals’, which was a covenant between God and His living creation as a whole. The radical difference is evident in the biblical narrative: God speaks to Noah, yet Noah never answers. Abraham is the first to be so close to God that God not only speaks to him but speaks with him. For this reason, the covenant between God and Abraham is entered into as a covenant between God and human being as human being, whereas the earlier covenant with Noah expressly encompasses, in addition to humans, ‘fowls’, ‘beasts’ and every other ‘creeping thing of the earth’ (Gen. 6–9). The Joseph novel explains what is new about the covenant between God and Abraham with the suggestion that the inner interleaving of knowledge of God and self-­knowledge was ‘the origin of the peculiar quality of Abram’s fear of God. For since God’s greatness was indeed something terribly factual outside him, and yet at the same time coincided in some sense with his own greatness of soul and was indeed its product, Abram’s fear of God was not fear alone in the true sense of the w ­ ord – ­it was not only trembling and quaking, but also attachment, intimacy, and friendship, both in one’ (346–7).



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Among the beings of nature, human being is merely one transient thing among other things, some of which are incomparably greater and more powerful. Moreover, humans know that they are weak, finite and mortal, so they have good reason to fear many things. Instilling fear in them would not distinguish the highest, as that which Abraham recognizes as the true and only God, for this it has in common with everything that is exceedingly great and powerful. Abraham discovers the singularity of the true God by discovering the infinite in Him, which invokes in human being ‘not only trembling and quaking, but also attachment, intimacy, and friendship’. The infinitude of God is ‘something terribly factual outside’ of us, but at the same time so similar and akin to the selfhood of human being that our own ‘greatness of soul’ faces us in the divine archetype in a familiar and friendly manner. Abraham fears the God he discovered not in the way humans earlier feared the many deities of nature. He transforms the archaic fear of God into a new courage towards God that sublates this fear with the insight that infinite and finite selfhood are related in essence. With Abraham, it is not just a new understanding of God that is brought into the world, but an entirely changed stance of human being towards the highest. God is familiar to us in a radically new way because we face Him as image. Abraham’s discovery of the one and true God makes a cut in human history that is not to be forgotten. It resulted in a liberating disambiguation of one’s understanding of world and self, synthesizing the multitude of competing life powers into one power. Thus, in the Joseph novel, a further ‘great benefit’ of Abraham’s consists in ‘reducing multiplicity and terrifying ambiguity to unity and something reassuringly familiar, to the Definite from whom all things came, both good and evil, both the suddenly terrible and the blessedly routine, and to which one had to cling no matter what. Abraham had gathered powers into the one power and called it the Lord’ (345). Collecting the many world powers into the one power that is single and highest is nothing other than the expression of that courage towards God that, in the Joseph novel, distinguishes Abraham’s self-­knowledge and knowledge of God. ‘Joseph’, one reads, ‘understood quite well the boldness and strength of soul expressed in the original father’s conclusions about God.’ He had the ‘courage, the fullness of courage required to reduce divinity’s manifold abundance to his God, to trace all sorrow and all grace directly back to Him, to rely solely upon Him and make himself exclusively dependent upon the Most High’ (346). One must make expressly clear how much courage is required in staking everything on the one and true God and making oneself ‘exclusively dependent upon the Most High’. Ordinarily, it seems advisable for humans to leave open as many options as possible so that one is well prepared to recognize a particular life power (a ‘god’) in order to secure oneself from this side. But, to be on the safe side, one equally recognizes a second, third or fourth life power, which one likewise seeks to p ­ ropitiate.

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Without Abraham’s courage towards God, one stands insecurely and fearfully in the face of one’s own life story, which is torn between competing life powers and not understandable as a whole. Thus, it seems to be a precept of prudence to minimize life’s risks and disperse them among as many lesser and demi-­gods as possible. The polytheism that Abraham overcomes is for this reason essentially a polypragmatism. The pusillanimous man follows the timid strategy of being servant to as many masters as possible, renouncing the possibility of gaining everything to avoid the risk of losing everything. This is what Joseph immediately understands: Abraham’s courage consists in rejecting this form of ‘pragmatism’ for him (and for human being as such). He does not merely rely on the highest ‘too’, but rather on the most high ‘solely’ and ‘exclusively’. Abraham’s courage towards God becomes especially patent in a scene in the Joseph novel narrated specifically to illustrate it. Abraham is conversing with his half-­brother Lot, who ‘had turned ashen pale as he said to him, “But if your God forsakes you, then you are totally forsaken.” To which Abram had responded, “True enough, so you have said. And then there will be no forsakenness in heaven or on earth to compare in ­magnitude – i­t will be absolute. But keep in mind that if I appease Him and He is my shield, I can lack for nothing and will possess the gates of my enemies.” And Lot took heart and said to him, “Then will I be your brother”’ (346). In Lot’s initial question, anxiety in the face of ultimate questions, which is typical of human being, finds exemplary expression. Yet Abraham’s ‘blessing’ shows itself above all in him being able, by means of his own model, to convey self-­respect to others to overcome their pusillanimous understanding of self and world. His new kind of courage towards both  the intellectual and the existential risk corresponds exactly to his clear consciousness of what it means to be human. It is a distinction that one lives up to only when one risks something and reduces the ‘multiplicity and terrifying ambiguity’ to the most high ‘from whom all things came, both good and evil, both the suddenly terrible and the blessedly routine’.

Not the Good, but the Whole Abraham’s liberating unification of the multiplicity of competing life powers leads to a new experience of God, which puts human understanding to the test. How is one to understand more specifically that the true God is good and evil, the ‘routine’ and the ‘sudden’, the blessed and the terrible? Here is where the radicality of Abraham’s revaluation of all values is perhaps most visible, which can be seen in that initially the Joseph novel’s formulation appears hardly ­plausible – ­perhaps even objectionable.



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Ordinarily, a moral ‘onesidedness’ is associated with the conception of God: wherever humans vacillate between good and evil, God is connected essentially with the good, for, whatever else God is, He is in any case good. This leads, to be sure, to ‘God’ being understood merely as an inauthentic form of speech for the good, as a ‘morality for the people’. This moral interpretation leads in the final analysis, however, to the divestment of God’s reality. If perfect goodness is conceived of as an ‘ideal’ to which (unfortunately) nothing in reality corresponds, a god who is nothing but the good likewise becomes an ideal, which may be edifying, but to which nothing in reality can correspond: it is merely human morality projected onto the heavens. The moral conception of God is a response to the tension between all-­ encompassing reality and all-­goodness that is inherent to the conception of God. It responds with the priority of goodness before the whole of being, thereby accepting that God, though He is good, is unreal, unknowable and powerless. Abrahamic monotheism, as it is understood by the Joseph novel, opposes this misunderstanding with the, at first glance, objectionable antithesis: God is ‘not the good, but the whole’ (348). For Abraham, God is not the very highest good that lets us ask how far it is real, but rather the very highest reality, the whole, that lets us ask how far it is good. An answer to this question will entail relativizing the human concept of the good, under which God was subsumed too easily, as if it were a self-­evident fact. Here, the Joseph novel speaks of the experience of ‘an enormous fact’ that this question arouses, and ‘that belonged both to God’s outside presence and at the same time to the greatness of Abram’s soul’. The novel speaks of the experience of ‘the fact that the contradiction of a life world that was supposed to be just resided within God’s greatness itself, that He, the living God, was not good or merely good among other things, but was evil besides. His living presence embraced evil and was at the same time holy, the Holy itself that demanded holiness’ (347). The ‘contradiction of a life world that was supposed to be just’ is not a contradiction that ought to be blamed on a faulty point of view, but rather resides ‘within God’s greatness itself’. A knowledge that sought to eliminate the contradiction from the outset would obstruct access to Abraham’s God. Indeed, the adventure of Abraham’s self-­knowledge and knowledge of God consists ultimately not in denying the contradiction between living reality and the moral ought in God, but in subjecting oneself to it. These quotations from the Joseph novel are oriented to similar formulations from the original text. Thus, Job, who is often presented as an example and archetype of belief next to Abraham, states: ‘What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’ (Job 2: 10). And, accordingly, God says of Himself in Isaiah: ‘I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things’ (Isaiah 45: 6f.). Evidently, it is strongly emphasized that He is the one Lord and ‘there is none else’,

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from whom everything arises, from whom everything real has its origin, whether it be light or darkness, peace or calamity, good or evil. Thus, God is to be understood as the whole and not as the good, insofar as the good in the sense of morality cannot be the whole but only one side of morality’s opposition of good and evil. The insight that God is not just the good but the whole does not lead, to be sure, to a pantheistic levelling of reality in which everything is equal and demands have no place. Quite the contrary: the monotheistic concept of God leads to a heightening of life’s tension, since in God’s holiness finite life is confronted with an absolute standard that pulls it beyond itself (and its own morality): ‘And He was holy! Holy not out of goodness, but out of being the living God, and more than living, holy in His majesty and ­terribleness – u ­ ncanny, dangerous, deadly’; ‘but He also demanded holiness, and that He did so merely by existing gave the Holy One a greater meaning than that of mere danger. The caution that He enjoined became piety itself and God’s living majesty became the measuring rod of life’ (348). While Abraham’s God exists beyond the moral distinction of good and evil, the formulation makes clear that this distinction is by no means replaced by a banal indifference. Taking its place is a different, more profound and sharper distinction: between the holy, on the one hand, and human being on the other, which ought to satisfy the demand for holiness. Thus, God is not on this side of good and evil, but beyond good and evil. The ‘enormous fact’ that God is not merely the good (as part of reality) but the whole of reality may also be formulated in that He is ‘good’ in another, more radical sense than is conceivable by human morality.4 Far from suspending every value distinction and every ought in His all-­encompassing reality, He makes an absolute demand, ‘merely by existing’, that in its sharpness and ‘danger’ transcends every moral demand. His reality beyond life becomes ‘the measuring rod of life’.

God’s History? The relation between finite human life and its measuring rod, God’s being ‘beyond life’, is of course dialectical. The holiness called for by the measuring rod is a demand that implies that life is to a certain extent unholy. For this reason, from the viewpoint of finitude, God’s being beyond life appears initially as a stark antithesis to life: what can be said of God cannot be said of life, and what can be said of life cannot be said of God. The narrative ontology of the Joseph novel demonstrates this in light of the intimate relation between ‘life’ and ‘narrative’, for the living is what develops through story and history and can thus be narrated. Likewise, life only becomes aware of itself in human being once we understand our temporal being as a life story in terms of its narrative unity of meaning.



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Thus, the stark antithesis, which the God discovered by Abraham forms into natural life, can be illustrated more specifically as an antithesis to the narratable stories: ‘The original father had many other things he could teach about God, but he had nothing to narrate – not in the sense others knew to narrate stories about their gods. There were no stories about God. This was perhaps the most remarkable thing of all: the courage with which Abram posited God’s existence from the very beginning, without any attendant circumstances or stories, but simply by saying “God”’ (349). Even in this perhaps ‘most remarkable’ point, there is a radically critical element inherent to Abrahamic knowledge of God that is directed against misunderstandings in previous conceptions of God. Abraham’s God is indeed the original beginning that precedes and underlies everything, but He is not known and understood in His truth by human being in the beginning. Not until the middle of development of history is he made present. For this reason, true knowledge of God must be asserted against the multiplicity of usual conceptions of God, in which the grounded and national rootedness of human being articulates itself. That God lacks a (hi)story is directed against previous conceptions of God, as they are too close to the natural life of human being as well as to familial stories of gods dealing with love, marriage, sibling disputes, procreation, birth and death. The Joseph novel emphasizes the stark antithesis of the God discovered by Abraham to the ‘family gods’ of polytheism: ‘God had not arisen, had not been born, of any female. Nor was there a female beside His throne, no Ishtar, no Baalat or mother of God. How could that be? Simple reason led one to understand that such a thing was no possible idea in view of God’s entire quality.’ God ‘was alone, and that was a hallmark of His greatness’ (349–50). In this way, the God discovered by Abraham indicates an adamant no to the entanglements of natural life that can be narrated. His sublime greatness transcends the colourful multiplicity of the narratable, just as the one space (Makom) transcends the multiplicity of all concrete spatial figures.5 This name of God makes God’s sublimity in contrast to the stories of natural life particularly clear, for what could be more starkly opposed to the narrative temporality of life than pure space? Yet this ‘no’ to life is joined by a new ‘yes’ to life and its n ­ arratability – ­a yes whose new essence is made possible in the first place by the initial no. God is not the fire, yet He can be ‘in’ the fire precisely because He created it and approved of it. God is not the world, yet He can be ‘in’ the world precisely because He created it and approved of it.6 Likewise, God is not the history of the world, yet He can be ‘in’ the history of the world precisely because He created its preconditions and approved of them. Yet there is no history of what is exclusively good, routine and blessed; there is history only of what is good and evil, routine and sudden, blessed and terrible. God did not create solely the morally good, but rather the whole of the world so that it may have a history.

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This dialectical shift from the original negation of history to the creative affirmation of the transient world and its narratability is formulated in the Joseph novel by means of a dialectic of past and future. The ‘lack of stories’ of the God discovered by Abraham ‘was to be understood only conditionally, correctly only in terms of the past, but not the f­uture – a­ lways presuming that the word “narrate” can be applied to the future and that one can narrate the future, and be it in the form of the past. Nevertheless, God did indeed have a story, but it concerned the future, a future so glorious for God that His present, glorious as it was, could not match it’ (350). Abraham’s discovery of God thus makes present, at the same time, the history of God from its past up to its future. God’s past is characterized by its ‘lack of stories’, which cannot be narrated. And yet this unprethinkable lack of stories gains some relation to time and historicity by being inserted as the past into the order of God’s living time and, as the ground and condition of narrativity, moves to the limit of narratability. By contrast, God’s future is an entirely different limit of narrativity. It does not negate narratability but rather accomplishes it, in that history will one day be narrated and understood perfectly clearly and distinctly, but in the present only piecemeal and with patchy understanding. Thus, in the Joseph novel, one reads the following about God’s history, which concerns a future that is not equalled by anything in the present: ‘Oh day of God’s apotheosis, day of promise, expectation, and fulfilment! It would, let it be noted, also include the apotheosis of Abraham, whose name would henceforth be a word of blessing, a greeting to be shared among the races of men. That was the promise’ (351). Yet the promised day is not present but future. That is why everything that is present is subject to reservation, for nothing can come to accomplishment in the present. Accomplishment is reserved for the future: ‘this was what lent a quality of suffering to God’s countenance at present, a quality of not-­yet and of expectation. God lay in bonds, God suffered. God was held captive. This softened His sublimity, making it an object of comforting devotion for all who suffered and waited, who were not great, but small in this world, and it put scorn in their hearts ­against . . . ­all things shameless in their greatness’ (351). God’s future can at best be narrated fractionally and indirectly, since the imperfect can refer to the perfect only fractionally and indirectly. The narrative radicality of the Joseph novel manifests itself in conceiving and shaping this brokenness narratively as a peculiarly broken temporal logic of narrating that is possible in the present. It assumes, namely, that ‘the word “narrate” can be applied to the future and that one can narrate the future, and be it in the form of the past’. The well of the past is thus also, and above all, a well of the future. The Joseph novel narrates God’s future, which cannot be narrated in the present because it will be the accomplishment of narrating. For this reason, it narrates the future by narrating the past and contemplating the ‘old’ stories that narrate God’s covenant with human being.



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These reflections have shown that this covenant has been entered into for the sake of narration. For this reason, God did not create solely the morally good but, rather, the whole of the world. And for this reason, His creation culminates in human being, for human being is distinguished among all creatures in that being human means being thoroughly temporal. We are what we are only if we understand ourselves in terms of stories and history. That is why we can narrate.

Model and Succession It is in Abraham’s self-­knowledge and knowledge of God that humans acquire for the first time knowledge of what it means to be the image of God. The relation between God and human being is placed on a new ground: on the ground of self-­knowledge. This is ‘the origin of the covenant that the Lord made with Abraham’. The bond that implicitly already tied the archetype and the image becomes an expressly and reciprocally recognized covenant and alliance. The covenant between God and Abraham is accompanied by a change of name in which the essence of the posited cut is given particularly clear expression, dividing before and after and thus allowing a new epoch of history to begin. Abram casts off his old name and acquires a new name whose meaning points to the future: Ab-­raham, father of the many (peoples). This change of name also indicates, however, that the adventure of self-­knowledge in which Abraham discovers God results in a profound change in the personal selfhood of Abram, in a fundamentally different and new self-­understanding in the presence of God. This change of character is sealed with a new name so that the cut will not be forgotten, but passed down ‘from generation to generation’.7 The promise to Abraham that accompanies the covenant consists precisely in his epoch-­making self-­knowledge and knowledge of God not being forgotten in the later history of humanity. Time and again, it will find successors who take this as an example and adopt Abraham’s legacy by attempting to walk in his ‘footsteps’.8 In this way, Abraham becomes the archetype of the blessed human being who is called upon to shape the future. In the original text, the covenant between God and Abraham is sealed with the following words: ‘As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, and you shall be a father of many nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations.’ ‘And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you’ (Gen 17: 4–7). The covenant thus posits a lasting cut, arranging the story narrated by the original text into a before and after. Especially the afterwards of

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future events is important for the understanding, for the cut becomes what it is first by proving itself over time, by not being forgotten but rather remembered and made present anew. In this way, the beginning that is made with Abraham, which initially can hardly be distinguished from a mere relative and transient beginning, first proves to be an absolute beginning for the contemplating understanding. It belongs not to the levelling continuum of natural time but to the order of a counter-­time, which promises to make the covenant of Abraham with God into an eternal covenant. The new consciousness of God and self that comes into the world with Abraham is sealed by the covenant with God and endowed with the promise that this beginning will mark a new epoch in the history of humanity, never to be forgotten. Abraham’s discovery, that self-­knowledge and knowledge of God mutually determine and require each other in human being, should always find successors who take his self-­consciousness and consciousness of God as a model and attempt to do justice to it in the here and now of their own respective present. That is why the Joseph novel calls the covenant of Abraham with God ‘the explicit confirmation’ of the ‘inner fact’ of the newly gained self-­ understanding. Of course, an ‘inner fact’ must continually be interpreted and understood, for an absolute beginning in relative time must appear at first glance ambiguous, indeed unintelligible. Its interpretation is necessarily controversial, so that the Abrahamic blessing and covenant with God stand at the beginning of a history of interpretation in which the meaning of the beginning is in question over and over. For this reason, the name of Abraham marks not merely the coining of a narrative model, but likewise the beginning of a dispute concerning the appropriate understanding of its meaning. On this point, the novel adds: ‘The life of such men, with whom a new history begins, seldom or never means a pure and unquestioned “blessing”.’ And ‘whether this destiny may be a blessing or not is a question’, to which ‘always and without exception there can be different answers’. But ‘of course a “yes” was always the answer of the community of those growing by both physical and spiritual means’ and succeeding Abraham, in connection to whom ‘Joseph traced his own spiritual and physical existence’ (7–8). In this way, Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel places itself explicitly in the narrative succession of a model of ‘inner unrest and wandering’. It adds its own re-­narration and interpretation to the numerous re-­narrations and interpretations that constitute the history of reception and interpretation, which takes its point of departure from Abraham ‘whose novel experience of God is destined to shape the future’ (7). To be sure, the novel more specifically takes a later descendant of Abraham as its actual model. Joseph reveals in an exemplary manner how the model of Abraham is to be understood and to be made into a standard for one’s own understanding of self and world. In other words,



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the Joseph novel is Thomas Mann’s sweeping project of appropriating Joseph’s understanding of self and world anew under the conditions of the twentieth c­ entury – ­and thus of accepting Abraham’s legacy.

Theology of Narration What characterizes the composition of the Joseph novel is the way it recounts Abraham’s succession in the exemplary stories of Jacob and Joseph, explicating them in narrative form. But the inner unity of meaning of the novel is more fundamentally determined by the fact that it thinks of itself as a narrative succession of Abraham. It tells, then, not merely of Abraham’s heirs and successors, but is itself what it narrates: an ­attempt – ­here and now, in one’s own ­present – ­to understand and to do justice to Abraham’s discovery. For this purpose, the most important feature of the novel is that it posits itself as a narrative in the succession of Abraham. His new self-­knowledge and knowledge of God is not merely the novel’s content; rather, it is expressed in a much more fundamental and radical manner in the novel’s narrative form, which understands narrating itself as self-­knowledge and knowledge of God. The dialectical similarity of human being and God that Abraham discovered is conceived and shaped by the novel as a narrative kinship, as a similarity in narration. Thus, it is written in the Joseph novel: ‘The narrator, one will find, should be inside of the story, one with it, and not outside it.’ But how is it, then, ‘with God, whom Abram thought into being and recognized? He is in the fire, but He is not fire. He is both in it and outside of it. It is, to be sure, a twofold matter: to be something and to contemplate it. And yet there are planes and spheres where both take place at ­once – ­the narrator is in his story, but he is not the story; he is the story’s space, but the story is not his space, but rather he is outside of it as well, and by a shift in his nature he puts himself in a position to comment on it’ (671). In order to understand this crucial passage adequately, one must be clear about the risk articulated in it. A sense of self is expressed that, using the words that the novel uses for Abraham’s sense of self, one could call ‘almost arrogant and intemperate’. The narrator risks identifying a kinship in terms of similarity between Abraham’s God and the narrator’s own narration: if God is the space of the world and yet the world is not His space, then the narrator is the space of the narrated story, ‘but the story is not his space’. The narrator of the Joseph novel deems the thought so important that he repeats it once more, in a later passage that addresses again the dialectical relation between Abraham’s self-­knowledge in God and God’s self-­ knowledge in Abraham, while extending it to Abraham’s heirs and humanity as a whole. Thus, it is viewed as a ‘universal property of the human creature’ and ‘an instrument for God’s self-­knowledge’, a

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property that ‘grew particularly prominent’ in Abraham’s ‘tribe’. This is because ‘from the very beginning there stirred within it a seed of insight into the Creator’s extra-­worldliness, His totality and s­ pirituality – t­ hat is, that He was the space of the world, but the world was not His space (like the narrator is the space of the story, but the story is not his, which then offers him the possibility of commenting on it)’ (1050). This is a conception of similarity in a literal sense: God relates towards His work, the world, ‘like’ the narrator stands to his story. The logic of similarity leads, then, to the reverse conclusion that is just as daring as it is illuminating: the work of God, the being of the world, is comparable to a narrative, and the creative God thus becomes the narrator of being. The narrator of the Joseph novel, who re-­narrates the story of Abraham and his heirs, explicitly accepts in this way the inheritance of the novel and personal understanding of God. For his own narrative self-­understanding, he reinterprets in an original manner Abraham’s central insight that we can know the true God only by knowing ourselves. For the Joseph novel, we can know the true God by recognizing Him as the archetype and ground of human narrating and, at the same time, human narrating as the image of divine narrating. In this way, the narrative self-­knowledge of the Joseph novel understands the essence of human being concretely in terms of his genuinely temporal and linguistic gift of understanding the meaning of narratives and of being a narrator oneself. That is why the way God is ‘in’ human narrating without Himself being the narrating is again radically different from the way God is ‘in’ the fire without being the fire. God is in human narrating insofar as humans tell of God ‘thanks to His power’. Narration thus knows itself not merely as an image of the divine but, more importantly, as ‘an instrument for God’s self-­knowledge’. Yet the archetype of Abraham also reveals that God’s self-­knowledge is possible in the narrator only if the narrator does not misunderstand the fact of similarity as a demand to become one with God, but rather as a demand to keep a distance to God ‘very alertly and clearly’. In this sense, one reads in the Joseph novel that ‘At no point have we intended to awaken the illusion that we are the original source of the story of Joseph. Before anyone could tell it, it happened; it flowed up out of the same spring from which all that happens flows, and in happening it narrated itself’ (671). The distance between finite human narration and God’s absolute creative narration consists, then, in that human narration invariably depends on preconditions that it cannot itself supply. A finite narrator is not the ‘original source’ of what he narrates; the happening of the world, for which it is given that it narrates itself, precedes the narration of the world. The Joseph novel formulates this essential aspect of its narrative ontology clearly as a theology of narration. In its narrating, every human narrative tells also of something that cannot be told, as it is something that tells itself: of the narratability or historicity of being.



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An understanding of a narrative is, for this reason, limited and insufficient if it does not also explicitly understand the narratability of being that manifests itself in every story. For the Joseph novel, this is especially evident in the stories that it re-­narrates, which were already in the world when they narrated themselves through happening: everyone ‘knows it or thinks he knows it, for often enough it is merely a superficial, unjustified, dreamy and vague kind of knowing. It has been told a hundred times and passed through a hundred media of tellings. And here today it is passing through another, in which it gains self-­contemplation and recalls what once actually was the case with it, precisely and truly, so that it both flows forth and comments on itself’ (671–2). According to the Joseph novel, human understanding in the presence of the highest reality and ultimate questions is comparable to a dream: we know something without knowing that we know something; we suspect something without understanding what it means; we hear and tell stories that we believe we know, but do not understand them because ‘it is merely a superficial, unjustified, dreamy and vague kind of knowing’. The awakened understanding arises, however, from this dreamy ‘vagueness’ as soon as it reflects upon itself. For this reason, the Joseph novel narrates the story of Joseph with new means, so that ‘it gains self-­contemplation and recalls what once actually was the case with it, precisely and truly’. Concretely, the self-­contemplation of the narrative revolves around the central insight that the story of the blessing of Abraham and his heirs essentially tells of the historicity of b ­ eing – ­that is, of the enigma of narratability and of the ‘original source’ of all stories. In the Joseph novel, the story awakens to an understanding of itself because it is not only narrated once more, but, rather, for the first time with the understanding that it is narrating of ­itself – ­that is, of narrating. For this reason, it would be a ‘very serious blunder’ to mistake the literal story of the Joseph novel with what the narrator seeks to ‘comment on’. The task of adequately understanding the Joseph novel consists not so much in commenting on it, but rather in commenting on what it itself comments on.

6 What Are Human Beings, that You Are Mindful of Them?

Higher Echelons – Human Reason and Language – Evil – On the Economy of Morality – The Narratable World of What Happens – Who Narrates? – The Novel of the Soul – Very Serious Jokes – In Praise of Transience

Higher Echelons ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The leitmotif of I-­saying has become more complex as a result of the reflections on Abraham’s ‘novel and personal experience of God’: alongside human being, God likewise says ‘“I”, and to the other “Thou”’. In this way, human self-­knowledge is placed on a new foundation, for humans can know the peculiarity of their own I-­saying by comparing and contrasting their selfhood with God’s I-­saying, by means of a dialectical logic of similarity. It is significant, then, for the project of a narrative self-­knowledge that, in the Joseph novel, yet another voice becomes audible in the concert of I-­saying – a­ voice that observes and comments on God’s covenant with humans ‘from outside’, as it were. At issue, as one reads in the Descent into Hell, are ‘the angels, whose less than friendly attitude toward humankind is, to be sure, an a priori certainty. To them God’s creation of a life world of good and evil and His concern for it seem some sort of majestic whim that nettles them, for they ­assume – ­probably more rightly than w ­ rongly – t­ hat behind it lay a weariness with their psalm-­singing purity’ (34). In the Joseph novel, the angels build the ‘Realm of Sternness’ (33). With their ‘psalm-­singing purity’, they assume the standpoint of rigorous ­morality – a­ standpoint that is not entirely alien to humans, even if they are not capable of taking it up in angelic purity. The ‘stern’ seriousness of angelic purity is not a foreign view of human being from outside, for humans can find this standpoint within themselves as ‘morality’. Every reader responds paradoxically, then, with a certain sympathy towards the angels’ stern rejection of humans and their life world of good and evil.



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From a strictly moral standpoint, the ‘creation of a life world of good and evil’ is to be understood only as a ‘majestic whim’ or, put less carefully, as a moral mistake. It is only aggravated by God’s enduring ‘concern for it’, since it suggests a ‘weariness’ of pure morality that, for the nettled angels, must be as incomprehensible as it is grievous. Yet, precisely for this reason, consideration of the angelic voice casts new light on the creation of the life world of good and evil and God’s concern for ­it – e­ ven if we are dealing with the rather indirect illumination of an indignant  ­ignorance. Thus, insight into why the angels are wrong in the face of God deepens our understanding of the divine and human I-­saying. The angels’ standpoint is introduced right at the beginning of the Joseph novel in the ‘anthropological overture to the complete work’, but it is not until the Prelude in Higher Echelons at the beginning of the fourth and final part that it is presented in full detail. There one reads that, for the angels, underlying the morally questionable concern of God in human being, there is ‘a whimsical train of thought’ only ‘too familiar’ to these higher ‘circles and echelons and long a source of bitterness’. God’s ‘offensive idea’ was more specifically supposed to be this: that the angels ‘were created in Our image, yet are not fruitful. Whereas, behold the animals are fruitful, yet are not after Our similitude. We will create human b ­ eing – ­in the image of the angels, and yet fruitful!’ (1041). Also from the point of view of the angels, then, creation is permeated by a logic of similarity. Yet the angels see themselves as the only legitimate similarity to God, irrespective of the fact that they lack ‘animal’ fruitfulness. Indeed, the addition of this fruitfulness, for the ‘Realm of Sternness’, deforms human being into an ambiguous double being that represents nothing other than a distorted and morally reprehensible caricature of angelic purity. Thus, the angels’ judgement upon human being could not be any different: ‘How absurd. Worse than superfluous, devious in fact, a whim, and gravid with remorse and bitterness.’ ‘But all in all, no matter what interesting aspects, beyond mere bestiality, may be inherent in that bestial advantage, the quality of “fruitfulness”, we, as the “unfruitful”, at least did not drink iniquity like water; and One will see just how far One gets with One’s fruitful species of angels’ (1042). The narrative mastery of this and similar passages consists in pursuing the question concerning the ‘enigmatic being’ of ­humans – ­which holds the Joseph novel in suspense from beginning to end, lending its language ‘urgency and fire’ – from the point of view of the angels. The guiding question is thereby varied and alienated by the standpoint of the ‘Realm of Sternness’, which is by no means free of self-­interest and self-­praise. The witty and profound effect is that the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel becomes noticeable only ironically, as a hidden subtext in the moral indignation of the angels: as an ‘interesting aspect’ that is reluctantly noticed and immediately rejected.

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From the standpoint of the angels, too, human being is a double being that joins the preternatural and natural into a new form of existence. For the moral rigorism of purity, this connection is of course only a muddy, objectionable mixture of elements that ought to remain neatly separated from one another. What is ‘interesting’ about the double being of humans, their genuinely historical and narrative language and reason, remains inaccessible to the preternatural angels (and likewise to the natural animals). They see only the ambiguity, the good and evil, the blessed and terrible of being human, but not the possibility that thereby arises of understanding interpretatively what is ambiguous, what transcends the realm of stern ­literalness – ­and thus to have a history, and to have stories. In the eyes of the angels, the morally dubious fact that creation does not remain with the angels and a­ nimals – b ­ oth of which are unhistorical and without s­ tories – b ­ ut rather proceeds to the ‘good and evil life world’ of human being, with history and stories, casts an equally dubious light on the creator Himself: ‘Out of pure restlessness, out of a pure need to act and a pure urge for “if one thing, why not another”, for “after angels and beasts, why not an angelic beast as well”, One became entangled in non-­ wisdom, created something flagrantly precarious and e­ mbarrassing – o ­n which, given One’s venerable obstinacy, One then, precisely because it was an undeniably mistaken creation, hung One’s heart all the more and attended to it with a zeal insulting to all heaven.’ A concealed subtext is once again underlying the explicit outrage. As double beings or ‘angelic beasts’, we are the precarious beings whose ­being – ­in contrast to the angels and the ­beasts – ­is not fixed once and for all (like a letter). Rather, our being can change in the historical and narrative process of self-­knowledge, because it means the meaning of existence as we each understand it. The precariousness of such a (hi)story of meaning, which can be narrated and understood, quite often embarrasses us, for it encompasses the living whole of good and evil. Historical and narrative meaning is always fragile, which is why its characteristic dignity and truth are grounded in being at risk. Is this the reason God is concerned, in ‘venerable obstinacy’, precisely with ­humans – ­a concern that must be ‘insulting to all heaven’ because one may suspect in it a ‘weariness’ towards the fixed state of having no history and having no stories?

Human Reason and Language For the reasons mentioned, the existence of human being is for the angels a source of constant piqued amazement: ‘Constantly hovering about their lips are amazed and reproachful questions like: “What are human beings, O Lord, that You are mindful of them?” And God’s replies are indulgent, soothing, evasive, sometimes even ­annoyed – a­ nd in a sense definitely humiliating to them’ (34).



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What matters not only in saying ‘I’, but also in questioning, is who is doing it. For this reason, the question ‘What is human being?’ has a different meaning depending on who poses it. The question has a distinct ring when raised in the Psalms: ‘What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands’ (Psalms 8: 4–6). Here, the questioning wonder is coupled with a gratitude towards God, having ‘crowned’ humans and ‘visited’ them, causing them to be astonished at themselves and to contemplate the actual meaning of their dignity. The same question sounds very different in Job’s mouth: ‘What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?’ (Job 7: 17–19). Here the questioning wonder is coupled with an experience of suffering, which can spring from humans’ divine distinction because God does not ‘let them alone’, for the distinction means at the same time an absolute demand. And the same question concerning human being sounds entirely different once again when posed by the angels. Their astonishment is coloured by a piqued undertone, which arises from the motif, familiar from the story of Cain, of an aggrieved self-­love – ­that is, of the envy of God preferring someone else. Since we tend to forget to be astonished about ourselves in order to repress the precarious character of our distinction, the Joseph novel holds the mirror of the indignant angels up to us so that we may recognize ourselves in this ironic and profound caricature. Showing the way for the sought-­after self-­knowledge is the narration that one angel opposed the preference God conferred to humans not ‘quietly’, but rather rebelliously in the open, such that ‘on that day when God demanded that His hosts bow down before Adam because of his reason and because he knew how to give names to all things’, the angels indeed came, ‘even though some of them smiling covertly and some with knitted brows’. But ‘Sammael did not. For with savage openness he declared it nonsense that those created from the effulgence of glory ought to sink down before something made of dust and e­ arth – ­and it was on that occasion that he was overthrown’ (34). Humans’ controversial advantage is thus defined more specifically: their reason and the accompanying capacity ‘to give names to all things’. That this means an advantage compared to the beasts that lack reason and language is self-­evident. Thus, the task of an adequate understanding consists above all in clarifying to what extent this means an advantage also with respect to the angels, to whom reason and language can surely not be denied. The critical clue for a closer understanding is provided by the angels’ argument, which is actually supposed to show how nonsensical the preference for humans is. The angels refer to how humans are made from

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‘dust and earth’, whereas angels are created ‘from the effulgence of glory’. The question ‘What are human beings, that You are mindful of them?’ thus takes on a new form: how can the disadvantage of having originated from such an inferior being as ‘dust and earth’ represent an advantage compared to those created purely from the highest? To what extent does human reason and language, rooted in the dark depths of dust and earth, exhibit a dimension that is inaccessible to pure reason and language? To answer this question, it is helpful to consider that the angels’ p ­ oint – ­that humans are the beings that are made ‘from dust and earth’ – also appears in the account of creation in the original text. Through God’s word, the world is called into existence out of nothing. The sentence ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light’ (Gen. 1: 3) forms the sublime model according to which worldly being, in virtue of language, enters into its genuine reality. Yet only the creation of human being does not follow this model. Instead, one reads: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’ (Gen. 2: 7). Human beings, the culmination of creation, are thus explicitly the only creatures that have a double root: a ‘dark’ root that is conceivably distant from the divine ‘effulgence of glory’, and a ‘light’ root, which, unlike for the rest of creation, is not the divine word but rather the divine ­breath – t­ hat is, the living source of the word. The fact invoked by the angels against humans, that they are the creatures made ‘from dust and earth’, thus leads to the question that the angels do not pose: why does the Creator, who is capable of creating everything through the Word, take a detour for humans via the ‘dust of the ground’? What does it mean for humans not to be called into existence directly with the Word? Is this ‘dark’ root of human being the reason they in ­particular – w ­ ho are not immediately placed under the divine Word of ­creation – ­are endowed with the distinction of a language that knows ‘how to give names to all things’? Evidently, the enigmatic distinction that God ‘attends’ to humans with ‘a zeal insulting to all heaven’ is closely linked to their double being, the ­fact – ­which, in the eyes of the angels, can only speak against ­them – ­that they are made ‘of dust and earth’. The distance that God grants humans and their relative independence makes their existence precarious, yet precisely for this reason also enables an entirely novel closeness to God, determining distinctly human reason and language as an ‘instrument for God’s own self-­knowledge’. For this reason, as one reads in Hebrews, God ‘does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham’ (Heb. 2: 16).

Evil Concerning the fallen angel, the Prelude in Higher Echelons speaks of ‘surmises’ that ‘were definitely based on the probability’ that the thought



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of creating human being ‘could be traced to the promptings of the great Sammael, who at the time, before his effulgent fall, had still stood very close to the Throne’. Why are the surmises so probable from the perspective of the angels? Because Sammael’s ‘chief concern had been to initiate and make a reality of evil, which, although no one else entertained or cultivated such an idea, was his innermost thought, and because there had been no other means by which to enrich the world’s repertoire with that same evil than through the establishment of human beings’ (34). Is evil a thought that originally hatched in the ‘Realm of Sternness’ (even if it is the guilt of human being to ‘make a reality of evil’)? Does moral purity, which so happily insists on its unambiguous goodness, harbour a hidden affinity to evil? Does the good require the agitating adversary of evil so that it may notice itself? Does the moral purity of the good live parasitically on the negated opposite? Or is the good of morality itself in fact a form of evil? The angels of the second Prelude are not fazed by these questions that form the unsettling subtext of the surmises they invoke. Instead, they are fascinated by Sammael’s project, which, as they understand it, aims at cunningly exposing God. In their view, ‘Sammael’s malice’ consisted in a reflection that begins with the difference between the fruitfulness of animals and the holiness of angels: ‘The qualities portioned out between them and ­us . . . ­had originally been united within the Creator Himself, and only the being suggested by Sammael would be truly created in His image, only in it was that union likewise to be found. With this being, ­however – t­ hat is, with human ­being – ­evil came into the world. Was that not a jest to set off giggles? Precisely the creature that, if one wished to put it that way, was most similar to the Creator brought evil with it’ (1043–4). The angels, the unfruitful ‘courtly images of God’, do not really understand themselves, then, as images in similarity to God; rather, for them, humans are ‘most similar to the Creator’. As precarious double beings, they dialectically unite, in themselves, the distinction of fruitfulness and divinity that is ‘originally united’ in God. To be sure, ‘evil came into the world’ with human being, which is Sammael’s cunning hidden agenda, ensuring, in the Higher Echelons, for repressed cheerfulness and secret satisfaction. But how are we to understand that it is precisely human being, the precarious image in the likeness of God, that is guilty of ‘enriching’ ‘the world’s repertoire’ by means of evil? Since human being is created in God’s image, the possibility of evil that is brought into the world through human being must lie grounded in God’s essence, for God is more and other than pure divinity. When considered in isolation, the latter is only a general principle, a concept of the highest, an ideal, but not a living reality. The living God must be understood, then, as the original unity of divinity and fruitfulness. For animals in turn, f­ ruitfulness – w ­ hen considered in i­solation – m ­ eans that an individual being propagates ‘fruitfully’ by producing other individual beings of the same species. The original unity of divinity and fruitfulness

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in the living God becomes clear in language by a peculiarity of the word ‘God’: ‘God’ is a concept with which we designate the highest and the whole of being, but at the same time a name we employ in interacting with living individual beings. The fact that human being as finite and twofold is ‘most similar to’ God is visible, then, also in language. The word ‘human’ is likewise to be understood both as name and as concept, once one expresses it in Hebrew (as in the original text of the creation account): ‘Adam’. With the name ‘Adam’, the first human is named as an individual being; and with the concept ‘Adam’, the first human is addressed as the whole of humanity. This ambiguity has been illustrated primarily by means of the twofold use of the word ‘I’, which not coincidentally exhibits, in its use as subject and as object, the same doubling that the words ‘God’ and ‘Adam’ exhibit. This double aspect of concept and name, universality and individuality, is a characteristic of selfhood. Now the essence of evil consists in how divinity and fruitfulness, which are originally united in God, are ­placed – ­albeit without being fully separated from each o ­ ther – i­n an inverted relation in the finite and precarious double being of human being: the universality of reason and language is degraded to a mere means for private ends. A man who understands humanity in his own person and every other person only as a means, and not simultaneously as an end, instrumentalizes the universality of reason to his reason and the universality of language to his language. An evil being understands itself as an isolated private I and not as a representative of humanity in the unity of meaning of history. In evil, human reason and language threaten to destroy themselves, for private reason is no reason, and private language is no language, and a private I is no I. Reason and language, in order to be what they are, must be employed not merely as means to arbitrary private ends; rather, they must at the same time be respected as ends in themselves. Genuinely human reason and language are for this reason likewise characterized by the precarious double aspect of universality and individuality, concept and name. Just as much as a private reason is no reason and a private language is no language, the universality of language and reason calls for individual liveliness and originality to ensure that language not degenerate into a formula and reason into a commonplace. For the Joseph novel, the true purpose of genuinely human, of living and precarious, reason and language consists in being the historical-­ narrative medium of self-­knowledge of God and of human being. This thought is not foreign to the angels either. They believe that, in human being, ‘God created for Himself a mirror that was not very flattering, anything but’; yet they also know why God attended to the precarious mirror ‘with a zeal insulting to all heaven’. This is ‘because a mirror is a means for self-­knowledge and because He would then see the consciousness of that ambivalent creature reflected in one son of man, in a certain Abirâm or A ­ braham – ­a means for His own self-­knowledge. Judging from which,



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man was the product of God’s curiosity about H ­ imself – w ­ hich Sammael shrewdly presumed and exploited with his advice’ (1044). In the eyes of the angels, God, of course, is the one deceived: Sammael cunningly lured Him into a venture, the course of which cannot be ‘flattering’ to ­Him – i­ndeed, it must be demeaning. How could the infinite know itself adequately through the finite, the highest through one of its creations? God’s self-­knowledge is thus ruled out from the outset. If an attempt is nonetheless made, the result can only be inadequate, distorted and compromising. For the ‘Realm of Sternness’, the situation is for this reason entirely unambiguous: ‘Anger and chagrin were the inevitable and ongoing consequences’ (1044). Once again, it is not difficult for the reader of the Joseph novel to assume the standpoint of the angels. They merely make explicit what must follow from the rules of a strict logic of pure morality: nothing can justify creation of the good and evil life world of humans. That is why it is ‘an undeniably mistaken creation’. Even if humans cannot fulfil the demand of a strict logic of pure morality, they can nevertheless embrace this ­logic – ­and denounce themselves, both creation and Creator. The Prelude in Higher Echelons unfolds the angels’ pure morality in such detail to make clear not only to what extent humans can embrace its standard, but also that it is questionable whether this morality is truly as ‘good’ and sublime beyond all doubt as it understands itself to be. In this spirit, the second Prelude refers to Cain, ‘the founder of fratricide’, whom the angels observe with favourable gratification, for in him ‘evil was joined with cheeky intelligence, logic, and truculence’. They recount that ‘One had not exactly cut a very dignified figure in the question One put to this son of Eve: “What have you done? . . .” For Cain had answered: “To be sure I slew my brother, and that is sad enough. But Who created me as I am . . .? Who put the evil drive in me to do the deed that I have undeniably done?”’ The angels show themselves impressed by these questions: ‘Not bad, that. Exactly as if Cain, or Kayin, had taken counsel with Sammael beforehand’ (1044).1 Certainly, one cannot deny to Cain’s justification a certain ‘intelligence, logic, and truculence’. What is it, then, that remains inaccessible to such a logic, which appears so irrefutable to the angels that they trace it back to a counsel of Sammael’s? How should we understand, in critical opposition to a logic of pure morality, a genuinely narrative logic, for which self-­ knowledge in the precarious counterpart of human being need not entail the disgrace of God? How can insight into the narrative and historical character of human reason and language result in Cain not having the last word?

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On the Economy of Morality God and human being, Creator and creation in His image, build a dialectical unity of meaning so that denouncing the one always affects the other. If humans cannot satisfy the rigorous standard of pure morality, then God’s ‘morality’ is also in question. Thus, it reads in the second prelude: ‘In these circles the prevalent opinion, shared to be sure with greatest caution, was that not everything was fully right when it came to rewards and punishments down below and that the moral world established upon Sammael’s advice was not treated with requisite seriousness. It would not have taken much, indeed at times nothing at all, for these circles to have come to the conclusion that Sammael took the moral world more seriously than He’ (1045). From the point of view of the angels, the ‘moral world established upon Sammael’s advice’ must be treated with the seriousness befitting it. Yet the ‘seriousness’ of morality consists more specifically in the precise allocation of rewards and punishment. The result is a strict economy of morality: each receives what he or she ‘deserves’ – no more, no less. Motives that do not conform to the logic of the moral equivalence exchange ‘equal for equal’ are thus alien to such an economy. Generosity, grace or even simply clemency have no place. Everything must be subjected to the economy of morality without exception, for an exception as an exception would be immoral. But God is God only because He is an exception, or, more exactly, because He is the exception in contrast to everything finite and created. For this reason, God’s true essence and intent reveals itself where He makes exceptions and does not handle the moral world with the ‘requisite seriousness’. It does not remain concealed from the angels, then, that God’s rewards ‘served as a moral cloak, as pretexts for blessings that were in truth explicable from out of fundamental favour, out of predilection that had scarcely anything to do with the moral world’ (1045). As exception and distinction, God’s ‘fundamental’ favour and predilection transcends the levelling logic of equality of the moral economy. That is why the angels in the Higher Echelons sympathize with Cain who, though he murdered his brother and in this respect acted against ­morality, wanted to eliminate a difference that is likewise objectionable to  the ‘Realm of Sternness’: the difference of divine blessing and preference. This resentment towards the favour and exception that God granted, visible in the first fratricide, implies an underlying resentment towards God Himself. He is the one and true God only because His being means exception and difference. It can be assumed that the angels’ sympathy with the ‘cheeky intelligence, logic, and truculence’ of Cain comprises also a sympathy with his implicit rebellion against the fundamental difference of creation: against the difference between Creator and creature. This difference is fundamental for all finite being, for God does not represent an



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exception to the rules of the created world and violate them; rather, God is the one exception that justifies and makes the rules possible. The Creator’s absolute sovereignty is offensive to the angels because it means a relativization of their created being and of the moral world. Hence, it must be particularly incomprehensible and vexing that not merely God’s ‘rewards’ but also His ‘punishments’ violate the strict and pure logic of the moral economy. The angels are clear about the fact that ‘One, if one may say so, was misusing punishment as a means to show more favour and raise up higher still.’ ‘Punishment as an instrument to even greater ­greatness – t­hat highest jest also shed light back upon the transgressions and impudence that had been the reason for punishment and “forced” Him to act, a light that had not exactly been the light of the moral world’ (1046). The Joseph novel is the exploration and narrative unfolding of an understanding of the world and human being made possible by this light, which is not the strict light of the moral world but rather the cheerful and ironic light of the ‘highest jest’. Here, the novel follows the model of Abraham and ponders the ‘egregious fact’ that God is not just the good (as part of reality) but rather the whole of reality, which is good in a different, deeper sense than is conceivable with the economic logic of a rigorous morality.

The Narratable World of What Happens The standpoint of the first prelude diverges clearly from the standpoint of the angels in the second prelude by casting the evil that comes into the world with human being in a different light: ‘But when all this is regarded calmly, to speak of a “Fall” into ­sin . . . ­is possible only as starkly moralistic overstatement’ (32). The ‘Descent into Hell’ takes into account what the angels in their vexation push to the side: God’s concern for human being. If one ‘considers God’s peculiar zeal in His relationship with the species that arose from the mixing of soul and matter, with human beings who obviously and for good reason were an object of the angels’ jealousy from the very beginning’, to ‘speak in this connection, then, of sin in the sense of an offence against God and His explicit will is only partly correct’ (33).2 Like every narrative, the meaning of the ‘Fall’ must be expressly interpreted in order to be understood. The common interpretation, according to which the Fall consists in the first human having to make a moral ‘choice’ between good and evil and deciding for the latter, can hardly qualify as appropriate. The forbiddance that the story of the Fall narrates is obviously not a moral forbiddance, for the forbidden tree is none other than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Precisely this knowledge that is forbidden is presupposed by the common interpretation as always already given and as entirely unproblematic in itself.

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This inner problem of knowledge of good and evil, which is fashioned narratively in the story of the Fall and misunderstood in its traditional interpretation, may be expressed another way: the first human could not understand at all what was forbidden to him because knowledge of good and evil has no meaningful content in the paradisiac condition of innocence. What was forbidden, then, was a null form of ­knowledge – ­that is, knowledge of nothing. Yet the subtle dialectic of the narrative consists in that this, which is nothing in and for itself, gains reality in the human grasping of what is forbidden: having become guilty, human being is subject to the moral law of good and evil, which first came into the world as a result of the transgression, the first human’s reaching for the tree of moral distinction. This ­insight – ­that the story of the Fall traces the origin of null forms of knowing, speaking and ­understanding – ­makes clear, however, why talk of the Fall ‘is possible only as starkly moralistic overstatement’. For the null understanding is something that indeed ought not to be, yet unavoidable if understanding is to be gained at all. As has been repeatedly emphasized, every true understanding requires time in order to unfold historically. This means, however, that every attempt to understand something begins with a misunderstanding, whose nullity, nothingness, is not realized until there is a later and better understanding. Wanting to avoid the nullity of the misunderstanding from the outset would mean, then, wanting to avoid the understanding itself in its peculiar temporal-­ narrative historicity. The condition of innocence is thus the condition of not understanding, which is why the process of understanding presupposes the loss of innocence: the ‘Fall’. Human understanding is possible only in a h ­istorical – ­ that is, narratable – ­ ­ unity of meaning. That is why the Joseph novel makes clear in both preludes that the Fall forms the fundamental beginning of the temporal-­narrative constitution of the world. The angels in the Higher Echelons know very well that the Fall ‘created the prerequisite basis for all narratable events’. It is firstly through creation of the good and evil human life world that God created the ‘narratable world of what happens, the world of forms and of death’ (1047). And one reads accordingly in the ‘Descent into Hell’: ‘There can be no doubt we have arrived at the final step “backward”, have reached human being’s highest past, defined Paradise, and traced the story of the Fall, of knowledge and of death, back to its pure and truthful form’ (30). Being human means having a history and a story that can be told and understood. For this reason, the final step ‘backward’, ‘human being’s highest past’, is the initial foundation for the narratability of world events in the ‘Fall’, in the creation of a temporal world of transient forms, of finite ­knowledge – i­n one word: of death. If the being of the world were not transience in the deepest and most unsettling sense of the word, then it would not be narratable. That is why, for good reason, the ‘feast of narration’ in the ‘Descent into Hell’ is called a ‘feast of death’: because the story



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of the Fall makes clear that death and the narratability of transient being spring from one root. This interpretation of the narrative of the Fall underlies the Joseph novel. The ‘Descent into Hell’ makes this clear right at the beginning where it concludes from the ‘pious tradition’, which reports of the ‘divine forbiddance for the first human beings’ to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of “Good and Evil”’, with a view to God, that ‘there can be no doubt whatever that He knew what the result would be beforehand’ (32–3). The ‘outcome’ of the story of the Fall, which decisively determines its meaning, is the awakening of human understanding in historical time. The meaning of the narrative of the Fall is thus the narrative exposition of the beginning, which underlies the historical understanding of human being. To be sure, the beginning of narratability is not narrated at the beginning, for it is not possible to reflect on the beginning in the beginning. This follows from the genuine logic of narrative unities of meaning. Only with time, once the story (or history) has progressed, can one ask retrospectively how everything may have begun; and, in posing this question, one shows that one has advanced. That is why the beginning is not known and narrated in the beginning as the beginning. It is a sober fact that the stories about the first beginning were not told until later, could not have been told until later, and the story of the ‘Fall’, the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, do not belong to earliest humanity. Thus, the possibility to tell of the beginning of history and of narration accrues to humans only in the temporal development of their history. Not until there is a decisive progress in their self-­consciousness are they able to reflect upon their presumed beginning and to put it in words narratively. They become knowable to themselves only through the later story and history that connects to the original beginning, for only those who stand in this story and history are in a position to look back to the beginning and thereby understand it. Underlying the composition of the Joseph novel, then, is the thought that the beginning of the universal history of human being, the final ‘step backward’, becomes accessible and narratable only in the course of the story and history that begins with Abraham. The story of Adam is not narrated in Paradise. It is the heirs of Abraham, rather, who first know and narrate the story of the Fall, the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The knowability and narratability of these stories is the result and proof of Abraham’s novel self-­knowledge and knowledge of God.

Who Narrates? Do we now know how everything actually took place? Does the Joseph novel disclose to us what literally played out with the ‘Fall’ and what the angels in the ‘Higher Echelons’ actually are? No, of course not. Thomas

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Mann’s remark above applies here, too: that the precision of the narrative is an artful play, a making present staged with linguistic means, whereby ‘humour, despite all human seriousness, is its soul’. Insofar as humour can be opposed to seriousness, it is a form of unseriousness. This does not mean, however, that someone who is unserious is necessarily humorous. Many forms of unseriousness exhibit merely a lack of seriousness and lag behind seriousness. But there are other forms of unseriousness that transcend seriousness because they are superior to it. One such form of unseriousness that positively transcends seriousness is humour. Experience teaches that serious individuals often exhibit a lack of humour, whereas humorous individuals widely succeed, by contrast, in being serious when it is deemed necessary. Humour integrates the capacity to be serious and at the same time transcends it, behaving freely towards seriousness, whereas seriousness is often unfree towards itself, which means humourless. Something similar may be said concerning the relation between being and aesthetic play. Insofar as it can be opposed to being, the ‘artful play’ is a form of nonbeing. Yet not every form of nonbeing is art. There are many forms of nonbeing that merely exhibit a lack of being and lag behind being. But there are also forms of nonbeing that transcend being because they are superior to it. Such a form of nonbeing that positively transcends being is the play of art. Experience teaches that knowledge of mere being often exhibits a lack of aesthetic judgement, while aesthetic judgement, by contrast, generally succeeds in knowing the literal relations of being if necessary. Artful play thus integrates the capacity to know being, and at the same time transcends it, behaving freely to being, while the knowledge of being is often unfree towards itself: it is banal. Thus, it is necessary to correct the common view, according to which irony is incompatible with a passionate interest in reality and truth because it is directed against every form of seriousness. The irony of the Joseph novel ought merely to guard against the misunderstanding that its insights are ‘literally’ in the text, that they could simply be ‘stated’ and raked in as minted coins without the reader having to undertake the effort and risk of interpreting the meaning. Irony is supposed to prevent this by urging the reader to cultivate a mature wakefulness towards the ambiguous text. It thus undermines the simple seriousness of the literal in order to protect the complex seriousness of understanding meaning from inappropriate simplification.3 So, the art of adequately understanding the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel consists ultimately in the art of taking seriously, in the appropriate way, the novel’s humour and artful play. Its humour and artful play must not be underestimated or derided as ‘mere’ fiction or irony, nor simplified to the humourless seriousness of the literal, and thus misunderstood. Rather, the irony is to be discovered firstly in the supposed seriousness so that, in a further step, attention can be directed to the new kind of seriousness in the irony.



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For this ironic freedom of a humour that is more serious than the unfree seriousness of the literal, the Prelude in Higher Echelons offers an especially subtle sample in the wording that, with Joseph, we are dealing with a ‘particularly saucy and arrogant individual specimen of the species’, ‘who had been thrust in our faces’ (1041). The ironic artful play of the Joseph novel is made clear in an exemplary manner by means of the little world ‘our’. In fact, in the German original, the quoted sentence is formulated in direct speech from the perspective of the angels, whose I-­saying, as a rule, is a We-­saying. But if this is the case here (and also in other passages of the second prelude), then the question arises whether the entire Joseph novel is not told from the perspective of the angels. Is the narrator of the ­novel – ­that is, the voice that the reader ­hears – ­an angel who consistently narrates the stories of Jacob and Joseph, even though his angelic standpoint is hardly ever directly visible, such that an inattentive reader overlooks the hints and erroneously believes that the ­narrator, ­as is typical of ­novels, ­is a human I- and We-­sayer? Then the reader of the Joseph novel would be in a situation similar to Joseph’s as he encounters the ‘man in the field’ who, as ‘messenger and guide’, points him the way to the brothers in Dothan (439). Joseph, too, fails to notice in this scene that the messenger is an angel. For Joseph, the ‘peevish fellow’ (441) is a ‘peculiar man’ (438), but he mistakes him for a human who expresses peculiar and somewhat confused views. Thus, the ‘stranger’ says to Joseph: ‘I cannot comprehend the zeal on behalf of a species whose purity can be described only retrospectively and in comparative terms. And yet that species must always be kept in mind and there are always new and wondrous plans for it, so vast that one must prepare the way for this and that and I know not what, all on behalf of its bit of future, just as I must guide you along your way now, you bag of wind, so that you may arrive at your ­goal – ­how truly boring!’ (441). The ‘double’ irony in this passage of the Joseph novel would consist, then, in how the reader would still be similar to Joseph, while being attentive enough to understand what Joseph himself fails to understand: that the ‘stranger’ is not a human, but rather an angel. It would nonetheless escape the reader’s attention that an angel is not merely being spoken about but that the narrator, too, is an angel. The story of an angel whom Joseph mistakes for a human would itself be narrated by an angel whom the inattentive reader mistakes for a human. In this way, the decentring of the human I would gain a new dimension. The I-­saying of the isolated human would be decentred not only in view of a supra-­individual past and future of humanity, but also in view of an I- and We-­saying that are no longer human and from whose standpoint the Joseph novel is narrated. Yet this reading, according to which the narrator of the Joseph novel is not a human but an angel, is not really compatible with the text as a whole. It must be apparent already in the scene in which Joseph ­encounters the

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angel that there is no indication of a sympathizing closeness of the narrator to the angel told about in the narration. By contrast, there are clear indications of such a closeness to Joseph. The ‘peevishness’ of the angel is evidently narrated from an outside perspective (that does not share this peevishness), whereas the narrator is acquainted with Joseph’s inner perspective: ‘What a peevish fellow. Why is he showing me the way, then, if it’s such a bother? Joseph thought. It is really stupid to play the obliging one and then pout about it’ (441). Moreover, in the first prelude, in the ‘Descent into Hell’, a We is spoken unambiguously from the perspective of humans, just as the We of the second prelude is formulated unambiguously from the perspective of the angels. The novel begins with the human enigmatic being that comprises our own existence and whose mystery is ‘the alpha and omega of all our speaking and questioning’ (3). Accordingly, the narrator identifies himself unmistakably with Joseph: ‘At this point the young Joseph grew dizzy, just as we do when leaning over the edge of the well’ (11). To be sure, it would be just as inappropriate for the artful irony of the Joseph novel now to simply identify the narrator with the purely human perspective of the first prelude and to disregard the disorientation that is due to the changed narrator perspective of the second prelude. It is mistaken to assume the narrator adopts a perspective that is either always identical with a human or always identical with an angel: it underestimates the irony of appearance and illusion and overlooks that, in the Joseph novel, being not always identical with oneself belongs precisely to the central features of I- and We-­saying. So the correct answer to the question ‘Who narrates the Joseph novel?’ is this: the meaning of the question needs to be understood differently from how it is customarily understood. It is not a matter of answering the question unambiguously in favour of a fixed identity of the narrating I- or We-­saying (human or angel). Rather, the ironic ambiguity of a narratively decentred I- and We-­saying should be understood as the appropriate shape of a genuinely human ‘identity’, the essence of which consists precisely in not being fixed and consistently identical with itself. This decentred non-­identity with oneself is the condition that enables humans to be historical and characterized by stories. Humans appear ‘authentically’ as humans where they are not ‘authentic’ but, rather, playing a role as a character mask, actor or ­impostor – ­for example, the role of a narrating human or angel. For this reason, the ambiguous narrator of the Joseph novel is not ‘equally far’ from the standpoint of humans and the standpoint of angels. Rather, due to this decentred ambiguity, the narrator adopts the peculiar standpoint of human being. Only once they understand their capacity for ambiguity and irony no longer as a morally questionable deficiency, but as enigmatic talent and distinction, do humans become aware of their own being as humans. The vacillating identity of the narrator, which cannot be consistently fixated, is thus a compositionally significant disorientation



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that the Joseph novel requires of its readers so that the narrative meaning of the novel becomes clear. From the standpoint of a ‘pure’ morality, actors and impostors are nothing other than dubious, if not reprehensible, figures, who carry out their ironic jokes with what is highest for moral seriousness: with their personal identity. Thus, with good reason, angels suspect that the moral world is less serious for God than it is for them, for also God tends towards ambiguity, which shows itself in the stories of the world as narrative irony. He thus reveals that, while He highly respects the identity of moral purity, He respects even more highly the narrative non-­identity of historical human being.

The Novel of the Soul The narrative device, in the second prelude of the Joseph novel, of renarrating important motifs of the story by formulating them from the standpoint of the angels is also illuminating in view of the preconditions of the story located in the time that cannot be enumerated, the time of a pre-­ worldly past. They ­build – ­as it reads in the ‘Descent into Hell’ – the first grounds and pre-­history of life and the material world. Angels are not subject to time in the same way that humans are, the latter thus being simultaneously precarious and historical. Angels have knowledge of the distant past and future that is accessible to humans, at best, in the precarious mode of dreamlike intuition. The compositional double structure of a human prelude and an angelic prelude enables the Joseph novel to ‘confirm’ the preconditions of the s­ tory – w ­ hich are unfolded in the ‘Descent into Hell’ – once again in the second prelude, from the standpoint of the angels. Thus, it reads in the Higher Echelons: ‘In order to understand rightly what was in progress and at work here, it is necessary to recall certain data and facts from the preconditions and preludes to the running story. What is meant is none other than the “novel of the soul” that was briefly recounted there with the words available: the novel of the primordial man’s soul that, like unformed matter, was one of the originally posited principles, and of its “Fall” that created the conditional basis for all narratable events’ (1047). The Novel of the Soul forms, then, the ‘precondition’ and ‘the conditional basis for all narratable events’. The precondition for all narration is itself presented in the form of a narrative: as a novel of the ‘primordial man’s soul’ and its ‘Fall’. That the Joseph novel understands itself as the systematic execution of human narrative self-­knowledge could hardly be articulated more clearly. According to the novel, the essence of the human soul is so intimately interwoven with the enigmatic gift of narration that humans can make their being present only in the form of a narrative.

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The novel of the soul, which is narrated in the ‘Descent into Hell’, is for this reason a ‘long tradition of ­thought – ­based on humankind’s truest self-­sensation and arising in early days, to become incorporated as an heirloom into religions, prophecies, and the successive epistemologies of the East, in Avesta, Islam, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and Hellenism’ (27–8). Again, it is not a matter of rendering literal relations of being, but rather of narrating a relation of meaning from out of the primordial past of ­humans – ­that is, ‘arising in early days’. The primordial beginning, which the novel of the soul narrates, distinguishes ‘the three personal elements of matter, soul, and spirit’, between which, through ‘interplay with the Godhead there unfolds the novel that has as its true hero the adventurous and, in adventure, creative soul of human being’ (29). But the ‘adventure’ of the soul of human being is the ‘Fall’, for in the beginning the soul possessed ‘life, but not knowledge’, because knowledge and understanding presuppose the desertion of the innocent but unconscious beginning. Thus, the soul possessed in the beginning ‘indeed so little’ self-­understanding that, ‘dwelling in proximity to God in a high world of peace and happiness, it let itself be agitated and confused by its i­nclination – i­n the literal sense of moving in a ­direction – ­toward formless matter, eager to mix with matter, and to generate out of it those forms by which it could achieve bodily passions’ (29). True self-­knowledge and the point of the novel of the soul are not located, of course, at this nebulous beginning of the story but rather in the middle, from where one looks back and responds to the beginning and the ‘Fall’. This middle is formed by spirit, for God, ‘from the substance of His divinity, sent spirit to man, into the world, to awaken the soul from its sleep within the shell of man’ (29). Thus, the spirit is expressly called ‘younger’ than the soul: ‘The soul of primordial man is the oldest.’ As for the spirit, ‘it is in some indefinite sense closely similar to the former, but is not that same again, for it is younger, an emanation of God to instruct and liberate the soul, to sublate the world of forms’ (30). According to the immanent logic of narrative meaning, the story’s resumption is more important than its beginning with regard to its meaning and understanding. That is why the spirit is more explicitly narrative and historical than is the soul, for the spirit first appears in the middle of the temporal-­narrative development of the original story, which frees itself in spirit from its origin and thus begins to unfold a historical unity of meaning. Thus, spirit is historically constituted through and through: it has an explicit history and story in which it does not remain the same but, rather, changes from its original identity so radically that, with time, it begins to understand its original assignment in a different and new way. Spirit becomes unsure whether its assignment was really meant as unambiguously as it originally appeared. Has it really been sent after the soul to save it, to undo the soul’s beginning and remove the conditions of ­narratability – t­ime, transience and ­death – ­from the world by annihilat-



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ing the finite world of forms? There can be no doubt, then, according to the Joseph novel, ‘that as time of the play goes by the spirit finds itself increasingly embarrassed by its role as the world’s destroyer and gravedigger’. Thus, ‘the spirit’s viewpoint changes to such an extent that, though it conceives of itself as having been sent to remove death from the world, it learns to sense itself as just the opposite, as the deadly principle, as that which brings death upon the world’ (31). It is easy to see the ironic tone of this narrative, which deals with a spirit that, ‘as time of the play goes by’, begins to doubt its original self-­ understanding and thus ‘learns’ to adopt a new standpoint towards itself and the world. More difficult to understand, though, is the seriousness of the insight that is concealed in the obvious ­irony – ­namely, that the genuine narrative possibility of the soul’s story and the Joseph novel is the result and expression of the spirit not having carried out its mission immediately according to the original understanding. If the spirit had not had any doubts about its original understanding of its mission, the novel of the soul could not be narrated in the first place, and not re-­narrated in the Joseph novel. The Joseph novel struggles here with understanding the condition of its own existence. It seeks, by means of the irony of the novel of the soul narrated by it, a serious answer to its central question: why is there transience and narratable meaning rather than merely unfading and meaningless being? To understand the Joseph novel’s answer, it is important to take note that the novel does not unambiguously affirm the insecurity of the doubting spirit, but rather characterizes it as a precarious weakness: ‘A certain weakness in the spirit’s character becomes evident here, inasmuch as it has difficulty bearing up under its reputation to be the deadly principle intent on destroying all forms’ and it makes it ‘a point of honour to be rid of that reputation’. It follows an impulse ‘that might be termed an illicit infatuation with the soul and its passionate drives’ so that ‘words get twisted around in its mouth and come out sounding like flattery of the soul and its enterprise and, with a kind of tendentious wit directed against the spirit’s own pure goals, speak out in favour of life and forms’ (31–2). The Novel of the Soul is a ‘play’ that is essentially determined not simply in being played in the narrative ‘length’ of time, but more in that the fellow players’ understanding of what the play is about changes with time. Spirit does not insist in all strictness on its own ‘purity’, but rather half-­internalizes the delicate intent of the guilty soul, sympathizes with the forms of transient life and develops ‘a kind of tendentious wit’. Spirit thus becomes a narrator, or, more exactly: it becomes the spirit of narration. By discussing the ‘preconditions’ of the stories in the ‘Descent into Hell’, the narrator of the Joseph novel narrates not merely the original ­story – ­the ‘first foundations of humanity’ – but equally the original story of narrating: the origin of narrative spirit, in whose embodiment in the here and now of its present the narrator of the novel understands himself.

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In this way, spirit’s self-­doubts in the ‘Descent into Hell’ must be understood likewise as the narrator’s own unsettling self-­doubts. In obtaining the more specific determinations of the ‘novel of the soul’ from within, the narrator holds the mirror up to himself in the Novel of the Soul, granting the reader insight into the precarious background of narrative self-­knowledge that lends ‘urgency and fire’ to the novel’s language, and ‘insistence’ to the novel’s questions. The narrator of the Joseph novel half-­internalizes the precarious intention of the guilty soul, hoping this is the true meaning of his mission. That is why the ‘Descent into Hell’ revolves around this question: has the spirit ‘truly been sent to sublate the material world by separating the soul from it and leading it home’? And the answer shows the Joseph novel the way: ‘A possible supposition is that this is not God’s idea and that in fact the spirit was not, as its reputation would have it, sent after the soul to play gravedigger for the world of forms created by the soul with God’s gracious assistance. It is perhaps another mystery.’ This ‘supposition’, formulated tentatively with a ‘perhaps’, gains shape once it is formulated in the genuinely narrative medium of time and in interplay with its three dimensions. Just as the soul is an ‘oldest’ open to the erstwhile state of the past, the younger spirit is open to the future, for the spirit is ‘in and of itself, and wholly essentially, the principle of the future, the “It will be”, the “It shall be”’ (35). Spirit’s doubt about the initial understanding of its mission can now be formulated precisely in view of the temporal dimensions of past and future: ‘It remains debatable where life and death are to be found here, since both ­parts – t­ he soul interwoven with nature and the spirit external to the world, one the principle of the past and the other of the ­future – ­claim, each in its own sense, to be the water of life, and each accuses the other of being on death’s ­side – ­and neither unfairly, since nature without spirit, just as spirit without nature, can scarcely be called life’ (35). Doubting and the questioning that seeks self-­knowledge come into the world together with the spirit of the future, for the spirit opposes the questionless bias for what is past and conventional and opens up the dimension of historical time. Should it thereby stay ‘pure’ and reject the past entirely? Evidently not. Even though primacy is certainly due to the future in relation to the past, an isolated future in the interest of a temporal-­narrative life is just as insufficient as an isolated past: both a past without a future and a future without a past ‘can scarcely be called life’. For this reason, the Joseph novel lets itself be led by the thought of a dialectical mutual penetration of future and past: ‘But the ­mystery – ­and God’s quiet h ­ ope – l­ies perhaps in their union, that is, in the spirit’s genuinely entering into the world of the soul, in the mutual penetration of both principles, and in the hallowing of the one through the other, thus actualizing the present of a humanity that would be blessed with blessings of heaven above and blessings of the deep that lies below’ (35).



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The ‘it was’ of the soul’s past and the ‘it will be’ of the spirit’s future should, like letter and meaning, join together in a text, which can and must be understood anew in every act of making present. The text of the Joseph novel hopes to gain a share in this original text by narrating the stories of the past once again in view of the future, letting them become present.

Very Serious Jokes For good reason, one distinguishes between the narrator and the author of a novel. This fundamental distinction makes sense in the case of the Joseph novel, too, for only against this background can one see to what extent Thomas Mann, as artist and narrator, identifies with the narrator of the Joseph novel. In this way, the Joseph novel pursues not merely a narrative self-­knowledge of the ‘essence of human being’, but also, at the same time, a self-­assurance of the author as artist and narrator. A striking feature in Thomas Mann’s self-­understanding is that he sees his task as artist to consist in a fundamental resistance, directed against settling down in a certain truth or morality: ‘An artist, I think, remains to his last breath an adventurer of feeling and of spirit, tending toward deviousness and the abyss, open to what is dangerous and harmful. His task itself requires the soul’s and spirit’s freedom of movement; it demands from him that he be at home in many and also in evil worlds; it tolerates no settling down on any truth and no dignity of virtue’ (1987, 294). The ‘freedom’ of the artist’s soul and spirit, as Thomas Mann understands it and claims it for himself, is a fundamental ‘no’ to all ‘fixed’ circumstances. It is a no to every settling down in literally conceived truth or ­virtue – ­a no that is beyond good and evil. The appearance of art thus stands in contradiction to the literalness of being and morality. And the original ‘yes’ of art resides precisely in the ‘no’ of its spirit of contradiction, which expresses itself not least in an inner dialectic that is related to the inner contradictory nature of the spirit from the ‘novel of the soul’. This inner contradictory nature is for this reason not a deficiency, but rather the only appropriate form for a new kind of truth and virtue, whose essence consists in not letting itself become literally fixed, so that it can be presented solely in the contradiction of the irony. For Thomas Mann, ‘it is precisely this that makes art so lovable and worthy of practice; it is this wonderful contradiction’, that it is ‘at the same time refreshment and judgement, praise and glory of life through pleasurable reproduction of life and critical–moral annihilation of life’. Its ‘mission’ is, ‘to put it diplomatically, maintaining equally good relations with life and with pure spirit, being at the same time conservative and radical’. ‘Here is the source of irony’ (421). Thomas Mann identifies a contradiction as the ‘source of irony’, which he will later narratively fashion in the Novel of the Soul of the Joseph

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novel as spirit’s doubt. This doubt of the spirit concerns the question of whether its mission is in fact to be understood as being called upon to be the ‘gravedigger’ of the transient world because nothing finite can endure before the radicality of pure spirit. Thus, the determination of the spirit as ‘sublating the material world’ appears to hold. For Thomas Mann, adequately understanding irony comes down above all to conceiving of its s­ ource – t­ he contradiction between the conservativism of life and the radicality of ­spirit – ­actually as a contradiction, in order that irony not be misunderstood as a blunting of radicality, as a lazy compromise between life and spirit. Irony, according to Thomas Mann, is not a disempowered form of spirit, but rather a form of spirit that has been heightened by reflection, which protects its radicality from the simplification of ‘pure’ literalness. In the beginning, art and irony thus stand for Thomas Mann very clearly on the side of spirit and not on the side of life: ‘if someone declared it to be a task of art to awaken the fear of God by bringing life before the judging countenance of pure spirit, then I would not want to contradict’. The artist has the task ‘of awakening the conscience of life and of keeping it awake’ (421–2). Yet the spirit’s objection to the dull sleep of immediate life transforms at once into an inner contradiction of spirit with itself. A spirit that simply insists on the superiority of its ‘purity’ is hardly able to reach and awaken life; its original radicality threatens to sink into an abstract, unfruitful and thus harmless protest. Thomas Mann is explicit in his description of this threat: ‘One will not want to say that a world experience in the sense of the radical spirit would be quite favourable to art. The personal result of life would be constant rage against all appearances’, because ‘all forms of life grown out of the human condition’ appear ‘stupid, crude, mean, and opposed to spirit, that is, the chaste nothingness. “The spiritual” never gets over his anger, his quiet fury and inner contradiction, his hatred and protest. What this tone of life, this way of seeing, this continual rebellion in the name of decent nothingness is supposed to have to do with being an artist’: ‘I do not know’ (422). Spirit’s valid objection to mere life loses its validity as soon as spirit begins to insist complacently on its own purity and superiority. This injustice of the overly pure spirit must not simply be converted, however, into a justification of natural life. Rather, the injustice now lies on both sides insofar as they isolate themselves from each other: life that is isolated from spirit, that does not understand itself, is coloured by a secret longing for death just as much as spirit that is isolated from life becomes the ‘gravedigger’ of life, disdaining what is transient ‘in the name of decent nothingness’ and making itself into a servant of its annihilation.4 Thus, for Thomas Mann, irony is directed equally against the false seriousness of life and the false seriousness of spirit. Irony is ‘always irony toward both sides; it directs itself against life as well as against spirit’ (422). It does this not in the interest of a comfortable middle way that



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avoids extremes, but in the interest of the original objection of spirit to the immediacy of life, which must of course be protected from the false seriousness of a pure spirit that understands itself all too l­iterally – a­ nd thus misunderstands itself. It is no accident, then, that Thomas Mann, in the self-­commentary of the essay that he penned in 1942 on Joseph and His Brothers, refers again to the dialectical unity of ironized seriousness and serious irony, which underlies the novel’s language and composition. He illustrates this unity in reference to ‘the reading which the author prefers and which he considers helpful while working on it’, because it is a ‘symptom for the innate character of a work, for the category towards which it strives, the view it secretly has of itself’. Of course, Thomas Mann is thinking here ‘not of factual sources and material research, but about great works of world literature which seem greatly related to his own effort, models whose contemplation keeps him in the right mood, and which he seeks to emulate’ (1996, 195). Here, the theme of succession that walks in the ‘footsteps’ of a model and pattern experiences a new variation. The author of the Joseph novel, in which this theme is meaningful in manifold forms, understands himself in writing the novel as having been instructed by ‘models’ that he ‘emulates’. For this purpose, ‘factual sources and material research’ are ruled out, of course, from the outset, for they lack a spiritual relation to the project of the Joseph novel. By contrast, Thomas Mann understands works of world literature as ‘greatly related’ insofar as they are patterns of that spiritual irony that the Joseph novel has selected as its narrative guiding star. Such ‘strengthening reading during the Joseph years was provided by two books: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Goethe’s Faust’. With Tristram Shandy, it was ‘Sterne’s richness of humorous expressions and inventions, his possession of a truly comical technique’ that Thomas Mann considered exemplary for his Joseph novel, ‘for to refresh my work, I needed something like this’. Yet even more so is Goethe’s Faust the model that is ‘greatly related’ to the peculiar seriousness of ironic human self-­ knowledge in the Joseph novel: ‘this life’s work and linguistic monument developed from some tender, lyrical germ-­cell, this enormous mixture of magic opera and mankind’s tragedy, of puppet-­show and cosmic poem’ (13). Of course, it would be a mistake to assign the dialectical unity of seriousness and irony, which Thomas Mann envisages in the Joseph novel, undialectically to Sterne and Goethe, attributing ‘irony’ to the former and ‘seriousness’ to the latter. Rather, for Thomas Mann, the ‘humour’ of Tristram is distinguished precisely by its new kind of seriousness, which regards human life ironically, for it is far too serious to be left to the seriousness of literalness. Accordingly, Thomas Mann understands Faust as an ‘enormous mixture’ that discovers the puppet show in the tragedy of humanity, and at the same time fashions it as a cosmic poem. Certainly,

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he is aware that Goethe himself designates in a letter the second part of Faust as his ‘very serious jokes’.5 In Goethe’s formulation, what the Joseph novel is striving after in its way finds expression in a very tight space. Thus, Thomas Mann prefers to formulate the guiding thought of his Joseph project on the basis of his model from Goethe: ‘“Faust” is a symbol of humanity, and the Joseph story was meant to become something like that in my hands. I told about beginnings, where everything was there for the first time. That was the attractive novelty, the uncommon amusement of this kind of fable telling, that everything was there for the first time, that one foundation took place after the other, the foundation of love, of envy, of hatred, of murder, and of much else’ (13). Whoever wants to understand the transient being of the world as history, as novel of the soul, must tell of beginnings that are not relative but absolute, ‘where everything was there for the first time’. Narration of such beginnings must master the art of making one’s own literalness transparent for symbolic meaning, because the time that is narrated is the time that cannot be enumerated. Characteristic of the Joseph novel is ‘the uncommon amusement’ that the literal seriousness, with which the novel tells of the ‘first foundations’ of the transient and narratable world, is the mask of an irony. This irony takes the enigma of time more seriously than does the humourless seriousness of a literalness that accepts being as a meaningless given fact and therefore remains without understanding of time and transience.

In Praise of Transience In the Joseph novel, the ironic tension between immediate literalness and the meaning it mediates and conceals is not a mere stylistic device. The point of the novel’s narrative irony consists precisely in that it presents and interprets a reality that is likewise ironic. In other words, not only the narration of the Joseph novel is what it is because it is ironic; also what is narrated, the historical reality of the world and of human being, is what it is only because it exhibits an ironic tension between literalness and meaning. This should be designated as realism of irony. This concept makes clear that the irony of the Joseph novel is not merely a subjective attitude towards a reality that, in itself, exhibits no relation to the dialectical tension of irony; rather, the historical reality as such is constituted ironically, which means that a realistic understanding of reality must above all become attentive to this irony of reality in order to interpret it correctly. Seeking such an interpretation, the Joseph novel takes into account this understanding of reality in its own ironic presentation, which ought to bring to the reader’s attention the peculiarly ironic attention with which the novel relates to the ironic reality.



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Yet the concrete concept of a reality that exhibits in itself the dialectical tension of irony is transience. Transient being is ironic in an eminently realistic sense. Transience undermines subversively the immediate appearance of real things and relations existing in perpetuity, and it ironically suspends with time the literal being of what is immediately given, changing it into its opposite. A world that is in itself ironic is to be designated more specifically as the world of temporal t­ ransience – ­that is, as the world of history. Humans are well aware of this universal transience of historical being and of the finitude of their own existence in an abstract sense. Yet, ordinarily, they cannot and do not want to make this awareness fruitful for their concrete understanding of self and world. Instead, they cling desperately to the illusory ‘endurance’ of being in order to suppress as long as possible the passing that is already at the door. This suppression of transience characteristic of everyday human consciousness generates to begin with the positivist illusion of a stable and reliable being, rendering human understanding of self and world essentially unhistorical even where it has the ‘facts’ of history in sight. Yet the rigid literalness of the seemingly intransient being is just as meaningless as the suppressed transience in its mere literalness. For this reason, the positivism of literal being ultimately agrees with the nihilism of literal annihilation in the respective meaninglessness of their ontologies: a meaninglessness which we can free ourselves from only when we become attentive to the ironic character of transience and to the meaning made possible by this transience. Such an attentiveness to the irony of transience and its concealed meaning, which underlies the Joseph novel, is explained in greater detail by Thomas Mann in his late essay Lob der Vergänglichkeit (1952). The essay begins with the following words: ‘You will be surprised to hear my answer to your question concerning what I believe in or what I consider highest: it is transience.’ In this way, the general prejudice is met right at the outset, according to which transience is something sombre that ought not to be, of which one does best not to s­ peak – o ­ r, at least, to do so in regretful clichés: ‘No’, Thomas Mann responds, transience ‘is the soul of being, that which lends value, dignity and interest to all life, for it creates time, and time is, at least potentially, the highest, most useful gift, which is related in its essence, indeed identical with everything creative’ (1997, 219). Time, then, according to Thomas Mann, does not cause the passing of being. Quite the contrary: transience ‘creates time’. For this reason, the praise of transience is above all a ‘praise’ of the temporalization of being, made possible by transience, which makes what is real narratable and interesting. Where ‘there is no transience, no beginning and no end, no birth and no death, there is no t­ime – a­ nd timelessness is standing nothingness, as good and bad as it is, what is absolutely uninteresting’.

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Here, the opposition of being and nothing, which is ordinarily understood as the greatest possible difference that can be thought, is noticeably undermined. Literal being and literal nothing agree in their respective meaninglessness and timelessness. They make being ‘as good and as bad’ as nothing, because the pure positivity of timeless being is as meaningless and ‘absolutely uninteresting’ as the pure negativity of timeless nothing. With Thomas Mann, this undermining of the distinction of being and nothing evidently takes place in view of and in favour of another distinction. What lends all being and life ‘value, dignity and interest’ in the first place is the temporalizing transience that, from the standpoint of positive being, must appear as the form of negation. Yet this constitutes precisely the objective irony of transience, that it negates the alleged ‘solid’ positivity of literal being, on the one hand, and opens up, on the ­other – ­in the passing of ­literalness – ­an entirely different positivity, which allows the literal to become readable and understandable. Thus, the envisaged ‘exchangeability of the concepts “being” and “transience”’ (220) leads for Thomas Mann to the radical understanding of transience as the ‘soul of being’, which is not to devalue being but rather to safeguard it from meaninglessness, the hallmark of the untemporal. Praise of transience brings to attention that transience, in negating and letting pass the endurance of being, makes possible at the same time something positive which is more valuable and more interesting than everything that merely is and endures. Passing time enables meaning, which can arise only where being ­passes – ­that is, where something has a beginning and an end. The essentially historically and narratively constituted meaning is radically finite in this way because it becomes meaningful and understandable only from the end: meaning is a gift of finitude. The ‘habitability of a celestial body’ and life on it are, as Thomas Mann expressly emphasizes, only ‘a fleeting interlude’ when ‘measured against the scale of aeons’. Yet transient life does not thereby lose its value. Quite the contrary, it gains ‘thereby enormously in value, soul and ­allure – ­gaining and arousing sympathy as episode, and besides by its indefinably mysterious character. With regard to its materiality, nothing distinguishes it from all other material being. As it broke free from the inorganic, something had to be added, which still no laboratory has been able to properly grasp and determine. And it did not stay put with this addition. Humans emerged from the realm of ­animals – ­through lineage, as one says, but in truth by something additional that one defines only inadequately with words such as “reason” and “cultural capacity”’ (219–20).6 On the clock of cosmic being, the ‘living’ marks only a vanishing brief stretch of time, and humans as ‘rational beings’ form, in turn, only an ‘episode’ of life. But the fact that, evidently in life and then once again in human reason, an augmentation of the transient and ephemeral character of being takes place leads to the insight that allure, soul and value of a being are brought about precisely through its transience. Human reason, which articulates itself in language, is the most valuable in the middle of



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a finite and transient world because it is the most fragile. That is precisely why, in human reason, the fragile and ‘episodic’ character that belongs to transient being as such becomes conscious of itself. In the suppression of transience, we do not escape death but rather align ourselves with it. Being gains value, dignity and interest not in spite of, but rather by virtue of, the temporal transience that animates being and makes it narratable. In Thomas Mann’s Praise of Transience, one thus reads: ‘Among the most essential properties that distinguish human being from the rest of nature are knowledge of transience, of beginning and end, and thus of the gift of time.’ In becoming aware of finitude and in their knowledge of beginning and end of their respective individual existence, humans experience their own in-­finitude in the sense that only by ‘something additional’ do they become able to understand the finite as finite and the transient as transient: for Thomas Mann, ‘the animation of the being by transience reaches its completion in human being’ (220). This original essential determination of human being opens for Thomas Mann the view for the ‘additional something’ that humans are capable of experiencing in their transience. Much as meaning and understanding are a gift of transience, so are meaning and transience not immediately identical. Meaning can only become understandable where being passes ­away – ­yet not all passing away is therefore meaningful. Transience of being is for this reason a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of meaning. In the original phenomenon of meaning, something ‘indefinable’ can be experienced, which must join pure transience in order to animate the letter of the finite with spirit. Of course, the experience of spiritual infinitude of understanding awakens in human being firstly in the experience of the nonsense of ­finitude – ­that is, in the enigmatic and disturbing experience of time, transience and death. But it first comes fully to itself where nonsense does not retain the last word and humans overcome their fear and desperation in the presence of transience by becoming attentive to the specific value, to the dignity and lovable character, of the mortal and episodic. Now they no longer stand in hostile opposition to time, but can rather ally themselves with it, in order ‘to wrest with its help the intransient from the transient’ (221). The enigma of human being is consequently the enigma of the gift of understanding. The enigma can be explicated more specifically in the antinomies of human existence, which are always antinomies of the enigmatic connection between finitude and infinitude. If humans were only finite, they would not notice finitude as such; if they were only infinite, finitude would not pester them as nonsense and become an enigma to them. Only as double beings, then, are humans capable of understanding but at the same time also obliged to u ­ nderstand – t­ hat is, they must make the effort and take the risk of interpretation in order to become understandable to themselves. Humans understand themselves, however, only once they understand their understanding.

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For an adequate understanding of understanding, it is necessary above all to understand the dialectical relation between finitude and meaning, which can be explicated only step by step. In a concise aphorism, Nietzsche masterfully focused the decisive point: ‘End and goal. – Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody has not reached its end it has not reached its goal either. A simile’ (1986, 360). Here, the two levels that are decisive for the understanding of the relation between finitude and meaning are joined together in a very tight space. The single tones of the melody fade away, pass by in time, without the single tone thereby becoming meaningful. Only the melody that joins multiple tones into an overarching unity of meaning gains musical meaning, which manifests itself when the melody reaches its end. And yet the meaning of the melody refers to the whole of its temporal shape, not just to its ­end – ­a whole that constitutes itself, to be sure, only once the melody has found its end. If the melody, then, has not reached its end, it has likewise not reached its goal, the constitution of a whole of meaning. Yet Nietzsche’s aphorism is masterful not simply because it explicates the enigmatic relation between finitude and meaning in terms of the thought-­model of the melody, but because it also applies the ironic tension of being and meaning to his own text. The aphorism itself is constructed as a linguistic unity of meaning, like a melody, which can, only upon reaching the end, reach its goal, which is not identical with the end. At the end, Nietzsche writes: ‘A simile.’ In this way, what is explained with the model of the melody is radically generalized: the meaningful event of the melody is a simile for the temporal meaningful event of all of reality insofar as it is finite and transient. In this way, the narrative-­musical logic of the melody forms for Nietzsche a second-order simile, which ought to help us better understand the general logic of similarity of transient being. Every narrator who understands him- or herself is for this reason friends with time and in praise of transience, for what is rendered creatively is, concerning its meaning, a work of time, a gift of finitude. And the narrative mastery of the Joseph novel consists in making what every narrative is as narrative into the theme of the narrative. In this way, the narrative form becomes the content of the narration. The novel revolves, then, relentlessly around the one question: what it means for human being to be open to meaning and to possess the gift of understanding. In every successful act of understanding, one implicitly understands what Goethe at the end of Faust explicitly articulated: ‘All that is transient / is but a simile.’ What is transient does not want to be; rather, it wants to be meaningful.

Part Three The Stories of Joseph

7 The Future

Self-Love – Wit in Language –Ambiguity of the Talent – Knowledge of the Future? – Being on One’s Way – Sympathy – Certainty of Death – The Dreamer of Dreams – The Catastrophe

Self-Love ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ Like every human being, Joseph too is an I-­sayer. But he is no ordinary, average I-­sayer; in his youth, he is an especially obtrusive, pushy and saucy I-­sayer. ‘Being loved and preferred was a habit crucial to his character, lending it colour and tone’ (37). The self-­loving conceit manifest in this habit will incite his brothers’ hatred and envy to the point that they will decide to kill him in order to silence his I once and for all. In the figure of Joseph, Thomas Mann displays his narrative approach in an impressive manner: he ‘employs the methods of the realistic novel’ but ‘constantly passes beyond realism by symbolic intensification and by making realism transparent for spiritual and ideal elements’. The stories of the young Joseph reveal, as one reads in the novel, ‘his belief, his world picture, his conviction, firm as natural law, that everyone must surely love him more than they loved themselves’ (452). What is spiritual and ideal in the figure of Joseph is accordingly the principle of self-love raised to conceit. Self-­love is so common among humans that no one can honestly claim not to know it. Equally universal is, of course, the moral condemnation of the ‘world picture’ of a self-­absorbed individual who is convinced that all others must love him or her more than they love themselves, for such a picture ­is – a­ ccording to the usual c­ ritique – b ­ ased on a narcissistic delusion of grandeur, suggesting a superiority of one’s own self that in truth does not exist. In the figure of the young Joseph, the Joseph novel makes clear that this usual critique of universal self-­love misses the actual problem. The actual problem does not consist so much in imagining for oneself a distinction

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that one in fact does not possess. Rather, the actual problem first becomes explicit in light of a symbolically heightened figure such as Joseph who is in fact superior to other human beings. The actual problem is thus not the imaginary, but rather the real, distinction. For this reason, it is no coincidence that the second part of the novel – ‘The Young Joseph’ – begins with a section titled ‘Beauty’, for Joseph was ‘in the eyes of all who beheld him the most beautiful among the children of men’ (317). Yet this employment of the superlative to the point of the symbolic is not the end. Joseph’s superior beauty is further distinguished by not being in opposition to the spirit but, rather, essentially related. Joseph’s special beauty was such ‘that it incorporated the spirit and its arts’ so that ‘no opposition and almost no difference remained between the two, between beauty and spirit’ (331). Thus, Joseph has indeed objective reasons for his conviction and worldview that ‘everyone must love him more than they love themselves’. In reality, and according to everyone’s judgement, he is precisely the one whom the average human may at most imagine in the delusion of his or her wishful dreams. Joseph is not only beautiful and enchanting, full of charm and wit and elegant with ­words – ­he is all this to such a degree that he becomes the model and archetype of the one whom everyone loves. How, then, is it at all possible that, in spite of his factually given advantages, not all others love him more than they love themselves? The novel is very careful in formulating the answer: ‘The unbiased eye necessarily comes to rest with purest rapture on such a manifestation of a divine lack of tension, which is likewise so constituted as to arouse the bitterest emotions in those who have reason to believe they are diminished or darkened by its light’ (331). Only the unbiased eye is free to recognize without envy the objective advantage of the other and to take delight in it. Yet this means, by implication, that the symbolically heightened advantage is suitable like nothing else for bringing to light the lack of ­unbiased – t­ hat is, the selfish self-­absorption and unfreedom o ­ f–h ­ uman being. Cain’s descendants certainly do not love the lovable that outshines them; indeed, they even hate it because the superior grieves them in their own vanity, so that they are gripped by envy. For them, the objective advantage becomes an absolute vexation precisely in its factual justification. For the composition of the novel, it is thus characteristic that Joseph understands himself early on as a spiritual descendant of ­Abel – a­ self-­ understanding that he points out to his father with smug enthusiasm: ‘How splendid it is that God loves us and delights in us and lets the smoke of our sacrifices ascend to His nostrils! For though Abel did not have time to sire children, but was slain in the field by Cain’, ‘we are of the lineage of Abel the tent-­dweller, and of the lineage of Isaac, the younger son, who was given the blessing’ (88). In the two stories Joseph alludes to, he recognizes a recurring pattern that he expressly highlights in order to flatter his father (and himself). As



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he understands it, the motif of the blessing, which governs the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, extends much further into the past: up to the literal first family of which the story recounts. Cain and Abel are equal in being the first two sons of the human race (their parents, Adam and Eve, were themselves never children); they are unequal, however, insofar as Cain is the elder and firstborn; and they are in an entirely different sense unequal insofar as God allows Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s sacrifice to ‘ascend’, though Abel is younger. Joseph is witty enough to connect the advantage that lets the ‘smoke of the sacrifice ascend’ with the advantage of the blessing into a unity of meaning that spans the stories, in which God draws distinctions again and again by ‘loving and delighting’ in those He has chosen. The kinship between those who are distinguished, brought about by the blessing over the course of narrated time, is thus of a purely spiritual nature. While it may find expression in a physical kinship, it is by no means based on it. Joseph understands himself (and his father) effortlessly as ‘of the lineage of Abel’, irrespective of the fact that ‘Abel did not have time to sire children’. The further course of Joseph’s story will show that, while his advantage consists in understanding much that remains closed off to others, he does not understand his own gift of understanding. Thus, his knowledge is comparable to a dream, which knows much without knowing that it knows it. It would be inappropriate to the narrative meaning of the Joseph novel, then, if one sought to attribute the unfreedom of self-­absorption to only one part of its protagonists, for the consequences of the ­Fall – g ­ uilt, egoism, transience and ­death – ­are the inheritance of all humans. For this reason, the narrative self-­knowledge of the Joseph novel grasps the thought of human self-­absorption so radically that it brings to light the absorption not only among the u ­ nblessed – ­namely, as ­envy – ­but likewise, and almost even more tellingly, among the blessed, as conceit. In this way, the original sin of self-­loving absorption splits in Joseph and his brothers into two main figures (conceit and envy), for it is precisely the entirely undeniable, symbolically heightened fact of the advantage that brings to light human absorption. The ungifted do not pass the test of inequality because they do not freely acknowledge the advantage, but only envy it. The gifted one, by contrast, does not pass the test because he fails to understand his own advantage as a mere role in the universal play of masks; he takes credit for it conceitedly, and thus spoils it. A hasty taking sides with the young Joseph against his brothers (or vice versa) would not do justice, then, to the tragic nexus of guilt throughout human life, for only all the brothers together yield the simile of humanity that the Joseph novel aims at. For this reason, the novel expresses both manifestations of the absorbed self-­love that underlies Joseph’s stories in decidedly impartial words: ‘If one traces the severely worsened relationship between Joseph and

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his brothers to its fundamental grounds’, ‘one will encounter envy and conceit as the first and last grounds; and anyone who loves justice will find it difficult to decide whether it is the former or latter f­ ailing – t­ hat is, whether, in personal terms, it was the individual or the group as it grew ever more menacing in its actions toward ­him – ­to which the main blame for all this misfortune should be assigned’ (330). Where there is blessing, there is always envy and conceit stirring among human beings. The ungifted one envies the distinguished one and finds it unjust that the other, and not he himself, received the advantage. The preferred one, in turn, with his self-­absorbed conceit, stirs the latent envy into open hatred. The inner logic of the story of Joseph and his brothers begins to develop precisely at this point of departure: Joseph rubs his brothers’ noses in the fact that he is the preferred one, pushing their envy to the extreme until in the end they throw him into the pit to die in order to remove the vexation of his blessing from the world. Joseph’s fall into the pit will mark the turning point of the story and point a way out of the fateful nexus of guilt.

Wit in Language Joseph’s gift manifests itself firstly as wit. Already in his early years, he shows a passionate love for speech and language. This will serve not only to his advantage, for in the beginning he is a self-­absorbed chatterbox who cannot keep his mouth shut even when he ought to do so. Contained in this dangerous impropriety and linguistic recklessness are also the seeds for something that will become increasingly i­mportant – t­ hat is, his attentiveness to all dimensions of meaning, for meaning means being in the form of language: what is meaningful can be read and interpreted like a text. In a scene from the Joseph novel in which Joseph’s linguistic wit and propensity for recklessness manifest themselves in equal measure, the young Joseph seeks to reassure his father, who reproaches him for carelessly sitting alone at the well. A lion could come and eat him. The witty boy responds: ‘Does my dear papa not know that animals fear and avoid man because God has given him the spirit of understanding and instilled in him the order and kind to which each of them belongs? And does he not know how Sammael shrieked when the man of clay first knew to put names to creation, as if he were its master and maker, and how all the fiery hosts were amazed and cast down their eyes, for they know quite well how to cry “Holy, holy!” in chorus arrayed, but lack any understanding of the ranking of higher and lower orders? And the animals, too, are ashamed and tuck their tails, for we know them and have command over their names and can deprive each of its roaring presence of individualness simply by presenting it with its name’ (68). Here, the essence of humans and their peculiar ‘spirit of understanding’ is opposed by J­ oseph – ­precocious and surely borrowing from teachings,



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half-­understood – ­to the animals and to the angels. The enigmatic gift of the ‘naming’ language is unique to human being among created beings, so that this distinction of human being becomes a vexation for the angels and the cause of Sammael’s ‘overthrow’. Yet characteristic of his still immature understanding of his own gift of language and meaning is the closing phrase, to which he deliberately allows his speculative digression to lead in order to justify himself in the face of his father’s reproach. According to Joseph, he has no need to fear the lion because he is a human endowed with language, and the gift of naming goes hand in hand with a consciousness of the ‘order and kind to which each of them belongs’. Something isolated such as a lion knows about this human gift of seeing through the illusion of individuation with the help of language. Thus, it is ‘ashamed’ and ‘tucks its tail’. Joseph’s witty formulation for the fact he targets calls the alleged substantiality of the individual a ‘roaring presence of individualness’ (a simile particularly suited to the lion). This formulation ‘wittily’ captures the isolation of the ‘individualness’ and the corresponding restriction of the time horizon to the immediate present: each individual thing behaves as if it were unique. The critical power of language, which never names things in isolation but always only in terms of a unity of meaning, exposes this ontology of meaningless being as the illusion of individuation. The alleged individuality of individual things in the respective isolation of their here and now is decentred through language, which places the literalness of the individual in the context of linguistic meaning. In the linguistic order, reality thus comes to itself in the first place. Herein consists the spiritualizing, clarifying, but also enlightening effect of language: it criticizes the arrogated uniqueness of the individual by naming the isolated by its name, thus recognizing it as part of an overarching whole. The young Joseph is well aware that his own wit with language, too, belongs to a much larger context and is only what it is in light of this context: ‘What he believed was that the Spirit of God’ had ‘created the world through his Word. He thought: just think of it! Through the Word, the free and external Word, the world had come to be, and, even today still, although a thing might be present, it was not truly present till man bestowed existence to it in the word and gave it a name’ (332). In the beginning was the W ­ ord – ­not water, being or chaos, but the Word. Meaning in language thus precedes the being of the world and underlies it. Or, as Joseph formulates it: God created the world through ‘the free and external Word’. By ­connecting – ­in a still dreamlike, semi-­ conscious ­manner – h ­ is own talent with the original story of the creation of the world in language, he testifies to his wit in language and his art of interpretation. He expresses his conviction that a reality is not fully real and has not fully come to itself until existence has been bestowed to it ‘in the word’, and until it is rightly named. Together with the concerned Jacob, readers will of course ask themselves whether this ‘wit’ is really sufficient to carry the clever Joseph

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to safety in the serious case of a lion encounter. But it should not be overlooked that also the immature and reckless side of Joseph’s talent for language, in which profundity and imposture are precariously linked, is not pointed out until it is apprehended in words. Correcting a faulty or inadequate understanding of language never leads, then, outside of language, but rather only deeper into its understanding.

Ambiguity of the Talent Beyond the mere wit of language, Joseph’s true talent consists in his extraordinary sense for the future. In this he is distinguished from his father. In the Joseph novel, the gift of narrative extension of the isolated present ‘backwards’ (in the direction of the past) is the peculiar distinction of Jacob’s. Throughout the entire novel, Jacob is the exemplary character who possesses the gift of contemplatingly ‘connecting thoughts’. Over and over, he immerses into the recollecting contemplation of past models to which he relates his present experiences in order to understand their narrative meaning. But, for the narrative unity of meaning of a story, what is even more essential than its past is its future, and what distinguishes Joseph is the gift of extending the isolated present ‘forwards’, towards the future. The special gift that makes him into the title figure of the Joseph novel is a peculiar sense for what is coming, which is at once a sense for the whole of the story, since the actual meaning of a story can only be understood in terms of its end. For Jacob, the promise of the future that he inherited from Abraham as blessing is above all a past that he attempts to do justice to, caringly and broodingly. Characteristic of Joseph, by contrast, is the awakened and cheerful sense for the future as future, and with it the sense for the historical and linguistic character of allegedly meaningless being. Thus, Joseph possesses in an exemplary manner a sense for meaning, the gift, cultivated in language, of understanding historical time: ‘Restlessness and dignity, that is a seal of the spirit, and with a child’s fearless propensity Joseph recognized the traditional imprint upon the brow of his father and master, although his own stamp was not the same, ­but – ­determined more strongly by his charming ­mother – ­was more cheerful and less anxious, and his personable nature was more open to conversation and communication’ (36). Joseph’s special gift, his ‘superiority’ compared to Jacob, is of course balanced exactly by the profound ambiguity of his talent, making it appear to be quite unclear in the beginning whether Joseph is distinguished by it or merely marked by it. This central ambiguity that will fundamentally determine Joseph’s character and his stories is immediately visible to Jacob’s watchful and caring eye: ‘He knew of Joseph’s proclivity for vaguely ecstatic states, for not really formed and even half playful strain,



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which sometimes was truly prophetic, and he was very uncertain in his fatherly reaction to it, profoundly aware of the holy and pernicious ambiguity of such propensities’ (336). The ‘holy and pernicious ambiguity’ is the general sign of blessing, and thus not to be found in Joseph’s brothers who lack the gift of the blessing. This allays Jacob’s concerns: ‘The ­brothers – ­ah no, not a one of them had shown the least sign of being chosen in that way; God knows, they did not look like seers or men visited by spirits. One need lose no sleep on their account; raptures, whether viewed as pernicious or holy, were not for them.’ Being chosen, being visited by spirits and being seers are features that, in all their ambiguity, belong not to the brothers, but rather to Joseph. As proud as Jacob is, then, of the prophetic visitation that he perceives with his favourite son, Joseph’s ‘raptures’ were also a constant source of worry. The holy and pernicious character of his talent and of ‘being chosen’ is further accentuated by the composition of the novel, in that the ambiguity encroaches on Jacob’s assessment of the gift, and with it his behaviour towards Joseph. He vacillates in how to position himself towards the evident difference between Joseph and his brothers. The evident fact ‘that Joseph stood out’ from his brothers, ‘in a significant, if also dubious, way’, in one sense ‘fit into Jacob’s plans’: ‘this could be taken as a mark of distinction that, along with so many other advantages, made his election as heir all the more plausible’ (336). Jacob, himself having received the blessing without being distinguished in a physical ­sense – ­that is, as the ­firstborn – ­thus follows the ‘plan’ of intervening again in the physically determined succession to pass on the blessing not to his firstborn (Reuben) but to Joseph. For this purpose, every gift of Joseph’s that sets him apart from his brothers and can be understood as a distinction is a most welcome justification. Yet, on the other hand, ‘Jacob was not perfectly at ease with his observations. There were certain people in the l­ and – ­the sort the father’s heart would not want Joseph to be one of. These were holy fools, vituperators, obsessed by God, who foamed at the mouth and made a living of their ability to p ­ rophesy – b ­ abblers of oracles, who roamed about or lived in caves visited by clients and who pocketed foodstuffs and money in exchange for prognosticating all sorts of lucky days and hidden things.’ Here, the full ambiguity of the ‘exception’ from the rule of mediocrity and normality becomes clear. The exception is not desirable as such, for there are numerous forms of the ‘gift’ that are actually just abnormal compared to normality and worse than mediocrity: a kind of ‘savaged’ enthusiasm. For this reason, it is written of those who present themselves as obsessed by God and as babblers of oracles: ‘Jacob did not like them because of his God’; ‘They were filthy men of disorderly and crazed habits’; ‘Both the nature of these men’s drives and what ultimately lay behind it were obvious enough: nothing but filthy Baal worship and sacred whoredom’; ‘That was no secret; everyone was aware of such connections and relations; except that people roundabout regarded them

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with a kind of amiable awe devoid of any of the sensitivity that was part of Jacob’s spiritual tradition’ (336–7). The average consciousness rests upon an obscure underground, whose successful repression constitutes the ‘normality’ of mediocrity. For this reason, observing the actualization of what is normally repressed, representatively acting out archaic patterns of behaviour, generates in everyday consciousness a comfortable and reverent shudder as it senses to what extent it itself takes part unconsciously in what it wards off half enraged, half fascinated. Yet the relapse to repressed developmental stages, irrespective of the energies of genius it may unleash, must nevertheless be criticized as an anti-­spiritual ­regression – ­to be sure, not in the name of sterile mediocrity but in the name of a ‘spiritual tradition’ that knows and takes seriously the power of obscurity, repressed by ordinary consciousness, yet without surrendering itself to it. Thus, it is able to connect night with day, the blessing of depth with the blessing of spirit. The Joseph novel designates this dialectical unity, which demarcates spiritless regression from the genuinely spiritual elevation over mediocrity, as ‘God-­understanding’: Jacob ‘had nothing against reasonable oracles with arrows or lots cast to determine the blessed hour for this or that business’. ‘But wherever the God-­understanding broke down and lewd frenzy took its place, that was for him the beginning of what he called “folly”, a very strong word in his mouth, strong enough to express utter disapproval’ (337). The ‘election as heir’, whose features Jacob would so readily identify in his favourite son Joseph, must be demarcated, then, from two sides: firstly (the easier task), from the average probity represented by Joseph’s brothers in manifold ways; yet secondly (the trickier task), from the enthusiasm of genius, the abnormal ‘folly’ that breaks the God-­understanding in which the night-­side and the day-­side of human existence are unified into a dialectical unity. The father, who ‘understands God’ in an exemplary manner, accordingly ­sees – ­in his son’s unusual talent that transcends the limits of normality – ­ ­ his own pattern varied in an unsettling ambiguous and precarious manner: ‘But how unnerving to think that Joseph, with his childish proclivity for rolling his eyes and dreamlike speaking, might be in contact with those unclean regions of the soul.’ ‘Was it not a cause of worry and pain to see how the honest and grace-­filled gifts of the fathers were diminished in unstable sons, to their refined perdition?’ (337). In the end, the fatherly concern will be outweighed, however, by the assurance that Joseph’s ‘refined perdition’ will ultimately turn out for the good, empowering him not only to inherit Jacob’s blessing but even to lend it a new and heightened reality through understanding that reaches into the future. For this end, the still unstable youthfulness of his son is a reassurance: ‘What a comfort, then, that Joseph was still so young; his instability would grow firm, more robust and steady, would mature to respectability in the God-­understanding’, which grants to the ‘dark



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elements in the character of his favourite’ a ‘freeing clarification on the intellectual level’ (337–8). Jacob thus makes sure that Joseph is instructed properly in languages, and that he learns in this way to connect his dreamful talents with the soberness of the letter: ‘It was a very good thing that Joseph was learning, was regularly practising in the word and literacy under skilled tutelage. He, Jacob, had not needed it; even his grandest dreams had been respectable and tempered. But the old man felt that Joseph’s dreams were in need of the precise discipline of the reasonable letter’ (337–8). Of course, as the reader of the Joseph novel already knows, Jacob’s clever educational programme will fail miserably. Jacob’s foolish preference of his favourite son will throw him precisely into the ruin from which the pedagogical precautions were supposed to save him. They, too, contribute to heightening Joseph’s self-­absorbed conceit and rousing the incensed and envious brothers to the final act of desperation. But, within the unity of meaning of the Joseph novel, this ostensible failure and ruin is precisely the condition that enables the discussed narrative irony to manifest itself and prevail. Jacob’s educational plan will be thwarted by an incomparably greater plan, which achieves with entirely different ‘pedagogical’ means what Jacob’s educational programme falls short of: the resolving clarification of the ambiguous obscurity in Joseph’s talent.

Knowledge of the Future? A first, still harmless and relaxed test of Joseph’s ‘dreaming’ talent for the future can be found in a rather incidental dialogue with his father, in which all the motifs that will be significant for the further course of Joseph’s stories are already in play. Jacob addresses himself to the young Joseph: ‘Yashub, my child, listen to what I want to ask.’ ‘Let my child tell me what he thinks of wind and weather and of their forecasts, and what his state of mind is in regard to whether the late rains will still arrive in time’ (85–6). At first glance, a familiar scene presents itself: the father, tending to the thriving of his herds, asks Joseph for information about the expected weather. Yet this is also what is radically unfamiliar about the scene (at least for the modern reader)­. Jacob evidently assumes as a matter of course that his son can give him precise information about the future weather, and not on the basis of indirect inferences but because the future itself is accessible to him. For the persons of the Joseph novel, not only the I standing open ‘backwards’, towards the past, is accordingly a familiar experience, but equally (if more rarely) the standing open ‘forwards’, towards the future. Corresponding to the enigmatic human capacity for recollecting the past is, then, an analogous, indeed unequally enigmatic, capacity for dreaming, for prophetic foreknowledge of what is yet to come.

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For this reason, Joseph is by no means surprised by his father’s question, does not reject it as ‘impossible’ or ‘inflated’, but rather reacts to it with the same self-­evidence with which it is posed. He responds: ‘You are listening just above ­me . . . ­and your child is still listening as well, both to what is without and to what is within, and he brings tidings and news to your listening ear. For in my ear is the sound of branches dripping and of drizzle falling upon the plains, though the moon is exceedingly bright and the wind comes from Gilead. For this rustling sound is not of the present time, but near in time’. And so ‘my lord can be confident and certain in the matter of quenching waters’ (86–7). Joseph thus justifies the trust placed in him with regard to his talent for seeing the future (which his father evidently does not possess). Jacob thanks his favourite son with proud satisfaction, which is of course immediately joined by concern with regard to the possible ‘vexation’ on the part of his brothers: ‘It is a fine thing that my boy is blessed with dreams; that is because he is my firstborn by my true and dearest wife.’ And he adds: ‘I  love you because you have spoken comfort to me in regard to the quenching waters, but do not tell just anyone that you dream beneath the tree, do not tell it either to the children of Leah or to the children of the handmaids, for they might take offence at your talent’ (87). At this point, the reader already anticipates what will soon happen in the s­ tory – ­and it happens promptly ‘the very next day’, between Joseph and his brothers: he ‘babbled on without a second thought about his dream of the weather. And they were all the more annoyed when his dream was fulfilled, for the late rains were abundant and pleasing’ (92). The narrative meaning of the literary composition is entirely unambiguous, for the narrator could have simply let the ‘late rains’ fail to appear, or at least be more sparse. That the narrator does not seize this possibility thus points the way to an adequate understanding. The question dealt with in Joseph’s stories is accordingly not whether there can be a prophetic human gift in human beings, but rather what the consequences are for human understanding of self and world that this gift indeed exists, and appears time and again. The unambiguity with which the prediction of the ‘abundant and pleasing’ late rains appears in the novel makes clear for the first time the dreamy ambiguity with which Joseph behaves towards his talent. Accordingly, the brothers are vexed by Joseph’s prediction all the more once it proves to be reliable and actually to come true. Far from accepting this real success as a mitigating fact, which could immerse the previous verbosity and boasting in a conciliatory light, the furious envy of the brothers is spurred on precisely by the undeniable fact of the talent, and driven to the deadly extreme. How, though, is this gift of the future, which will be narrated time and again in the stories of Joseph, to be adequately understood in all of its unambiguity and ambiguity? The question is not easy to answer. If the modern and ‘enlightened’ reader wanted to regard the whole only as



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a charming aesthetic fiction, which artistically plays with the ‘prophetic superstition’ of earlier times, then the project of the Joseph novel would be missed from the ­outset – ­a project that, according to the novel’s own words, consists in applying the word ‘narrate’ to the future and attempting to narrate the future in the form of the past. Readers of the Joseph novel thus find themselves unexpectedly in a position not dissimilar to the young Joseph’s. They, too, must find in the ambiguous status of the talent of being able to ‘dream’ of the future the most sober meaning possible, and to subject this talent to a ‘freeing clarification on the intellectual level’.

Being on One’s Way A further test of Joseph’s talent for the future makes clear in a new and especially complex manner what has been developed thus far. Once again, the test takes place in a ‘concerned’ dialogue between father and son, though this time it is not the worldly concern for the wellbeing of the livestock, but rather the spiritual concern for the permissibility or impermissibility of an anachronism of the past, of something ancient and traditional, the religious ‘backwardness’ of which is causing Jacob anxiety. Here Jacob’s general God-­concern intensifies into a narrative attentiveness to time, to the ‘state’ of historical development, which is at the same time a development of God, so that it contains for human being the commandment to abandon anachronisms of the past that the present state of history has already moved beyond. In this way, Jacob is thoroughly convinced that ‘necessarily the pondering, the concerns and the restlessness that were Abram’s part and are ours as well remain for ever and ever, so that we may detach ourselves from the things that the Lord wishes to move us beyond and is perhaps already beyond H ­ imself – ­that is: concern’ (385). According to Jacob, the concern is directed concretely at ‘the feast near at hand and the night of sacrifice when we slaughter the sheep after sundown and dip a sprig of hyssop in its blood so that when we paint the doorposts with it, so that the Destroyer may pass over. For it is the night of passing over and of life spared for the sake of the sacrifice’ (384). The questionable custom at issue is an old traditional feast, whose archaic constellation of sacrifice, blood and the ‘night of passing over’ seems to Jacob to be no longer in keeping with the time. Jacob is thus inclined to do away with the ‘out-­dated’ feast for the sake of the ‘purity’ of the teaching: ‘Ought we not be troubled about the Lord and the time, whether we still understand them and are not sinning against both by adhering out of lazy habit to some filthiness that they would have us move beyond? I am seriously considering whether it may not be my task to step beneath the oracle tree and call the people together

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for them to hear my concerns and listen to my doubts concerning the Feast of Pesach’ (386). The name of the feast (‘Pesach’), pushed all the way to the end, confirms explicitly what the knowledgeable reader could have already surmised with talk of blood, doorposts, passing over and the ‘sprig of hyssop’: the archaic feast that is adhered to, perhaps only out of ‘lazy habit’, is precisely the feast of Pesach or Passover with which the Jews commemorate the exodus from E ­ gypt – a­ divine salvation and ‘life spared’, which, in reference to Jacob, does not at all lie in the past but in the distant future. Joseph has not yet set foot in the Egypt out of which the Jews, led by Moses, will make their exodus, any more than the indefinitely long time that separates the stories of Jacob and Joseph in the Book of Genesis from the appearance of Moses in the Book of Exodus has elapsed. Here again the Joseph novel demands of its readers a high degree of historical and narrative attentiveness in order that they may orient themselves within the narrative unity of meaning that is instituted by a model and its repetitions. According to the Joseph novel, there is, underlying the feast celebrated by the Jews as ‘Passover’, an age-­old model in which the motifs of the sacrificial animal, blood, doorposts and salvation or spared life form a unity. Already for Jacob, the feast is so archaic that, from the standpoint of the concern inherited from Abraham ‘about the Lord and the times’, it is perhaps already too old. It stands as a hollow relic of an overcome epoch, under the suspicion of owing its continued existence only to a lazy and godless habit, which conserves the ‘filthiness’ instead of liberating itself by transcending it. Of course, the point of the whole narrative construction consists in that the Jewish feast of Passover could not at all exist in the form in which it is celebrated still today had Jacob prevailed in his critical intention of doing away with it in its pre-­form. In that case, the model that the later Jews reinterpret and repeat through variation in their feast up to this day would not have been passed down to them. Equally impossible would be the Christian Easter feast, which falls precisely during the time of the Passover feast and should thus be understood as a reinterpretation of the Jewish reinterpretation. Someone must have suspended Jacob’s God-­fearing purism, then, and saved the future stories. In the Joseph novel, this ‘someone’ is Jacob’s favourite son. In the discussion with the strict father, Joseph pleads in favour of conserving and ‘sparing’ the old feast. Here, Joseph reveals, then, a further sample of his talent for the future: the feast of salvation should be saved for the future. It is not merely the passion for sparing and saving that is characteristic of Joseph’s talent, but, even more, the concrete argumentation that he invokes for this purpose against his father: ‘If the child may regard himself as having been asked, then he counsels that the feast be spared, that it not be zealously assailed because of its stories, which over time may perhaps be replaced by some other, which you might then tell during



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the eating of the ­roast – ­the sparing of Isaac, for instance, which would be very fitting. Or let us simply wait in time, as God may glorify Himself to us in some great act of salvation and sparing, which we will then make the basis of our feast as its story, singing songs of jubilation’ (386). At stake here is the continued existence of the original Passover feast, which is already so old and faded that the concrete salvation and sparing that it celebrates can no longer be remembered at all. The feast has degenerated into a mere habit, and its motifs (sacrificial animal, hyssop, blood, doorposts, passing over) are not understandable anymore. Jacob raises his justified critique against this dead form that persists only by dint of human laziness and thoughtlessness. His son saves the feast from this critique by interpreting the dead state of the original feast as an opportunity for the ‘advent’ of future stories into the established form. According to Joseph’s insight, the future requires an already existing pre-­form in which it enters and intervenes varyingly, in order to realize itself and become understandable. Joseph considers ‘the sparing of Isaac, for instance’, to be a very suitable reinterpretation of the ancient feast of salvation, but immediately adds that it remains to be seen whether ‘God may glorify Himself to us in some great act of salvation and sparing’, in order to inscribe anew this future salvation, which Joseph does not know but anticipates, into the old pattern. Of course, the reader of the Joseph novel knows this refers to the Passover feast of the Jews and the liberation, recalled in this feast, ‘out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of bondage’ (Ex. 20: 2). In this way, Joseph’s talent for the future connects, with anticipation, the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt with the story of Abraham and the refused sacrifice of Isaac. Jacob responds with amazement and delight to Joseph’s art of interpretation and accepts the advice to spare the ancient feast for the sake of the future: ‘For you spoke for both the custom and the future, much to your honour. And you argued for a waiting that is on the way at the same time, and my soul smiles upon you’ (386). Joseph’s talent for the future is characterized precisely. Its essence consists in a clear consciousness of the historical way of humanity that places each isolated occurrence in the unity of meaning of a spiritual wandering. Thus, Joseph gains the gift of a narratively constituted understanding that arises equally from recollecting the past and from anticipating the future. Joseph understands himself (and humanity) as being on the way in the adventure of understanding of self and ­world – ­that is, in the sequence of reinterpretations and new interpretations of tradition. Yet, more specifically, this requires an attentiveness that is organized temporally and historically, which avoids simply accepting obtusely what is customary and given, but also resists rejecting it wholesale. Instead, it understands it in terms of its position in an overarching unity of meaning that extends from the past through the present to the future.

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Sympathy Joseph’s gift of the future essentially rests upon his sense for the twofold decentring of his own present, both through the past and through the future. While speaking to his father, Joseph employs a simile in order to articulate in language the relations of time and meaning that are not easy to understand: ‘“Look, there is a tree”’: ‘“The treetop sparkles, swaying in the wind, for its roots are stuck in the stone and dust of earth’s realm, deep in its darkness. And does the merry treetop likewise know much about those dirty roots? No, but rather it has moved beyond them with the Lord, rocking in the wind and not thinking about them. And so it is, to my mind, with custom and filth; and that we may enjoy the taste of our pious rites, we will let what lies far below remain nicely far below”’ (385). The simile draws on the visual relations of what is below and above in space in order to clarify the dynamic and non-­visual logic of the historical way, which, ‘with the Lord and the time’, strives from the past via one’s own respective present into the future. What has sunk and been discarded in obscurity, dust and dirt is an essential aspect of history that cannot be severed from it; otherwise, everything higher would lose its root. Yet this insight must not mislead one to the converse error of making the root itself into the essential. The lowest should be taken seriously as the root, which the spirit has moved beyond ‘with the Lord’. What characterizes precisely the sovereignty of a genuinely historical spirit is that it can, like Joseph, say about its own beginnings and roots, with cheerful composure: ‘we will let what lies far below remain nicely far below’. Drawing on Thomas Mann’s assessment of Freud’s psychoanalysis, one can say of Joseph’s art of interpretation that its enlightenment must not be confused with ‘blithe superficiality’, since it recalls the obscure root of present and future history. Even less, to be sure, may the clemency for the obscure root be misunderstood as an enthusiastic taking sides with the night and the pre-­rational. Evidently being on the way in stories and history, which enables and requires the capacity to understand, is for Joseph neither a day without night nor a night without day. For this reason, the narrator of the Joseph novel elucidates the art of understanding that Joseph possesses as a mediation of the absolute difference between day and night, life and death: ‘Sympathy is a meeting of death and life; and genuine sympathy arises only when the sense for the one holds the sense for the other in balance. The sense for death on its own creates rigidity and darkness; the sense for life on its own creates flat banality devoid of wit. Wit, then, and sympathy arise only where the piety for death is coloured and warmed by a cordial regard for life, while the latter is made more profound and valuable by the former. This was the case for ­Joseph – ­like this were his wit and his cordiality. This was his ­blessing – ­the double blessing with which he was blessed, from above and from the deep that lies below’ (1230).



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The flat banality of the isolated attentiveness to life and the rigid darkness of the isolated attentiveness to death converge in the literalness with which they believe to take life or death seriously. Yet this literal seriousness lacks spirit and true depth because it is ‘devoid of wit’, for wit is what first binds what humans ordinarily separate: life and death. Ordinarily affirming life too readily and repressing death too easily, humans gain in wit the spiritual freedom to face life and death equally with sympathy, which shows human self-­knowledge the way in understanding of transience.

Certainty of Death In the passage just quoted, what is particularly important for the further line of thought is the ‘sense for death’, which balances the sense for life and thus makes possible wit and sympathy. Both of these avoid the flat banality of optimism and the rigid darkness of pessimism. Talk of the ‘sense for death’ makes clear that a knowledge of the future is available to every human. It is the knowledge that one will die. Death is not a future event next to others but, in a very specific sense, the future for humans: their end. And each of us may forecast this future with absolute certainty. It is not conceivable or probable that one will die, but known with certainty. Each human is thus the prophet of his or her own death. Certainty concerning death does not have the character of an inductive inference from past cases of death to one’s own death in the future. In sharp contrast to such an induction that is always only probable, one’s own death in the future is distinguished by absolute certainty, which must appear enigmatic in view of the prejudice that one can know nothing about the future with certainty. And yet this certainty of death sustains and pervades all our knowledge, including our understanding of self and world. The sense for death thus precedes a deepened sense for life. This is the sense in which one is to understand Thomas Mann’s explanation in his ‘Fragment on Religiosity’: ‘But what, then, is religiosity? The thought of death. I saw my father die. I know I will die, and this thought is the most familiar, behind everything that I think and write’ (1994, 296). He adds: ‘No day of my waking life has passed on which I have not thought of death and the enigma’ (297). The enigma of human being, which is the ‘alpha and omega of all our speaking and questioning, lending pressure and fire to all speech, insistence to all questions’, is thus closely interwoven with the certainty of death. Certainty of future death indicates to humans that their relation to the future and the whole of time is different from what it is for everyday consciousness of the time continuum, for which the future is ­‘indeterminate’ – that is, empty.

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With their enigmatic certainty of death, humans have, then, a unique guide for understanding what is actually at issue in the forms of the enigmatic talent for the future invoked in the Joseph novel. In view of death, it is obviously not the question of being that arises for ­them – w ­ hether their expectation of death is empirically ­correct – ­but rather the entirely different question of meaning, that is, what it actually means to be able to predict our own death with such certainty. While the being of death is certain, its meaning, by contrast, is not. This tension between being and meaning, knowledge and understanding, will define the further course of Joseph’s stories. Joseph’s gift will open for him a dreamlike knowledge that raises in the first place the question concerning the true meaning of this knowledge. In knowledge, Joseph is certain; but in understanding the knowledge, he is not. His story will be the way of appropriating this understanding, step by step.

The Dreamer of Dreams In the young Joseph, the gift of the future manifests itself especially in dreams that are understandable to the dreamer only in part, yet to the reader of the novel in their entirety, for they predict the future fully accurately, shrouded only slightly by their figurative language. That is why the envious brothers call Joseph mockingly and tauntingly a ‘dreamer of dreams’ (333). This stamp of mockery gives expression to the impotence of those who do not dream and who thus begrudge the gifted one for his gift. Yet therein also lies, presumably without the brothers suspecting it, a profound truth about the young Joseph. While he is indeed the gifted one who is capable of dreaming, he is conscious of his gift only ‘dreamily’. He knows the most important things without knowing that he knows them. The deep ambivalence of Joseph’s gift consists more specifically in that he parades and flaunts his unusual art of understanding in a self-­loving and vain manner, thereby failing, however, to understand one thing: himself. In exemplary clarity, the young Joseph is the case of someone who has ears to hear, yet does not hear. He understands many insinuations without understanding his own understanding. He interprets the world, but does not interpret his interpreting. Despite his talent for solving puzzles, he overlooks the greatest and most fundamental ­enigma – ­namely, himself. This is expressed in a tragic form in Joseph’s favourite dream, which he tells to his father: ‘Do you know the sweetest dream, which I have been dreaming many thousand times? It is the dream of preference and of being the child. For much will be granted the child of God, what he begins shall turn out well for him, he will find grace in the eyes of all, and kings will praise him.’ ‘For in their hatred they sent for me and laid snares for my steps, they dug a pit before my feet, and thrust my life into the pit,



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where darkness became my dwelling place. But I called upon His name out of the darkness of the pit, and He healed me and He rescued me out of the underworld. He made me great among strangers, and a people I did not know serves me, touching their brows to the ground’ (91). The reader of the Joseph novel immediately understands what the young Joseph curiously does not. In his favourite dream, Joseph not only anticipates in truth his own life in its key points, but also dreams very clearly of the holy and pernicious turning point of his life, the catastrophe that will make a new man out of him. He will have to experience a grave and darkness before being healed. But Joseph babbles away about this abyss, thoughtlessly and without understanding, lulling himself alone in the aroused delight in being a ‘child of God’. Showing so much sense for the narrative points of a story in other contexts, he is peculiarly dull and obtuse in view of the vision of his own life, by giving himself over entirely to the prospect that captivates him, of being ‘great among strangers’ and of being served by a people. Through his gift for the future, Joseph knows that the grave is waiting for ­him – a­ nd at the same time does not know because he does not want to. He speaks of the hatred of others, of the pit they will push him into, of his future dwelling in the ­darkness – ­and he does not understand what he is saying. Indeed, he does not even notice it because he prefers to turn his attention to the ‘more pleasant’ chapters of his life story. As a result of this selective attention, the overall meaning of his life story escapes him, and with it an adequate understanding of the parts he directs his attention to. Precisely in this regard, Joseph is a representative of humanity. Looking away from death, repressing all-­too-­certain mortality, is not an accidental feature of his individuality but rather a universal feature of human being as such. For every human being knows that he or she will die. This knowledge is so familiar to each of us and belongs so intimately to our being that there is no need for a prophetic dream to make it known to us. And yet, ordinarily, we do not want to know what we know, so the certainty of our death transforms into a dreamlike indeterminacy, to which we pay attention only occasionally and never very emphatically. Thus Jacob, too, exhibits the primordial human inattentiveness to death as Joseph tells him of his favourite dream, which Jacob understands no better than does his son. Jacob likewise sees only the ‘great’ end when he, full of care and concern, asks his son: ‘My child’s words are imposing, but do not accord with reason. For what does it mean that a strange land will serve him lying upon its face?’ (91). Is that in fact the only question Joseph’s dream raises? Is that in fact the only worry, the only concern Joseph’s dream ought to give rise to?

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The Catastrophe The story of the young Joseph is heading towards a catastrophic turning point, a narrative cut that arranges the events into a before and after. The catastrophe is i­ntroduced – ­could it be any different? – by another dream of Joseph’s, which he recounts to his brothers carelessly and boastfully: ‘Each of us bound one sheaf of wheat, and there were twelve of us, for Benjamin, our youngest brother, was with us in the field.’ And ‘my sheaf is standing in the middle, straight up, but yours, gathered round it in a circle, bend low to it, bend low, bend low, but mine stands upright’ (412). This self-­absorbed dream, too, will fulfil itself in time: one day, the brothers will bend low before Joseph in Egypt on the occasion of a hardship that is directly related to the theme ‘sheaf of wheat’ (nourishment). Of course, the young Joseph and his brothers do not know at the time of the narrated dream that things will turn out this way. Yet Joseph senses vaguely in his conceit, and so do the brothers in their envy, that there is something true in the dream. And, as the original text narrates, this is precisely what goads fully the envy of the brothers to the murderous hatred: ‘And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words’ (Gen. 37: 8). What follows is the true catastrophe, the attempted murder, the fall into the pit of death. In the original text it reads: as the brothers saw Joseph ‘afar off, even before he came near them, they conspired against him to kill him. And they said one to another, “Look, this dreamer is coming! Come therefore, let us now kill him, and cast him into some pit; and we shall say, ‘Some wild beast has devoured him.’ We shall see what will become of his dreams!”’ (Gen. 37: 18–20). Here, the envy escalates to the planned murder. Joseph’s brothers know very well in the renarration of the Joseph novel that they are walking in the footsteps of a narratively coined model: ‘The way now lay clear to their father’s heart and they would r­eturn – w ­ ithout Joseph.’ ‘They would be a­ sked – a­ nd not without a certain horrible j­ustification – a­ s to the whereabouts of the person without whom they were returning. To be sure, they could answer this question with a shrug. Were they their brother’s keepers?’ (463). Thus, the narrator establishes a connection of thoughts to the narrative model through a direct quotation from the original story: ‘And the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know: Am I my brother’s keeper?”’ (Gen. 4: 9). With regard to the bitter fight between Joseph and his brothers, the novel places great importance on the narrative attentiveness of its reader always bearing in mind the original fraternal fight between Cain and Abel, the underlying model for the struggle between Esau and Jacob. Precisely against this background, the meaning of the fact emerges that not all brothers want to repeat Cain’s model literally, without variation. Reuben is an exception, and a deviation from the coined archetype: ‘But Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out



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of their hands, and said, “Let us not kill him.” And Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit which is in the wilderness, and do not lay a hand on him” – that he might deliver him out of their hands, and bring him back to his father’ (Gen. 37: 21–2). Into the model of the fratricide, a reservation is introduced in the later repetition, which makes possible the later salvation (even if it will happen differently from how Reuben imagines it). Following Reuben’s advice, the murder will not be committed i­mmediately – a­ s most of the brothers had originally ­planned – b ­ ut rather left to time: Joseph is to perish slowly in the pit without the brothers having to assume any guilt for direct bloodshed. Secretly, however, the aim of Reuben’s suggestion is to use this time gained to save Joseph, for postponement means hope. In this way, the struggle between Joseph and his brothers is a late variation of the original theme. On the one hand, it makes explicit what is contained implicitly in the origin. But as an explicating variation of the original theme, it, on the other hand, opens the possibility for the salvation of Abel, or rather ­Joseph – a­ salvation that, as it will be shown, goes hand in hand with the original story being understood for the first time. The composition of the novel will unite both: the postponement of the murder, the grace period in the pit, will enable Joseph to wake up out of the dream of his conceit; conversely, his awakening, his regret and his new understanding of what happens, is the true meaning of his salvation.

8 The Dying Grain

The Oracle – The Simile of the Dying Grain – Joseph’s Awakening – Compassion – The Illusory Character of Individuality – The Truth of Illusion – At the Empty Grave – The Other Simile – History in Becoming

The Oracle Joseph falls and is transformed by the fall. To understand the narrative meaning of the conversion, it is necessary to pay attention to the hints the novel gives in advance, in a rather ‘dreamlike’ anticipation of the imminent future. Its most significant and compositionally most artful lesson is an ‘oil oracle’ that the parents and relatives have arranged on the occasion of Joseph’s impending birth. So Joseph is only indirectly involved in this event; he is still not born and yet already gives occasion to enquire into the ­future – ­here, specifically into his future. In Jacob and Joseph’s time, the study of oracles is a well-­established service frequently in demand, so the enquiry into the future in Joseph’s case follows a well-­ rehearsed convention: ‘In her fifth month, Laban insisted Rachel be taken’ to see ‘a seer and p ­ riest . . . ­so that he might foretell both her and her child’s future through augury. In the presence of others, Jacob held to his principles, objected and declined to participate, but ultimately he was no less feverish than his kin to know the oracle and always the first to wish nothing be missed’ (272). The ‘augury’ of the future is more or less routine in the careful preparation of a birth that seeks to ensure that ‘nothing be missed’. Even Jacob, who, for religious reasons, distances himself from ‘babblers of oracles’, has no objection in the case of the eagerly awaited child of his favourite wife Rachel. His critique of the essence of the oracle by no means concerns, then, the real possibility of a prediction of the future; on the contrary, just like his religiously less enlightened environment, he is convinced of this possibility.



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From among the numerous forms of knowledge of the future, the family selects the oil oracle: the seer ‘Rimanni-­Bel had taken his cedar rod and bowl, had prayed and sung and poured oil on the water and water on the oil and cocking his head had observed the formations of the oil in the water.’ The following depiction of what the seer augurs from the water–oil mixture is fashioned as a report to Jacob by those who have returned home. The first information reported to Jacob is clear and unambiguous: ‘Two rings had emerged from the oil, one large, the other ­small – ­by every indication Rachel, the sheep breeder’s daughter, would give birth to a boy.’ The continuation, too, is understandable: ‘One ring had emerged from the oil toward the east and then stood ­still – ­the mother, having given birth, would return to health.’ Now follows the central section of the oracle report, which withdraws into the obscurity of ambiguity, speaking of life and death: ‘But since the oil, after water was poured, sank and then rose again and clung to the rim of the bowl, so whoever was sick would rise again, but whoever was healthy would surely die. “Not the boy!” Jacob could not help crying out. No, for the child it was just the o ­ pposite – a­ ccording to the oil’s hints, which in this instance were not easily understood by human understanding. The child would go down into the pit, and yet live; it would be like grain, which bears no fruit unless it dies’ (274–5). Even if Jacob (like his relatives) for the most part does not understand the oracle, his interjection that is noted by the novel is nonetheless significant. For one, it indicates his trust in the oracle for the part that he understands: he fears for ‘the boy’, even though he cannot at all know which sex his child will have. Further, he fears for the child and not for the mother in the obscure allusion to a danger, which casts a distinctive and highly ambivalent light on the state of his soul. His passionate preference for the still unborn Joseph casts a shadow of guilt on the greater fate of father, mother and son. Readers of the Joseph novel, by contrast, understand the oracle much better, for they know that with the oil the future is predicted with remarkable precision. It is true that the child will be a boy; it is true that the mother will have a difficult birth, will initially recover only to face in the end an early death; and it is likewise true that the healthy newly born child will, by contrast, initially ‘go down into the pit’ in order to live in the ­end – ­like the grain that only bears fruit after having been transformed by dying in the dark ground of the field. As it is also called in the oil oracle, the crucial point of Joseph’s story will be a ‘raising up of the head out of death’ (275). It would have been very easy for the narrator to have drafted the oracle less accurately and played with a mix of prophetic ‘hits’ and ‘misses’. But the novel reveals its narrative intent and mastery precisely in that it, on the one hand, frames the oracle perfectly accurately, yet, on the other, formulates it in such a way that its more far-­reaching prediction can be

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understood only by the reader who is already familiar with the story. It cannot be understood, however, by those immediately affected, who indeed hear the accurate and obscure oracle then and there, yet cannot understand its correct and precise prediction. This matter-­of-­fact difference between hearing the literal and understanding the meaning is the basis for an adequate understanding of Joseph’s stories. His dreamlike gift of the future wavers ambiguously between mere hearing and true understanding, for the future has its own language, which is obscure but not deceptive. With all the remarkably numerous anticipations of the future framed in the Joseph novel, there does not occur an erroneous prophecy, not even once. All are immediately muddled and incomprehensible, so that the consciousness caught in the here and now hears only the letter and barely understands the meaning; yet when mediated in the context of the whole story, they are all entirely clear and accurate, so that the knowledgeable reader not only hears the letter but can also understand the meaning. This dark–light double aspect of the oil oracle is aptly characterized by the novel: ‘Yes, the verdict, the judgement spoken by the ­oil – ­it was a murky and ambiguous matter; in possessing it, one was not much wiser than before, for it was both consolation and threat in o ­ ne – ­but surely that was how the future had to sound if it could speak, and at least they had heard some sound from it, if only a buzzing, words spoken through lips shut tight’ (275). In the oracle scene, a limit of understanding thus becomes patent: both the seer who expertly translates the silent language of the oil into a ‘verdict’, as well as those who hear the verdict, understand only imperfectly what the verdict means; they hear the verdict and at the same time they do not hear it, for they do not understand it. For the readers, by contrast, who are familiar with Jacob’s and Joseph’s stories up to the end, the verdict is immediately understandable so that they can know that the obscure and ambiguous story of the oracle tells of the future very accurately. At the same time, readers can, without difficulty, put themselves in the ‘obtuseness’ of the characters of the novel who, caught in the opaque literalness of the here and now, hear without understanding. Thus, it is possible to go back and forth between not understanding and understanding the same oracle. One and the same oracle can and must be taken in two different meanings: in the one case as mere fact, as being, which one may perceive but not understand, and in the other case as meaning, as literalness that has become transparent to its meaning, is no longer opaque and un-­understandable being, but rather meaningful and understandable. Nonetheless (or perhaps precisely for this reason), the oracle scene of the Joseph novel has a peculiar oppressive effect for the reader. This effect reveals to what extent our consciousness is ordinarily shaped by the conviction that the future is unknowable. It is unknowable not only for the limited human understanding, but because of fundamental reasons, such that the view into the future sees nothing, not because our eyes are



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too weak, but because in the future there is nothing that can be seen. The future is an ‘empty’ space into which one must plan and act, but to which one cannot direct the attentiveness of interpretation and understanding. Had the novel intended only to reinforce anew this common conviction, then it would surely have fashioned the oracle scene completely differently. Instead, it demands from thinking an unusual and profoundly unsettling conception: the future is not an indeterminate and empty dimension of time; on the contrary, it is accessible to the interpreting attentiveness of human being and can be made present. But, ordinarily, humans are not in a position to understand the language of the f­ uture – ­at most, they know retrospectively that they actually always already knew what was waiting for them.

The Simile of the Dying Grain The line of thought thus far by no means exhausts the way the future is made present in the oracle scene of the Joseph novel. Shot through with manifold allusions to the future, artistically balanced between night and day, not understanding and understanding, the narrative contains a further foreshadowing that refers not to the stories of Jacob and Joseph, but instead reaches much further into the future. In the context of the Joseph novel, this is an ‘anachronism’ that is applied very deliberately. In contrast to the familiar anachronism of the past, in which an out-­dated fragment of the past persists still in the present and has become alien, one may call this an anachronism of the future, because a fragment of the future that is alien and alienating is anticipated in a present where it does not belong. Thus, one reads at the end of the oracle report: ‘The child would go down into the pit, and yet live; it would be like grain, which bears no fruit unless it dies.’ This phrase is anachronistic in the sense given above because it anticipates, or rather cites, a central simile of the New ­Testament – ­if one can call such an anticipation a citation, namely, a citation of the future. They are the words with which Jesus predicts his death and his resurrection in the Gospel of John, which those standing around are unable to understand: ‘The hour is come that the Son of Man shall be glorified. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone: but if it dies, it produces much grain’ (John 12: 23–4). We will have to come back to the simile of the dying grain. Here it should be emphasized that, upon closer inspection, one can find again in this simile the complex relation of night and day, not understanding and understanding, presented in the narrative of the oil oracle with regard to the future. As much as the perfect understanding belongs to the future, it must be preceded in the past and the present by the ‘grain’ of not understanding or misunderstanding, from which understanding

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will then emerge. Or, with the words of the simile: the grain of not understanding or misunderstanding must die in order to bear the fruit of understanding. At the centre of understanding is thus always a transformation, for we cannot understand anything adequately in the first, immediate grasp. Understanding always falls short in the beginning and is in need of improvement. The correct understanding presupposes a­ – s­ometimes ­painful – ­self-­correction. A pre-­understanding, a prejudice or a misunderstanding dies, and in its dying sprouts the true understanding: the dreamer awakes. Understanding is thus possible only when its future in the past and in the present is in some form anticipated. The anticipations that do not understand or misunderstand prepare the ground for understanding, without which this understanding would not be possible. For this reason, understanding is a genuinely historical process that develops only gradually in narratable time. So the ‘raising up of the head out of death’ from which the oil oracle speaks in obscure and incomprehensible words is not an accidental or external circumstance that needs to be understood. Rather, it is precisely what takes place in every successful understanding.

Joseph’s Awakening Joseph has f­ allen – i­nto the pit, which, according to his brothers’ plan, is supposed to serve likewise as his grave. In the depth of this well, scarred by the blows of his brothers and confronted with his death, Joseph experiences the transformation of understanding: ‘He wailed for a long time as his brothers moved off, begging them not to desert him. He scarcely knew, however, what it was he cried out in his weeping, and that was because his true thoughts were not with his mechanical and superficial pleas and wails, but rather somewhere below them; and below these true thoughts others truer still moved as their shadows, their ground bass, their deepest current, so that all together, arranged vertically, they resembled agitated music that his spirit was occupied with d ­ irecting – a­ bove, middle, and ­below – a­ ll at once’ (465). The narrative meaning of the central turning point of the novel is marked formally by a multi-­layered metaphor that is much more than a mere metaphor because it concerns the unity of form and content of the entire Joseph novel. Music is only what it is because it organizes itself in time recollectively and anticipatingly, and thus gains something lasting out of the passing of time: it gains meaning, which occupies spirit. For this reason, the spirit of inner organization that is receptive to meaning is related to music: it transgresses recollectively and anticipatingly the narrowness of the I caught in each I’s own now. Joseph becomes conscious of the first or ‘true’ deeper layer by freeing his thoughts from his immediate present (the mechanical and superficial



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pleas and wails) and turning to the past: ‘While he was lying tied up on the ground and enduring the excruciating transport to the well, his thoughts never stood still despite all those numbing terrors; his thoughts had definitely not remained solely in the frightening present, but had also hastily skimmed back over a past in which all of these ­things – ­though hidden to his soul’s trustfulness and yet somehow also brashly half-­known to ­it – ­had been in preparation’ (466). A peculiar form of connecting thoughts transpires. Joseph’s thoughts return to the depth of his own past, in which his current present was prepared and announced. The circumstance that the future from that time was being prepared and announced in the present from that time was ‘hidden’ to Joseph ‘and yet somehow also brashly half-­known’. At that time, he indeed had a ‘dreamlike’ knowledge of his future, even if it did not become clear to him until now, in the awakening of understanding. Joseph now recalls the pre-­history that led to his brothers’ deed and his fall, and he understands that his brothers are not the guilty ones, but rather that he himself is guilty. Joseph realizes that he roused and incited his brothers with his blind conceit; he appreciates that in the past he continually caused them suffering, and he understands that his own suffering in the present only reveals and reflects what he had done to his brothers in the past. In awakening out of the fixation on his own private I, Joseph’s own suffering changes through the newly obtained understanding, into compassion for his brothers: ‘It goes without saying that he had been utterly terrified and that he wept in pain at their blows; fear and pain, however, were thoroughly drenched with compassion for the torment of hatred that he was reading in those sweating masks appearing closely in front of him’ (466). Awakened to compassion, he is no longer alien to his brothers and separate from them; rather, he begins to understand them by recognizing the torment in their hatred, thereby reading what their previously opaque ‘masks’ mean. Joseph now understands that his brothers’ deep suffering speaks to him through the mask of envy and h ­ atred – ­and this arouses his compassion. Yet even more appropriate to the awakening narratively framed by the novel is the reversal of the sentence: first, compassion is awakened in Joseph, and in compassion he understands the masks of his brothers for the first time for what they ­express – ­namely, as masks of suffering. That is why Joseph does not react to his own suffering in the dark well in the way most people would. He has no self-­pity but, rather, compassion for his brothers who are about to kill him, for he realizes how much suffering is necessary to come to the decision to kill him: ‘My God, the brothers! To what had he brought them? For he understood that he had brought them to t­ his – ­many and grave mistakes had been committed in the assumption that people loved him more than they loved themselves, an assumption that he had believed and yet not quite actually believed, but according to which he had at any rate lived and that, as he plainly realized, had landed

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him in this pit.’ ‘He had clearly read this in the distorted, sweating masks of the brothers’ (466). Once again, the brothers, whom Joseph previously opposed as alien, separated and lacking understanding in his self-­ centred conceit, are explicitly designated as masks, which now express and make understandable (readable) to the transformed Joseph the suffering that he himself caused. In this way, the literal being of the isolated individualities becomes transparent to compassion in the text of common suffering. The opaque world that the egocentric individual seeks not to understand, but rather to master and exploit for his own needs, becomes transparent and understandable in compassion. It becomes readable to the extent that the I, which is closed in on itself, decentres itself through compassion. This I itself becomes a person (mask) because it begins to understand fellow humans likewise as persons, as fellow actors on the stage of the world.

Compassion The transformative conversion, which the novel narratively stages as Joseph’s awakening by virtue of compassion, repeatedly invokes a philosophically coined m ­ odel – s­ pecifically Schopenhauer’s teaching that the deepest insight and virtue of human being is compassion. Correctly understanding the Joseph novel thus requires that this teaching is made present. For this purpose, it will come down above all to elaborating, matter-­of-­factly and philosophically, Schopenhauer’s central insight that is likewise crucial to the Joseph novel: the insight into the illusory character of individuality. The point of departure for Schopenhauer’s philosophy of compassion is a view of human life freed from ‘dreamlike’ deceptions and self-­deceptions, which clearly sees the story of suffering concealed in every human life story. For ‘every life’, according to Schopenhauer, ‘is a continual series of mishaps great and small, concealed as much as possible by everyone, because he knows that others are almost always bound to feel satisfaction at the presentation of the plagues from which they are exempt for the moment; rarely will they feel sympathy or compassion’ (1969a, 324). Schopenhauer believes that every human hides his or her own story of suffering, since we all have reason to suppose that our fellow humans would meet an open confession of suffering not with compassion, but instead with the malicious pleasure in seeing misfortune befall not them but someone else. For this reason, human life, as Schopenhauer formulates it with biting acumen, is ‘covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself. On the other hand, everyone parades whatever pomp and splendour he can obtain by effort’ (325). Concealing one’s suffering from others is only one side of the phenomenon, however; the other side is the human tendency to conceal from oneself the true cause of suffering. More often than not, according to Schopenhauer,



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we ‘shut our eyes to the truth, comparable to a bitter medicine, that suffering is essential to life, and therefore does not flow in upon us from outside, but that everyone carries around within himself its perennial source. On the contrary, we are constantly looking for an external individual cause, as it were a pretext for the pain that never leaves us’ (318). We attempt to come to terms with our suffering by tracing it as far as possible to external circumstances for which we need not take any ­responsibility – ­circumstances so contingent that there is hope they may simply blow over like a rainy day. The ‘external world’ becomes, then, a repository in which we unload our experience of suffering, while the impetus for self-­knowledge that it offers is thereby neutralized and literally ­suppressed – t­ hat is, deferred. One attempts to minimize the extent one is affected by the totality of suffering by imagining that ‘external’ suffering is separated from the ‘inner’ suffering of each I. One hopes to suffer less, the smaller one draws the circle of what counts as the individual I. Yet the smallest possible radius of a human pseudo-­existence is the ‘individual’: one strictly separates the narrow private I from the rest of reality and, in isolation, considers oneself safe from the greater part of suffering, for it is then merely the suffering of others and not one’s own. The ordinary self-­understanding of humans as isolated ‘individuals’ results, according to Schopenhauer, from seeking to suppress universal suffering as far as possible: ‘Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction’, ‘so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis. The boundless world, everywhere full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite future, is alien to him, is indeed a fiction to him. His vanishing person, his extensionless present, his momentary gratification, these alone have reality for him; and he does everything to maintain them, so long as his eyes are not opened by a better knowledge’ (352–3). But the better knowledge that opens our eyes is the insight that an ontology based on the principium individuationis does not protect us from suffering, but rather, on the contrary, is the very source of suffering. We suffer, Schopenhauer believes, not so much from the ‘what’ (the external circumstances) but, rather, from the ‘how’ (the inner form) of our life. The ‘how’ of our ordinary existence, the inner source of human suffering, consists concretely in our understanding of self and world, according to which the human being is an isolated individual being, separated from all the others that likewise say ‘I’. If we believe, however, to be able to delimit and assert ourselves in contrast to the rest of the world, then the human life story becomes meaningless and unintelligible: it becomes, on inner grounds, a story of suffering. Thus, the essential crux of Schopenhauer’s philosophy consists in the central insight that we suffer not merely because of other humans or ‘external circumstances’, but above all because of ourselves. As individuals,

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we suffer not only when we lack something, but just the ­same – ­and, indeed, particularly i­ntensely – w ­ hen we have everything. We share the first kind of suffering with all living creatures; the second kind is what distinguishes us as humans. It is called boredom: ‘Boredom is nothing less than an evil that ought to be despised; ultimately it paints on the countenance real despair’ (313). True suffering, which results from an understanding of self and world in terms of the principle of individuation, emerges out of concealment into the light once the struggle to preserve the individual I is successful. At that point, one’s own individual existence and life, which one was fighting for as highest good, becomes a torturing burden. We have no idea what to do with our individual existence once it is secured, because it is meaningless, and we do not understand ourselves and our life story. To evade this despair of boredom, we resort to a desperate passing of time and life. Human life ‘swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents’ (312). The meaningless emptiness of a life of not understanding oneself, which makes itself felt from time to time ‘like a dream’ in the boredom of mere existence, is explicitly elevated by Schopenhauer to the knowledge of philosophy: ‘It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the flow of life of the great majority of humans. It is weary longing and torturing, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without knowing why. Every time a human is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations’ (321–2). One can hardly deny the intellectual and linguistic force of these sentences. They combine in a most peculiar manner the awakening power of the biblical prophets and the maxim-­like soberness of the French moralists: Jeremiah with La Rochefoucauld. Under the conditions of the modern era, an insight that truly inspires human self-­knowledge must be formulated at once emphatically and soberly. It unites Pascal and La Bruyère with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; it explains, moreover, Schopenhauer’s unique influence on many artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which has always been a source of irritation for academic philosophy. Someone who does not understand himself because his life story is meaningless lives a life akin to death in its desperate vanity and unfreedom. One can certainly distract oneself from this despair, in the way one ordinarily distracts oneself from knowledge of the end of one’s life. Yet someone who is desperate and who succeeds in distracting himself from his despair is nonetheless still desperate, just as someone who successfully suppresses his mortality nonetheless still remains mortal.



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Schopenhauer’s insight can be unfolded into single moments. Human life is for the most part a senseless staggering towards death because, in existing in a dull longing and torturing, one exists ‘without knowing why’. But this lack of understanding towards one’s own life is only the subjective side of what shows itself objectively as the banal character of ordinary life that is devoid of meaning. A life that ‘flows’ without understanding and without reflection is a life not lived, similar to the soulless movement of a clock that ticks away mechanically and without reflection until its energy has been spent. Here, the additional comparison with music that Schopenhauer weaves in is especially instructive: a melody, which becomes worn out, trivialized and robbed of its musical meaning through countless repetition, is similar to a human life that does not understand itself and is thus robbed of its meaning. Accordingly, the peculiar meaning of art and especially music can remind us of what we have forgotten in the senselessness of our life routines, and what we miss in the boredom of our banal existence, and thus help us to move towards the better knowledge that may free us from our egocentric narrow-­mindedness.1 The moral commandment to not be selfish thus falls short and misses the true phenomenon, for it is simply not possible to not be selfish insofar as one understands oneself as an individual: as individuals, we are selfish. For this reason, Schopenhauer considers all moral pleas as empty and sanctimonious so long as the root of egoism remains untouched: the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality in the naïve understanding of self as individual. As Schopenhauer expressly notes, the ontological egoism of an individual understanding of self and world carries, to be sure, the punishment within itself. If one misunderstands oneself as an isolated private I, then one’s life is the hell of desperate and boring meaninglessness, for everything isolated is meaningless. A private I has no meaning because every overarching context, which is the basic condition for the possibility of meaning, is negated by the self-­isolation of human being as an individual. For this reason, the ‘better knowledge’ that Schopenhauer’s philosophy repeatedly reflects on with new approaches is the human self-­knowledge that overcomes the isolation of the individual and breaks open, as it were, the selfish closed being from within.

The Illusory Character of Individuality The guiding moral difference between good and evil is ordinarily addressed to the individual: good actions, like evil actions, are individual actions, so that ordinary morality places the individual before the ‘choice’ of good and evil, without thereby allowing one to imagine that the ­principle of individuation could itself be the actual problem and root of evil.

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Thus, Schopenhauer thinks with morality against morality when he defines the good and the just as the liberation of human self-­understanding from out of the bias of an ontology of individual isolation: ‘Just as previously we saw hatred and wickedness conditioned by egoism, and this depending on knowledge being caught in the principium individuationis, so we found as the source and essence of ­justice . . . t­ he penetration of the principium individuationis. This penetration alone, by sublating the distinction between our own individuality and that of the alien others, makes possible and explains perfect goodness of mind, extending to the most disinterested love’ (1969a, 378). The rare exception to the general rule of egoism, which can be experienced in justice and love, has always been venerated and esteemed by human beings. Schopenhauer lends it a new interpretation by pointing to its constitutive c­ ondition – t­hat is, that the isolated individual no longer confines him- or herself to the private borders of an accidental here and now, or, put positively: that in justice and love the isolated individual succeeds in understanding his or her own little I as part of a greater unity of meaning. According to Schopenhauer, what impresses us about just and loving humans is their capacity and readiness to decentre themselves. That is why for Schopenhauer the essence of love is compassion: ‘that pure love (caritas) is of its nature compassion’ (375). In compassion, the isolated individual ­overcomes – n ­ ot in thought, but rather intuitively, in ­feeling – ­the limits of his or her I caught in the respective here and now. The individual is thus affected by a suffering that would have to remain alien to him or her according to a logic of an individualist ontology of separated and meaningless individual things. No longer fixated on the small, contingent horizon of individual existence, the one who is awakened in compassion now understands the whole in his or her being. Schopenhauer’s philosophy thus understands itself as a conceptual interpretation and systematization of a human intuition rooted in compassion: ‘Intuitively, or in concreto, every human is really conscious of all philosophical truths; but to bring them into one’s abstract knowledge, into reflection, is the business of the philosopher, who neither ought to nor can do more than this’ (383). Evidently, the Joseph novel takes up this reflection. The narrator works with narrative devices so that Joseph’s awakening from being caught in the principle of self-­love is narrated. The narrative identifies his awakening, however, with the carefully composed moment in which Joseph is pushed, by his brothers, ‘into the pit’, upon which a stone is resting because it is supposed to become his grave. It is in this cave that the turn and decentring takes place: ‘Another Joseph cried out from under the stone’. ‘What shaking had not accomplished, the fall into the pit evidently ­had – ­Joseph was awakened’ (465). It does not follow, then, from what the narrator borrows from Schopenhauer that the novel becomes a philosophical discourse. Rather, the Joseph novel narrates how the knowledge that becomes a philosophical



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theme for Schopenhauer is experienced by Joseph firsthand. Joseph discovers not Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but rather what Schopenhauer’s philosophy is about. Yet this discovery is not an exclusive privilege of Joseph’s. Each individual closed off in his or her meaningless individuality is, as Schopenhauer shows, acquainted with the obscure intuition that one’s own I and one’s world are not as ‘solid’ as they ­appear – ­the intuition, then, that one’s own private existence is not to be taken as literally as the obstinate seriousness of self-­assertion dictates. Thus, this feeling occasionally creeps up on the isolated I: that reality is in fact a drama, one’s own person a mask, the world a stage. This playful character of one’s own existence opens up for Joseph following his precipitous fall, as he looks back on his previous life: ‘Joseph knew precisely, and admitted it openly and honestly to himself as he sat there at the bottom of the well, that the shameless “assumption” by which he had lived had been a play in which he himself had never seriously believed, or ever could have believed’ (467). In this way, not only his brothers become ‘masks’ to him, but he understands himself as a ‘mask’ and his own life in retrospect as a ‘play’, yet a play ‘in which he himself had never seriously believed’ and which he therefore played poorly. Precisely here is where the awakening of understanding announces itself: Joseph’s I decentres itself, experiencing itself no longer as being but rather as playful meaning; yet the concrete meaning of this meaning, which one could seriously believe in, is, to be sure, still entirely obscure.

The Truth of Illusion The novel tells not only of Joseph’s ‘true thoughts’ that stir under the surface of his pleas and wails, but also of his thoughts that are truer still: ‘and below these true thoughts others truer still moved as their shadows, their ground bass, their deepest current, so that all together, arranged vertically, they resembled agitated music that his spirit was occupied with ­directing – a­ bove, middle, and b ­ elow – a­ ll at once’ (465). The passage that articulates this thought of Joseph’s that is ‘truer still’ points the way for the adequate understanding of the Joseph novel. Why did Joseph goad his brothers to envy and hatred? He ‘had had to do it because God had made him expressly to be so that he did it, because He had intended it all with and through him, so that, in a word, Joseph should go down into the ­pit – ­or put even more precisely, wanted to go. But why? That he did not know. As it appears, so that he would perish. But ultimately Joseph did not believe that. He was fundamentally convinced that God looked farther than just to this pit, that as usual He had far more extensive intents and was following some purpose of the distant future, and to serve it he, Joseph, had had to drive his brothers to

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the uttermost. They were being sacrificed to that future, and he felt sorry for them, despite how bad things were for himself’ (467).2 The three ‘musical’ levels, which were distinguished in Joseph’s spiritual arrangement, may be determined now more specifically as the dimensions of present, past and future. The narrowness of the superficial ‘pleas and wails’ in the here and now is initially transcended towards something earlier, as Joseph understands his present in the context of their previous history, and as his compassion for his brothers reveals to him that they are all actors (masks) in a drama that has its origin in the obscure depth of the past. Of course, this transcending into the past will be transcended once ­more – ­namely, towards the future. Joseph begins to understand the present and the past in view of a purpose in the ‘distant future’, which lends the entire drama of human existence its true meaning in the first place. If, by contrast, the present is understood exclusively from the past so that the future stands in the continuity of what has been, then everything that happens moves under the power of a repetition of what is always the same ‘with insignificant variations’. Everything is transient, everything in vain, because what repeats itself in the end is only what already always repeated itself from the beginning: the passing in time, vanity, death. The whole of reality must then appear meaningless, as Schopenhauer captures it bitterly and soberly: everything is ‘a constant passing away, a vain striving, an inward conflict, and a continual suffering’. On the stage of the world theatre, what is displayed in monotonous repetition is constantly the same: ‘suffering humanity and the suffering animal world, and a world that passes away’ (1969a, 379). Under the dominance of what is always the same, the thought that the world is comparable to a stage and humans to actors is only understandable as the claim that differences are not relevant. It is indifferent which role one plays since all roles indiscriminatingly display only the same, over and over: the emptiness, the vanity and meaninglessness of brief human life between birth (entrance) and death (exit). The role of the king is no more important than the role of the beggar, because both are equally unimportant, meaningless and vain. This nihilistic perspective of absolute meaninglessness of being and human life does not change until the present is no longer regarded in view of the past alone, but equally with regard to a true future that ruptures the compulsion for repetition of what is always the same. In the process, the new perspective absorbs the older perspective, not as truth but as an appearance that must be correctly interpreted and understood: ‘As it appears’ the future has ready for human being only death and decay. ‘But ultimately Joseph did not believe that. He was fundamentally convinced that God looked farther than just to this pit, that as usual He had far more extensive intents and was following some purpose of the distant future, and to serve it he, Joseph, had had to drive his brothers to the uttermost.’



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Joseph is ‘fundamentally convinced’ that the appearance of perishing will not have the last word. But from where does he get the thought ‘that God looked farther than just to this pit’? This thought is familiar to him because presumably God is, as usual, also this time ‘following some purpose of the distant future’. Joseph may insert, then, his own life into the unity of meaning of an overarching story because similar stories are known to him from the tradition of Abraham’s children. The God discovered by Abraham is the Lord of what happens; He can, as Jacob formulates it, ‘let the future pass through fire unscathed and burst the bars of death’; He is the author of the story that is l­ ived – o ­ r, better, p ­ layed – b ­y humans. Abrahamic courage towards God is this faith. To be sure, the courage towards God that Joseph inherited from Abraham only helps him to understand his life as a story with which God follows ‘some purpose of the distant future’. Thus, he still does not know the specific purpose: ‘But why? That he did not know.’ But he knows, as he now realizes in the awakening of understanding, that he was serving this unknown purpose by driving his brothers to the extreme, bringing himself into the pit. This ambiguous intermediate position of a knowledge that trusts in the purpose of what happens, without, however, concretely knowing it, determines the fragile position of human being in the theatre of the world: one knows that nothing is to be taken literally, yet still not what concrete meaning the letters have; one plays the role of one’s life, yet at the same time must constantly struggle to understand the meaning of this role. The insight that life is to be understood not literally but as theatre play may create some distance to the immediate suffering, the ‘superficial pleas and wails’ in the here and now, but it creates at the same time a new commitment and new suffering: the commitment to understand one’s role and the suffering of not understanding it, or not understanding it sufficiently. Humans are thus, at the same time, actors and victims of their role, albeit no longer victims of the dull repetition of what is always the same, but rather victims ‘for the future’. But even so, Joseph feels bad for his brothers ‘despite how bad things were for himself’. As theatre play of the world, the novel of the soul serves a purpose in the distant future, which requires that distinctions are made within the play that are not vain but meaningful. Only what is distinguished within itself can be meaningful and purposeful. Thus, it is an indispensable condition for the possibility of future understanding that different roles are played on the stage of the ­world – ­and it will depend entirely on the ‘purpose of the distant future’ of the play whether the king or the beggar plays the more important role for the whole of meaning. The essence or being of human beings is the appearance of their role-­playing. That is why their existence is not oriented to duration but to meaning. The source of their dignity and duties is their transience: human being ought not to be, but to mean, something. Humans become actors not by playing what they are but by playing what they are not, by

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what they display on the stage of the transient world by means of their understanding. The unity of meaning of the theatre ­play – ­like the meaning of ­language – ­calls for differentiation. In what one plays, one ought to clearly and distinctly set oneself apart from fellow actors for the sake of a better reading and understanding of what one plays. At the same time, despite all differentiation, one ought to bear in mind the fundamental insight that all humans are actors, thus equal to one another and related like family. The literal individuality of the private I must, on the one hand, with Schopenhauer be exposed as illusion, by making clear to the one who lives away in the ‘naïve pride in being first and unique’ that, as a person, one plays a role in the theatre of the world, even when the role is played in the ‘simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’. On the other hand, this must not lead to an anti-­individualism that negates everything and everyone indiscriminately. On the contrary, one must assert against Schopenhauer that the meaningless I-­ centredness of a narrow-­ minded egoism is not overcome by disregarding the I, by simply denying the will to life, but rather only through a heightening of self-­respect, in which one truly takes oneself seriously for the first time as human and thus learns to understand one’s life differently and in a new way. It now becomes clear that the musical simile applies not only to the multi-­layered constitution of Joseph’s spirit, but likewise to the multi-­ layered composition of the Joseph novel. Stirring under its narrative surface is not only one level of thought citing Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but an even deeper layer that thinks with Schopenhauer against Schopenhauer. Human individuality is surely illusion, yet this illusion is not simply null and mere illusion; rather, like the appearance of art, it must also be understood in its truth as appearance. Against Schopenhauer, the Joseph novel invokes Schopenhauer’s own point: that the meaning of reality cannot lie outside of being and time, because there is no meaning without letters, and meaning moreover demands a temporal context in which it can impart itself to understanding. That is why the meaning of a text does not lie outside of the text and its letters: then it would not be the meaning of this text and of these letters, and, thus, no meaning at all. Or, in Schopenhauer’s words, the ‘metaphysical’ cannot be thought and experienced apart from the world of experience. Rather, it ‘must express its essence and character in the world of experience; consequently it must be possible to interpret these from it’. ‘Accordingly, philosophy is nothing but the right and universal understanding of experience itself, the true interpretation of its meaning and content. This is the metaphysical, in other words, that which is merely clothed in the appearance and veiled in its forms, that which is related to the appearance as the thought is to the words’ (1969b, 184–5). In strictly appropriating Schopenhauer’s fundamental insight, the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel turns against Schopenhauer’s tendency to flee the world that is incompatible with this ­ontology – ­that is,



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the tendency to regard reality as meaningless because it is transient, and to negate life because it means suffering and passion. Thus, the novel understands the symbol of theatre more consequently than does Schopenhauer. An enlightened understanding of self and world, which understands the world as theatre and one’s own I as actor on this stage, testifies to how the solid and enduring being in truth is a transient illusion. But it testifies at the same time, and even more so, to an attentiveness that discovers in the transient illusion of the play a new truth that gives the play its meaning and makes it understandable.3

At the Empty Grave After being pushed by his brothers into the pit and awakening as a new human, Joseph is rescued from the well by merchants who take him with them on their way to Egypt. Yet Reuben, too, intends to save his brother. Thus, he separates himself from the other brothers, knowing that he cannot win them over for his enterprise, and attempts on his own initiative to save Joseph from his death in the well. In the darkness of the night, Reuben reaches the well where he expects Joseph to be and happens across an unexpected scene: ‘How could that be? Someone was sitting beside the well, and it was uncovered. The two halves of the well stone lay on the tiles, one atop the other, and on them sat Someone in a tunic, leaning on his staff, and gazing directly at Reuben with silent lips and sleepy eyes.’ In response to the question concerning who the stranger is, Reuben receives the following answer: ‘One of many’; ‘I am nothing special, and you need not be afraid’ (501–2). Once again, the Joseph novel shows an I-­sayer in a circumstance that leads him to hold his own identity in suspense. He is one of many, but it remains unspoken who the ‘many’ are and who the ‘one’ of the many is: ‘I am nothing special.’ Instead, the one interrogated points to his role in a greater unity of meaning on the stage of reality: ‘I have been put here as a watchman over this well, which is why I am sitting here watching. If you think that it gives me any special amusement and that I’m sitting in the dust for the sake of pastime, you are erring. One does one’s duty, according to the instruction, and sets aside many a bitter question’ (501–2). Reuben does not understand the answer, for it belongs to his role in this story not to understand his role and not even to know that a role has been intended for him, which he has to play in the scene at the well and in the further course of the narrative. It will be the role of the ‘watchman’, engendering in Reuben precisely that mixture of lack of understanding, confusion and dreamy anticipation of the future, so that he can play his role and one day understand what he does not understand now, in the here and now of the scene at the well. Someone reading the Joseph novel for the first time understands the scene at the well better than Reuben does: just well enough to be able

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to understand in outline Reuben’s lack of understanding and his role as the one who will understand in the future. Even the first-­time reader already  knows that the ‘watchman’ of the well is that sullen ‘stranger’ who had led Joseph to Dothan and, mysteriously, said to him that ‘no one  can assure me that, for example, I shall not have to watch a well’ (439). But only the reader familiar with the whole Joseph novel will truly understand who the ‘many’ are among whom the stranger counts himself, without wanting to be something special. He is one of the many angels whose tense relation to humans will be articulated in the second ‘Prelude’. That is why the ‘watchman’ is not comfortable sitting in the earthly ‘dust’, which he does only because he ‘does his duty, according to the instruction’. The assistance towards Reuben that he must fulfil according to his duty and the instruction is not especially to his liking, so that he prefers to set aside ‘many a bitter question’. The duty and instruction that determined that he be the watchman of the well make him feel uncomfortable because they put him in a subservient relation to a concrete exemplar of the less esteemed human species, and because, moreover, the assignment is obviously connected ‘with a zeal insulting to all heaven’, which God shows humans by granting t­ hem – ­often mediated by angelic ­messages – h ­ ints of instruction and enlightenment. That is why the stranger’s response to Reuben’s further questioning ‘But who put you here?’ is just as obscure as it is sullen: ‘It doesn’t matter where such an assignment comes from. It usually passes through many mouths, and there is little benefit in tracing it to its original s­ ource – ­you must take up your position in any case’ (502). In the first reading, these and other remarks of the strange ‘watchman’ are understandable, at best, in a superficial manner. The reader will surely suspect there is something to be understood, without being able to understand entirely the true meaning of the scene at the empty grave. It is only in the second reading that it becomes understandable who is actually speaking and what the deeper meaning is of the ‘obscure’ intimations spanning the entire length of the novel. As one’s understanding of the scene at the empty well between the stranger and Reuben only really arises in retrospect, the reader may recognize him- or herself in Reuben’s role, who is having the same experience. It thus belongs to the narrative art of the scene at the well that hearing the dead literalness and understanding the living meaning are presented together. Not understanding is portrayed by Reuben who faces the stranger’s remarks with annoyed perplexity, even when he senses there is more going on deeper down than the impenetrable surface of the literalness seems to indicate. Understanding, by contrast, is the stranger’s matter. As an angel, he is in possession of supramundane knowledge, which contrasts with human knowledge especially in its foreknowledge of future happenings. The angel is capable of speaking obscurely enough so that his speech is immediately un-­understandable, but also of being



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bright enough so that his sentences can become understandable through ­mediation – ­that is, in retrospect (or in repeated reading). It is in this artistically staged doubling of dark and light that the further course of the scene is to be understood as well. Reuben realizes that the stone covering has been removed from the well in which he expects Joseph to be, and thus asks with urgency: ‘Who rolled the stone from the well? You perhaps?’ The answer of the stranger, ‘others went to the trouble’ ends with the obscure counter-­question: ‘but must not the cover be rolled away if refreshment is to come from the well?’ Who would want to blame Reuben for responding, ‘racked with impatience’: ‘“What are you talking about? . . . I think you’re just chattering away and stealing precious time from me with your babble. How is a dry well supposed to give r­ efreshment – ­there’s nothing but dust and rot inside”’ (502–3). And thus the stage is set for the renewed appearance of the simile of the grain of wheat, which already played an important role in the earlier story of the oil oracle. The stranger responds: ‘“It all d ­ epends . . . ­on what has first been committed to the dust and lowered into its womb. If it was life, then life and renewal will come forth a hundredfold. A grain of wheat, for example – ’. At this point the agitated Reuben wants to interrupt the speech, but the angel resumes his suggestive instruction: ‘“You are quite ­impatient . . . ­But you should learn patience and expectation”’, for ‘“fulfilment proceeds only slowly, and begins with first one attempt and then another, and it is provisional present both in heaven and on earth, not yet the true present, but merely as an attempt and a promise. And so fulfillment rolls along, ponderously, like a stone, if it is heavy, is rolled from a well. It would appear that people were here who went to the trouble of rolling the stone away. But they will have to roll it for a long time before it is truly rolled away from the hole, and I, too, am sitting here only as an attempt and provisionally”’ (503). Once again, different levels and forms of understanding arise. Reuben actually understands nothing at all and even deludes himself about the facts of the ­matter – ­that Joseph is still in the well and in need of being rescued. The reader who knows the whole of the Joseph novel understands more: for instance, that by means of the s­ imile – l­ike in the earlier story about the oil o ­ racle – ­the stranger alludes to how Joseph, after having been thrown into the darkness of the well, arises transformed in order to bring forth much fruit. Once Reuben finally discovers that Joseph is not in the well, hence fearing that he is dead, the stranger responds again with the simile of the grain of wheat: ‘I don’t know what you understand “dead” and “alive” to mean. . . . Allow me to remind you of the grain of wheat lying in the womb, and to ask what you think of “dead” or “alive” in regard to it. Those are mere words after all. For it is so, that if the grain falls into the earth and dies, it bears much fruit’ (505). But it is one thing to notice the conspicuously stressed repetition of the simile of the grain of wheat, and quite another to understand the meaning of this repetition and the role of the simile in the unity of meaning of the

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Joseph novel. For this reason, it is not easy for readers, even after having re-­read the text, to side themselves with the angel who has foreknowledge of the f­uture – a­ lso when the angel indicates obscurely that the entire story of the Joseph novel builds, in turn, only a part in a still more encompassing unity of meaning. Yet this is evidently what is meant when the angel designates the narrative arrangement of the simile through the story of Joseph as ‘an attempt and a promise’, so that the stranger himself is also sitting at the empty well ‘only as an attempt and provisionally’, for ‘fulfilment proceeds only slowly’ and the stone will still be rolled for a long time and again and again ‘before it is truly rolled away from the hole’. Here, the narrative journey becomes especially clear once again. Similar to the story of the old salvation feast with the sprig of hyssop, the scene between Reuben and the stranger at the empty well-­grave narratively frames a coined form that is not yet ‘fully valid’ then and there. Rather, it anticipates its future fulfilment and represents for the moment only a provisional approach and attempt. But what ‘expectation’ ought to be ‘learned’ here? What fulfilment is anticipated that lies in the future well beyond Joseph’s stories? The angel knows it, and for this reason has no access to the genuinely historical and narrative form of ‘expectation’. Instead, what is peculiar to him is the clear and secure consciousness that in the scene with Reuben he is sitting at the empty grave ‘only as an attempt and provisionally’. For humans, it is different. According to the angel, they ought to ‘learn patience and expectation’. But what expectation, reaching beyond the compass of the Joseph novel, ought to be aroused in the scene at the empty grave? Why ‘had the stone been rolled back from the well? Re’uben no longer understood anything’ (501). Does the reader understand any better? Of course, the reader knows that it was the merchants who had rolled the stone from the well and taken Joseph with them. But at issue here is not at all the understanding of this literal event. This becomes clear from the artful composition of the scene with the angel and Reuben at the empty grave, the complex arrangement of which seeks to induce a learning process that aims at ‘patience and expectation’. It is not only Reuben who is instructed but also the reader, through Reuben, since the temporal horizon of the expectation extends well beyond the boundaries of the stories of Joseph and his brothers. It is a suggestive hint, then, for the reader and not for Reuben when the stranger at the empty grave shouts ‘Do not touch me!’ (503). The insinuation can be seen into the future well beyond the story of Joseph. Yet the thoughtful reader will ­presumably – ­even without this additional ­hint – h ­ ave made the connection in thought between the empty well that is being watched by an angel and another empty grave that is told of in the Gospel: ‘the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it’ (Matthew 28: 2).



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So the angel sits and watches at Joseph’s well, in effect, only for ‘practice’, as he explains to the confused Reuben.4 That it proceeds with the fulfilment of the expectation ‘only slowly’, and much is only ‘attempt’, is evident in how the elements of the scene at Joseph’s empty grave are arranged somewhat differently in the much later story. Now it is the angel himself who rolls away the stone, though it is no longer the angel but, rather, the Resurrected who says to Maria Magdalena: ‘Touch me not’ (John 20: 17). Is this the ‘fulfilment’ of which the stranger speaks in the obscure insinuations to Reuben? Is it in reference to this stone that he says one requires many approaches and attempts ‘before it is truly rolled away from the hole’? Is he thinking of this empty grave when he says that he is sitting at the empty well in Joseph’s story ‘only as an attempt and provisionally’? Reuben does not understand the angel’s obscure insinuations and allegorical references. Does the reader understand them if he or she understands the scene at the well as an attempting anticipation and ‘promise’ of the Gospel? Yes and no. The reader may understand the allusion in the sense of understanding that the Gospel is being alluded to, but this does not mean that one also understands the allusion in the sense of understanding the Gospel itself that is being alluded t­ o – t­ hat is, the story of the empty grave and the Easter resurrection. The project of the Joseph novel of narrating the future by narrating the past is thus, likewise, to be understood twofold. On the one hand, the future at issue is the past for the Joseph novel because it looks back upon the literal Easter story; on the other hand, though, it is future and expectation for the novel and for its readers because the true meaning of the Easter story has not yet been properly understood. Perhaps it will be understood one day, once the grain of understanding, having been buried in the past, will have germinated. Reuben’s non-­understanding and eventual understanding are thus the ‘small’ model from which the Joseph novel is looking to prepare and rehearse an understanding of the ‘greater’ mystery. To be sure, it anticipates this ‘greater’ understanding without being able to give it or even possess it itself, for the novel itself is only a provisional approach and attempt. That is why, in the scene at the well, reference is made again and again to the simile of the grain of wheat. For this simile indicates that, in the Joseph novel, a future understanding is at stake and that the novel can pass on only the ‘seed’ of the understanding, but not already the understanding itself, which is reserved for the future. And that is why the simile of the grain that dies and bears much fruit is so important for the composition of the novel: the simile indicates through its content what the narrative understanding of the novel is after, and, at the same time through its form as a simile, that this understanding has limits.

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The Other Simile For an adequate understanding of the Joseph novel, it is thus helpful to note not only that the scene at the empty well anticipates the empty grave of the Gospel, but that the narratives of the New Covenant also know a variation of the simile of the dying grain of wheat. In this variation, the simile of the sown grain, which is transformed and which brings forth fruit, is explicitly related to the fundamental human enigma of understanding, so that the interpretation of the simile develops a typology of diverse forms of unsuccessful and successful understanding. This version of the basic theme of grain that dies and brings forth fruit appears in the Gospel of Matthew as the simile of the sower: ‘Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!’ (Matthew 13: 3–9). Here, the interpretative reconstruction must begin with the last sentence. Whoever has healthy ears is able to hear; by contrast, whoever is deaf has ears (regarded outwardly), but cannot hear. This distinction can be applied once again to the one who hears, who indeed hears but does not understand what he or she hears. In a figurative sense, it may then be said that he or she is deaf (without understanding): hearing and at the same time not hearing (understanding) what he or she hears. This is the meaning of the last sentence: whoever has ears to hear may also struggle to understand the simile of the sower. Hence the simile, in its indirect form of presentation, responds to a block in understanding, which becomes clear when Jesus responds to the question of the disciples that connects directly with the simile: ‘“Why do You speak to them in parables?” He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand’ (Matthew 13: 11–13). This peculiar block in understanding is fundamental. Those who do not understand do not see with seeing eyes and do not hear with hearing ears. This phrase is very fitting, for what the eyes immediately see and the ears immediately hear is literal being. But what cannot be immediately seen or heard is the meaning of the literalness that was seen or heard. Those who do not understand what they see and hear are thus incapable of letting the literalness of the sensually given being become transparent



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for the meaning of what is seen and heard, which itself cannot be seen or heard because it is accessible only to understanding. The literal being of each communication (the words that I hear or the writing that I see) must firstly be interpreted in terms of its meaning, so it may become understandable. This enigmatic art of understanding requires attentiveness and constant practice to become more apt and subtle on its own terms. Yet at the same time, ‘contemplation’ (reflective enquiring into meaning) requires its peculiar time and it cannot be commanded. Understanding cannot be forced, but appears: ‘whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance’. Yet the unavoidability of interpreting meaning also implies the counter-­ possibility of a total blindness to meaning: seeing nothing with seeing eyes and hearing nothing with hearing ears, for one has lost the understanding distance to the literalness of being that is given to the senses. This blindness consists, then, in no longer understanding the difference between being, which can be stated immediately, and meaning, which can be understood only through mediation. To be sure, no one is so deaf and blind from the outset that the art of understanding meaning is entirely alien to him or her. But the art of interpretative attention to meaning must be taken seriously and it must be practised, for without practice it becomes dull and is ultimately lost entirely. Whoever disregards the gift of understanding to the point of not practising it and not being attentive to it will also be deprived of what he has: the original openness to meaning. The consequence is that he will no longer see with seeing eyes and hear with hearing ears. The sentence that whoever does not have shall also be deprived of what he has must sound harsh, unjust and cruel, so long as it is understood with regard to relations of being, or, rather, so long as it is not understood. For why should the one who has little be deprived of even the little bit he has? Evidently, the converse commandment is in force with regard to relations of being: the poor should receive, the suffering be consoled, and the hungry and the thirsty be satiated. The sentence saying that, whoever does not have, from him shall also be taken away what he has, does not, then, hold for relations of being but rather for relations of meaning. Relations of being are characterized by the fact that they know paucity (poverty, hunger, thirst), because being becomes less when it is divided: five thousand people cannot be satiated with five loaves of bread and two fish. By contrast, relations of meaning do not know this form of paucity; quite the contrary, divided meaning becomes more, not less. An understanding that I retain for myself soon degenerates to a non-­understanding, whereas the understanding that I share with others becomes richer and stronger: not only can five thousand be satiated; from the five loaves of bread and two fish, there is still remaining ‘seven large baskets full’ (Matthew 15: 37). It would be of no help, then, to give someone who lacks understanding, having forgotten and lost the attentiveness to meaning as such, the

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‘meaning’ directly and unmediated (like a piece of bread). The what of an explanation of meaning is necessarily misunderstood if the how of each explanation of meaning is not understood along with it. The latter is not fulfilled successfully by those who lack understanding, so that, according to Jesus, ‘in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: “Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive”’ (Matthew 13: 14). The passage quoted here from Isaiah reads as follows: ‘And he said, “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; Keep on seeing, but do not perceive”’ (Isaiah 6: 9). Thus, it has become clear why Jesus states: ‘Therefore I speak to them in parables.’ Similes ought not to veil and protect a content that would be too ‘precious’ for those who lack understanding, reserved only for the chosen few. Instead, they ought, by means of their character of insinuation, to call attention to the decisive form of every communication of meaning, and thus re-­awaken the buried capacity to understand meaning.5 The simile of the sower responds, however, not only in terms of its form (as a form of speech) to a block in understanding; it also addresses the diverse causes of a lacking or deficient understanding in the content of the simile. The four possibilities of how the sown grain can ‘fall’ symbolize four possibilities of how something can be understood. The extreme total lack of understanding forms the beginning: ‘When anyone hears the word of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside.’ Those who neglect the gift of the capacity to understand meaning, letting it grow numb, will be deprived of what they have (what was sown in their hearts). The disappearance of meaning in a total lack of understanding is similar to the grain of wheat that does not even fall on ground, but rather on the infertile path, only to be eaten up immediately by birds. A different pathology of understanding is elucidated with the following sentence: ‘The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.’ The grain that falls on rocky ground, which has ‘not much earth’, paradoxically grows too quickly because it does not throw down deep roots; consequently, it wilts just as soon as it is put to the test by heat and drought. The second approach to understanding ultimately aims not at all at the word itself which is to be understood but rather at the pleasant effect of the word on the one who ­understands – ­an ‘understanding’ that, as a result, is immediately extinguished once the initial delight is tested by tribulation and persecution. The third pathology of understanding is elucidated with the following sentence: ‘The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.’ The second and third pathologies are thus related. In both cases, the sown grain of understanding begins to grow,



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yet the growth is hindered. While understanding at the second stage lacks the blessing from below, the roots in the dark depths of the earth, now the blessing from above is ­lacking – ­that is, the freedom and the courage of understanding. Growth of the understanding of meaning into a complete fruit is choked by the ‘thorns’: the ‘worries of this life’ and the ‘deceitfulness of wealth’ shackle human understanding of self and world to literal being, thus preventing us from making the letters of being transparent to the word that is to be understood. The simile ultimately reaches completion with the true understanding of the w ­ ord – a­ n understanding that is ‘blessed with blessings of heaven above and blessings of the deep that lies below’: ‘But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty’ (Matthew 13: 19–23). Since the sequence of the four possibilities of understanding began with someone who ‘hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it’, it is only consistent that it ends with the counter-­possibility of someone who ‘hears the word and understands it’. This makes unmistakably clear once more that the simile of the sower varies the simile of the dying grain of wheat in order to speak in similes of what every simile requires: of the understanding of meaning that is revealed and at once concealed by the literal, such that humans must hear and understand it.

History in Becoming Let us return to the empty well in the Joseph novel and the watching angel who astonishes Reuben with his remarks, which Reuben certainly hears but cannot understand. Thus, the stranger says to Reuben: ‘When you entered the well’s house you were annoyed at my presence and angry because I was sitting on the stone.’ But ‘perhaps it is for your sake that I have been put here beside this pit, so that I may bury one or another grain in your understanding, that it might silently preserve the germinating bud’ (505). Once again, then, in the scene at the empty grave, the simile of the grain of wheat is varied, and not for the last time, for Reuben hears straight away from the stranger another intimation: ‘The boy is here no more, as you can see. His house stands open, it did not hold him, none of you sees him anymore. But there should be One of you who will nurture the seed of expectation, and since you came to rescue your brother, then you shall be this One’ (505). The grave could not hold Joseph, and so the oracle turns out to be true: ‘The child would go down into the pit, and yet live; it would be like grain, which bears no fruit unless it dies.’ But what does it mean that it turns out to be true? Evidently, the meaning of the story does not consist simply in the statable fact that Joseph is ‘no longer there’ because the merchants

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rescued him from the well. Rather, the interweaving of the simile of the dying grain indicates that Joseph’s salvation ­story – ­like the s­ imile – p ­ oints beyond the level of the literal course of events. Joseph has not only been saved, but ­transformed – ­like the grain that must die to bring forth abundant fruit. In this simile, the sublation of the illusion of individuality is symbolized very tightly: the hard, selfish reticence of the isolated individual existence breaks open like the grain that begins to bring forth abundant fruit. The grain does not, then, reproduce itself in its individuality, but rather opens itself into a multiplicity in the medium of time. From out of the individuality arises a multiplicity­: the grain bears thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. The angel that is watching at the well wants to help Reuben to understand the simile-­like character of the events. He makes reference to a further level of meaning of the simile of the grain, which is to be understood as a symbolization of the process of understanding, for also the essence of understanding is transformation in the medium of time. Understanding requires time because a ‘grain’ is initially buried in it, in the darkness of what is not yet understanding, where it is first simply ‘quietly safeguarded’. From this ‘germ’, understanding will one day ripen like a fruit, because human understanding never appears instantaneously but rather only in the narrative slowness of the repeating variation of a story. An important aspect of the simile consists, then, in that it itself describes the process of understanding that the stranger wants to initiate and promote in Reuben. The germ of understanding is designated by the stranger also as the ‘germ of expectation’. Understanding expresses itself in expectation, for someone who understands himself in an encompassing unity of meaning lives in expectation. Humans fully find themselves not where they successfully arrange themselves in their here and now, but rather where they know to bring their here and now in the genuinely historical and narrative tension of expectation. Successful human self-­understanding leads, then, in the end, to an attentiveness to the future: ‘For the future is hope, and out of goodness time was given to human being, so that he may live in expectation’ (793). Angels cannot be attentive to the future because they already know the future. For this reason, angels are not subjected to transient time to the same degree that humans are, and for this reason they have no access to a genuinely historical and narrative existence that lives ‘in expectation’. The stranger thus helps Reuben with an understanding that is not accessible to the stranger himself in the temporal-­historical manner symbolized by the simile of the sown grain. Yet this is the reason God reveals a participation in the history of human being, behind which the a­ ngels – a­ s one reads in the first p ­ relude – s­ uspect, ‘probably more rightly than wrongly’, ‘a weariness with their psalm-­singing purity’ (34). The stranger meets his ‘assignment’ to Reuben by summarizing his numerous insinuations and obscure phrases in a concluding speech:



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‘With your permission, I would like to bury a seed of thought in your ­understanding – ­that this story is itself merely a play and a feast’, that is, ‘merely a beginning, an attempt at fulfilment, and a present not to be taken fully seriously, but is instead a jest and an allusion’. ‘It could be that this pit is but a grave’, ‘that your brother may still be very much in the becoming and has not yet become at all, just as this entire story is still in the becoming and has not already become. Take it, please, into the womb of your understanding and let it calmly die there and germinate. But if it bears fruit, then give your father some for refreshment as well.’ Through the lecture to Reuben, some hint for the appropriate understanding of the Joseph novel and the intention of the narrator (and author) is given, for the narrator, too, seeks to bury a ‘seed of thought’ of understanding in the reader. The narrator is similar to the stranger who prepares the coming understanding for Reuben, who initially understands nothing. At the same time, the narrator is similar to Reuben because the novel not only tells of Joseph, but attempts to understand the stories of Joseph in the narrative repetition and exposition. The Joseph novel shows, then, how ‘play and feast’ intertwine in the stories, to what degree the alleged seriousness of the events is ‘a jest and an allusion’, and that the relations of meaning that are narrated are ‘still in the becoming’ and have by no means ‘already become’. Readers should understand it also as a wink in their direction, when at the end of the scene at the empty grave one reads: ‘Reuben, however, tried to recall the words of that vexing young man, the man of the place, who had sat atop the well stone. It was not easy to remember them, for they were really quite vague and full of twilight, more verbiage than speech, and he could not reconstruct them. And yet somewhere in Reuben’s deepest understanding a seed had been left to germinate’. ‘It was the seed of expectation that Reuben nourished, secretly feeding it with his own life, in sleeping and waking, until he was a grey-­haired old man’ (511). Precisely when humans succeed in understanding themselves and the meaning of reality, they become aware how greatly their understanding is still ‘play and allusion’. Who would presume to understand completely the history of humanity, or even simply one’s own life story, in what is attempt and allusion? Like Joseph, we understand it at best as a dream: we understand it and yet do not understand what it means, exactly, that what is transient is only a simile.

9 Only a Simile

Joseph in Egypt – Historical and Narrative Attentiveness – Laban’s Realm – Huya and Tuya – Egypt as Symbol – The Sphinx – Interpreting Dreams – Pharaoh – Letter and Spirit of Understanding – Interpretation of God – Historical and Narrative Truth – Play and Allusion

Joseph in Egypt Joseph is transformed as he is rescued by the Ishmaelite merchants from the well of death. The awakening of understanding, which divides his life story like a caesura into a before and after, is made clear narratively in that Joseph the rescued does not return to his previous life, but rather leaves his home, his father and his brothers behind: ‘And Joseph was brought down to Egypt. And Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a successful man’ (Gen. 39: 1–2). Yet Joseph’s separation from his father is a dialectical movement. As will be shown, not until he leaves his home does the possibility arise for the first time of walking in the ‘footsteps’ of his father with understanding, making present, in a different way, the model that Jacob had previously made present in his way. Thus, only in understanding the stories of Joseph in Egypt as Joseph himself understands them does one understand them adequately: as a varying repetition of the stories of Jacob. The Joseph novel discusses the narrative unity of meaning that is woven through these repeated repetitions of a fundamental theme or pattern in its own passage, which retrospectively and prospectively, as it were, stands in the middle of the stories of Joseph in Egypt. It articulates the connections of thoughts, which build the unity of meaning of the individual stories, on the basis of a simile: ‘There once was a man who had a headstrong cow that refused to wear the yoke necessary for ploughing his field and always threw it off. He took her calf away from her and



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took it to the field that was to be ploughed. When the cow heard her calf bellowing, she was easily led to where the calf was and submitted to the yoke’ (668). In Joseph, the shaping of his character that is fulfilled in awakening expresses itself especially in a new kind of understanding of his life story. He understands that his life is the making present of a simile. For this reason, he allows himself to be led willingly to Egypt to the house of Potiphar by the merchants who rescued him from the well. But, precisely because of his new attentiveness to the unity of meaning of the happening in Egypt, he is initially cautious, for he is aware that something is still missing for the story to find its meaningful continuation: ‘The calf is out in the field where the man has brought it; but it does not bellow, it is as still as death, for it first eyes this strange field, which it takes to be a field of death’ (668). Joseph understands the role he is to play in Egypt by relating the symbolized pattern in the simile of ‘man’, ‘cow’ and ‘calf’ to his own life story, such that he recognizes himself in the ‘calf’, which was ‘brought’, in his special case, to the ‘field of death’ of Egypt. That he understands the deeper meaning of the narrative pattern is clear precisely from the fact that he does not simply repeat it literally and immediately. He has arrived on the ‘field’ and it will come to pass at the right point in time that Jacob follows after h ­ im – t­his much is clear to Joseph. But his attention to the concrete relations of meaning also allows him to understand that the hour has still not arrived. That is why the calf initially behaves ‘as still as death, for it first eyes this strange field’. Just as it ‘knows the man, it at once surmises, with the clarity of a dream, that it does not mean something incoherent and vague that it has been carried off to this field rejected with such headstrong dislike at home, but that this is part of a plan in which one thing follows another’ (668). Joseph, the dreamer of dreams, has awakened out of the conceited dream of his private I by the caesura of self-­understanding. His new understanding remains, however, a finite, human understanding, so that he still understands, according to the novel, ‘with the clarity of a dream’. He now understands that his life does ‘not mean something incoherent and vague’, but that what appears to the eye, without understanding, like a meaningless series of chance events is in truth ‘part of a plan in which one thing follows another’. The plan, then, is essentially articulated temporally, so that it is clear to the narrative attention that understands it that everything must have its hour in order to integrate itself meaningfully into the historical and narrative context. Just as the appearance of an actor must not occur too late, nor too early, Joseph waits patiently for the hour, of which he knows not only that it will come, but that it is not yet here, ‘for simply being carried off will not itself suffice; something else must first occur, something that very quiet awareness and childlike secret confidence is devoted to, though one cannot even surmise how it might bring itself on the way and how it will

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proceed. That lies with the man who brought the calf to the field, that lies with God’ (668). Joseph waits because he understands. But understanding makes the waiting into expectation, for he understands there is need for something else to occur in order for the model to realize itself also in his particular case. In view of Jacob’s ‘headstrong character’ that abhors the Egyptian ‘field of death’, it is indeed impossible to ‘call’ the cow onto the field. In order that the impossible become possible, intervening changes are needed that do not reside within Joseph’s power, much as he understands that they are required and much as he expects them to occur. How, then, will their occurrence be made possible? – ‘that lies with God’. Thus, Joseph lives in expectation of a future for which his understanding leaves him hoping. Precisely the moment of the patient enduring establishes the connection of thoughts between the Egyptian Joseph and the stories of his father: ‘No, Joseph did not forget the old man at home.’ Rather, what he experienced ‘was imitation and ­succession – ­for his father had first experienced it before him in a slight variation. And there is a mystery in watching how will and guidance are blended in the phenomenon of succession, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish who is actually doing the imitating and attempting to repeat what has been lived ­before – ­the person or the destiny. What lies within is reflected in the external and, seemingly without being willed, becomes the matter-­of-­fact reality of events that are bound up in the person and were always one with the person. For we wander in footsteps, and all of life is some filling of the present into mythic forms’ (669). Once again, the solemn tone announces that the novel is touching upon its central theme and guiding insight: the meaning of human life experienced in ‘imitation and succession’. The peculiar structure of the Joseph novel arises more specifically from the fact that its central insight, that human life becomes understandable to itself only narratively in the fabric of repeated and varied stories and models, is likewise narratively fashioned, repeated and varied. In this way, the repeating alteration, which the theme experiences in the stories of the Egyptian Joseph, is the goal and conclusion of the whole narrative; in terms of this conclusion, its meaning is to be understood once more, better and differently, because in it the earlier stories join together into an overarching unity of meaning. In the stories of the Egyptian Joseph, this unity of meaning is narratively fashioned by showing how Joseph himself understands this overarching unity of meaning. Thus, one reads of Joseph, who in Egypt initially endures patiently in expectation: ‘But now he was totally preoccupied with the return and resurrection of his father’s story within him. He was Jacob, his father, entering into Laban’s realm, carried off to the underworld, intolerable to those at home, fleeing before fraternal hatred, before the red man’s snorting jealousy of blessing and b ­ irthright – E ­ sau transformed tenfold this time, that was one variation; and Laban looked somewhat different in this present as well, had arrived clad in royal linen



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and on fire-­spending wheels, was Potiphar, tamer of horses, large, fat, and so bold that it set those around him trembling. But it was he, there was no doubt of it, though life might play with ever new forms of the same and the similar.’ Egypt is the varied ‘Laban’s realm’ into which Joseph, like his father earlier, has fled because Esau’s hatred haunts him. In the case of Joseph, Esau appears ‘tenfold’ as a jealous band of brothers who are after his blood. Laban, too, has transformed in the Egyptian repetition of the father’s example: Potiphar, whom Joseph serves, is now ‘clad in royal linen’ and is arriving on ‘fire-­spending wheels’. Such variations, whose aspect of irony and wit can surely not be denied, do not hinder Joseph, however, from recognizing the model that playfully makes itself present in human life in ‘ever new forms’. Adequately understanding the Joseph novel requires appropriating Joseph’s knowledge that Egypt represents a variation of ‘Laban’s realm’ on the stage of the world theatre. What will this connection of thoughts entail, however, for the Egyptian Joseph? Is it the aspect of repetition, or rather of variation, that is decisive for him? Ought he, like his father, to face the brotherly hatred ­unforgivingly – ­or to alter this motif? The further course of Joseph’s stories in Egypt will show that it is the alteration that matters: Joseph will make peace in the end with his brothers.

Historical and Narrative Attentiveness The guiding theme of the Joseph novel is the ‘phenomenon of succession’, which may be expressed in the insight that human life ‘walks in footsteps’ and thus fills coined forms ‘with the present’. As a result, the protagonists of the novel reflect their life in a manner oriented to understanding by relating it to the past and the future by ‘connecting thoughts’. Not only does the novel narratively present this complex unity of events and reflection, but it also, like its protagonists, steps out of the immediate context of the narrative again and again in order to discuss its narrative meaning. Not merely the narrator of the novel, but also its author, steps out of his narrative business again and again in order to discuss it in an essayistic form. Thus, in his essay on Joseph and His Brothers, penned in 1942, Thomas Mann comments on the guiding thought of the novel: ‘The feeling for the way, the progression, the alteration, the development is very strong in this book, its whole theology is connected with this and derived from t­ his – ­namely, from its conception of the old testamental “Covenant” between God and man: from the thought that God is dependent upon man, which comes together with the thought of human dependence upon God in their common aspiration for the higher. For God, too, is subject to development, He, too, changes and progresses: from the desert-­like and demoniacal to the spiritual and holy; and He can do so without the help of the human spirit as little as the human spirit can do without Him’ (1996, 198).

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The ‘whole theology’ of the Joseph novel revolves around the Abrahamic covenant between God and human ­being – ­a covenant that, as already stated, implies a theology of narrating that the Joseph novel narratively explicates. In his essay, Thomas Mann highlights an especially important aspect of this theology: the historical and narrative fundamental character of reality, which is the enabling condition of narrating, belongs precisely to the highest reality. Abraham’s God is not something static, beyond change; rather, also He – and precisely He – ‘changes and progresses’. God is thus not a ‘fixed point’ that is always the same, but instead reveals Himself, as Abraham discovers, as the truly living God in change and (hi)story. Indeed, in a sense, He is the history itself: its meaning that changes and renews itself in narrative progress. The God that Abraham discovered is for this reason not an objective fact, not something that is ‘fixed’ once and for all, but rather a developing I, a someone who has a past, a present and a ­future – ­that is, who lives through a history. In other words, the word ‘God’ is not merely a concept that designates something (the divine, divinity), but equally and even more so a name with which someone is addressed. Yet knowing someone means knowing this someone’s history and story; understanding someone accordingly means understanding this someone’s history and story. This holds not only for humans but equally for the living God of Abraham: knowing Him means knowing His history and story; understanding Him means understanding His history and ­story – ­and, above all, the resulting demand for one’s own present. Abraham’s God, which the theology of the Joseph novel narratively contemplates and recollects, is thus a living God, possessing a will that progresses. From the perspective of human being, only a genuinely historically and narratively oriented attentiveness to the concrete and ever new demands of the respective world hour can do Him justice. Human ‘God-­concern’ is hence, for Thomas Mann, ‘not alone the concern creating God in thought, determining and knowing Him, but principally the concern with His will, with which ours must coincide; and with what the clock has struck, the demand of the aeon, of the world hour’ (198). Whoever remains sedentary and the same in temporally and narratively developing reality necessarily lags behind the development. But whoever changes does not, for that reason, necessarily keep pace with the historical and narrative development. The particular status of the development, the concrete demands of the particular ‘world hour’ in the particular here and now, must be ‘met’, which is evidently possible only by means of an understanding attentiveness to the meaning of the developing history and ­story – ­a meaning that is itself through and through historical and narrative, so it can tellingly be called a ‘demand of the aeon’. For human being, the insight that conceives of the real as a historical and narrative development implies, then, a commitment to an understanding that follows after and alongside history, and which understands ‘what the clock has struck’.



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Against this background, a very concise concept of religiousness arises for Thomas Mann: ‘Were I to determine what I, personally, mean by religiousness, I should say: it is attentiveness and obedience; attentiveness to the inner changes of the world, and to the mutation in the aspects of truth and right; obedience which loses no time in adjusting life and reality to these changes, this mutation, and thus in doing justice to the spirit. To live in sin is to live against the spirit, to cling to the antiquated, obsolete, and to continue to live in it, due to inattentiveness and disobedience’ (198). The two cardinal virtues of a narrative theology are accordingly attentiveness and obedience. Spiritual attentiveness advances by taking heed of the history of the w ­ orld – t­hat is, of ‘the mutation in the aspects of truth and right’. Spiritual obedience follows by ‘losing no time’ in realizing what ­is – ­thanks to historical a­ ttentiveness – u ­ nderstood in one’s own present. Yet both are always in interaction since a life that denies obedience to attentiveness would also soon forfeit its attentiveness and its understanding. For Thomas Mann, the concept that captures both virtues as a unity is spirit. The reality of the spiritual consists precisely in being alive and thus not fixable, so that it cannot be ‘stated’, but rather only made accessible in an understanding that is itself just as spiritually and historically variable as that which is understood. As always, what is thereby decisive is the historical, for everything that is historically constituted changes, but not everything that changes has for this reason a history. A history implies that it is meaningful and understandable, whereas a mere change may, by contrast, also be meaningless. Abraham’s wandering, his exodus out of every form of sedentariness, should be understood, then, as the sign of his new, genuinely spiritual religiosity. A reality understood as radically historical and narrative offers human knowledge no fixed points that could appease it, so taking the place of the presumed security of a static knowledge is the sceptical and ironic alertness of a historical and narrative attentiveness. This makes what is seemingly fixed in a superficial literalness understandable in terms of its historical and narrative meaning. Only such a historical and narrative attentiveness may enter into a ‘covenant’ with the Highest, Who is Himself alive, historical and story-­like to the highest degree.1 This peculiar task of understanding, which historical and narrative attentiveness faces, can be illustrated exemplarily with the help of similes. The Joseph novel often speaks in similes by conceiving of the immediate literalness of reality as a simile and making it transparent for its meaning. This meaning becomes accessible only to a connection of thoughts that knows to relate what is immediately given in the here and now with the past and the future. Thus, the simile of the man who moves the headstrong cow by sending its calf ahead poses a challenge for the reader’s interpreting a­ ttentiveness – ­a challenge related to the task that Joseph’s historical attentiveness faces in Egypt. The three roles in the simile (‘man’, ‘cow’ and ‘calf’) are o ­ bviously each cast differently over the course of the stories of Jacob and Joseph so

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that the model is varied, and its meaning must be interpreted each time anew. Furthermore, there is a subtle difference in the new casting of the roles. Whereas the ‘calf’ and the ‘cow’ are each played by different people, the ‘man’ is always God. One can nevertheless speak here, too, of a constant new casting of the role, for also Abraham’s God ‘is subject to development. He, too, changes and progresses.’ Thus, while the ‘man’ is always God, in every varying repetition of the model it is not just the fellow players’ concrete understanding of God that changes, but likewise the essence of God Himself. This is precisely what constitutes the ‘covenant’ between God and human being: God gains His history, for He ‘can do so without the help of the human spirit as little as the human spirit can do without Him’. Thus, on the side of human ‘roles’, one ought also to attend to a dialectic of difference and unity that makes possible an identity by means of change. For both the human and the divine I, it is essential that the I is a self not in spite of but rather in virtue of historical change. Another way of expressing this is to say that, again and again, different individuals enter into the model of the simile in order to repeat and vary the respective roles by playing them. But since all individuals belong to humanity, which they represent as persons, ‘cow’ and ‘calf’ are always played in the end by the one ­humanity – ­even though human self-­understanding changes with each variation, such that a history of human self-­knowledge emerges that answers anew, time and again, the question concerning what it means to be human in the presence of God. Joseph in Egypt is also conscious of this when he sharpens his historical attentiveness to ‘the mutation in the aspects of truth and right’ by thoughtfully relating the role he is now to play in Egypt with analogous cases in the past. He recalls vaguely that Abraham was forced once already, because of a ‘famine’, to move to Egypt as a ‘stranger’ (Gen. 12: 10). Clearer is, of course, the analogy to his father, with whom he identifies: ‘He was Jacob, his father, entering into Laban’s realm, carried off to the underworld’. Joseph, then, is entirely clear that not only the different roles of the theatre, but equally the stage on which they appear, must be taken into consideration in understanding the specific meaning of the story. For this reason, it is especially important in understanding adequately the stories of Joseph in Egypt to be clear about what is meant more specifically in the Joseph novel when Egypt as a ‘field of death’ is related in thought with Laban’s realm as ‘underworld’.

Laban’s Realm The world develops historically and narratively, and humans must struggle to keep pace with it. If reality is not always the same, then it will not suffice to content oneself with what one knew yesterday and took to be



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right, and thus to leave everything as it was. Instead, the critical question is always ­relevant – ­whether reality has not changed since yesterday, whether the truths and morals that were valid yesterday are still valid today. The basic spiritual capacity that underlies historical and narrative understanding is thus attentiveness. For Thomas Mann, the concrete counter-­concept to the spiritual wakefulness of this attentiveness is a spiritless dullness and inattentiveness, which closes itself off to the claim of historical and narrative reality and hence falls for the illusion of living in a static and meaningless reality. Such a meaningless reality would be suitable only for serving the private purposes of the individual as more or less recalcitrant material. Abraham’s discovery implies in this way also a new understanding of evil: ‘To live in sin is to live against the spirit, to cling to the antiquated, obsolete, and to continue to live in it, due to inattentiveness and disobedience.’ In becoming understandable as inattentiveness and dullness, human turpitude can be characterized as a special form of stupidity. For Thomas Mann, there is, then, ‘a special, religious concept of stupidity’ that he calls ‘God-­stupidity’ and that he elucidates in view of Laban’s role in the Joseph novel: such a person is ‘Laban who still believes he must slaughter his little son and bury him in the foundation of his house, which was once a great blessing but stopped being one. The true and original sacrifice was human sacrifice. At what moment did this become a horror and a stupidity? Genesis records this moment in the image of the denied sacrifice of Isaac, in the substitution of the animal. Here a man, progressed in God, frees himself from a stagnant custom, beyond which God wants to get with ­us – ­and already has’ (1996, 199). In the Joseph novel, Laban is a symbol of the new understanding of evil that was made possible by Abraham’s discovery. For this reason, it is instructive how the novel gives concrete shape in Laban to the dull backwardness of a God-­forsaken stupidity. This occurs in Laban’s statement in his first meeting with Jacob: ‘My house does well enough for me’, and Jacob responds in shock, ‘Don’t say that!’; ‘If a man is easily content, then God is content for him as well and draws His hand of blessing from him’ (187). In Laban’s few words, the pattern of the discarded one is already sketched, which arouses Jacob’s decisive o ­ bjection – ­the pattern of a ‘modest’ happiness in the corner, the symbol of a false modesty, seeking solely contentment and satisfaction. Laban is branded as the representative of the pusillanimous who hold themselves for unimportant, seeking their ‘happiness’ in fearful undemandingness. Yet such an understanding of self and world constitutes for Jacob (and the Joseph novel) an outrage in the face of the nobility of human being as the image of God: ‘Laban was a gloomy man, without favour before the gods and without trust in his own ­happiness – ­and so with only little success’ (200). Laban’s figure does not become the simile that defines the whole novel, however, until the narrowness and gloominess of his unlived life is

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further determined as ‘Laban’s realm’. In this sense, Laban appears above all as a distrustful economist who regards all appeals to magnanimity and humanity as figures of speech. He believes to be standing with both feet on the ground of r­ eality – ­which he does not understand, but on which he, precisely for this reason, attempts to calculate as ‘rationally’ as possible. The gloomy realism that governs ‘Laban’s realm’ pursues a logic of self-­interest that encourages bowing to the more powerful while finding refuge among the weaker. Thus, Laban says to Jacob entirely bluntly: ‘These are the natural hardships of commercial life that I am accustomed to taking into account. The bankers in ­Haran . . . ­likewise demand of me what they wish, because I have urgent need of their water, and knowing I need it, they make whatever demand suits them’. ‘You are dependent on me, and so I shall fleece you. I am not rich and blessed enough to puff myself up with the joy of love . . . – this is how things stand’ (194). By borrowing unmistakably from modern forms of life, the Joseph novel reveals allegorically Laban’s peculiar understanding of self and world that grasps the real as meaningless, brutal and ruthless. He believes he is acting ‘realistically’ by ­adhering – ­likewise without any sympathy and without ‘puffing himself up with the joy of love’ – to how things stand economically in order to find his little advantage. Laban consequently regards Jacob’s entirely different understanding of self and world merely as the empty ‘figure of speech’ of a sentimental illusion, which Laban cannot and does not want to afford. Laban’s desperate egoism stems from his fundamental disregard for human being, from his conviction that he does not matter and that he is for this reason justified in raking in his ‘modest’ advantage. Yet this is precisely what his peculiar evil consists in, which submits to the more powerful and in return squeezes the weaker. He coerces others because he takes himself to be powerless and his own life to be meaningless. The evil of this banality makes Laban’s realm in the Joseph novel into a hell of the ununderstood and unlived life: into an ‘underworld’ in which Laban rules as an ‘underwordly devil’. Jacob ‘was saddened by the religious unclarity and insecurity’ that manifests itself in such a hopeless economization of life, ‘for one ought to have been able to expect a decidedly more enlightened attitude toward God from Laban, the great-­nephew of Abraham, the brother of Rebekah. In reality, Laban possessed the message of his western relatives’ traditional faith, but his knowledge of it was so mixed up with local usages that it could be said to be the other way around, with these being the main parts of his convictions with which something Abrahamic was mixed up. Although he sat at the source, the very starting-­point of spiritual history, or indeed precisely because he had remained sitting there, he considered himself entirely a subject of Babel’ (214). Laban is the sedentary o ­ ne – ­or, better, the one who has remained ­sitting – ­who does not go along with the development but rather blends the new and progressive heedlessly with the old and backward things,



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so that all has ultimately become non-­binding and un-­understandable for him. He is nonetheless related to Jacob, the blessed one. In this way, the narrative gives symbolic expression to how good and evil, prudence and stupidity are not simply alien to each other, as though the one had nothing to do with the other, but rather, in a certain sense, ‘related’. For a genuinely historical and narrative understanding of good and evil, it holds that evil is evil because it was once good in the past. Evil is what is stale, good that has been abandoned by spirit. By contrast, the good has never been evil, because the good is always original (new). This asymmetry defines the historical and narrative essence of good and evil in their related opposition. If the good degenerates into routine, into a moral commonplace of universally common behaviour, then it is already half-­way to dying off and decaying. What was once good, ‘which once was a great blessing’, has become evil in a new time and, as out-­dated past, poisons the present. From here arises an even better understanding of the ironic distance with which the angelic ‘Realm of Sternness’ is fashioned in the Joseph novel. The good that is symbolized by the realm of angels is absolutely unhistorical and n ­ onnarrative – t­hat is, ‘pure’, everlasting: it has always been and will always remain the same. And, for this reason, it is also sterile, lifeless and unoriginal. From God’s interest in humans, one may thus surmise ‘probably more rightly than wrongly’, as one reads in the novel, a ‘weariness’ with regard to the ‘psalm-­singing purity’ of the angels. An essential aspect of God’s perfection is that He is perfectly original. Everything He does is ‘glorious like on the first day’. Thus, no one aside from God can, in a strict sense, be called truly good, for the good is truly good only insofar as it is truly original. The religious commitment of human being to historical and narrative attentiveness is immediately linked with God’s originality, which cannot be ‘fixed’ or ‘stated’ once and for all and be reduced to fixed rules. In order to understand God, humans themselves must be original. This is why Thomas Mann, in his essay on Joseph and His Brothers, defines human religiosity as a God-­concern: ‘The “God-­concern” is the worry of deeming that which was once right, but is no longer, to still be right and to live up to it in an anachronistic manner. It is the pious sensitivity for what is degenerate, out-­dated, internally outrun, which has become impossible, scandalous or, in the language of Israel, an “abomination”. It means listening intelligently to what the world spirit wants, to the new truth and necessity’ (1996, 198–9). The idea of a timeless fixed norm of behaviour for human being, as entertained by a ‘morality’ of the sedentary, must be criticized in light of historical and narrative monotheism. It turns out to be a form of the dull inattentiveness that contents itself with the comfortable supposition that what matters is always the same and remains the same. Yet what is commanded changes with time, because the attained position of spirit changes with time, and humans, in turn, may not dispense with the ­specifically

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­istorical and narrative wakefulness and attentiveness ‘to the inner h changes of the world, to the mutation in the aspects of truth and right’. Only someone who is attentive will keep pace with history by enquiring self-­critically again and again into whether his or her understanding of truth and right yesterday is still original and up to date today.2 The aspects of truth and right thus exhibit a historical-narrative time core. That is why allegedly timeless and unchanging truths and rules of behaviour, which are extolled to humans with moral intent, can gain so little force in their concrete lives. Life, when it is really lived, is neither timeless nor unchanging but rather, through and through, historical and narrative, so that the instruction in a ‘wisdom’ abstracted from time not only does not help humans to understand themselves, but precisely prevents true understanding. Human self-­understanding can develop and articulate itself only historically and narratively, for it relates to the historical and narrative existence of human ­being – ­or, better, because it is identical with this existence that expresses itself and finds itself in this self-­understanding.

Huya and Tuya Laban belongs to the stories of Jacob. When the Joseph novel emphasizes how much the Egyptian Joseph follows in the footsteps of his father, and the ‘field of death’ of Egypt is thereby explicitly compared to ‘Laban’s realm’, then the stories of Joseph in Egypt must know a varying repetition of the symbolic figure of Laban, in which the essence of ‘Egypt’ is symbolized, as it were, in miniature. Accordingly, in the essay on Joseph and His brothers, there is hint of an Egyptian variation of Laban’s special God-­stupidity, which lacks the historical and narrative attentiveness of the ‘God-­concern’. Of this religious form of stupidity, one reads that it appears in the figure of Laban, who ‘does not know this concern’, and in a related form that ‘accounts for it as clumsily as the sibling-­like parents of Potiphar who sacrifice the manhood of the son to the light’ (1996, 199). The Egyptian variation of the Laban theme diverges, then, from the model in the stories of Jacob in that Potiphar’s sibling-­like parents know the God-­concern, but they account for it so ‘clumsily’ that here, too, it is a narrative presentation of God-­ forsaken stupidity. The parents sacrifice ‘the manhood of the son’ and are thus guilty of an ‘abomination’, which cleaves to the discarded, out-­dated, internally overrun, even when a ‘clumsy’ attempt is made to free oneself through the deed from what is backward.3 Joseph gets to know this ‘underworld’ in a carefully composed scene, which takes place on a stage that is a symbol of the exceptional refinement of the high civilization of Egypt. ‘The furnishings of the little cottage revealed heavenly good taste: set on lion’s feet, the elegant long couch of ebony and ivory was strewn with down cushions and draped in hides of



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panther and lynx; the roomy armchairs, their backs of artfully stamped gilt leather, were heaped with embroidered pillows and had overstuffed footstools in front’ (698). In these surroundings, which are deliberately called and described as being in ‘heavenly good taste’, Joseph becomes the witness of a familiar dialogue between the sibling-­like married couple. Huya the brother and Tuya the sister are both frail and old, and have the habit of using the ‘little pleasure cottage’ for a rest together. Joseph waits on them as a ‘mute servant’, so that the old couple feels undisturbed in their intimate exchange of thoughts. ‘But there was Joseph kneeling nearby in the corner with his tableware, just diagonally opposite to them. He knew quite well, however, that he was only a mute servant, with just a thing-­like presence, and he fixed glassy eyes to stare just past the old people’s heads’ (699). Huya keeps the somewhat faltering conversation with his sister running by looking back on the whole of their life together: ‘it was life, the life of two from beginning to end. We have seen much of the world and been among the people of the world, for we are nobly born and near the throne. But ultimately we two were always alone in our little cottage, the cottage of our brother- and sisterhood, just like in this one here: first in our mother’s womb, then in the house of childhood and the dark chambers of marriage. Now we greyhairs sit in the tranquil cottage of our old age, light of frame and built for but a day, a fleeting refuge. But eternal shelter has been prepared for this holy pair in the columned cavern of the West, which will finally hold us in safekeeping through countless jubilees, and from those walls embraced by night the dreams of life will smile’ (702). Even if, regarded superficially, one had ‘seen much of the world and been among the people of the world’, life was ultimately spent ‘from beginning to end’ in a cave or ‘little cottage’. The mother’s womb, the house of childhood, the dark chambers of marriage and the tranquil cottage of old age are merely variations of one theme that in the end appears purely: the wish for secure and everlasting perpetuation that will ultimately reach its goal in ‘eternal shelter’ of the future gravesite in the columned cavern of the West. The luxurious burial chamber will be adorned with pictures on the ‘walls embraced by night’, which present ‘the dreams of life’. In this way, the ambiguous essence of life, which ought to find here its ‘eternal shelter’, is alluded to by a subtle but unmistakable turn in the novel. The life of Huya and Tuya spent in a cave with ‘heavenly good taste’ basically resembles the grave that, already during their lifetime, is waiting for them. The sole aim of their life being its secure and comfortable perpetuation, it has already adapted beforehand to the mummified silence of death of the dark columned cavern. A certain uneasiness arises, however, as Tuya incidentally mentions the ‘judgement’, which, according to traditional belief, one must pass when one leaves life and passes over to ‘eternity’. ‘And will there be judgement?’ Huya asked uneasily. ‘One must reckon with it’, answered

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his sister; ‘It is the doctrine. But it is uncertain whether it is still fully valid. There are doctrines that are like deserted houses; they still stand and endure, but no one dwells within anymore’ (703). Here one can hear once again the central motif of the ‘God-­concern’ – that is, ‘the worry of deeming that which was once right, but is no longer, to still be right and to live up to it in an anachronistic manner’. The concern of Huya and Tuya is directed concretely at the doctrine of judgement, which may still stand and endure, but is no longer filled with life, and has been deserted by spirit. Their personal interest lets them hope that the doctrine of judgement is no longer valid, since it is the only uneasiness that cannot be mastered by the carefully planned tranquility of life and death. At the same time, this interest in security must also be concerned to take all eventualities into account and not disregard a doctrine too hastily. Thus Tuya turned to the responsible ­experts – ­that is, she ‘spoke with Beknechons, the Great Prophet of Amun, about it’. His answer is characteristic for the symbolic ‘Egypt’ in the Joseph novel, for his ‘unclear’ response, as Tuya tells her brother, reads as follows: ‘The doctrine holds true. . . . All things hold eternally true in the land of Egypt, he said, the old just like the new erected alongside it, so that the land is swollen full of images, edifices, of what is dead and what is alive, and one walks among them in propriety. For what is dead is the more holy only for being dead, for being the mummy of truth to be eternally preserved for the people, though it is also deserted by the spirit of those newly instructed’ (703). The answer does not satisfy Tuya because she (quite rightly) discerns in it that the priestly elite, while they feel they are above the ‘folk belief’, nonetheless allow it to persist outwardly for reasons of public policy. Such a pragmatism with a wink, which declares the dead to be ‘the more holy only for being dead’, even if it is already deserted by ‘the spirit of those newly instructed’, is not sufficient for Tuya, likewise for pragmatic reasons. She does not pursue, though, a pragmatism of transient life but rather a pragmatism of eternal death, for which a degree of security matters that the priests’ answer does not offer: ‘He is a strong servant of Amun and zealous for his god. He is less concerned with the king below, who holds the crooked staff and the fan, and he cares little for the great god’s stories and doctrines. That he calls them a deserted building and mummified truth does not make it more certain that we shall not have to stand before him as people believe and declare our innocence and let our hearts be weighed, before Thoth can record our absolution. . . . One must reckon with this’ (703–4). Here it becomes perfectly clear that it is not so much the attentiveness to historical and narrative truth that underlies the God-­concern of the two old ones; rather, it is the self-­interest that seeks to secure itself optimally from all sides and for this reason must know what must be ‘reckoned’ with. Only in this way is one optimally prepared for everything. And so the more articulate sister impresses upon her brother: ‘I must by all means



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be at your side, just as in life, so, too, in d ­ eath . . . ­in case you have lost your reasons and the justification refuses to occur to you at the decisive moment’ (704). The ‘God-­prudence’ here consists in trusting one’s rhetorical skill in transforming ‘at the decisive moment’ the weaker into the stronger, what is unjustified into the justified. The brother subsequently gives the conversation a new twist by reminding his sister: ‘I enkindled within an ancient and holy house the idea of offering partial payment to what is holy and new’ (704). Appearing next to the concern for the old is the concern for the new. The latter remains, to be ­sure – a­ s the formulation of the novel makes c­ lear – w ­ ithin the ‘economic’ logic of calculation and ‘partial payment’. The two concerns turn out to be the two sides of one insecurity. Where the traditional doctrine and form of life are so dead that it becomes questionable whether and to what extent they are still to be taken into account, there arises at the same time a vague need for something new, which likewise must be taken into account. The conversation between the siblings additionally mixes into the calculating assessment between old and new the difference between female and male, matriarchy and patriarchy. So the sister admits to her brother that he was the one who ‘began to distinguish between what is holy and what is glorious, what is new in the world, establishing a new order, but with uncertain intentions toward us, so that by way of precaution one must offer something to appease it’. For the sister ‘did not see it’ and, ‘reposing in what was holy and old, was incapable of understanding this new order’ (704). Huya becomes noticeably more articulate in speech when it is a matter of ‘his’ concern: ‘Nothing is more agitating in this world than concern for the order and the aeon, for it is the most important of all.’ Here the God-­ concern is likewise recognized, which already shaped the stories of Jacob and Joseph.4 Thus Huya proceeds to speak of the God-­concern regarding ‘holy matters’ as the concern ‘whether they are still holy and not already despised because a new eon has dawned; and one must make haste to keep pace with the newly proclaimed order and appease it with some consecrated offering if one is not to perish’ (704). The ‘God-­stupidity’, which is given symbolic shape in the novel through Huya and Tuya, accordingly relates not to their God-­concern as such, but rather solely to their ‘clumsy’ manner of wanting to do it justice. The concern whether the ‘ancient and holy’ is possibly ‘already despised’ because a ‘new aeon’, as a new order, has dawned, has a very concrete and personal background for Huya, for he asks himself whether marriage between siblings is indeed still ‘holy’: ‘brother’s and sister’s ­embrace – t­ ell me, is that not indeed the self-­embrace of the deep and akin to the engendering by seething maternal stuff, despised by the light and the powers of the newer order?’ (707). His sister attempts to calm him with the ‘old pious’ reference to the models from the Egyptian world of gods: ‘Is there anything more pious than imitation of the gods? They all engender from their own blood.’

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‘Darkness is holy and marriage after this model highly esteemed in the judgement of human being’ (707). But her brother has gathered momentum, vehemently seizing the side of the ‘male’ light against the ‘motherly’ darkness: ‘For the light is glorious, which is to say, manly, and it despises the seething of maternal darkness, to which our engendering was still quite close, hanging from it by its umbilical cord. Behold, it must be cut, that umbilical cord, so that the calf may be free of its mother cow and become a bull of the light’ (708). Now the idea of ‘partial payment to the holy new’ is given concrete expression, which is conducted, however, on the cost not of the parents but of the son: ‘Our Horus, whom as brother and sister, Usir and Eset, we engendered in the gloomy d ­ eeps – ­we wished to remove him from that dark realm and consecrate him to the realm of purity. That was our partial payment to the new age, which we agreed upon. And did not ask his opinion, but did to him what we did, and perhaps it was a blunder, but a well-­intentioned one’ (709). In this way, the novel moulds Huya’s ‘clumsy’ taking sides with what is ‘pure’ without appropriating this taking sides itself. Instead, it is inclined towards the reply of the sister, who, with clever irony, responds to the overly simple glorification of the light: ‘To be sure, to be sure’: ‘And yet you yourself, old man, are not certain if the cut with which we cut the umbilical cord between him and the maternal darkness was not perhaps a blunder. For in being so consecrated, has the son become a bull of the sun? No, but merely a courtier of the light’ (710). With an acumen perhaps motivated especially by the preceding disregard through the ‘manly’ light, Tuya recognizes the lie in the ‘partial payment to the holy new’ that consists in the castration of her own son. Just as the old holy may have become vacuous, and persist only as a dead housing deserted by the spirit, so is the presumably new holy vacuous and mere pretension, since the ‘bull of the sun’ turns out to be a courtly eunuch whose ‘purity’ consists, in fact, only in the sacrifice of the manly strength. Tuya highlights the last point once more in another manner, by placing herself in the difficult situation of her daughter-­in-­law: ‘As a wife and mother I sometimes have my worries for her sake as well, for despite the endearing and pious consideration she shows us holy parents, I do suspect that at the bottommost bottom of her soul she, too, nurses a slight annoyance and a secret rebuke for our making a courtier of our son, whereas for her he is not a true Captain of the Guard, but bears only the title’ (710–11). Tuya prefers not to count it as a victory of ‘purity’ that Potiphar leads with his wife not a ‘marriage of the flesh’ but only an ‘honorary marriage’, for this appears to her not as progress but rather an impotency clad in much taste and honours, ‘sparkling with honour by day, and yet a sorrow by night’. Thus, to her, the overly self-­confident ‘daylight pride’ of her brother is suspicious. She evaluates precisely the ostenta-



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tious culminations of ‘as many and more consolations’ as evidence of a violent repression that sees itself under constant threat by the return of what is repressed: ‘And if you once feared the revenge of the light because of our dark marriage, then I, as a woman, sometimes fear the revenge of motherhood’s darkness’ (713). Here Huya and Tuya’s conversation pushes forward to the edge of true self-­knowledge. Only one step is missing and it would be clear to both that the whole ‘comfort’ of their life is only the impotent ‘many and more consolations’ for a life not lived. The lifestyle of ‘heavenly good taste’ offers only compensatory satisfactions that cannot entirely appease the subliminal unease in a dead culture. Only one step is missing, and their need for life and something new would free itself from the fetters of the dead and old. But the conversation ends instead in a ‘senile giggle’ with which the budding self-­critical knowledge is staved off: ‘Tee-­hee,’ Huya went: ‘No need to fear, darkness is mute.’ Nothing was ‘to be done against such cozy ­parents – ­is that not wry and waggish?’ And Tuya begins to giggle because she understands how ‘waggish’ it was that the parents ‘clipped their children’s wings’, but that ‘the resentment’ is securely ‘banished and sealed’ and ‘cannot find fault’ with them (713–14). Thus, the momentary irritation is soothed because the conventions and taboos of a high civilization ensure that the elderly and the parents are honoured, and that the abominable and bloody secret, repressed in the ground of the culture, must not be called by its name.

Egypt as Symbol The fundamental difference between cultural refinement and true God-­prudence is immediately clear to Joseph, who is dismayed at the conversation between Huya and Tuya: ‘how like Laban, they had persisted in the old customs, precisely in the very act of trying to accommodate what was new in the world’ (716). ‘What utter fools before the Lord this pair of holy parents are, he thought. . . . It only shows that dwelling in a heaven of exquisite taste is no protection against foolishness or the most awful blunders. I would have to tell Father of this heathen God-­stupidity’ (714). That he thereby thinks of his father is also because he knows how much Jacob ‘detested and disapproved of all things Egyptian’: ‘Service to the state, which evidently defined life there, offended his inherited sense of independence and self-­responsibility; and the cults of death and of beasts that flourished there were folly and abomination in his eyes, especially the cult of death, for any worship of what was under the ­earth – ­beginning already very early on, with the earthly, with grain decaying fruitfully in the ­earth – ­was for him the same as fornication’ (334). By connecting thoughts, the contemplating Jacob loves to make what is given in the here and now transparent to its meaning, turning it into

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a symbol whose content is suitable for stimulating reflection. ‘Egypt’ becomes an exemplary symbol for what in his eyes is discarded, degenerate: it is the country ‘far below’, the ‘monkey-­faced Egypt’; its inhabitants ‘emerge from the womb already old, so that their suckling babes resemble little aged men and begin to babble of death within an hour’: ‘Without exception they are conceitful, wanton, and sad’ (73). The land thus really means the ‘below’ where everything that has been overcome gathers in a dark realm of death, a realm of unfreedom. Jacob therefore called ‘that muddy land down under’ not ‘Keme or Mizraim’ but rather ‘Sheol, hell, the realm of death’ (334). Jacob’s connecting of thoughts can thereby invoke the tradition that recounts a journey Abraham made to Egypt. In the Joseph novel’s re-­ narration, Abraham ‘forged ahead far into the south, beneath another sun, into the Land of Mud, where the water runs b ­ ackwards . . . ­and boats float downstream to the north, where an ancient, stiff-­necked people prayed to their dead and where there had been nothing for an Ur-­man to search out or accomplish in his distress’ (6). As a counter-image, the upside-down world of ‘Egypt’ builds a core element of the understanding of self and world that originates with Abraham. The enigma of the story of the Egyptian Joseph consists, then, in the question as to why Jacob (and with him the Jewish people in becoming) should end up moving to Egypt of all places. Or, formulated with the words of the simile: why is it necessary that the headstrong cow plough the field of Egypt, that the man send the calf ahead of Joseph so that it happens despite all unwillingness? The solution to this enigma lies, as always, in the enigma i­ tself – ­that is, in the simile-­like talk of the ‘field’. The solution to the enigma lies locked in the secret of the grain, which, as Jacob determines with horror, must decay fruitfully in the earth of the field before it may bring forth fruit a hundredfold. Joseph understands the simile differently and better than does his father, and here the Joseph novel follows him. For this reason, Joseph is not unambiguously hostile towards ‘Egypt’, but rather recognizes in addition to the rigid proximity to death a contrary moment. Only once the grain has passed through the dark stage of death in the field does it bring forth fruit. Without the dark ground of the field, it would remain fruitless, even if the living fruit does not emerge in the end from the field but from the grain. The symbol of Egypt, as it is fashioned with care and in detail by the Joseph novel, does not come into full view until the dialectical unity of both moments has been taken into account: the ‘God-­stupidity’ of a rigid late culture and the fruitful earth with which a new beginning is prepared. Joseph is receptive to both because, on the one hand, he stands as an heir of Abraham and Jacob in the tradition of loathing Egypt as a ‘house where death is worshipped’ (567). For this reason, he learns with some unease from the merchants who rescue him from the well that they will take him to Egypt, to the ‘realm of death’, ‘for the custom of regarding Egypt as the land of the underworld and its inhabitants as the people of Sheol



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had been born with him, and he had never heard otherwise, particularly from Jacob. He was to be sold into that sad lower world, his brothers had already sold him to its depths, the well had been a fitting entrance into that’ (557–8). On the other hand, Joseph is ‘moon-­wanderer’s latter-­day grandchild’ (1184), who is not unsympathetic towards the reckless and decadent features of a late culture. That is why the young Joseph is unable to hide a ‘smile’ during his father’s diatribes on Egypt, ‘for he knew that Jacob’s description of the customs of Mizraim contained grand generalizations, one-­sidedness, and exaggerations’ (74). In his essay, Thomas Mann states that Joseph’s way ‘from Canaan to the Egypt of the New Kingdom is the ­way . . . ­to a high civilization with its luxuries and absurd snobberies, in a land of the grandchildren, a land whose atmosphere is so much to Joseph’s taste because he is himself a grandchild and a late soul’ (1996, 198). In the Joseph novel, the aspect of death associated with ‘Egypt’ becomes particularly clear when Joseph sees the pyramids: ‘Joseph gazed ahead wide-­eyed at the solid geometry of these tomb mountains, piled high by slaves in the Egyptian house of bondage that Jacob so disapproved of.’ ‘They alone had proved victors over the dreadful time mass of their age, beneath which everything had vanished and lay buried that had once divided and filled the spaces between their monstrous figures as pious splendour. The temples of the dead that had once stood braced against their slopes and in which “eternal” services had been established in honour of those who had died towards the sun.’ ‘Joseph no longer saw anything of that in his day and did not even know that his not-­seeing was a not-­seeing anymore, a seeing of annihilation’ (603–4). In view of the ‘dreadful’ age of the pyramids, the Joseph novel finds drastic expressions in Jacob’s spirit: Joseph’s ‘gaze prodded at these bare remains of giant mathematics, this vast trash heap of death, the way a foot kicks at debris’. Here, Egypt is similar to a trash heap of the dead. Under this aspect, Joseph’s journey through Egypt is a journey through a dead ‘high civilization’, which has not yet realized the fact of its death, even though it has already been deserted by the historical and narrative spirit, so that it continues to exist sluggishly in overgrown, vacuous truths and morals that have become ‘debris’. The ‘dreadful endurance’ with which the pyramids, ‘deserted by their time, yet stood in God’s presence’, lent them, in Joseph’s eyes, ‘something abominable and damned’ (604–5). Yet, under this aspect, ‘Egypt’ is a symbol for every epoch whose time has run out. That each late culture considers itself ‘eternal’ because it has entered into a ‘posthistoire’ of a lived-­out rigidness is precisely the earmark of having been deserted by spirit in history. For this rigidness, the future solely consists in the successful perpetuation of the status quo. To compensate, it cultivates an aesthetic mysticism that flees the world, seeking to adopt and appease the latent unease in a culture that has become a museum. This unease feeds, however, the other aspect of ‘Egypt’ to which Joseph, as a later grandchild, is especially receptive.

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Thus, with Joseph’s entrance in the ‘little pleasure cottage’ in which he will listen to the conversation of the old couple, the novel reads very characteristically: ‘Culture was smiling down at him here, and Abram’s belated grandchild, Jacob’s next to youngest, already somewhat worldly . . ., took some pleasure in secretly looking back upon his all too spiritual father, who would have disapproved of all this image-­making. It is utterly lovely, he thought, so let it be, old Israel, and do not scorn what Keme’s worldly children have accomplished here, its smiling tension and high-­soaring taste, for it may well be that it even pleases God Himself! Behold, I am its good friend and find it charming, though, to be sure, always with a silent awareness in my blood that transferring what is there to the heaven of refined taste may not be the most genuine and important thing; rather, what is far more necessary is God-­concern for the future’ (698).5 This double aspect of the Egyptian late culture, which in Joseph is met with some understanding and sympathy, shapes Huya and Tuya’s conversation in which the symbol of ‘Egypt’ is reproduced in miniature. To be sure, Joseph responds with ‘anger at the old couple’s irresponsible God-­stupidity’ and with ‘abhorrence of the cosy way in which they smugly considered themselves secure against all reproach’. Yet what ‘he had heard was more apt to broaden his point of view and serve as a warning to the scion and pupil of his fathers against his regarding their narrow spiritual homeland and wrestling with God as something all too unique and incomparable’ (714–15). Here the critical motif, that ‘the supposed individual’, who lives ‘unaware, in his naïve pride in being first and unique’, is varied meaningfully in being applied to Abraham and his heir. For the Abrahamic tradition, too, there is the danger of taking oneself ‘as something all too unique and incomparable’, and thus of restricting one’s point of view narrow-­mindedly. The encounter with the world empire of Egypt effects for Joseph a universalization of the initially still ­provincial – ­that is, regionally restricted – ‘world of his fathers’. This universalization that makes the history, the stories and the concerns of Abraham and his heirs into an affair of humanity is what matters: ‘It was not just Jacob who was concerned in this world. That occurred everywhere among human beings, and everywhere humans fretted whether they still had an understanding of both the Lord and the ­times – ­even though that also led here and there to the most awkward sort of knowledge and even though Jacob’s inherited idea of the Lord provided him with the most refined and exhausting means for testing the concerned question about the extent to which humans’ customs and morals may lag behind the will and growth of that same Lord’ (715). ‘God-­concern for the future’ is a universal affair of humanity because each human stands under the commandment of knowing him- or herself. Yet this self-­knowledge is possible only historically and narratively, and indeed in two respects: in respect of one’s own life story, and in respect



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of the status of spiritual development reached in the present. Insofar as humans seek to understand themselves, they must understand themselves in terms of the times. For Joseph and the Joseph novel, there is no question that Abraham’s inheritance is a ‘means for testing’ of the first order. But as the stories of Jacob and Joseph show, such a means for testing is a constant challenge for the adequate understanding, not a guarantee that the understanding will always succeed. This is why Joseph does not want to judge too harshly the old couple’s clumsy God-­stupidity: how very close at hand ‘error constantly lurked here as well. One need not even think of Laban, having remained sitting in the origins, and of how he put his little son in a jar.’ ‘Had not Jacob’s melancholy scruples about the feast tempted him utterly to destroy the feast and its customs for the sake of its roots, which might well be nourished by filth far below? His son had had to plead that the Feast of Life Spared be spared itself; but the shade-­spending treetop, which had grown up with the Lord beyond the filthy root, would also wither and die if one were to rip it up’ (715). Again, Joseph asserts the central historical dialectic of ground and existence, of night and day, of blessing from below and blessing from above, which is also expressed in the simile of the grain that for Jacob evokes only loathing, for he tends to ‘rip up’ everything dark and root-­like. The story of the spared Feast of Life Spared shows how Joseph understands the simile better than does his father. While the fruit has reached beyond the grain, it owes this, too, to what remains behind in the dark ground. Both above and below, day and night, form a dialectical whole that would be destroyed if one wanted to intervene one-­sidedly for the one party and to eradicate and sacrifice thereby the other. Joseph believed that ‘it was not by uprooting things’ that one was ‘to approach the spirit of the father’, for this is the central teaching of the story of the refused sacrifice, which belongs to Abraham’s inheritance: ‘God had tempted Abram to bring Him his son, but He had then not taken the boy, but instructed the father by substituting a ram.’ The ignorance of such stories is thus a further reason for Joseph’s clemency with the Egyptians: ‘The tradition of these people here, though they moved in a high heavenly realm of good taste, was sadly lacking in such wise s­ tories – ­one could excuse them for many things’ (715–16). In Joseph’s understanding, the point of the story of the revoked sacrifice consists not only in a moderating shift of the sacrifice, which substitutes the ram for the son to be sacrificed. Rather, in place of the sacrifice is the story of Abraham’s temptation and the sacrifice that is revoked in the end, ­which – ­as a ­narrative – ­must be understood. The story of the rejected sacrifice shows, however, that every sacrifice before God becomes a stupidity when the development has gone beyond it and God, instead, wants to be understood. Huya and Tuya’s sacrifice is thus expression of their clumsy ‘God-­stupidity’ because, as sacrifice and partial payment, it takes the place of the demanded understanding. For in Egypt, too, the

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time for the opposite has come: understanding ought to take the place of sacrifice, which is no longer in keeping with the time.

The Sphinx The timeworn, jaded and dead aspect of ‘Egypt’ is summarized by the Joseph novel in a symbolic figure that has stimulated human reflection since time immemorial. After Joseph had taken sight of the pyramids as a ‘trash heap of death’ without being particularly impressed, the Joseph novel arranges a scene with peculiar symbolism: in the night, Joseph is unsettled by the memory of a figure that he saw during the day and ­that – ­unlike the ­pyramids – i­mpressed him to such an extent that he returns to it in order to examine it. It is the great Sphinx, which, as one reads in the novel, next to the pyramids ‘is appearing abruptly out of sands, timeworn’ (605). The ‘timeworn’ character is again expressly emphasized, and the closer characterization of the Sphinx will serve to conceptualize the obscure fascination that originates from the apparently ‘eternal’ aspect of Egypt: ‘It was a Sphinx, which means a riddle and a mystery, and a savage one at that, with the claws of a lion and a thirst for young b ­ lood – a­ threat to any child of God and a snare for any offspring of the promise.’ ‘Crouching there in brutal unchangeability, with a nose eaten away by time and cruel open eyes gazing out at its river, it had nothing to do with promises, that was not the nature of its menacing riddle. It would endure drunkenly into the future, and yet that future was savage and dead, for it was merely endurance and a false eternity, devoid of all expectation. Joseph stood there testing his heart against endurance’s voluptuously smiling majesty’ (608). The ‘Egypt’ that functions in the novel as counter-­image to the narrative ontology of the Abrahamic promise and its ‘offspring’ is the image of a false eternity. The Egyptian world is depicted as a cult of ‘unchangeability’, shaped by the fear of passing time, a fear that pierces everything and is discernible precisely in the tremendous efforts to escape transience and mortality by taking refuge in the ‘eternity’ of stony endurance. Yet such an ‘overcoming’ of the passing of time is in truth a resignation to the power of time: it seeks to become similar to what is feared by entrusting itself entirely to the phantasmagoria of a rigid ‘majesty of endurance’ that is abstracted from time. For this resistance against the temptation of a false eternity, Nietzsche is a model, describing it as a phantasmagoria that has fascinated especially philosophers: ‘You ask me what are all the idiosyncrasies of the philosophers?’ ‘For one thing their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think they are doing a thing an honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni – when they make a mummy out of it. All that philosophers have been handling for thousands



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of years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their hands alive. They kill things and stuff them, these servants of conceptual idols, when they worship’ (1998, 16). In a very similar manner, the Joseph novel understands ‘Egypt’ as symbol of a fear that has evolved into a form of life and culture, which attempts to oppose transience with the ‘mummy’ of ossified ­endurance – ­a persisting endurance that, to be sure, represents a false eternity because it is ‘devoid of all expectation’, so that the future of such a fossilized world remains as ‘dead’ as this world itself. The counter-­concept of expectation concisely characterizes the peculiarity of that genuinely historical attentiveness and narrative art of interpretation that the novel not only makes into the theme of its narratives but also itself serves as a concrete example by re-­narrating the story of the Abrahamic promise and of its pupils, making present in reflection what is narrated. In this sense, the Joseph novel explicitly opposes an ontology of dead endurance that is fascinated by the seeming suspension of time and the immutability of being. It opposes it with a narrative ontology that arises from the central insight that transience and mortality are not synonymous with nothingness. Quite the ­contrary – ­they lend value, dignity and interest to being in the first place: ‘For you err greatly in saying that the transience of such stuff is one reason less to admire its ­form – ­indeed, it is one reason more, because mixed with our admiration is a touching sympathy that is totally lacking in our regard for the enduring material beauty of brass and stone.’ And the novel continues with emphasis: how ‘would you instruct the heart that the stuff of life is lower and more despicable than the enduring stuff of its imitations? The heart will never, ever learn or accept that. For endurance is dead, and only death endures’ (919). As the ‘offspring of the promise’, Joseph knows this. That is why the Joseph novel confronts its hero with the Egyptian majesty of endurance, so that he ‘tests his heart’ against false eternity. In this way, a thoroughly plastic juxtaposition of dead, enduring being and of living, historical-­ narrative meaning arises: ‘Joseph stood there beneath the stars and before the giant riddle for a long time, his weight on one leg, an elbow propped in one hand and his chin in the other’ (608). This night-­time scene in which Joseph is standing before the Sphinx also has the character of a citation that, in the context of the Joseph story, appears alien and anachronistic. Joseph represents a ‘figure’ that alludes to another figure that belongs not to Egypt but to the context of Greek mythology and tragedy. Just like Joseph, so is the speculating Oedipus standing before the Sphinx. In a letter to Wolfgang Schneditz, Thomas Mann feels compelled to offer an ironically coloured ‘defence’ of the Sphinx episode in the Joseph novel: ‘Your academic objections to my Sphinx depiction in “Joseph” are entirely justified. But the novel takes scientific liberties, and I have in fact taken the encamped beast out of the Egyptian and playingly placed it in the Greek context because for me it was important to have the young

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Joseph standing before it as the speculating Oedipus.’ If ‘you write about the image of Egypt in the Joseph literature, then you can reproach these freedoms adamantly. Indeed there are quite a few anachronisms in the work’ (1999c, 314).6 This letter reveals what is already clear to the attentive r­ eader – n ­ amely, that the Joseph novel is not a poetically embellished Egyptology. Its true theme is not a literal reality, which is also (and even more) accessible to an empirical research of facts. For this reason, he deviates on occasion quite deliberately from the findings of the empirical sciences when it serves symbolic clarification. This is expressed in the quoted letter where Thomas Mann defends the ‘time-­eaten nose’ of the Sphinx in the Joseph novel against the objection that the nose did not disappear until much later: ‘With the stubbed nose, I was not concerned with history but rather with the idea of time, in this case with futureless endurance, and I left the nose to be regarded as a symbol for this fruitless burden of time on the figure rather than having it shot down by Mamluks.’ If the historical reality is understood in this way as a symbol or simile that must be narratively interpreted, then the figures that are highlighted in particular are those that, like the Sphinx, embody and display as symbolic figures the fundamental symbolic character of reality. For Thomas Mann, it is important to allow the Oedipus story to flow into the simile of the Egyptian Sphinx because only in that story is the enigma of the Sphinx explicitly articulated and resolved, for in Greek mythology the Sphinx famously appears as the beast that kills, curiously enough, by assigning humans a riddle they cannot solve. The Sphinx’s puzzling question reads as follows: ‘What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?’ Oedipus is the first to solve it: ‘It is the human!’ Thus, he breaks the power of the Sphinx and of its deadly riddle. The riddle that the Sphinx gives is the riddle of human life. It cites stations of the temporal and transient life story of a human being from a small child to an adult and then an old person. But the point is that one’s own existence, put before one’s eyes in this way, is ordinarily not understandable, and can thus encounter one as the riddle of the Sphinx. For human being, solving the riddle means, then, knowing oneself. The liberating solution out of the confusing symbol of the Sphinx is human self-­knowledge – t­ hat is, humans who know themselves as humans: ‘It is the human!’ The story of Oedipus who stands contemplatively before the Sphinx thus becomes a symbol of human self-­knowledge. That is why Joseph, who is blessed with the gift of interpretation and understanding, is connected in thought in the novel with the speculating Oedipus. At night, Joseph is testing his heart against the Sphinx, though its riddle fails to gain power over him. As a ‘child of God’ and ‘offspring of the promise’, the historical-­narrative unity of meaning of reality has already become clear to him in self-­knowledge. Thus, the Sphinx facing him remains silent, without riddle: ‘For this monstrous beast of the ages



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in its royal headdress of ­stone. . . . ­What riddle did it speak? But it did not speak at all. Its riddle was its silence, that calm, drunk silence, in which the non-­being directed its light and brutal gaze on past the man who stood there questioning and questioned’ (607). The ‘calm, drunk’ silence of the Sphinx also indicates that, while Oedipus could solve a riddle with the sentence ‘It is the human!’, this solution itself contains a riddle that may be called the true riddle of self-­ knowledge. Joseph did not come to Egypt, then, to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, but to fulfil an entirely different interpretation, which will superficially be dedicated to the worldly dreams of the Pharaoh but in the end enlighten more his dreamlike conception of God, in which the past blends hazily with the future. This is why the story of Joseph and the Sphinx concludes likewise with a dream in which Joseph hears the Sphinx saying: ‘I love you. Come to me and name your name to me.’ Yet Joseph resists the temptation of false eternity: ‘How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’ (608).

Interpreting Dreams The scene in which Joseph is contemplating before the Sphinx, in which the figure of the speculating Oedipus is ‘cited’, prepares the key scene of Joseph’s stories in Egypt: the scene in which Joseph finally stands before Pharaoh and interprets his dreams. Solving a riddle and interpreting a dream are related in that both display a non-­trivial form of understanding through which the art of understanding as ­such – ­that is, the understanding of u ­ nderstanding – ­becomes the theme. Joseph’s way from Potiphar to Pharaoh is, of course, so far and wayward, and the power imbalance and the social division between the ‘nobody’ from a foreign land and the absolute ruler of Egypt so extreme, that the scene between Joseph and Pharaoh appears humanly impossible. Something else must ‘first occur’ for the story to become possible against all odds. Yet what must first occur ­lies, ­as Joseph knows, ‘with the man who brought the calf to the field’ – that is, it ‘lies with God’. For this reason, he accepts his rapid rise in Potiphar’s court with the same calm consent with which he accepts his sudden fall (‘Potiphar’s wife’) that leads him to prison. Joseph understands prison as ‘another pit’ (1052), which repeats and varies the transformation he experienced in the first pit his brothers pushed him into. His present situation meant ‘the return of a frighteningly familiar situation: once more he lay helpless in his bonds, just as he had once lain for three ghastly black-­mooned days in the round depths of a well, sharing that hole with crickets and cellar denizens’. As depressed and dejected as the Egyptian Joseph is, now once again, in view of his self-­imposed ‘fall’, his suffering is ‘also accompanied by a heightened awareness of destiny and a meaningful play of thought’. This is because

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‘the son of Jacob and his true wife had been unable to resist such play his whole life long, no more as a grown man, whose years were now counted at twenty-­seven, than as an imprudent boy. But for him the dearest and loveliest form of playing was allusion, and whenever events in his attentively watched life grew rich with allusion and circumstances proved transparent for a higher harmony, then he was happy, for transparent circumstances can never be entirely gloomy’ (1053). The peculiar happiness of play and allusion in which opaque being becomes transparent to a higher harmony is the happiness of understanding. His life circumstances becoming transparent in understanding is for Joseph more specifically guided by a ‘connecting of thoughts’ with the simile of the grain, for it is clear to him that ‘the hour of the descent into hell’ has approached again (1054). On his way to prison, he sees that it was ‘the time of sowing, the time of hoe and plough, of ripping the earth open’. The Joseph novel exposes the simile in detail: Joseph sees how ‘the farmers along the fertile banks go about the serious, dangerous business of tilling and sowing, each task with its attendant rules of precaution and ­atonement – a­ nd a mournful business as well, for seed time is a time of mourning, a time for burying the god of grain, for Usir’s interment in darkness, a time of only distant hope. It is a time of ­weeping – a­ nd Joseph wept a little as well at the sight of peasants burying their grain, for he too was about to be buried in darkness again, with any hope still very distant’ (1054). In this thought connection with the simile of the dying grain, which resonates again and again in the Joseph novel as a leitmotif, Joseph makes clear to himself that his hope, however distant and impossible it may seem according to human standards, will not be in vain. The repeated salvation is intimately connected with Joseph’s gift of understanding and his art of interpretation. In the ‘other pit’ of the prison, Joseph encounters Pharaoh’s ‘chief butler’ and ‘chief baker’, both of whom fell into disfavour and are thus in prison together with Joseph. In the original text, it reads as follows: ‘Then the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, had a dream, both of them, each man’s dream in one night and each man’s dream with its own interpretation. And Joseph came in to them in the morning and looked at them, and saw that they were sad. So he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in the custody of his lord’s house, saying, “Why do you look so sad today?” And they said to him, “We each have had a dream, and there is no interpreter of it.” So Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, please”’ (Gen. 40: 5–8). Each man’s dream ‘has its meaning’, yet the meaning is not immediately accessible to the subject of the dream, to the dreamer. There is need, then, for someone versed in the art of interpretation to interpret the dream. The peculiar position of the dreamer to his dream is aptly alluded to by language in the German translation, with the formulation that replaces the sovereign ‘I’ (Ich) with the abysmal ‘it’ (Es): ‘Es träumte mir’ or ‘Es träumte ihnen’ (‘A dream came to me’ or ‘A dream came to them’). The



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decentring of the I in the experience of meaning thus becomes exemplarily clear, for the ‘I’ must be brought out of the too self-­evident ‘middle’ of its world so that a unity of meaning can be opened to it, which remains closed to it so long as one persists in the thoughtlessness of an egocentric thinking.7 To be sure, the openness to meanings gained by the decentring of the I is often accompanied by the cluelessness concerning how one ought to understand and interpret the dreamily intuited meaning. The sentence from the original text has its place here: ‘Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, please.’ If the dreamy experience of meaning is carried out in a peculiar decentring of one’s own I, it by no means follows that, in a successful interpretation of what is dreamed, the I is reinstated in its ‘old rights’. Rather, it is a condition of successful interpretation that, for human being, a moment of inaccessibility of the meaning that is becoming understandable remains conserved, and that it is understood alongside in understanding. In the original text and in the Joseph novel, this moment of something joining in is connected to God: ‘interpretations belong to God’. Someone who understands meaning has thus not ‘generated’ or ‘made’ the meaning in ­understanding – ­if he had, the meaning would be meaningless and there would be nothing to understand. It is important to take note that God appears not primarily on the side of what is to be interpreted but on the side of the interpreting: ‘interpretations belong to God’. The side of interpreting is the side of understanding and reason. Herein manifests the central insight of Abrahamic monotheism: that God can never be merely the object of an interpretation, for He is ‘I’ in such a radical sense that he cannot be objectified or reified in any way. As Abraham discovers for the first time, the one and true God can be known only in a self-­knowledge in which we understand ourselves and are decentred as subjects in the act of understanding, for our own understanding and its meaning essentially contain a moment of inaccessibility. In the peculiar decentring of the understanding of meaning, the human I thus experiences a different I from the subject of understanding, which is at once itself and not itself. That is why it reads in the Joseph novel concerning Abraham’s relation to God: that God was in Abraham ‘who knew Him thanks to His power in him’. Between the butler’s and the baker’s clueless non-­understanding in light of the meaning of their dreams and the joined-­in moment in every interpretation that ‘belongs’ to God, there is a mediation that is genuinely human: narration. For that reason, Joseph demands of those who are clueless to tell him their dreams so he may interpret them. In this way, Joseph demonstrates again his special gift of interpretation by accurately interpreting the two dreams of the butler and of the baker as signs of the future, announcing to the one his pardon and to the other his execution. Joseph’s ‘openness’ to what is yet to come, evident already from earlier stories, manifests itself here in the gift of understanding the dreams of others, who do not understand them themselves but can tell about them.

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A reader familiar with the stories knows, of course, that Joseph’s dream interpretation in prison is only the prelude to the ensuing, central scene of interpretation. Now Pharaoh, too, dreams, first of seven fat cows that rise from the Nile, which are immediately eaten by seven lean cows, and then of seven full ears, which are immediately devoured by seven burnt ears. ‘Now it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled, and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise men. And Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was no one who could interpret them for Pharaoh’ (Gen. 41: 8). In this crisis, the pardoned chief butler recalls Joseph and his art of interpretation so that what appears humanly impossible becomes possible: not only will Joseph be freed once again from his pit, but also the nobody from the foreign land will be called before Pharaoh in order to interpret his dreams for him.

Pharaoh The ‘Pharaoh’ of the original text remains historically undetermined. It is different in the Joseph novel, in which the dreaming Pharaoh is given a precise place in history: ‘during Joseph’s stay in prison, toward the end of his first year, it happened that Amenhotep, the third of that name, united with the ­sun – ­and his son, the dreamer, set the double crown upon his head’ (674). The symbol that makes the Pharaoh, as ‘son’ and ‘dreamer’, similar to Joseph in character, is in this way connected by the novel quite deliberately with a literal reality. Here, to be sure, the question arises for the recollecting understanding regarding whether the literally real ought to serve as a key for understanding the symbolic meaning or, the other way around, the symbolic ought to serve as the key for understanding the real. Interleaving of historical symbolism and historical reality becomes particularly complex in that the ‘Pharaoh’ of the original text is, against all historical probability, identified in the novel with Amenhotep IV, who will later refer to himself as Akhenaten. If one wanted to integrate Amenhotep IV in the history of monotheism and Judaism, then it would be historically much more plausible to connect Akhenaten not with Joseph but with Moses.8 In other words, starting with the stipulations of the historical letter, one would not connect Akhenaten with the dreaming Pharaoh of Genesis, but rather with the Pharaoh of Exodus, who must sustain the ten plagues before he allows Moses and his people to leave Egypt. Now the challenge posed to an adequate understanding of the Joseph novel is that the novel employs, as a deliberate stylistic device, the historical improbability of identifying the ‘Pharaoh’ in the stories of Joseph with Akhenaten. The narrator is counting on a reader who draws the ‘connection in thought’ of the improbable ‘Pharaoh’ of Genesis with the much more probable ‘Pharaoh’ of Exodus. This not only establishes a



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connection between Joseph and Moses, but at the same time indicates that the encounter between Akhenaten and Joseph that is narrated in the novel is not intended as a happening in the sense of a literal historical event. Instead, the reader ought to realize that the novel is not concerned with a literal historical choice (either Joseph or Moses belongs to Akhenaten’s time), but with the historical repetition of a model in the development of ­monotheism – ­a model that, in the stories of Joseph and Moses, is presented and understood differently each time. The already very complex fabric formed by these ‘thought-­connections’, which superimpose contrapuntally in the central scene of dream interpretation, is extended a dimension further by Thomas Mann in his essay on the Joseph novel: ‘Now the dreamer interprets dreams, and the day comes when he is taken from the prison in haste and stands before Pharaoh. He is thirty years old then, and Pharaoh is seventeen. This hypersensitive and tender youth, a God-­searcher, like Joseph’s father, and enamoured of an enthusiastic religion of love, has ascended to the throne during the time of Joseph’s imprisonment. He is an anticipating, a premature Christian, the mythical prototype of those, who are on the right way, but not the right ones for that way’ (1996, 193). While the Pharaoh of the novel is accordingly Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) when considered historically, he is at the same time ‘the mythical prototype of those, who are on the right way, but not the right ones for that way’. The motif of being on the way, which is so important in the Joseph novel, is arranged here in an explicitly ambiguous form: Pharaoh is a ‘God-­searcher’, who intuits and anticipates what is searched for only ‘enthusiastically’. For Thomas Mann, he is above all someone who ‘anticipates’, and what he anticipates is expressed clearly: it is Christianity. Pharaoh thus appears in the Joseph novel as a ‘premature Christian’, whose immaturity is made vivid in the figure of a ‘hypersensitive and tender youth’. His ‘prematurity’ is so exalted and ambiguous that, like his dreams, it is in need of a clarifying interpretation that, of course, only Joseph can provide, for among the Egyptians ‘there was no one who could interpret them for Pharaoh’. So the Pharaoh in the novel asks Joseph immediately upon his arrival: ‘It is said of you that when you hear a dream you know to interpret it, is that so?’ And Joseph responds affirmatively with the constraint already known: ‘I can do nothing. God alone can do it, and He does it at times through me. Everything has its time, both dreams and their interpretation. When I was a boy, I dreamt, and my hostile brothers scolded me as a dreamer. Now that I am a man, the time of interpretation has come. My dreams interpret themselves for me, and at most it is God who gives me the gift to interpret the dreams of others’ (1156). The dialectical theme of the Joseph novel, the understanding of understanding or the interpretation of interpreting, intensifies in this central scene into a concise demonstration of the art of interpretation. It characterizes the novel in its content and form, and is here conceptualized in the concluding part of

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the narrative by shifting the gift of understanding to an explicitly divine perspective. Evidently, the art of interpreting is adequately interpreted and understood only when we not so much attribute it to ourselves but, rather, take it as a divine gift: ‘I can do nothing. God alone can do it, and He does it at times through me.’ The interpretations in which Joseph displays his gift of understanding, and which the novel narratively interprets and reflects, become possible when something else joins in, which Joseph cannot have at his sovereign disposal. Joseph understands this inaccessible dimension of understanding as the dimension of God. As the understanding of understanding gains in this way a divine dimension, the new task arises of interpreting the understanding of God, introduced here in terms of the interpretation of the interpretation. If the art of interpretation can be understood only in terms of God, then the essence of the highest, by the same token, can be understood adequately only in terms of an interpretation of God that is oriented to the understanding of understanding. The decentring of the I in the execution of understanding is articulated very clearly by Joseph with regard to the interpretation of dreams: ‘My dreams interpret themselves for me.’ The interpretation of dreams is thus just as inaccessible to Joseph as the dreaming is to the dreamer. Joseph’s expression ‘My dreams interpret themselves for me’ is comparable to the expression ‘the dream came to me’ (German: ‘Es träumte mir’). The respective I is not so much the sovereign subject of interpreting but rather the arena, the stage of interpretation on which that which ought to be understood shows and interprets itself to human being. Precisely for this reason, in every successful understanding, a self-­understanding is involved in which the I internalizes that peculiar decentring that the I performs and experiences if it succeeds in opening itself to the ultimately inaccessible (hi)story of understanding. Joseph, who was a ‘dreamer of dreams’ as a boy, has now matured into an interpreter of his own dreams, who is ultimately also able to interpret the dreams of others. Thus, it is no coincidence, but rather an inner consequence of the composition, that, in the critical scene in which Joseph is standing before Pharaoh and interpreting his dreams, the art of understanding, which permeates and structures the Joseph novel as a leitmotif, is itself expressly interpreted and explicated: ‘composure while interpreting and prophesying’, according to Joseph ‘is connected with the fact that it is an I, a single and particular one, through which form and tradition are f­ ulfilled – ­which, in my view, provides them with the seal of the reason of God. For the pattern-­like tradition comes from the deep that lies below, and is what binds us. But the I is from God and belongs to the spirit, which is free. This, however, is well-­conducted ­life – ­that the binding pattern-­like from the ground is filled with the I’s freedom of God, and there is no human ethos without either the one or the other’ (1158). For Joseph, it would be a misunderstanding, then, to conceive of the divine such that it counters the unboundedness of human being with



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what is ‘solid’ and ‘binding’, which is what ultimately matters. A thinking that seeks ‘fixed points’ and strives for ‘sedentariness’ is inclined to this misunderstanding. As an heir of Abraham, Joseph knows that things are precisely the opposite. The truly divine is what releases and liberates. For this reason, the I ‘is from God and belongs to the spirit, which is free’. At the same time, the human I as finite I is also bound, indeed, to the ‘pattern-­like tradition’ that ‘comes from the deep’. In this way, human finitude is interpreted concretely in terms of time, for that which binds humans is the past, which forms the traditional ground of every human existence. It is a ground from which humans must, however, liberate themselves through interpretation in order to gain a future that is more than the eternal return of what is always the same. Joseph’s interpretation of the ‘composure while interpreting and prophesying’ thus aims at a genuinely historical unity of meaning in which the past, the present and the future dialectically interleave. The liberating movement of understanding starts from the timelessness of an unhistorical, egocentric consciousness caught in the narrow-­mindedness of a contingent here and now, because it does not understand itself narratively. The I which is awaking to understanding experiences its initial decentring through the past, through the ‘ground’ of its e­ xistence – t­hat is, through what is passed down as tradition and valid as model and in whose traces the I walks. In the face of the danger of losing itself in the bad infinity of this ‘well of the past’, the I that is tied to the past preserves the gift of the future, that is, the freedom of the interpreting spirit that knows how to connect itself with the ground of the past into the respective single and particular spiritual present of the original ­understanding – ­an understanding that is granted ‘the seal of the reason of God’. For this reason, there is no ‘human ethos’ in the present ‘without either the one or the other’ – that is, without past and without future, without the blessing from below and without the blessing from above. It follows from this historical character of the event of interpretation, however, that the past’s form of a valid model is not simply repeated in understanding; rather, in every making present it experiences an original variation, bringing it into life for the present and relating it to the future. Thus, in front of Pharaoh, Joseph elucidates the difficulty of the art of interpreting to the effect that ‘the general and the form experience a variation when they are fulfilled in the particular, that is, when the known becomes unknown and one does not recognize it’ (1157). Time as the root and source of finitude is the power that allows what is given immediately in the here and now to pass; it alienates the seemingly familiar and known into something unknown, which, unnoticed and not understood, is often forgotten, but which also contains within it the potential to be recognized in an original interpretation and to be adapted to the present in a new form. As a consequence, the task of historical and narrative interpreting consists in recognizing the universal in its respective single

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and ­particular, temporal alteration and raising it to the liberating spiritual present of understanding. The young Egyptian ruler is impressed by Joseph’s remarks: ‘Pharaoh is also very talented and advanced for his years, but it is uncertain whether he would have known how to discern and order this matter of the binding pattern of the depths and the dignity that comes from above’ (1158). Evidently, the Joseph novel does not pursue the idea ‘close at hand’ of comparing Joseph and Pharaoh to each other with as sharp a contrast as possible. Instead, it attempts to allude initially to a similarity and true kinship between the two ‘character masks’. Precisely in the inner kinship of their central interest of knowledge, Pharaoh becomes aware of the specific superiority of Joseph in being able to raise what both want to understand to the liberating spiritual present of interpretation. This peculiar interplay of similarity and distinction becomes especially clear in the way Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream. After all the general reflections on the essence of historical and narrative interpretation, the ruler of Egypt (and the reader of the Joseph novel) is prepared to proceed to the concrete dream interpretation: ‘Pharaoh is now disposed to hear from this sensible lad the interpretation of his difficult dreams’ (1167). In the process, Pharaoh is well aware that the profound word ‘interpretation’ is many-­layered: ‘But what does my dream mean and whom was it trying to mean to me?’ (1169). The interpretation that the interpreter gives to the dream that is to be interpreted can be adequate only if it makes clear at the same time that the meaning of the dream is not a neutral fact. Rather, it seeks to say something to the dreamer in his here and now and ‘means’ something in this very concrete sense. Also here, the dream-­ interpreting Joseph and the dreaming Pharaoh are, then, related, and at the same time different: it is Pharaoh who is given the meaning, but it is Joseph who understands how to interpret what is meant.

Letter and Spirit of Understanding For the concrete dream interpretation, Joseph forgoes all ‘utensils’ and ‘tools’ (e.g., a ‘kettle’), which the Pharaoh offers him as a precaution: ‘I need nothing between heaven and earth to perform my task. I interpret dreams freely, for better or worse, just as the spirit gives it to me. Pharaoh need only tell them’ (1167). Yet the ‘only’ in the last sentence ought not to hide the fact that Joseph names once again an important condition for the possibility of his interpretation. Pharaoh must be capable of presenting what is to be interpreted to him in the form of a narrative: no narrative, no interpretation. To be sure, Pharaoh does not understand his dream, but he must understand it well enough to be able to narrate it. Joseph’s art of interpretation ultimately consists, then, in making explicit the implicit understanding already in play in the narrative itself.



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Thus, in response to Pharaoh’s claim, leading to the dream interpretation, that he does not know what his dream is to mean to him, Joseph insists that ‘Pharaoh is ­mistaken . . . ­if he thinks he did not know it. Your servant is capable of no more than offering him in prophecy what he already knows’ (1169). The point of departure of the dream interpretation appears at first glance exceedingly paradoxical. While the dreamer claims to not understand his own deed, the dream, the hailed dream interpreter claims he can only ‘prophesy’ what the dreamer already knows himself. How can the interpreter know something, though, if the dreamer knows nothing? In dreams, like in narratives, it can happen that central motifs are highlighted by being repeated with only minor deviations. Also, Joseph’s remark, that he can say to Pharaoh only what he already knows, is the repetition of an earlier remark that his father, Jacob, heard in a conversation he dreamt. His interlocutor responded to Jacob’s statement that he ‘cannot exactly tell the d ­ ifference . . . ­between what I know on my own and what I am experiencing from you’. The response at that time was the same: ‘If you did not know it’, then ‘I could not tell it to you’ (232). The Joseph novel alludes, then, yet again to a central remark of Freud’s in ‘Hypothesis and Technique of Interpretation’. The dream, according to Freud, is ‘an achievement and expression of the dreamer, but one that tells us nothing, one that we do not understand’. But what do we do in everyday life when we hear an utterance that we do not understand? We ask for clarification – that is, we ask the other what his utterance is supposed to mean. Dream interpretation, according to Freud, must proceed precisely along this line: ‘Why may we not do the same thing here, ask the dreamer what his dream means?’ In other words, psychoanalysis pursues ‘the technique, as far as possible, of letting the solutions of their riddles be told by the subjects themselves. The dreamer himself, then, is to tell us what his dream means’ (1920, 78–9). Freud’s elucidation of the psychoanalytical technique of interpretation is striking, for it can appeal to the everyday situation in which we can ask for clarification from the one whom we do not understand, yet precisely this situation seems to not be given in the dream. Freud concedes as much directly: ‘It is common knowledge, however, that this is not such an easy matter with dreams.’ ‘Since the dreamer always says he knows nothing and we know nothing and a third person surely knows nothing, it looks as though there were no possibility of experiencing it.’ And yet there is a path for interpretation: ‘For I assure you, it is very possible, in fact, probable, that the dreamer does know what his dream means, but he does not know that he knows it, and therefore believes he does not know it’ (79). At first glance, the task of psychoanalytical dream interpretation is just as paradoxical as it appears in the novel in the key scene between Joseph and Pharaoh. There, the concept of the ‘riddle’ is revealing, which Freud, too, employs: interpreting a dream is similar to solving a riddle. The formal structure of a knowledge that does not know itself and for

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this reason believes not to know is also present in the peculiar structure of a riddle that appears at first glance un-­understandable and nonsensical, yet which conceals understanding and meaning precisely in that which appears un-­understandable and nonsensical. Otherwise the riddle would be no riddle, the essence of which consists precisely in being solvable from out of itself. That is why Joseph’s approach is similar to the Socratic ‘art of midwifery’, when he asks Pharaoh: ‘Did you not see the cows climbing up out of the flood, one after the other in single file, hot on each other’s heels, first the fat ones, then the lean, with no break in their rank, but all in one line? What rises out of the vessel of eternity, one after the other, not side by side, but in single file, with no gap between what is departing and arriving, with no break in rank?’ And the one asked does not only answer immediately with ‘Years!’, but also recognizes very quickly that the meaning of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows is repeated in the analogous sequence of the ears of grain so that both dreams have one interpretation: ‘Seven fat years will come’ and ‘seven of scarcity’ (1169–70). The crucial turn in which the meaning of the dream suddenly reveals itself to the initial non-­understanding is described precisely in this truly classical dream interpretation, the main moments of which are narrated by the original text. At issue is the suddenly joining insight that the immediately dreamed (the cows and the ears of wheat) are not to be understood literally but symbolically. The cows and ears of wheat are not years, but rather they mean years. To be sure, this conversion from being to meaning itself ought to be understood symbolically, if understanding itself is to be understood. The particular transition of understanding from the letter of the cows and ears of wheat to the years that are symbolized symbolizes for its part the general transition from literal being to spiritual meaning, which every interpretation and every understanding must achieve. For that reason, it is no coincidence that the meaning symbolized in Pharaoh’s dream through literal being (cows, ears of wheat) is time. In principle, we cannot experience or present time directly, but always only indirectly ‘in’ the change from day to night and ‘in’ the movement of the hands of the clock. Time is the meaning of these literal processes of being, showing itself ‘in’ them without itself ever becoming a literally statable ‘thing’. Thus, time is to a certain extent that which is not a thing as such, which we understood in an original interpretation of immediately given being. Yet the passing of time is not only what we originally interpret, but also builds at the same time the universal condition of the possibility of each concrete interpretation and of each contentful understanding. For this reason, transience and the temporal dimensions of past, present and future, which are grounded in transience, are understood alongside in each act of understanding. However, understanding does not exhaust itself herein and it would be misleading to understand understanding only very generally as the understanding of time, for understanding is never



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general and wholesale but always concrete and specific. In Pharaoh’s dream, it is thus not a matter of time as such, but rather of two times seven years, not more nor less, which stand, moreover, in a particular order: first comes the ‘good’ time and then comes the ‘bad’ time. Understanding the dream concretely means, then, adequately understanding these concrete determinations of time. Here Pharaoh falls short. He understands the order that first brings the abundance and then the hardship only as a reassuring reprieve, letting the next seven years pass without worry before having to face the hardship. Joseph opens a different perspective: ‘For the period of blessing that has been promised us not only means a reprieve, a time for catching one’s breath in order to bear up under the ordeal, but also allows room for precaution.’ How ‘a great and wonderful thing’ is not the ‘precaution, which in the end is even capable of turning disaster into blessing! And how gracious is God that he grants the king this view far ahead into time through his dreams’. ‘For the fourteen is one time, just as it is two times seven, and it begins not in the middle but at the beginning, which is today, and today is the day for viewing the whole.’ Pharaoh understands the dream, but Joseph understands once again differently what is understood, and only thereby adequately. The dream does not seek to open some ‘neutral’ knowledge of a future whose meaning is fixed from the outset, so that Pharaoh would have to follow the course of events only as a knower, but an otherwise uninvolved observer. The dream does not seek, then, to convey any foreknowledge of a necessity for which the only difference is whether or not one knows in advance what will necessarily happen anyway. Rather, the dream wants to mean something to ­Pharaoh – ­that is, to move him through knowledge to action (precaution). In this sense, Joseph understands that the true meaning of the dream consists in the demand not merely to acknowledge gratefully the achieved ‘view of the whole’ as a granted ‘reprieve’, but in deriving new meaning from it, which ‘in the end is even capable of turning disaster into blessing’. Understanding the dream adequately means, then, for Joseph, not simply translating it into an accurate foreknowledge of the future, but above all understanding which intention is connected with granting human being this foreknowledge. In the case of Pharaoh, this means concretely that the dreamlike foreknowledge was granted to him as a precaution so that he himself may take precautions from the beginning and not simply passively let happen what will happen anyway. Here, the precaution relates not to the literal happening predicted by the dream, for the literal is ­unalterable – ­that is, the seven years of abundance and the seven years of hardship will come. But the meaning of this literal happening is not unalterable in the same way. The literal abundance and hardship can be appropriated by prudent precaution so that the abundance can be used to mitigate the hardship. Joseph makes this clear to the ruler of Egypt, who, out of gratitude, raises Joseph to the highest official

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of Egypt who, as a precaution, is asked to save the abundance in large granaries in order to counter the subsequent hardship. To be sure, Joseph understands or intuits even more. He understands that the hardship and the prudent ­precaution – ­with which the hardship in Egypt will be countered thanks to his interpretation of the d ­ ream – ­will also lead Jacob to Egypt in the end. In other words, the headstrong cow will take the yoke upon itself and plough the field of Egypt, for the cow has heard the call of its child. Joseph understands this by interpreting Pharaoh’s dream in terms of the distant and not so distant future. He thereby resembles his father who, as one reads in the novel, was ‘walking on transparent ground made up of infinite layers of crystal leading down into fathomless depths and brightly lit by lamps hung in between’. Yet for Joseph it is the layers of meaning of the future that become transparent to him.

Interpretation of God In the ‘dream interpretation’, which is narrated by the Joseph novel in detail as a dialogue between Joseph and Pharaoh, it has become clear how no genuine historical and narrative interpretation that recognizes a unity of meaning of past, present and future is possible without ‘reason of God’. Conversely, an adequate understanding of ‘God’ is possible only on the basis of an understanding of understanding. The insight that the art of interpretation cannot be attributed to human being alone, but instead is to be conceived as a gift of God is complemented by the insight that the divine dimension exhibited by the interpretative understanding of meaning can for its part only be clarified on the basis of an understanding of understanding. It is thus consistent that the word ‘God’, which Joseph employs repeatedly during his dream interpretation, itself becomes a theme following the interpretation. The dream interpretation transitions into an interpretation of God as Pharaoh directs the question to Joseph: ‘You say “god”’. ‘You’ve said it several times now. Which god do you mean? Since you are from Zahi and from Amu, I assume that you mean the bull of the field that in the East is called Baal, the lord’ (1159). Pharaoh’s question implicitly points to the fact, which is fundamental for every interpretation of God, that ‘God’ is firstly only a word, which leads one to ask in a non-­trivial manner how this word ought to be understood concretely. It is obvious that the question cannot be settled simply by referring to an empirical object that the word designates. This becomes clear precisely in those cases when this appears to be done. If by ‘God’, for instance, the bull of the field is meant, then what is spoken of literally is firstly a bull of the field, to which is attributed, in a further step that is not easy to understand, the property of being a ‘god’ or of embodying a ‘god’, which is called ‘Baal’ in the East.



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Even in the case of a ‘divine’ bull, the relation between being and meaning, between literal objectivity and linguistic meaning is fundamentally different from the case of stones, houses or ordinary bulls. For this reason, one cannot simply distinguish between ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief’ as though one either believes or does not believe in ‘God’ – because evidently the meaning of the word ‘God’ is not uncontroversial such that it could simply be presupposed. The question ‘Which god do you mean?’ thus differs essentially from the question, which appears similar at first glance, ‘Which house do you mean?’ That is why human talk of God is frequently confused, if not downright absurd. But precisely in this peculiar confusion, an inner kinship is expressed between understanding of God and human self-­understanding, for also the articulation of human self-­understanding turns out confused often enough. What we can say about the meaning of our life, about the ‘highest values’, about ‘happiness’, ‘freedom’ or ‘self-­fulfilment’, appears, next to the clear determination with which we speak about objective being, peculiarly clumsy and hazy. Thus, we frequently turn to commonly used phrases that, having been approved by convention, ought to conceal the emptiness of the lack of understanding. That is precisely why one may say with good reason that humans, in their confused understanding of God, always express also their confused self-­understanding, and that, by the same token, enlightening their self-­understanding means enlightening their understanding of God. Of course, the ruler of the Egyptian empire knows the confusion of human conceptions of God, of which there are countless examples in his dominion. In the face of the nonsense of folk belief, what matters for him is firstly a critical distancing: ‘my own talents tell me that unbelief is almost more important than belief. Belief requires a great deal of unbelief, for how can anyone believe what is true as long as he believes nonsense?’ (1181). This sober and incorruptible critique of the ‘nonsense’ of many conceptions of God is rooted for Pharaoh in the passionate interest in a true and adequate understanding of God: ‘Pharaoh knows his way around among the gods of mankind. He must know all this and test it, and like a gold washer sluice his kernel of truth out of all the absurdity, in order to perfect the teaching of his revered father’ (1159). Once again, it would have perhaps been more obvious to have staged Pharaoh’s understanding of God from the outset as an ‘antithesis’ to Joseph’s Abrahamic understanding of God. But also here, the Joseph novel emphasizes a basic affinity between Pharaoh and Joseph, in which the divergence of understanding will not be sketched in until later. The novel grasps this affinity as a ‘God-­concern’, which Pharaoh and Joseph share in a distinguished manner: ‘How odd to think that the ruling passion of this coddled ­lad – w ­ ho obviously accepted the luxury of his birth as a matter of c­ ourse – ­was said to be a longing to know the Most High; and as he stood there off to one side, Abraham’s great-­grandson, looking around, was amazed at how this God-­concern could appear on

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earth in such different humanity, so remote and so alien each to the other’ (1152).9 With Pharaoh, the God-­concern exhibits two aspects that are clearly distinct from each other. As political ruler, he regards the understanding of God firstly as a means and point of leverage to govern his subjects. So he says to Joseph: ‘Human beings are a helpless lot. They do not know how to do anything out of themselves, and if left to themselves not the least thing ever occurs to them. They are always merely imitating the gods, and as they picture them, so they act. Purify “god” and you purify human being’ (1182–3). Pharaoh knows that human life is imitation and succession, even and specifically when humans live away in their naïve pride in being first and unique. This senselessness only leads to humans playing their role ­poorly – ­that is, ­unoriginally – s­ ince they unfreely repeat the pattern they are not conscious of, because they lack understanding. If one now calls this pattern, which must be repeated by those who do not understand their own life, the respective ‘god’ that governs their life, then the result is Pharaoh’s paternalistic formula: ‘Purify “god” and you purify human being.’ But what model is followed by the ruler who wants to ‘purify’ the models of his subjects? The question leads to the second aspect of Pharaoh’s God-­concern. It relates not to the ‘gods’ of the people, but to his own understanding of God. The clear and sober language of knowledge of something other, which understands the other human only as a means and not also as an end, gives way to the intimate and confused language of self-­knowledge. This transition is designated by Pharaoh with an especially intimate word: God is his ‘father’ whose teaching he must perfect. In Joseph’s presence, Pharaoh speaks repeatedly of God as his ‘father’. He accordingly decides to adopt a new name, for it is important to assume ‘a more truthful name, one that bears the name of the one and ­only – ­the name Ikhnatôn, in f­ act – s­ o that what I am called may be pleasing to my father’ (1179). How is this understanding of God as ‘father’ to be understood? Does Pharaoh understand himself when he speaks in this way about God and himself? Or is he speaking instead as if in a dream that still needs to be interpreted? Joseph will interpret Pharaoh’s dreamlike understanding of God in the same way he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream earlier. In answer to the question which ‘god’ Joseph means and whether it is the one called ‘Baal’, Abraham’s grandchild responds: ‘My fathers, the God-­dreamers, . . . made their covenant with another Lord’ (1159). This negation, which initially relates only to ‘Baal’, leaves entirely undetermined which ‘Lord’ Joseph’s forefathers made their covenant with. Determining this will be the aim of the interpretation of God in a more specific sense that now follows. The kinship that has already been mentioned between the interpretation of God and the earlier interpretation of the dream is reinforced once more by the peculiar formulation with which Joseph designates his fathers as



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‘God-­dreamers’. According to the Joseph novel, the true understanding of God always encompasses two moments: the dream of God, which forms the basis of the understanding, and the interpretation of God, which clarifies the meaning of the dream and raises it to true understanding. In the novel, Pharaoh and Joseph are repeatedly designated as ‘dreamers’. Both are moved, moreover, by the ‘God-­concern’, which appears ‘on earth in such different humanity, so remote and so alien each to the other’. This dreaming God-­concern forms, then, the common foundation for the conversation that follows, which seeks to interpret the confused dream of God that does not understand itself and to raise it to the light of meaningful understanding. If God is the highest, then He also makes the highest demands of the interpreting understanding. One of the most profound points of the Joseph novel is that the Egyptian interpretation of God does not begin with an evident confusion or a patent dream, but rather with what appears as the complete opposite: clarity and wakefulness. As commonplace as it is to talk of the ‘light’ of truth, which ‘enlightens’ obscure confusion, it is remarkably rarely asked whether the meaning of this prevalent metaphor of light is itself clearly and distinctly understood, or instead remains, upon closer examination, unclear and dreamlike. In this way, ‘evidence’ of the understanding must itself be enlightened and made accessible to the interpreting understanding. Pharaoh almost revels in always new songs in praise of light: ‘Blessed brightness that created the eye that it might greet you, both that which sees and all that is seen, the world as it comes to itself, that knows itself only through you, O light, O loving difference’ (1186). The lyrical sway of this hymn of light is evidently grounded on the suggestive interleaving of literal and symbolic meaning of ‘light’. Where does the border run exactly between being and meaning? And how is the symbolic meaning to be interpreted more specifically if it differs from the literal being of sunny daylight? Through the concluding phrase that calls upon light as ‘loving difference’, the Joseph novel establishes, moreover, a connection of thoughts to Jacob’s confused wedding night. Here, like there, the overly blissful or self-­certain insistence on difference is a symptom of not having made a difference and not having understood sufficiently. With Jacob, there was a literal obscurity that his understanding could not penetrate; with Pharaoh, by contrast, there is a literal brightness, characterized by a dreamlike obscurity, because the meaning of his overly blissful taking sides with light is only partially understandable to him. For Pharaoh, light and darkness, day and night, build a simple dualism: ‘For every day is a time of blessing and a feast of joy after the cursed time of night, when he turns himself away and the world sinks into self-­oblivion’ (1187). For Pharaoh, light is divine because it is cleanly separated from its opposite: day is unambiguously the ‘time of blessing’, while night is unambiguously the time of ‘curse’. The divine would be similar, then, to a day without night. Yet precisely because it is

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so neatly distinguished, the difference goes astray. God differs from all being precisely by not being ‘something’, not even the light or the good, but by being the whole. Joseph is prudent enough to respond to Pharaoh’s enthusiasm for the ‘blissful brightness’ first by contributing a story: Pharaoh’s ‘golden speech reminds me of another of our stories, the one about Adam and Eve, the first ones, who were terrified by the first night. They actually believed that ‘the earth would become formless and void again. For it is light that separates things and establishes each in its place.’ ‘But God gave them two stones.’ ‘He rubbed them together for them, and behold, fire sprang from them, . . . making order of the night for them’ (1186). Outwardly, Joseph responds to Pharaoh’s ‘golden speech’, though he withholds the unity of meaning of the biblical creation narrative in which his story is imbedded, and which the reader of the Joseph novel must supplement. While this narrative designates light as the first thing God creates through the Word (‘Let there be light!’), this means at the same time a clear disempowerment of created light in the face of the Creator and the creative Word. Now the sublimity of the Creator towards His creation resonates in Joseph’s story: while they are, as creatures, situated within creation with its change of day and night, humans ­are – ­as the image of God endowed with l­ anguage – a­ t the same time independent in the face of creation. The story shows the latter point, not without humour, as the spirit of human being, w ­ hich – ­instructed by G ­ od – u ­ nderstands how to extract light from the night-­side of nature. Pharaoh does not understand this point of the story that is half withheld, half merely alluded to. Yet he senses vaguely Joseph’s reservation, such that he replies somewhat impatiently: ‘What a shame you have not also told of the happiness of those first ones in the morning, when the whole god shined upon them again and drove the dark and monstrous one from the world’ (1186). For Pharaoh, the sun shines as the ‘whole god’. Such a manner of speaking may still have symbolic meaning, but evidently also literal meaning, such that being and meaning, letter and spirit become entangled, once again, in a dreamlike manner that is half understood at best. Joseph’s reserve prompts Pharaoh to urge expressly for the clarification of the understanding of God: ‘let us speak seriously and not playingly of most serious matters. Your g ­ od – ­who is he and what is it about him? You have neglected, or avoided, to provide me clear information about him. Your father’s grandfather, you say, discovered him? That sounds as if he had found the one true god. Can it be that, at so great a distance and so long before me, a man discerned that the one true god is the solar disk, the creator of that which sees and all that is seen, my eternal father in the heavens?’ (1191–2). Again, the Joseph novel turns to Abraham’s discovery of God. The central thoughts of the exposition are repeated once more, a final time, marking a compositional climax towards the end of the novel ­that – ­as the



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conclusion of the novel will ­show – p ­ oints beyond itself and the stories of the novel. There is, however, one difference: the earlier expositions of Abraham’s discovery were anticipated by the narrator of the novel, who appealed to the reader while commenting and reflecting. Now the new understanding of God is narrated as Joseph’s exposition and reflection that he directs at Pharaoh. This brings the narrator together with Joseph, and the reader together with Pharaoh. Pharaoh’s identification of God with the sun, his sentence ‘that the one true god is the solar disk’, should not be understood simplistically. Then the critical ‘correction’ that Joseph develops would lose its urgency because it, too, would be simplistic. The objection that God is not the sun can be understood in the sense that He is not the sun because He is something different, a different ‘Something’. Or the negation can be understood much more subtly: God is not the sun because God ‘is’ not at all in the same way that the sun or any other objective reality, any ‘something’, is, however great and overwhelming it may be (like the sun). This gives rise to an antimony that can no longer ‘simply’ be avoided. It seems the understanding of God would need either to understand God’s being in analogy to objective being (e.g., the sun), or to negate His objective being such that it becomes questionable to what extent He ‘is’ at all, instead of not being. If one wants to avoid the latter, then the only way out seems to be Pharaoh’s: to understand God as a pre-­eminent being in the sense, for example, of the sun, which, as the ‘eternal father in the heavens’, is the creator of sight and being seen, knowing and being known.10 ‘No, Pharaoh’, Joseph responds: ‘He did not stop at the solar disk. He was a wanderer, and even the sun was but a way station on his arduous wandering’ (1192). Abraham resisted the temptation to worship the sun in its power of being: ‘You are powerful’, he said to Shamash–Maruduk– Baal, ‘and terrible is the power of your blessing and curse. And yet, worm that I am, there is something within me that exceeds you and that warns me not to confuse the witness with that to which it bears witness. The greater the witness, the greater the fault if I allow myself to be seduced to worship it instead of that to which it witnesses. The witness is godlike, but not God. In my pondering and striving I am likewise a witness who reaches beyond the sun to that which more powerfully bears witness than does the sun itself, and its fire is greater than the sun’s fire’ (1193). Everything that has being bears witness to that which has being, but not in the manner of witnessing, yet which by no means lacks being. On the contrary, its ‘fire is greater than the sun’s fire’. How should we understand this? Firstly, God as the ‘highest’ sets in motion a constant outbidding of negation, which contents itself with nothing positively given, even if it is the sun that outshines everything. Instead, it strives into the ‘infinite’. In this regard, God is the sublime which strictly demarcates itself from everything finite and thus also from everything human: ‘“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as

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the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts”’ (Isaiah 55: 8–9). There is, to be sure, the danger that an understanding of God that seeks to bestow honour upon God by raising God into the absolute sublime height ‘beyond being’, where He is to reside in an ‘inaccessible light’, undermines this understanding to such an extent that it converts into a simple non-­understanding. At best, God must dissipate in the end into an ‘idea’ or a ‘principle’ without life. The insight goes further in that the movement of the constant outbidding of everything that is given is accomplished by human thinking. Humans realize that the highest is sublime over everything finite, so that they, in virtue of their own spirit that knows to transcend every positively given limit, seek God in the infinite. Yet this infinite is not a ‘thing’, not an ‘object’ that would lie infinitely far away from human being, but rather the peculiar restless infinity of one’s own spirit that faces itself, as it were, in the understanding of God. But, in this way, there arises with the first movement of God’s radical shift away an equally radical counter-­movement, which does not take away from the first movement, but leads it to its true goal of learning to understand the infinite distance at once as infinite closeness. Thus, Joseph says to Pharaoh: ‘The sun is distant, probably three hundred and sixty thousand miles distant, and yet its rays are here among us. But Who directed its course is more distant than distant and yet close to the same ­extent – c­ loser than close. Distant or close, both is equal to Him, for He has neither space nor time’ (1196). God is ‘more distant than distant’ and, to the same extent, ‘closer than close’. This is not an empty phrase that is supposed to conceal a lack of understanding of God, but rather a sober and clear explication of the Abrahamic understanding of God, which is essentially an understanding of understanding. What is ‘closest’ to humans is understanding through language, which makes them into humans. That is why it is the closest, most familiar and most intimately known. Anything else that ought to come ‘close’ to them can do this only insofar as they understand it, since everything that is not understood remains alien and distant. Understanding itself is ‘closer than close’ because it is the root of human closeness. To be sure, understanding itself is initially un-­understandable to humans. In this way, what is closer than close to them becomes to the same extent more distant than distant, and the commandment ‘Know thyself!’ becomes the ceaseless unrest of human existence. On his wandering, Abraham makes the liberating discovery that the dialectic of closeness and distance on the side of human being is met by an exact corresponding dialectic of distance and closeness on the side of the one and true God. Humans may know themselves in God because God knows Himself in them. Joseph explains this to Pharaoh as the spiritual essence of human being. In response to Pharaoh’s question as to whether Abraham did not, in



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fact, ‘stop at the sun’ but instead ‘forged beyond it’, Joseph states: ‘Yes, in spirit’, for ‘in the flesh he was but a worm upon earth, weaker than most of those beside and above him. And yet he refused to bow low and worship even one of these phenomena, for they were work and witness just as he was. All being is work, and before work there is spirit to which it witnesses. How could I commit such great folly and burn incense to a piece of work, however powerful? For I am a knowing witness, whereas the others only are that, yet do not know it. Is there not something in me of that to which all being bears witness, of the being of the being that is greater than all its works and is outside them? It is outside the world, and it is the space of the world, and so the world is surely not its space’ (1196). Humans, as the sole ‘worms upon earth’, who know that they are work and witness, at the same time know that their knowing spirit in them is witness ‘to which all being bears witness, of the being of the being that is greater than all its works and is outside them’. This ‘being greater’ must not be understood in a quantitative sense, since it means a difference to everything that can be measured and compared in any sense. A ‘work’ is an object in measurable space and in quantifiable time, a thing that can consequently be compared with other things. God, who is ‘greater than all His works’, is thus, as Joseph says, distant or close, past or future or present: it ‘is equal to Him, for He has neither space nor time’. He is thus the space and the time of the world, such that the world cannot be His space and the quantifiable time not His time.

Historical and Narrative Truth The understanding of God that Joseph unfolds before Pharaoh is new to the Egyptian ruler, and at the same time familiar. Similar to the preceding dream interpretation, he recognizes the soundness of Joseph’s interpretation. This time there is no need for the hint that he already knew himself, in a vague, semi-­conscious form, what is told to him. Pharaoh now recalls that he knew, and at the same time becomes aware of why he forgot what he knew. For Pharaoh, the understanding of God is above all a teaching with respect to his people. This gives rise to the peculiar dialectic that the teaching is too easily limited to what is teachable with the chance of success. Pharaoh designates himself in this sense as ‘responsible for the triumph of the doctrine, that all human beings accept it, yet he is afraid that improving and purifying the doctrine until it is nothing but purest truth might mean to make it unteachable’ (1194). This fear of a truth that may be ‘unteachable’ leads, then, to the repression of true knowledge, for already the teaching that not the image of the divine sun but rather that which is depicted in the image ought to be ‘worshiped’ is hard: ‘it is a heavy demand upon human being, and of a hundred men, twelve understand it’ (1194). Yet Joseph’s understanding of

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God takes such a radical step beyond this ‘demand’ that the truth becomes so demanding for Pharaoh that it amounts to what is ‘unteachable’: ‘But if the teacher now says: “For the sake of truth I must require you to make an effort even beyond this, however sorry I feel for you in your simplicity. For the image is the image of the image, and bears witness to a witness. When you burn incense to the image and sing its praise, it is not the real solar disk high in the heavens that you ought to ­mean – ­not that either, but rather the Lord of the Atôn, who is the fire in it, and who directs its course.” That is going too far and is too much for any d ­ octrine – a­ nd of those twelve, not one will understand it anymore’ (1194–5). Pharaoh understands why Abraham became a wanderer, turning away from the settled ways of understanding of the sedentary in order to be able to think an ‘unteachable’ truth: ‘Your ancient father, soothsayer, had it easy, although he made it difficult for himself. He could make it difficult just as he pleased and strove for truth for his own sake and the sake of his pride, for he was only a wanderer. I, however, am a king and teacher, and dare not think what I cannot teach. And such a king soon learns not even to think what is unteachable’ (1195). How simple and obvious it would have been in this passage for the Joseph novel to distance itself ironically from Pharaoh’s anxious worry concerning the ‘teachability’ of the truth, and to take sides with Abraham’s radical seriousness and lonely truthfulness. Such an irony and taking sides are surely present, but it is essential for the arrangement of the Joseph novel that, in the concluding part of the stories of the Egyptian Joseph, such irony and taking sides is fashioned with restraint. Joseph the grandson is himself a ‘teacher’, and interpreter and mediator of Abraham’s original discovery. That is why his interpretation of God in the conversation with Pharaoh is framed, in analogy to the dream interpretation, as an art of reminding the other of something forgotten. Thus, Pharaoh states: ‘But in my silence I forgot it. Yet behold, what does the father do for his beloved son? He sends him a messenger and interpreter of ­dreams – ­who interprets his dreams, dreams from below and dreams from above, dreams of imperial and heavenly s­ ignificance – t­ hat he might awaken within Pharaoh what he already knows and interpret for him what has been said to him’ (1195–6). The motif that recurs in the novel numerous times, that Joseph is blessed with ‘blessing from below and blessing from above’, experiences here a significant variation. The blessing and the dreams of ‘heavenly significance’ from above are surely the most important and must be taken seriously; yet Joseph’s special gift consists in mediating the above with the below, the radical ‘demand’ of transcendence with the dimension ‘of imperial significance’, of teaching and politics. That is why the Lord led Joseph as a calf onto the Egyptian field of death in order to compel the headstrong cow to follow and to wear the yoke. The Abrahamic understanding of God, the ‘purity’ of which Jacob wants to carefully safeguard, ought to be mediated with the ‘below’, which



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Jacob loathes. What in the beginning was the family affair of a small clan of wandering shepherds, is the true understanding of God that ought to find its way, step by step, into the world and become an affair of humanity, even if this entails initially a clear depreciation of purity and s­ ternness – a­ depreciation that will make necessary a further demarcation from the world, a renewed wandering through the desert of purity and sternness, that is, the exodus from Egypt initiated by Moses, which corresponds like a mirror image to the entrance into Egypt initiated by Joseph.11 In this sense, the original text tells of a dream in which God appears to Jacob and promises to make of him in Egypt a great nation: ‘So He said, “I am God, the God of your father; do not fear to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there. I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph will put his hand on your eyes”’ (Gen. 46: 3–4). Abraham’s original discovery thus sets a history in motion, structured by the rhythmic alternation of intensive purity and explanatory expansion. That is why it is important for the one who walks in the ‘footsteps’ of the earlier ones, and thus stands in the middle of this story, to recognize the signs of the time and to know in each case which ‘hour’ has struck. Is it time to give up, for the sake of purity, the ‘out-­dated’ teaching that has become overly self-­evident and deformed through compromises, or is it instead time to secure and to explicate in the present a still barely understood anticipation of the future? What is demanded historically or narratively can be missed, then, in two ways: by turning excessively to the past and holding on to what has been overcome, and by turning excessively to the future and raving over what is yet to come. Truth thus gains a historical and narrative dimension. Not only what was once true, but is no longer true, is untrue in the now of the present; also what is going to be true one day, but is not yet true, is untrue in the now of the present. Historical and narrative untruth of the untimely thus knows two shapes: the out-­dated and the premature. That the precocious and premature can be just as untrue as the timeworn and outdated is so essential to the concept of a genuinely historical and narrative truth inscribed in the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel that it places the Egyptian ruler ultimately in the wrong by placing such a premature truth in his mouth: ‘God is immaterial, as is His sunshine, He is spirit, and Pharaoh shall teach you to worship Him in spirit and truth’ (1197). The last phrase reveals far into the future. The original text reports that ‘Joseph’s bones’ that were brought from Egypt are buried on a piece of land near Shechem that Jacob once purchased.12 The Gospel of John adds a ‘well’ of Jacob’s, where the scene between Jesus and the Samaritan takes place, which is so meaningful for the Christian understanding of God.13 The Samaritan says to Jesus, the Jew: ‘“Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “You worship what you do not know;

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we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. . . . God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth”’ (John 4: 20–4). By having Pharaoh ‘cite’ these sentences out of the distant future, the Joseph novel characterizes him unmistakably as an ‘anticipating’ and ‘premature Christian’. But, as true as the sentences will be for the Joseph novel with Jesus, they are untrue with Pharaoh because they are untimely. First the historical development is needed, which connects to Joseph and calls itself ‘Judaism’ after his brother Judah. In this way, the sentences acquire their peculiar t­ruth – t­hat is, their historical and narrative truth (a circumstance that is also staged unmistakably in the Gospel of John by the careful staging at Jacob’s well and at Joseph’s grave). With Pharaoh, by contrast, the ‘anticipating’ sentences are expression of a rapture, and the Joseph novel presents their inner instability as ‘all too blissful’ impotence. Thus, Pharaoh says to Joseph at the end of the interpretation of God: ‘For my words are not my words, but the words of my Father Who sent me, so that all may become one in light and in love, just as I and the Father are one.’ And the novel adds: ‘He now smiled an all too blissful smile and at the same time turned pale as death.’ He ‘closed his eyes, and remained that way, standing erect but obviously no longer present’ (1198). In this way, as Thomas Mann states in his essay on the Joseph novel, Pharaoh is ‘the mythical prototype of those, who are on the right way, but not the right ones for that way’. This is formulated similarly in the Joseph novel, yet in such a subtle, indirect manner that Pharaoh does not realize it. In a sense, Joseph holds a mirror up to Pharaoh by narrating to him the story of Esau and Jacob, who ‘betrayed’ the firstborn for his father’s blessing. Joseph concludes his story with the point already familiar to the reader of the Joseph novel: Esau ‘did not fare well inside the tent, and as an imposter he was received, the wrong right ­son – ­for aided by a mother’s guile the right wrong son had long since come before him. His was only a curse, a desert ban, for nothing else was left after the blessing was bestowed’ (1165). Pharaoh appears amused and reveals an awareness of the fact that the story is the narrative composition of a meaningful insight: ‘No, what a baroque story!’ ‘The wrong right son, you ­say – ­and the wrong son, who was the right one? That’s not b ­ ad – b ­ oth bewildering and witty. May a higher kindness preserve every man from being right and yet wrong’ (1165). To be sure, he does not notice that precisely what he wishes to be preserved from has already come to pass, for he plays the role of the wrong right one, whose truth is untrue because it is untimely, without realizing that he is playing this role. In this way, the Joseph novel shows again that the mediation of truth and history happens noticeably in stories that are narrated, and which can thereby sharpen the consciousness for the ‘character role’ of each individual



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existence. Pharaoh understands this, but ultimately Joseph understands it, once again, better and differently, because he was instructed by the narrative wisdom of the stories he inherited from Abraham and which are alien to Pharaoh. To be sure, the end of the novel will show that Joseph is also a narrative embodiment of those ‘who are on the right way, but not the right ones for that way’.

Play and Allusion At the beginning of the line of thought pursued here was the thesis that, in the Joseph novel, what matters is presented more specifically as the blessing, whereby the more specific meaning of ‘blessing’ is to emerge as the line of thought is unfolded: the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph will make clear in the end how to understand the ‘blessing’ adequately. At the end of the stories of Joseph are Jacob’s blessings, which mark at the same time the end of Genesis: ‘And Jacob called his sons and said, “Gather together, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the last days”’ (Gen. 49: 1). Jacob blesses by telling the blessed son what will face him in the future, for being blessed means having a future. Yet this means, in turn, that having a future is not a given. This becomes immediately clear from the fact that the s­ entence – ­that Jacob tells his sons their future in b ­ lessing – ­is not easy to understand. Does it concern an already past future, for the history is told from a standpoint for which what is still future in the narrative logic has already happened, which means Jacob’s foretelling blessings are in fact only events of a later time projected back? Have the late narrators and editors of Genesis merely put in the ‘prophetic’ mouth of Jacob what they already knew from the later history and story of the Jews? The Joseph novel, which not only narrates but likewise reflects and comments upon what is narrated, knows this question and has a response: ‘For what about those clever fellows who claim that Jacob’s blessings were written after the time of Joshua and are to be read as “predictions from the event”? One can only shrug one’s shoulders at t­ hat . . . ­because we are present at the dying father’s bedside and can hear his words with our own ears’ (1470–1). It is obvious that the last phrase should be understood as thoroughly ironic. It is less clear, to be sure, how to understand whether this irony places the ‘clever fellows’ not in the right but in the wrong. Doesn’t the i­ronic – t­hat is, l­iteral – n ­ onsensical assurance of the narrator with regard to being present to ‘hear’ Jacob’s blessings admit of only the one conclusion that, overall, talk of ‘blessing’ and of ‘future’ in the Joseph novel is not really to be taken seriously, but ‘only’ ­ironically – ­that the novel appears in the end to be nothing more than a pretty and entertaining play with a fictional unity of meaning, which ought to be understood ironically and not literally and for this reason may not, and does not seek to, lay claim to ‘serious truth’?

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The Joseph novel is meant to show that things are different. It treats ironically what seems to be the only possible ‘seriousness’ of literal being in order to direct attention to a new kind of seriousness in the irony itself. What is evidently an ironically formulated insistence on the serious case of literalness seeks to treat not the seriousness, but rather the literalness, ironically. Of course, one should not thereby deny that there are ‘predictions from the event’ in a banal, meaningless sense. Consider the case of something happening and someone subsequently writing a predated note that minutely ‘prophesizes’ what happened. This note does not present any great challenge to the understanding, so in this case it is entirely appropriate to content oneself with the ‘revealing’ assessment of the literal course of events. That the circumstances can be completely different and incomparably more complex is revealed, however, by the story of the Fall, which likewise may be conceived as a ‘prediction from the event’. The fact that the conditio humana is shaped by being exposed to death, the pain of birth, the sweat of work and related things is translated narratively to the story of a past ‘Fall’, the result of which is supposed to be the present situation of humanity. Yet this narrative reflection upon the beginning of human history is not a trivial projection of present circumstances backwards into a ‘fictional’ past, for the simple reason that a meaningful human self-­knowledge gains shape in this ­reflection – a­ self-­knowledge that is possibly not at all conceivable without the narrative. For this reason, the narrative is not a pointless doubling of what the present knows anyway; rather, by means of the narrative, the present makes something clear to itself for the first time, which it is immediately conscious of, at most, obscurely, like in a dream. Moreover, the meaning of the narrative of the Fall does not consist merely in helping the present to an interpreting self-­knowledge by means of a narrated past. Rather, its true meaning consists in identifying a surplus in the past that points beyond the here and now of the present into the future. The story of the Fall, which tells of how things have not always been as they are now, is the narrative expression of a powerful hope that the present will not have the last ­word – ­a hope that the narrative alludes to in the formulation that one day an offspring of Eve ‘shall bruise’ the serpent’s head (Gen. 3: 15). In this sense, the Joseph novel also understands Jacob’s blessings not as simple ‘predictions from the event’ but, rather, as interpretative self-­knowledge of Abraham’s heirs, for they make a surplus explicit that reaches well beyond the foreseeable future of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt, the wandering through the desert, the settlement of Galilee, the kingdom and the Babylonian Exile. The Joseph novel interprets this surplus in the sense that the reason the original text narrates the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not so



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much to give its own present a legitimate ‘ground’, but rather to express the hope in them that the present will not have the last word. One may take as a sign of this ‘surplus’ the enigmatic fact that Jacob passes on his inherited blessing not to Joseph but to Judah. A ‘prediction from the event’ is present insofar as the later heirs of Abraham designate themselves as ‘Jews’, so the self-­designation of the later narrator is reflected in the name of Jacob’s chosen son. But if it is only a matter of giving the later development a legitimizing ‘prehistory’, then why is the decisive ‘forefather’ (Judah) only a marginal figure in the narrated stories? Why is he the fourth in the series of sons, and moreover a son of Leah, who was cunningly forced upon Jacob against his will during the wedding night? Why is Joseph and not Judah Jacob’s favourite son, of whom the original text has the most to tell? The Joseph novel interprets this puzzling fact in the composition of the original text as an ambiguity in the meaning of Judah’s blessing through Jacob: ‘Judah, you are the one!’ (1471; Gen. 49: 8). Initially, by means of the surprising, indeed improbable, nature of the choice, the power of the blessing stands out all the more clearly: ‘Yes, he was the ­one – ­this tormented man who felt himself totally unworthy.’ ‘In deepest shame Judah bent low for his b ­ lessing – b ­ ut then what a strange thing happened! As the oil of promise flowed from the horn upon his head, in equal measure to the high solemnity of the occasion, his feeling grew more secure, found manifest consolation, and spoke to himself with growing pride’: ‘blessing drips upon my head. God have mercy on m ­ e – I­ am the one!’ (1471). Here, the blessing is not a response to a distinction that was already at hand before; rather, it shows its power and validity precisely in distinguishing originally, so that the blessed one first becomes what he is by means of the blessing. At the same time, in the original text and likewise (in much more detail) in the Joseph novel, Jacob does not stop with blessing Judah as a ‘lion’ who grew up on ‘prey’. In the end, ‘in blessing Judah, Jacob intended no such brutal heroics. The hero at whom he was aiming, whom he had long ago brought about in his mind, was not of that splendidly roaring sort that weakness has a fondness ­for – ­no, Shiloh was his name.’ For Judah, ‘this name of promise was totally ­new – i­ t came as a surprise to the entire assembly, and they all listened in amazement. Only one person among them all already knew of it and had been waiting eagerly to hear it’ (1472). Through the carefully staged amazement, the Joseph novel makes clear that Jacob’s blessing of Judah in its promise encompasses a completely different promise, and in its future also means a completely different future. To everyone, this promise and future of a new ‘hero’ is entirely un-­understandable: ‘Only one person among them all already knew of it and had been waiting eagerly to hear it.’ In the Joseph novel, the role of receiving from Jacob an explanation of the meaning of the other promise and future falls upon Thamar: ‘She was listening to the world, and promise lay hidden in it, both early and

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late, a vast, multibranched history filled with stories through which the purple thread of assurance and expectation ran from once to once, from the most erstwhile to the most ­future . . . ­the Star of Peace. This was the star of Shiloh, the Son of Man, the son of election of whom it was promised to the seed of woman that he would bruise the head of the serpent’ (1271). With this explanation, the Joseph novel makes clear that it interprets the surplus in Jacob’s Judah blessing messianically. Jacob reaches out not only to the Jewish present in which the original text is written, but well beyond into a future that is no future, but rather what is ‘the most future’ – that is, to a future that cannot be superseded by any future. The most future is the response and the counterpart to ‘the most erstwhile’ – that is, to the past that is not preceded by any time, which means the ‘final step “backward”’ because transient time and the narratability of the world have their origin in the Fall. The Joseph novel discovers the messianic surplus not only in Jacob’s blessing for Judah, but likewise in the blessing for Joseph. Jacob first summarizes in it what the stories of Joseph have already shown in detail: ‘Not without rapture will his name be remembered, for he succeeded where few ever succeed: to find favour before God and man. That is a rare blessing, for one usually has the choice of pleasing either God or the world; but to him was given the spirit of charming mediation, so that he pleased both.’ The motif of the mediating unification of a blessing from above and of a blessing from below here resonates in varied form. Jacob now makes unmistakably clear, however, that Joseph (similar to Pharaoh) is assigned the role of a premature, anticipating precursor: ‘Be not proud, my child’, for ‘it is a lovely blessing, but not the highest or most stern. Behold, your precious life lies in all its truth before the eyes of a dying man. It was play and allusion, a confiding, cordial state of favour, hinting at salvation and yet not fully summoned and admitted to true seriousness’ (1476). The Joseph novel and the Joseph stories that the novel re-­narrates are play and allusion: they hint ‘at salvation’, anticipate it without being ‘fully summoned and admitted to true seriousness’. The later ‘salvation’ is understandable only when seen in the context of the earlier allusion and echo, which is cited and transformed in what is later. Historical truth of the later accordingly requires the ‘allusion’, the anticipation that, strictly speaking, is premature and historically untrue, yet prepares the later truth and enters it as a narrative and historical moment. By the same token, the earlier is understandable in its narrative meaning as allusion and echo only when it is seen and interpreted ‘anachronistically’ in the messianic light of what is later, which it points to in preparation. Joseph’s life is not only play and allusion; in the end, he also knows that it is. Thus, he says to his brothers, who, following Jacob’s death, fall on their knees before Pharaoh’s powerful and splendid governor and beg for forgiveness: ‘Am I as God? In the land below, it is said, I am as Pharaoh,



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and though he is called god, he is but a poor, dear thing. But in asking for my forgiveness, you have not, it appears, really understood the whole story we are in.’ And here, on the last and closing page of the Joseph novel, Joseph incorporates Jacob, too, in the play: ‘for he, too, was in the play, in God’s play’ (1491).

Conclusion

Making Present

Diagnosis of Time – Nihilism as Human Self-Belittlement – Abraham’s Legacy

Diagnosis of Time ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.’ The dialectic ambiguity of I-­saying, as shown by the line of thought pursued here, can initiate a process of self-­knowledge. Anyone says ‘I’ in a unique w ­ ay – ­but everyone does this. This fact is suitable for waking the I out of the delusion of a presumed familiarity with itself and to move it to wander, leaving behind its sedentariness in what is familiar in order to know itself. Such self-­knowledge overcomes the stubborn narrow-­mindedness of an I that understands its I-­saying exclusively in view of its isolated private I in the contingent here and now of its isolated existence. The universality of I-­saying decentres the isolated I and places it in an overarching unity. This unity is more specifically a historical and narrative unity that decentres the I firstly with regard to the past, by becoming aware that, in its speaking, thinking and acting, it is always already walking in the ‘footsteps’ of earlier times. In this way, as Thomas Mann formulates it, the individual I is divested of ‘the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’: its illusion of ‘being first and unique’ makes way to the alert historical and narrative consciousness of repeating a coined model on the stage of one’s own present. To be sure, if decentring through the past were the only possible expansion of the I, self-­knowledge could lay bare only its impotence in the face of the past’s infinitely deep and inexhaustible well. Yet this is where the new reflection sets i­n – t­hat the past is related to its repetition in what comes later just as much as this repetition is related to the past. What is earlier is repeated in the ­later – ­not mechanically, but rather varied in its better or worse understanding. The past that is oriented to its varying repetition in what is later in this way gains the character of what is incomplete, which

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sets history as history in motion in the first place. The incompleteness of the past is thus not merely at work in every present of history; it also pushes beyond every present into the future. In this way, historical and narrative self-­knowledge becomes conscious not only of how the human I is related essentially to the past that precedes and underlies it as its ground, but that, by the same token, the past is related to the respective human I in the sense that the incomplete and unsatisfied in the past makes a demand on the recollecting and understanding I. But the recollecting understanding can do justice to this demand only if it understands the past and itself in light of a future that history aims at in its temporal articulation. This double decentring of the human I that ‘stands open’ to the past and to the future is realized in the making present of understanding that must be achieved anew and originally again and again. In making present, the understanding reaching out to the unity of meaning of history becomes concrete in a human self-­understanding in today’s demands of the day. For this reason, human self-­knowledge is always historically situated and requires a distinct attentiveness to the signs of the time, a critical consciousness of ‘what the clock has struck’. In accordance with the double decentring of the I, there is, however, a double lapse of the making present in today’s demands of the day: ‘staying put’ in a past figure of spirit, which history has already progressed beyond, and the impatient and premature anticipation of a future for which the time is not yet ripe. Being concerned that one could lag behind the course of history by getting by with an understanding of self and world from y ­ esterday – ­Thomas Mann calls this the God-­concern: ‘The “God-­concern” is the worry of deeming that which was once right, but is no longer, to still be right and to live up to it in an anachronistic manner. It is the pious sensitivity for what is degenerate, out-­dated, internally outrun, which has become impossible, scandalous or, in the language of Israel, an “abomination”. It means listening intelligently to what the world spirit wants, to the new truth and necessity’ (1996, 198–9). Being that always remains identical with itself is dead and meaningless. For this reason, transience of being is a necessary condition for the world to be a meaningful, narratable and understandable reality. A world that develops historically and narratively requires not only that humans understand it, but that they, in understanding, keep pace with its historical and narrative development. If reality does not constantly remain the same but, rather, develops and is alive, then what was true yesterday becomes the untruth of today. In ‘listening intelligently to what the world spirit wants’, human understanding of self and world becomes what it is in the first place: a making present in today’s historical and narrative situation that must in each case be interpreted anew and originally. Yet the idleness of remaining with a stale truth from yesterday must not be negated abstractly by an impatient spirit that wants to skip the slow-



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ness of the development prematurely. For Thomas Mann, that is why the distinct morality of the spirit ‘actually consists in not getting bored with ideas before they have been realized. For a reality forfeiting all contact with the spirit, a reality forsaken of spirit and God, irredeemably retarded reality whose circumstances are in stark disparity with the “true”, that is, spirit’s achieved level of knowledge, would be in d ­ anger – a­ nd here we are expressing ourselves coolly and calmly’ (1994, 76). Thomas Mann wrote these sentences in 1927 as work on the Joseph novel had just begun. They express the clear consciousness of a historical crisis that will gradually intensify during the years the Joseph novel is written (1926 to 1943), escalating to a true catastrophe. From the outset, this lends the language and contemplation of the novel the intensity and urgency that emerges from attempting to gain a self-­knowledge that is grounded in the intelligent listening to one’s own present and current world hour.1 Not only does the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel narrate stories in which the concern for a genuinely historical and narrative understanding of self and world is articulated over and over in new and different ways, but the author himself is animated by the same concern of interpreting adequately the signs of the time and of accounting for the demands of the day. For Thomas Mann, the Joseph novel is thus not a separate study of a past far away, but rather the making present of a historical and narrative model with which one’s own time, in its crisis, may gain a self-­critical standard. Thomas Mann makes this clear in his essay from 1942 on the Joseph novel. First he invokes the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as models for a God-prudence in which ‘a human more progressed in God’ is freed from what is timeworn, ‘which God wants to get beyond with us and is already beyond’. He continues: ‘Must I add, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we owe the tribulations which we now have to endure, the catastrophe in which we are living, to the fact that we lacked God-­prudence to a degree which had long become criminal? Europe, the world, was full of stale and outworn things, of evident obsolete and even sacrilegious anachronisms which the world will had clearly been beyond, and which we permitted to continue, in dull mind and in disobedience to this will’ (1996, 199). For Thomas Mann, both forms of lacking God-­ prudence interact destructively: the inertness that perseveres in the yesterday of what is established, and the rapture that hurries ahead in the tomorrow of pure spirit. In this way, reality and truth are torn asunder in the extreme form that for Thomas Mann is the hallmark of the present: ‘such pathological, such unmistakably dangerous tension, in the political, social and economic life of the peoples, between truth and reality, between what has long been reached and accomplished by the spirit and what still took the liberty of calling itself ­reality – ­such tension has perhaps never been there before; and foolish disobedience to the spirit or, religiously speaking, to God’s will, is undoubtedly the true cause for the explosion which stuns us’ (16).

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Thus, an interpretative treatment of the Joseph novel ought to turn in the end to Thomas Mann’s diagnosis of time, which is an important moment in the novel itself, but which also experienced decisive impulses during work on the novel. So the thought pursued here reaches its aim by finally gaining a view of the present.

Nihilism as Human Self-Belittlement In the context of Thomas Mann’s diagnosis of time, many passages of the Joseph novel gain an additional dimension of meaning, for they present indirectly, in what they directly say, a critical commentary on the present in which the novel was written. This holds especially for the passage in which Thomas Mann summarizes his criticism of the present in an urgent, albeit indirect exhortation: ‘The human I’s claim to central importance was the precondition for the discovery of God, and only ­if – ­by failing to take itself s­eriously – h ­ umanity were utterly to perish, could both discoveries be lost, together’ (1407). Like a dazzling flash, this exhortation illuminates the project of the Joseph novel and makes its relation to Thomas Mann’s diagnosis of time almost blatantly obvious. From the quoted passage, it is clear that the novel was written in the hour of an epochal threat: the threat that humanity may ‘utterly perish’ because it no longer takes itself seriously. The ground and consequence are clearly indicated. It is not that humanity perishes and for this reason no longer takes itself seriously, but rather that humanity no longer takes itself seriously and therefore utterly perishes. The moment of danger of losing a seemingly unlosable good casts new light on what threatens to go missing. In comparison to the ‘secure’ tradition, a different and perhaps more profound understanding of this good becomes possible because its historically fragile constitution suddenly becomes visible in the danger. Now ‘the human I’s claim to central importance’ becomes understandable as a peculiar discovery and achievement, whose distinct character consists in having been the ‘precondition for the discovery of God’. Yet the internal relation between the discovery of the specific dignity of the human I and the discovery of God becomes understandable in view of the concrete threat that ‘both discoveries be lost, together’ – with the necessary consequence of the utter perishing of a humanity that has unlearnt how to take itself seriously in the sense mentioned. In his diagnosis that traces the manifold grievances and ills of the present to the one ­root – ­namely, that humanity no longer takes itself ­seriously – ­Thomas Mann follows Nietzsche once again. In the Genealogy of Morals, one reads that the ‘defeat of theological astronomy’ – that is, the suspension of the geocentric world ­picture – ­has placed the threat of human self-­contempt on the agenda of history: ‘Has the self-­belittlement of human beings, their will to self-­belittlement, not progressed irresistibly



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since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in their dignity and uniqueness, in their irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the p ­ ast – t­he human has become an animal, without any simile and without reservation or qualification’ (1967, 155). Nietzsche diagnoses not a belittlement that occurs like a natural event over the heads of humans, but rather the will to self-belittlement that he believes characterizes human being of the present. More specifically, this self-­belittlement consists in humans no longer understanding themselves as double beings in which a ‘naturally lusty and preternaturally wretched existence’ are united enigmatically. Instead, humans understand themselves exclusively as ­ animals – ­ that is, as literal, meaningless being, ‘without any simile and without reservation or qualification’. In this sense, Nietzsche continues: ‘All ­science . . . ­has at present the object of dissuading human beings from their former respect for themselves, as if this had been nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit’ (155–6). Thus, the following critical question is directed against the ontology of a meaningless being that underlies such a ‘science’: ‘Have humans perhaps become less desirous of a transcendent solution to the riddle of their existence, now that this existence’, since Copernicus, ‘appears even more random, beggarly, and dispensable in the visible order of things?’ (155). The will to self-­belittlement is connected, according to Nietzsche, with the unwillingness to raise oneself in any form above the literal, visible ‘order of things’. In the face of the letter of what is given, human being thus renounces all ironic distance, and thereby renounces the reservation of the simile towards literal being. For human being, the being of reality becomes meaninglessness, and the human I consents to the random, beggarly and dispensable existence that an ontology of meaningless being assigns to it, because the human I egoistically hopes to be able to arrange itself cosily and comfortably in this niche of a mere private I, undisturbed by universal demands. Why should human beings as human beings still take themselves seriously? From here, Nietzsche gains his own diagnosis of time. ‘For this is how things are: the belittlement and levelling of European man constitutes our greatest danger’; ‘We see nothing today that wants to become greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-­natured, smarter, more comfortable, more mediocre.’ Here lies the ‘fatality for Europe’: ‘The sight of human being now makes us ­weary – ­what is nihilism today if it is not that? – We are weary of human being’ (44). Nietzsche sees himself confronted with the last human, who no longer takes himself seriously but instead seeks comfort and mediocrity: ‘The earth has become small then, and on it hops the last human, who makes everything small. . . . “We have invented happiness”, say the last humans, and they blink’ (1978, 17). But, in Laban’s realm, which is ruled by the false egoistic self-­ satisfaction of those who take nothing seriously because the only thing that is important to them is their respective private I, nihilism has two

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aspects. As Nietzsche clearly sees, next to the good-­natured, comfortable and mediocre aspect appears an aggressive and destructive aspect that seeks to numb the boredom of meaningless existence at any price. Thus, for Nietzsche, ‘Europe is rich and inventive today above all in means of excitation; it seems to need nothing as much as it needs stimulants and brandy: hence also the tremendous amount of forgery in ideals, this most potent brandy of the spirit’ (1967, 159). For Nietzsche, the nihilism of an ontology of meaningless being expresses itself especially in the conjuncture of a general spiritual forgery that produces meaning surrogates on an industrial scale. Nothing is safe from its reach: morality, art, religion and philosophy are forged into stimulating means to pass time, all promising to put a check on the nihilism of boredom. Nietzsche’s astute critique does not tire of demonstrating over and over that this ‘most potent brandy of the spirit’ that is summoned against nihilism is itself only a variant of nihilism and meaninglessness. Nietzsche does concede that ‘the main concern of all great religions has been to fight a certain weariness and heaviness grown to epidemic proportions’ (130). Yet this religious fight of weariness and human self-­ belittlement does not reach the true root of the ills, which, according to Nietzsche, can be seen in how even the great religions could not prevent the great devaluation of all values, which has helped nihilism to its reign today. Thus, Nietzsche opposes nihilism with a radical school of suspicion that, without exception, suspects a germinating cell of nihilism in all traditional forms of spirit. His thought is dedicated to a total critique of morality, religion, reason and truth in accordance with his gloomy and remorseless motto: what is falling, we should still push. Yet Nietzsche’s own suspicion turns against such a totalizing critique. Isn’t the attitude of an indifferent suspicion and ‘unmasking’ itself a figure of precisely the nihilism that Nietzsche seeks to overcome?

Abraham’s Legacy Thomas Mann draws on Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism without adopting its overly sweeping features. While the diagnosis may be correct and perceptive that human being in the present age is endangered especially by the will to self-­belittlement, and in many cases the suspicion that the ‘remedies’ summoned up against it in the present are only further variants of nihilism may be justified, it is just as false and inappropriate to be suspicious of everything and to want to see in everything nothing other than a more or less refined mask of nihilism. For Thomas Mann, this concerns in particular the critique of religion. He takes as a starting point Nietzsche’s own insight that the ‘main concern of all great religions’ was to fight the human propensity to nihilistic ‘wea-



Making Present 277

riness and heaviness’. It is surely correct that also ‘the great religions’ are, often enough, misused as a comfortable cushion of human convenience. But no one knows this better than religious consciousness itself. That is why the most rigid critique of ‘idolatry’ and the ‘superstition’ of a false understanding of God is levelled by religion itself. The most radical critique of religion is the religious critique of religion. Belief contains a lot of unbelief, ‘for how can anyone believe what is true as long as he believes nonsense?’ Thomas Mann thinks, then, thoroughly with Nietzsche against Nietzsche when he conceives of the critique of nihilism as God-concern and a warning ‘of deeming that which was once right, but is no longer, to still be right and to live up to it in an anachronistic manner’. Yet Thomas Mann does not follow Nietzsche’s defeatist motto of still pushing what is falling. If, in the same historical hour, Abraham discovers the infinite importance of the human I and the true God, then it does not speak against the validity of these discoveries that ­they – l­ike everything h ­ istorical – ­are fragile and endangered. The real danger that both discoveries could ‘be lost again together’ is for Thomas Mann not a reason against, but rather the decisive reason for, his project in the Joseph novel of narrating the Abrahamic stories anew. The Joseph novel seeks to uphold Abraham’s threatened legacy and remain faithful to it by explicating this legacy under the conditions of modernity and in the framework of a narrative ontology to make its truth understandable. On this point, Thomas Mann writes that ‘some people were inclined to regard “Joseph and His Brothers” as a Jewish novel, even as merely a novel for Jews. Well, the selection of the old testamental subject was certainly not mere accident; most certainly there were hidden, defiantly polemical connections between it and certain tendencies of our time which I always found repulsive from the bottom of my soul; the race-­rage, illicit particularly in Germany, which is an essential part of the Fascist mob-­myth. To write a novel of the Jewish spirit was timely, just because it seemed untimely’ (1996, 194). This clarification adds a new motif to the previous diagnosis of time. For Thomas Mann, fascism is what makes it ‘timely’ to write a ‘novel of the Jewish spirit’, for fascist anti-­Semitism perceives with demonic sensitivity the decisive antithesis to its own nihilism in Abraham’s legacy. The resolute negation of the infinite dignity and inner transcendence of the human ­person – ­that is, the fight against ‘the human I’s claim to central importance’ that came into the world with ­Abraham – ­is what constitutes the true essence of nihilism that escalates in fascism into the revolt of human being against the humane. In this fight, Thomas Mann positions himself on the side of ‘the Jewish spirit’, which for him is at the same time the side of humanity. That is why, in his essay on the Joseph novel, he repeats essentially unchanged the passage from the novel on the relation between the discovery of the human I and the discovery of God: ‘I narrated the birth of the I out of

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the mythical collective, the Abrahamic I which is demanding enough to hold that man should serve only the Highest, from which the discovery of God followed. The claim of the human I to central importance is the precondition for the discovery of God, and from the very first the pathos for the dignity of the I is connected with that for the dignity of humanity’ (1996, 196). The Abrahamic I was born out of the mythical collective, which is why the danger of the discovery disappearing again is at one with the danger of the human I as person sinking back into the collective of the social community. The latter has priority only before the isolated private I, but not before the human I as person, whose unique dignity for Kant consists in being a representative of humanity. This can also be formulated in that humans are not only individuals but also ­persons – ­that is, not only social but also metaphysical beings. For this reason it is wrong, according to Thomas Mann, ‘to confuse the supraindividual with the social, to place it completely in the social sphere: one thereby neglects the metaphysically supraindividual; for the personality, not the mass, is the actual bearer of the universal’ (1987, 179). Thus, the egoistic self-­centredness of a nihilistic individualism cannot be overcome with an equally nihilistic collectivism of society. Neither leads out of nihilism, since both are variants of the human will to self-­ belittlement. Humans can overcome the nihilism of human self-­contempt only by gaining respect for their humanity, through which they take themselves infinitely seriously as humans for the first time. For Kant, that is why all duties towards oneself are unified in the commandment of self-­ knowledge. It requires the genuine work of self-­knowledge for humans to become conscious that they are more, and something other, than an isolated private I. Yet the line of thought pursued here has shown that the concrete condition of the possibility of such self-­knowledge is historical, narratively articulated time. History is what makes possible in the first place the expansion of each individual I into humanity in the medium of understanding mediated by language. The stubborn narrow-­mindedness of the isolated individual is not merely the narrowness of a spatial fixation on one’s respective bodily limits, but more the narrowness of a temporal fixation on the respective present. The narrower the story and the history out of which we understand ourselves, the more narrow-­minded and narrow-­ spirited we are; the more encompassing our story and history reaches out into the past and future, the more we understand humanity in our own person and in the person of every other. In this sense, the narrative ontology of the Joseph novel drafts an encompassing story and history of the human I. Its unity of meaning is meant to make humans’ dignity and claim to central importance understandable to them. Out of protest against the prevailing Zeitgeist, Thomas Mann writes a ‘novel of the Jewish spirit’, which makes present an incomplete and unsatisfied past through re-­narration, because he holds a histori-



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cally and narratively situated self-­knowledge to be possible only when it appropriates the past’s claim to understanding. Yet the Joseph novel equally makes a claim to future generations. Whoever seeks to do it justice will reflect not only upon the novel, but more so upon what the novel itself reflects upon. And this means reflecting upon what it means for human self-­knowledge that what is transient does not want to be, but to mean, something.

Notes

The Art of Self-­Knowledge 1 Upon closer examination, one can see that this account is also not always of help with single words. While it may make sense at first glance to clarify the meaning of the word ‘tree’ by pointing to a tree, with words such as ‘time’ or ‘or’ this approach faces insurmountable difficulties. 2 Basically, the primordial phenomenon of understanding the unity of meaning can be clarified with every demanding text, whether it be a poem, a play or a narrative. A narrative is distinguished here from all other linguistic forms simply because it incorporates most clearly the historical-­narrative constitution of human existence into the organization of its own sense of language. For this reason, we speak of the life story of a person when we want to gain a view of the temporal whole of a human existence, and only in exceptional cases of a life drama, and barely at all of a life poem. Nevertheless, the art of understanding can be practised not only on a narrative but, just as well, on a play, a poem or a sonata. For this reason, Wittgenstein states that ‘Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think’ (1953, 121, §527). 3 ‘Ces deux modes de regard sont indépéndants, l’un de l’autre. Le texte vu, le texte lu sont choses toutes distinctes, puisque l’attention donnée à l’une exclut l’attention donnée à l’autre.’ 4 ‘En se reportant à ce qui précède, on pourrait dire que la lisibilité est la qualité d’un texte qui en prévoit et en facilite la consommation, la destruction par l’esprit, la transsubstantiation en événements de l’esprit.’

1  The Ambiguity of the I 1 In the Joseph novel, some biblical names are written differently from the norm (in German: Issak/Jizchak, Jakob/Jaakob), whereby the spelling may even vary within the novel. (By contrast, the customary spellings are used for the thought pursued here in order to make clear that the reflections relate not only to the



Notes to pages 45–70 281

narrative of the Joseph novel but also to other ­narratives – f­ or instance, from the original text.) This deliberate inhomogeneity of the names takes into account the central issue that the ‘I’ is ambiguous and human identity unstable. 2 It is for this reason remarkable that, in ­1939 – ­that is, as work on the Joseph novel was already well ­advanced – T ­ homas Mann provides in retrospect a precisely matching characterization of The Magic Mountain. The ‘ambition’ of the earlier novel, according to Thomas Mann, consisted in pretending ‘to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks’ (1999a, 725). This identity of content and form that was already striven for in The Magic Mountain reaches completion, however, in the Joseph novel, in which it acquires its most consistent and radical form. Precisely for this reason, Thomas Mann is ‘compelled to believe the voices that consider that Joseph represents the climax of his life work’ (Letter to Otto W. Zenker, 10 April 1949; Sk 315). 3 To be sure, it is obvious that an exact counter-­model is also a form of the varying repetition. Whoever does the opposite of what is expected likewise follows the established ­model – ­only in an inverted form. The negating, inverting repetition testifies just as much to a ‘father bond’ as does the affirming repetition. 4 Thomas Mann gave the speech in Vienna on 8 May 1936, on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday. At this point in time, the first part of the Joseph novel had already been published.

2  The World Theatre 1 This difference between an ontology aimed at knowledge of meaningless being and an ontology aimed at understanding meaning is illustrated by Schopenhauer by means of a memorable and witty anecdote: ‘Two men from China went to the theatre in Europe for the first time. One occupied himself with understanding the mechanism of the machinery, at which he also succeeded. The other tried despite his ignorance of the language to decipher the meaning of the play. – The astronomer resembles the former, the philosopher the latter’ (2015, 580). 2 The original meaning of the Latin word ‘privare, privatio’ points, of course, in a different direction: the private as a ‘divestment’ of the public sphere (res publica). 3 Kierkegaard expresses this thought very clearly on one occasion: ‘Look sometime at the world which lies before you in all its diversified manifestations; it is as when you look at a stage, except that the variety is far, far greater. Every individual of innumerable multitude is someone in particular through his difference from others; he represents something definite, but essentially he is something different. However, you do not get to see this in life; you see only what the individual represents and how he does it. It is as it is in a play. But when the curtain falls on the stage, then the one who played the king and the one who played the beggar, and so on severally, they are all much alike, all one and the same: actors’ (1949, 71).

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Notes to pages 78–131

3  Narrative Irony 1 With regard to Jacob’s sentence ‘God is the difference’, Thomas Mann makes the following comment in a letter: ‘It is certainly a bitter irony that he says this in a moment when human cunning and deception rob him of the gift of difference’ (letter to Agnes Meier, 17 November 1951; 1999c, 324). 2 As will be shown, the motif of a dialectic of day and night is taken up in the Joseph novel in the central formula ‘that you may be blessed with the blessing of heaven above and the blessing of the deep that lies below’. 3 This thought in its classical form, which Thomas Mann may have had in mind in his own formulation, can be found in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where one reads that those who ‘enjoy themselves in their existence are called “happy”’. ‘World history is not a soil of happiness; in world history the periods of happiness are blank pages, for they are periods of harmony, of the missing contradiction’ (2011, 172).

4  The Well of the Past 1 Along these lines, Thomas Mann explains in his lecture on Freud: ‘With regard to the fulfilling character of Jesus’ life, it is not easy to distinguish between the Evangelists’ stylization and His own consciousness. But His word on the cross, about the ninth hour, that “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” was, against the appearance, not in the least an outburst of despair and disillusionment, but on the contrary a lofty messianic sense of self. For the word is not original, not a spontaneous outcry. It stands at the beginning of the Twenty-­second Psalm, which from the beginning to the end is an announcement of the Messiah. Jesus was quoting’ (1999b, 293).

5  How Abraham Discovered God 1 For this reason, the ‘political-­national’ component in the promise passed down to Abraham, to whose descendants the prospect is presented of ‘all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession’ (Gen. 17: 8), is for the Joseph novel a belated addition that distorts the original meaning: ‘All this is to be accepted only with ­caution – o ­ r at least must be correctly interpreted. We are dealing with late and tendentious interpolations, whose purpose is to legally fix in God’s earliest intentions political power relations that were established much later, and by force of arms. In reality this moon-­wanderer’s personality was not the sort that either receives or generates political promises’ (6–7). 2 In this way, Abraham’s discovery of the radically non-­imaginable character of the highest reacts back on human self-­knowledge. While it may occasionally be tedious that we cannot see or sketch thought, what is of the spirit, this effort highlights precisely the peculiar dignity of human being: being human means



Notes to pages 132–151 283

that our essence cannot be grasped as an object because we are spirit, can think and ­understand – a­ nd precisely in this regard we are in the image of God. 3 The leitmotif – ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it’ – acquires once again a different and more complex meaning. One should neither insist upon an ‘I’ in the sense of an isolated private existence, nor abstractly negate the ‘I’ in a Nirvana of egolessness. In contrast to these two forms of d ­ esperation – ­desperate in wanting to be a self, and desperate in wanting not to be a ­self – ­is the true meaning of I-­saying that Abraham discovered: that a divine I-­saying is always already inscribed in the human I-­saying, so that we may neither isolate nor relinquish our own I. Rather, humans understand their dependent selfhood only when they at the same time understand the absolute selfhood of God, in contrast and in relation to each one’s own There-­ness and Thou-­ness. 4 This is the meaning of the rebuke of the Gospel: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good, but One, that is, God’ (Luke 18: 19). 5 Makom, the Hebrew word for space, is understood in the rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature as a name for God. Thomas Mann could have read Micha Josef Bin Gorion’s Die Sagen der Juden: ‘Why is the name of the Lord also called Makom? Because God is the space of the world, though the world is not His space’ (1919, 4). 6 For this reason, Makom is only one name for God that ought to make clear that God is ‘the space of the world, though the world is not His space’ – that God is ‘of necessity much greater than all His works’, and it is ‘equally necessary that He be outside His works’. His works are nonetheless His works, and the world His creation. 7 That is why Abraham’s epoch-­making self-­knowledge, which grounds a new selfhood in a new self-­understanding and remains unforgettable for the future, is comparable to the acquisition of a character that Kant emphatically describes: ‘The human being who is conscious of having character in his way of thinking does not have it by nature; he must always have acquired it. One may also assume that the grounding of character is like a kind of rebirth, a certain solemnity of making a vow to oneself, which makes the resolution and the moment when this transformation took place unforgettable to him, like the beginning of a new epoch’ (2006, 194.) 8 On this basis, it is also possible to understand the true meaning of Jacob’s reproach to Esau that he could forget the unforgettable: ‘Everything you say is excruciatingly asinine to my ears, for what happened between us cannot be forgotten.’

6  What Are Human Beings, that You Are Mindful of Them? 1 The model of this defence of Cain can be found once again in the Sagen der Juden by Bin Gorion: ‘I have indeed slain my brother, but you are the one who created the evil drive within me. You are the shepherd of all creatures who let me kill Abel. You are now the one who killed him, for had you accepted my gift as you had accepted his, the envy in me would have never been awakened’ (1919, 117).

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Notes to pages 153–214

2 Fully in line with this is another passage in the ‘Descent into Hell’: ‘If God might not exactly have enjoined and encouraged the soul in its ­enterprise – ­it certainly did not act against His idea, but rather only against that of the angels, whose less than friendly attitude toward humankind is, to be sure, an a priori certainty’ (34). 3 In this sense, Herman Hesse wrote to Thomas Mann about the novel The Holy Sinner: ‘Most readers would have sufficient insight to sense the ironies of this delightful literature, but not all to know the earnestness and piety which underlie these ironies and lend them their true, high gaiety’ (Herman Hesse to Thomas Mann on 8 November 1950). 4 Surely Thomas Mann, in his characterization of spiritual nihilism, is alluding to Mephisto’s verses: ‘I am the spirit that denies! / And justly so; for all that time creates, / He does well who annihilates! / Better, it ne’er had had beginning’. 5 From Goethe to Wilhelm von Humboldt on 17 March 1832. 6 Here, one may compare, in Felix Krull, the analogous deliberations by Professor Kuckuck on the train journey to Lisbon.

8  The Dying Grain 1 Thus, in the Joseph novel, the counter simile to the old tune, which is played again and again ‘with insignificant variations’, is the whole ‘agitated music’ that Joseph’s ‘spirit was occupied with ­directing – ­above, middle, and ­below – ­all at once’. Music is suited as a simile that illustrates both a meaningful and a meaningless human life, and indeed for one and the same reason: music is the temporal art par excellence, for it makes present in a unique manner the double face of ­time – n ­ amely, its transitory–futile aspect that levels all differences, and its counter aspect that, in occupying the spirit, enables meaning through recollection and expectation. 2 In the merely superficial similarity in formulation, the Joseph novel indicates the fundamental difference between Cain and Joseph. Cain’s question to God ‘Who created me as I am?’ seeks to evade responsibility. Joseph’s insight that God created him specifically such that he would act as he acted marks, by contrast, his willingness to assume responsibility for his own life story. 3 Schopenhauer is well aware that there lies concealed in the absolute denial of the will to life an equally absolute affirmation. Thus, he writes on the final pages of his major work: ‘If a contrary point of view were possible for us, it would have the signs change, and would reveal the being-­for-­us as nothing, and this nothing as being.’ He continues: ‘We, however, who thoroughly remain standing on the standpoint of philosophy, must content ourselves here with negative knowledge, content to have reached the final landmark of the positive one’ (1969a, 438). 4 ‘I could indeed vanish, and with ease, but I am not about to do so at your bidding, neglecting my duty, which demands that I sit here and watch for the sake of practice’ (503–4). 5 That is the only way to understand this sentence adequately: ‘Because the



Notes to pages 223–243 285 knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them’ (Matthew 13: 11). The secrets of the kingdom of heaven are not secret information communicated to only a small group of disciples, yet concealed and withheld from the ‘people’. Quite the contrary, the letters of the secrets lie before everyone’s eyes, but most eyes see them without seeing them, failing to grasp the letters as letters and enquiring into them in their meaning.

9  Only a Simile   1 The genuinely historical, story-­like character of the covenant between God and human being is characterized by the word ‘faith’, for faith is what it is only when its character is shaped by a living attentiveness, allowing it to take heed of the history of what it is faithful to.   2 For Thomas Mann, ‘piety’ is ‘a kind of prudence, God-­prudence’ (1996, 199). This God-­prudence is not fixed to any given stations because it is what it is only when it is free and original. Its freedom is clearly distinguished, however, from a random, unbound arbitrariness, because in its original freedom it remains bound to the absolute originality and freedom of God, which develops in a lively manner in a history and story. The Abrahamic critique of the unhistorical and nonnarrative character of a sterile morality consequently interprets evil in a new way, as a break with God, as a break of the covenant with the historical and narrative spirit. Thus it reads in the Joseph novel: ‘Through Abraham and his covenant something had come into the world that had never been there before and of which the nations knew nothing: the damnable possibility that the covenant could be broken, that one could fall away from God’ (349).   3 In the Joseph novel, the difference between the abominable deed of Laban who sacrifices the life of his son and the deed of the Egyptian parents who ‘only’ castrate their son evidently takes up corresponding reflections from Freud’s Totem and Taboo.   4 In connection with the ‘feast of conciliation’, Jacob speaks of the concerns and the restlessness ‘that were Abram’s part and are ours as well for ever and ever, so that we may detach ourselves from the things that the Lord wishes to move us beyond and is perhaps already beyond ­Himself – ­that is: concern.’   5 Joseph’s conciliation runs through all his stories in Egypt. The Joseph novel repeatedly shows that ‘he had conformed, even though inwardly distant, and became a child and inhabitant of Egypt’s year, celebrating its freakish customs and the feasts of its idols in an amiable, worldly fashion, though always with moderation and no little irony, confident that the man who had brought the calf to this field would close one eye’ (1017). To be sure, the last formulation also makes clear that this conciliation is accompanied by a feeling of guilt, hoping for a ‘closing of one’s eyes’.   6 Letter from 12 February 1949.   7 Nietzsche connects to this a reflection that Thomas Mann appropriates in his own manner in the Joseph novel: ‘With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious

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minds hate to c­ oncede – n ­ amely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think”. It thinks; but that this “it” is meant to be precisely the famous old “I” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty”’ (1966, 24).   8 Freud does this, for instance, in his study Moses and Monotheism, which arose at the same time as the final part of the Joseph novel, and which draws on research literature that Thomas Mann, too, was familiar with.   9 In Thomas Mann’s essay on the Joseph novel, one accordingly reads on the ‘God-­concern’: ‘It is at home in my novel everywhere: on the pastures of Canaan and on the Egyptian royal throne’ (1996, 198). 10 The kinship between this thought and Plato’s analogy of the sun is obvious. 11 This connection between Joseph and Moses is also drawn by the Joseph novel by means of the peculiar name that Joseph assumes in Egypt: as ‘I was stolen and brought down to this land, what I am has taken on another name: it is now Osarsiph’ (1177). The Ptolemaic historian Manetho recounts that ‘Osarsiph’ or ‘Osarseph’ was, under the rule of a pharaoh, a rebelling priest with the name ‘Amenophis’, who later adopted the name ‘Moses’. The Jewish historian Josephus adopts this story and interprets it in terms of the Jewish Moses who leads the Jews out of Egypt. This is then taken up by Freud’s reflections, among others, and also by the symbolic ambiguity of the title figure of the Joseph novel. 12 ‘The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel had brought up out of Egypt, they buried at Shechem, in the plot of ground which Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for one hundred pieces of silver, and which had become an inheritance of the children of Joseph’ (Joshua 24: 32). 13 ‘So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour’ (John 4: 5–6).

Making Present 1 In this sense, during work on the Joseph novel, Thomas Mann reflects upon ‘the sensitive office of the writer’ of ‘feeling out and designating the will of time’. Here it is a matter of concretely registering ‘changes and transitions of the mental, moral and social life with a definiteness’, which is the result of ‘a sharpened gift of perception and nerve reaction’ (1996, 54).

References

English translations of German texts are quoted from the editions listed below, though adapted by the author and the translator of this book. Bin Gorion, Micha Josef. 1919. Die Sagen der Juden, Vol. III: Die zwölf Stämme. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening. Freud, Sigmund. 1920. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by G. Stanley Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Vol. XV. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1963. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Vol. XVI. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2011. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Vol. I. Edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, David. 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kant, Immanuel. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Robert B. Louden. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2017. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1949. Works of Love. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Princeton University Press.

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Mann, Thomas. 1933. Past Masters and Other Papers. Translated by H. T. LowePorter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mann, Thomas. 1947. Essays of Three Decades. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mann, Thomas. 1987. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Unger. Mann, Thomas. 1993. ‘Der Künstler und der Literat’, in Essays in sechs Bänden, Vol. I. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 158–65. Mann, Thomas. 1994. ‘Fragment über das Religiöse’, in Essays in sechs Bänden, Vol. III. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 296–8. Mann, Thomas. 1996. Essays in sechs Bänden, Vol. V. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, Thomas. 1997. Essays in sechs Bänden, Vol. VI. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, Thomas. 1999a. ‘The Making of The Magic Mountain’, in The Magic Mountain. London: Vintage Books. Mann, Thomas. 1999b. Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger, and Other Writings. New York: Continuum. Mann, Thomas. 1999c. ‘Joseph und seine Brüder’, in Selbstkommentare. Edited by Hans Wysling. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, Thomas. 2005. Joseph and His Brothers. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. London: Penguin Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. Translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford University Press. Plato. 1914. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schiller, Friedrich von. 1972. ‘The Nature and Value of Universal History: An Inaugural Lecture [1789]’, in History and Theory, 11:3, 321–34. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969a. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969b. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2014. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. I. Translated by Sabine Roehr. Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2015. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays,



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Vol. II. Translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press. Valéry, Paul. 1957/60. Pièces sur l’art, in Oeuvres, Vol. II. Paris: Gallimard. Valéry, Paul. 1960. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. XII. Translated by David Paul. New York: Pantheon Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge.

Index

Abel see Cain and Abel Abraham courage 205 covenant with God 132–4, 138, 139–40, 221–2 discovers God 123–8 Egypt and 234 ‘God-prudence’ 273 knowledge of God 137–8 legacy of 276–9 self-knowledge and 243 understanding of God 260–1 universalization and 236–7 wandering 123, 124–6 academia, Schiller’s critique of 24–5, 26 Adam and Eve the Fall and 153–5, 264 as first ‘I’ 150 Akhenaten/Amenhotep IV, Pharaoh discusses God with Joseph 252–63 dreams and 244, 245–52 historical and narrative place 244–5 ‘poor, dear thing’ 266–7 teaching truth 259–60 angels evil and 148–51 judge humans 144–6 as narrators 157–8 stranger at the well 208–11, 215–17 view of Cain 147, 151, 152 animals, naming 176–8 appearance, Nietzsche on 19

archetypes 56, 142 art language and 21–4 truth of 21–4 Avesta 160 being art and 22 enigma of 104–5 history and 59 literal 23 meaning and 14–16, 29, 60–1 narrative ontology 16–21 transience 161, 166–70, 272 see also human being(s) boredom 112, 117, 200 Bruyère, Jean de La 200 Cain and Abel 66–7 angels’ view of 147, 151, 152 Joseph’s brothers and 190–1 roles of 70–1 self-love and 174–5 celebration/feasts 118–20 character human beings in roles 67–9 Kant on 34 selfhood and 33–5 compassion 198–201 cow (headstrong) simile 218–20, 223–4, 252 Delphic Oracle / know thyself 3–5, 6, 13



Index ­291

descent into hell ceremony and 119 narrative 112 regressing into past 121–2 self-knowledge 104–6 the well of the past 108–10 dreams Freud on interpretation 249 God and 243–4 interpreting 242–4 Joseph and 188–9 Pharaoh and 244–52 symbols 250 dying grain of wheat simile 209, 212, 215–17, 242 parable of the sower and 212–15 egoism see under self Egypt Exodus 244–5 headstrong cow 252 history and the Sphinx 238–41 Pharaoh and 244–5 envy, Joseph’s brothers and 175–6, 190 Esau attempts murder 190–1 haunts Jacob 221 Jacob speaks as 40–5, 75 Joseph on 262 offers reconciliation 63–4 role of 49–50 fascism, anti-Semitism and 277 Faust (Goethe) 165–6 ‘Fragment on Religiosity’ (Mann) 187 free will see under freedom freedom viii of action 30–2 character and 33 selfhood and 32 of will 30–3 Freud, Sigmund 186 ‘Hypothesis and Technique of Interpretation’ 249 unconscious knowing 80–1 ‘Freud and the Future’ (Mann) 52–3, 81

‘Freud’s Position in the History of Modern Thought’ (Mann) 81 future angels know 216–17 blessings and 263 Joseph’s sense of 178–83 oracles and 192–5 Gabriel, Markus vi–vii Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 274 Gnosticism 160 God Abraham and Isaac 86–91 Abraham discovers 123–6, 126–8 absolute power of 95 angels’ resentment and 152–3 covenant with 132–4, 138, 139–40, 221–2 creation and 148 ‘God-concern’ 253, 255–9, 272, 277 ‘God-prudence’ 273 ‘God-stupidity’ 225, 228, 234, 237 good and evil 134–6 heart of philosophy viii history and future 96, 136–9 of hope 91–2 humans in image of 126–8 indulges humans 146–8 interpreting dreams and 243–4, 246 Joseph understands 180 Mann and belief 27–8 monotheism and 132–4 Pharaoh’s discussion of 252–63 self-knowledge and 127–32 the sun and 257–60 testing Abraham and 94–6 theology of narration 141–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust 165–6 good and evil angels and 148–53 the Fall and 153–5 God and 134–6 historical understanding 227 individuals and 201–3

292

Index

happiness, meaning and 62–4 Hellenistic thought 160 hermeneutics 94 history false eternity 238–9 God’s 96, 136–9 inattentiveness 222–4 Mann’s own context 273 reinterpreting traditions 185 spirit and 92 understanding the world 58–60 human being(s) a clod of earth 131 compassion 198–201 covenant with God 138, 139–40, 221–2 double aspects of existence 105 as enigma 27–30 the Fall 264 historical decentring 59 history of 116 I-identity 48 illusion of individuality 206 judged by angels 144–8 language and reason 150 life and death 186–9 meaningless and 14–16 novel of the soul 160–3 in the public sphere 68 in roles 67–9 self-belittlement 274–6 self-respect 102–4 transience 166–70 uniqueness and 53 universality and 69–73, 103–4 weak, finite and mortal 133 weariness 275 Hume, David 5–6 A Treatise of Human Nature 6 Huya and Tuya 228–33, 236 ‘Hypothesis and Technique of Interpretation’ (Freud) 249 illusions of individuality 201–3 truth in 203–7 immortality v, viii inequality, the gifted and ungifted 175

irony and humour narrator and 155–9, 163–6 transience 166–70 Isaac blindness of 62 the denied sacrifice 86–91 ‘God-prudence’ 273 salvation of 184–5 Isaiah good and evil 135–6 Islam 160 Jacob the blessing 262, 263–7 blessing the ‘wrong’ son 40–5 compared to Joseph 178–81 death and 189 the denied sacrifice 86–96 dreamt conversation 249 Egypt and 233–4, 235, 261 as exemplary 121 four deceptions 85–8 ‘God-prudence’ 273 the headstrong cow 218–20, 252 and Judah 265 Laban and 225–6, 228 Passover and 183–5 pleased with prediction 181–2 speaks as Esau 40–5, 75 wedding night 76–82 Jeremiah 200 Jesus Christ empty grave 210–11 parable of the sower 212–15 with Samaritan at well 261–2 Job God and humans 147 good and evil 135 John, Gospel of empty grave 211 Jesus and the Samaritan 261–2 Joseph attempted murder of 190–1 awakening of 196–8, 202–4 the blessing 263, 266–7 brought to Egypt 218–21 compared to Jacob 178–81 conceit of 190



Index ­293

discusses God with Pharaoh 252–63 dreams and 188–9, 242–4, 244–52 Egypt as symbol 233–8 gift of interpretation 92–6 God-understanding 180 Huya and Tuya 228–33, 236 illusion of death 204–7 knowledge of the future 181–3 Moses and 244–5 non-death of 96–7 oracles 192–6 Passover and Jacob 183–5 Reuben at the well 207–11 rise in Egypt 241–2 self-love and 173–6 sense of the future 178–83 Sphinx and 238–41 transformation of 216 tree simile 186–7 wit of language 176–8 Joseph and His Brothers (Mann) vi angels and 144–6 archetype characters 49–50 author/narrator irony 163–6 beginnings 122–3 blindness and the blessing 50–2 Cain and Abel pattern 66–7 celebrations/feasts 120 connecting thoughts 64–6 in context of Mann’s time 82 courage for monotheism 132–4 covenant with God 138, 139–40 decentring of the I 46–8 deceptions 85–8 deliberate anachronism 91–2 delusion and deception 74–6 descent into hell 104 future and promise 114–16 God’s history 138 happiness and meaning 62–4 history and 59–60 irony and narrator 155–9 as a Jewish novel 277 killing time 111 levels of meaning 45–6 Mann’s essay on 42, 221 meaningful/-less souls 55–6, 57, 60–1



narrative ontology 24 narrator and reader 61–2 novel of the soul 159–63 as sacred story 41–3 saying ‘I’ 39–41 spiritual inheritance 88–91 style and language 50 theology of narration 141–3 time and 110–12 transience and 166–70 universality 71 unrest of the blessing 43–5 see also Abraham; Akhenaten/ Amenhotep IV, Pharaoh; Esau; Isaac; Jacob; Joseph; Judah; Rachel; Reuben Judah Jacob’s blessing and 265–6 and Judaism 262 Judaism anti-Semitism 277 Joseph and His Brothers and 277 Joseph and Judah 262 Kant, Immanuel on character 34 cosmopolitan philosophy 26 critique of reason 18–19 freedom of will 33 narrative ontology 16–21 persons and universals 278 revolution in thinking 31 universal humanity 71–2 Kierkegaard, Søren 200 knowledge artist of 25 unconscious 80–1 Laban ‘God-stupidity’ 228 realm of 220–1, 225–8, 275–6 sacrifices son 225 language the art of 21–4 the ‘I’ 8–10 Joseph’s wit 176–8 music of speech 22–3 narrative and ‘I’ 11–13

294

Index

Leah, Jacob’s wedding night and 76–9 life and death certainty of death 187–8, 189 immortality v, viii sympathy 186–7 literature 21–4 Manichaeism 160 Mann, Thomas author–narrator irony 163–6 on belief 27–8 deepest thought 35 enigma of human being 27–30 ‘God-concern’ 227, 272 ‘God-stupidity’ 225 the individual ‘I’ 271 on Joseph in Egypt 235 metaphysical being 72 model of narrative ontology 24–7 narrator and reader 61 own historical context 273 pangs of conscience 33 on Pharaoh 245 philosophical mind 24–6 repurposing myth 82 on the Sphinx 239–40 taking oneself seriously 103 on uniqueness 53 works of essay on Joseph and His Brothers 42, 221 ‘Fragment on Religiosity’ 187 ‘Freud and the Future’ 52–3, 81 ‘Freud’s Position in ... Modern Thought’ 81 ‘Praise of Transience’ 167, 169 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man 30 see also Joseph and His Brothers (Mann) Matthew, Gospel of empty grave 210 parable of the sower 212–15 meaning actors and 57–8 art and 22 egoists and 102 finding new 94 happiness and 62–4



history and 59 irony 75 in life 60–1 meaninglessness vi, 14–16, 17, 20, 29, 204–7 narrative and 11–13, 16–21, 45–6, 75 novel of the soul 161 the stupid man 45 suffering and 82–5, 200–1 symbols 250 unity and 65 metaphysics 18, 72 monotheism, Akhenaten and 245, 257–8 Moses Exodus 184, 185 Joseph and 244–5 myth, repurposing 82 narrative archetypes 49–50 descent into hell 112 dream interpretation and 248–9 the Fall and 153–5 feasts of 118–20 of God 136–9 irony and 75, 163–6 narrator and reader 61–2 repurposing myth 82 sacred stories 41–3 self-knowledge 11–13 spirit of 161–3 theology of 141–3, 223–4 time and 12 wandering heroes of 107–8 narrative ontology vi of freedom 23 irony of narrator 155–9 Mann’s and Joseph’s times 273 project of 16–21 relation to life 136 suffering and 82–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 200 appearance and the thing-in-itself 19 bourgeois scholarship 26–7 conceptual mummies 238–9 concern of religions 276



Index ­295 end and goal 170 Genealogy of Morals 274 human self-belittlement 274–6 narrative ontology 16–17, 19–21 nihilism 274–7

obedience 223–4 Oedipus, the Sphinx and 241 ontology of egoism 101–2 of meaningless being 14–16 see also narrative ontology oracles 192–6 dying grain simile 193, 195–6 Pascal, Blaise 200–1 Phaedo (Plato) 4–5 Pharaoh see Akhenaten/Amenhotep IV, Pharaoh Plato Phaedo 4–5 Potiphar brings Joseph to Egypt 218, 219, 220 Joseph’s rise with 241 and his parents 228, 232–3 ‘Praise of Transience’ (Mann) 167, 169 Psalms 147 Rachel death of 83 Jacob’s wedding night and 76–82 oracles and 192–3 reality meaningless vi, 14–16 objective/subjective 14, 19–20 transcendental 18–19, 23 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Mann) 30 religions and belief 276 sacred stories 41–3 theology narrative 223–4 see also God Reuben apart from brothers 190–1 at the well 207–11, 215–17 Rochefoucauld, François de La 200

sacred stories 44 Abraham and Isaac 86–96 Cain and Abel 66–7 universal history 155 sacrifice Abraham and Isaac 86–91 Laban’s son 225 salvation, allusions to 266 Samaritan at the well 261–2 Sammael 149–51, 176–7 Schiller, Friedrich von 24–5, 26 Schopenhauer, Arthur boredom 112 compassion 198–201, 202 falling into the past 109–10 freedom of will 30–2, 33 human awareness 28 illusion of individuality 201–3 meaninglessness 204 narrative ontology 16–21 primacy of drive 81 against scholars 26–7 self and language 8 self-knowledge and 6–7 self and self-knowledge Adam as first ‘I’ 150 adventure of 123–6 angel ‘we-sayers’ 157–8 boredom and time 116–17 character and 33–5 concept of 3–5 cosmopolitan philosophy 26 decentred ‘I’ 46–8, 56, 77–9, 85 Delphic ‘know thyself’ 11, 13, 30 descent into hell 104–6 freedom and 32 in God’s image 126–8 historical and narrative 272 ‘I’, humankind 125–6 I-saying 5–10, 39–40, 130–1, 271 illusion of individuality 201–3 knowledge of God and 127–32 meaning of ‘person’ 58 meaningless being and 14–16 narrative meaning 11–13 ontology of egoism 101–2 reinterpreting traditions 185 as self-understanding 52–4

296

Index

self and self-knowledge (cont.) selfhood and 52–4 Socratic non-knowledge 4–5, 13 subject and object 4–7 suffering and compassion 200–1 theatre analogy 74–6 time and 271 universal human beings 103–4 self-belittlement 274–6 self-love 173–6 self-respect 102–4 Seneca ‘life is like a play’ 58 Shakespeare, William ‘all the world’s a stage’ 57 sower, parable of 212–15 the Sphinx 238–41 spirit disturbance from 106 enigma of being 104–6 life and 164 novel of the soul 160–3 spiritual inheritance 88–91 wandering 106–8 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy 165 suffering 198–201, 204

time abyss of past 108–10 angels and 159 beginnings 122–3 diagnosis of 271–4, 275 feasts 118 future and promise 114–16 Joseph’s awakening and 204 life and death 112–14 narrative meaning 12 not enumerated 116–17 passing/killing 110–12 Pharaoh’s dreams and 250–1 regressing into past 121–2 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 6 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 165 truth historical-narrative time core 228 meaningless reality and 15

theatre analogy actor’s thought-model 55–7, 57, 74 feasts of the narrative 118–20 meaning and 60–1 roles of human being 67–9 truth in illusion 205–7 world as stage 57–8

wandering self-knowledge and 124 spirit and 106–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig on immortality v language and ‘I’ 9–10 world stage see theatre analogy

understanding, block to 212–15 universality 278 human being and 69–73 Kant and 71–2 Valéry, Paul 22–3