On the Tragic 9781636674889, 9781636674902, 9781636674919

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ON THE TRAGIC

Peter Wessel Zapffe Translated by Ryan L. Showler

Originally published in Norwegian in 1941, this is the magnum opus of one of Norway’s most celebrated philosophers, now made available in English for the first time. It examines the concept of the tragic and attempts to construct a more precise and useful definition on the basis of a “biosophical” look at the situation of organisms in their environment and their attempt to realize interests on multiple fronts through abilities they possess in a variety of degrees. This is a theory of genius, and of the dangers that frequently accompany it, and a sober account of the perils of consciousness for the human species. The robust and thorough treatment includes in-depth analysis of the relationship between real-world tragedies and those portrayed in theater and literature. The English translation of On the Tragic by the Norwegian philosopher, writer, and environmentalist Peter Wessel Zapffe is a major achievement that for the first time introduces this classic text to Anglophone readers. On the one hand, the text is highly relevant to contemporary debates on the meaning of life and anti-natalism (the view that birth and life have negative value); on the other, it is a major text in 20th century Existentialism and Pessimism that develops an original theory of the human condition (as being characterized by meaninglessness and injustice). Finally, the text is known for its high literary level, vivid descriptions, and black humor. —Roe Fremstedal, Professor of Philosophy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology The translation of Zapffe’s Om det tragiske into English is a major event that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Zapffe argues that human consciousness mutated accidentally from nature as an error of overdevelopment, producing needs earthly life can never satisfy. The disillusioning insights that follow are formulated in a sophisticated everyday language and with an abundance of humor. —Jørgen Haave, Zapffe biographer and Senior Curator at the Henrik Ibsen Museum, Skien, Norway In this first English translation of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s On the Tragic, Dr. Ryan Showler has performed an extraordinary service to philosophy and, indeed, to the liberal arts and humanities. The Anglophone world can now appreciate the intensely original thinking of this remarkable scholar. In consequence, Zapffe will hereafter be recognized as among the most lucid and thoughtful advocates of philosophical pessimism. —Todd K. Shackelford, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, Oakland University and Founding Director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychological Science Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) was a Norwegian philosopher, author, educator, and mountaineer. Widely considered one of Norway’s most important philosophers, Zapffe has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, covering a wide variety of subjects including literature, dramaturgy, religion, logic, the environment, and the human situation. Ryan L. Showler (translator) received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Loyola University Chicago in 2008.

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On The Tragic The English translation of On the Tragic by the Norwegian philosopher, writer, and environmentalist Peter Wessel Zapffe is a major achievement that for the first time introduces this classic text to Anglophone readers. On the one hand, the text is highly relevant to contemporary debates on the meaning of life and anti-natalism (the view that birth and life have negative value); on the other, it is a major text in 20th century Existentialism and Pessimism that develops an original theory of the human condition (as being characterized by meaninglessness and injustice). Finally, the text is known for its high literary level, vivid descriptions, and black humor. —Roe Fremstedal, Professor of Philosophy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology The translation of Zapffe's Om det tragiske into English is a major event that shouldn't be taken lightly. Zapffe argues that human consciousness mutated accidentally from nature as an error of overdevelopment, producing needs earthly life can never satisfy. The disillusioning insights that follow are formulated in a sophisticated everyday language and with an abundance of humor. —Jørgen Haave, Zapffe biographer and Senior Curator at the Henrik Ibsen Museum, Skien, Norway In this first English translation of Peter Wessel Zapffe's On the Tragic, Dr. Ryan Showler has performed an extraordinary service to philosophy and, indeed, to the liberal arts and humanities. The Anglophone world can now appreciate the intensely original thinking of this remarkable scholar. In consequence, Zapffe will hereafter be recognized as among the most lucid and thoughtful advocates of philosophical pessimism. —Todd K. Shackelford, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, Oakland University and Founding Director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychological Science

On the Tragic

Peter Wessel Zapffe Translated by Ryan L. Showler

On the Tragic

New York - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - Oxford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zapffe, Peter Wessel, author. | Showler, Ryan L., translator. | Zapffe, Peter Wessel, Om det tragiske. Title: On the tragic / Peter Wessel Zapffe (author) ; Ryan L. Showler (translator). Other titles: Om det tragiske. English Description: New York : Peter Lang, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023043423 (print) | LCCN 2023043424 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636674889 (hardback) | ISBN 9781636674902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636674919 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Philosophy of mind. Classification: LCC B4445.Z33 O613 2024 (print) | LCC B4445.Z33 (ebook) | DDC 128— dc23/eng/20231211 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043423 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043424 DOI 10.3726/b20965

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG ISBN 9781636674889 (hardback) ISBN 9781636674902 (ebook) ISBN 9781636674919 (epub) DOI 10.3726/b20965

© 2024 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA [email protected] - www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

“ – why did the rift have to happen? I have never yet found an answer to this, and no one can be found who is earnestly asking.” Hebbel

CONTENTS

Foreword by David Benatar Foreword by Thomas Ligotti Translator’s Preface Author’s Preface Chapter 1. Introduction § 1. Goal and method § 2. Concerns

xiii xv xvii xxi 1 1 6

Chapter 2. Biological Conditions § 3. Individual and the outside world § 4. Fundamental features of the individual’s life § 5. Uexküll’s schema § 6. Conflict § 7. Morality. Terminology § 8. Abilities. Surplus and deficiency

9 9 11 20 23 25 28

Chapter 3. On Primitiveness and Differentiation § 9. Protoplasm § 10. Primitiveness in humans

37 37 40

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Chapter 4. Human Interest Fronts § 11. Biological interest front § 12. Social interest front § 13. Autotelic interest front § 14. Metaphysical interest front § 15. Polyfrontal engagements Chapter 5. On Over-equipment and Unfixedness in Humans § 16. Character § 17. Over-equipment. General remarks § 18. Physical power § 19. Perception § 20. Intellect § 21. Memory § 22. Imagination § 23. Emotion § 24. Other abilities § 25. Combinations § 26. More on character and personality § 27. Example § 28. The “metaphysical-melancholic clarity of vision” § 29. Comment § 30. Variations in metaphysical readiness § 31. Metaphysical-moral anxiety § 32. A test subject goes into the fire § 33. Psychopathological point of view § 34. Pathological form – cultural relevance § 35. The concept of culture § 36. The abnormal § 37. Psychiatry and culture § 38. The cultural-pathological paradox § 39. Comment § 40. Birnbaum’s conclusion § 41. Other authors § 42. Comment. Own conclusions § 43. Parallels from the animal kingdom

45 45 46 52 56 63 71 71 74 77 77 84 87 88 90 91 91 99 101 103 108 112 115 117 121 124 125 127 129 132 136 138 140 143 145

Contents

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Chapter 6. Real Solution and Surrogate § 44. Introduction § 45. Real and pseudo-solutions. Concepts § 46. Surrogate posture § 47. Real solution associated with deficit in general (1 a) § 48. Deficiency. Surrogate solution (1 b) § 49. Surplus state. Real Solution (2 a) § 50. Under-fixedness (3) § 51. Over-fixedness and error-fixedness (4) § 52. First example § 53. Second example § 54. Third example § 55. Fourth example § 56. The experience image § 57. The desire image § 58. The working image § 59. Metaphysical morality § 60. Fifth example

149 149 150 151 154 155 157 158 167 168 169 175 181 185 186 198 203 220

Chapter 7. On Catastrophes § 61. Suffering, misfortune, catastrophe § 62. Catastrophes. The individual links § 63. Object of attack § 64. The attacking power § 65. Own complicity § 66. The first outline of the concept of guilt § 67. The importance of criminal law for the present context § 68. Outline of the general part of criminal law § 69. Existential guilt, physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological and ethical guilt § 70. Criminal guilt § 71. Metaphysical guilt § 72. The occasion, the “triggering cause” § 73. The posture of the stricken person

229 229 231 232 234 237 238 244 245 272 289 291 292 297

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Chapter 8. Qualified Catastrophes. Determination of the Objectively Tragic § 74. Qualifications. Double-acting impetus. Peripeteia § 75. The tragic qualification § 76. Comment § 77. Victim and observer § 78. Culturally relevant greatness § 79. Greatness and catastrophe § 80. A. The counterpower is linked to the origin, unfolding, or result of greatness § 81. B. Catastrophe by autotelic and heterotelic greatness § 82. C. Greatness in fixedness and capacity § 83. D. Greatness asserts itself in the biological, social, or metaphysical field of interest. It unfolds in a hostile (satanic), indifferent, or sympathetic environment § 84. E. Greatness is linked to a real or pseudo-engagement § 85. F. The catastrophe strikes (directly or indirectly) the interest associated with greatness, or it strikes a different interest § 86. G. Greatness is one- or multi-sided; it leads to catastrophe through conflict or without conflict § 87. H. The counterpower is internal or external or both § 88. I. The stricken contributes to the course with existential guilt, physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological, ethical, criminal, or metaphysical guilt. The term “tragic guilt” § 89. K. Randomness and necessity in the tragic course § 90. Is there an absolutely necessary tragedy? § 91. With the question of the necessity of the tragic, another naturally arises: Can the tragic be overcome? § 92. The heroic § 93. Tragedy and lifeview Chapter 9. On the Autotelic Experience of the Tragic § 94. Autotelic and heterotelic viewpoints § 95. New field of experience § 96. The tragic course of poetry § 97. The theater § 98. The term “aesthetic”

299 299 307 310 313 315 320 323 324 326

331 337

338 341 343

346 351 360 366 371 377 381 381 386 388 400 401

Contents § 99. § 100. § 101. § 102. § 103.

The relativity of the viewer Introspective method The individual factors of the poetic-tragic experience The overall poetic-tragic course Comment

xi 405 407 410 423 427

Chapter 10. Tragic Poetic Works § 104. Introduction § 105. Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound § 106. Job § 107. Shakespeare’s Hamlet

431 431 436 441 452

Chapter 11. Scattered Features from the Literature on the Tragic § 108. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) § 109. Sketch of the history of tragic theory in recent times § 110. Theodor Lipps § 111. Johannes Volkelt § 112. Josef Körner

467 467 481 513 538 552

Summary Index

565 569

FOREWORD David Benatar

Until now, Peter Wessel Zapffe’s major work, Om det tragiske, has been inaccessible to those English speakers who do not also know Norwegian. That fact, although not itself reaching the level of tragedy, has nonetheless been deeply regrettable. English speakers who do not also understand Norwegian have had only glimpses of his work, via translations of a few of Dr. Zapffe’s articles, his own English summary of Om det tragiske, as well as secondary literature about the Zapffean view. Given this, it is surprising just how well-known Dr. Zapffe has become in the anglophone world. Indeed, there has been a considerable and growing interest in his work in recent years. In pessimist, anti-natalist, environmentalist, and other circles there has been a clamoring for more, including a full translation of his magnum opus. Ryan L. Showler has done a great service in making Dr. Zapffe’s On the Tragic available both to those whose home language is English and those (non-Norwegians) who are fluent second-language speakers of English. Dr. Showler’s translation will be of interest not only to academics, but also to lay people who are interested, inter alia, in anti-natalism, philosophical pessimism, and tragedy.

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Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Om det tragiske began as a doctoral dissertation. After the first draft was significantly shortened, the doctoral degree was awarded. Even after the shortening, it remained a very long work. The first edition of the book was published in 1941. Translation is never an easy task. The length of this book must have made the translation an even more onerous one. However, Dr. Showler’s translation is unfailingly lucid. Moreover, where there is some issue of translation, he has helpfully drawn the reader’s attention to this in notes. Other notes provide context where required. Dr. Showler’s translation also includes an index, which was absent in the original Norwegian. This will be an immensely helpful addition for readers seeking out, or wishing to refer back to, specific concepts and issues. Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) was a fascinating person. While he is best known as a philosopher, he was also a lawyer, a humorist, an environmentalist, a photographer, and a mountaineer. These may seem like disparate characteristics. In fact, they coalesced. For example, he photographed the mountains he climbed. His love of the mountains fed his environmentalism, which in turn contributed to his anti-natalism – the view that it is wrong to procreate. This is because he was disturbed by the negative human impact on the natural environment. His sense of humor, like his love of mountain climbing, was not incompatible with his philosophical pessimism, including his view that life is ultimately meaningless. Humor is one very reasonable response to tragedy. Mountaineering may be meaningless, but it can be a wonderful distraction for those who enjoy it. I learned of Dr. Zapffe’s thoughts only after his death. Yet, our lives did overlap by more than two decades. I am sorry that I never met him, although I have wondered whether, if we had met, we would have had a common language in which we could have conversed philosophically. Books do enable their authors to “speak from the grave,” but once those authors have died, their readers cannot speak back to them. Dialogue becomes impossible. That certainly is tragic.

FOREWORD Thomas Ligotti

Ryan L. Showler’s impressive translation of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s On the Tragic, originally published in Norwegian in 1941, is a most welcome rendering into English of a major statement of philosophical pessimism, not least because such works have been few and far between in any language. Representing Zapffe’s most comprehensive statement of his dark worldview, this volume is also timely, given a newfound receptiveness to discourses of a pessimistic tenor that has recently emerged within academia. Previous to Showler’s translated edition of On the Tragic, Zapffe’s only publication of a like nature in English was “The Last Messiah” (1933), a lyrical and strident essay of a type perfected by the Romanian-born French author E. M. Cioran. In addition to its investigation into the less fortuitous aspects of human existence, On the Tragic shares with this earlier piece the proposition that among our species, “the capacity for suffering grows as the life of consciousness grows.” Zapffe’s virtuosity in his treatment of this fundamental theme of pessimistic thought, among the wealth of insights and perspectives that compose On the Tragic, is in itself an achievement for which he cannot be praised highly enough. Among the great matters of existence – the proper exposition of which requires a commanding surplus of intellect and honesty – is the phenomenon of suffering, both one’s own and that of others. In this regard, On the Tragic is particularly admirable

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and exhibits a nobility of spirit rare in any work of philosophic reflection. For English-language readers concerned with the widest spectrum of human experience, Zapffe’s masterwork will inspire what some may consider a peculiar kind of gratitude and even amazement.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

This first English translation of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s On the Tragic has proved difficult for a number of reasons. First, Zapffe wrote the text in a language style that would have seemed old-fashioned, though elegant, even when the book was first published in 1941. Zapffe biographer Jørgen Haave has told me in conversation that it is written in the language that Zapffe learned in school with the Norwegian spelling norms established in 1907. It would be characterized now as eccentrically conservative Riksmål and is very close to Danish. The language of Norway has a complicated history and has been modified several times as the country has sought cultural separation from Denmark, of which it was previously a part. The differences are not so great that Zapffe’s writing is not mutually intelligible with contemporary Norwegian, but the spellings of many words are different enough to create difficulties for a translator. Second, Zapffe intentionally employs a fairly unique use of quotation marks and italics for emphasis throughout the text. He mentions this strategy in § 10. In some places, he uses quotation marks to simply draw attention to a term or phrase, in others to point to a technical denotation, and still in others to quote. This is further complicated by the fact that Zapffe includes extensive German quotes, especially toward the end of the book, without using quotation marks at all. The text moves seamlessly between Norwegian and German

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without any demarcation whatsoever. We can assume that the educated Norwegian or Danish reader would have also had a reading knowledge of German, and thus Zapffe saw quotation marks as superfluous in these places. I have added quotation marks to these quotes. His use of italics seems to match that of their current English use, except for the fact that he always italicizes author names, a practice which may have been standard in Norwegian at the time, but is not a standard practice in English, and thus, these have been removed. Zapffe’s many footnotes throughout the text have been marked with numbers, while the translator’s notes have been indicated by letters. Zapffe wrote at a time when Latin terms and phrases were still somewhat prevalent in intellectual written discourse, as demonstrated by his frequent inclusion of such terms and phrases. The fact that he was an attorney prior to his philosophical work also contributes to this inclusion, given that Latin has survived longer in legal circles than almost anywhere else. One is faced with the choice between translating these Latin terms and phrases out of the text, with or without their inclusion in footnotes, or retaining them. I have opted for retaining them, and it is my guess that Zapffe would be in favor of this decision. The chances of Latin returning as the language of intellectual discourse are virtually non-existent, but one must decide whether one wants to contribute to the decline of a practice that had its clear value for centuries, or to push against the decline. I have chosen the latter. At the very least, the reader is given the opportunity to learn a few Latin phrases that he or she did not previously know. The English translations of the phrases are given in footnotes. Terms and phrases from other languages, with a few exceptions in cases where the original language is being discussed, are translated into English in the text and given in footnotes with the language indicated. I have chosen to remove a few instances where Zapffe added a footnote asking, “Grammatical error?” The grammatical issues to which he is referring are lost in the translation to English and thus become irrelevant. I owe a special debt of gratitude to several people who have made this translation possible. Roe Fremstedal (Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Jørgen Haave (Zapffe biographer and Senior Curator at the Henrik Ibsen Museum), both of whom have written on Zapffe, provided indispensable assistance with difficult passages. Hans Jørgen Stang (Director of UNIFOR, which manages the literary rights of the Berit and Peter Wessel Zapffe Foundation) kindly facilitated the acquisition of the rights to publish Zapffe’s text in English. Philip Dunshea (Senior Acquisitions Editor at the Peter Lang Group) was a joy to work with and expended

Translator’s Preface

xix

considerable effort to make the publishing of the translation possible. Abdur Rawoof, Charmitha Ashok, and the production team at Peter Lang also did significant work preparing the text for publication. I am grateful to Chip Smith at Nine-Banded Books and Professor Todd K. Shackelford at Oakland University for their assistance in finding a publisher. Dr. David Benatar and Thomas Ligotti, who have contributed greatly to the awareness of Zapffe’s thought in the English-speaking world, graciously wrote forewords for this publication, and I am indebted to them for this. Special thanks to Ingri Haakonsen and Marianne Bjørndal at Pax Forlag for giving us access to the digital files of Zapffe’s figures included in the text. I would also like to thank the administration and Sabbatical Committee at Henry Ford College for approving a sabbatical that accelerated the work on this project. And thanks to Tim Oseckas, Andreas Nilssen Moss, and Amanda Sukenick for their help with Zapffe information and for spreading the word about the existence of this translation. No translation is perfect and there are widely differing opinions on how best to approach the task. Any failures to capture Zapffe’s thought in a way that he would have found satisfactory are my own and I ask for forgiveness up front. My hope is that possible future editions or translations will remedy any shortcomings.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

When the plan emerged concerning the reprint of this book, the following question in particular arose: Could the central thoughts be assumed to have been empirically confirmed or refuted in the course of the over 40 years that have passed since the first edition in 1941? A tremendous time lies between, well-suited to shift the life position of anyone, individually, globally, and metaphysically. In one respect, developments have not followed the forecasts of the first edition. The connection between “greatness” and “downfall” is more evident in the external expression of technical ability than in the internal mental development. While the external material triumphs are now approaching a high point, followed by decline and catastrophe, we still grope with what we with rabulistic simplification can call the Western and intellectual mean, still wrapped in painful insecurity and perplexity. The tendency of intellectual powerlessness and moral dissolution is more of a function of the proximity of the technical catastrophe than of a philosophical nihilism with independent value. Nevertheless, the awareness of what it entails to be born as a human being on the earth seems to be breaking through to an increasing degree, even in otherwise extroverted people. The pressure of existence itself, not least the confrontation in both the mind and body with Death as intrusive,

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all-encompassing fact, appears in anxiety and flight symptoms, in loneliness and xenophobia, dependence on intoxicants, overwhelming crime, growing populations in psychiatric hospitals, etc. – scattered tips of invisible icebergs. What the book attempted to do is follow the line of “interests and conditions” from the amoeba to the desperate suicide of the person of genius. Cultures, whose inspiration and intrinsic value implicitly originate from the idea of “the penetration of the universe by the spirit as the template and meaning of life,” burn out in turn as “the path of hope.” It is as if our striving does not have “the universe’s approval.” And where hope is leaking out, general indifference gains its all-encompassing entry. In an unprinted manuscript, the author has given the following expression of his “philosophical will”: “When the contemplative man, a studiosus perpetuus vitae,a has indulged in the Indian wisdom, or Gnosis, that the Mystery of Life is amoral, then the awe evaporates and he can in all his physical powerlessness, from the soul’s categorical imperative, seize the mystery by the neck and shake it like a mitten.” Oslo, June 1983 P. W. Z. The view from the last cairn can be briefly captured in the following sentence: “The human race comes from nothing and goes to nothing. Beyond this there is nothing.” Asker, June 10, 1988 Peter Wessel Zapffe home dying This writing now completed, I would like first and foremost to thank my parents for having made it practically possible for me to focus on the work. I also thank Professors Fr. Paasche and A. H. Winsnes for their generous interest and valuable advice, and last but not least, Professor Arne Næss for his relentlessness and profound impact. With the exception of a few footnotes, the book was written before April 9, 1940.b

a perpetual student of life. b The date of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway and Denmark.

·1· INTRODUCTION

§ 1. Goal and Method It is a long-established practice to begin an investigation by explaining the goal and method. In short, the goal here is to make a contribution to the understanding of the tragic. I will attempt to specify the method when the goal is more precisely defined. What do I mean by “the tragic”? Is there any doubt about the meaning, or is “the tragic” one of those concepts that has a fairly unique content for all people at all times, such as, for example, the term “the dangerous”? It is certainly not possible to cast “a quick glance” at the theoretical treatment that has been allocated to the concept in Europe over the last 2,200 years, but if it were possible, it would convince us that there is not only doubt about the content, but that there are, in fact, about as many concepts of “the tragic” as there are authors. Perhaps I can align myself with one of the older writers, or combine multiple previous proposals, or establish something intermediate; or do I intend something completely new? Or is it that I indeed have no intention in advance, seeing it as my task to give the concept its appropriate place, on an independent basis, by gradual approximation and plugging of sources of error?

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Let us say that this last one is the task. Where will we then take hold? Is there not a danger of making the preconception precisely the definition that one is hoping to achieve? If one stands completely free, how can one find a starting point at all? It does not make sense to cast a net around the whole universe and then little by little to pick out everything that is not tragic, and the expression must indeed mean something. We need to find out what this “something” is. Where should we begin? Does the subject belong to aesthetics, metaphysics, psychology, dramaturgy, ethics, or natural science? Perhaps even psychiatry, sociology, or literary history? All these viewpoints are represented in “the ancients.” If there is no single identifying mark that runs through all these divergent conceptions, do we have anything else to do but enjoy the atmosphere while the sparks of hope die out? There are, of course, all the theatrical tragedies. Is “tragedy” therefore a clear concept? Can the word mean nothing more than a play with a tragic course? If not, then we are just as far away. And if it can mean something else – for example, a literary category – then we have not caught the tragic even if we catch the tragedy. Then we have etymology. From what does the word originate? Tragos – goat; tragedie, tragodia – goat-song. It would indeed be difficult to hear the goat-song in Prometheus, Hamlet, the Book of Job, etc. But then what about the common linguistic usage? The word is used every day, in newspapers and conversations, in jest and seriousness. “Gypsya fight with a tragic end.” “Don’t take that sorry little girl too tragically.”b All these people must then mean something, and in this meaning there must be something common since it clearly seems they understand each other. I sent a questionnaire to twenty of my acquaintances: “What do you understand by the word tragic? Refer to some examples, etc.” And I received a hail of synonyms: Quite sad, troublesome, woeful, highest degree of sadness, in the neighborhood of disastrous, not to be laughed at, fateful, woeful with dramatic character, pitiful, having something to do with being a shame, sad on a serious basis, but at the same time significant, powerful, attracting and having a certain elevation, our most precious interests suffering shipwreck, irreparable, something being torn away from life, that there is suffering, something hopeless that one cannot prevent, woeful and unpleasant, the opposite of comic, extraordinary misery, a The term tater is used here for Romani travelers. Much like gypsy, the term is now seen by some as derogatory. b Here tragisk is given to express too seriously, a use of tragic that is uncommon in English.

Introduction

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unfortunate occurrence, boundless despair, meaningless evil, innocent punishment, complete annihilation, refining woe, pain borne with pride, when a great personality suffers, when goodness is met with punishment, when one expects something better, when there are no comforting factors, when the misfortune could have been avoided; as examples are mentioned war, loss of provider, shattered illusions, egg yolk on a new suit, etc. Our being stuck is not due to a lack of interpretations, but to whom should we listen? All of them are indeed intelligent, educated people. What now? Send out more forms and determine the result from a simple or three-fourths majority? It still looks pretty dark out. But of course, I would not have admitted this so boldly if there were not a very slight chance remaining. Are we absolutely certain that the theorists among themselves and all the everyday speakers do not have a single preconception in common? That there is not even anything that is tragic? No, we are not so certain. On the contrary, the vast majority are aware that the word tragic is of central importance, that there is something that requires this word and nothing else, and that the word should be used for this something and not for anything else. One finds everywhere the need for the word tragic, and one wants the word to denote a distinctive and representative quality. No one has yet stepped forward to demonstrate that the expression is superfluous, that the meaning could be covered equally well by other adjectives that do not raise any problems. We should not be astonished that the phenomenon for which the word stands has never been revealed in such a way that everyone was convinced and the discussion died down. The term can change from time to time, from person to person, and yet there can be something common in the associations that the word awakens, some reality in the immediate “sensation” of the tragic. But where shall one find this “common multiple” for the varied factors, this “geometric location” where the intersecting lines cross? We will find them, when the field is made wide enough, in humankind itself. Not even the most “ethereal” of the speculative theorists, who in the tragic may see something such as “the idea of release from the finite,” etc., will deny that the tragic, irrespective of its possible metaphysical significance, is an attribute of earthly human fate and manifests itself in the human value struggle, not in the form of “idea” and “limitation,” but attached to concrete collisions between “the self” and nature, the self and God, personalities between themselves, incompatible demands within the individual mind. I have not been able to find in any writer or daily speech an attempt to untie the tragic from the

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human field of interest, or more precisely, from that part of it which is marked by defeat and downfall. If we have now gained a feeling of being on a firmer basis, then it is weakened again by the fact that authors designated as “aesthetic” have sought the tragic solely in the theater (in the most read or performed tragic poetry), in a dramatic series of events that emerged innovatively or was cultivated by a creative poet’s mind, and which life outside the theater cannot produce with the same “purity.” There, the viewer is practically focused and incapable of enjoying the “aesthetic” side of the course; thus, the tragic in the course itself also disappears, because the tragic is an aesthetic category. Nevertheless, these researchers are also attempting to establish the conditions for this “tragic-aesthetic” experience coming into play in the theater; thus, they will also be cited when we discuss factors and dynamics in the underlying relationship, that is, the collisions of practical interests and the individuals’ attitudes during them. Nonetheless, the problem’s subject matter is divided into two: On the one hand, we will have to work with the structure of the tragic phenomenon, with what I will call without deeper meaning the “objectively” tragic, and on the other hand with its distinctive effect on the observer, both in practical life and in poetry and theater. Many writers have gone from a “given” tragic-aesthetic quality of experience and determined the “objectively tragic” according to this. The difficulty then becomes justifying the claim that this particular artistic experience is “the tragic.” Some in their distress reach for the nature of the objective phenomenon, and thereby the circle is closed. Thus, we find it safer at first to seek out the objectively tragic without worrying about its effect on the mind. And thereby the method is given: it is neither metaphysical nor aesthetic nor anything else other than biological. Perhaps it would be better to say “biologistic,” and even more tempting is “biosophic – thinking about life.” But this has a connotation of mysticism that does not belong here, and if the more common term biological is precisely defined for use in the following, then it performs the service just as well: One uses a biological method, built on a biological basis, when one considers life as a tension between task and ability, as the struggle of organisms to realize their interests, each in its environment. The word interest is at the center here and is the pivot around which the whole consideration rotates. At the moment, I cannot give any further proof of the viewpoint’s fertility for the present task. I take a chance when I assume that by means of the method chosen life’s variegated weave can be pulled apart so that the elements of the tragic appear. It suits me to work within this viewpoint and not to

Introduction

5

choose a different one only to have the product come to a halt or fail. It seems to me that the suggested method provides good conditions for an approximation to the formation of a tragic theory for precise research, perhaps just a first approximation, but even this is painfully needed. The method does not preclude the insertion of metaphysical interpretation, for example at any stage of the process, if any should wish; it does not imply any particular notions of life’s origin and transcendental goals or non-goals; it only works with the struggle of life as it appears to the individual experiencing subject. The procedure is largely this: First, I will try, with particular emphasis on the main theme, to clarify certain basic conditions of organic life and its situation in the earthly environment. This will bring about a first restriction of the subject matter. Starting with organic life as a whole, then treating humans separately, we will try to become aware of what unites (in the crudest way and only for our purpose) and what separates humankind from its fellow creatures in the plant and animal kingdoms. An overview of the animal and human “catastrophe types” will then, according to plan, bring us into the immediate vicinity of the burning questions. In any case, what I hope to disclose this way is whether the – for now hypothetical – tragic phenomenon is naturally linked to organic life as a whole, to human life in general, to certain categories of people, to individual human beings, or to occasionally occurring coincidences or courses. At the same time, we will see whether it is possible to maintain a unified concept of the “tragic” from the biological viewpoint, or whether the term falls apart in case studies. No possibilities within the method’s radius of action shall be eliminated beforehand. Least promising of all these possibilities will be our simply ascertaining the relationship of the research object to the method. Should the noble target escape despite all efforts, should it turn out to be, for example, that subjective assessments are ultimately decisive, then we must come to terms with this result and seek a lesser comfort in the fact that at least there is a warning sign for those who find themselves at the same intersection. But so long as both the alluring and the discouraging conclusions are as far away as they are at present, we will instead take hold with fresh powers and direct our attention to the tools that must first be provided. Even the basic questions of research cannot be taken up; it may be the task of others to defend the “scientific” work as a whole against attacks of, for example, a cognitive-critical nature. When it comes to driving in a nail, I have to use the hammer as it is; but this is not the time for theoretical discussions of tool construction. Some tools are considered safer than others; currently, for

6

on the tragic

example, experimental psychology has a favorable reputation. There are indeed scientists who believe the safest method is to simply describe the scientist’s behavior.1 With such an obscure, ambiguous, complex, extensive, intangible theme as “the tragic,” it is immediately clear that we cannot confine ourselves to this “inner circle” of scientific security. We must work with tools that result in a strong dilution of a possible “scientific pretension,” which in the “exact” scientist’s eyes may indeed seem like pure fraud or more kindly expressed as lyrical fantasy. I am thinking of such things as generalization, introspection, and “co-feeling,” indeed “co-experience” in the imagination with animals and humans on a completely uncontrollable basis. Without such aids, we cannot take hold of our theme; we would rather have what we do not be called science. However, these reservations do not in any way mean that there should be no discipline or control. The joy of links that become chains, the intoxication of an emerging system, must never lead us to lose contact with the healthiest of all sources of thought – experience. This is a pretension we must not give up; it is the requirement of subjective intellectual integrity.

§ 2. Concerns Objections from two sides may be raised against the chosen method of “applied biology”: first, from the biologist’s side, who finds his or her science abused, and then from a philosophical and aesthetic point of view, where one refrains from involvement in the scientific way of thinking. Jakob von Uexküll expresses the former objection in Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung [Building Blocks to a Biological World View], Munich 1913, p. 67. However, it is not our intention to promote an expanded biology in the academic sense of the term, but merely to consider the organic development of life from the point of view of interest struggle. Nor do we intend to force poetic theory into the terminology of a natural science or to narrow the imagination with biological dogmatism. The method does not interfere more deeply here than the man who cleans an attic; he puts “art and poetry” in one place, but he does not take a stand on the content in any other way. It is the necessity of specialization that raises such objections. The knowledge base within the individual disciplines has gradually become so great, the methods and the pertinent problems so distinctive throughout, that all 1 Arne Næss, Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten [Knowledge and Scientific Behavior], Oslo 1936.

Introduction

7

attempts to combine the results will be characterized by dilettantism. The researcher who is designated as “polyhistoric” therefore becomes an increasingly rare phenomenon, a cultural type that is about to die out. If one is still out there, one rings with no answer at one closed faculty door after another and is either rejected as an outsider or received and given an indulgent smile – “The greatest biologist among the aestheticians and the greatest aesthetician among the biologists.” And yet one is perhaps an honest laborer in an unknown vineyard, a rich-feeling and farsighted soul whose only error is not settling for registration alone, but through synthetic inspiration the sparks draw from one power chamber to the other, and one uses what one’s diligence has gathered to bring forth the image of humankind’s cosmic condition. For this person, perhaps the real purpose of science is to shed light on the only necessary and eternally burning question: what it means to be human. And when no single discipline has answers to give, then it is the turn of the good dilettante. This consideration is admittedly an unfortunate choice for validation of my own attempt in a polyhistoric direction. Faced with the work plan that has been laid out up front, I cannot avoid feeling my lack of knowledge with painful force. In order to feel somewhat prepared for such a task, in order to have approximately acquired the normally requisite conditions to accomplish it – as much as it is possible within the framework of a single life – one must be fully familiar with the fields of labor, methods, and prevailing views in a variety of sciences – philosophy, biology and sociology, the history of religion, art, general culture and literature, aesthetics in the broadest sense, psychology, pedagogy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis – to name only the most important. Besides having done a significant amount of special study of tragic poetry and its origin, one has to have lived a rich and direct life, had dangerous enemies and important friends both with and without betrayal, stood in personal and erotic relationship with diverse people, been independent and bound, familiar with one’s own transgressions with stinging shame and worn out under undeserved adversity with exasperated self-esteem, having had to fight for existence with failing resources, known the panicked need for partial or total confirmation, been through the joy of triumph, fortified in heroism’s ecstasy, paralyzed by cowardice and tormented under moral conflicts, collected the fruits of knowledge with a mature mind and vibrating sensitivity, often with periods of depression and world angst, and experienced a number of representative crises and mental breakdowns. Only then could there be the prospect of the resonance chambers in one’s mind firing as the material demands.

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on the tragic

The comparison between these relative prerequisites and the qualifications that the author cannot help but admit must necessarily produce a discouraging result. If I, with full awareness of this regrettable situation, have nevertheless embarked on the task, then it happens on the grounds that not everything can wait. If we put off any work until we feel unquestionably competent, many paths would remain untried. Besides, the material has long absorbed me, and the more I read the current literature on the subject, the stronger the desire becomes to try a new orientation, so much more because this captivating theme has never been thoroughly treated in Norway. However, the procedure to be tried lacks clarity in the tradition; thus, I have found it necessary to explain in this introduction the challenges that have arisen at the beginning of the work.

·2· BIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

§ 3. Individual and the outside world In the following discussion, when talking about “the environment,” “the surrounding medium,” “the external world,” etc., this does not mean that the standpoint of realism is taken in the dispute between the cognitive theories of realists and idealists. The terms only have the meaning that a conscious organism is believed to experience its state, at least partly, as a play against a “non-organism,” a “non-I,” an outside world, or a counterworld. Sometimes the expressions do not even mean this but only that we naturally or practically or in our aim toward fruitfulness arrange the biological object of observation in such an opposition. And since it is not our intent to pursue a cognitive theory but only to seek a description of the struggling life as we experience and interpret it (albeit with the means reserved in § 2), to speak of an external world in the everyday meaning of the phrase becomes the only reasonable expression. The opposition between the individual and the outside world is firstly related to the “principium individuationis,”a to the distinction between the individual bearers of interest. These then become the outside world for each other. Secondly, the opposition must be sought in the separation of the interest a principle of individuation (a phrase frequently used by Schopenhauer).

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bearers from surrounding inorganic substances, or, in order to avoid the word inorganic, from substances that do not amount to “competing individuals.”2 With our purpose in mind, it is not necessary to go into the specialists’ discussions about these matters; it is enough to mention the words spiritualism and materialism. A biological standpoint is presented by J. v. Uexküll, who without drawing philosophical consequences sees the living cell as something in principle different from the soil.3 At the “lowest” stages of life nothing other than a “degree difference” from the “highest” forms of non-life (the crystal, the self-moving chloroform droplet, etc.) can be detected; thus, this is of subordinate importance to the task. However, it is important that the possible degree of difference in the human, or perhaps in other highly conscious beings, is so great that it is perceived as a “difference in nature” in the everyday meaning of the phrase. We believe after all that the tragic will relate to the immediate life experience and not to things as they appear in scientific concerns. The subject of the investigation allows one to rely on biological theory without having to take a stand on the disputed questions that meet the student at the entrance to the discipline.4 Thus, it is unnecessary here to worry about the origin of the species or for other reasons to participate in the scuffle on Darwin’s grave. Successive, simultaneous, or inexplicable origin may be just the same to us as long as we are allowed to maintain the idea of common conditions, of “equality under the law” of all life, or more precisely, of common main features, of the functional conditions of protective, nutritive, and reproductive mechanisms in the distinctive earthly force field. This community can be traced back to the protoplasmic basis of life and the unity in histological structure (the function program of the muscle and nerve tissues). Although the interpretation of the general schema shows a multiplicity of variants, the fundamental unity is expressly or implicitly presupposed by otherwise disagreeing scientists. Within the threshold of life, biology works mainly with degree differences. On this foundation, I now build up a certain number of indispensable conditions, which thereby have the least possible axiomatic character. They may not have a significance such that the main view of the essence of the tragic 2 Cf. J. v. Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [Environment and Inner World of Animals], Berlin 1921 p. 13 and 31. 3 Cf. Uexküll, op. cit. in the chapter “Das Protoplasmaproblem [The Protoplasm Problem].” As characteristic properties of the living organism are mentioned (p. 21) formation, regeneration, and super-mechanical regulation, i.e., altered reaction by repeated stimulus. 4 Kr. Bonnevie, Organisk Utvikling [Organic Development], I–II, Oslo 1929.

Biological Conditions

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stands or falls with them, but I need them in order to use the comparison with the simpler life forms of the animal kingdom for introduction into the central human problem’s circle of thought.

§ 4. Fundamental features of the individual’s life 1. It is clear that certain animal species have died out, and others are currently in the process of dying out. If one asks what the life of the individual has led to in these cases, then no reference can be made to the species, though this answer has a provisional validity for species that are still unfolding freely and strongly. And the question goes further: what has the life of the species, the life of the form idea so to speak, led to in these cases? This can only be answered with a counterquestion: with what right is it demanded that life should “lead to” something? This question later becomes central to the analysis of the tragic; here it is only given and we pass over to another: what was the reason that some species died out? The answer is less hypothetical concerning species that die out today before our own eyes. Here we do not have to dig into nature’s original workshop, although it is enticing for the fancy to imagine mutation points which as blindly hurled form variants appear in the landscape perhaps with one, perhaps with no likelihood per thousands of viabilities in the given environment. In ontogenesis, which anyone can study, there is enough material for a picture of “the struggle for life.” The wonderful and fascinating cooperative program that seems to associate the individual and the outside world into a unity of meaning and harmony is present only in a favorable environment. The favorableness is determined by the individual’s needs and is often the result of a longer process alongside the death of some and the adaptation of other individuals. Humans have not yet been able to observe any biological principle of superiority that holds up the best of the individuals or species and guarantees them exactly the characteristics they need in the world of landscapes and cohabitation to which each of them is consigned. The ability to search for the optimum sometimes helps, but not always; it shows the bone mounds after what was. We cannot believe that it was the very interest of life, self-preservation, that failed; the analogies indicate that life had broken down despite all the attempts to survive. Neither the

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on the tragic

species nor the individual could, at the very moment of critical need, obtain help from adaptation tendencies, which optimistic biologists believe assert themselves over the course of millions of years. In the absence of accessible mutation points, one can look at the ancestral points: the emission of a new path involves so much uncertainty and so many unknown factors of significance for the well-being of the new individuals that the expression “blind and random hurling” is not too strong. A preliminary definition of the concept of randomness is desirable here. Nothing is “random” if everything has its “sufficient cause.” But the word may have a different meaning, less metaphysical, less absolute, more practical, and more tangible. When one says that an individual is randomly ejected, then one means random in relation to something; here, in relation to the individual’s needs and the conditions for the satisfaction of the needs. In the word itself there is a clue: something “fell to”a the outside, outside of calculation. Phenomenon a is random relative to phenomenon b when b is part of a “program” and a is of significance to the course of the program without this being predicted or able to be foreseen. By “program” in the broadest sense is meant a human meaningfulness of things, an arrangement of the co-occurrences into structural groups in conjunction with a schema in space or time. The “program” that we associate with an emerging animal generation is the same as we see in all life, that the individuals must maintain their species-typical form and in the fullness of time allow it to pass on to a new generation. From the observation that the organisms have an inherent tendency to adhere to the program, we conclude that their partial functions are found to work together to realize it. The program itself is not subject to experience, and even in this cautious form the assumption cannot be verified. But without it, it is hardly possible to look forward to “the tragic,” at least not if one wants to maintain the possibility that the tragic can mean something else and more than the death of individuals and species. It is necessary to emphasize the following with regard to randomness. Each case will itself show whether or not the meeting between a given individual’s equipment and the assigned environment is life-conditioning. If it is not life-conditioning, the individual goes out of life’s history forever, dissolves into parts that are not themselves interest-bearing, returns to the foundry and becomes indifferent raw material for new interest-bearers, perhaps for another species. Jesus of Nazareth was aware of this law of chance, aware of the lack a Reference to the literal meaning of tilfældig (faldt til = fell to) translated random.

Biological Conditions

13

of an orderly outline, an economic principle, a guarantee of task and meaning with each seed, aware that the crudest luck and not just the quality of the seed is essential to its further fate, that many are called but few are chosen: A sower went out to sow. And as he did, some fell on the road and the birds came and ate them. The birds also have to live, but the seeds they pick do not need to have germinating power. And there was no one who made sure the best seeds fell onto fertile soil. When we look with admiration at the successful ones with their hundred-fold yield, it is the few survivors that we admire. Thus, the earthly conditions have been described in such a way that the unfolding of life is either admirable or there is no life whatsoever. The compromised blunders lie hidden in the fossil layers. We unconsciously base our own relatively insignificant technical skill upon admiration. Nature has “solved problems” that tower dizzyingly over what we are tinkering with ourselves. But perhaps a human being was needed for any problem to arise at all, a being that is accordingly capable of sufficiently little and comprehends sufficiently much. There may be a reaction beyond the admiration of nature analogous to a case like this: a man has thrown a pea into a thimble from fifty meters high. Later, one suspects that he has emptied a whole bucket of peas over the thimble and that all the mistakes have been removed before the invitation to look at the result. The admirer’s attention turns away from the successful triumph and focuses on the innumerable innocent victims. One demands a justification for what has happened and does not find it because of the fact that at the same time histological magic tricks are occurring. 2. An important feature of the living individual is that once life has begun, the successive states (those to some extent associated with stages of development) cannot be brought about in an arbitrary order by external changes. The law can be illustrated by a forward-moving gear wheel where the present functions as an emergency break. The relationship can also be expressed as follows: The species-determining substrates of the created organism are characterized by the fact that they not only roll out in a distinctive spatial form but also follow a certain schema in time. 3. The rollout requires the maintenance of a fine-tuned, internally balanced state called the vital balance. With simpler animals, the danger of disturbance lies primarily in the influences of the surrounding world. These may be of both chemical and mechanical nature, and the danger can lie in both the degree of strength and quality. Animals are defenseless against certain stimuli; toward others they can, through a threshold

14

on the tragic system, make a life-serving selection. For protection against overstrain almost all living creatures have an ectoplasmic “stimulus shield,”a a layer of hardier material, of a substance that is closer to the mineral than the soft parts, that is “interestless” and poorer in life’s possibilities and therefore superior toward the battering it faces.5 4. The maintenance of the vital balance also depends, of course, on the creature’s own behavior.b It will be useful to distinguish between three types of behavior, as the concept of behavior (conduct, behavior,c comportment,d posture) is intended to encompass both actions and reactions. (All questions related to the distinction between these we pass over here). A. Some reactions are unequivocally determined by the nature of the organism itself and occur automatically upon appropriate stimuli without the need for any decision-making by the creature (reflexes). B. Others in the process are equally determined, when they first take place, but they do not occur automatically every time an appropriate stimulus arises. It appears as if the creature can choose between action and non-action. If the cat is to escape into the open land, it has to run on all fours, but it does not always flee; sometimes, it sets itself in defense. C. Finally, there is a type of behavior in which the use of the body is determined by conscious agency – of course, here also within certain limits determined by the body’s structure such that one has more or less room to act.

Behavior as mentioned under A will hereafter be called fixed (fully fixed), under B (if the type turns out to have its own meaning) half-fixed, and under C unfixed. The distinction, which carries a significant part of the following investigation, will be clarified later. 5. The will or tendency to preserve the vital balance and perform actions that result in a new generation (whether or not the individual a Reiz-schutz (Ger.). 5 Cf. Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle], Ges. Schriften [Collected Writings] VI, Vienna 1920 p. 215 f. b opførsel (Nor.). c English given. d Verhalten (Ger).

Biological Conditions

15

is consciously pursuing this) raises the individual’s energetic tension toward the outside world to the point of struggle. The state of struggle is sometimes pervasive (the whole organism is engaged) and often highly complex; the front of the effectors extends from each cell to the application of the entire individual’s total cellular capacity. The struggle concerns, above all, (a) life-essential rapport with the inorganic environment (breathing and temperature conditions), (b) protection against enemy animals, (c) acquisition of food, and (d) sexual function. For the conscious grades of life, this striving is experienced as an interest, that is, a sense of value and an associated prompting to secure this value. We can call this state interest. Dead medium, on the other hand, is “state-indifferent.” Provided the “unconscious forms of life” share this characteristic with the elements, it is entirely up to humankind’s own account whether we “find it better” or “more correct” for a plant to grow and bear seed than for it to be pulled up and killed; I ignore the human needs that can be met by the plant having such a “fate.” The concept of fate presupposes that there is “a greater call to” one course than to another, that the history of the fate-suffering entity either coincides with or deviates from an interest-related schema. Thus, one cannot speak of fate, but indeed of history, in connection with a stone on the beach. In the case of a nail, the possibility is already closer; “the interest” is indeed the viewer’s and not the nail’s own but can be transferred to it in the same way as in fairy tales. The nail then has a “better fate” by being beaten into a wall than by lying on the bottom of the sea and rusting. We expect the course of events that is consistent with interest, at least in “higher animals,” to be followed by pleasure, and that which is inconsistent by aversion. This is more than a linguistic tautology; with the moment of pleasure there appears a subjective element; we have moved out of the border area where there may still be questions about degree or essential difference between life and non-life – we find ourselves in the indisputable domain of life. The individual moves toward pleasure and away from the aversive.6 By this fundamental property, the unfixed ability expression flows out in such a way

6 No stance is taken in this regard concerning possible restrictions on the validity of this claim, cf. Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] Ges. Schr. [Coll. Writ.], Vienna 1920.

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on the tragic

that only the life-serving fuel is put into action, while that which would put the individual in jeopardy is held back in potential. The premise is thus that the pleasure-giving and life-serving coincide. 6. The surrounding medium is usually of inorganic nature (air, water, soil), less frequently of organic (parasites). By the word environment, one often thinks of the medium alongside the acting substance masses. If the environment is favorable, the development of the individual will proceed unhindered and result in the birth of a new generation which, having benefitted from the parents’ care (a small environment of the most favorable kind that isolates against the greater dangers), is able after some time to fend for itself and mate in turn. Thus, the first couple has fulfilled its biological “purpose” and rolled out its last substrate; after loss of reproductive ability and the youngest offspring’s departure, “the lonely old” can only retire and die. A lifespan beyond this point must be regarded as a kind of inertia without biological value. Something other than the existence of the species, some other or “higher” meaning alongside basic animal generation – despite all “the mysteries of instinct” and “the experience of millions” – humanity has not yet observed. If the environment does not provide the necessary conditions, one of three things will occur: (a) The creature’s functions will be so firmly fixed that it cannot “adapt” to the unfavorable conditions; it is bound to remain “faithful to its uniqueness.” Sooner or later the vital balance is destroyed and the creature dies, loses all abilities, including fertility, and is absorbed into the environment’s “potential.” Humans have not been able to observe any difference in “interestlessness” between the land that has not yet been caught by life and that which has been alive. A quantity has been used and given back; a loop of struggle, of pleasure and suffering, has basically ended at the starting point. Observation shows the status quo as similar to the water before and after the snowman. The difference between strong and weak individuals is also eliminated as the ashes of an inferior piece of work are chemically inseparable from the ashes of a masterpiece. (b) The creature’s unfixed reserves allow for complete adaptation and the environment is beneficial to the adapted form.

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(c) Between cases a and b is a scale on which the ability to exist and propagate is preserved but where the poor conditions permit only a partial unfolding of the substrate. The result is a crippled form with a greater or lesser margin of aversion. By adaptation here we are not thinking of changes in the creature’s internal organization, only of the ability to change the external behavior after conditions shift, for example, to seek out a cave in a colder climate while this was previously unnecessary. The procuring of caves, nests, and the like is related directly to the question that concerns the boundary between the individual and the outside world. The endoplasm of the amoeba and the internal organs of larger animals, as previously mentioned, find a first defense in a stimulus shield consisting of ectoplasm, calcium, skin tissue, horns, etc. With its approximation to inorganic structure, this “inborn cave” forms an intermediate layer that is simultaneously part of the animal and the external world’s furthest outpost. The transition is especially evident in snails and hermit crabs. Insofar as the stimulus shield is considered part of the environment, it has its defining characteristic in the fact that it, as the closest ring of an otherwise erratic or unfavorable environment, “behaves” in accordance with the animal’s vital needs, an expectation that the animal does not dare place on the rest of the outside world. Apart from symbiosis in the broadest sense, humankind has not had the experience of the environment having adapted itself to the necessities of the living organism. A case of interest contact between the processes of the outside world and life has never been found. The actually existing conditions of life are not thought of as interest contact. The courtship of the individuals in their adaptation efforts has been disturbingly one-sided and is without exception met with the cold shoulder. There can be no talk of interest contact because the environment lacks the ability or willingness to undergo variations in harmony with the living being’s needs in a given emergency situation. In this sense, the universe is alien to everything living. Fire and drought, storm and cold strike without regard; it is up to life to save itself as best it can. The terms of this relationship can be seen in the image of a residence permit that can be withdrawn at any point in a terrifying barbaric country where the language is strange, and that operates according to orders from unknown and inaccessible entities, and where one can be tortured and killed at any time. Often reward and disgrace can be connected to our own behavior; at other times things go badly when we expect a little success. When I say “we,” this is more than a “technical plural” because in this play we are a fraternal circle

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from the amoeba to the dictator, which, however, does not put any constraint on our reciprocal clash. The self-produced stimulus shield is not always sufficient under such conditions; it must be expanded and reinforced. A still wider range of objects, a layer of the real world, must provide such properties in the vicinity of which the animal can confide during eating, sleeping, and maternity, and other circumstances where the defense capability is reduced or the danger is overwhelming. The cave can, therefore, be seen as a projection of the idea of the stimulus shield into the outer world. The limitations of tissue differentiation as armor appear to have a compensation in the ability to “alter” the outer world according to the same needs. The animal willingly exchanges the restriction of the freedom of movement associated with the “fixedness” of the cave walls for the acquired safety. The meeting of the animal’s diverse efforts and the outside world’s conglomerate of harmful, useful, and indifferent agents then plays out in continual shifts between conformity and divergence of conditions and needs. A certain number of individuals will always perish according to the law of probability such that with their bodies they cover the danger points of their fellows. The indifference of the outside world, in fact, entails an advantage for organisms in that they do not have to fear that a counter-interest from the physicochemical factors’ side will damage their well-being. However, the rest of the environment threatens this possibility from other species and from other individuals of the same species (the enemy). Here one can speak of an inverted interest contact. The predator realizes its interest precisely in those events that destroy the prey’s. The more magnificently the prey unfolds its uniqueness, the more vigorously it will be sought. The predator knows about the prey’s nature and the weaknesses of its stimulus shield and has the will and ability to break in at this location (e.g., the abdominal skin of the hedgehog. A tropical spider sticks its victim, a beetle, in five anatomically correct places). The rule seems to be that “nature takes an interest in” only one species at a time; the species face each other as blindly fanatical parties in an anarchic state; there is no leader who wishes the whole well. X only works for X, Y for Y, etc. Exceptions exist in rare cases where two species truly serve each other’s well-being (symbiosis); however, we do not have the means to determine whether the cooperation is “intentional” or “coincidental.” The presence of other creatures will thus, for a given individual, exert three kinds of influence on its life struggle: The organisms nearby are incorporated into the rest of the indifferent environment, possibly with the modification that

Biological Conditions

19

qua fleeing prey they make the individual’s nutrition difficult. Or qua predator they increase the individual’s struggle by hunting or attacking it. When speaking of such an environment fragment in what follows, the term hostile will be used. A qualified case of a hostile environment exists when the enemy’s intention includes not only the satisfaction of its own needs but also the prey’s suffering and death, not as a means, but as an end in itself. Here the term satanic environment fits. Finally, the term sympathetic environment will be applied to forms of symbiosis, and social cooperation within a single species. 7. Externally or internally conditioned disturbances in the vital balance or substrate-determined development (by analogy) are associated, we believe, with aversion, which at a certain degree of intensity takes on the character of pain. It is believed that the biological function of the pain is that of alerting the individual to a threatening danger or forcing it into a life-preserving posture when the situation is critical. The organism must, therefore, be arranged in such a way that the pain avoidance coincides with life preservation, such that the whole is driven toward continued life through a game of frightening and enticing motivating factors. It is precisely by being an evil, precisely by its nature of unbearability, that the pain fulfills its biological purpose. Admittedly, this interpretation of the pain phenomenon is missing an economic principle that ensures a relationship between pain and what it is supposed to do, but finding any other interpretation without resorting to metaphysical guesswork would prove difficult. It is especially toward external danger, toward the breakthrough of the stimulus shield, that the individual has the ability to respond in a life-preserving manner. It is more difficult to protect against balance disturbances in the interior of the organism, and pain works in vain. The only thing the animal can do then is to behave as if the pain-inducing stimulus came from the outside – as if it were trying to move the danger to a place where it can be overcome. This phenomenon, which raises the notion of a first sprout of imagination, can be subordinated to the extensive term projection. At best, the pain leads to the neutralization of the danger and the restoration of the status quo, sometimes to increased life force through experience, or even to a temporary or chronic suppression through an overloading of the nerves and mind. In these cases, the pain has, to a greater or lesser extent, fulfilled its purpose. It is different when it works blindly and spares no effort even where one sees that from the very

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on the tragic

beginning there is no hope, such as when the organism is burned out by age and the pain occurs as part of the death process (cf. § 19). As the life front expands with greater differentiation, the balance is also more dangerously stretched, and the risk increases as more opportunities for suffering are taken in. The ability to suffer increases in proportion to that which the state interest encompasses. Unlike pain, I think of suffering more as a state of mental evil; however, the boundary is not always sharp. If one creates a scale of interest for the forms of existence from the mineral to the sentient human, then one also has a scale of suffering ability – and of the probability of suffering. If one admits that suffering is largely an unfortunate and troubling by-product of existence, and that the very principle of balance implies an element of insecurity, then one comes to the conclusion that the mineral in this respect is the sovereign form of existence. How helpless Arria’s “It does not hurt, Paetus” – the crown of the Stoic philosophy – will be compared to the serenity of the boulders during the collapse of the world. A change may announce itself to a consciousness; it may enter a field of interest (an assessment field) and become about doing. With increasing awareness, there is increasingly more to be done – stability declines and security of existence becomes increasingly undermined. As can be shown, this process is neutralized to the same degree that the interest front is accompanied by an increase in the automatic or conscious protection capabilities. The fact that there is an increase in the richness of experience in conjunction with the growing insecurity described is a relationship that cannot be taken up at this initial stage.

§ 5. Uexküll’s schema A living individual’s outside world is dependent on the individual’s receptive and even its effective equipment. By the outside world is meant here the overall environment from which the animal receives its impressions and which it in turn seeks to influence. One can say then that, on the one hand, the animal through its distinctive sensory equipment makes a selection from the factors that make up the human world where this is more extensive. On the other hand, the possibility is open that the animal, through sensory abilities that the human lacks, experiences qualities of the outside world that are unknown to us (the dog’s scent world), in addition to the fact that we know nothing about how the different animals experience impressions due to the same kind of sensory device, for example, the depth view of stereoscopically coordinated lenses.

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With terminology from Uexküll’s Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [The Environment and Inner World of Animals], we will use the expression functional cycle for the animal’s total activity rapport with its specific world. Uexküll schematically depicts it in the following way (p. 45):

FIGURE 1: Functional cycle of the animal. 1 is the “receptive system,” 2 is the “effective system,” 3 is the animal’s total “inner world,” 4 is the total object, 5 is the receptor, 6 is the “feature carrier,” 7 is the “effector,” 8 is the “operation carrier,” 9 is the “connecting structure,” 10 is the “perceptual world,” and 11 is the “operational world.”

1. “Receptive system”a = sensory nervous system. 2. “Effective system”b = motor nervous system. 3. The animal’s total “inner world.”c a Merknetz (Ger.). b Wirknetz (Ger.). c Innenwelt (Ger.).

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on the tragic 4. Total object. 5. Receptor = sensory apparatus. 6. “Feature carrier”a = the part or property of the object acting on the sensory apparatus. 7. “Effector”b = the animal’s organ for action. 8. “Operation carrier”c = the part of the object where the operation takes place. 9. “Connecting structure”d = the object-related connection between feature carrier and operation carrier. 10. “Perceptual world”e = the animal’s overall world experience through impressions. 11. “Operational world”f = overall operation experience.

Now, if a creature (such as Paramecium) has only one form of reaction to any physical or chemical influence, then one must assume from the foregoing that its world crudely possesses only a single property beyond the medium itself, to which the animal does not react (op. cit. p. 40). When the intensity of the influence changes, the response always changes in the same way regardless of the nature of the influence (judged by a human being). It is difficult at this primitive step to imagine an entity that perceives qualitative differences between impressions but only has a single monotonic response available. In that case it is close to establishing a connection between world feeling and response, although it is of course bold to want to divide and limit the impression mass according to the number of reactions at the organism’s disposal. Theoretically there is nothing wrong with a single visible reaction covering a multitude of sensations, and such an assumption is beyond doubt when one moves over to the so-called higher animal forms. Uexküll, however, seems to want to assert the universality of the response being an expression of world feeling, and one must concede here: such a presupposition only allows for research on empirical grounds; it basically shuts down all

a b c d e f

Merkmalträger (Ger.). Effektor (Ger.). Wirkungsträger (Ger.). Gegengefüge (Ger.). Merkwelt (Ger.). Wirkungswelt (Ger.).

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speculation – except for the speculation that lies in the rule itself. If, when changing the stimulus, one detects state changes in the interior of the creature, there is nothing wrong with assigning it hypothetical qualities of experience. So, we are content to list in question form a: Can the creature respond to different impressions with the same reaction (since our observation is the same)? b: Can it respond to the same “sensation” with qualitatively different reactions (apart from a dulling or sharpening of the response by repeated stimulus)? The second question contains the problem of unfixedness. Does unfixedness simply mean that the creature possesses reserve material for not yet developed reactions that are simply waiting for the (appropriate) stimulus to awaken them? Or does the term – in a mechanical model – mean that a stimulus can initiate a plurality of simultaneous but alternative responses? Or is it a matter of fundamental independence between stimulus and reaction? Now that we have reached the threshold of the cause and will problem’s gunpowder cache, it is a good time to gather our attention again on our poor “ideal experimental creature,” which with dubious right attempts to appear as a common denominator for the whole animal world’s response mechanism. As long as one is dealing with only a single reaction and a single kind of sensory transmission – the latter seems to be the most important thing – then there may not be any question concerning some real object experience, only concerning a perception of quality. It is only when there are two kinds of sensory transmissions in conjunction (e.g., smell and sight), where the impressions are linked in “connected structure”a as well as intersecting in a geometric location, that one can imagine that an object experience of the simplest kind arises. Similarly, the first occurrence of consciousness seems to be associated with the aversion-prompted choice between two equivalent reactions that are “initiated” simultaneously by one and the same stimulus. Ultimately, one can imagine that the primordial form of self-feeling is born of basic distinctions between stimuli from the outside world and the interior of the organism, or from an experience of its own biological power or powerlessness. One hardly arrives beyond guesses.

§ 6. Conflict So there stands our amenable experimental creature, with a minimal equipment of object experience, consciousness of choice, and self-feeling, also a Gegen-gefüge (Ger.).

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suitably hungry, in front of an inviting edible object. We take this opportunity to apply a number of human abstractions to the present case. The creature experiences a biological imperative: thou shalt eat. If the prey is a sea urchin or a hedgehog, an inhibition occurs at the same time: here is food, but it stabs. A conflict is present in the creature’s “consciousness”; it wants and does not want at the same time, and if one consideration is looked after, another is violated: If I eat, I get stabbed; if I avoid getting stabbed, I starve. The structure is this: The object unites in space two properties toward which the subject can only respond in a life-expedient way in time, namely by first responding correctly to one (eating) and then correctly to the other (not eating). However, this division of the reaction is made impossible by the simultaneous presence of the qualities of the object. The subject cannot eat and not eat at the same time, whereas on the other hand, the object can very well be edible inside and harmful outside. The outside world unites what the organism must separate; the object is important to two fronts of interest at the same time (the nutrition front and the health front) and serves them only alternatively with alternative violation of the other. The subject, on the other hand, has to accommodate both since its welfare is contingent on the cumulative fulfillment of a number of conditions in the same way that the balance of a three-legged stool depends on the support points being present at the same time. Conflict, therefore, arises because the subject is, on the one hand, under the pressure of a polyphonic biological imperative and, on the other, lacks ability – possibly organs – to separate from a given object the favorable “operation carrier” from the unfavorable one such that the operation only hits the favorable part. The presupposition, of course, is that the subject is fully aware of the object’s duality qua “feature carrier.” If the subject lacks the described ability, there will be no conflict, though all other conditions are present. The hedgehog is a problem for the dog but not for the fox, if it is true that it can take a spike (interest-free object) in its mouth and flip the hedgehog over. Unfortunately, there are also objects of conflict (antinomies) that cannot be flipped over. Others are fully flippable but have spikes on the underside as well. The situation is only apparently made safe (its operation carrier is of an illusory nature); in reality, it is the beginning of catastrophe. Whenever a dual task can be settled through a dual reaction, the conflict is absent or dissolves. The animal eats its meal and at the same time keeps the enemy at a distance by growling and physiognomic intimidation.

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§ 7. Morality. Terminology We have expressed ourselves in such a way that the creature is dominated by a “prompting” to life behavior, and we infer from the conduct to a norm of action (cautiously: norm of behavior). In the unfixed creature, we can imagine a congestion of potential alternatives in front of the gate of realization where only one impulse at a time gets through and becomes historical fact, possibly with consequences for the further fate of the creature. But a norm of action in the context of multiple possibilities, prescriptively designating certain reactions and rejecting others, is precisely what one understands by morality. However, a reservation arises immediately: not every choice of expression has a moral value but only the choice that serves a norm of “high worth” in competition with impulses of more enticing but less “worthy” nature. Already here it is therefore necessary to allude to the distinction between desire and value which will later be explained more clearly; on the animal level, it is perhaps safer to talk about two kinds of desire. Morality has meaning only in relation to a norm; the norm “should” be respected. What, on the other hand, the norm itself designates as the highest is a purely factual issue that is subject to experience. The animal actually seeks to avoid pain and harm and sustain its life, and in this regard, it “should” choose between behavioral variants, resist temptation since the other is mimicry, go around the bay since the ice is thin, etc. By this we are not saying that the selection takes place in a manner which to a greater or lesser extent “resembles” a human conflict of motives. Given that the law is pure, nothing is said about how it is best fulfilled in a given case. If, in the moment of need, one can make the law present for one’s consciousness, then nothing has been gained, for it is precisely the law that creates the vexation of the choice. With the reservations mentioned, there is nothing wrong with seeing the amoeba already as a bearer of biological morality. The amoeba’s structure-forming gene responds “rightly” when it makes a mouth-opening at the arrival of food and ectoplasm at the arrival of the enemy. Now, if one shapes the food (sugar?) like a spike, conflict may theoretically arise: the creature does not absolutely need nourishment now, but the appetite for eating is stronger than the “cautionary voice” of the defense tendency, and the spike fatally penetrates because the formation of ectoplasm is neglected. I do not know if anyone has ever observed such a “biological sin” from the genetic side. It may not even be possible, but in that case the amoeba is considered fixed, and the concept of morality loses its usefulness.

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Concepts such as “biological value” and “biological assessment” have now been gained with useful distinctness. For the hungry, food is valuable and the cave worthless; the assessment of the one fleeing is the reverse. For the slightly hungry the food is better than the cave. In the choice of posture the animal has a biological responsibility. That is, some of the sources of the animal’s fate are attributed to its own behavior; the animal is co-determining in the course of events affecting its most vulnerable interests. For the activity of the hungry animal, food is the natural object. The activity has its given and sufficient reason in this, that it must bring about the neutralization of the need; its goal is to make itself superfluous. Uexküll puts it like this: “The activity of each functional cycle ends with the elimination of the feature carrier from the environment.” The animal is at rest. If the impulse lacks an object, or the “object candidate” lacks a usable operation carrier, the operation is blocked. The animal finds no opportunity for effort, and when the need is strong, a state of anger or anxiety occurs, followed by biological paralysis of action. One can easily observe how, for example, cats actually oscillate between blockage and inspired start when it comes to a difficult leap. Particularly rich phenomena unfold in the shifting game of parades and slashing during battle. The combatant is looking for operation carriers in the opponent (exposures). But another process can also play out. The animal certainly performs the particular activity which it by virtue of disposition or experience “considers” to be the right one, one that, for example, applies to the procurement of food. This need appropriate or best possible customized activity can be linked to the expectation that the long-awaited result will come into being. If the expectation is met, the animal has received confirmation of the appropriateness of its behavior and any uncertainty in that regard falls away. The animal’s efforts have received biological sanction. The consequence is biological security, and after a successful battle, biological triumph. Where the feeling of security is exaggerated and ecstatic and no longer corresponds to the objective degree of freedom from danger, one can speak of biological hubris. The state feeling an animal must have after giving its best, and in the presence of a favorable result, can be designated as good biological conscience. It has not neglected its biological hygiene. However, not every functional cycle ends with sanction and rest.a A visual impression can promise odors and tastes that do not materialize; a tasty meal a siesta (Nor. from Span.).

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can be followed by convulsions and fear of death (the fox and the bait, the cod and the piece of glass, mimicry). Subjectively, the animal is acting properly and in accordance with its highest distinguishing ability, but “objectively” incorrectly. Expectations are not met; efforts are not confirmed; the posture is answered with biological veto; the animal’s judgment does not have genuine biological truth. The cases where the action is ineffective and causes neither better nor worse (disappointment) form an intermediary. The feature carrier then replies, “No”; when the result is also a misfortune, it responds, “No, on the contrary.” In a state of distress, the animal either hopes for salvation or is seized by anxiety about or fear of destruction – all in the biological sense, unlike the corresponding abstractions applied to human life conditions; they have a more varied application. When the animal sees through a trap or a mimicry, one can think of it happening by a kind of double consciousness, a biological irony or skepticism. A biological lie is met with a critical function. Or the animal can enter the trap and suffer partial harm; in hindsight, when the more correct behavior is realized, biological remorse may arise; in anticipation of the result of poor effort of one’s own making, there may be bad biological conscience with readiness to suffer the imminent biological punishment, perhaps in connection with the feeling of biological guilt (the animal is sunning itself instead of collecting winter supplies). Each animal species has its specific biological taboo; the hen has the water, the fish has the land, etc., and the individuals must in this instance suppress their desire to experience this taboo. After unsuccessful actions and defeats in combat, dogs, cats, roosters, etc. show physiognomic expressions of biological shame, and by repeated failures, they can take on the mark of biological humility toward the stronger as an expression of knowledge of their own biological inadequacy or inferiority. This can lead to a biological crisis, after which the ashes are gathered together for new biological success; what has then taken place can be called a biological conversion, followed by biological penance, that is, painstaking restoration work where all other considerations give way to this one. No species can exist with only biological veto; the expectation of sanction must be to some extent reasonably justified; the object must have the characteristics the subject “believes” it has. The hungry must be able to “count on” form and color, smell and taste, and sound and texture, suggesting high-quality nutrition according to experience or an innate choice tendency, and then the result of a well-executed eating act should be painless satiety and not stomachache and misfortune. In this relationship, the demand is for biological justice.

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When this requirement is not met, life becomes blocked, for then the obstacle lies in the only means at the disposal of the conscious being; destruction lies in the path of hope. The demand can also be expressed as follows: The relationship between operation carrier and feature carrier must not have changed since the last meeting between the individual and the outside world without the individual taking the change into consideration. Experience conditional actions have their prerequisite in the fixed nature of the environment, in a “law of nature,” a pattern according to which the changes in the outer world take place. The animal forms a picture of the situation and selects its posture in trust in the unbreakable order. It is anchored in the conviction of “rebus sic stantibus.”a Within this qualification the changes can then take place freely. Instead of the fixedness of the environment, one can talk about the relative rhythm of the changes. Landscapes change character, geological epochs replace one another, and the earth itself comes into being and perishes. But the crises in the planet’s geological history are infrequent compared to those in the individual’s life, and the pulsations in the history of cosmic form are imperceptible compared to the birth and death of species. The individual turns one’s little life-wheel in a system of gears with increasing diameter: the landscape’s, the aging planet’s, and the universe’s itself. Whether the above-mentioned states of mind actually occur in animals, or rather, whether abstract human expressions can be applied to what is occurring, is an open question. But this concern is of secondary importance; this is a purely auxiliary account, a “biosophical” starting point for the later study of human life conditions.

§ 8. Abilities. Surplus and deficiency It can be said that it is through abilities that the individual’s “conscious and choosing agency” unfolds substrates and maintains vital balance. An ability can be described as a fund of potential life expressions, both of the receptive and effective kind, which the individual can use as needed. If one encounters life expressions that do not prompt the idea of a conscious, receptive experience and effective decision-making agency (e.g., reflexes), this is closer to talking about properties. When an ability is present, it can alternate between actual and potential organ states. By the latter expression, I understand an “organ tonus” that is not present at the moment the organ is observed, but a things standing thus.

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which finds itself appropriately induced through conscious agency. The organ shows, according to the circumstances, non-use, use, and varied use. In order to be viable in a given environment, the individual must be allocated a certain minimum of fitness equipment. Thus, a sea eagle must have good eyes as long as it is in its element and strong wings; otherwise, it will be observed by the prey, miss the meal, and be doomed to perish. If the bird is caught, blinded, and cropped, the organism is however unchanged and still suited for the needs that were satisfied by means of wings and eyes. But in its new environment the eagle gets food in a tin bucket and no longer needs the lost abilities to maintain life. One now envisions that the bird in its damaged state is set free, or one imagines a fresh and unharmed specimen abducted from the nest and held captive for some years, as was done once in the author’s presence. When released, the birds (there were two) were unable to maintain life on their own. While the damaged bird was sufficiently equipped to survive in the cage, the healthy and “expected” one was insufficiently equipped to live on the loose. On the other hand, it was more than sufficiently equipped to perform what was required of it in captivity, namely that it should move by its own power from the sleeping area to the dish and back. It had eyes like binoculars and roamed royally over its six-square-meter cage kingdom. It unfolded a wingspan of three cubits and sailed roaring from one wooden perch to the other. Both as a prisoner and in the released state, it suffers from a mismatch between ability and object. In the cage, it is over-equipped; in freedom, it is under-equipped, in biological terms. One could also use the expressions “over-biological” and “under-biological” equipment. (When a functional cycle is to become active, it is required on the side of ability that there is also a need and energy, and that there are no inhibitions present. There also may be over- and under-equipment where energy is concerned. This is not referred to separately in the following.) In the case of under-equipment (the released cage bird), the object demands an ability but does not find it. There lies the food but it is only acquired by a degree of skill that is not present. When ability and task cover each other, the object seeks an ability and finds it. The relationship of over-equipment, however, is peculiar (the uninjured bird in captivity); here the ability to seek an appropriate object exists without finding it. After the biological needs are met, the given objects come to an end; the given meaning ends with the unfolding of ability. Supplementary abilities (imagination, ingenuity) may, in cases, help to provide the unemployed ability with an object surrogate; the conscious agent must then itself give meaning to the use of force (e.g., play) if it needs such meaning.

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For us humans, ability most often has its meaning in being expended in service of a purpose and providing a long-awaited state. The unfolding of ability in the biological sphere is heterotelic; it has its purpose outside of the ability and theoretically could also be satisfied by other abilities. On the other hand, in the case of over-equipment, the unfolding of the ability is autotelic; it is the ability itself that directs, and the intention is the unfolding of precisely this one ability and nothing else. The presence of ability is often associated with a tendency to use it; the ability is a sucking and shaping duct for disposable power. The individual is pleased to work, to know “that it is alive” in a good way. I believe that the phenomenon of “surplus ability,” potential energy, will play an important role in the later attempt to insert “the tragic” into a general life context, and therefore I summarize the main idea: It is well compatible with a picture of life as an experimental operation that the equipment of the organism in relation to the demands of the environment constantly shows a “too little” or a “too much.” In the first case, the individual must suffer or die. In the latter case, the subject is threatened by an internal rupture; its unused ability bundles await suitable objects and at best find surrogates. This in turn can induce a hypothetical need outside of or contrary to the real-life needs of the subject. Schematic Representation 1. Deficiency.

FIGURE 2: Organism’s ability is too little to cover overall task front. J is self-feeling, e is the ability bundle, A-E is the overall task front, AB is the life-related relationship with the medium, BC is defense against enemies, CD is nutritional requirements, DE is sexual tasks, A-F is an example of covered task front (arc corresponds to ability angle e), FE is the uncovered, fatal remainder.

J = self-feeling, experiencing the center. e = ability bundle. A-E = overall task front:

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AB life-related relationship with the medium. BC defense against enemies. CD nutritional requirements. DE sexual tasks. A-F example of covered task front; the arc corresponds to the ability angle e. FE uncovered, fatal remainder 2. Balance.

FIGURE 3: Organism’s ability meets overall task front without remainder.

The sections S are object surrogates. The gaps between these are uncovered ability. 3. Surplus. First Case

FIGURE 4: Organism finds object surrogates for excess life-related ability. S sections are object surrogates.

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Here, it is the qualities of life-related ability that are present in unnecessarily great measure. But the life front can also be covered normally and the surplus then turns into an ability that lies completely beyond the life angle and cannot even come into use during the “struggle for life.” One thinks about the abilities that are presented during circus dressage or the sea lion’s balancing tricks. The schema for this case is as follows: Second Case

FIGURE 5: Organism meets life-related tasks normally and finds object surrogates for excess ability that is not life-related.

Finally, one can imagine the presence of such an extraordinary, extra-vital ability while the life front is unmet. Examples may be difficult to present from the animal kingdom but will be all the better known from the human world. The schema of the third case is as follows: Third Case

FIGURE 6: Organism with extraordinary, extra-vital ability fails to meet life-related tasks.

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Should it occur that the overbiological (or, as in the last two cases, abiological) utilization is more pleasurable than the life-serving, this can mean conflict and danger, cf. the fable about the ants and the grasshopper. In the case of long-term non-use, both the abilities and the desire to use them can decrease (apathy, reversion) if they do not eventually push through with irresistible force. Grotesque forms of life expression can arise where the ability is crippled but the desire remains unchanged or increases (senile eroticism). The collision of motives between “the beneficial” and “the entertaining” is probably rare in animals. Overbiological or abiological expression only occurs when the existence requirements are secured. Play between young animals is best observed in species where the young are nourished and protected by the parents for a long time (mammals) and is less observed in species where the newborns must, from the very beginning, struggle for their sustenance (chickens). Bird song, which is believed to aid mating, continues after the nest is full. Otter sliding and the like in adult animals can be mentioned here. A compelling example of over-equipment by hypertrophy of the organ itself is, among others, the Irish giant deer (Megaceros eurycerosa), fossils of which have been found in post-tertiary sediment.7 Its body was like a current moose; its shrubshaped (palmate) crown grew to a width of up to three meters. Paleontologists believe that the species died out because of the antlers’ disproportionate size and weight. The deer was armed too powerfully; the defense was not precise; the whole complex was such that a single point was enough to tip the enemy over. Appropriate as this was, it was hung up in rocks and trees, and perhaps at an early age the animal collapsed in the open field from fatigue in the neck muscles. There was also a great danger of hemorrhaging when the antlers had to be replaced each year – and what expenditure of calcium! In the absence of calcium-containing nourishment, the bones must have been brittle since the antlers had to set first! Surplus of energy and potential organ use variants can be easily observed in domestic animals that are fed by humans but still have their “instincts” intact. I even did the following experiment with a dog (boxer):

a Also known as Megaloceros giganteus. 7 Abel, Othenio: Die Stämme der Wirbeltiere [The Species of Vertebrate Animals], Berl. and Lpz. 1919 p. 795 (illustration), 813. Same author: Lehrbuch der Paläozoologie [Textbook of Paleozoology], Jena 1920 p. 437. (Unavailable:) Hescheler, K.: “Der Risenhirsch [The Megaloceros]” in Neujahrsblatt der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich [New Year’s Journal of the Natural Research Society in Zurich] 1909. Stück [Part] III, Literatur [Literature]. Romer, Man and the Vertebrates, Chicago 1934 p. 176 (reconstruction).

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The dog was kept confined for some time in a small room and fed well. During the short-term visits to the room to change the food bowl and litter box, I adopted a strictly unresponsive demeanor and put on a facial expression that rejected any thought of play. At last it almost did not react to my entry and eventually lost its appetite to such an extent that it completely neglected its former favorite food, calf liver in brown sauce. When it was released, it immediately went to search the beach and the garbage cans where its efforts were quickly rewarded with a half-rotten shank of a cow, which it began to devour with voracious appetite. The shank was torn from it (with gloves and turned away nose, and to the grief of the dog) and later served in a dish at home. Here it was refused with the strongest signs of disgust, while the calf liver was devoured. I understood the scope of the phrase “found food.”a The boxer was not satisfied having its life simply secured. It wanted to use its abilities, unfold its character, and live a life worthy of a dog. The blocking of the nutritional mechanism’s ability complex by feeding can be illustrated by a simple schema:

FIGURE 7: Blocking of nutritional mechanism’s ability complex by artificial feeding (right) vs. natural state (left). The gap b is the need to be filled, e is the associated ability, and d is the coverage provided by the ability.

To the left is the natural state. The gap b is the need to be filled; e is the associated ability; d is the coverage provided by the ability. To the right is seen the relationship by artificial feeding. The coverage comes unsolicited, the operation carrier only exists for the consumption apparatus, and the whole acquisition mechanism becomes blocked.

a gefundenes Fressen (Ger.).

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Dogs often become obese and lethargic and lose any hint of “canine idealism.” When transferred to a zoo, many species of animals cease propagating despite the fact that they seem to have better conditions than in their original home. “Lower” animals are usually less sensitive; as long as the nearest decent place has a reasonable temperature and humidity, they worry less about the geographical location of excrement. Generally speaking, the phenomenon of surplus in animals occupies a very small space next to life-sustaining pursuits, and the possible surplus activity poses hardly any difficulty for the animal to be satisfied in full compliance with the strict biological imperative, for example, by fighting play and excursions for the sake of pleasure. After the entertainment, the animal sits on its rear and allows the world to turn as it will. The secret of the soothing and recreational effect on many people of being with animals is undoubtedly partly the fact that there is in the animal full harmony between ability and need. At a suitable degree of satiety and warmth, the animal finds itself in a state of happy, calm, and carefree well-being. The world is as quiet as a sea, and there is nothing more to be done. The human has, as far back as we are aware, tried to achieve a similar mental peace by countless means: by thinking and asceticism, by daydreaming, by using narcotics, and by engaging in war.

·3· ON PRIMITIVENESS AND DIFFERENTIATION

§ 9. Protoplasm In the second chapter of Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [The Environment and Inner World of Animals], J. v. Uexküll gives a description of the fairy-tale substance with the beautiful and fascinating name of protoplasm. He talks about the nuts it has given scientists to crack by its enigmatic properties which do not allow classification and only an approximate understanding of what is happening. Arrangement in a known scientific category is difficult because the substance combines homogeneous liquidity with pronounced mechanical functions; understanding becomes even more difficult because it has not been possible to detect and track any structure. And spontaneous and unpredictable phenomena are an abomination to the human intellect, even if they can awaken imagination and emotion to the liveliest activity. Here we will focus on two of the many peculiar properties of protoplasm, namely access to temporary organ formation and to permanent differentiation. The first sign of change in the original homogeneous mass of an individualized zoological unit is the formation of a membrane, an outer layer of firmer substance, ectoplasm, as opposed to the unchanged inner endoplasm. These two plasma forms can overlap each other. Similarly, there is an ever-so-small

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mouth with an associated esophagus and stomach whenever food is nearby. This all disappears after the meal and waste elimination and no trace remains; the amoeba “sets the table” in its own interior and afterward makes use of the material for other purposes.8 But already in the Paramecium there has been a significant change. Here I cite Uexküll’s Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 32: The development of a mechanical structure has already taken a major step forward in the case of the infusoria. Although its endoplasm still exhibits a purely protoplasmic character, because organs are formed and pass away, the ectoplasm has lost the super-mechanical ability of free structure formation and thus lost its protoplasmic character. The ectoplasm of the infusoria has a solid form and shows a whole series of completed structures.

There is thus a kind of threshold, an elastic limit that the protoplasm must not exceed if it is to maintain its ability to “change its mind,” its ahistorical way of life, and its immortality through division. In the amoeba, there is no maternal animal that dies and no generational shift; all individuals are “siblings.” The Paramecium has lost these prerogatives, but on the other hand: the infusoria’s ectoplasm is a real stimulus protection, much more effective than the amoeba’s capricious membrane formations. The new ectoplasm is differentiated; it has “chosen its destiny” and burned the bridges behind it. In return, it is one with its function; by renouncing or losing possibilities, it has gained increased strength for its current task of mitigating harmful stimuli. This observation has a universal quality; it touches a major feature of organic life and earthly dynamics in general: The opposition between the withheld, which possesses all possibilities intact, and the used, the inserted, the effected, which is caught in the wheels of history and produces stronger, but singular results. Protoplasm, which resists differentiation-related success in the outer world for the benefit of an unrestricted choice between uncreated forms – who can avoid seeing the all-encompassing genetic radiance and the overwhelming metaphorical power of this simplest of all conditions of life? Money provides a close parallel. Money itself also has properties, but first and foremost it represents possibilities. The boy who broods over the nickel and celebrates revelry in the imagination, does he have any idea where that torment of choosing comes from which ravages him in this bittersweet moment? Just as the shopkeeper’s counter is the fortunate child’s Rubicon, so differentiation 8 Discovered by Jennings. See Uexküll, Biologische Weltanschauung [Biological Worldview], Munich 1913 p. 28.

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is the fate threshold of protoplasm; here the rich distress of choosing dies and is resurrected as meager security. Differentiation, separation, and divergence lead to fixedness, fastening, and unambiguity in each of the new, distributed conditions. But differentiation and fixedness are not the same, nor are they inextricably linked. The differentiation is not completed with the first step but it continues through changing forms as long as the cells have residues of unused protoplasm intact, still with their own creative reserves (Uexküll, op. cit. p. 216 f.). Without touching on the controversial problems of mutation and evolution, we would like to note that morphological systematics have arranged bone forms, organ types, and tissue according to the concepts of the primitive and the specialized. But we will not ask how the transition from primitive to specialized forms has taken place or has been possible, or which interaction has been demonstrated or could be thought between form-giving forces and surrounding medium. On the other hand, it is important for our aim that, judging by the fossil finds, primitive forms everywhere precede specialized ones. This time order has indeed contributed to the fact that certain forms have been called primitive as opposed to earlier. But chronology is not everything; even in the forms themselves a language is hidden. The more they are adapted to the medium, the clearer is their technical perfection (judged by task, efficiency, and economy), and the stronger the functional singularity is realized (the horse’s hoof, the tusk of the narwhal, etc.), the greater the amount of protoplasm appears to be irreversibly in service of the technical task, transformed from super-mechanical to mechanical state form. The specialized organ form then stands in a double relation to the primitive. Another factor justifying the distinction is the sequence of stages in ontogenesis. Though it must be the case that Haeckel’s “biogenetic laws” have been shown by the latest discoveries to have limited validity, nonetheless one can still see in ontogenesis an expression of nature’s typical workmanship. And the individual’s pathway goes from viscous cell to completed organ, each with its own distinctive tissue. The enigmatic forces to which specialization (the adaptation for the different kinds of interaction with the environment and between the organs themselves) owes its origin have sometimes been called genes in a causalistic spirit, sometimes purposefulness,a entelechy, vital forceb in a finalistic (teleological) one, in addition to neutral terms such as principle of generationc and a Zielstrebigkeit (Ger.). b élan vital (Fr.). c Bildungsgesetz (Ger.).

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form forces, all words that suggest form creating powers within as opposed to Darwin’s externally-conditioned adaptation. The presence of undifferentiated protoplasm is a condition for the activities of these “forces”; the plasma is the material in which the forces manifest themselves and present themselves to us such that we in our time of need may have “something” to return to. As the material is used up in differentiation, the “powers” are gradually depleted until they no longer appear in any change. “Structure inhibits structure formation,” says Uexküll, op. cit. p. 10, cf. pp. 21, 23 and 32. Incidentally, one rarely has such a good opportunity as here to realize the degree to which human concepts and schemas are helpless in relation to what “really happens” in nature, that is, what we know and observe without being able to give a discursive expression.

§ 10. Primitiveness in humans We have an example of a progression from a primitive to a highly specialized organ form in the well-known plate at the end of the horse’s outermost foot joint, which has changed from being five-toed to single-hoofed and is thereby technically adapted for hard surfaces. The extremity divided into five separate units is considered the primitive starting point for a number of specialized forms. A similar account is applied to many other anatomical details by means of which it has been possible elsewhere to extract the primitive characteristics. In connection with this a discovery was made that greatly contributed to the Darwinian dethronement of the previously assumed view that the human is the pinnacle of all specialization; on the contrary, the human shows many striking primitive formations. Not only does the brain show considerable quantities of undifferentiated protoplasm (the following information originates from Hermann Poppelbaum, Mensch und Tier [Man and Animal], Basel 1933), but even the skull shape, the tooth system, the nose, the larynx, the skin tissue, muscle building, the body’s axes, internal organs, and embryonic organs also show comparative primitive traits from an anatomical point of view. At the same time, some interesting observations from animal embryology show a striking match between precursors of animal embryos and those we find in the fully developed human being. Assuming that discourse about reproduction amounts to something more than mere equality or inequality, this is similar to using an expression like the following: the final stage of the human form (in this regard) is passed by certain animals, either in the fetal state (gibbon, cf. Poppelbaum p. 18) or at a young age (chimpanzee, Poppelbaum p. 19). A forceful linguistic expression of this observation (according to

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a lecture by Poppelbaum) has been made by Klaatsch: “Man is an ape born too early.” Our ancestral relation to the apes is consequently turned on its head. Another break with what was still seen as true in 1910 has occurred in recent times: We are accustomed to seeing ourselves as the very last sprout on the tree of life, and on the assumption of “fixedness as the goal of the form forces,” one would for that reason expect to find a specialized creature that is complete, at least one that was past any animalistic stage in that regard. Maintaining the viewpoint of primitivity must lead to a revision of theories concerning humankind’s age, – and such a revision has also been underway in the last 20–30 years (see, e.g., Byrn, Menneskeracerne [The Human Race], Oslo 1925 p. 62). However, the oldest fossil finds show no signs of greater primitiveness than in the type that exists today. Therefore, within the time periods in question, it appears that the process of specialization in the human has stopped; it is not moving forward in the present and future toward unknown goals. This is the meaning of Klaatsch’s paradox. Under the influence of the general biogenetic rule of movement from primitiveness to specialization, anthroposophic-minded people have come to the conclusion that much of the human body’s equipment is “held back, stowed away”a on the path to final fixedness, either because there are no substrates to continue the process, or because something that is known only by name, the work of the so-called inhibitory genes, has occurred. Accordingly, the “phylogenetic situation” of the human is such that it has stopped at a relatively early stage of specialization. The human is, in the morphological sense, “en route”; it is in a state of “stationary becoming,” the paradox with which all of this is necessarily brought together. It can also be said that the human as a species has become fixed in its unfixedness. The presence of humankind’s primitive character does not mean that we, like the cave toad in Carinthia, can change shape according to the needs of the moment – at least not in the anatomical-physiological sense. The organ building itself is presumably completed. It is in the organ use – in the new functional developments of the organism that we must seek evidence of the variability we expect to find in an unspecialized form. There in human organ use we indeed also find an unlimitedness which no existing animal form can match. By practice the human can master the most disparate skills using its body alone. Thus, the human community already

a verstaut (Ger.).

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shows what bodily employment is about, an individual difference that far exceeds that which one finds within any species or genus of animal. Rudolf Steiner has very elegantly expressed the connection between the human’s primitive marks and its versatile use of organs. Steiner believes that our technical imagination is a direct compensation for the lack of specialization. The hand is so far back morphologically in the branch network that it has phylogenetic possibilities inherent to both paw and claw, wing and flipper. The “form forces” that have been held back in potential have come to us as direct benefit through consciousness. The forces project their capacity into the surrounding world and can play here across a plurality of the variants that animal bodies can only realize individually because the phylogenetic “choice” of one possibility has excluded any other. We create the oar and the propeller in place of fins, the club in place of the bear paw, and the ramrod in place of the elephant’s stomping forelegs, armor in place of a protective covering, the plane in place of the wing, pliers in place of the claw, etc., yes, even the insect’s transformations “resurface” in our “mystical initiations” and related ideas about transformations and new births in which the old person is discarded and replaced by a new one (this last example is not Steiner’s). We have also transferred the versatile utility to our artifacts; we “combine” tent and kayak, etc. Whatever one might think of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy as a whole, in the notion of a “stowage of form forces” one has at least an inspiring and fruitful working hypothesis when it comes to constructing an image of the human phylogenetic situation. However, the idea has now done its job and will not be further built upon in any direct way in what follows. The technical ability of the human is evident in the domination of the immediate material world. The “downside” of the advantage is that everything must be learned. In the body itself there is no “instruction manual”; there is nothing that deserves the name “organ soul” – this is certainly true with respect to the reproductive organs. In most cases our actions pass through the conscious agency where they are subject to nominal control, even if in the prevailing view they have their root in the unconscious, in an innate instinctual constellation. Biologically speaking, the body makes possible three kinds of use: life-serving, life-indifferent, and life-harming. The human child must learn how to make the right choice between these, a skill it gains through experience with associated mistakes and suffering. In return, with the growing self-acquired insight the child’s self-feeling and self-consciousness increase (cf. Richard Eriksen, Hvad er mennesket [What is Man], Oslo 1934).

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How very different it is with respect to the fixed animal limb, the fish’s fin, and the migratory bird’s wings! The use is unique to the body’s own structure and does not need to be learned, only to be brought to perfection. The chicken’s egg tooth, with which it cuts out of the egg and which then falls off, is a forceful example. The use and the final product can even appear as a direct emission from the organ such that the boundary between the individual and the outside world is blurred; the spider’s web is a case among many. The animal needs far less than the human to learn the distinction between serving and non-serving use. The duckling edges its way onto the water with the last bits of the shell on its back – the human child reaches for the moon. “The animal is tyrannized by its organs,” Goethe said, and presupposes the presence or desirability of an independent agency. “Wisdom” lies in the organ building and is given to the animal free of charge; it does not need to be matured in the brain first. The fin “belongs” in the water, while in this sense the human hand is “foreign” to all elements. The animal that swims, flies, runs, gnaws, etc. becomes a virtuoso and has in this both its strength and its limitation. In a strength-proving body-to-body test, the human usually comes up short, but it asserts itself through a detour via a technical intermediary. We find a meeting between hand and claw in the story of the Molboer and the lobsters: “The Norwegians are a little people, but they have a strong grip.”a With fixed organ use the serving of life is pure when the animal is viable. In the human being, there is not even an initial tendency to life-serving use. The child drinks lye, but the kitten does not; a child having been burned avoids the fire, but the animal avoids the fire before being burned. The distinction between biological and super-biological equipment lies sometimes on the side of and sometimes crosses the distinction between fixed and unfixed organ use. By surplus is primarily thought a quantitative measure of the capacity and by unfixedness a qualitative trial. The distinctions have their value though they may in a given case collapse when we lack the means to distinguish a new ability from a variation addition in an old one. There are also conceptual difficulties when one and the same organ serves as a vehicle for multiple abilities, and when several organs are used for the same purpose. Greater unfixedness can mean a higher biological sense of responsibility and increased need for fixedness help in the form of moral norms. It also includes the opportunity for increased life strength through experience, and for rescue during environmental changes in which the fixed form is doomed. a Reference to a Danish folktale about a man from Mols who mistakes a ship full of lobsters for Norwegians.

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During changes in the surrounding world, the entire front of life can be shifted: previous surpluses become necessary; old necessities fall away; the sectors of ability utilization change in scope and space. Compared to the fixed form’s mechanical tranquility, however, unfixedness also results in a heavy life pressure. The choosing ability is at the same time the choosing duty, and the duty to choose can be experienced as a burden and a vexation with the scale of suffering ranging from the slightest agitation to the devastating nightmare of nervous angst. It is not only the correspondence of abilities and tasks that causes animals to be refreshing to humans. It is perhaps made stronger by the calmness with which they rest in their fixed form, thereby giving us the secure feeling of being in the presence of a truly harmonious character. How many times have we admired the cat’s dazzling confidence in socializing, witnessed with envy how it exercises its sovereign autonomy without seeming offensive and without losing its dignity even in the most shameful situations? The human’s character formation cannot come anywhere close to that of the cat when it comes to presenting a being in which nature is no longer in dispute with itself. During these considerations, it has not been possible to rely solely on experience or accepted science. It has been necessary to cross bridges that could be more solidly built to avoid harm. Instead, conditional conjunctions, quotation marks,a and a reserved mode of expression have been used to the extent that they were found to be consistent with the readability of the text. An immediate objection concerns the widespread anthropomorphization of the conscious and unconscious life of animals. The expressions used can with much greater right be applied to the human in its purely biological interest struggle. It is quite deliberate, however, that circumstances and designations have been assigned to the simplest possible stage of animal life; it has come about in order to prevent the representation from becoming contaminated by all the associations that would inevitably occur in the transfer to human conditions. A human being that has only a biological interest front would be an abstraction. The end here must justify the means; the purpose is to show the biological soil of some of the conditions we anticipate when the tragic in its time is to be determined.

a See Translator’s Preface for an explanation of Zapffe’s unique use of punctuation in the text.

·4· HUMAN INTEREST FRONTS

§ 11. Biological interest front The task now is to follow certain threads, to identify certain patterns in the human life weave, which may be of significance for the determination of the tragic. In the fifth chapter, it is the unfixedness of human organ use and in particular the surplus in the various domains of ability that make up the subject of the study; at present, it is the expansion of the circle of interest and environment in the transition from animal to human. With Uexküll we believe that the environment of the individual organism is closely related to the “receptive system” of the organism; with its help the organism “chooses” the outside world it is capable of experiencing, standing in rapport with. The “selectivity” of the radio is a useful illustration. When sensation of the environment is accompanied by conceptions of the source of the sensation, and these conceptions are structured, one can speak of “cognition” in the ordinary sense, insight into the nature of the conditions. The source of sensation is then theoretically available for influence and control on the part of the subject. Control of the environment comprises a scale from the best passive attitude to active arrangement of the object according to long-range plans or the needs of the moment.

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Consideration of the entire field of human life gives rise to a division into four different “fronts,” “levels,” “fragments,” or “sectors”; the term depends on the representation model chosen. These “fronts,” etc., will now be described separately, without regard to their possible functional connection. The biological part of the human life field shows a great resemblance to that of animals; most of what has been said above about the biological interests of animals can be easily applied to humans. Existence depends in a similar way on all the problems having been satisfactorily solved in relation to breathing, temperature, defense against enemies, disease and injury, nutrition and reproduction, in short, to the biological maintenance of the individual and the family. To some extent one can also separate out abilities that are especially tied to biological life struggle, sexual function, physical force, etc. But such a division has little value because most abilities are used on all fronts in turn. It is the interest that we count when an activity is assigned to a specific life front.

§ 12. Social interest front The social front sits close to the life-sustaining front and also exists in animals. However, the similarities between animal and human social engagement are so few that there would hardly be any useful viewpoints to gain by going into the social life of animal species. While animals are likely to experience their species companions only as they enter the individual’s “perceptual world,” human beings include, for example, all their fellows in the past, present, and future through a single conception of humanity, and can thereby take a position on it as a unified object. And each individual has knowledge of the needs of their fellow human beings. The relationship with “the nearby” is usually important for the well-being of the individual: one has social needs that one seeks to satisfy by choosing the right posture. (We will not go into the question of whether social needs are primary or, in some cases, can be reduced back to other needs, but merely establish that social needs are present.) Social needs are distinctly different from biological ones when, for example, one has secured life-sustaining conditions both for oneself and the family and yet is suffering because of one’s relationship with other people. The social goods are principally love, respect, and trust. Ultimately the social environment is always made up of people but also includes objects that have a bearing on human relations (“res publicae”a). This a public affairs.

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does not mean that human beings always act as social objects; they can, for example, also belong to the biological environment (cannibalism, primitive struggle). The social outside world also involves intersecting and entangled forces that can be neutral or affect the subject favorably or unfavorably. But to a much higher degree than the biological world, the social is made up of minds, of other similar interest bearers, of entities with whom it is possible to have interest contact, and who can be appealed to with the prospect of a better state by reason of the appeal. Human beings are a material which, of itself or by alteration, can act as a sympathetic environment, that is, undergo variations in harmony with the individual’s needs and because of them. But the entities in the social environment also have their own interests to look after. The attention and power of the individual are therefore divided between “egoistic” and “altruistic” demands.9 Through one-sided egoistic engagement a human being becomes indifferent or even hostile to its neighbor. Finally, there is a rich possibility present for satanic relations. People often have a refined knowledge of each other’s “sensitive spots,” physical and mental, the “places” where the victim’s stimulus protection has holes or is thinner. The task of finding the strongest appropriate stimulus for the vulnerable party may have the character of a pleasurable game. The more spectacularly the victim’s aversive reaction displays itself, the more secure the confirmation the other will receive of one’s ingenuity (Shakespeare’s Iago, torture). The pleasure from tormenting others is a topic to which psychologists have paid much attention. For our purposes it is enough to establish that it exists. One of its possible bases is the tormentor’s feeling of power, though this does not fully explain the “sadistic pleasure” – with or without sexual emphasis. Power is the ability to arrange a stubborn outside world according to one’s own needs. The desire for power rests on a solid biological foundation but has lost its connection with it and become its own goal. With power one forces both nature (animals and landscapes) as well as humans to behave in one’s service. In human cohabitation, the ruling and serving position types play a significant role; they have at all times split the community into a serving and 9 We also perceive the individual’s social organization as based on its interest. Egoism must therefore be defined as a tendency to satisfy one’s own needs without regard to others, while altruism is one’s own satisfaction that can only take place through the satisfaction of others. An “absolutely unselfish” action – which thus has no value to the agent – evades understanding and thus becomes morally irrelevant (e.g., compulsory actions). One can also say that the satisfaction of egoistic actions is direct, while the altruistic is indirect, secondary.

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a ruling class. In our time, the conditions in which these two types of position apply are so complex that a class division on this basis is not always possible. In the countless shifts of daily life, the individual is sometimes a person of power, sometimes the object of another’s power. Or both at the same time: from one’s step on the ladder of rank one is a sneak upwards and an iron claw downwards. The henpecked husband tyrannizes his staff. The desire for power can be “primary” due to truly superior abilities or “secondary” due to neurotic conditions. The notion of “biological justice” corresponds to the concept of justice in society. What one can say most confidently about this concept is that the word covers an inclination in many people (not just in the wronged), a desire, a will, that a particular scale of social standing types should exist in an unalterable relationship with a particular scale of socially conditioned outcomes for the standing holder. Great difficulties of logical, psychological, and practical nature are associated with the demand for justice in society; one of them should be mentioned immediately, but the main treatment appears first in Chapter Seven. The requirement of justice is related to the laws that apply in the subject area; these are partly legal and partly “moral”10 in nature. They are created by humans, not “given” as the laws of nature, and can therefore change in space and time at their own discretion. In this way, the unfixedness of individual humans is transferred to the social form. (On the other hand, in animals, bees, ants, etc., the social form can be fixed.) The struggle over which laws should apply is an important part of public social life. The variability of the laws means an advantage in that they can be adapted to changing needs, but it can seem unfortunate due to the uncertainty that necessarily comes with it. Even during the time between the changes there are plenty of moments of uncertainty: the laws are exercised by people, and these people are something else and more than bodies of law enforcement. It is easy for affective forces to blend with and disguise the “ideal structure.” When one blames the judge for working “impersonally,” one forgets that this “blind” application of law is the best guarantee of legal security. Lawyers have long been aware of the difficulty 10 The word morality is usually used in the sense of “social morality” and often in opposition to legally correct behavior. This interpretation, which is widely used both in daily speech and in ethical literature, in my opinion causes unnecessary difficulties. All questions become easier when one implements the approach stated above: The concept of morality is applied without regard to the nature of the interest front. In this language, social morality also includes the legally relevant behavior; one could distinguish by incorporating the expression legal morality.

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of combining legal security (legal fixedness) with the individual treatment of plaintiffs and offenders. This is a relationship the structure of which we already know from the animal world: the judge is something else and more than an applier of law; he is, for example, an excellent spouse and provider, a skilled professional, etc. The goat is not only an average runner, it is also a skilled climber; nevertheless, on the plain it is caught and killed by wolves. The wolf is a poorer climber, but in the decisive situation it is the faster runner and nothing else determines the fate of the goat (the outcome of a possible fight is also decided in advance). The situation has operation carriers for running only; all other efforts are irrelevant. The goat is an organic entity, a biological subject, an indivisible complex; everything that together constitutes the goat must share the fate here. The climbing goat (sufficiency) cannot escape when the running goat becomes the wolf’s prey. The fact that the wolf is victorious on the flatland is biologically just because it is a better runner and a more capable warrior, but it turns out that even at this most primitive stage the problem of justice presents a complication. Similarly, in addition to the biological, the human is also a social, legal entity, a legal subject, which cannot be divided. When the thief named Olsen is punished, the misfortune also hits the Olsen spouse, which is clearly unreasonable. Nevertheless, the judgment is legally just because it was in this case the conduct toward the other person’s goods that was fate-producing, the test of the Olsen legal subject’s social quality. It can be concluded that no principle of commensurability between crime and punishment has yet been found, just as the harshness by which the perpetrator’s dependant is affected by losing its partner can be disproportionate to the seriousness of the transgression. The killer can be rich, the thief poor. Through constitutional laws the various societies seek to create a more lasting fixedness as a guarantee against overly unpleasant surprises. A political revolution more or less corresponds to environmental changes on the biological level, in more cases to the advent of a new geological epoch. New variants and new types of human beings are emerging; new standards of justice are set. The individual’s relationship to one’s social environment may be of “private,” “private-public,” or “public” nature; the terms hardly need any explanation. The relationship with the individual environmental unit may according to the circumstances fall under each of these terms. Examples of environmental units include: tribe and family, friends and colleagues, fellow believers, fellow gender members and fellow race members, church, municipality, state (the individual state organs) – and on the other side, enemies and strangers of all

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kinds, people of other nationalities, faiths, castes, genders, races, professions, etc. As the animal secures its biological status by choosing a correct posture toward the environment’s characteristics, so the member of society builds one’s social position on an appropriate attitude toward the social units by which one is surrounded. Society is one of the “homes” that the individual builds on the outside within the landscape’s wider environmental horizon. With these homes the individual imposes certain restrictions on life expression in exchange for the benefits obtained in the same way that the animal voluntarily gives up its freedom of movement in the cave. Alongside the legal action directives, there are the “moral” ones, which also vary with time and place. Some such “ethical norms” have had longer life than others, for example, that agreements should be kept. There is a dispute between scholars concerning how such norms are created; the question does not necessarily coincide with the question of why they are created, their purpose. This problem is of greater importance to us because we must already assume that a tragic phenomenon will in practice unfold within the framework of finished social-moral rules. Only in special cases, for example, with the so-called moral geniuses, can the creation of moral norms be thought of as part of a tragic course. The pioneers either lay out new goals for the social endeavor or find better ways to realize the old goals. If they are significant, they are either recognized or persecuted as delusional teachers. It is usually the bigger offenses and with respect to the form or object of more significant disputes that are the subject of judicial review, while the thousand trifles of daily life are determined by “common belief,” by “good tone,” fair play, conduct, well-being, etc. “Moral rules” can be included in legislation when they are sufficiently “matured.” Sometimes a conflict arises between the legal and the “moral” assessment: one punishes for formal reasons an act that is recognized “morally,” and tolerates another which one “morally” condemns – circumvention of laws, procuratorial tricks. Legal judgments, both criminal and civil, conviction and acquittal, and “moral” recognition or condemnation are to be categorized in our holistic view as “social sanction” or “social veto.” The prohibitions protecting values can be called social taboos, and anyone who wants to violate a social taboo must try to suppress this desire. However, the taboo rules are not enforced as in primitive times; to some extent, one takes into account the perpetrator’s disposition (motive) alongside the objective action. The purpose of the right social posture is to be socially recognized in the broadest sense of the term. The recognition comes with a number of benefits

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of both social and non-social nature. The means of gaining recognition is acting as a favorable environment for one’s fellow human beings, and this is done partly by positive social actions (help, etc.), and partly by satisfying non-social needs in socially tolerated forms. However, the choice of social posture does not take place, as is true of the biological, only through the consciousness or the mind; it is also influenced by important unconscious and irrational (e.g., emotional) factors. Within the largest social group, humanity, there is the national society, which in turn is divided into smaller groups determined by divergent interests; the smallest social unit is the individual. A group can be the optimal social environment for its members but be asocial and hostile toward non-members. Its unifying interest then has social currency only within the group itself, while to non-members it appears as group egoism. For disputing groups, it is often a matter of making an impact on child-rearing; the child is influential in the present and becomes decisive in the future. The disagreement concerns a myriad of inter-human matters and ranges from the most trivial local to the most difficult questions of principle – state and individual, etc. The individual action or effort may, in a similar way to the biological, be successful or unsuccessful. The course is determined partly by the agent’s innate or acquired fixednesses (character) and the degree of skill one displays, and partly by fixed and random external conditions. The individual may be error-fixed in relation to the requirements of the society in question, or possibly under-equipped. One’s posture, generally or in some cases, is asocial or antisocial. That even a surplus of ability can mean a difficulty in participating in the social symbiosis will be shown later. For the normal individual the unsuccessful course can lead to social remorse, anxiety, danger, and need for salvation (redress, forgiveness, etc.) for the social self (social self-feeling). The social self can be lost by social catastrophes such as banishment, life imprisonment, and the like. The individual, therefore, acts under social responsibility: one must respond when the proper authority asks one for the social values one was set to guard. If one has violated the social imperative, this can be counted against one, that is, one’s will or intent is seen as a contributing cause of the incident, and one’s further fate is made dependent on the posture one has shown. On the other hand, a well-cared-for social hygiene will give good social conscience. Initially, it is easier to satisfy an egoistic need in the social than in the biological environment. It is required of the individual that one must, to a certain extent, entrust the supervision of one’s fields of interest to certain social organs

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(police, for example) and correspondingly suppress individual defense; social protection exchange. These organs may also respond in the end but not with the precision that characterizes biological defense. Vital areas are, therefore, constantly exposed, and the awareness that something is socially taboo does not deter the aggressor from satisfying one’s desire. Besides such direct attacks, the socially loyal are also threatened by various forms of social mimicry. This has come into widespread use and is known by a wide range of terms such as lying and deception, misrepresentation, breach of promise, masking, camouflage, bluffing, simulation, swindling, cheating, inaccuracy, unreliability, “diplomacy,” trapping, and fraud. Most people play this instrument with virtuosity and more or less malicious intent. The technique can also be used to the benefit of recognized values, such as when the police lay traps for a suspect and the doctor’s “untruths,” but in the greatest number of cases it means a betrayal of the social trust. In the discussion of the biological pleasure principle, it was said that the pleasure-giving must coincide with the life-serving if no conflict is to arise. Something similar applies to the social environment. If the pleasure principle is to promote loyalty and solidarity, everything that serves others and “the whole” must surely be pleasurable and everything else aversive. In practice, this is not the case. Social efforts can be alternately pleasure-producing, aversion-producing, and pleasure-indifferent.

§ 13. Autotelic interest front During the discussion of the play of animals it was said that an activity can unfold on the ground of its content alone without the expectation of any particular result. The animal certainly does not distinguish between pure pleasure play and the play human theorists see as unconscious preparation for biological or social activity (the theories are many and contentious).11 The animals may not even know that they earn their living by eating, defending, searching for the optimum of the environment, etc., or that by the mating act they ensure the continuation of the group. It is possible and likely that they blindly follow their “urges” or “instincts” and that distinguishing between play and life struggle is a purely human phenomenon.

11 Cf. Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Tiere [The Play of Animals], 3rd ed. Jena 1930, and same author, Die Spiele der Menschen [The Play of Humans], Jena 1899.

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In humans, there is in many cases an unquestionable distinction between pleasure play on one end and, for example, what is popularly called “duty” on the other. “Duty” is a term that is not used in the following, and therefore it is unnecessary to define it. But as a rule, it encompasses activity that is intended to safeguard the social and biological interests; one never hears about “duty to pleasure.” It seems natural here to count both pleasure-seeking activity and the unpleasant detour to pleasure. However, if we were to extend this to include “non-aversion” or “least possible aversion,” it would mean an explosion of the concept. In that case, it would hardly be possible to point to a single life expression that is not pleasure-related. Not even the most joyless toil for a meager outcome could be left out since even the outermost existence minimum can be presented to the toiler as better than ruin. Therefore, we do not wish to include working against aversion under the concept of pleasure-seeking activity, but only what one could call, with yet another expression, positive pleasure. However, it might be tempting to form a category that encompasses both the pleasure-seeking activity and the striving against aversion in which all human life expression is included, popularly called non-duty. The group would then include a number of experiential states of both an effective and a receptive nature that have certain somewhat distinct features in common, but I admit it is difficult to specify these features. The definition must be found in what is said about the category in general. If we ask people why they have engaged in a related state or activity, often it will happen that (if they are honest) they will not refer to any generally accepted intention beyond the engagement, but instead they will answer: I like this at the present time, or: I want it because I want it, etc. When forming a concept category, it is best to start by avoiding difficult boundary questions and instead taking a concrete example that does not raise doubt. Food must contain nourishment to fulfill the biological purpose of the meal, but it should also taste good. If, on the one hand, there is a culinary masterpiece with little nutritional value and, on the other hand, a bottle of liver oil and a moldy breadcrumb, then a refugee who needs the strength to continue will choose the nutritious diet, even if one abhors liver oil. The difference emerges even more clearly when one thinks of such things as coffee and tobacco; they are considered biologically harmful when consumed in larger doses, but many knowingly and willingly expose themselves to this danger (cf. alcoholism) because the coffee and tobacco give them an immediate

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improvement in well-being that they refuse to do without. Here it is the taste and stimulation that go into the new phenomenon group. What we seek, however, is a category that includes any engagement where reception or activity or internal cultivation has “its goal in itself,” has “self-purpose,”a is “an end in itself,”b is “disinterested,” or “autotelic” as it is called in the aesthetic literature.12 It could thus be attributed to such things as the release of anger and other intense affects, indulgence in despairing sadness, etc., self-worship (narcissism), scientific research for the sake of ability use and exploration for its own sake regardless of the biological-social value of the result, production and acquisition of art, when it is not consciously a means in the service of other things, athletics and sports that do not aim at biological hygiene, the challenge of dangers and difficulties solely to have one’s skills tested and confirmed, “aesthetic” attitudes toward landscapes and people, certain forms of intellectual employment (“creative work”), daydreams, drug use; even certain states of fixedness of emotional value (“I am demonic”) are naturally included. However, already a concern arises here: if all the pleasure-seeking activity is to be included in the category and we have also included in this activity the unpleasant detour to pleasure, then we are hurt by including an activity that has no goal in itself. I save for ten years to go to Italy, but I do not want to go there for biological reasons (my doctor advises me not to travel) or for social reasons (on the contrary, it will bring about criticism that I am heading south alone and leaving my family in Homansbyenc). If such planned renunciation is to be included, then it must be seen as a subset of the pleasure-specific goal, as absorbed by it; but unfortunately, it does not have its goal in itself. Even more troublesome is a case like this: to win the love of a lady (an abiological value if the intention is not having children) I play tennis, make sailing trips, etc.; in other words, I use pleasurable means to achieve a pleasurable result. Can one here say that the means is also autotelic since it is pleasurable? If qua means it is precisely “heterotelic,” is not the intention outside of itself? Is there a way out by saying that the means is autotelic in so far as it is a pleasure in itself, and heterotelic in so far as it serves a more distant goal? A third variant: participating in harvest time in good weather and together with clever girls can be pleasurable in and of itself, can have some of the joy of play, even if the intention is of a clear biological nature: the collection of a b 12 c

självändamål (Swe.). Selbstzweck (Ger.). See, e.g., Yrjö Hirn. Det estetiska Lifvet [The Aesthetic Life], Stockh. 1913 p. 26 f. 37, 47. A neighborhood in Oslo.

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winter supplies. Autotelic? Yes, if the harvesters are not concerned about the hay barn burning down afterward. But what about for the farmer whom the fire would ruin and who nevertheless welcomes girls and sunshine? And, least of all, could he keep things apart if asked? If the point of view is to be maintained in a case like this, then it can be said that the activity covers two types of interest simultaneously, one biological and one autotelic; it combines “the useful” and “the pleasurable.” But the point is that “the pleasure” does not stand alongside the “useful” but only because of the fact that biology is unharmed. If I am gripped by anxiety or horror at an imminent danger, then I feel a strong increase of pleasure precisely by being saved. Here it would seem artificial if, in order to salvage the system, one tried to distinguish between “the value of being saved” and “the pleasure of being saved.” We stand at the limit of the category’s usefulness. A positive determination, for which we hoped in advance, is thus unsuccessful. But the concept of an autotelic interest front can also be maintained by a negative determination: the autotelic is the field of life that is not biological, social, or, as justified in § 14, metaphysical. Faced with the meagerness of this determination it must be remembered that the distinction need not have “validity in and of itself”; it is only a tool to gain an overview of the roughest features of humankind’s complicated “life mass.” And such an overview again is a prerequisite for locating “the tragic phenomenon.” With these reservations, we have thus established an autotelic interest front. Like other interest fronts, it can be assigned an engagement, an expectation, a course, etc. In general, the subject will also interact here with an environment, but ecstasy and depression states can also be thought of without environmental sensation. In contrast, the autotelic self-feeling can become overwhelmingly strong; one experiences a “pure being” freed from all heterotelic considerations. As far as the experience of art is concerned, the self’s relationship with the outside world is an important question; as an example of such a discussion of the philosophy of art, I mention C. V. Holst, Le sentiment de bonheur chez Stendhal [The Feeling of Happiness in Stendahl], Introduction (Master’s Thesis, Oslo, 1936). As long as one disregards conflict situations, the assessment (of means and ends) is in this, as in any other interest plan, given by specific factors. The engagement that one is most disposed to at the moment, or to which the outside world strongly invites, attracts attention and action to itself. The appropriate means is better than others, and the customized behavior is better than any other. The scale according to which the assessment is carried out is marked in

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its upper and lower points by what is most likely to be achieved and preferably avoided. Tobacco is better in the pipe than coffee; it is better to smoke the tobacco than to cook it. The object can either be taken from the “real” world or brought about as a surrogate by the help of imagination and memory. Since the action either results in the expected condition or not, autotelic sanction or veto occurs. With repeated engagement, the feeling of value can change or develop; the experience becomes more selective; the object choice can shrink “down” and expand “up”; we can speak of a low-autotelic and a high-autotelic engagement. The assessment is also subject to suggestive influence and more closely resembles the social and the biological assessment where the scope is severely limited. We have quickly passed here the content of autotelic experiences and the possibility of arranging them according to a scale; the questions belong in Chapter Nine. Autotelic life expression is ahistorical in the sense that it is exhausted and terminates in and with its existence; it is not intended that it should flow into something new – this could only come about by a further development of the autotelic readiness in question. States of pleasure may actually benefit the organism, but they do not lose their autotelic character unless they are produced or experienced for the purpose of providing biological strength. Autotelic experience can as autotelic be detached from all life contexts, appear discontinuous in relation to the constructive biological-social endeavor, and have a mark of sterility. This does not prevent one from looking back from the deathbed on such an experience as the culmination of one’s life. Later in the chapter, it is mentioned that autotelic elements are frequently combined with others in the diverse, complex interests of daily life.

§ 14. Metaphysical interest front The word metaphysical does not sound good these days; it evokes the idea of ardent speculation that one takes hold of when one suffers defeat in the practical. We believe at the outset that there is a primary need for what we here call metaphysical life readiness. By primary is not meant primitive, for the metaphysical need is undoubtedly related to the high differentiation of humankind. Should it be convincingly argued that the metaphysical need, which is perceived as a “total need” or a “universal need,” is always derived from unsatisfied partial needs and can be practically reduced back to them (e.g., by psychoanalytic treatment), the following description nevertheless has its significance

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in the present context because in the vast number of cases of the actual tragic course, one has nothing to do with psychologists and analysts. We have arrived at an initial notion of what we here call metaphysical need through a reasoning like this: it seems to us that the animal’s engagements are tied to a few moments or to shorter periods of time. Its “individual” effort consists in a single expression or in a small complex of these. The animal’s life “breaks down” into scattered tasks, each with its final goal. A rat that is put into new surroundings hardly cares about the way to food before hunger arrives, while a human being in a similar situation will think: even if everything is good at the moment, difficulties will arise sooner or later, and how will it go then? There is nothing in the animal’s “conscious” posture that tells us humans about a kind of “moral continuity”; one expression does not oblige the other with the demand for a uniform style of behavior (conscious fixedness tendency); the animal is “mentally liberated” from its old tasks as it takes up new ones. Its trust in biological justice, its anxiety, anticipation, etc. are attached to the present situation; synthetic abstractions or principled views do not break in here; the animal does not engage in induction. Since these considerations will serve as a basis for comparison only, we can disregard anomalies such as storing food for the winter and the like. Now, there are probably given people, and undoubtedly given periods in the lives of all people, which are characterized by similar fragmentary life readiness. In such cases there is no metaphysical sense of life; nor does it matter whether the human shows the continuity of consciousness that was missing in animals. But then we come an important step closer in the matter. New Year’s Eve is a recurring occasion when most people, drunk and sober, talk about “life.” The almanac’s protective fence is suddenly gone, and the gaze falls outward. New Year’s night “stands open” as someone said. Often it becomes a bit outwardly lyrical and includes vague inward feelings of “big things” that it is best to get away from again as soon as possible. There is a draft from the “open” New Year’s night which is not conducive to health, not favorable to concentration in the office. Other than this, it is the starry sky and the death of a relative that typically create an itch in the usual ways of thinking. In these situations, most people feel and think (metaphysical engagement has elements of thought, feeling, imagination, etc.) something different and more than the following: 1. The starry sky is harmless and of little value as a light source (biological aspect).

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on the tragic 2. It is practically irrelevant to my relationship with my fellow human beings (social aspect). 3. It is quite pretty to look at but not as pretty as fireworks at the stadium (autotelic aspect).

In the event of a death: 1. Who will provide us with shelter and food now? (biological aspect). 2. This means government crisis. Imagine a choir at the funeral of one who served time in prison (social aspect). 3. Now we won’t hear him perform anymore. How is that for a beautiful corpse? He had that coming, the swine (autotelic aspect). The starry sky and death are apt to explode into a human mind a deeper sense of the world and self. The first signs of an emerging metaphysical engagement are considerations like these: How immense the world is. What is a human life and what does it mean? I wonder if there is a further context in which the individual’s life is just a detail just as the single act is a detail within life? Of vital importance to the human life image is the fact that, while the animal is probably not aware of its own death before it arrives, the human is already aware early on of the probable length of life. And the awareness of the limitation of life to a certain number of years seems to be a condition for being able to condense the scattered life impressions into a synthetic image. (But it should not be described as a truly universal image. The individual’s “overall life image” will consist of more or less basic features characteristic of the individual.) The path is not long from the synthetic image to viewing the total activity with all its active, receptive, and processing phases from the cradle to the grave as a unified effort in a larger, hypothetical environment. And in immediate connection with this view the “normal” human being then asks about the meaning of the total life effort. To say that an action or other fragment of life has meaning is to say that it gives us a quite specific feeling which is not easy to rewrite for thought. There may be something along the lines of the action having a good enough intention so that when the intention is achieved, the action is “justified,” aligned, and confirmed – and the subject is at ease. The object then disappears from attention in a completely satisfactory way. The subject has a feeling that says: now everything is orderly and good; nothing that has to do with this matter can be better imagined.

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The need for such a meaning alongside the individual episodes of life is characteristic of most “normal” people. On every environmental level, one chooses the actions and the impressions that make sense and avoids the harmful and the indifferent. For the hungry it makes sense to buy food but not a stamp collection. It makes sense to put a ballot in the ballot box but not a business card or a self-portrait. The meaning requirement is first extended from the individual act to a small complex of acts: I open the glasses case with the intention of removing the glasses. The action has meaning; it would not have it if the glasses had been already taken out. An act of this nature gives us no satisfaction; we only regret our distraction and the wasted time. If it were thought that a human being was involved in nothing but meaningless actions (these then must be compulsive behavior), in a short time one would destroy both one’s social and biological life. As soon as the glasses are taken out, the meaning requirement asks: Was it to clean, repair, or put them on? If there is no intention, opening the case was meaningless to a greater consciousness; a lesser consciousness, on the other hand, does nothing more than remove the glasses and thereby the action is justified, warranted, beyond reproach. If a higher consciousness is to align itself with this view, it must arbitrarily limit its capacity to the first of the two links. Otherwise, the meaning requirement is expanded as consciousness expands. The natural arrangement here does not seem to be a one-after-the-other arrangement of the narrow and the wide consciousness, but an over-and-under arrangement. Fine, I also have coverage for the second link: I took the glasses out to use them. For what? To read. Why? Here, there are two practically conceivable possibilities: (1) To read “for fun.” One then ends up in an autotelic employment and all further inquiries in the matter may cease. (2) I maintain the heterotelic perspective and answer: To pass the exam – the process goes on. Why take an exam? (a) (Autotelic.) Because it is so fun to be a student. (b) (Heterotelic.) To obtain a livelihood. The first alternative is released. The second alternative: Why a livelihood? To be able to live my natural life to the end. Why? The answer must either bring in life as a whole among the autotelic forms of effort; it is lived “for its own sake,” “for what it is,” and nothing further. In that case there is no metaphysical extension concerning one’s life purpose, at all, or at the moment one answers. Or, one maintains the heterotelic aspect and then the question remains open: Why? This question is a metaphysical one in the sense of the present work. It expresses a metaphysical need, the need for a heterotelic meaning of life

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alongside the autotelic. The causes can be many, and the hypothetical solutions can be many, and not all of them belong under the term metaphysical engagement. If a man is erotically malnourished and for that reason seems to have lived in vain, the need is of a metaphysical nature; it could have been satisfied by available means – more or less. It is different if the man asks: Why do I have such a nature or why did I have such an upbringing that I am always an outsider? Though here there is no need of a metaphysical nature; it is only a partial satisfaction. But the fact that a man’s life has been irreparably destroyed without any prompting on his part is a stain on the history of the universe as we want it; it is a charge against the morality of the “world order.” Thus, the metaphysical need is formulated in a new way, or if one wishes, it has revealed a new aspect: the need for a moral world order; that is to say, a world order in which everything has organization, purpose, and meaning, where suffering, if necessary, is utilized according to an economic principle, where fate is appropriate to need, in short, where everything is done fairly in the opinion of each individual or in an assessment that everyone can “rise to” by themselves. And if justice is insufficient, love shall do the rest; the metaphysical environment must then be controlled by a sympathetic mind. The only exception to the requirement is the area that falls under the exercise of human will: I know that the stove is hot, and when I touch it, I do not call the pain metaphysically unfair. This only happens when it was not within the power of the afflicted person to prevent it, or when this could only be done by the sacrifice of a higher good (conflict). Injustice in the partial aims will, therefore, easily provoke a metaphysical reflection, but it does not have to. It is, for example, biologically just that the strong overcomes the weak, but it is metaphysically unjust that one is born weak and the other strong when needs and conditions are equal. The “false” metaphysical indictment, which closer examination proves could be directed at the complainant oneself, will be discussed in Chapter Six. When it is said that humankind has a need for a moral world order (and this is very often called a tragic theory), then a reservation must be made. The individual’s own life and its possible meaninglessness concerns one much more than the lives of animals and plants do, not to mention hypothetical life on other planets. Even other people’s lives do not concern one at all times. Each of us has had times when we happily gave up the universe with human and mouse to satisfy a personal need. At other times, we are prepared to stand in solidarity with humanity and even with all existing life because we assert the principle that all interest bearers have a claim to a fate that is appropriate to the interest.

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The need for a meaning of life is not identical to the need for a loving God and a life after death. If the need for meaning could be satisfied another way, this would be the most important thing; we could then imagine giving up both God and immortality. But it pains us to imagine such a solution, and so we cling to the notions of metaphysical salvation that at least have the possibility of analogy. Indeed, most, if not all, features of the hypothetical-metaphysical environment are in fact taken from the partial aims, as is shown in Chapter Six. Many people, therefore, confuse their metaphysical need with the religious; they do not see religious salvation as a means that could in principle be replaced by another. To a certain extent, however, believers entertain the idea when they say that they “leave everything to God.” But they also do not doubt that God’s provision will meet their personal needs in matters large and small. People also confuse the need for meaning with the need for a continued existence; there are indeed those who do not aspire to anything higher than a continued bourgeois existence, the “false immortality,” cf. J. L. Heiberg: En Sjæl efter Døden [A Soul after Death]. But in the absence of other metaphysical confirmation, it is just as difficult to deny continued existence as it is to see a solution without God. Death’s brutal and arbitrary cutting off of our most precious engagements suits us terribly for more than one reason. We can disregard the “spasms and Devil’s power” by the process itself, and the thought of the subsequent dissolution, which requires a Novalis to taste. It is enough to think about the fact that the possibilities of life, active, receptive, and meditative, are rarely or never fully realized. Here, we are only talking about the realization needs of which one is aware. There is no limit to what we would like to experience and accomplish; nothing is better suited to the imagination than a continuation of the path from amoeba to human. Since “God” represents the highest we can conceive concerning fulness of life, the need can be described as the need to be equal to God, both in fixedness and capacity. And when we are now by nature’s hand endowed with this wonderful and desperate longing, there is something “that should not be”a in the fact that all so-called opportunities, hopes, and dreams will be buried with the body and become nothing. The longing for eternity and infinity can, therefore, be seen as a fruit of over-equipment in ability and readiness, over-equipment in relation to the cause of a deficit on another edge, for example, biologically. Even the experiences of pure beauty sometimes cause pain because they are “only autotelic.” The term “salvation of a nicht-sein-sollend (Ger.).

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the soul” in the broadest sense is cover for the same needs, the preservation of the identity, spiritual development to endless heights, etc., things we feel more than have clear ideas about. “Salvation of the soul” is, therefore, a term for metaphysical sanction. If one now imagines one’s metaphysical fate as dependent on one’s own effort, in contrast to the doctrine of pure grace that ultimately means a blocking of metaphysical readiness, then around the metaphysical need, a complex gathers of the same kind as that which we know from the partial fronts. One can reasonably speak of metaphysical ability, object, effort, morality, responsibility, hygiene, conscience, assessment, truth, expectation, anxiety, remorse, guilt, punishment, fate, veto, distress, destruction, acknowledgment, taboo, inhibition, displacement, conflict, justice, etc. The environment itself in which the metaphysical endeavor unfolds is, as mentioned hypothetical, derived from the needs in analogy with known environmental types. For those who have a metaphysical need – in the absence of a survey one can only guess that most people have them – for them this need is in rank the most necessary, at times the only necessary one. But it does appear with varying affective strength and sometimes lags behind other, more pressing needs. The division of interest fields that has now been made is a theoretical aid which, like all other means of division, is an overcutting of lived life. In practice, the four categories of interest will, as a rule, be so intimately interwoven that one cannot unequivocally say to which front an engagement should be rightly attributed. Frequently the question is also of no particular interest; only when we come to the conflicts does it again become relevant to operate with four incommensurable forms of assessment. To some extent, the complicated situations of interest can be described as combinations of the simpler ones: the situation is then perceived as polyfrontal. The play between monofrontal and converging interests can be easily observed in the role that a single object plays in life’s changing circumstances. Example: a bottle of wine. As a thirst quencher and a throwing weapon, it is part of the biological environment. As a stolen good, as a commodity, or used for representative purposes (diplomatic dinners), it is closely associated with social interests. As an intoxicant or tasty fruit juice, it represents an autotelic utility. Finally, as part of symbolic meals (the sacrament of the altar), it plays a role in the metaphysical struggle of humankind.

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§ 15. Polyfrontal engagements If the division is taken into account and is thought to be exhaustive, then the total interest of humankind can be captured in a limited number of variants. The engagement may be: 1. Purely biological (abbreviated to b.). Ex. A shipwrecked crew’s attempt to reach land. (It must be assumed here, as in the later examples, that there are no other interests present than those mentioned, or that they are disregarded.) 2. Purely social (abbreviated to s.). Ex. Honorary redress. 3. Purely autotelic (abbreviated to a.). Ex. Tobacco smoking. 4. Purely metaphysical (abbreviated to m.). Ex. The quest for the meaning of life. Religious asceticism. Polyfrontal conditions then appear first in six two-sided variants: 5. b-s. Ex. Employment relationships. Social interaction today is heavily infected by biological interests, and always has been. A well-regarded theory is that the formation of society is an expression of collective-biological readiness: dangers that befall the individual can be overcome jointly. As the social machinery is developed, an increasing number of individuals are detached from personal contact with the sources of biological life, the original production, forestry and agriculture, mining, fishing, hunting, and cattle breeding. Already this first division of labor makes the exchange of goods necessary, and the financial sector transforms direct business into economics. The community thus represents to its members a part of their biological environment alongside the social; the dependence on the community grows and develops more dimensions. In the end, it is only through social arrangement that the individual can find his or her subsistence; the path to the sources is reserved for few in number and closed to most. It is only in peculiar situations that the “social human” experiences a confrontation with the original biological environment, involuntarily in accidents, war, and natural disasters, voluntarily in exploration trips and the like. The condition of biological under-equipment that human beings have themselves produced by the social transfer of protection can come harshly to the fore in such circumstances.

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on the tragic 6. b-a. Example: A sailboat is leaking and the happy summer visitors have to swim to shore. The swim is “fun” while at the same time necessary for self-preservation. Something similar applies to eating good food; biological consideration alone would be covered by oatmeal and liver oil. At banquets the maintenance of the body’s nutritional balance is very much in the background; it is not even proper manners to bring up this side of the matter. The combination is also expressed by the formula “Strength through Joy.”a Primitive biological chores have through society’s intervention become increasingly autotelic, for example, hunting and fishing, but if the hunter gets lost, the original purpose may again be relevant. The reproductive act is also an illustrative example; there are those who claim that it must not be performed for autotelic purposes but only with the intention of the continuation of the species. Finally, we mention embellished weapons here; there is debate concerning the significance of the ornaments in primitive times, see Yrjö Hirn, Det estetiska Lifvet [The Aesthetic Life], Stockholm 1913. p. 42f. 7. b-m. Humans beseech God for biological salvation. Life is seen as the manifestation of transcendental forces. Saying grace. According to various religions, spiritual salvation is sometimes gained by denying the biological considerations (celibacy, askesis), sometimes by promoting them (the commandment: be fruitful and multiply, cultivating deserts and eradicating wild animals as part of the struggle for metaphysical confirmation, the victory of the good, Zoroaster). Priests on fixed salaries. 8. s-a. Social gatherings. “The joy of serving others.” If the autotelic component gains the upper hand, “love” may very well be associated with social betrayal; one person then becomes merely “the means of pleasure” for the other. 9. s-m. Meaningful life, goodness as religious duty, the notion of metaphysical confirmation in the form of “the community of the saints,” “the gathering of the blessed,” and the like. 10. a-m. Metaphysical life feeling can be more terrifying or more blissful with metaphysical sanction or veto than seems necessary; “bliss” is the maximum of pleasure, “hell” is the maximum of pain. Concerning

a “Kraft durch Freude” (Ger.) – the name of a state-operated organization promoting various leisure and tourist activities in Nazi Germany.

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the so-called mystical states, it is claimed that an ecstatic intoxication occurs in association with a metaphysical “sense of clarity” during which the self is experienced as an integral part of everything or the divine. In less sublime embodiments, the combination a-m can be observed in Protestant churchgoers who, in addition to maintaining their metaphysical hygiene, also attend because it is “pleasant” in the church, or for the sake of organ music, or because of the priest’s oratorical gift. Catholic ritual has a predilection for employing autotelic lures (church splendor, incense). Temple prostitution in Babylonian and Persian cults and the Greek orgiastic worship of Dionysus has left its last pale bud in church gossip. Then four groups appear with three components in each: 11. b-s-a. This combination exhausts the life of the ametaphysical social person, practically rich expression in loyal forms, where each day has enough of its own pleasure and its own torment. Special examples: the pleasure of working in a socially beneficial profession, joint meals at the end of the day. 12. b-s-m. Wherever a component is missing, the activity will be pleasure-indifferent. The examples are not obvious. One must think of such things as childcare from Christian duty where the work itself is without pleasure for the practitioner. 13. b-a-m. This posture is asocial and instead aims at individual living, possibly reproduction, personal “happiness,” and mental arrangement toward the chosen metaphysical authority. Within the framework of a society this can hardly be sustained throughout a lifetime. Examples would probably be found among different types of recluses, visionaries, and ingenious criminals. The posture will easily have a pathological mark. 14. s-a-m. This group lacks the biological element; in other words, the activity is self-sacrificing. It is closest to thinking of social action (“good deeds”) as the “happy path to salvation” or the like. Besides being self-sacrificing, this life posture can also be based on profit; in relation to self-preservation, it is thus considered either subbiological or abiological. Finally, there is a combination where all elements are included:

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on the tragic 15. b-s-a-m. Parenthood is a good illustration. The child as a life product ensures the existence of the family line (genetic-biological consideration) or contributes to the family’s maintenance (individual-biological consideration). In addition, it means fulfilling the so-called national civic duty, giving parents joy and entertainment (possibly saving their marriage), and forming a suitable object for their love and available energy. Finally, the child very often fills a metaphysical function. As a “gift from God,” it is the expression of God’s sanction of the marriage and the life course as a whole. For others, the child and the family’s continued existence are a form of “eternal life”; I have also heard fathers say that reproduction was the only sure way to deal with the many difficult metaphysical problems – that life had to exist was the only thing that could not be doubted. Or: If I raise the child in the right spirit, it may in time be a “gift to God” and as such contribute to a more lenient view of my own metaphysical status.

There may also be other links between the different fronts of interest. A biological effort or neglect can occur with social consequences (benefit or harm) and vice versa; the same applies to the other fronts. What serves one interest ends up hurting another, and vice versa. The subject comes up against difficulties of an interfrontal nature. An act can, therefore, be an expression of good morals on one front and of bad morals on the other. If one refrains from stealing jam because one thinks it is poison, it is an expression of good biological morality. If the jam is not poisoned but belongs to someone who trusts me, the morality is of a social nature (legal and “ethical”). The morality is autotelic when one does not steal because one does not like jam but “should” have eaten it for biological reasons, and metaphysical when one believes the theft will harm one’s godliness or fate after death, or feels it a betrayal of humanity’s struggle for order and meaning in everything. As a rule, children have not developed social or metaphysical morality and are therefore referred to biological-autotelic directives in a similar way as animals. “He is disabled and nearsighted, so we can safely harass him.” That is an ugly thought, say the adults, but this judgment is only half-true. Such treatment of the disabled companion is certainly socially reprehensible, but in the biological-autotelic sense it is completely acceptable, indeed an expression of skill in judgment. The fact that in one case the social is considered over the biological, and in the other case the other way around is something that does not concern the concept’s determination.

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It may be mentioned here that the previously described division of the outside world into hostile, indifferent, and sympathetic features intersects with the classification just dealt with. The theoretically possible cases then become these: (1) Biologically hostile. (2) Biologically indifferent. (3) Biologically sympathetic. (4) Socially hostile. (5) Socially indifferent. (6) Socially sympathetic. (7) Autotelically hostile. (8) Autotelically indifferent. (9) Autotelically sympathetic. (10) Metaphysically hostile. (11) Metaphysically indifferent. (12) Metaphysically sympathetic. Examples are unnecessary. These dual properties occur in a wide variety of combinations: 1-4, 1-5, 1-6 … 2-4, 2-5, etc. For the same reason that there are four different kinds of morality, there are also four kinds of justice. One and the same result can be just on one level and unjust on another. We have understood justice as a norm closely related to the ability to learn from experience. There should not suddenly be a new rule to the detriment of the subject when it through trial and error has adapted to the old. This is then the abstract norm. But the incorporated rules are different on the different environmental levels – though there should be some common features – and consequently the requirement of justice has different content on the different levels. Taking the experience on the biological level, in the rightly fixed organisms it coincides with its immediate propensity, while in error-fixed ones a gap opens. But just like morality, the concept of justice only makes sense when there is a certain degree of unfixedness present, or else the judgment lacks a basis of comparison. On the biological level, it demands success that aligns behavior with what is learned from experience. The individual who is born stronger, faster, and with finer senses can demand the same when it is aware that these characteristics distinguish it from other individuals. Thus, the demand of justice presupposes a developed consciousness, and we cannot imagine its presence in animals without anthropomorphizing. On the legal level, the content is something different; the criminal’s skill is irrelevant to the judgment. On the social-moral level, the content is one-third; on the autotelic level, a fourth; and on the metaphysical level, the content changes according to the individual’s conception of the environment (religions and views of life). The basis of comparison is sometimes the fate of the individual in relation to the fate of its peers (equal effort, equal fate). One can also sometimes compare the fate of the individual with other, hypothetical fates, without taking into account the fate of the others. Injustice is then present but everyone has an equally unjust fate. This is close to calling this injustice metaphysical. But in doing so we are also faced with a question that is not easy to answer – what is meant by the term “metaphysical injustice”? We may hold that justice

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is a norm for the distribution of pleasure and pain, of interest-related and interest-conflicting fates, and the norm is applied to the effort. The meaning of the term then becomes this: the individual’s metaphysical fate is unjust when it is inappropriate (for good or bad) in relation to its metaphysical efforts. But are we content to be judged by objective and metaphysical laws? No; since we know nothing of the applicable rules, the subjective right must be taken into account; the motive, the good will, must be decisive. But why did the subject in question not have a “good will”? The issue of freedom of the will should not be touched upon here, but it is only on indeterministic grounds that one can speak of metaphysical justice; if the mind is determined, justice must give way to metaphysical love. It seems that this demand is of an autotelic nature; it springs from our psychic constitution as something irrational. We do not accept the error-fixedness and the innate under- or over-equipment as the basis for a metaphysical veto. We penetrate the foundation and call for justice in the origin of the foundation as well. In so doing, one is also led to inquire into the basis of the partial judgment of justice. It is, for example, socially just that someone who keeps the laws has a better social fate than someone who does not keep them – but why does someone not keep them? Will not inherent qualities always come into play over which the “will” cannot have dominion? And why are the innate characteristics so differently distributed? There is no effort here by which to measure. This distribution should in any event also be an expression of the “moral world order”; we also demand meaning for what happens on the partial level. The term metaphysical justice has in this account a second meaning. In the first place, it is metaphysically unjust that there is partial injustice, but also meaningless suffering can be hidden behind partial justice. This too becomes metaphysically unjust unless it finds justification as part of the subject’s just metaphysical fate (cf. Christianity’s teachings on earthly trials). It is not easy to think of a metaphysical confirmation that does not take into account the misery on the partial fronts. Indeed, we do not even know how suffering on the partial fronts will be able to appear without doubt as partial justice as long as effort and result are incommensurable. Beyond relatively just, therefore, no judgment can be made. Many may feel called to pass judgment on the element of justice in a given, possibly tragic, course: first and foremost, the suffering self, as we hear one or imagine one’s judgment, then one’s surroundings (the viewers) as we hear or imagine them, the historian, the poet who picks up the material, the affected

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fellow actors, the reviewer, the theater audience, ourselves, and our contemporaries, as we hear them or imagine their judgment. Sometimes one is at risk of having the judgment on one level infected by the consideration of justice that belongs on an irrelevant level; strength and beauty, wealth and power can contribute to a more lenient view of social transgressions; human kindness is extended in support of the biologically inferior, etc. Here it is important to maintain boundaries that are as clear as possible and to judge the effort in each area according to the law of that area. The fact that one is a musician or tennis player, beautiful, strong, philanthropic, or religious should not help the philologist on one’s exam. If one gives in to such impulses, one ends up in the chaos called “poetic justice,” a variable mix of individual influences and emotions and semi-rationalized “premises” of all kinds, a luxury that has its place and value only in the life of the imagination. This does not mean that one can set the goal of avoiding all affective influence. At bottom there always lies an affect, and researchers will even trace the autotelic path back to such dark sources as revenge and envy. They have the judgmental public in mind; when it comes to the victim’s own demand for justice, it seems easier to turn to biological conditions. And even though the demand for justice was originally based on affects such as those mentioned, these are now, through an advanced sublimation and rationalization, in the service of cultural endeavors. The relationship between an action and its consequences can, after everything, appear to the viewer as (1) biologically just, (2) biologically unjust, (3) “ethically” just, (4) “ethically” unjust, (5) legally just, (6) legally unjust, (7) autotelically just, (8) autotelically unjust, (9) metaphysically just, and (10) metaphysically unjust. There are a number of combinations with two, three, four, and five links. In this chapter, we have tried to gain an overview of the nature of the tasks that the human has to perform when one wants to secure one’s physical or mental well-being. In the next chapter, attention is focused on the abilities and attributes that play a key role in the struggle to accomplish these tasks.

·5· ON OVER-EQUIPMENT AND UNFIXEDNESS IN HUMANS

§ 16. Character “Thou shalt not” is the adult’s first commandment to the child; “thou shalt” is the second. The child’s unfixedness is one of the things that makes an upbringing necessary. In the first life stage of the child, it is enough to create inhibitions for the most harmful deeds, “Don’t eat poo,” etc. The parents themselves take care of the positively right. Gradually the child is prepared, first to treat properly what the parents are providing, then to acquire general utility values through skill in some work. The choice of work is a difficult and fateful decision that often places the unfixedness under the brightest light. Few have a dominant ability that predisposes them to a job; as a rule, the case is decided by mere coincidence, by matters that have little or nothing to do with personal dispositions. Upbringing applies to all fronts of interest and continues as self-education after the influence of the parents has lessened or ceased. On the biological front the child learns to take care of life and health, not play with fire, not walk on thin ice, etc. In the domain of autotelic learning there are games and play. The central task is the incorporation of the “real” social morality of the child’s time, place, and social status (i.e., the parents’), of which the “ethical” part is

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especially important; in most states, the child is without criminal liability and cannot accumulate wealth. Above all, it is about mastering their desires and affections or letting them be fulfilled in tolerated forms; this last preparation for cultural life is especially difficult and full of dangers (Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [The Discomfort in Civilization], Vienna 1930). Finally, there is also training in the group’s metaphysical system with associated creeds, norms, and particular actions. In addition to these externally provided fixedness producers of both internal and external reactions, there are the innate, constitutionally conditioned ones, as well as the possibility of dispositions that make one particularly susceptible to certain influences when they make themselves felt. By the word character in the following, we think of fixedness of all three kinds as it appears in a person’s characteristic bearing or reaction style in the broadest sense. Character is thus seen in contrast to the unfixed variability of reaction types behind which no guiding principles can be discovered. It follows from this general formulation that the character can be revealed, or rather paid attention to, in all interest fronts, and does not refer to social morality alone. Furthermore, the assessment of character will depend on the judge’s character and other preconditions. One may see a style of reaction where someone else perceives only opportunism and arbitrariness, or each one may identify a different “thread” in the act and each believe that the thread found is an expression of the character. The main question then is this: In relation to what is a thread present? How would one describe the style of reaction one believes to have found? We hesitate to mention here that there are in principle an infinite number of determinants from which to choose, and that the characterologists (Kretschmer, Weininger, Wundt, Utitz, etc.) each choose a different one as the most important. If one within a group agrees that this or that character exists in a given case, then the assessment of this character comes second. There are also difficulties in agreeing which characteristics of a human being are innate and which are acquired, or rather, the relation between inherited and acquired contributions to the individual character traits. The action type first appears when a shorter or longer series of encounters with given objects has been observed, and it immediately catches the eye how incalculable in number and kind the sources of error and moments of uncertainty are. In practice, one would tend to consider as hereditary the features that are least susceptible to external influences and which are similar to the traits of the agent’s relatives.

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If a person in a given situation acts differently than one expected, one cannot afterward declare that this person has “violated his or her character,” acted “foreign to character.” The unexpected reaction can indeed be just as true an expression of the “character” as any other. It is therefore only asked which character has been decided on in advance. This one can then either include all the reactions of the person or only a prominent group, for example, the posture the person constantly adopts toward particularly important selection decisions or to a particular group of objects. One has no observation material other than the individual bearings, unless supplemental theories have been developed in advance that place character in relation to race, physical constitution, gender hormones, etc. The character emerges from, is crystallized through the observation of individual actions and is more or less a result of them in the consciousness of the observer. But this is close to inferring from the observed reaction style a “something” in the agent’s nature that is the cause of the unity of character, a “fixed core,” a “forming pipe,” or the like. But calling this “something” about the character is the same as making it unavailable for research. In general one often says this for the sake of ease. (Cf. Clauberg und Dubislav, Systematisches Worterbuch der Philosophie [Systematic Dictionary of Philosophy], Lpz. 1923 p. 109 par. 7, cf. p. 354 f.) As inherited character-forming factors, in addition to race, physical constitution, and gender (innate, not “inherited”), one also thinks of temperament (disposition), capacity for neuroses, etc. But which is cause and which is effect is not always easy to say; nor is the boundary always clear between what is causing the character and what is part of it. Acquired character traits are ones that one believes are brought about through education, activity, social order, random encounters with the outside world, habits, reading, socializing, suggestive influences, the leadership of remarkable personalities, and, in short, the entire influence of the cultural circle in which one lives. Sometimes, one may encounter characters that are more than ordinary solid structures; the person appears thoroughly fixed. Words such as stiff, rigid, dogmatic, narrow-minded, reactionary, stubborn, obstinate, hardheaded, and the like are often used to describe them; also in anniversary speeches and obituaries: upright, straightforward, faithful, unshakable, unwavering, unyielding, rock-solid, and single-cast. There may be reason to distinguish between a more “mineral” and a more “dynamic,” “living” character formation; the latter is then the fruit of one’s conscious moral work with oneself. The character can

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be “developed” to have greater personal or cultural value, either over a longer period of time or suddenly, by a crisis or conversion. Those who never seem to be able to arrange themselves on any fundamental principle are “characterless”; they are called flighty, erratic, unreliable, spineless, opportunists, and traitors; in an obituary there may be something about the right of emotions, the wide vision, the spacious heart, the childlike glow, and the like. Character is often associated with inflexibility and limitation in disposition and thought, while looseness is associated with self-sacrificing goodness and helpfulness, charming social talents, etc. Between these extremes, both of which can rise to the psychopathic, lies a scale where “fixed” and “loose” forms of reaction are combined in a myriad of ways.

§ 17. Over-equipment. General remarks As mentioned, the boundary between “unfixedness” and “surplus” is not sharp; in cases of doubt it is difficult to determine: here one has a reaction variant within the same ability, here there is a new ability, and here there is a quantitative addition, an increase of capacity within the same quality. Nevertheless, we came to the conclusion that the distinction could be maintained since the difference, as soon as one gets outside the boundary fields, comes forward clearly and provides an overview. As an initial explanation of the concept of surplus it was further mentioned that most people have ability and power beyond what they need to meet the demands of vocation, procreation, and social organization – the conditions of human life sine qua non. This surplus can be objectless and only present in potential; it can be triggered in autotelic activity toward a given or sought-after object, and it can furthermore take the form of metaphysical readiness. In some cases one is the master of the surplus; it is displaced and sublimated when the appropriate object is taboo; at other times it is a voice that during mortal threats demands to be heard: we are under the tyranny of abilities. Over-equipment does not in any way apply with unchanged strength at all times. Its timeliness and intensity depend on the feature and operation carriers in the surrounding world, on desire and non-desire, fatigue and alertness; it changes with psycho-physical states, etc., whose deepest reasons evade understanding. Such variations are disregarded in the following where nothing else is said. However, a surplus is always present, regardless of the nature of the ability, as long as the person is not burdened with the greatest demand it

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can tolerate.13 The surplus thus varies with the capacity and demands of the outside world at each moment. One finds chronic and acute forms with all the intermediate steps. Through training and practice (instruction) capacity can be increased as it naturally increases during childhood; by apathy and non-use it diminishes, and it naturally decreases in old age. For the sake of completeness, I will set up a permutation of the variation possibilities according to the formula

C/D – 1 = 0 (in the same units) where C is the capacity, D is the demand of the outside world (including any kind of task, as well as purely mental problems), and s is the surplus. When C is equal to D, the surplus is zero. There are nine variations: 1. Capacity (C) constant, task or demand (D) constant: Surplus (s) constant. 2. C constant, D increasing: s decreasing. 3. C constant, D decreasing: s increasing. 4. C increasing, D constant: s increasing. 5. C decreasing, D constant: s decreasing. 6. C increasing, D increasing: a. C increases more than D: s increases. b. D increases more than C: s decreases. c. C and D increase the same: s constant. 7. C decreasing, D decreasing: a. C decreases more than D: s decreases. b. D decreases more than C: s increases. c. C and D decrease the same: s constant. 8. C increasing, D decreasing: s increasing. 9. C decreasing, D increasing: s decreasing. A similar list can be created for deficit; in both cases, modifying influences are disregarded. The human surplus phenomenon can be thought of in different ways. One can, for example, take a look at the individual interest fronts in turn and 13 Cf. William James, Memories and Studies, Lond. 1911, the chapter “The Energies of Men.”

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describe the status. This procedure would mean that the same abilities would have to be discussed again if they reappeared on a new interest front. Another way is to discuss the ability categories one by one and for the time being let them remain on those fronts to which they especially apply. This order will be followed here. We will thus initially do a thorough mapping of the human ability complex; we are aware that the boundaries are not sharp. Faced with possible objections from the circle of professional psychology,14 it is safest to note that the following list does not claim psychological unassailability or presuppose a return to the “ancient ability psychology.” All desired space can be kept open for new dividing lines and for the new unconscious- and synthetic-dynamic perspectives. The task, of which the readers will all be well aware, is not to make a contribution to psychology, but, on the contrary, to apply the necessary minimum of common psychology to obtain the overview we need and nothing else. In a possible later encounter with tragic cases there will be opportunity for more in-depth studies and use of supplementary viewpoints. For now, we do not aim at anything other than to have the tragic determined as a category. With these reservations, the following main groups of abilities are enumerated: 1. Physical power (all purely bodily abilities). 2. Perception (sensation). 3. Intellect (including thinking, understanding of interconnection, analysis, combining ability, constructive ability, criticism). 4. Memory. 5. Imagination. 6. Feeling (change of mind state, affect, emotion,a drive). Perhaps feeling can be better referred to as a “property” than an ability. Our particular interest does not lie in the distinction here. 7. Abilities that do not fit in 1–6. Sometimes these abilities can be seen as something different from the previous ones, and sometimes as combinations of them; there is often an unknown element. Group 7 must include such things as “acting ability,” “linguistic ability,” mimicry, artistic, technical skills, etc.

14 See, e.g., Willy Hellpach, “Nervenleben u. Weltanschauung [Nerve Life and Worldview]” in Grenzfragen d. Nerven- u. Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] VI p. 16. a English given.

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§ 18. Physical power Concerning the purely physical equipment of the human, because of the exceedingly rich utility associated with primitiveness, it is more natural to talk about unfixedness than over-equipment. In terms of degree, we do not usually have more than is needed, rather the other way around (we are weary too often); only in a few and in transient conditions can a really troublesome surplus be observed – the muscular giant who is the watchmaker and the like. The social transfer whereby the individual’s physical defensive readiness is taken over by society has, however, left quantities of bodily ability and power idle, such that one as a rule finds them triggered toward objects of an autotelic nature (outdoor recreation, breaking records). If one wants to count man’s sexual potency in this group, combined with unfixedness in the form of polygamous tendencies, then the surplus here is a well-known social problem. Changes in the social environment have been suggested to make appropriate objects accessible.

§ 19. Perception The question of what changes have taken place in the sensory equipment of the human from primitive times to the present does not interest us in this context. In a given “tragic situation,” as this will ultimately be described, a person may under no circumstances suffer or benefit from a possible sharpening or weakening of one’s equipment because of the influence of millennia. By changes here, we mean only those that can intervene in the person’s interest struggle, those that take place in a human being within such a limited period of time. The same stimulus does not always have as strong an effect on us and not always in the same way. Concerning the relationship between the performance of our senses and the demands we make on them in daily life, we can basically say that the senses suffice; life is also to a great extent consistent with the sensory equipment. If it fails, conscious and unconscious alternatives come to our aid: substitute senses, glasses and hearing aids, binoculars, and telephone. Sometimes one feels that one is lacking stronger senses, and finally there are instances where we have a burning desire that our senses would give us less. If one imagines a continued increase in sensory power, it becomes obvious how important it is in a given environment that an upper limit is not exceeded; the “nerves” would be destroyed.

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The influence of habit must not be forgotten here. Generally speaking, it is now becoming clear that surplus is a relative term; in each case there is the question of a norm: in relation to what in this case is there a surplus? When it comes to sudden and random stimuli under otherwise reasonable conditions (explosions, etc.), it is not natural to talk about surplus in perception, but rather where there is a multiplicity of constant effects in an environment to which one is consigned and cannot change without significant disadvantages (noise, stench, blinding light). However, a surplus of sensory power does not necessarily have to be bothersome. It can be a source of pleasure and call for cultivation; in this case it can also tyrannize its owner, act as an autotelic imperative, and be a “burden.” As a rule, in such cases one is dealing more with highly differentiated senses than with abnormally low irritation thresholds, or with both in combination. Interesting examples can be found in Birnbaum: Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathological Documents] (Berlin 1920) p. 48 ff. Among the senses, however, there is one which in relation to the surplus question stands in a special position for all people, and that is the sense of pain. Here I count the experience of pain without further reference to the perception and refer to none of the widespread discussions of the phenomenon’s psychological structure and physiological basis – special pain-causing nerves – etc.15 In § 4 it was briefly mentioned how the biological meaning of pain has been sought in the idea that it should awaken the individual and tell one of an imminent danger, as well as that by its intolerable nature it forces a pain-relieving and – it must be assumed – life-preserving reaction. These issues will now be addressed a little more thoroughly, substantially by quotes from Semi Meyer, op. cit. The ability to feel pain is considered over-equipment to the extent that pain does not fulfill a biological purpose. Pain and suffering (mental pain) as a possible means for high-autotelic, social-moral, and metaphysical goals is discussed in a later context (Chap. 6). When thinking of pain, we are imagining bodily unease of all kinds, but only when it is sufficiently strong. Meyer first highlights the importance of the pain experience and its role in the struggle for existence.

15 See, e.g.: Semi Meyer: “Der Schmerz [Pain]” in Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] VII (H. 47) p. 67 and Goldschneider, A.: Das Schmerzproblem [The Pain Problem], Berlin 1920, p. 60 and 91.

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– (It) intrudes as few other events in our conscious life. It can push everything aside; it can become so overwhelming that it completely abolishes orderly thinking and lets go of everything in favor of the desire to be liberated from it. (p. 6) In free nature the battle between creatures rages incessantly. Just as the creature lives forever, so too does it die at every moment, and in the cruelest battle the individuals tear and rip one another apart. Nature has created the most horrible weapons for this battle, and at the same time it has also created for defense the mighty instinct that in the moment of danger allows the individual to mobilize its total power for the protection of its life and its health, be it by vigorous counterattack or by escape through its highest ability. But because life and health are the highest goods [for all living beings? at all times?],* pain is thus the most overwhelming of all feelings. When it drills and torments we are filled with the drive to protect ourselves from harm and annihilation. If no prevention is possible, then the drive expresses itself in vain, but it does so with violent movements that cause the whole body to curl and twist, and with the most terrible screams of agony one seeks a way out. (p. 27) – when on the torture rack, the teeth clench … etc., thus it is likely that the radiations of the tremendous energy in the process of pain are released into the nervous system and must discharge in one direction or another. (p. 28) Nothing is more suitable for relieving the pain than getting it out; if one holds the expressions of pain back, the pain becomes greater. – Therefore, in animals all pain is directed outward, and many creatures turn, even when they are plagued by the pain of disease, against their surroundings –. Every animal becomes enraged by pain. (p. 29) In the greatest pain all muscles contract and the body twists and contorts itself under the torment until a powerlessness sometimes delivers them from it. Panting breath and the onset of sweat, as well as an increase in cardiac activity, redness of the face, and the like are not expressive movements at all … but probably phenomena that accompany the intense muscle and nerve work in the organism. The scream of pain can be related to an appropriate movement belonging to the avoidance drive …

But Meyer is skeptical of the view of the scream as a distress signal; even animals that do not help each other scream. He believes that the scream may have been retained after it had done its job of summoning the mother during upbringing. Crying and tears in humans are associated more with mental pain. Expressions like these are obscure in origin and meaning. Physical pain has a stronger mental reflection in the child than in adults. Mental pain, says Meyer, “is probably the unique property of humans.” The view is that the mental distress of animals is inferior to the human being’s in terms of scope and intensity.

* Author’s note.

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The author then addresses the question of the economy and efficiency of the pain mechanism. The usefulness of the whole system lies only in the present and in what is most important to the natural life that is mainly harmed through attacks, the strongest possible avoidance activity. The more severe the pain, the more the defense gains in strength and fierceness. No so-called pure muscle work ever rivals the powerful service that pain produces during battle. (p. 26)

“Pain enables the organism to respond differently to a strong impression than to a weak one” (p. 76). When one has burned oneself on the fingers, it is unmistakable; as long as the pain persists there is also an urge to withdraw from the painful stimulus, even when this operation no longer finds any external object. As impractical as this design in our organism may be, however, the aversion drive is at its full strength, and the torment of the condition lies in part precisely in the fact that the aversion urge finds no object. This is why many people, especially children and the undeveloped, so eagerly seek one … (p. 26, object surrogate)

In this “persistence”a of pain we have a first indication that there is an over-equipment. On page 27 it is further stated: “One must not forget [as overly eager Darwin supporters have]* that not every smallest structural and functional property can have a meaning and a purpose, and that many things have occurred to cause them to arise.” – It is a great exaggeration and an overestimation of the purposeful creative principle of nature if one believes that every single organism must be appropriate in all its parts and in its overall course at every moment. If we are organized in such a way that injuries are usually painful for a longer period than needed, then we must keep in mind that nature is not all-powerful. It is quite inappropriate for it to be co-developed and dragged along throughout life for some purpose’s sake, and the agony of the pain is not even harmful, mostly just useless. (p. 25)

Meyer distinguishes between “normal pain” (that which occurs by cuts, blows, etc.) and “disease pain.” Assuming that the individual is not completely cut off from healing the diseased condition, this distinction must be called

a Nachdauer (Ger.). * Author’s note.

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weak. Disease pain, however, has to a greater extent than “normal pain” invited the author’s criticism (p. 61 ff.). “Everything that has been said concerning the benefits of disease pain is untenable.” The pain is “a coincidental accompaniment” of the disease process; its onset is dependent on the irritation of nerves. Therefore, when we want to investigate which disease processes are painful, we must expect no other lawfulness than that the pain must come through processes which manage to affect the pain-mediating nerves in the same way as the normal pain stimuli.

And the location of these nerves, etc., turns out to be random in relation to the location and receptivity of the exposed tissues. “Nature … could not achieve a situation where precisely those diseases bring the kind of pain with them by which the warning could really help.” Slow moistening and stretching as pain managers can reduce the function of the nerves, for example, by soaking in water. Therefore, quite large tumors, even in organs rich in pain-communicating nerves, can also grow without pain. On the other hand, a very small but rapidly rising fluid retention or tumor formation can cause pain that is not in any proportion to the harm [for example, in osteoarthritis]. Hence the severe dental pain due to inflammatory processes which are not worth mentioning in themselves and which mostly cure themselves. Nor can there be any benefit to the pain when there is no infection present but the pain is entirely due to the dental nerves being laid bare from the mechanical rubbing during eating. The animal cannot keep the tooth out of use until it is completely healed, and going to the dentist is not possible. By favoring the tooth, the animal only prolongs the pain. A large tumor can form in the interior of a bone without the slightest pain indicating the danger … Whole organs can be destroyed by subtle processes and the disease becomes noticeable by its effects alone, not by pain [under-equipment]. It is completely random whether or not a disease process is painful.

In cases of inflammation, the pain threshold (which can normally be a thousand times higher than the touch threshold) can be greatly lowered. Such hypersensitivity with certain diseases “can in many ways interfere with natural healing or even indirectly cause the greatest damage by preventing the normal functions of the diseased organ, even causing death.” Under such conditions animals can become unable to move and fall like defenseless victims to their enemies “because of a disease which would be healed in no time without pain.” A person can starve to death due to an upset stomach because it is too difficult

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to ingest. “Thus, the harmfulness of the pain here clearly comes to light … Nature has blamed herself for that which is most shameful.” And birth pain is a coincidental by-product; if morphine had no effects other than counteracting pain, doctors would use it to a much greater extent than now. Finally, it can be recalled that quite a few toxins can kill painlessly, indeed even provide the highest pleasure. On the other hand, it is precisely the therapeutic cure that can be extremely painful; sometimes the sick person prefers to recover without it. In an actual case, the fear of a necessary dental operation, since the person had just recently undergone a similar one, was the triggering cause for one going insane. Based on the insight presented, Meyer rejects any doctrine of the biological utility of disease pain and once again states that the value of normal pain is also generally overestimated. Susceptibility to pain is related to the organism’s degree of differentiation. Since pain is tied to specific mechanisms in the nervous system, Meyer claims on p. 75 that it must rise to a higher level in the animal kingdom and discusses the related phylogenetic issues. The fact that an animal responds differently to a weak and a strong stimulus does not prove that it feels pain; reflexes also make room for such differences. Unfortunately, one has no sure knowledge of where the reflex ends and the conscious, emotional response begins. The fact that animals’ visible reactions have a certain external resemblance to our expressive movements should not immediately lead us to believe that they are in pain, for example, the bending of the earthworm. If the earthworm had consciousness, it should be divisible like the worm itself, which is an unreasonable conjecture. (The boy who said, “They like it,” was close to correct.) But even where the behavior of animals makes them likely to have pain experiences, these cannot approximate the intensity and effect they have in humans. We know that highly refined natures also generally have strong feelings; they are also much more susceptible to bodily pain than cruder natures. And it is no different in the entire world of life. This is why no animal has pain that is as severe as the human’s, and the further we descend into the animal kingdom the weaker the pain probably is, just like any other feeling … Because the human of all creatures has the most feelings – a statement whose truth it is not at all possible to doubt – the human also has the strongest, and the pain had to reach such a height precisely because the human can most be diverted [distracted] by other drives and is most prone to suffer damage to its body as its attention is focused elsewhere. (p. 44)

Meyer here presupposes a principle of purposiveness.

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We have every reason to assume that in the human with its highly developed feeling life, the more primitive feelings, and among them pain, have also developed to their full height, and that the human therefore enjoys the dubious advantage of being tortured by pain more than any other living being. (p. 78)

“… there is no real cure for pain” (p. 45) – except indirectly through skin thickening and the like. “Only in old age does the intensity of pain recede slightly … But this applies even more strongly to the higher feelings than to pain.” The ability to remember pain can be developed to varying degrees, but the idea of a previously experienced pain will not be able to reach the strength of the experience itself without assuming the character of hallucination. Yet pain experiences related to other memory material hold a prominent position: “Strong emotional impressions are deeper in memory than indifferent ones – everyone knows that a thing that has upset one is indelibly etched into one’s memory.” Pain-witha is a term introduced by Semi Meyer alongside the well-known b pity (p. 51). We feel pain at the direct sight of mutilation, etc., in other people or animals; experience tells us that there is a difference here from what is usually understood by pity. The latter is related to sympathy, the taking of a standpoint, empathy (is this also found in pain-with?), mental processing, etc.; pain, on the other hand, is a primary sensation of half-mental, half-sensuous character. But the boundary between the concepts is not clear. Meyer gives no definition, but based on his conception of pain as feeling, and feeling as an operation of consciousness, he has a clear conception of the origin of painwith: the sight of injuries in others awakens our own defensive instinctc and we inevitably make the defensive movement.d This “induced instinct” (not Meyer’s expression) appears to our consciousness as pain-with. It is not at all necessary that we first think or feel our way into the condition of the sufferer. Meyer concedes that the boundary is not sharp. We have chosen here to attribute the experience of pain to perception and mental suffering to the emotions; mental suffering will therefore be discussed in connection with the emotions. Semi Meyer’s views and expressions may in some points provoke a critical comment even from the layperson, but here this would lead us too far off track. a b c d

Mitschmerz (Ger.). Mitleid (Ger.). Abwehrtrieb (Ger.). Abwehrbewegungen (Ger.).

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The phenomenon of pain has occupied us for so long because we are faced with a case of equipment anomaly that has far-reaching significance and is a key feature of the human condition. There are philosophers, and not the least important, who have used the phenomenon of pain as a basis for a systematic view of life. And thinking of a possible increase in the sense of pain must be met with horror. This, by the way, is already so overwhelming that the imagination cannot have much to add; it indeed reaches its limit grasping states that we know exist, torments that “go beyond any understanding.”

§ 20. Intellect This term encompasses a number of highly conscious modes of functioning that are both linguistically and psychologically distinct from one another but which, in view of their purposes, naturally fall together; the overview thus mentioned thinking, understanding of context, analysis, combining ability, constructive ability, and criticism. The power of judgment can also be mentioned, whereas the ability for objective perspective, impartial attitude, and the like, on the other hand, come under fixedness conditions. In the domain of the intellect there is ample opportunity to observe deficit both in self and in others; dismissing a person by alluding to his or her intellectual deficits is very popular. With the help of thought or other abilities often we can perceive a problem as such, but the mental power is not so strong that we can solve it. In the absence of the problem being comprehended or experienced there can be no deficit whatsoever because one has nothing with which to measure. The stone is not under-equipped since it does not need intelligence. But the human feels its under-equipment when it fails and acts inappropriately. However, a surplus may also appear here. The definition of the term surplus has been straightforward so far, but now it must be supplemented. We have said that surplus is produced when the capacity exceeds the measure required by the problem’s solution. However, in the present domain and several of the following there can often be doubts as to where the task lies or how it should be defined. In each case, one must state compared to what a surplus is present. The determination can be actual or evaluative; in the latter case, it is the surplus’ beneficial or harmful character at which the focus is aimed; the yardstick is the individual’s partial or total welfare. What is then a harmful surplus for one person may be an actual surplus for another because this

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person has other dominant interests. Sometimes the surplus may be in the size of the capacity, sometimes in the fact that the individual has this ability at all in addition to its other equipment (cf. p. 36 f.). In its simplest form an intellectual surplus results from the fact that a given task requires less intellectual power than one is capable of providing. Such a surplus is almost always present and seldom takes a crasser form: the recruit, who is a professor of mathematics, is assigned to count sugar cubes. This purely factual account, however, interests us little; surplus has significance for the investigation first as value or harm. The value of an intellectual surplus is clear today. Understanding is one of the shortcuts to correct action. The larger the fund of insight, the more mature the technique one has, the more securely one can see future situations from this edge, both known as well as unknown. Therein lies a call to increase insight and ability beyond the requirements of the moment, beyond any arbitrary limit. What is undoubtedly surplus today may be what saves one in a future situation. However, as insight into the nature of the environment (its relevant interest-related characteristics) captures new areas, further contexts, the pressure of responsibility also increases. It becomes increasingly difficult to act because the thought process, the decision is supplied with more and more factors to take into account. The insight brings forth consequences of our behavior, raises questions, throws light backward, forward, and to the side, raises new meaning requirements. Things that had been blessed as pure yesterday stand as conditional and complicated today. Turmoil and toil are accompanied by anxieties and doubts. Since the overall field of interest is so complex and varied, increasing insight in general will reveal an intersecting variety of welfare-serving and welfare-harming effects. The pressure of these processes can affect the “nervous system” and assume catastrophic character – even if the interests involved are “only” of a biological-social nature. Work on the metaphysical course (here seen from the thinking side) then extends from the partial engagements and brings a last addition to the pressure of responsibility. But even if it does not go this far, great intellectual capacity can be difficult for its bearer. One does not fall so easily into a simple fate; the ability constantly seeks out objects beyond those that the work places at one’s disposal. The fact that the work demands everything one possesses in power is not always enough; one can still be unhappy. What used to be a full-fledged object turns gray and becomes indifferent in the larger context. “Self-evident truths” of life and action are lost, first in the little things, then in ever-expanding rings, and for many it turns out that once

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the old security of life is broken, it is difficult to get it patched up or find a new one. It is a bit of a curse to have to question all impressions, to never be able to accept a sensation or a viewpoint with the same happy confidence with which you received a gift from father or mother in childhood. For the awake, critically-analytically conscious, life lies in enemy lands; defeat and error lurk in the alluring, the beautiful, and the seemingly innocent; there is mimicry everywhere. The stones are enemies The window grins betrayal.*

In this regard, the intellectually limited is better off, provided there is not an under-equipment. Something similar applies in any threatening situation where the insight is useless. Doctors sometimes take advantage of this circumstance with hopelessly ill people – allowing them to become “blissfully ignorant.” Even the healthy knowledge concerning death can sometimes have its dark sides. A difficulty of a peculiar nature arises from surpluses in technical efficiency (“material culture”). The first needs are met, but the production of means does not stop there; it is forced to continue because of other needs that have nothing to do with the first. The means take over; it is no longer the need clamoring for a means, but the means clamoring (“advertising”) for a need. The supply has been greater than the demand; the need is no longer on the side of the consumers, but on the side of the producers. They then try to find new, “natural” needs as far as possible, and then create artificial needs. The supply is pushing on all sides such that the well-off eventually has to put itself in the defensive position. And – in the arbitrary choice of the one purchase, the one value, the joy can easily be mixed with the pain of having to forsake the thousands that are actually just as close to one’s heart – or just as far away. The means are about to become ends; they cast a shadow over the vision so that it becomes increasingly difficult to see what will be of service. The original meaning of things is blown up. Roads are being built to create traffic. Many inventions are created to meet the inventor’s need to express ability. Edison, for example, said that he was obsessed with his task and had to bring the work to completion, but that he published his results under great hesitation: no one can know if they will be of use or a curse. When technical insights are exploited by a single person or group for destructive purposes or * Verse lines of August Stramm (1874–1915).

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for their own benefit in contravention of established norms, this situation can be seen as either surplus or error-fixedness in relation to the social-moral advantage. Another example is exploration trips by aircraft. Such autotelically motivated technical conquests amount to an inconsiderate theft of humanity’s experience and prompts the thought of international censure. The value of “achieving” is not always identical to the value of “what is achieved.” While we previously considered surplus in a heterotelic light as the means alone, we now also draw attention to its autotelic value. Like all functions, the use of the intellect is also pleasing in itself, irrespective of service. It tends to free itself from the tyranny of intent. But the rule of pleasure only applies to “cognition” as a function. The content, the fruits, the load with which the thought ships return, are not always of an enjoyable nature. The rich web of beauty, coherence, meaning (“Maya”) experienced in the “naïve” stage seems to have been torn to pieces, leaving only the grinning functional skeleton. The intellectual posture toward life thus enters into antagonism with the emotional, and the normal human being needs both. The individual’s immediate joy of experience in each thing and its “joy of life” in general can be harmed by overbearing analysis, criticism, and reflection – and this happens long before reaching the pathological domain where the critical function is a compulsive phenomenon.16 We will return to this topic later in the chapter when intellectual surplus is considered in its combination with other forms of surplus.

§ 21. Memory Here too it is better to think of deficit. Often enough there is reason to desire both a more secure and more comprehensive memory. Surplus can only be talked about in cases where forgetfulness would be preferable: a painful experience, for example, disproportionately strong in memory to the detriment of new action. It is difficult to “get over” a death because the deceased stays with one with painful accuracy in every detail, etc. However, when a person lives so strongly in memory that one neglects one’s current life, there is much to suggest that the memory image is added in imagination.

16 See, e.g., Vogt, Medicinsk psykologi og psykiatri [Medical Psychology and Psychiatry], Kristiania 1923 p. 170.

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§ 22. Imagination Arne Løchen17 saw the natural transition from memory to imagination in memory-falsification. In this mental field, most people – as with pain – have the feeling of ever-present reserves; one must look for cases where the lack of imagination actually amounts to a hardship. Describing the imagination here is not necessary. There are just a few points to mention. It will probably be useful to keep the function of the imagination separate from its material. The function again is partly of an analyzing, partly of a synthesizing and combining nature; but there is doubt whether it can also be creative. From an experiential point of view, it is assumed that the product is something else and more than the sum of the components. This question also concerns the material. The common opinion among psychologists is that the imagination, like the dream, must derive its substance from experience. If one wanted to prove that a product of imagination had no root in experience, one would have to be able to draw the boundary against unconscious and forgotten experience, which is hardly possible. There are two possibilities in this case: the new formation could be experience possible or wholly and partly experience foreign. At any rate, it is not easy to find any limit to the reworking of the substance of experience the imagination can perform, and in this transformation or change into unrecognizability one has to – as in the dream – set down one’s starting point if one wants to search for an innovative ability. In terms of direction and product, the imagination seems to be the least fixed of all human functions, and it naturally leads one to think of undifferentiated protoplasm. Here we can quote a statement by Henri Amiel18 (1821–81); it certainly applies to his personality as a whole, but the imagination plays a significant role: “But ten people live within me, according to time, place, environment, opportunity, and I slip from one to another continually – I feel like a chameleon, like a kaleidoscope, like a Proteus, like a dormant fluid.” The phrase is almost identical to the one Uexküll19 uses to characterize the core of “the protoplasm problem” – “a structural fluid.” Thus, Rudolf Steiner and many religious minds with him have also thought of the varied richness of organic life

17 Løchen, Fantasien [Imagination], Kristiania 1917 p. 27 among others. 18 Cited by Birnbaum, Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathological Documents], p. 66. 19 Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [Environment and Inner World of Animals].

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as a manifestation of the creator’s imagination; Steiner also placed the imagination in relation to morphological primitiveness. As the intellect’s unfixedness is corrected by logic, so the unfixedness is corrected in, for example, the artistic imagination through the rules of rhythm, beat, and style of composition. The difficult psychological questions concerning “the self’s” relationship to the imagination and its relationship again to thinking, emotion, memory, etc., should not be taken up here. But some dividing lines can be drawn between active (productive) and passive (reproductive) as well as, what may be of most importance to us, between heterotelic and autotelic activities of the imagination. The former is utilized when predicting situations, solving tasks on the various interest fronts; it is difficult to distinguish this from what is called “inner feeling,” or that which works in close connection with critical analysis. Autotelic imagination is cultivated for its own sake; it provides surrogate objects for unfulfilled experience ability and imaginary gratifications of all kinds, besides bringing immediate pleasure in its lush presence (the pleasure of fabulatinga – with a minor change in Goethe’s expression). That it as a surplus could pose a danger to other interest fronts can even be sensed behind Arne Løchen’s lyrically-optimistic exclamation: “Lifted up to flight by the world’s wonderful beauty for sense and thought, the spirit is on its way to forgetting the external world for the sake of its own richness.” This is when a strong biological-social control is needed. Even within the normal-psychological context a rich imagination can be disposed to dissatisfaction with the given conditions, insecurities, fears, or excessive bad conscience. It is the number and depth of the possibilities that causes this – life pressure increases. Much of this can be overcome through understanding, but the problems spread over time as they are overcome from within. Certain psychopathological conditions are characterized by the fact that the imagination is not subject to heterotelic censorship (mythomania, pseudologia fantastica). It is noted that the various components of the human mind work together in every state of consciousness; they may never appear in the “pure” form that would correspond to the theory. All division is artificial and must be abandoned as soon as it has been of use. Thus, it has been difficult in the past to describe components such as intellect, memory, etc., without mentioning the emotionality that accompanies them at all times. a die Lust am Fabulieren (Ger.).

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§ 23. Emotion In the emotions we become conscious of the operation, says Semi Meyer in the work cited above, p. 24. This rule shows the biological mission of emotionality. For a subject to respond to the influences of the outside world in a life-preserving way, this can be done in one of the following ways: (1) through an appropriate fixed reaction (reflex, etc.), (2) through insight as shortcut, (3) through emotion (in the broad sense, expansive mental movement, affect, operation, emotion,a etc.) as shortcut. Furthermore, we can think of such things as hunches, instinct, intuition, inspiration, impulse, or similar sources of reaction whose nature is subject to very different interpretation. Where an emotionality exceeds the measure required, when a beneficial act is to be initiated in this way, one has a surplus relative to this need. The surplus can be present without having any obvious consequences for the individual’s external fate; it blows off steam inwardly. Many movements of the mind are pleasurable as such; what is surplus in relation to biological-social necessity can, therefore, have autotelic value. But a highly developed emotional life can also endanger the individual’s general well-being; the stress and the violent oscillations (up one minute and down the nextb) wear one out or make one unfit for marriage or regular work. Or emotional pressure can be experienced as an inner explosion, a despair from which there is no possible release through an appropriate external action, but possibly through artistic production or reproduction. The case may also manifest itself as a deficit in technical skill. The impressions of landscapes, art, people, and events can work in this way; the emotion can lead to crime (crime of passionc), to mistaken heroism, etc. In the face of violent impressions, says Olaf Bull, “The happiest ecstasy of the senses is a miserable and incomplete answer.”

A surplus in affect can also corrupt the desired and, without the surplus, probable outcome of a given situation. Examples are: paralyzing fear that makes the individual unable to defend itself or flee; despair over an accident that causes one’s objective importance to be perceived as highly distorted (sense of inferiority); overwhelming joy in luck (lottery win) such that its fruits are spoiled a English given. b himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt (Ger.). c crime passionnel (Fr.).

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(in ancient stories they die of joy, the proud father, the longing bride, etc.); pity or compassion that paralyzes the emotions or torments the sick; outbursts of anger that make the angry person comical; unrestrained expression of feelings of love that makes reciprocal love impossible. The examples may be endless; in fictional literature they are beloved as motifs. Whenever one is in the violence of emotion, especially when the expressive actions cannot be controlled, one is at its mercy, whether or not the emotion in this case is beneficial for the associated or other interests; this applies to kind as well as degree of strength and inertia, in a short-term engagement as well as over a longer period of time.

§ 24. Other abilities In the last group presented in the overview (§ 17) are collected different kinds of abilities of a more complex nature; no deeper inner coherence was sought. For example, expressive skills, professional abilities, etc., were mentioned. Here too one often finds a surplus in the ability, or in the urge to use it. Linguistic abilities can predispose to talkativeness with consequent social isolation; physiognomic abilities can reveal inner states that should have been hidden; mimetic-plastic abilities can bring uncontrollable dissatisfaction because they do not allow for expression; the force of action can push the power from a person into conflict with, for example, social considerations when the opportunity is too tempting (everyone remembers from school days how difficult it was to resist the invitation of the situation) – professional skill can mean suffering under the lack of an object or recognition; and finally, it is not so rare that artistic endowment becomes a danger to the gifted’s health, economy, civic respect, or mental well-being in general.

§ 25. Combinations We have seen that in a number of domains human equipment can be harmful to life in its maximal manifestation. For some traits, the individual’s current biological-social environment may exert an influence on the extent of this harmfulness, but other traits create circumstances without external conditions having input. If the possibility of harm is present in every domain, the danger will be even greater when a plurality of such surpluses works together in the mind. The content of consciousness is always complex, and in any case the intrusion of components other than the one that dominates at the moment is

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always possible. The entire constellation plays in constant variants including – according to possible psychological rules – surpluses of various kinds that can find the root and infect the whole. If the person were now occupied with the biological-social imperative alone, then a state of surplus need not mean so much. It would be experienced solely as a nuisance or an extraneous element and according to ability one would seek to remove it in the same way as is done with a foreign body in the organism. But this is not the case. The presence of abilities generates, under certain conditions, a tendency toward manifestation, utilization, realization, and putting into action. And this action must have meaning, must be sanctioned on the interest front where one puts it, must give the feeling of confirmation, of final peace concerning this ability and effort. It must have had a development and an outcome that feels appropriate to the hopes and value we associated with it. We cannot always accept a course of life where our potential maxims are condemned to meaninglessness and rejection. There lives within us an autotelic imperative that says: You must make room for your own character and realize your powers and your opportunities for experience without enduring a constant diminution of heterotelic purposes. We establish the metaphysical requirement of life – whether it ends with death or not – that it must be filled to the brim with meaning in everything that happens, in all that is found in experiential consciousness, and this applies in the first place to the substrates in us that we experience as inalienable and that constitute our being’s uniqueness, our once-in-a-lifetime historical opportunity, our pride, and our life’s journey. Thus, our most beautiful sensation, our highest thought, our most precious memory, our mightiest poem, our deepest sorrow, and our proudest act become “sacred” to us because life holds nothing higher. In expressions of this kind, perhaps above everything else in love taken as eros in its widest sense, the human form is at its ultimate limit in its own judgment. This ultimate limit can be experienced as “life intoxication” – a condition that becomes deadly in a non-sympathetic environment as soon as it touches the ground alone (Bettina von Arnim). Goethe’s lines in the West-Eastern Divan: The highest happiness of Earth’s children is in personality alone –

contain, as life-doctrine, an abiological element insofar as the concept of personality does not involve biological and social adaptability. What exactly

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Goethe is laying down here in concept is unclear, but the second verse seems to indicate an autotelic fixedness, of “being oneself” as Ibsen says: Every life can be led if one does not miss oneself. Everything could be lost if one stays what one is.

Assuming that the weight of personality lies in the will and the ability of individual development, an antagonism between personality and the family line may arise as long as the life-preserving effort – crowned by reproduction and protection of the young – does not enter into that activity through which the individual in question promotes its autotelic development. In other words, whether or not the personality includes a willingness to reproduce – which in a “personality” also presupposes a positive outlook on life – will depend on chance and casuistic relationship. A personality does not by definition have to be socially-morally oriented, and even if one agreed to a demand for this, this does not mean that the willingness to propagate is present everywhere. The individual person could analyze one’s motives to find that they are grossly selfish, perceiving reproduction as compelling human beings to cover the private demands of parental responsibility with their lives and deaths, and based on this see its abandonment as an expression of a higher social ethic. Or a personality cultivator may look at it more practically: he fears or realizes that the work for wife and child and socializing with them and with the wife’s relatives, etc., – in short, the routine bourgeois duties – will force too great an adjustment to his powers and time such that he will sooner or later be faced with the choice between either sacrificing his interests or seeing both deteriorate. The theme has a rich literature. A hypothetical change in social conditions could conceivably resolve the personality cultivator’s external conflict, but not the inner one. But the trend today does not work in the personality cultivator’s favor. If one is working with a concept of personality that does not include the social and reproductive biological efforts, then where this effort does not happen accidentally one will see that the personality’s strength is the ruin of the family line, and the family line is the ruin of the personality. This opposition is found not only in the lives of individuals but also in the political history of peoples, in the tension between “cultural” (humanist) and economic-military considerations, and in the opposition between liberalist and absolutist government.

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Related questions are discussed in Georg Brandes’ essay “Det store Menneske [The Great Man],” cf. Skrifter [Writings] XII, Copenhagen 1902. If one thinks of the flow of generations as a river, the individuals can direct their power either into or out of the river, either “sacrifice for” the future of the generations or seek individual confirmation of their lives. The diagram on the left shows an impersonal but reproductively strong group, and on the right a personally developed, but reproductively weak group.

FIGURE 8: Impersonal but reproductively strong group (left) vs. personally developed but reproductively weak group (right).

In other words, if the autotelic development requirement had been fixed in us in the same way as the larva is fixed in its development into the butterfly, the human species could have become extinct sometime after the surplus (combined with the error-fixedness) had started to emerge. If we were forced by nature to be faithful to these longings as Megaceros (§ 8) was forced to be faithful to its antlers, then what we still call the elite of humanity would have long since found the fate of the deer, and only the human type that was not equipped with the urge to raise its brow over the biological-social sphere would have lived on and subdued the earth. But our difference from the deer is precisely that in principle we are not forced. We find in our soul a longing for the peace of fixedness in the maximum of expression, but not this fixedness itself. As with all unfixed ways of life we experience a choice: we can follow an autotelic impulse or oppose it, push it

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away for the sake of heterotelic considerations. Moreover, not all autotelic tendencies are incompatible with that which is essential to life. Thus, our constitution itself contains a source of conflict, a tension between incompatible tendencies. This tension changes in countless nuances, asserts itself more or less in each moment, sharpened and milled under the influence of changes in the environment – but it is always present as a disposition, a restlessness, or a threat, and hinders our happy rise to an ultimate life form. Many of our most important action impulses thus meet at the crossroads where one path says “To perfection” and the other “To continuation of life.” It is assumed in the following that the path of perfection is chosen – for a lifetime, for a period of life, or just in a given conflict of interest. The term perfection in this text does not imply any moral program; it is used in a purely functional sense to characterize a posture toward life which can be one of two: Either the individual expands one’s surplus without regard to the life-serving – or the person remains faithful to a fixedness tendency without taking it into account (quantitative or qualitative perfection). The moral imperative the individual follows must then appear to it as something else and more than a mere learned rule. It must be experienced as a central principle of life, a style of action with roots in the depths of one’s being, as something with which one’s mental welfare stands or falls. It will also often have a metaphysical reflection. How then do such inclinations arise? Making a distinction between inherited and learned tendencies is difficult in individual cases since certain criteria are lacking. In the following, we assume the subjective state of experience. The choice of life posture and partial postures does not always proceed through thinking; just as often it may be the result of an “irrational” process. But since we are writing a dissertation here and not a novel, it becomes necessary to some extent to translate the posture selection to the language of thought. Anyone who wishes to seek confirmation, “fulfillment”a (Johannes Müller) on the path of perfection can say to oneself in one’s heart: This perception is beautiful; I want to dwell in it. This landscape, this human value speaks to something in me that responds. I will allow it to respond, and be one with my answer. I have an experience readiness; here is an equally rare and priceless opportunity to fill it, to make sense of this part of my life. So, I do not ask for permission; the prohibition then must announce itself and show that it represents to me a higher interest, which after all I am willing a Erfüllung (Ger.).

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to take into account. But why would I want to get involved with a continuation of life that either never reaches forward or that once in the evening of life reaches forward to something I no longer have the ability to accept? If not now, when should I be allowed to lay hold, since I have before me an object I cannot imagine being any better? One can say: This thought is tremendous and breathtaking; in this deep vision, in these possibilities, the power of my understanding is exhausted. That I have embraced this tremendous interconnection makes sense to this part of my life and is a confirmation to my spirit, and what else do I need? What do I have to do with a continuation that only blurs and breaks up and erases, a continuation that, in the light of my highest synthesis, only becomes a nightmare of repetition? I do not want to think long but to think big. One can say: In my childhood alone life was beautiful, true, and good. Something sweeter than this I cannot wait to achieve, even though I devote my energies to the continuation. Therefore, as long as possible, I will live in remembrance; the world is strange and cold, so let me wander with my dead until I myself am one of them. The world wants to erase their memory, but I want to be faithful and in my loving thought make sense of what they were.20 One can say: Nothing is like daydreams. In them all my longings are fulfilled; in them are the disharmony and all the sorrows wiped out; in them I find the world where I rightly belong. And when I carve my dreams into stone, let them come to life in poetry, color, and lines, melt them down into music and pour the power of my passion into the chords, then I feel that here alone lies the answer to my life. This is what I have to accomplish on the earth. Priceless is every moment of inspiration, whether it becomes a work or not; each of them is worth a long life in lukewarm sorrows and joys. One can say: Love alone feeds my starving soul and warms my freezing heart. I can sound no tune without love; no life is worthy of the name life that is not permeated by it. I do not want to give up on my beloved. It is my most sacred and my only one, my duty and my painful happiness, my wealth and my faith. If I let go of my sorrowful burden in order to serve life, then it becomes desolate and empty in my heart, then I have chosen the smoother path and my name is traitor. Then I am worthy of my own rejection since I have rejected the most precious

20 Cf. “Lovtale over Abraham [Eulogy on Abraham]” in Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven [Fear and Trembling].

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treasure of my heart. Therefore, I will place the inverted cup on my shield and be like Sir Gilbert of Billingskov.a And finally, one can say: Only action can give me a life worthy of humanity. I have to see my abilities manifested in the external world, set forces turning, be involved in creating events. There is an intoxication in acting as prima causa to new directions in the history of realities. Then will I know that the mark of my life will not be erased – the deed will reinforce it; what does it matter if it demands my life in return? In practical life, these things are rarely experienced as described here; one feels impulses accompanied by inhibitions, associations, etc., and follows them or pushes them away as one is “disposed” at the moment. Nor does one clearly distinguish between the different impulses; in most people, all of the tendencies just mentioned are present and tones alternate in consciousness. They may feel close to an undifferentiated urge for vitality, for the richest activity and experience possible. However, this urge is very often halted in its fulfillment due to the lack of appropriate objects. One races from one imperfect object to the next, always seeking one that better matches one’s ability in kind and degree.21 The erotic life’s thicket of complications, its eternal struggle between pleasure and aversion, both in life and literature, certainly has an important precondition in mismatches between erotic ability and erotic object. Many people have, therefore, created in the imagination the image of a hypothetical person who represents to them the optimum erotic object as well as they are capable of imagining it; for Ragnar Vogt, “fantasy lover” is its name; “the bride of my dreams” is another expression. The bravest hope is that this person will meet one after death, cf. Gunnar Reiss-Andersen’s poem: Don’t ever forget her you never met –

The word erotic is used here broadly such that it also includes “higher” passions such as affection and the like. Much erotic guilt undoubtedly comes from the a Reference to a poem entitled “Det omvendte bæger [The Inverted Cup]” by Johan Sebastian Welhaven. 21 The possibility of self-deception must be kept in mind here. Psychoanalysis in particular has uncovered many “spurious phenomena” precisely on this point; it turns out than one “at root” seeks something completely different from what one thought one was seeking and the like. If the uncovering is to be persuasive, one must first accept the criteria of psychoanalysis for the “real” and “apparent.”

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same inappropriateness between ability and object. With an inferior connection, there arises a feeling that these abilities, which in themselves carry the promise of confirmation beyond all understanding, now, because one could not wait, etc., have been given a caricature of the experience they seemed certain to. To put its white lacquered sailboat in a mud puddle when it was created for the roaring sea is to commit an autotelic sin. Regardless of how irrelevant the social-moral prohibition is for this feeling of guilt, it is clear that the feeling of guilt can continue unabated through an erotically unsatisfactory marriage, while it leads to the person’s confusion as bad air during a successful summer flirt. If an appropriate object is clearly inaccessible (white man as a prisoner of bushmen), the guilt, which also rises to metaphysical dimensions, can be transformed into dissatisfaction without guilt, or turn into heroic despair. Don Juan’s instability and polygamous tendencies on the whole (cf. nymphomania) are explained psychoanalytically as a failure of ability, but from the present viewpoint they must be seen as over-equipment and unfixedness of ability corresponding to the objects’ poverty; the alternation between multiple objects replaces a complete, final object. The concept of fidelity is related to erotically irrelevant considerations: the gardener is not “unfaithful” to the rose when one later cultivates a forget-me-not; one has full readiness for both; they do not steal anything from one another; they are incommensurable values.22 Sometimes an under-equipment conceals an over-equipment, for example, when the protagonist somewhere in Grabbe wants “more senses or less pleasure,” or when someone points out the human’s smallness in the face of space and time. Admittedly, there is a deficit in the control of the given object, but in order to feel the impotence one must first have grasped the object, that is, been receptively over-equipped. It is not necessary to grasp space and eternity to defend oneself against them, as in the case of a storm. But now the object is there, and not even the imagination can lift up our corresponding activity to equality with such an impression. If this were a case of pure under-equipment, then a dog or a stone must perish completely under the starry sky or under a woman’s feet; a human being can keep going with difficulty by writing verse. Also, sometimes an apparent surplus hides an insufficiency, for example, in what is called overcompensation (H. Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology], Oslo 1927 p. 279).

22 There are sources of error in this context to take into account: the subjective perception of an object’s appropriateness can be co-determined by emotional stresses that the person in question interprets “incorrectly,” cf. previous footnote.

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§ 26. More on character and personality While “character” was mainly thought of as the embodiment of a person’s fixedness-formations in relation to biological and cultural norms, the word “personality” has aimed more at quantitative conditions, at capacity. The distinction was taken as a starting point for the sake of clarity, and now a modification must be made. In daily life no “personality” can claim its social or autotelic position without great difficulty, preserving the momentum of prestige that the term implies, without the capacity associated with qualities closest to it: originality, uniqueness, harmony, and permanence. Similarly concerning character, it must not only consist in mineral firmness but be a flexible and more dynamic permanence, an organic and “human” fixedness phenomenon; a certain minimum of ability may also be assumed. Without these additional and modifying features both character and personality can take psychopathic forms. As the definition is chosen here,23 it becomes more natural to say that a person has, possesses character or personality than to say that he or she is one or the other. What is commonly called life feeling can roughly be described as a kind of effect partly of environmental feelings, inner feelings, imagination’s expansion of the given conditions (emotions, etc.), memories, and results of thought co-determined by character construction and acquired cases of fixedness, “temperament,” and “disposition.” In short, it is a very obscure and complex story when the non-psychologist looks at it theoretically, but it is often clear enough for the one experiencing it. Life feeling can be shallow and flickering, deeply and heavily moving like a sea, rich and diverse sounding like a mine in Novalis, bright and full of confidence, oppressive and dark and with evil suspicions. To keep life feeling theoretically based for the moment on mood, one could see it as a motif that recurs in the individual tunes in varied form and is mixed with other motifs yet still recognizable, analogous to pattern, style in a musical piece or poetry. A human being can slowly change one’s way of life or find it suddenly transformed by experiencing a catastrophe, a love, etc., but it must in any case have a certain duration and go to some extent “to the bottom” of one’s nature. Life feeling includes “general status” and “general direction of 23 Other definitions in Wilh. Reich, Charakteranalyse [Character Analysis], Vienna 1933 (1929), Birnbaum, “Über psychopathologische Persönlichkeiten [On Psychopathological Perspectives],” (Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens [Border Issues on the Nerve and Soul Life] Vol. 10) p. 8, V. Bekhterev, “Die Persönlichkeit [The Personality]” (Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 7) p. 2 ff., Kurt Schneider, Die psychopathischen Persönlichkeiten [The Psychopathic Personalities], Lpz. and Vienna 1923 p. 10 ff.

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movement.” It can act as a life pressure when one or more interest fronts are under constant strain. Even when talking about life pressure, it is ultimately a more lasting and more typical condition than in acute, albeit ever so difficult situations. The violence of life pressure (using a particular representational model) can be said to depend on the relationship between the load (from the outside or from within) and “the nerves’ ability to bear.” But this image leads to unclear distinctions: can “the nerves’ ability to bear” be increased without dulling them, and how can one do this? And – can the pressure be measured by anything other than the pressure on the “nerves”? After all, the effect will not be “twice as great” if one loses two brothers, gets two illnesses, makes two alarming discoveries about “humankind’s lot” – instead of one. Nonetheless, the experiencing human can have that experience in such a way that as awareness expands, life pressure increases: overseeing the fronts requires greater effort. In a reliably favorable environment, no such parallel in growth will emerge, but it will be present where the environment, the conditions are unsafe or directly threatening. The phenomenon will most often appear when the individual’s reserves are heavily engaged beforehand. The promise of the scriptures24 that “he who increases his knowledge increases his pain” does not apply without regard to the knowledge in question, but under certain conditions the statement may prove to be correct. By the expansion of the “spiritual and mental horizon” a number of modifying conditions will also intervene: the “new knowledge” interacts with the old, changes the interest itself, as capacity grows, etc. It is not necessary to mention that an increase in spiritual-mental capacity can make a person stronger, freer, and happier. However, it is important to remember that suffering and pain can also be the “cause” or “prompting” or “trigger” for growth in the personality. In the biological model this can be explained as follows: increased strain mobilizes new and previously unimagined forces; one’s real ability is first measured in the test. But this is not happening everywhere. The suffering expands the personality regardless of the usefulness of the enlargement; it is possible that a new understanding and the blasting out of new chambers of resonance simply perishes in the present situation or in the longer term; the suffering tells us things about our own nature and our condition in the world that we would often be “happier” without.

24 Ecclesiastes 1:18.

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§ 27. Example An important contribution to humankind’s image of its “cosmic situation” is the discovery of “the law of corruptibility.” In the beginning the child assumes that just as his or her surroundings are, they must also remain. All conditions and objects are given and obvious. The child also establishes his or her outside world, makes fixed ideas about it and finds a firm posture toward it; when this posture is first tried, the child expects it to always produce the same result. At a certain age the child responds with rage to a new drinking cup, a different nanny, etc. When older children hear about accidents, illnesses, and financial ruin in others, it is obvious to them that it has not affected their own family – we are not of the kind to which this happens. By living under parental care, the human child usually builds up a fund of life trust, security, and guarantee. This fund must be depleted eventually; experience sets in and breaks down security. Confused and betrayed, the young human must sooner or later witness the destruction of the original life feeling; initially he or she can view the catastrophes as exceptions and isolated phenomena, as misunderstandings, whims, or missteps of providence – it cannot be meant this way, or the like, but in the end the law of chance must sink in with all its dreadful weight. Even those who persist in their childhood belief in a providence that monitors the interests of humans are forced to change the image of that providence; at the least it does not seem visible and does very little. The demand for order and permanence (fixedness of the environment) seems to be a feature of human-specific nature and is not only due to pedagogical tradition. And even if one cannot – because of the slow rhythms – deny the universe a relative order and permanence, yet these properties only to a limited extent benefit the interests of humankind; as the scale becomes smaller and all the rhythms become tighter, the variability of creation and the chaotic interplay of forces becomes more and more troublesome in the day. One recognizes that “anything is possible” and this probability is the only guarantee bestowed on us. The more finely the experience is organized, the stronger one will be exposed to the devastating effects of this “recognition,” and the more necessary it will be for one to work out a protective principle. An unarmed metaphysical trust has a very modest application to earthly existence. There is only one point concerning which the recognition can be secure – in the everyday sense of the word. Whatever hand fate may deal, it must end with death. And even if death comes late, the afflictions of age

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will catch up with a person in their time and leave their mark on one’s life regardless of the desires and plans one may still have. This knowledge of death, the most bitter gift of our surplus knowledge, is already given to us in childhood; on the journey down the river of life the waterfall of death stands high above the valley. Many try to drown it out with their own noise, but the silence afterward becomes doubly dreadful. But not all are marked as strongly and not in the same way. There is a great distance from the barren knowledge of the duration of life to the completely devastating pre-experience of the dissolution process25 with all the glowing questions that arise and with the strange light that falls upon all human activity. From the battlefields and cemeteries the lively thunder of what was is heard. Great works hurled down over the ruins of great works, and behind the scenes of events one sees the silent millions who were busy with tools and plows as the storms of history gathered over their heads. Now everything is silent; the distinction between what succeeded and what failed is erased. Here the world ruler and the nameless victim mix and swap soil while new villains head over the plain, charged with unused power. Like a great lung the earth breathes life out and death in through all its pores. The history of everything is grasped by the observer who burns with the experience of the incomprehensible renewal and the nightmare of repetition in the greatest and the least. This experiential pressure can be pleasurable to the point of ecstasy as long as it is autotelic as the wonder of being, as a sparkling play of receptive richness, as a rushing journey through time and space, as an explosion of barriers as consciousness grows toward omniscience. But this “aesthetic” style of posture cannot reign supreme for the remainder of life without this remainder being significantly shortened. If we want to rescue the continuation, we must return to a serving heterotelic posture, to the struggle for food and family life. When the synthesis has to be terminated, or when the action has to be made meaningful in the infinite context, then it turns out that the powerful perspectives are more than a source of pleasure – they are a danger. The world one has seen in such expansive synthesis, in such etched small details, is no longer a painting for occasional and entertaining consideration; now it is the place to live, work, and die, a synthesis where one’s self, actually and concretely, is a working detail. The world of the past and the future is also our present world today because we ourselves were 25 “To grasp death is a breath of death” (Arnulf Øverland).

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once the future of our parents’ consciousness and must become the past of our children’s. This extension of the mind and body’s present environment, of the circle of phenomena on which our thoughts must take a position and toward which our actions must adopt a posture, pose a danger to biological-social welfare. We are threatened with action paralysis because the task is too difficult. The responsibility for the individual action extends to historical responsibility, even to world responsibility; one’s own fate as a measure of value now includes, in the light of synthesis, also the fate of humanity. When we demand metaphysical meaning for our own lives we do so also for the dead and the unborn. All shining deeds in the past, present, and future, all defeats and catastrophes, all anxiety and suffering, all unknown victims and all forgotten heroism, all must have meaning, and sufficient meaning, if I – with the world consciousness awakened in me – am able to maintain my inspiration, my desire for work, my full-fledged readiness for burdens and compassion. World responsibility, the maximum expression of human action consciousness, necessitates a moral norm of equally far-reaching validity, a norm that encompasses and complements all the partial norms we know from the individual spheres of interest. The lack of a universal object (or rather of an “operation carrier” in the object of humanity’s fate) is ultimately the lack of a universal moral. With a growing personality there is first a growing pressure of responsibility and then a growing metaphysical helplessness.26

§ 28. The “metaphysical-melancholic clarity of vision” Before attempting to draw out the metaphysical-moral consequences of the general surplus of consciousness, we must consider a peculiar and central state of experience which perhaps more than any other is suitable for ripening the metaphysical consciousness. Most have in their early youth or later awoken with what in the absence of any other designation we may call “the metaphysical shock.” Among other possible forms, it may also take the following one: One awakens in the night and is fully alert in a strange, penetrating clarity that may not have been known before. All everyday matters and concerns are clear, but infinitely distant, like “a story of itself.” Two things fill consciousness 26 Corrections to this process will be addressed in the next chapter.

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with “absolute” meaning: the self and immense space.a I feel – or feel myself – as a center of “pure existence,” of “absolute being,” or however one will now try to describe it – the expressions used are nothing other than descriptive. The space in which this naked, living I “finds itself” (all words have qualified meaning), is desolate, cold, whizzing by, and foreign. It is foreign to an extent like nothing one has experienced, and it whizzes by out of sovereign indifference. Labels are powerless; phrases such as “absolute outside world” or the like can give direction. This condition is followed by “clear sight,” by “X-ray vision,” without any hint of intellectual struggle, grasping and seeing perfectly through every subject that the thought touches, in the smallest details and in the greatest context, freed from the usual “affective shell.” In most of the cases with which I have become acquainted in practical life (other than by reading), it has been found that where one succeeded in maintaining a fragment of these rare and brief perspectives, there it proved superior to the thinking one usually achieved.27 However, the condition is characterized first and foremost by angst. Nor can the angst be precisely described; it is the “the angst of being this,” being human, feeling forced by interests that must not be set aside. “World angst,” “world loneliness,” and “world distress” are terms that give direction. It is as if the All that has produced us now turns its back and does not want to know us. One feels it as a frontier state, an ultimate possibility; cognition has, as it were, penetrated the outer objects and now falls behind us. The unsolicited thought appears: One more step and you are lost for life. From the sources of my knowledge of such maximal states, I have the definite impression that it would be quite wrong to reject them on the grounds that they have only pathological interest. (Concerning the term pathological see below.) The closest way to characterize them is as cases of extreme sharpening and extension of the usual state of experience, a maximum emotional expansion associated with a lifting of the aiming point from partial objects to a universal “existence object.” Weaker forms of sudden expansion of the “inner sense” indeed occur in all people every day and can change the situation from a Reference to Kant’s claim: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge 2015 p. 129. 27 Here, however, one must be aware of the difficult to control conditions for such subjective experiences really having some objective content. The possibility of self-deception is always present, and there is an imminent danger of interpreting such an exceptional state in accordance with a predetermined view.

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serenity to panic or vice versa. Expansion can be a condition of life’s salvation, namely where the subject would otherwise have chosen a posture that was right in the narrower but destructive in the larger environment. Surplus is only present when the increased insight is without value or poses a danger. Young people often have to learn to protect themselves from excess of insight; they make for themselves a mental “stimulus protection.” It is a serious strain for a receptive mind when the young person discovers that one can follow one’s own creation from the disappearance of the germ line in the darkness of the past and from the grocer’sa shelves to the horror of birth. What was “I” in 1850 and when did “I” really come into being? While the less receptive upon learning about metabolism and “the human body” sees nothing more than cram work and curriculum or at best useful and entertaining knowledge, a more delicate mind of a particular constitution can go from crisis to crisis, be repulsed by feces and urine (inter faeces et urinam nascimurb), experience unimaginable horrors with each new piece of knowledge concerning bones and viscera, and in despair plead to be released.28 There can be an unbearable torment in experiencing oneself as a skeleton under cover, with soft parts suspended in a pouch on the front, and in the skeleton’s creepy ridiculousness identifying with the living. Many people have childhood memories of the mortal disgust at people removing their dentures, wigs, or wooden legs, first impressions so violent that they are reproduced in all similar episodes later in life. One does not intend to be blind to the comic side of the scene, but it is as if it is violently swept away when the other qualities break through; compared to these the comic becomes inferior and insignificant and only helps to increase the unpleasantness. There are shocks of a very particular kind when one realizes the kinds of conditions one is set to share. The fear of surgery is thus quite different and more than the fear of bodily pain. Stories of amputations, accidents, and torture can completely occupy consciousness, and the imagination builds horrors beyond all comprehensible measure of what was known. Just as a tooth is to be pulled, the feeling inside one asks: How is this possible and what is life? Such “organ fear” a The Norwegian Kolonialhandlerens translated here as “grocer’s” signifies businesses that specialized in the distribution of international items. These “Kolonials” or “Colonials” can still be found widely in Norway today. The allusion appears to be the wide reach of the genetic material that meets in the conception of a human being. b We are born between feces and urine. Often attributed to Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux. 28 For example, Hebbel and Rousseau, see Birnbaum, Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathological Documents], Berlin 1920 p. 78 and others.

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may unfold further and even include the number of fingers and the like, as the “I” through these phenomena finds itself having five-ness and other arbitrariness imposed on it from unknown sources, grotesque body shapes it has never asked for and never would have chosen, etc. What kind of satanic arrangement is it for me to find myself entangled in a web of strange matter to whose blind law I am subject and whose form places me in the transition between fetus and corpse, between two repulsive caricatures of myself?29 Anatomical insight causes direct destruction when it leads to the dissolution of “self-evident truths,” of familiar and dear unified perceptions of daily life: the lover’s adorable smile turns into grinning mechanics – such as when looking at a photograph held upside down. The illusion of living unity can be evoked anew, but so can it in the face of dead things, so that a torn boot with visible toes acquires a physiognomic expression of high mimetic value. The illusion of organic unity in interconnected elements, of a coherent and interacting whole, is an important prerequisite for normality in one’s external and internal life. By this mode of apperception, which may be first and foremost a consequence of the sedative influence of habit, we grasp clothes and man, teeth and lips, landscape and house below. If in this field an “objective”-analyzing view breaks in, the world collapses in failure around one; people turn into ghosts and strange caricatures that pass each other in homes and on roads, blind to nothing but their own grotesque chores performed under social grimaces and empty of any meaning, as though they have lost all known and warm and human traits. The bare factual insight destroys the immediacy and all the emotions that have their prerequisite in it, the oil in the machinery of the soul and the nourishment for its growth. The insight is “inorganic” and “toxic”; it does not belong to the growing, vegetative life, but still demands its place. For such people, to understand everything is to hate everything.a The idea that these phenomena should be seen as expressions of a level of consciousness-plus and not as a qualitative decay (a pathological fixedness) finds support in a view such as the following: When an individual wonders about the nature of one’s environment and its conditions (as opposed to another individual that only utilizes the environment and conditions to meet one’s basic needs), then this implies that there is a basis for comparison in the person’s consciousness, a concept or viewpoint of “higher” order from which the given conditions can be compared with others, hypothetically. 29 The condition is referred to as “castration complex” in the psychoanalytic literature. a Tout comprendre, c’est tout detester (Fr.). A modification of the French saying: Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner [To understand all is to forgive all].

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One thinks of, for example, a child who witnesses its home burning down, and then the building of a new house. In the past the house had of course been something to the child, an unchanging being with a kind and understanding face, an important part of the child’s worldview. If now he or she is of a thoughtful and sensitive temperament, the event may cause a double crisis in the child characterized at the same time by collapse and expansion of consciousness. First: Even for us it is thus possible; we are not in any special position. (The fire has come to us; it wills us something; we are surrounded by someone or something that has sent us the fire; there are opportunities in the air, etc.30); in other words, the sense of the environment is greatly expanded. Next: The new house has no face; it is coming into being day by day out of nails and boards; we can decide for ourselves how it should be. This for the child is a completely new concept of a house, a lonely and gray concept, and – an open door for the invasion of the fields of interest by destructive forces, while the old house was a guarantee against such possibilities. As the new house is established, it also gets a face, but the child now knows that this is something one has given the house oneself – if the whole is something else and more than the sum of its parts, then this is something we ourselves add. The child has become lonelier in his or her surroundings than before. Despite the arbitrary choice of example (there may also be a number of other reactions to an event like the one mentioned) and despite various deficiencies in the analogy, such a “recognition crisis” in a child’s life can clearly be used as a picture of any of the processes that overthrow the “naïve” adult’s, and for the practical expression of a view of the self and the outside world, and which in the hell of “melancholic clarity” creates the ground for metaphysical needs. With horrible, indeed even in its softened form, unbearable strength, the question tumbles over the unprotected receptive, as misused as it is unavoidable: What is life? What kind of cunning devilry have I come up against here? And what does it mean that I can stand “outside” and ask such a question? That is, that “I” am not identical or one with my form of existence, that I can think of a number of different and “better” ones, and that myself can be neutrally observant and evaluative of the play of forms and the encounter of forces both in the outside world as well as in the organism – without rapport with my central tendencies – that chance has assigned me. I can look at my own body with an enemy’s glare; I can hate its weakness, detest its malformations, and stare with 30 Cf. William James: “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in Memories and Studies, London 1911.

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horror at the signs that it is anointed and consecrated to death, to decay, disintegration, and decomposition. What is death? Is it not the end of everything? Why should I find myself in this? Have I myself in an unknown way caused my condemnation, or am I a victim of a chilling metaphysical injustice according to human measure – and with what else do I have to measure? The world is not built on human principles; here we are tyrannized by a law that does not ask for our values and requirements. And what kind of a rift in my being makes me subject to criticism and clearly not one with my being, as I infer the animal must be, but instead that causes me to experience my situation as a human being in the image of something like a traveler or explorer who with all one’s expensive equipment has fallen off the train and is in the hands of cannibals by whom one is assessed for tenderness and fat percentage? Or by analogy with the holder of a residence permit in a foreign country where I do not have the right of origin and have to borrow everything from the grace of the state, a grace that can be withdrawn without notice? From where do I get this feeling that tells me my being’s rightful place and rightful fate are other than the ones I have had to accept – what journey was I on when I fell off the train and was born human? What country is my proper fatherland then if in the land of life I am only a stranger? Metaphysical speculation that intends to answer these questions does not concern us here. We do not even ask the questions for ourselves; they are designed merely to illustrate the nature of the challenges; they are about describing. All we are trying to assert is that under otherwise equal conditions such challenges will be indicative of a more highly differentiated mind compared to one that is exempt from their kind of visit – and that differentiation here is a gift of both good and evil. The good is to be sought in the expansion of consciousness itself, in the sense of ability, in the joy of intellectual function; the evil (unfavorable, unpleasant), on the other hand, is in some of the notions the function has forced upon us and in the consequences we find it inevitably draws with accompanying assessment and affect.

§ 29. Comment The process of consciousness just outlined moves from “recognition” (impression and interpretation) to assessment and affect. However, the process can also be thought of in the opposite direction, a viewpoint that is presented in a wide variety of movements in modern psychology. According to this view, “the drive” is primary – uninhibitedly unfolded or in neurotic disguise – assessment

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and affect are determined by the drive, which is related to temperament, etc., after which the self “chooses” its observations and arranges its interpretations according to its needs. The consequences and assessment of one and the same “objective” phenomenon may therefore be different in people with different temperaments, etc., without it being possible to set any ranking among them. Although this work does not take into account psychoanalytic or individual psychological views, it is impossible to ignore such approaches; in this they have gained an all too strong position. There are also enough instances in everyone’s experience that invite one to such an interpretation more than to any other. Where the call is sufficiently strong, the possibility of in-depth psychological interpretation will therefore be kept in mind. Previously when we have used a more “rational” approach to the problem of “dangers of insight,” it was with a view to the common factors of the human interest complexes and the uniformity of the environment (the conditions) that insight provides – so far as it can be argued that such a commonality and such uniformity exists. Another basis is the premise that the concept of appropriateness is applicable when one wants to assess the relationship between interest and insight on the one hand and assessment with affect on the other. In a given case, the latter is either appropriate (“normally adapted”) or inappropriate in relation to the first. The “objectivity” in the appropriateness assessment, however, just as in the term “normal-psychological,” depends only on statistical matters. As long as a “recognition” of the nature of the environment has a direct impact on simple and straightforward interests such as the biological, a given assessment of the recognized conditions can be judged with certainty by the question of appropriateness. The jungle at night is usually a dangerous and frightening, thus unfavorable, environment for a solitary and unarmed human being. This assessment should be appropriate (“real-adjusted”a) if the traveler has an interest in life, health, and freedom from pain. One can imagine that the explorer has arrived in the promised land and is busy with one’s task; one races into the unknown immediately and experiences paroxysms of the joy of discovery (cf. inexperienced Easter guests and “children in the forest”) – until suddenly the sun goes down and one stands there disoriented, handed over to the whims of the situation, if one cannot find one’s own way. In the chosen example, when the interest of life is first present, the perception of the danger of the situation (the mimicry of the situation) represents a real-angepasst (Ger.).

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a valuable plus in consciousness compared to the scientific interest and the lyrical rise of the splendor of the tropical sky, something to which even the cautious traveler would have been fully receptive under more reassuring circumstances. But if one is like someone who is out to “see Naples and die,” this person will not understand the anxiety concerning the emerging darkness. The appropriateness test immediately becomes more difficult to employ when one is dealing with a metaphysical domain, yet it seems possible to draw a parallel: For one who has an interest where the “metaphysical conditions of the self” are concerned, the anxiety concerning such anatomical insight signifies a valuable plus in consciousness compared to one who has metaphysical interest but lacks the plus – ceteris paribus.a The metaphysically indifferent, on the other hand, can devote oneself exclusively to the enjoyment of the skeleton’s elegance and technical efficiency. This enjoyment can also be experienced by the “metaphysician,” but only during a thrill similar to that which is involved in the explorer’s admiration of the tiger’s power. The metaphysical thrill can only be based on a desire-colored metaphysical postulate (cf. Chap. 6). Again, the biological parallel to this is the inexperienced explorer’s belief that the unknown and mysterious jungle “must be safe because it is so magnificent” or the like. Needless to say, the metaphysical interest and environmental feeling are primary, and they cause “organ dread” and the like, which are secondary. The formation of a metaphysical sense of life is such an obscure and complicated period that it is impossible to state something common concerning the sequence of phases and factors; besides a subjectively limited introspection, one has no material other than what would appear in a comprehensive and difficult survey. It is also of interest to point out the mutual affinity and the possibility of interaction existing between organ fear, paralysis of action, etc., on the one hand, and a metaphysical sense of life on the other. In metaphysical thinking, phenomena such as those mentioned may not serve as an argument, but they may play a role as a catalyst or be used for illustration. Nor is there any basis other than interest when it comes to an evaluative comparison between life preparedness and the biologically indifferent attitude in the jungle, and the same is true when one wants to weigh the metaphysical sense of life against the non-metaphysical. There is nothing in the way of a non-metaphysical personality by its power and reach in the biological-social or artistic-autotelic field for a given human group’s general cultural appreciation a with other conditions remaining the same.

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being able to rise altogether differently than the uneducated and insignificant metaphysician who only “marvels at existence,” indulges in unrestrained speculation, and may not even have the sufficient expressiveness to give a clue as to what one means. Therefore, it cannot be easily argued that just any form of metaphysical consciousness represents a cultural plus over just any form of non-metaphysical consciousness. Nevertheless, there can be a practically applicable, albeit not in principle unimpeachable, ranking. A metaphysical consciousness could grasp unlimited non-metaphysical content without losing the metaphysical point of view as a result; it is possible without use of force to arrange and subordinate any kind of high partial insight into the metaphysical picture of life. On the other hand, even a high-powered partial consciousness cannot in the same way arrange a solid metaphysical engagement in a sum of non-metaphysical partial postures (unless an arbitrary metaphysical commitment simply includes such incorporation). A reasoned action directive for the whole life, a life goal that includes and supplements the individual goals, a synthesis that leads to all other syntheses, etc., could, both in “biologistic” as well as cultural aspects, be described as more complete in relation to the elements included. There is a path of development, differentiation, and organization from the partial to the metaphysical. Without a revolution in the deepest areas of human and cultural fixedness, it will not be possible to reject the metaphysical mental life as inferior, partial, as pathological effect. It would have to be shown in that case that any metaphysical engagement must be able to stray during the ascent to even higher syntheses in the same way as a political convention strays during the ascent to “universal humanism.” We are currently ignoring those who seek the ultimate life solution in a reduction of human consciousness. From a “biologistic,” holistic view, it is closer to seeing the metaphysical-moral need as an extension, an interpolation of the development from the unconscious reflex to the responsible choice of posture on a broad basis, seeing it in close connection with the reaction distress that arises from human knowledge of death, – the last and most bitter fruit of recognition. One can conclude from self-reports and other literary testimonies, from conversations with other people, and possibly from one’s own experience, that metaphysical readiness to a large extent feels and is experienced as something very dignified and inviolable, although serious challenges come with it. It can occupy a dominant place even in minds that apply selective and scathing criticism of its impulses and maintain a relentless demand for intellectual reasonableness. The seeker believes that in metaphysical security any kind of

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non-metaphysical catastrophe could be withstood with brilliance; one thinks of the strength already given by arbitrary metaphysical beliefs. Conversely, no partial success can by way of belief silence the “genuine” metaphysical need when it first arises in earnest. Consequently, often when the ecstasy of partial confirmation turns into emptiness, privation, and despair, metaphysical turmoil begins to haunt the ruins and awakens the longing for a universal and unfailing action directive. It is sufficient if these considerations justify a primacy for the metaphysical life on psychological, albeit not on logical grounds.

§ 30. Variations in metaphysical readiness The reason we will concern ourselves for a while with related questions is that we believe we see in the metaphysical domain of interest not only the most serious, the most significant, the most valuable, but also the most catastrophic consequences of human over-equipment and unfixedness, while at the same time something tells us that such a dual assessment provides a promising path to the determination and understanding of the tragic. This domain has so far been treated as singular, as aiming at a uniform object; this was primarily to delimit it against the non-metaphysical domains. Now a dividing line can be drawn in the interior of the domain. The subjectively given may be a dissatisfaction, an anxiety, or a turmoil that, despite its potential strength, only feels obscure and must be intellectually processed to take shape. The idea of this processing is to receive the turmoil, etc., that has appeared in such a way that there is an opportunity to overcome it, in such a way that it evokes an operation carrier. To some extent this is achieved when the turmoil is clarified into a need. It is this need that can be of a different nature and give rise to a distinction, and the difference is then passed on to the object that the need creates or finds. The need in varying forms concerns a meaning of life as a whole. By life here is meant the existence of human and other conscious beings; we more easily accept that the plant kingdom and the mineral’s existences are meaningless in the human sense, or that they have no other meaning than to be a potential raw material for conscious life. If the individual’s life has meaning, it must be part of a sufficiently good task; otherwise, the meaning becomes autotelic and this is not sufficient for everyone. The task must by nature be complete in dimension and appropriate such that it engages all the preexisting meaningless surpluses in abilities and attributes. The object must be “absolute,” that is, in

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the terminology used, metaphysically fixed, purged of all doubt, and the struggle to achieve must be subject to the law of justice. When the demand is made in principle, all surrogates and inappropriate proposals are rejected; thus, when one intends to satisfy him with quantitative ends, Grabbe’s Faust says: Weakling, you believe that masses can satisfy me – – Show me the abyss, which I do not find bottomless, the summit, from which I do not dizzy, the universe, which I do not think infinitely greater than myself – – Friend, I have investigated power and its purpose.

Above all, as mentioned previously, it is the consciousness of death that awakens the metaphysical need. If, as the worst of all meaninglessnesses, one feels that the continuity one experiences in one’s interior, the history and destiny of the “self,” the most “fixed” thing one knows through all the change, must also be impermanent like a cloudscape and a snow sculpture – then there is nothing left for the self. And “nothing” is not a satisfactory target for the work and suffering, ability and hope of a life, or all life. There is a dizzying feeling of emptiness which can be explained by the fact that all empirical objects have been weighed and found too light. Then as a last resort imagination seeks beyond the limit of life – an extreme consequence of the organism’s ability to seek the optimum in the environment – there the thought of its distress and homelessness can cling to a protoplasma of opportunity, which the flames of history have not yet hardened into law. The need for meaningful continuation beyond the grave, the belief in an encounter with everything we lack here, the hope, or the fear of the fate that awaits the self in the “new world” – all of this belongs to what we call afterlife-metaphysical readiness. It can also appear outside the framework of life in reports of supposed interaction with the afterlife. But there are also other types of metaphysical orientation that may occur alternatively or cumulatively in relation to the afterlife. Even if there is no noticeable need for the existence and growth of the self after death, even if one could declare oneself fully satisfied that the “soul” is wiped out with the body, even if one were unable to accept the possibility of a continued life regardless of wants and needs, even if one positively rejected the idea as not desirable – one’s sense of life does not have to lack all metaphysical character.

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The urge for metaphysical rapport with existence can manifest itself in a constant quest – one is waiting to “take a standpoint” and choose a posture. In the biological field as well, in a situation of doubt, this resort is often more beneficial than an arbitrary and risky decision and requires under otherwise similar conditions a higher degree of awareness; but here it has its limitation in that the subject will sooner or later need to act in order not to perish. In the metaphysical field this compelling necessity is rarely present; it is likely to occur where a metaphysical deliberative decision is represented by, for example, a social one, or also when the psychological pressure becomes too much. Often one can continue the quest one’s whole life without falling victim to an increasing panic. Precisely because the uncertainty is so overwhelming, one can feel some security and a fairly good conscience in the seeking posture itself: a just metaphysical authority will not be able to deny one sanction. One indeed knows within oneself that one has taken up the weight of metaphysical responsibility to a higher degree than the person who, for the purpose of liberation, has disconnected one’s awake criticism and “gone in for” a more or less arbitrarily chosen system. A metaphysical point of view can also be combined with positive effort. The surplus power is then directed to the “ideals” (hypothetical optima) that the individual envisions being realized within the framework of humanity’s earthly life, examples being “the victory of the good” and “spirit’s penetration of matter.” The boundary with social and other non-metaphysical goals is not clear. The distinction depends on the value the idea has for the individual, the need it covers. This too is often unclear. Ideas like the latter we will call earthly-metaphysical, as opposed to the ones described above.31 An earthly-metaphysical view of life does not have to positively reject the possibility of afterlife realities; it can refrain from taking a stand on them. But it is especially important when an immanent-metaphysical view of life lacks the safety valve lying in the possibility of a life after death that it is stronger than anything else at its disposal for a convergence of all the individual’s lines of power toward a common output gate, toward the top of the personality cone. Metaphysical need can be seen in the image of an electrically charged pole that gathers voltage from large reservoirs and likewise “longs” for a counter pole in order for the spark – in human life, the spark of confirmation – to run across and bring balance and calm. 31 In order to avoid misunderstandings, I have abandoned the previously used terminology: transcendental-metaphysical and immanent-metaphysical.

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§ 31. Metaphysical-moral anxiety In the next chapter we will try to gain an overview of the metaphysical surrogates by which most people try to cover their need for universal meaning, and the techniques used to stave off criticism. In the present chapter, however, we will examine how a person who is sufficiently strong and versatile enough to act as representative and test subject, and who maintains the requirement of intellectual honesty, will be positioned when one attempts to create a norm of action in harmony with one’s metaphysical need. Action, which in so many circumstances is a condition of the continued existence of life, and in which every life readiness is subjected to trial by fire, necessitates a completion of the mental preparation. Action is like a conversion of the motive work; the preparation is wiped out and resurrected in the action, but the consequences are independent of the preparation. In the world of action, motives are meaningless, and this often feels like an injustice to the person who has worked on the motivation and considers it an essential part of the effort. In the social environment, therefore, especially in recent times, one seeks to modify the iron law of biology and give weight to the motives. In the Norwegian Penal Code of 1902, they were sometimes granted mitigating, sometimes aggravating effect, while in other cases it was decided that they should have no significance, or that the entrance of certain consequences should have an effect on the verdict regardless of motive. A threshold exists in each case beyond which a motor expression cannot occur without being irreversible. The location of the threshold varies greatly according to the circumstances. When the fateful point is passed, the effort is seized by foreign and, in relation to the intention, random causal lines and enters as an impersonal part of history. Now it is no longer in the agent’s power to maintain the interest contact between the effort and the values it is intended to strengthen and protect; now the power has shifted to become part of an indifferent environment. Thus, the morally delicate person will also feel responsible for unforeseen consequences of the action, indeed for consequences that could not be foreseen. One knows that what one’s “prima causa”a accomplishes on its journey from now to the end of the world no human can imagine. For one, therefore, it is something offensive to the demand for the completion of the motivation work; the act feels arbitrary, groundless, and immature, as cowardice and a first cause.

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laziness, as a sacrifice to the “nearest demands” and thereby as a reduction of the field of vision for which one has fought. The analogy of the protoplasmic transition to irrevocable fixed forms appears with irony. In extreme cases of the outside world’s demand for action – and it is these that are the subject of our attention in this chapter – the highly moral personality chooses between a violence against the mind, a trampling of the finest, deepest, “holiest” in one’s being, a betrayal of the “human” in one on the one hand, and a renunciation of the actual, biologically, socially, or autotelically correct action on the other. The spread of metaphysical paralysis from simple and crude cases to encompassing the individual’s total motor life is not easy to illustrate for a number of reasons – emotion also plays a significant role. In daily life, one rarely has the opportunity to observe anything more than the initial weak beginnings; if the phenomenon develops further, the final act will take place at the nerve clinic or lunatic asylum. But one has easier access to study the paralysis on the various partial fronts, and I note a few examples from these. That the motor reaction of the animal can also be blocked was mentioned earlier (§ 6). It happens during conflict and it happens when the animal is in doubt about the nature of the environment.32 The cat Mette was born in the spring and one autumn day found the field covered in snow. For nearly a minute it stood motionless on the stairs before engaging in closer contact with the unknown. Some rabbits – an animal species that is otherwise not plagued by inhibitions – did not mate and did not want to eat when they were taken out into the yard where they were not used to being; they did not engage; they had all senses open and all limbs free to escape. Animals with less of a sense of danger would have grazed and mated, and thus dogs would have pounced on them. The human’s sense of danger can develop so far that it smells the dog of eternity. When all reactions seem equally dangerous, the “nervous” animal lays down at a safe distance with its gaze resting on the suspicious object. Thus, the hermit’s soul lies with its eyes fixed on a world behind the visible. The phenomenon reveals its nature, reveals itself as a threat or prey, as a gateway opens to the ability of the animal, and it discharges itself with full élan in attack or flight, and with confidence in the expediency of life expression. It is precisely such an “operation carrier” that is not immediately given in the metaphysical environment. The human in the biological environment reacts in a similar way; if one is completely without means to judge the situation, one freezes and refuses to 32 Cases where an individual is “paralyzed” by, e.g., an extraordinary discharge of power in its immediate vicinity, we can disregard here.

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move (fog, hidden crevasses). Two Danish women with “mountain anxiety” screamed loudly at the mere touch, as did the rat Malene when it got stuck in a curtain. Moral doubts in the social environment are well known. An example that also has a comic side is the man with the old razor blade who dares not put it away somewhere so as not to cause accidents, and who keeps the blade in his hand in growing despair until he is rescued by the forced intervention of more robust natures. The judgment doubt of young jurists can also be noted here. The transition to metaphysical-moral distress is not obvious. Many, perhaps most, metaphysically conscious people view their biological-social environment as part of the metaphysical environment, and as the only part available to experience and trial. In so doing, they are relegated to practicing their metaphysical morality in this environment, relegated to work out a universal life course through the partial courses. In this way, the metaphysical environment obtains a kind of operation carrier for the seeker, and the problem is then no longer where, but how. As long as the metaphysical life depends on imagination and feeling alone and does not speak to our capacity by a manifestation in the visible, only two possible postures are conceivable: Either the metaphysical consideration must be viewed as irrelevant to practical life, or it must become supreme and thus lead directly into passivity because the self would not dare to infect the integrity of the universe, forcing its contribution on the future. (“All or nothing.”) How different it is when one’s practical environment is identical or connected to the part of the metaphysical that “protrudes into” the perceptually and physically influenced. Doubts from all the partial fronts are then accumulated with the question of the metaphysical value of the effort. If now one has certainty that one’s motives are absolutely “pure” and that reliable paths are available for partial sanction, then one can act on these and declare – to the metaphysical authority in one’s mind – that one has done one’s best and that there are no opportunities beyond this. Ultra posse nemo obligatur.a But as just developed, one never knows what one’s efforts can turn into, and the motives can play one of the worst tricks. When does one finish testing them?

§ 32. A test subject goes into the fire Continued action will show that the discrepancy between the metaphysically sought and the practically found does not have a tendency to diminish; on the a No one is obligated beyond what one is able to do.

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contrary, one is caught more and more by intruding forces and considerations. In addition to this, one will almost certainly be infected by one’s fate and become someone else after acting. In order to rest for a while from the pressure of introspection and assume the more comfortable position of the observer, we can pass the problem on to a test subject. He is well-suited for the undertaking; he understands the situation and he will not oppose at any point. We put him in the false situation and quietly retreat. He soon finds out that any effort is futile and that he is going more and more astray; results drive him from bulwark to bulwark while age advances and the remaining opportunities are reduced for both external and internal reasons. The comforting notion of “doing his best” is becoming increasingly thin, more suspicious, and less satisfying; action is not the way, action is not his “best.” The only thing that stands open to him after this realization is to keep his powers on standby and stay prepared for the possible encounter with a highest object. He does not burn his oil as a pastime; he hides it in his lamp while he waits. And although he dares not hope for the groom’s coming, or shall we say the bride’s coming, at least he forms no unworthy connections. For him waiting is “doing his best.” He can realize a single life in history, an inadequate and bland life, an edifice with shapes and colors, but built with clay. And he can live a thousand lives in his consciousness where infinity lies like a plasma under his will. If one wishes to criticize him with the story of the trusted talents, interpreting the talents as the power of action, he would answer that the parable lacks the most important figure, the one who frightens him: the servant who speculated with his master’s estate and lost everything. At the same time, it is open to him to interpret the talents as consciousness, and in light of this interpretation neither of the enterprising servants defeat him, for with this one talent he has gained goods for his master until he has collapsed under the burden. Thus, he withdraws his interest from the partial fronts and lives for “the one thing needful.” And as insight grows at the expense of dreams, there is less and less that is suitable as a target of metaphysical energy, not even the last and only possible, to end his life by an act of will. In despair over the inadequacy of action, it is the weary hand of life that clings to the last holding point. In this most extreme stage imaginable, complete external and internal passivity, this holding point is slipping. Consciousness has come to the end of its course and the self dies from a lack of metaphysical stimulus.

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During this account we have presented the paralysis of action essentially as a logical consequence. Against this view, however, a weighty objection can be made: The ideal test subject refrains from action partly because he cannot calculate all the consequences of it, and partly because even the best conceivable consequence does not satisfy him metaphysically. He therefore chooses non-action. But if this is to be a suitable result, it must be shown that the posture of non-action is free from the objections affecting the other alternatives. In practice, the “consequences” of non-action will be equally incalculable, and in the positive direction passivity does not provide metaphysical comfort. In other words, it was only a diversionary solution, a pseudo-solution that, upon closer examination, turned out to be as unfit as the line of action. Passivity qua solution is also a positive stance; not willing action in such a situation is difficult to distinguish from willing non-action. Our ideal individual will therefore look deeper for something that is neither action nor non-action; he wants a third option, a “beyond the question of action vs. non-action.” Logically, therefore, it is no more likely that he will behave passively than that he will act; both are metaphysically unsatisfactory; as volition, both are “violence against the universe’s pure course.” Moreover, the will to universal negation will not in practice guarantee a realization of the chosen program. In a modern society where health guardians dare not pick up the social or metaphysical responsibility of letting other human beings take care of their lives as they please, the “metaphysician” is fairly sure of being taken into protective custody, kept alive with nourishment and a maximum of care, and thus forced to live a life of representative length with strong social engagement. Something “beyond the question of action”a is not practically available to him qua human; nor is it psychologically accessible as long as he insists on intellectual honesty. Since for the seeker suicide must also be the result of a maximum in acting power (or else caused by mere affect and thus morally worthless), he finds himself deprived of any practical path and relegated to constant and consuming doubt. And finally: if he resigns and lets things take their course, then he has thereby abandoned his metaphysical interest struggle and stands on an equal footing with the non-metaphysical consciousness, even if the origin of the

a Jenseits der Handlungsfrage (Ger.).

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posture is different. In this context, the post-metaphysical indifference becomes equivalent to the pre-metaphysical. The objection’s conclusion is thus that this is no way out for the metaphysical seeker, nor is universal passivity as conscious effort. However, while admitting that the paralysis is not logically justified, it can still occur appropriately for psychological (non-logical) reasons, as it did in the cat and the rabbits in § 31. As long as uncertainty is raging in the seeker, as long as he is the confused and vulnerable prey, this condition has a profound effect on external activity; on the basis of his organic constitution he will be forced into a motor collapse whether he believes in its usefulness or not. And thus, both for himself and for those who cultivate the metaphysical with greater moderation, a frightening disparity between the need and the ability is exposed: We cannot even satisfy the urge to work with the related problems without sacrificing ourselves to biological-social catastrophes and thereby also to an interruption of the meditative mode. And we already have to occupy ourselves with the question of whether it requires employment or not, as long as a negative answer is not immediately given or experience has not shown that the question is solved by neglecting it. Also, in parallel with the relationship with the biological-social environment, it feels like it is of more value to work with the problem than to leave it; the latter even feels like betrayal and infidelity against the best in our nature. Not even the question of the possibility of a path allows the organism to take up a consistent intervention – and how is it possible to obtain something from a master who punishes the earnest plea itself with a quick death? A biological parallel to this situation is imagining two shipwrecked crews on a deserted island where there is nothing edible. The one who restlessly searches for something to eat will perish faster than the one who immediately sits down and resigns. The latter is the biologically inferior of the two, but the peculiarities of the environment give it longer than the former to be rescued by chance by a passing ship. The flaw in the representation is that we as viewers know that there is no food on the island. In the metaphysical environment, we have no corresponding knowledge; the viewer here is in the same situation as the seeker: No one is ready to reach even the most modest form of liberating recognition, that there is no metaphysical path. We realize only that we are prohibited from seeking the way with total force; we are prohibited from “doing our best.” The situation thus produces a qualified disharmony between ability and striving. And it is difficult to see any likelihood that this disharmony will subside in the future. It is quite the opposite. Increasing intellectual demand has,

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on the one hand, led to an ever broader and more fearless welcoming of metaphysical questions, and, on the other, exposed consciousness to the greater pressure of responsibility and doubt so frequently associated with higher grades of mental differentiation. After all this, there seems to be a paradox concerning the condition of the human form in the earthly environment. It is a paradox that revolves around the fact that the more fully one unfolds one’s substrates, the less likely one is to become “happy,” that is, thrive and realize one’s most important needs. As a result of the previous investigations, this conclusion should reinforce our hope of being on our way to finding the “tragic phenomenon.” In its place then the task will be to examine whether the paradox applies universally, or how far and in which circumstances it arises.

§ 33. Psychopathological point of view Several of the conditions described in the preceding, and above all the “metaphysical paralysis,” will today, as in older times, be largely regarded by physicians and scholars as pathological phenomena. It therefore seems natural to end the treatment of human over-equipment and fixedness difficulties with a mention of certain characteristics and types of people that are called psychopathic (“constitutional psychopathies” (Forel), “degenerates”a (Möbius, Magnan), “superior degenerates”b (Charcot)). The psychopathic is an area within the anormal (abnormal); this language is used by most authors.33 Both designations are of a purely statistical nature. “A fundamental biological difference between sick and healthy does not exist.”34 The norm is already difficult enough to determine. Pelman (loc. cit.) states: “Normal is what corresponds to the archetype, and if this is quite difficult to determine in the physical, then it is even more so in the psychological.” In addition, there is the difficulty of separating the sickly from the merely abnormal. Pelman quotes Forel: “There are no normal noses, but does that mean all noses are pathological?” – and applies the question also to the mental a Entartete (Ger.). b dégénérés superieurs (Fr.). 33 See, e.g., Clauberg and Dubislav, Systematisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie [Systematic Dictionary of Philosophy], Leipz. 1923 art. “Biologie” litra F. – Pelman, Psychische Grenzzustände [Psychic Boundary Conditions], Bonn 1909 p. 2. – Birnbaum, Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathological Documents], Berl. 1920 p. III. 34 (Clauberg and D. loc. cit.).

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domain. In order to have a line with which to work, in the following we can disregard the crudeness and approximation of the definition and call processes and conditions sickly when they noticeably decrease the individual’s biological or social adaptability or shorten its lifetime relative to the average.35 In each case it must then be decided which average should be taken into account: the nation, the place, the race, the guild, etc. Thus, when Ragnar Vogt36 immediately sets disease and suffering as synonyms, we cannot follow him here; we want open access to operate both with suffering-free diseases and with suffering of a non-diseased nature. The chosen working definition seems to establish a hierarchy of human interest fronts with the biological-social front being used for a comparative basis and not the autotelic-metaphysical. However, this is not intended to involve any assessment. It stays with external consequences and says nothing about the “nature” or intrinsic value of phenomena; the concept of the sick may therefore change as the biological-social conditions become different. (Normal and healthy would apply to certain kinds of exhibitionism in a nudist society.) Bonhoeffer also argued long ago that “pathological” phenomena should be investigated regardless of the distinction between sick and healthy.37 Nevertheless, the definition which in varying forms is the one commonly used will be used here in the absence of any better one. It will then be immediately seen that the metaphysical orientation is in principle beyond the opposition between sick and healthy, and only through its consequences can it come into contact with it. No great weight lies on the distinction between sick and healthy. Psychopathic states may occur in two main forms that may turn out to actually dissimulate each other: a qualitative and a quantitative one; that is, the terminology used here signifies either surplus-deficit, or fixedness anomalies 35 Cf. Bleuler, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie [Textbook of Psychiatry], Berl. 1937, p. 98 and others. 36 Medicinsk psykologi og psykiatri [Medical Psychology and Psychiatry], Kristiania 1923 p. 156. 37 See Birnbaum: “Grundzüge der Kulturpsychopathologie [Fundamentals of Cultural Psychopathology]” in Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] Vol. 18 p. 64: “After all, it is also not decisive for the beauty of the pearl whether it is a natural or pathological excretion product of the shell.” Cf. same author Psychopathologische Dokumente (Psychopathological Documents), Berlin 1920 p. 273: “The intrinsic value of religion cannot be assessed at all according to whether or not it is related to the pathological; it depends on completely different mental potencies.” On the principal issue: The use of assessment viewpoints in psychiatry, see Oppenheim: “Gibt es eine psychopathische Höherwertigkeit [Is there a higher psychopathetic value]?” in Neurologisches Zentralblatt [Central Neurological Journal] 1917 p. 771 and Birnbaum: “Kulturpsychopathologie [Cultural Psychopathology]” p. 56.

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of various kinds, coordination errors, forced phenomena, etc. In a rough schematic and for our limited use, the field of inquiry can be represented as follows:

FIGURE 9: Normal and pathological states. DFGJ denotes quantitative normality, BCLM qualitative normality, ABKL error-fixedness, ACDF surplus, GJKM deficit, ABDE dualqualified disease patterns from surplus and error-fixedness, GHKL dual-qualified disease patterns from deficit and error-fixedness, and BCEF quantitative over-equipment and normal types of fixedness.

The quadrangle DFGJ denotes quantitative normality (normal capacity). The quadrangle BCLM captures qualitative normality (normal fixedness types), while error-fixedness is found in ABKL. ACDF denotes surplus. GJKM denotes deficit. Dual-qualified disease patterns are represented by ABDE (surplus and error-fixedness) and GHKL (deficit and error-fixedness). For us the area BCEF is of particular interest. Here one finds quantitative over-equipment and normal types of fixedness, especially normal-psychological (appropriate) relationship between the genesis of the condition and its form of expression. In order for a surplus of mental equipment to be described as a diseased characteristic, it must, by definition, express itself in a way that is detrimental to the biological or social welfare of the individual, as the demand for it is perceived by the “majority” or those in power. If the surplus lets off steam inwardly or outwardly in such a way that it manifests itself in only sanctioned forms (“sublimation”), then officially one lives normally. In drawing up examples of surplus forms in the foregoing, the question of sick versus healthy was kept outside intentionally; it was only a matter of pointing out how the extraordinary conditions lie, so to speak, in the extension of

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biologically-socially useful and high-value characteristics. Although the ordinary assessment contained in the word sick is not one of a moralizing but rather of a cultural, collective-biological, or collective autotelic nature, such a stamp will as a rule mean more to the bearer of the abnormal property. Even if this is in one’s own eyes the only natural – the abnormal is the normal for the abnormala 38 – high-valued, sacred, and central thing; nevertheless, the judgment of the outside world can exert a considerable influence on one’s well-being and be fateful for one’s outward life. The question of the pathological’s relation to the cultural endeavor arises here, and then primarily, the surplus pathological with normal fixedness conditions. An immersion in this matter for its own sake would hardly pay for the pursuit; more distant tasks await us, and the investigations we conduct here are still of a functional and preparatory nature. Therefore, since we have from Birnbaum’s hand the work mentioned above, “Grundzüge der Kulturpsychopathologie [Fundamentals of Cultural Psychopathology],”39 a citing of important points from this text will be preferred.

§ 34. Pathological form – cultural relevance Birnbaum (p. 11) mentions Lombroso as one of the first who sought to show on scientific grounds essential correspondence between the creative (schöpferische) person and pathological features. However, he thinks Lombroso’s slogan “genius and madness” was rushed; later studies have shown how complicated and varied these conditions are, and they have also gradually attracted a considerable literature. The cultural and the pathological can stand in different relations to one another: external coincidence, inner affinity, and fellow communion. The last one is of particular interest here; concerning it, B. says (p. 25): … certain highly differentiated psychopathic types with the most delicate responsiveness of emotional life to the finest stimuli, with increased susceptibility to all emotional influences, with increased ability to be sensitive to all slight movements of the mental life: they epitomize the type of cultural personality in their increased enjoyment of cultural experience par excellence: Henri Amiel, the Genevan philosopher,

a l’anormal est le normal pour l’anormal (Fr.). 38 Julien Teppe: Apologie pour l’Anormal [Defense of the Abnormal], Paris 1935 p. 13. 39 Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] Vol. 18.

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represents (on the basis of his diaries) this (psychasthenic) psychopathic type, which at the same time coincides with the highest quality cultured human type.

The burning question here concerns the demarcation of “the pathological” in the personality, and then this: what makes these traits called pathological? What kind of “sickness” is one dealing with in each case? If the “sick” consists solely in an increase in capacity or differentiation beyond the average, then the related terminology conceals a culturally hostile and culturally restrictive tendency, since in that case the path through the diseased is the cultural hope’s only chance. Or does one mean that the “psychopathic qualifications” will eventually have to be spoken of and recognized and be called healthy, but only insomuch as biological conditions and social convention are able to bear them? What cultural ideal is revealed in this psychiatric language? If, on the other hand, it is claimed that the same degree of capacity can also be reached on non-pathological grounds, then it remains to be proved wherein the essence of the pathological consists if not in the degree of differentiation or capacity. If the answer is that it consists in the lack of social adaptability, then an honest logic requires that the ignominious adjective in its meaning of subnormal be transferred to the relevant community. Many suspicious motives can hide under the requirement of “social adaptation.” (Asocial and antisocial adverse effects which may be ascribed to complementary deficit factors in the exceptional person fall outside of this account.)

§ 35. The concept of culture The need for a definition of the concept of culture now arises with force, and a dichotomy immediately comes into view: Collective versus individual culture. For our needs, the frame must be made wide; by collective culture one may think of the external, group-dependent, historically verifiable, widely recognized forms and contents of human life expression, and by individual culture of personality manifestations in the light of the viewer’s assessment. But – the viewer changes and very often the two forms of culture intertwine and presuppose one another. In the four definitions set up by Clauberg and Dubislav,40 one can see how the point of view shifts: 1. The “culture” of a society at one time means the science, the art, the religion, the civilization of this society in its entirety as a unity at that time. 40 Systematisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie [Systematic Dictionary of Philosophy] art. “Kultur [Culture].”

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on the tragic 2. “Culture” is the production of the capacity of a rational being for any purpose whatsoever (hence in its freedom). (Kant) 3. The totality of objective values is called “culture.” 4. The path of humanity from itself as the lower to itself as the higher is the path of “culture.” (Simmel)

One can see how the topic is inexhaustible and the possibility of commentary endless. For our purposes, the commonsense view is the best fit, although it cannot be established with certainty.41 There is no reason to exclude the inward manifestations of the personality from culture as a category, but it goes without saying that they do not yield a result that is sensible to other people; nor do they have any means of ascertaining and assessing them. Amiel’s sublime inner life has entered into the collective (intersubjective) culture through his extensive diaries. Unfortunately, there is also no reliable basis for assessing a cultural contribution. To a large extent one will probably use an extension of the biologically given assessment: greater skill, greater life force; but this norm is supplemented with autotelic points of view, and time- and place-determined social and metaphysical components. In principle, everyone is free to assess the highly differentiated ability types as low and place primitivity in the high set; political revolutions sometimes also cause crises in the ranking of cultural values. Under the heading “Die kulturelle Eignung des Pathologischen [The cultural aptitude of the pathological],” Birnbaum gathers in the work mentioned42 the following important elements: 1. Cultural-psychic receptivity and plasticity of the pathological. He refers here to an article by Hermann Oppenheim, to which we will return later. 2. Cultural-psychic activity and efficacy (examples include Cagliostro, William Blake, Swedenborg, Savonarola, Madame Blavatsky, Mary Baker Eddy). 3. The originality and productivity of psychosis (Rousseau, Baudelaire, E. A. Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Strindberg, Saint-Simon, et al.).

The following statement is taken from Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (p. 33): “What right do we have to assume that only normal minds can bring nature closer to its goal? One may find an abnormal mind 41 The use of questionnaires to bring to light the commonsense conception of the concept of truth, recently conducted by Dr. Arne Næss, resulted in the absence of any particular conception that could be called the commonsense conception. 42 “Grundzüge d. Kulturpsychopathologie [Fundamental Principles of Cultural Psychopathology],” Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 18.

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more appropriate for a particular purpose.” (The metaphysical-finalistic feature of the quotation does not concern us here.) With certain reservations, Birnbaum says that a “scale of cultural valence” can be drawn up: Least suitable for the cultural are the serious organic psychoses (paralysis, etc.) – “with their profound degradation of the very cultural layers of the personality.” Best suited however are “the psychopathic constitutions with their merely quantitative differences from the norm alongside a largely qualitative correspondence with the psychic character of the culture.”43 (Here, moreover, it seems natural to read Birnbaum as claiming that the pathological consists precisely in the quantitative excess.) Thus, there is a demand to keep separate “the scribblings of a confused paralytic, the fleeting rhymes of a manic” from “the serious artistic achievements of psychotic artists like Blake or pathological poets like Gogol” (p. 56). Cf. a statement about Kant in Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathological Documents], p. 287: “Kant’s mental demise brings us to the sovereign rule of the laws of organic life to painful consciousness – that even this highly organized mind was able to sink to the depths of the most primitive mental life, to mental vegetating.” In general, the pathological will appear to be a greater danger to a thinker than to a poet or visual artist who in any case seeks only to express subjective qualities of experience.

§ 36. The abnormal Before we follow Birnbaum right up to his conclusions, we will take this opportunity to expand the notion of abnormal characteristics; we have a suspicion that in the abnormal we are dealing with some of the raw materials of tragic personalities and fates. The abnormal may lie in the relationship between the final reaction and what has been the cause of it. For common stresses such as the remorse of conscience and the death of a loved one, it is through the example of the majority within the individual age group that the space has been established for normal reaction with fairly set boundaries both in nature and scope. Thus, the reaction of joyfully telling of the death of a loved one is abnormal (cf. Vogt p. 192) or to believe, as Blücher, that in punishment for his sins he became pregnant with an elephant.44 In quantitative terms, one has apathy beyond the lower limit 43 The BCEF field in the figure in § 33. 44 Birnbaum: Psychopath. Dok. [Psychopath. Doc.] p. 131.

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and excitation beyond the upper.45 (Harpagon: “The whole world should be hanged.”) It is more difficult to establish a standard of behavior when it comes to extraordinary stresses. Here one cannot build on any type of majority; the material is too uneven to be introduced to a common denominator. Such stresses can be arranged in the same way as reactions: some are unusual in nature, others in their strength. And here we arrive at the significant conclusion that any “normal” human being subjected to extraordinary pressure may be forced into unusual behavior, to behave in a way that in isolation appears as abnormal, but viewed in the light of the stimulus the behavior must be called appropriate in relation to it, based on analogical inference where such is possible. Here one encounters abnormal life expressions that have come into being in a psychologically normal way.46 The president’s dance display is explained by the fact that he has mice in his pants. But such a motivating cause is not always obvious (for example, the so-called “summation of stimuli”a), nor is it always available to every observer. It turns, for example, on a capacity or differentiation in the agent’s spiritual-mental equipment that greatly exceeds that of the observer; thus, the observer has no means at all to pass judgment on the genesis of the behavior with respect to normality.47 In such cases, a psychiatric treatment aimed at bringing the “patient’s” reactions into biological-social forms could in fact mean an attempt to force in one an inappropriate reaction, in other words, to transform one’s “capacity anomaly” into a “functional anomaly” – if the psychiatrist does not limit oneself to seeking new appropriate paths from the surplus to biological-social arrangement. The significance of a distinction between inappropriate reaction and appropriate reaction to an unusual stimulus is evident when one thinks of the medical student approaching an over-differentiated “patient” with the textbook questionnaire (“How are you doing with our Lord?”). The layperson may in some cases be more inclined to see the normal-psychological in the patient’s linguistic responses as “childish” and “rude” (Vogt p. 184 cf. 221) than the young psychiatrist who has the textbook’s guarantee that the utterance belongs to the excitative syndrome and therefore need not bother with any

45 Vogt p. 182 ff. 173, cf. Pilez: “Die Verstimmungszustände [The Mood States]” in Grenzfragen d. Nerven- u. Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] Vol. 10 p. 37. 46 Cf. Pilez op. cit. p. 5 f. II, 34. a Summation der Reize (Ger.). 47 Cf. Pelman op. cit. p. 1.

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criticism. Perhaps one is even reaching the patient with a “to understand all is to forgive all.” Seeing the patient’s life expressions from the symptom point of view can undoubtedly be overdone, even in the mental hospital where a psychosis is diagnosed but where the patient often retains normal-psychological components alongside those that are afflicted. When this tendency is combined with standardized treatment due to the size of the population relative to the operation of the facility, patients with normal recognition requirements are held in a situation that is more than disorienting and unpleasant.

§ 37. Psychiatry and culture Psychiatry’s position toward higher cultural forms is not clear. Its leading point of view has found expression in Bekhterev (“Die Persönlichkeit [The Personality]” in Grenzfragen [Border Issues] V. 7 p. 1), who says: “The health of the person and their normal development should therefore form the next and immediate goal of any psychiatric care –.” This is a program that at first glance does not invite any criticism. But if compared with the following in Vogt, Medicinsk psykologi og psykiatri [Medical Psychology and Psychiatry] p. 214: “The abnormality is determined in relation to A. The general norm, the average person of the same age, gender, race, culture … B. The personal norm, the person’s own habitual constitution” – then a neighboring question arises: How will the doctor present oneself in a conflict situation where the patient’s abnormalities and biological-social neglect are essential conditions for one’s cultural superiority? If this is the case, what will the treatment set as its goal? The following paragraph in Birnbaum, among other places, also shows how easily one can go wrong here (Ps. Doc. p. 127): Pathological conditions of severe depression and anxiety afflicted Martin Luther’s mind at times. They burdened him with a load of discouragement, doubt, guilt, and despair that was much heavier than the magnitude of the task taken up, the significance of the upheavals he had set in motion, and the gravity of the responsibility that would have been placed upon him with psychological necessity.

On what basis does the author here give Luther the amount of mental activity he can afford to carry without being placed among the psychopaths? Is it based on existing statistics concerning the trials of religious reformers? Is not the significance of any such statistics extremely questionable as long as the real and unquestionable psychological stress is difficult to chart in each

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case and a reaction norm is therefore not easily located? Can “the magnitude of the task, the significance of the upheavals, and the gravity of the responsibility” be measured at all, and if so, with which scale? Where would one find at all “a magnitude, a significance, and a gravity” that could justify (make appropriate) a reaction like Luther’s if not in his own case? Does the author think that a degree of depression and anxiety, like that which one finds in Luther, can never be normal-psychologically conditioned; in other words, does he claim that there are objective limits to normal and non-pathological reactions regardless of the stress? (The boundary between stress and reaction is not always clear in the mental field.) In any case, it should be clarified wherein the “pathological”a of Luther’s states of mind consists and why they are referred to as “pathological.” The possibility of predicting the nature and degree of reaction when one knows the cause is often used as a criterion for the reaction not being pathological (except for predictable disease stages) – but can one ever say that one knows the cause when it comes to the external and internal counterpowers with which a religious reformer has to contend? When Birnbaum sees Blücher’s periodic indifference to historical events in 1814 and his desire to retire from the army (Ps. Doc. p. 131) as a clear manifestation of his “old-age melancholy,” this probably has its support in psychiatric experience and agrees with the nature and course of the disease type. But perhaps a Norwegian would have an easier time than a German seeing something normal-psychological in a desire to take off the uniform. And who can, without the most intimate knowledge of the case, draw a boundary here and guarantee that a field marshal will not – when the intoxication of action ebbs, and precisely in the later periods of life when the gaze is directed toward the past – be able to see at a moment of historical clarity or far-sightedness the limiting and contingent nature of a post like the one he has been assigned and to which he has dedicated his life? The year 1918, after all, gave to Blücher’s reticence a historical justification. This is stated without saying anything about the correctness of the explanation for Blücher; such a normal-psychological interpretation is undeniably more relevant when applied to psychogenic forms of depression than in melancholic psychosis. Nor is that train of thought alien to Birnbaum, as is evidenced by a passage in an article on cultural psychopathology, p. 54: “An aversion to parliamentary life can be conditioned as much by normal psychological motives as by the compulsion of nervous defects.”

a krankhafte (Ger.).

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The danger of exaggeration is present here. But if, as a matter of principle, there are possible cases covered by the account, I expect that they will contribute to the elucidation of the tragic phenomenon. I therefore summarize the reasoning: Given a person who reacts abnormally in certain situations: If it can then be shown that the person’s reaction is predictable from the knowledge of a mental illness from which the person is likely to suffer – then it is also likely that the reaction has its root, or one of its roots, in the disease. The unfortunate consequences of the action then become part of the unfortunate consequences of the disease itself, even though it passes a conscious agency and is rationalized there. Therefore, as long as we seek the tragic, an action effort in an otherwise compelling course will cease to interest us when it appears to be disease-determined; the course can be described as sufficiently characterized without the use of the word tragic. We have tried, however, to show that abnormal actions do not have to be the manifestations of illness even though their consequences may coincide with the consequences of the diseased and insufficient. This opens up a further view of the human condition that calls for closer study when seeking the tragic. And further: Although one can show that the acting person (or the reacting person) has pathological features, the abnormal (and even less the normal) reaction need not originate in the pathological factors or have any contact with them. In extreme cases the pathological can even be utilized for cultural purposes, and in such cases it would be absurd to use the pathological feature as an argument against a supposed justification of the cultural action.48 The fact that a person is a psychopath does not preclude one’s ideas from being submitted, etc., to an objective test; on the other side, one should not be seduced by the objective reasonableness of disregarding the possibility of psychopathic or neuropathic sources of reaction. We move on. In connection with a mention of the genius (op. cit. p. 44), Birnbaum notes that, especially when it comes to the “degeneracy phenomena,”a that is, the unfavorable hereditary “anomalies,”b 49 the psychopathological manner of consideration employed so far needs a biological supplement. 48 Cf. William James: Religiøse Erfaringer [The Varieties of Religious Experience], Kbh. 1906 p. 12 ff. a Entartungsphänomene (Ger.). b Abartungen (Ger.). 49 I refrain from translating so as not to harm the nuances.

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Alongside “the degeneration”a as the basis for sub-normal mental systems, the genius’ over-normal equipment also necessitates biological consideration. The genius, whose cultural significance is unquestionable, is at the same time a pathological phenomenon qua degenerationb and also demonstrates from a psychopathological point of view, relationship with the pathological. (“Goethe’s reference to the sensitive, particularly delicate organs of the especially talented.”) Birnbaum himself highlights the “abnormal50 reactions to the stress tests of fate” in others such as Beethoven, Kleist, and many others. From a biological point of view, they are final links in a biological series, a hereditary sequence, which results mainly from biologically inferior germination and mixing, or more precisely, from a biological inferiority-inclined inheritance; both (both the over-equipped and the under-equipped) have their last effects on the cultural: they turn out to be culturally significant human variants even if one is culturally advantageous and of high quality and the other often quite unfavorable and inferior.

Cf. Psych. Doc. p. 125: “ – higher appearances of the psychological (this may well mean personal cultural) and cultural life can, however, be associated with scientifically diseased life processes.” Birnbaum does not frame the problem philosophically; he is a psychiatrist and biologist. Yet it is clear that the question has plagued him; there is something “that should not be” (to speak as Volkelt) in this connection between high dignity in one area of life and inferiority in another. One instinctively asks for “nature’s intention,” and the author then considers the matter from a biological point of view: the culturally valuable is “a coincidental side effect” (“Kulturpsychop. [Cultural Psychopath.],” p. 60). But it is Birnbaum as the cultural person who lets out this deep sigh: (loc. cit.) “Thus, at the same time the biologically determined as well as the culturally significant phenomena still remain for the time being the painful child of cultural pathological research.”

§ 38. The cultural-pathological paradox For our own use, we will refer to the just mentioned, at least seemingly functional context as the “cultural-pathological paradox” because it can be seen a die Entartung (Ger.). b Entartung (Ger.). 50 The fact that the author to a certain extent uses the words abnormal and pathological as synonyms is detrimental to the clarity of his presentation.

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as a special case of the precarious paradox we were dealing with previously. Since the relationship is believed to be of central importance to our investigations (we are currently only approaching the tragic by “instinct”), we will yet – without synchronous commentary – quote from various authors, including Birnbaum. In his Psychop. Doc. he says about Rousseau: “And so we see again here a rich profit from psychosis.”

Concerning H. v. Kleist, it is said (p. 77) that he identified himself with his dramatic characters and suffered with them; by the death of Penthesilia he was himself both mentally and physiologically affected. This observation contributes, says Birnbaum, to “the one fundamental discovery that one cannot ignore: that a psychological manifestation may be closely related to the pathological yet belong to the highest quality human phenomena.” This conclusion is drawn with nearly the same language in a large number of cases. Thus, in the context of “pseudological types” such as Clemens Brentano: In the mental visions of Cl. B. it is shown that the gift of fabulation involves a substantial element of poetic talent. But here we recognize again that it must be subject to artistic control and restraint, – its extreme growths, its unbridled excess endanger both the poet as well as humanity. – So, we find here again – side by side with the pathological – the highest value mental phenomena of a creative power and inventiveness closely related to the defects of a mental delusion.

Goethe and Gottfried Keller have both pointed out the close relationship between the scoundrel and poet, as illustrated by Cagliostro and others (p. 92): “The bridge that leads from the most fabulous poetic creators of all time across the adventurers of certain cultural epochs to the highly fraudulent modern criminal types must not be overlooked.” Mentioning G. T. Fechner, it is asked (p. 98): “Are we going too far if we conclude that there is a far-reaching dissemination of mild psychotic traits among outstanding people?” Bismarck used sleepless nights to think through and engage in hypothetical debates with political opponents (p. 99), but when he later read through his notes, they were not useful in practice: they were too subtle. Here for the first time in the context of ongoing mental activity we encounter a moment of value: it is a mentally fruitful, productive work that takes place in Bismarck’s night-excited mind. A mental exercise that does not meet the practical

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This is a surprisingly unconditional wording. More cautious but, for us, equally important conclusions are drawn on p. 99, 123, 139, 144 f., 155, 169, 175, and 292. Furthermore, we must quote (“Kulturpsychop. [Cultural Psychopath.]” p. 63): “– the pathos, the suffering, the tragedy, the essential element, and the fate of the pathological nature open the way to the high values of life –,” and here he lets Kurt Schneider51 continue: Every living philosophy, and especially every art, has one of its sources in the struggles of a self-suffering and self-tormented soul.52 Only the depressive or at least the skeptical attitude to life opens up the last depths of existence.

(I would like to point out the parallel between the depressive sense of the irreality of the self, the distance from objects, and the disappearance of all points of view on the one hand, and certain results of modern critique of cognition and logical analysis on the other.) Almost identically, E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ps. Doc. p. 111) writes: “I have always believed that nature especially in the case of abnormalities grants glimpses of its most frightening depths” – something that becomes self-evident if it is these glimpses – or the fact that one comes by the consequences of them – that make the personality abnormal. Gérard de Nerval (1808–55)53 wrote to Coleridge: Do not think, Coleridge, that you have experienced the greatness and strength of your imagination if you have not been insane. I do not know why I use the language of disease because I have never felt better about myself. At times I have kept my strength and my ability doubled. It seemed to me as if I understood everything; the imagination gave me infinite pleasure. Should one regret having lost what men call reason if one has gained this in return?

51 In Handbuch der Psychiatrie [Handbook of Psychiatry], Leipzig and Vienna 1923. “Die Psychopathischen Persönlichkeiten [The Psychopathic Personalities]” p. 48. 52 Ps. Dok. [Ps. Doc.] p. 36, cf. Pelman, Psychische Grenzzustände [Psychic Border Conditions] p. 217 ff. 53 G. Labrunie.

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(It is not immediately understood why “reason” could not be present without destroying the rich inner life, but one is willing to accept an ad hoc concept from the author that mitigates the supposed contradiction.) In a similar vein, Henri Amiel experienced a return from autotelic-metaphysical lands to the biological-social treadmill (Birnb. Ps. Doc. p. 65): “And from these heights and horizons, to fall without limit into the muddy ditch of triviality! What a fall!” When the sense of life, especially in association with intellectual penetration, needs ever greater and more universal depths, it is metaphysically inquiring into existence as such, characterized by the encounter between an outermost, sensitive exponent for the specifically human will-to-form and an outermost exponent for the personality’s metaphysical imaginary circle. Thus, states the poem of Calderón: For the crime of man is having been born.

“Before whom should I blush?” asks Grabbe referring to the imperfection of the universe. But more breathtakingly than anyone, perhaps the deepest in its direction that any person has borne testimony, Amiel describes his sense of life (Birnb. Ps. Doc. p. 160 f.): “ – The skin of my heart is too delicate – for me what might be spoils what is; I devour myself in pain for what should be. Therefore, I resist reality, presence, everything that cannot be made up, indeed they scare me.” Three o’clock in the afternoon is the worst time of day for Amiel: – I always feel with equal passion the terrible emptiness of existence, the inner fear, and the painful thirst for happiness. – This torment of the light is a strange natural phenomenon. The sun, mercilessly placing the patches of our clothes, the wrinkles of our face, and our gray hair in the brightest light, does it shine with the same merciless light into the barely hardened wounds of our heart? Does it give us the shame of being?

This remarkable utterance from Amiel gives us an opportunity to remind ourselves of the intention of collecting these quotes, of what is important for the overview. His interpretation (in question form) of the emotional experience of light is not the only one possible – and it does not follow the feeling with any logical necessity. A psychoanalyst thus prefers to seek other and hidden sources of the feeling of a “shame of being.” But Amiel’s rationalization is one of several possibilities, none of which takes precedence. And if the daylight – as a source of life, as an impression of beauty, as useful to many – elicited

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in the sensitive mind a praise hymn to nature, then this linguistic expression with its associated affect would be consistent with the usual and expected, normal and appropriate reaction, bordering on the trivial. It would not call for further processing; it would not promise the discovery of deeper connections – more than the other typical reaction. And above all in this regard: The case would be pushed aside as irrelevant to the tragic. The antinomy, however, the paradoxical in Amiel’s reaction, curiously draws us closer. But: If someone now came along and proved that this unusual and interesting reaction was merely a sign of illness, due to error-fixedness or neurotic self-deception, then the case would thereby also be classified in a way that no longer piqued our interest. On the other hand – as long as the possibility remains that the feeling of a “shame of being” is in some way related to the personality’s unusually high differentiation and, in the given case, has even more to it than other interpretations that may be considered – then one is indeed dealing with a functional connection between the biologically inalienable and the culturally sublime which in turn awakens this thought: this is where one may be able to look for the tragic gold.

§ 39. Comment Admittedly, at least two more important questions remain unanswered. First of all: Is there any possibility of establishing a hierarchy among several existing interpretations of the content of emotional consciousness on a basis other than statistics (custom) or logically persuasive power here and now and to these very people? The question belongs primarily to the theory of cognition and should not be dealt with here. This work presupposes the possibility of practically convincing conclusions. On the other hand, I find myself obliged to admit that very often when I have found pessimistic interpretations stronger, prouder, more complete, braver, more profound, and by far more compelling than the proposed optimistic variants, considered them as emerging from a larger field of psychological impact, this has not depended solely on arguments which I have put forward in this work on a given occasion. It has also had its basis in a “subjective evidence” or whatever expression one would choose to designate a view that requires no justification, subjectively satisfactory (even while retaining intellectual reasonableness), but objectively irrelevant forms of certainty. This circumstance exposes the view – in the places where it may have pierced through the objective construction – to the suspicion of being substantially due to unconscious affective needs. We cannot guard against such a suspicion at all today – radical psychologists find evidence even where the layperson

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thought he or she had heroically renounced every hint of emotional satisfaction. The suspicion can hardly be answered in any other way than making oneself available for analysis. The purpose of this digression is to answer a possible objection to the preceding. If Amiel’s reaction to daylight – one could say – is given attention because it contains a contradiction, then on the other side an optimistic-sanguine reaction to an impression that is usually designated as sad demands the same interest – one thinks, for example, of Novalis’ joy over the darkness of night and death in Hymns to the Night. Similarly, despair about a misfortune should be uninteresting; it is nothing but what one had reason to expect. I also do not think that any pessimistic interpretation with its associated depressive mood is preferable to any optimistic-sanguine one. The experience of the night and death we find in Novalis is undoubtedly richer and more compelling than the typical variants of fear of the dark and death anxiety. The determining factor is precisely the expansion of the conceptual, imaginative, and emotional life, but this consideration again violates the requirement of objective durability. Therefore, in many instances where I find pessimistic views more valuable than others, it is not because they are in themselves pessimistic, but because they on the one hand cause greater mental expansion, and on the other are characterized by greater persuasive power. If they do not meet these requirements, they are both logically and philosophically inferior, and there is no greater reason to hold them than there is reason to prefer an optimistic interpretation simply because in a given case it is in accordance with one’s wishes and needs. It is easy for the perception of these issues to be overly emotionally infected. If one were to try to assign one view a primacy where cultural valence in concerned, we could refer to the following considerations which are tantamount to support for the pessimistic: What should lead to a pessimistic interpretation – which is assumed to be unwelcome and go against one’s interests – if not its greater factual weight?54 (One then ignores unconscious motives that make the pessimistic desirable.) So far, we can give prerogative to the following consideration: Where an insight into the nature of human life is sought and not an autotelic-metaphysical upliftment, at least a pessimistic readiness seems to be a better starting point. Another question of importance for elucidating the connection between cultural worth and biological-social deterioration is this: Can the contradiction in question be eliminated by changing biological-social conditions? 54 Cf. Peirce: “La logique de la science [The Logic of Science]” in Revue philosophique [Philosophical Review] 1878 (2) p. 559 ff.

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When a contradiction in general is to be removed, it must be done by relaxing either one factor on the basis of the other or the other on the basis of the first; also, both factors can be changed in different ways so that harmony emerges. In the present case then it can only be a question of changing the cultural ideal, which according to the lessons of history can be done to a large extent in the case of social forms of culture. However, as far as personal-autotelic culture is concerned, the feasibility of the method is less obvious; here it seems that constitutive elements come into play with fixedness tendencies in their wake. Next one could speak of changing biological-social conditions for the individual cultural personality while maintaining the collective cultural ideal or recognition of individual variants, possibly in connection with the development of medical science that secures the abnormal against certain adverse health effects in soma and psyche. One may think of an extended use of poet grants and the like. Undoubtedly, through measures of this kind many painful external conditions could be mitigated for the life-weary cultural personality, just as a development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis could be thought to eliminate certain psychological difficulties with which the abnormal cultural personality may have to contend today to a greater extent than others. However, it seems unlikely that all related problems of any significance will be resolved in this way, or through a possible reorientation in both personal-cultural and biological-social respects with greater harmony between the needs of the individual and society – in reciprocal and in mutual relation – as task and result. The plurality of both internal and external interest fronts always seems to put obstacles in the way. But we are now on the brink of pure speculation, and there is also another reason to let the question go: For the material of fates in life and poetry, to which we will later be referred to find the tragic realized, these future or merely speculative opportunities are of little or no interest. They may then be for questions like the following: Is the tragic time-specific or “eternal” and the like; in other words, things that do not belong to this stage of the investigation.

§ 40. Birnbaum’s conclusion Of particular interest are the sections in Birnbaum where he summarizes his views on the “cultural-pathological paradox.” It may seem that these many quotations burden the presentation, but we are at a crucial point in the present

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work’s train of thought and should therefore not shy away from the efforts associated with a wide representation of professional voices, especially since the matter is not suitable for a single person’s investigation. Since the quotations are long, I have translated them, albeit with the danger that some nuances will be lost. One might lament that the modern state with its rigid organization gives so little space for the uniqueness of the individual, is so inhibitory to these harmless connections and manifestations of pathological natures, and forces into uniformity the more colorful varieties of the human species, that it gradually becomes a bit monotone – one does not know that it (the state) thus also keeps the not so harmless in check. (Ps. Doc. p. 263) Only those who also know how to appreciate this pathological feature, therefore, fully grasp human life and fate. It is not to be mistaken: life would be freed from many very heavy and sad things, from many anxieties and disappointments, from many insecurities and harms, if the pathological (abnormal?) was banished from its perimeter. But this is just as certain: life would also become considerably poorer in forms and shades, in colors and light, in richness and fullness of the mind. It would mean a loss in life value (op. cit. p. 303).

The following apotheosis is found in the same author’s “Über psychopathische Persönlichkeiten [On Psychopathic Personalities],” Grenzfragen [Border Issues] V. 10: Finally, if one now considers how psychopathic personalities naturally appear in everyday life, no longer from a psychiatric and scientific point of view, but as they immediately, as human beings, act on us, then it turns out that they are directly opposite the normal average, which of course only includes the meager variants in the region of an unremarkable and unexceptional mean, – that they in the face of these “mediocre” average persons are distinguished by a stronger appearance of their personality components. They are advantaged people with eye-catching mental characteristics, personalities in the narrower sense of the word, who often appear as more highly organized due to greater mental sensitivity and substantial differentiation. And what has hitherto been regarded only as a deficiency now also turns out to be an advantage. It is precisely these personalities’ stronger form that makes them so incompetent in practical life, precisely this greater differentiation in their mental life that is closely associated with an increased vulnerability, precisely these qualities that open those who are burdened with them to attaining a general, a cultural significance. Often enough “degenerates,” Magnan’s superior degenerates, are individuals of high worth who stand out mentally above the others; it is also stressed, I believe by Charcot, that among them are the finest minds; thus, it is not uncommon that valuable cultural phenomena have these

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on the tragic psychopathic features to thank for their emergence, development, and breakthrough. The extraordinary impression sensitivity of these persons causes things to affect them violently which bounce off others without leaving any trace; their highly refined and highly differentiated emotional life with its increased sensitivity allows them to create distinctive emotional values and new ways of seeing; precisely the disharmony in their mental life, the uncommon in the interaction between the emotional and imaginative spheres, and, in conjunction with this, their extraordinary way of looking at things, all these, conveying new and original values in the day, produce far-reaching, fruitful inspiration. And further: The one-sided, exaggerated focus on certain things, whereby sides that have been hitherto overlooked and disregarded come into their own light, also brings valuable and content-heavy matters to legitimate validity and expression. And finally, the immeasurable tenacity in their emotional lives, the unwavering conviction of the correctness of their ideas, the tireless, self-sacrificing devotion of their total power, the stubbornness in their pursuit, otherwise unnoticed and suppressed values for which they step up to the counter, push through and then are sustained permanently. Therefore, especially if excellent mental powers are connected to the abnormally constructed emotional life, they cannot simply serve pathological and worthless momentary phenomena as producers and followers, but in the best sense must be carriers of genuine culture, promote solid progress, and create fruitful ideas. May our community therefore embrace many such psychopathic elements – and there is no doubt that for one who with open eyes regards our cultural life, even if one does not think it is so steeped in pathological elements as, for example, Möbius believes – there will be no reason yet for the serious concern that we are going to face cultural decay: for what in a biological sense means inferiority, degeneration, and decline, in real life is most closely associated with dignity, ascension, and cultural progress.

§ 41. Other writers A few central passages are reproduced here from Pelman, Psychische Grenzzustände [Mental Border Conditions], Bonn 1909, where Chapter 1 and 16 in particular illuminate the present questions. “Genius becomes impractical because its creative activity is not in the service of utility, because it is useless; in fact, being useless belongs to the nature of the genius’ work –” (p. 209). Does not the term autotelic cover the meaning here better? Genius has been given a sacred, yet unfortunate gift in that it strives for the highest – and must – be founded on inner discontent and torn-ness. The inner torment of the genius is the mother of infinite works, which are only too often paid for with one’s

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own life (p. 210). – Even the divine gift of imagination can reveal itself as a Danaan gifta –. From Pascal also comes the well-known saying that the greatest mind is as much accused of folly as the greatest fool, and that stepping out of mediocrity would mean stepping out of humanity. The genius – is located, as the highest elevated intellectual activity, close to, or even at the boundary between the normal and the abnormal and must therefore have many touch points with insanity. But forms of existence can be similar without ever merging into one another, and it would be a logical mistake to see a degeneration in every deviation from the norm. (p. 212) I have already pointed out – that genius does not protect against insanity. But for the geniuses who were insane, there are many more and greater who had no trace of insanity. Concerning the most important geniuses, it is all but certain that they were not insane. (216)

Pelman further claims, in agreement with Birnbaum and others, that some are geniuses through their illness (Gérard de Nerval), while others are in spite of it (Poe, Hoffmann), and finally there are cases where illness and giftedness stand side-by-side in the personality without exerting influence on one another. Pelman cautions against confusing genius and manic constitution (p. 216): The apparent addition in mental activity is in reality based only on the fact that the duration of the idea process in mania is not, as in the healthy, mastered by an “overall vision,”a which in the moment relies on a certain direction in the train of thought and inhibits all extraneous whims. Consequently, in mania there is no increase of ideas, but a thinking without goals. In reality, the manic is not richer in ideas, but poorer; not stronger, but more reckless.

The author then draws a clear boundary between illness on the one hand and healthy giftedness on the other, which strongly invites criticism. We too will distance ourselves as much as possible from this conclusion; we would deny that someone in our day could draw it without it having a purely speculative, not to mention a “lyrical” basis: In itself, genius is what it has always been, an approach to the development of the human race, a step forward toward a higher typus. What is still unusual in the present will become normal in the future; the genius of today will be the normal human of tomorrow.

– The author seems to forget that there is also a “yesterday.” a Reference to Virgil’s warning in the context of the Trojan horse in Aeneid, II, 49: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes [Beware of Danaans (Greeks) bearing gifts].” a Gesamtvorstellung (Ger.).

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Our remaining quotations must be reserved for Hermann Oppenheim, “Gibt es auch eine psychopathische Höherwertigkeit? [Is there also a psychopathic superiority?]” in Neurologisches Zentralblatt [Neurological Central Journal] 1917. Oppenheim begins by referring to other authors. Forel, (“Übergangsformen zwischen Geistesstörung und geistige Gesundheit [Transitional Forms between Mental Disorder and Mental Health]” in Corresp. f. Schweizer Ärzte [Corresp. to Swiss Doctors], 1890 nr. 8 A)55 states (Oppenh. p. 772): “Even goodness can become pathological, abnormal. One can see people who through unhealthy conscience and unhealthy desire for sacrifice not only torment and destroy themselves, but even torment the objects of their excessive care.” Oppenheim adds: “He talks about those who always want the good, but do the bad.” “Koch (Abnorme Charaktere [Abnormal Characters], Wiesbaden 1900)56 stresses that many psychopathic inferiors rise above others, showing refined sensitivity and energetic drive. He also concedes that noble characters appear among them.” With regard to genius, Oppenheim refers to Pelman. Strohmeyer (Vorlesungen über die Psychopathie des Kindesalters [Lectures on the Psychopathy of Childhood], Tübingen 1910),57 Anton (“Gefährliche Menschentypen [Dangerous Human Types],” Psychiatr. Vorträge f. Ärzte [Psychiatr. Lectures for Doctors], Berlin 1914),58 and Hoche (Die Grenzen der geistigen Gesundheit [The Limits of Mental Health], Halle 1903)59 express themselves similarly (p. 773), after which Oppenheim himself says: Thus, we find in almost all authors the admission that exceptional giftedness, especially in certain areas, and similarly strong development of the emotional life, can be associated with psychopathy. – But it is the prevailing notion that even then it is always about there being something imperfect, disproportionate, a defect in the distribution and equilibrium of the mental life, – that the advantages are offset and obscured by deficiencies and inadequacies in other areas (thus in Hoche, op. cit.).

Here Oppenheim lays out his new problem: “Nowhere do I find mentioned the question whether, as opposed to psychopathic inferiority, there is also a higher worth that has its roots in psychopathy, or whether there are characters in which dignity and psychopathy have the same source.” The author himself 55 56 57 58 59

Missing from Univ. Lib. Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 5. Missing from Univ. Lib. Missing from Univ. Lib. Missing from Univ. Lib.

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answers in the affirmative based on some of the cases described, taken from his own clinical material, where the worth is either moral (qualitative), or intellectual (quantitative), or emotional (qualitative-quantitative), and where the pathological feature (depression, etc.) has no consequences for the biological-social welfare of the patient. As valuable properties are mentioned compassion, altruism, gratitude, justice, objectivity, conscientiousness, sense of responsibility, “increased emotional life of a distinctly altruistic character.” Oppenheim stresses that the accompanying depression states have a certain external resemblance to melancholy but must not be confused with it. Concerning one patient he reports: As a cause of his depression he describes the war with all its horrors, the destruction of so many human lives and cultural values, the hatred …. Everything he says makes good sense. There is no indication of any unhealthy limitations in his thinking, though he must be counted among the pessimists [!]. He feels it the way the majority of the deeper ones feel it, only in increased measure. Also, the fact that he is often unable to defend himself against a feeling of despair, and at such moments has longed for death, can be derived from the strong reaction to the events of the time.

§ 42. Comment. Own conclusions The author, however, gives no evidence that the patient’s (the sufferer’s) depression does not have pathological sources. But here it depends on where the burden of proof lies. Should one say that an unusual reaction may be considered normal-psychologically justified (healthy) unless the contrary is proven, or should it be considered pathological until proven to be healthy? In both cases it becomes a practical judgment. Here one again encounters the problems associated with the distinction between sick and healthy, and between the healing of a disease and the patient’s abandonment of theoretical views he had while he was ill. Do all the unusual reactions that can be observed during the disease also have to be of a diseased nature, or is the simultaneity of the disease and the theoretical views merely a necessary but not sufficient criterion of the pathological nature of the views? One is at risk of calling the reaction pathological because it arises from an assumed pathological state, while the state is once again determined by means of the reactions. A test of a certain value with respect to the durability of the patient’s rationalization (that he is himself in the best faith is not enough) would be whether one could observe in him the effects of an honorable peace settlement with

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mutual reparations, etc. so that he again had reason to “believe in humanity” (Case III of Oppenheim). Would all then be well, apart from the painful memory, which time would eventually round off to a mild melancholy, to an affective value? But he is not inclined to accept the war as the sole and complete cause. Even if the psychiatrist does not wish to look at the patient with a gaze sharpened by the suspicion of psychopathic or neuropathic causes, it will still be based on “general human knowledge” to assume that “the war for the sensitive and culturally conscious personality” means something more than the actual destruction, that it is an exponent of something unsatisfactory in the condition of humanity in general. It is conceivable that the war has actualized a metaphysical need in the patient. But whether one takes this assumption as the basis or one joins Oppenheim’s view, that is, accepting the patient’s explanation, in each case the assumption is that the reaction is abnormal only in its appearance, its quantity, but at the same time is psychologically normal in its origin; in other words, that it must be regarded as real-adapted to the given conditions. From this admission, however, the step is not far to recognizing the possibility that a despair over human history and conditions in general can be normal-psychologically justified and not express flight from life and powerlessness, but a mental addition. An (emotional) depression and an (intellectual) pessimism on the basis of humanity’s historical misery, however, lose their basis as the evils are overcome and thereby reveal themselves as deficit phenomena or error-fixedness. In principle, nothing prevents imagining most of Schopenhauer’s, Hartmann’s, and Leopardi’s “evils” cleared away and the impact of the remaining on the general well-being reduced to a minimum – although the practical difficulties appear to be considerable. It is first a metaphysical value pessimism that deprives its bearer of all the gifts of comfort and at the same time presupposes a maximum of recognition pressure and moral sensitivity. In this area “historical progress” shows no improvement; the metaphysical value requirement is not affected by new social orientations and technical triumphs. By reducing the “human qualities” of the race in favor of primitive and impersonal ones, one could conceive of an approximation toward the happiness which the aforementioned pessimistic philosophers consider unattainable. But this happiness has nothing to do with what one imagines as the mission of culture when one has metaphysical expectations for it. “Human qualities” – by this vague expression I am thinking here especially of the surplus of autotelic-metaphysical consciousness with its violent demand

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for confirmation, the urge for expansion and interest contact, meaning, and interconnection, thus the will to shape not only houses and landscapes, but the entire universe according to human ideals, radiating eternity and infinity with love and spirit. But are these ideals, the crown and curse of humankind, then something else and more than a little compulsion and a little surrogate, a little fruit of upbringing and a little phenomenon of the age, a little fin de sièclea and a little affectation – in short, something one can and should for the sake of comfort and utility get rid of the sooner the better? In other words, is the “cultural-pathological paradox” – at this point we are all a bit “psychopathic” – a specific and changeable human phenomenon, or can it be said to be biologically legitimized by analogies from “lower” life forms?

§ 43. Parallels from the animal kingdom If for this purpose one places on one hand cultural excellence as synonymous with individual extremes within the species characteristics, the species specialty (flight, gnawing, digging, dam-building, etc.), and on the other hand places biological inferiority as equal to weakness of life in the given environment, then it should not turn out to be difficult to find an illustrative example from the animal world. After all, we have already been in contact with two: the dog that prefers the spoiled food it has sniffed out itself, and the giant deer that is broken down by the splendor of its antlers. But these examples are not so good for further investigation. Under no circumstances can there be any complete analogy to be found because the situations of animals and humans are far too different; what is sought is simply a case where there is a fixedness or unfolding tendency that is perceived by the animal as valuable, or better yet, central and pleasurable, but proves itself as indeed biologically harmful, and therefore strikes with resistance or counterimpulses in the animal’s consciousness. The kinds of examples that apply here can be graphically represented by a common diagram. A variation scale AB runs from autotelic high value (highest desirability) at A to low value (detestable) at B. Another scale CD runs from immediate death at C to greatest biological benefit at D. The scales run parallel from A and C to B and D. The result of the organism’s choosing and rejecting agency is the line EF which moves simultaneously on both scales. a end of a century (Fr.) (referring especially to the end of the 19th century).

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FIGURE 10: Relationship between fixedness or unfolding tendency and biological harm. AB is a variation scale running from autotelic high value at A to low value at B. CD is a variation scale running from immediate death at C to greatest biological benefit at D. EF represents the result of the organism’s choosing and rejecting agency which moves simultaneously on both scales.

By now arranging the various factors according to the selected case, one can push the test animal’s willingness to adapt toward AC or BD respectively. A number of examples are thus available. We choose the following: A ship that has some cats on board is abandoned by the crew and beaches on a deserted island, after which the cats leap ashore. The island’s only inhabitants are some jumping, but inedible beetles, so it looks as if the fate of the cats is sealed. Then one finds that the muddy clay of the beach contains plump and tasty clams that are easy to open. From the autotelic viewpoint, it is far less enticing for the cats to dig in the clay than to make tiger leaps on the land beetles; the latter is a life worthy of a cat. Choosing this is the expression of an idealistic posture toward life – dignified and at the same time fatal. The life-giving, on the other hand, is a different, detestable pursuit to which no decent cat will stoop. The individuals who most excellently represent the cat form in its unique way of life will have the most difficulty in participating in the shell-digging and are therefore biologically inferior under the given conditions. Others, on the other hand, with greater indifference to a cat-like standard, will lie in the mud all day and simply gorge themselves and breed. Periodically they raise a muddy glance and squint toward the snobs on land; scorn and satire alternate with glowing hatred because the land cats remind them of their betrayal of the species’ most precious property. Optimism emerges in due course to cover the guilt and reproach, and they eventually do not notice these scruples at all, nor are they for cats to count. Soon they will have to build up their defenses further; the land cats are called neurotics and psychopaths – harsh words that stimulate the muddy colony’s self-esteem. The analyst, sent up from the beach, notes a “resistance to recovery” and diagnoses water fears. The water cats have

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triumphed, but the others have also found the account correct, and acknowledged it because they knew what was behind it. The hunting cats, however, have become pessimists, not because of those evils on which the others place the greatest weight, injury and hunger, breathlessness and coldness, but because they have found themselves destined for a world that has no regard for the sacred formula in their hearts. In this realization, they have stopped propagating. Soon, however, prophets arise among them and teach them the art of hope: Once upon a time, we all came from a land where what we captured with our noble hunting art could also be eaten and digested. But many of us were evil and would not cultivate our agility and power, which is why the ship was stranded. Now doom is waiting for the faithful, but when we are dead a new ship will come and fetch those who have not given up. And then all the others will die and never be picked up. But hunger tore them in the gut and a tremendous cry arose. And they complained in many keys, saying: Two souls live, alas, in our breasts.a And many became traitors and went into the mud and ate their fill; but others repented at the prophet’s words and ascended ashore, and washed their fur, and prepared themselves for the great journey. The proudest joined together and declared that it was the duty of every honorable cat to die rather than sell its soul for a mere clam. And when the leader noticed that his powers were ebbing, he got up on a stump and died what is called a tragic-heroic death. And many followed his example because they could not become comfortable with useful resignation; they became faithful to the highest goal of the cat form even as they understood the prophet’s consolation and the despair harbored in his heart. But most of the members from both camps became slaves of eternal doubt, dividing their time between restless satiety and asceticism with consuming privation. The relief of getting rid of the aristocrats was of course great; but the new ideal, to become one with the crabs, could not even be realized.

a Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in unserer Brust (Ger.). Reference to Goethe’s Faust I, II. “Before the City Gate,” Vers. 1112–1117.

·6· REAL SOLUTION AND SURROGATE

§ 44. Introduction The previous investigations have shown that the tasks of the human interest struggle can be gathered into two large groups. One is related to the choice of posture and the security of reaction, that is, to the fixedness condition in the organism, while the other is associated with the sum of abilities relative to given tasks, that is, with quantitative disparities. The roots of both have meaning problems, of which in particular the question of the meaning of existence as a whole has far-reaching significance; these problems are related to the quality of the object. While the individual is in the process of solving a problem, it is subject to strong and diverse mental movements on which, as a rule, the fate of the enterprise depends. If there is the prospect of good fortune, hope arises, trust, expectation; if it looks hopeless, anxiety is stirred up, angst, depression. Often the joy of the function itself is so strong that the course becomes immaterial; this joy can rise to ecstasy, a state that in many cases is the all-powerful autotelic life goal. When the problem is solved, the organism rests; the functional cycle has come to an end; the ability is finally triggered and confirmed.

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If the difficulties are not overcome, the front of interest is condemned to suffer harm. There is then a state of reduced well-being that ranges from the slightest displeasure to the experience of an all-consuming catastrophe. Chapter Seven deals with catastrophes, while the present one deals with the possibilities of catastrophe solution, as far as such is in the power of the subject. The fact that an unfavorable situation can be changed and the threatened values saved by the play of coincidence is something that does not need to be more clearly explained here. It is the calculated struggle for a good outcome that is the object of inquiry.

§ 45. Real and pseudo-solutions. Concepts The multitude of solution types can be arranged in two large groups – the real and the pseudo-solution groups. And since solutions are brought about through a posture (behavior), one can also talk about real and pseudo-postures. Posture and solution may coincide, but they do not have to. If one looks for a positive designation for the pseudo-solutions, words such as imaginary or imagined, illusory, fictional, suggestive, pseudo-, apparent, and surrogate solutions can be used. The names indicate different properties of pseudo-solutions and will be used according to the nuances of each case. Designations such as indirect, simulated, etc., are also considered. On what basis is it possible to make such a division? A basic example will provide a starting point. During the World War, “surrogates” were substituted for food and beverages. The word surrogate then signified a low quality, but not only that. No one would think of calling roasted soybeans a surrogate if coffee had been unknown. What is crucial in this is that the surrogate is distributed as, acts as, has pretensions to the “genuine commodity.” Roasted food soybeans are not themselves inherently surrogate, but soybean coffee is a surrogate for coffee. Although this relationship is simple and obvious enough, it is stated nonetheless because it will serve as a guide below. Thinking in a daydream, for example, is in itself real enough; but if one treats the triumphs one has celebrated in the imagination as if they had occurred in one’s outward, historical life, building one’s feelings of self-worth upon them, and acting with claims of experience, then there is reason to speak of surrogacy. On the other hand, intensity or durability are not in themselves useful criteria; the pseudo-solutions are often the superior ones in both respects.

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It must be admitted that the characteristics depend to some extent on an estimate. This applies to at least the same extent when seeking a positive determination of the real posture. It helps little if one inserts words like “actual,” “true,” “direct,” “appropriate,” or other similar terms instead of real, although these designations may provide support during the practical application of the distinction. In a given case, however, it is possible to designate a posture as real when it is related to such things as the nature of an organ (eating as opposed to a nutrient enema, etc.), or in agreement with what has traditionally and conventionally been designated as appropriate and normal. Disagreements can arise: what one calls a real solution another thinks he or she can see through, etc. Frequently one will also come across cases where one has doubts concerning which group a particular posture should belong to (assuming that the question is of any importance at all); among other things, it may be difficult to draw the boundary between the good surrogate and the real satisfaction. The fact that principled objections can be made to the durability of the distinction and to the limitations of its practical application need not mean that it loses its value for an examination of the tragic. In support of the whole approach, it can be stated that psychology60 and, above all, psychoanalysis61 are based on such a dichotomy, just as the layperson operates with it on a daily basis. The tension between the two types of posture is also strong and constantly noticeable in perhaps every person’s life, both individually and as a member of society.

§ 46. Surrogate posture The surrogate posture has the same basic intention as the real one, to secure the values in the various domains; these values are themselves of a partly fictional, partly real nature. It is therefore close to perceiving the fictional values, together with the struggle to acquire and retain them, as a separate front of interest, which can then either be arranged across the four fronts we have operated with so far or be understood as a supplement to each. The bearer of the fictional posture does not have to be aware of its fictional nature, but one can be. If one panics because of the tension between the desirable-real and the necessary-fictional, one will endeavor to equip one’s mental mimicry with all the hallmarks of reality; in particular, one will feel 60 See, e.g., Harald Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology], Oslo 1927 p. 266 ff. 61 Cf. the concept “Ersatzbefriedigung [replacement satisfaction]” in Freud’s neurosis doctrine.

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the urge to do so in a social environment where the fictional posture (possibly posture fragment) is assessed significantly lower than the real. Even if no direct exposure takes place, a suspicion may arise and be supported by accompanying circumstances. Features such as “nervousness” of various kinds can reveal to a knowledgeable or sharp observer a failure, a void, an underlying relationship that is hidden. The symptomatic features can be such that one could possibly end up with a secret insufficiency if one did not know that such relationships exist and that a triggering situation can bring what is in the background to light. The construction of posture layers in a person’s conscious and unconscious mental life is, as a rule, extremely complicated. (Insofar as we will later seek the tragic in poetry, it benefits us that the poet must make a choice. Possibilities are also limited in each case due to the loyalty one should observe to the poet’s own perception of his or her characters.) Possible cases of fictional posture layers in animals would hardly help to shed light on the condition of the human being for whom the associated psychology is specifically human. We will not, therefore, dwell on the question of whether such cases exist or whether animals have any preconditions for them to arise. In humans the fictional layers seem to be linked to the ability of a dual posture in the whole as appears in lies and deception, irony and dissimulation of all kinds. It is in the imagination and the related suggestibility that one must seek the root of the phenomena, along with unconscious mechanisms of unknown nature. With the help of these properties, a human being is able to behave as if the external or internal situation were different from that which reasonable experience (observation) says (the boundary is not always clear), as if it were more – or less – in line with one’s wants and needs. As a rule, the fictional posture is applied when real solution is above capacity or excluded for other reasons, when it is associated with discomfort, or is devalued as insufficient. Otherwise, the real solution has the advantage, especially since it ultimately releases the engaged mental content, actually ends the functional cycle, while in the fictitious solutions an unsatisfied residue may be left.62 The surrogate solutions have wide variation both in nature and importance; they range from the most innocent small scams in daily life to an all-encompassing deluded life system. There is reason to believe they can play a role in the tragic course. 62 Cf. H. Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology] p. 264 f.

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A thorough distinction between posture types and solution types would have been desirable, but this has been abandoned as it would complicate the presentation to an excessive degree. In a given case one will nevertheless be aware of the difference, for example, where a fictional posture leads to a real result or vice versa. When trying to gain an overview of the whole field of surrogate postures, the best method is to divide them into four main fronts based on the previous division we have made with the fields of interest. There may also be other ways to arrange the material; the ability categories or the capacity and fixedness conditions could be used. Through a combination of the elements, all considerations will come into their own, and a schema is therefore drawn up. This must, by virtue of the earlier definitions, be regarded as exhaustive; however, we do not intend to claim in advance that both real and fictional solutions can occur in all situation types. This is something that is shown by closer examination of the individual cases. The elements fall into five groups: First group: I. II. III. IV. V.

Biological environment Social environment Autotelic environment Metaphysical environment Interfrontal and polyfrontal environment. Second group:

A. Sympathetic environment B. Indifferent environment C. Hostile (satanic) environment. Third group: α. β. γ. δ. ε. ζ.

Perception Intellect Memory Imagination Emotion Expression ability. Fourth group:

1. Under-equipment 2. Over-equipment

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Calculation gives us 576 monofrontal and 1,440 polyfrontal combinations. The reader will be spared a complete run-through of all variants. Some of the cases are of so much greater practical significance than others that they can be regarded as representative; through their treatment the reasoning will be sufficiently illuminated.

§ 47. Real solution associated with deficit in general (1 a) This unsustainable state is eliminated by increasing the ability or reducing the demand, or both in unison, cf. § 17. The same is achieved in other cases by changing the environment, a resort which, however, when it takes the form of flight, can stand close to the surrogate. With regard to increase in ability, it is worth noting that some of the human ability categories, such as physical strength and memory, can be consciously developed through exercise and training, while this is the case to a lesser degree or not at all in others (emotional life, imagination, intellect). Another means is compensation; this consists in replacing the deficient ability with another, so that one still asserts oneself through to the overall result. The boundary of surrogacy is unclear. If the under-equipment is located in a single sense, it may happen that the organism itself initiates a compensation; other senses develop correspondingly stronger and indirectly take over part of the function of the impaired ability (sense proxy). With the help of technical imagination, one can allow the forces of nature to do the work for which one does not have the power oneself due to physical weakness; in the same way, other people’s abilities can replace one’s own – one goes from being an executive to being a directing agent. Memory is supported through notes, the law of corruptibility is counteracted by transferring the transient form to resistant material, the spirit seeks refuge in the mineral. Division of labor is a form of social symbiosis by which one another’s

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one-sided qualifications are mutually beneficial. One can also increase one’s power through association. A peculiar case exists when one organism is the object of another organism’s effort, or when two organisms are both objects and hostile to each other (battle). The inferior’s chance then lies in transferring the fight to an arena where it is superior to the opposing party, for example, negotiation or cunning. Delay is a partial real solution.

§ 48. Deficit. Surrogate solution (1 b) A widespread form of fictional offsetting of a deficit consists in devaluing the object in question or the entire environment (projection). A devaluing can also be actually justified, but this presupposes a surplus. This tactic is known from the fable of the fox and the grapes. It rests on a rationalization of the abandonment of intention, so that when criticism is kept down, one comes away with self-esteem and possibly social sanction intact. Even the one who had ability to overflowing, one says to oneself, would have acted the same way in a situation like this, and the question of one’s own ability therefore loses all interest. A person in the fox’s place would – if the tactic succeeded – experience defeat only in the stomach and not in the soul as well. Even in starvation one is in a sense the master of the situation; one is greater than one’s fate because one has called down the catastrophe through an act of will; it enters into one’s plan and thus even signifies, as a result, a form of sanction (cf. Fr. Schiller’s ethics). A fellow human being’s cynical exposure of the whole mechanism can therefore lead to final and complete breakdown. This fraudulent motive finds its real territory in the social environment. If one’s surroundings are composed of people who have resorted in advance to devaluing one in order to assert themselves fictionally, one can use this as a real means. A form of the same maneuver with higher cultural value occurs when a person assumes a view of life that renders the lack of capacity irrelevant: one is like a reed in the fraudster’s hand, but fortunately there is a Nemesis one had almost forgotten, and at least a retaliation hereafter – so just wait. Cf. scripture: the last will be the first. Correction through imagination for unsatisfactory equipment or conditions can take different forms, some of which the linguistic tradition has gathered under the term illusion. The transition from wish to belief happens easily in the human; even those who demand honesty of themselves may be deceived in this way. By virtue of the illusion, one is – in one’s own imagination – up

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to the demands of the outside world. Closely related to illusion is a rewriting of the relationship with the environment, and from this again the transition to interpretation is imperceptible. Even with the reality conditioned, affective life plays into the interpretation of the “given impressions”; beyond a certain limit, one interpretation cannot claim greater real justification than the other. In front of a Stone Age grave where only the teeth are left, the optimist will enthusiastically exclaim: The smile can never die! But even the pessimist will find one’s view of life confirmed: The gnashing of teeth is the only thing that defies the law of corruptibility. Compensation and overcompensation are also familiar and treasured surrogate means,63 both of which can have real application. The first was mentioned in § 47: one claims to have a different skill than the one with which one fell short. In overcompensation, one simulates a surplus precisely in the area where one is insufficient; the fearful projects a proud being. The process can also take place unconsciously: fear turns into recklessness. A variant: Whoever cannot assert oneself in one forum takes it up excessively in another; the henpecked husband becomes an iron fist in the office. The use of surrogates like these sometimes requires a certain kind of environment, for example, one in which the under-equipped can establish contact with interests. Here, as everywhere, whether one is dealing with a sympathetic, indifferent, or hostile-satanic outside world plays a significant role in the interest struggle. Hope is a posture that has features in common with both rationalization and illusion, yet it is distinctive enough to form its own type. In the most diverse species of dissatisfaction, hope plays a role that is difficult to overestimate. As a first approximation, it can be described as a pleasurable expectation of uncertain future events. Hope can be rationalized or, said differently, the mere desire can be hardened into a hope by a reflection like the following: It has not yet been proved that the unborn history cannot bring states that match my wishes better than the present ones. But in principle hope has nothing to do with the likelihood that the long-awaited conditions (or events) will occur. It is a blind attitude, a kind of mental expression movement of a desire. Nevertheless, it will naturally be strengthened or weakened as it is based on real calculation or lacks its basis in the empirically possible and refers to pure self-suggestion. Hope, which on the one hand is an indispensable stimulus even for the most honest nature, can on the other hand have a dissolving effect on both the 63 Cf. Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology] p. 279 f.

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character and the individual’s external establishment in existence. Thereby the individual passively and constantly looks forward to the possibility that luck, that is, the unexpected occurrence of favorable external coincidences, will solve one’s problems, rather than putting one’s ability under the given conditions and trying to exploit them or force them at will. Metaphysical hope stands in a special position, which is why it is mentioned in a different context. Several of the emergency strategies discussed here also apply to difficulties of a different nature than those associated with deficit. The same is true of sublimation, which has its principal use in surplus, and which perhaps may benefit from a well-developed ability even when it is to serve in the field at hand. The deficit-afflicted person makes, for example, one’s sense of inferiority the object of an ability that one possesses to a sufficient, perhaps an excellent degree. Sublimation borders on compensation on this edge. One writes a mourning play about nature’s inadequate stepchild; one raises an emotional desert voice and makes a charge against society; one’s name is on everyone’s lips. One triumphs as a philosopher when one is stranded as an eroticist; the suffering has forced one to take up questions that the successful leaves behind. A kind of sublimation akin to compensation also occurs when one gives up and claims comfort in the pleasures of martyrdom. However, the possibility of real justification must not be missed here (introverted, meditative type).

§ 49. Surplus state. Real Solution (2 a) Surplus can be present without causing difficulties of any kind; on the contrary, it gives its bearer a sense of security, pride, and power. If it is distressing, one can seek out and conquer a more difficult object and thereby gain increased sanction. Downsizing or other reductions of ability are also possible, but only as long as the bearer does not experience this as an indignity or a flight; in this case the way out becomes a substitute. What about the possibility of ability regulation in general? Like higher animals, the human cannot live “fully open” at all times; one cannot seek a constant maximum of action or reception, if one’s life is to last. The nature and degree of the output are adapted to the task, and the nature and degree of the reception are regulated as far as possible according to the needs or what is sustainable in the moment, all in the service of life preservation. This is real adaptation; one isolates oneself against impressions that are too strong (stimulus protection) and refrains from excessive action because it is pointless.

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However, it sometimes happens that a person feels obliged to depart from this rule of adaptation; one uses one’s regulatory ability for abiological purposes. An autotelic or heterotelic imperative breaks in and requires a maximum (or a minimum) realization (quantitative demand). If the result of the motive struggle in this case is that the individual regulates – based on motives which he or she considers inferior to the relevant imperative – “slinking away” in other words, then this posture must be regarded as surrogate, if it can be regarded as a solution to the conflict at all. The ideal imperative is repressed. On the other hand, if one acts in accordance with the requirements of the ideal, then the biological and low-autotelic impulses are repressed. We will return to this matter during the discussion of error-fixedness and interfrontal conflicts of interest. Troublesome surplus in sensation (pain) can sometimes be “drowned out” by exposing oneself to a powerful competing reception; painful memories are rendered harmless by “diversion” and isolation; the same is true of an untimely exploding emotional storm. The object distress caused by a surplus of ability is best addressed in a later connection.

§ 50. Under-fixedness (3) The general real fixing work lies mainly in the intentional and conscious sides of character formation, striving to find a posture style on the basis of impressions and trials (empirical fixedness). The experiential establishment of habits has a prerequisite in the immutability of things; one “cell” of security after another is inserted into the subject’s worldview and form of posture, one “ectoplasmic body” of finally settled relation problems after another. In the child, one can easily witness such a piecemeal construction of a reliable arrangement. “If I do such and such, then it goes well.” Security devices of this kind can be called real anchors; the image is taken from shipping: the ship is fixed so as not to begin drifting and fall back to just anywhere. The results of experience interact in different ways with the inherited fixedness posture. In the extension of the more practical character formation, which is particularly aimed at biological-social and partly at autotelic reaction security, is found the preparation of a view of life as a general posture determinant, most often on a metaphysical basis (cf. § 55 ff.). One of the difficulties of the real justification of the view of life is that unconscious desires arise when interpreting the experience material. The capricious and liquid personality, for which the fixedness work has failed, or which shows no interest in character formation at all, may, to a certain extent, evade the consequences of its inconstancy by joining groups where

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such qualities are met with recognition (certain kinds of artist circles, “bohemians”). Anyone who lacks the ability to fight through one’s fixedness struggle alone can seek support from mentors, authorities, and pioneers of various kinds; one imitates or “identifies” with “the great person.” In the desire for fixedness there will usually be an admiration for the “hero’s” purely quantitative greatness. In hero worship, as so often otherwise, real and imaginary patterns of fixedness intertwine with each other to inseparability. “Follower” means, for example, that one’s idol has come closer to a general life solution; the idol has pointed to the “right” object and the “right” posture for the noblest readiness of one’s imitators. One has sensed the sanction in the last heights reached before plummeting, precisely because it was this height reached and not any other. It is above all the seeking of the ideal self that in hero worship finds a lamp for its foot. Faith in the leader’s “path” can bear characteristics of imaginary anchoring. The meaning of this expression will be clear after the foregoing. It signifies a presupposition, a belief, a conviction in the bearer that something in the environment, something in the individual itself, some connection or other, relates to such and such, and that this “absolutely certain” state of things has significance as a guarantee, as a basis for one’s choice of posture in the particular or general. This applies to all anchors. The fact that the belief can be “crazy” in an “objective” trial of others without thereby losing its subjective value to the bearer is expressed by the adjective imaginary. Real anchoring, on the other hand, can be “verified.” Often an imaginary anchoring has its origin in a real anchoring that has been thinned out more and more until the foundation is completely gone. Related problems can also arise because the outside world has too little constancy. Either one must locate or constitute certain unchangeable features in all the floating and real anchors here, or else try to cleanly adjust one’s own needs according to the changing conditions. For the child, the home often has a significant value as a real anchor; all the people there are known and safe, and the child may be received with kindness everywhere because his or her father is an esteemed and significant man in the village or small town. When the young person goes out into the world and faces adversity and feels lonely and alien, one still has a refuge in the consciousness of belonging to a place where someone thinks carefully about one and remembers one’s existence and where one is received with joy when one returns. This anchoring can be exposed as imaginary if, for example, the emigrant actually comes back after a long time.

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Meanwhile everything has changed: the old friends have died or moved, the houses are new, the tone is different, and one’s own name is forgotten. The anchor cracks; there follows a crisis of depression and uncertainty until one slowly begins to lay the foundations for a new one, or becomes comfortable with retreating to one’s reserves. Like the real, the field of imaginary anchors is also “infinitely” large both in number and in kinds. Overview of the individual’s anchoring complex becomes easier in that one’s anchors can in many cases be arranged according to the value they have for one’s overall well-being; some can be separated out as main anchors, while others are of minor importance. There are also a lot of imaginings that do not have the character of anchors; they are not a guarantee of any real interest in the subject; they do not play a central role in one’s overall sense of life; they are not beams and stones in one’s image of one’s own existence. The duration should in principle be immaterial, but in practice it can be treated as a sign. Here as everywhere: the concepts have hazy outlines. We have encountered anchors previously, during the mention of deficit surrogates, but without anticipating the name. There we used the term illusion; an anchor, however, is a narrower concept. It may be an illusion that I am descended from Harald,a but it is an anchor only when I sufficiently base my beliefs on this conviction, when I let it carry my self-esteem and my social pretensions; I comfort myself with it when something goes awry. Some prefer to base their security of life on real anchors (empirically tested assumptions), while others – including the so-called neurotics – mainly take refuge in the fictional. A very unusual anchoring can arouse suspicion of mental abnormality or mental illness. There is hardly any basis of testing other than “normal judgment”; it therefore becomes difficult to describe an anchor as real or not real in and of itself. (The same is true for the anchor’s antipode, the fear that is believed to be “absolutely certain.”) The following examples of anchoring notions can according to circumstances be both real and imaginary: – I am demonic (perceived by Relling-Ibsen as imaginary, “life lie”). – I am an English citizen, a real Østerdøl,b a daughter of the sea, a son of the mountains, a peculiar type (a fictional anchoring of this kind can arise when it is based on a remark that actually applied to someone else). – I can never become poor (financially), never get something like tuberculosis; these kinds of things cannot happen to us (revolution and the like). a Harald Fairhair, the traditional first King of Norway. b a person from Østerdalen, Norway.

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– I am an old courter of women, old sailor, old cavalryman, old Arctic seaman (one has, for example, visited Spitsbergen as a photographer and is now an expert in all Arctic affairs, semi-real anchoring). – There is a meaning to everything that happens. Strong emphasis on imagination causes the naive believer’s notion that “today is Sunday all over the world” (Christmas, Easter, indeed even May 17a are perceived as cosmic realities; it is Christmas). The same can be said of Emperor Wilhelm II’s perception of his own position; after the revolution in 1918 he should have stated: How could it be in my power to abdicate; I am after all king and emperor by the grace of God. Anchoring is an important part of the human interest struggle; it is also richly represented in all kinds of beautiful literature – “every inch a king!” (King Lear). In the last two examples the royalist will be able to see something real more easily than the republican. Interesting in this regard is the case in Bjørnson’s The King where the protagonist is said to be forced to anchor his people. The individual may be more or less dependent on one’s anchors, have a greater or lesser need for fixedness and security, brood over or squander one’s anchoring goods. Almost any anchor can act as the main anchor in a given case, but not all can be called common. One might dare say that those that satisfy the metaphysical need most easily become the central and most precious. The breakdown of the more peripheral anchors takes place daily in most people’s lives (disappointments, failures) without leading to anything but a transient state of worsened mood. The closer they are to the foundation of the structure, the more important it is that they hold, all the more so as a plurality of anchors are interconnected in complicated structures where one part rests on another. A crack here can lead to mental destruction and death by one’s own hand. That on which the whole of one’s will to live and personal edifice was built has collapsed, and the biological imperative alone is not enough to justify continuation. One therefore constantly sees people defending their main anchors with a passion and a relentlessness in argumentation that to excess betrays the affective charge. At the same time, they are supported by isolating themselves from dissolving criticism from the outside or in their own thought life. This direct defense is replaced by an indirect one when the anchoring is such that one does not want to reveal it, a Norwegian Constitution Day.

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for example, for fear of being ridiculed; one then has a secret anchor. In this case one processes what concerns the anchoring by way of detours, often by very complicated ones. A main anchor, like other anchors, can also cease to exist in another way, namely by being replaced by a new one. The replacement may also be accompanied by a state of crisis, but when successful, catastrophe is avoided. Most people must sooner or later replace some of the anchors they had as children, both real and imaginary: that the parents are a refuge in all circumstances, that they are never wrong, that they provide for everything and take responsibility for everything, that if you are simply polite and upright everything will go well. There are those who cannot handle this replacement, which biological-social considerations demand; they do not have the courage or power to give up their old “life values,” or they do not think it is right to give them up; they may consider them “sacred.” Their fate then is to fight for something that does not have “the right to live,” but which for them is perhaps the highest, be it an overt or secret anchor, with all the sufferings and problems that such a posture brings. The much written about “infantile fixation” is an example of such a condition. Here the unconscious often plays a major role, and the theme belongs to the field of psychoanalysis; one of the tasks of analytic treatment is precisely that of helping the patient complete the transition from (unconscious) infantile “anchors” (the word has a slightly different meaning here) to real or socially sanctioned imaginary anchors “for adults.” In the course of their lives almost all people will have to go through a number of different anchoring states, between which there is an interregnum of posturelessness and doubt. In many people, a purely rhythmic regularity of anchor-seeking and anchor-fleeing develops here. In the first the need for fixedness applies most strongly (conservative attitude), but when one has incorporated a life image and begins to feel stable, the critical abilities and the urge for variation, for other perspectives and new forms of apperception, awaken to freedom. This psychological peculiarity has parallels in the purely biological life: The travel-weary and storm-stricken wanderer has no higher goal than finding a little shack, where one may not be able to take a single step, but where one can rest and fall asleep knowing where one is on the earth. How gladly one sacrifices one’s freedom of movement for the awareness that the walls of the cabin protect one from so many unpleasant surprises. But soon one is saved and comforted in mind and body, and the shack, which was recently a longawaited refuge, now appears to one as an abominable prison; perhaps the roof is much leakier and more dilapidated than one was aware in the initial joy of

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having come home. And now one again gives up its dubious benefits for new pursuits, new joys, and new dangers. This schema is repeated in many areas of life, including with great clarity in political life. A variant of these conditions is also found in the one who, through the changing states, maintains the demand for continuity, growth, and progression, for example, the one who works forward toward increasingly secure, ever broader, and deeper underpinnings of life. After a number of periods of varying standpoints (note the word) and others in turn of rich and painful “liberation” (i.e., the eradication of certain conscious “collective” forms of anchoring), one arrives at the conviction that one must now finally establish oneself and dismiss new criticism in order to enjoy the result in peace; one consolidates for reasons of “mental hygiene.” This decision may have a certain mark of real solution if it is substantiated by as much objective examination as one can “reasonably demand” of a human being in the circumstances and within the time and power one has at one’s disposal. If the seeker were now to plunge into a new state of dissolution in order to pursue a standpoint on an even deeper and broader basis, it might be probable or obvious that one would no longer be able to succeed – owing to failing forces or “nervous breakdown.” One would end one’s life in the maelstrom of unfixedness without land in sight. The struggle for a lifeview can be represented here in the image of a swimmer who has gone into an immense, perhaps an unlimited body of water as one’s means. Near land it is close between the islets (the fixed points), but as one gets closer to the horizon the distance becomes ever greater, and finally one has the choice between staying where one is or throwing oneself out again without the prospect of finding land anymore. Illustrative parallels can also be drawn from mountain climbing; the word anchor even occurs in alpine jargon. Most of the anchoring cases we have seen thus far have been of an individual nature in the sense that they had their basis, their raison d’être in the individual’s heritage and experience, in one’s subjectively determined needs. Also, the notions and values that may with advantage be called collective we only perceive as a side of individual life; according to our terminology they form part of the individual’s social life front. The term individual is roughly based on the biological “principium individuationis,” the principle of individuation, on the completed functional unit of the organism as opposed to the slime and the inorganic mass. Anyone who wishes to see in the concept of “the collective” anything more than a mere abstraction must therefore customize the definition of the individual in an arbitrary way with the desired result in mind. It is the

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individuals who carry the collective impulses, and in given cases they can cut them off completely. Where “the collective” really has the individual in its violence, the structure is such that either the collective impulses in the individual are sufficiently strong, or through external means they are forced upon one by other individuals who are the bearers of a collective impulse. What characterizes then the collective anchors as opposed to the individual ones is nothing more than that they are common to a sufficient number of people and that their value to the individual may depend precisely on their value to others, depending on their immediate social course. “Interindividual” is therefore a more apt term. Religious anchors belong to this group. Since the need to be covered by such a belief is fairly similar among a large number of people, it makes sense that a good proposal gains general recognition and is handed down from generation to generation. But here too anchor-seeking and anchor-fleeing tendencies apply alternately: liberal periods are replaced with conservative (orthodox) ones. The change in time is supplemented by a difference in space: The political and religious society consists of groups that are at different points in the anchoring-dynamic spiral or pendulum curve. Not every fairly common view or convention is an anchor, as mentioned earlier. They only become so by people individually acquiring them, internalizing them, building their lives on them, becoming dependent on them, and experiencing them as “truths.” There are such truths that, according to Ibsen, are only twenty years old. The cultural paradox, which took shape at the end of Chapter Five, meets us again here in a larger field. Biological regeneration sometimes necessitates a relaxation of criticism and a reduction of consciousness to a minimum that serves the collective-biological purpose. A people like an individual may have to take a “cultural pause” to strengthen the elementary basis, without which there is no life and therefore no culture. Many who are democrats in principle may recognize a temporary authoritarian policy on this basis. The formation of a new collective anchor as a positive factor, culminating in slogans, is supported by isolation mechanisms as the negative; in public life, this takes the form of censure. In a number of historical cases, an absolutist rule of government, when not based on the pure use of power, has shown this duality of positive and negative efforts, not least in the spiritual realm. Those in power have realized the importance of going through the lifeview in order to achieve a more lasting result; cf. the Roman Church in its struggle against “enlightenment” and reformation, the Holy Alliance, National Socialist Germany, and Soviet Russia. The agitatory and apologetic

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organs, teachers, press, etc., therefore, work hand in hand with the crude and mechanical external censorship. Often even in the very anchoring itself there is an apologetic or isolating element: for many Christians doubt itself is a sin. Cf. the ancient Indian dogma: The earth rests on an elephant. But, says the critic, what does the elephant stand on? On a turtle. Now it is intended that the interrogator should keep silent in shame, that one, for reasons of decency, that is, external causes, should declare oneself satisfied. Still, if one poses the fatal question about the turtle: firstly, one has embarrassed oneself socially; secondly, one deserves to be burned alive because one has touched the divine secrets. The replacement of collective anchors can also cause dangerous crises, not only by the external clash of power between preserving and dissolving groups, but perhaps even more by the general lack of fixed holding points that will quickly emerge, and the consequent susceptibility to influence and inability to resist destructive impulses. For many the undoing of the old anchoring leads to desperation and suicide, such as with German naval officers after the peace in 1918, with Chinese students after the revolution, and Austrian monarchists after their incorporation into Germany in 1938. The examples remind us that the anchors often cover an object need at the same time as the fixedness need, thereby giving rise to quantitative expansion in exchange for the sacrificed qualitative. An anchor can therefore be most strongly characterized sometimes by its object-forming, sometimes by its posture- or property-forming function. A cultural unity can be based on a more or less finished anchoring system, built over load-bearing beams, the fundamental cultural ideas. Such include: the idea of progress, the absolute value of enlightenment, the divine nature of the emperor, the honor of the nation, the mission of the race, and the promises of the “collective” human. The anchoring struggle can be represented in the image of a log driver running from one floating log to another. It is important that the new one is within reach when the old one is let go. Tradition, which seeks to build an enduring raft, is constantly threatened in its work by the rushing flood of new, historyless generations. There is much to suggest that the imaginary anchor is the most important fixedness surrogate. It is a panacea: with the help of the anchor the incompetent saves one’s self-esteem; for the under-fixed it solves the doubts concerning the course of action toward given objects and tells what is needed concerning the missing objects one needs to fit into one’s life-image. And for the overequipped, it allows a meaningful target of objectless masses of power.

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But there are also other emergency strategies for the lack of (constitutional) fixedness. In the casting of lots, for example, one establishes an imaginary law, which in turn attaches some importance to different colored stones. Besides giving unambiguous results, this method also has another advantage: it liberates the subject in some sense from the responsibility of decision-making, the outcome being determined by external coincidence. Admittedly, the decision seeker must first distribute the effects arbitrarily between the various stones or the numbers on the cube; in the latter case one can be anchored in the quantitative precedent of the six sides, which in itself does not assign it any particular alternative. In many cases of the drawing of lots, etc., one finds utilization of certain anchors in larger fictional systems. The boundaries between the various fictional means are vague and the combinations are numerous. If there is later use to describe the role of an imaginary system in a “tragic course,” one must analyze it based on the different kinds of psychological techniques used by the person. In order to overcome the new doubts that arise when the immediate doubts are resolved through arbitrary means, one often resorts to more far-reaching fictions, symbols, and mysticism. Regarding the choice between young ladies in one’s circle of acquaintances, 1 will refer to Miss Larsen, for she is a lonely “one,” 6 to Miss Nilsen, because she has “sex” appeal, etc. In this way one saves the form itself from the claws of doubt. There is absolutely nothing “real” that speaks for letting 6 refer to Miss Larsen. Often tradition provides the basis for a formula or rule. At a “higher” level we find the tactics of astrology, where the position of the stars is decisive for practical decisions, cf. oracles. Games of chance invented to serve metaphysical needs will be mentioned later. As a modification of the drawing of lots, one can consider another way out of the torments of uncertainty, namely to add an external necessity in one’s life toward which one must take a serving position. Such a “health cure of limitation” can be implemented in many ways. Examples: The aesthete, who is going crazy from being “tossed by the waves,” decides to take a permanent job. The depressed wreck enters the Foreign Legion. The rich man, who no longer knows what to invent, begins a journey of discovery and is thereby forced to concentrate on simple and obvious tasks, all of which give full meaning by virtue of self-preservation and the “scientific” task. For the ordinary citizen, hiking, card games, etc., do the same; these pursuits certainly serve as “diversion” (mental variation and distraction from daily work), but at the same time, or for a different one, they equally satisfy the need for concentration, for a reduction in the circle of equal “operation carriers.” Climbers,

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chess players, and polar explorers talk about the peace of concentration, and even returning soldiers sometimes have to go through serious crises when they are suddenly granted freedom and peace. Marriage can also act as an upright container when the erotic life feeling, in the broad or narrow sense, has become suitably swollen – to the joy and restorative peace of those who suffer from directionlessness, and to the hollow despair of those who would rather empty to the bottom the innumerable cups of erotic unfixedness. Finally, there is a related way to reduce the pressure of responsibility in the duty to choose; this does not necessarily need under-fixedness as a precondition. One forms or becomes a member of an organization that issues certain expressions of will on behalf of its members. In secret voting, both the governing body and the members in many cases avoid the legal, indeed even moral responsibility – though the procedure to outsiders may be reminiscent of the wrongdoer’s attempt to erase one’s tracks. In all the examples given, these may in some cases be real solutions.

§ 51. Over-fixedness and error-fixedness (4) An over-fixedness in an otherwise beneficial direction will often take the form of unwavering idealism and be experienced as an inalienable personal value, and it then acts as an anchor. The problems it creates are frequently of an interfrontal nature, the autotelic demands jeopardizing biological and social values. The individual can fret over this conflict or go beyond it through a secure assessment, a subjectively determined, more or less real justified hierarchy across the fronts. In the latter case, what remains is “only” to endure the suffering that might have arisen in the realization of the indomitable principle of action. The over-fixed may, however, harbor a desire to be freer in one’s own mind, to be able to more easily adapt to the changing situations – even if the principle is still respected and the demand for intellectual reasonableness will not be given up. One can then arbitrarily expose oneself to the force field of another viewpoint, obtain a set of new arguments which, by their effect, allow one to deviate from the letter of the old formula without thereby having to lower one’s standard of responsibility and insight – thus, on the basis of real solution. In other words, the change must be thought to proceed through the assessment of the indispensable principle, through a conception of it, no longer as an end in itself, but as a means to a higher purpose. Thus, it may be optionally replaced

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by another means. An example is the transition from a creed to a freer conception, such as the one portrayed in Høffding’s Ethics.64 For fixedness in a harmful direction, the same considerations apply in part, but here it also happens that the bearer oneself does not sanction its coercive property (complete fixedness) or inclination (fixedness tendency). Such disapproval is not inherently ruled out by over-fixedness, but it is difficult to imagine a practical example. In the case of an error-fixedness of which the bearer disapproves, one will have every urge to seek the change of the state, if this is at all possible. The correction takes place unconsciously through reaction formation65; it takes place consciously through adaptation of various kinds, and where the adverse reaction form or property is due to nervous or pathological disturbance, through treatment. Successful repression can also be considered a real solution, and the same applies to environmental change (the exhibitionist joins the nudist association). Compensation also plays a significant role here, both as real and as imagined solution (she is not pretty, but she is the smarter one). In the imaginary resorts, one encounters to a large extent the same mechanisms that exist for the under-equipped and under-fixed. Error-fixedness will indeed imply both a sense of inferiority and a need for a new fixedness formation. Some examples now follow in which the schema’s provisions are combined in different ways. If they give rise to new considerations of surrogate means in general, these will be taken into account regardless of whether a stricter system would refer them to an introductory section.

§ 52. First example Front of biological interest (I) Under-equipment (1) Indifferent-hostile environment (B-C) Physical ability complex (ζ) Real solution (a).

The hungry hunter meets a bear but finds his weapons too weak; he dares not attack the animal with bow and arrow. If the bear lets him go, then he also lets the bear go and instead kills a rabbit, from which he initially gets equally 64 Copenhagen 1887 p. 312 f. 65 Cf. Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology] p. 278.

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fed. Or he returns armed with spears, or with his sons, and then brings down the bear. On the other hand, if the bear does not let him go, the hunter himself is made the object of an ability and an affect release, and at the same time the bear qua outside world goes from indifferent to hostile, perhaps satanic. As he presumably cannot defend himself or escape, his only chance lies in depriving the bear of its operation carrier, to devalue himself as an object. He achieves this by lying down and playing dead and enters into sufficiency by transferring the situation to an arena where other skills are required than those that have so far been decisive (strategy instead of force).

§ 53. Second example Social interest front (II), deficit (1), under-fixedness (3), and error-fixedness (4), surrogate solution (b). A separate treatment of the cases combined in the heading (II, 1, b, – II, 3, b, – II, 4, b) would, to too great an extent, have to override the living context. They are better highlighted together; one can still keep in mind the individual factors and will easily be able to recognize them when they act both independently and in close functional connection. The social sphere of interest perhaps occupies the relatively largest space in most people’s life field; it consists, directly or indirectly, of other individuals and is therefore also the most plastic part of the overall outside world. Here interest contact is mutual, for good and evil; here the impressions play unceasingly from seething sadism through mineral indifference to frenetic sympathy. The atmosphere is dense with the mixture of fraud and reality; the ironic layers of games and countergames, for each other, against each other, and by means of each other are innumerable. In this tropical hotbed, the fertilizer of trapped affects also germinates a formidable growth of many-colored fictional mushrooms. The devaluing of the environment (possibly projection) often takes the form of blaming society for its own misery, a favorite trick among demagogues. One praises ancient or future social conditions at the expense of the present. Both the error-fixed and the insufficient find the world they need, partly by the reactionary-romantic escape to the past, and partly by the radical-romantic escape to the future. Collective daydreams of this kind do not have to lack a real basis; the imagination is often a prelude to real improvement, and there is nothing in the way of “the old” being embedded in social values that there is reason to restore. On the other hand, the daydreams can also be cover for sheer inadequacy. Neurosis-formation is an extension of this tactic.

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Individual forms of devaluing that do not have the daydream as a positive complement exist in cases such as the following: The tormented lover devalues the adored object to make the loss feel lighter (“grape tactic”), the parents blame incompetent teachers when the son cannot pay attention, the Norwegian lost the boxing match because the foreigner was brutal. Here, as in the following, we have in mind only the cases where there are no realities at bottom. Alongside the daydream, there is another form of escape in isolation. In the feeling of insecurity and inferiority one withdraws from any exposed position and pretends to be disinterested; one does not exactly have to devalue the things one does not want to be a part of, but – one has already lived through these things, one is very tired of impressions (aesthetic blasé or “spleen,” affective fatigue). In the same connection can be mentioned the escape to idealism, to the idealism that is not a real will for a higher order but a pretext for escaping from a social effort for which one has no desire or capacity. In exposing more and more forms of self-deception, psychoanalytic research has gradually chiseled its way to the realm of “true” or real idealism; there are those who believe it is completely shattered. Ultimately, the answer may stand on the definition of the term idealism. Horace already exposed, in the Seventh Satire,a the still well-known trick of rotation of environment (imaginary compensation). One has two or more places of residence that one is constantly moving between; in reality one is nothing overall, but one has a need to assert oneself, and one does it in each of the places by asserting the position one has in the others (Hamsun’s August). Thus, it is extremely embarrassing to be observed in several places by the same person; if the person is near the next time one makes an allusion to one’s hidden reserves, one is actually consigned to the person’s mercy. Anyone who has arrived on the slope of the capital in such circumstances avoids meeting people from one’s hometown. One can also run a similar game between different professional groups and the like; one is, for example, the greatest philologist among the lawyers and the greatest lawyer among the philologists. Compensation as a real solution will claim a wide space in the social sphere; the division of labor and the individual personality formation leads to extensive specialization. Inflated capacity in one field may be the response to insufficiency in another; people come together constantly who are skilled and representative in completely different ways or areas. Aside from abnormally intolerant circles, one is therefore everywhere legitimated by the kind a Book II, Satire VII.

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of high dignity one represents, even though one cannot or does not intend to assert oneself in the environment in which one is currently located. Here the sympathetic-social environment stands out sharply from the indifferent- or hostile-biological: it does not help anyone who has fallen into the water that one is a skilled hunter; here it is only a question of swimming. Fictional compensations can also unfold themselves richly under the shelter of the legitimacy of partial inadequacy in the social sphere. On the one hand, the properties that are brought into use can be purely imaginary – one does not have them – and on the other, one can emphasize qualifications that are not relevant to the current situation. Children are virtuosos at this. I’m not as good as Ole, but my dad is better than Ole’s dad, and my sister is prettier than Ole’s sister who has a hump on her back. Jens is stronger than Ole, but Ole is from Oslo and Jens is only from Moss, which isn’t very good. Jens dares to torment the headmaster’s cat, but Jørgen’s mother is related to Tordenskjold,a and thus Jørgen is saved; his social environment cannot yet distinguish relevant from irrelevant compensations. We now stand where compensation makes a transition to anchoring. Before we address the role of anchoring in the present area, here is an example of overcompensation: The timid person adopts a boastful quality to cover one’s insecurity. The simulated quality can eventually turn into habit and from there to “nature” so that one can hardly suspect it if one does not know how “character traits” come into being. Another example: One has suffered from the feeling of being a boring land crab, but after a brief trip aboard a seal-hunting vessel, all Arctic affairs are mastered to perfection. Here too the desire can become the mother of reality: One draws to oneself everything that can strengthen and fortify the longed-for skill, etc., and this eventually begins to emerge, such that one can afford to admit the one and the other, and even end up having to flirt with one’s ignorance so as not to be chained to being “an obvious expert.” The imaginary anchor presents a variegated picture. The underlying illusion itself is of ever-varying nature and the manner in which “the self” relies on the illusion, utilizes it in its assertion struggle, also varies (the anchor’s “substantial” versus its “functional” character). The name can play a role as object anchor, fixation anchor, and sufficiency anchor, of which the last two cases concern us here. Its real value is covered with illusory significance. Name mystique, the idea that the name implies a Peter Jansen Wessel Tordenskjold, Norwegian nobleman renowned as a naval captain and killed in a duel (1691–1720).

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certain properties, is not dead yet. The sound and etymological meaning of the name are transmitted associatively to the person, translated into the language of the form. Petrikke Sebedæussen is initially at a disadvantagea compared to Ellinor Falck.b Foreign phonetics, the silent e, and exotic letters such as c and h, x, w, z and long s provide good support. One can change one’s name in order to obtain a renewed elevation in the personality, and one surrounds one’s signature with extravagant embellishments and sweeps. Remember you are a Müller, says the boy’s father fiercely, and then he knows how he has to conduct himself. Or the effect may be the opposite: If you are a Løwendahl, then you do not need other qualifications. In our time, such fictional platforms are finding themselves more removed, but they still claim a not insignificant place, and one finds them in use where one least expects them. Money almost always has reflective effects far beyond the economic sphere. The rich also encounter recognition and reverence from those who are personally superior to them, while they in turn may feel their position weakened by indebtedness. This “prejudice” has its root in the real preconditions of the monetary system, the subsistence economy, where there was a stronger connection between wealth and skill. Many try to accumulate a fortune in order to also gain the respect of their fellow human beings (surrogate for love) – indeed even in the hope of appearing erotically appealing. Despite the critical social consciousness of our time, money as a surrogate means is highly esteemed, which is due to the moral and aesthetic personality formation occupying a very modest place in the public consciousness. In Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens none of the “friends” have the eye for the core of social dignity that underlies Timon’s dispositions. So-called impeccable attire is also one of the things that replace personal values in the ordinary course of life. One does not choose one’s clothes based on aesthetic considerations, color, and fit with one’s own nature, but adopts the cut which is up-to-date.c Clothing “creates” people; the clothing factory solves the style problem for the helpless. Not only does the outfit make one qualified, but it also provides fixedness (standard). Paying attention to the fashion centers’ slogans, all the fashionabled women are ingénue one year, garçonne the next, etc., and even their fragrant aura is directed between animal rut and a English handicapped given. b The idea here seems to be that the sound of the name Petrikke Sebedæussen is more awkward than the sound of the name Ellinor Falck. c English given. d English given.

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fresh hay. Those who have a sense of unified style will also adapt their attitudes and their spiritual appearancea according to the physiognomics of the attire and external appearance. As an excellent supplement to these transportable personality props comes word choice and language use according to recognized patterns, interspersed foreign words and exotic phrases, as well as so-called good manners when these lack any underlying meaning and are accompanied with something close to the character of grimaces. A “stylish” tie from a spring sale in a magazine, a slick hairstyle with “relaxed” coves, a dialect from the capital with laryngeal sounds in happy imitation of the French fleet visits, and a splash of mercantile depression in the blurred eyes turn the consul of Austria, born Didriksen, into the guesthouse’s naturally qualified dignitary.b Social vanity often saturates itself with superficial values. One becomes a member of an exclusive club, calls oneself deputy, director, shareholder, attends general meetings – there are wives who in their first year of marriage thought it was an assembly of generals – one seeks to establish an order. The recently established Order of Lenin in Russia seems to indicate that under any social system there is a need for arbitrarily established honorary criteria of this kind. Even the objects with which one surrounds oneself can shine on the owner’s person, such as a sportscar, an elegant automobile, a villa with columns and terraces, antiques, and modern art. Symbolic features such as crowns, scepters, and pontifical decorations become something more than outward signs of identity; they convey some of their “essence” to the bearer’s person. Conversely, in the eyes of many people, the individual who is affected by the condemnation of the church’s law or becomes the victim of some misfortune also becomes personally tainted. A large number of cases of purely suggestive effects come to mind in this last example and must be included during the subsequent treatment of catastrophes and their cause. Social conventions have their real job in supporting the uncertain assessment, but they often continue their game after the real basis has long since ceased. In addition to the real character formation mentioned above, choice of profession also entails quite a few imaginary features. The transition is successive – at first perhaps one shuns, as much as possible, professionally irrelevant thoughts, while one’s political and moral views begin to imperceptibly align with the interests and traditions of the guild. One starts wearing a particular outfit, in line with the technically appropriate – the type of hat is very a apparition (Fr.). b pasha (Turk.).

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important – and the professional jargon is transferred to new domains: the young doctor feels compelled to speak cynically about erotic matters, etc. Perhaps one even sets one’s facial expressions in accordance with one’s notions of the character and dignity of the profession: The artist projects the nude-serene, the theologian the mild father-of-all, the detective the eagle eyes, and the analyst the snake gaze; the officer takes on the stern-virile look, the racecar driver the mineral-mechanical, the missionary the transparent-seraphic, etc., and reflections of these mimicry formations may eventually spread to deeper layers of the soul. Other imaginary fixedness impulses that are similar to the guild, partly collective and partly more individual, lie in the extension of real attributes such as nation (the country’s history, one exposes oneself to colds in trust in the Viking blood, etc.), race (one cultivates one’s Aryan traits), state constitution or opposition to it (red necktie and dissatisfied look), sex (one has read Weininger and is 100% male), age (cf. the willingness to present a different age than that which one has reached), the professions of relatives and acquaintances (the singer’s husband also becomes an artista with velvet jacket and white collar), bodily strength and other real qualifications, appearance (a young man from the province completely copied the appearance of the actor Alf Blütecher because a lady had said that he had Blütecher’s nose). Imitation and its more qualified form identification are widely used in the service of style formation. The archetype must therefore be firmly fixed; one also acts as a source of fixedness for one’s devotees. For the person whose not being noticed is a worse evil than being unfavorably noticed, the herostraticb enterprise is a useful means. When the associated fame does not seem entirely shameful, it has its ground in the fact that concerning an action that is unusual in nature or degree one can never be absolutely sure that behind the reproached outbreak there does not hide a representative force, such as despair, etc., that has caused one to strike out against the legal objects. At least in their own imaginations, the fraudulent may find support in this real possibility. Repression of a shameful trait or shortcoming occurs frequently in the social sphere, perhaps more frequently there than elsewhere, both consciously and unconsciously. It seems natural that this resort should be judged as real when it acts as part of a normal course of life under the given conditions, and a auch-Künstler (Ger.). b infamous; derived from Herostratus who burned down the temple of Artemis in a quest for fame.

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as surrogate, on the other hand, when the assessor thinks the deficiency or error-fixedness could have been overcome in better ways and eventually dismissed.

§ 54. Third example Autotelic interest front (III), over-equipment (2), under-fixedness (3), real and surrogate solution (a and b). One may at first notice that the distinction between real and imaginary solutions (objects, behaviors) on this front is even more difficult to draw than elsewhere because much of the autotelic readiness is linked to the imagination and must seek its own real objects there. The boundary may be clear theoretically: a daydream is a real activity for the imagination itself, but for the urge to experience erotic optimum, it is a surrogate. Furthermore, it may be recalled that for many people there is something unsatisfactory about the autotelic quality itself, even when it concerns a fragmentary engagement. The activity concludes and dies; it does not bear fruit without being “heterotized”; it does not put the subject in a better position to face future problems by its autotelic quality alone (cf. § 13). The need for a heterotelic effect can have a variety of causes, including human envy and its suggestive influence on one’s own conscience; autotelic engagement can also feel like a waste of possibilities when it is faced with the metaphysical question: How have you used your time and power? The need manifests itself primarily by alertness and wide consciousness, by the strength of judgment and the sense of responsibility; during the pure sensory rush, it will less frequently break in intrusively – but it can arise again afterward. In the well-known state of physical and mental impairment after excessive alcohol consumption, it is precisely the heterotelic need that arises: the urge to organize oneself into a life plan with strict, continuous lines. The characteristic of a state of surplus of autotelic readiness lies in the fact that an ability or a longing seeks an object for the sake of realization. It is then assumed that the subject has reached beyond the first, completely unfixed state of indeterminate fantasies and desires, and has gained a fairly certain sense of the direction in which one’s readiness is headed. As with surpluses in general, one of the strategies is to seek out an object surrogate. The daydream and in part the sleep dream are perhaps the main suppliers of such surrogates; they can be driven to unimaginable heights by nitrous oxide and opium intoxication, etc. (The experience is surrogate for

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the drunk, if he would definitely prefer to have the same experiences in the world of “reality.”) “The dream bride” was mentioned earlier, the hypothetical object optimum for erotic ability complexes in the narrower or wider sense of the term. In a recently published Danish novel, the fictional nature of such a love dream is revealed in a purely barbaric way. The dreamer once in a lifetime caught a glimpse of the one “who from eternity was destined to become his” – and this glimpse was enough. After death, he confides to a fellow passenger his secret hope for the meeting beyond: she now awaits him as an immaculate cherub so that they can spend eternity together. And then it turns out in the course of the conversation that the divine virgin is the travel companion’s mother, who currently resides in a public house, and is furthermore as worn out as a dishrag after an ecstatic and soul-crushing marriage to a bloody criminal. In erotic relationships that are actually realized, the unfulfilled experience readiness can be partly met by self-suggestion, partly by the other party being clear about its inadequacy or its relative error-fixedness and creating a being that meets the needs of the other party. This one accommodates with his own self-suggestion and then is able to live in the belief that his spouse fulfills the requirements of the ideal; this belief can be further supported by such things as a “soulful profile,” something “helpless” about the shoulders, something “noble” about the hair, something “confident” about the blouse, a breathtaking crack in the voice, etc. (“fetish”). On the basis of these “ideal fragments” one reshapes the nature and character of one’s counterpart, puts into her what one wanted to find there. As surrogate for an object optimum, variety among inferior objects finds widespread use. Especially in the area we have just put forward, restlessness and flight are well-known phenomena. In the longing for the “blue flower,” one flutters between the yellow and red. Variability is a real solution for anyone who simply wants to engage in erotic exchange without aiming for the “one and only true love.” Additionally, it can be overcompensation for the fearful and impotent. The hope for autotelic confirmation plays an important role in most people’s lives, especially during childhood, but also later. One waits for “the wonderful.” In the notion of “happiness” there is also a densification of the autotelic reflex by the heterotelic forms of confirmation. Autotelic hope is perhaps the most powerful stimulus we have, so powerful that there are those who prefer the hope rather than the final confirmation (i.e., its image of confirmation); they find “true happiness” in striving for happiness. This posture may be more or

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less real justified. The detour through the social is also familiar: the one who goes out to bring happiness will also find it. Not everyone has the ability to “look forward to” future events to the same degree; there is a difference in temperament, but there is also a difference in experience. In the light of hope the expected experiences are transformed; the pleasing factors are reinforced and idealized and endowed with endless possibilities, while the indifferent and unfavorable are pushed back. The stronger the ability of hope one has, the greater the possibility of disappointment: When the experience to which one has attached one’s great expectations becomes reality, the promising factors are reduced and transformed to the same degree as they were colored by the hope, while a number of unforeseen troublesome concrete aspects of the case appear and create inhibition. Experiences of this kind can have a shocking effect, but even without this the individual can by repetition become disillusioned. Awake intelligence and critical ability also undermine the autotelic hope from within. Often the opportunities for happiness lie behind each other as bright peaks, one covering the other so that one appears as the brilliance dies away from the previous one. A writer’s idea gives rise to a delightful drama, the drama to a sensational premiere, the premiere to an enthusiastic review, the review to international attention, the attention to an award, or the final winning of a woman’s love. One imagines that all this is really coming true, so the author cannot say he has been disappointed; his expectations perhaps even appear to be surpassed. Yet, it is as if the joy dies as soon as it is born, so one has to constantly look forward to the next stage. Everything turns into what one had hoped for, but still not as one had hoped; one is misled by one’s preconceptions about the ecstasy of confirmation. Taught by experience, more than one sage has warned young people against putting their hopes in external impressions and events, and instead has advised seeking satisfaction in a harmonious state of mind. This road is wellsuited for the old because in old age the ability of expectation is often worn out; the remaining time is short and its possibilities clear. The old have “finally learned”; they own the healthy and bitter fruits of experience, for which they have exchanged piecemeal the ability of real and imaginary joys. They look at the youth’s pep, enthusiasm, and confidence in life half with envy and half with disdain. A stimulating principle, a happy ability to live on fraud after the realities of failure, have ebbed away from them, and they see every opportunity in the relentless light of experience. Old age is a confession, says Malraux. A people of old may have had misgivings about putting a new generation into

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existence, if the ability to stop it had been present. But for the time being, there is hardly any danger of humanity dying out due to its being disillusioned. First of all, fatherhood tends to already be a fact when the first objections arise. Secondly, there is no one who would listen to the old when they raise a cautionary voice since they do not have the authority of power, and what they bring is hardly exciting and nowhere close to fun. And thirdly, humans tend to die at about the same time as they reach the critical stage of passivity and indifference. A new, fresh-blooded generation, just out of the great cycle, yet with the dew of the creation act still on its forehead, absolutely ignorant and absolutely happiness-ready, moves in and grasps with eager hands around the worn wheels. The wisdom of the old is not truth to them – nor will it be for infinitely long, about fifty years. There are also satisfied older people who either forgot their disappointments or never had autotelic hopes beyond what life actually gave them. There are also those who are satisfied in spite of their defeats, either because autotelic confirmation has not been of particular importance to them, or because they have learned to replace it with other values. Autotelic hope as positive imaginary value is supported by concealment (mental isolation) as a negative complement. It is part of “proper manners” that one should not talk too much about disappointments and loss, illness and pain, the hollowness of marriage and the suffering of age, the dark side of the sex life, the details of digestion, and the horror of death. The same phenomenon that we considered earlier in the social light meets us here in the autotelic field; means and end have been exchanged. The “perfect company man” always knows how to avoid or rewrite, and he contributes positively to the common autotelic hygiene by shouting things like: It’ll be fine!a Keep smiling!b Be optimistic! Keep your head up! Time, time!c Cheer up,d old pirate, etc. Newspapers are cautious in describing cases of misfortune,66 and sufficiently pitiful individuals are removed from public places by police assistance. The art of conversation (as opposed to real “discourse”), which often forms an important part of the art of hosting, has both a negative and a positive a b c d 66

Ça ira! (Fr.). English given. Tempo, tempo! (It.). English given. After the Molde fire in 1940, a metropolitan newspaper wrote: “– but the view and location are still the same. One simply cannot lose courage when one lives so safe and so snug under the hill.” After the complete destruction of Bodø that same year, one of the city’s citizens said to the same newspaper: “Nothing is so bad that it is not good for anything. I’m thinking about how difficult it has been to change something here in Bodø.”

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task. The negative consists in preventing a sense of the pointlessness of the gathering from seizing those who are present; thus, pauses are bad. The antipause technique can be developed to refinement. The positive task is first and foremost to give each of those in attendance a heightened sense of self-worth, which can be achieved in various ways, among other things by constantly repeating the guest’s title. Similar duties fall upon the good guest, and many a company-weary night wanderer on one’s way home has reflected on the troubles of life when at a nearby fence one observed the simple formalities of the gathering of four-legged beings. In connection with conversation, mention can be made of the suggestion that can be exercised through language, by choice of words and expressions. This feature is actually utilized in language through poetry (style); although the value here is “imaginary” in the sense that it is experienced through the imagination, it has no mark of being surrogate as long as it does not act as a substitute for anything else, for example, the practical life’s experience value. Its greatest importance as mimicry is the suggestive power of language in fields other than the present one, but also here it can exert quite a lot of influence. Autotelic apparent values can be pretended and truly experienced through the name one puts on things, symbols that cover their gray mundane nature and give them a tinge of festivity and color, novelty, élan, and solid quality. In addition to all kinds of agitation, this relationship is exploited especially in advertising; foreign names of well-known brands are increasing; French names for homegrown foods whet the appetite; the country student in Oslo must learn that “katrine plums” means prune porridge. Speech can have a real function on important occasions, but it can also be the speech that makes the occasion important. The fixedness of autotelic pursuit sometimes causes difficulties and can be brought about on a more or less real basis; the principle of the highest pleasure actually works in a directionally determined manner. If the autotelic effort in itself does not provide enough confirmation, one can supplement it with a quasi-heterotelic aiming point. The knight toured “for his lady’s colors”; the athlete fights “for Norway,” “for the flag,” for his club’s honor, etc. The aiming point also appears to be meaning-giving when the sense of futility threatens to destroy the joy. Prizes and commemorative medals fulfill a similar mission: they may be financially worthless, and anyone who would remember the event may be dead, but in the veteran’s own mind the medal shines as an immortal token of one’s contribution to the history of the sport, indeed the universe; the medal acquires a tinge of “absolute value” and is even experienced as a

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kind of metaphysical identification. Sometimes one can help oneself with even less, training “for the sake of physical fitness” and maintaining physical fitness “for the sake of training.” Old outdoor enthusiasts “train” rather than “walk,” and there are those who read German grammar on their deathbeds “for the sake of practice.” On the other hand, an original heterotelic aim can disappear through the change of conditions; one becomes a master of shooting and fly-casting without any preparation for hunting or fishing. In the last example, the aiming point was originally of a biological nature. The idea of “calling” on which, for example, Ibsen placed great weight, has a metaphysical hue; here the aiming point is designed for anchoring. On the other hand, the meaning-giving purposes associated with the division of humanity into groups and the competition between them are socially infected. In one field or another, one group or one individual must necessarily lie a hair’s breadth ahead of the other, and thus the goal is given: We must be equally good, and preferably better. In the biological-social field this relationship is usually characterized by conflict; in the autotelic it appears more like a peaceful competition: the choir’s “Vårlyd” has a larger repertoire than the neighboring “Fjordklang,”a etc. In order to alleviate the lack of a fixed principle of assessment in autotelic – especially artistic and scientific – achievements, some countries have resorted to establishing an academy, in which presumably competent judges are seated and equipped with incontestable authority. Through the academy’s judgment, the larger audience is relieved of the anguish of doubt, but in order for each artist to enjoy the same relief, one must recognize the authority of the academy; if one considers the resident judges as old and foolish, one is just as far away, whether one is recognized or rejected. The danger of such an institute is that the goal of the autotelic-cultural endeavor is the academy’s recognition and nothing else, and the difficulty of its normative activity is in the fact that the doubt over the value of the artwork is replaced by the doubt over the judges’ competence and the suspicion of the motives which brought about their election. The scientist and the inventor may also be exposed to challenges that are similar to the ones we have seen here for the artist, when the ecstasy of discovery itself loosens its grip on their consciousness. The manufacture of means for the manufacture of means, etc., may be associated with a discontent, which

a Two different music festivals.

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will easily be metaphysically colored. The anchor of “the absolute value of progress” and other similar ideas can then serve as a meaningful target. Expression at all costs, however, is not the only resort for the autotelically over-equipped. There is also another means of achieving the longed-for harmony between readiness and realization, namely, limiting expectations, cutting back on the need itself. One can try to deaden one’s autotelic drives and tune one’s life solely toward heterotelic goals, or at least make no claim to pleasures other than those which one can safely count on experiencing. The needs can sometimes be suppressed when they would otherwise destroy one’s well-being; one decreases one’s life potential to gain security and tranquility, trying, for example, to forget the beautiful unknown that has ruined one’s night sleep. A special case exists, which we have briefly considered from a different point of view, when the motivation for suppression or neglect is the following: The real objects that are present here and now are far too trivial in comparison with the promise I attach to the highest realization of the ability. I therefore prefer the suffering of complete abstinence rather than the suffering of an unworthy release; privation arises, but the inferior joy breaks down my self-esteem. One renounces the joy of alcohol in its entirety when a bad wine is offered instead of a noble grape; one gives up all of one’s writing when one has to profane it to get the public’s notice; one refrains from outdoor life completely when the only realizable form is mass processions between placards and barbed wire. One does not want to degrade one’s readiness for experience or one’s worth by engaging them in a third-rate enterprise where the pleasure is further diminished by the comparison with the optimum, and in such a way that one might be hogtied by the consequences when a worthy object comes along.

§ 55. Fourth example Metaphysical interest front (IV), under-equipment (1), under-fixedness (3), surrogate solution (b). In the previous chapter there was an opportunity to witness, from a stated point of view, a human struggle to find a metaphysically real solution; the difficulty there was found in metaphysical morality. If a metaphysical solution is to be described as real, it must, without the help of “dishonest” means such as the confluence of desire and probability, provide answers to a dual problem. The first concerns the nature of the metaphysical environment, possibly its non-existence. The other is a posture problem: how do I best serve my metaphysical interest? With the non-existence of the environment, the solution must lie in a return of the metaphysical need to simpler,

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more transparent psychological conditions. Thus, at first the “metaphysically hungry” operates with two unknowns; each variant of one (the environment) corresponds to a range of posture variants; the question of fixedness stands open in the other’s potency. Only when the dual question is answered, really or fictionally, does the purely practical task arise: how can I equip myself for the task? Face to face with the total metaphysical problem, anyone who does not give up the requirement of intellectual honesty will presumably feel one’s position dominated by powerlessness and doubt. It is tempting to say that one must feel this way, but it is not necessary to make this claim; the significance of this relationship to the tragic will, as far as can be judged at this point, be the same even if a person who is “really” metaphysically sufficient emerged, so that all doubts and objections were muted just as in the biologically sufficient. Assuming a maximum metaphysical need in the sufficient, and a fairly uniform problem, this person’s appearance would also mean a world revolution of incalculable reach. That the intellectually prepared must stand for us as the prominent figure is connected with the nature of this work; in a manifesto or poetic work other character traits, such as violence, one-sided agitational will, dramatic wealth, etc., in metaphysical readiness, are the central and only beatific ones. If it is to be possible to determine whether one’s power and ability are sufficient, the task must first be stipulated. The natural move then is for us to first consider fictional solutions to the question of the nature of the metaphysical environment. When it comes to drawing the distinction between real solution and surrogate in the field that we are now considering, a new difficulty arises in addition to those that will be remembered from the other fronts. With these at least one had the means of comparing a supposedly fictional solution with others, which from experience could be determined to be real to a higher degree. And these “empirically real solutions” often had a certain objective scope; they could to a large extent be made available to other people in need as well, and they seemed to be really liberating with something like the certainty of a natural law. Perhaps this feature is most easily seen in the biological real solutions; the hungry get food, the drowning air. Any criticism or doubt about the adequacy of the solution, any suspicion of being subject to deception, etc., will not be able to occur in normal cases. The function is too strongly fixed, the need is clear, and the solution is intersubjective (interindividual).

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Yet in the social and autotelic fields (when it comes to pure values of pleasure) the observer encounters some relativity and subjectivity. What is a real solution at one time is not necessarily today. But in many cases, there will be no doubt either in the person in question or in the independent observer that here is a real solution according to all human standards. The solution may only have subjective value, but the observer will not be able to find anything to criticize about it. However, given the difference in temperament, ideology, etc., between two people or groups of people, what may be regarded as an undoubtedly real solution by one group is regarded by the other as scam, smoke and mirrors, or bias. Such an assessment can also arise when one party lacks the necessary prerequisites to experience the value that the bearer finds in a solution. This fluctuation both in the definition of the problem as well as in the conceptual boundaries encounters an aggravated form when entering the metaphysical field of interest. The subjective-objective problem arises here in its full power and threatens to destroy the whole distinction between real solution and surrogate. Ideological groups fight each other with a passion that is proportionate to the central importance of the matter. We must refrain from taking any principled position here and confine ourselves to examining the possibility of criticism in given cases. Until a case can be further investigated, it must remain open whether the solution is considered real or fictional. After all, in this field the “objective” or interindividual criteria of reality that existed elsewhere are lacking, and thus the subjective conviction about the reality or adequacy of the solution more strongly demands recognition. On the other hand, the metaphysically engaged (who equally maintain the other fronts of interest) might be more shocked to discover failure in their metaphysical orientation than they would have been if they had discovered surrogates elsewhere in their life course. The demand for the reality of the solution in the most qualified sense of the term is here sharper than elsewhere because it concerns the “ultimate thing” and the very basis of our spiritual existence. The metaphysical seeker can eat bark bread and drink lake water, save oneself socially by isolation, and help oneself with erotic daydreams. But when one discovers the slightest cheat in the metaphysical orientation, one feels obliged to reject it and pose the whole problem on a new basis. Here one cannot compromise; here one demands all or nothing. (Only the metaphysical seeker is of interest here. For others, the relationship may be the opposite: they are the least demanding in the metaphysical field.)

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It was on the basis of such a rigorous, subjective demand for the logical or emotional inviolability of the solution that in the previous chapter we reached the fruitlessness of the subject’s efforts – one who left everything to seek the one thing necessary. The framing of the problem as a contradiction between “faith and knowledge” does not interest us here. Faith is experienced by many as “knowledge,” and much “knowledge” is exposed as “faith.” A definition of “knowledge” would entangle us in the realm of cognitive theory. The conflict between the two aforementioned factors in a human mind only concerns us “functionally”: as a fact with this or that effect. Subjective conviction about the adequacy of a metaphysical hypothesis can mean two things: Either conviction that the hypothesis covers a transcendental reality and, therefore, is hypothesis only in relation to the current scientific requirements for verifiability, or the view that the human (possibly the bearer oneself) needs no other kind of certainty than the subjective, that a theory like this or that is all one needs to be able to live contentedly and to explain apparent meaninglessness, – and that the question of conformity with any kind of unknown reality is of no interest. The scientific viewpoints, one could argue, are, after all, nothing but conceptual models which have their whole raison d’être in that they fill a need, and which are applied as real solutions without asking for the thing in itselfa or the like. Nonetheless, the conviction of the transcendental ground of a hypothesis could, in a given case, be considered surrogate for the reasons stated above, for example, the fact that the bearer lacks or has arbitrarily repressed one’s critical ability, that one builds on an anchor which does not withstand the light of trial but must be maintained by isolation. The real solution must be subjectively sufficient, first and foremost, but the fact that the solution of a universal human matter has only subjective value is precisely one of the things which is, by analogy, apt to arouse suspicion. Perhaps this is best expressed by saying the following: On a scale between pure real solution as the right pole, and pure surrogate as the left pole, a case of belief can be placed to the left of another orientation if the belief, when compared to the other orientation, shows more significant features in common with surrogates known from other fields. The need for knowledge can in and of itself be purely autotelic in nature. In a metaphysical light, insight is something more than its own goal; it is a means of grasping a task and choosing a posture. It should tell us which conditions we are subject to in everything. Metaphysical research is therefore partly a Ding an sich (Ger.).

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extroverted, but it is supplemented by an introversion: what are the interests at stake here? We have pointed out often enough the interests that include the demand for meaning in existence in the greatest totality and smallest detail, the demand that this meaning be just, that it be, in the metaphysical sense, good, caring, inestimably valuable, and sufficient. The need for a continued personal existence is found in many people; for others, it is enough that the just meaning is something eternal, something exalted and sublime, which can give their lives the consecration that they crave, such that it is “sanctified” even if it ends in death. In the work toward recognizing the structure of the universe qua metaphysical environment, one can distinguish between three different layers, which can be, but do not have to be, represented in one and the same person. These layers in the pursuit correspond to three different kinds of world images; they can be called the experience image, the desire image, and the working image, or for the sake of brevity the E image, the D image, and the W image.67

§ 56. The experience image Experience (the word is used here in a practical, not a cognitive sense) and what one believes one is able to predict on the basis of experience at best shows only a limited and conditional meaning or the fulfillment of partial justice requirements. But very often it is impossible to reasonably keep track of any of the parts. (Whether a course can “have meaning” without “being fair,” or be fair without having meaning, is an alluring but somewhat speculative question.) The raw experience image is imposed on the viewer irrespective of one’s wishes and needs. In this image, inorganic nature appears as an indifferent and partially unfavorable environment, organic as partially hostile, and here human life in body and mind is concluded with death. One’s attempt to construct one’s own fate can at any time be at the mercy of a game of overpowering and blind coincidence, one’s efforts erased from memory by the ravages of time, and one’s good will, suffering, and heroic sacrifice in vain in a wider context. Here the “villain” triumphs and here the innocent are trampled down; here 67 Cf. Willy Hellpach, “Nervenleben und Weltanschauung [Nerve Life and Worldview],” Grenzfr. d. Nerv. u. Seelenlebens [Border Iss. of Nerv. and Soul Life] Vol. 6, which programmatically uses the expressions Weltbild [world picture], Weltanschauung [worldview], and Weltillusion [world illusion].

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misfortunes are inherited from father to son and here values are destroyed on the command of power, and the wages of love become hatred and mockery. Indeed, even if they are purely high-value tendencies, they collide because of the incalculable complication of the life apparatus, and their forces are unleashed in death and destruction. The experience image also includes an extensive field of happiness, but this does not prevent large parts of the image for many from standing in the strongest conflict with their central and highest tendencies and their metaphysical needs. The good does not “outweigh” the evil, and even the prerequisites of happiness often leave a lot to be desired in a moral assessment. Those who feel this way are probably in the majority under normal circumstances, and it gives them a qualification in the eyes of the “humanistic” cultural perception. The stronger they experience the failings of the experience image, the more difficult it will be for them to endure their existence and maintain an undiminished will to reproduce, if the experience image were the only source of their life posture. It is also claimed by the “believers” that a life “without God” is worse than death, and even the non-believer generally needs a supplement to bare experience.

§ 57. The desire image In certain cases of metaphysical distress, therefore, a person has the choice between mental destruction (possibly suicide as natural death from mental cause) and salvation by fictional means. Perhaps the most common is the strategy of neutralizing or rendering harmless the experience image through a desire image, an image that is built on anchors with no proven basis.68 The only model of meaning to which one can attach one’s metaphysical anchor is that which one derives from one’s practical earthly life: meaning is a sufficiently valuable target for effort. Therefore, the given recourse is to regard the world and life process as an interest-emphasized enterprise whose subject is a world subject, a world will, or a world spirit. This subject must be characterized by a certain fixedness, a certain need, and a certain ability, but it is not necessary to ascribe other human attributes to it initially. Already the human spirit 68 Here and elsewhere are given figures of speech such as “built over,” “anchors,” “without provable basis,” etc., not some visual representation. Only when the figures are detached from their origins and seen in their mere function does meaning come to mind. The use of a figure should preferably be “technically possible” even in a purely literal interpretation, but this is not always achievable since the expressions are being forced to render more than they were originally intended to.

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now has an opponent, a dynamic counterpart, a directional aiming point; one is no longer alone in everything. But demand increases and new questions burn. Does the human have contact with this world subject; does one have the right to participate in the enterprise of the subject; does one have the right of birthplace in the universe? Also, the desire image must answer these questions with a yes. In the end, we are only asked if we can accept the plan, whether the world enterprise is such that we can go in for it with soul and body, make the plan ours, find all our “cosmic longings” confirmed through it. When the human in this way recreates the universe (as a metaphysical environment), changing it from being an indifferent and incomprehensible monstrosity to a field of interest with tangible “operation carriers” for a manageable endeavor, this must also be done by analogy with the fields of interest we know from practical life. Where else would the model come from? The terminology of most, perhaps all, religious systems is thus also largely derived from earthly conditions: the “path” to “salvation,” “rebirth,” the “kingdom” of heaven, the “gate” of death, the “abyss” of hell, etc., are all expressions that make the metaphysical environment accessible to human thought and initiative. All the non-metaphysical environments that are our workspaces in daily life have over time undergirded metaphysical conceptions and still give elements to them today, elements that have partly become sublimated and have entered into an inextricable connection, and partly have retained an unmistakable imprint of their origin. Just as every earthly functional cycle consists of an “effective system” and a “receptive system” (Uexküll, cf. the schema p. 22), so too in the metaphysical life (which in its fixed form usually means the religious), human effort is met with the world subject’s, God’s, response. God can be perceived as different from the world or more or less identical to it. Together God and the world then constitute the hypothetical-metaphysical environment. In the extension of the biological posture toward life, there are religious services such as burnt offerings and drink offerings; God has bestowed offspring and crops, and now he gets a share of the yield. In primitive religions, this cult, along with various similar forms of mysticism, is almost a detour to biological confirmation and lacks any metaphysical aim in our sense of the word. Here one does not appeal so much to the person of the god but reveals one’s secret to him in the same way as one does with nature. Artificial “rain” is produced and thus the god is in a way compelled to fulfill the wish. God as a natural force is the main feature of such religions. Biological elements are also seen again when humans serve “the light” and the “good” powers (i.e., those

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good for humans) by exterminating predators, cultivating the earth, and the like. Even today God serves biological purposes; he creates and sustains life, gives offspring, health (healing) and bread, victory in war, and “eternal life” in bourgeois forms, of the kind that J. L. Heiberg satirizes. At a higher cultural level stands the social relationship with God; God is king, father, comforter, friend. Here it is of no use to divulge to him any secret, such as with the god of agriculture and hunting; now he is capricious and unpredictable like a human being and must be won over like a human being: by flattery and prayer, by gifts and penance. Atonement as a social means of restitution is transferred to the relationship with God, the food sacrifice becomes atonement, and self-punishment mitigates the influence of God. To secure oneself against surprises one enters into a covenant with God, commits oneself to provide certain services for restitution. The human can promote or damage the interests and world plan of God, and the latter is “sin.” This sense of biological, social, and autotelic insufficiency and innate unfavorable traits reverberates in the religious realm as “inheritance,” as metaphysical error-fixedness: as a just judgment we deserve to be rejected and destroyed as the unfit organism. But just as the biological iron law is modified in the social field, so too is the metaphysical iron law softened by the fact that God shows mercy in the place of justice. Others think of liberation from sin through “purgatory,” a metaphysical adjustment. The God of mercy is no equal opponent; he is terribly big and strong; he is a tyrant when it suits him. Where this trait is prominent, the relationship with God is characterized by servility; one crawls before God, calls oneself a miserable worm, etc., as one does with an earthly despot. However, a more developed cultural consciousness finds something unworthy in this image of God; humanity begins to distance itself from it, God no longer responds to our highest ideals, and the metaphysical quest begins to pass him by. And the higher the ideal reaches, the greater the distance from the experience image: connection is no longer possible; faith requires a leap. In humanistic Christianity, for example, God is no longer perceived as a ball bouncing between passions, in which case it constitutes the ultimate moving principle, but as loving, as fixed in sympathy. The image, however, clashes with another unquestionable demand, the requirement of the omnipotence of God. The presence of “evil” on the earth is a problem child for the religious art of anchoring and interpretation. Here the Devil has played an important role in justifying counterpowers; modern religious consciousness, however, gets very little out of such notions,

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and one has to resort to other principles of explanation. Leibniz thus chose to save the dogma of love at the expense of omnipotence. Autotelic life readiness has also contributed to the religious posture toward life and continues to do so to this day. The house of worship is built in beautiful forms and of precious material; it is adorned with colors and with works of art of various kinds. The worship is characterized by beautiful singing and music; fragrant oils are burned, light sparkles, and the clergy wear magnificent clothing. God is praised as the glorious; beautiful is the earth he has given us; blessed is the abode of his heavenly kingdom, even if it only entices with singing instead of women and wine, or even just with spiritual fellowship. Mutual love is a pleasure-giving element in and of itself, and the notion of God as a groom even seems to be associated with erotic emotional complexes; the same goes for virgin worship, which sublimates the man’s erotic needs. And here it is precisely the autotelic nature of love that is emphasized – completely detached as it is from child-bearing as a heterotelic goal. The autotelic pessimuma is also represented, namely by the notion of a hell, which is characterized by a maximum of possible unhappiness. It is a weakness of most religious anchoring systems that they accommodate only a single or some aspects of the metaphysical need. Therefore, in addition to preaching as the offensive element, their followers must also develop an apology, a defense against the objections raised by dissatisfied authorities, or by people clinging to a different anchor and fighting their fellow claimants to strengthen themselves. This defensive activity is partly theoretical interpretation or misinterpretation, and partly practical; here it manifests itself in such things as inquisition and censorship. The maintenance of the desire image is a public matter through the state church, and thus power can be put behind the words; this is also possible when the independent church has secular bodies. Countless are those who, in the course of history, have perished from battles between carriers of antagonistic desire images. Sometimes the image itself contains an apologetic element; thus, according to certain variants of Christianity, doubt itself is a sin. But the construction itself of the “metaphysical house” with the laws that apply to it (articles of faith, confession) is one thing; its use in current, practical situations such as refuge during distress and doubt is something else. Not only is one besieged, in society as well as in one’s own mind, by countless, compatible and incompatible desire images, but even if one has gone all in for one of a worst condition.

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them, one is not done with doubt. It does not help even the most honest and self-denying readiness to serve the will of God if one cannot say with certainty what this will entails. There may be some support in the canonical writings, but they sometimes come from different authors and contain contradictions for one reason or another such that the outcome is different depending on the passage one looks up, and sometimes the different statements can be interpreted in different ways. Even one of the bishops of Norway could thus say in a sermon: “I said to God: I am perfectly prepared to serve you, but what do you want me to do?” The idea of a direct “guidance,” both in “eternal” and in “temporal” affairs, has sprung from this anguish of doubt, just as there have always been ingenious systems devised for the attainment of metaphysical means of fixedness (oracles, “manna,” etc.). The terrible pressure of religious responsibility, which is related to unfixedness, has also been eased in different ways. The doctrine of predestination, the idea that all human souls “from the beginning” are fixed in a favorable or unfavorable direction, surely exchanges the torment of doubt for a different one. Fatalism is a variety of the same thought, but here the fixedness is extended to “temporal” events. A widespread and highly valued strategy is to “give one’s will to God,” abdicating from one’s power as a governing authority, as prima causa. Such people who have “surrendered the self” seem to decide and act quite the same way as others, but when asked, they say that it is God who acts through them and therefore they cannot sin, regardless of the consequences of their actions. Besides psychopathic states (and pure mental insanity), there are hardly any forms of life which to the same degree as religious readiness exhibit such endless variations in human nature. While the foundation in many cases is affectively pure, the last-mentioned example may also be based on the following idea: The interests of humankind should not at all claim any place next to the world will since it must necessarily have better understanding than we have to decide where the course should go. A number of metaphysical assumptions are more or less consciously based here, but the model is biological-social: the leader must decide by virtue of one’s skill and vision. A genuine community of interests must be presumed to be present if this delegation of power is to mean anything more than simply a deliverance from “the burdens of governance” as the greatest of all evils. One refrains from asserting one’s abilities and interests in the course of the world in the same way that one withdraws from social positions of responsibility. Another basis of passivity is the blockade, the collapse of will at the confrontation with an insurmountable task.

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However, for many, a consequence of this negative posture can be that the human is superfluous in the cosmos. And it was precisely this unbearable conclusion from the experience image that should have been deprived of its sting through faith. With yet another mental leap, yet another levity toward the appearance of the image of God, one therefore supplements one’s surrender through a positive anchoring: Within certain limits, however, the human can still help or oppose the world will despite the fact that it, of course, does not need any help or have anything to fear, etc. The main thing is that in any case we must have unlimited confidence in the world will and in the essence of life and not give up but continue reproduction in spite of everything. Religion is a Proteus; it can be used or abused for almost anything, but most often it is a defense of life. Its strongest position is that of pure faith; as soon as it is tried with reasoning – and apologetics does not do well without this – it shows itself to the unbeliever as a circular dance between insufficient anchors: one fragment of faith covers its part of the need and, through logical contradictions, becomes a danger to another fragment; coverage on one front means exposure on another and vice versa. In the Greek doctrine of fate, as one encounters it in tragedy, this sliding game, which always lacks a piece, was developed to the parodic (cf. below § 105). Through the desire image one’s metaphysical concern is attached to the contours and reduced to a relatively manageable task, at least a task that is not obviously hopeless. A certain margin of uncertainty is needed in order to avoid being in surplus and being plagued by all the difficulties that come with this condition; nothing is required, for example, but me keeping the ten commandments or dying for the spread of Islam, so I can do both that and more and still be metaphysically unsatisfied. It is particularly important to draw the paradise state with lines that are as broad as possible, so that the rushing imagination will not live through it all beforehand and be gripped with boredom before the glory begins. The idea of a continuing development neutralizes this concern, but instead gives rise to another – will there never be peace? It is best to help oneself with a reference to the fact that we have no idea whatsoever about these things in advance, given that the possibilities are impossible to grasp. Dante’s colossal light, which in the literal sense would only irritate the eyes, must be taken as a symbol of mental-spiritual expansions of unknown and “unbelievable” positive nature. Excellent, says the doubter, but why should one waste one’s divine opportunities on an earthly life of a horrible kind, soaked in the flattest trivialities that recur incessantly without the slightest sign of lifting – here I am missing an economic principle. Ahh, the believer answers, partly to

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learn patience (a biological virtue especially known from the hunt), partly to get rid of a number of (socially) inferior qualities (why did we get them?), partly to make the transition all the more fabulous, and partly for reasons unknown for which it does not belong to us to dig. For if we do that, we are immodest and depraved, and that is the very worst thing in this case. Nor should the doubter bring up “identity difficulties” and the like, which could conceivably arise when all individuals are liberated from their earthly characteristics: age, sex, memory, character, etc. All these things God manages, says the believer, and he also makes sure we see nothing of the lost (among whom are perhaps our earthly friends), whereby there might be a shadow over the exultation. The central point in some, even modern forms of Christianity is, as suggested before, the spiritual process, which can be initiated in various ways; it partly comes as redemption from outside for the metaphysically desperate, for example, after a night of “wrestling with God”; it is partly achieved through a “method”; it is partly started by an impulse of will. The content of the process throughout is that the newly converted or “saved” “surrenders his or her life to God” and is liberated in whole or in part from “the burden of the self,” from the responsibility of life’s worldly and afterworldly course. The mystery of Christ in this conception implies only an offer of salvation; the offer becomes without effect for those who do not receive it, and acceptance then takes place by the process mentioned. The believers themselves, the “truly saved” (believers themselves admit that there are apparent phenomena), maintain that the change or transformation brings about a fund of hitherto unheard-of joy, relief, and security. The non-believer would most easily imagine “salvation” as a maneuver just like the settlement, a biological-social contract form that was prohibited by law in Norway because it was perceived as immoral. The agreement consisted in a person surrendering both one’s movable and immovable property as well as one’s free self-determination to another person, in exchange for providing for one’s maintenance and vouching for one in various ways. The same reaction that led to the law against the settlement can also come from the doubter when one is called upon to “convert” in this qualified sense of the word. To me, “abandonment of the self” stands as an escape into a fictional posture, one could conceivably answer in a conversation with an insistent proselytizer. I consider the appeal of faith to be a temptation to degrade my human dignity, to sin against the principle which I must see as the image of God in me, to use your own expression. I feel myself, that is, the cultural person in general, as the only responsible authority on the earth; I perceive humanity as the “universe’s” only bearer of the idea of meaning and justice, as long as I see

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no other. It is the greatest decadence I can ever imagine that I, on such weak terms as the desire for my own comfort, should turn the rudder from me over to a replacement, whom you may call God, but whom I have come to know as blind coincidence, a principle which is insufficient for the metaphysical consciousness. I could have done it, and I wanted nothing more, if I had first gained a genuine and all-encompassing confidence in the principle which through you demands that I hand over my place to the one who through you fishes for my vote. At the same moment that I recognize him as my superior and one who is better suited to carry out what is urgently needed for me, when my consciousness in rare moments encompasses all living things that were, are, and will be, at that same moment I would, with thanks and cheer, throw the lead weight of power into his lap, as an encircled garrison does, or a ruler who is exhausted and despairing is freed from the nightmare of government by a capable and energetic son. But not as long as a worse chaos and a multiplied suffering would occur at the same time as humankind withdraws its hand. The believer:

The non-believer: The believer:

The non-believer: The believer: The non-believer: The believer: The non-believer:

The believer:

The non-believer:

But think of all the evil that is actually caused by humans: falsehood, covetousness, war. All this we cannot overcome without the help of God. Is it not God who cannot overcome it without our help? Some people believe this, but it is the worst heresy, and it is a shame that they have been allowed to rent locally at Grønnegaten 4.a God needs no help from us. Why then has he not overcome it? Because he has made it our job to overcome evil. That is why it is there. But you said not long ago that we could not. No, because God wants us to ask him for help. And then we can. We could certainly squabble about this till doomsday. But if I am to form the notion of a God who truly fulfills my metaphysical needs, then he cannot stand there and mess around in this way. Nor can I take on a worldview that has to be supported by this kind of interpretive acrobatics in order not to collapse. But do you think that the human is so powerful alone? Do you not sometimes find yourself in both physical and spiritual distress and long for salvation at all costs? Yes. But then I feel like a soldier surrounded by the enemy. He can save his life by deserting, but he prefers death under the banner which to him is the symbol of the highest. As he perceives his position as

a A random address in Norway.

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on the tragic a good soldier, this is how I perceive mine as a “good” person, and the salvation you recommend to me is the deserter’s salvation. A life of shame is never a wise exchange; it can be more expensive to me than ruin. But how can you know for sure that there is no unknown meaning to everything that is happening? I am not saying I know it, and I do not even deny the possibility of such a meaning. But I demand to see it; I am a Thomas now, and I have not made myself into this. I demand to understand the meaning of the suffering, the repetition, the development, and the decay that is experienced; otherwise, I will not join in the miscarriage. Your demands are presumptuous and misguided, besides being comical. Who are you that you dare to demand anything from God? And who are you that you dare to demand my humility toward one of your own wishful thoughts? You think with your mind alone, but you must throw away your reason and only believe if you want to avoid being held accountable to God. Already this seems to me to be a somewhat contentious demand. It is precisely my sense of responsibility that holds me back, since I am missing a demonstration of what is likely in your viewpoint. Everywhere in earthly life my welfare and my ruin, so far as I am the master of them, depend on this, that I try and consider in advance. Have I then incorporated this life-preserving principle so that it has become part of my nature only to now throw it away as unfit and harmful? There you just hit the heart of the matter. Here it is such that you first have to take the path, then you will get confirmation afterwards. Here you have to simply disconnect all the safeguards, that is what is essential, and throw yourself into the depths of the seventy thousand fathoms.a Then the doubts will leave. I think you are probably in this situation to guard against doubts. Anyone on shore can criticize the color of the rescue belt, but for the one in the middle of the Atlantic without a boat, it is enough to cling to it. In spite of all the suffering, I now prefer to stay on land, but you were not able to do this and therefore you escaped to the sea, and now you want me to panic in the same way as you and demand that I give you recognition for the plank you found? – This is not how I feel, the believer replies; I just wanted to share with you the abundance of my joy.

a Reference to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Chap. 2.

Real Solution and Surrogate The non-believer: The believer: The non-believer: The believer: The non-believer: The believer: The non-believer: The believer:

The non-believer:

The believer:

The non-believer:

The believer:

The non-believer:

The non-believer:

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And what do you think are the consequences of not accepting your offer? First of all, you get a life without these values. I don’t miss them. And then you go into death and eternity in protest against God. Against your idea of God, you mean. Yes, and what then? It’s not for me to say any more about these things. You are reluctant to condemn me to eternal torment? Belief in hell is a poisonous and damning doctrine and an insult to God’s infinite love. I can say nothing to you about your eternity, but you are already living a life without the joy of God –. An opium user once told me something similar. And I had to admit to him that my life was poor in comparison to his own states of delight. But I still maintain my physical health and regard it as the most valuable thing in spite of all my needs. And now I also hold on to my spiritual health and regard your influence as a temptation to something worse, to the anesthetizing habit of faith. Religion is in essence a matter of judgment, you are right. On the other hand, you cannot compare me to an opium user, for it will only bring you temporal pleasures, while I give you eternal truth. For me, this is the thing, that you say you bring me the eternal truth, and I believe you believe you do. When I believe something, it is because I find it sufficiently likely to be able to use it as a given when I act. On the other hand, it does not matter to my belief whether the most likely is desirable or not. My faith is not based on probability, but on certainty. Faith is a knowledge without evidence, a knowledge through feeling. Faith is above all a matter of feeling. Does what you believe match your desire? – Yes, absolutely. – Do you believe because you desire, or do you desire because you believe? – I believe because I must. So not because you want to? – That’s also why, of course. – Indeed, because otherwise there is nothing to thank you for? And nothing to blame me for, if I do not have to? – No, of course. Faith is and remains a matter of will. You don’t want to be compared to the opium user because you say you come with the truth. Now there are certainly forms of intoxication with overwhelming subjective cognitive value. The same goes for “mystical states” that are achieved through spiritual exercises. But you have to let go of this comparison anyway if you want to join another, namely, with all those who in the course of time have wanted to bestow upon me the truth and concerning whom I have always believed they

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on the tragic believed it. In writing and speech they add up to hundreds, strict and hateful sectarians mixed with the tolerant and those without dogma and with all the transitional steps toward the non-religious worldview. How do you want me to choose here? Here you have to decide by your conscience. – But it is precisely my conscience that makes me abstain from making any decision. A choice here would be for me a pure gamble. Yes, it is a lottery you have to play to have any chance of winning. – But also with the prospect of losing everything? – Yes, indeed! If you draw a wrong number. But the surest way to lose everything is to not play. In my opinion, this metaphysical lottery expresses an immoral principle; it signifies a violation of the moral continuity of the world order and is contrary to my deepest sense of justice. – How dare you demand that your sense of justice be a law before God? – So, do you consider the possibility that God’s sense of justice may be substantially different from your own? It may well be; I don’t know anything about that. – How then can you know that faith helps you in your eternal concern? – God has said it through his word. And you do not doubt that God keeps his word? – Of course not. – But does not keeping or not keeping his word affect God’s justice? What if it is the believers who are condemned after all? I can never imagine that. By the way, it doesn’t matter if you push me with logical acumen. Our conversation has degenerated into a game of words. And even you will one day feel small under the hand of the Almighty. No one knows how long he will tolerate your arrogance. – Then I would answer as Job in Chapter Nine: You can crush me because you have the power, but even you still have to convince me. And then our relationship with a real existent God is neither a case of feeling nor a case of will or of a judgment call, but rather a matter of power.

This conversation is intended as an average of the countless discussions that have been held through the centuries by informed lay people (nontheologians) about these matters. It shows how certain central needs in humans are driven to faith, while other central needs lead to distance. It also shows what there is to do for each of the two discussing. Their value as representatives may be disputed; I have imagined a radical skeptic with a developed metaphysical need and a positive believing Christian without rigorous extremes. The

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self-contradictions of the believer are weaknesses only from the skeptic’s point of view, and the disrespect of the doubter is only from the Christian’s. What is striking is that the believer engages in a discussion at all when even a logical victory is of no real value – but how else was one to come into contact with one’s opponent? By preaching and gestures alone one would have gained nothing from the atheist other than to be regarded as deranged. It is from this interest point of view that we must here consider the issue of faith; it is as a practical matter of life that it conceivably plays a role in “the tragic.” The historical, psychological, and logical problems of profound nature arising from the matter of faith fall outside the scope of this study. Toward the comprehension of the origin and form of faith in each case it is important to be aware of the importance of such things as temperament and other inherited equipment, neurotic conditions, upbringing, tradition, and external life circumstances. Desire images of a non-religious nature also exist, though perhaps to a lesser extent. Here too it depends on where one wants to draw the determinative boundary of the religious. Many have believed in an anthropomorphizing of nature itself, which makes possible a contact with human interest: the sky blushes with shame over injustice in society, the river sobs with sorrow at the death of the innocent, the trees bow down over the grieving, the birds console by their song. This is then meant as something else and more than pure lyric; it is meant as a guaranteed cohesion between everything created. Hypothetical anchors of a metaphysical nature that do not rely at all on empirical possibility are here to be regarded as desire images, such as the belief in a Nemesis, in a final equalization of the “evil” and the “good” both in individual human life and in the history of the universe, in an inherent meaning to everything that happens (now I understand that the world war happened so that mother could rent out the attic), in an upcoming “millennial kingdom” on earth where all problems are solved, in a “golden age” which is initiated by the return of one of the nation’s heroes from legend and history69 (Barbarossa, Ogier the Dane, Olaf the Holy), etc., cf. pantheism, finalism, and other metaphysically meaningful views of life and philosophies.

69 Cf. Paulus Svendsen, Gullalderdrøm og utviklingstro [Golden Age Dream and Developmental Belief], Oslo 1940.

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§ 58. The working image Neither in the religious nor the non-religious desire image does the “responsible critic” lack the points of attack one needs. For this reason, many people do not seem to be able to swallow a desire image, however varied it may be. They do not reject the positive, constructive faith, but they also do not find themselves satisfied with putting the imagination in the place of experience. They know that a desirable interpretation can both hold true and fail, and that probability is a question in itself. They are prepared to support a desirable metaphysical life goal, but this must not be incompatible with experience and what one believes can be predicted on the basis of experience. “Scientific knowledge” understood in the everyday sense must either be taken as a basis or find a place in the system. One creates a working image of existence (of “life” and “the world” and the relationship between them), which can, admittedly, cause serious difficulties and still invite criticism, but in which the whole person can unfold oneself with a certain, albeit never so thoroughly justified, prospect of metaphysical confirmation. Likewise, the view that no metaphysical confirmation is possible can fit among the working images. Such a view will usually be closely related to experience, but in neurotic natures can also be developed as a desire image, since it brings affective benefits. The working image – or lifeview, as it is usually called – has fluid conceptual boundaries both against experience and against desire; it may also lie on the verge of the non-metaphysical posture: To carry on my practical life I must have some theoretical background, but the fundamental contradiction between desire and experience is one of the things that can be left open. Here we touch on the important problem complex that connects to the question of the relationship between affectively determined, affectively codetermined, and affectively (ideologically) neutral views. Neither here nor elsewhere can we immerse ourselves in this fundamental question without getting distracted – we must be content with operating with a scale on which the presumably more or less affectively determined types of postures are placed in relation to each other. Concerning the relationship between “world image,”a “world illusion”b and “worldview,”c Willy Hellpach says some things in the work cited above70 that also illuminate our subject: a b c 70

Weltbild (Ger.). Weltillusion (Ger.). Weltanschauung (Ger.). “Nervenleben u. Weltanschauung [Nerve Life and Worldview]” in Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 6.

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Worldview is not world image … In worldview I eliminate, or at least I try, and the purer the picture seems to me, the more perfectly this abstraction succeeds. There certainly is a world image that physics, a world image that biology presents to us, and it does not ask how the viewer feels when looking at it. Better: we do not let it ask for it. We, the people who have become “objective,” pride ourselves on being able to endure an unpleasant world image. Endure! The world image finds us receptive, passive, suffering; our hopes and desires, everything that we want to take for the real meaning of our life may not have a place in the world image – fine, they have no place; a world image does not care about these troubles. But worldview is not world illusion, not religious belief. In that case it would have to be a pure, absolute matter of feeling. Religion does not need to care about a world image; it can ignore it, negate it, cover it up, so that it remains irrefutable for those who have it, as long as it is compelling to their feeling, satisfies their affective needs. A world image can be defended with arguments, disputed with arguments; religion in its essence is beyond discussion. There is nothing stranger than the suggestion of some natural scientists that religion has to respect the scientific world image. As in all matters of feeling, a religion respects nothing but the feeling that satisfies it. Thus, even if one might scorn illusion and superstition, illusion and superstition bear the right to exist only as emotional value for the believer. Nowhere else. These are now the two poles: The world image, a product of the intellect, is obtained with the strongest weeding out of all subjective material and color; religion, an absolute matter of feeling, without any obligation to respect the products of the intellect and objectivity. At any time, there are people who are satisfied with one or the other alone. However, the tendency to pick up a piece from the opposite side usually predominates. The result is the compromises between the world image of science and the need for faith. But these compromises are not a worldview, because viewing is not a patchwork of seeing and longing, but something new, in which the intellect and the emotion participate in the same way …

And now follows a closer examination of the author’s concept of view,a which is not quoted. With the term lifeview the importance of the whole tradition will flow into the concept of the working image and every reader will immediately have enough examples at hand. Variants that have no metaphysical bent, however, do not concern us here, unless they are expressions of a positive devaluing of metaphysical readiness. It is the functional value of the lifeview that most strongly captures our interest here; one must assume that it above all else will be the carrying value of the lifeview for the individual who assigns it a role in a given “tragic course.” Therefore, it seems unnecessary to lay down a historical or systematic overview of the most well-known a Anschauung (Ger.).

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types of lifeviews, just as there was no reason in the past to address religious-historical questions or theories of religion’s origin. The conception of the succession in time must necessarily be roughly the same, but here, as in the history of literature, one can dispute about the paths taken by the individual thought impulses. With regard to systematic classification, different principles can be used, considering respectively a method of thought direction, content, evaluation, etc. One then tries, as much as possible, to set the directions opposite each other in antithetical pairs, thereby illuminating each other mutually. The layperson’s metaphysical view of life rarely contains aspects of significance that one cannot find in some known philosophical system. But one often arranges the material according to one’s private needs, combining and interpreting in a way that can make the logically sensitive professional philosopher white-haired in one night. Elements of the diverse E, D, and W images are mixed together into a porridge that ferments from internal contradictions. Every year popular philosophical writings emerge wherein some conceptual model has been embedded as a continuous motif in the fabric of existence, used as a magic key to open the door of understanding everywhere. Who among us can say that we have not solved the riddle of existence in our youth? “Death and renewal” and “the constancy of energy” are such keys; a Swedish humorist has proposed “the law of the damnedest possible.”a The scale between valuable cultural work and speculative nonsense is long and finely divided and can also be set up in a number of ways according to the assessment. Generally speaking, these writings are of a positive thrust; they are guides to “happiness” and also directly or indirectly solve the metaphysical problem, when they draw attention to it at all. As a rule, however, they presuppose a very limited mental readiness of those who are to be benefitted. (In this regard, one is led to recall the many celebrated academics who have turned at the milestone and in the cheapest truisms bestowed on us the center stone of their diadem of wisdom. Thus, a prominent Oslo doctor recently built his metaphysical confidence on the fact that people are washing more often now than before.) In a culturally superior class, there are a number of representative “ideas” that assume the metaphysical need will be met with the attainment of optima in biological, social, or autotelic forms. The proponents of these ideas expect a state of universal confirmation, when their idea is finally realized – we ignore here the role the idea can play as an expression of biological-social realities. a lagen om det jävligst möjliga (Swe.).

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Examples include: the abolition of war, the socialization of society, the common language for all, the machine’s takeover of labor, economic abundance for all (technocracy), “development” and “progress” in unclear generality, the victory of “the truth” and “the good,” spirit’s radiation in the universe, etc. The “negative” lifeviews also vary but may not be as strong as the positivefinalistic. There is something paradoxical about these views; they seem to defy our assumption that the working image fills a need. Can one need a negative or pessimistic view of life? Psychoanalytic writers have strongly argued that pessimism must be explained from neurotic needs.71 As far as I understand, these scientists do not recognize any real, “objectively justified” pessimism. (We have the system of thought in mind, not the depressive or melancholy mood.) If the answer is to divide the pessimists into two camps, the neurotic and the objective, then the analyst asks: And where is the distinguishing criterion? Of course, everyone claims (and in the best faith) that no pessimism is as objective as one’s own. It must be admitted that we do not possess such a criterion. But this is why one is not obliged to accept the psychoanalytic induction that if some (perhaps even all) pessimistic patients exhibit neurotic constitution and cease to be pessimists after treatment, then all pessimists must evince such a constitution. Furthermore, the inner connection between neurosis, pessimism, recovery, and optimism invites a closer examination, which cannot be carried out here. We have to ask ourselves: Why could neurosis not have caused the patient, because of one’s highly differentiated nervous life and one’s traumatic experiences, to have a deeper objective insight into the conditions of human life, both partially and metaphysically? Could it not have compelled the person to raise questions and investigate connections that have no or only theoretical interest for the healthy? If a watchman by going up to the tower discovers the enemy’s preparations, what role does the motivation play for him going up there? In any case, the question is still open, and one must therefore be allowed to operate with two (both hypothetical) main forms of pessimism, the objective and the neurotic, although the required criterion cannot be presented. With greater precision the idea is expressed as follows: One must be able to work with a scale where there is an “objective” pole to the right and a “neurotic” pole to the left, and where a given case of pessimism can be placed to the 71 See, e.g., Eduard Hitschmann, “Schopenhauer, Versuch einer Psychoanalyse des Philosophen [Schopenhauer, Attempted Psychoanalysis of the Philosopher],” Imago II.2, 1913.

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right or to the left of another case. The matter quickly becomes complicated; there may be a call to distinguish between pessimistic theory (view of the “universe”) and the application of this theory to the practical case. The overall view can be objectively substantiated even if the practical consequences are neurotically determined. A man retreats to the desert; he lacks social adaptability, but his reasoning is irrefutable. The “more genuine” pessimism must then be perceived as an extension of the animal’s purely biological pessimistic view when the conditions and prospects are sufficiently bleak.72 After all, it would be a purely manic behavior to see the future confidently faced in a situation that, judging by all experience, must end with defeat for the most valuable interests. The clearer the interest is formulated and the safer the environment is characterized; the more convincingly can one determine the prospect of sanction or veto. It is especially the view of the metaphysical interest in the assumed cosmic conditions that underlies the pessimistic “views of life.” Positive value is gained by such a lifeview first and foremost in the autotelic respect, in the subjective belief of the bearer that one represents a higher degree of insight and intellectual reasonableness, as one has relied as much as possible on the basis of experience, judged by probability alone, and renounced the relief that any desirable interpretation would also bring. (On the other hand, one will not be able to “adjust” in a daily life case; one takes the umbrella in the sunshine and is the only person who does not get one’s clothes ruined by the unexpected rain.) Hereby comes the “aesthetically” rich experience from immersion in the frightening perspectives; with an image from the climbing of the pinnacle, we can call it “the abyss.” This “aesthetic” need is thought to play an important role in the experience of the tragic course. (The “aesthetic” of an experience can on the basis of tradition be defined as a distinctively autotelic quality, cf. § 98.) Social benefits are more related to neurotic pessimism: one “seems interesting” and acquires the pity of the young ladies. Metaphysical value can also be acquired by objective pessimism through the consciousness of the bearer that one has “done one’s utmost,” that one “in one’s courageous truth-seeking has not pulled away from the blackest consequences,” that one has not saved oneself by anything that has stood before one as an enticing but dishonorable means, that one “has 72 A scientific examination of certain Schopenhauerian views can be found in Kowalewski, “Studien zur Psychologie des Pessimismus [The Study of the Psychology of Pessimism],” Grenzfragen des Nerven- u. Seelenlebens [Border Issues of the Nerve and Soul Life] Vol. 4. It confirms Schopenhauer’s assertions to a large extent.

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borne in one’s heart all the sin of the world,” etc. A cosmic order, which is just in this respect, must acknowledge this effort in the metaphysical problem field. In this respect, the bearer is optimistic. Of great interest is distinguishing between a deficit and a surplus pessimism: In the first, the bearer loses hope and faith because one is not sufficient; the problem is clear enough and in its solution lies salvation, but one cannot solve it; the human cannot do it. In the second, the discouragement is due to the perception that none of the tasks one can actually set will be able to give one what one inwardly longs for and cannot forsake – even if they were completed to perfection. “False pessimism” amounts to pessimism as a desire image, a worlddevaluing of “neurotic” origin. The pessimist “takes revenge on life” because things went badly for one on some partial interest front. However, this does not happen through conscious revenge emotions, but (according to recent psychology) unconsciously, such that pessimism stands for the person as wellfounded.

§ 59. Metaphysical morality In order to provide real-life help, the idea of the nature of the metaphysical environment must be supplemented with a moral doctrine that is organically related to the individual experience, desire, or working image. The religious world image coincides with rituals, prayer, steadfastness, preaching, etc., as religious morality (action directive); within certain denominations social worth also deserves religious sanction, and autotelic benefits can be religiously relevant and thereby become heterotelized. A peculiar example is the juggler who performed his art for the Blessed Virgin. The religious image can also be morally indifferent – the believer oneself does not matter; one is saved or lost according to the divine command or according to an original determination. Or one will be purified after a shorter or longer period in a purgatory and, if one will only endure there long enough, can have the joys and the leisure one desires, on metaphysical credit. We know the morality of the experience image from previous chapters, and an additional metaphysical perspective that does not change the character of the experience image will not lead to any change in morality. The working image, on the other hand, will perhaps by its plasticity entail an even more diverse variety of moral rules than the religions exhibit. In general, it can be said that in purely metaphysical matters only the best, the most unlimited and

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unconditional, is good enough as effort – unless the religion or work ethic itself commands or permits a regulation in favor of non-metaphysical interests. But precisely in the practice of such a compromise doctrine the metaphysical consciousness can eventually become bungled and adulterated – a danger in which most people live because they try to reconcile the considerations, because their daily commitment is not metaphysical, except on Sunday morning, but polyfrontal or interfrontal. Every healthy life readiness shows a striving toward the optimum. By idealism one readily understands the drive to carry through this endeavor in spite of resistance and divergent impulses that are enticing but inferior to the subjective assessment. Passive idealism is characterized by the notion of a direction or a state that is such that should be maintained or sought. In active or practical idealism comes an effort in the specified direction; during conflict it can be sharpened into heroism, which will be addressed later. Tradition has gradually separated out certain directions and states as “idealistically practical” as opposed to others (the goal is not always the optimum but “being an idealist”), but conceptually these others (e.g., lying on the couch and meditating while others “work”) are not excluded when the person concerned is sacredly convinced of the posture’s superiority. The unfixed subject can strive toward an optimum in three different ways, and this applies regardless of the interest front: (a) by regulating one’s capacity upwards, achieving as much as possible in a presumed right direction, enduring as much as possible the relevant stresses; (b) by regulating one’s capacity downwards, performing as little as possible in the wrong direction, indulging in (enjoying) the fewest possible (or weakest possible) receptions of indifferent or harmful nature; (c) by emphasizing that one’s accomplishments and receptions are of the right kind, regardless of quantity, or in steadfastly maintaining an external or internal state. There is a quantitative, more dynamic idealism, and a qualitative, more static one, which can occur in all combinations. In the purely religious sphere, as a representative example, one finds under a. the weight the Catholics put on the number of prayers and masses (active endeavor) and Eastern self-mortification (passive, endurance endeavor). Under (b) one finds distance from earthly pleasures (renunciation, asceticism), and under (c) orthodoxy and strict ritual. If one thinks of a religious image, or a working image, in which metaphysical sanction is not sought despite, but rather through the partial interests, under (a) personality development can be identified as an active element, and “to open one’s heart to as much of the

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suffering of others as possible” as passive. Selflessness, ultimately self-sacrifice, is a social ideal that enjoys a high reputation as a metaphysical-moral norm even outside the ranks of believing Christians. Under (c) comes devotion in general, steadfastness in conviction, and the like. Of these examples, there is one that in a study such as this is entitled to a little more thorough treatment; it is likely that the type of posture in question plays an important role in many a “tragic” context. This is self-sacrifice – for an idea or for other people. It concerns the thought process as far as it is a part of a metaphysical perspective. The doctrine of sacrifice as good metaphysical morality can rest on pure faith and will in this case only be able to be described, not discussed. It is different when it is part of a working image in which the engaged subject seeks to build one’s posture on reasoning as far as possible and is therefore also receptive to rational objections. It is conceivable that the suggestion of self-sacrifice in a given situation is presented to the ideal test subject from Chapter Five or arises in him in such circumstances that he is given the time and opportunity to weigh for and against. The question on which he must then concentrate is the following: Does self-sacrifice for me, in general and in the present case, fulfill the demands I place on metaphysical effort? Initially it looks promising because it is universal; it eliminates all the individual’s non-metaphysical demands in favor of the “one thing needful.” It is assumed here that the subject has not reached the extreme deliberations in which we last left him and which for psychological reasons led to the collapse of action. If he merely doubts here, it is a bad sign; a real metaphysical solution should, of course, preclude the doubt. He takes, for example, his starting point from the traditional saying rooted in Christian doctrine: Humankind is here to help others. He will then immediately be made to wonder about a few things. In what way should I help the others? In what way should the others help me? To help them? Here he is caught in a circle if he does not break out, and if he breaks out and sets a goal outside the circle, he has left the starting point, which was not intended as a “starting point” in this sense, but as a basis. In and of itself, he could probably agree to submit himself completely to serving the interests of others, but not just any “others.” The recipient must be worthy of the sacrificer’s valuation, must represent the sacrificer’s own pursuit on a higher level, with superior means. But then it is not really these others he serves, but his own interests with the others as intermediaries. And then in the reverse order: One imagines, our truth seeker exclaims, that someone should

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“live for me” – if during my life I should give “meaning” to another person’s life! It is bad enough that I sit here as the result of the dreams of three hundred generations. Such an attitude in another human being, a woman for example, I could certainly “bear,” he thinks, but not on metaphysical terms, and that was the question this time. And further: Sacrifice as a principle presupposes, first of all, that there is always someone who needs it, in other words, that the metaphysical endeavor to which the sacrifice must belong, and which must have as one of its goals the liberation of humankind from the “earthly imperfection” – is not unfruitful. The sick and poor, etc., must be there until the end; the worst thing that could happen is to run out of unhappy people. Indeed, unhappy also in the metaphysical sense, because they are barred from helping anyone and thus attending to their metaphysical hygiene. The truth seeker cannot settle for emotional values alone. In a situation of practical choice, and there are always plenty of them, helping one can mean leaving the other to his or her fate. How can one choose here; how can one have the right to choose? The question is related to another: I am trying this way now because it has been recommended to me. But from which corner and in which sense can I expect metaphysical confirmation? Is there not in my work of mercy a silent defiance of the world order that will give me confirmation? Should I look at my own motives alone, or should I first and foremost have the result in mind when I sacrifice? A failed sacrifice is perhaps worse than nothing, and at what point should I finish trying here? The second point is this: Sacrifice assumes that the others are willing to accept. But their metaphysical chancea will lie precisely in their not accepting, partly in order to not impoverish the giver and to enable one to later help others, partly not to displace these others at the moment, and partly to positively renounce themselves. And from the giver’s point of view: How should one distribute one’s help; how much should one give to the other; if one aims for a whole life of sacrifice, one must save something – etc. And: Can and should one impose one’s sacrifice on others when this will have the painful consequences for them just mentioned? Does not the true sacrifice lie in the sacrificer renouncing one’s pleasures only for the sake of one’s neighbor? In a society where the idea of sacrifice had completely permeated everything, the outcome would either be that all the sacrificers would give their lives and die out, after which the raw and reckless recipients of the sacrifice would feast on a English given.

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their graves and be farther away from a metaphysical point of view than ever. And then the deceased would have achieved exactly the opposite of what they intended, which was the metaphysical perfection and salvation of all people, not just themselves – otherwise they were not sacrificers in spirit and truth. Or, the other possibility in a community of passionate sacrificers is that there would be a shortage of recipients. A moral genius would then conceive of the idea of sacrifice in another potency, abandon one’s own sacrifice, and make oneself available as a sacrifice recipient.73 Potential remaining non-idealists would want to stage the most horrific scam by posing as self-sacrificing sacrifice recipients. More importantly, however, no one would hesitate to follow the example of the genius; there would be a new phase in which everyone demanded to be the recipient of sacrifices. In the next period the pendulum would swing back, but each time with a new layer of motives. Cf. the saying: It is better to suffer wrongdoing than commit wrongdoing. One must treat one’s neighbor better. Thus, one has to commit the wrongdoing oneself. Jurists learn that when a recipient does not want to know anything about what the provider puts forward, the provider can deposit payment and thus be free of responsibility. However, neither a moral “mora”a nor other resorts taken from private interest fronts can be applied to the present field without depriving the associated posture of its dignity and seriousness; these properties have already been in danger in the preceding, and the emotional side of the matter is not of the least importance in practice. Our truth seeker has already become acquainted with a number of doubts concerning the metaphysical sufficiency of the idea of sacrifice for others. And one could probably find more. In the oft-cited situation of two shipwrecked people on the same plank, it is conceivable that one would have a greater conscientiousness that keeps one from uncritically handing the plank over to the “unknown passenger.” Suppose it were an anti-metaphysical agitator who upon one’s landing would want only to deliver the bourgeois fool to the laughter of one’s peers. Or worse: suppose the fellow passenger were as morally sensitive as the subject. One would then have the opportunity to test one’s theoretical considerations on a specific situation in which the decision is even more urgent. For both of them it would be a matter of concern to receive the sacrifice, even if for the purely social reason that it could become a story with which to return 73 In a drama by Reinhard Goering: Die Südpolexpedition des Kapitäns Scott [The South Pole Expedition of Captain Scott], Berlin 1929 p. 50 f. one is a witness to such potentiation. a Latin legal term meaning delay or default.

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to society and recount how the other sacrificed oneself. Pure social cowardice can in a given case be the sacrificer’s basis, who must, as Ibsen says, “have the courage to choose life under the circumstances.” The duty to provide for those the sacrificer leaves behind is also social, something a highly moral survivor would find difficult to evade. Perhaps the sacrificer was worn out by malnutrition or ruined by illness; in fact, the sacrifice is a relief for a variety of concerns; it is ultimately a camouflaged suicide, a deception, a refined revenge, precisely through the social obligations it imposes on the recipient. The sacrifice recipient may have reason to suspect one’s motives. A reverse consideration may also apply: Am I socially entitled to sacrifice myself for an unknown passenger and win myself an honorable exodus at the expense of all those who depend on my work and now become helpless or relegated to the mercy of others? Am I acting correctly if I destroy in this way the hopes that I have for myself as a soulmate, politician, artist, scientist, family father – expectations that I, even in an honest assessment, believe I can essentially fulfill? Poor but enthusiastic believers have collected money for a scholarship for me, or to pay for a lengthy hospital stay, so that I can return to work – am I free to dispose of my life? And – if one can bear the burden that one receives one’s life at such a price – will not one’s continued existence be embittered and contaminated because one cannot endure this knowledge, because one daily sees the gaping gulf between what one can and will accomplish “for humanity,” as compared to what I could have accomplished? Will one not become an enemy of society and humanity because of the scrutiny of one’s surroundings and the silent accusatory glances or their constant sarcasm? And if instead one can be expected to just go on whistling, without the slightest sign of concerns like these – maybe one is even a “criminal” who will immediately resume one’s socially harmful activities – is one then worth the sacrifice? Is it good social economy that I make the choice in favor of Barabbas;a will not my legacy be crucified? Am I competent to make such a comparison? What do I know about what is ultimately valuable or not valuable? Am I allowed to sneak away from the sound, concrete assessment with that kind of unclear metaphysical talk? When such considerations dominate the choice, the situation is either social or interfrontal. But they can be transferred to the purely metaphysical realm. Also in this light, the sacrifice can be seen as an escape from what a In the New Testament Gospels, following a tradition of commuting a prisoner’s death sentence on Passover, Pilate asks the crowd to choose between Barabbas, an insurrectionist who had committed murder, and Christ. The crowd chooses to release Barabbas.

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is more difficult to bear than death, and here too the sacrificer can do the other a disservice. And here we are dealing with matters that for a particular assessment are more about acting than the maintenance of duty and public opinion. Here it is asked whether the recipient knows the way to justify the price paid for his or her life, not by a social, but by a metaphysical evaluation. And without belonging to a dogmatic faith a metaphysically sensitive person may well find it difficult or impossible to endure having the voluntary death of another human being to thank for one’s life, having knowingly and willingly received this death as a sacrifice. And even for the Christian, there can be something unpalatable about purchasing salvation with the sacrifice, when the recipient may only have this one chancea to be saved. By returning to life, one will inevitably perish. The same applies if the giver or recipient is a group, an army, a people, a humanity. Without arbitrary assumptions, the number, the quantitative element, cannot be cited as a metaphysical argument, but it can as a biological and social one, since this is based on common and general formulations. Here also the majority can express its view by force and compel the individual to die for the people, a case which, however, has nothing to say to us in the present context. In a position of its own stands the case where a contract is entered into between the two on the plank. One who, for example, can no longer work at the goal of one’s life (one has suffered lasting damage or the like) is sacrificing for the other on the basis of the fact that the other will work on the same task to the best of one’s ability, possibly completing it. The task can be anything, but here it is assumed that it plays a role in the sacrificer’s metaphysical interest front. One cannot then say that this is pure sacrifice as a metaphysical path. Furthermore, each of them can think: One thing I do not want is to burden the other person with a responsibility of this kind and this extent, but another thing is that I cannot make myself an executor for the other person. If the other person believes that he or she can bear it, then I have nothing to test this conjecture – or do I? Am I allowed to reason at all before I sacrifice – or am I even obligated to do so? As someone who does not belong to any religion, I do not know what is metaphysically the most valuable – and even though I look to the autotelic as the only guide and ask: What do I like and know best? without a glance to any side – I cannot answer this either. The result of the metaphysicalmoral clash between the two on the plank could, in a given case, be that both a English given.

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sacrifice themselves, in which case they do not do it for each other, but for an idea. The idea may be social, autotelic, or metaphysical, but in all cases it is abiological. As an anchor, such an idea may be supported by isolation, etc., and in a given case then the anchor may rupture into doubt or into the conviction of its fictional nature. If it proves to hold up in extremis rebus,a then here we have one of the cases where death and perfection, as the latter is perceived by the agent oneself, are inextricably linked. In an article by Josef Körner74 we find as the basis for the idea of sacrifice the assumption that in the world there is a certain sum of evils that God is working to remove. In this work humankind can participate by suffering; God receives the help of the suffering human being “by means of whose suffering the sum of all evils in the world is gradually depleted, and God’s moral power increases.” Unfortunately, the actual consequences of this idea of a society of “pain eaters” would more easily give substance to a macabre tragi-comedy than to a truly redeeming testimony. (Cf. § 112.) In general, the idea of sacrifice, like so many metaphysical means, does not rest on reasoning, but on purely emotional conditions – whether it be sacrifice for another human being (other human beings) or for an idea. However, in the life of the mind one rarely experiences emotionality without thinking, especially when a choice and act of will are imminent, and there are painful consequences to follow. The boundary conditions here are a complicated psychological problem that cannot be dealt with by us. The irrational factors can most certainly be described in individual cases, and perhaps best by artistic means. Even though such a description may be an excellent, perhaps the best source of understanding of a present case, we must, however, when it comes to the matter in general, adhere to the processes which are most easily “put to thought.” Sacrifice for an idea generally assumes that if one “believes in” the idea, it is worth the required price. However, social interests can break in and contaminate the purely autotelic-metaphysical posture. Whoever sacrifices oneself for a socially sanctioned idea, no matter how one assesses it in one’s own quiet mind, can count on social sanction, reputation, and legacy – this is something one enjoys in advance. Legacy in particular in many cases also fulfills a metaphysical function; the sacrificer does not perceive the difference clearly. At the prospect of a bright legacy, many have given themselves even a in extreme peril. 74 “Tragik und Tragödie [Tragedy and Tragedy],” Preussische Jahrbücher [Prussian Yearbooks] Vol. 225 1931 Berlin, p. 284.

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though they did not realize the value of the object, and in their current, narrower surroundings only reaped scorn and ridicule.75 Unwavering beliefs concerning the social or “absolute” value of the object can be found in the so-called moral geniuses, possibly also religious and technical, who die for their beliefs for external or internal reasons. Indeed, even a relentless trust in the relative value of their view allows them to heroically bear the hardship from an ignorant outside world, or an outside world that does not have the courage to accept the same opinion, or that for other reasons becomes their opponent. The idealist here does not act solely on the basis of the supposed superiority of one’s moral idea, but perhaps to a greater extent on the basis of a sense of “duty.” One must be faithful to the demands of the ideal which one must try to realize. Duty is a difficult concept to investigate; perhaps it changes content according to the specific circumstances under which it is used. For us duty will be tantamount to a biological, social, metaphysical, or autotelic imperative. If such an imperative is to be not only ascertained but also understood, it must be conceived either as an irrational fixedness tendency or as motivated. Psychoanalysis is supplementary here with the highlighting of the unconscious driving forces in various forms. The act of duty is motivated in the heterotelic realm through the desire to avoid the unintended consequences of neglect, in the autotelic realm through the awareness of the inner discontent that will follow. The positive incentives, the desirability of the conditions which the action is expected to cause, as far as I understand, are not connected to the nature of the action as an act of duty. The boundary between duty and non-duty is graduated; duty begins where there are misgivings about acting differently, where an external body of power or an internal welfare principle forms a threatening background, but where the subject is in principle still free (as opposed to physically forced). Subjectivity and relativity permeate this whole matter, and the use of language is ambiguous. Rather than getting lost in further speculation about the “general nature of the concept of duty,” we will, when we later deal with specific instances of the sense of duty, investigate what factors play into each of these. On a scale between “genuine” and “false” heroism as extreme poles, the case will be closest to the “genuine” when the agent (here the sacrificer) oneself has the conviction that the value of the idea is sufficient to “justify” the sacrifice – that there is a sense of proportionality and harmony in the sacrificer’s consciousness – all from a resulting effect of all the factors that are actualized on the occasion. 75 Cf. Lucian, The Death of Peregrinus.

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Anyone who will not acknowledge any sacrifice without a so-called selfish motive can reach the concept of heroic sacrifice by making selfish regard more and more indirect, by letting it be realized by a detour to the sacrifice. In the shelter of “genuine” heroism’s social position and psychological opacity, a more “impure”-minded individual can also find refuge in selfsacrifice – an individual whose “selfish” awareness is more direct. One who, for example, carries the awareness of a “wasted and failed” life can scout for a good enough opportunity to give what remains as a sacrifice “for one good cause or another.” This person is still alive, and precisely the psychological opacity and lack of an objective standard will mean that the “world’s” and perhaps one’s own attention will focus more on the action than on the possible motives. Indeed, should a psychologist even succeed in revealing the whole matter as a gesture or camouflaged suicide, he or she (the psychologist) can risk the greatest trouble because there is, for example, national pride in the matter; the hero has brought about an anchor formation. A conversion has taken place; the history of the case goes no further back than to the heroic, the act by which the cultivated personality sacrificed one’s life – for the king, the nation, the idea of justice? – if they can indeed be in conflict. The meaningless “deed” is precisely such a sought-after occasion. Originally “the deed” had meaning by virtue of an assessment concerning which both the individual and one’s social environment were absolutely beyond doubt. It applied to problems whose solution either brought endless positive values or saved from a major catastrophe; if needed, one could also reap laurels for achievements that consisted of nothing but manifesting human performance at a relative maximum. This last case appeals to an autotelic interest, which in practice presupposes that no burning heterotelic issues occupy the attention and power of the surrounding group. However, the deed (we here presume a deed that involves at least a serious risk factor) loses its metaphysical “operation carrier” (which is purely due to the transfer of the social estimation to the metaphysical field of interest, thus surrogate) as the underlying assessment is diluted and relativized. The occasion is no longer good enough; one burns inwardly with one’s will to act (which we must regard here as a combination of metaphysical sacrifice readiness and non-metaphysical desire for expression) if one does not want to expose oneself to being ridiculous both in the eyes of others and one’s own and thereby miss out on the apparent metaphysical value one sought behind the outward praise. Flight across the Atlantic was originally something that could satisfy the metaphysical needs of a primitive

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mind – alongside the autotelic-social. But eventually there were so many who were willing to risk their lives for flight across the Atlantic that it became completely empty. The Atlantic began to wear out as a sacrifice-worthy object – the last Atlantic hero (1936) even got a reprimand when he arrived. (The reader will have noticed that here we approach from a new side matters with which we have previously been in touch when dealing with the problem of autotelic surplus. At the same time, they lie at the transition to the type of situation we will come to at the end of this chapter, which we have given the name interfrontal.) Another example, concerning which can also be said with some certainty that autotelic maximal expression sometimes plays the role of metaphysical surrogate, is the climbing of mountains, which in certain central European countries, especially lately, has been a refuge for the sacrifice-ready and the deed-seekers. Economic misery has created widespread desperation among young people because, among other things (and this is what concerns us here), they are deprived of a number of the metaphysical readiness diversions available to the individual in normal social conditions. They stand with their lives as an unused ability and look around – what should they use it for that is not too pathetic? Fate has given them a talent that burns in their hands and demands to be put to use. Thus, it is easy to resort to reckless utilization on the mountains as the only way out. Here, by virtue of the prevailing social assessment, one can still perform the unique, the unimaginable, the singular, radiate in one’s own and others’ eyes, and feel metaphysically relieved, though not satisfied. Loss of life may not be the direct intention, but it is included as a dolus eventualisa: if it is required, then so be it. Increasingly difficult routes are chosen until either an accident or a psychological crisis occurs, for example, conversion to religion. Here too the decisive weight lies on first performance – repetition interests neither the outside world nor the seeker oneself. A widespread phenomenon is evident in this: only through the unique, once-in-a-lifetime “new” performance does the human lose the dreadful sense of superfluity; only as unique in the history of the universe can one work one’s way into a metaphysical functional cycle. In the difficulty of realizing this requirement one can see perhaps one of the deepest prerequisites for the collective movements. However, the deed and readiness for self-sacrifice do not always lead to biological death. Sometimes one survives the “heroic attempt” and a reaction often occurs. The intoxication ebbs – and the metaphysical value fades with a foreseen possibility.

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the autotelic-social. Continued life creates new needs, even though a rented laurel provides restless relief. Perhaps the hero starts thinking like this: It would have been better if I had lost my life. Indeed, there are heroes who have gone to the dogs physically and mentally because they have survived their only metaphysical chance – war heroes, polar heroes, scientific heroes. It is one thing to be a hero while the occasion is at hand and gives a high-voltage ecstasy, and while the applause from the outside and one’s own sanction from within lifts one above all insecurity – it is another thing to be one in the long run. The entire emotional basis becomes a different one, and though one is still “excited about the idea,” both fatigue and daily repetition affect the assessment, the sense of relevance, etc., both in oneself and others. The ideal self, corresponding to the metaphysical self, becomes overshadowed by other “self-fragments”; new considerations emerge from the organism itself, which the weary metaphysical self must fight, often under different conditions. The one who actually loses one’s life in the heroic engagement escapes this reaction, which is so dangerous to the feeling of confirmation. One even dies in a moment of vivid faith in the consciousness that one has reached the moral climax of one’s life – and as far as the outside world is concerned, one appears to it as explained, stripped of everything that obstructs and hinders, freed from the restriction and relativity of earthly conditions, as a guide, one who has arrived at the long-awaited metamorphosis. We can worship a god and the deceased without fear of the consequences, which must happen with the living. Through death, the hero becomes fixed in one’s maximum, exempt from the devaluing impact of the present. Precisely this effect could in some cases be cited as an objection to heroic self-sacrifice as a metaphysical-moral real solution – the heroic real affect does not seem to have its source in union with some “absolute value.” It was an affect like others, one could say, in the highest real justification by the awareness of the social dignity of the action. Alongside faith and self-sacrifice, humans have also sought metaphysical confirmation in countless other ways. The Holy Grail – the blue flower. In recent days, the arts and the associated “intuitive cognition” also play an important role for many in this regard. One objection is that it is a fairly specific and for others partial metaphysical need that is covered through art, namely the need for a harmonious sense of the world, liberation from the broken demands of partial fronts. Here again we are reminded of the distinction between the universally valid and the subjectively sufficient metaphysical answer. Others believe that love, ecstasy, or the natural sciences lead forward. The theosophists gain knowledge of metaphysical realities through the leader’s

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visions, the anthroposophists through spiritual exercises of various kinds, the spiritualists through a medium’s communication. Against science one might object to the idea that any “knowledge,” “recognition,” “cognition,” or whatever word one will use, which research can lead to is useful for the metaphysical need. And what assurance is there that possible scientific results will not be the demise of the metaphysically distressed? Is there anything today that seems to indicate this? – One believes in “the formation of the personality,” though there are highly developed personalities (Ibsen, Strindberg, and others) who have only arrived to ask the question even more ruthlessly. To be happy with one’s own moral efforts is not the same thing as having solved the problem of meaning, but for many it can mean a valuable relief. After summarizing some of the difficulties that arise in solving the problem of meaning, Harald Høffding76 declares without reservation: all this makes it logically and ethically impossible to assert an ethical principle as the source of world developments. Any theological and philosophical attempts to overcome this difficulty have proved fruitless. Orthodox theology has only pushed the question further back, and speculative philosophy has fled and explained away the difficulties. The only way to get rid of these difficulties is to not think about them, and this way is not easy for all individuals.

In our terminology, the conclusion will look like this: The formation of a working or desire image is not the only applicable tactic. Isolation is one of the others. One “will not enter into” metaphysical questions; a norm of good tone requires that one does not bring them into orbit. Of greater value to the cultural pursuit, here as in other contexts, is sublimation, a process by which energy bound by the problem is released by detours. The metaphysically despairing becomes party leader, writer, philosopher, poet, preacher, artist, humanitarian, and prophet. While such a cultural use of power has in the past been categorized as an uncontested real solution for autotelic surplus, we encounter it here as a metaphysical recourse whose real satisfactory value can be disputed. The psychological origins of the posture can be different, as well as the interests it is intended to cover. From a particular view, culture also emerges as a product of metaphysical panic – just as talking and contrivance may be the thing with which a doomed person seeks to guard one’s consciousness against unbearable feelings and reflections in the last minutes before execution. The perception of “sublimation” here flows into the perception of “distraction,” and one is then led from these more qualified cases downward to culturally inert or 76 Ethik [Ethics], 1887 p. 298.

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even harmful forms of distraction, the task of which is merely to turn attention away from the painful metaphysical questions. The means are many and well known, and of varying value – alcohol intoxication, erotic intoxication, travel, entertainment, socializing, art, etc., surrender to practical details, work, escape from synthesis. The horizon is limited by intentional concentration, and attention is bound alongside continuous series of sensory impressions. Work is the salt of life, it is said in a not-so-harmless metaphor: Only what tends to rot must be salted. Distraction can be represented in the image of an airplane, which must keep moving to fly because the air only carries for a moment. The pilot may become sluggish from routine, but the instant the engine chokes, the crisis is acute. Even during the most orgiastic bacchanal such a “crash” can occur, and in a moment the situation is transformed from reckless abandon to the macabre. “Metaphysical emptiness” laughs in the face of the life worshiper. One then nauseously perceives how the mind hangs in its own web, while a hell lurks beneath. The deeper one’s metaphysical needs are attached behind all external behavior, and the more stubbornly one has neglected one’s metaphysical hygiene, the easier it is under the circumstances to be at the mercy of panic, and the more one will be susceptible to a cheap surrogate, as long as it is positive (American middle class). Previously there have been two different ways of seeing metaphysical readiness, as “real phenomenon” and “apparent phenomenon.” We chose the viewpoint that pays attention to both options side by side. The “false” metaphysical need, which according to psychoanalysis is mainly due to rationalization and projection, should then be eliminated by analytical treatment. It then comes down to asking whether or not it should be possible to “solve” the presumptively real conditioned metaphysical readiness by somehow bringing it to an end, for example, through an appropriate upbringing or a completely secure social arrangement. It is alleged that in Russia, the religious need has been eradicated in the new generation. A skeptic might object that the appearance of the need may have disappeared, but no one knows what the individual is holding in secret. And why the widespread agitation if there were no forces resisting? Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) has written about an eradication of the metaphysical need through control of the genetic makeup. But speculation about various possibilities in this direction has, for the time being, such a thin basis that for the conception of the tragic they mean nothing but a curiosity.

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From a metaphysical point of view, such a reduction of human nature would look like a terrible decline, a “return” to the “animal” plane. But – one can hardly get past this – when the last metaphysician is exterminated or dies, there would no longer be anybody to make this comparison. And thus, the conscience would also be free and the metaphysical innocence re-established. If there is no more general requirement of justice and no universal need for meaning, then neither injustice nor meaninglessness would exist, except at a minimum, where it could be rectified and made good again. If there is a really convincing prospect that the amputation would succeed, that it is quite inconceivable that it could fail and result in worsening conditions – on what basis could one be discouraged, apart from positive creeds which claim that the metaphysical endeavor is compulsory? The metaphysical seeker then stands largely at a crossroads where two alternatives are found for a consistently executed path: Either go unconditionally for a hypothetical and irrational creed or consider the metaphysical need as an almost psychopathic superstructure of conscious life (possibly as a nervous phenomenon) and do one’s best to defuse or eradicate it. We have these two programs for consideration. But at the dividing point mentioned, there is a third conceivable path at which we must stop briefly before we conclude this variegated chapter with some brief remarks about the interfrontal conflict of interest. The test subject from before, whom we have inconsiderately equipped with the necessary representative characteristics, must once again bear the burden and heat of the moment. One is now at this intersection in one’s metaphysical personality development. But one cannot comfortably follow any of the traditional paths. One path seems to require one’s devaluation as the bearer of a critical intelligence, while the other is in the sharpest conflict with the nature of one’s metaphysical needs. To the person this need is something “sacred” and inalienable, indeed a crown of thorns, but just as fully a royal sign. By virtue of this need, one is the judge of the universe and the faithful, watchful eye of human life. In this need one’s uniqueness is fulfilled; from this height, one overlooks the details and collects them into an immense, inquiring, and accusatory synthesis. The animal and the happily blind can be delivered from their immediate need by a simple trick, but here other goals apply. Here one is a chief of the lineage of the redeemed, suffering, and inquiring, of known and unknown sacrificers and agitators. Should we as the living count the harvest of death? it is asked in a Greek tragedy, but so does our metaphysical human being; one counts the harvest of death and leads them forth by one’s hand,

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demanding a meaning for their lives. And one counts the unborn embryo, and everyone is equally close to one because everyone is human. By one’s metaphysical demand one is a god because one carries a world in one’s heart, and one is a slave because this weight is about to crush one. Here one has the choice of throwing off one’s cross, one way or the other, or taking the downfall as an inevitable consequence. Under these conditions one chooses the downfall. Admittedly, it does not give one what one seeks, a positive confirmation, but one chooses it as the least unsatisfactory because no salvation is given except by fraudulent means. By these means alone, by which one desecrates one’s “sacred form,” one can win a continued existence that is something more than a dull and desperate meditation, whose last results have long been clear to one, and each time cause one to arrive at wherever one takes one’s point of departure. It is natural that a direct or indirect suicide may present itself to one as an enticing and liberating way out. But suicide is a flight. If one has the “nerves” to bear the condition for a moment, one may not fail. Act or not act, both are arbitrary. Only a necessity that knows no resistance can take responsibility from one. One is the prisoner of life; one is the hostage of an unknown tyrant. One has learned that the ultimate will to subordination under an unknown plan leads to complete passivity, not as a logical but as a psychological consequence. Here and no further has one arrived with one’s meditation, and no other tool does one know or recognize. But it may happen that precisely on this extreme frontier toward final collapse in the face of impossibility something happens to one. One’s fate has been like that of a blind animal whose interests have all been pierced, all its hopes defeated. And while it exerted its powers and willing readiness beyond all reserves, its almighty master heaped a double torment upon its aching back in exchange for each battle won. Then it happens that there is a crisis in the animal. On the threshold of annihilation, facing impossibility itself, it raises a battle with its hopeless power, a moment’s struggle before it is crushed under the master’s stick. But in this moment, it has cleared space for its uniqueness; it has experienced its form as being equal to that of the master. Trusting in the absolute submission of the slave, the master left one’s limbs free with which to serve him and be kept in the spirit of the dream of liberation, and not give up hope as long as there are forces in reserve. With prudence he only provides the useless in the violence of despair. But the slave’s limbs have acquired a dangerous strength through wear and tear, and that freedom the ruler had to give one, he now regrets with the blood he wipes from his face.

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My tyrant is life, says the metaphysical pain, life and the drive to live. We writhe in the chains of life, and when it has twisted us to the last drop, we are thrown into the grinder of horror to be turned into new lives. To there! we scream every now and then in a sense of clarity that has flared up. Then the tyrant smiles and supplies a new hope that we throw ourselves into with body and soul – and when it is no longer hope but possession, then we are perplexed by its emptiness and scream for a new To there! But in exchange for being a carrier of suffering of the highest order, for being ravaged not only by hunger and cold and holes in the tissue, but also by divine desperation itself, by the anguish of choice, we receive the ability we call our free will. This one door life has left open to its prisoner, that one might have the hope and the inspiration of the idea of liberation to endure: Endure more until one can no longer serve life through breeding and the means for breeding. Then one has no resources and no stimulating principle, and life does not care about which bodily movements one still performs on the way to the common grave. Life has left a single ability unchained, one that one feels now, the will – tied in relationship to the life drive. And this is what one is now rebelling against at the threshold of annihilation. You got me, but my son you shall not get! You made a fatal mistake when you allowed the breeding to be under my will. And not by love did you do this, but that I should face this worst of concrete responsibilities when I had fought myself free of the details: Should I carry on this evil or should I not? And now I no longer ask what you want, but you have to ask what I want, and I no longer want to sacrifice to the god of life. I will hit you with the ability you released to torment me; I will use my insight against you and rob you of your prey. And the abused millions will stand behind me like a plow as I sacrifice my most precious hope on the altar of justice, rebellion, and retribution, and become the last of my generation. And if you still think you are going to win because my wife and I cannot do without a child, to whom we will give our love, then you must still starve and perish, for there will be two breeding, and when they have bred one, they have perfected their abilities. Then they will have one who receives their love and their goods, and carries their dreams further. And always two shall breed one, and I will set this total as a denominator under the number of life and it shall not be like the stars or the sand of the sea, but the river that becomes nothing in the great drought. Then you shall know your impotence and beg me, a human, on your bloody knees. But I will be unrelenting just as you were unrelenting in all my hours of distress. And for a moment I, a human, shall be your equal, your cruel generosity, before you strike me with the black

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night while I am still alive – the black night in the mind that now there is nothing more for which to hope.

§ 60. Fifth example Interfrontal situations (V). The previous examples involved a single interest front. But the case was also briefly touched upon where the task was to unite several interests, partly within the same front (after all, each front can be divided into subfronts, e.g., breathing, temperature, eating, and reproduction in the biological field) and partly from different fronts. As the schema was drawn up in § 46, it produced 1,440 such situation types; by modifications to the schema, of course, the number becomes different. From these a few may now be chosen, whose representative qualities also shed light on the others. The characteristic feature of all of them is that the individual, in terms of posture choice and capacity, is capable of solving each of the two problems in a relatively satisfactory way, but not both (all), or indeed all, but not simultaneously. But the qualification is precisely that the “cumulative” or “simultaneous” solution is as much a matter of welfare for the individual as the solution of each individual problem. If one focuses on one of them, one neglects or opposes the other. The functional connection between the problems and the associated effort can vary greatly, as will also be seen in the next chapters. In practical life, one often finds complicated situations; the position is interfrontal, at the same time as each individual task is problematic. The individual finds oneself, for example, situated between two tasks, one where the road is clear while the ability is in deficit, and another where the ability is sufficient but where there is doubt concerning the procedure. Such complicated situations should not be dealt with in their generality; the elements have now been provided so that they can be extracted in a given case when there is special reason for it. The fact that both problems “cannot” be solved means that the case seems impossible to the engaged individual. No complete real solution can thus be imagined without the difficulty proving to be only apparent. It can therefore only be a matter of partial real solutions, and partly of surrogates. The fact that a coincidence appears redemptive does not concern the calculated struggle, which here has alone been kept in view. Nor does it challenge the conceptual determination that an observer sees a real solution that is hidden from the perplexed. In other contexts, on the other hand, there may be reason to distinguish between “subjective” and “objective” or intersubjectively insoluble conflicts, for example, in moral philosophy and dramaturgy. In the next chapter

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such situations are addressed, as well as interfrontal ones, which (subjectively or objectively) cannot be resolved, and which therefore result in catastrophe. It becomes necessary there to revisit a plurality of situation types once again; for this reason, it is also not necessary to give any summary of the variants here. There are two types of conflict in particular that come before others for treatment. The first is the opposition between certain species of autotelic expression and the consideration of cultural work and the social order, which to a large extent must rest on the neglect of the individual. Modern designations of such expressions are the sexual drive (libido, eros, broadly), the self-assertion drive, and the aggressive drive. It is thanks to Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking research that this field, with its innumerable sources of suffering, is now becoming more and more elucidated. He has addressed related issues especially in a small book, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [The Discomfort in Culture] (Vienna 1930). It is stated here (p. 127): In the individual’s process of development, the program of the pleasure principle, the satisfaction of the need for happiness, is maintained as the main objective, while the arrangement or adaptation to a human community appears to one as a condition which is hardly to be avoided, which perhaps would have been better. Put another way: individual development appears to us as a product of interference between two endeavors, the pursuit of happiness (there is no “happiness”), which we usually call “egoistic,” and the pursuit of union with others in society, which we call “altruistic.” Neither of these designations penetrate beneath the surface. In individual development, as has been said, the main emphasis is most often on the egoistic or happinessseeking pursuit; the other, which one might call “cultural,” usually settles for being restrictive. It is different in the cultural process; here the aim to form a unity of human individuals is to a large extent the principal matter; bliss-finding as an aim still exists, but it gets crowded into the background; it almost seems as if creating a great human community would succeed best if one did not have to worry about the happiness of the individual.

I refrain from any close critique of details and cite further (p. 128 at the bottom): So also the two efforts, the one toward individual happiness and the other toward human connection, have to fight with each other in each individual, and thus the two processes, the individual development and the cultural development, encounter one another in hostility and fight for the terrain.

Though the terminology is different from that which we employ here, the next passage in Freud is nonetheless quoted because it is of interest that the author seems to believe in a real solution, perhaps through psychoanalytic treatment:

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on the tragic But this struggle between individual and society is not a descendant of the arguably irreconcilable opposition between the primitive drives, Eros and Death; it signifies a conflict in the general management of the libido. It can be compared to the conflict concerning the distribution of the libido between the ego and the objects, and it allows for an eventual equalization of the individual, and hopefully also in the future of culture, even though it currently makes the life of the individual so difficult.

The last paragraph of the book reads: The question concerning the fate of humanity seems to me to be whether and to what extent its cultural development will succeed in becoming master of the disruptions of communal life through the human aggressive and self-destructive drives. In this regard, perhaps the present time deserves special attention. Humans have now brought the forces of nature so far under their control that it will be easy for them to exterminate one another to the last person. They know this, and this causes a good part of their current anxiety, their unhappiness, their anxious mood. And now they are waiting for the other of the two “heavenly powers,” the eternal Eros, to make an effort to assert himself in the fight against his equally immortal opponent.

(In our day, however, what Freud calls the aggressive drive has entered into a synthesis with the extreme ideal of community. This shows how artificial and limited such a “division” of the context of life is, even if it does a service in a single relation.) Different terminology often means a different viewpoint, but what Freud points out here can nonetheless give light to our theme. The author then also mentions different solutions, different kinds of life techniques (especially in III) in situations of conflict, with a special focus on the present. They all involve the repression or displacement of the happiness drive,77 alongside various forms of flight. As far as a possible application to the cultural demand is concerned, he can only refer to future possibilities, and he seems largely skeptical of the idea of an ultimate and exhaustive real solution. Important in this regard is a statement on p. 72: “Often one seems to perceive that it is not just the pressure of culture, but something in the function of its own being that negates our full satisfaction and forces us to take other paths.” Consequently, the type of conflict becomes more than purely interfrontal; it becomes complex. Alongside the one-sided regulation of the autotelic demand, attempts have been made to achieve harmony through different kinds of compromise. The rationalization (“heterotelization,” “moralization”) of the pleasurable, socially amoral activity is important. One tries to obtain social sanction on one’s behalf 77 Cf. Schjelderup, Psykologi [Psychology] p. 266 ff.

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by portraying it as culturally relevant, as part of a recognized social endeavor. The polar scientist who is out as a purely personal matter emphatically stresses the scientific nature of the expedition; the specialist struggles in self-interest for the subject’s prestige, etc. Reaction formation and other means mentioned under monofrontal situations may also apply here. The other representative conflict is the opposition between life-serving and life-indifferent impulses and considerations. It is superfluous to assert that this opposition is necessary or principled; it is enough to state that it appears randomly. By the phrase “life-” here is meant the maintenance and continuation of the organic form of humankind, by direct and indirect biological effort. Lifeindifferent, perhaps life-hostile, roughly denotes certain autotelic and metaphysical endeavors that have emancipated themselves from biological considerations. Concerning these conditions, we have previously used the terms “continuation or repetition paths” as opposed to “perfection paths.” Continuation paths usually coincide with biological efforts, sometimes also social ones, while perfection paths will appear in the social, autotelic, and metaphysical fields. When on the one hand life-indifferent expression becomes harmful, and on the other the bearer is judged to be the highest, the worthiest human, the most important for the welfare or well-being of the ideal self, then the following peculiar paradox already seen in several compounds arises: The path to what is perceived as the worthiest is at the same time the path to destruction and death, and thus also to the annihilation of the high-value pursuit as empirical reality. The concept of perfection also implies completion, conclusion, but imperfection in principle leaves room for development and continuation. “Continuation of the perfect” is meaningless if it does not presuppose imperfection in a new relation. The destruction may be intentional and part of the confirmation (martyrdom); it can be covered by a “dolus eventualis” (if it is not to be avoided, well then, so be it); it may appear as bitter and despised necessity or break in surprisingly. The functional connections between optimum and downfall can be widely different. Diverse are the testimonies of highly developed people concerning the encounter with this “value-biological paradox” and the significance it has had for them. Here are a few: Fr. Schiller has said the following (in the Prologue to Wallenstein, Eleventh Scene): “– and if you do not lay down life life will never be won;”

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the passage can be interpreted in the same spirit as Ibsen’s “– only that which is lost is eternal.”

In Schiller’s first line, “life” seems to mean biological life with all its unused forces, in the other, autotelic-metaphysical confirmation. In the poem “Selige Sehnsucht [Blessed Longing],” Goethe forms the idea as follows: “And as long as you do not have this: Die and become! you are just an obscure guest on the dark earth.”

Changing the second line to “this: Become and die” certainly ruins the meter, but at the same time the mysterious element disappears and the verse better illuminates the problem at which it is aimed; the underlying psychological process in both cases is the same. It is unnecessary to claim at this point that the paradox applies to all highly differentiated human life expression. For the time being it must remain open whether and to what extent the problem – randomly or essentially – does not occur or can be overcome without pseudo-maneuvers. But the conflict between life-serving and life-indifferent (possibly life-harming) considerations has in any case been a central and burning issue for great thinkers and poets through millennia of European history, from Sophocles to Ibsen. And one is tempted to say that if a spiritual leader has not discovered this problem, then he or she cannot stand for the universal. The relationship between the two life paths, the continuation path and the perfection path, when these paths are thought to be implemented in pure culture, can be graphically represented in support of the view. In a Cartesian coordinate system, the x-axis (and its parallel lines) can represent the “repetition or continuation path”; it comes from an unknown past + and runs toward o (zero) in origin. x = o denotes the natural death of the individual. Inside − x time runs to the “endless future,” whether it is conceived as an earthly generational continuation or as an individual continuation hereafter. The y-axis (and its parallel lines) is perpendicular to these lines illustrating the “value or perfection path.” Its + ∞ is the ideal that the human can strive toward by one’s own power; at − ∞ lies metaphysical-transcendent desiderata, possibly realities, which are beyond the reach of humankind and in cases can only be reached through detours. The upper left quadrant then becomes the unfolding field of this earthly life, and the only (hypothetically) real solution is the line y = + ∞.

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The more one’s course of life is near and parallel to the x-axis, the stronger one stands biologically, but the less significant one also is in the history of ideas, in the struggle for metaphysical meaning and value. And the more the curve is near and parallel to the y-axis, the weaker one is biologically, but the more one is at the same time involved in the fundamental value struggle. Following this orientation, we can now draw two representative life curves, each denoting its own extreme, and a third curve showing some kind of compromise.

FIGURE 11: Relationship between continuation path and perfection path when implemented in pure culture. The x-axis and its parallel lines represent the continuation path; it comes from an unknown past + and runs toward o (zero) in origin. x = o denotes the natural death of the individual. Inside – x time runs to the “endless future.” The y-axis and its parallel lines are perpendicular to these lines illustrating the perfection path. Its + ∞ is the ideal that the human can strive toward by one’s own power; at – ∞ lies metaphysical-transcendent desiderata, possibly realities, which are beyond the reach of humankind and in cases can only be reached through detours. The upper left quadrant then becomes the unfolding field of this earthly life, and the only (hypothetically) real solution is the line y = + ∞.

The pure biological line (I) is placed a small distance in positive y, thereby showing that this posture does not avoid the value considerations, but only when this can be reconciled with a continuation that is not reduced. But the line can at any time be forced down and coincide with the x-axis, that is, to a value zero point. (Remember that the word value here is used in a specific sense; otherwise, everyone is free to perceive the continuation as “value.”) The

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extension of the curve into − x is dotted to denote “the false infinity” – the incalculable continuation through the lives of new generations on the same plane – continuation in the sense of repetition, here or beyond. The value or completion line (II) looks like a hyperbola. It increasingly departs from the path of continuation and points toward the maximum of value, while approaching the y-axis (death line) as an asymptote. While line I hits the perpendicular death line (i.e., takes, or is forced to take, the full consequence of “the law of corruptibility”), line II will indeed approach the death line to inseparability, but never coincide with it. This means: the death that results from the individual’s idealistic-heroic life-indifferent posture (in origin and meaning) is different from the organic conditional death. In its last consequence, the value line is also perpendicular to the x-axis, but it is as the personality “overcomes” or makes insignificant the organic annihilation by choosing it voluntarily (it is only the subjective experience of these conditions that is illustrated by the graphical representation). Meanwhile, a hyperbola returns from “infinity” in the lower right quadrant and continues to run toward the negative x-axis as an asymptote. Translated: The impetus that the heroic person has set in motion will, from a certain metaphysical viewpoint, no longer be destroyed. A metaphysical value has been triggered from its potential state at y = + ∞, and realized in time; from standing vertically on the continuation line, the value curve is now forced into ever greater parallel with the x-axis; it is individualized because it is lasting. In the upper left quadrant existence becomes value (and if you do not lay down life), in the lower right quadrant the value gains existence (your life will never be won). The oscillation of the curve denotes the annihilation that is only apparent. Curve III, the line of harmony or compromise, is perhaps the one most frequently followed. The individual is in the violence of one’s impressions; sometimes the course ascends from the pressure of the autotelic-metaphysical conscience, sometimes it descends again prudently and opportunistically to safe horizontality. In the end, the death line is touched at the angle that the moment determines; perhaps most people, who realize that the hour has come, have a small final recovery toward positive y (deathbed conversion, cathartic crisis). “The spirit of compromise” that Brand calls Satan appears here as “the spirit of life,” as self-preservation’s only way out from under the tormenting pressures of idealism. It expresses itself through the same kinds of psychological tricks and honest attempts to build a satisfactory life tactic that occur in monofrontal situations and does not need to be customized in detail here. Above all,

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it is rationalization and desirable interpretation that come into play on the part of the pseudo-solutions, along with variants of sublimation. Maneuvers such as these are favored material for stern rebuke as well as for comic-satirical poetry (main example Peer Gynt). But just as the individual had to fear catastrophe before it had built up its individual art of living, so too is it later threatened by destruction through the breakdown of tactics – directly by one consideration breaking through and destroying the balance, and indirectly by the awareness of having deceived oneself and lived incompletely and dishonestly.

·7· ON CATASTROPHES

§ 61. Suffering, misfortune, catastrophe If we begin with aversion as the immediately given, we can say that suffering (mental or physical) is aversion with sufficient strength. And if we take the word course in the widest possible sense, suffering can be said to arise from a course that is contrary to the subject’s interest; under the course then are also counted organic conditions and opaque mental processes, illness, age, and death. However, a proportionality between suffering on the one hand and the opposite course-interest on the other can be established only within narrow limits; suffering is due to many unknown factors and incalculably complicated conditions; it is also usually intimately associated with moments of nonsuffering and of positive pleasure and value. In the previous chapters, course was used in a more limited sense: a plan, a pursuit, a course of interest struggle, where a conscious effort creates tension with the outside world and may be associated with suffering but does not have to be. The suffering may be linked to the various stages of the course of the interest struggle, but perhaps especially to failure. Attempting to define the concept of suffering will hardly lead to greater clarity, since the meaning of the word is specific and unambiguous; it is found

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across conditions that seem common to all people. The fact that the suffering can vary infinitely is another matter. Thus, I use the term in the traditional sense without further explanation. Neither has Diederichs,78 who has devoted himself to an in-depth study of the phenomenon of suffering and its associated problems, relied on more than one suggestion of a definition. On p. 7 he says, “It is essentially a moment of misery that needs to be lifted,” and later that suffering is something “that is, but should not be.” It is thus supposed to be a state that the bearer with sufficient strength wants to change. But sometimes, there are sufferings (evils) that the bearer (e.g., the ascetic) does not want to change because, at the same time, the condition does something of value; sometimes, one very strongly wants a change in conditions without it, therefore, being natural to call them suffering (e.g., the comic predicament). One can hardly reach a description of the very experience of mental suffering without artistic means, nor can a description of the expressive movements of suffering give us what we seek, a return of the complex phenomenon to easier conditions. Mental suffering consists of, or is accompanied by emotions such as sorrow, privation, dread, remorse, jealousy, anxiety, etc. The bodily pain referred to above in §§ 4 and 19 has no corresponding division; by daily custom one distinguishes between stinging, tingling, pinching, shooting, etc. Suffering can be short or long-lasting, be removed, continue unchanged, or increase to paroxysms and cause both mental and physical ruin. By the word misfortune one usually thinks of the impersonal event which is the “nearest cause” of suffering, whereas suffering is attached to the subject and carried by him or her. The distinction is not always clear but often will be: The fracture of the leg is the misfortune, and the pain, the inactivity, etc., is the suffering. Minor misfortunes are called mishaps. We will understand a catastrophe as a qualified misfortune. The word means upheaval – one complex of interest is annihilated and violently reversed to another. In daily speech (the press, for example), catastrophe is generally used for misfortunes that occur surprisingly and are of sufficiently large scope; the term almost covers an impression category. In this work, it will be used for irreparable misfortunes of sufficient significance. The provision of irreparability is not logically applicable (in theory, all changes are irreparable – factum infectum fieri nequita) but practically useful. According to this use of terms, a misfortune (which is not a catastrophe) could be irreparable but of limited significance – or of greater significance but repaired (overcome, gotten 78 Vom Leiden und Dulden [On Suffering and Tolerance], Berlin and Bonn 1930. a a thing done cannot be undone.

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over – restitutio in integrum,a status quo ante bellemb). A misfortune as well as an instance of suffering can “turn for the best” and has in this sense been a misfortune only apparently or in relation to an abandoned assessment method. The refining and deepening effect of suffering is highlighted by a number of authors, besides Diederichs (op. cit.), including such writers as Nietzsche and Freud. In Christianity, it forms a core issue. An example will demonstrate what I mean by irreparable in a practical sense, and by catastrophe as a sufficiently significant, irreparable misfortune. If a singer loses his arm, this is a misfortune according to the normal usage of language; it cannot be repaired, but it is devoid of influence on the life experience that gives the singer biological, social, and autotelic sanction. It is difficult to think of the loss of the arm as a catastrophe in itself, but it can be “a cause” of a catastrophe: The singer is abandoned by the woman he loves and is mentally broken down. On the other hand, it would be a catastrophe for him to lose his voice (where nothing else is stipulated). The decisive factor for classification, therefore, appears to be the hierarchy of interests in each case, and in order to establish a hierarchy, one must first have defined and identified each individual interest. If the catastrophe is regarded as more extensive, it would be unnecessary to burden the presentation with a constant highlighting of the mishap – misfortune – catastrophe scale, and with a similar scale for suffering from the slightest discomfort to the most extreme despair and rupture. I therefore restrict myself to talking about catastrophes and throughout imply the milder forms and the suffering that accompanies them.

§ 62. Catastrophes. The individual links In the event of a catastrophe, some factors will catch the eye more than others. In practical terms, it is advantageous to be able to individualize these factors in the limitless continuum and arrange them in groups. Such individualization and grouping do not, of course, claim a principled validity. But if one is to clarify its continuum, make it digestible for thought, then one must give it a structure, even if this operation is tantamount to the most severe violence against the substance, since it is “immediately” experienced. They naturally fall into three groups, which can then be divided again. In most of the cases of catastrophe in practical life, and that are able to be dealt a returning everything to the state in which it was before. b the state existing before the war.

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with in dramatic literature, such a triad will be useful for overview. The division is no more than a starting point and a preliminary working method; it will be shown during use how far it will serve us. As the first group of factors we have the object of attack, the endangered interest, the destroyed value. The second group is formed by the counterpower, the attacking power, the hostile dynamic, and the interfering conditions in the environment. The third group is more difficult to characterize; it includes what is needed for a catastrophe to happen, apart from groups 1 and 2. As a collective name one can use occasion, triggering cause, or the like. I reiterate, especially in connection with group 3, that the division will not express different degrees of necessity, all factors being equally necessary. The groups are side-by-side, not superior and subordinate. All the circumstances that characterize the individual catastrophe are distinct from these catastrophe conditions sine qua non and – both in practical (task-related) and “aesthetic” (experience-related) respects, distinguish it from others: the object of the attack, the nature of the interest-hostile condition, the nature of the cause, the interaction of the impulses, the attitude of the affected subject before, during, and after the catastrophe, its effect on one’s entire relationship with life, the appearance of the overall course to the observer.

§ 63. Object of attack An object of attack in the sense here presupposes an assessment agent. For the mineral there are no catastrophes because it has no state interest, an interest which means either that a state should remain unchanged, or change in a certain way, or approach a certain goal. Concerning the plant and possible unconscious animals, it is close to saying that it is “better” for them to grow up and propagate than to be torn up by the root, eaten, burned, etc. But this conception is due to the observing human; we place interest in the unconscious organism based on our knowledge of its “entelechy,” its normal course of development. Already in the case of “conscious” animals the situation becomes a different one; at the very least, the animal, through affect, or whichever term one wants to use, experiences a strong attraction to certain conditions and a violent abhorrence of others. However, since the animal’s field of interest is relatively limited (painlessness, food, air, mating, offspring, freedom of movement), so will the catastrophe variants also be. We do not know whether they

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are perceived as anything specific, although the associated expressive movements often seem to indicate this. Above all, however, it is in the human and in the human world that catastrophic events take place. Here one will also find the richest range of attack objects, of values, and of delicate interests that provide an abundance of easily ignited “fuel.” One will have in mind, from earlier chapters, the outline of these interests. The biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical values, individually and in every conceivable connection, need not be repeated. What one must remember, however, is to always orient oneself based on the affected bearer’s own situation: What is biological value for one (the muscular strength of the bodybuilder) is, for example, autotelic value for another (the athlete), cf. the wine bottle in § 14. The environment is also important here: the blind-born will perhaps, when he or she hears about the existence of vision in others, experience the deficit as an autotelic misfortune, but it may not become biological due to assistance for the blind. For the lone explorer who loses sight in the wilderness from a lightning strike, the blindness, on the other hand, will be a biological catastrophe or initiate one. (There are theoretical questions that need not be addressed: when does the “prelude” end and when does the “actual” catastrophe begin? Is the catastrophe really happening before it is completed? The summary answer must be that the catastrophe is a process, of shorter or longer duration, which in each case must be demarcated according to practical considerations.) By breaking through the biological interest front of the value-bearing subject, forms of suffering such as gasping for breath, freezing, starvation, misfortunes such as fire in the grain storehouses, destruction of tools, illness, death of offspring, and catastrophes such as early destruction of reproductive ability, the total annihilation of offspring, and deadly events of all kinds excepting old age occur. Natural death, on the other hand, can be catastrophic for non-biological, artistic, religious interests, etc. The reason for the distinction is this: It is natural to speak of catastrophes only within areas that are in some way subject to the possibility of sanction, areas where there is room for preventive effort on the part of the subject. Removing this distinction would also result in natural death having to be classified among biological catastrophes and then gaining a dominant place. By breaking through the (real or pseudo) social interest front, forms of suffering such as feelings of shame and loneliness, misfortunes such as demotion and loss of civic esteem, and catastrophes such as banishment and exile (the

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Jews’ expulsion from Israel, Roman exiliuma and interdictio acquae et ignis,b Church law’s condemnation and excommunication) occur. By breaking through the autotelic interest front, forms of sufferings in a given case such as pain in and of itself, privation, and depression, misfortunes such as loss of abilities for autotelic life expression (loss of beauty, artistic ability, loss of financial surplus, etc.), which significantly reduce the joy of life and may even stimulate the heterotelic field of interest (the return to “the path of duty,” etc.), and catastrophes such as one of the aforementioned misfortunes when it degrades the individual’s entire will to live and makes one a mental wreck (the destruction of anchor-bearing sentimental values, the failure of expected triumphs or pleasures) occur. By breaking through the metaphysical interest front (or, despite representative efforts, failure to establish a satisfactory status), forms of sufferings such as religious anxiety, consciousness of sin, cosmic angst, metaphysical feelings of emptiness and confusion, the impression of life’s meaninglessness, misfortunes such as the breakdown of metaphysical anchors, exposure of prophets whom one has believed, etc., and catastrophes such as the breakdown of the main metaphysical anchor, the discovery that one is eternally lost occur. Most misfortunes have an impact on multiple interest fronts. We consider as the interest bearer everywhere the individual human; when a group acts as a bearer, we perceive the group as a collection of temporarily like-minded individuals. The necessity of this appears as soon as an individual departs from the group.

§ 64. The attacking power Also in the case of that which damages interest or the counterpower, one must begin by individualizing and simplifying the incalculable complexity of factors. The largest demarcated danger possible one finds must lie in the outside world of the interest bearer. The outside world here means everything existing that is not identical to the interest bearer’s being and that is in such a functional relationship with it that it can influence the status of the field of interest. The interest bearer – “the self” – is here a helping concept; our notions concerning it and its distinction from the non-self are obscure; all models have defects. However, I see no way to clarify the “objectively tragic” a exile, banishment. b interdiction of fire and water.

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without the help of this opposition. A number of questions of a more speculative nature must be left untreated; perhaps upon closer examination they will even be revealed as pseudo-problems. This applies to questions about the nature and dissolution of the bearer and the interest itself (return to simpler components), and it applies to the relationship between bearer and the interest. Cases where one cannot get clear about one’s interest must first be treated on the basis of the desire to get clear about it. If one lacks even such a desire, one has exited human interest completely (apathy). The case will thus be irrelevant to the purpose of the inquiry, unless one draws in other people as interest bearers. The concept of the outside world has been dealt with previously (§ 3), just as the content has been divided in different ways. Some of this must be repeated here, where the train of thought is naturally linked to it. The outside world of a species individual is partly the physical environment, partly plants and unconscious animals, partly conscious animals of other species, and partly fellow members of the species. It is possible that higher animals can also experience their own organism as the outside world; the human can at least. Additionally, in the human there are mental states and processes with which the self does not feel identical, and derived notions of metaphysical conditions. A complex of images of the outside world generated by interpretation and imagination joins the sensory and empirical. The physical environment appears to be indifferent to the interest field of the organic individual. Entire faunae have died out because temperature, moisture conditions, etc., changed in a way that clashed with the needs of the organisms. The human can, to some extent, direct “the elements”—air, fire, water, and earth, as the ancients said—and new forces that have since come into sight, but not possess them. They work as grumbling slaves in our flues and dams; on the smallest occasion they break out and follow their own law in a way that is similar to revenge. The same indifference is found in plants and most animals (the “love” of pets is a mysterious relationship), and to some extent also in one’s fellow humans and even in one’s own organism. It is a matter for medical science to examine whether and to what extent one can speak of interest contact between our conscious biological interests and the many processes in the organism. At least outside the purely biological conditions, no such contact is found; it already fails in the pain mechanism, cf. § 19. The giant deer is not the only animal species that has died out precisely due to blind organic forces (hypertrophy). The indifference manifests itself partly in the fact that the forces cannot be calculated, and partly in the fact that they will

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not allow themselves to be undermined: Sometimes, it is the outside world’s unfixedness (in relation to our plans) that threatens our welfare; sometimes it is its over-fixedness or error-fixedness. Alongside indifference, the hostility of the outside world plays a significant role; this characteristic manifests itself in animals, but especially in other humans. The term must cover a scale of nuances here: On one end there is the satanic exploitation of another’s weakness, where the intention is nothing but to work against the victim’s interest. The motives can vary greatly. Examples: Certain kinds of torture, battle, where it is more about the defeat of the opponent than one’s own victory, sadism. The border with the non-satanic is unclear; in the battle with a rival one has already left it. Here each of the participants seeks to realize one’s own interest. During this endeavor, one must certainly fight the other’s interest, but only in so far as the other’s endeavor stands in the way of one’s intended goals; striking the other’s interest in and of itself holds no attraction. In the extension of this example lies the case of a conflict of interest, where the strongest (e.g., “the society”) regrets having to harm the interest of the weaker. Nor is the transition to a sympathetic environment sharp. Even from the presumably favorable environment, dangers can threaten: The sympathetic person adds to me an evil in order to save a value that, in his or her opinion, is higher (for others or myself, directly or indirectly) – an assessment I may not share at the moment. Or: The motive is the best, but the insight is insufficient. Or: Alien intentions change the impetus on the way to the recipient, or one’s need in the meantime becomes something else. Excessive expressions of sympathy can seem like a nuisance to the one they were supposed to please. Finally, it can be mentioned that the modern social order entails a number of limitations on the individual’s ability to express and satisfy one’s needs without this being due to the outside world’s indifferent, hostile, or sympathetic character. It is due to necessity. One could at most speak of an indifference of the living conditions in a wider sense, which is shown by the fact that this necessity has arisen. In society, the individual’s sphere of interest clashes with a number of others who are referred to as groups and individuals, for example: spouse, child, family, friends, guild fellows, superiors and subordinates, political fellows and opponents, competitors and rivals, state and parish, church, foreigners, other races, different believers, etc. Consideration of oneself and of these surrounding interest bearers cannot always be reconciled.

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§ 65. Own complicity We have so far imagined that the catastrophe strikes a person who has mainly been passive; one has not, through one’s own positive efforts, set the forces that bring misfortune in motion. This distinction, which is practical, not principled, is of central importance to the study of the origin of catastrophes with a view to the tragic and will be elucidated in the following. The investigation finds its natural place under the description of the interest-harming forces with which we are concerned, because it relates to the impetus of catastrophecreating nature that lies in the victim’s own life will. The section on occasion is thus pushed all the way to § 72. The opposition between active and passive posture relative to the origin of the catastrophe is better expressed on a scale than by a division. At the lower end of this scale are misfortunes that strike without one doing anything, neither “in connection to” the misfortune nor without connection to it. One is born defective or deformed, one is hereditarily burdened, and one is infected by one’s parents or neglected by them before one even begins one’s conscious life. One step higher toward the will-related cause lie the misfortunes one “incurs” by breathing, eating, moving, being in a particular place at a certain time, etc., in short, by performing the basic functions of the psycho-physical organism. These are associated with a risk minimum that cannot be avoided. But a normal person must do more than these; one must engage in complex activity within the framework of the community to which one belongs, take care of one’s professional work, fulfill one’s public and private duties, pursue entertainment, art, and eroticism. There is also a risk associated with this activity, which every human being must run, even while exercising the highest diligence (diligentia quam in suis rebusa). Not even through complete passivity can one avoid the risk; on the contrary, then misery is a certainty. This “legal risk” or “functional risk” is well worth noting; as long as it is not exceeded, no one can be blamed for exposing oneself to it. Exceeding the legal risk will first result in the lower degrees of what in criminal law is called negligence, and then in the more serious degrees. Then comes “thought” or awareness of the onset of the catastrophe in the broadest sense, and finally the direct will or intention. The scale expresses the relationship between the catastrophe and the motive as a catastrophe-creating factor. It must be supplemented by a scale a care in one’s own affairs.

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that shows the motive’s catastrophe-preventing value. This scale also has its lower pole in pure unconsciousness (inborn guarantees, the organism’s selfprotection mechanisms, etc.), then come the catastrophes that are avoided by being in a place at a given point in time, etc.; the next step could be the use of experientially beneficial (safety-giving) arrangements in daily life – then the various degrees of deliberate counteracting of misfortunes in general, and finally the conscious employment of all available means to prevent a particular, actual, imminent danger. Alongside motive, ability (technical skill) also plays a role in the result. The theme of the investigation we must now address lies in the chain of motive – ability – result.79 The catastrophe-creating capacity of the human is demonstrated by misfortunes that affect both oneself and others. The latter is perhaps the most frequent, and that which is easiest to motivate; there is something paradoxical in the former. Normal people do not harm themselves without doing so to achieve a higher value (asceticism) or a value that is currently more attractive (masochism) or to escape a greater evil than that which one adds (suicide). Only in the case of coercion does the relationship change. As a rule, one puts oneself at risk by putting one’s values at stake for a good result, or by realizing one’s plans without a sufficient overview of the consequences. In the following we will have this general catastrophe-creating ability in mind, whether it affects the agent oneself or one’s neighbor. And the matter to which attention must be directed, above all, is the question of the agent’s guilt.

§ 66. The first outline of the concept of guilt The word guilt has a broad tradition in religious, ethical, punitive, and dramaturgical literature, and in Chapter Eleven, we will have the opportunity to become acquainted with the many meanings attributed to it in the past. At the moment another task is more pressing: to outline a concept of guilt within the context of the current train of thought. In connection with both ordinary linguistic tradition and ethical and criminal theory, guilt can initially be determined as something that arises in connection with the relationship between effort and result. By effort, I understand here a unity of motive and technical ability. There are religious systems according to which one can sin, that is, be “guilty,” by the mere “evil 79 Cf. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lond. 1926 p. 228, 230.

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thought,” the mere inferior motive,80 and similar notions have been expressed in the administration of justice. But in examining guilt as part of the genesis of a catastrophe, such a concept of guilt can do no good. No one can defend oneself from the fact that an inferior motive appears in one’s consciousness; the chance of an ethical choice arises only when one determines one’s action in relation to the inferior motive. Such motives are even a prerequisite for an ethically worthy course of action; if they did not appear and were not overcome, one could not talk about morality at all. Christianity has also removed evil desires from the will of man and attributed them to the influence of evil spirits. But the fact that one cannot frolic freely here without responsibility setting in is clear from the warning: Whosoever looks at a woman to lust after her, etc., and the commandment: Thou shalt not covet. In a study like this such desire cannot be taken into account without it having consequences for one or another interest status. Much more applicable then for the conception of guilt in modern criminal law is the requirement of action. Cogitationis poenam nemo patitur.a 81 Whichever relation one arrives at as guilt-producing in the motive – means – result connection, it seems clear that without a working stance on the cause problem (a working concept of “cause”) and on the problem of the freedom of the will (the psychological cause problem), there is little prospect of moving forward. When in this work it is stated that phenomenon a is one of the causes of phenomenon b, it is firstly meant that b follows after a in time, and secondly that b from ordinary experience could not be thought to occur unless a had gone before. If we are faced with a new and unknown kind of phenomenon, then we seek to determine its “causes” by inferring analogically from known conditions. In the experience underlying the assumption of a causal relationship, one need not have done it oneself; it is enough that one (within the risk minimum) has accepted a communication about it. In a framing of the causal concept like this, one need not worry about the process itself by which phenomenon a causes or produces phenomenon b. It is thus not a philosophical causal concept that has been sought here, but a practical one, which has a living function in the human interest struggle, and

80 That is, motive of action. A belief system does not even attach ethical or metaphysical relevance to the assessment motives, cf. Høffding, Ethik [Ethics] 1887 p. 20. a Nobody deserves punishment for thought. 81 Hagerup, Strafferettens almindelige del [General Part of Criminal Law], Kristiania 1911 p. 145.

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with which the philosopher also operates when one does not “think.” Certain relationships (besides pure succession, such as the night following the day and the like) between previous and subsequent states are treated in the practical life as fixed, regardless of whether the experience corresponds to a general law or can be processed logically. (By state in this context is not meant the conditions great and small – a “causal” state, a “world state,” will never return identically – but by it is meant the conditions that pertain to the interest struggle, that are relevant to it and that can be identified and recognized on this basis.) Even where a “causal relationship” seems to be lacking, in practice and nearly all science, one assumes that it still exists – excepting, of course, philosophical treatment of the causal problem (and certain conditions in atomic physics). In practical life, the premise of fixed causal relationships is a tool sine qua non; it is expressed in every single transitive verb,82 and in the vast majority of “tragic” courses (however these are to be determined), people act and think under such a premise. Otherwise, the person is abnormal, unless one is a causal philosopher. We have to consider the problem of the freedom of the will in the same way – not philosophically, but practically, as the assumption of freedom or constraint functions in the human interest struggle. The problem concerns us only insofar as it is relevant to the thought- and action-related pursuit of sanction. We set aside then the case where a philosopher has made the work of the problem of the will one’s life’s task. For the philosopher, the question appears as a problem alongside other problems, while one’s function falls outside. In one’s work on the problem of the will, the philosopher will, however, come into consideration for us. It will presumably be useful to abandon the highly abstract and ambiguous expression “freedom of the will” in favor of others that are more precise and tangible. Here we will benefit from seeking out a modern thinker like Bertrand Russell. Russell (op. cit. p. 231) begins his analysis of the term by identifying its affective meaning. He asks: What do we really want when we want free will? Some of our reasons for desiring free will are profound, some trivial. To begin with the former: we do not wish to feel ourselves in the hands of fate, so that, however much we may desire to will one thing, we may nevertheless be compelled by an outside force to will another. We do not wish to think that, however much we may desire to act well, heredity and surroundings may force us into acting ill. We wish to feel

82 Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Lond. 1926 p. 228.

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that, in cases of doubt, our choice is momentous and lies within our power. Beside these desires, which are worthy of all respect [!], we have, however, others not so respectable, which equally make us desire free will. We do not like to think that other people, if they knew enough, could predict our actions, though we know that we can often predict those of other people, especially if they are elderly. … The desire for this kind of free will seems to be no better than a form of vanity. I do not believe that this desire can be gratified with any certainty; but the other, more respectable desires are, I believe, not inconsistent with any tenable form of determinism.

The author divides the question into two: 1. Are human actions theoretically predictable from a sufficient number of antecedents? 2. Are human actions subject to an external compulsion? The first question is answered in the affirmative by Russell (p. 233 at the bottom). It is not necessary for the determinist to maintain that he can foresee the whole particularity of the act which will be performed. If he could foresee that A was going to murder B, his foresight would not be invalidated by the fact that he could not know all the infinite complexity of A’s state of mind in committing the murder, nor whether the murder was to be performed with a knife or with a revolver. If the kind of the act which will be performed can be foreseen within narrow limits, it is of little practical interest that there are fine shades which cannot be foreseen. … The law does not state merely that, if the same cause is repeated, the same effect will result. It states rather that there is a constant relation between causes of certain kinds and effects of certain kinds. … We may suppose – though this is doubtful – that there are laws of correlation of the mental and the physical, in virtue of which, given the state of all the matter in the world, and therefore of all the brains and living organisms, the state of all the minds in the world could be inferred [the last is quoted for the sake of context, though the value to us is questionable]. … It is obvious that there is some degree of correlation between brain and mind, and it is impossible to say how complete it may be. This however, is not the point which I wish to elicit. What I wish to urge is that, even if we admit the most extreme claims of determinism and of correlation of mind and brain, still the consequences inimical to what is worth preserving in free will do not follow.

The point is this: Although a human action is presumed to be determined by one’s entire past, that does not mean that at the time of the choice one is forced to do something other than what one “wants to,” what one finds most appropriate. The desire and the assessment can be determined and stand in constant relation to the action (or better: the action can be a function of its

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antecedents) without this dissolving the subjective sense of freedom. From this conclusion, the author can now answer the second question in the negative. Are human actions subject to an external compulsion? We have, in deliberation, a subjective sense of freedom, which is sometimes alleged against the view that volitions have causes. This sense of freedom, however, is only a sense that we can choose which we please of a number of alternatives: it does not show us that there is no causal connection between what we please to choose and our previous history.

The explanation follows: Causes do not compel their effects. … There is a mutual relation, so that either can be inferred from the other. … We (shall) not say that the present state compels the past state to have been what it was; yet it renders it necessary as a consequence of the data, in the only sense in which effects are rendered necessary by their causes. [A clearer precision of the difference would have had its place here.] The difference which we feel in this respect, between causes and effects, is a mere confusion due to the fact that we remember past events but do not happen to have memory of the future.

Russell’s statement, open-minded, relativistic, technically superior, and exhaustive as it is in its attempt to reconcile the old antagonistic views, nevertheless does not leave the reader in any state of happy liberation. One has the feeling that there is still plenty of puzzling substance in the well-known and tenacious problem. And here whoever seeks to clarify the tragic must bid farewell to the professional philosopher and follow one’s own path if one wants to move forward. In the human interest struggle, there is a fundamental difference between causes and effects, between action and consequence. Without differences of this kind being the center of attention, life could not exist, or not in the hitherto known forms. The scientific view represented by Russell, according to which the fixed relationship is not a causally but a reciprocally functional relationship, is unusable in practice already for the reason that in practice one can conclude from cause to effect to a much greater extent than one can conclude from effect to cause. An end result can have many different origins precisely when one asks for “the kind of effect” and does not see the relationship in principle. In the final state the origin history may be blurred. If I strike the dynamite, then I know exactly how things will go, but as far as the aftermath is concerned, there are immediately a number of possibilities (cf. arson investigation). The masterpiece can undoubtedly be turned into ashes, but are the ashes a masterpiece or rubbish? The difference is even greater when

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the cause is an expression of will. From the desire for revenge, I can infer murder, but not from the corpse to the desire for revenge. However, the purpose of these considerations was to find a working standpoint. We have two experiential conditions to consider: 1. Where multiple motives apply at the same time and require different reactions to the same stimulus, we experience the decision as a choice task, for whose result we are responsible. That is: We predict and accept that the expected consequences of the action will, to a certain extent, have a bearing on our own welfare. If it is given in an environment where interpersonal values apply, the responsibility means that I may be forced (from outside or by my own moral belief) to (according to ability or to a certain extent) restore these values if I have harmed them, possibly even endure an “equivalent” welfare deterioration. 2. The second condition is this: Our brain is so arranged that we only “understand” what has “structure.” We cannot make any image of an act of will that has no reason because it lacks structure. All the reactions of ourselves and others that we “understand,” we understand them because we believe we know the cause. When this dawns on us, we have what has been called the “aha experience.” The cause is everywhere an interest; without interest, there is no act of will, just reflex, ideomotor reaction, etc. Action contrary to all interest is inconceivable or pathological – I grab the handle, not the blade, because I do not want to cut myself. If I grab the blade, it must be for some purpose, or it must be due to inattention, haste, etc. Perhaps in the end the interest turns out to be this: I will in any case show them that I have free will. Just as we in the physical environment and with animals expect the stimuli we experience to have reasons, we act among people under the constant assumption that expressions of will have them, otherwise we could never influence them. Deliberations on a factual basis, arguments, persuasions, appeals, threats, and agitation would cease and have to be replaced by physical force. Selection capability and responsibility consciousness, subjectively experienced psychological unfixedness in the agent, are necessary prerequisites for the ethical assessment of a person’s behavior. This circumstance is particularly important when it comes to an act that leads to catastrophe, to the radical destruction of values. One half of the human’s life activity lies in counteracting such destruction, while the building of positive values engages the other

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half. Wherever the individual does not have dominion over one’s catastropheproducing ability, the others must protect themselves from this person, and the means are many. In orderly society, the protection – for certain values – is exercised through the judicial system in general, especially through criminal law.

§ 67. The importance of criminal law for the present context That part of a person’s life activity that is subject to public restraint can be difficult to place in any particular relation to the rest of one’s life, in terms of importance. Often the processes that have avoided any legal apparatus are the ones that interfere most strongly with one’s fate. But the deeds that fall within the action circle of the legal apparatus, which are relevant in relation to its norms either through conformity or antagonism, nevertheless constitute an essential part of a person’s external life, and thus have consequences for the internal. And for us they have the great advantage that they have been systematically worked through, placed in groups that facilitate overview, and illuminated in all their phases as far as is theoretically possible and practically useful. At the basis of jurisprudence lies, inter alia,a a “common sense of justice”83 which also applies in juridically irrelevant fields. Therefore, viewpoints that have been asserted in the legal disciplines, where they are not specifically characterized by practical-technical considerations, can often be applied to, for example, the purely moral sphere and areas that are “morally infected.”84 In the case of dramaturgy, this is particularly true of viewpoints from criminal law. I have therefore chosen to postpone the final formulation of the concept of guilt until we have become familiar with its closest neighborhood by reviewing some considerations of criminal justice. The criminal justice analysis of the concept of guilt has both a principled and a technical aspect and forms the most solid basis for the construction of both an ethical and a poetic concept of guilt. Criminal law is certainly indebted to ethics, but ethical speculation has in criminal law had to go through the fiery trial of application. As a legislator and judge, the human has the task of creating a social cosmos. The principles

a among other things. 83 Cf. Oscar Platou, Retskildernes Theori [Theory of the Sources of Law], Kristiania 1915 § 6. 84 On the relationship between law and morality cf. beginning of § 12 and Hagerup, Straffrettens almindelige del [General Part of Criminal Law], Kristiania 1911 p. 33 f.

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one must follow must of course be as close as possible to those one could wish were followed in the world of nature. The judicial apparatus can act in different ways as the transmitter of powerful evils, which can be experienced as catastrophes. A lost trial can knock a person down, not to mention the death penalty, life imprisonment, and judicial murder. The working out of an applicable category of guilt is, therefore, an important task for jurisprudence; it is possible that it has not yet been resolved, and it is also possible that each time period must resolve it in its own image, or that in the future the matter will be settled without the concept of guilt. However, a great deal of valuable material has been gathered and will be useful in part here. When in the following an outline is presented of the doctrine of guilt in Norwegian criminal law (which in the main points is in line with other Western European criminal law), it is natural to have the legislative side (the relationship seen from the lawgiving perspective) closest in view. Practical considerations have necessitated certain violations of the theory (liability without fault, etc.) to which the citizen must submit. The highly compressed presentation relies on Francis Hagerup, Strafferettens almindelige del [The General Part of Criminal Law], Kristiania 1911.

§ 68. Outline of the general part of criminal law 1. The psychological basis of criminal law (see Hagerup § 1). Certain actions and omissions result in “society” adding to the originator an evil; they are called crimes or offenses and are considered expressions of will. Criminal law is based on psychological concepts but must work with practical goals in mind, and here it will be forced in part to make itself independent of the fate of the psychological problems in their actual field of study. There is also another difference: psychology seeks a genetic explanation, it asks how the phenomena come into being; recent criminal justice does too, but at the same time it assesses the will expressed in relation to the best interests of society, and it aims at a preventive policy. Normally an action occurs after a “conflict” between prompting and impeding “motives” – the former is pleasurable, says Hagerup, the latter

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unpleasurable. Objection: But a number of actions for which one is criminally responsible take place without any hint of such a conflict (the so-called crimes of negligence), and during the strict exercise of duty, it is often precisely the impeding impulses that are pleasurable. A number of actions are also performed without the pleasure-unpleasure element in the “motives” making itself noticeable. Motives are partly ideas, says H., partly emotions and assessments that occur in connection with the ideas.85 On the boundary of the expression of will lies the habitual act, and completely outside it the muscle movement, speech, etc., caused by reflex or done during sleep, fever, and the like. (It should be added that in recent times attention has become increasingly focused on the unconscious sources of action, drives, and neurotic dynamics.) Expressions of will have purpose, says H. The purpose can either be achieved through the expression itself (autotelic expression) or lie in a more distant effect, an expected result, about which the agent has made up one’s mind when one acted. In both cases the purpose is willed. The purpose may again be the means to a more distant purpose; the latter is the intention, while the intermediate purpose in terms of means could have been replaced by another. The person has “willed” this too, but in a weaker, more conditional way. In some cases, “motive” and intention coincide (telos), in others they do not, where affect and emotion are perceived as motive, the change of the object as intention. Concerning a more constant affective disposition one speaks of temperament. On the whole, it is important to distinguish between the more chronic, general conditions for the creation of the act of will, and the more temporary, particular ones. This refers to the subject as well as the outside world. As long as criminal law seeks to trace the expressions of will back to their preconditions, it has to go through the question of the freedom of the will, says Hagerup; but it does not depend on how this problem turns out. If the knot becomes too tangled, criminal law can cut it with a dictatorial decree. The fact is that neither a deterministic nor an indeterministic view can be reconciled with the practical function of criminal law. Hagerup suggests a compromise: A person chooses freely, but only from among the available motives. We have previously outlined our working standpoint concerning this matter and will not here even refer to the views which have been used to give criminal law a sound, principled basis on this point. Hagerup, who despite the best of intentions becomes trapped by the jungle, shows how dangerous it is to approach these questions: 85 Cf. H. p. 70, note.

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But this fatalistic determinism overlooks the fact that the notion of causality in application to the mental field necessarily has a somewhat different meaning than in the material, as causation does not directly relate to mental phenomena, as it does in the case of real substances, which can be linked to a balance of cause and effect dependent on the constancy of matter. (p. 14)

2. The ethical basis of criminal law (see Hagerup § 2). Revenge and retaliation as the reaction of animals and primitive humans to attacks can partly be regarded as a manifestation of a primitive trait, and partly as a fruit of experience. The affective discharge itself strongly points to the first viewpoint, while the fact that the reaction stops the attack or prevents repetition points to the latter. So far social life has not been able to do without this primitive form of reaction, and the teaching of Christianity about turning the other cheek has not yet managed to ground a criminal or civil arrangement. But to avoid chaos and revenge on everyone, social bodies have been created which, as long as necessary, mediate the reaction based on the above dual need: the satisfaction of the revenge instinct and sense of justice on the one hand, and the prevention of repetition on the other. A number of writers have sought to bring this relationship into harmony with their view of life or with the main principles of the philosophical disciplines, especially ethics. The moral justification of the state for punishing has been sought partly in a divine ordinance (e.g., Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts [Philosophy of Law] 1829), partly on the basis of the whole moral order located in transcendental commands (thus Kant, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre [Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right] 1797), or in the laws of world development itself (Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Elements of the Philosophy of Right] 1829), or in the aesthetic sense of a necessary harmony (Herbarth, Allgemeine praktische Philosophie [General Practical Philosophy] 1808), or in the purifying and atoning power of the accompanying pain (Kohler, Das Wesen der Strafe [The Essence of Punishment] 1888) – Hagerup p. 15 f., which further states: Common to all these theories is the fact that they are based on a metaphysical foundation that evades empirical cognition, and that the ethical reasoning of punishment is not linked in any necessary connection with its practical purpose. In this regard, these theories have been called absolute theories of criminal justice as opposed to relative ones which see the purpose of punishment and thus its legal basis in the management of the legal order.

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The approach finds its sharpest expression in Kant: Even if human society were facing its extinction, the last murderer would still have to be executed. Proponents of natural law (Althusius, Rousseau, and others) locate the ethical basis of punishment in the individual’s voluntary submission to the state in the so-called social contract. This theory also lacks an empirical basis. Against the stated view, Hagerup (p. 17) argues that the only sufficient ethical justification of punishment lies in its necessity; punishment is a means in the service of social defense. The absolute theories seek, roughly speaking, the rationale in a metaphysical causa, while the relative mainly seek it in an earthly (biologicalsocial) telos. For the former, retribution is an end, for the latter, a means. The former is based on a notion of punishment as a semi-mystical expiation of violation – a restoration of the disturbed “metaphysical harmony” and thus an annihilation of the crime in the metaphysical history of the world. No “should not be” remains, and what has happened no longer threatens the metaphysical welfare of the offender. The idea shows a strong analogy with biological “expiation” – one has neglected one’s winter supply but now goes and works double in the remaining time, or: when one by suffering has overcome the consequences of one’s biological mistake, it has lost its importance. For relative theories, retribution does not mean a fulfillment of an ideal justice requirement; it merely means that punishment must have its occasion in a particular act. The evil that is added to the offender is an enhanced expression of social disapproval; thus, according to Hagerup, the punishment receives a supplement to its purely pragmatic character: In the judgment of society there is also an ethical element; the punishment is both quia peccatum esta as well as ne peccetur.b The ethical substance depends on the fact that one can blame the agent for what he or she has done; in other words, despite the occurrence of the aberration, he or she has the same ethical interest as the punishing society. In contrast to this “classical” idea of punishment, recent theories, the “positive” or “realistic,” claim that it is not the act committed that is the “object” of punishment, but the disposition from which it originated. Not the crime, but the criminal is punished. These theories are based in particular on two considerations (see Hagerup p. 19, where there are references). The first has its premise in determinism: If human volition is “causal,” it becomes difficult to find any psychological basis for concepts such as responsibility and guilt. One can protect oneself from dangerous acts, but to condemn them makes no more sense than the condemnation of a natural catastrophe. a because one has transgressed. b that one does not transgress.

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The second consideration assumes that the notion of “the normal ability to have one’s actions determined by motives” (accountability) is not sufficient as a prerequisite. The distinction between sick and healthy mental life is questionable, and the “normal ability” can be impaired at any time by strong drives, affections, hereditary pressure, and criminal habits. And the greatest danger is posed precisely by people with “reduced accountability.” It is to the character of the criminal that the means must be directed, the task of which is again to deter him or her from committing crimes, or alternatively, to improve him or her after he or she has committed them, and, if this is impossible, to incapacitate him or her. Hagerup admits that safeguards other than punishment are needed, but he also argues that “in most people there is an average ability to discriminate between the various motivational conceptions and consider their weights” (p. 23). The legal order on the whole is “addressed to the normal human being, of whom it requires a societal behavior, a demand which can be made because it is experientially fulfilled.” – For the sake of the safety of the citizens, one must also wait for a manifestation of the dangerous state of mind – especially since the state of mind often does not come to the fore in any other way. At this point, the author encounters his opponents concerning the practical consequence: If punishment is perceived as repressive, it must be different from merely preventive measures. When determining the penalty for the attempt, both viewpoints apply. The question is close to one we have asked previously: Should the criminal consequences be linked to the motives or the result? It immediately comes to mind that the result is a far safer point of departure than the motives, which in a given case may be inaccessible to any test. But criminal law must be a practical organ on an ethical basis. Its task is, quite rightly, to cover a multitude of disparate needs. As long as one in one’s actions is clear of a purely external collision with the criminal laws, one is free to have the blackest motives for this exemplary behavior. And there are actions that are punished without regard to motive, because social considerations make it necessary, especially in extraordinary circumstances, such as war, etc. On the other hand, the motive, in Norwegian as well as in other European law, is given considerable weight, both in terms of criminality and sentencing. This is related to the recognition that the result often depends on factors over which the individual is not master. Connected to this last question is another: Should the punishment aim for effects in the individual criminal (special prevention), or for effects in the whole community, in all persons who may in the future be at risk of

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committing crimes (general prevention), or both? The first point of view in particular has helped to open the eyes to the offender’s individual characteristics, an element which has recently come forward with great strength; the second is addressed more to the improvement of social conditions in general. In earlier times, especially the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, achieving general preventive effect was sought by displaying the carrying out of the sentence for public viewing. A more current point of view is this: General prevention lies partly in the general awareness of the power and watchful eye of the legal order, and partly in the general recognition of the ethical significance of punishment. Hereby a general feeling of security flows again, and in abstract affairs an insulating protection is established against the feeling of an amoral world order. In a sense, the burden is more on the threat of punishment than on the particular carrying out of it; its task is only to show that there is power behind the words. Unfortunately, no law can prevent the skilled criminal from having a better chance of escape than the clumsy one. The larger number of crimes are also committed on the condition that they (or the offender) can be concealed. However, codification of criminal law not only protects the loyal society; it also protects the criminal against the arbitrary exercise of power by the social organs. The criminal has one’s rights; one is not helplessly at the mercy of one’s judges. Franz von Liszt could, therefore, remark with a certain right that the penal code is the criminal’s Magna Carta. A lecturer has described this statement as “a tasteless expression of a correct thought.” The same could be said about the reflection that it is the penal code that creates the criminal; the criminal is the one who acts in violation of the law (nullum crimen sine legea). However, it must be remembered that the law stands as an expression of the general view of justice, and that it creates not the criminal, but the concept of the criminal. If the function of punishment must seek its ethical justification in the necessity of social defense, it follows that its presence in society must not represent a greater evil than that which is defended against. The right to punish must be used with economy. Under the exercise of the punishing authority, a new ethical requirement emerges: There must be a certain relationship between crime and punishment; the punishment must be “fair,” that is, be reconciled with the sense of justice in each case. a no crime without law.

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Already the economic considerations just mentioned are a directive with respect to the size of the penalty: It is not ethically justified to punish more harshly than necessary. The following three elements contribute to determining what necessity requires in each case (H. p. 23): 1. The importance of the affected interest. 2. The nature of the offense (harmfulness). 3. The disposition that the offense expresses. But with this we have not moved the fundamental problem of justice, the logical superstructure of the sense of justice, a single step closer. And let it be said right away that the prospect of reaching such a structure is less than small. Ius suum cuique tribuerea – Ulpian, who in turn relied on Aristotle, did not come any closer (Digest. I, 1, 10). A modern attempt such as K. Gareis, Vom Begriff Gerechtigkeit [On the Concept of Justice],86 must also be content with merely referring back to the sense of justice, which in a given case may be common only to the members of a group. Hagerup limits himself to this provision as well; he does not even realize that there is a problem. At the heart of the matter lies the fact that crime and punishment are incommensurable quantities. A wellintentioned attempt to establish a kind of commensurability was made by the introduction of the principle of lex talionisb (mirrored punishmentsc): the murderer was executed with swords, the arsonist was burned, the perjurer had the hand cut off with which he or she had sworn, coin counterfeiters had molten metal poured down their throats, the blasphemous tongue was cut out. (H. p. 55 with note 24) The fact that the “similarity” thus achieved was highly illusory is readily realized; “the mirroring” itself also had a practical purpose, to show the spectators what the person had committed and remind them of the consequences of this act. Modern criminal law refers the fundamental question to ethics and restricts itself to drafting a practicable directive: The sentence is determined by the judge’s discretion within the limits set by the law. Hagerup argues strongly against the view that in order to be ethically justified the punishment must signify a good for the convicted (albeit in an “indirect” or higher sense and from the “society’s,” not the convicted person’s a render to each one’s own. 86 Festschr. f. d. jur. Fakultät in Giessen [Commemorative for the Legal Faculty in Giessen], 1907, p. 273. Gareis differentiates between rechtserzeugende [right-generating] and rechtsanwendende [right-enforcing] Gerechtigkeit [justice]. b law of retaliation. c spiegelnde Strafen (Ger.).

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judgment). The notion rests on Kant’s doctrine that no person should be used merely as a means. But this is exactly what happens, for example, in cases of war, and there can be no doubt, H. believes, that an order from the state to the individual to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country is ethically justified. The example is not the best; it is conceivable that the ethical sense which H. assumes is the same in all normal people would be different on this particular point. Improvement is not the primary purpose of punishment, says H.; improvement is the state’s task through other organs. But in the future a gradual transfer of criminal cases to these organs could be imagined, a transfer that has already begun for young criminals. The boundary between the area which, from the legislature’s point of view, should lie under criminal law, and that which is regulated by common moral opinion, has changed over the course of time within individual societies. Heresy, “promiscuity,” and luxury in food and clothing were punished in the past, but not (as now) various forms of dishonesty in commerce, animal cruelty, neglect of children and the helpless. The state also has other means besides punishment when it comes to restoring a disturbed condition – financial coercion, invalidating legal acts, compensation, and mortification. According to Hagerup, the difference between “civil” and “criminal” wrongdoing depends solely on expediency and is not conceptual, p. 35. Punishment is a qualified repression on the part of the state, and it is therefore important that the related rules at all times align with the rest of the legal order, as well as with the general view of morality. Penal rules therefore become more easily outdated than other provisions. 3. The general causes of crimes – are often divided into two groups: the individual and the social. In effect, this means seeing crime from two different points of view. Some individual causes are discussed in previous chapters, albeit in other respects: surplus and deficiency, error-fixedness, and under-fixedness. In the case of error-fixedness, Lombroso may be recalled (Criminal Man, 1871–76), whose theory can be set out like this: A large class of criminals display innate typical, anthropological peculiarities akin to those found in wild and primitive peoples. Lombroso, therefore, considers these criminals as atavistic echoes of distant cultural periods. The theory is now generally abandoned. On the other hand, it is important to distinguish between “occasional criminals” and “habitual criminals,” as well as between those violating the more timeless norms and those who violate a temporary provision.

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Societal conditions partly determine the interests that are the protection objects of criminal law. But they also seem to influence the nature of the crime trends that develop most strongly (Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois [The Spirit of the Laws] 174, Quêtelet). Crime statistics87 show the correlation of criminality with economic conditions, unemployment, fishing and harvest yield, etc., with the difference in city and country,88 with the public education system, institutions (prison system), with prostitution and alcoholism, with prevailing customs and conceptions of morality, with racial differences, with seasons, climate, and landscape. (In Italy, there are 16 times as many homicides as in England, 9 times as many as in Belgium, etc. Otherwise, the informative value of such statistics is questionable; there must be extensive research before a possible connection can be established.) Certain types of crime have occurred throughout all history (identification, property encroachment, homicide, violence, decency transgressions, etc.), while others occur more temporarily. Where a state or cultural form is in decay, the criminal element (both according to contemporary and our own judgment) permeates all walks of life from the prince to the beggar, especially as regards the lesser offenses. In our day, such actions are more localized to the so-called “lower” classes, the less educated and economically poor, the unordered, non-constructive natures, but economic fraud, corruption, etc., do not show any similar restriction. (The condition for embezzling a million is among other things that the amount is trusted to one.) Professional crime now rarely appears as organized and armed assaults (robberies, remnants still exist, such as in America and Corsica) but mainly as theft, receiving stolen goods, and fraud. 4. The historical development of penal law (cf. Hagerup § 6). European punishment has its sources in Roman, Germanic, Mosaic, and canon law. These legal constitutions again have their origin in the feeling of revenge,89 which could also go beyond to others besides the offender (generational revenge). The feeling of revenge is strongest when the offender is caught in a fresh deed, and this is dominated on the whole by highly subjective and random factors. The original “punishment process” was of a purely private nature, a matter between

87 Where Norway is concerned: Norway’s official statistics, 4th series. 88 In 1905 there were in Norway 1,250 convicts in the countryside against 2,239 in the cities, although the population was approximately 2/3 to 1/3. This information is credited to Hagerup. 89 Others highlight envy, for example, Ranulf in Meddel. udg. av Det kgl. danske Vidensk. Selskab [Released Announcements of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters] Vol. 18.

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the offended and the offender, or their relatives and successors. A change occurs with the rule that revenge can be averted by a fine. Collective prosecution existed only for qualified crimes, for example, treason, and resulted in the death penalty or banishment. Shortly thereafter, however, religious and administrative considerations merge, and the first criminal constitutions form. The prerequisite is a sufficiently strong state power. More and more the state becomes a party in the case; the state’s interests are violated in and with the offended. Population growth and new social conditions also have an effect. The distinction between intentional and unintentional (negligent) violation of law is widely recognized; the most severe punishments only affect those who acted with intent. On the whole, the question of the offender’s subjective guilt begins to become more emphasized, whereas before (like the animal) one merely looked at the objective action. Now criminal will is required. However, while Roman law held that criminal will had to appear in action (cogitationis poenam nemo patitur), canon law drew people to court because of purely mental events, a practice which had dreadful consequences during the heresy and witch trials. In the transition from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Modern Age, the sources of justice on the European mainland presented a patchwork image; the trial was therefore characterized by obscurity and uncertainty. Eventually, a number of codifications appeared – especially under the influence of natural law – to address matters. However, their provisions were still heavily casuistic, and therefore, it was not long before they proved inadequate in practice. The courts then sought to fulfill the law themselves and a doctrine of so-called non-statutory crimes and punishments was formed, which soon gave rise to abuse and arbitrariness.90 Only recently has the abstract redaction of the legal text been reached, which allows for the union of flexibility and firmness, as much as one can set that goal, with a relatively small number of paragraphs hitting every conceivable crime. The punitive evil itself originally consisted of loss of life, banishment, and confiscation of property. Later came the corporal punishments, torture and mutilation. Only after the Reformation did imprisonment and forced labor

90 This relationship is easily overlooked by those who today attack the judges because they “cling to the letter of the law.” How easily could the judge’s digestive troubles mean one more year for the wrongdoer!

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begin to take over, in connection with fines – the states had squandered human lives so long that there was a shortage of labor. During the period of the Enlightenment, in many countries a strong reaction arose against the handed-down barbaric procedural rules (torture) and punishments. Leading names in this opposition were Voltaire and Beccaria; what brought Voltaire into the fire was the astonishing miscarriage of justice in the case of Jean Calas. It is a typical bourgeois view that breaks through here, a demand for humanity and for the protection of the individual; thus, the emphasis should be on the practical considerations and not on the ecclesiastical abstracts. The effects of the opposition immediately appeared in a series of legislative works and extend down to this day. They had their dark side in a growing formalism, consistent with the speculative philosophy – and after a period during which the public interest was one-sidedly emphasized, the demand for individual treatment of the criminal is now rising with increasing strength. Psychological, sociological, and psychoanalytic insights form the scientific premises here. Only in the dictatorial states has the absolutist view been revived. 5. The penal code’s scope in time (cf. Hagerup § 10). As mentioned, penal laws often have to change, and such changes may pose a risk to certain ethical requirements (justice). The most important tenet of protection in these requirements was recognized already in Roman times and resurrected in the French Declaration of Human Rights (1789 Art. 8); it exists for Norway in § 97 of the Constitution: No law shall be given retroactive effect. It is the law that applies at the moment of action that the court must use. In certain cases of uncertainty, the law must be applied which in the given case gives the defendant the most favorable verdict. 6. Local jurisdiction of the penal law, international criminal law (cf. Hagerup § 11). The following main principles have been proposed: a. Territorial principle: A state’s criminal law applies to acts committed within its territory. b. Personal principle: A state’s criminal law applies to its subjects, regardless of place of action. c. Real principle: A state’s criminal law applies when the violation has included a resident or domestic legal entity.

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on the tragic d. Universal principle: As a representative of the entire cultural community, any state can punish crimes wherever and by whomever they are committed.

Since each of these principles contains a useful idea but is not suitable for unilateral implementation, the applicable international rules rest on a combination of the principles. In addition, special agreements are made for the extradition of criminals, etc. 7. The penal code’s scope in respect of persons (cf. Hagerup § 13). The principle of equality before the law is observed in most cultural lands, but subject to certain restrictions. This applies mainly to the ruler or president, members of the National Assembly in office, foreigners with the right of extraterritoriality, foreign heads of state, foreign clergy, and diplomats. 8. The concept of crime (cf. Hagerup § 14). Not every antisocial (let alone immoral) act is a crime, just the ones that are allocated punishment by the law. However, the legal system operates relatively slowly, and at any given time actions may be allocated punishment which should have impunity under ordinary legal consciousness, at the same as there are “gaps” in the law. For the sake of legal security, the law must be followed dogmatically in both cases, and from this there may flow absurdities. As the conditions for an act to be considered a crime, Hagerup (p. 140) mentions: a. The law establishes a plurality of crime types, and for the act committed to be subsumed under one of these, it must fulfill the type’s offense content. b. The act must be “unlawful”: contrary to a general rule of law (different from the actual penal code itself) which in the present circumstances prohibits or commands the act. However, it does not have to be “unjustified,” that is, contrary to the perpetrator’s subjective rights; it can be subjectively justified and yet punishable (e.g., vigilante). c. The perpetrator must be able to bear “subjective guilt.” d. Certain so-called objective criminal conditions must be present, cf. point 6 above. 9. The crime’s offense content (cf. Hagerup § 15). By offense content is understood the sum of the objective factors that determine the nature of the act in

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relation to the categories of the law. One thus operates with certain modalities in the perpetrator’s position, distinguishing between a. attempted and accomplished crime, b. unity and plurality of “actions,” c. single perpetrator and several working together. As the main constituents of the offense content Hagerup counts: A. The crime’s subject. The objects of prosecution are only individual humans, not even so-called “legal persons” (associations and the like). In ancient times trials were also held against animals, and Xerxes had the sea flogged. B. The crime’s object. There is a distinction between the object of attack and the object of protection. The latter is a legal property that the penal code will protect (public trust, life, freedom, honor, bodily integrity); its ascertainment can sometimes raise doubts. The object of attack almost coincides with what Uexküll called the operation carrier (cf. above § 5); in the case of theft, the stolen object is the object of attack, while the property right is the object of protection. The objects may partly coincide and partly not. In some cases the law requires that the object be damaged (material crimes); in others it is enough that the object has been exposed to danger, or that the act was likely to expose it to danger, while others are punished regardless of the consequences for the object (formal torts and purely omissive torts, failures to act). 10. The consequences of the action. Causation (Hagerup § 18). Not every external consequence (effect) of an otherwise relevant act has a criminal significance; the law only targets a selection of these consequences. The selection is partly positive and partly negative; in the latter case the act results in the absence of a consequence that the legal order wills to have occur. The guilty may have either failed to produce a consequence which he or she was obligated to produce, or he or she may have hindered its appearance. The idea of “consequence” presupposes a causal relationship. Hagerup operates primarily with the practical concept of cause that we have outlined for our own use. We can therefore to a large extent benefit from the investigations he has conducted. And since we are dealing here with issues of central

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importance to our main theme, I need to reference the author more widely than has been done thus far. I do so even more confidently because the related considerations are especially strong in the “ordinary sense of justice” and can therefore have an interest even outside the limits of jurisprudence. Many degenerate shoots of the so-called “poetic sense of justice” and many poor, quasi-legal views in older dramaturgy could have been avoided had the author been able or willing to “think criminally.”91 I mention this in order for the reader to be clear since one is being dragged around in a seemingly external discipline.92 “In the broadest sense, everything that happens is rooted in everything that has gone before,” says Hagerup, p. 153. A single fact is never in itself the cause of a certain external result, but always only in connection with a number of other facts, and this also applies to the individual human action. When we declare that a fact is the cause of a particular event, we do not mean that it alone produced it, but that, in our knowledge of the laws of the coherence of phenomena, we cannot imagine that the event would have occurred if that fact had not existed.

In this negative determination of the cause of action, H. avoids taking a stand on the positive nature of the causal connection, and this is what makes the provision practically applicable. We do not assume a causal link between a and b when we consider it justified to assume that b would have existed if a in otherwise unchanged factual conditions were thought to be absent. Thus, when X has given Y a lethal knife stab, but Y, before death can occur, is struck by an instantly fatal shot, X has not caused Y’s death.

The sense of justice, however, demands a quite different and powerful reduction in the extent of the “consequences” of an act that require punishment, even in the case of those directly produced by the action. As often argued, they can be unforeseen in number and species, and should one be responsible for all of them, the slightest mistake could be enough to destroy one for life. The main rule which has therefore broken through both criminal 91 I am thinking of writers such as Hegel, Gervinus, Otto Ludwig, et al., cf. Chap. 11. 92 Criminal justice and dramaturgy actually have many points of contact, and they have long been noticed. The Oresteia of Aeschylus is built on a criminal case. Hegel points out the emerging criminalistic feature of the recent tragedy (see Hasenclever, Das Tragische und die Tragoedie [The Tragic and the Tragedy], 1927 p. 90). Urbye (Praktiske opgaver i strafferet [Practical Tasks in Criminal Justice], Kristiania 1905 p. 18) uses as an example Jonas Lie’s Naar Sol gaar ned [When the Sun Goes Down].

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law and tort law is that one is only responsible for the so-called appropriate consequences, even though the actual intention of the action was unlawful. Appropriate consequences are ones that, in common experience, are grounds for expecting, consequences that must largely occur, unless life were to perish or be forced into a radical restructuring. But even for appropriate consequences, one is not unconditionally responsible; thus, in a given case, one is not responsible for extensive catastrophes due to unfair competition or unjustified criticism, although these appear as “natural” consequences of the action. On the other hand, practical considerations have necessitated a few, severely limited cases of punishment and liability without “guilt,” and thus without appropriateness. Toward a more detailed determination of the concept of appropriateness, the following is noted (cf. Hagerup p. 157 ff.): A causes B to make a journey with the intention of exposing him to danger (in the hope that he will perish) and achieves this. If this were an issue of appropriateness, the journey must have been especially dangerous, and in particular it would have mattered if A knew about this danger, while B did not know about it or “should have known about it” – measured according to normal requirements for insight. Even if the action were manifestly unlawful, indeed punishable, the perpetrator could claim that the appropriateness objection applies: A has assaulted B, who therefore arrives late for the train. He must take a boat instead, and it sinks. The assault is a “cause,” but the consequence is not appropriate without the existence of very special circumstances. The previously used distinction between “cause” and “condition” has been abandoned in Norwegian law. But the thought that underpins the consideration is nevertheless expressed in the different significance one assigns to several interacting causes; they can, for practical purposes, be arranged on a scale of “closer” and “more distant.” A stabs B with a knife in the street. If the ambulance crashes, this consequence is not appropriate. But if B is stabbed during a mountain climb, and the rescue expedition is overtaken by an avalanche, the relationship is more debatable. Appropriateness occurs by degrees. The consideration is the same when the result is due to a plurality of actions, for example, an action of A + an action of B. The question is whether A could expect that B’s action would complement one’s own. A puts a loaded rifle in the nursery, where it is fired during play. A puts C’s watch on a street staircase, where B takes it. Bar argues that if A here acts “negligently” and B “intentionally” (see below), the consequence is not appropriate in relation to A. The question is compelling and can develop in several directions, which,

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however, would lead us too far astray. I agree with Hagerup, who in both cases thinks the consequence is appropriate in relation to A. B’s responsibility is a separate matter. Also, whether the injured person oneself contributed to the consequence does not change the appropriateness relationship. A sets out a poisoned cup for B, which B drinks. The consequence is appropriate in relation to A regardless of whether A reckoned either that B was unaware of the poison or had plans to commit suicide. It would be different if B had suffered a minor harm but against all expectation neglected to be treated (e.g., with the thought that if I happen to die, A will be convicted as a killer and will really get it). In certain cases of psychological influence, the causal chain can also be judged as appropriate. But human intercourse is so highly complex and necessitates so much interpretation between person and person that there is a call to give the “legal risk” mentioned above a fairly wide scope. One cannot be morally blamed for the unforeseen consequences of a thoughtless word; there is even reason to tolerate a certain degree of “negligence.” An objectively correct statement is in all cases exempt from punishment, but for an objectively incorrect one, for example, a conscious lie, which leads to an injurious action, there may be criminal liability. The same goes for advice. An action is sometimes prohibited because it produces experientially a state of danger (cautions and the like). But even where such a prohibition (possibly command) is violated, and the person is guilty of a criminal offense, one cannot be liable for every consequence of the transgression, when they are ever so distant and unlikely. Example: B places an explosive device in a suitcase aboard a steamship. If A stumbles into the suitcase and it explodes, B is not responsible for this, unless he has negligently placed the suitcase in the middle of the passageway, in a poorly lit place, etc. But for this circumstance, the contents of the suitcase are of no significance. One must in each case look at the interest-bearing dynamics of the suitcase. The “poetic sense of justice” here will easily mix the concepts. A misfortune can also be brought about by preventive measures; the same applies to certain omissions. The reasoning gives rise to logical difficulties but makes good sense in light of the causal and appropriateness concepts we are using here. But even in the case of omissions, the responsibility – both ethical and criminal – is limited. No non-factum can be regarded as a cause (and far less an appropriate cause) of any event. In the given case, there must be reason to expect a specific preventive action by the omission. Such a reason arises first

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and foremost where the omission is unlawful (in the civil law sense) – e.g., where an on-duty lifeguard fails to help a drowning person (cf. Hagerup § 36). 11. Other elements of the offense content (Hagerup § 19). The means used is usually of no significance to the offense content of a crime, but not always. Theft with the use of force becomes robbery; the use of particularly dangerous or pain-causing instruments has an aggravating effect. Concerning ill-suited means, see below. Time, place, and special circumstances can have an influence partly on the criminality, and partly on the offense content. An otherwise “identical action” can be judged differently based on how these elements turn out. The personal circumstances, age, position, kinship, etc., of both the culprit and the victim can affect the criminal consequence. For Hagerup, these conditions, which we can call with a collective name the accompanying circumstances, have, on the other hand, no significance for the question of guilt itself. One takes note of this with astonishment; it is related to the special design Hagerup has given to the concept of guilt, which we will later reject. The production of danger can, as mentioned, be part of the content of the offense, such that both the means used is dangerous and certain conditions, from a statistical point of view, make unfortunate consequences likely. Cf. the penal code (22/5 1902) § 148, which speaks of actions whereby loss of life or extensive destruction of private property can be easily caused. There has also been discussion concerning the logical justification of the term “concrete danger.” It has been said: When an injury has not occurred, it could not have occurred either, and there has been no “danger” in the objective sense; danger is merely an expression of a subjective assessment of the situation. Against this criticism, Hagerup uses the appropriateness consideration. The issue eventually gets lost in metaphysics and in this form has no significance for us. In the human interest struggle, we operate on an experiential basis with more dangerous and less dangerous, as well as harmless situations. In many cases, “danger” can be based on a probability calculation of the chances for and against. A supporter of the above criticism would undoubtedly, if one found oneself in a gunpowder warehouse with a theoretical opponent, prefer to destroy the opponent with arguments, rather than to agree and celebrate the conciliation with a cigarette. Assurances in the smoke that the other’s discomfort was due to a purely subjective assessment and had nothing to do with the objective conditions that count might not seem as convincing under the present conditions.

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Some crimes consist in establishing an unlawful condition that then persists. This persistent condition may be irrelevant to the offense content, for example, the continued dislocation of possessions by theft, the continued cohabitation in bigamy. In others, the persistent condition is of particular importance; criminal guilt increases as time goes by, for example, with incarceration. With certain omissions the criminal condition could also be considered as persisting. 12. Committed as opposed to attempted crime (Hagerup § 20). Hagerup points out the difficulty of a substantive definition of the concept of committed crime and concludes with a formula: A committed crime exists when an action (or omission) reveals all the elements which according to the penal provision constitute the components of the crime’s offense content. Criminal attempts, on the other hand, exist when an action has been initiated whereby the commission of a crime was intended to commence, but which does not reveal all the elements of the crime’s offense content, Penal Code § 49. The language in this provision has been criticized; in particular, the word “intention” must be given further interpretation, cf. Hagerup p. 177. Attempted and committed crime mutually exclude each other and cannot be combined. It must then be that the attempted action itself is framed as a committed crime according to another section. Prior attempts are assimilated, so to speak, by the accomplished action. The attempt signifies a discrepancy between intention and result. This can have different causes: (a) The agent’s activity may be interrupted externally. (b) The effort fails to meet its target due to the unsuitability of the means (ability). (c) The criminality of the act (or really of the motive) is due to an error: The bigamist believes that his first wife is alive, while in reality she is dead. In case (c), the criminal offense will have to be limited so as not to strike the pure “cogitatio.”a An attempt thus includes both an incomplete action and a completed action with unsuccessful results. 13. The criminal offense of the attempt (Hagerup § 21). The criminaltechnical distinction between attempted and committed crime belongs to a more advanced legal consciousness. A milder penalty for an attempt (especially for the so-called completed attempt, where the result’s failure is due to outside forces) admittedly means a consideration of the external consequence (or its

a intention.

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absence) as opposed to the motive, which in both cases may be the same. But since the boundaries here are difficult to draw, and the legal system has never been able to establish the purely motivational point of view, in the doctrine of attempt there is a compromise between the two principles. Interesting is the provision in Penal Code § 51 II: In some cases, the attempt can be punished equally with the accomplished crime if it produces a different unlawful effect than the intended one: A wants to kill B with dynamite, B is out, but the house goes airborne. The consequence here is included in A’s “intent” in the broadest sense. But this provision applies even to the unintended consequences, and it may seem that the requirement of appropriateness is weakened at this point. A assaults B to take his watch, but he is prevented by spectators. B, however, dies of terror. Quite frankly, however, this is not about such a weakening (and thus an extension of the concept of guilt), but merely an extension of the penal code. Therefore, the viewpoint developed above in connection with the dynamite suitcase on the steamer is not hit by Penal Code § 51. 14. Attempted actions as opposed to preparatory actions (Hagerup § 22). Any action can initiate criminal activity. On the scale between legitimate conduct and clearly attempted action, there is an extensive field where there may be criminal desires present, but where these desires have so far not been reflected in anything other than a formally legal action: one invites a lady on a hike. Where the act has not yet, so to speak, reached criminal individuality, nor yet is an “operation carrier” for the judicial system, jurisprudence uses the term “preparatory action.” Formally legal acts must be exempt from punishment, so that the law-abiding citizen is not paralyzed in one’s honest occupation, does not incur serious suspicion every time one sharpens a knife or invites guests over. But the criminal can take advantage of precisely this circumstance, since one benefits from public trust, which is due to the fact that the majority does not abuse it. There are also cases of punishment for a preparatory action, where it is of a particularly mischievous or dangerous nature, and the military penal code has a provision for the person “seeking to prepare.” Conceptually the boundary of the attempt cannot be drawn. But the unusualness of an action will be apt to arouse suspicion, such that here it becomes the suspect who must make it clear that he or she did not have sinister intentions. And in any case, when the agent has done all that was required on one’s part and

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left the rest to powers over which one has no control, one will be beyond the threshold. 15. Unsuitable attempt (Hagerup § 23). At what degree of unsuitability – in means or object – does an attempt cease to be a criminal offense? Even from a purely ethical point of view the question must arise; blameworthiness may extend beyond the criminal offense, but here also one must reach a limit, where the attempt becomes simply meaningless facts or even comical. One more step and one is over in the pathological, possibly in an under-equipment that makes the attempt harmless: one draws a portrait of one’s enemy and studies the drawing. On the undoubtedly criminal side of the boundary lies the case where A gives B poison with the intention of killing him; he thinks the dose is large enough, but it turns out to be too small. (The aforementioned theory, which rejects the concept of objective danger, must consistently lead to impunity for an attempt like this: If B did not die, then he was not exposed to any danger either; at most it could be a bodily injury on the grounds of the abdominal pain.) But if A has bought strychnine to kill B, and makes a mistake with the bags so that B gets sugar instead? And if A goes out to stab B, but in the dark “confuses a tree trunk with his victim and stabs [!] it”? (H. p. 186). The question is one of the most contentious in criminal law and will not be analyzed further here; a clear separation of motive, ability, and result (including coincidence) seems to be the surest basis for the consideration. Hagerup’s investigation has been attacked by a number of other Norwegian lawyers, who in turn disagree with one another. The question flows into another, which will be mentioned later, namely the meaning of “error.” 16. Withdrawal from attempt (H. § 24). The same considerations that are the basis of the attempt’s criminality must result in impunity or reduced punishment when the perpetrator voluntarily abandons the attempt or even counteracts its harmful consequences. On the one hand, this may indicate a lesser asocial disposition, and on the other, the re-examined effect of the commenced action. The idea behind the provision is to save values and reward the withdrawer for one’s improved attitude. The incomplete attempt’s criminality is removed when the perpetrator of one’s own free will definitively abandons the criminal activity; the motive is

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legally irrelevant. The completed attempt’s criminality is removed when the perpetrator oneself prevents the criminal consequence before one knows that one has been discovered. In the trilogy of preparatory action-attemptwithdrawal, we have gathered the most important of the dynamics associated with the metamorphosis of the conception, when it through the action passes into history. 17. Collaboration of multiple individuals (H. § 25). Collaboration toward a criminal result can take place in different ways: a. The agents do not know each other or do not work together consciously toward a common result. b. A person can produce a result by employing another who cannot be punished (child, insane, etc.) – one is then called an “intermediate perpetrator.” c. Several can work together consciously. In this case one cannot conceptually distinguish the principal and the assistant, but instead ethically-practically arrange the cooperation on a scale. A may have “instigated” the crime, “enticed,” or “encouraged” B (possibly produced intent in him or her), physically or mentally strengthened B in his or her conduct, kept obstacles away, or otherwise “participated” without oneself fulfilling the article’s offense content. Assistance rendered after the crime has been committed is not regarded as contributing to it, but as a separate offense. In the past it was claimed that participation (“complicity”) was accessorial in relation to the main action and therefore could not be punished unless the main action came to fruition. A recent view (Getz) argues the complicity’s own criminality; each of the actors is judged individually. According to Norwegian law, participation is punished only when it is explicitly mentioned; in other words, the law did not want to give any universal viewpoint. One can also participate in an omission. If several people enter into an agreement to jointly commit a crime (conspiracy, intrigue), this is a preparatory action, unless it becomes punishable as an independent crime (delictum sui generisa). 18. Unity and plurality of criminal acts (H. § 30). The prerequisite for being able to speak of unity and plurality of actions is an individualization of actions,

a unique offense.

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a typification, as the law has done for practical purposes. It is called ideal concurrence when a single act covers multiple offenses, such as three when a married man rapes his sister. Here there are three individualized interests (objects of protection) violated by the same action. In accordance with the course of biological conditions, the penalties in such cases are increased or cumulated (a participant in a desert expedition kills the guide by smashing the last water bottle against his head). 19. Cases where an otherwise criminal offense is free from punishment because it is justified (in line with civil interpretation of the law). Self-defense (H. § 32). In the self-defense clause one has a legalized remnant of the old bellum omnium.a The state recognizes that it cannot adequately safeguard the defense interests of all citizens and that a limited right to self-defense should be left to them. Clauses such as self-defense and state of emergency form similar “biological islands” in the socialized environment; the same applies to certain legal forms of vigilantism. The right of self-defense is the right of defense against an unlawful attack by all means, even the most extreme, taking the attacker’s life. “The attack” on the legal interests may also consist of an omission, for example, where a ship’s crew or army regiment refuses to obey in a critical situation. The nature of the threatened legal interest is irrelevant for access to self-defense – it may also belong to a third party or the state – but may affect the appropriateness of the means of defense. The defense must not exceed “what has been presented as necessary” in the specific situation under the conditions at the time of action. The attacker’s “guilt” is of no significance; an attack by children or the insane also justifies self-defense. A particularly audacious or outrageous attack could justify an exceeding of the right of selfdefense, an extended impunity, due to the attacker’s natural emotions, his or her strong sthenic as well as asthenic affects. The excess is only punishable when it is “unconditionally unreasonable” – judged on the basis of the normal average. If the attacked believes that the attacker is much more dangerous than one really is, and uses a disproportionately dangerous defensive weapon, he or she is nevertheless “blameless” unless the mistake can be “imputed to one” as negligence. The right of self-defense is not subsidiary, such that it first appears “when the danger could not otherwise be averted.” Thus, in general, one is not

a war of all against all – bellum omnium contra omnes.

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obligated to flee, even if one could save oneself in this way too. It is different perhaps when one can save oneself by fleeing without shame. Qua “death penalty without conviction,” the self-defensive action causes theoretical difficulties similar to, for example, the border guard’s right to shoot down fugitive smugglers. State of emergency (cf. H. § 33). Attacks by a senseless or mentally incompetent person lie on the transition to “state of emergency.” Such is the case where one is threatened by forces with which one cannot establish interest contact, non-subjects, nature’s “elements,” animals, hunger and cold, etc. Here one also has the right (and therefore impunity) to save oneself by actions that are not otherwise tolerated, namely when the threatened legal interest seems particularly important in relation to the damage caused by the escape. But this right is subsidiary; it assumes that the danger cannot be averted in any other way. There has been controversy concerning the clause’s legislative basis, but in any case, it signifies a concession to the self-preservation drive. The protected legal interest is restricted to persons or goods in a broad sense, and the use of defense justifies compensation claims for the affected. The fact that the danger is self-inflicted does not nullify the emergency right; here, however, the variations form an unbroken scale all the way to the conscious counterfeit, where one uses an arranged state of emergency as a pretext. In Norwegian law one person has never had to sacrifice another person’s life in order to save one’s own (two shipwrecked people on a log, cannibalism of a starving crew), but in order to save a greater good according to current assessment such as the “fatherland” and the like. Unfortunately, no general scale of values is given. The emergency right becomes void when there is a danger which the threatened person has a special duty to defy (soldiers, doctors, sailors, mountain guides); one can use whatever means one wants, as long as one does not neglect the task itself. A distinctive case of the state of emergency is the collision of duties, a case we have previously encountered under the term interest collision or interfrontal conflict, and which here comes to the fore in the field of criminal law. The situation types and the variations are also numerous here. A person is, for example, being ordered to appear as a witness at two different places. The legal system cannot demand the impossible, declares Hagerup – and the person must always be blameless when the impossibility is not due to one’s own circumstance and one chooses to fulfill the duty which presents itself as the

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Hagerup does not specify the criterion according to which the choice must be judged. He seems in utter doubt by referring the person to casting lots. The possibility of non-action is not mentioned. The main point of view, however, is not to be mistaken, and in a study like this is worth noting: Under Norwegian and other modern Western European criminal law, a person should not be punished when, by virtue of the circumstances, a “guilt” has been imposed in the external sense, that is, one is forced into a position which in form, so to speak, in the nature of the posture, is congruent with one who is punishable. The possibility of taking a different approach is only apparent: In the conflict, there is in reality a hidden impossibility. In the example cited, the called witness may choose between appearing at location X and at location Y, but this choice is illusory in relation to the interest in preserving, namely not missing out on, either of the places. If one chooses now to appear at location X, and thus not to appear at location Y, then it would be sophistry to call this a voluntary choice; it is in fact no more voluntary than if the witness as another Prometheus were chained to the rock. Modern criminal law here expresses an ethic that in dramaturgy is not always developed to the same high degree. With it one often finds remnants of “taboo ethics” and of the iron law of error-fixedness. 20. Violation of one’s own legal interest. Consent. Negotiorum gestioa (cf. H. § 34). At the beginning of the chapter, it was mentioned that one can incur catastrophes willfully. In normal psychology this will only happen when the individual, by injuring one of his or her interests, gains benefits for another. The main rule is that such actions are not criminal. Suicide and attempted suicide were previously criminal offenses, but are now regarded only as prohibited, which has consequences for the participants. The issue is whether the legal interest (different from the material object to which it relates) belongs only to the individual or both to the individual and to society. In animal cruelty, the animal belongs to the individual, but the object of protection is a common human feeling. In military matters, the health of the individual is a matter of state; a self-inflicted injury to evade an exercise is therefore punishable.

a Management of or interference with the affairs of another without consent.

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A similar consideration applies where the affected person has given consent to the cause of the injury. Impunity also applies under certain conditions to the so-called unsolicited conduct of business (negotiorum gestio): A knows that B has wanted to give C a specific silver vase as a wedding gift; B travels away and forgets the wedding. A gives the vase to C, assuming that B would have consented if there had been an opportunity. 21. Vocational duties and the like (cf. H. § 35). Actions performed under a vocational duty cannot be punishable. It is different when, for example, a command is exceeded, or the subordinate realizes or “clearly should realize” (Military Penal Code § 24 – the phrase is problematic) that one, by obeying, will have participated in an unlawful action. The subordinate has a duty to exercise criticism (primarily toward the formal side of the command, the question of competence) only in serious cases; on the contrary, one has an obligation to refrain from criticism. In the purely moral field, on the other hand, the subordinate can easily be prone to the most serious objections; precisely what is right in the eyes of the state can stand for the individual as unworthy (e.g., military service) and vice versa. The most unfortunate in ethical respects is perhaps when the individual finds both the incompatible postures ethically justified because they each serve their recognized interest. No special rules apply to doctors’ intervention; their impunity is based on general principles of criminal law (state of emergency, consent, negotiorum gestio, value-preserving intent) and is void when these principles do not apply. 22. Hagerup § 60. Reasons why penalties may be reduced. Although the related questions are dealt with by Hagerup first in connection with sentencing and insofar as they are independent of the guilt question, we will nevertheless include them here; there are also various legal experts who argue about where they best belong. The section deals with the so-called “accompanying circumstances” which, no matter how one views them, are of paramount importance for the ethical and social-political judgment of the action, as well as for the repression the court finds advisable and in accordance with the law. The law expressly states in a number of places that the accompanying circumstances must be taken into account.

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on the tragic They are briefly summarized as follows: a. Particularly extenuating circumstances that the court or jury may consider. Hagerup gives no examples, and in reality these circumstances will most often coincide with those laid out below, and those that the law expressly mentions. b. Young age. c. Decreased accountability, for example, by impaired mental ability, fatigue, advanced age, illness, and the like, but not by self-inflicted intoxication. d. State of emergency. Since the ordinary state of emergency justifies the action, it cannot be referred to; the author must have thought of “state of emergency-like” conditions where the criminal guilt is not nullified. e. Excessive self-defense, see above. The author’s classification has undeniable systematic difficulties, which we will discuss in more detail below. f. Justified rage – and surely other “commonly known” affects (cf. crimes of passiona). g. Ignorance of the action’s unlawfulness. h. The guilty person’s dependent position. i. Demonstrated remorse for the deed. j. Attempt and withdrawal from attempt. k. The nature of the disposition and motive – their lack of social or antisocial character or their positive value.

On the other side, there are aggravating circumstances, the most important of which is repetition (Hagerup § 61). 23. Subjective guilt as a condition of punishment (Hagerup § 37 ff.). The same thing may have happened to some readers that happened when I first reviewed the work of Hagerup on which we are here relying: The heading astonished and confused me. Was it not subjective guilt that had been struggled with in the pages from § 18 onwards, except in §§ 1 and 2 and later in § 60? The more I immersed myself in this, the stronger I got a sense of a flaw in the author’s system. Attempted versus committed crime, forms of collaboration, competition, objective illegality, self-defense, collision of duties, consent, vocational duties, reduced accountability – how can it be possible that all these factors have no influence on subjective guilt, do not constitute aspects

a crimes passionnels (Fr.).

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of it, and only come into consideration after the question of guilt has been decided with a yes or no? I see no way out of the fact that, on this point, Hagerup seems to me to be neither clear nor convincing. The material that the author has gathered for the illumination of the matter also has value for us, but we cannot agree with the way he uses it. Of course, a purely theoretical polemic on punishment is outside the scope of this work, and since Hagerup’s developments everywhere eventually have a criminal address, we will not summarize his ethicalphilosophical assumptions and then show that they are not properly applied. Only a logical untenability in the conclusion should be briefly pointed out: Hagerup first develops the idea that there are two forms of criminal guilt, intention and negligence, and this is determined unconditionally.93 Then in § 43 he speaks of “psychic aspects that lie outside the concept of intention, but which have significance for punishment.” Where, then, does the conceptual boundary belong? Finally, on p. 328 he states: “ – intention is not in itself necessarily a criminal concept; conceptually something can just as well be an intentional charity as an intentional offense.” Now the student has lost the last holding point and realizes that one will never become a legal candidate. Even more astonishing, however, is the doctrine of the so-called guilt exclusion reasons (Hagerup p. 278 f.). As far as I understand it, this doctrine represents a violation of the basic principles of concept formation. There are two forms of guilt: intention and negligence. Well, I say, and come with a person who has intentionally taken 15 percent interest because a lawyer was misunderstood and it was thought to be legal – here intention and accountability are in perfect order – so the person is guilty. No, the followers of the doctrine now reply, because here there is a reason for guilt exclusion. This is a disappearing act, a logical sleight of hand. One thinks of a zoologist who gives the following definition of the term horse: A horse is a mammal with hooves. Well, I say, and bring in a zebra; here’s a mammal with hooves, is it therefore a horse? No, answers the zoologist; the definition is correct, but there is a horse exclusion reason, namely the tail, which looks like a cow’s tail. Well, I say, is there anything about the color, too? The color, the zoologist replies undaunted, is certainly outside the definition, but it is nevertheless important for the greater or lesser certainty with which one can ascertain that a horse is present.

93 One does not find any explanation of the problem in Jon Skeie, Den norske strafferett [The Norwegian Criminal Law] I, Oslo 1937 (Chap. 8).

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The criticism of Hagerup’s portrayal of the problem of guilt can be briefly stated as follows: The author has not with sufficient clarity set apart “guilt” in the sense of intentional cause, that is, a psychological matter – and “guilt” in the sense of “reason for blame” – an ethical matter. The concept of guilt in Norwegian criminal law includes both of these kinds; but it is also determined by purely legal points of view that can intersect both the ethical and the psychological considerations and that change with each new criminal law commission. The problem of guilt, or, if you will, the problems of guilt, is one of the most important, difficult, and contentious issues, both in legal philosophy and in ethics and dramaturgical theory. It also necessarily occupies a central place in this study. We hereby terminate the presentation of general points of view on criminal law and deal with the problem of guilt without connection to Hagerup.

§ 69. Existential guilt, physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological guilt and ethical guilt By an action we mean here an appropriate combination (or unity) of an act of will and a motor act, or also an intentional motor passivity. The concept of action is therefore to be located on a dual scale: one that runs between indifference or even reluctance on one pole and desire or intention on the other – and one that runs between motor passivity or technical incompetence on one pole and maximum of energetic effort and ability on the other. Through action, a human can consciously influence processes in the external world. However, as stated above, one can become a co-determinant of such processes through one’s very existence, by being there, and there at a particular time, etc., cf. § 61. This kind of causation, which has nothing to do with the life of the will, in the following will be called existential guilt. The word guilt is used here for causation in the physical-chemical sense, in the same way as when one says: It is the faulta of the horse, the tree, the weather. Effects that result from particular, individual, innate, or acquired characteristics such as deformity, blindness, mental abnormality, etc., can be traced back to physiological guilt, a peculiar case of existential guilt. On the boundary of the will life a The term skyld used here is typically translated guilt throughout this text but can also mean fault, blame, culpability.

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lie the precautionary steps one takes while carrying out one’s legal activities within the recognized field of risk; here one can speak of legal or functional guilt. The will now appears in the line of sight, and through a gradual transition we reach psychological guilt, where the crucial element is the conscious will. How far does the agent’s will reach; which part of the physical and mental consequences can be “brought back” to the will; which detrimental consequences can in some cases be “imputed” to one as psychological guilt? In order to answer these questions, one must first form an idea of the scope of the concept of the will with regard to consequences. In all talk of the will as a psychological cause, one assumes that the will life of the agent is normal, that one is susceptible to roughly the same motivational presentations that most people have in deciding, that the motor effect is appropriate in relation to the will (he must not pull his wife by the hair “to be good to her”), and that one can set one’s ordered will in spite of blind passion. This applies in general to the psychological habitus of the agent; in addition to this is the consideration of transient conditions that can have an influence on “the willpower”: exhaustion, fear, severe pain. All these conditions are included in the requirement of accountability. How far a passionate or affective or “physiologically” conditioned act can be regarded as an act of will is unclear and must be determined as well as it can be in each case. Recent research places increasing emphasis on the unconscious forces behind any voluntary choice. The following questions show that there may be doubts concerning what is meant by “will”: If I must have a hired car to attend an important meeting, and the driver, when he has heard the situation, demands my gold watch with its chain and my wallet with my total life’s cash to drive (physical compulsion) – did I then “will” to give him my treasures when I give them to him to get there, and in principle was I free to withhold them? And did I then get things “as I willed” them and have reason to be satisfied? Or: I marry Miss C. because I think she is rich. Instead, I receive her unpaid bills as a wedding gift. Have I “willed” the marriage? Sometimes less happens than the intention involved; have I always “willed” this less when no more happens? And sometimes something more happens. How far have I willed this more, and how far can it be “imputed” as psychological guilt? Here are two points of view to consider. When it comes to the exploitation of my state of emergency and the marriage to C., the question can best be answered by approaching it in a different way: In relation to what did I will the action? I have given my money away as a means to get there, but it is only the possession I have “willed” to transfer to the driver, not the ownership. And I have “willed” to marry C., as the source of

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the expected assets, but not as the source of the liabilities. Sometimes one can gain clarity through a countertest: Would I have acted like this if I had known it would go that way? When it comes to other people, however, it will usually be too risky to operate from such a thought position. As far as the driver is concerned, there is another factor that comes into play. One would be inclined to say that there was a lack of will, not so much because one was compelled by the distress, but because one does not sanction his criminal posture. It is different when dealing with unaccountable forces: In order not to freeze to death, I burn a precious manuscript that has been entrusted to me. Here one is more inclined to speak of will. The second point of view to be examined in this context is characterized by the following question: Does it matter for the will, for the determination of whether there has been a will, that the offender has a hope or desire that this and that should occur or not occur? Before answering this important question, let us illustrate it with an example, taken from Hagerup, that gives us an overview of the scale on which the will is to be located; the scale has been expanded in part for our special purpose. A is seeking a new position in order to get more income; this is the purpose (telos) which here coincides roughly with the motivation (causa): A earns too little. A gets the position. B, who would otherwise have gotten it, breaks down in disappointment and takes his own life. This result lies outside A’s will; he had not even thought of the possibility that there might be other applicants, or: He had been told reliably (and it was believed by A within legal risk) that there were no other applicants. It would be different if A applied for the position just to cause B to suffer. On the scale of these two possibilities lie, roughly simplified, the following steps, which could be placed in a different order: 1. A knows that there are other applicants, but he does not know if B is among them. The number here is of importance for A’s guilt. 2. A believes or knows that B is applying. 3. A also believes or knows that the position has crucial significance for B. 4. A does not know how he is ranked in relation to B. 5. A believes or knows that he is ranked at No. 1 but does not know how B is ranked. 6. A believes or knows that B is ranked at No. 2. 7. In that case, A will outperform B and believes or knows that B will be upset about this. 8. A applies in the hope that B will instead get another, equally good position.

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9. A applies regardless of what B thinks or achieves. 10. A being below B is humiliating. 11. A applies to cause B to be humiliated, a thanks for the last time when A was passed over by B. 12. A has heard the rumor that B has had suicide plans and applies in the hope that they are connected to the economy and are now going to happen. 13. A has heard B say that if he does not get this position, he has no alternative but to take his own life. A has already applied and maintains his application. 14. When A hears B’s statement, he decides to apply; he knows he is better qualified than B, and now sees an opportunity to get revenge on him. 15. When B hears about A’s appointment, he dies of a heart attack. Or: He blasts himself and his house into the air with dynamite, killing his entire family. 16. During the explosion, A’s son happens to be nearby and is killed. Or: B invites A’s son to his house so that he will die in the explosion. Other variants: 17. A knows nothing about B’s psychological or economic difficulties but wants it to be so bad for him that he does not survive being passed over, or the loss of the chance of a better income. 18. Against all expectation, it is B who gets the position and not A. In the joy of it, B dies of a heart attack, or he decides to celebrate in advance, lives luxuriously, arouses the disdain of his creditors, goes bankrupt, loses the new position, and take his own life. A thinks this produces the same benefit, though he had not intended these possibilities. A would have wished it had gone that way if he had thought of it. Under no circumstances is the attitude punishable, since the means, applying for the position, is legitimate. And its ethical assessment does not concern us here. The only thing that is asked about is the will as a causal factor. How far does A’s will reach in each case, and by what means does he realize his will? In which case does he will and cause that B is humiliated, that B takes his life, his family’s life, his own son’s life? The example clarifies with sufficient specificity the relationship between hope and desire on the one hand and will on the other. All are symptoms of a particular interest of the person who acts, but with hope and desire the realization depends essentially on powers of

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which one is not master, or on hypothetical conditions. One can say that hope and desire pass over into will the moment one does something that in common experience is suitable for producing the result. Hope and desire denote passive states of interest, the will an active one. Therefore, will alone comes into consideration when asking about psychological guilt, will in the light of the employed means. In the consciousness of the means’ radius of action lies the basis for psychological guilt, and this consciousness encompasses not only deliberate inevitable consequences, but also consequences which, irrespective of desires, hope, motive,94 or intent, will be produced by the means with sufficient probability, set against the background of the agent’s personal experience and intelligence. Accordingly, criminal law in European countries also operates with more psychological forms of guilt than those which can be deduced from intent and motive. In Norway, they are called willfulnessa and negligence,b in Germany intentc and negligence,d internationally, after Roman law, dolus and culpa. Dolus is the closer, culpa the more distant relationship between act of will and consequence. At the risk of repetition, we will dwell on these concepts for a while; it is of special importance that we have a carefully considered point of view when we later judge the guilt conditions in literary dramatic events. Criminal justice scholars have been divided into two camps: adherents of “the theory of will” and “the theory of representation” (cf. Hagerup p. 304). One theory which seems to be a persuasive attempt at reconciliation was produced by Reinhard Frank in a much-needed clarifying article “Über den Aufbau des Schuldbegriffs [On the Structure of the Concept of Guilt].”95 Although the concepts of willfulness and negligence in general are infected by ethical 94 The word motive can be used in several ways (cf. Hagerup p. 8 note 4), for example, both as motivational ideas (sometimes coinciding with intent) concerning underlying assessment (ideology) as well as concerning affects and character traits. While the intention (as telos) is supposed to be “attractive” to the expression of the will, the motive (as causa) should seem “pushing”; the motive should be the drive to leave the old state, the intention the drive to obtain the new one. Does this reveal anything? It seems in any case that the motivational idea can be more easily put into appropriate connection with the result than a “motivational” affect or action-determining character trait. a forsæt (Nor.). b uagtsomhet (Nor.). c Vorsatz (Ger.). d Fahrlässigkeit (Ger.). 95 Festschrift f. d. jur. Fakultät in Giessen [Commemorative for the Legal Faculty in Giessen], Giessen 1907, especially p. 545.

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judgment, they can nevertheless be usefully based on a doctrine of psychological causation; Hagerup also came to the realization, unfortunately too late, that they have nothing to do with the social value of the action (op. cit. p. 328). The theory of will in its crudest form is now commonly abandoned; it presumed that only the consequences which coincided with the agent’s intent (the consequences one had deliberately “set for oneself”) can be called intentionally caused. In contrast, the theory of representation claims that other consequences, when entry seems less certain, are included in the intention when they have registered in the agent’s consciousness as sufficiently probable. Here, however, a reservation arises: the probability must have an objective experiential basis; it is not enough for the agent to believe that his or her means is effective, for example, a spell. It is this characteristic of the consequence that is expressed by the term appropriate. Desires and hope in the promotional or inhibitory direction are also of no fundamental importance to the intention, but in cases of doubt, especially when the intention is investigated in a criminal case, appear as symptoms. Consequently, a consequence can also be regarded as intentionally caused even if it is contrary to the agent’s motives or intent. This is also our view. Examples: Shipowner A places an explosive device on one of his ships in order to gain the insurance money; he has no interest in anything other than this, but the intention also includes murder. One who intentionally breeds a child has also intentionally caused its natural death, although this is by no means the goal. But the child’s appropriate suffering can also be imputed to the parents as psychological guilt, dental pain, puberty difficulties, heartbreak, labor pains (unless the child can be said to have taken over the cause), death struggle, and this is despite the fact that the parents’ innermost desire is for the child to avoid these troubles. Even random accidents and misfortunes of all kinds will, to a certain extent, have to be imputed to the parents as intent, which is appropriate from a statistical point of view. The appropriate portion is exceeded partly by misfortunes occurring in unusual numbers (the child is bitten by an angry dog every day) and partly by being unusual in their kind (the child is struck by a meteorite). This last example shows how important it is to distinguish between ethical and psychological guilt.96 Negligence (culpa). Operating with negligence as a concept of psychological guilt means expanding the boundary of psychological causation. This can 96 A number of illustrative examples, especially from the frontier boundary areas, can be found in Urbye, Praktiske opgaver i strafferet [Practical Tasks in Criminal Law], Kristiania 1905, nos. 13–37.

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be done either by drawing in more distant, less appropriate consequences, of which the agent realized the possibility but did not take them into account, or nearby consequences, of which he or she was unaware but “could” or “should” have been aware. In the first case, one speaks of “deliberate negligence,” in the second of “unconscious negligence.” Between intent in the broadest sense and the “grosser” conscious negligence, there is only a difference of degree; with unconscious negligence, however, one seems to operate with new psychological presuppositions. With the phrase “could have realized,” etc., one imagines that the agent possesses the general prerequisites for understanding the scope of one’s actions or omissions, normal intelligence, normal knowledge, etc. (The phrase “should have realized” refers to a moral obligation and therefore does not concern us in this regard.) But this is more of a definition than an explanation. What is the meaning that someone “could have realized” what one actually did not realize? Either one has to resort to the intention here: By means of an act of will the person has isolated oneself from certain associations which would have otherwise appeared. In that case, the person has, though indirectly, psychological guilt for the incident, if this was sufficiently appropriate. Or, one must presuppose a transient actual reduction of the power of judgment or imagination, and this condition must be subordinated to physiological guilt. If one punishes the unconscious negligence without seeing it as an indirect intention, then in reality one punishes a condition for which the subject cannot be made psychologically responsible, for example, an under-equipment or error-fixedness. This may be socially-politically expedient; there is no lack of legislative arguments in favor of public response to injurious negligence, but a “punishment” such as this must have the character of a protective measure and not of repression. At the mildest degrees of negligence, where the offense fades away and where the field borders the area of legal risk (which ends with a risk minimum), are located the old problems of personal causation of catastrophes as opposed to those which affect the individual without prompting on one’s part as a willing being. Only by also being placed in an ethical light, however, do these problems take on their full importance, both for the ordinary view of life and for the conception of tragedy and catastrophe plays in ancient and recent times. With regard to the significance of the desire or motive in acts of negligence, we must note here too that it does not matter to the psychological cause whether a consequence is desired to occur or hoped to be avoided; in both cases, it has registered in the consciousness of the agent as to some degree

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probable or at least possible; otherwise, the question of desirability would not have arisen. However, even if one acts under the express premise that the consequence should not occur, a nexus has been established between one’s storyforming imaginary life and the external consequence, when this is actually an appropriate result of the action. A consequence of this is that a person of imagination and combining ability will have a greater psychological guilt radius than a person of limited ability in this direction; the specialist will within one’s area of specialization have a wider radius than the layperson, etc. Also, here a natural scale is formed which leads from the “mentally incompetent,” where there are no conceptions of the consequences of one’s action, and up to the metaphysically high-conscious, who sees no limits to the consequences and thus for psychological guilt. Nobility obliges. The concept of appropriateness proves to be elastic; subjective, individual considerations will easily creep into the presumptively intersubjective appropriateness judgment. Examples: A skilled swimmer dives into the water one summer day to save a man. The man is frightened and stronger than the swimmer, who is pulled down and drowned. If he did not doubt for a moment that he could carry out the rescue without endangering himself – if it did not vaguely occur to him that he had other dangers with which to reckon other than just the water, then he also did not psychologically cause his own death, of course not intentionally, but not negligently either. To use here an “objective” standard as a basis – e.g., the observers’ assessment of the strength and emotion of the victim – is to confuse physiological and psychological guilt. But with only that glimmer in the swimmer, that there was such a risk, the scale of guilt has begun. The gradual transition from non-guilt to guilt and the discretionary decision are clear in the daylight. If William Tell (cf. Hagerup p. 305 n. 11) had struck his son’s head, a parallel consideration would have to be made. It has always been assumed that he was shooting with this possibility in mind. If one wills the end, then one also “wills” the means, even if it contradicts one’s innermost desire. The interests involved do not concern the purely functional issue addressed here; in order to highlight this, examples have been chosen where the interest is contrary to the result. Nor does this question have any importance here: How was it possible that this and that risk did not appear in the agent’s consciousness when they were obvious to everyone else? One only has to note whether it appeared. Cf. the following example from Urbye (op. cit. no. 33, 2): A, tired from hunting, leaves his loaded muzzle-loading rifle (where one cannot remove the cartridge by hand) standing in the hallway. After he lays down, he comes to think of

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this, and because he is afraid that an accident could happen with the rifle, he gets up, goes to the doorway, and fires his rifle outwards toward the yard. He thereby kills B, who is on a night run. The account that I have everywhere based on these examples will be found in Urbye, op. cit. nr. 35. Urbye’s view is apparently this: Although this consideration sounds plausible, it does not, however, have any legal basis in Norwegian criminal law. According to this, thoughtlessness is in some cases punishable. According to the stated main point of view, any case of misrepresentation (misunderstanding, error, ignorance) must also be assessed in relation to psychological guilt; A wills to strike down B in the shelter of darkness, but C appears instead of B and is killed. A is psychologically guilty of a man’s death, but not of C’s, unless he intentionally took on the risk of striking passersby at night. If this risk in no way occurred to him because he was convinced it was B who came, then he is undoubtedly a socially dangerous gentleman, whom we will make emotionally responsible for C’s death (e.g., by making him pay compensation to C’s survivors), but psychologically guilty he is not. Whenever the actualities are other than those the agent has expected (error facti, error in objecto, in persona), one has psychological guilt as far as one’s own circle of ideas and the external conditions coincide with each other, but no further. In this specific case, one would have to operate with property units and form a common measure of the factors of consciousness and the outside world. (Difficulties will easily arise and one must beware of technicalities; it is better to admit that the phenomenon cannot be structured.) – The same applies when the nearest course that the action initiates is different from what the perpetrator intended but leads to the same result: A lifts an ax to strike B; B leaps to the side and crashes through a hole of which neither of them had been aware. Here one must not be confused by the fact that the result in terms of interest is what A had wanted to produce; functionally it is just as foreign to A’s plans as B having been rescued by an angel. A has no more psychologically caused B’s death than if he had given B 10,000 kroner and then B jumped backward with delight and fell into the hole. Here too it may be good criminalistic policy to let A pay for the unintended consequence “since he first embarked on such villainy,” and it suits our revenge instinct perfectly, but it lacks any logical justification. However, the world of life, poetry, and imagination serve us quite well, since there are cases which are difficult to shine light through logically and always retain something enigmatic about them. In such cases, it is often more important in social life to have a fixed rule of assessment than that this rule is in principle inviolable. First then, it is important that it

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is roughly in line with “the sense of justice,” and then that the distance to the logically tenable is not too outrageous. All those who – rightly – attack criminal law and its practitioners by reference to their weak or failing fundamental principle should take this fact into account: One would have had to wait to establish justice until all theoretical questions were unanimously decided, thus chaos would have reigned to this day. I do not wish in the end to give the reader an enjoyable impression of the dangers with which a criminal law commission has to contend. The draft of the current penal code has a § 41 which reads: “It is also considered criminal negligence when someone outside of an emergency situation exercises any art or occupation that requires a particular insight or skill that one does not possess.” (One has forgotten to add: “with the consequence that an accident occurs,” or the like.) The proposal did not go through, but a fairly similar provision, which also includes science, was applicable under the Penal Code of 1842 (Chap. 4 § 2, 9) and is apt to arouse melancholic thoughts in any overworked reviewer. While psychological (and physiological) guilt is a matter of fact, a matter of the “objective” relationship between will (content of consciousness) and result, ethical guilt is a matter of assessment. It may seem questionable to use the word guilt concerning two or more conditions that are conceptually so different. But firstly, they enter into an intimate functional connection during acts of will, where both apply (ethical guilt cannot even arise without prior psychological guilt), and secondly, the concept of criminal law includes elements of both, besides other matters that can also be called guilt conditions. The term guilt is retained to avoid violations of language usage, but in order to prevent misunderstandings from arising, will never be used without the adjectival qualification. Under this condition, one can even introduce new conceptions of guilt when they prove useful and operate with all of them at the same time without any confusion. “Guilt” is a collective concept with tradition as a background. To the same extent that one is psychologically guilty for a state that has come into being, one is cut off from referring to forces of a foreign will as the sole cause of the result. One cannot be astonished by it; one cannot “accuse fate” under general human endorsement; one cannot accuse the world order of injustice because this particular consequence was the fruit of one’s own action – all while one knew the earthly dynamics. One will also not be able to protest against responsibility under general endorsement. Responsibility is the fact that one, oneself or others, all of the forces of nature having been known in advance, is required or forced to bear one’s (perhaps the greatest possible) part

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of the consequences that have occurred or will occur, or to restore the damage caused according to one’s ability. The concept of responsibility can, therefore, also be divided; one bears “physiological responsibility” (the blind person must come to terms with the fact that the consequences of blindness go beyond oneself), psychological responsibility, ethical responsibility, criminal responsibility, “metaphysical” responsibility in different variants, etc. The concept of responsibility is closely linked to the dynamics that allow the consequences to strike where the cause lay; one therefore takes responsibility first and foremost for the harmful consequences (though this is not conceptually given), and for the favorable consequences uses terms such as rights, claims, etc. Similarly, the term guilt is complemented by merit. (That a person is strong or beautiful is then his or her “physiological merit” [advantage]; that one was nearby when the king’s boat overturned is one’s “functional merit”; that one imagines useful side considerations is “psychological merit.” “Moral merit” needs no further explanation here, and “criminal merit” is of no practical significance, since the highest one can attain is to not be arrested. Rewards are not given, but during a criminal case it can have a mitigating effect that one has “no prior convictions.”) But if the afflicted person who has physiological guilt cannot complain about the consequences in relation to the guilt, and the one who has psychological guilt cannot complain about the consequences in relation to the will, they may, however, on the basis of a deeply rooted ethical consideration, accuse “fate” – the causal factors of a foreign will – because they have become physiologically guilty, and in some cases where the act of will was prompted by influences foreign to the will, psychologically guilty. From this one can derive the concept of “world guilt” or “divine guilt,” which we will, however, only discuss later. At the moment, we are closer to establishing a transition from psychological to ethical guilt in the individual person. The psychologically guilty person, after the act of will has ended, may take on different attitudes toward the incident or seemingly inevitable result. I note some of these attitudes: 1. One is satisfied that, through one’s act of will, one became a psychological cause (with success). 2. One is not dissatisfied with the fact that one became a psychological cause per se, but one wishes one had done something else. (One has built a house that one thought was large enough, but later experience shows that it should have been larger.)

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3. One is unhappy that one became a psychological cause, but one could not avoid it without jeopardizing major interests. (A is desperate over seeing his children starve, but his moral ideals forbid him from working at the cannon factory, and he cannot obtain other work. Conflict.) 4. One is unhappy that one became a psychological cause. One felt or knew at the moment of action, or at the time when the decision was made, that one “ought” to act differently, and now one is ashamed and has regret. One feels “ethically guilty.” Wherever there are others who think one should have acted differently, and one realizes this, it is these others who say one has ethical guilt. One’s own judgment may coincide with the others’ or deviate from it. When it is said that the sinner is “convinced” of one’s (ethical) guilt, it does not mean that one has acknowledged one’s guilt. It is often apparent upon closer inspection that it is only one’s judges who have convinced themselves. A peculiar dual emphasis often occurs in the “guilt conscious”: One enjoys intensely and would at no cost do without the good the action has provided one, but at the same time one has a sense of something unpleasant and degrading, and most of all one fears being exposed. There are mental illnesses where an “unexplained feeling of ethical guilt” is part of the disease or a symptom of it. In other cases, the ill person defends the feeling of guilt concerning acts that the normal person finds “guiltless” or concerning heinous actions which the ill person has not committed. Also, normal people often have a feeling of guilt that they cannot explain, and this is frequently associated with anxiety. Psychoanalytic research has made these relationships its main theme. In the following, however, we have nothing else in mind but the feeling of ethical guilt, which is linked to individual, conscious actions, to actions that simultaneously imply psychological guilt, since the decision is the object of a motive struggle. Thus, what may lie behind the motives, or assert itself in non-motive form, should not be examined; without this simplification of the focus we cannot hope, within a proportionate limit, to find what we seek, a practically useful foundation for the concept of ethical guilt. The existence of the feeling of ethical guilt requires a number of things: 1. There must be a specific other action (possibly omission) or standard of action with which the agent can compare one’s action (posture). 2. The notion of this other action or norm must be present in one’s consciousness at the moment of action or in the time during which the

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on the tragic decision was made. If the thought arises later, the associated sense of shame will not be the feeling of ethical guilt according to the definition used. 3. At the same time, the other action or norm must stand for one as better than one’s own action (or the norm of which it is an expression) – better in the present circumstances. According to what has been previously developed concerning morality, this means that it either leads to the goal with greater certainty or strength, or leads to a higher goal (judged according to the subjective hierarchy), or better agrees with a subjective autotelic moral requirement (possibly an ideal self, a higher self) according to which a posture is experienced as better in and of itself. From this third condition it follows that, among other things, the subject in a collision of duties between equal demands cannot incur ethical guilt (possibly only physiological) by obeying one obligation and neglecting the other. 4. The agent must deviate from the better norm, though one felt it was in one’s power to pursue it.

How then was it possible that one did not follow the better norm? Is not the idea paradoxical, whether one considers the relationship from the deterministic or indeterministic point of view? The simplest explanation is that one chooses to obtain an inferior but more immediate good, rather than a greater but more distant one that is less relevant at the moment, but which one knows will appear with force later (cf. social economy teaches about present and future goods). Often it is associated with a sense life in which an autotelic good “out of weakness” is preferred over a heterotelic one that one cannot do without, when one is in one’s full moral power and working with difficult horizons. But the opposition can also be something else, thus a “low-autotelic” interest can often displace a “high-autotelic” one in the subjective assessment. The crucial thing is that the positions of the goods in one’s principal assessment do not have to correspond to the pleasure values they have at each moment. Central fixedness tendencies must often be realized in battle, and in this battle partial and total defeats occur. The same is true of unfolding tendencies that demand the individual’s overall power and therefore necessitate relinquishment. The action that produces moral guilt has not been exhaustively clarified through this summary presentation, but with some supplementary statements it will be sufficient for the purpose – to later understand the role of ethical guilt in the tragic course. First, it should be remembered that moral guilt can arise in both the biological and the social (“moral” and legal), autotelic and

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metaphysical spheres of interest. Guilt-producing actions are called sins, iniquities, transgressions, offenses. According to this terminology, “original sin” should rather be called “original guilt.” Insofar as we find use of the notion, it is included in the physiological (possibly metaphysical) guilt type. In our time, we are greatly preoccupied with the possibility of a future eradication of moral guilt, but we shall not dwell on these ideas. It is another matter whether a person can “settle one’s account,” revise one’s ethical status, and finally acquit (possibly condemn) oneself. The acquittal may be perceived by a listener as real when, for example, a plausible motive is presented, and as fictional when it seems to be due to a desired arrangement, a sought rationalization. Tactics of purification from an ethical accusation made by others can be varied, but the goal will always be to make the action look ethically superior or ethically indifferent. Even more complicated are perhaps the maneuvers one takes in one’s own consciousness to vent a feeling of ethical guilt. When the individual has a single intention in mind, a posture is perceived as ethically superior (relative to other possible postures) to the same degree that it presents itself to the agent as more useful. The “good” manner of reaction coincides with the technically correct one, and the “bad” with the technically incorrect one. But here are two reservations: for an ethical test, technical correctness must not be measured by the actual result, but by the agent’s subjective perception, by one’s “good will.” In other words, in order to gain ethical value, the posture, upon its creation, must pass on to a choosing agency; a fixed reaction, an expedient reflex has no ethical value, and an inexpedient one does not entail ethical guilt. And this choice can thus be between two postures in relation to the same purpose. Here is the second reservation: Is this choice enough to give the posture ethical value? Must not the choice be made between competing interests? Will not a normal individual necessarily choose the best posture toward the individual purpose unless there are competing impulses, for example, ease? This question is here left to ethics. We ourselves will operate with ethical value both when it comes to choosing a posture toward the individual purpose and when it comes to choosing between purposes. We thus avoid in each case having to take a stand on the competing impulses, which can often be difficult to frame; nor is there always an interest in taking such a stand. A posture is ethically unimpeachable then when it aligns with the agent’s notion of the best posture as far as his or her ability is concerned. If one knows enough to be able to pronounce such a judgment, then this judgment will be “factual” or “objective”: one holds up given magnitudes such as conception, ability, and effort against each other and sees whether the effort complements

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the ability in the direction indicated by the conception. Such an ethical judgment is an ascertainment and not an assessment; the same is true when one asks whether the interest the agent sought to realize also stands to him or her as the one he or she should now realize, not only that in weakness he or she feels tempted to realize. A change, whereby the ascertainment is replaced by an assessment, only occurs when the viewer measures the agent’s highest interest against one’s own highest interest. Within a particular group of people, there is usually a kind of greatest common goal of the many diverse interests that the members individually set as the highest, and for the posture that is considered the best in relation to the realization of the interest – an ethical resultant norm which also covers the very need for a norm, the need for fixedness. The norm is therefore strengthened with a rational basis, defended, and given increased prevalence by instruments of power and other bodies. The norm can also be claimed by a minority that is in possession of the instruments of power, while other minorities form “opposition” and seek to work through censure. The collective judgment focuses partly on “abnormal” interests that the individual wants to realize, and partly on the defective manner in which one realizes the recognized, “normal” interests. Rarely does one hear a judgment like this: If one has decided to go after this unworthy object, at least one will use the skills one possesses. Sometimes the regard for the legalized object breaks through so strongly that it is counted better to miss the reproved object one has chosen than to realize it with force; this is especially true when the object is regarded as being harmful to society or for other reasons is an object of positive disgust. It is then considered better not to have any “morality” than to have a strong positive “immorality.” Dramatic poets often look at this relationship differently; for them, the “aesthetic” interest is sometimes more important than the social interest, and the dazzling social immorality often has a greater aesthetic value than the feeble morality. It is an autotelic moral norm that is inserted here. The comparison between the observer’s value scale and that of the agent (or the act itself) will usually serve as an assessment and end with praise or reproach (expression of emotion), but it does not have to. The observer can also be neutral in one’s own assessment and make the comparison purely factual. “Reproach” in a sense other than social veto seems to lack both logical and psychological basis when it is put forward by others besides the agent oneself. What really constitutes reproach directed at the agent on the part of “society,” such as Hagerup asserts? If the agent of an action, which “society” calls immoral and punishes, tried to benefit oneself and harm one’s neighbor, then

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this person can be considered foolish or dangerous (traitor, enemy of humankind) because one allowed oneself to be a bad environment for one’s fellow human beings. We protect ourselves from such a person, and we draw back our sympathy from him or her, but the “shame on you” attitude has no place in the point of view used here. A person always houses a plurality of interests and seldomly has one arranged them into a fixed hierarchy. One will therefore be strongly predisposed to doubt when the situation demands that one interest be sacrificed for another. One may protest against the very necessity of the decision and see in this necessity a defect in the security of the environment; ultimately, criticism will be directed at the “world order” or the metaphysical environment. More distant is despair over one’s own complicated circle of interests, that is, the desire for a different way of being. I have so far avoided referencing examples from fiction because it is easy for extraneous, above all “aesthetic” considerations to interfere. This is least true of problem poetry, and since Ibsen’s Doll’s House is an illustration of the just concluded train of thought, I am going to cite a part of the drama’s ethical structure: Helmer is sick and will die if he does not travel to the South. Nora obtains the money by means of a crime and saves her husband’s life. This interest to her is the highest, not just the most pleasurable at the moment of action, but the one she also considers within her total circle of interests as the highest when she is “on the level with herself.” The forgery is moral, that is, most effective in relation to the realization of the interest, and the action is thus moral in a dual sense when viewed through Nora’s eyes. The social values that Helmer sets highest, perhaps higher than his own life, do not even register as an objection to Nora; no conflict arises. The case shows the limitation of ethical guilt on two sides: The stronger the objections, the stronger the doubts first, and then the feelings of guilt. And the weaker the appearance of the objections, the more the action approaches a fixed reaction, an expression of instinct, which is triggered, so to speak, blindly and without passing the choosing agency. Already the instinctive certainty with which Nora commits forgery means a danger to the moral relevance of the action, and this danger is sharpened by the fact that the considerations Nora does not raise, neither then nor later, are determinative for most people. Nora’s lack of “social conscience” in the usual sense exempts her from the “anguish of choice,” and it is this abnormal one-sidedness in the circle of interests that makes her accountability problematic.

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The mere judgment of others, when this judgment does not coincide with one’s own, is conceptually without significance for both guilt and innocence in the ethical sense. In the area with which we are dealing here, however, one finds such finely graded transitions, such a complexity of the psyche, and such a strong suggestibility, that the feelings of guilt and innocence at once quickly appear contrary to the intellectual result. If one is accused of obscenity, a sense of shame arises even if one is innocent. The number of impulses is incalculable and the boundary between what we have sought to determine as ethical guilt and related states is not clear. Nor is the boundary between assessing and ascertaining ethical judgments clear. Modern psychology has opened up the prospect of new frontiers and new views that further blur the conceptual distinctions. Finally, a few remarks concerning so-called “moral geniuses.” The term is widely used in dramaturgy, for example, in connection with Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring [Gyges and His Ring]. In a society, both a value scale and a posture scale will eventually become stabilized; the benefits of such ethical fixedness are many, including providing rest and security. But it is also not free from having drawbacks; firstly, it hits both the under-equipped and the differently assessing (conflicts) hard, and secondly, it can become inexpedient when new conditions and new insights come into being. During such cultural crises, there are sometimes moral innovators who propose or practice new value scales (possibly new anchors) or a new way of safeguarding old interests. The contemporaries are then often split into two parties, one that joins the innovator and considers him or her a moral genius, and another that sees in the innovator a danger, considers him or her either as delusional or as a deceiver, and seeks to incapacitate him or her. Or they tacitly recognize the person but will not admit it, either because the new doctrine deprives them of certain pleasures, or because it touches tender spots in their nervous life. Sometimes the innovator stands alone and can then be eliminated without difficulty. Since his or her teaching either wins over time or not, the person is then declared by “the judgment of history” to be a “tragic genius” or a confused zealot. Sometimes the idea itself can find recognition, but it cannot be put into practice. As for Nora, her exercising of the right of love is undoubtedly in line with a widespread assessment. But her love is what Forel (Die sexuelle Frage [The Sexual Question]) calls an “egoism for two”a: the program’s general implementation would mean

a Egoismus zu Zweien (Ger.).

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social chaos with the subsequent annihilation of precisely those values that the new morality should preserve.

§ 70 Criminal guilt What Hagerup calls in a number of places “subjective” or “own” guilt is a condition with changing contours; sometimes it is almost psychological guilt, sometimes almost ethical. Nor does the author distinguish between “subjective” guilt and criminal guilt. The value of Hagerup’s investigation of the study of punishment is not here to be examined, but what we cannot avoid is providing ourselves with a concept of “criminal guilt” which is in connection with the rest of the train of thought. One is criminally guilty if one meets the conditions for being convicted under applicable law. These conditions, for modern Western European law, are briefly summarized as follows: 1. That the person in question has produced a state which the legal order does not tolerate (an unlawful state) and has been deemed a criminal threat. 2. That the emergence of this state can be imputed to the person as psychological guilt (that one is accountable in general and was also at the moment of action – and had awareness of the consequence). 3. That one has, in the court’s opinion, acted in a moral guilt-producing way, not in relation to abstract norms, but when all circumstances in the specific situation are taken into account. But here it must be noted that the court does not in principle inquire according to the defendant’s own moral viewpoint, but according to the relationship of the action to the assessment upon which the society has based the legal order. The defendant is morally guilty, it says, when one has acted as one did, even though one was aware that another alternative was better according to the assessment of the society. Which grade the action represents in one’s own subjective assessment is only considered insofar as the relationship is relevant to the social assessment. First one determines whether the threshold for criminal guilt is exceeded, then the degree of guilt. The latter question is more difficult to decide than the former. A large number of factors are involved here, and a number of rules have been set up; in most cases, these rules are rationalizations of emotionally determined considerations of fairness. The question of the presence of guilt

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on the tragic in general is decided by the jury in court cases in Norway, and the question of the degree of guilt partly by the jury, and partly by the court. As a result of this division, the peculiar situation may arise in which the defendant is first convicted, after which one is acquitted because the degree of guilt is too small.

Many have thus reasoned that if criminal law should first take into account the moral value of the action, and if that value is closely related to the so-called “accompanying circumstances” (cf. above), these circumstances must be taken into account in determining the question of guilt and not only in connection with the degree of guilt, or even only with the sentence. What Hagerup orders partly under “objective conditions of punishment” (§ 46), partly under “grounds for exclusion” (p. 278), partly under “conditions of accountability” (§§ 39–41), partly under “psychological factors that are outside the intention, but have significance for criminal guilt” (§ 43), partly under “modalities in the outward manifestation of the crime” (§ 20 ff.), partly under “objective unlawfulness as a condition of criminal liability” (§§ 31–36), and finally under “reasons why the penalty may be increased or reduced” – these are all factors that some dissenting theorists (consistent with a widespread lay view) will apply to the question of guilt itself. A prominent representative of this view is Reinhard Frank (Tübingen) whose article on the subject we have mentioned above.97 Consistent with the results at which we have arrived ourselves, Frank states here (p. 528): “In my opinion the concept of guilt is a compound term, the components of which include among other things intent or negligence.” Unfortunately, Frank does not attempt the production of an exhaustive record of these other components of the concept of guilt, but he mentions, for example, that there must be “normal characteristics of the circumstances in which the perpetrator acts” (p. 530). And concerning accountability, which is often referred to as a “guilt prerequisite” (cf. Hagerup p. 286), it is stated on p. 527: “It is not guilt, not a prerequisite for guilt, but it is part of the guilt.” And a better definition than the following one, which Frank himself calls a slogan (p. 529), he has not found either (it would in that case be quite long): “Guilt is reproachable – culpable behavior is reproachable behavior. – a prohibited behavior (controversial) is to be counted as producing guilt if one can be blamed for having taken it.” As conditions for this to happen, Frank mentions the following, although as cited here the term “condition” is contrary to the just stated claim on p. 527: (1) “A normal mental 97 “Über den Aufbau des Schuldbegriffs [On the Construction of the Concept of Guilt],” Festschr. f. d. jur. Fak. Giessen [Commemorative for the Legal Faculty in Giessen] 1907.

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nature of the perpetrator, which we call accountability. (2) A certain concrete psychological relationship of the perpetrator to the action in question. (3) The normal nature of the circumstances in which the perpetrator acts.” The meaning is this: That for which, under normal circumstances, one could “blame” a person could be morally acceptable in exceptional circumstances, such as self-defense, prior mental and physical distress, etc. It is a predominantly ethical concept of guilt that Frank has developed, and this concept includes psychological guilt as a necessary link. But such an ethical guilt is not tantamount to criminal guilt. A new law makes an action punishable today that was not yesterday, punishable even though the acting person does not know the new law, but only knows that the action is prohibited by civil law. One’s ethical guilt is the same yesterday and today, but today one is also liable to punishment. There is another aspect that shows that criminal guilt is a concept in itself: In ancient times people did not ask about subjective guilt at all (ethical and psychological guilt), see Hagerup § 6, cf. primitive rules on the violation of taboo – and there are still remnants of this view where the interest of the state so requires, see Hagerup p. 280 and the doctrine of punishment for the unintentional p. 181. While in the latter case there is an expression of the pure revenge instinct, the punishment mentioned in Hagerup p. 280 in our day will be perceived more as a protective measure than as a repression. However, the fact that the law establishes a criminal guilt that does not presuppose ethical or psychological guilt cannot be denied. It is then also the case that, by virtue of a “delegated authority,” ethical and psychological guilt have a bearing on criminal guilt – from the point of view of those in power.

§ 71. Metaphysical guilt Finally, for the sake of the completeness of the presentation, a brief account will be given of metaphysical guilt. While all other forms of guilt have a real earthly basis, this one rests upon hypothetical premises. It originates from a metaphysical (possibly transcendental) norm, to which one must bow regardless of one’s own judgment. Otherwise, the agent becomes “guilty,” that is, one becomes an operation carrier for the “punitive” reaction of transcendental forces in this or an afterlife form. One can, however, be metaphysically guilty (liable to judgment) even without one’s own contribution, after the model of biological error-fixedness (physiological guilt): For no apparent reason, this and that family, this and that individual, are made the target of transcendental

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authorities’ (gods, demons, fate, etc.) devastating missiles that can hit any kind of interest. One seems to hear an echo of this particularly Greek view in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Here the metaphysical guilt is linked to bare existential guilt, but it can also be linked to ethical guilt, as in the Christian consciousness of sin.

§ 72. The occasion, the “triggering cause” Of the three groups of factors that make themselves felt in the event of a catastrophe, the first two, the object of attack and the attacking power, have now been addressed. The discussion of the second group has been disproportionately large, but this was not to be avoided once the willing human had been placed among the counterpowers. The arrangement could also have been different: had the court been regarded as a counterpower, the crime would have to be regarded as the occasion. But for the victim, the criminal is the counterpower. There is reason to give the third group, to which we now turn, the broadest possible scope. Theoretically, no boundary can be drawn at all; no person knows for sure what conditions could be dispensed with without the catastrophe disappearing or changing its identity; no one knows the hidden causal weave of the course of the world. And the contributing factors can be so complicated and unindividualized that it makes no sense to say that this or that relationship is the triggering cause. It is only on purely practical grounds that a state or a process that precedes the catastrophe can be declared irrelevant in relation to it; one separates it out in the same way as one has to in one’s life. Japan’s ministerial crisis last week has no influence on my stomachache today – I think. The striking interplay of coincidences in which forms, processes, constellations, and structures arise, alter and erase, promote and destroy human interests has captivated our thoughts and imaginations in all times. What was the cause and how did it work – what forces met what difficulties under what conditions – that is the theme of practically everything that humans have communicated in word and writing for the pleasure of experience as far back as history goes. This is the case with folklore and mythologies, myths, dramas, epics, god and hero poems, fables and legends, novels, ballads, lais, and anecdotes – not to mention the writing of history itself. Only the lyrical winds the flower garland of lamentation and praise around the harsher epic dynamics.

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The distinction between attacking power and triggering cause (occasion) will not always have significance or give greater clarity. Often it will be more straightforward to talk only about the attacking power because it includes the occasion. But to abandon the notion of a “mediating impetus,” a catalyst, so to speak, would hardly be favorable; in all practical life one distinguishes between closer and more distant causes of an event. The occasion appears in its simplest form in cases where known and obvious values are daily surrounded by known and obvious dangerous forces, but where order and isolation prevent a “short circuit.” The ships cross the sea with life aboard, germs fill the air and the drinking water, the individual’s unfolding takes place in a thicket of considerations, the orderly will is besieged by diffuse urges and inclinations. Where such tense but appropriate structures pervade, the term occasion has its best and clearest meaning. The occasion may, like the attacking power, lie in the fixed characteristics of the organism, in a (congenital, acquired, chronic, transient, etc.) state of deficit, surplus, under-fixedness, over-fixedness, or error-fixedness – in concert with certain situations. The various forms of guilt discussed above are found here without further application since there is no conceptual distinction. So far catastrophes have been thought of as having a practically “simple origin,” for example, the following: A lion breaks out of its wooden cage and kills the zookeeper. The attacked value is the life of the zookeeper, and the attacking power is the lion. The rat that gnawed on the wooden bars may still be included in the attacking power, while the distracted professor, who in the context of his vitamin experiments went with rats in his pocket and lost one in the zoo, may only justify the term occasion. In poetic works one often deals with such simplified causal relationships; the poet has already by one’s work in a sense “processed” the raw material and brought out the structure; one has almost certainly prepared the matter for the main altercation. A particular interest is put in the foreground and exposed to a particular attacking power that is triggered by a specific occasion. Without such simplification, the poet would hardly have achieved the artistic effect one intended. Reckoning with the work often requires that the viewer or reader be loyal to the conditions with which the poet has worked, and not raise questions beyond these. Fiction is strongest when it makes all unnecessary questions irrelevant or uninteresting. In practical life, the lines can easily be blurred or lost in the boundless. It is true that if a catastrophe can be spoken of at all, then there must be an interest

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that has been hit, and it must be hit by something. And these two factors can usually be determined quite accurately. But in a case such as the following, where the object of attack is equal to civic esteem plus normal activities at home and at work, and the attacking power is in the reaction of the state’s criminal justice organs, where does “the occasion” or “triggering cause” really lie? I am sentenced to life imprisonment because I shot the constable, who wanted to arrest me for disorderly conduct, of which I was guilty because I was intoxicated and desperate, because I had been fired, because I had borrowed money from the cashbox, because I wanted to pay a medical bill, because I had to see Dr. A., because he was the only one at home, because Dr. B., who is my friend, was away, because …, and because A. is a crook whom I do not want to owe anything, because …, and because I got pneumonia, because I went to work with a severe cold, because it should not be up to them, because …; I got the cold because I was standing in the wind without a coat, because I let someone borrow the coat, because …, and then I happened upon a street fight that came about because …, and came to see it because I walked a different way than usual, because my usual road was blocked, because they were digging, because the sewer had overflown, because Mrs. Nilsen had filled it with debris to annoy her husband, because they had quarreled, because Nilsen had said something about the “woman” that he had heard in the club the night before, where he went because … As one can see, physiological guilt (susceptibility to colds, etc.) has been linked to functional guilt and psychological guilt, partly within the risk minimum (the need to go another way), partly within the legal risk (that I stopped to watch), and partly outside of it (that I went in the cold without a coat), to ethical guilt (that which I felt from borrowing from the cashbox), and to external coincidence (Nilsen’s sewer), and formed a series of causes with appropriate and inappropriate links in variegated confusion; links of different types of merit could also be included. A branching of roots provides a better picture than a chain. A branch point then indicates that it is natural here to return the present impetus back to its preconditions. The further away from the catastrophe an impetus lies, the more doubtful is its significance for the interest’s fate, or better: the more doubtful is its significance for the branch that the agent oneself makes up. The further away it is, the more possibilities there are for the impetus to take a different direction than the one leading to the catastrophe. The schema shows one more thing: All impetuses of proximity degree 1 are as practically “important” as causes; the

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same applies to impetuses of proximity 2, etc. The further one goes back from the catastrophe, the greater the number of preconditions that will be taken into consideration, and it will soon become unmanageable. Of each of these distant, numerous preconditions, one can rightly say that if it had not been present, the catastrophe would not have occurred. Each of them is thus a precondition sine qua non. However, it should be noted that, firstly, much of the principled identity of the catastrophe can be changed without the practical identity doing so. Secondly, many of the preconditions will be the normal conditions of all life, and the catastrophe will be just one of the myriad consequences to which they have contributed. By their presence, they may have prevented a number of other catastrophes, etc. If one gives up on working with a speculative “causal metaphysics” and instead uses a practical standard, then one can with a firm hand cut away the greater part and keep what is practically relevant. More serious, however, is another kind of complication in the preconditions. In the just given example of the convicted man, one can change the last link: Nilsen mentioned something about the woman that I myself told him in the club to seem witty and thereby strengthen my interpersonal position. This impetus is apt to serve my (social) interests on causal path 1, and turns out, albeit in an inappropriate manner, to damage them on causal path 2. Such an impetus (or causal factor) will in the following be called a double-acting impetus (or causal factor). Now, it was previously explained that an inappropriate consequence cannot be traced back to the subject as a psychological cause, at the most as a physiological one. There could then be doubts as to what the double-acting impetus was supposed to have brought about. Two possibilities arise immediately: The effect may include all consequences that appear to be causally related to the impetus in such a way that the impetus is a condition for the onset of the effect sine qua non. Or it may include only those consequences that have entered into the agent’s consciousness. An intermediate possibility is the inclusion of all appropriate consequences, but no other. The safest way so far is to use the conception to the fullest extent possible, consistent with the first-mentioned alternative above. According to this, a double-acting impetus is a causal factor that proves to simultaneously serve and harm the interests of one and the same subject, regardless of what one or most people could expect. A double-acting impetus can, in its simplest form, be represented schematically in this way:

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FIGURE 12: A double-acting impetus at first degree of proximity. V is the value, A is the attacking power.

The double effect (“ambivalence”) occurs here in the first degree of proximity. Example: The hungry dog and the hedgehog. But it can also lie further in the causal network, as in the case of the convicted man. The schema then becomes this:

FIGURE 13: A double-acting impetus at second degree of proximity.

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The closer examination of double-acting impetuses and conditions associated with them belongs to the following chapter. It might be good, therefore, to end the chapter here, but for the sake of completeness, we must first take a quick look at the different postures the stricken person can adopt before, during, and after the catastrophe.

§ 73. The posture of the stricken person During the various phases of the catastrophic process, this will have its precondition both in “common” and in “special” factors. Among the common ones are: the character of the stricken person (e.g., a “person of will” or “person of affect,” anchored or unanchored, real or unreal oriented, over- or underequipped, etc.), the cause of the catastrophe and the connection to one’s own guilt, the stricken person’s previous “fate,” the nature of the destroyed value, the catastrophe’s sudden or gradual, anticipated or unforeseen appearance, etc. Among the special factors, one can count transient mental and bodily dispositions, the affective valence of the counterpower, and other modalities in the details of the catastrophe. The posture before the catastrophe could thus be unsuspecting, anxiously awaiting, consciously or nervously defying, proud, self-conscious, energetically opposing, trusting in the belief in one’s own power, panicked fleeing, pleading, heroically renouncing, upset and despairing, dully resigning, logically analyzing, philosophically reflecting, aesthetically enjoying, standing still, with gallows humor, mocking, etc. Some of these postures can also be maintained during (and sometimes after) the catastrophe itself, thus they do not have to have the precondition that the catastrophe has not yet occurred. In some cases, certain variants will be rendered impossible by the destruction of the functions that the catastrophe brings, while others will be untouched. Of essential importance here is whether the stricken person has reserves or whether one has been deprived of one’s last and only resort. The reserve can be a real or fictional anchor, the value of looking good in the eyes of others (or even one’s own), or just the hope or idea that not everything is lost yet, there will be an avenger, be a redress, etc. It can also be expressed this way: The posture depends on whether the stricken person “identifies” with the destroyed value, or can separate it from one’s “real self,” raise oneself “ironically” above it. Physical pain will often preclude any posture other than seeking relief through screaming out. In a catastrophe of a

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more mental nature, a philosophically or morally worked through consciousness will react differently than one that is in the violence of emotion. Unique is the posture where one decides to “choose the inevitable” and thereby maintains an (albeit only purely formal) appearance of being the master of the situation and not its victim. One has in a way “achieved what one willed” and dies sufficient (cf. beginning of § 48). A posture after the catastrophe can only be spoken of when the catastrophe does not consist in or entail physical death or the annihilation of the features of mental life which are a condition for one to speak of “posture.” We have run into a problem here at which, however, we must simply stop. Where are the boundaries of the concept of posture? Posture is a narrower concept than reaction; a reflex or blind affective outbreak cannot be called a posture. On the other hand, it is too strict to require a carefully weighed act of will. The posture may well be affectively accentuated, but with a certain degree of “accountability,” of the presence of ordering ability or “choosing power,” one must say. The posture is therefore something other than the psychic-physiological state after the catastrophe, mental ruin, breakdown of life will or ability to act, disillusionment, etc. In light of this, after the catastrophe there could be postures such as sorrow, passivity, despair, hopelessness (especially where the striking forces have been overwhelming) – rage, desire for revenge, defiance (especially with forces one feels capable of fighting, albeit only through affect). With resignation, heroic tenacity, and loyal forbearance, possibly with readiness to restructure the fields of interest (though also with cool retaliation readiness), the will begins to play a stronger role. The stricken person may discover one’s reserves for the first time through the catastrophe itself. This has not been as total as one first thought; perhaps it even opens one’s eyes to fundamental mistakes one has previously made, to values one has had no idea about, to the prospect of a new and better life. Suffering has awakened powers in one that one did not know or had neglected to express. The catastrophe has become a crisis, a revolution, and yet it has undoubtedly been a catastrophe. One must therefore distinguish between catastrophes of a “pedagogical” nature, which it is tempting to call them, and others which are purely devastating. With the latter, it makes no sense to talk about purification and new life, and the only “reconciliation” through the result is in the case of the consciousness that one has done one’s best and that now there is nothing more to lose.

·8· QUALIFIED CATASTROPHES. DETERMINATION OF THE OBJECTIVELY TRAGIC

§ 74. Qualifications. Double-acting impetus. Peripeteia A catastrophic course is hereinafter referred to as qualified when it exhibits marks that place it in a particular class within such courses and thus differentiates it from a “basic” catastrophic course. These marks are purely interestrelated and have no necessary connection to the impression-related value, for example, its merit as poetic raw material, cf. Chap. 9. A qualification is accordingly an interest-related (factually) significant property. On the path we have taken so far, no phenomena have emerged that have naturally led thought to the term tragic, except precisely where it was such a qualified catastrophe, for example, with the giant deer, the cats on the island, the abnormally gifted, and the searching metaphysician. Therefore, should there be hope that on the chosen path we will find a category that strongly demands to be called tragic, and which cannot be exhaustively described by words such as unhappy, sad, disturbing, meaningless, etc., then it must be within the framework of qualified catastrophes – this is a result that is also not contrary to the main trend in linguistic and aesthetic tradition.

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In what ways can a catastrophic course have characteristics that make it distinctive in the human interest struggle? If the analysis from the previous chapter is retained, it is found that the qualifying circumstance can lie 1. in the attacked value, 2. in the attacking power, 3. in the occasion, individually or cumulatively in the relationships 1–2, 1–3, 2–3, and 1-2-3. 1. The attacked value is indeed qualified in advance in the case of catastrophes, in contrast with reparable or less extensive misfortunes. But there is room for further qualification. Sometimes the destroyed value can play a particularly important role for the stricken subject, either in general or under the accompanying circumstances of the moment. This applies, for example, to the realization of a particularly exceptional ability, or a particularly strong fixedness tendency, or the attainment and preservation of all-encompassing values – the feeling of moral innocence, life confirmation as opposed to particular confirmation, the possibilities of the future, the actual and principal hope. Metaphysical interests often occupy such a dominant position. The attacked value can be representative, either because it is assessed particularly highly, or because through affective emphasis it makes a strong case regardless of assessment, for example, bodily pain (torture) and suffering inflicted on an “innocent.” Here there is a difficulty in classification, since a simple misfortune or a basic catastrophe can be more affectively intrusive than a qualified catastrophe – one sometimes prefers to suffer a loss one regards as much worse, rather than a painful or humiliating cure. But the stricken individual can also be regarded by one’s fellow human beings as a representative exemplar, bearing an inalienable intersubjective value: the “innocent,” the “good,” the “righteous” is stricken, the “holy,” the skilled, the genius, the leader. The poet gets hit in the head by a roof tile, perhaps just as one was about to complete one’s greatest work. The composer becomes deaf. That the composer loses a toe, on the other hand, is not even a catastrophe, if the person is especially ingenious. Even without being a great individual, a person can be a carrier of great intersubjective values, for example, the pregnant and the sleeping. The murderer here strikes not only the

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individual, but “ideal values,” “sleep” and “the source of life.” The individual’s defense readiness is impaired in the value’s service. 2. The attacking power or its bearer can on the one hand be particularly frightening, surprising, overwhelming, sinister, contemptible, trivial – and on the other particularly sympathetic, friendly, essential to life, of high cultural value. Examples: One is attacked by a person one has treated well. A man loves two women who love him back, but the order of society, which the man also acknowledges, does not allow bigamy. The counterpower can also be specifically related to the attacked value: the doctor gets sick, the firefighter burns inside his own house (“it appears to be a coincidence”), the desert expedition perishes due to rainstorms (qualitative disparity, inappropriate), the mouse gnaws through the mooring ropes that hold the ship (quantitative disparity), the aerobatic pilot falls out of bed and becomes disabled, the only navigator among the shipwrecked dies of a mosquito bite. The qualification may also be due to other kinds of coincidences: one falls into the grave one had intended for one’s neighbor or one’s enemy (“irony of fate”). The attacking power was set in motion for enjoyment and amusement – hunting accidents, collapsing carousels, etc., or it consists of factors that are by themselves harmless (“summation of stimuli” or the like). Notable also is the repeated and the cumulative catastrophe, slow torment, until destruction occurs. Japanese mothers who show up at the station to say goodbye to their sons are run down by a mistakenly switched train. The church collapses over the believers who are asking heaven for salvation from an invading enemy. A little girl who is putting flowers on her mother’s grave is crushed by the tombstone. Catastrophes that are qualified in one or another of these ways are often described as tragic in the daily press. But for us this conclusion would be hasty. 3. The occasion, the triggering cause, provides without comparison the richest variety of peculiarities. Both in its basic and qualified form it gives the deepest insight into human life and has at all times also captivated thought and imagination. This is especially true when the occasion produces a completely different course than that which was expected and reasonable, or the fate of the interest turns out to depend on entities one had never thought of in the case. Such entities may lie within each other like Chinese boxes: The castle will be spared if any of

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on the tragic its inhabitants can cure the enemy field commander – the only doctor is wounded – the only stretcher is broken – the only carpenter then becomes the one on whom it all stands. The world’s most loving people live together in a lighthouse where loneliness and monotony destroy their nerves so that contrary to everyone’s intention it ends with murder and madness.

Often there are disparities between the attacked value and the occasion: A family has over the centuries expanded its wealth and social reputation – and then the whole thing falls to pieces by one reckless act insignificant in itself. A torch can be thrown into the library or art collection by an anonymous soldier. Of particular interest, however, is the occasion that can be traced back to the victim’s own efforts or is related to the achievement of a purpose. The following example is of interest to curiosity. A well-known entomologist comes to India to search for a rare fly. A procession is arranged in honor of the empire’s famous son. Below an elephant goes mad and the scientist himself is injured; he loses his sight and has to give up his science. The elephant’s madness came from a fly that was caught in its eye; the fly is taken out and brought to the entomologist: it is the sought-after species. But the example overlaps with the most important kind of qualification by occasion, the double-acting impetus mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. It was defined there as a causal factor, possibly an act of will, which in one way, along one path, promotes or brings about an interest, and in another way, along another path, harms that interest or another belonging to the same person. In this formulation, a double-acting impetus, which delineates a historical unit, encompasses all the actual, expedient and harmful, appropriate and inappropriate consequences it ends up bringing about. It becomes the object of our attention the instant it, as an anonymous causal factor, enters into direct functional connection with the human’s life interest. Its peculiar significance lies precisely in this relation and in it alone. Qua causal factor, there is nothing special about it; any impetus could be double-acting by arranging interests in connection with it. If I open a window to let in air, this impetus is fortunate to be single-acting. But the divergence can be established by summoning an elderly woman who does not tolerate drafts. If the woman is the hereditary aunt of my fiancée, opening the window will on one hand serve my immediate physiological well-being, and on the other put my economic and social prospects at risk. The action has become double-acting in relation to my circle of interest by the aunt appearing.

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The impetus comes from the outside when I get hit in the head by a roof tile and get injured but would have ended up in certain death if I had not been hit. It comes from other people, for example, by the doctor’s painful intervention. If the impetus comes from oneself, it can, for example, have its root in physiological guilt: I have long, ugly fingers, but they are excellent for piano playing. The interests are two different ones, but the characteristics of the hands cannot be divided; both characteristics must be included, even when the hands are singularly engaged. Furthermore, the impetus can have its origin in functional guilt (legal guilt): Tired after traveling, I enter my bedroom and surprise an unknown couple who have sought refuge there; the man gets angry and stabs me. Or: I do my company a service and do not intend thereby that I harm my brother’s business. Or: I court a young lady who turns out to be my long-lost sister. Or: I stumble over a suitcase and break my leg. This leads to the discovery of an explosive device in the suitcase. The impetus can also come from psychological guilt: I have learned in advance that there is a couple in the bedroom, that my brother’s business will be harmed, that the lady is my sister. After careful consideration, perhaps inner struggle, I still decide to act the way I did. Or: I finally decide to drive B. into financial ruin and do not know that he is the creditor of my own obligations. Ethical guilt is present in the following case: I cannot give up the relationship with my best friend’s wife, though I say to myself that my behavior is shameful; I avoid meeting him and feel socially-morally reduced, but my passion is strong. Criminal guilt: I decide to take the life of my enemy and then present myself before a court. A new qualification arises when it is the same interest that is served and harmed. To ensure the welfare of his daughter, her father chases away her adorer who is a scoundrel. In despair, his daughter takes her own life. Examples include the many kinds of contradictiones in adjectoa: The tourist association writes that far too few enjoy the breathtaking solitude in Ørnedalen (the catastrophe here must, as in some other examples, occur in an extension of the course.) Unique also is the case in which an interest is brought about, established by the same causal device that later leads to its loss. For example, a pathological a contradictions in terms.

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condition that initially triggers an artistic or philosophical activity with the associated desire for confirmation98 afterward dissolves the personality and thus also the extraordinary ability. Nietzsche’s fate is often (rightly or wrongly) presented as an example of such a course. Or: A. finally wins Miss B.’s love and “happiness makes him a poet.” He neglects his work, is fired, and must give up the woman. As has been shown above, it is important to make a distinction between whether or not the subject is aware of the double effect of the impetus. In the first case, where the damaged interest is not subordinate to the promoted one, a conflict may arise; there is an awkward necessity of choice with equivalent or affectively equal considerations: I am addicted to morphine, but I know that it is detrimental to my health. The fiercest is such a conflict in which both interests are vital; it is in reality a camouflaged catastrophe, the subject’s choice is illusory. Example: A man has two diseases, neither of which is fatal; they can be cured individually by using the right medications. But precisely the medication and the behavior (exercise, etc.) prescribed for one disease are catastrophic in relation to the other, and perhaps even the reverse is true (biological antinomy). The mountaineer is driven down from the ridge by a storm, but in the ravine he is exposed to falling rocks. In both examples, it is pure sophistry to say that the doomed “choice” is to die one way or another, that “he got what he wanted,” and that the end is due to psychological guilt. A choice can only be talked about when the decision has an intention: I choose to have the least painful disease. But the choice then applies only to one manner of death in relation to the other, not in general, and not at all in relation to continued life. The course, with the exception of a minor detail, is determined by a foreign will’s power. When the agent is not aware of the double effect of the impetus, this simultaneity of inhibition and prompting is dissolved; first comes the prompting, then the action, and finally the inhibition. This can then be so strong that it would have prevented the action if it had been able to assert itself in time. The shipowner sends out a rotting ship to get the insurance money and discovers later that his son has run away aboard the ship. In connection with this, it can be mentioned that two single impetuses can be functionally linked in such a way that they resemble a double-acting

98 “Maniform expansion” cf. Vogt, Medicinsk psykologi og psykiatri [Medical Psychology and Psychiatry], 1923 p. 184–85.

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impetus: I am known for my generous donations of money to fight prostitution. Just before I receive the medal of merit, I discover that my lawyer has put all my money into public houses with a 60 percent yield. Related to the double-acting impetus is an effort that the agent believes will only serve one, while it proves to only harm one – through the same or through a different interest than that which one intended to serve. The slave murders his master to gain the promised reward but is instead punished for his unfaithfulness. This type includes all kinds of mimicry, mistakes, misunderstandings, camouflage, lies and deception, presentation, certain kinds of betrayal, etc., all from the victim’s point of view. Misunderstandings are often linked to the ambiguity of human communication; a statement is interpreted in a different sense than the one in which it is made. Nor can all details be disclosed through a statement; the essential is said and it is assumed under legal risk that the recipient supplements the message in the usual way. I ask a man to row me across the fjord and he says yes. I do not then mention all the assumptions that lie behind it, that the weather is suitable, that the boat is close, that the man can row, etc. But what is implied can easily be perceived differently, and this circumstance can again be exploited deliberately through ambiguous and cunning speech, where one has both “said” and “not said,” since the words are interpreted. Mistakes often come from a lack of insight – sometimes an insight one happens to miss at the moment, sometimes an insight one could not have as the individual one is, sometimes an insight from which one qua human is cut off. The environment, for example, could have changed between the expression of will and the onset of the effect. Or the order has changed character along the way, or my interest has become a different one. “Aim for the rider on the white horse,” says the military commander, and thinks it is the enemy general. He does not know that his own son in the commotion of the battle has overcome this man and climbed onto his horse. Or: A message is intercepted, changed, and forwarded. Or: A man from Kristiansand proposes to a lady from Kirkenes. While the letter is on the way, he falls in love with someone else. Many cases are covered by the following formula: One chooses a detour to the goal but is trapped by the detour and marked by one’s fate; upon arrival, one is someone else. Sometimes one is cut off from investigating beforehand, at other times well-executed inquiries may be possible but they require a too elaborate apparatus – examining everything gives less prospect of good fortune than relying on a “rebus sic stantibus.” Or: The object has other properties in addition to the one that brought about my action. Property A has set my “effective

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system” in motion, but it is properties B and C that then hit my “receptive system.” A cigar qua operation carrier triggers the appropriate reaction in me, that I light it and smoke it. Thus, my enemy can count on giving me a bomb in the form of a cigar, that I will light it myself, since this is the experientially correct reaction to a cigar. It is “correct” for the insect to search for the light, or the species might not survive, but not when the light is a flame. One remembers the example from the amoeba; with a sugar stick in the shape of an awl, the creature responds to “awl” and not to “sugar.” With the development of the subjects, the operation carriers of the outside world become increasingly differentiated. But there is a limit to the degree of differentiation that can be combined with a fairly uninhibited life of action, and here a functional risk (legal risk) must be taken, for example, for the maintenance of public trust. It is good social morality to put one’s suspicions aside, and under certain conditions the less suspicious one is, the better it is, because one is involved in creating an appropriate disposition. But such a development toward high social value requires a correspondingly increasing demand for justice in the environment. The expansion of the field of life, the growing number of tasks, and increased demand for concentration entail an expansion of the functional risk: The more one relies on the assumed structure, the more easily and the harder will one be hit when the structure fails. The more correct one is in one’s action in relation to the supposed structure, the more destructive one is in relation to the real (traitors). According to common assessment, the approach with the highest value here is the catastrophic, while that with low value (suspicion) provides sanction. With this factor we have reached a new qualification in the catastrophic course, and one whose significance has the furthest reach. It naturally belongs in a new section, so we take this opportunity to make some further preparatory considerations. The outline so far of the qualified catastrophes is not meant in any way to be exhaustive; we have only sought a broad view of the most important categories. In poetry and practice, one finds complicated courses in which the structures mentioned are found only as elements and where the employed thought process must be given new applications. This pertains, for example, to a course where an apparent intention conceals another, underlying one, where what is presented as the end is in fact a means. And this pertains to courses in which the action engages the agent in choice situations the possibility of which one had not envisioned beforehand. Or: One starts an enterprise halfway, but then retreats because of the funds that prove necessary. Or: One’s attendants and

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the like go further than one would have thought, use more dangerous, more brutal means, exceed a mandate the interpretation of which is more or less subject to doubt, etc. I also mention these supplementary examples because some writers have intended to find the tragic in such qualified courses, an opinion I do not find sufficient reason to share. Finally, it will be useful to have at our disposal the term peripeteia. The word means upheaval and, in certain courses (effort-result), signifies a certain phase, namely the crisis that occurs when the effect of the action, from actually or seemingly going in the agent’s favor, suddenly (or successively, in several steps) turns against one and then develops to one’s detriment. Examples: A country disarms in confidence in the League of Nations. Even at the enemy’s incursions and first acts of violence, one waits confidently for the intervention of the alliance. Peripeteia comes with the first doubt, which turns out to be true. Or: A young man is subjected to torture and cast aside to die. The mother finds him and uses all her love to relieve his pain and save him. It succeeds. Peripeteia comes with the first inkling that he will be seized and must go through the torture for a second time. A change in expectation that does not correspond to the actual conditions will not be called peripeteia unless the effect is the same as the alteration in reality – a reversal of current that gives a complete and well-rounded course of interest in the opposite direction. A mere and bare change in the direction of the course, the exchange of objects, etc., on the other hand, does not call for the use of the term peripeteia. There could be greater reason when the crisis turns a threatening course “to the best.” It would be outside of the linguistic tradition to use the term in cases where relatively insignificant interests are at stake: The hosts are eventually so exhausted from the preparations for the big party that they have to send cancellations. But in catastrophic courses the word has widespread application.

§ 75. The tragic qualification The case in general wherein a veto (zero or minus result) occurs, though one expected and after experience had reason to expect sanction, need not occupy us any longer now. We can move on to the special case in which there is a veto, though there were special reasons to expect success, and it is precisely these special reasons that in casua lead to the destruction. Example: a in the case.

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A platoon of volunteer soldiers has with remarkable bravery been able to cross a river that lies between the fighting lines. In their complete concentration on the task they have failed to look back; they think their comrades are behind them. Their courage and skill entitle them, after their education, experience, and military tradition, to a particularly strong expectation of victory and distinction if they survive the ordeal – and to the hero’s name, the thanks of the fatherland, and carefree conditions for their survivors if they fall. None of this happens, but something completely different instead. First alternative: The order was misunderstood; a crossing was planned only to hide from the enemy until reinforcements arrived. The troops, ordered to retreat, are then mowed down and listed as “ordinary fallen.” We presume they knew this would be their fate when the retreat order came. Second alternative: The troops are surrounded and captured, taken to a remote camp, and left to their fate; here they die one after another from neglect. At the same time, they see from the homeland’s newspapers that it is exclusively occupied with domestic politics, after the revolution all the war pensions for the survivors have been revoked, etc., no one seems to suspect that they exist. Finally, their last holding point dissolves: Even the ideal for which they have sacrificed their lives and their happiness is a fraud.99 The destruction is total, biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical, and the cause of all the misery is that they signed up as volunteers because they were superior to their comrades-in-arms in skill and morale. Third alternative: The captain does not have time to destroy his terrain map; the map falls into the hands of the enemy and causes defeat. The troops enter under the icy silence of their countrymen, are accused of treason (the old officers, who knew the circumstances, are meanwhile replaced by new ones), are sentenced, shot, and buried in disgrace. A less effective effort would have given them a less terrible fate, they may say to themselves. But at the same time, as soldiers, they had no other way to go if they wanted to do their best. They would never have been able to forgive themselves if they had not signed up, as it stood for them at the moment of choice. The structure that is crucial to us in a course of this kind is so clear that a number of examples immediately also appear from plant and animal life, when one sees them in the human image. (The inverse relationship has less interest in an investigation like this but can be mentioned for completeness: The 99 Cf. Dwinger: Die Armee hinter Stacheldraht [The Army behind Barbed Wire]. (Not allowed on loan at Univ. Lib.).

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cowardly and deficient recruit is passed over as a front soldier and gets power over his former comrades via politics. The deer the hunter captures is so thin and weak that he gives it back its freedom.) The following example from the plant world will come in handy during further investigation: A fruit tree should, from the human point of view, see its “task” in bearing as richly as possible. But if the branch now bears so richly that it breaks from its own weight before the fruit is ripe, then it has achieved the opposite of “what it willed,” and precisely because it was such an excellent representative of its kind. Similarly, the magnificent specimen should be the “goal” of an animal herd, if it wants anything more than mere continuation. Both in biological terms (speed, power, sharp senses, etc.) and in autotelic (the joy of standing erect, antlers, feather splendor, etc.), the magnificent specimen represents an addition in value, and unique hopes are attached to it. But as soon as a hunter appears, the relationship turns on its head: The leader falls victim to his first bullet solely because it is superior to the herd. What in one environment, in one relation, gives increased prospect of confirmation, means in another environment, in another relation, increased danger. It seems that catastrophes of this kind are the most qualified imaginable. They are something more than what happened there and then; they have consequences for the future, not just in fact, but in principle. Before this happened, the subject could and must have believed that the path of confirmation went through the richest and most correct manifestation of its innate or acquired qualities. A defeat in battle could be explained as follows: I was not skilled enough. The theoretical (principled) possibility of confirmation was still in force. The case is different after a catastrophe of the kind just mentioned has occurred: A pursuit does not fail because ability and will did not hold to the goal, but because they met the goal to an exceptionally high degree. And it is not only the individual pursuit that has been knocked down, but the very idea of the struggle has received a fundamental blow; the belief in the principle of confirmation is, if not destroyed, then violently shaken; perfectibility as the path to greater cultural heights is closed. Trust in the environment and one’s own ability, in life, in other words, has suffered a dangerous, irreparable rupture. The more central the interests involved, the more destructive the course must be. And the effect is not always limited to the stricken individual. The leader’s fate is not irrelevant to the herd. It lies a bit ahead in the only direction where the herd may have the prospect of confirmation by its own efforts; it shows

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each of its species companions a part of the path of hope. The catastrophe, to a greater or lesser extent, strikes the hope of both the species and the individual. Even among qualified catastrophes, the course described is in a decidedly special position, and any further qualification, which in turn would put it in the shade, is difficult to conceive. The course completely fulfills the requirements that (in § 1) were placed on the tragic phenomenon: that it is not exhaustively denoted by any other term, that there are no other phenomena that could, with the same right, claim the designation, and finally, that the application of the word to the phenomenon lies at the focal point of linguistic and aesthetic tradition, although it also exhibits divergent distribution. The objectively tragic, defined with greatest possible conciseness, is thus the destruction of the principal fighting prospect. In ways other than those described above, such destruction, under the present earthly dynamics, cannot take place. A more elaborate definition might sound like this: The tragic course comes about in such a way that a person seeks to realize a representative way of life by representative means, and thereby obtains a veto which breaks down one’s faith in life. An assessment element mixes itself here with a purely functional element. It could then be remarked of the phrase the objectively tragic: The determination contains subjective components. The term is chosen to create opposition to the “poetic tragic”; it denotes the events in the outside world that could possibly give the raw material to “tragic poetry” (cf. Chap. 9). The definition, however, raises a swarm of associations and supplementary questions. These questions, however diverse they may be, are nevertheless intertwined to the extent that I have had to abandon approaching them in a clear sequence. It is better to elucidate them implicitly through a continuous presentation; repetitions will necessarily occur, but their purpose is to show where one area flows into the other.

§ 76. Comment If we return to the fruit tree, which breaks because it bears too richly, immediately there are comments to be made. The tree must be anthropomorphized; it must be moved into a tragic viewpoint. One can assume that the tree has no conscious urge to break out of the repetition and create a “higher” form of life, a richer, more complete manifestation of the fruit tree’s “idea” – i.e., function type. Even if the tree were conscious, it is likely that its form forces, its underlying substrates, would have unfolded without remainder and been

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realized in and by the mere continuation, the maintenance of the standard once reached, and its transfer to new individuals. From the point of view of the apple tree (i.e., from the human view of the apple tree), there is nothing unsatisfactory about this, each year bearing the same respectable number of suitably large apples – with periodic fluctuations to an average. Because the tree lacks choice and longing for perfection (based on unrealized substrates and inherited fixedness tendencies), it is cut off from experiencing a tragic fate. A tree that became fatally rich in bearing would be seen by its species companions as merely sick (hypertrophic), as unviable and reproductively incompetent, perfectly in line with nature’s other stepchildren, the worm-eaten, those on stony ground, those that are broken by storm, etc. It would be completely different if the tree or fellow trees associated a value with the growth that has occurred, and therefore felt encouraged, or found reason to strive for it, or to acknowledge it and be proud of it when it comes into its own. But the situation first becomes alarming when the new value comes into competition with the intention of continuation: The tree now sees the only meaning of its existence in the production of more and more large apples. Every stage that has been attempted has exhausted its possibilities for the history of the individual, such that repetition or staying at the same stage is redundant, hollow, wasted, and non-life. One can imagine that the new value, the new pride, and the new danger, the increase in life excitement, the increased ecstasy the closer the rupture approaches – that all this has sprung up as a differentiating mutation from the old lineage that only knew repetition with its dangers and its values. With the new value comes a new catastrophe and a new perspective: Now I am not stricken by a misfortune as before, but I am stricken because I represent, and will represent, an addition in relation to the old way of life.100 The tree becomes tragic in that humankind puts into it its own desire for confirmation, its drive for perfection, its longing for infinity, its “transboundary tendency” (E. Berggrav). For in humankind the critical mutations have taken place; in humankind a seed has sprung forth which demands the unfolding of beauty, strength, courage, sensitivity, love, insight, etc. beyond any limit dictated by the concern for life and breeding. The fruits of this “sacred seed of death” are found in the highest cultural productions. Culture, the individual and the collective culture

100 Certainly, as we shall soon see, a purely biological tragedy may be imagined in which the play is about the continuing interest alone, but then this interest must be the only consideration in the moment – a sine qua non for all other values.

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in the widest sense of the term, is the vehicle that carries the human quest for confirmation of its readiness for life. Since now the tragic perspective requires both a unique functional unfolding and an overall intelligence of relatively high development in the person who will experience it (whether it is the victim or the observer), it is tempting to think that one will not find it formed on any cultural level, at least not as a specific category. It presupposes, among other things, that the perceiver must be able to distinguish between the actual and the principled. The experience of the tragic perspective also seems to be a relatively late fruit of human intellectual development, a privilege for a matured, more differentiated generation. The preserved cultural documents – there will probably be particular questions about pieces of writing and narrative material, alongside the need for fine art – contain, as far as I know, nothing that contradicts this assumption. If the tragic insight is regarded as a qualified evil, possibly as a metaphysical catastrophe, then there are tragic dynamics in this development itself. Primitive tribes hardly have any clear conception of a difference between basic and qualified downfall. When the delicate, sensitive, imaginative, or deep-thinking individual breaks down under the bloody savagery of war and hunting, while the simple and obtuse natures endure, the victim is surely alone in feeling his qualities as something other than a sickly debilitation; perhaps he even despises himself. If he makes an attempt at humanistic reforms, he is killed as a rebel against the customs of the fathers – and “rightly”: Everything suggests that he is an insane seducer and a false prophet. Only a later time that shares the victim’s ideals can perceive the tragic in his fate. If there is to be a deeper view by such a tribe, then effort, purpose, and catastrophe must all be representative from the tribe’s assessment. A very first step is also taken in the doctrine that those who are killed during hunting and battle gain more honorable conditions after death than those who die in bed. A situation such as the following should be apt to awaken the first “tragic wonder” at the stricken: A youth undergoes the painful initiation to manhood; he is suspended in a branch by sticks in the flesh. He bears the test with brilliance, but his woman (sister, mother), who does not understand what this is good for and cannot bare the sight (perhaps she thinks he is going to die), lifts him down in his unconscious state and nurses him. The initiation is thus ruined; the man is unworthy in the eyes of the tribe; a life of shame is the only thing that awaits him. In rage and despair, he throws the woman into the pit of the condemned, so that she can be killed at sunrise. Another woman is sitting there for the attempted murder of her husband; they tell each other their fates. Would not

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the benevolent, if she has as much mind as she has heart, begin to work on a question that lies beyond and gnaws at her consciousness and which she is unable to put into form? The historical-psychological question of the first expressions of tragic consciousness should not be taken up here. We will also retain the term tragic even if the roles are distributed: one subject fulfills the functional conditions, the other the intellectual – just as when the doctor makes the diagnosis regardless of the patient’s experience of the symptoms and one’s knowledge of their significance. The viewer can use either the stricken person’s or one’s own assessment.

§ 77. Victim and observer At this point, there is the possibility of a distinction that will prevent confusion. The course can be experienced as tragic only by the stricken oneself, or only by the observer, or by both. The difference in perception may relate to one or more of the characteristics that constitute the tragic course, namely the cultural relevance of the purpose, the quantitative or qualitative sufficiency of the effort, the importance of the value hit, the severity of the attack, the causal relationship between effort and catastrophe. If the observer assumes the assessments and judgments of the stricken, one can certainly see the course as “formally tragic,” but it has no tragic consequences for one except that one has the same assessment oneself. The course is experienced as tragic only by the stricken. But the observer can also assume one’s own assessment, and for this person the course is not even formally tragic. The observer may find the central purpose less important (the stricken “supports” the temperance movement, which the observer cannot describe harshly enough – or: the observer has a one-sided metaphysical focus while the stricken person a one-sided biological, etc.). Or one finds the stricken person’s efforts inadequate; his or her means are not representative in the qualitative or quantitative sense (one agrees with the stricken that “the world should be improved” but not that the path is terrorism – or: one also agrees on the path, it is enlightenment and argumentation, but the knowledge and logic of the stricken is so constituted that the plan is condemned in advance). Or the observer finds no functional link between effort and catastrophe. (How tragic, the stricken exclaims, my rhetorical power frightened them! No, says the observer; they left because you picked your nose during the lecture.) Or one thinks the stricken could have suffered the misfortune “like a man” instead of breaking down; the

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hope was not in principle destroyed, only factually halted, etc. The observer may also be prevented from perceiving the tragic because one has a cruder, less differentiated nature (the primitive tribe), or because one is fixed in some arbitrary or temporal assessment. Under comparable conditions, the tragic can be perceived by the observer but not by the stricken. The purpose and effort that the observer admires are experienced by the bearer as something obvious and ordinary or are one’s innate traits to which one does not give any thought. The bearer misses the new dimension in the image that the observer has. Finally, the tragic can be perceived by both the bearer and the observer. The conditions must not be set too strictly here. It should be remembered that most people do not have firm and clear ideas about the nature of life confirmation. As a rule, they are susceptible to new proposals for both ends and means. Not everyone “knows” if there is a path and where the path begins. If the stricken person fights for a different goal, or by other means than the observer, one may still feel oneself as on the same front; the task is so vast, so seemingly unsolvable, that practically every attempt can be reckoned as participation when it is not too outlandish. There is a solidarity relationship between the bearer and the observer, as between the soldier in the rear and the one on the front line; the tasks are initially different, but in the end the same. The significance of unity and conflict between “tragic” theorists is ignored here. Both the subject and observer can vary greatly. The subject can be stricken either as an individual or as a member of a group (family, guild, nation, race, etc.), or as a human being in general, as a species representative. The group members will then experience the tragedy and be stricken by its main consequences if the group interest is involved in the course. With the expanded meaning of the term, one can see tragic structure in the whole course of cultural movements; the stricken is then not the individual supporters, but the movement itself, which is made into a bearer of interest by a kind of personification. But in the foreground is the personal tragedy, in which the bearer of interest is an individual who happens to experience the collective interest as a personal matter. The individual’s position in the tragic course can also vary greatly. The same extraordinary ability which for one is the most powerful vehicle for one’s life hopes, for the other represents an obstacle because his or her hope seeks completely different paths. The critical intelligence, which to the thinker is a weapon sine qua non, is precisely the worst danger to a believer. Or the goal

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may be the same, but the means are different: Two subjects both seek the “eternal life” of history, one as a strategist, the other as a poet. Or both seek ecstasy, one through action (women, political power, voyages of discovery), the other through meditation or mystical initiation. Or they seek different goals through the same means: Of two outstanding warriors, one fights for Christianity, the other in order to free his son. With the observer, the same factors change and thus so does the perception of the tragic. As the individual and collective conditions of life change over time, new ways of life, new obstacles (counterpowers), and new kinds of occasion replace or are added to the old: race, heritage, upbringing, disposition, character, social and political conditions, landscape, cultural tradition, collective and individual pseudo-solutions, etc., come into play. But also, over time the concept of being an observer can change content: The tragic subject can abstract oneself as an observer, the external observer can be a single person (a “layperson,” a poet, an aesthetician, a moralist, a believer, a pessimist, a historian, a philosopher, one who combines several of these qualities), a group (an elite, a party, a “school,” a discipline) where everyone thinks the same – or there can be a disparate mass of viewers (an “audience”). The observer does not always have the tragedy of life in mind; often one looks to accounts of real or poetic-tragic events. A middle ground between reality and narrative emerges, as far as the impression is concerned, the present scenic presentation. The observer of the poetic-tragic course takes on a special position and will be treated in a separate chapter. As mentioned, whether a course should have a tragic effect on one depends on the observer’s own interest situation, and it depends on one’s ability to see. Hereafter we assume these conditions in the observer everywhere, unless otherwise stated.

§ 78. Culturally relevant greatness The individual person’s central, or if you will final, ultimate goal of life – more or less conscious and clearly formed – can be quite varied. It even changes during the individual’s life with age, experience, and what one might call one’s “nervous fate.” It is more or less comprehensive, tangible, abstract, contemplative, or affective, can belong to the biological, social, autotelic, or metaphysical circle of interest, or several at the same time. Some goals can be arranged side by side, others are superior and subordinate, such that one goal includes the other.

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The fact that a goal is central does not have to mean that the goal is the only thing that determines the well-being of the person in question, such that one gladly sacrifices everything else for this one goal. This centrality is an obscure issue; it does not help to know what an investigationa would bring to light. For many we might not find any ranking at all, at least not one expressed in their practical lives; they could not give an account of what “means most to them”; everything is equally important and they cannot conceive of forsaking anything. The case does not exclude tragedy, but through the tragic course the engaged interest will move into a special position. The possibility of tragedy is greater when a single interest clearly dominates. The exclusive, aristocratic so to speak, in the tragic fate is related to such selectivity in the life interest.101 In the overwhelming number of tragic cases one is dealing with a superior interest or interest group. In what ways can the central interest be confirmed (realized, fulfilled)? First, it can happen by accident, chance in the outside world; the long-awaited state occurs without functional connection with desire. A man seeks “the woman of his life”: One day a foreign plane explodes over his head and with a parachute the appropriate object for his erotic life readiness lands at his feet. But for the developed person there is something unsatisfactory about the accident as a confirmation principle. It is possible enough that the happy couple is still not particularly bothered by this side of the case. It is clearer for the congratulatory friend who himself sits saturated in Strindbergian terror. The gain by accident is a costly gain, a Pyrrhic victory, a questionable success, for it makes our abilities, our motives, our will, and our efforts meaningless, irrelevant in relation to the historical course. It is a breach of all structure; it pulls the ground out from under our feet and the control out of our hands; it puts us outside the “wedding garden,” the celebration of the happy order, to where there is darkness and gnashing of teeth. And if – in another use of the image – at another time it puts us inside, we are guests without identification, without guarantee of the duration of the party. The accident is amoral and would as a sole principle mean that life and the world lack meaning in the human sense. For meaning implies structure; at the least, the term implies a functional connection between the action and that which is eventually achieved. In the earthly dynamics, accidents are paired with opportunities for decisive action on the part of humankind, and thus, as far as possible, for structure a enquête (Fr.). 101 This selectivity can be seen in the fact that the predominant number of tragic characters in literature are men. (The statement is roughly schematic.)

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or meaning, for the determination of a direction in human unfolding and fixedness endeavors. Effort, the outer and inner perfectibility, and the fruits of it in action, is for humankind the appropriate way to the goal, the only acceptable path of hope. This path provides not only a tangible result, but also a creation of meaning. By virtue of the relevance of the effort, of perfectibility’s homeland right in the environment, one human being can learn from the other, and may ask one who has come further along on the common path: What does it look like for our hope where you stand? The concept of culture brings together all human endeavors aimed at central life goals, individual and collective. One can therefore say that the tragic is linked to culturally relevant forms of striving; the irrelevant are too exposed to be judged as error-fixedness. Within the overall cultural endeavor, the distinction between representative individuals and the larger average can now be repeated. The former have come further, are situated directly or indirectly, at stages that are the goals of the average initially or afterward. We need an expression for this representative property which can vary without limit. The theoretical tradition offers the term greatness and I see no reason not to use it. Downward, greatness borders the full-fledged average; in some cases it is even natural to count this. The “fully correct” behavior can, in the right surroundings, acquire the character of greatness. Particularly when it comes to the assessment of autotelic forms of greatness, subjective factors may be strongly applicable; heterotelic greatness is easier to determine “objectively.” Upward, greatness has no principled border; it may simply have something boundless about it, which is related to the human “longing for infinity.” But in fact, there is a limit: For certain species of greatness, death sets the limit of higher development. The body and “the nerves” are too weak a foundation for the vast superstructure. And in relation to the tragic, a peculiarity applies: The superhuman greatness has less to say to me than a greatness I can easily grasp, put myself into, and think of reaching. It is too remote, too little relevant; its catastrophic consequences do not block my pursuit to the same degree; it will be a long time before those problems become central to me (directly or by effect); maybe my path will never pass by them. There are two ways that the great (of high cultural value, representative) individual can deviate from the average. (Greatness presupposes deviation in the positive direction, that is, toward an optimum, an ideal. If the greatness is of a culturally hostile nature, it must contain a “positive essence.”) They are 1) by the nature and degree of fixedness (“static fixedness”) and 2) by the nature of the unfolding (“dynamic fixedness”) and degree of the unfolding (capacity).

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These major types of greatness can again be divided. The fixedness can apply to the whole range of human characteristics and the unfolding to the whole range of abilities. Both types of greatness may be due to innate dispositions or acquired through volitional work. In both cases, the greatness can be culturally relevant – but how do the different origins relate to tragic qualification? The acquired greatness in this regard raises no doubt, but the innate causes a difficulty in that it is not evidence of any choice and is consequently morally irrelevant. For the observer who does not know whether the greatness is innate or acquired, the tragic quality can be weakened. But for the stricken, greatness can be something of which one has never thought; it is a matter of course for one like all of one’s other qualities; it has no distinctive value. If it leads to catastrophe, one sees nothing qualified in this event; it is in line with other misfortunes. Even the observer who knows the connection may find it difficult to see something tragic in the course (it is assumed here as everywhere else that the observer is not in favor of a different formulation of the tragic). The tragedy is indirect in some cases: The tragically stricken is not a single subject, but the cultural endeavor as a whole. If the tragedy is to be direct, the bearer must “discover” one’s innate greatness and its cultural value, acknowledge it, and accept its consequences, so as to acquire, gain, appropriate in a “higher,” more qualified sense, what one already possesses. To a large chronological and topical extent, fixedness applies as a cultural value, both by its “correctness” and its strength. As mentioned, a distinction can be made between static fixedness (faithfulness, steadiness, steadfastness) and dynamic fixedness (persistence, continuity, goal awareness). The value may be partly of an autotelic nature (greatness of fixedness as intrinsic value) and partly of a heterotelic nature (the importance of reliability for the order and security of social life). But fixedness is not exclusive as a carrier of greatness; it also happens that unfixedness is set as the highest, for example, in terms of imagination, adaptation, tolerance, and objective thinking. Dogmatic times will most easily see greatness in the unshakable attitude, while the “relativists” see it in agility, unboundedness, and “freedom.” A transition to fixed reactions (e.g., civil status) is sometimes condemned as apostasy, betrayal, calcification, or spiritual death. In yet other conditions the highest lies in the right relationship between fixed and unfixed elements. When unfixedness becomes program, it creates a strange mixing relationship; unfixedness becomes fixed. The term

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is used here in two different senses, one psychological-physiological and one logical. Also, a “culturally hostile” “greatness” can have autotelic and cultural value; there is no guarantee at all that one culturally relevant greatness will act in insurmountable competition with another. The limit on capacity greatness is not sharp in practice. Fixedness without capacity is an abstraction in the same way as capacity without direction. Generosity, for example, may have elements of both: That A is more generous than B may mean A always gives something, B less often, but it may also mean that A gives more than B. In other cases, the distinction is clear. Capacity greatness can also be found both above and below the average. The arrangement of properties of thought and language in opposite pairs is involved here. When greatness lies at the maximum of property (output) X, then it can often be equally said to be at a minimum of property contra-X. The maximum of courage is equal to the minimum of cowardice, etc. The maximum of goodness is equal to the minimum of cruelty, but the reverse does not apply; the minimum of cruelty can lie in complete inaction, but goodness appears as something positive. Upon closer study of linguistic usage, it may turn out that the arrangement in contradictory pairs cannot be maintained, that the properties must be treated independently of one another because they have different psychological prerequisites. There are also situations where one cannot decide whether the motive is courage or cowardice or both in unison (one saves a drowning man because one does not have the courage to say that one let him go, although it is morally defended). Superiority in capacity also has partly autotelic and partly heterotelic value. In terms of pure impression, the quantitatively large will often appear stronger than the quantitatively small. In practical life, tasks are usually insurmountable because one does not have enough power and insight, less often because one has too much. Usually, it is easier to regulate power downward when the task requires it than to quickly provide reinforcements. As long as a task has unknown sides, a person will mobilize a maximum of means and ability, making sure to have reserves in hand. A development usually consists of a growth. People also set their ideas about life confirmation in connection with a development to the more comprehensive, in time and distance, in power and insight, to larger fortunes, increased population, etc. The task also frequently fixes the capacity to a particular height; less often one finds a diminishing pursuit (the ascetic’s intentional destruction of sensory capacity, muscle power, and bodily health in general).

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The concept of greatness, as a rule, presupposes that the door of hope is not passed during the quantitative growth. The captain who sets sails that are too large and is thereby shipwrecked does not perish as a result of greatness, unless one no longer sees the purpose of the journey in the safe arrival, but in the satisfaction of the spirit of adventure, ambition, youthful passion, and the like. The gardener who heats the greenhouse to the boiling point shows that one has a surplus of fuel, but the deficit in insight becomes crucial to the result. Here the normal person will limit one’s efforts to the middle target. But sometimes one also finds a reluctance to adapt one’s efforts to the demands of the task. And this reluctance may be due to culturally relevant considerations. But it can also be a manifestation of mania or obsession: The captain cannot tolerate the look of empty masts. The configuration and demarcation of the concept of greatness can now be concluded with some supplementary and summary considerations. A human being is thus great in one’s characteristics. A characteristic is great when, in nature or degree, it is closer to the recognized optimum than the putative average. When the average – as the only basis of comparison – increases, the area of greatness becomes correspondingly smaller. The optimum, the ideal, does not have to be outlined; it is enough that one has a direction pointing toward it. The optimum is either in itself a goal of life, or it is the best-suited prerequisite for the realization of such. A prerequisite is best suited when experience proves that it is, or one must believe it to be a priori, or it is immediately perceived as such because of the peculiarity of human nature. The notion of greatness as autotelic value may depend on heterotelic interests, but need not. The bishop may well be moved by the pathos of the revolutionary speaker. On the other hand, the assessment of a present greatness as a means will be colored by the assessment.

§ 79. Greatness and catastrophe The tragic course can now also be described as a course in which greatness leads to catastrophe. We are thus faced with a question of a functional nature: How can greatness lead to catastrophe? That it can do so has already been shown by examples. The task is therefore to provide an overview of the variants; there are many kinds of greatness, many kinds of catastrophes, and many paths from the one to the other. In this context, a number of fundamental divisions appear which, although lying across from each other, are each capable of illuminating distinctive aspects of the tragic. Instead of carrying out the divisions on a

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single basis, we will therefore apply each of them in turn. Repetitions cannot be avoided but are not always bad; a single case of the tragic course will always shed light on several aspects. What needs special clarification is the structure of what is seemingly paradoxical in greatness leading to destruction. From a biological point of view this paradox can only be explained by the fact that the interest-serving properties of greatness are associated with others which are interest-conflicting. The paradox reveals itself as a double-acting impetus, as a cumulation of good and evil. There is no room for speculative mysticism until one begins to inquire about the hidden sources of the earthly, biological-physical dynamics. The interest-harming elements of greatness must be error-fixedness (including over- and under-fixedness) or an inappropriate degree of efficiency. How these elements can assert themselves without greatness losing its character as such is an important question in the following. The harmful characteristic can stand in functional connection with greatness in four different ways: 1. The harmful characteristic lies in the preconditions of greatness: A mental illness produces greatness and at the same time prepares the destruction of the personality. The structure here is of a psychophysiological nature; the details evade our knowledge. 2. The greatness is identical to the harmful characteristic: The inquirer’s spirit during the Church’s inquisition. An autotelic value is corruptive in the specific environment in which it unfolds. 3. The greatness is associated with the harmful characteristic: The genius leader does not tolerate others uniting; the oppressed join together and overthrow him. The leader has challenged a counterpower which he has dominated on one edge, but which is superior to him on another. 4. The harmful characteristic is the consequence of greatness: A person shows great talent in a particular enterprise and is celebrated. After this experience, one can no longer adjust to one’s former life, neglects one’s work, and eventually perishes. In each of these four ways (the boundaries between the groups are not sharp), greatness can be functionally connected to deficits, surpluses, under-fixedness, over-fixedness, and error-fixedness. When we say that the tragic catastrophe is due to characteristics that are functionally connected to greatness, first and foremost we are thinking of the appropriate catastrophe, of a ruinous outcome one had to expect, as everything

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was. This manner of speaking can also be used for inappropriate catastrophes but must then be pulled in by the hair. Greatness is always associated with the “harmful characteristics” the bearer possesses qua human. The great person is not exempt from the general functional risk that everyone must run. When the catastrophe is shown in casu to be caused by greatness but does not appear to be an appropriate consequence of it, but instead a fruit of the general human functional risk or of the characteristic as such, regardless of dimension, it is not natural to say that it is due to a harmful characteristic of greatness. For the time being we are dealing with appropriate and inappropriate catastrophes; the distinction first emerges in a later section. The harmful characteristics of greatness are thus not used as a basis for division; it would seem an unnecessary rigidity in the system that all kinds of conditions of life and death should be seen from this point of view. As mentioned, it is partly the characteristics of the human being in general or of the bearer as an individual, and partly also of the casual or general environment that most attract attention, cf. what is noted under double-acting impetuses, mistakes, etc. “Characteristic” is also a relative term: A subject’s characteristics are ultimately determined by one’s relation to the environment. The different kinds of structures are best shown by examples in connection with the individual classification bases. These are (if the ones already mentioned are included): A. The counterpower is linked to the origin, unfolding, or result of greatness. B. The greatness is of an autotelic or heterotelic character. C. The greatness lies in a fixedness condition or a capacity condition. D. The greatness asserts itself in the biological, social, or metaphysical field of interest. It unfolds in a hostile (satanic), indifferent, or sympathetic environment. E. The greatness is linked to a real or pseudo-engagement. F. The catastrophe strikes (directly or indirectly) the interest associated with the realization of greatness, or it strikes a different interest. G. The greatness is one-sided or many-sided. It leads to catastrophe through conflict or without conflict. Interfrontal tragedy. H. The counterpower is external or internal. I. The stricken person contributes to the course with existential guilt, physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological, ethical, legal, or metaphysical guilt.

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K. aThe greatness is due to “necessary” or “random” conditions. The catastrophe is an appropriate or inappropriate consequence of the greatness. A given tragic case can be set in any of these relations, and by taking them in turn the case will be illuminated from a number of different sides. However, it is not claimed that the arrangement is fully satisfactory in all circumstances; one must be prepared to find in literature and practice cases that make new distinctions desirable. They can also have such complex structures that the individual lines are difficult to draw, and the arrangement can then have a certain degree of arbitrariness. For the sake of order, I also include the first letters, though they have already been of service during the preparation of the outline.

§ 80. A. The counterpower is linked to the origin, unfolding, or result of greatness A good example of a counterpower that has its origin in common with greatness is mental illness of the aforementioned kind. But there may be others as well. A young man is mistakenly put on the throne, “goes all in for” his task and manages to become an outstanding ruler, an ability he would not otherwise have been able to find or develop in other circumstances. The welfare of the country now becomes his only and central task of life, which he is in the process of leading when the mistake is discovered. Shamefully driven from his position, he soon perishes. This case gives rise to a supplementary consideration. A fate like this could also strike a person with no special ruling abilities – cf. Pseudo-Demetrius. Would not his fate also be tragic, and where does the difference lie? Does greatness play a crucial role here – is it not pedantry to let the degree of talent determine the degree of tragedy? It should be acknowledged that this kind of tragedy has a somewhat weaker impact than the kind wherein the catastrophe is a consequence of greatness – that it is closer to the case where greatness and catastrophe happen together without having a functional connection. In other words, the course we have here lies closer to the boundary of the tragic. But I think it would be too strict to place it outside the boundary. A greatness that is infected in its very source a Zapffe may be following the long tradition of skipping J in alphabetical enumeration due to the fact that J was not included in the Latin alphabet until after the Renaissance.

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has no hope in itself, and yet it justifies the bearer’s expectation of qualified sanction. One would have had the same fate if one had not been great, it is true, but then one also would not have been allowed to see into the Promised Land. During the unfolding, greatness awakens its counterpower wherever realization goes hand in hand with the production of interest-hostile impetuses. These can come from the outside – envy, aggrieved interest bearers, or from the agent’s own consciousness – scruples concerning the means the greatness necessitates. Unmusical neighbors threaten to murder the composer who receives his divine inspirations at all times of the day; the wife threatens to leave the chemist who pollutes the house with his ingenious experiments. A mediocre pianist and an untalented chemist may also be a scourge to their surroundings, but their fate does not amount to the same central form of humanity’s quest for confirmation. A compelling example of catastrophe that is a consequence of the realization of greatness (the distinction lies not only in the time of the onset of the catastrophe, but above all in the fact that the greatness here actually comes to fruition) is found in what can be called tragic irony: In the form there is sanction, but in reality corruption. A statesman trains his son to be an excellent politician in order to continue his father’s work – after which the son employs his insight in the opposing party’s action. Or: The gifted leader has succeeded in carrying out his country’s liberation struggle – but the victory’s consequences are internal strife and decay.

§ 81. B. Catastrophe by autotelic and heterotelic greatness Greatness that the bearer or observer experiences as autotelic (e.g., artistic talent) can lead to catastrophe by its impermanence. The bearer is lured into basing one’s entire life on the autotelic value and has nothing to fall back on when it fails. Fame often works this way. Fame, however, is not tantamount to greatness, rather it is a fruit of it; the prospect of fame can heterotize a greatness that was previously autotelic (the bearer “loses one’s innocence”). The dangers of fame (“resting on one’s laurels,” etc.) could have been mentioned under letter A: the catastrophe linked to the result of greatness. Fame is also given without demonstrable greatness, and the fame cannot therefore be readily recognized as a tragic ferment. We must then look at the greatness that underlies the fame, and at the characteristics of it; it is immaterial whether

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it has found public recognition or not. Nor should wealth, noble birth, royal power, or titles be confused with autotelic greatness, as is often the case in literature. That the advantages of this kind are associated with danger is certain enough, but a catastrophe will only be of tragic effect for those who in titles, etc., see a real path to life confirmation or its confirmation itself. The relevant autotelic greatness already entails enough danger; it is unnecessary to take up autotelic pseudo-values. Concentration and power distract from the tasks that form the functional basis of existence: biological and social adaptation. The intensely demanding talent does not have enough patience, humility, peace of mind to make the trivial detour toward a constructive life; one demands confirmation for free, with “the right of genius.” It is easy to assume that what feels like the most valuable will also be the most effective, the golden key to any area of life. This is “a cheap demand of world order,” a metaphysical pretension. But our living conditions are completely unsentimental and unreceptive to enthusiasm; they work according to their own law with ice-cold steadiness and require in every field the appropriate effort: In the sea nothing except seamanship matters for the one who wants to preserve one’s life. The tension between the drive to perfection and continuation considerations will increase, as in a steel spring, until a rupture occurs. In this everything can go under, or the spirit can drift into the oceans of ecstasy as the land of life sinks into the horizon. The musician neglects finances and health, wife and child, and eventually the decay also affects one’s art. Or it is the metaphysical hygiene that is neglected: The demoniacal cultivator of life is overtaken by one’s metaphysical conscience and finds one’s life wasted in a higher sense. Or the young man’s life demands have led to loss of reproductive ability through venereal disease, and the mature man is broken down either because his love is stranded, or because there is no one to take over his work, name, and property. Things stand for him as if his “eternity” has been killed. He was breathtaking as he lived and devastated at the worst, and the dimensional joy of life undoubtedly has a place in the general cultural consciousness: Culture is not just productive; it is also combustible. Also, at the opposite extreme, the greatness of renunciation in the service of personality development (an autotelic value: the highest happiness of Earth’s children) is tragically perilous. Nature takes revenge on one-sidedness. Or the value reveals itself as illusory. A psychoanalytic recognition that the greatness is due to the opposite of dignity, namely angst, can rise up in the bearer in one’s mature years and show one a “lost youth,” and a lost love life that will never return and now stands for one as the highest. Or one sees one’s present life as

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a wilderness of sterile selfishness where no warmth of heart could endure; one remains lonely to the point of despair. But one was magnificent in one’s shining self-sufficiency, one’s fiery pathos and spiritual power, and many were those who were helped and enriched. Pathos is the appropriate style in which an autotelic greatness (sometimes also a heterotelic) lends itself to linguistic expression opposite to the counterpower. The pathetic style of language corresponds to a psychological reality, a state of mind which may well vary, but which can usually be characterized by the same main features. Its main elements are fixedness of attitude, certainty, judgment, and confidence. The fixedness is supported partly by thinking (arguments, apology) and partly by affect. Where conviction and affect join together, one speaks of passion; pathos is the organized linguistic expression of passion in the struggle for its realization. But pathos is not just expression of such passion; through the linguistic framing comes the clarification, consolidation, reinforcement of the position; the expression acts back on the state from which it emerged. One may feel bound by the program one has pursued; one has eyes turned on one, gained followers – now changing course or turning back is more difficult. Pathos can also express a heterotelic greatness, but it is then nourished by the incidental autotelic value of the leading goal and the aversion to other goals. Heterotelic greatness has its immediate danger in the temptation to choose double-acting means in order to achieve. The encounter with an enticing “operation carrier” inspires the striver to the boundary of compulsive behavior; intoxicated by the nearness of the realization, one does not sufficiently respect the warning signs and chooses the height at the expense of durability. Or one respects them and becomes involved in a ruinous conflict. Often the talent is one-sided and can even have its counterpart in a catastrophic under-equipment on another edge. The philosopher is called to the country’s helm, but as strong as one is in theory, one is just as helpless in practice; in one’s new position one causes the worst misfortunes with the best intentions and breaks down oneself.

§ 82. C. Greatness in fixedness and capacity As an example of greatness associated with under-fixedness, we have the previously mentioned type of artistic talent, the main strength of which lies in the Proteus-like variability, the disposition-related instability; one thinks of the actor. The only fixing factor lies in the demand concerning style, but the style demand does not always support the fixedness-seeking person behind the

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artist. Like the critical-relativist talent, one is threatened by posturelessness, inner dissolution, and melancholic depression. It does not have to be so, but it can go this way (Amiel, H. v. Kleist), and the under-fixedness (in relation to the minimum required fixedness that health demands) is then a condition for greatness and for downfall. Over-fixedness in the otherwise correct direction can have tragic consequences when a person’s greatness lies in one’s absolute, one’s unconditional allegiance to a principle to which one has knelt once and for all, and which is still regarded by the observer as correct – but in such a way that there must be a certain amount of leeway, a certain ability to compromise. Shame on the one who gives oneself to the poor, says folk wisdom. Examples from life will easily seem artificial because they must be so heavily schematized, but literature (which, before Chapter Nine, I avoid quoting so as not to get involved in heterogeneous considerations) provides quite a few: one thinks of Timon of Athens, Michael Kohlhaas, Ibsen’s Brand. They have the correct direction, one says, but they overdo it. The writers are signifying: Their nature is such that if they did not overdo it, they also would not have the correct direction. And precisely in overdoing it, in the “all or nothing” attitude, in the transboundary will, both the culturally constructive and the poetically breathtaking, the “sublime” in these figures is found. Characteristics often encountered in catastrophic over-fixedness are faithfulness, sense of responsibility, objectivity, honesty, unselfishness, and love. (We ignore here that some of these characteristics can possibly through in-depth psychological research be reduced back to simpler elements.) Faithfulness: One will not betray a friend, an idea, an agreement, etc., even though there is the strongest call for it, indeed even though it can be shown that the friend, the idea, etc., does not deserve the exhibited fidelity with the sacrifices it brings. The spirit of compromise, pragmatism, “adaptation” is the lifesustaining correction to the desire for fixedness; unfortunately, at the same time, it means the abandonment of the idea and submission under conditions one disparages and feels it is one’s job to change. The problem is real for the subordinate who finds an order immoral and does not think one can execute it. But the step into the “stubborn,”102 obstinate, pointless, culturally irrelevant is not far: A mad man with a revolver urges me, if I hold my life dear, to shout, “Death to all women!” “Ha,” I answer, “act contrary to my beliefs, never,” etc., and get shot. Sense of responsibility: One considers all possibilities 102 Cf. Otto Ludwig’s Erbförster [Hereditary Forester].

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so conscientiously that the power of action becomes paralyzed. Something similar applies to objectivity, which is regarded as a condition of scientific research: It is sometimes necessary to be subjectively arbitrary toward a case in order to get something done at all; objectivity can often work under the mask of subjectivity (although the reverse occurs more often). Objectivity has been previously mentioned as an example of under-fixedness; the emphasis was on the ability to take in views other than one’s own affect-determined ones; in this context, the emphasis is on the non-negotiable principle. Honesty: Anyone who ruins oneself for the sake of the idea of honesty, who sacrifices one’s fortune and the like to be able to participate in and establish a general highvalue disposition, can unfortunately not always count on sympathy and pension: No “moral fund” exists to comfort those who have sacrificed everything for the culture. And with poverty come other evils; in the end the stricken may lose one’s faith. Intellectual honesty often strikes faith directly. Unselfishness and love: Without being a culturally irrelevant “bleeding heart” one can in a given unfavorable environment be exploited precisely in the service of the forces which one intended to fight. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the religious will to believe, originating from trust in everything and in human conditions in everything, in its over-fixed form can lead to fatal mistakes (“cures” that become the patient’s death, etc.). On the border of capacity greatness stands refined taste: The overly sharpened selectivity limits the selection of objects to a degree that can seem destructive. Error-fixedness occurs most easily when a fixedness has been correct in relation to a previous environment but by a change in the environment becomes destructive. The revolution has prevailed: The more magnificently a person then represents the old cultural ideals (the leaders), the stronger one challenges the new leaders. The fact that these are probably incapable of seeing any tragic dimension in the victim’s fate is another matter – after all, the victim is great only for those with whom one shares ideals, or who evaluate one objectively despite differences of opinion. Greatness and error-fixedness can have the same source in psychopathological cases. Greatness functionally connected to deficits rarely occurs in practice without it being more natural to see the deficit in ability x as a surplus in ability contra-x. A deficit in receptivity, however, stands in a unique position; here one often finds the precondition for the unimaginable strength with which some people bear terrible blows of fate; an impenetrability that others must try to obtain through isolation. We are all aware from the daily press of the jubilant wife who has been ill and poor for seventy-five years; the husband has died

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at sea, five children are insane, five are crippled, and five are in prison – but she is in a good mood all day long, etc. (we ignore the delirium of satisfaction, Vogt p. 185). Even if one does not want to speak of greatness in this case, the straight-backed unwavering nature under a personal misfortune can undoubtedly seem “great” – and there is also nothing in the way of the reduced receptivity becoming catastrophic in another area of life, where a certain degree of sensitivity is required. What the warrior owes to his invincibility may make him unfit for marriage to the highly cultured woman he loves, and this will be his ruin. A similar double effect can be observed in memory and association deficits, narrow awareness, and others (here is meant a deficit in relation to the average or to the life task of which one is not capable). Worth mentioning is also the greatness that can be found in compensation and which is still threatened in that the source is infected. The richest tragic soil, however, is presumably found in the area of greatness by surplus. Chapter Five lists some examples of surpluses that lead to catastrophe without the notion of “culturally relevant greatness” being used. There are also plenty of cases of surplus that cannot claim this designation, just as the greatness can also lie in a peculiar combination of a particular nuance (hence a fixedness condition) and a particular degree of capacity. It is possible that this applies to some of the preceding as well as the following examples, but it is either a fixedness-related or a capacity-related dimension that most strongly catches the attention. In receptive greatness there can either be plenty of objects, and then there is a danger that the pressure will be too strong, such that the “nerves” fail. There are people who are only soundboards, only naked nerves; they lack a stimulus protection against life’s powerful impact, but are inspired poets, etc. Or there is a lack of objects; the need for experience grows into obsession, and lacking breaks the bearer down, or one reaches for destructive surrogates. The lack of “operation carriers” in the environment can also become catastrophic in active greatness, as we shall soon see. Most often both types go together; engagement provides interaction between action and reception, for example, in the erotic-sexual life and the personal love life where a burning, very rewarding, and very demanding nature is at risk of both neglect and of bursting. Also, the loss of the appropriate object will have worse consequences for such a person than for a more lukewarm nature. With greatness in action readiness, it is often a matter of a purely autotelic exercise for the ability; the bearer longs for the unfolding for its own sake. One is then tempted to grab one’s objects wherever one finds them, without being inhibited by heterotelic

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considerations. And here it becomes important that it is much easier to reach exceptional dimensions in destructive than it is in constructive directions. One can compare what it takes in time and ability to create a work of art, a cathedral, a machine, a human personality – and what it takes to destroy them. Afterward we see little of the individual abilities. In our day it is relatively rare for a person to seek the central fulfillment of life through the development of physical power, agility, etc. Before the time of social care, this was different, since physical skills occupied an important place among the culturally creative, both as means and ends. At that time there were also greater dangers to a “greatness” of this kind. The appropriate expression was found not so much in work performance or in mere weightlifting or other sports, but in challenging a counterpower, be it humans, animals, or forces of nature. And the person who chose a task beyond ability was most assured of the admiration of one’s fellows; indeed, the particularly strong and physically courageous man felt a kind of duty in this direction; he had to provide his surroundings with a sensation. Greatness in the area of bodily skills still counts in journeys of discovery, in war, and in sports; here it has yet another real cultural value, partly as a means and partly as an end. Nor does it lack a “vis attractiva”a in relation to destructive influences. The superior can be given life-threatening tasks that no one would think of tackling with only mediocrity at their disposal. As a slave or prisoner of war, the giant is prone to being abused, being placed in a more intolerable occupation than the others. You can do it, the superiors think, until the strong succumbs – while the others manage. Bodily strength plays a special role in biological tragedy, see below. We do not have much to say about culturally relevant greatness in connection with surplus in pure perception; what has been said about physical power can be partly applied. Only in conjunction with sensitivity, imagination, and artistic ability can the perception join a type of greatness and condition catastrophes (cf. the differentiated personality’s increased susceptibility to pain – § 19). It is not only in the absence of unfolding conditions (the musician in prison) and in the undermining of health through the overly violent experiential pressure that an artistic greatness can prove incompatible with general welfare; the catastrophe can be triggered in countless ways by the extraordinary talent’s inability to integrate into society, by the environment’s lack of understanding, etc. a attractive force.

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Nor is an exceptionally good memory alone likely to demand the designation of culturally relevant greatness; this ability must also serve more general types of talent, above all the intellect. Such things as understanding (insight, critical analysis, judgment), combining ability, and technical ability were attributed to the intellect (in § 20); they are all of the greatest cultural relevance. The fact that a criticalanalytical insight can dissolve both vitality and action is unnecessary to repeat here. Such catastrophes are of an internal nature, but they can also be external: The rulers strike the opposition, which they fear more the more talented it is. In addition to philosophical and political ability, technical ability is particularly suited to awaken an external counterpower. The authorities fear the consequences of ingenious invention and get rid of the inventor (Salomon de Caus).103 Or: The inventor (possibly the scientist) is seized by the intoxication of the idea; one must have money for experiments and obtains it through a crime. Or: One’s family suffers need, one must abandon the experiments and undertake stable work, one’s life has lost its purpose and meaning, and one is spiritually extinguished. Or: When it is rumored that one is about to succeed, one’s apparatus and records are destroyed by a competitor who fears being overshadowed. Unfortunate consequences of technical victories are pointed out in § 20 – supply exceeds demand and becomes a threat; the device takes power from the people. Weapons are becoming more effective and enable the annihilation of life on an ever-larger scale. Alongside these more particular types of greatness, there is more generally the “cultural personality” who combines in various ways different abilities and characteristics and who by one’s greatness can cause different kinds of catastrophes in different ways. Going into detail is inadvisable.

§ 83. D. Greatness asserts itself in the biological, social, or metaphysical field of interest. It unfolds in a hostile (satanic), indifferent, or sympathetic environment Biological greatness becomes culturally relevant when it is not placed in the shadow of any “higher” value, when it either predominates alone or when the biological sanction is a condition sine qua non for all other endeavors. This can indeed also go beyond self-preservation or simply seek its way through 103 Cf. Andreas Munch’s drama.

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biological self-sacrifice (certain kinds of social and metaphysical endeavor, for example) – “Life is not the highest good.”a The following example of biological tragedy may at the same time serve as an image of the cultural situation of each society: A wrecked ship’s crew has waited on a deserted island for rescue from outside. They then decide to make a single and final attempt by way of effort. They equip an expedition of two men, who naturally are the captain and first mate, to try to reach an inhabited area. They give them the best they have in weapons, food, and clothing, tear down their hut and build a raft, give their blankets for a sail, and send them out on the only path of hope. The raft is then destroyed by a storm, the effort has been in vain; the current hope is broken, but not the principle: The raft could have been better, the sea fairer. The catastrophe is qualified and death for the remaining is certain, but the course has yet to have a tragic dynamic. This only arises if the chosen two with weapons in hand take the last remnants of food and clothing, and then sail away. Then they would not tell anyone, if they were approached, so that their course of action would not be known. Or: The long period of suffering has ruined the nervous system of the crew – the two on the raft go crazy at the prospect of escaping and start firing at the remaining ones. This case, however, lies on the boundary of the tragic; the concept of greatness is allowed to stretch too far. This flaw should be eliminated by the following example: The stranded ship’s crew lies in the sand devoid of means of existence, has given up hope, and indulges in lamenting passivity. Only the one with the mental and physical wherewithal can still hope and act. With tremendous effort he crawls across the island to seek food and water. Eventually he returns to the stranding site: meanwhile a ship has rescued the others; he sees it disappear over the horizon. Social tragedy. We assign a course to a particular interest front when both the interest associated with the effort and the one hit by the catastrophe belong to this front. If they belong to different fronts, there may be doubts about the classification. Social tragedy here includes both social efforts and social catastrophe. But how is social tragedy possible? Is not the person there as a pioneer among co-strivers, and is not an important part of the common endeavor precisely to give the recognized greatness the best possible conditions? Unfortunately, the conditions are not quite so idyllic. Self- and group-interest very a das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht (Ger.) (Schiller, Die Braut von Messina [The Bride of Messina], end of Scene II).

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often come before the common cultural endeavor, the demands of affect take precedence over common sense, and honorable conceptions of good and evil, expedient and inexpedient, worthy and unworthy are irreconcilable with each other. The “moral genius” who sees new and better paths to the recognized goals, or “higher” goals beyond them, cannot fight for one’s idea without breaking with existing beliefs, violating values, hurting feelings, exploding anchors. As one progresses toward increased security, one spreads angst and resentment around one. Many see their peace of mind, etc., threatened and their only salvation in the demise of the dangerous defiant, and in the annihilation of his or her work. Greatness is loved and recognized, but it is also hated and persecuted. First of all, the great become great and the small become small by comparison, and not all small ones can reconcile this comparison with their self-esteem and egotism, or with continued good conscience. Envy raises opposition: If we cannot be as great as you, then at least you will be as small as we are, or you will be eliminated (cf. Ranulf op. cit. p. 186 ff. 217 et al.). Often the plot succeeds because the adversaries use the weapons that the great person disdains (slander and the like). Good deeds often have this paradoxical effect: Instead of generating gratitude, they awaken the feeling of subservience, inferiority, and dependency with the resulting enmity; the welldoer loses one’s “faith in humanity” and becomes a misanthrope. The leader is always highly vulnerable – not everyone can be a leader. And the opposing party is first and foremost aiming its shots at the person with the golden helmet. The leader can be driven by irreconcilable opposition into tyranny and thereby make enemies among one’s own. The relationship between ruler and field commander is illustrative: the commander’s task is to win his ruler’s wars, but victory is not without danger – the field commander must not become too great in the eyes of the ruler and not in his own either; then he is “liquidated” as it is called in recent ministerial jargon. Another structure: A person has made an excellent effort on a given occasion, and now everyone demands that this person remain elevated. One is either unable or unwilling, and then either forgets what one once has accomplished (Roald Amundsen circa 1922), or one pledges oneself to the task, or grabs repurposed resources (example for fellow believers: the medium Einer Nielsen). Or: After the success, one cannot trust oneself with one’s old fellows; one has developed a taste for a higher life standard and is stranded while trying to reach it.

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Periodic shifts in the collective judgment can cause tragedy for those whose greatness depends on the conditions of one period. One can also speak of tragedy as a characteristic of the period, determined by its main cultural ideas: the tragedy of the scientific mind in religious-fanatical times (especially when the religion is actually threatened – Socrates, Bruno), the tragedy of political ambition (ancient Rome, the Renaissance), quest for military power (ancient conquest marches, Wallenstein, Napoleon). The outstanding Russian worker advances to being in charge, is given an impossible task, and is punished as a saboteur. The period itself as a value carrier becomes tragic in Oswald Spengler’s view: The saturation of a central cultural thought is a sign of its impending doom. That the individual’s cultural arrangement (displacement, sublimation) can cause nervous disturbances104 and thus social insecurity is a condition that can show tragic structure but does not have to. Only where the disturbances are conditioned by the greatness of the cultural arrangement does the relationship become tragic, not when they are related to the arrangement in any way whatsoever. Here we touch again on the boundary question. It could be argued that any effort (regardless of greatness and importance) that merely points toward a recognized optimum and results in an evil (regardless of the significance of the evil) should be called tragic. However, the idea would entail such conceptual content that it is necessary to distinguish qualified cases.105 There is nothing more than a difference of degree, however, between the tragic concept mentioned and what we are operating with here; our concept thus includes the essence of the other. This is an explanation of the fact that, for example, a simple collision between love and reason cannot demand to be called tragic, no matter what the custom in literary-historical tradition is. On the boundary is a case like the following: A Norwegian receives a “Viennese child” in his home and mutual friendship develops. For the sake of the child’s well-being and safety during the journey home, he lets his wife accompany the child to Vienna, and a love affair develops between her and the child’s father. All the marks of tragedy are present; doubt applies only to the effort of the man – is it common or culturally representative? Economic position may be important as an indication of the state of mind. Cf. also the following case: A man has been vigilantly guarding his wife’s every step, and also manages to have her for himself. However, his moral consciousness evolves 104 Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [The Discomfort in Culture], Vienna 1930. 105 So, it must be called tragic that a man freezes his legs when he goes to work, that he turns off the light when he thinks he turns it on, etc.

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such that he thinks: I will not practice coercion anymore, she is a free person like myself, and she must be allowed to meet other people (he means men). After this the wife falls victim to the first dashing man that comes her way. Opponents of women’s emancipation will see the man’s behavior here not as a manifestation of greatness but as weakness and stupidity. Metaphysical tragedy. The case that emerged in Chapter Six lies outside of the fixed religions: One puts all one’s ability toward seeking the metaphysically correct through meditation, which is one’s “predominant characteristic.”a This path leads to the blockage of the same metaphysical striving; the impossibility could be of a logical, psychological, or physiological nature: logical if the conclusion is that one can neither act nor not act, psychological if the ever-expanding and deepening empirical impression of the course of the world destroys any metaphysical confidence, any possibility of belief in meaning as a real anchor, physiological if the ruin of the body ends the metaphysical pursuit before it has even come close to any result. Tragic is also the course that has found expression in Ecclesiastes: The highest growth in wisdom leads to wisdom revealing itself as a deception. Only by reaching the final heights could the writer of Ecclesiastes draw this painful conclusion; for the less skilled the path is still hopeful. For one who always has faith in reserve, if “cognition” were to fail, wisdom, strictly speaking, has not been the royal road of hope, only a preliminary attempt, and thus the tragic character is absent. Even within the religions the metaphysical pursuit can be carried by intellectual honesty – even science presupposes a kind of “faith” in axioms and conceptual models. The idea of God as a working hypothesis does not preclude intellectual honesty; here the wish is not seen as “knowledge,” and the “ought”b is not portrayed as an “is.”c Nor is it appropriate to talk about metaphysical trickery in the case where faith was acquired in childhood as something that is obvious and has never been subjected to criticism. The designation of pseudo-solution does not exclude the possibility of greatness, even in the eyes of the unbeliever. Faith has its natural soil in the human mind and the need for faith is so strong in most people (be it faith in any future life confirmation) that even the unbeliever will not be able to dispute the cultural relevance of faith – deny that it is one of the main paths to metaphysical confirmation. Where does “reality” end and where does “appearance” begin? – This is a question that cannot be decided in haste not a faculté maîtresse (Fr.). b Sollen (Ger.). c Sein (Ger.).

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only in the metaphysical sphere of interest. If a person declares him or herself completely metaphysically satisfied, then one cannot refute this person with arguments, expose his or her confirmation as a fraud, and avoid his or her maneuvers from tragic relevance. For these maneuvers, which the unbeliever looks upon with disgust and unspeakable contempt, mark precisely for the believer victory over thought and earthly self-interest. The standard decides everything, and one has here as little as elsewhere the right to use only a heterogeneous assessment. The religion’s own conception must be taken as the basis; the Greek conception of gods and fate, Islam, Buddhism, Brahmanism, Catholicism, and Protestantism must be seen as bounded fields of metaphysical tragedy. But tragic events inside the individual religion will not have an effect on anyone other than the like-minded that are stricken. Such a course is most easily encountered when there are multiple metaphysical entities (transcendent subjects) that are in conflict with each other, representing “opposite” or incompatible commitments. The more one worships one god, the more one annoys the other. Orestes obeys Apollo and is therefore pursued by the Fates. Hippolytus (his tragedy, however, is not metaphysical in our sense) worships Artemis and offends Aphrodite. For monotheists this danger is absent, but it still lurks in incompatible scriptures. One has truly fulfilled the requirement of the fourth commandment throughout a lifetime – in happy ignorance of the newer commandment: Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. One first discovers these words on one’s deathbed and expires in the assurance of eternal perdition. It must be assumed that in the event of less zeal concerning the one point, one would have become acquainted with the corrective requirement. Simple greatness of faith lies precisely in the naive belief in every single word as opposed to theological subtlety, which replaces the word with interpretation and dispute concerning what God has meant. The mentioned tragic variant is hardly practical. More often it may happen that a person seeks to do the will of God to the extent that one is unable to bear the consequences; efforts have been above ability. Either one feels unworthy in the eyes of God and liable to perdition (afterlife-metaphysical catastrophe) or faith gives way to doubt (this-world metaphysical catastrophe). A first glimpse of this tragedy lies in the words of Jesus on the cross: Why have you forsaken me? Also compare Ibsen’s Brand: Does not a speck of salvation / a quantum satisa of man’s will apply? Doubt has the danger that if there is first a hole in the wall in one place, then everything can become uncertain; if one first starts to argue about the “truth” of a single word, then one can argue about everything. a amount which is enough.

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For the person who reckons with a real existing metaphysical environment, it is important whether this environment is hostile (satanic), indifferent, or sympathetic. In the expressions of Jesus and Brand there is the fear of indifference. It seems difficult to say anything general about the environment’s relation to interest with a view to tragic courses. In the case of the hostile environment, one must make a distinction since the hostility concerns either the interest of greatness or other interests. In the first instance, the environment is highly disposed to tragedy; in the latter case, there is nothing special to note. In an indifferent environment, coincidence seems to have greater leeway, and in a sympathetic environment it seems that the tragic must primarily be caused by misunderstandings, mistakes, and ignorance. Here too a distinction must be made since the sympathy concerns either the interest of greatness or other interests of the bearer. The adversary of the political leader is the hostile environment, the forces of nature that strike the explorer down is the indifferent environment, the rescued ship’s crew who, without knowing it, leaves one of the shipwrecked behind is the sympathetic environment.

§ 84. E. Greatness is linked to a real or pseudo-engagement The first alternative raises no doubt. Nor is the pseudo-engagement per se an obstacle to greatness, as was just pointed out. The cultural pursuit is too strongly relied on to rest on hypotheses and hopes that cannot be verified. But the same pursuit is also largely aimed at a future state, where all engagement must be based on reality, where isolations and distractions, fictional anchors, simulations, and compensations must finally be dispensed with and replaced with “authenticity” and objective insight. Already now the supporters of this program will require that the high-quality person be representative also on this point; one should not settle for a pseudo-engagement where there is the possibility of a real one. But then one must not confuse origin and result either. A person’s greatness may have a neurotic starting point, but the insight he or she gains through the pseudo-maneuver (e.g., overcompensation) may be sufficiently real. The driving force of a mountain climb (angst, feeling of inferiority, originality sickness, world weariness,a being in love) is without influence on the geographical value of the view of the landscape one has from the top. When the origin is completed one can often cast it aside as a ladder one no longer needs, now that one has ascended. Perhaps in most people with acquired greatness, a neurotic factor a Weltschmerz (Ger.).

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has played a part in its origin. Nothing, after all, gives such a blazing energy and such an inexhaustible perseverance on all the detours to the goal as that which forces the neurotic into action. The significance of neuroses to cultural pursuits in general is a relationship that cannot be ignored. That the assessment of the cultural goods may once again have a partially neurotic background is a possibility that will lead us too far astray.

§ 85. F. Catastrophe strikes (directly or indirectly) the interest associated with the realization of greatness, or it strikes a different interest The densest case of tragedy is where the interest of greatness (interest of effort) is directly hit: The leading pacifist stirs up the supporters of peace so that they turn to armed action against the war party. Or the pacifist enforces disarmament in protest of the war; even defensive war is objectionable, although it cannot be compared to offensive war. The country is conquered and the pacifists, along with the other soldiers, are forced to wage war against the foreign power. The leader’s fate is tragic in the eyes of the pacifists, while the supporters of defense do not see greatness in the leader’s achievement, but shortsightedness. The friend of liberty realizes his life program, that there should be freedom of opinion and freedom of propaganda for all, including those who want the abolition of freedom. These win. The humanist politician forces through the idea that the opposition should only be countered with arguments. This also applies to the opposition that despises arguments and will use force. Consequently, these are victorious: In a battle between words and weapons, the outcome is clear. A doctor will not collect the fees in his poor district, although he has kept rates lower than is reasonable. His own family lacks the essentials; eventually he is put under conservatorship and now a solicitor is recovering his claims at top rate. Patients are deprived of their only lamb, the agitation increases, and they end up attacking and cursing the doctor because had he been stricter with them, they would have escaped ruin. In such a course there is often a hidden “contradictio in adjecto”: “There must be no morality; those who are moral are immoral.” The term moral is used here in two senses: (1) to follow the adopted norms, (2) to follow the new norm: not to follow the adopted norms. The gymnasium society approves by a three-quarters majority that the minority is always right. The Cretan alleges that all Cretans are liars (minus times minus equals plus). It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. If I have the choice, I should give my brother

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the better part, thus suffer wrong, while I take on myself the sacrifice to do wrong. However, I am judged by the action and not by the motive. An aesthetician uses impressive acumen to settle the controversy concerning the tragic; he will replace the 200 existing theories with a new, singular, final one. In the history of aesthetics he then finds himself listed as No. 201. Not all these examples fulfill the requirement of the tragic; they merely show a structure that may be the basis for a tragic course. On the other hand, the shipwrecked person who is out on reconnaissance while his companions are rescued (see above) does fulfill it. Here the interest of effort is hit directly. A father’s goal is to raise the standard of the family by leaving his son a bigger fortune, but the wealth goes to the son’s head such that he destroys both the wealth and himself. A field commander sacrifices his only son to the gods for victory. The smoke from the sacrificial fire reveals the camp’s location to the enemy, who attacks and destroys the devout soldiers. More often it may be the case that the interest of effort is hit indirectly – as a result of a different interest being struck down. The most straightforward and effective way is that the bearer is deprived of life such that the rest is lost of itself. Or one’s enterprise may be paralyzed by the family being held hostage. Or one comes into conflict with social regulations and loses the basis one must have for one’s continued work in the service of greatness. The variant leads to a new main group: The catastrophe involves a different interest than the interest of effort, while in principle this is unharmed. The inventor is destroyed, but the formulas are safe. As a rule, the well-being and fighting ability of a person do not depend solely on the fate of the interest that is most important to the person; only in rarer cases is one able to sacrifice all other considerations for the “one thing needful.” General welfare depends on an extremely complicated system of interests, rational and irrational. The agent’s “eros” toward a single task or life in general can be undermined in a myriad of ways. On the basis of the division into fronts one can roughly distinguish between the following main groups: 1. Biological effort (with sanction) – social catastrophe. By “biological effort” one can partly think of an effort that puts biological values at risk, and partly an effort that works to the benefit of such values. In this example both parts apply: Husband and pregnant wife are on their way to a doctor when a storm dashes the boat upon an islet; it is a winter evening. One night on the islet means death for all three lives, and the husband decides to swim to land, an inconceivable feat. Everyone is rescued, but the husband is physically ruined. The wife takes a lover, the husband shoots the lover and goes to jail, where he curses his swimming skill and wishes that they had all perished on the islet.

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2. Biological effort – autotelic catastrophe. The most skilled crewmember of a ship in distress is expected to swim ashore with a rope. He manages to save everyone but gets his face crushed and loses sight. Neither biologically, socially, nor metaphysically does he suffer any disruption; it is the opposite. 3. Biological effort – metaphysical catastrophe. A husband throws himself against an attacking ox to save his wife; it succeeds, but the husband is maimed. The wife takes a lover. The husband does not shoot the lover, but he loses faith in God, the principle of justice, and the meaning of life. 4. Social effort – biological catastrophe. A husband knows his only son is a thief. Another is suspected and the wife thinks they should let the other take the punishment. After a soul struggle, however, the husband decides to name his son, but the wife takes revenge and gives the husband poison. – A lawyer does not dare to recover what he is owed from his poor clients since it would mean their ruin. He himself or his only child suffers from an illness that can only be cured by a trip to the South, but he is not financially able to do so. 5. Social effort – autotelic catastrophe. During voluntary medical service on the battlefield, the dancer loses a foot and the musician loses a hand. The effort was associated with risk, but no more of these misfortunes than of others: The two would have been able to bear an exchange of injuries. – The shipowner refuses to denounce the order that a rotting ship should be launched as seaworthy. He is terminated and unemployed and abandoned by his wife, whom he despises but is madly in love with. He cannot endure the agony of jealousy. 6. Social effort – metaphysical catastrophe. The child of the lawyer in No. 4 actually dies and he loses his faith in the moral world order. – The Crusader has taken pity on an unbeliever and is then told that he has forfeited his eternal salvation. He has not “loved God more than men.” Any kind of tragedy may have the effect of the loss or shaking of faith in the moral world order. 7. Autotelic effort – biological catastrophe. The polar scientist accomplishes a superhuman task, but from frostbite he becomes impotentia generandi.a The athlete sets oneself a mind-boggling goal, which one reaches, but destroys oneself. (Examples such as these can easily involve factors that diminish the tragic structure, such as, for example, the predictability of the catastrophe and the relationship between the values sacrificed and gained in the ranking of the stricken person. More about this later.) 8. Autotelic effort – social catastrophe. The poet who seeks only poetic values, not moral, is ostracized by the “good society” where one, however, has one’s a impotent.

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natural roots. If one were less captivated by the engagement, less in the violence of one’s talent, one would have been more easily able to compromise in favor of the social arrangement. 9. Autotelic effort – metaphysical catastrophe. The philosopher seeks “truth” for its own sake, i.e., for the sake of intellectual joy. The duty of scientific skepticism makes faith imperceptibly crumble, such that one eventually falls back into despair from standing alone in a godless universe. – In Faustian spirit one could also note the person with the tremendous life hunger who gives oneself to the Devil in order to empty the bowl of earthly joys. In autotelic greatness the specifics of the impression in each individual case will often be a condition for the general acknowledgment of greatness, and the schematic form in which the examples must be placed is hardly suitable to convince. 10. Metaphysical effort – biological catastrophe. Often in a central metaphysical engagement, biological considerations will be subordinated to the extent that destruction of biological values is not experienced as a catastrophe. But this does not have to be the case; one may be passionately interested in one’s metaphysical fate without consequently being the least disposed to let oneself be abused or killed or to neglect one’s health at all. In the religions’ light, all features are disturbed; the best examples are found outside: Contemplation compromises the livelihood or breaks down the nervous system. But inside there are also examples: The missionary is ready to sacrifice his life to God, but he is also deprived of his posterity, so he cannot do it anymore. A “weakness” like this is well compatible with a significant metaphysical personality. 11. Metaphysical effort – social catastrophe. The intellectually honest person is ostracized by the dogmatic environment in which one has one’s natural roots. During the dictatorship of the proletariat, contemplative spirits are declared enemies of the people. 12. Metaphysical effort – autotelic catastrophe. The husband’s religious or contemplative engagement pushes his wife, with whom he is madly in love, away from him. The ascetic must give up one’s artistic joy but cannot bear losing it.

§ 86. G. Greatness is one- or multi-sided; it leads to catastrophe through conflict or without conflict Whether a person exhibits more kinds of greatness than the one who is tragically engaged is in itself irrelevant. But there may also arise a unique constellation: It is precisely considerations of greatness b that hinder the realization of greatness a,

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perhaps also the reverse. One-sided greatness has only a relatively inferior counterpower with which to contend; but in the other case there is a counterpower that is of equal if not higher value. The realization is affected (in multi-sided greatness) by the same considerations that lead to the realization; the obstacle is therefore not only factual but principled. The consequence may be that both kinds of greatness must be forsaken, and thus the bearer’s life is wasted – or that both seek realization and thus destroy one another. Especially where the bearer cannot avoid acting (since passivity is even worse), one will be tempted to seek liberation in suicide, which is tragically justified here. The third possibility, that one is sacrificed and the other is carried out, can produce tragic courses of the types mentioned under F., but only when the sacrificed interest is roughly of equivalent value to the favored one. Example: The field commander loves his wife who belongs to a hostile nation. There is greatness in his love and his patriotism and strategic ability. The gifted political leader is at the same time a great “humanist” and considerations mutually paralyze each other; separately the tasks can be accomplished, but not simultaneously. This is a case of interfrontal tragedy. Interfrontal tragedy contains a conflict (moral antinomy, “collision of duties”). But the total area of conflict is much wider than this; in any tragic course there is the possibility of conflict, namely when the double effect of greatness is foreseen while there is still time to turn back. On the other hand, tragic fate occurs without conflict when the effort is considered favorably single-acting, such that the catastrophe comes as a surprise. In this last case, the tragic is removed only when it can be explained as an under-equipment that the agent did not foresee the double effect or the unfavorable single effect. The soldier who signs up as a volunteer does not have a tragic fate by being shot; it was something he had to expect. He cannot have had some culturally relevant hope that is broken by this catastrophe, even though he incurs it by a kind of “greatness.” The tragic assumes, after all, that the effort is linked to an empirically or a priori justified hope. If the volunteer believes himself out of danger, or his father did not warn him at all (he is packed full from novel reading and only thinks of the medal with which he should come home, and what young ladies will then say) – then he reveals a weak judgment such that he ceases to be representative. The greatness of his choice of action should depend precisely on the awareness of the risk to which he is exposed. In the former case – where the double effect is foreseen – the tragic may be removed in that the agent with knowledge and will knowingly and willingly put a value at risk; the course is not tragic, but possibly heroic (see § 92). Besides heroic conflict, life exhibits a number of conflicts that cannot be called tragic even if they end in catastrophe – namely, the conflicts that strike the individual qua human and not qua great human. They have their natural

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place between basic or otherwise qualified catastrophes: One is given the choice between death and the renunciation of one’s faith. There is no biological greatness needed to hold life terribly dear, and no metaphysical greatness is needed to be able to look with horror at eternal torment. The case closely borders another which better shows the transition to altogether basic catastrophes: A ship has caught fire on the open sea; the lifeboats are destroyed and the sea is teeming with sharks. The choice made by the crew is only how to die. A “conflict” like this is only a link in the catastrophe itself. However, as such, this kind of catastrophe can also be a tragic course, namely where, because of one’s greatness, a person is subjected to such a union of conflict and catastrophe: The religious leader of the people is given the choice of renouncing one’s faith or watching one’s relatives be tormented; one is selected from the vanquished because one’s decision is representative. In the tragic part of the course, which can be considered complete as the choice is made, the counterpower is not internal, as it always is in a moral conflict (cf. H.), but external, namely the enemy commander. A tragedy like this is only seemingly interfrontal; it is in fact monofrontal. A tragic constellation (we now no longer need to see the course played out to the bitter enda; it is enough to have an overview of the possibilities in a situation) – can be experienced as interfrontal by the observer, who then represents the general cultural pursuit, without any actual tragic subject, or without the tragic subject perceiving the interfrontal nature of the relationship. There is no need to look for exceptional cases here, such as the philosopher and the pianist having to live in the same room. State considerations versus individual considerations, nationalism versus cosmopolitan humanism, “emperor” versus “Galilean,” “faith” versus “knowledge,” the sexes’ different perceptions of life … the purer and stronger each of these cultural elements is formed, the more difficult the reconciliation or synthesis of the opposite element becomes. (The difficulty of removing the oppositions is discussed in § 91.) The interfrontally tragic is perhaps the most qualified of all tragic types, insofar as the stricken person may not even want the counterpower to be removed.

§ 87. H. The counterpower is internal or external or both This distinction has already been discussed in Chapter Eight and in connection with interfrontal tragedy under G. One can discuss where the a English given.

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boundary should be drawn. We have taken the position of counting physiological and even psychological factors as external powers when they act without passing through the authority of choice. Here there are gradual transitions; impulses of this kind (drives, emotions, etc.) can become more or less absorbed into censoring work (in increasing degree by the volitional character and personality formation) and thereby gradually transition from external to internal counterpowers; they cease to be “blind.” In other words, this applies to character traits that do not manifest themselves as automatic mechanisms or as irresistible imperatives, but more as tendencies toward fixedness, expression, or inhibition, such as intellectual honesty, sexual lust, and other sthenic or asthenic affects, ambition, cowardice, will to objectivity and logical thinking. With an external counterpower there typically is a decision-making subject, a unified and unidirectional life will, and an unimpaired action capability face to face with the besieging forces.106 With internal counterpowers, the line of battle lies not between the subject and the outside world but in the subject’s own choosing and energy-distributing authority. A split subject is torn between one’s various impulses; a splintered assessment ability seeks to orient itself between incompatible interests; a paralyzed and blocked action stares at a drop port. There is a civil war in the striver’s consciousness. The tragic structure with an internal counterpower often consists in the fact that the reckless realization of greatness gives rise to contradictions, inhibitions, bad conscience – there are other interests with demands for protection. This can happen before or after the effort is made: “One face before it happens, another shows the deed done.”a Self-contempt and self-condemnation can be the result. Factors of neurotic origin often form the internal counterpower of dangerous strength; pleasure and angst have the same origin, and the subject is ambivalent toward the appropriate object, etc. The rationalizing activity oscillates between consciousness and unconsciousness: The motives are arranged according to the desire, and when the action is completed, the curtain falls. One has deceived oneself; the mainspring was not of high value but the opposite. Here can be mentioned the tragic variant wherein one dangerously develops one’s ability to self-discern. No motive is final; the moralintellectual honesty’s ironic X-ray vision only drives one further and further

106 Here I had to interrupt the writing to chase away a goat, whose all-consuming company I had attracted by my animal friendliness. a From Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina [The Bride of Messina], end of Scene 1.

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into oneself until one loses all ability to act because one cannot vouch for any of what one does.107 In metaphysical tragedy, the counterpower will be primarily internal because the conception of the metaphysical environment is derived from the metaphysical need and is more or less a fruit of self-activity. God, “fate,” world morality, Nemesis, etc., are notions that derive their life force from the subject’s imaginative ability. They are therefore to some extent subject to the influence of the will and they act on the subject’s choice of posture only by registering in the consciousness. Exceptionally there are metaphysical factors represented in the external environment – appointed servants of the Church (God’s proxy), consecrated vessels, taboos, sacred animals, inspired scriptures, prophets, medicine men, oracles, etc., have metaphysical fate-determining power within the respective religion. The external counterpower can become internal the moment the agent becomes aware of it and recognizes its place. Such a transition can prevent the course from ending tragically, and it can also make a course tragic that would not be otherwise. Example: The genius radium scientist has two goals: to benefit humanity and to become socially and financially capable of obtaining Miss B. He (A) spends day and night in the laboratory and has no idea that his organism is about to be destroyed. He is a pioneer and only later does one learn to protect oneself. One day he discovers that the misfortune has happened; he has lost his potentia generandi. The discovery crushes him; now he can no longer present himself to Miss B. He still has the salvation of mankind from cancer, but the two goals are closely linked in his consciousness; he despairs more and more and ends up taking his own life. We now imagine that he is warned in time. The counterpower thus moves into his own mind and creates conflict. Humanity or private life? He is unable to make a decision, and as a last resort he submits the whole matter to Miss B. She declares that she wants to be with him even if he continues as a scientist. An approaching tragedy is deflected by the counterpower becoming internal and thus in the given case a way for a third option is opened. Conversely, the tragedy can be triggered by the counterpower becoming external: A is poor and loves Miss B with hope, but he decides after a soul struggle to give her up so as not to cause her unhappiness (poverty, break with

107 Cf. Tilling, “Individuelle Geistesartung u. Geistesstörung [Individual Mentality and Mental Disorder]” in Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 4 p. 12.

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the family, etc.) – a trait of social morality, heroic greatness. He manages to struggle through the trial, and he eventually falls in love with another woman. One now imagines that during A’s inner struggle, C appears as an adorer of B, and A recognizes C as a villain. B will still be better off as A’s wife than by falling into the claws of C. Thus, the doubt comes to an end, and a unified, resolute subject turns against the external counterpower C. No means are avoided, and it ends with A gunning him down during an attempted violence (representative action). Prison time and ruined health. B marries D and it is horrible. A new variation can be imagined wherein the counterpower again becomes internal. A gladly bears the prison sentence and knows that B is waiting for him when he comes out. But then it starts to dawn on him that he did not kill C to help B, but the mainspring was rage and jealousy when he believed C was the preferred one. The unconscious art of motivation has led him to the light. A less sensitive moralist would have a good day in this opportunity and, after release, approach B with a sharpened appetite. But A no longer feels worthy; in his own eyes he is now a common killer. The internal counterpower, the conscience, stands in solidarity with the external, legal apparatus.

§ 88. I. The stricken contributes to the process with existential guilt, physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological, ethical, criminal, or metaphysical guilt. The term “tragic guilt” – Without interest-bearing subjects, there are no catastrophes; existential guilt is therefore always present in a tragic cours. Existential guilt is a purely causal relationship that has nothing to do with assessment. The same applies to physiological guilt. This form of guilt is presumably also present in any tragic course since greatness – including the acquired kind – must find at least some of its preconditions in the constitutional uniqueness of the bearer. The relationship is clear when it is a physical defect that has driven the subject to acquire a greatness as compensation, and even more clear with innate greatness. The philanthropist becomes terminally ill; it turns out that one has not withstood the air in the slums. (One might bear one’s death heroically but not that one’s work be interrupted right now; half-done is worse than nothing.)

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Functional guilt seems at first glance to be in the same position, since a misfortune caused by a functional guilt (breathing, eating, walking on the street) belongs to the common human sphere of life. It flows from a risk minimum to which the stricken is exposed not qua great human, but qua human. Yet the functional guilt can be thought to have independent significance for a tragic course, namely where the stricken would not have performed the common human function now, here, and so, if one had not been driven by one’s greatness. The philanthropist has a road accident on the way to the slum. If one had gone elsewhere, one would not have taken this taxi. However, the causal link is so “weak” that we must willingly give way to a view that excludes functional guilt from the tragic course. The engagement, we might say, which is aimed at the realization of greatness, has already left the common human basis and belongs to the exceptional. In actual cases, sometimes one and sometimes the other point of view could have the most to offer. With innate greatness, it also seems to make no sense to speak of psychological guilt. The realization is initiated by constitutional forces that do not need to be conveyed by an act of will. As was also emphasized in its section, such a characteristic may have greatness only for the observer since it does not stand out for the bearer from one’s other characteristics. The bearer must be aware of the characteristic’s (ability’s) peculiar significance (e.g., by meeting resistance); one must take it into one’s consciousness, evaluate it, and acknowledge it. Thereby psychological guilt also comes into being. That it then plays an important role in realization needs no further proof. Ethical guilt lurked in the background when we spoke of the internal counterpower. Now, one would think that when a person acquires ethical guilt by realizing one’s greatness, then it would have been even “greater” if one had neglected the realization – and in that case one ceases to be tragic; by putting one’s greatness into practice under these conditions one no longer does “one’s best,” one no longer acts representatively. But a human mind is not organized according to a schema that our present knowledge can determine; theoretically incompatible tendencies can flourish side by side. Ethical guilt may be present even if the agent is convinced of the dominant cultural value of one’s pursuit. (It may have such a value in its generality, but certain considerations may allow it to step into the background here and now.) And one is not always ready to give it up at the first tinge of doubt. The artist is working on his great oeuvre. As long as the work continues, he cannot earn his bread; he is sustained by his old mother who is herself struggling for his sake. What determines whether the artist is great or not? His own knowledge or imagination? The judgment of the

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day? The judgment of the future? Which future? What is the ranking relationship between the pursued, possibly achieved, and the sacrificed value? For one who sees in the mother’s peaceful old age a more important cultural concern than the completion of the work of art, the case will not be tragic for the artist (though it was a painting or a plastic work like Michelangelo’s, a symphony like Beethoven’s, a drama like Ibsen’s. In Hebbel the example is almost realized.).108 Unfortunately, we lack a generally valid, intersubjective scale. The imagined genius who, according to all judges, has no ability does not become tragic if he lets his mother wear herself out and is then broken by a nag of conscience. (It must then be tragic on another basis, namely an upturn to ethical greatness whose source is infected by catastrophic ingredients.) The boundary must be drawn in each case. Although the artist’s own efforts and good faith are the same in both cases, whether or not one is successful will nevertheless influence the judgment concerning the tragic in one’s fate. And it will also influence one’s selfreproach. But even with definite success, the feeling of ethical guilt is not ruled out: During the high thrill of the work, the artist has no sense of anything else – now that everything is over, he remembers his mother there and then, the bent back, the tired eyes. Or he did not think she worked that hard – now that she is dead, he knows she did work at night too, but kept quiet about it so as not to distract him. The first thought that arises when criminal guilt is mentioned in connection with the tragic is indeed this: Can culturally relevant greatness be punished at all? Is not the penal code at all times kept in line with the same cultural assessment that forms the basis on which something is called great? Unfortunately, this is not the case with these matters as one would prefer. The human group that produces the penal code is not the only one that counts culturally, and greatness can get its stamp from a group other than the one to which the penal code commission belongs, an artistic, religious, philosophical, political, or athletic group. For this reason, legislators do not have to represent an inferior cultural consciousness. They have other goals at which to aim. The criminal guilt tragedy is of the kind that may appear interfrontal to the observer, although for the bearer it is monofrontal: One does not recognize the criminal considerations, only one’s own greatness – while the observer recognizes both and with pain sees their incompatibility.

108 In relation to Elise Lensing.

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The social-moral consciousness of a human being sometimes works quickly; the road is short from experience (case) to a new principle. Legislation cannot travel the inductive road at such a rapid pace; the commission may enter it, but then turn back; perhaps it later arrives at the same result as the individual reformer, but it takes times. The commission has things to consider that the individual can ignore. During this time, the current rule and the new view are at odds with each other. The moral genius must act according to one’s conviction, but in doing so one is also criminally guilty. But even outside such times of legislative crisis, an antinomy can arise between the culturally great and the criminally permissible. The motive for an action can have cultural relevance, while the result sets the judicial system in motion (formal torts, unintentional consequences). Or the agent has used a means (e.g., a fraud) in confidence in the success and economic benefits; but this fails due to unforeseen and unpredictable coincidences. Briefly: The representative pursuit of individual and collective confirmation may not always restrict itself to criminally permissible paths; life sometimes breaks the frame of criminal law. Something similar applies to the moral judgment of society, which the bearer does not share. Ethical and criminal guilt can also be linked to the origin of greatness. Young A steals an idea from old B, who breaks down after the loss. The idea releases endless abilities in A; he realizes the idea for the betterment of humanity in a way that demonstrates his superiority over B. Then he learns about B’s fate and this news devastates him. His own efforts are now nothing compared to the wrongs he has inflicted on B. Contemporaries judge differently. A had enough “latent” or “potential” talent even before he stole the plan, but without its inspirational influence one must assume that it would not have come to fruition. A, for example, would have gone to sea for the rest of his life, while B’s idea concerned a method for ore removal; A instead becomes a mineralogist. Guilt may be linked to the realization of greatness, as we have already seen, and finally to its consequences. Ultimately ethical guilt is part of the catastrophe, tantamount to the loss of “the joy of innocence.” The religious leader will have an ethical-metaphysical feeling of guilt if he saves his family’s life by renouncing his faith – and he will have an ethical-social feeling of guilt if he “egoistically” secures salvation by surrendering those closest to him to the executioner’s fancy. The notion of metaphysical guilt has often been associated with the tragic, or rather the catastrophic course. The gods give humans greatness in order to

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raise the height of the downfall; humans realize their greatness in violation of the privileges of the gods – exceeding the limits set for their unfolding (cf. the idea of “the envy of the gods”). Or the gods use the great person as a tool and throw one away when the purpose is achieved. Or a person buys greatness in exchange for the salvation of one’s soul. Our point of view here is neither historical nor aesthetic, and thus speculations of this kind should not preoccupy us, except to provide a figurative expression of a biological or psychological reality; as interpretations of these we cannot use them. They can then also be varied and supplemented by inventive minds at any time. One who in order to realize a greatness in the external world neglects one’s contemplation may feel a real ethical-metaphysical guilt. It is then just a special case of ethical guilt. The incomprehensible metaphysical guilt, on the other hand, is a separate concept. “Tragic guilt.” The previous investigations have given the concept a tentative outline. Tragic guilt must contain both a causal factor and an assessment factor. The causal factor may be clothed in (along with existential guilt) physiological guilt, functional guilt, psychological, criminal, and metaphysical guilt (in the Greek or Calvinist sense). Greatness is one of the many preconditions to which catastrophe can be traced. The assessment factor is clothed in ethical guilt; but this ethical guilt is of a double nature: It refers partly to the realization of greatness as a norm of action, and partly to other considerations as a norm of action. “Tragic guilt” is therefore a synthetic term; it refers to the risk a person takes by realizing one’s greatness, risk in both causal-related and in assessment-related respects. But this risk is basically the same, whether realization later proves to lead to success or to catastrophe. Therefore, when the catastrophe must be regarded as a random consequence of greatness, the applicability of the term tragic guilt is greatly weakened; one is tempted to let it go. Somewhat stronger is the position of the appropriate or “necessary” tragic course (cf. K.). But I would not have used the term if it were not for the completely dominant place it occupies in older theories of the tragic. And even there it has had changing content; sometimes the emphasis is put on the metaphysical, sometimes on the ethical, etc. For the layperson, it has an air of obscurity and deep mystery. If one uses it today, one must always be prepared to support it with elaborate commentary; it lends itself poorly to going out into the world on its own two feet. The word tragic alone also covers practically the same meaning, and one gets to know the guilt relationship best by dividing it into its individual components.

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§ 89. K. Randomness and necessity in the tragic course For a philosophical view of causality, the distinction between necessity and coincidence probably cannot be maintained; everything in the total course is, for the principled view, equally “necessary” or equally “random” – the expressions really have no meaning.109 If they are to make sense, one must first isolate a specific, definite course, with beginning and ending, and hold oneself strictly to this. The easiest to grasp is such a movement wherein the course is overlaid with interest, where it in some way or another coincides with a human endeavor, a plan. There are two ways in which an interest-related course can be considered: from the result back to the preconditions or from the preconditions to the result. In the first case, one has the result before one as a historical fact, while conditions and origin lie in the past and must be reconstructed, possibly under uncertainty. In the latter case, current conditions are configured for a future, more or less uncertain result. Looking at the first case, we can distinguish between essential and inessential factors (essentialia and accidentalia). To break the window, the man had to throw a rock, this is essential; inessential, on the other hand, is whether he throws a piece of quartz or granite. The distinction is carried by the fact that one does not perceive the result with “theoretical” or “principled” precision but makes a practical choice between the marks that characterize the result. The choice is determined by the meaning of the effort: A house, a ship gets meaning, unity, coherence, and form by the function for which it was intended; humans, by their relation to the objects, create a synthesis of planks, bolts, ropes, etc., and call this synthesis a ship. The locations of the knots in the woodwork, on the other hand, are of no significance to the resulting ship. It is the same in all human purposes: They are given outlines, names, and identities according to what humans will with them, seeking in them coverage for their needs. Their “demarcation in everything” “corresponds” to a demarcation in consciousness. From this point of view follows a different philosophy than the principled, a practical philosophy, and it is in it alone that the contradiction of necessity and coincidence has meaning (apart from metaphysical systems). The inessential conditions in the origin of the result do not attract attention at all (that the planks come by boat or train, that the builder has a red 109 Cf. Clauberg and Dubislav, Systematisches Wörterbuch d. Philosophie [Systematic Dictionary of Philosophy] art. “Zufall [Coincidence].”

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shirt, etc.), as long as the result is consistent with the plan. But if the plan is crossed (the boat is leaking, etc.), then I ask for the cause, and if I do not find it in the essential (appropriate) features of the origin, then I examine the inessential. And it may happen that I find it there: The ox in the neighboring yard has pierced the boat. Actually, it was aiming at the builder, who was wearing a red shirt, but he was saved by jumping to the side. When the alteration of the plan is due to inessential features of the origin, it is said in the following that the cause is random.110 In relation to the result, the shirt could also have been blue. Through randomness, accidentalia gain interest-related relevance. Now it turns out that the boat is leaking because the planks are wormeaten. I asked the builder, “Why did you use the planks?” If he replies, “Because I was drunk,” the cause is random (unless the man is always drunk) – but if he replies, “Because there was no other material to acquire,” then it is necessary. However, it is immediately seen that if one goes one more step backward in the series of causes (the previous “last link” is then considered as a result), then new possibilities of randomness arise: “Why is there no other material to acquire?” “Because the warehouse burned down last week.” “Why did it burn down?” etc. The question as to whether a precondition is random or necessary can therefore only be answered when one draws a certain boundary for the origin, arbitrarily determining its beginning. The conditions that exist within this boundary are then accepted as necessary. I lose my left thumb while chopping wood; the reason is random: One can actually chop without the finger accompanying. (The notch in the chopping block, on the other hand, is unavoidable.) But if I were born without a left thumb, the reason is not random, but necessary: I draw a boundary for the investigation at my own birth. I accept the conditions that existed at that point in time because I have never been able to exert any influence on them. That I could have been born mute, handsome, rich, as a prince in another century, etc., are “possibilities” that belong to daydreams and are of no value to my real hope of confirmation. The case wherein I was born with a distinctly clumsy and reckless nature, such that it “is just like me” to chop my finger off, points to the need for a scale. The necessary preconditions for a result must then be seen partly in the “laws of nature,” and partly in the human willful and intentional efforts. Under the laws of nature are found the environment’s static and dynamic fixedness, 110 Another formulation, see Rötscher, “Der Zufall und die Notwendigkeit im Drama [Coincidence and Necessity in Drama],” in Jahrbuch f. dramatische Kunst u. Literatur [Yearbook for Dramatic Art and Literature] Vol. I, Berlin 1845 p. 123, cf. Zimmermann ibid. p. 376.

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night darkness, gravity, growth and increasing age, biological death, the neighbor’s envy, and other normal reactions, etc., common human or known individual traits of the mental life. Without sharp boundaries, the necessity of the first passes from doubt into descending degrees of predictability, until the scale ends in pure hazard, where human plans are at the mercy of chance. In epic and dramatic poetry, one often finds the character of the protagonist established as an unshakable precondition; at the same time, the poet gives in the exposition the state of things outside the character, which one asks the reader to accept without criticism. This kind of necessity, however, has proved to dissolve into randomness when one takes one or more steps backward toward the origin. Pieces of necessary connection are separated by random segments, and the necessity of the overall chain then becomes no stronger than the necessity of the least necessary link. Concerning the ship, one goes back to the fire in the warehouse and from there to a careless vagrant, from the person to the parents and what made them come together. Only by drawing an arbitrary boundary for the origin do we get a sequence fragment with a necessary origin. However, there is also another kind of necessity; one may call the first an open necessity, the other a closed one. A loses his brother’s glasses in the grass and does not find them again as they have fallen into a hole – a random cause. A loses them in the sea from a ship and does not find them again – the cause belongs to open necessity. The brother B himself loses the glasses in the grass and cannot find them again because of a closed necessity: If he had been able to find them without glasses, he would not have needed glasses at all. Only by chance could he find them again. C is denied a union card because he does not have work. The reason why he does not have work can be quite random – he was, for example, terminated due to an odd misunderstanding. Or it may be “openly necessary” – he is incapacitated by illness, possibly congenital. If he cannot work at all without having a union card first, the reason is a closed necessity. The university student must abandon his degree, since he does not have private pupils to tutor; he must have these in order to pay for his studies. Random cause: A female colleague, whose goodwill he has spurned, slandered him to the students. Open necessary cause: He lacks the ability to teach. Closed necessary cause: He is not allowed to teach before taking the exam. I could not have come into the world as a handsome prince in the 11th century, for had I done so, it would not have been “me.” Sometimes the closed necessity reveals a double-acting impetus: If the psychopath had not had his illness, he would not have had his greatness either; the illness is thus a closed necessary cause of the dissolution

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of greatness. In order for the revolution to be carried through, the leaders must flatter and excite the masses; after the victory, the masses turn to the leaders and demand the power they deserve according to the agitation applied. (When a means has two properties, one of which cannot be dispensed with, the other becomes necessary.) But the masses could have been different – then the necessity is open. With open necessity the value would have been saved if condition a had been changed to a1. With closed necessity, such a change does not help, for by it the value itself is removed. (In a monograph concerning the random-necessary opposition here one would have to work both in breadth and depth. In relation to the concept of the tragic, the given suggestions will suffice.) I have not seen the terms open and closed necessity used, but the terms external and internal necessity are often encountered – unfortunately, as a rule, without definition. The terms could be used synonymously with openclosed, but this would invite other conceptions. By “external” necessity one could partly think of a factor which was tied to its “causa,” by “internal” of one which was determined by its “telos.” Or with external necessity one could connect the force that “external” powers exert on a course, forces of nature and other people’s intervention – while “internal” could refer to the demands of character, morality, logic, and the like in the agent. The possibility of even more interpretations arises when the reader encounters the expressions in the various writers of tragic and dramaturgical theory. Because of this ambiguity, I have found that one must deviate from the linguistic tradition. Such preconditions which later turn out to be decisive for the plan’s fate, but which the agent neither “had to” nor “could” expect, are random. While necessity is linked to fixedness and predictable variations, randomness is linked to the unpredictable. One thinks of the weather. This example also shows that preconditions (likewise consequences) can change from random to necessary through increasing appropriateness – namely by increasing insight, here the meteorological. What is still random for the undeveloped, the advanced must sometimes take into account. The term appropriateness, on the whole, has many advantages over necessity; it fills the term’s absolutist-mineral crust with dynamic life. And it leaves room for the comment that we have nothing but experience upon which to build when we say that a is a necessary precondition for the result A. Many sources of error can enter into experience and its interpretation; the term appropriateness has room for all of them. It shows the tension of living between object and

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ability, while the term necessity is just a dead formula. The contradistinction random-necessary is, as stated, not sharp either; the transition is captured by a scale of appropriateness. By necessary we thus mean highly appropriate, and by random we mean inappropriate. In dramaturgical theory, one continually finds the term necessary, primarily “internal necessity,” used concerning a nexus that is not even highly appropriate but is formed by an arbitrary selection from among the determining factors. A factor can also move from random to necessary in a way other than by the increase of insight. It was said that what could just as well have been different on the occasion, without the practical identity of the result changing, can be attributed to the inessential features of the origin, and that an interest-crossing consequence of such an inessential factor is to be regarded as random. The result, whose practical identity is A (ship), has, according to experience, the necessary conditions a, b, and c (planks, bolts, boatbuilder). Whether the planks are of pine or oak (a1 or a2), the nails of iron, metal, or wood (b1-b2-b3), etc., is of no significance to the resulting ship (A), but important to the resulting polar ship, ship for scientific expedition, etc. (A1-A2, etc.). The more detail one uses to describe the result, the more preconditions are shifted from being inessential to being essential, and the more kinds of intrusions go from being inappropriate to being appropriate, from being “random” to being “necessary.” As a curiosity can be mentioned Karl Marbe’s111 theory concerning the “statistical equation”; When a certain “random” event of two or more possibilities (birth of boys, red color in roulette) has recurred a certain number of times, there is a reversal; the number never reaches staggering heights (which in nature would mean catastrophe), an “equalization” takes place as if an invisible regulatory hand intervened. In a short summary like this, the theory says almost nothing, and the rich speculation it invites we must unfortunately abandon. Randomness is an essential part of life as long as our insight is limited. Through increasing knowledge we execute a gradual transition, we extract “chaos” from “cosmos”; that is, we partly adapt the world to our needs, partly our needs to it.

111 Et al. in Grundfragen d. angewandten Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung u. theor. Statistik [Fundamental Question of Applied Probability Calculation and Theoretical Statistics], Munich and Berlin 1934 p. 12.

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If one now looks at the course in the reverse direction, from the given preconditions to the possible consequence, then a quite similar consideration applies, as will be remembered from the section on criminal law in the previous chapter. “Necessary” consequence means highly appropriate consequence, “random” consequence means inappropriate consequence; between the extremes lies a scale. Here too one finds randomness as a variant within an appropriate main phenomenon: The explosion is a necessary consequence of the ignition of dynamite, but in the fragment’s point of impact one can observe an increasing randomness. One then thinks of the impact’s significance for other interest-related processes, which have nothing to do with the blast: At the critical moment, a fragment blocks the keyhole just in front of the jealous husband’s eyes, which in turn will determine the family’s continued unity. A shot into a crowd necessarily hits (i.e., with a high appropriateness of perhaps 1,000 to 1) someone, but it is random that the victim is P. W. Pedersen, a widow’s only son, who was in the crowd because … and who should have been on the very same day … etc. – here the probability level is perhaps 1 to 1,000. These circumstances were unknown and therefore inessential to the person who shot. The analysis of the concept of randomness, like other such preliminary investigations, could have been placed in an earlier chapter, so that here we could content ourselves with applying the results. But it is precisely this investigation that I have wanted to have fresh in memory when the aspect is to be applied to the tragic course. In the tragic course, one has to deal with two main phases of origin, that of the greatness and that of the catastrophe. A distinction could be made in detail between the origin of the greatness, of the attacked value, of the counterpower, and of the occasion, and in each place one could separate the random from the necessary. Such an investigation in general and in addition to the preceding would have hardly any value. Should a practical case make it desirable, the means have been made available. In the case of innate greatness (possibly certain dispositions), the origin lies in unknown inheritance paths; for the life of the bearer, inheritance is a precondition one does not escape, but in the preconditions of these preconditions one finds the richest game of chance. The transition to acquired greatness is characterized precisely by the fact that the determining randomness moves down into the bearer’s own life. The more one attempts to make sense of innate traits in a person’s greatness, the easier it is to see it as inevitable; one thinks: A trait like this would have broken through in any

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environment. The question raises a myriad of other issues and should not take up space here. Far more fruitful is the consideration’s application to catastrophe as the consequence of greatness; here one has a more easily accessible and quite well-defined field of observation. When it comes to the moral appraisal of the agent’s efforts, one must acquaint oneself with his or her conditions, while he or she acts, while he or she still stands with the hope in mind and the means in hand, not knowing for sure how everything will turn out. In other cases, one is faced with a given catastrophe with the task of clarifying the preconditions. Poets such as Sophocles and Ibsen have used such a retrospective method. As a rule, however, we must assume that the tragic course lies in front of us in its entirety, so that both preconditions and catastrophe are given. The task is then to determine the extent to which the catastrophe is a necessary or random consequence of the greatness, or rather: to determine the degree of appropriateness in the individual phases. The counterpower in itself is usually of no interest. The counterpower which represents another cultural endeavor and is thereby marked by necessity must be an exception; the counterpower which is a fruit of greatness or has a common origin with it and is thereby connected to greatness with closed necessity also stands in a special position. More important, however, is the question of necessity concerning the occasion of the counterpower being directed against the attacked interest, by “short circuit” so to speak. Two main variants present themselves: (a) the catastrophe comes from the realization of greatness in the original environment and (b) from the bearer seeking a new one. (a) An individual jealous person in an otherwise favorable environment will appear as a random counterpower, unless one assumes that there will always be “someone” who does not tolerate the greatness of one’s neighbor. It is different when the whole age opposes the bearer of greatness; when it is precisely the mark of the age that has provoked or triggered the greatness (tyranny), the necessity is closed. Or the greatness is of the kind that must awaken the counterpower regardless of the time period, because there is something commonly human in the reaction. In the case of an internal counterpower: The composition of the character may seem random; it is possible to imagine a great artist or politician who also tolerates young people having success. Certain character compositions are more common than others; nature necessarily gives a person, for example, the valuable trait a without at the same time giving the

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unfortunate trait b or withholding the valuable trait c. Moral tact is difficult to associate with acting power, etc. (see below). Schema: If one imagines ad hoc greatness as a column of bricks placed individually on top of each other, there are bricks of such shape that the column will collapse even on the flattest ground when a certain height is reached. With other bricks, one could theoretically reach an unlimited height (planed slabs); but the earthly foundations are never completely flat, and wind gusts and tremors occur everywhere. In order to avoid all disturbances, one would have to build such a complicated apparatus that the stacking would lose its purpose, etc. Catastrophe is appropriate everywhere. Coincidentally, on the other hand, stacking in a haphazard way is safe if the foundation is just about level (at limited height); but the builder has in unimaginable folly chosen the top of a cone, or the choice of foundation was remarkably bad (mud). The result is appropriate within this choice. Practical example: A gifted and idealistic politician hopes that his only daughter, whom he loves more than anything on Earth, will continue his life’s work (appropriate). He nurtures her into an important political personality. At a discussion meeting, she gets to know the opposing party’s leader and is captivated by his glow (appropriate? random?); a love affair develops between them and they marry. She anticipates her father’s negative reaction and dares not meet him face to face; they travel far away and tell him about what has happened in a letter. In his first desperation, the father writes a letter back and curses the daughter. But at night he has a struggle within himself, and love triumphs (appropriate?). The next morning he telegraphs a conciliatory text to his daughter and asks her to bring the man with her and come home. By a mistake in the telegraph service the daughter receives the letter first, despairs and shoots herself (random?). Or: On receiving the telegram, the daughter dies of joy. Or: She rushes to her husband with the telegram; he is implacable and swears to destroy her father. Her eyes are charged, she leaves him forever and travels home (NB train accident), after which everything ends up with idyll. Or: The daughter goes to the station to telegraph back (a way she otherwise would not have gone) and is hit by a taxi (random) or a meteorite (even more random). Or: Her husband is also overcome by her father’s love; they travel back and there is a full reconciliation (appropriate?). The husband is then shot by his associates who suspect him of treason (appropriate? In relation to the reconciliation, the consequence is appropriate if the husband’s party is a group of terrorists, but it is not because the father-in-law is conciliatory – the appropriateness is open.). The daughter curses her father for his

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reconcilability – without it she would have lived happily with her husband in a foreign land (completely inappropriate?). Or: The young couple does not allow themselves to be moved by telegrams; eventually the daughter places her knowledge at the husband’s disposal, after which, as a result of this knowledge, he destroys the father-in-law and his work. As one can see, some factors are undoubtedly appropriate, while others are just as random; still others, and probably the vast majority, raise doubt. Well, one says, a course like this sounds reasonable, but another or opposite course would also have been reasonable. Speaking of necessity in any of these courses as a whole clearly has no meaning. When the dramaturgists speak of “internal necessity,” they usually mean nothing more than that the course is reasonable. (b) When the greatness is realized by the bearer seeking a new environment, the relationship can be represented by a simple diagram.

FIGURE 14: Greatness realized by the bearer seeking a new environment. S denotes a group of subjects surrounded by the present environment I, while II is the new environment. Right figure shows the possibility of environment II having one sector with a favorability degree of 0.

S denotes a group of subjects surrounded by the present environment I, of which the degree of favorability is 1. In this environment, life can be kept going at a low level and with a large margin of suffering. Only one of the subjects, namely S1, has enough buoyancy and ability to strive for a higher way of life; but in order to realize this idea one must move out of the environment in which one lives. The representative subject succeeds in breaking the boundary and penetrating the surrounding environment layer II. Three possibilities can then be imagined: The new environment has favorability degree 2 within the circle, and the greatness will then necessarily lead to success. Or the new environment has favorability degree 0 within the circle, and the result of the

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effort will then necessarily be catastrophe. (If the subject S1 returns to live in environment I, the hope will at the least have been destroyed.) Third possibility: Only one sector of the new environment has a favorability degree 0, while the rest has favorability degree 2. The narrower the sector with degree 0, the more random the catastrophic outcome; the wider it is, the more appropriate the tragedy becomes. Randomness may prove to cover an underlying appropriateness: The subject S1 has a character that forces one to attack the new environment at 0. If one had not attacked right there, one would not have crossed the border at all (closed necessity). The scale from basic random catastrophe to the necessarily tragic can be illustrated by an example, namely the fruit tree used above. (1) The storm breaks both the rich and the poor branch: basic random catastrophe. (2) Both rich and poor branches wither as the tree grows old: basic, necessary catastrophe. (3) The storm breaks the rich branch because of its heaviness, but not the poor: random, “tragic” catastrophe. (4) Gravity breaks the rich branch, but not the poor: necessary, “tragic” catastrophe. Necessity can be linked to the different kinds of fixed conditions (laws), chemical, physical, physiological, psychological, and logical laws, as well as moral considerations (biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical), the intention necessitating these and the means.

§ 90. Is there an absolutely necessary tragedy? It is clear that the random tragic is inferior to the necessary, in terms of the cultural pursuit. Random tragedy strikes hope here and now and for this person, but not there, not in the future, not for other people. The more necessary the tragedy, the larger the area of hope that is laid to waste. The necessary tragedy is qualified while the random tragedy is not. The looser one sets the requirement for appropriateness, the easier it is to find examples; as the requirement is tightened, the collection shrinks. It is then a question of whether a completely necessary, universal human tragedy is at all conceivable, a truly definitive principled blockade of some inalienable path of hope for confirmation of a universal human readiness for life. We then no longer ask what is necessary under this or that precondition (with a sufficient number of accepted preconditions any catastrophe becomes “necessary”) – such as, for example, temporal and local climatic conditions, the current form of society, this or that cultural period, under the sway of this or that collective

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pseudo-solution. We ask what is necessary tragedy under preconditions that are present for all human beings at all times, preconditions that cannot be changed without both “human nature” and “cosmic conditions” changing. We ask if there is a species typical tragedy in the sense that a human will always face it, especially if one is the bearer of certain types of greatness. The question falls into two parts: (1) Are there any characteristics or abilities that at all times are considered to be great by the culturally conscious, that is, as important to the common human confirmation struggle? (2) Are there any of these properties that will always, directly or indirectly, lead to the downfall of the corresponding endeavor? 1. If the question is aimed at the possibility that every single existing person in historical time throughout one’s entire culturally conscious life should recognize a common form of greatness as inalienable, then the question is answered with a no to all of the above. A sharp reduction of the requirements must be made if we wish to approach a positive possibility. The research, which alone would require lifetimes, would need to compare the assessments, paths, and goals of the different races and cultural traditions; one could not settle for an external similarity (e.g., between Germanic and Japanese “heroism”), but would have to go into the individual elements of the ideas and their origin, the dynamics of thought and emotion, etc., and this is still not said to have been reached. Already in the first place, therefore, we find the field of inquiry limited to what, with Cyclopean linguistic usage, is usually called the Western European cultural tradition; but also within this, new boundaries arise between an increasing number of separate assessment communities. In the history of philosophy, as in the image of Europe today, one looks in vain for formulatable common main lines of cultural endeavor. At any rate, it should be clear that only that which in the overall human confirmation struggle has an eye toward a community in assessment, a commonly recognized “ideal,” will be able to operate as a species typical tragic course. The safest move here is to suggest the possibility of a scale on which the most fleeting individual whim forms the lower pole, and which rises toward ever greater commonality with the culturally conscious, both in time and space. Relatively high on this scale (not to say at the highest step) one would find, or rather, one must place an assessment like the following: It is beneficial to the overall struggle for confirmation that each individual expands one’s consciousness and refines one’s sensitivity, sympathizes with one’s fellow human beings,

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and seeks to find and realize a meaning of existence as a whole, one’s own and that of humanity. Generally speaking, these strongest widespread collective tendencies cannot be well-formulated. If it now turns out that some of these efforts are associated with danger to the same degree as they deserve the term greatness, then one has come as close to a case of common human tragedy as at all possible – within the main viewpoint used here. 2. That the various characteristics that contribute to the realization of the “humanistic cultural ideal” outlined above – honesty, objectivity, etc. – predispose to a tragic course in a suitable environment can be seen as a first approximation to the necessary tragedy. Thus, the highly developed risk suffering from a lack of objects, the picky eater consistently has more difficulty being satisfied than the indiscriminate eater, the highly cultured easily becomes lonely. On the whole: the greater the demand, the more difficult the fulfillment. A “universal tragic tendency” could be said to lie in the fact that the capacity for suffering grows as the life of consciousness grows; one thinks of the scale mineral – plant – lower animal – higher animal – human – tragic human. It is then presumed that the growing consciousness does not lead to improved means of combatting the suffering, a question worth investigating. As a predisposition, it can also be mentioned that the “nerves” cannot carry an equipment of imagination, feeling, memory, etc., beyond a certain measure. The historical developments to date, in known and unknown details, have included such a wide margin of meaningless and horrifying suffering that it is highly appropriate to connect increasing clarity and stronger compassion in the observer with greater despair. And the picture today does not indicate any imminent improvement in this relationship; it is the opposite. Nor would it help the past victims whose life interests were irrevocably destroyed. The impact can only be ameliorated through interpretations of the past and reference to future possibilities. Under “predispositions” toward tragedy one may also mention the “tendency” in nature that when an “impetus,” or whatever one would call it, has become sufficiently strong, or has repeated itself a sufficient number of times, then a counter-impetus or reaction occurs (cf. Marbe and the “statistical equalization”) thereby avoiding catastrophe. The statement really says nothing more than that the environment has so far allowed organic life to exist. Does such a conservation principle (which in nature slows down the quantitative

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“greatness”) also apply to human nature with its forms of greatness? Hebbel thought so: A metaphysical regulator knocks down the individual who has “exceeded the limits of nature” – either through “hubris” (“arrogance”) or because one was made a tool in the service of “progress.” Cf. Ibsen’s “cornerstones under the wrath of necessity”a and the Greek idea of the envy of the gods. In Herodotus (VII, 10), Artabanus tells Xerxes: You see that God hurls his lightning against the living beings who tower above the others. He does not allow them to presume anything. The small, on the other hand, do not bother him. You see that lightning always strikes the tallest houses and trees. God loves to put limits on everything that is too high … God does not allow anyone but himself to have proud thoughts.112

The pioneer will easily meet resistance in all circumstances because the plan is new and untested. It can also be immature; the conservative and the traditionalists react. The pioneer cannot be blamed for lack of insight; it is often the fate of the innovator to be thanked for the insight the successors think he or she should have had. Cf. Welhaven’s “Protesilaos.” When “wisdom” pushes far enough, it can cast doubt on the value of wisdom (Ecclesiastes 1:18; cf. 7:4). As the “sphere” of recognition grows, the surface area also grows toward the unknown. A continual analysis also finally attacks values one would prefer to leave untouched; thought “breaks in” and causes depression. But this peripeteia does not occur in all branches of research; for long distances, on the way research provides useful fruits and joys of its own, and it continues to assert itself as one of the most important paths of hope. Cultural endeavor necessitates certain renunciations and displacements (proportional to the value of the effort?) of direct operational life expressions, and nature may take revenge on this (Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (The Discomfort in Culture), Vienna 1930). Caesarius of Heisterbach states concerning the decline of the monastery: “From all this we see how discipline produces abundance, and the

a From Emperor and Galilean, Act 3. 112 Cit. by Svend Ranulf: “Gudernes misundelse og strafferettens oprindelse i Athen [The Envy of the Gods and the Origin of Criminal Law in Athens],” Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser udgivne av Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab [Historical-Philosophical Announcements published by The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences], Vol. 18 p. 98. See Chap. V, various places.

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abundance, if we are not very careful, destroys the discipline, and the discipline in its fall sweeps away the abundance with it.”113 However, there is no statistical record of the fate of greatness under varying conditions, and other than as a predisposition, a susceptibility to tragedy cannot be talked about in connection with circumstances such as those mentioned. We cannot boast of having found any case of principled inevitable tragedy. The following is a tempting thought: When a greatness is of a heterotelic nature (it has its value qua means), it will not be able to bring about necessary tragedy; the characteristic (ability) has only been called great because it has been shown in experience that it works. On the other hand, an autotelic greatness has its value in itself and thus provides sanction in and by its existence. However, this thinking seems sophistical. Firstly, in all practically appearing greatness there will be both autotelic and heterotelic elements which are not always distinguishable. Secondly, the bearer of the autotelic greatness will generally base one’s well-being on something other than the mere presence of that greatness; often the greatness requires realization, and in addition the bearer is dependent on other values, for example, continued biological life. Here we encounter another previously mentioned notion that it might be tempting to try: Any perfection drive contains an abiological factor and will sooner or later conflict with continuation considerations. Theoretically, however, one cannot dismiss the possibility of success in creating a perfection ideal that is both culturally relevant and compatible with self-preservation. Furthermore, it is a widespread assessment that the representative person must be prepared to sacrifice continuation for the sake of growth; but the outcome of the conflict is heroic, not tragic, in this case. This element points toward interfrontal tragedy; perhaps we will find a more fertile field there. Perhaps there is a given greatness A which can be realized separately, and another greatness B which can be realized separately, but which mutually exclude each other despite the fact that neither of them can be dispensed with in the overall cultural endeavor? Each species of greatness is, as long as the associated path is not abandoned, something singular and inalienable, which cannot always be subordinated to another cultural consideration. If such a conflict is to be necessary, regardless of person and environment, it must be linked to fixed conditions, that is, either to the earthly dynamics, or to the constitution typical of human nature, or to the interplay between them, in other words, to a law’s “either-or” against the need’s “both-and.” In the case of 113 Cit. by Thorolf Holmboe, “Et blik ind i middelaldersk religion [A Look into Medieval Religion],” Kirke og Kultur [Church and Culture] 1937 Vol. 8 p. 484.

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earthly dynamics, one cannot ignore the possibility of a technical overcoming of the unfavorable conditions, and the same applies, albeit to a lesser extent, to physiological and psychological conditions (one thinks of the perspectives of optimistic psychoanalysis). On the other hand, we cannot operate here with a change in the human interest life, since it would mean that the entire account would have to be changed, as mentioned earlier. The humanistic-cultural endeavor to which this section pays special attention requires, on the one hand, conscientious deliberation, and on the other, effective action. But the stronger the ability of both is developed in a person, the more difficult it will be to unite them. The same applies to the “characteristic pair” of sensitivity and wide horizon (whereby the individual “burns up”), to the highly driven individuality and highly driven social cultural readiness (freedom contra order, imagination contra discipline, etc.). The incompatibility is certainly also present at a lower, non-representative stage, but does not then trigger catastrophe. However, it must be kept in mind that the will can also be characterized by greatness (greatness of fixedness) even if the ability (greatness of capacity) is not present. A central condition within these incompatible characteristic pairs is the opposition between experience and metaphysical need, between the image of the historical course and the universal demand for meaning and justice, between intellectual readiness and the equally indispensable demand for a moral world order, between the E image and the D image, or ultimately, as it is expressed daily, between “knowledge” and faith. What is here called the humanist view of culture recognizes as partial greatness, on the one hand, objectivity, intellectual honesty, and wide consciousness – and on the other: sensitivity, love of humanity, highly developed need for justice and meaning, burning faith readiness. But individually these characteristic groups imply one-sided equipment. Neither the “coldhearted” intellectualist, who only recognizes the laws of experience and logic, nor the blind believer, who recklessly interprets the world system great and small according to one’s own private needs, can be counted as a representative individual for the overall humanistic-cultural readiness. The first uses recognized means but fails to meet the central need. The other has found answers to one’s needs but has achieved this through means that in all other matters of life would lead to physical or mental ruin. Objective research has not yet been able to point to a complete meaning of life as a whole; instead, it leads to the dissolution of the last point of view and gives us complete relativity. We find ourselves more and more coldly lonely in a godless universe where we tumble and are crushed in a

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monstrous machinery of interest-estranging power, around us and in our own internal being. Faith, for its part, pulls the foundation out from under human capacity use and gives us up to chance, to desire-determined subjective judgments. The more one in one’s worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more deluded one is in the light of intellectual honesty. The autotelic value of the methods stands here in inverse relationship to the heterotelic: the “honorable” means gives a useless result, and the “dishonorable” a useful one. On these premises, a living metaphysical need (with all that is included), coupled with a burning urge and a tremendous ability to use an honorable method, will, on the one hand, characterize the most culturally valuable human type, and, on the other, be predisposed to despair with a necessity within the boundaries of appropriateness. On which person should one put one’s hope if not on the one who unites the highest need with the highest ability? It seems that here we have met the tragic form that is the closest match to what we seek: the least conditional and the most qualified, an interfrontal, highly appropriate tragedy with mutually “justified,” that is, culturally relevant counterpower, a form in which the interest of greatness is directly hit by the realization of greatness and where the catastrophe is all-encompassing. Like fire and water, these two supreme realms of hope sizzle against each other; the water extinguishes the fire, and the fire consumes the water. Neither of them can live without the other’s demise, but together they make up humanity. In this sense, humankind is a “tragic species.”

§ 91. With the question of the necessity of the tragic, another naturally arises: Can the tragic be overcome? First, it must be made clear what is meant by an overcoming of the tragic. Multiple interpretations are possible; we choose here one based on the following distinction: Either it is the stricken oneself who rebuilds one’s interest life from the ruins of the course, or it is the observer who guards oneself against a similar fate. In either case, the means may be real (factually justified) or pseudo (suggestive, affectively over-determined, etc.). Real means seem to have their place in cases of random tragedy, while the pseudo may exist in more highly appropriate forms, as in the case of basic catastrophes. However, pseudo-means are not absent in random tragedy. Real overcoming of necessary tragedy is a

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self-contradiction; to the extent that overcoming is possible, the tragedy ceases to be necessary. That the tragic is overcome implies something other and more than that it is removed, deflected, and the like. The tragic is thus removed with the last greatness-bearing individual, but the tragic relationship between greatness and catastrophe is not thereby overcome; no path of hope, which was previously closed by tragedy, has been opened. Overcoming can only happen either by greatness being given access to realization, or by the present form of greatness no longer being culturally relevant; it has been discovered that hope can follow other paths. The improved conditions and advanced assessment are to the benefit of posterity, while the tragic subject itself is helplessly lost. That the consequences are survived (by the stricken) does not mean that they are overcome; a person can be knocked down in one’s hope of confirmation without having to undergo biological demise. We are here on the border area between the tragic and the non-tragic. It must be maintained that the course has to risk central interests; if, therefore, the stricken is regenerated, and in one’s time (without the help of “isolation,” etc.) builds up a new central life interest, the tragic course must be regarded either as partial, or as a “pedagogical” phase. Casual conditions must be decisive here. If one looks first at the stricken person, then it is difficult to spot real overcoming opportunities even if the tragedy is inappropriate. If, for example, the stricken comforts oneself with the fact that the course was random and that a new greatness bearer will have better luck, then one is not stricken in one’s interest core, only partially; one’s fate may be heroic, but not tragic. However, the stricken person can, as long as biological life is preserved, save oneself by pseudo-solutions, cf. Chapter Six; as examples are mentioned: Isolation, distraction, and attitude: The stricken flees the scene and everything reminiscent of the incident one plunges into a vortex of superficial diversions; one continues to exist on the low-autotelic remnants of one’s interest life – such a reaction need not cast a shadow over one’s former greatness. Here we are not dealing with real resources; culturally the person is destroyed. Alcoholism, narcotics, desperate “heroism” or rabulism, the glory of martyrdom in one’s own eyes signify resorts of this kind. An assessment of the new fruits of life in relation to the lost is out of the question. Rewriting, interpretation (rationalization), and anchoring. With rewriting one can, for example, undo the causal relationship between greatness and catastrophe; thereby the catastrophe is reduced to being basic and greatness retains its fundamental hope. In principle, one interpretation is as good as

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the other, as long as one is not aware of the underlying reality or its absence. On the basis of epistemological nihilism, the desire-emphasized interpretation has as much going for it as the one that goes against desire. The tragic course can be deprived of its destructive nature by being set in a hypothetical and desirable context: The tragic downfall is only apparently due to greatness, but in fact the cause lies farther back, in a sin the stricken previously committed, or one’s progenitors committed (Nemesis, ancestral punishment). Or it is a reunion with the world spirit, the absolute, etc., from where the self through individuation has broken out and fallen into finiteness, etc. Intellectual dishonesty can hardly be spoken of here as long as interpretation is only presented as a possibility in which one has chosen to believe. But the step is not far to presenting the belief as knowledge. Chapter Eleven gives a brief overview of the rich harvest of good and evil that the interpretation of the tragic has produced. Among the anchors, the religious and the heroic anchors occupy a prominent place. In the first of these, the circle of interest is extended to the hereafter, whereby the earthly tragic course becomes partial in relation to the whole, or even a means in the service of confirmation. The path of grace is more important than that of greatness – by myself, I am capable of nothing, etc. If this attitude is present from the beginning, the course will not be tragic at all. On the boundary between religious and heroic anchors lies the idea of the “coming God,” the future moral universe. With each tragic and unjust fate, the “total sum” of injustice is reduced by a corresponding quantity. What so far seemed meaningless gains positive value in the wider perspective; the front of interest is expanded to include the future generations who will enjoy the fruits of my suffering, the center of gravity having shifted to them (cf. § 112). The religious anchor can be heroic, but need not be. It does not always entail a great sacrifice, and when the benefit of the heavenly values in comparison to the earthly is obvious – the choice is not always admirable. The heroic anchor usually places less severe demands on the stricken person’s faith capacity. But this anchor can, when present from the beginning, also deprive the course of its tragic character. The heroic reaction (regardless of the distinction between real approach and surrogate) can be briefly characterized as follows: In order to salvage a value that the bearer holds highly, one displays a culturally relevant greatness that is associated with a significant sacrifice – a sacrifice that the normal person would not be able to make. The sacrificed value is assessed as lower, but in return has a stronger affective value. Goods that weigh heavily in the choice’s

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scales are thus destroyed, but the value for which the effort took place is not destroyed. Herein lies the crucial difference from the tragic. The heroic attitude may be based on a factual assessment of the sacrificed and the saved good (or the prevented evil) and in this case the anchor is real; this case is dealt with in § 92. The surrogate is only present when everything is arranged for catastrophe (basic or tragic), but where the stricken, after the catastrophe has become inevitable, makes a mental maneuver and – dies “for the fatherland,” “for the future,” “for the sake of good,” etc. – something one had not thought about until that moment. While the heroic pseudo-solution is most convenient for the stricken self, there are others that are reserved more for the observer; most are available to both. The observer finds sublimation very helpful: The tragic is experienced – receptively or productively – as an autotelic phenomenon (cf. Chapter Nine). Its most important form, which even has a certain cultural relevance, is the conversion of the tragic course into art and poetry, above all into dramatic poetry. The course itself need not be in any way softened or embellished; affectively, giving form already means liberation, but of course not factually. As long as this is conceded, in the case of tragic poetry nothing of what one might call the “aesthetic betrayal” will stick, but the empathy and the factual “should not be” of the tragic course will be swallowed up by the artistic pleasure, creative joy, or ambition. With the “tertiary”114 observer in the theater, the danger of these is present in abundance, and assistance is provided by the easy opportunity for isolation and distraction; one thinks of the intermission act of eating, conversation, and toilet glory. Different from isolation is the condition wherein the stricken or the observer does not grasp the tragic perspective of what is going on and therefore only has to overcome a basic or otherwise qualified catastrophe. But the observer sometimes has an available way out that is closed to the stricken person: One can overcome the tragedy really, that is, one can secure oneself and one’s posterity against a similar fate. This can happen in different ways. 1. One can eliminate the tragic counterpower (what the stricken was not able to do) and thereby give greatness the opportunity for realization. Illustration: When the herd is protected, the magnificent specimen can unfold itself in peace. The political leader obtains for oneself the means to eliminate one’s enemies. Many a lurking counterpower (both in tragic 114 One imagines the stricken (“hero”) as “first observer” and the poet as “second.”

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on the tragic and basic catastrophes) has been dissolved through technical, medical, and psychological advances, through welfare organizations, grants and insurance, through growing social consciousness (cessation of rank difference and the like). But new counterpowers can arise in place of the old ones, and sometimes only a shifting of the tragic is achieved. 2. The counterpower is still present, but the occasion is removed. Illustration: The gardener places a support under the endangered richly bearing branch. The leader protects oneself against the dagger of envy with a powerful bodyguard. 3. One can push through a new assessment, whereby the old, endangered type of greatness loses its cultural relevance (one thinks of the excessive Spanish royalism), and instead finds paths of new hope that are less dangerous. 4. Where the stricken interest differs from the interest of effort a fourth possibility emerges: The stricken interest loses its value. The greatness is assessed as previously, but it no longer leads to tragic catastrophe, at the most to the heroic.

When one then considers the case of the necessary tragedy, as presented above – the conflict between commitment to experience and metaphysical need – is there any prospect that it can be overcome? It would have to happen that both types of greatness were allowed to be realized at the same time, but how would this be possible? Or one form of greatness or the other must lose its cultural appropriateness. Do these needs have their roots in the human organism, or are they a fruit of upbringing and tradition? Can psychoanalysis over time be thought to expose the metaphysical need as an emergency relief that covers simpler, realizable needs? Can the metaphysical need be conceivably rooted out through glandular treatment and eugenics? Or can we surrender to completely uncritical faith? For the time being, the question cannot be answered, and it leads to wild speculation. All that can be said is that until now no one who has experienced this central tragedy in its full weight has been able to provide directions for overcoming on a real path. The only possible reaction has been to head off the tragedy, for example, by suicide. Closer to a real solution lies the cessation of reproduction. If the conflict is perceived as essentially insoluble, and at the same time its two conflicting types of readiness characterize the only human worthy development, then the moral conclusion gives itself: I must refuse to create new bearers of interest. The decision would create a terminal epoch in the evolution of the human species; a panicked continuation in time means nothing;

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the end point has already been reached. Through the heroic abandonment of “posterity,” like a collapsed path of hope, the sacrificer gains a sense of autotelic confirmation. The tragic insight has matured into a resolution through which the meaningless gets a tinge of real meaning, a resolution to which all the anonymous sacrificers of the past make their contribution and which in the consciousness of renunciation is working on the final redemption. There is a feeling that says: In this renunciation, this no to continuation, lies the utmost cultural possibility of human form. It springs from a dual source: One is an unquenchable demand for love and order in the overall business of life, for justice and meaning in all conscious fates. The second is an unflinching and relentless loyalty to experience and the tools nature has given us to separate the durable from the failing, the real from the fictional, the interestserving from the interest-antagonistic. In the melancholic outlook, humankind reaches the limit of its spiritual power and at the same time depletes its ability to suffer. Then its patience is exhausted and it gives its ultimatum to life: Give me the guarantee or I will use my will against you and wipe you out. But life only responds with new ferocity, and so humankind acts. In this act it takes, by force and voluntarily, the consequence of the proud curse which was placed on the firstborn of the species at the time the requirement of order was burned into its heart with indelible handwriting.

§ 92. The heroic The unity of rising and annihilation in this extreme position necessitates yet another delimitation of the tragic – namely in relation to the real heroic. It is all the more required since a frequent mixing also occurs in poetry and theory. The determination of the heroic faces the same difficulties of nomenclature encountered in the determination of the tragic (§ 1), which shall not be mentioned again here. Yet the linguistic tradition is much more unified where the heroic is concerned,115 and with this tradition we support the tentative characteristic of the heroic (heroic outlook, posture, course, way out, fate), which was just given. It stated that the “hero” (the term rests on tradition) remains loyal to an idea of high cultural value, despite the fact that this loyalty puts one in danger or causes one serious misfortunes.116 The misfortunes, or rather 115 Cf. Kowalewski in Grenzfragen [Border Issues] Vol. 4 p. 6 and 101. 116 Høffding, Den nyere filosofis historie [The History of Modern Philosophy], Copenhagen 1903, I p. 143.

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the values that are destroyed, are assessed at a lower rank than the ideal, but affectively they weigh heavier – otherwise there is no heroism. In the loyalty to the ideal, demonstrating itself in steadfastness or in expression, the hero finds central confirmation: “Losing all was the cost of winning.”a The hero does not sacrifice in vain; in the hour of downfall, one is closer to the life answer than before. This is sometimes expressed as “the hero is greater than one’s fate”: The meaning is that one is independent of the fate of one’s other interests. As will be remembered from § 4, the word fate is used in this work as tantamount to the relationship between the actual and the interest-appropriate course. The tragic subject, on the other hand, sacrifices in vain; in the downfall one stands further away than ever. The field commander heroically sacrifices his son for the salvation of the fatherland – and wins. If he loses in spite of the sacrifice, the course is neither heroic nor tragic, only the prelude is heroic. On the other hand, when the sacrificial smoke (a different ritual is presupposed to be impossible) betrays the camp and causes defeat, the course as a whole is tragic, although the prelude is still heroic. The hero has faith, trust in the value and its terms, and this faith is preserved and strengthened through the downfall of lower values. If the tragic person originally has faith, it is annihilated; this is at the heart of the tragic catastrophe. The catastrophe to which the heroic posture most often leads in poetry and theory is biological (bodily) death; but other misfortunes also come into view. Thus, there is much reference to long-term and serious suffering, even if an ultimate catastrophe does not occur. A major requirement here as with tragedy is that the course takes place in important fields of life, at a sufficiently “high level.” That the renunciation or effort has the culturally right direction is not enough: A dental patient is not necessarily heroic. What has been said in connection with the tragic concerning the agent’s assessment in relation to the observer’s applies in full here. If the “hero” stands firm and would sooner let oneself be shot down than make a concession that the observer finds straightforward and not at all degrading (e.g., toward an insane attacker) – then one does not act heroically to the observer, but only stubbornly, etc., or even abnormally. Heroism with “unfit means” may have cultural relevance as far as the disposition (fixedness, motive) is concerned, but the application is irrelevant. “False heroism” can be spoken of when the courage conceals a fear or cowardice, when sacrifice is a pretext for escaping from existence in a respectable way, when it is the result of an overcompensation or forced as a “virtue of necessity.” a From Ibsen’s Brand, Act IV.

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Thus, in the case of the interest of effort and greatness, the same considerations apply as in the case of the tragic. With the counterpower one encounters the first difference: The heroic counterpower always has an internal component, see below. Also important is another distinction: Of central significance to the tragic was the “justified,” the culturally relevant counterpower; but with heroism the counterpower must be culturally irrelevant or of lesser value in the present case. Likewise, it is necessary that the misfortune strikes a different interest than the interest of effort. Here the misfortune must also be in functional connection with greatness, and there must be room for a choice from the hero’s side. Heroism presupposes a fixed hierarchy in the hero such that one has no doubt which value one should choose. But this hierarchy may well come into being at the moment of the trial; it is the current assessment that gives the saved and the sacrificed values their relative positions. In one case it is heroic to sacrifice the family for science, in another it is the other way around. The hero has permission, indeed duty, to sacrifice one consideration for another. When one does (it depends solely on one’s “willpower”), one knows what this engagement is about, without ethical and even metaphysical guilt, and feels oneself matured and worthy to receive confirmation – from whatever edge it may come (God, legacy, one’s own convictions, etc.). Heroism is therefore the diametrical antithesis of ethical guilt; it is ethical merit of the first rank. Then why can the tragically situated person not save oneself by the heroic posture in statu mortis?a To go out of life with a raised brow and unbroken hope, with one’s eyes directed at hypothetical but all-confirming values, and bearing witness that the heavy fate prepared for one by inferior forces is powerless against the human’s indomitable will and eternal ideals – is not even a humanistic norm a more dignified posture than letting oneself be crushed by misfortunes and seduced into depression and self-sacrifice? The question is indirectly answered in the previous section and would not have been mentioned here if we did not see support for it both in daily speech and theory. It has already been stated that the abandonment of the struggle at a time when (in the judgment of the observer) there were still fundamental reserves left has no cultural relevance. A breakdown that is not “factually” justified, appropriate, so to speak – which takes place where a better person, a clearer judgment, a greater strength would find new, principal fighting possibilities – is inferior to the heroic approach. But if one considers the situations in which the a in the time of death.

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principal fighting possibility must be regarded as lost, then any heroic variant will present itself to the honest (victim or observer) as a pseudo-solution, as a fraud, and thus lose its cultural relevance. The observer sees, for example, the heroic posture as a manifestation of one-sidedness, limitation, pseudo-anchoring, etc. Military heroes are often aided in their efforts by a narrowness or by a war-blunted consciousness. Heroism implies a maximum of acting power and therefore requires a bold conclusion to the critical deliberation, or a break of the connection between action and criticism. Particularly illustrative are cases in which the counterpower is culturally relevant or where it is precisely the interest of effort that is hit, such as in the aforementioned incompatibility of empirical honesty and metaphysical need. Here it is not possible to establish on a factual basis such a ranking as the heroic requires. Either the saved and the sacrificed interests are incommensurable, or they are equal – in the last variant they are even identical. The transition from tragic to heroic posture117 then occurs in the fact that in extremis rebus it reveals a usable ranking with which the stricken person had not previously worked. The adversity has brought one to clarity concerning one’s position and awakened one’s pathos; the most difficult trial was needed to induce one’s highest ability. The transition from heroic to tragic posture occurs similarly in that the striver is assaulted by doubt concerning the ranking that has hitherto held one up and in confidence in which one has burned the bridges behind one, – doubt concerning its usefulness or its real nature. Thus, a first flicker of tragedy appears in the heroic posture of Jesus of Nazareth when he says: “Why have you forsaken me?” If the next utterance “it is finished” can be interpreted as follows: Now it is too late anyway, then there is a possibility that the fate of Jesus may be perceived as tragic. The general assumption, however, is that the faith was strong enough to overcome the brief moments of doubt and weakness, and the course was in this case decidedly heroic. A similar consideration arises from Ibsen’s Brand when he says: “Does not a speck of salvation / a quantum satis of man’s will apply?” However, the distinction is not sharp and many intermediate forms can be imagined and found. The striver has, for example, based oneself on one or another common anchor (“the triumph of good” or the like), but is aware that its reality is not proven. No definite stance has been taken on this issue; the attitude is closest to this: If the anchor is not real then at least it should 117 The purely external, physiognomic bearing has significance as symptom of the real interest status and plays an important role in the poetic-tragic; but it does not bind the observer to any particular judgment.

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have been, and in any case, I am ready to sacrifice my life. More important is another intermediate form that can be called the heroic-tragic: The hero has indeed chosen to give up one value in favor of another, which is assessed higher, but does it without hope and without a feeling of victory, because one can only choose within a circle of resignation. A political leader is captured by a mob, which threatens him with a painful death if he is not willing to give up where his family has been hiding. He knows that they will be found sooner or later and be shot, and that they will perish pitifully even if they are not found. Still, he cannot bring himself to betray them, and the threat is carried out. The situation is completely hopeless for him and his family. And as far as the mob is concerned, it only gets more excited by the victim’s defiance. It is under completely different conditions that a “heroism” like the one he exhibits really contributes to establishing a disposition. To “die for an idea” has no meaning when the idea is not served by the sacrificer’s death. If all Norwegians “die for Norway” then there will be no more Norway for which to die. The heterotelic perspective is absent in such cases and there remains only a purely autotelic (possibly metaphysical) satisfaction, because one has acted in accordance with one’s assessment or one’s “best feeling.” Cf. the heroic renunciation of religion and other hypothetical values, in which the feeling of having retained a certain spiritual purity can in no way undo or surpass the suffering of cosmic loneliness and metaphysical futility. Something similar applies to the heroic abandonment of reproduction; the loss overshadows the gain to such an extent that any talk of real confirmation must disappear. (The relationship is judged purely intellectually; the influence of the temperament on the assessment we must disregard here.) A course that is closer to the heroic could be called tragicheroic; it is also suggested by Fredrik Paasche118 in application to Hamdesmaal. The tragic cost (feeling of loss) is clearly overshadowed by the heroic confirmation of faith: “It shall shine on our name.” Heroism and tragedy are, as one can see, two qualifications of a course that have factors in common (greatness leads to misfortune), but which in principle are different. There are tragedies that do not exhibit heroic traits; one thinks of cases of innate greatness that are realized only until catastrophe strikes; even in the case of acquired greatness, the end may come suddenly, and the counterpower is then purely external. With heroism the counterpower is also internal; the misfortune may be foreseen and warded off, a choice can be made, a temptation turned down. Mere impressive combat is not enough. Thus, it cannot 118 Norsk Litteraturhistorie [Norwegian Literary History] I p. 140–42.

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be called heroic from our point of view that despite illness Schiller was able to continue his work. Admirable and the like will be the correct expressions here. The heroic must lie in the fact that, by working, he hastened his death, though he would have rather lived, or he inflicted considerable suffering on himself which he would have rather avoided. On the other hand, there is heroism which is completely without tragic features. The hero is given the choice to die or betray one’s friends and declares oneself ready to die; the platoon takes up position and the hero just waits for the boom. Then it turns out that one was only being put to a test, and now comes the reward. The tragedy is also removed when the hero has not for a moment doubted the task: Endure to the end and thereby win the confirmation, the crown of life – e.g., Christian martyrs. One thought that will readily occur to the reader is this: What significance does it have for the distinction we will examine that catastrophe can be foreseen as appropriate? Can a course be anything other than heroic when one knows that one is exposing oneself to a sure or probable catastrophe? And if one is not aware of a danger that lies in the moment, does one not reveal a deficit in judgment that deprives one of the characters of a representative individual? Does it have meaning to talk about appropriate tragedy in this sense? The questions are answered indirectly in the previous investigations but may deserve to be directly illuminated. We first assume that it is the agent oneself who anticipates the catastrophe. If one regards it as certain, the posture is heroic, unless the element of choice is severely weakened; this may be the case with innate greatness. In pure fixedness, the heroic quality is removed, but the tragedy which is only perceived by the observer may still be present. If there is only one danger of which the striver is aware, there can be room for tragedy even if the element of choice is strong. In and with the danger, a hope is also given, and the presence of the danger does not exclude the cultural relevance of the hope. If there were no difficulties to overcome, then there would be no cultural endeavor. With heroism, the catastrophe is covered by the agent’s resolution (in the criminal law sense, cf. § 68) or at least by a dolus eventualis, by psychological guilt: Even if things go wrong, I will act as I do. In pure tragedy, this is different. The catastrophe could not even be covered by a dolus eventualis, for in that case effort would be unnecessary: The path of hope would be blocked in advance and an action despite this would only mean a superfluous affirmation. The tragic subject is culturally seeking, while the heroic has found in advance and “only” has to realize. Here too one encounters the heroic-tragic as an intermediate form.

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When talking about catastrophe, it must be remembered that the term has been used both regarding the destruction of the interest that is the origin of the entire action, and regarding the destruction of other interests, when the misfortune is significant and irreparable (the definition in § 61). Here it is important to make a distinction: If the term is used in the former sense, then there is no catastrophe at all in the heroic course, since the sacrificed values are inferior to the value of effort. If the term is used in the second sense, then there are catastrophes in both kinds of courses, but in the tragic the catastrophe becomes more extensive. Tragic greatness is in many cases compatible with failing foresight. The pioneer, for example, penetrates into an unknown region where experiences must first be had. Certain types of greatness are such that a concurrent developed cool calculating ability would have reduced the greatness (one thinks of affectively or “instinctively” conditioned greatness such as reckless love of humanity and the like). Nature is once again such that it does not distribute its gifts equally across all ability categories. An action can have the external traits of heroism without its characteristic basis. It turns out (discussing possible methods for such assessment would go too far) that the action sprang from “vanity” (the urge to be too great, cf. Lucian on Peregrinus’ self-indulgence), overcompensation (for “cowardice,” inferiority, etc.), “virtue of necessity” (otherwise it would be even worse), fixedness, mania, unconsciousness (cf. animals that “do not know fear”).

§ 93. Tragedy and lifeview We have defined tragedy as the destruction of the principal fighting possibility; in the tragic course, ruin lies in the path of hope. Thus, at the beginning of the course, hope must be present, and at the end of the course, hope must be destroyed – the tragic has its place on the path between hope and non-hope. It follows that two groups are cut off from experiencing a tragic course. One group consists of those whose hopes are based on desire and wish alone and are therefore unrelated to any empirical course. However it goes with all their real values, they preserve their hypothetical central value because they simply deny that they have been hit. To this group belong all “sworn” optimists and most religious believers. For them a tragic course reveals nothing about the one thing needful, only about the delusions of self-assertion and the frailty of the flesh. Ultimately, they save themselves by pure interpretative acrobatics

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with no trace of scruples. This approach is culturally relevant in their own eyes, but unworthy in the eyes of those who demand intellectual honesty. The second group consists of those who, from the beginning, were without hope, and therefore had nothing to lose. Such people can be found among the nihilists, Buddhists, and adherents of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For them the tragic course is just an unnecessary confirmation of things about which they were already clear. The lifeview (in the widest sense of the term as encompassing the desire image, the experience image, and the working image) has in this way significance for the possibility of experiencing a fate as tragic in our sense. But the relationship can also be the opposite. A tragic fate seems to necessarily exert some influence on both the stricken person’s and the observer’s perception of “life.” The tragic is indeed capable of being experienced as evidence; the basic catastrophes relate to the tragic like the attempts to triple the angle with compass and ruler relate to the evidence that it does not work. Thus, the tragic, by its very nature, entails a pessimistic view of the conditions of the interest, which were unique to the course. Pessimism here means: lack of faith in the possibility of the realization of an interest. Each case of tragedy will involve its own application of pessimism, determined by the struck value and the way it was struck. Thus, initially, it is a purely casuistic pessimism. Even with the necessary tragic incompatibility of metaphysical need and intellectual honesty, pessimism is limited to the implied question. But here it touches a common value pessimism: an outlook that does not deny that “the evil” can be overcome but claims that “the good” (the biological, social, and low-autotelic values), even if it is realized, is insufficient. The urge for generalization will easily lead victims and observers to infer a universal pessimistic lifeview from what has happened; but one must keep in mind that the tragic course has no evidentiary power beyond its causal preconditions. If such an inductive (and subsequently deductive) inference is to stand, it must ascertain the non-reality of a principle that stands or falls with its exceptionless validity. But the principle of the “moral world order” has this very property: In a single case it fails, so it does not apply at all. The principle can be restated as follows: The fate of all interest bearers shall have meaning in large and small. That there is meaning is to say that the interest bearer or observer is fully satisfied with it. We have previously established the demand for the moral world order (metaphysical justice) as an indispensable characteristic of a (“humanistically” set) culturally relevant whole person. This demand is subjected to a severe test already in basic catastrophes – first and foremost by

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the innocently inflicted, but also by the “self-inflicted,” because it is impossible to establish any commensurability between transgression and punishment. Basic catastrophes already provide the basis for an indictment against the “world order,”119 because it first equips us with this and that vital interest and then violates those interests most horribly. In the case of basic catastrophes, there is still another theoretical path open: overcoming the counterpower by perfection; but in the tragic this way out is closed. The tragic form gathers an entire human group’s life requirements and abilities and goes before it like a hope plow. And the grievance of the tragic victim is the grievance of the entire human group. In no case is the requirement of justice and the will to perfection violated with colder indifference, with bloodier mockery. Nowhere is a course experienced as a fraud on the part of life to the same degree; nowhere is a deeper confusion created by the corruption. While the basic catastrophe shows what one risks by being human, the tragic tells what it means to be human; it gives the outermost outlines of our “cosmic situation.” And, in light of the tragedy this situation is impossible to bear. The “melancholic clarity” destroys; it shows us Jehovah in a mirror. As the tropical animals perished when the cold came, so we languish in the metaphysical climate that registers through the tragic course. Clearly the value of this climate is determined solely by its relationship to our own requirements, – but what standard should we use if not the highest human interest? By this standard humankind demands its terms of accounting; it tries and it judges them, even though it cannot master them with quantitative power.

119 “The world order” is an expression that is encountered frequently, especially in German tragic theory. Any information about what the phrase means in each case is rarely or never found. We ourselves have used it in the sense of “metaphysical environment,” the environment derived in our thought, in which we embed our lives as a whole, in the image of the individual’s relationship to the earthly, total or partial environment. But often one sees it used immediately when something one finds good or bad is happening; the innocent comes to harm – Weltordnung [world order]; the villain falls into one’s own trap – Weltordnung. The world order is then either attacked or defended (theodicy). But every detail of every human interest struggle cannot be decisive for the characteristics of the world order; it cannot be bad yesterday (because then I was penniless) and good today (because now I have won the lottery). My neighbor, who is robbed tonight, judges just the opposite. We say the world order, but we mean only an economic detail; none of us has anything to do with the phases of the moon, etc. The misuse has its root in a kind of religious projection, in the notion of a final cause, a world orderer, to whom one can direct one’s complaint. The affect thus causes an operation carrier. But no matter how one uses the phrase, the reader has a right to know what meaning it has in each case.

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The utmost possibility of human form is realized when the individual becomes faithful to the sacred and deadly seed that lifts one to deity’s height and consequently opens the abyss under one’s foot. In the chromosomes’ stellar script is found “that great, gigantic fate, that crushes people when it raises them.”a At the moment of the fall from the precipice, the tragic soul stands face to face with the enemy as an equal opponent. One is the bearer of a higher principle in human eyes than that which triumphs, but now one knows that this higher principle does not have the right to life. Therefore, like Job, one says to the executioner: Who has hardened himself against you and had peace? – He passes by and I perceive him not. And who will say to him: What are you doing? He does not turn his wrath back, and beneath him the “haughty” must bow. And though I am in the right, I would not answer; I must ask that mercy be my judge. For there is none who can break up our feud and lay one’s hands upon both of us.b

a From Schiller’s “Shakespeares Schatten” [“Shakespeare’s Shade”]. b Reference to Job 9:33.

·9· ON THE AUTOTELIC EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAGIC

§ 94. Autotelic and heterotelic viewpoints It was mainly through the aid of abstraction that in the previous chapter we arrived at the concept of objective tragedy. But some of the characteristics according to which the idea was oriented were of an assessment-related nature, insofar as objects and courses were arranged according to their relations to human interests. But there we were more concerned with the causal structure than with value judgment; we sought to understand the origin of the tragic course more than to describe its effect on the mind. Only in one respect was the effect also mentioned: We said that the essential property of the course, which is precisely what made it tragic, must lead to the destruction of hope, when it came to perfectibility as the path of life confirmation. In other words, the appropriate effect of a tragic course is the maximum of despair, both for the stricken and for the sympathetic observer who shares the stricken’s hope and co-experiences his or her destruction. Alongside the metaphysical catastrophe (destruction of hope) – which presupposes a sense of and central interest in the tragic dimension – there will also normally be despair over the basic catastrophes that form part of the tragic course and break into the stricken’s biological, social, or autotelic interest front.

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But it is precisely when it comes to the autotelic interest life that new experiences open up. It turns out that the issue of the effect of the tragic is not exhausted by noting the pain of the interests being violated. The stricken may already be imagined having experienced positive values during a struggle in which one has placed one’s highest hope and strongest ability. At least one has lived; even if one is devoured by the beast of life, still one has flamed higher than it usually falls to the lot of humankind. One has lived interestingly. “So be it if I have run my ship aground – .” The autotelic experience of joy can become so strong that the course ceases to be tragic: The confirmation of life is no longer associated with the perfectibility being feasible (the metaphysical justice), but with the total sum of pleasure, however it stands for the demand for meaning and coherence; this demand may have faded into the background. Therefore, in the following there is only talk of that autotelic value which can be reconciled with the preservation of the tragic character of the course. And then it will not be in the stricken him or herself, but in the observer that one finds the richest material. First, imagine the case where the observer is witnessing a tragic course in practical life. There may be enough substance to provide autotelic experience value: the representative properties of the stricken, the magnificent struggle, the sublime catastrophe, and the philosophical obsession with the coherence as a whole. Objects like these are sure to arouse a great deal of pleasurable and valuable emotions, imaginative activity, and thought associations in the observer who is open to them. But in practical life one is not easily open to such values in an otherwise interest-conflicting course, because one experiences the event in its heterotelic aspect. One assesses the event on a practical, biological, social, metaphysical scale, or across these categories: political, economic, and military. What happens simply should not be, because one measured the event precisely against the interest that is being violated. And the tragic course is particularly suited for such an assessment. It is already painful to see a human being destroyed; this is even more the case when it is an exceptionally well-equipped person, and most of all when one is destroyed because one is so excellently equipped and justifiably should have a richer and happier life than most. Indeed, we demand sociallymorally of ourselves and each other that we should have this viewpoint when our neighbor suffers, and do not indulge in the color contrast of the blood on the grass or our fascination with the eighteen-year-old widow. Artists are often blamed for being set this way; they commit what the social-moralist might call an “autotelic betrayal” (Ibsen: “On the Heights”). And we should not only passively hold fast to a social-moral viewpoint, but we should be active, intervene

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in the unfortunate events, and help as best we can in the hope that the course may change in the interest-related direction. Not even in the sense of aversion is one allowed to have an autotelic viewpoint; the sick must not be left helpless on the grounds that they have a repulsive appearance or are disgusting to look on and smell. The risk of infection, biologically relevant, immediately becomes something else. With strong pleasurable autotelic engagement, one does not want to change things at all (this is in fact related to autotelic interest), except perhaps for the worse, so that one can still enjoy the raging flames in the old town, the light shows from the nightly bombings, the skill of the surgeon. The most difficult is probably an autotelic viewpoint when our own interests are threatened, or when it comes to our own well-being. The further away the stricken or blissful person stands from us, the easier it is for us to see the matter autotelically. The higher the tsunami in our own village, the more horrible it is, but the higher it is on Sumatra, the more magnificent. The thrill one feels by an overwhelming power here and now becomes more pleasant with every kilometer increase in distance, every month forward in time, every decreasing degree of interest toward the stricken people. The autotelic viewpoint penetrates more and more into the heterotelic; they are mixed in every relationship. We will not mention that it was a magnificent bolt of lightning that struck Aunt Malene in the park, but we dare to enjoy the glorious summer day, even though the farmers are praying for rain. Perhaps the easiest is the autotelic viewpoint when there are no human fates involved in the play of the dangerous forces: the thunderclouds parading across the desert, the waves breaking against the cliff, eruptions of isolated volcanoes, battles between magnificent, preferably wild animals. And one more thing is important: The heterotelic aspect breaks in more easily when it is in one’s power to exert influence on the interest-conflicting side of the matter, than when one is cut off from intervention. If I see two horses fighting in the mountains, it seems more natural to experience the fight autotelically, even if one is killed, than when the scene is played out in a field where I can summon the owner. But – the more strongly the autotelic viewpoint has a hold of one, the more blind one is to other aspects. Many crimes find their explanation in this fact. The social order even allows a certain leeway for pleasurable experiences on an interest-conflicting basis, bullfighting, cockfighting, rabbit hunting, boxing, mountaineering, and chambers of horrors. The degree of purity in the autotelic engagement may again be related to the intensity of the feeling of pleasure or aversion that the viewpoint causes in a given case. Here is a distinction that becomes important in the following: The opposition between autotelic and heterotelic engagement is

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one thing; completely different is the nature and degree of pleasure or aversion within the autotelic engagement, after this has become exclusive. The distinction will, among other things, be of great help when tackling the endlessly discussed question concerning the “tragic paradox”: How can a particularly forceful interest-conflicting course provide a particularly strong experience of pleasure or value? This question is the main topic of the present chapter, but at such an early stage it must be asked in a more general form: What influence does it have on the autotelic experience of a course that it is (heterotelically) interest-serving or interest-conflicting? Or more precisely expressed: that for the autotelic experiencing observer there is a heterotelically interest-conflicting side to the observed course? One will then immediately see the benefit of the mentioned distinction. The question falls into two parts: What is the significance of the heterotelic interest for the entry into and maintenance of an autotelic viewpoint? And: What is the significance of the heterotelic interest for the degree of pleasure or aversion once an autotelic viewpoint is established? The first question can again be divided into three: (a) Can the interestserving nature of the course prevent or evoke an autotelic viewpoint? (b) Can the interest-conflicting nature of the course prevent or evoke an autotelic viewpoint? (c) Can one in general decide whether the interest-serving is more favorable or more unfavorable than the interest-conflicting when it comes to entering and maintaining an autotelic viewpoint? These questions are perhaps best answered indirectly. We have imagined the life expression of a human with the model in which certain “sides” of the objects are assigned certain types of experience readiness (operation or reception readiness), thereby becoming “operation carriers” or “feature carriers” for this readiness (cf. § 5). The individual becomes “engaged” in a particular relationship with the object and perceives this from a particular “viewpoint.” The human has a very complicated interest front, and there is nothing in the way of a (single or compound) object being interest-serving from one viewpoint, and interest-conflicting from another. Service and conflict, in the autotelic or heterotelic sense, may be simultaneously present for consciousness, or one viewpoint may displace the other. Coffee is good, but it is expensive and it is harmful; this applies to a number of the immediate pleasures of life, that there is harm or risk associated with them (cf. §§ 6, 60, 74, 86). Others in turn have heterotelic benefits: Fruits are good in taste and at the same time contain nutrients and vitamins. Liver oil has the same useful properties to an even greater extent, but the taste is not inviting. Acetic acid as a drink is interest-conflicting

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in both respects. The result of this observation is that the autotelic, the pleasureaversion giving properties of the object, are without functional connection with the heterotelic, the useful-harmful. The coffee would have been just as good if it had been cheap and healthy, the fruit as tasty, and the oil as bad if they had been biologically worthless or harmful, and the acetic acid just as painful to drink even if it could cure mouth cancer. Nevertheless, there can be a connection by psychological means; for example, the harmful properties appear as an inhibition or resistance, which deprives the pleasure of some of its luster or causes one to completely or partially abandon it. Awareness of the benefit of the action, on the other hand, gives pleasure the freest play and will even be able to suggest a pleasure emphasis for tasteless or disgusting diets. The interest-harming alerts the individual and awakens one to preventive activities, while the serving soothes and leaves the mind free for other engagements. Thus, it seems that heterotelic service is much more favorable to the creation and maintenance of autotelic engagement than the interest-conflicting. But then it must be added: under otherwise equal conditions. If the conditions are changed such that the factually interest-conflicting object exerts a much stronger autotelic attraction on a given observer at a given moment than the interest-serving counterpart, then the relationship becomes different. I can fall so in love with the dressmaker Miss Olsen, who is poor and uneducated, that I give up Countess Løwenhjelm, who is rich and definitely fertile. Tuberculosis may show a higher mortality rate than ox attacks, but the bacteria’s autotelic effect cannot match that of the ox. The examples have so far been simple. It then becomes a question whether the view holds true when one comes to more complicated conditions. With objects such as coffee and tobacco, indeed even with destructive fire and war, such a viewpoint can be created by a conscious moral choice, where strength of character, social responsibility, and the like come into play. But in other cases, one may be surprised and captured by the autotelic viewpoint; one forgets the heterotelic viewpoint and does not notice this until afterward. It is a different psychological mechanism that mediates the transition here, and the importance the heterotelic has for this mechanism is a matter that can hardly be resolved by introspection alone. One must resort to experiments. But it should at least be assumed here that heterotelic value plays a subordinate role compared with the power of the “feature carrier” which brings about the autotelic viewpoint. Thus, we move on to question 2. What significance does the heterotelic interest have for the degree of pleasure or aversion once an autotelic viewpoint

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is established? We have asked this question because it forms one of the focal points of 2,200 years of discussion. But it will be readily seen that once the two types of viewpoint have been understood to be incommensurable, the question can just as well be given another form: What significance does the heterotelic interest relationship have for the degree of pleasure and aversion when the heterotelic viewpoint is completely abandoned? And then the question itself gives the answer: none.120 On the other hand, for the nature of the autotelic experience, the matter will be highly determinative, together with the peculiarity of the appearance and the observer’s preconditions. One time I experience a case of misfortune more strongly and purely autotelically than another, another time the other way around. But I do not easily confuse the two impressions. Thus, it is important for the autotelic experience that the course is biologically, socially, or metaphysically interest-conflicting.

§ 95. New field of experience We can now go into more detail concerning the possibility of autotelic values by experiencing tragic courses in practical life. We should preferably begin with basic suffering, misfortunes, and catastrophic courses and examine the values there, later adding one qualification after another, and finally look at the highest, tragic qualification’s possible allure, introspectively, or extracting it by experiment. However, such a method would arouse serious misgivings, which are admittedly more of a practical than a theoretical nature: It would be a very unusual person who had a purely autotelic viewpoint toward events of this kind, so unusual that it would be approaching an abstraction. For this reason, the method will be primarily speculative and introspective; experiential material is difficult to access. Let us therefore conclude with the confession that the autotelic values of the tragic course in practical life are not sufficiently enticing as a theme. So, for the moment we look away from the philosophy to which the course afterward may give rise, which was discussed in § 93. Far more fruitful will be to seek out tragic courses where the autotelic viewpoint is naturally, customarily, and socially-morally recognized, and where it will therefore be accessible to more solid research methods. Such tragic courses are found in poetry, narratively developed in tragic novels, epics, short stories,

120 Thus, the possibility of practical experiential states in which heterotelic and autotelic elements are inextricably linked has not yet been established.

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etc., narratively-lyrically, particularly in tragic ballads, and finally dramatically in the tragedy, as it is conceived and defined in the following chapter. The innumerable discussions about the nature of art (including poetry) should not be recounted here. However, in one of the central disputes we have had to take a working stance, and this must be briefly justified. We have declared the poetic experience to be of an autotelic nature, and we will thus be counted among the proponents of the theory of l’art pour l’art, art for “art’s own” and not for “life’s” sake. An opposite view has in our day found supporters especially among the cultivators of the so-called social arts, that is, representations in words and images of miserable people and living conditions. This art is said to have two purposes: partly a dominant heterotelic one, to “awaken the social conscience,” and partly a subordinate autotelic one, to captivate with the power and accuracy of the production. In this dispute, however, we have not taken a stand in a polemical sense, but only in a systematic and terminological one. In our view of boundaries and concepts there is no devaluation of the “heterotelistic” view of art. If a person desires, prefers, or demands to be engaged in a purely agitating, or in a combined agitating-autotelic reception, rather than a purely autotelic one, then one is free to – theoretically, and, in our present society, also practically. Nor do we regard one as having less developed taste for this reason. But when on the one hand a pure agitation is given, and on the other a purely autotelic production, then in our opinion it will be best to use the simpler phenomenon for systematicity and terminology. A foundational concept (“art”) that is composed of incommensurable elements is not suitable to serve clarity. As far as the familiar question of the purpose is concerned, we will take the working position that calls a work of poetry one in which the purpose serves the autotelic intention, otherwise not. The fact that this conceptual formation does not conceal an assessment will be evident from the fact that we regard the “compared” values as incommensurable. As far as the problem with the tension between the slogans “art for the sake of art” and “art for the sake of life” is concerned, in our opinion these formulations express nothing at all as long as the terms “art” and “life” have not been defined separately and in relation to each other. When this is done, the discussion will be greatly simplified. The next step in the treatment of this section’s actual theme is an examination of the difference between the tragic course of poetry and the “objectively tragic,” as it was presented in the previous chapter. Another question that arises concerns the observer’s position: Is there any difference between the autotelic viewpoint one may take toward the strong interest-conflicting

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(possibly tragic) course in practical life and that which we suppose will occur when one reads or sees poetry about a similar course? Since we have treated the tragic-autotelic viewpoint in practical life at most provisionally, a direct “comparison” between the poetic viewpoint and the practical-heterotelic viewpoint can be used, that is, a marking of the difference. The investigation will include a reasonably exhaustive description of what poetic-autotelic experience of the tragic as a rule might conceivably entail, possibly also including a tracing of psychological causes where these are of particular interest. The questions are so closely connected that no schema for answering should be drawn up in advance.

§ 96. The tragic course of poetry How does this differ from the tragic course in practical life? The question itself gives the first clue: The difference is not in the tragic, which is itself present in both cases, but in the fact that one course is poetic, the other real. The historical account forms a kind of intermediate, which sometimes approaches poetry, sometimes is dependent on the accuracy of the rendering. To say that the course is poetic will first mean that it is fictional; it is created and re-created in the imagination, first in the poet’s, then in the imagination of the receiver (the listener, the reader, or the viewer). The fact that the receiver’s imagination can be more or less instrumental does not change the fact that the object is a product of imagination or an imaginative rendering, although other mental abilities are also at work when a poetic work is created. What is rendered (in a poetically qualified way) can be self-experienced, heard, or read, a poetically unprocessed substance, or a substance that others have previously treated but which the new poet experiences (lives through) and recreates in a new way. Therefore, a number of conditions for the origin of the tragic quality are different from those of reality, and this influences the entirety of its appearance. Thus, poetry’s tragic course arises alongside a specific intention and/or on the basis of a specific need. The poet feels the urge to cast what lives in one’s mind into a lasting, appropriate, and valuable form. The sublimation frees one from the heterotelic pressures of the material, and one secures this part of one’s fate against impermanence, at least initially. This may be the whole motivation, but as a rule there comes a notion of a suitable recipient, in whose mind the poem is to evoke states similar to the poet’s. The poetic tragedy is therefore colored by both its origin and its purpose, as well as by the readiness that the

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poet hopes or expects or fears to find within the recipient. One can also write poems for wished-for recipients whom one conceives ideally, even though one knows they do not exist. The tragedy in practical life is a fruit of the uncontrollable forces of the wilderness and battlefield, a crippling surprise for both the victim and the observer. The associated feeling of ruthless arbitrariness, of being given up to chance, of homelessness in the cosmos, can also be found within the victim in the poetic tragedy. For the victim oneself, the game is the seriousness of life, otherwise “romantic irony” ensues. The peculiarities of poetry are created (consciously or unconsciously) by the poet and observed by onlookers and theorists. But can the difference be described at all as a difference in the object itself – does not one always have to make the detour to experience? This, with related side questions, is one of the most burning issues in the aesthetic discussion and is also associated with tragic theory. We hope that the epistemologists will respect the neutrality of a working position such as this: When we speak of the object’s factual distinctiveness, then we mean the distinctiveness that emerges from human judgments and assertions; it is in relation to human interests and categories that the objects find their place. Indeed, it can be said that we always make the detour to experience, but it is precisely in the nature of experience that one can make the crucial distinction. Factual, organized judgments emerge from a relationship with the object, a “viewpoint” in which the understanding works mostly in isolation (we disregard deep psychological preconditions); one experiences the act in such a way that the impression is under intellectual control. The reception is met by an organizing activity. The purpose of the whole, the satisfaction of the interest, is different from that of an immediate and passive reception of “impressions” in which the understanding enters into the background for other functions of the mind. It is tempting to support this point of view with Uexküll’s doctrine of the external world, as outlined in § 5. When we speak of the object as something different from experience, it is because the object can also be determined by means of a reception apparatus other than that which is set in motion by an autotelic engagement. The “tragic poetic work” object unit has other additional feature carriers besides the qualified autotelic ones. And there is no way for these to change from one observer to another without any distortion of the object’s factual identity, which may continue to be the same. The Hamlet tragedy remains the Hamlet tragedy, although A finds it good this year and bad next year, while B considers it just the opposite.

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We have here allowed in some superficial and in all respects unsatisfactory remarks concerning a difficult subject in a massive literature. However, their purpose is correspondingly restricted: solely to give a provisional justification for the distinction in what follows. One issue is then that the observer’s readiness is different in practical life than when one goes to the theater to see a tragedy. But also, what one sees is something different. (We must disregard the possibility of variations in the factually organized judgment.) The world one encounters in the tragedy is ruled by a governing hand. There are those who interpret the world in the same way, but there the interventions are of a more obscure and controversial nature. (Here, as elsewhere, we must give up seeking a criterion of difference with validity beyond given relationships.) By contrast, the bitterest enemies of faith can agree that the poet reigns as a god in one’s world; one’s spirit hovers over the waters, one creates, directs, and obliterates human fates according to one’s own desire and plan. In tragedy, the poet is a fierce and cruel god who, without regard to the victim’s interests, unleashes upon him or her the same destructive forces that may unfold themselves in the care of the gods of life, or without them. One works in a different dimension than the seeking and struggling victim who only has the ability to live in “length and breadth,” while the poet also sees the height. And now comes the distance: The poet’s world plan rises gradually for those who follow the emanation. Although this plan can also be interpreted differently, there is, however, a law in large and small that satisfies a human need, an arc spanned over the finished work: the law of tragic poetry. Even though chaos is unleashed, there is an eye that watches and a will that governs, and we know that in this world a spirit lives in harmony with our own, though not visible, a spirit under the control of the human character. The world of the poetic work is human-made, built with the raw material of life, with its convenient or inconvenient matter, but the matter has undergone a transformation process, and it is adapted and arranged for reception. So, of what does this transformation process consist? A first clue lies in the word poem,a which may well come from the Latin dictare, but which by a coincidence appears to be equivalent to a word of Germanic origin, meaning dense or condensed. Norwegian vernacular has the form “seal a boat,”b just as the German-Dutch dichtenc links both meanings. (It would lead too far away from the subject if we tried to characterize poetry in a digte (Nor.). b digte en baat. c write, seal.

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general. The following is only concerned with tragic poetry. In what features it corresponds to other poetry must be left behind. It is different from other poetry in that its main motif is a tragic course.) Poetic condensing in the tragic poem appears at first in two phases, one a selecting and one a processing phase.121 First there is a seclusion of a possible tragic course, so that all the tragically irrelevant accidentalia, which in the real world hang on everywhere, are stripped away. But there is also a different standpoint: The poet seeks the autotelically active substance. It is not at all clear that every objectively tragic course is autotelically active, or that it in such a way is suitable as a substance for tragic poetry. Here is where the law of poetry sets its conditions. A few of these should be mentioned: If, for example, the greatness of the protagonist is culturally relevant, it is not automatically autotelically relevant or suitable for receiving autotelic relevance through the poet’s artistic power. A “boring moralist”a may in a given environment have his or her unquestionable cultural significance, but he or she does not move the observer; the poet finds him or her unfit for one’s purposes. Nor is the boastful bearer of greatness particularly suitable. Greatness that appears in activity is perhaps best suited for dramatic treatment, whereas receptive kinds of greatness instead require epic or lyrical form, etc. New considerations also emerge for the sake of appropriateness. The too-obvious cause will easily become trivial, too familiar, and indifferent. On the other hand, a game of chance can “have something in it” which allows the observer to perceive a context of obscure, mysterious nature. The downfall of Romeo and Juliet has “poetic appropriateness,” even though chance becomes increasingly dominant. A criminal is eventually struck by an evil, and the imagination traces the thread of retribution to the deep weave of fate. The counterpower must not be too “popularly horrible,” too exquisitely refined a sadist, such that the conditions of the bearer of greatness become too special (Othello-Iago, Gothland-Berdoa in Grabbe). A counterpower that has cultural and autotelic relevance on its own will engage the attention in a completely different qualified way. The hero’s posture during and after the catastrophe (possibly the struggle, the suffering), which is irrelevant during objective tragedy, must have

121 This does not say anything about the ways in which the various poets work, nor about the place of the tragic in what is traditionally called tragic poetry, cf. Chap. 10. I am thinking here about a “realistic” approach similar to the one described in Otto Ludwig’s Shakespeare Studies. a tråkig moralist (Swe.).

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a positive autotelic sign. All these questions appear in more detail during the discussion of the observer’s impression. The poetic process is often compared to the goldsmith’s and the ore smelter’s approach. The image can fit the selection phase; for certain casuistic novels without internal cohesiveness, the work seems to have ended with the selection. But in tragic structures, it is all about a unity in diversity, a unifying principle as the main characteristic. Where this unity is not already present in the raw material, the poet must create it; one derives the “greatness” from one edge of one’s world of experience, the catastrophe from another, the causal relationship one may build oneself – extending the appropriateness to the smallest links, so that, in Hebbel’s words, there is not a single mouse hole left where unauthorized randomness can slip in. And then one forces it all together within one organic principle, one thought, one vision, one musical mood. The processing of the substance has begun. This may be more or less extensive; the raw material may be near to or distant from the finished product. In the proverb, the parable, the anecdote, the fairy tale, and other very simple poetic forms, the tragic structure may be present in nuce.a But what lies between when one comes to a comprehensive novel or a five-act drama! Compare Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with the saying: Shame on the one who gives oneself to the poor (i.e., who gives until one is poor oneself). However, in a tragic structure such as this lies an excellent basis for dramatic construction; greatness and counterpower, struggle and catastrophe are factors that both the philosopher and dramatist can use; the structure provides a happy coincidence of autotelic possibilities and heterotelic significance. Through the processing the poet must achieve two different things: One must create and maintain an autotelic viewpoint in the observer, and one must fill this viewpoint with valuable experience. How does one create and maintain an autotelic viewpoint? In order to avoid a great number of distinctions that are located alongside the present theme, in the following we will only consider the tragic drama. If the poet’s efforts are to be considered separately, the material becomes the read drama. Nowadays the poet can usually expect the audience to meet one halfway, indeed more than that with regard to autotelic readiness. The poet no longer needs to prepare the reader as before; one knows that when one takes a poet’s a in a nutshell.

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work in one’s hand, one must set aside certain assessments and take up others. One does not reach for Hamlet to learn history or geography. But the poet does not always have such favorable conditions; one often finds it necessary to appeal to the goodwill of the recipient. The essence of many prologues (as one finds them in Shakespeare, Holberg, etc.) is this: Put aside the sorrows of everyday life and forget the paltry shillings you had to shell out to the bookseller or the ticket clerk. Let what is here rolled up capture all your senses, and the useful will be united with the pleasurable and you will go away happy. With an increasing literary culture, the demand for the “useful” falls into the background and the emphasis is more on the “pleasurable,” while at the same time this concept is developing toward the “valuable.” The audience helps the poet both establish and maintain the autotelic viewpoint, but filling it one must be able to handle oneself. Cabaret artists, for example, may also talk about “the battle with the audience” before the autotelic goodwill is established and it all glides along smoothly. During the discussion of an autotelic viewpoint in practical life, it was shown that distance in time, place, and engagement provide favorable conditions. The poet makes use of this relationship. But one does not always have to use such crude means as distance in time and space; the lyricist, for example, gives the mood here and now. What the poet is trying to achieve we will call with figurative application psychic distance. This term, and terms with similar conceptual content, have been used by a large number of authors122 and must be said to be in the central region of the entire art-theoretical discussion. To participate in, or to simply refer to this discussion, would lead to a sidetrack. The expression psychic distance is neutral in psychological respects and covers sufficiently well the experience here to be highlighted.

122 For example, mention is made of Chu, The Psychology of Tragedy, Strasbourg 1933, Chap. II, especially p. 23, 29 ff. Chu’s reference to Hamann and Münsterberg’s doctrine concerning “isolation” could not be checked, nor Adolf Hildebrand’s doctrine concerning “Fernsicht [perspective]” mentioned in Wrangel, Estetiska Studier (Aesthetic Studies), Lund 1898 p. 97. However, reference can be made to Alois Riehl, “Bemerkungen z. d. Problem d. Form i. d. Dichtkunst [Comments on the Problem of Form in Poetry]” in Vierteljahrschrift f. wissenschaftliche Philosophie [Quarterly of Scientific Philosophy] 1897 p. 98, various places, and Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance” as a factor in art and an aesthetic principle, in The British Journal of Psychology Vol. V (1912–13) p. 87 ff. definition p. 88, in application to the tragedy p. 103 f.

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By what means then does the poet place a psychic distance between the reader and the “hypostasized” substance of the work? One does so partly by the nature of the content itself, and partly by the form in which it is conveyed.123 The events of the play can be placed in a bygone era, in distant lands, in royal circles, or some other environment with which the reader is presumably less familiar. Accordingly, one gives the language a patina or “local color,” which changes the effect of the words on the discerning mind, covering their naked functional content with floral borders of images and associations. Ancient plays often have this effect by their age alone, without the intention of the poet; the temporal distance, etc., then has a new function (Holberg). In return, it can then obscure the freshness of the content, a factor which also in turn serves partly to maintain the autotelia, partly to provide the viewpoint content. Modernization of older pieces has brought this problem to the fore. The stronger one is captivated by the content, the more the demand for psychic distance can be relaxed. Naturalism puts the emphasis on content, and classicism on the form; if it first succeeds in maintaining the viewpoint, good naturalistic or realistic poetry can keep a contemporary reader stronger in spirit. But if it is easy for one to get close to the breaking point of the viewpoint, the engagement turns to social outrage, etc., there is little air in the tire, the rims will easily scrape down. With good classicist poetry, this danger vanishes; in return, it has probably occurred that a yawn or two have cracked. If one moves in the direction from classicism to naturalism, the psychic distance shrinks and disappears. To the one side one then has slum reports and crude agitational displays where the fictional element disappears, while the viewpoint becomes purely heterotelic. To the other side, there are bullfights, cockfights, dwarves, the lady with no lower body, etc., where the fictional element is missing, but where the autotelia is sought to be maintained on other grounds. The cultured northerner falls more easily out of the viewpoint than the southerner; he or she pays attention to the animal cruelty and the miserable fate of the circus lady.124

123 The content-form problem can only be touched on implicitly. 124 A question well worth addressing is this: What influence do living conditions, education, etc., have on the boundary between autotelic and heterotelic viewpoint? We note in summary that cultural development can, on the one hand, make a person more selective, discerning, thus losing autotelic values from childhood (glossy photos, robber novels, licorice) and, on the other, provide new ones in replacement: natural ambiance, art, and poetry.

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The content is further removed from daily life by unusual characters and events, an artistic means of which Aristotle was already aware. The unknown in nature and degree prevents the reader from applying one’s everyday standard; one has enough to take in. The escalation in what is happening does not allow one to relax or slip away. It might all take place in a mythological world (Prometheus) where the imagination must manage entirely on its own; supernatural forces intervene or seem to intervene. We take this opportunity to also refer to the fictional nature of the action. If the observer, etc., has never lived in the poetic course, then one knows that this is not a reality for one – and this contributes to one’s heterotelic reaction apparatus being “switched off” or “blocked.” Perhaps more than the content of the play, the form asserts itself as the creator and maintainer of the autotelic viewpoint, in addition to contributing to filling the viewpoint with content.125 The poetic condensing adds psychic distance. In practice we experience things differently; the new “purity” and concentration in that which is experienced requires a new readiness on the part of the recipient. We go centuries forward or backward through time in the course of an hour or two; we follow a human life from the cradle to the grave; we travel through many countries by imaginary flight routes; we read the deepest thoughts and feelings of people as in a book. We witness their inner growth or decay, see what is to come and see the thread of events spun and tied. We are in a new world with new conditions for vision, so we also have new eyes. Heterotelic readiness is blocked with new strength by the accomplished appropriateness of actions and consequences; the aide in us scouts in vain for a flaw in the chain of necessity – just a little randomness such that it could have gone differently, but no. The thought is a bird that does not find a perch; even for a purely imaginary intervention, the course lacks an operation carrier. In addition to a patina and local color, the form of the language will also create a psychic distance. Not a word is superfluous, not an image is banal, not a thought hesitates or falters without also serving the artistic purpose. The verse carries one with it on long, bearing wings; the style runs smoothly from moment to moment. This is not the case in everyday life; even the language belongs to the new world, which we cannot escape before the poet wills.

125 We thus distinguish between the play’s content, as opposed to the play’s form, and the viewpoint’s content as opposed to its creation and maintenance (its properties qua viewpoint). The content of the play can serve the creation of the viewpoint, but also its content, and the same applies to the form of the play.

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When the poet puts so much effort into keeping us in the autotelic viewpoint, it is because one has a content to convey. And what we should experience in the world of art this time is a tragic course. But one cannot grasp the tragic structure as a unity until it is fully rolled out, that is, before the book or performance is over. The recipient’s autotelic posture has been maintained then for several hours, but it could also have been if the content were nontragic, if one just sat in a stream of impressions. It is to be noted concerning the distinction between the nature of the viewpoint and the content, as well as between the form and the content of the play, that it will not always be clearly found in a practical case. One may doubt whether a poetic element “pertains to,” “should be counted as,” “is best viewed as part of” the form or content of a play, and one may encounter “content” which changes with the “form” in which it appears here and now. For the sensitive this ultimately occurs with all content; it is colored by the form; the style here is the mediator. The way something is said can determine the meaning. But even in a statement such as this, one makes a distinction between manner and matter. How then is “the matter” identified, the “what” of the statement on the whole? Here there are linguistic, logical, cognitive-theoretical, and metaphysical ravines that we cannot stop and admire. We also do not use the distinction as anything other than a tool; when it has done its service, we can lay it aside. The same applies to the second distinction: When the dramatist places the recipient into a stream of impressions, is it to maintain his or her autotelic viewpoint or to fill it? Both, and yet the distinction is not only theoretical, but also practical. When the poet believes the autotelic viewpoint has been sufficiently established, one can venture into things of a purely substantive nature that would have burst a less strongly grounded viewpoint. If something like Gloucester’s blinding and Cordelia’s death (Lear 3.7 and 5.3) were to occur in the first scene, before the observer had yet lived oneself into the world of the play, one would not only feel autotelic aversion, but one would exit the whole viewpoint and angrily throw rotten eggs at the writer and actors as private individuals. The fact that one, just like many renowned art researchers, hates to suffer such scenes even if one remains in the autotelic viewpoint shows that the poet (to certain observers) has not been able to make the partial autotelic aversion digestible as part of a higher and more comprehensive cohesiveness. (The term “higher” should be justified by the fact that one is dealing with commensurable impressions. Which impression is the highest in any given case, of course, depends on the individual’s assessment.)

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The actual theme, the content of the viewpoint, under these considerations is left somewhat in the background; then it is pulled forward. I mentioned the importance of an escalation in what is happening. This demand on the poet’s efforts implies a number of others. The assets of the play must be allocated in such a way that the autotelic expectation initially and gradually awakened in the recipient is fulfilled in the best possible manner. The task of the viewpoint content is to be an optimum object for the special, highly qualified autotelic experience readiness that is actualized at every moment in the recipient. There may be surprises, pauses, line breaks, or anything at all, but the recipient must find everything autotelically justified, if not immediately, at least by the end of the book or performance when the sight gathers. Everything is allowed within the one great condition: What is done must succeed autotelically. Whether or not it succeeds is decided by each observer each time. Whether the observer’s judgment is (or is not) in line with “common sense,” with “developed taste,” etc., is determined by each judge in each case.126 Within the secured autotelic viewpoint, there is, as one will remember, a scale of pleasure and aversion, or of experience qualities which are arranged across this opposition on a scale from maximum to minimum of value (value destruction). At the lowest step on the scale there is unbearable, tearing pains and depression, desperate longing for death and the cessation of all things, disgust at life and other fruits of depression and melancholy – while the top soars into seraphic spheres, in unimaginable delight, in nameless riches and confirmation, in the possibility of divine metamorphoses. The poet must play with this orchestra of images, thoughts, and feelings, and the more daringly one sets up the composition, the less false notes are tolerated. The recipient’s experience readiness has its own laws which the poet must know; in each phase of the reception, one must be able to hear what may come now and what may not, based on one’s own introspection, intuition, and inspiration. (If the poet has perfect power over one’s internal well regardless of the recipients, then it will be seen whether one has hit or shot past.) The decisive factor is not only what has happened immediately before, but the reverberation of earlier short or lasting sounds joins with later ones to produce an ever-shifting pressure on the expectation, which then again changes as it is fulfilled and renewed. By the end all sides of expectation must be fulfilled, and the recipient must have an “actual,” “organically coherent” autotelic experience with “natural” beginning, 126 On the basis of many such judgments, some researchers have tried to establish a “normative aesthetic” with less variable assessment factors, removing irrelevant suggestions (“it is from Goethe”), etc.

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natural climax, and natural ending, all determined by the experience readiness one was partly born with, partly developed oneself, and partly cultivated in the moment. This psychological relationship must be taken into consideration by the poet. But the smaller the pretensions of the work, the more leeway the poet has. A “novel” can be captivating even if it completely lacks composition, as long as there is unity in the interest that is awakened – indeed, often there is not even this. It also matters greatly whether the work is intended for a modest or an autotelically developed audience. Already, the serious drama has a narrower circle of appropriate viewers, and the tragedy addresses itself only to a few. (The term “few” here refers to those who experience the tragedy “fully.” The fact that the underdeveloped can “enjoy” certain aspects of the tragedy is well known.) The demands made on the poet are thus similarly strict; there is no occasion for entertaining fixtures and artistic hors d’oeuvres. It is an autotelic experience of a qualified, rigorous, and exquisite nature that tragedy will provide. In the sensory-autotelic field similar conditions apply: Candy and sweets can taste good in their time, but if one smokes a precious Cuban, then one will be exempt from pleasures of a lower nature within the same “reception type.” The dramaturgy of tragedy has been the subject of special attention for centuries (from the 4th century B.C., with a break in the Middle Ages). This is true of Europe, more recently of America, while the ancient cultural lands of the East, India and China, have perhaps cultivated the theory of drama127 but have not known any “tragedy” in the Western European sense. (Possible causes of this circumstance are traced by Chu, Kwang-Tsien: The Psychology of Tragedy, Strasbourg 1933, chap. 12.) The literature on the tragic drama is immense and applies itself to a host of questions. As far as the dramatic ordering of material is concerned, from centuries of experience a formulated schema has come about, the individual factors of which may in practice change attire and space, but which can usually be found in any serious drama.128 It comes down to searching for some psychological process as a model for this schema. One can then either imagine the steps in a thought act marked by “concentration 127 An Indian dramaturgy names: Natyashastra by Bharatan muni. Sanskrit, Bombay 1894. Chap. VI with English overv. Paris 1926 p. 15 ff. Cf. Sten Konow, Das indische Drama [The Indian Drama], Berl. and Lpz. 1920 p. 2 and various places. “Antitragisk [Antitragic]” norm p. 12, 29, horror atmosphere p. 30. 128 Cf. among others Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas [The Technique of Drama], Ges. Werke [Coll. Works], Leipzig 1897 Vol. 14 and Robert Hessen (pseud. Avonianus), Dramatische Handwerkslehre [Dramatic Craft Apprenticeship], Berlin 1895.

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and material, processing and conclusion.” Or one can think of an “emotional process,” possibly in connection with phases of a glandular activity: stimulus, climax, and relief. A practical model can be found in the selection and arrangement of points that one makes purely inadvertently when one tells others something one heard or experienced, and the goal is to catch their attention or win their applause. Much better ways will probably be found to “explain” the fact that there are given and can be formed autotelic “units of experience” of greater or lesser magnitude with appropriate beginning, development, and end. For “the pleasures of the table,” the formula is given physiologically, just as the socio-economic concept of “elastic demand” has an enlightening impact. In sports it is about expenditure of energy in appropriate amounts, interrupted by rest and regeneration. But what about in the dynamic unifying work of the poet? Here one must seek the answer in a psychological justification for the old dramaturgical rule concerning the unity of action.a In brief, the above-mentioned schema can be presented as follows: First comes the exposition, a narratively marked section that gives notice of the preconditions of the action, localizing the recipient’s attention, and laying down a keynote for what is to come. Then the main character is presented, the bearer of the tragic fate, and his or her greatness is revealed. But the hero’s happiness is threatened; an external counterpower, culturally relevant or not, is presented, an internal counterpower is highlighted. The traits and countertraits of the opposing forces leave the outcome questionable for a time; then occurs129 the climax, crisis, peripeteia, and from here forward the catastrophe approaches with an inescapable stride. By variation and filling of this schema, the poet satisfies the recipient in a purely dramatic fashion. But even more is given. The supporting characters are unfolded in their slightest shadows and deepened in their hidden circumstances; one gets to know them as living people and not just as beams in the tragic structure. And around the dramatic framework, there are clusters and garlands of beauty and other autotelic stimuli: the sound and rhythm of the language, the subtle ambiguity or striking force of the lines, the music of the verse, the metaphor’s sudden flare. Just as Gothic pillars can bear chaotic capitals without thereby losing their celestial flight and their defiance of gravity, so the dramatic structure can be crowned with glittering details that do not

a l’unité de l’action (Fr.). 129 In five-act dramas, the third act has proved particularly suitable for the crisis. The fourth act is notorious as a dramaturgical problem.

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belong to the course of action, but which nevertheless live their natural life in the shelter of the bearing spans.

§ 97. The theater When the drama is staged, the theater’s devices come into play. The workday is over, one puts on a darker suit, calls on a lady of whom one is painfully fond, swinging up in a car in front of the festively lit portico where the city’s monuments are gathered, mixed with the excited crowd. In countries where the audience has a theater culture, one will already be able to see in the foyer whether it is a pleasure play or a mourning play that is coming. If it is a mourning play, there is a church or temple atmosphere throughout the theater; one softens the voice and slows down in stride and hand movements. Our young man already feels strangely moved; things like this, he is able to feel and pay attention to; here, he can lead his lady into a world that is superior to the office, the apartment, and the promenade. They will experience strong and unfamiliar emotions together, and collectively with the whole great, solemn, festive crowd, wherein a number of the city’s prominent personalities with women in grand makeup shine by their mere presence. The young man feels comfortable in this elevated company, where not a soul finds his presence conspicuous – and his lady feels with unshakable instinct that this is life. “There” – he may whisper with his voice full of secretive awareness, “it’s the writer U. U. and just behind him sits the Australian minister. One is telling a very tantalizing story – shh, here comes the royal family.” The vestibule’s chaste marble, the foyer’s white and gold, the deep, calming runners, the lounge’s sea of lights over noble red armchairs, the magic carpet there in front so full of promise, the director nervous as a racehorse, the orchestra’s unintelligible finishing toucha – all this goes through the eyes and ears in broad currents and whispers soothingly to all anxieties about what is to come: Fear not that tears and pain, blood and death are coming. We, the theater, are aware of what we owe you. The lifted mood in which all impressions have now put you shall not be betrayed. Even if you are gripped by the seriousness and know the movement is getting the best of you: Not for a moment should you feel uncomfortable in tailcoat and jewels or experience things that you should not share with the person next to you. After all, we do not want to scare you away from the theater; on the contrary, we want you to come back as often as you can. a English given.

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The orchestra begins, the overture voices the irrational string of the mind in preparation for what is to come. A moment of breathless anticipation – and the curtain opens up revealing a world to which only imagination gives access. The composition of the scene is immediately captivating, the colors strong and matched to the eye’s desire, and the style of furniture and costumes tell of bygone times and distant lands. A flooding light from hidden sources highlights the main male character’s ideal masculine traits, the main female character’s ethereal beauty, the villain’s diabolical nature. Powder and makeup, wig and crinoline cover a middle-aged alcoholic actress with Princess Victoria’s legendary grace. The expressive movements and the living gestures, the full sound and vocal variation through all registers, carried into the vast room of spectators with a well-calculated acoustic – in this storm of impressions all everyday perspectives are denied, and the new readiness is filled to the brim with priceless pleasure, so that the viewer, half in a trance, lives in the scene until the end. Painfully confused he is suddenly torn back to parterre B by a raucous, tearing noise; a whole mass of people clap their hands together, he feels himself for a moment among the human inhabitants, and then he is “himself” again. The evening has been great, but there is a sting left: Why was he not led just as carefully and gently out of the fantasy land as in its time he was led into it? Why should he be systematically made defenseless against the external world for three hours, if this world is suddenly allowed to fall upon him like a wild animal?

§ 98. The term “aesthetic” Above are some important features that make the play tragic and its appearance different from the real. There are also scattered glimpses of the recipient’s impressions and self-activity. These scattered glimpses will now be elaborated on and supplemented. In the following the recipient is simply called the viewer, as the presentation is aimed at the most complete dressing of the poetic-tragic course – the theatrical performance. In “good” tragic poetry, the course qua autotelic object is endowed with a number of qualifications, which only partially, isolatedly, and randomly occur in the real course. It is these qualifications that make the poetry “good,” and the phrase is for that matter a tautology. What does it mean that a tragedy is “good”? It must mean that someone finds it good. It cannot mean that it is good regardless of whether someone finds it good; at least I do not understand this meaning without resorting to Platonic metaphysics. On Monday X says

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the tragedy is good, on Friday Y says it is bad. What is it like in the meantime? The relativism can be made a little less sharp by agreement on the following word usage: The tragedy is good when certain “experts” find it good, regardless of the opinions of others. Or: It is good when the poets themselves, or an “age” (certain authoritative writers in this or that epoch) assess it highly, or when it is praised by a larger audience, possibly contrary to the judgment of the critics’ guild. In addition to the poetic processing’s gathering and purifying of features from reality, there may be new features that “never” exist in the autotelic experience of reality, however qualified it may be. Are there such features? Whether this is answered in the affirmative, or one just assumes a degree of difference, it may be desirable to have a term that covers the overall distinctive features we preliminarily consider to be found in any “appropriate” experience of a poetic-tragic course. As a candidate for this term, first and foremost the tradition-laden expression “aesthetic” presents itself. With the examination of the “aesthetic experience” as the main theme, one must also approach “experience” as a psychological or “aesthetic” concept (i.e., as a concept within one’s own “aesthetic” science). But in our case, there is little emphasis on a fine distinction in this regard. More important is this: Do we get some benefit from using the term aesthetic to signify certain experiences by the poetic-tragic course? There immediately arises the concern that the term aesthetic traditionally includes a whole range of different types of experiences, impressions of nature, machines,130 sculpture, painting, black-and-white art, music, poetry, dance, theater, architecture, daydreams, and artistically driven activities, indeed, even eating and eroticism. Within the individual object groups there are new variants, beautiful, charming, sublime, comic, dramatic, tragic impressions, etc. Are there any common characteristics (scientifically workable or not) among all these different experiences? The question is important for those who work with “aesthetic experiences” as the basic theme; here it would lead us astray. Our theme must be limited to the experience of the poetic-tragic. Is it then possible to find a characteristic that once and for all distinguishes this experience from the autotelic effects of the natural tragedy? This is impossible to answer in this ambiguous generality, difficult to answer even if two given experiences were compared. Will not the overall situation affect the impression so strongly that the distinguishing characteristic disappears? Will not similarity 130 Cf. Guyau: Les problemes de l’estétique contemporaine [The Problems of Contemporary Aesthetics], Paris 1884 p. 115–22.

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and difference vary with the “opposed pairs” that are applied to the material (lifting/crushing, valuable/worthless, enlightening/non-enlightening, etc.)? Indeed, but the inessential opposed pairs must be eliminated. Which characteristics are essential and which are not? How should the comparison be made? By describing both experiences and comparing the descriptions? Or by reproducing them alternately in consciousness and comparing white-hot introspection? And if the work is to produce a result, one would have to compare each of the two experiences with a third, and so on until one would finish the work at some arbitrary time. In the tragic field, one of the conclusions could then be that a given real course in a certain autotelic aspect provided a more qualified experience than a given bad tragedy on the same subject. In that case there is nothing special left over in the tragedy, other than that it is created by a human and only qua book, etc., is impressed by reality, while the content is of a fictional nature. I know that what I receive is not reality, and thus the engagement is different. Then it is asked whether the object should be prepared with such engagement in mind, or whether it is enough that the observer believes it is prepared this way. Here one must take a working standpoint based on an object that is present, namely the tragic poetry, and say: In any case, we are also aesthetically engaged when we experience in a qualified autotelic way a fictional object content that another human mind has produced with the intention of evoking a qualified autotelic experience. The question of whether there must be agreement between the poet’s intention and the actual experience is already removed for the reason that only in rare cases will there be the opportunity for a comparison, and even then, by very deficient means. But suppose the recipient believes one has a poetic-tragic course before one, and experiences it in a qualified autotelic way, while in reality it is a report to the government? Since the main emphasis is on the experience, one must also call this aesthetic. Or instead, one believes that one has an unpoetic report to the government, while in fact one has received the bloody-born pain child of a “tragic poet” who, with this work, wanted to establish his or her immortality; well, then the experience was not aesthetic. Which qualifications are the ones that justify calling a qualified autotelic experience aesthetic, while another must “settle” for being qualified or basically autotelic? – this will be the ultimate core question. I confess that I am unable to answer it, nor have I found any satisfactory answer from others, merely dazzling descriptions of “aesthetic impressions” and conflicting distinctions. Is it terribly important that the question be answered

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satisfactorily? For the experiencing self – hardly. For the theorist – undoubtedly, if one wants to use the word “aesthetic,” but to what degree does one demand that the answer be satisfactory? Well, only in the sense that it must satisfy one’s own particular needs. Our particular needs are based on the designation “appropriate experience of tragic poetry,” which resolves at least the immediate doubts concerning the definition. The emphasis is therefore on the definition and not on the term itself. A newly created term, “tragetic” or anything at all, would then be more advantageous than aesthetic, because the latter is infected by the endless theoretical discussions and would always be in danger of being “understood” differently. One must use it with sword in hand. In all cases one has the following challenge to cause one to be sidetracked: If a factually identified object has triggered an aesthetic experience in person A once, will it always do so? Experience answers no; the experience depends on the receptivity of the recipient. But then maybe the receptivity is enough such that any object can and will trigger the experience only if the recipient has a suitable receptivity? Here too experience points in the negative direction. I sit alone one evening and my “mood” desires an object that can concentrate, increase, and “trigger” it. I grab one book after another, read some lines and put it away – this was not what I was looking for. Then I come, let us say, to Wergeland’s Creation, and immediately the contact is closed: the receptivity becomes actualized, the vaguely seeking mood matures and is fulfilled, becomes firm and strong; the poem carries me out across boundary after boundary because it has found me in a fortunate moment. The experience of the poem is richer for me than it has been before, but do I dare to use the expression “appropriate”? Thus, before addressing the definition, one must ask: What does it mean that an experience of poetic tragedy is appropriate, do appropriate experiences of this kind exist, where do they exist, and how can they be ascertained? If even this is not clear, a term such as aesthetic will tie one’s hands before work begins. Earlier in this chapter, we somewhat carelessly assumed that there “exists” a unique experience from “good” tragic poetry. We did this on the basis of interpretations of our own experience and in the shelter of a towering tradition. Now we can afford to turn critically against this pleasant conjecture, this safe reference to “common opinion,” this convenient generalization of the recollection of one’s own impressions. Are we allowed to appoint ourselves as authoritative tragic viewers? Is the investigation good enough to present a

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personal testimony as the sole material? Not when the heading reads “autotelic experience of the tragic” rather than: my experience. How is it then for the others who attend tragic plays?

§ 99. The relativity of the viewer A theater audience is an extremely dissimilar crowd of people, both in crosssection (at the individual performance) and in longitudinal section (from time to time). There are people of both sexes, all ages, and all walks of life. All degrees of artistic experience and development of taste are represented, from the critics’ guild to the man from Grukkedalen who has never been to a playhouse before and went in because he thought it would be uplifting. Some see the play for the first time and have difficulty “following the thread,” while others know inside and out the historical and interpretive commentary on every single line. A. thought it was a pleasure play and is bitterly disappointed; B. is only waiting for the rape scene. C. is in love with the theater student Miss D. who has a supporting role. E. is an actor on a leave of absence, or a former actor, dismissed. F. is newly engaged to the boss’ daughter, and now they are sitting together in front-row seats. G. has recently lost four children in a fire and has been told that he has inoperable cancer; the play is about illness or about one who betrays his love to become a partner. H. is a romantic, melancholic, and pensive philosopher. I. is sanguine and a fluttering butterfly. K. is “reviewing the classics.” L. is letting himself “be seen in public.” M. declares to one of the “Friends of the National Theater” that “when after a good dinner, well dressed, I sit in the National Theater in my good seat, they can perform whatever they want.” N. has lent the writer money. O. is his political opponent. P. has a free ticket and is passing time enjoying an evening in the theater. Q. has sold his winter coat to experience Moissi. R. is a priest and a teacher. S. is a fugitive criminal. T. is a moral fanatic and teetotaler. U. is a life worshiper and a playboy. V. is a coat check girl with prima-donna dreams. W. is a professor of aesthetics. X. is a cleaning woman who has a strong susceptibility to the light, which breaks in the fourth act; so does Y. whose glass store received the delivery job in competition with Z., who is on the scene as a firefighter. These and an infinite number of other differences in the viewers’ general and immediate preconditions make it likely that their experience of the play is not “one and the same.” We get a strong confirmation of the relativity of the impression even among the presumably qualified by “casting a glance” (admittedly easier said than done) at the amount of mutually incompatible theories found in the

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aesthetic literature (cf. Chap. 11). When authors can write so differently about the “same” thing, one gets a strong suspicion that the thing is not exactly the same. In other words, they have experienced tragedy in quite different ways; one builds one’s interpretation on plays a, b, c, the other on d, e, f, the third on a, d, g, etc. Besides, everyone knows from oneself and one’s friends that the same play can at one time seem sadly subdued, at another heroically stimulating, etc., according to one’s own receptivity, the conception of the director and actors, the configuration of the stage, etc. How should one go about trying to find a common characteristic of all theatergoers’ impressions (in a broad sense) of tragic plays, or, if this task is considered insurmountable, to find commonality in the experience within certain groups of viewers? Indeed, it would be an expensive and extensive apparatus that would have to be set in motion – and how satisfactory would the result be? I shall suggest a possible method: One or more plays must be characterized as undoubtedly tragic. Then one could either perform the pieces in an experimental theater or be on the lookout when one goes to an ordinary theater; to a certain degree one could confine oneself to reading. In all cases it becomes necessary to have a large number of subjects tasked with communicating what they have experienced when they saw or read the plays, the first time, the second time, etc., on big festive evenings, for empty seats, under varying conditions of different kinds. From the available descriptions, one would have to form “units” or descriptive factors: When C and D both felt compassion, then one assumes either that they meant “the same thing,” or then new trials would have to be set up from word usage and meaning. Now it is clear that the people must make a choice of factors when describing their experiences, cutting out what they consider accidentalia. A. lost his glasses on the floor, B. was bothered by his neighbor eating onions. Does this belong to “the tragic experience”? Of course not – one can easily answer, and yet it is clear that the experience is influenced by such coincidences: A. missed all the facial expressions, and B. could not concentrate on the play. D.’s impression was perhaps that “Ophelia was awfully sweet” (he is in this case in the company of the German aesthetician Lipps), E.’s that Mrs. F. acted poorly or brilliantly. G. remarks that the iambic pentameter seemed old-fashioned, H. that the prose lines pulled him out of the lyrical-musical intoxication. I. experienced the absolute giving birth to the finite, after which the finite through annihilation returned to the absolute. K. felt a “wanting to be God while maintaining selfhood,”a L. saw how the partial ideas merged into a total a Gottseinwollen mit Beibehaltung der Ichheit (Ger.).

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idea. Some of this has nothing to do with what we call the tragic quality of the play, but how does this help when the subject has nothing else to say? What should one single out then? Perhaps we should ourselves strike out what we think is accidentalia with our own hands? Fine. But one still has to take into account the person’s ability or inability to adequately express what he or she has experienced. Nor can one disregard the fact that the people are not theatergoers in the usual sense, but people who have been given a task and perhaps are being paid for it. One is afraid of appearing stupid, another wants to give “the poor student” (the leader of the study) as much as possible for the money – he does not seem to have very much. Thus, there are a sufficient number of difficulties and sources of error. Perhaps our fear is unfounded? Perhaps by a procedure similar to the one described one would get the most beautiful agreement: The entire group of student subjects has felt gripped and shaken to the core, but at the same time lifted and finally liberated.

§ 100. Introspective method We do not, however, have the time to start an experimental theater like the one described. Are we thus cut off from any further work on the question of the autotelic experience of the tragic? Will it only be loose talk or poetic declarations when the description is on an introspective basis? Perhaps, if one declared that “this is the description of the poetic-tragic experience” or something similar. But according to the foregoing we will not declare this. All we mean to say is the following: It must be possible to set up and describe some reactions, feelings, thoughts, imaginative activity, partial and synthetic experiences of value, and other elements that could be thought to be appropriately co-caused by poetic-tragic objects. The writing here thus builds partly on my own recollections, partly on the testimony of others (conversations and theoretical literature), and partly on “psychological speculation.” Based on a presumed community within large groups of people, it is hoped that with each new element the readers will look into themselves and nod in recognition: Yes, one could probably come to have that feeling, etc. And more than that: The reaction is not recognized as a coincidence but as something that “belongs,” and is generally assumed to register as a “natural” consequence of the tragic structure of the object and its artistic clothing. Exact information may not be required. The matter demands some leeway and a certain flexibility; what we need lies in the term appropriateness: a logical

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elasticity that provides space not only for the fixed experience and the pure thought, but also for certain shifts within boundaries of a purely introspective, emotional, and speculative nature. During the mention of the dramatic-theatrical clothing, some effects were depicted that the viewer could possibly experience, and which did not derive from the tragic structure of the play. The autotelic viewpoint is assumed in the poetic-tragic as in all other art, its dramatic tools share this with the drama chiefly, and the other pleasures of the visit to the theater are usually granted to the audience regardless of the nature of the play. Therefore, if in what follows we are to investigate possible appropriate effects of the poetic-tragic, then we must first eliminate contributing but not specific factors, general autotelic relief from everyday pressure, the dramatic elements as such (excitement, surprise, sudden dramatic turns of events,a etc.), the linguistic and stylistic ferments as such, and finally the general theatrical parts of the overall experience. But, on the other hand, we cannot retain as material a poetic-tragic course in nuce, without any clothing, because this is not experienced in the theater. It can sometimes be useful to abstract, but not here where we intend to investigate a real experience. It thus becomes necessary to include general autotelic, linguistic, dramatic, and theatrical attributes, but only insofar as they are directly linked to the essence of the matter, to the very tragic structure and its individual factors: to the greatness, the occasion, and the downfall. Before we go into these factors, however, a reservation must be made. It is always assumed that the viewpoint of the viewer is purely autotelic. And it is still maintained that if a clearly heterotelic element breaks in, then one moves outside the area designated for investigation. But suppose that the heterotelic background of moral, political, economic, etc., interest struggles on the stage mixes in such a way that significantly colors the autotelically experienced content, but without breaking the viewpoint itself. Perhaps there are also syntheses of the autotelic and heterotelic viewpoints, and perhaps a given experience of a poetic-tragic course could simply be regarded as such a synthesis. We also know from experience that the transition from one viewpoint to the other does not have to take place in one stroke, but can occur on a scale, as when gradually waking from sleep. It is easiest to imagine such a heterotelic background in the viewer who represents what, after Müller-Freienfels,131 has been called the contemplative a coups de théâtre (Fr.). 131 Psychologie der Kunst [Psychology of Art], Lpz.-Berl. 1923, Vol. I p. 66 ff., cf. Chu, The Psychology of Tragedy, Strasbourg 1933 p. 68 ff.

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viewer type (Zuschauer) as opposed to the participant (Mitspieler). In practice, one will hardly find pure types, but the distinction has its value; I myself have found it already clearly manifested in two sisters at the age of seven. The participant viewer completely identifies oneself with one or more of the performers, forgetting oneself entirely, triumphing and despairing when the protagonist triumphs and despairs, and living in the life of the scene as if nothing else existed. Nietzsche would call them Dionysian viewers; it is the presented affects that fill them the most. To a certain extent they coincide with what recent psychology after Jung describes as introverted natures; one could also call them intensive. Such viewers experience above all the characters that capture their sympathy; here they have a deeper “empathy” than others. In return, they will easily miss the production’s other poetic values, composition, atmosphere, line art, philosophical stimulation, etc. After all, they cannot very well identify themselves with all the performers in turn, and not at all when several of them stand against each other as enemies in the same scene, etc. Here the contemplative viewer has a great advantage. One is also actively involved in what is being performed, but not in such a way that one forgets oneself. One is not captured by any single part, but retains the overview even in the most violent confrontations, and can allow everything to come to its full right, collaboratively and individually. One is what Nietzsche would call an Apollonian viewer; one enjoys in cool calm the form in which the forces appear; one is also intellectually engaged. Often one will have an “extroverted” nature and see things more in length and breadth than in depth; we could therefore also use the term extensive. The combination of contemplative and participatory postures seems to provide the most complete experience of plays, under otherwise similar conditions. A similar type difference is also found in poets and actors. Diderot132 wanted actors to keep their personalities out of the play; but as a viewer he was a participant.133 There has also been talk of the opposition between subjective and objective art; Oscar Walzel has written a reflection on Ibsen, Goethe, and Schiller’s relation to this opposition.134

132 Paradoxe sur le comédien [Paradox of the Actor], Oeuvres Complètes [Complete Works], Paris 1875, Vol. VIII, 5, p. 345 ff. 366, various places, cf. 392 op. cit. p. 72 ff. 133 Gerhard Gran, Fremmed Aandsliv [Foreign Spirituality], Kr.a. 1920 p. 89. The article “Sentimentality” has several examples of participatory reading. 134 Vom Geistesleben alter und neuer Zeit [On the Intellectual Life of Ancient and Modern Times], Leipzig 1922 p. 501 ff.

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Whether the viewer in casu tends toward one or the other posture type will naturally exert a certain influence on the peculiarities of the poetic-tragic experience as well. Nevertheless, I find it unnecessary to make the distinction in the following, but I note that it opens in two directions the possibility of a synthesis between autotelic and heterotelic viewpoints: For the contemplative type, heterotelic background can be expected in the form of discursive problem treatment and the like alongside the impression, while the participant type can be thought to demonstrate a blurred boundary between autotelic emotions and “practical compassion,” the urge to kill the villain and the like. It is open to debate whether participating poets, actors, and viewers form an optimal collaborative unity, or whether in a given case higher results are obtained by a combination.

§ 101. The individual factors of the poetictragic experience It is natural to mention the greatness first. We have already noted that not every culturally relevant greatness is poetically useful. It is not enough that the protagonist is representative in the heterotelic sense: biologically effective, socially of high moral standards (an intolerable prig can more easily “fit” in the comedy), metaphysically confident (greatness of fixedness), or seeking (“dynamic greatness”). The greatness must be given an autotelic brilliance, be truly breathtaking, captivating, fascinating. The exclusively culturally relevant greatness can be roughly judged by the help of the understanding alone; the also autotelically relevant appeals primarily to irrational faculties. A culturalphilosophical assessment might place Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck higher than Doctor Relling, but Relling captivates by his uniqueness, his strange reaction to the occurring events. When the character is merely “interesting,” the experience may well be autotelically valuable but not tragic, as claimed by, for example, Groos. The viewer should therefore have a certain cultural consciousness akin to the poet’s. When the irrational conditions are present (emotion, etc.), on the basis of this common cultural consciousness sympathy may arise for the protagonist, who is in large part representative of the poet’s cultural assessment. “We are both in the boat of life, and we all strive for the highest confirmation; I see which path your abilities point you toward, and my imagination is ready to follow you on this path.” This “dramatic sympathy” is something more than a dry ascertainment of cultural relevance; it is precisely “pathic,” there are

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feelings in play, there eros appears in the viewer’s relationship with the protagonist. One admires the protagonist; indeed, one can come to “love” him or her. A unique relationship arises toward young and charming female protagonists such as Gretchen and Kätchen; they may represent one’s hypothetical erotic optimum object. For female viewers, there are protagonists such as Siegfried in The Nibelungenlied, Hippolytus, and Goethe’s Werther or Tasso that come into consideration here. The intellectual elements in the cultural assessment of the protagonist’s qualifications need in no way sever the autotelic viewpoint. Here there is admittedly a difference since the viewer observes the problem, for example, by the protagonist oneself working on it (Duke Skule) or the poet putting it directly to the audience. A Doll’s House has been interpreted in both ways. A scientist who works on problems for the sake of intellectual joy also has an autotelic posture. When the contemplative viewer takes up a cultural or philosophical problem, detached from the dramatic context, one breaks the boundary of the fictional and as a result one of the autotelic qualifications that we have intended to attribute to “appropriate experience of poetic tragedy.” But qualifications are preserved as long as one works on the problem within the context of the drama and to a certain extent “thinks with the minds of the performers.” Of particular interest here is the consideration of the reaction of the viewer when the protagonist, in one’s attempt to realize one’s greatness (as intrinsic value) or attain one’s goal (with greatness as means), comes into conflict with the moral norms of the viewer, here meant in the sense of the social-moral. The norms either belong to the viewer’s heterotelic life (morality determined by the consequences) and in that case lie outside the fictional-autotelic engagement. Or they belong to the practical-autotelic life (“the good for the good’s own sake”) and lie outside the fictional-autotelic engagement. Thus, in both cases they are irrelevant to the poetic-tragic experience, unless they have a function in the protagonist’s environment or are found in him or her. This is related to the classification of the tragic from the point of view of the cultural circle (§ 78, and others). An Eastern prince lets his enemies be captured and killed under torture; our moral associations concerning this are few and weak. It is different if a modern Western European uses similar means. Then we are immediately clear about the social-moral reprobation of the action, we co-experience in the case of the protagonist’s torn conscience and the environment’s judgment, but we do not judge him at his own expense as long as we live in the play’s world with the imagination’s help. The contemplative viewer

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can go so far as to say: You see, he complicated the situation – to which the participant would respond: Yes, he must, he must. Nor is a course such as this “poetically exhausted” by an intellectual moral assessment. Just as important to the case is the manner in which it all comes to light, how the protagonist expresses one’s hatred and triumph, how the victims react, etc. Here the poet’s nuancing works together with the actors’ bodies, appearances, and perceptions; mood and knowledge from previous scenes color in, etc. The viewer has full permission to let oneself be enchanted by things against which a jury has to be relentlessly on guard. The analysis of the concept of guilt that was undertaken in §§ 65 ff. was intended to meet the need for reasonable guidance, partly during the theater experience itself, but especially during theoretical work afterward. When the greatness in a very different manner assumes a criminal character, one is not surprised that the consequences become catastrophic. What awakens the wonder in us, and drives a wedge into our unified, harmonious, sympathetic-admiring state of mind, is that a greatness like this may or must be realized in such a painful interest-conflicting manner. The more appropriateness there is, the stronger will this element of unsettling wonder be. Already in the experience of the protagonist’s greatness there can thus be strong elements of both pleasure and aversion, and these impressions are, of course, independent of whether or not the subsequent course is tragic (when the play is first seen). With the appearance of the counterpower comes the tension in the air: How will this develop? An internal counterpower produces conflict, a theme for “introverted” viewers; an external counterpower produces a fight, a theme for “extroverted” viewers. The counterpower of cultural relevance also produces a philosophical reflection; the counterpower of poetic relevance awakens sympathy and perhaps admiration for a new aspect: There is an experience content analogous to loving two women, but purified of private concerns. The enjoyment of watching a fight is in the nature of most people. The advantage of the poetic fight should then be that one is both engaged with one’s sympathy for the protagonist and detached as an autotelic viewer. Even a fight in reality (such as a boxing match) can be experienced almost purely autotelically, and also has the benefit that “the illusion” cannot well fail. But the autotelia in this case has other preconditions, perhaps of inferior cultural relevance, and can it be reconciled with a profound sympathy for the losing combatant? The poetic fight is experienced both “from within” and “from without.” (This is not the place for a comparison between the

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vis attractiva of reality and poetry – an enticing theme for both experimental psychologists and introspection.) It can further involve such powerful and significant forces that it acquires the mark of the sublime: First one is startled by the power of the impression, then one is lifted up to the plane where the fight is occurring and experiences an increase in, an expansion of the ordinary state of consciousness. It can happen that the fight and the counterpower’s reaction reveal a side of life about which the viewer knew nothing, but which now draws one violently closer. Perhaps one has felt inferiority and envy toward the “great” natures; now one sees that greater light also produces greater shadows, that highly driven living is also dangerous living. Such “instruction” one may well receive in autotelic engagement; the viewer simply cannot help but learn something from a good drama. The difference from didactic lectures is the fact that the information here comes as a by-product; it alone cannot justify the performance. An analogy from the sensory-autotelic realm: A masterpiece of a wedding dinner also nourishes; it is not the primary intention, but it is also not to be avoided given the raw materials of which it is made. A regard for the nutritional value (porridge and herring) is not enough the make the meal festive. In the tragedy, the mental abilities of both intellectual and emotional nature are put into full-toned function, which leads to a sensation of pleasure or value (functional joya). Such a sensation can be present even when the affect is aversive and the mental visions frightening: All affects can have a pleasurable component because they are affects, and something similar applies to captivating, albeit threatening connections that arise in “cognition.” Life becomes richer, thought takes a mighty grip of the cosmos, we are part of the world adventure, we are filled with vibration. The central problem of aversion as a source of value has its first facet in the question of the dramatic effect of the protagonist’s suffering. For a great number of authors, the discussion of the tragic has been confined to this one question. The word that first occurs to one when it comes to “enjoying someone else’s suffering” is sadism. And there is no reason to deny that sadistic inclination can play a role for those who attend a tragic performance, just as it undoubtedly did in gladiator fights, public torture, and executions, and can still be thought to appear in a mild form in bullfights and boxing matches. With sadism, however, one thinks of a sexually accentuated feeling of pleasure (sadism in the narrower sense even assumes that the suffering has been added a Funktionsfreude (Ger.).

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to the victim by the enjoying self). And it is perhaps the very few who notice any sexual accentuation when they look at the poetic protagonist’s suffering, especially not when the protagonist and viewer are of the same sex. We disregard abnormal tendencies here as well as in-depth psychological theories, as the task is to describe the viewer’s conscious experiences. Forms of “pleasure from cruelty” are also given where no such sexual component makes itself felt in consciousness. Mutilated people (train accident, fire), corpses and skeletons, operations, and funeral scenes exert a strange attraction even on people who least of all wish on others some evil and with the deepest horror discover this desire in themselves. “Explaining” this urge will here, as elsewhere, refer it back to names or causes that are more familiar or understandable, or which for other reasons do not call for further questions. I shall attempt such an explanation, knowing that there is room for others as well, and that variations in psychological causes and effects always threaten the identity of the phenomenon. If one considers something like torture, it has, among other things, a strong intellectual autotelic attraction. It awakens a curiosity, which may well be “sensational” and culturally inferior, but which can also have the deepest and most serious quality imaginable. What is life, what does it mean to be human, what conditions does existence entail for us when we get far enough out? It is as if the observer is asking: What do you do when you are forced to endure what you can not endure? How do you look in the face, in the eyes, what language do you use to convey your condition? You who are now out in the borderlands, I see that the expression pushes against insufficient organs of communication like trapped dynamite; let it tell me what you experience out there, then I can imagine it without having to go there myself. More “philosophical” values can also attach themselves to the impression. Here now is an organism, equipped with a range of powerful reactions, of instincts and reflexes, with mental abilities in mass for fight and flight, for angst and anger. A heavy avalanche of millennia of experience pushes them forward in the victim. At the same time, the stimuli to which the victim is exposed are met with an equally vast knowledge of these instincts, etc., and a knowledge of how they are put into a maximum of activity. Finally, when the reaction is blocked (the victim is tied up and gagged), the most qualified biological situation that can be imagined arises. The stronger and finer the reactability is developed in the victim, and the more certain and more comprehensive the torturer’s insight into anatomy, physiology, and psychology, the more extraordinary must the effect be. (Excepting abnormal cases, the victim’s willpower may simply

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shift, not remove the effect.) Giraudoux speaks somewhere of the prisoner’s “wealth in death.”a In the observer’s eyes, it may be a kind of evolutionary paradox that comes to mind here, a kind of short-circuiting between different “currents of life force.” Torture’s presence in the history of the human race may therefore signify a trial by fire for the hope of a leading intelligence related to ours, behind the unfolding of life on earth, – not to mention the vilest mockery of such a hope. Captivatingly striking and paralyzingly terrible is the blossom that life’s unfolding has put in human prisons and inquisition chambers. No earthly beings can compete with us here; when the imagination seeks out the humanly possible in the direction of torment, it does not turn to the animals, but to the world of the gods. In the tyrant a feeling of power is able to join the possible others, which develops from the victim’s abuse, while the observer will instead enjoy one’s own safety. Both of these factors have been treated in tragic theory,135 and, of course, it does not deny that they can register in a viewer in the theater. I myself have never noticed the components, nor have the 6–8 theater enthusiasts I have asked. And it can hardly be useful to draw from practical areas of life when it comes to the feeling of power and safety. Poetic “imitation” (mimesis) creates conditions for experience that are vastly different from those found in daily life. The peculiarity (and yet far from clear in the theory of art) is that, as Aristotle mentions, one often enjoys, by the mere imitation, things which are aversive or pleasure-indifferent. It is enough for a student to copy one’s professor in a striking way, and then the auditorium is in ecstasy, even though the professor’s being is no stranger than others. Miniature objects can produce the strongest enchantment, even if the original does not (a truck, an electric kitchen, puppet theater, beginning amateur photographers). Suffering by good mimesis, therefore, already has value qua mimesis, but it shares this value with other objects. For us it is more about finding out what is not common. The difference between reality and mimesis is evident when one thinks of the “normal” reaction to the suffering of others: “compassion.” It registers as pain, co-pain (with an image from electricity, one could also call it induced pain), but also as a strong urge to help, to bring the agonizing state to an end. Whether this urge originates from an “instinct,” or it has its “mainspring” in the “desire” to bring an end to the other’s suffering, or to bring an end to one’s a richesse dans la mort (Fr.). 135 Among others by Lipps, Der Streit ü d. Tragödie [The Dispute Concerning the Tragedy], Lpz. 1915 p. 37 f. with Valentin in mind.

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own co-pain, or is a product of upbringing, etc., is a psychological question we should not get into; the theme has a considerable literature.136 More important here is the fact that compassion changes when confronted with a poetic object. The pain is still there, one thinks of Gretchen in prison, but since the course is fictional, there is no connection to the urge to help; similarly, the whole “psychic neighborhood” of feelings, associations, etc., is different. One is, as far as the development of events is concerned, a passive observer, just as when reading a book. (There are reports of viewers who in the theater are gripped by practical compassion, antipathy, etc. A young man grabs Othello by the arm; an elderly lady warns Hamlet against the poisoned sword; an Englishman throws a shilling to the freezing student; a Chinese woodcutter has his ax with him in the theater and cuts down the traitor.) Poetic compassion is a more complex feeling, which can also be said of other feelings and thoughts awakened by the poetic-tragic course. Aversion, in compassion and otherwise, is, for example, not of the nature that, as long as one gets rid of it, the way it happens does not matter. It should be done in a way that the viewer can accept based on the qualified autotelic assessment method into which one has eventually worked oneself. A badly placed happy endinga makes one mortified and angry. Once the poet has entered into the dramatic danger zone, he or she is also subject to the laws of dramatic apperception. The co-experience of pain produces aversion, or also aversion. But in the poetic engagement, aversion works synthetically with the pleasure of the experience function and forms an overall autotelic value. One can sob in the theater, and despair can burn in one like acid, but as long as the poet’s iron grip, sorcery, or whichever image one wants to use, is there, one has no urge to shout or leave; it is the opposite. (The emotion may become so strong that one must step out to recover, but the viewpoint toward the powerful object is not broken thereby.) Here it is not sufficient as an “explanation” to refer to the autotelic experience of a heterotelic interest-conflicting course (§ 94). When one intoxicatedly co-experiences a bayonet attack, then there is generally no aversion present, and if aversion arises, it drives away the pleasure; there is an either-or, not a both-and. One simply does not think that each one of these young men has a personal life that is now being destroyed, etc. (heterotelic assessment), or how awful it is to see them on the page (a different autotelic assessment). The pleasure-giving autotelic viewpoint first has to sidestep any 136 Concentrated presentation with bibliography in K. von Orelli, Die philosophischen Auffassungen des Mitleids [The Philosophical Conceptions of Pity], Bonn 1912. a English happy end given.

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heterotelic viewpoint regardless of benefit and harm, and then (or at the same time), of all the autotelic aspects regardless of pleasure and aversion, only one, intoxication, remains. But with Gretchen in prison the relationship becomes a new one: here one immerses oneself precisely in this idea: What a shame that this lovely human child should be trampled down. If this is the reaction of the viewer (or part of it), then it is no longer possible to say that a pleasurable autotelic viewpoint has blasted away everything else. If it were ultimately necessary to maintain the pleasure-aversion model, one would have to refer to other kinds of “double affects” such as, for example, the erotic ambivalence in which one simultaneously loves and hates. Or one could also use Du Bos’ “theory of movement” in which the emotion as such is positive, regardless of the factors of aversion, because – in our own terminology – the emotional readiness is triggered in full-toned function. However, it seems more appropriate to abandon the pleasure-aversion opposition as the “means of explanation” in a case like this. The viewer can hardly even tell whether it is “pleasure” or “aversion” one feels; I personally believe that I have found myself beyond this opposition. On the other hand, it is clear that one is attracted to a scene like Gretchen in prison, that one (in certain dispositions) would like to experience it, though one may also be a little apprehensive about one’s own tears. The experience thus represents a value. (Whether it has value because one would like it, or whether one would like it because it is valuable, is a question that must be left to psychology.) Previously we have seen ourselves having to set the value standpoint in opposition to the pleasure standpoint. This was during the discussion of moral choice (in §§ 7, 69, 92). There one alternative represented pleasure and low value, the other aversion and high value. A similar opposition can be established between the airy and bright poetic silver alloy and the mourning play’s heavy, dark ore, whose carat content is reserved for the renunciate, the one who no longer lets one’s life content be determined by basic autotelic pleasures and enjoyment, but makes one’s mind available for heavier and richer engagement. The factors mentioned so far would seem more satisfactory when it comes to “explaining” the attractiveness of the prison scene qua isolated tableau, than if it is part of a further dramatic context. Here the new addition is that the scene has a function within the whole. Just as an artificial tooth is borne by its healthy comrades, so too sits the aversive scene atop a poetic golden bridge between before and after. From Gretchen’s pleasure and suffering, and from all the other joyous and painful and beyond joyous-painful scenes together, the

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spirit of the play rises, and this is what the recipient must catch. That one very often stares in vain looking for the play’s spirit is a matter in itself. A manner of expression like this last one obviously does not satisfy psychology’s requirements for usable concepts, but this is not the intention either. If one lets go of the irrational137 in the experience of art, which cannot be captured without remainder in a cognitive schema, then one also lets go of what experience says is the most important part. It is a different matter that one can afterward try to think about one’s experience, work one’s way further and further through the area that was irrational at the time of the experience. Psychology can arrange the irrational into a whole system, “approximately,” in which the barrels are arranged in a warehouse without knowing what is in them. It cannot simply translate the irrational into an understandable language, but it can attack and conquer it in part. How far a psychological structuring of causes and effects can reach will naturally depend on starting points, conceptual models, and methods; in any case, this is a matter of dispute in aesthetic theory. Some of the things that were said about the suffering also apply to the catastrophe, the climax of the suffering and its completion in this form. In the suffering there is yet another battle and perhaps the possibility of triumph; hope and fear alternate in the viewer’s breast. When everything is lost, this condition is replaced by a new one. The battle itself is often a qualified event, a sensation, which has experience value already qua extraordinary and meaningful. It can arrive in different ways: creeping, or thundering like a landslide. The impression then becomes dispiriting or sublime (“lofty.”a Our word “exalted” does not cover the meaning. “Tremendous and breathtaking” and the like lie closer.) When the impression is suffocating (cf. Desdemona’s death, where the viewer is also “strangled”), the poet has no support in its “inherent” autotelic positivity; one is then given the especially difficult task of making it poetically valuable, possibly by arranging it convincingly within the overall dynamics of the play. Scenes such as Gloucester’s blinding in Lear and Lavinia’s mutilation in Titus Andronicus, judging by the literature, have proved “difficult to digest.” Here it is tempting to make the assumption that the greater the “common autotelic” aversion is by the substance, the greater the poetic power must be to 137 The word should not mean anything fundamentally different from “rational,” but rather that a mind content belongs to the emotional and fantasy life, etc., and has not hitherto been “clarified” in mechanical model. a erhaben (Ger.).

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force it to work in a poetically positive way. And the higher must the poetic value of the result also be, if the work is really to succeed (cf. in ethics “the path of greatest resistance”). One objection is that the question must precisely be whether and to what extent the poet’s task is crowned with luck. And sometimes one achieves a massive effect with an obstinate substance (autotelically interest-conflicting or indifferent) and a weak effect with an agreeable one (autotelically interest-aligned) – at other times the other way around. In each case, what the outcome will be will show itself; predictions have a poor foundation. A number of authors have seen the tragic poetic effect in the sublime (Kant, Bradley, Hirn). They are thinking mainly of the sublimity associated with the protagonist’s posture during the suffering and the catastrophe. A new greatness, which may arise under the purifying influence of the suffering, joins itself in some cases to that which came to light in the protagonist’s efforts. These two very different manifestations of greatness are often confused; although they may in some cases be related in form or function, it is important to keep them fundamentally separate from each other. There is nothing in the way of the protagonist being able from the beginning to present culturally (and autotelically) relevant greatness in one respect or another; one is, for example, a gifted musician, scientist, or party leader. And then, when the catastrophe arrives, one breaks down mentally, despairs, laments, and seeks rescue in flight. The protagonist’s posture is under the influence of the counterpower and afterward is in principle of no significance to the objectively tragic character of the course considered, although the greatness in effort can also be infected by the “smallness” in posture. But for the poetic impression, the posture will be strongly determinative, perhaps decisive. But even concerning this one cannot say anything certain in advance; much depends on the “manner” and the totality: Antigone, for example, laments over her fate without casting any shadow over her heroic efforts. It was mentioned before that some writers (including Karl Groos) use the term tragic in a way that does not contain the mark of culturally relevant greatness; it is enough that the protagonist seems compelling, interesting, sympathetic, etc. Another view (asserted by Schiller, among others) that also deviates from our own is this: No effort greatness is needed provided there is posture greatness during the suffering. One falls ill but heroically138 continues 138 Heroism is (in § 92) used adjectively about a choice of action, in which the social-moral value is preferred, in spite of great sacrifice of the inferior but at the moment more pleasurable interests. We will call heroic the result of the competition of alternatives, that an

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one’s work for – any culturally relevant purpose. The course can also be tragic in our sense, in that downfall and greatness are functionally connected: Greatness probably would not have appeared in this person without downfall as a precondition. What then determines whether the course is tragic or heroic is the stricken person’s feeling of injury or triumph: Does one value the lost or the won value the highest? Here there are usually difficult border fields. It can be imagined, for example, that the viewer’s overall impression is uplifting, even though the protagonist is in despair; the person has nonetheless manifested one’s high value in a way that puts the downfall in the shade. Or vice versa: The protagonist triumphs, but the viewer despairs; one does not share the protagonist’s faith in the “learned formulas,” one sees the heroic posture as a pseudo-solution behind which the emptiness laughs twice as frighteningly. The impression gives a first glimpse of the “tragi-comic,” a heightening of the hopelessness toward the “properly entertaining.” Here we are ostensibly using a way of thinking from which we will later distance ourselves in other authors (e.g., Volkelt), namely, to infer from the effect to the tragic nature of the course; by effect is meant emotional effect. But it has not been our intention to switch over to such a method. Already the determination of the objectively tragic had to be made with a subjective factor, namely the assessment of the greatness and its fate. This subjectivity then accompanies the transfer to the poetic field, and gains there perhaps an even greater leeway. Another relation is of similar effect: “Western European culture” also recognizes a number of autotelic values, beauty, uprightness, strength, courage, etc., regardless of the heterotelic function of these properties. Such values are already determined in the real-life field by the effect (emotional effect) they produce. These emotional determinations also follow along as attributes of greatness when the tragic appears in poetic attire; they also play a crucial role in the poet’s choice of material. When the catastrophe involves or causes the protagonist’s death, this will shape the effect in different ways. One does not leave the theater with the painful impression of a destroyed life that struggles on in pieces – a theme which indeed can also be thought of poetically. The protagonist’s biological death is worse, but dramatically it can have great advantages. It rounds off the impression, depicting the protagonist’s life as a consummated fate, a unified, naturally bounded object. All new possibilities are cut off, nothing more can be autotelic high-value posture is preferred over an autotelic low-value but more tempting posture: One faces the enemy, although one feels the strongest urge to “surrender.” This is at first glance; an analysis of psychological motivation can dissolve the concepts.

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done or changed in the protagonist’s life; only from the outside can new light be cast on it. A new ring is added to the poetic blockade of practical engagement, a new psychic distance is established by transferring the experience object to memory139 instead of it being present. The memory makes a selection from the object’s “feature carriers,” the more indifferent middle tones disappear, while the extremes in the positive and negative direction appear in sharpened form. At the same time, the autotelic character of the object is highlighted. The fact that the object no longer exists, and therefore draws itself back from the control of experience, gives the transformative powers of imagination a freer play; a predominantly sympathetic object is shifted upward toward the object optimum (childhood memories, the introduction “once upon a time.” Poets sometimes have to wait for temporal distance before they can derive poetic values from an experience substance). The impression of the protagonist’s greatness becomes purer, stronger, more beautiful. At the same time, death places an atoning glow over the “all too human,” it works as a refining process, the protagonist “regains one’s innocence,” the unimaginable and total annihilation destroys the foundation underneath a narrow, particular assessment. It is easier to “understand” another human being when he or she no longer exists. One no longer looks at him or her from the many partial points of view, such as husband, citizen, friend; one sees him or her against the backdrop of the common human lot that is born without choosing its conditions, that fights the blind’s battle against external and internal dangers, and finally that has to turn over what has been gained piece by piece. One sees him or her sub specie mortis,a sub specie æternitatis;b the metaphysical dimension rises vertically atop all the earthly. This is especially true with death as a tragic catastrophe. Death as common human lot reinforces the aforementioned feeling of sympathy for the protagonist when sympathy is present in advance, and can create sympathy where it was previously absent (Richard III). As a negative condition, death contributes by removing inhibitions. One can give love free reins without the risk of “hurting oneself,” without the fear of later unpleasant surprises. And the experience of a strong and pure love for another human being (even if it is a fictional person) meets a deep-seated need in most people. A number of the affects that are awakened by the protagonist’s death, and above all by the 139 Concerning the importance of memory in connections like these, see Alois Riehl, “Bemerk. z. d. Probl. d. Form i. d. Dichtkunst. [Comments on the Problem of Form in Poetry]” in Viertelj. schr. f. wiss. Philos. [Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy] 1898 p. 98 ff. a in the face of death. b in the face of eternity.

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manner in which one dies, especially for participating viewers, have such emotional intrinsic worth: the proud compassion, the gentle sadness, the warm, flowing grief. Theodor Lipps has strongly emphasized this dramaturgical function of death. With suicide the actual experience of death combines itself with the impression of the thoughts and emotions that led to the extreme action. Death can also liberate the viewer from a painful experience of the protagonist’s suffering, when such a liberation is poetically relevant. At least one author (Valentin) has found “the tragic pleasure” in this relationship; it is a case of the relief from “a temporary experience of pain.”a The viewpoint is effectively countered by Lipps,140 and to me it seems that Valentin has exaggerated the meaning of “liberation” at the expense of other factors. On the other hand, it has an important function in the dynamic of the dramatic experience: to prepare for the winding up of the viewer’s poetic engagement. Another part of this winding up is (in casu) the “punishment” or death of the people who hitherto represented the victorious counterpower, either now sympathetic and culturally relevant (Hegel) – in that case the counterpower itself can be the bearer of a tragic fate – or unsympathetic and culturally irrelevant. In the end, it is a pressure, an irritation, a tension in the viewer’s mind that is dissolved; the revenge instinct is satisfied. The “moral balance” in the world of the drama, which the counterpower has pushed out of the play, is restored where the counterpower is concerned. The theory uses the term “poetic justice” and then refers to a relationship between merit and fate within the poet’s work, which the viewer finds just. In the pleasure of poetic justice, many authors have found “the specifically tragic enjoyment” (cf. Chap. 11). It can hardly be doubted that when an unsympathetic counterpower is hit by poetic justice in a poetically talented way, such a course is well-suited to give the viewer a powerful poetic stimulus. The motif dominates in most crime novels. In dramaturgy one often hears about “resolution.” In the broadest sense the resolution amounts to a part toward the end of the action in which the viewer’s agitation is in one way or another brought to rest, such that one is prepared to leave the theater in both intellectual and emotional satisfaction. If one takes the term in a narrower sense, then the theory shows more contentious views; the moralists (such as Lipps) demand remorse, repentance, and punishment for all sins in order for the resolution to be complete. Such resolution must take place in the protagonist’s (or the counterpower’s) own a eine vorübergehende Schmerzerregung (Ger.). 140 Zeitschr. f. vergl. Lit.gesch. [Journal of Comparative Literary History] New Version Vol. 5 p. 438 ff.

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mind. During the unfolding of greatness, one has violated moral principles which one fundamentally recognizes oneself. The expansion is stranded, and now the neglected interests are rolling back over the defenseless terrain with increased force. When the protagonist (or in a given case, the antagonist) cannot endure the pressure and seeks death to be rid of it, possibly in the idea of a metaphysical purification by offering one’s life as a sacrifice, this “greatness” in posture can “reconcile” the viewer to the protagonist’s past mistakes. The poet then escapes the other more difficult task of “reconciling” the viewer to the sight of the unfortunate victims, that is, makes them poetically digestible. “Greatness” is in quotation marks here because one never knows what a closer motive analysis of the magnificent gesture can reveal. Voluntary death as sacrifice, regardless of motivation, does not stand in our time as a widely accepted magic solution that automatically opens the way to both social-moral and metaphysical “atonement,” that is, the re-establishment of the status quo in the moral accounting. Only in military circles has suicide retained its prestige as “proper form,” when it comes to erasing a stain on “the regiment’s honor,” etc. Concerning the sacrifice’s compatibility or incompatibility with the tragic character of the course, what is said above about posture in general applies.

§ 102. The overall poetic-tragic course The individual features of the dramatic-tragic experience that are now being discussed can also occur with dramatic works of a non-tragic nature, with mourning plays, fighting plays, hero plays, etc. (cf. § 104). They can even occur cumulatively without the poetry being tragic, as this qualification first arises from the functional connection between greatness and catastrophe. A poetic work can accordingly be tragic without having poetic value (for a given viewer). If one seeks a poetic experience to trigger a “melancholy” mood, there is no guarantee that the play is tragic; a non-tragic play can in poetic terms stand much higher. In the literature on the tragic one often finds the view asserted or assumed that if a work first merits the designation tragic, then it is also poetically valuable (e.g., in Yrjö Hirn). The tragic is then considered a “poetic” or “aesthetic” category, while in our view it is a unique constellation within the practical cultural pursuit. The fact that this constellation, like almost any other, can be subject to poetic adaptation, cannot change the fundamental concept of the tragic into a poetic concept. It remains to be determined what poetic value may be associated with the tragic functional connection itself, with the greatness being inextricably linked

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to the catastrophe. Here one should not aim for the manner in which the connection comes into view, the tension, the successive, inescapable revelation, or the sudden shock of peripeteia. The artistic dressing is of great importance, one might think, but the tragic connection certainly shares the benefits gained thereby with other dramatic structures, for example, the heroic. Only the effect caused by the structure itself should be specific to the tragic. However, the artistic means cannot be abstracted from the “substance” they bring forth, as long as one has the actual poetic impression in mind, for in this a living connection between “substance and form,” “matter and manner,” “what and how” indeed enters into an indissoluble synthesis. The distinction first arises during theoretical work afterward. Thus, it is not exhaustive if one says that what the tragic structure borrows from the artistic means are foreign feathers which one will find again next time somewhere else. Experience points more toward the manner of expression that even the tragic structure for its part permeates and colors the artistic means and makes them one with itself in a way that is not encountered outside of tragic poetry. As a concrete case of tragic structure, the proverb “Shame on the one who gives oneself to the poor” was mentioned. The reader may have one’s own reservations about the example, but it works for us for the moment. The proverb as a statement addresses our “practical thought,” while the tragic in definition addresses our “theoretical thought.” The tragic in poetic clothing speaks to our whole soul and spiritual personality, to knowledge and memory, to thought, feeling, and imagination, to glands, drives, and instincts, and to all faculties psychology knows to mention. How then can the crushing message which the tragic structure in poetic clothing conveys to our overall personality be endowed with staggering autotelic value in such a way that so many notable people from their own lives and so many writers from diametrically opposed camps set it highest among all imaginable “aesthetic” experiences and compete in their praise of it? I have not found a completely satisfactory answer, clear enough and sufficiently exhaustive, in anyone, and it is also clear that I cannot give one myself. This also applies to the individual factors in the tragic course, which have just been considered separately. But there was not much to do there either since these questions can be answered in different ways without having a decisive influence on the answer to the last and most important. Nor is it enough to point out here that any object (course) can be experienced in a positive autotelic way, even if it has a negative sign in a heterotelic context, is interest-conflicting. For there is (we presume) an autotelic

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minus also with a course like the tragic, namely when the tragic figure has won the viewer’s sympathy and compassion. Then one autotelically wants the protagonist to do well. And then it goes badly for him or her instead. The problem is also presumably relevant in plays where greatness and catastrophe are both present, but without a functional connection – a constellation that some writers (Volkelt, Lipps) have called the tragic. Here the answer must first and foremost point to the fact that the unfortunate fate puts the protagonist’s greatness in a clearer light and sharpens our sympathy and compassion for him or her. And this effect must then also be found in the area that we call tragic, because the mentioned qualification in the course is covered by what we have called tragic qualification. What is new is the causal connection. It can also increase the viewer’s poetic compassion, making it even clearer to one how undeserved the protagonist’s suffering is. But on the other hand – if the protagonist has incurred the catastrophe through moral guilt, weakness, incompetence, error, etc. (though this minus forms a complement to greatness), then this relationship should rather diminish compassion, compared to that which is (presumably) felt toward an only outstanding person stricken by a misfortune for which he or she does not even have psychological guilt. It is clear, therefore, that if compassion is maintained, then it has also shifted or expanded; it partly takes on a new character. It is no longer biological and social misfortunes that awaken compassion, but something that in the terminology used here was called a metaphysical misfortune; it is no longer a special case, but a universal human concern. Philosophical reflection concerning the tragic course will be remembered from §§ 76, 93, and others. The question that now arises is a different one: How do we describe or “explain” the full autotelic value of the experience of a tragic connection – or rather the superior autotelic value that also absorbs the autotelic aversion? We must first pause then for a moment at the philosophical reflection. In autotelic experience there can also be an intellectual component. The heterotelically frightening perspectives in the autotelic-intellectual conception turn into occupying perspectives. The viewer’s real metaphysical fate steps into the background. Consciousness extends beyond boundaries one had not imagined; one experiences one’s condition and its possibilities as pure intoxication, Dionysian, demonic, mystical (“with closed eyes”), freed from earthly considerations and earthly consequences. And the metaphysical terror, the life and world dread that rises in poisonous columns of smoke from the tragic recognition turn in poetic experience into Pythian vapors that evoke a divine shudder. The anonymous commoner expands into a timeless genius, a Lucifer who

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subdues heaven and hell under his cosmic flight. One becomes strong enough to meet Jehovah’s face. But one does not gain access to this melancholic mythical land without a harsh initiation. Just as the mountaineer’s qualified experience of nature costs the abandonment of all bourgeois security and comfort, and necessitates an unconditional submission to the forces of earth and air, so too does the tragic perceiver throw off of oneself one’s tangled protective mechanisms against life angst and world distress, one’s wretched pseudo-solutions with their artifice and cheating, and enter into the experience as naked as one came from one’s mother’s womb. Like the sinner in the confessional, like the neurotic in the agonizing moment of admission, one must give up one’s sickly treasures to the last remnant and enter the crisis of death or salvation. In this metaphysical catharsis lies the initiation into the tragic intoxication. But why is it that such an autotelic expansion of consciousness, such a formless metaphysical ecstasy cannot also be attached to an experience of a non-tragic nature? The answer must be drawn from the destructive perfection drive, which, in Chapter Five, we found to be a fundamental feature of human nature. In the theater (more than by mere reading) one can indulge in this drive without the danger of being destroyed by the real consequences. (But one can indeed expect this in the square outside.) The viewer sits in a heterotelically protected position; during the two or three hours of the performance, one cannot starve or freeze to death, become unemployed, ill, or arrested because one gives way to the perfection drive and brackets the continuation drive. For here the ruthless realization of catastrophic over-equipment takes place only in the imagination, not in the real life. But the imagination is closely linked to both intellectual and emotional life. With the protagonist as an object, I can through “empathy” and “identification” take the catastrophic course, there lying rolled up in his or her being as a demanding substrate. I can also, together with the protagonist, reach the heights from which Vigeland’s Abela looks into the land of confirmation, and the depths, from which we look into the land of horror. The protagonist must pay with life or “happiness” for his or her audacity, because it unfolds in a “real” and factual environment. I myself do not risk any similar consequences because I unfold my own courage in a fictional environment. I experience and survive what the real environment forbids, because the protagonist has died instead of me. I experience his or her unfolding and death as if it were my own, and thus I am liberated cathartically a Sculpture in Oslo of Niels Henrik Abel (Norwegian mathematician) by Gustav Vigeland.

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from the oppressive censorship that the continuation requirement every hour of the day imposes on my destructive unfolding tendencies. In the tragedy I can realize “vicariously” such tendencies in two stages: First, I join the protagonist in developing a culturally relevant greatness in some partial sphere of life, with Coriolanus in his heroic patriotism, with Hamlet in his sensitivity and clear vision, with Brand in his ideal fixedness. Then I have the experience of the protagonist’s tragic downfall and thereby have the opportunity to express my metaphysical criticism, on the protagonist’s behalf, not on my own. I myself can completely let go of the destructive conceptions concerning life’s meaninglessness, an insight which at the same time represents the supreme fruit of my intellectual honesty and power, and in real life leads to paralysis, depression, protest against procreation, or other incapacity for life. I experience the cathartic ecstasy of finally living out my being, and at the same time I drop the price because I am in the theater and not in Rome, Elsinore, or Iskirken, where in the protagonist’s incarnation I also meet the protagonist’s fate. The central autotelic value of the tragedy thus consists in a pseudo-solution of the metaphysical problem of meaning through sublimation.

§ 103. Comment In § 102 it was necessary to go a bit further in the use of irrational141 expressions that were previously restrained. Partly for this reason, and partly with the forthcoming Chapter Eleven in mind, we shall dwell for a bit on related fundamental questions. How far can one go in the use of intellectually obscure, emotionally determined, imaginative concepts and expressions, of metaphors, metonyms, synecdoches and hyperboles, of elliptical concealment and stylistic ornamentation, before the presentation loses the last glow of “science,” or to say it more concretely, before the text ceases to be a dissertation? It immediately comes to mind that the requirement of exact, “scientifically” defined terms must vary with discipline and theme. The requirements are stricter in physics and mathematics than in the so-called intellectual sciences or humanistic disciplines, where speculation, intuition, inspiration, etc., play an important role. Among them aesthetics may be entitled to a particularly great deal of freedom in the use of language. By aesthetics we here understand an intellectual activity which intends, in a certain manner and to a certain 141 Cf. note in § 102.

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extent, to understand qualified autotelic experiences. The first step in such an understanding will, as a rule, be a transferring to words of the experienced irrational phenomenal quality. The purpose of this action is then to clarify what it is one is speaking about, so that the subsequent investigation may have something distinct to reference. If the operation is not to be deprived of all prospects of success in advance, the aesthetician must at least have unlimited terminological freedom. As an analogy one can use the story of the woman who wanted to collect sunshine in a sieve. The sieve was quite suitable for gravel and pebbles, certainly for gold and pearls, but not for sunshine. It flashed in the sieve when the woman held it out beneath the sky, and she saw clearly that it was full of sunshine, but when she entered the house with it, the light was gone. The light was of such a nature that the sieve was not the appropriate tool. In a “similar” way, one can say that logically and psychologically determined concepts are excellent tools for their particular purpose, but not when it comes to capturing the peculiarity of qualified autotelic experiences, perhaps not even of basic sensory autotelia. Does the woman then have any way to carry in the light? Yes, she can smear the sieve with chemical compounds, with a yellowish porridge-like material whose nature is as unknown to her as the light. She comes into the house with a new problem in place of the old one, but she has at least brought the light in, which for the time being was the most important thing. Later she may begin to speculate about how it all hangs together. But to understand this, she must go through a long and difficult schooling, and perhaps she will not want to understand it anyway. (On the other hand, the matter would have been clear to her if she were able to bring in the sunshine with the help of the sieve alone!) But she cannot wait until understanding comes to act, because meanwhile the sun will go down. She must yield to using the effective means, even if it is of the Devil, and not the useless, though this is the only thing the village recognizes. The aesthetician cannot wait for the final triumph of psychology. One must use the appropriate tools, the irrational tropes and figures, to capture the essentials. If one uses the currently recognized psychological terms, the treasure is lost. Thus, one would rather risk one’s work not being recognized as science; that is not what it is all about. The aesthetician has an intermediate position “between art and philosophy,” or from the present point of view “between poetry and psychology.” Should one manage to bring together two such widely separated, indeed at first glance incommensurable intellectual

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fields, then as a first condition one must be at odds with both. The aesthetician must guard against acting in the “trance” of scientific pretensions; nor should one deny a priori the importance of science for the clarification of autotelic experiences. One must assert one’s unconditional neutrality and safeguard the interests of both “antagonistic” parties in relation to each other. It is therefore necessary for the aesthetician to sufficiently master the scientific methodology. But at the same time, one must have the ability to indulge oneself uninhibitedly in the basic and qualified autotelic content of consciousness, to immerse oneself in completely diffuse, structureless, chaotic, untamed impulses. One must be like a wave in the sea, like a whirlpool in the river. Only then can one act as the yellowish porridge-like material that catches the sunshine. Just like the artist, one must also technically understand the heterotelic interests which in this case form the basis of the autotelic experience. But after all this one is still different from the artist; one does not remain in one’s inner experiences, but one tries to work one’s way out of them little by little and see them from the outside. One eventually tries to get light back to the understanding’s home, which is originally dark and closed, so that what has happened out there at least provides a feature carrier and later an operation carrier for discursive thinking. However, this process must take place step by step and with the greatest discernment and care. Initially the description must be predominantly “poetic,” in the “same” manner as a mushroom pulled up in syrup is for the first few seconds indistinguishable from the syrup. What the future can bring from new achievements in this area one knows little about today. The attempts by psychology and psychoanalysis until now to explore poetic works without aesthetics as an elastic intermediary may have filled the sieve full of gold-bearing gravel, but the “light” is undoubtedly missing; the same applies to a one-sided historical or sociological view of poetry. The use of a “poetic” manner of speaking to the extent necessary should at this point, in the case of aesthetics, be able to unite expediency with a certain scientific, possibly pre-scientific relevance. In the event that in the next chapter it becomes unavoidable to resort to tropes and figures, we refer once and for all to this rationale.

·1 0 · TRAGIC POETIC WORKS

§ 104. Introduction In the previous chapter, it was important to highlight the autotelic experience of the tragic, and with brief justification we then chose the tragedy as the most suitable attire for the tragic course. But at the same time, it was said that a tragedy could be inferior to a non-tragic drama in terms of autotelic value. Alongside this reservation comes a new one which was also hinted at earlier: Even as the carrier of a tragic course the tragedy may in a given case be weaker than an epic, a novel, a lyrical poem on the same theme. The emphasis now, however, is not on such a comparison (which there is rarely an opportunity to employ and which has only special poetic interest), but on the fact that other forms of poetry can also carry the tragic substance with full-toned power and rich autotelic effect. Literary-historically, an epic is a larger narrative work, usually in verse form, which treats heroic accomplishments and catastrophic fates. The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Kalevala, The Nibelungenlied, Jerusalem Delivered, and others are known examples. An epic tends to be broad and sweeps along with it an avalanche of events and people; the composition is the least prominent. Thus, one cannot expect a single tragic structure to hold it all

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together; it is in episodes that the tragic can be sought if one chose such a task (cf. Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen [Aesthetics of the Tragic], Munich 1897 p. 21). The same can be said about Nordic saga poetry, about Breton literature, and chansons de gestea (though the latter maintains the unity of the protagonist), and in particular about modern novels. The novella, on the other hand, is by its “monographic” character well-suited for a tightening of the fabric into a tragic structure; one thinks, for example, of Michael Kohlhaas by H. v. Kleist. With lyric poetry we approach the art forms that are entirely unsuitable for the carrying of tragic content, but which usually require an addition, an expanded activity on the part of the recipient, for a tragic characteristic to arise. The ballad, with its epic line, is the most favorable form; in the same group can be counted the folk song (possible example: “Bendik and Aarolilja,” Norske Folkvisor I [Norwegian Folk Songs I] by Liestøl and Moe, Kr.a. 1920 p. 111). Is the lyric ill-suited, how does it relate to the non-poetic art forms, music, painting, sculpture, or architecture? The tragic course must as a rule consist of a development, a “one after another”b; this is in the word “course.” In the “fine arts,” the dance is accompanied only by music, which along with its “side by side,”c the harmony, also has a one after another, a continuous stream. When it comes to evoking a mood, music has very effective means; it is therefore natural that the writers who identify the tragic based on the emotions (e.g., Volkelt) place music high as a conveyor of the tragic. They think of composers such as Beethoven and Wagner (Volkelt, op. cit. p. 15 ff.). Seen, or rather heard, against the backdrop of our own definition, music is one of those arts that at least requires a powerful addition from the recipient’s imagination if a tragic contour is to emerge. The most suitable is thus the professionally despised program music, which for the layperson ranks highly. One experiences it as a colorful epic tale, which, despite its ambiguity, leaves room for a personal interest bearer, for a counterpower, context, and catastrophe (Tchaikovsky’s “1812”). Music can also (in Greek tragedy and modern opera) accompany a dramatic plot, support and supplement it, follow it as a “musical commentary,” an instrumental chorus so to speak, or merge with it into a unity in the viewer’s experience. But even then it receives its “tragic light” from the plot with which it is “synchronized,” and when the plot is missing, the impression becomes so diffuse, so irrational, points to so much and nothing, that the term tragic finds no place, although, a French medieval stories. b Nacheinander (Ger.). c Nebeneinander (Ger.).

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as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one probably believes one is experiencing “the struggle between darkness and light” or the like. Naturalistic painting is at least unambiguous enough; it is beyond doubt what the image “depicts,” or the title states the necessary information (Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa, Delacroix: The Massacre at Chios, Goya: The Garroted Man, Watts: The Angel of Death142). However, with its bare side by side, painting is best suited to depict a particular phase – a cross-section more than a longitudinal section – of an event. Greatness can come forth, as well as the counterpower, the struggle, and the catastrophe. The causal relationship is weaker, but it cannot be declared theoretically that painting is excluded from providing a tragic connection. In “expressionist” art (Munch: The Scream), we can experience something similar to a theorist of the Volkelt school; he calls his experience tragic, but we do not. A similar consideration applies to sculpture. In our view of the tragic, the sculpture has even more limited means of expression than the painting when it comes to tragic material, while it has given a writer like Valentin the richest tragic experiences (“Die Tragik in Werken hellenischer Plastik [The Tragic in Works of Hellenic Sculpture],” in the book: Über Kunst, Kunstler und Kunstwerke [On Art, Artists, and Works of Art], Frankfurt a.M. 1889 p. 94–129). When visiting prisons, crematoriums, insane asylums, etc., Volkelt experiences (op. cit. p. 12 f.) tragic moods, but they are due to associations that appear, not the architecture he actually considers. Neither for us does architecture have any prospect of communicating tragic content, nor has it ever been the intention of the builders. It is certainly not a disgrace to the art that it lacks means of expression for the tragic; it is only when the art itself chooses to convey a tragic substance that one is allowed to make demands in this regard. And it is usually no art other than epic and dramatic poetry that embarks on this task. By a tragedy we understand, as previously suggested, a drama whose main theme is a tragic course in this work’s sense. A number of plays that literary history calls tragedies – partly because of tradition, and partly because they are in the broadest general sense about heroism and moral victories, suffering and death, or awaken dark, complex, and at the same time depressing and lifting moods – are not tragic in the sense of this work. In the same way that we have tried to distinguish clearly between the tragic qualification and quite a few others that have acted with pretensions in this direction, we will now also separate the tragedy from related drama types that are not based on a tragic course. The 142 Not naturalistic.

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plays associated with such types are in the literature called tragedies purely axiomatically, without it being developed what it is that makes them tragedies. It is now accepted that the Greeks and Romans, Calderón and Shakespeare, Corneille and Racine, Schiller and Hebbel, Oehlenschläger and Strindberg wrote tragedies. Concerning these plays we will, when they are not tragedies in this work’s sense, and if it becomes appropriate to give them a species designation, use other expressions, hero plays, fighting plays, conflict plays, problem plays, mourning plays, fate plays, catastrophe plays, etc. If one now, with one’s final definition in one’s pocket, decides whether or not a work is tragic, it is not sufficient to lay the definition as a template on the work and see if it fits. Complicating considerations arise. It could be thought, for example, that the poet, or the time and society in which the play appeared, had its own finished conception of the tragedy and the tragic; art and theory have often gone hand in hand. If someone wanted to write “the history of the tragedy,” one could not neglect such a finished conception out of hand, even though one worked on the basis of one’s own. This is also the case if the poet and his or her time and society had their own ideals of greatness, their own notions of cause (“fate,” Nemesis, magic, the intervention of gods and saints, etc.), their own assessment of catastrophes (“losing face,” etc.). If then, in the opinion of the time, the play shows greatness as a cause of catastrophe, then the historian could have reason to call the play a tragedy, even if “the present” does not, and even though neither the greatness, the cause, nor the catastrophe fit one’s own conceptual forms. Consequently, the tragic quality of an older work can be determined in three different ways, which in the given case can produce three different answers: (1) Is the play tragic from one’s own conception of the tragic and from one’s own judgment of greatness, cause, and catastrophe? (2) Is the play tragic from one’s own conception of the tragic, but from the poet’s (the time’s or society’s) judgment of greatness, cause, and catastrophe (when this can be ascertained)? (3) Is the play tragic, or is it a tragedy, from the poet’s (the time’s or society’s) conception of the tragic and the tragedy (where “greatness,” “cause,” and “catastrophe” may not need to be included)? The matter is further complicated by the fact that the term tragedy has not always meant that the play was tragic. The Greek tragodia means tragedy, but the adjective tragicos means tragic only in the sense of “belonging to the tragedy”; Sibbern proposes the term “tragedic” (Om Poesie og Konst [On Poetry and Art], Copenhagen. 1869, Vol. III p. 190 ff.). According to P. Rokseth, the “French tragedy” is not “tragic” (Den franske tragedie I [The French Tragedy I], Oslo 1928 p. 165 f.).

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Questions like these are offshoots of a more general problem: the relationship between historical and ahistorical factors in the consideration of poetry altogether, and especially of works from another cultural epoch. The dispute between “historians” and “aestheticians”143 concerns us here with respect to a single question: When should we use “our own view” toward older poetry, and when should we try to reconstruct the past? Here, we can seek a basis for orientation in the distinction between fixed and unfixed functional forms in humankind. However, it is hardly necessary to set up any absolute opposition, either between fixed and unfixed life expressions or between historical and ahistorical factors; a scale will do the same job. The more biologically fixed life functions then constitute the more ahistorical element; we assume that the Greeks had roughly the same experience as we have when they were exposed to basic dangers, starved, froze, could not breathe, were weary on long marches; likewise, when they fell in love, encountered wild animals, went to war against stronger enemies, etc. Here, we most easily rely on our own experiences as a basis. However, even such “timeless” experiences as these are colored by the interpretation and assessment of the experiences, whether this agrees with the group’s or is one’s own individual possession. Already here one must therefore expect some variations, both in longitudinal section (from time to time) and in cross-section (from place to place, group to group, person to person). How much greater does the relativity become when one arrives at areas where unfixedness has a much freer play? The notions of morality and religion, of standing and honor, of royal power and freedom – ideologies and pseudo-solutions of all kinds show an almost unlimited variety. Here the viewpoint must be more strongly historical. This applies especially where the individual variant is fixed by sociological forces – absolutism, prejudice, tradition, program. “Historical fixedness” is something different from species fixedness. When an observer from a later age examines an older cultural fixedness, then one of two things can happen. Either one also contains within one’s own unfixedness the variant that one is studying, or one does not contain it. One “understands” “the age,” can live oneself into it, be thrilled and despair with it – or one cannot. In the first case, during the study, a number of people and human types are awakened in one’s own being, and one becomes, as long as one lives in the reading, in turn “the Greek person,” the Roman, the Medieval, the Renaissance person, etc. What is one after another in history, lies side by side in the reader’s nature. This is how one “experiences” it; the poet 143 See Rokseth op. cit. Indledning [Introduction], and Fr. Bull’s oppositionsindleg [opposition statement] in Edda 1929 p. 95 ff.

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may be particularly capable. On the other hand, if one wants to investigate whether there is any “real” correspondence between the bygone age and one’s own experience, then one has to take the difficult route of source studies, etc. Therefore, during work with older poetry, the non-historian is in a somewhat unsatisfactory situation. One must base oneself on one’s own and one’s time’s way of experiencing, and at the same time take into account the conditions under which the work appeared. The simultaneity of historical and ahistorical (systematic) manners of consideration, however, precipitates in our situation one result as far as the procedure is concerned. The subject of the study can neither be the strict literary-historical groupings, “the Greek tragedy,” “the Italian and Spanish Renaissance drama,” “the French classical tragedy,” “Elizabethan drama in England,” “the German idealistic drama,” etc., nor groups of works under collection names such as “Oehlenschläger,” “Strindberg,” “Ibsen.” We must choose quite different “molecular” manifestations of poetic tragedy, a single work and perhaps parts of a work. The selection has its difficulties since there is only one chapter available. It could be done from several points of view, cf. the three methods listed above. In a work with poetry as the main theme, one could discuss works that are traditionally called tragic and show why they are not tragic in cases. But here the selection must be limited to plays that are without doubt tragic in the sense of this work. Interpretation doubts can arise when the protagonist is not aware of the tragic qualification, of the connection between advantage and misfortune. When the protagonist him or herself works with the problem of metaphysical meaning, which is raised by the course, the uncertainty becomes considerably less.

§ 105. Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound The tragedy in the broadest sense, the serious drama, including the mourning play, fighting play, hero play, catastrophe play, etc. “was born” in the year 534 B.C. The dating of the Attic tragedy’s existence goes back to the moment when Thespis brought his “sideshow wagon” to Athens and participated in the Dionysia with a chorus. The innovation was that he himself acted as “respondent” to the chorus leader; by this two-person discourse in a dialect and a meter that differed from that of the chorus’ song, the seed toward the future “dramatic” acting was sown (by “drama” one originally thought of the act of worshiping the god). The chorus in the Dionysian procession wore goat masks, and it is believed that the name trag(os) odia, goat-song, derives from

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this. A vast literature has developed around the creation and development of the Greek tragedy, which we must bypass here. Among the many important questions, there is one which is of particular interest here: How could a cult, which was originally concerned with viticulture and the pleasures of drunkenness, be invested with “dignity,”a with pathetic seriousness, and gradually transform itself into a representation of life’s truly darkest sides? Some have pointed out that the festivals of Dionysus, in which the chorus leader wore the likeness of the god, were a reflection of the earthly sufferings of the god; the worship at the Dionysos Eleutereus was a very serious cult. There are other hypotheses as well, and as far as one can conclude from the scholarly literature, no satisfactory explanation has yet been given. It is amusing to notice how the authors, when they reach the gaping chasm, suddenly find themselves on the other side and pretend they have not seen the chasm. Only Nietzsche leaps out upon the seventy thousand fathoms, but his profound interpretation in The Birth of Tragedy has not won the acclaim of historians. The short-term growth between Thespis and Aeschylus is illustrated interestingly by the lost tragedy of Phrynichus, The Capture of Miletus. The play was a timely horror drama, and it provoked Athenian tears and political displeasure (weakening of the youth’s morale) to the extent that it caused them to sentence the author to a monetary punishment (among others, Bing, Verdenslitteraturhistorie [World Literature History], Oslo 1928 I p. 34). Are there any features that are common to the bacchant’s orgiastic procession and the strict and stylish play of the orchestra and stage? Yes, but it is uncertain how far one dares to interpret them. The distinction between the leader and the herd is still present, even though the chorus leader is now one with the chorus, while individuality has passed over to the actors. The passion has taken on new forms, but it has not weakened along the way; it has its full strength in the lust of Aegyptus’ sons and the fear of the Danaans, in spite of Prometheus, in the wrath of Zeus and the suffering of Ios, in the warring brothers, in the wailing of the Persians, and not least in the blood-steaming lineage of the Atreidae in all stages – just to mention Aeschylus. And it has not faded since. Throughout the whole of Greek tragedy there is a storm of emotional forces that only the law of poetics can rein in; ultimately, they blow them up too and drag the whole form of tragedy with them into annihilation. From the very beginning, the tragic protagonist occupied one’s place between the animal and the deity, or rather, one united them in one’s own nature. a semnotes (Grk.).

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Is it too forward to regard Greek poetry and philosophy as a crucial stage in the awakening of the Aryan race to a higher, a more catastrophic consciousness? Is there not a birth struggle in thought and tragedy’s unceasingly forward-tumbling questions – how is the earthly and the heavenly constituted, what controls the saving and the all-destructive forces, and how shall we preserve our little life flame on this battlefield of the mighty? Let us be soft-spoken and modest, says the chorus, so we do not antagonize the governing authority. But safe repetition is not enough for the protagonists; they require cross-border unfolding. They are slaves of the perfection path, and they learn that this path is also that of death. Beware of hubris, urges the chorus of common people, and submit yourself to the natural limits of humankind. But how is it possible to cross borders? Is there then a border between nature and non-nature through human nature itself? If so, from where does non-nature come? From me – answers Aeschylus’ Prometheus. Who is he? One of the Titans, but the first among equals: he is farsighted, he has cast the links of experience, Prometheus means “the one who thinks in advance.” He sided with Zeus during the rebellion against the old-world ruler Kronos, who was supported by the other Titans. After the victory, Zeus also wanted to wipe out humanity and create a new one (Why?), but Prometheus prevented this by stealing fire from the gods (Prometheus Pyrphorosa) and giving it to the children of the earth (How could this stop Zeus? By what means had he thought that humans would die out?). The motive was love and compassion. Zeus took revenge, Prometheus was bolted to the rock with the iron he had invented himself, and he was tormented for a number of years. He knew the secret to Zeus’ downfall, but would not reveal it, though he was threatened with even worse torment. Zeus therefore made the rock with Prometheus crash down into Tartarus. However, in the third part of the trilogy, Prometheus Unbound,b the final reconciliation occurs, a feature that is characteristic of Aeschylus.144 a Fire-bringer. b There is dispute about both the existence and the order of the other two plays (lost). 144 Literature on Prometheus: The text translated by Emil Zilliacus with introduction Stckh. 1931. Karl Heinemann, Die tragischen Gestalten der Griechen in der Weltliteratur [The Tragic Figures of the Greeks in World Literature], Lpz. 1920 Vol. I p. 12–39. Ernst Howald, Die griech. Tragödie [The Greek Tragedy], Munich and Berl. 1930 p. 75–83. Max Pohlenz, Die griech. Tragödie [The Greek Tragedy], Lpz. and Berl. 1930 p. 53–80. Geffcken, Die griech. Trag. [The Greek Tragedy], Lpz. and Berl. 1918 p. 29–32. Klein, Geschichte des Dramas [History of Drama], Lpz. 1865 Bd. I p. 185 ff. Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen [Aesthetics of the Tragic], Munich 1897 p. 437 p. 439 (register). Schück and other literary historians.

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To ask whether Prometheus is a “tragic” figure from the Greek viewpoint has meaning only in the context of Aristotle’s poetics, cf. § 107. Using our own definition, the answer becomes difficult because Prometheus belongs to myth. Such beings, half-god and half-human, are usually less suitable as tragic protagonists, though their sublime fate attracts both the lyricist and the dramatist. We do not know their interest fronts and means of power well enough, nor the environment, and their struggles and defeats can be irrelevant in the “philosophical” sense. It is different when the contemporary reader also feels that one’s fate is linked to his own by symbolism or more directly as allegory. Greek myths often conceal valuable knowledge concerning human nature and its conditions. Already for the Greeks, Prometheus represented the human species, and later poets made him into “man,” “the artist,” or the genius (Shaftesbury, Goethe, Shelley, et al.). Prometheus is “great” both by his insight and his love for the children of the earth (later also by his heroic defiance). These are qualities that both we and the Greeks value, and it is by them that he has incurred his sufferings. So far, the tragedy is in order. But mythology blurs the lines. The Fates had determined everything beforehand, and Prometheus knew their determination, but not Zeus. However, the Fates’ decision can be changed; there is often room for a “provided that.” Prometheus does not act as the Fates’ tool, or only as this; he has subjective free choice, and he chooses to realize the values which for him (and probably also for the Greeks) are higher than bodily welfare. In this choice, he is heroic. Unfortunately, mythology also interferes with the assessment of his love of humanity (wisdom was, however, something that gods and Titans set high). It is priceless to us, but in the environment in which Prometheus lived, it had no value and was pure “folly”; its only common characteristic was the defiance of Zeus. Nor can there be any injustice on the part of Zeus, unless one assumes a standard of justice that stands above the gods. Seen with the eyes of experience, justice is something that derives its power from human needs, and this could not arise until humankind had received Prometheus’ gift. But even with justice as the standard for the gods, Zeus was allowed to punish the theft – or perhaps humankind was also entitled to the fire? Hesiod (in The Theogony) is completely on Zeus’ side on this question. However, if the protagonist’s insight and love of humanity are assumed to be “great,” culturally relevant traits, and if his superhuman sufferings are assumed to be unjust, then the question remains whether Prometheus is a heroic or a tragic figure, or in this case a heroic-tragic one. If he meant to have preserved the one thing needful, if he attributed his sufferings to a subordinate principle

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compared to the salvation and growth of humankind, then he is heroic and not tragic. He does not make any such comparative assessment in Aeschylus. Like Sophocles’ Antigone, on the one hand he praises his efforts, and on the other he regrets his fate. Neither of them repent of their actions, and neither of them bear their suffering as a voluntary sacrifice. One could say they are too blindly subjective for our distinction between heroic and tragic to apply to them. And what sustains Prometheus is not the thought of the cultural achievement, but the awareness that the oppressor shall receive his punishment. And thus, we approach the pure basic fighting play. So far the yield is rather meager in terms of tragic qualifications. But in the text there are some expressions that attract attention. Prometheus is “overwise,” it says in Zilliacus p. 94. Wisdom leads him to go too far, to hubris. There is a limit to the favor of the wise; it is dangerous to be too intelligent. If you have too much of such a property, then limit yourself, and let the rest lie fallow. Otherwise, things will go badly. The warning against hubris is repeated by the Greeks from drama to drama; what lies behind it is the idea of “the envy of the gods.” Hubris is a case of what Aristotle for the purpose of the drama calls hamartia, the tragic (tragedic) flaw (cf. § 108). Unfortunately, it was necessary to approach hubris every time something important was to be done, and the Greeks were therefore very keen on the question of the balance between hubris and sophrosyne, moderation, between what we have here called the path of perfection and the path of safety. As Prometheus himself is overwise, so has he also “honored humankind improperly” (Zill. p. 25, 63). The recipient of the gift also gets too much and the consequences do not fail to appear. Aeschylus does not mention it, but in the myth that underlies the trilogy it is said that Zeus decided to punish humankind because Prometheus had given them too much. The beautiful Pandora (“everyone’s gift” or “the one who gives everything”?) was sent to the earth with a box full of misfortunes and suffering. (Among these misfortunes was also hope, which, however, was hanging over the edge when Pandora slammed the lid shut. The passage tempts one to profound interpretation.) Thus, here we find a true causal link between over-equipment and catastrophe, conveyed through the envy of the gods. According to one variant, humans even descend from a marriage between Prometheus and Pandora, with his son Deucalion being the only survivor of the “flood.” This marriage points directly to the bomber plane of 1940, in which the most recent triumph of technology is united with the maximum of destruction. Soon perhaps Pandora’s box will fall on the very rock where the Titan had to be punished because he gave humans fire.

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In later poetry, Prometheus rebelled against Zeus or God on behalf of humankind, a presumptuous thought that the respectable Aeschylus would never have allowed himself. His nature is “conciliatory” like Goethe’s; in the lost third drama, Prometheus Unbound, a reconciliation becomes possible by the fact that both Zeus and Prometheus have evolved since the first clash (Zeus is here a “becoming god,” cf. § 112). Such reconciliation is not a solution to the problem that was first posed “sub clausula rebus sic stantibus,”a but to a new problem which is no longer a problem. The names of the antagonists are the same, but as bearers of interest they have changed. In a similar way, Aeschylus “solves” the unsolvable conflict in The Oresteia: New legal-moralmetaphysical laws are established. As a thinker, Aeschylus is not very strict. He is a consecrated priest from Eleusis and he fights at Marathon in a flashpoint of world-historical powers, but he is not able to force these extremes in his nature into a persuasive synthesis. The clarification work becomes only a round dance among metaphysical agencies; human will in the dead and living, gods, daemons, and fate in a helpless vortex. It reaches its climax in The Eumenides, where Apollo seduces the Fates with wine. Hitherto the three goddesses of fate were the absolutely final authority among the determining forces of universal history, but here the mystery priest has for a moment swung himself around to see alcohol as the ultimate moving world principle. The motif is in no way exploited and there has hardly been the shudder through the theater that grabs us by the image of a world with dead-drunk gods at the wheel.

§ 106. Job There is, on the whole, something relatively cold in the reference to the Greek life angst and world pain, as one encounters them in the tragedy. The “Apollonian” element is always present, passion has the words it needs, but there is always stylistic control over the scene. The wild animal has learned manners. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is an exception; it truly smells of his worn garments. Here the distance is less than usual to that world where Job sits in his ash pile and scratches his rotting limbs with potsherds. The pessimism of the Jews as one encounters it in Jeremiah, Job, and Ecclesiastes is also artistically processed, but in such a way that “Dionysus” lives more strongly in it than “Apollo” – if these symbols are to be applied to Hellenistically stamped Judaism. It is useless to look here for harmony and moderation; here it bears the smell to the a under things standing thus.

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bottom. If this world pain is more gripping in its sublime glory, then it is also more dangerous; the poetic aspect is loose; it is not at all given that there will be a safe and sound return from this sightseeing in the land of despair. Job is a kindred spirit of Prometheus; they both suffer from the cruelty of the divine and both appeal to the principle of justice. According to a widely held view, there is also literary-historical connection between the drama of Aeschylus and the Book of Job as it is now found among the canonical writings of the Old Testament. The text history is interesting, though not as compelling as that of Ecclesiastes. The text of the Bible (Kristiania 1918)a is assumed in the following; only concerning pure self-contradictions and the like have text-critical considerations been applied, and then only on a general literary basis.145 Within the framework of the original folktale with retained prose, an (Alexandrian?) author about the year 400 B.C. put down his “wisdom poem” in metric style and thereby made the story of Job one of the pearls of world literature. It is someone with deep personal knowledge of pain, with a fierce passion, and penetratingly clear understanding that we meet here, someone with a fanatical will to intellectual honesty, and a poet who combines the ability to give his abyss-deep hatred of God a dazzling satirical form with cascading cosmic pathos. I cannot read the Book of Job as anything other than a blasphemous masterpiece, and there is a painful and golden irony over the writing’s fate: Through the interpolations of believers, the book of rebellion, with all its smoking curses, has been included among the rocks of faith upon which people today build their metaphysical comfort.

a Zapffe’s quotes from a Norwegian translation of the Book of Job have been translated directly and thus may differ at times from traditional English translations. 145 Of the numerous major and minor writings on the Book of Job, a few are mentioned here: Mowinckel, S., Diktet om Ijob [The Poem on Job], Oslo 1924. Nielsen, F., Smaaskrifter til oplysning for kristne [Scriptures of Enlightenment for Christians], 1887 (Buhl). Martensen, H. L., Den christelige Ethik [Christian Ethics], espec. part, I p. 395–400. Kbh. 1878. Cheyne, T. K., Job and Solomon, or the wisdom of the Old Testament, Lond. 1887, p. 1–115. Giesebrecht, Fr., Der Wendepunkt des Buches Hiob [The Turning Point of the Book of Job], Dissert. Berl. 1879. Ley, J., “Das Problem im Buche Hiob und dessen Lösung [The Problem in the Book of Job and its Solution],” in Neue Jahrbücher f. Philologie u. Pädagogik [New Yearbooks for Philology and Pedagogy] 1896. Sellin, “Das Problem des Hiob-buches [The Problem of the Book of Job],” in Univ. Progr. Berlin 18. Jan. 1931. Volz, “Hiob u. Weisheit [Job and Wisdom],” in Die Schriften des alten Testaments [The Old Testament Scriptures], Section III Vol. 2 Göttingen 1921. The following two works were inaccessible, mentioned because of their exceptionally promising titles: Kallen, The Book of Job as Greek Tragedy, 1918, and Owen, Five Great Skeptical Dramas of History, 1896.

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The poet continues the tradition that Job was great in the eyes of his fellow citizens, in religious, social, and economic terms. He was “faultless and righteous and God-fearing and turned aside from evil,” at the same time as he was positively helpful (1:1, 5, 4:3, 4, 6, 23:11, 12, 29:12–17, 30:25, 31:1, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16–34, 38, 39). He was greater than all the children of the East (1:3), happy and esteemed by young and old, rich and poor (29:2–11, 21–25). There is no one on Earth that is like him, says the Lord himself (1:8, 2:3). In other words, Job stood at the forefront of his society’s culture, and precisely those rare and excellent qualities that led him there were the direct cause of his complete destruction, his biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical ruin. He became the apple over which the mighty fought; he fell victim to a kind of “reverse” envy of the gods. The Lord boasted to Satan concerning his servant Job. And Satan replied: Job worships you as thanks for your favors. Take from him what he has, then we will see. Yahweh accepted the bet (1:8, ff., 2:5 ff.), and then the misfortunes broke over Job in two terrible tsunamis, to the point where only his life was spared. God wanted to show his adversary that Job served and feared him (whether he loved him is not the question here) only “for God’s own sake,” whether he sent good or evil – what kind of motivation is this? Job would submit himself to unconditional and humble recognition – of what? God’s power or God’s justice? Indeed, this is precisely the burning question in the following. And Job really did submit himself, as he had learned is correct, in both tests (1:21, 22, 2:10). In the folktale he gets his payback promptly, but here is where the poet inserts and demands space for human nature in Job. And the human is not only the figurative obedient slave of God; he is packed full with earthly life and power. Thus, Job gives God his due, but he curses, like Jeremiah, the day he was born (3:1–12). It is better to be dead than to endure a life like this (3:13, 17–19, 6:9, 10, 7:15, 10:18, 19), better to never be born (3:16). Why does God force those who do not want to live (3:20–22)? These thoughts unleash an avalanche of oratory from his “friends” Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. It is during their more or less endless dogmatic speeches that Job grows into a prosecutor of timeless dimensions, and gains a voice that brings together all the prayers and threats, grievances, hopes and curses of humanity in a few immortal verses. Alongside the rich and strong biological interests of humankind, the poet now raises a new one: The Book of Job is a culture-creating drama; it represents a cultural “mutation” similar to Prometheus, The Eumenides, and, in recent times, Grillparzer’s Libussa. One sees a new metaphysical consciousness being crystallized under the maximum pressure of suffering, the consciousness of the fundamental contradiction between

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God as the master of the environment and the sacred demands of humankind for meaning in what is happening. The lectures of the friends proceed with little variation upon the idea that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked in this life – a belief in which Job has also grown up. Accordingly, if Job is “faultless,” says Eliphaz (4:6), God will surely deliver him out of the torment again, if he only endures with patience and recognizes God’s justice in what he has done to Job (5:8). To God no man is perfect, and neither are you (4:17–19), and this is why you suffer (!). But when the purpose of the suffering is complete, you will be restored to your past happiness (5:24–26). As long as the trial continues, you can wail as much as you want, but no one hears you (5:1). Be grateful for the chastisement he imposes on you; it only shows that you are in his hand. I may have taken it too hard, says Job (6:3), but I simply cannot endure this; I do not have peace while I am sinking in my spittle; I am, after all, a human being and not a mineral (6:11–13, cf. 40:13 and 41:15). But I will try to be humble in spite of everything, if you will explain to me what my imperfection is, the imperfection that has earned me a treatment like this (6:24). After all, it cannot be my impatience now, afterward, that is the cause of the misfortune (6:25, 26, cf. 15:6). Neither here nor later is there any reason to think that Job holds himself as God’s equal in moral excellence. Job only wants to have stated that there must be a connection between imperfection and “punishment,” especially when it is not at all in a human’s power to be perfect. He must be allowed to compare his fate with that of others, and then he becomes skeptical about the distribution of good and evil. The friends misunderstand the zeal with which he later emphasizes his innocence; they believe an insane arrogance lies at its basis: Job considers himself “absolutely” (not relatively) innocent. But Job’s passion has a completely different source; he is not “self-righteous” at all; it is for the sake of the problem, in the service of clarification, that he puts his conduct under scrutiny. He wants to know what they mean by sin since they build their entire procedure on the doctrine of the downfall of the sinner and the triumph of the righteous. It is easy enough for you to preach, he concludes his answer to Eliphaz (6:5, 6), since you have all your goods intact. But my life is completely ruined; I am going to die from this disease, and then there is nothing more. There are other conditions there (Chapter 7). And since I have no more to lose (cf. 16:6) and gain nothing by silence (9:27–31), then in that case I will allow myself to complain about my condition (7:11, cf. 10:1, 13:13, 30:24). And now he addresses his words directly to his and his friends’ God (7:12 ff.). What will this be good for? Do you think I am a worthy target of your

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destructive powers (7:17, 20, 13:28)? (Do you not have more important things to do? Do you not think that you become less by acting like this?) At least tell me the reason for this endless abuse. Can you not end this while I live, and give me a moment’s peace – for if I die soon, then you must stop (7:21, cf. 10:20–22, 16:22, 17:14, 15). Now the young Bildad takes the lead (Chapter 8) and repeats what Eliphaz has said and applies it to the sons of Job – they have probably sinned since they were so hastily killed, for we cannot doubt the justice of God (8:4, 3, cf. 1:5). I agree with you on one thing, Job replies thoughtfully (Chapter 9); it can be of no use for a human to go to court against God (9:2, 4). But now the critical breakthrough in Job’s thought is happening: Why is it of no use? Is it because we are so weak in our discernment of justice that we would have to turn our eyes down with shame if the Lord God were to explain to us the least of his motives? No, he concludes with resulting despair; it is because of his overwhelming power in relation to ours, his greatness in meters and kilos, that we do not oppose him (9:4–10). It does not matter if we are right or wrong in the human sense (9:22). It does not matter for two reasons: First, he does not allow himself to be summoned to any negotiation (Verse 12); he does not communicate with us as humans do to one another (Verse 16). And second: Even if he met for negotiation, what does this help? There is no supreme authority to judge us both (9:33), nor does he recognize a legal principle that is also binding for himself. He is an absolute despot by virtue of his strength and knowledge (9:4); I could ask for mercy, but not for justice (Verse 15); yes, he can blame the innocent (Verses 30, 31), and force one to condemn oneself (Verse 20). Let him make us equal before the law, and I shall answer him (Verse 34, 35, cf. Chapter 33). But as long as he has me on the rack and stands over me like an executioner (7:20), there are no terms for any negotiation (9:17, 18). An indictment from God would itself have an inalienable value (31:35, 36). Here it is not at all a question of justice, but of violence and power alone, Job now concludes with mounting confidence (9:15, 20, 30, 31, 10:15–17). (And the prologue confirms that he is right. Yahweh’s motivation represents neither Job’s nor our moral judgment and seems incompatible with the dignity of the notion of God. God has by his dealings himself destroyed the foundation of faith for Job.) It is therefore of no use to appeal to the principle of justice; so much less since this has in no way been carried out on Earth (9:24), a thought which Job later takes up in its full breadth. Well, then one can see if the tyrant can be moved by any other means. There must be a meaning to the misery, even if this meaning is incompatible with the idea of justice.

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Let me know then why you are abusing me (10:2)! After all, I am your own work through and through (10:3, 8–13), so you must necessarily have some reason for destroying it. The human requirement of order and reason strikes like a flame against heaven; Job hammers on God’s ear hoping to find a humanrelated string. If you ask after my sin and iniquity, there is at least comprehensible contact on one single point, since then a common principle must apply to your and my assessment. Then there must be something commensurable in our conceptions and judgments, and this must also include my judgment of justice which you have created together with the rest (10:5, 6, 12, 13). If in fact God’s conception of justice is different from that of humankind, then it is equal for us to arbitrariness, and then our last chance is lost; if there is no path of hope through perfection, then we are at the mercy of a metaphysical lottery, then there is no longer any guarantee of our highest virtues, if faithfulness, humility, and beneficence are the broad path to corruption. But if God’s conception of justice is different from ours, then we should not use the term “just” concerning the dispositions of God. And we should not tolerate the swindle in the believers’ theodicy, if they call an act the most shameful crime, the most irreparable offense, when committed by a human being, but inscrutable love if it comes from God. One or the other: the same law and the same judgment for both parties, or different laws and different judgments, but not the same law and different judgments. If we should recognize the world governance as just, Job thinks (in 10:2–7 cf. 36:23), then the meaning must be: just in the human sense. Otherwise, God can be as righteous as he wants in his own language (e.g., in Elihu’s interpretation, 34:12, 14, 15, 17), but in our language, it is called unjust. Deep down Job has not yet given up the hope of a principle of justice in the human spirit behind what is happening, cf. 16:21, 19:29. But this hope now needs to be strengthened with a beam of reason, which is why he provokes the Lord so strongly. The considerations of the problem of justice must also apply to experience, says Job. If I see that a man is a crook, and I see that nonetheless or precisely for this reason he is doing very well, then the apologist cannot claim that it goes badly for him without giving the words a new meaning. If at the same time he pretends to use them in the usual sense, then he is logically dishonest. Thus, when Zophar in Chapter 11 repeats the tired dogma about the reward of virtue and the misery of the wicked, Job becomes seized by the arbitrariness of the struggle. He takes hold of his friends’ (or adversaries’) belief and shows that it is nonsense (12:2, 13:4, 5, 12, 17:4, 10, 21:27, 34) when measured with the standard of reason and experience (12:3, 11, 13:1–3, 18, 21:29, 24:25). Already

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the animals can perceive that they are left to powers that have nothing to do with goodness and justice (12:7–9), and if we turn to the human world, then it is rather injustice that is the ruling principle (9:24, 12:4, 6, 17, 24, 16:11, 17, 19:6, 7, 21:7–33, 24:12, 30:26). Human conditions are terrible when seen sub specie mortis (Chapter 14, 12:9, 10). You do not have to go so far to save your illusory grounds of comfort that you defend God with pure deceit (13:7, 9). If anyone can convince me, then I shall also bow down (13:19), but for pure folly I will not. Nor for talk of God’s inscrutability (11:7), for if I cannot form for myself some image of him, neither can you (13:2, 8, 11). In this way has Job also countered the second speech of Eliphaz (Chapter 15). In Bildad’s second argument there is a new element (18:4): What do you and your justice requirements mean in the great world business? It is the Stoic philosophy; it is poorly combined with the talion principle, but Bildad manages the knot by a familiar apologetic means: He links the incompatible contradictions with a “nevertheless” (18:5, cf. 35:6 vs. 34:36). Job can see no consolation in this, that his fate is in principle meaningless; he has no interest in a world plan in which humankind does not participate. The demand for meaning strikes him more strongly than before; on the contrary, Stoicism demands that his fate (the fate of all humans) should be engraved into the history of the universe with an indestructible script (19:23, cf. 16:18, 19). His demanding thought goes further to a higher authority than the God which he has been taught and which he cannot use – to an authority that has contact with the holiest needs of humanity (19:25–29). And now Job rises above his own suffering: The matter no longer concerns his personal well-being; it concerns the principle (21:4). When I think of how fates are distributed on the earth, I am horrified, and my flesh is seized with trembling (21:6). And if Zophar, who has once again emphasized orthodox views, retreats to the second line of his system of pseudo-solution and claims that the punishment for triumphant fathers’ wickedness comes upon the children instead (Exodus 20:5), then Job will answer that this is no “punishment”; it is an error in thinking to call it punishment, for a punishment must strike the perpetrator (21:19–21, 31). Job’s awareness of justice is incorruptible and rises from the despair in relentless majesty. (That the author should allow a man of Job’s character to suddenly switch to the theses of his opponents (24:17–24, 27:13–23) is so unlikely that we must, from a poetic point of view, be seeing a later contribution in these verses. Or did the poet, as in Chapters 12 and 26, allow Job to fall into the recognized key to show that he mastered it as well as the others?)

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In Chapter 25 Bildad returns with new artillery: God’s quantitative greatness. If Job does not have the astronomical dimensions of the Lord, then he must not attempt to assert himself (cf. 33:2, 36:22, 23, 39:35). Job cannot understand the reasoning and asks: For whom have you put forward words, and whose spirit went forth from you (26:1–4)? Job is also fully acquainted with this side of the Lord’s display of power, and with superior sublime poetry he gives Bildad a lesson in praising all the mechanical wonders we cannot perform following him. But – Job concludes threateningly – thereby the limit of his qualifications has also been reached (26:14); he can thunder and roar as much as he wants, but it does not help him in the slightest where that on which this case alone depends is concerned. On the contrary: The Lord has abused his power in order to take justice away from me (27:2). On this point, I am unwavering (Verses 4–6) because I cannot betray my conviction without harming my soul. And I will not back down from calling the world power immoral (Verse 7) that does not stick to the path of justice. If Job in Verse 7 points with “my enemy” to Yahweh (this is reinforced by 30:21, 33:10), then he is asserting here a new religious principle: The concept of the divine should not aim itself toward “the given God,” but the God we can accept must abide by the norm of divinity, according to our image of God as an optimum under the control of the human concept (cf. 16:21). Thus, we also demand that God should represent the highest wisdom, should infuse what was created with order and meaning. Where then is the source of wisdom, Job asks in 28:12; where is the spring that imbues both God and man? God himself is the only one who knows where the power comes from (28:23, 27) – and how has he used it? To measure the wind in kilos and the rain in liters and the lightning in meters. “Fear the Lord and turn away from evil,” that was all he got out of it! In a magnificent concluding procedure, Job finally closes his mouth to his three “comforters.” A later writer sees no way to save them, but support for Job cannot be gained either. He therefore introduces a young man, Elihu, who is not mentioned previously (Chapters 32–37). This person then should say the redeeming word and satisfy the demands of both faith and experience (32:2, 3, 34:4). Despite clear pretensions, however, he manages to do nothing more than repeat and modify what was previously stated. It should then amaze the reader that the Lord does not punish him for heresy when the day of reckoning comes, as he does with the other three (42:7, 8). Even more astonishing, however, is the fact that he rebukes them after he has himself repeated the most important of their speeches. But it amazes one only because one still retains

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certain notions of divine logic. After the Lord has presented himself personally, there is nothing astonishing about it. This speech of God (Chapters 38–41) is perhaps one of the most wonderful things one can read in the canonical scriptures. If one does not think that the author has transferred to the creator his own naive enthusiasm for all that is strange and peculiar and wonderful and odd in nature – then one must perceive the speech as a strongly refined, but all the more scathing irony. At any rate, Job is clearly confused by this comprehensive zoological demonstration. And when the Lord expectantly calls for him to respond, Job says very quietly: What I think about my sufferings, that you know. These zoological tricks, on the other hand, are not about our unfinished business. So, what else do you want me to say? (39:36–38)a The Lord is then forced to address the issue of justice, so reluctantly he will (the author has the problem that God has now joined the scene and can no longer hide without a loss of prestige). How can you dare to suggest that I am not just, the Lord asks in a storm (40:3).b Do you not see how strong I am and do you not hear how terribly I can roar? Show that you have the same power as I do, then I shall bow myself before you and acknowledge your right (Verses 4–9).c Power is the only thing that counts in my eyes. Do you know what my crowning work is? Not the human spirit with its sickly sense of justice, such as you fools think; no, the hippopotamus! Its legs are copper tubes and its bones are like iron bars! It is something other than you, you soft sprout with all your “fine sensations” (6:11–13). Now do you think that the human comes after the hippopotamus? No, far from it; the crocodile is its only equal. The crocodile has armor, but what do you have? (40:20d ff., Chapter 41.) Yeah right, you are really the one who should teach me something about justice! One imagines Job’s immeasurable astonishment at this tangible appearance of Yahweh. Here Job has sat and attached to the problem the very deepest, most central fundamental meaning, supposed that he had to deal with an opponent who must convince him to the point of mortal shame as soon as his tongue touched the burning question – a God so holy and pure that even his accusation would have to provoke exultation! And then he finds himself a The location of this passage is different in various versions (in the KJV it is 40:3). The numbering here aligns with the Geneva Version, upon which the Norwegian version Zapffe uses must have been based. b KJV 40:8. c KJV 40:9–14. d KJV 41:1.

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facing a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic caveman, a braggart and a bully, almost sympathetic in his complete ignorance of spiritual culture. Job is then almost immediately aware that it would be comical naïveté to bring up theoretical questions; if one is going to assert a conviction, it must be done to an opponent who has the understanding to grasp it, and who sees in the argument the common basis for discussion. Nothing could be more out of place here than to beat himself on his chest and declare his moral heroism until Yahweh put his foot on him and rubbed him out like a louse. He might as well take his grand airs to the hippopotamus and the crocodile. The situation has changed completely now that Yahweh has been harmed by revealing his true nature and no longer benefits from the idealizing imaginations of humankind. “Only what rumor reported had I heard of you, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore, I take everything back and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5, 6). Job speaks to the Lord with the voice that one does with mentally incompetent persons. He has fought against the Lord from completely erroneous premises (Verse 3). What is new to Job is not the quantitative greatness of God; he was fully aware of this beforehand (12:6–10, 13–25, 26:5–14); what is new is the qualitative smallness. His most exalted notion, his image of God, has collapsed. Job can give way to this stupid primal force without the slightest shame, since the “fight” has not affected his principal claim at all. A spiritual power can be destroyed, but not “defeated” by the destruction of its bodily bearer. Nor has Job been physically “defeated,” because he did not enter into battle. He is not convicted of any mistake concerning the justice of the world order; on the contrary, he has been strengthened in his viewpoint. By surrendering in this way, he adds to the tyrant the worst of all imaginable offenses, the fact that his opponent is not even worthy of a fight. The one who has no clue is Yahweh; he delights in the “triumph” like a child and initiates a great reconciliation. The pitiful friends, who thought they had taken care of their master’s best interests, held carefully to his written commandments, and just had them confirmed by personal revelation, and indeed even predicted the reconciliation – were given a severe chastisement, while Job, who has not yet recovered from the initial shock, witnesses his goods and gold returning and doubling. He has as many sons and daughters as those who were crushed in 1:19 – it is clearly the Lord’s opinion that if the number is the same, then nothing is lost. His wife also benefits from Job’s “new covenant” even though she went on the Devil’s errand in 2:9. What relentless light falls upon this God who thinks he can make everything right with money and cattle, after Job put his finger on the rotten toll throughout the world machinery!

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Thus, this mighty metaphysical showdown ends in light comedy. Job holds his wise tongue in his newfound fortune, but he probably will not forget the glimpse he got behind the creation’s stage in the moment of horror, even as he turns 140 years old and is full of days. Has Satan lost the bet? If he is of the same caliber as Yahweh: yes. But if he is an intelligent Mephisto, then he and Job have a little secret between them. Inwardly Satan has won a victory far more valuable than an outward one: The colossus has revealed his weakness, and his opponent has gained a grip on the human mind that was previously impossible. God did not know the reach of Job’s test; a whim in the ruler during a jovial reception (1:6 ff.) has developed into the bloodiest seriousness. Job’s tragedy is first of all external, that he is destroyed with his entire house because he is the finest in the land. But here the causal connection is attributed to a “Prologue in Heaven” and cannot be associated with known earthly conditions. Wealth can tempt robbers, it is true, but the storm and the leprosy are random in the light of experience. This tragedy therefore has no philosophical weight. But the internal tragedy is much more substantial. First, the sense of justice (the new greatness awakened by the external tragedy), in which Job is alone in his circle and in which the contemporary reader sees his crowning trait, leads to melancholy and world pain, to the most severe of all mental suffering. Secondly, the fact that Job’s strong imagination and superior mental quality make him especially susceptible to this suffering – the Almighty horrifies Job by “opening visions of the darkness” to his eyes (23:17). Limited natures are spared such deep vision, and the “wicked” have no corresponding problem of justice. This relationship concerns us so much more because it has something “eternally human” about it. But the God himself in the Book of Job, does he concern us? Is it anything more than a poetic game with an alien and outdated depiction of God? Do we know this God? Yes, we know him from the history of religion; he is the God of the Old Testament, the Lord of hosts, or as we would say, the God of armies, the zealous Yahweh. But does he only live in the history of religion? No, he also sits on a throne in our experience, today just as 2,400 years ago. He represents a familiar biological and social environment: the blind forces of nature that are out of touch with humankind’s drive toward order and meaning, the erratic impact of illness and death, the impermanence of fame, the betrayal of friends and relatives. He is the God of machines and power, violent domination, partial enslavement and conquest, copper tubes, and armor plates.

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There are others besides Job who meet him with spiritual weaponry. Some of them are trampled down in heroic martyrdom; others also see the limitation of martyrdom, bend themselves externally, but hide the despair in their hearts.

§ 107. Shakespeare’s Hamlet Like Prometheus, he is the “thoughtful in advance”; like Job, he curses his birth and his life and the plight of humankind in the world. But this enigmatic “stranger” in the family of tragic protagonists, the young Hamlet from the dawn of the 17th century, takes new paths; he finds his fate and his downfall on new fronts in the constant struggle of the human spirit. He is peculiar, even among the children of Shakespeare’s thought, but who he is, and how we best interpret his deeds, words, and omissions, no single author has yet been able to tell. Is he perhaps the poet himself, since so many of his thoughts return in Shakespeare and since the poet named his only son after him? Or is he just a particularly captivating version of the “melancholic type” of the time? Is he the idle dreamer, the coward who adorns himself with the mask of reason, or the dazzling war hero and heir apparent? Is he the prince of the drama’s kingdom or an unviable hybrid of old legends and the Shakespearean sense of life? The true aristocrat or communist, possibly humanist revolutionary? The champion of Christianity and the embodied moral ideal in a royal court of sin and lust, or the unscrupulous aesthete, seducer, and murderer? World savior or good-fornothing? Genius philosopher and ponderer or manic-melancholic psychopath? Seer and prophet or victim of the Oedipus complex and stuck in the puberty stage? A disguised woman or a noble vase in which fate has planted an oak? And what is the point of the whole thing? Those who believe that Shakespeare wanted to warn against the sickness of procrastination or emphasize faith in providence as the only durable ground, one does well now to ignore. But the poetic-dramatic meaning? Is the play a game of riddles that the poet has willed, or is it helplessly unsuccessful, or is the brain not yet created that is able to interpret it? These, and a myriad of individual questions have arisen in the centuries-long “battle over Hamlet,” in which writers by the scores have taken part, a battle that is still far from fought out.146 146 Here are a few of the works and monographs that deal with the play: Furness, H. H., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Vol. III and IV (Hamlet), London and Philadelphia 1877 with variations, notes, commentaries, and comprehensive bibliography p. 397– 429. Rümelin, Gustav, Shakespearestudien [Shakespeare Studies], Stuttgart 1866 p. 74 ff. Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy, Leipzig 1919, various places. Paulsen, Friedrich,

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There is hardly the step, the line, the trait in the protagonist himself and his fellow characters that have not been endlessly turned upside down and twisted inside out and been far differently and partly contradictorily interpreted. Is there any uniform character and dramatic nerve present? Is the play’s dramaturgy pure jumble or perfect order? Why does Hamlet hesitate, why does he so often act differently than one expects, and why does he decide to act insane? Is he sincere in his self-confessions, are the fellow characters sincere when they speak about each other and themselves, when are they and when are they not? If the poet himself has a purpose in these things, where does it come from? Does Hamlet love Ophelia, how does he love her, how has the relationship been between them, why does he abandon her? Why does he not have a thought for the fact that it is her father he has killed (one thinks of the distance to Corneille’s Le Cid!)? How do we explain the many chronological and characterological impossibilities – dramaturgically? Psychologically? Historically? Could Shakespeare’s mimetic-plastic instruction fill in for today’s audience all the holes that bother us? To follow a single author in all these doubts is hardly advisable. Then it is better to base one’s viewpoint on one’s own reading of the text, and afterward to test, alter, and develop it when one finds attractive points of view in others. One’s final Hamlet image may come to consist of cells and traits from many sides in theater and theory, as they are fused by the reader into organic unity. Such an image must also be formed that will examine the tragic structure of the play. But the individual questions only concern one in so far as they relate to this structure. We do not yet know whether or not the play is tragic, but we are in a way obliged to let our theoretical viewpoint illuminate, or be illuminated by the drama which in the literary tradition is the first claimant to the possible title of “tragic masterpiece of all time.” One temptation then lies closer than others: interpreting the play so that it fits the theory, by choice or by appropriate pressure. There are many pitfalls on this track, and getting out of them takes time and effort. We hope to succeed; for us, whether or not the play turns out to be tragic is of secondary importance. In all cases, it is our job to find out which conditions in the play are dependent on the tragic structure. An interpretation of specific factors can determine whether or not the play is tragic. Such an analysis will also reveal whether the tragic connection has anything to say about the poetic value of the play. Is it essential to determine whether or not there is a tragic connection? Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles, Stuttgart and Berlin 1926 p. 115 ff. Ludwig, Otto, Shakespearestudien [Shakespeare Studies], various places.

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Will the attention of the qualified viewer be directed unconditionally toward this relationship? If the thought strikes, we have, through the point of view of the tragic, also gained a basis of a feeling for the serious drama on the whole. A basis, yes. There will always be a number of poetically valuable, but tragically irrelevant factors, both in the play’s totality and in the action, characters, and interpolations. The investigation then does not indulge itself in any criticism of such factors. It inquires after three things: catastrophe, culturally relevant greatness, and functional connection between them. Hamlet’s misfortune extends to all four interest fronts; it is of a biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical nature. But common language could also distinguish between “external” and “internal” ruin. The “external death” falls directly into view: The prince is killed with poisoned sword in an athletic fencing match. This death is a catastrophe only if it is in sharp conflict with the biological interest of the protagonist, with a will to live. But the Hamlet that is stricken is a life-weary man; he has long wished for death, and he would have voluntarily left this world “had not the almighty set his canon against self-slaughter” (he says himself), and if the fear of afterlife possibilities did not hold back his hand. At this point it has been a while since he expressed such a thought, and Hamlet is to a great extent a man of the moment; he has repeatedly provided evidence of an undiminished self-preservation drive. But just before going to the fencing match, he expresses to Horatio, the only friend he has left, his resignation and a kind of fatalistic belief in providence; he does not wish to guard himself any longer. Did he still want to live? Did he feel the call to be king? Did he have anything at all for which to live? Love? Studies? Friends? Theater and music? The answers to these questions determine whether or not Hamlet’s death is a catastrophe. A similar consideration applies to the other misfortunes of an “external” nature, his father’s murder, the break with Ophelia, his mother’s betrayal and death. However Hamlet himself assesses his physical downfall, for the viewer it can to a great extent still feel like a should-not-be; it is, after all, the annihilation in one’s eyes of a both captivating and richly equipped young man. Together with the last link of a causal series, it thus also shows a tragic structure. While the murder is being planned, King Claudius says: “He, being remiss / most generous and free from all contriving / will not peruse the foils.” It is the last remnant of Hamlet’s trust in his opponent’s honesty that leads him into the trap. And it lays something touching over Hamlet’s death; here as elsewhere there is something of the animal’s innocence over everything he does.

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But the external death is only a seal upon the internal; and therein lies the real catastrophe. Then is there a breakdown of strong and central interests? Yes, it seems so – if one does not see in Hamlet a neurotic world-wailer who in fact enjoys his own melancholy and will not do without it. I do not see him this way. I place weight on him having the highest ethical ideals and realizing them by ability, on him being widely recognized as a highly valuable fellow human being, being fond of poetry, theater and music, of studies and sports, on him holding friendship as sacred, and loving a young girl. It seems that Hamlet’s original tendencies are toward a rich and positive outlook on health and goodness. – this beautiful edifice, the earth, this lovely canopy, the air, this proud vault’s fortification, this majestic ceiling inlaid with golden flames –. What a masterpiece is man! How noble in his thought, how endless in equipment, how expressive and admirable in form and movement! In activity how like an angel, – in the mind’s reach, how like a god! (2.2).a

But these grounding chords of a full-toned joy of life are blown up into a cutting disharmony; indeed, they already are at the moment we hear them ring. The young prince pulls himself back from his beloved and falls victim to the deepest life loathing and world pain. In this distress-forced No to life, I see the real catastrophe in the play. Why then does it go precisely this way for Hamlet? Does the cause (it seems reasonable to point out the selection of causes) lie in the surrounding environment, or in the protagonist’s character traits and dispositions, or in an interaction between them? Is the internal catastrophe an appropriate consequence of these causes? The environment shows special and general (universally human) features. Special to Hamlet is the death of his father and the mother’s almost instant marriage to an uncle whom Hamlet cannot stand, and who blocks his way to the throne; it later turns out that he was in a relationship with Hamlet’s mother while his father was alive. There is also Ophelia’s dependence on her father and brother, which in Hamlet’s interpretation becomes personal inferiority. These external events make the strongest impression on the prince’s disposition; he cannot let go of his grief over his father, and he is not finished a Zapffe typically quotes Shakespeare in English, but in those places where he quotes in Norwegian, as here, the quotes have been translated directly into English. Thus, the passages are in some cases slightly different from the English text.

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castigating the moral wretchedness by which he sees himself surrounded. He suffers (it seems to me) deeply and genuinely under these conditions, but he gains his distance and a certain empty satisfaction by pouring out a dazzlingly pathetic and satirical rhetoric on small and great sinners. Yet it can hardly be called normal (though appropriate in relation to the protagonist’s peculiar nature) to react to these things with such a sweeping and violent negativism as that which one encounters in 1.2: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt –,” in monologues and conversations throughout the play. Alongside these unique conditions, there are also general features of Hamlet’s consciousness and their contributions. He generalizes his personal experiences: Ophelia and his mother’s weaknesses become unsightly stains on the female sex overall, and the rottenness he finds in Denmark demonstrates a defect in the general moral world order. “Geographically” the thought does not hold true; there are places of refuge in Wittenberg and likewise in the relationship with unfailing friends, but on the metaphysical side, the meaning may be sufficient: If one is deprived of the orderly hand in a single place in the world where people hope and struggle, where can one be safe? A body is sick if leprosy is only present at the tip of the finger. It applies to everything or nothing. As an expression of a fiery ethical idealism, the generalization is appropriate in relation to Hamlet’s nature, without regard to scientific plausibility. With these dark perspectives comes the impression of the lot of humankind under the viewpoint of eternity: the disgusting dissolution of the body and the macabregrotesque migrations of the molecules (the conversation with Claudius in 4.3 and the cemetery scene in 5.1), and the uncertain fate of the soul with the many unimaginable and terrifying possibilities. But even these common features of humankind on Earth do not typically break down the joys of life and the will to live while the ability to decide fades like a frost-ravaged plant. The reaction is still out of the ordinary, and one is therefore directed to search for the explanation in the peculiar nature of the prince. Already in the first scene Hamlet catches the viewer’s attention. He stands out from the others by his withdrawn faithfulness in grief, and there is something that lies underneath his every response. It is understood that a particular mood and a particular collection of thoughts have the power over him. Gradually new traits appear, and the old ones are fixed and deepened. One is no longer preoccupied with external events for their own sake; with increasing tension, indeed breathless anticipation, one follows their effect on this one man.

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At the center of the whole story are the revelations of the ghost and the demand for revenge. A modern viewer might prefer that the information had come from an eyewitness at the deathbed or the like. But by using a messenger from an unknown world, the poet has accomplished something very important. It may not have been the exact intention to suggest something such as “the mysterious sources of the action’s impulse” – but at the least here lies the basis for a motive that gradually grows stronger: Hamlet does not just belong to “the earth”; his consciousness and circle of interest include something more than life, love, and promotion. He listens to his cosmic origin; he lives in wonder at this inconceivability, that he is human and sees that he is human. “There is more given in heaven and on earth / than what your wisdom dreams of, Horatio.” The call for revenge in the play has the function of shedding light on Hamlet’s personality, putting it to the test and forcing it to reveal itself, and driving his fate to external and internal maturity. Closest at hand lies the question of why Hamlet does not comply with his father’s order until he is himself stricken and can just as easily be said to avenge his own death. Here the interpreters crowd together; they argue for and against. An older writer says that in his view Hamlet must hesitate so that the play does not end after the first act. Otherwise, it is claimed on one side that the prince has the very best opportunity – “cause and will and strength and means to do’t,” as he says in 4.4. If he is still just delaying and wasting time, then there is something wrong with him, which is also true of his many intense self-reproaches. That the task could easily be done is shown by the rebellion Laertes leads when he finds himself in the same situation as Hamlet, etc. Others argue that there was every reason to wait and see – how will he as a regicide defend his action? With something concerning a spirit that appeared – no; then Claudius with the snake is better. Thus, he must have more secure evidence. The ghost might be Satan’s deception. The king exposes himself and the occasion arises, but the king lies in prayer; if he is killed now, his soul goes to heaven. Hamlet’s chivalrous nature recoils from slaughtering a defenseless man, etc. Against all these assertions, objections have been raised from the play itself: Opposed to “cowardice and idle dreaming” stands the courageous performance on the parapet, while the warriors are paralyzed by terror, as well as the boarding of the pirate ship. Hamlet can kill, it turns out time and time again, though it happens more in the moment of inspiration than after mature deliberation. The doubt concerning the “authenticity” of the ghost is removed when the king bursts out of the theater, and the theology, which holds his sword back during the king’s prayer,

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sits here as elsewhere strikingly loose in the context and seems like something the prince has learned, but is in no way permeated by. So why does he hesitate to take revenge? I have come to the conclusion that the question is of quite peripheral importance. The act of revenge is not the core of the play (“Do you still remember the whole matter?” 5.2); it is merely a means of revealing the core, an exponent of Hamlet’s far more important task: to grasp what it means to be human, to reach clarity concerning his life and acknowledge it in an appropriate and sufficiently valuable action. It would also have been a peculiar dramatic design that a man in five full acts would not do a single thing. “The most objectionable case,” says Aristotle in the Poetics XIV, 7, “is when a man knows the (destructive) nature of his task and still wills to perform it, but fails to do so.” Such a motif may be poetically relevant but finds its most natural form in epic poetry. The dramatic in Hamlet must therefore be sought elsewhere, in the struggle of the prince’s own life, and in Hamlet’s “battle” with his own metaphysical awareness. What nature then does Hamlet display? The most detailed approach here would be the following: First, the character of the protagonist is analyzed and described in its entirety, then one selects the traits that are believed to contribute to the origin of the (internal) catastrophe, and finally in this group the properties that constitute Hamlet’s culturally relevant greatness are assessed. Here we go directly to the last step. There is much to suggest that the poet himself intended to equip his protagonist with something other and more than purely autotelic (theatrically relevant) superiority, thereby giving the play a deeper catchment area for the more qualified viewer. How the Elizabethan audience and thinkers assessed the Hamletesque life unfolding, the historian of society and ideas must sort out. And the prince’s environment in the play? Just as it is, the fellow characters give expressions of love and admiration. Thus, Ophelia in 3.1 (Brusendorff’s transl., Copenhagen 1928–30): O, what noble spirit is here a broken one! / The eye of the court man and the tongue of the learned, / The sword of the warrior, the hope of the beautiful kingdom / and the rose bud, the mirror of fine custom, / the pattern of courtliness, the common goal / for everyone’s eyes –.

Even his enemy concedes in 4.7: “He is unguarded, noble, without deceit –,” and in 4.3: “He is loved by the unthinking crowd.” Fortinbras gives him the following honor in 5:2: “Then let four captains carry Hamlet / to the spectacle

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in warlike manner: / for his journey would surely have been royal, / if he had become king. War music / and warrior customs should honor his corpse.” In the case of modern readers, the assessment may be very different depending on cultural goals and formation ideals. In the following a “traditional humanist” value judgment is assumed. A distinction between greatness of capacity and greatness of fixedness will facilitate the overview (cf. § 78 f.). The former in Hamlet is primarily of a passive, receptive, “introverted” nature. It lies in an excellent mental equipment, a combination of intelligence, sensitivity, and imagination which one rarely ever meets, neither in poetry nor in life. Intelligence is especially evident in Hamlet’s knowledge of humans, in his convincing ability to see through the conscious and unconscious masks of his surroundings, to pin down the characters of those he finds morally inferior with great effect, the courtiers with their sham natures: Polonius, Osric, and the old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Queen, to whom he “speaks daggers,” the king, who is the arch-offender himself, yes, even poor Ophelia, who only represents her sex. But he has the same X-ray vision for the hidden interconnectedness of events and of the threads in his opponents’ machinations and in life’s otherwise variegated weave. This fully conscious intellectual activity is surrounded by such abilities as a highly developed “intuition” (suspicions that strike, “– O my prophetic soul!” 1.5) and a combining ability that produces series of surprising perspectives in the protagonist’s mind. The combining ability accompanies the imagination, which in Hamlet has overwhelming dimensions, especially since it goes hand in hand with a rich and strong perception and a vibrating sensitivity, which like a delicate instrument gives results with the slightest input. In the naked nerves there is, without ceasing, a playful life and a violent burning; this person is bare plasma, a bubbling meeting place for all the alternating streams of the sources of life. “What a piece of work is a man!” We must seek the greatness of fixedness that together with the capacity constitutes “the core” of Hamlet’s fascinating sorcery-like personality in the fact that this immense inner power is directed at that which is of morally high value. It is true that its manifestation in action, if the prince’s inspirational impulses can be called such, will not always win the applause of dogmatic ethics; a modern reader finds no reasonable relationship between guilt and fate in the cases of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and when he is admired for these exploits, it is not on an ethical basis. But some of Hamlet’s violence can certainly be attributed to “the time,” and in the poetic-dramatic sense, no

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shadow falls from it upon the prince’s character. On the contrary, the fact that the trapped fire and the immense pressure in the protagonist’s mind sometimes find their way outward in a liberating flash eases the viewer’s breath. In Hamlet, England has a prince charminga who truly justifies the epithet. Though such characteristics cannot be mentioned in an ethical context, there are others that remain. Everywhere, there is an impression of incorruptible integrity and almost fanatical idealism. He makes the same strict demands on himself that he does on his surroundings, even if he uses the right of the exceptional person to be the master of the rules and not their slave. He is faithful in his grief over his father, trustworthy in his friendship with Horatio, and honest in his love for Ophelia. These traits must be put to the test in order to gain ethical relevance; but such a test Hamlet would pass, the viewer is convinced. Hamlet is familiar with temptation: “To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand” (2.2). Hamlet does not enter into any current conflict, but throughout the play he is at odds with the royal house and the spirit that reigns there. And the demand for purity and order, justice and meaning is not given up for a moment; it emanates as a radiance from the mind and shines on the least as well as the greatest. A single component of this ethical strength is now becoming crucially important. It is Hamlet’s intellectual honesty, his uncompromising and allconsuming will to truth. The first lines (in 1.2) are like a series of hammer blows to force reality out from the royal couple’s desire-determined reframings. “– it is, I know not ‘seems.’ ” An unshakable animosity toward pseudo-solutions shows itself in changing conditions and goes together with yet another requirement of the human expression of life: Hamlet does not accept the recognized but fictional and partial objects when they appear with the face of universal sufficiency. He holds fast to grief, though it is called unmanly, stubborn, and impious; to him it is more impious and unmanly to let go of the deep and sacred feeling prematurely in order to get life’s external antics going again (1.2). He sees through the kingship’s fictional nature (Act 2): My uncle is king of Denmark, and those who made grimaces at him while my father lived, now give twenty, fifty, a hundred ducats for a miniature image of him. God’s blood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could figure it out.

Hamlet himself could “be trapped in a nutshell and still feel like a king over an endless space.” In his own philosophy, the young man (in the 1603 ed. he is a English given.

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nineteen, in the 1604 ed. thirty years old) has reached a general and radical relativism: “– there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2). He judges people according to human qualities and not according to external rank; he places an honest actor, the time’s despised jester, far above a “state minister” like Polonius. He wants friends, not servants. He despises goods and gold as ends in themselves (5.2) and repeatedly calls himself a poor man; the property owners are sheep and calves because they seek their security in calfskin documents; how does this help them in their graves? Finding objects that measure up is one of the most difficult problems for Hamlet’s centerpoint-seeking tendency. In people he finds disappointment and in books only words, words, words. What for the less selective, less discerning, less relentlessly value-testing are useful holding points in life’s storm, object help, fixedness help, meaning help – they easily become for this spirit transparent illusions. He is without refuge in his practical life. Indeed, he seeks psychological support in strong, primitive natures, in the stoic Horatio, in King Hamlet, the simple warrior, the good husband and father, in Fortinbras, the young powerful conqueror. It can sometimes amaze the reader that he is not more aware of the type’s spiritual limitation, he who otherwise finds flaws everywhere. It is the weary longing of the over-differentiated for the animal’s healthy tranquility, for a harmonious, collected, and protected mind, that also makes him blind to the fundamental unsustainability of this refuge. And yet not completely blind: What does heroism pursue? A bubble of honor? What is war? A boil that bursts out from the sick, trapped forces of peace and prosperity (4.4). Fraud and pointless attempts are everywhere. Where does he find the path for his own power? After a moment’s flare-up in the revelation’s ecstasy, loss and emptiness again follow. And still it is as if he is inspired by his first, earthshaking discoveries. He notes them on his tablet as a treasure he has won, an inalienable fund of knowledge concerning life and human nature, a first clue to a possible path for himself. When the all-consuming investigative flame is first lit, what is more natural than its revealing light, its purifying and destroying fire breaking over ever new fields, where the mind searches for sustenance and shelter, beyond values that had hitherto been good enough because no one had tested them seriously, measured them with stricter requirements? And then it is not only the fictional life help of others that the searchlight dissolves and destroys; his own holding points collapse. With an outsider’s objectivity and cold-bloodedness, he holds the day of judgment over himself. The advantage that he finds comes into its own uncut and is by no means hidden under a false modesty. He is fully aware of his will to honesty, his talent

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as an artist, his judgments of taste, and skill as a fencer; he feels himself as an aristocrat and expresses this in 5.2: “For lower natures it is dangerous / to go between the strong enemy’s blows / and angry blade tips.” But there is also no lack of bitter self-analysis and unbridled condemnation of his own weakness. In the conversation with Ophelia (3.1) he guides the knife into his own flesh with surgical confidence, he sees through his “needforced bravery” during the pirate fight, admits his idleness and fear of ghosts, accuses himself repeatedly in the strongest of terms, for apathy, lack of passion, and procrastination sickness when it comes to his father’s errand. But precisely here he touches on a connection between the paralysis of action and the overly rich life of consciousness (3.1): Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their current turn awry, / And lose the name of action. (Cf. monologue in 4.4)

This utterance comes forth in connection with an action which, alongside blood revenge, harms Hamlet most strongly: the one to put an end to his life. On a number of occasions, he expresses the desire to let go of a world where he no longer feels at home. Concerning the reason for this desire the reader receives detailed information, so detailed that it leads to the thought of rationalization, yet one recognizes the voice of Shakespeare from the 66th Sonnet and many other places. In the monologue “To be or not to be –” (3.1), there are the practical afflictions of life and the wickedness and vileness of humans. But the prince does not stop at this severe Schopenhauerism, which would have immediately brought down the metaphysical edifice and produced an irrefutable objection: Why do you not take hold and be rid of this mess? Hamlet’s depression turns out to go much deeper, as one can already see from the conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 2.2: “I have recently – I do not know why – lost all my cheerfulness –,” etc. The problem would by no means be solved by the cessation of the physical evils and the establishment of high moral relations between humans. A mind like Hamlet’s, so rich and agile, so comprehensive and so finely nuanced, cannot stop at the “nearest requirement.” Already in the field of biological-social value, he stretches beyond his surroundings, and he has a more expansive and very vulnerable interest front. But what concerns him in the world course does not stop with this. Processes to which a more limited mind is closed and against which a less daring spirit protects itself through isolation, turn over in Hamlet’s consciousness through wide-open doors, and

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ripple through it with cosmic visions, with horrifying perspectives of human conditions on Earth. “’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so,” says Horatio in the cemetery (5.1), but Hamlet replies: In no way; why can the power of imagination not pursue the transformations of human dust? Hamlet has already described them for King Claudius in 4.3, and now he draws his conclusion: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio!” Then perhaps it is these macabre imaginings that nourish the melancholy and hold Hamlet’s hand back when he wants to break down under the mental life pressure and turn him to refuge-seeking against eternal sleep? He himself says that it is “bad dreams” that plague and deter him (Brusendorff, Gyldendal Bibl. XII, Copenhagen 1928–30, p. 69 and 82). What are these bad dreams about? They are “the dreams the sleep of death can bring / when we have untwisted ourselves out of the chains of dust”; they are “the fear of the eye after death / the unknown land which no man who wanders / has returned from.” We know the limits of the distress of actual earthly life, but not the possibilities that await. However, these possibilities would have no motivating power if they did not make themselves known to us in this life already. But the misfortune is that they make themselves known to the one who has the spiritual power to grasp them and nerves enough to tremble under them. For him there is no refuge in death. He begins to catch a glimpse of the outlines of his human existence, and he sees that they are closing in. It is Hamlet’s immense metaphysical awareness that gives him the bad dreams. To a recipient like Hamlet the ghost could give a revelation, / whose smallest words should pierce / your soul and stiffen abruptly your young blood, / make your eyes leap like starshot / from their spheres, and the closed lids / separate and each hair stand erect / like the spikes on a furious hedgehog. / But the horror of eternity is not for the ears / of flesh and blood. (1.5)

This gentleness is of little value to Hamlet, knowing too well the condition described. His imagination provides for that with which the ghost must be gentle; it makes him “nature’s fool” and causes him “in dread and fear / to be shaken to the very heart / by thoughts which our soul cannot contain” (1.4). Still, he rejects the easy way that friends recommend and will force him to: stay away from such things and close the eyes to the abyss that is near and “could take power from reason, / and drive you to madness. Think about it.” But Hamlet exclaims: Let go of me, boys! By God, I make a ghost of the one who hinders me. The scientist’s mania is kindled, he wants to know what the boundaries of life entail, and with body and soul as effort he will experience what it means to be human. “Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

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/ looking before and after, gave us not / that capability and god-like reason / to rust in us unused” (4.4). “My fate cries aloud / and makes every little vein in my body / as firm as the lion’s tendons in Nemea.” The king’s warriors retreat, but Hamlet’s “prophetic spirit” goes the way of immersion and dedication. It began in sorrow’s deep, still crypt; in the midnight hour on the rampart it reaches a point from which there is no retreat. Hamlet is a marked man; he has seen an “angel” who has seen Jehovah. With relentless force he is driven toward a No to life, a No to the wild, banal, grotesque, and loathsome carnival on Earth’s burial ground. “I say, we don’t want any more marriages! Get thee to a nunnery, Ophelia. Why would you give birth to sinners in the world?” The one born is caught in the net of life, but “nature’s fool” has a means by which to switch roles. He has “something in him dangerous.” On a single occasion we especially see as in a flash to the bottom of Hamlet’s spiritual distress, the distress that he does not know a single purpose sufficiently valuable and reliable on which he can use his total life power without a paralyzing awareness of the relativity and partiality of the action, its insignificance in relation to the one thing needful, the distress that under the overwhelming pressure of his life feeling he does not understand how he should live, how he should respond authentically and appropriately to this storm of stimuli. It is in the cemetery, where Laertes jumps into his sister’s grave and asks the funeral procession to pile soil over both of them “till the flat plain / rises up to a towering mountain / high above old Pelion and over / the blue Olympus cloud top.” Laertes tries to release his affect through pathetic sublimation, and Hamlet is immediately inspired: Not bad, Laertes! There you are at the keyhole of life! But at the same time he clearly sees the falsehood of the other’s attitude, and it makes him furious to witness this thoughtless attempt to deflect his own sacred life distress with such trivial means. In heaven’s name, man, you do not see what you are touching! Lyric and measurement! Has one ever heard the match of clumsiness! If you can say mountain as high as Pelion, then I can say mountain that reaches the sun! And how does that help? Does it give meaning to your pain over the dead? No, but you have touched the fire point of life, and what will you do now? What will you do with your grief, you who seem to know what grief means? You who do not flee, but who throw yourself into the terrible question – you who dare to take it up! God’s death, what will you do, man – here I am rotting inside and devoured alive, because I still do not get hold of what it’s about! But now you have got it, and now I want to see what you do with it! So, answer in the name of humanity what you will do! Fight, howl, starve, tear yourself apart? / Drink up the river, eat crocodiles?

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Surely you did not jump into the grave of the flaming riddles just to snivel, just to challenge me with empty boasting? But Laertes has no answer to give; his pretensions in the direction of “great fate” collapse like a rag and Hamlet can add a new “nothingness” to the notes of his life. These considerations now also provide a key to the drama’s external action, to the connection between the prince’s love for his father and the grief over him on the one hand, and the “sluggishness” of the execution of the revenge concerning which his father has instructed him on the other. Why does Hamlet resort to the only possible compromise between the mission and omission – to remember? The answer is that the death of the father and even more the murder is experienced by the son as a tremendous metaphysical meaninglessness. To cast aside the grief from himself in order to take up today’s concrete task is to cower under the law of wickedness and randomness; it is to turn aside from the last defense, where the man-made torn banner still so far holds up against the hurricanes from the great chaos. Thus, he holds on to grief as an inalienable treasure, but what should he do with it? A solution has been assigned to him, blood revenge; it is a sufficient reaction for simple natures like Laertes and the older Hamlet, but for the son it is of no value in the context of life. Will there be meaning in the world if he cuts down the murderer now? Will the villain’s blood flow into the chamber of sorrow as a golden confirmation? No and again no, and not only that: If he carries out revenge, then he pulls his accounting with life down onto a plane where no real closure can take place, then he accepts a shameful arrangement, then he embarks on a horse trade with fate in which he is cheated out of the one thing needful. Revenge is what Olaf Bull calls “a miserable and incomplete answer.” The fact that the king’s soul must join the fall makes the enterprise a bit better, but this is also insufficient. On the contrary, to cut him down for his paltry attacks on Hamlet’s own life, a life he does not value higher than a button – to cleanse a chamber of Polonius and the world of two superfluous Rosencrantz and Guildensterns, this is smooth sailing and routine details and like for like. This does not concern Hamlet’s metaphysical engagement. But where he felt contact with “the eternal,” there his entire being has worked under feverish high pressure until it has burst at the meeting between internal and external annihilating forces. Hamlet has found no life answer; the belief in providence gains no power over the mind; he fights, suffers, and falls like a defeated spiritual warrior. “The rest is silence.” *

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For those who see in Hamlet’s spiritual advantage a greatness of unquestionable cultural value, and who understand the connection between the superior qualifications and the mental “sickness” that breaks down his faith and will to life – to them the Prince of Denmark is a tragic figure in all its glittering and intangible diversity. And he is this regardless of the path one takes when one draws the causal line between greatness and catastrophe. In this drama many paths lie open; they can go through clear processes of understanding, accepting the conscious motivation presented by the poet, and they can go through unconscious regions of the mind, where the psychologist and analyst follow effect and interaction by the light of theorems. And they can also go through “poetic intuition,” through the viewer’s watchful empathy, when one, without aesthetic program, is receptive with senses and intellect, with imagination and feeling fully open. One has enough of the “preconditions,” and the “poetic intuition” can provide the widest range of results, but also the tragic structure is agile and living and commands with its simple formula unlimited substance masses and variations. Thus, we do not claim that the view of Hamlet that was unfolded above is the “best” or “the only right one.” There is room for numerous others, and each of them, as the literature shows, brings new and surprising results for the day. What the poet would have nodded at in recognition, and what he with a smile or horror would have rejected, we have no means to determine. But within the extraordinary ambiguity of the play in small and large, our viewpoint will be able to take its place alongside the others. And it seems to me that an interpreter of the play who does not work with the “tragic connection” leaves rich opportunities untapped and misses the real-life value which a deep feeling for this drama can produce.147

147 In the three poetic works which have now been dealt with, only a small part of the views expressed above have been able to apply. It could, therefore, have been desirable to extend the chapter to include far more tragedies, so that they together and individually could justify the preliminary work to a greater extent. It is not for systematic but for completely extraneous reasons that I have seen the need to limit the selection to these three, and I myself am the first to regret this. A meager consolation lies in the hope that the reader, through the developed perspectives, finds oneself in possession of a tool which may have proved to some extent useful and fruitful in these examples. Should the whole theoretical part have found practical application, the chapter would have burst its natural framework within the whole, but there can still be no doubt that a richer range of applications would have been in its place. Supplementing the chapter with a possible “new edition” is hardly advisable, on the other hand, the setup of the theoretical apparatus is likely to be of service in later monographs (essays) on tragic poetry.

·11· SCATTERED FEATURES FROM THE LITERATURE ON THE TRAGIC

§ 108. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) The Greeks showed early interest in literary criticism, including toward the Greco-tragic, as was first found in oral narratives handed down and the oldest epics, and later in the dramatic tragedy and in historical writers. Sometimes real events were given as examples; the sense of the poetic-tragic was closely related to the sense of the objectively tragic. Indeed, there were those who found certain historical episodes “more tragic” than the darkest tragedies. At times the distinction was not the Greeks’ strongest suit. And disagreement was present from the start. Tragic poetry was judged differently from various aesthetic and non-aesthetic perspectives, from the point of view of the philosopher-moralist, educator, and statesman. The meaning itself of the word tragic shifted greatly over time; toward the end of antiquity, the meaning became increasingly superficial and trivial. A good overview of lines of thought and authors can be found in Robert Petsch, “Die Theorie des Tragischen in griechischen Altertum [The Theory of the Tragic in Ancient Greece]” (Zeitschrift f. Ästhetik u. allg. Kunstwissenschaft

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[Journal of Aesthetics and General Art Studies] Vol. IV) and in F. Geffcken, “Der Begriff des Tragischen in der Antike [The Concept of the Tragic in Antiquity]” (Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg [Lectures of the Warburg Library] Vol. VII). As a general rule, lines of thought and authors clearly characterize themselves either as supporters or as opponents of the tragedy. Sometimes it is its quality as poetry in general which is the subject of contention, sometimes the theatricaldramatic form, sometimes the content’s emphasis on suffering. Already Solon (600 B.C.) reportedly blamed the much younger Thespis (who came with his wagon to Athens in 534) for “spreading lies among the people.” And if one asks for the end of the dispute, it still has not come in 1940: Pietistic sects assert doctrines hostile to art and theater in close connection with the tradition that originated from Socrates and was developed by Plato (427–347). The friends of tragedy found their greatest advocate in Aristotle (384–322), whose Poetics provides the first stand-alone theory of tragedy. Aristotle was also a student of Plato in this discipline and received many central thoughts from him, but soon he went his own way, and the Poetics is partially written (lectured) in deliberate opposition to his teacher. Both for the classical philologist and for the layperson, a number of difficulties arise when one has to form an opinion about Aristotle’s Poetics. The problems fall into several groups, the most important of which are: (1) The text-historical question. (2) Uncertainty in connection with the translation, partly coinciding with and partly different from (3) Interpretation. (4) The value of the writing seen from a systematic point of view, its factual significance. The text problem is briefly discussed in Stahr: Aristoteles’ Poetik [Aristotle’s Poetics], Stuttgart 186 p. 3 ff. For examples of translation variants see: Hasenclever: Das Tragische und die Tragödie [The Tragic and the Tragedy], Berlin 1927 p. 11 f. Concerning interpreters, I have in a short amount of time found 75. We must leave all this and gather ourselves on point 4: The value of the writing from a systematic point of view. As a basis, we select the book by Stahr148 just mentioned, and a translation by Gomperz (Leipzig 1897), “authoritative … following the definitive solution of the philological catharsis problem by Jacob Bernays” (Hasenclever, op. cit. p. 12). The theory of tragedy has its main place in the Poetics, VI, 2.a The passage can be reproduced as follows: 148 Highlighted by Schasler, Kritiche Geschichte der Ästhetik [Critical History of Aesthetics], Berlin 1872 Vol. 2 p. 1175. a As he mentions at the end of the previous paragraph, Zapffe is working with Theodor Gomperz’s 1897 German translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. Zapffe’s references use an earlier and now much less common numbering system, an alternative to Bekker

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– The tragedy is the representation (imitation, mimesis) of a valuable, in itself completed action, – of appropriate extent, – in an artistic language whose means are varied according to the parts of the play, – not in narrative form, but performed by acting persons, – which evokes “pity” (eleos) and “fear” (phobos) and brings about a purification (liberation, refinement, catharsis) of/from these kinds of affects (pathemata). The definition’s individual parts, as one can see, are drawn from the most diverse areas of aesthetics. It has two sides: Firstly, the definition describes the Greek tragedy as it actually existed, and secondly, it establishes an aesthetic program, which is later defended. The definition is supported by the other chapters, and with the help of the text as a whole we must now elucidate the individual links. What is “general poetics,” what is “general dramaturgy,” and what is special “tragi-urgy”? Is there anything “specifically tragic” for Aristotle (objectively or poetically tragic?) and on what individual or interacting factors does it depend? The Greeks did not know any other serious drama besides the tragedy, and Aristotle was therefore bound to build his theory on it. The word tragic (tragikos) appears quite a few times. According to Langenscheidt’s GrecoGerman dictionary, it means (1) associated with the tragedy (tragic poet and actor, tragic mask, etc.) and (2) “sublime, great, exuberant, lofty.”a One gets the impression that this word’s meaning was just as unstable as it is now. “Exalted and sad” perhaps comes closest to the meaning it had among most people in Greek classical times. Later in antiquity it took on a flavor of affectation. In Aristotle, the meaning is relatively precise. He expresses himself clearly in XIII, 2, 5, and 6. The tragic is that which evokes fear and pity; that the “vicious” goes from misfortune to fortune is thus the “least tragic of all.” Euripides allows his plays to end unhappily; such plays seem “most tragic.” As far as the tragic is concerned, Euripides is thus the foremost among the tragic poets (XIII, 6). In XIV, 7 it is stated that the case described there would not be tragic because the numbering. Roman numerals indicate chapters and Arabic numerals indicate earlier paragraph divisions (into which more recent translations are rarely divided). They can be found, for example, in S. H. Butcher’s 1895 English translation of the Poetics alongside Bekker numbering. a erhaben, grossartig, überschwenglich, hochtrabend (Ger.).

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shock by the accomplished deed is not present. “Tragic” everywhere denotes a quality of impression; “seems tragic” is therefore more accurate than “is” tragic. Although XVIII, 6 alludes to an “objective course,” the meaning is probably also the same there: A matter is designated as tragic when it contains a sudden change of fate (peripeteia) and shows a “simple”149 action. If one seeks in Aristotle something “objectively tragic” that underlies the tragic effect, then one must cling to the word “imitation” – mimesis. But “imitation” is not adequate, at least not as an exhaustive translation (see Stahr p. 15 ff. and Langenscheidt’s dictionary); here, as elsewhere, one is prevented from proceeding on the basis of translation. Everywhere there is the possibility that the idea and concept boundaries of the Greeks do not coincide with ours. The word mimesis can also be translated as “production,” a conception supported by IX, 7, according to which both plots and characters can be freely invented. Again, the question is: Does one by tragic mean a structure, regardless of how it “has effect,” or does one mean an effect, regardless of the structure in which it has effect? (In the end, there is room for a more expressionist tragic art.) However, the text elsewhere suggests that mimesis is really meant as imitation. Thus, in I, 3 cf. III, 1, according to which the same subject, namely noble characters (V, 4), can be imitated in several ways, for example, by both epic and drama (III, 3). Cf. concerning recognition XVI, 1 and further XIII, 5, IX, 11–12, XI, 4. Here there are things that point to a purely structural point of view. Yet, in the Poetics Aristotle never goes beyond the aesthetic point of view; the reflection mentioned in several passages is the acting person’s own thinking within the framework of the play (VI, 6). At this point, Aristotle has no concept corresponding to our “objective tragedy.” All the more strongly has he highlighted the “poetic-tragic effect,” first as a variant within a larger group of phenomena: autotelic “pleasure” or experience of value by “factually set” aversion-producing matters (“aesthetic of the ugly”a) in IV, 3, 4: The same objects, which we see with aversion in their natural reality, we observe with pleasure precisely in their most complete depiction, for example, the production of the most disgusting beasts, indeed even corpses. Here too the reason is that the extension of cognition is an enjoyment of the highest rank, not only for the philosophers, but also for other people, albeit to a lesser degree.

149 The meaning here may be “dramatically concentrated,” therefore different from X, 2 and XIII, 2 where “simple action” means action without peripeteia. Cf. IX, 10 and XIII, 14. a Aesthetic des Hässlichen (Ger.).

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Next, considered separately. In the preceding reference is made to XIV, 7 and XVIII, 6. Beyond these one has VI, 19 on the tragic effect of the mere reading. In XIV, 2–3 mention is made of the peculiar pleasure the tragedy gives; it is the pleasure which is manifested in “fear and pity” with the help of the poetic representation, and in VI, 2 this pleasure is referred to as catharsis. Especially in XIV, 2–3, it is strongly emphasized that there is a specifically artistic form of pleasure that only tragedy can give; to evoke this is the “function”a of tragedy (XIII, 1). Aristotle (as the commentator presents him) seems to think that tragedy always gives this pleasure, a thought many aestheticians after him have uncritically inherited. Yet, in XIII, 7 he suggests that the audience often demands other pleasures from the tragedy besides the specifically tragic. In XXVI, 1 it is also stated that the tragedy is for the discerning viewer – in conflict with XXIV, 4, which judging from the content is a later interpolation. But no further description of the tragic pleasure is found in the Poetics. Toward explaining what is meant by catharsis, support has been sought in Politics VIII, 7 (Garve’s transl., Breslau 1799 p. 681 f. cf. p. 661, 665, 680). It is stated here concerning the sickly degenerate “enthusiasm” that by certain sacred songs the emotions can be brought to an intensified eruption, which is followed by relief and peace, as if the sick had experienced a medical cure and catharsis. The same is true of those which are full of “pity and fear.” It helps a bit, but not much. The core question is not answered here either. Instead, one finds a reference back to Poetics: “What I mean by the word catharsis, which I use here without explanation, I will more clearly develop in my thesis on poetic art.” And he either forgot this, or the section is lost. The section has also been compared with Rhetoric II, 8 (Knebel’s transl., Stuttgart 1838 p. 88 f.). Here pity is defined and the sufferings and catastrophes that awaken it are mentioned. Only the one who knows the suffering oneself and is sure that it can strike one or one’s family can feel pity. Here support has been found for the view of the concept of catharsis, that it is not the pity (and fear) that become “cleansed,” but it is the mind that is cleansed of the pity and fear. Which? Not the one which the protagonist’s fate awakens, but the fear and suffering (“pity for ourselves”) that we carry with us from practical life and into the theater, this is relieved by pity for the protagonist as occasion or catalyst. In the same way, then, one could be liberated from other sufferings such as anger, etc., when they receive full-toned expression in tragedy. A brief a ergon (Grk.).

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and clear examination of these questions can be found in Berger: “Wahrheit und Irrtum in der Katharsis-theorie des Aristoteles [Truth and Error in the Catharsis Theory of Aristotle],” a supplement to Gomperz’ translation of Poetics, Leipzig 1897. Aristotle is not the first to use the term catharsis. It was used, among other places, in medicine (both Aristotle and his father were doctors) and means the expulsion of harmful substances from the body. Thus, figuratively it means liberation from “mental toxins.” The idea corresponds with that of the confessional and psychoanalysis. In Chapter Nine we imagined “the life angst” being robbed of its worst sting by the viewer of tragedy bravely examining it. But if for the present moment these questions are set aside, one is not finished with the problems of catharsis in Aristotle. In what relation does catharsis stand to “fear and pity”? Does it occur as a result of these affects or is it an appropriate consequence of them, and in that case, can it be absent? What is it in the case that determines whether or not it is absent? Is it catharsis that distinguishes pity, etc. in the practical life from pity in the theater? We cannot pursue these questions here, only point them out. The same goes for another one, the last we touch on here, but perhaps also the most important: It is stated in Politics VIII, 7 (Garve p. 682) that the songs and keys that produce the musical catharsis are equally a source of innocent amusement. Accordingly, catharsis cannot be identical with the innocent pleasure, with the musical value of the song. Nor can it be with the poetic value of the tragedy, if the parallelism is maintained. What then is catharsis? A different kind of pleasure? Perhaps it does not have to be pleasurable at all. Is it at the least a “non-aesthetic” phenomenon? For example, an ethical, physiological, or even a psychopathological matter? Perhaps with catharsis the “tragic” effect of the drama is exhausted, but not its artistic one? The latter may include something else and more, which is not of a specifically “tragic” nature (= specifically cathartic? = Dionysian?)? Can a tragedy have a high cathartic effect (moving and horror dramas) and still be a poetic bungle?150 Did Aristotle not demand the cathartic effect for artistic reasons but, for example, for political ones, to ensure the theater’s state recognition? (Berger) It is saying too little if one confines oneself to the following interpretation: Fear (cf. Rhetoric II, 5) and pity are aversion; catharsis is pleasure. The viewer’s passions should be stirred, but

150 The definition in VI, 2 indicates that it is meant as such. A number of links would otherwise have been superfluous. “Beauty’s” properties, order, balance, and constraint (Metaphysics XIII, 3, Stahr p. 94) are not suitable for generating catharsis.

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one should not be let out of the theater until they are brought to rest. Catharsis denotes the drama’s emotional winding up. These and other less central questions are discussed in the rich literature on the catharsis problem. Here they would lead us too far. But whatever interpretation one would prefer, one must admit that there is something captivating and stimulating in the famous passage. The ambiguity has made it a spur to the imagination of numerous writers, and thus it has indirectly yielded rich fruits, albeit of varying quality. The most straightforward ones are found here, where a theoretician has coerced an interpretation from the great authority to be able to incorporate him into one’s own viewpoint. How is catharsis evoked? With the help of fear and pity, it is stated in VI, 2. But what are feara and pityb? Here too the interpreters crowd together. Most well-known is Lessing, who fights fervently for his viewpoint in Hamburgische Dramaturgie [Hamburg Dramaturgy], pp. 74–76, 78. Details in the Poetics itself suggest that the two concepts should not be taken too narrowly. Otherwise, one has, as mentioned, Rhetoric II, 5 and 8 to hold oneself to. Important is Poetics XIII, 2; here the awakening of fear and pity is distinguished from the outrageous (and in Ret. II, 8 from the terrible). But then a new element of pleasure enters in. The course described is “the least tragic of all,” because it contains none of those elements that matter; it neither is “philanthropic” (it does not arouse our human participation) nor creates pity and fear. Here two different things are meant; this is evident from the continuation. A third course awakens human participation, but not pity and fear. The course mentioned in XIV, 7 is not tragic, the author says: It gives a criminal-terrible effect, while at the same time the shock of the accomplished deed is absent (cf. 8). The course in 9 is asserted to be “the most effective.” Finally, in XIX, 2 it is stated that “the reflection” (the mindset toward the performers’ lines) must evoke passions, for example, pity and fear, or anger and the like. The question that arises from the text is this: Are fear and pity the only effects that bring about catharsis? The literature provides a number of differing answers that cannot be put forth here. How are fear and pity evoked? Does it not matter how they are evoked, as long as they are there? Can they be evoked by the tragedy in ways other than those Aristotle states? The ways mentioned are these: Fear and pity can be evoked in the viewer through certain qualifications of the play’s plot (the course, the action, the composition of events). The plot is the most important part of the tragedy, it is repeated with emphasis in VI, a phobos (Grk.). b eleos (Grk.).

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9–14. The plot should be unified, complete, and “appropriate,” carried by poetic probability or “internal necessity,” Chap. VII, VIII. But these properties are of general poetic importance and cannot be assumed to exert any direct influence on the evoking of pity and fear. On the other hand, other features of the plot do. First, the peripeteia, the reversal of fortune. Conceptually, the word can mean reversal from misfortune to fortune and vice versa (VI, 13–14, VII, 7, X, 1, XI, 1, XVIII, 6), but in tragedy only one variant can be used: the reversal from fortune to misfortune (XIII, 5 cf. IV, 3, 4). In order for the stricken person to have a “tragic fall from the heights” (the expression is Schopenhauer’s), he or she should be placed socially fortunate at the beginning of the play (XIII, 3). The reversal should come unexpectedly and suddenly, yet “appropriately,” not by a coincidence (IX, 11, 12, X, 2, 3). The peripeteia occurs during a striving, an interest struggle (VI, 9, 10). Next, by anagnorises, recognitions, discoveries, revelations (VI, 1, 3, 4, XVI, XVII, 3, XI, 2–5, XVIII, 2, XXVI, 4). Finest is the revelation that coincides with or causes the peripeteia (X, 1, 3). If “finest” means anything other than “most cathartic,” then the factor mentioned has a dual function: partly as a means of evoking catharsis, partly as an independent poetic element (cf. IX, 12, XI, 2, 4; XI, 6: “according to the law of art”). Pathos (sufferings, catastrophes, cf. Ret. II, 5) is mentioned in XI, 6 and must be intended as a third part of the plot that awakens fear and pity: “an action that causes destruction or pain, – killing on the open stage (cf. XIV, 1), severe bodily suffering, wounds, and the like.” Most qualified are such plots and misfortunes where the attacking force was believed to belong to a sympathetic environment. It is stated in XIV, 4 (Gomperz): Now if the enemy mistreats the enemy, then there lies neither in the completed nor in the forthcoming act – apart from the scenic effect of that part of the misfortune [element of pleasure, see below] – something pitiful; nor if the two are neither enemies nor friends. But when the misfortune occurs in the circle of relationships, such as when the brother the brother, the son the father, the mother the son, the son the mother kills or is about to kill or otherwise ruin – these are matters one has to look for.

A unique feature of the plot is discussed in XIII, 2; the passage points backward toward the peripeteia and forward toward the character and its significance in the tragedy. The plot must not proceed such “that virtuous (skillful?151) 151 Cf. II, 1. Is the courageous character (XV, 2, 3) virtuous or skilled?

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people go from fortune to misfortune, for this awakens neither fear nor pity, but is merely outrageous.” (This is precisely the tragic schema of recent times, and it turns out later that Aristotle also has a strong tendency in the same direction.) Nor should the “vicious” go from misfortune to fortune; this is the least tragic of all, because it contains none of the elements that matter; it awakens neither our human participation nor our pity nor our fear. In the same way, a bad person must not, in the reverse, go from fortune to misfortune [“criminal tragedy”]. For such a composition would certainly awaken our human compassion, but neither pity nor fear. That is to say, pity has for its object that which is undeservedly [not “innocently”] unfortunate,152 but fear has for its object that which is similar to ourselves. Such an outcome can therefore awaken neither fear nor pity. [But if there were a criminal among the audience, such as in Schiller’s “Kraniche des Ibykus [The Cranes of Ibycus]”?] Only the character that is in the middle can therefore be used [as a carrier of the tragedy’s main fate]. Such a character is the one who neither, on the one hand, towers over everyone in virtue [skillfulness?] and justice, nor, on the other hand, incurs the unfortunate peripeteia by one’s own immorality and wickedness – but who incurs it by a kind of mistake [error, hamartia] – and further, one must be of those who are of high standing [actually the character is irrelevant], such as, for example, an Oedipus, a Thyestes, and whosoever are the outstanding people of such genera.

In the cited text one finds elements that also occupy a central place in modern tragic theory. Aristotle touches on, on the one hand, the theme of “the culturally and poetically relevant, representative figure,” and on the other, “the subjective cause of the catastrophe, the tragic guilt.” How far his investigation goes on these points and what is missing from them it should not be necessary to determine. Many of the demands the author places on the characters are (as with the plot) of a general poetic or general dramaturgical nature and relate to the tragic drama only because it is also a drama. For example, in II, 1, VI, 5–7, 11, 16, 17, IX, 6, XV, 1–6, XXV, 8. But other sections have in mind the characters in the tragedy alone. XIII, 2 and 3 have just been referred to – according to which the character standing “in the middle” (assessed by morality and possibly also by skill) is the only useful one. The passage evokes amazement in the modern reader – one thinks of figures like Prometheus, Oedipus (“nomo 152 The word is “anaxios.” Knoke, Begriff der Tragödie nach Aristoteles [Concept of Tragedy after Aristotle], Berl. 1906, p. 59 note 1 draws attention to Plato’s Gorgias 523 B, where “anaxios” denotes the one who neither deserves residence among the blessed nor in Tartarus. By a coincidence (?) the tragic protagonist of later times has just become the “metaphysically homeless.”

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katharos,” clean before the law), Iphigenia, Antigone, etc. Aristotle himself must have had a sense that the stated conclusion, which emerged from pure theorizing, cannot be maintained, neither against the given literature, nor as a program. On the contrary, tragedy demands characters that stand above the average, already for the reason that people are attracted to the unusual (Rhet. III, 2). In II, 4 it says in plain terms: Tragedy will present people who are better than average. V, 4: Both epic and tragedy will present nobler characters. XIII, 4 refers to the tragically suitable character as “the one just described [in XIII, 3 – the character ‘in the middle’] or as one who is better than level [relative to the middle].” The reasoning must give way to sound poetic sense. The tragic works occur in the houses whose outstanding (XIII, 3) members receive the fate of suffering or bring about terrible things (XIV, 10. The passage gives rise to considerations of the relationship between character and fate in Aristotle). XV, 1: The character must be “morally skillful” (usefula as opposed to worthlessb), and they are this when their speech and deeds reveal a morally skillful, highvalue intention (cf. XXV, 8 – consistent with modern criminalistic thinking). Even a woman (cf. XXVI, 3) and a slave can be morally skillful, although in general the woman is an inferior type and a slave is plain and ignoble. XV, 8: “Since tragedy is a presentation of characters that are nobler and better than the contemporary people” (Stahr), so the poet must idealize one’s figures, while maintaining their individual distinctiveness. Although one creates angry, frivolous, or similar (inferior?) characters, one must at the same time show that they are morally skillful. This is how Agathon and Homer have drawn Achilles, a paradigm of impetuousness. With a certain astonishment one reads after this XVIII, 6: Dramatic action with peripeteia has a tragic effect and awakens [Stahr inserts here an “in any case”] human participation. This happens when the wise person, whose wisdom, however, goes hand in hand with badness, is outwitted before our eyes, like Sisyphus, and when the brave but unjust man is overcome.

The explanation must be that human participation is meant as a broader concept than tragic pity, – as the general concept, while pity is a subconcept. Participation then consists here in the “opposite” of pity, namely Schadenfreude, cf. XIII, 2. The passage is also of interest because Aristotle here is within the double effect of the protagonist’s character, cf. XIV, 4 and 8. a chrestos (Grk.). b faulos (Grk.).

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The section (XVIII, 6) ends as follows: “Such an ending also aligns with the law of probability, as Agathon expresses [cf. Rhet. II, 24, Knebel p. 131], for, he says, it is probable that much also occurs against probability.” The passage thus naturally leads into a consideration of the cause of the catastrophe, a factor which is not without significance in the creation of pity and fear. It is our concept of “appropriateness” that we find here. The catastrophe (pathos) is defined in XI, 6; it is assumed everywhere that it should fit in natural connection with the other factors in the play. Ideas related to appropriateness can be found in VII, 7, IX, 1, 9–12, X, 3, XV, 5, 7, XVI, XVIII, 5, 6, XXIV, 10, XXV, 17, 19. If the catastrophe occurs by a coincidence, the case must “seem to make sense,” have what we now call “poetic appropriateness”; an example is the statue of Mitys, which fell upon his murderer (IX, 11–12). The happy ending belongs to the comedy (though VII, 7 and XI, 4), and the ending must not be brought about by any machine god. Not even “poetic justice” (Aristotle calls it the double solution) is tolerated (XIII, 4–7). Wickedness and immorality in the stricken self as the cause of the catastrophe is not tragically relevant (XIII, 3); “the guilt” here seems to be perceived as more ethical than physiological. On the other hand, a different contribution on the part of the stricken is relevant, which falls almost entirely within our concept of psychological guilt: The unfortunate peripeteia comes about “by a kind of misstep” (mistake?) in the stricken. More is not said in XIII, 3, and if the scantiness is due to the destruction of manuscripts, then this is the most painful loss as far as the author’s tragic theory is concerned. Slightly fuller in 4 it is called a “significant” (meaningful?) misstep. This misstep should then be appropriate to the character and is therefore hardly identical to the “ignorance” in XIV, 6–8, if this in turn is attributed to coincidence. The “misstep” committed by Prometheus, Antigone, and the like cannot be compared to the mistake of an Oedipus, or Agamemnon’s double-acting sacrifice of Iphigenia. However, it is hardly consistent with the author’s scientific nature to draw dogmatic boundaries; what he intended here, as elsewhere, is probably only to arrange the variants on a scale according to their tragic and general poetic effect. Is it too bold to suggest that Aristotle in these sections groped for the notion of “catastrophic greatness,” which is the prize of a later time, and according to which the “mistake” does not lie unmediated next to the character’s “noble” sides, but springs from them because they cannot be separated? Where the mistake occurs not despite, but because of the character’s prominence? Besides in the character, fear and pity can have their source in reflection, as defined in VI, 6, 16, indirectly, in that reflection is caused by an action which

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in turn evokes fear and pity, and directly, in that it itself evokes these feelings, VI, 5, XIX, 2, 3. As a rule, however, reflection must work together with other factors in the play (VI, 12). Finally, it occurs that the scene imagery, as perceived by the eye, evokes fear and pity on its own (XIV, 1). The value of the scenic construction for the production of tragic pleasure seems to be somewhat different in the current text of the Poetics, whatever the reason may be. First, it is stated in VI, 4: When it furthers the action, which in the immediate, real presence completes the imitative presentation, then, in a certain sense, the decorative furnishings for the eye should prove to be the first necessary requirement of the tragedy, and the song composition the second. Later in VI, 19: The presentation for the eye is as an ingredient less important than the song composition. It certainly has an influence on the viewer’s mood, but it is still the least artistic part and the one that is farthest from the poet’s art, for the tragedy exerts its effect even without theatrical performance (cf. XXVI, 3) and actors, and otherwise the effective creation of sensation lies much more in the power and art of the engineer (director) than in the poet’s. We have understood Aristotle in such a way that pathos, which, alongside peripeteia and anagnorisis, is part of the plot (XI, 6), also evokes fear and pity. The author must have thought especially of pathos in scenic presentation; as a case of pathos is also counted killing on the open stage. In XIII, 6 it is further stated that tragedies with unhappy endings always appear on stage as the most tragic when played well. The passage fits poorly with VI, 19, XIV, 2, and XXVI, 3, but agrees with XIV, 1 and XXVI, 4, according to which tragedy is ultimately superior to epic, since it has stage production at its disposal – “a not insignificant component, whereby the pleasurable effects are evoked most vividly.” The contradiction disappears, however, if the distinction is made between artistic and cathartic effects. The “astonishment” mentioned in XIV, 2–3 seems in the author’s eyes to be neither artistic nor cathartic, and probably most closely corresponds to our sensation. Of the components which are enumerated in VI, 7, linguistic expression and song composition now remain, two sides of the tragedy to which Aristotle did not attach direct importance for evoking fear and pity. However, from Politics VIII, 7 one remembers the musical catharsis, which is especially evoked by Phrygian plays in Phrygian mode (Garve p. 683 f.). The performance of a Greek tragedy was very similar to that of our opera; text, music, and song were composed together. There would then also be room for a catharsis that did not revolve around pity and fear. As a rule, there was probably an intimate

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cooperation between tone, text, and the stage image. But the question still arises whether or not in the viewer, under the strongly compounded impression of the performance, a plurality of “pities” and “fears” as well as purifications of different origins could occur (cf. XVIII, 2), and whether it was always possible to experience them as a synthesis at the end of the play. In Antigone, for example, one begins a new chapter with Creon after Antigone is dead. Is the tragedy the only tragic (i.e., cathartic) form of poetry? Aristotle comments in Poetics in several places on the relationship between tragedy and epic, most generally in III, 1–3. Is it only in its dramatic form that the tragedy differs from the epic, or is there also a difference in content? Can the epic also be tragic? Tragedy has emerged from the epic as a more significant and more highly treasured expression form of the same poetic nature (IV, 10, 9). Both imitate an action (I, 2) with noble characters (IV, 8, V, 4). Kinds of tragedy correspond to kinds of epic (XXIV, 1) and all the components one finds in the epic are found in the tragedy (V, 5) alongside those peculiar to the tragedy. Common is the plot (XXIII, 1 cf. VIII, 1), which must be unified and appropriate, and both contain peripeteia, anagnorisis, and pathos (here called pathemata XXIV, 1). On the other hand, it is not said whether the epic should also have an unhappy ending and avoid poetic justice, as required of the tragedy (XIII, 4, 6, 7). (On difference in length, etc., see XXIV, 3, 4, VII, 5–7, V, 4.) The epic should also give its peculiar pleasure (XXIII, 1), but whether it is the same as by the tragedy is not said. Later Greek aestheticians, for example, Alexandrians, often highlighted portions of Homer’s epics as particularly tragic (Petsch). When IV, 9 speaks of Homer’s dramatic poetry, it must either be alluding to fullness of action (in which case the boundary between epic and tragedy is blurred) or to lost works. Catharsis belongs to the tragic pleasure, but no catharsis by the epic is mentioned. On the other hand, it is beyond doubt that the epic, according to Aristotle, can evoke fear and pity through plot, character, and reflection, especially since these feelings, even catharsis, can arise from the mere reading (XIX, 3). In addition, there are many paths to catharsis (see, e.g., XVIII, 2). The aesthetic question of whether the tragedy or epic “stands highest” can be difficult in our day because works of different literary genres are usually considered incommensurable. But in ancient times, such questions were discussed with passion. The final chapters of Aristotle’s Poetics seem to echo this discussion; in places the text even seems interpolated. XXVI, 1 is clearly polemic against XXIV, 4; in the latter section the epic is set highest (cf. XXVI,

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2), while the tragedy has the advantage in XXVI, 3–7. Here the spirit is aristocratically selective, while in XXIV, 4 and XXVI, 2 it selects for the popularly entertaining. * In the Poetics, as in his other writings, Aristotle evokes in the reader the greatest respect and at times admiring affection. This applies not only to the general literary and general dramaturgical considerations, which have formed a lasting foundation for two thousand years of poetics and dramaturgy right down to Gustav Freytag, Robert Hessen, and Hermann Hettner. In tragic theory, too, he anticipated central matters in current issues. He pointed to aversion as the path to the tragic value experience, asserted the importance of the character’s “greatness,” hinted at the problem of “tragic guilt,” showed the double effect in character as well as in action, highlighted the qualification of the counterpower and the appropriate justification of the catastrophe. He rejected the tragedykilling “poetic justice” and gave life’s misery a place in art in conscious opposition to Plato’s prescribed optimism. In method he is distinctly modern, empirical, and analytically descriptive. He does not lack vision for the whole picture, but his syntheses are never desire-determined. When he compares, as it were, human life with that of animals, he always applies what we have called in Chap. 1 of this work a biologistic or biosophical viewpoint. Robert Petsch ends the aforementioned article153 with a section that provides a general assessment of the Greeks’ efforts in tragic theory. He says (p. 248): Classical antiquity has not succeeded in extracting and investigating the experience of the tragic in its relatively purest aesthetic form in the context of the processes of consciousness. In particular, the history of tragic poetry itself brought a mixture of aesthetic and ethical lines of thought. From this point of view, antiquity appears to be responsible for all later theories of improvement through good and deterrence through bad examples, for all the ramblings of the Renaissance on the hardening, indeed the dulling of the soul against the suffering of life. But here are also the fertile seeds for Lessing’s theory of compassion and for Schopenhauer’s or E. von Hartmann’s tragic pessimism. Aristotle was more or less relied on in the theory of imitation of the 18th century, but with the same rights as Batteux can call Du Bos his father, the founder of modern emotionalism. In fact, the Greek thinkers touched the emotional bases that our age with its “aesthetics of the tragic” should first subject to a 153 “Die Theorie des Tragischen im griechischen Altertum [The Theory of the Tragic in the Greek Age],” in Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft [Journal of Aesthetics and General Art Science], Vol. IX. Cf. Geffcken op. cit. p. 156.

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thorough scientific investigation. Of course, it must finally be pointed out once again that our ability to feel tragically, and thus also our thinking about the tragic, have not benefitted as much from all the theoretical considerations of the Greeks as from the creative deeds of Aeschylus from Eleusis and his successors.

§ 109. Sketch of the history of tragic theory in recent times Why has no author yet been tempted by a subject like the history of tragic theory in recent times? It should be compelling and rewarding enough – even though the difficulties would be evident from the first moment. I cite some of them; they each have their own significance even if only a provisional sketch is given. First, the subject is not easy to delineate; an almost incalculable amount of material would need to be reviewed. Which line should the author follow? Should one feel bound by the use of the word tragic, even if the writer (such as Plato) saw the real tragic in a healthy and happy life or, like Nietzsche, in an amor fatia? Should one bring in those who wrote about suffering, death, “the evil in the world,” “the problem of evil,” etc., even though they did not mention the word tragic? Should one expect that all who deal with “the problem of beauty and art” in its generality have implicitly expressed their view concerning the tragic, since this is an aesthetic category for most aestheticians? And finally, what about those who see in “the tragedy” a literary genre, or highlight it dramaturgically, without inquiring after “the tragic”? Once the author had found a method of demarcation that one could at least defend, one would immediately encounter a new problem: How should one arrange the material? As a historian, one would naturally find oneself relying on the chronological method, discussing the various contributions after the time when the writing was published, the lecture was held, the letter was written, etc. But even if the method were modified so that each author were presented together, it would lead to significant shortcomings, violent leaps from one point of view to another, from country to country, repetitions and poor overview. It must therefore proceed by a systematic treatment that is equally comprehensive. But what systematic guidelines should the author adopt? One could try to arrange the tragic theorists by “viewpoint,” as they see the tragic from a

a love of fate.

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philosophical (metaphysical, ethical, etc.), political, theological, pedagogical, psychological, or aesthetic point of view. However, a number of theorists do not show any unambiguous viewpoint at all; ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical considerations flow together. This circumstance makes the method less useful; the individual writer, who has forced one’s various viewpoints together into a synthesis, or who at least thinks one has a unified view, must be mercilessly dismembered and divided into several sections. Others, with a common viewpoint together, it becomes unnatural to put together, since one’s system is a priori-dogmatic, the other’s empirical-relativistic, etc. After this our historian could feel tempted to try a new method: One could set up groups, not of writers, but of problems, and on each issue gather the writers who have expressed themselves concerning it. A number of such problems have gradually taken shape; they relate to “guilt,” “fate,” “character,” “necessity,” “reconciliation,” poetic and metaphysical “justice,” the “effect” of the tragic (including the problem of catharsis), and to interpretation (“world reason,” etc.).154 These and similar issues are like pivots on which tragic theory revolves. Theoretically, therefore, it is easy to identify them, but it is worse in practice, as the individual author’s “tragic image” often hangs together organically and opposes Halfdan the Black’s fate of being divided among several provinces, even alive. One obstacle to the clean implementation of all these method variants is the fact that the authors write not only about the tragic as they themselves now perceive it, but about different times’ tragic poetry, originating from viewpoints and feelings different from one’s own, as well as from each other. The method in the following overview is as comprehensive as possible; chronology is the basis but is broken if there is a call for it for the sake of the above-mentioned. In support of the overview, we have the just cited source collection in Hasenclever, as well as a collection of dramaturgical comments with a valuable preface in Petsch.155 Scattered information of historical nature can also be found in Volkelt,156 Hirn,157 and Körner,158 and an overview of certain theories without indication of author in Lipps.159 By contrast, one looks in vain in works 154 Cf. forward in Hasenclever, Das Tragische und die Tragödie [The Tragic and the Tragedy], Munich and Berl. 1927 p. 169. 155 Deutsche Dramaturgie [German Dramaturgy] I, Hamb. 1921. 156 Ästhetik des Tragischen [Aesthetics of the Tragic], Munich 1897. 157 Det estetiska Lifvet [The Aesthetic Life], Stockh. 1913. 158 “Tragik u. Tragödie [Tragedy and Tragedy],” Preuss. Jahrbücher [Prussian Yearbooks] Vol. 225. 159 Der Streit über die Tragödie [The Dispute concerning the Tragedy], Lpz. 1915 (1885).

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that deal with the history of aesthetics in general,160 in authors such as Zimmermann (Vienna 1858), Schasler (Berlin 1872), Neudecker (Würzburg 1878), Wrangel (Lund 1898), Croce (transl. Berlin 1930), and Utitz (Berlin 1932).161 They all search for what is common in “beauty and art,” while the history of tragic theory must aim equally at the diversity of the types of experiences and art forms. And it would be an exceedingly thankless job to try to find out how the different conceptions of “the nature of beauty,” etc., would turn out in application to the tragic. The historian (and we with him) must confine oneself to those who have completed the differentiation and are concerned with the peculiarities of the tragic. * After the decline of antiquity, tragic theory was at a standstill. What was written in the Middle Ages concerning such things had a moral disposition, such as Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime by the year 1000a and Johannes Tzetze’s long technical didactic poems in Greek about tragic poetry from the 12th century, published by Müller in 1911. Their main idea is (according to Petsch): If the great people have to suffer so cruelly for their (undoubted) guilt, how bad will it be for us ordinary sinners? Therefore, let us learn to lead a stainless and philosophical life. The Renaissance is characterized by the “hardening principle.” The horrors of the scene, set with exquisite splendor, will make the viewers calloused to earthly sufferings and better suited to the harsh life of the times, to daily life, in war and feast. The first author’s name of any significance is not met, however, until the 1600s. In 1624 Martin Opitz published Das Buch von der deutschen Poeterey [The Book of German Poetics], which ended the metric chaos in Germany and introduced the French alexandrine as the meter of the tragedy. Only later was this replaced by blank verse, which came from Italy through England. According to Opitz, the tragedy is not distinguished by the fact that it has an unfortunate outcome, as it had long been claimed, but by the fact that “it deals with death blows, despairs, child and father murders, fires, bloodsheds, wars 160 Except: Ljunggren, G., Framställing af de förnämsta esthetiska systemerna [Presentation of the Most Important Aesthetic Systems], Lund 1856 I p. 7, 8 m. note 3, 47 ff., 85 ff., 123 ff., 218 ff.; II p. 45, 110 ff., 122, 396 f. Lotze, H., Geschichte d. Ästhetik in Deutschland [History of Aesthetics in Germany], Munich 1868 p. 665 ff. 161 The following authors I have not been able to obtain: J. Koller (Regensburg 1799), Braitmaier (Frauenfeld 1889), Bosanquet (London 1892), Mustoxidi (Paris 1920) and Heinr. v. Stein (Stuttg. 1886). a a The text is typically dated much earlier than this, by the end of the 1st century C.E.

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and rebellions, lamenting, wailing, sighing, and the like, only related to royalty.” According to Schück (Allmän litteraturhistoria [German Literary History] 1921 V. III p. 627 cf. 278), Opitz has here only translated a poetics from 1561 by Julius Caesar Scaliger, who in turn compiled Aristotle and Horace. Scaliger has also been translated by the Swede Andreas Arvidi (died ca. 1670), from whom Schück quotes: a tragedy is, in its grandeur, the uniform heroic poem, wherein one rarely suffers, where insignificant dignitaries and plain matters are introduced, after which one deals with the dangers of kings, and for the sake of which wailing, exile, murder, fire, and other horrors are introduced.

One recognizes Aristotle’s “pathos.” Rule cultivation was continued after Opitz by Gottsched, the son of the Enlightenment. In Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst [Attempt at a Critical Poetic Theory] 1730, he highlights the cautionary as the intention of the tragedy; the form is not essential; it all depends on “the plot.” Gottsched even provides a “formula” for all tragedy writers, included in Petsch op. cit. pp. XV; it is infamous and is often referred to with derision. But if one ignores the fact that the poetic power itself has not come with it, the formula is certainly not stupid, and the tragedy that has never relied on a similar schema casts the first stone. The French classic drama is for Gottsched the great model; from this he derives the requirement of “the three unities,” the unity of action, of time, and of place, originally drawn up by Trissino (d. 1550), father of blank verse. One cannot speak of any “theory of tragedy” here. However, such a theory existed; it was worked out by French classical tragedy’s first representative, Pierre Corneille, who in 1660 wrote a preface to his collected works, “Discours sur la tragédie [Discourse on Tragedy].” Corneille has direct connection to Aristotle on what the “specifically tragic” concerns, the passions and their “purification.” The preface deals with otherwise formal and dramaturgical questions. The form indeed plays a dominant role in the French tragedy, cf. Rokseth, Den franske tragedie I [The French Tragedy I], Oslo 1928. In a similar position stands Lessing (1729–81) who, however, in Hamburgische Dramaturgie [Hamburg Dramaturgy] (1767–69) opposes Corneille because, in Lessing’s opinion, he has misunderstood Aristotle, with whom Lessing aligns himself (“a poem that evokes pity,” Hasenclever 21 f.). “Fear,” which must not be confused with horror, turns into pity as “the pity related to ourselves,” the fear that we too may experience something similar. As Lessing

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does not acknowledge and distinguish tragic suffering (in the sense of being qualified in a certain way) from basic evils, neither does he acknowledge and distinguish tragic fear (in the sense of fear of metaphysical meaninglessness) from the fear of concrete evils. The entrance of the Lessingian “fear” is a tribute to the reflection during the impression of the tragedy; the poet should not “mislead my insight to win my heart.” In connection with this, Lessing views catharsis as a moral purification, as “the transformation of passions into virtuous skills” (Hasencl. p. 28). It is the task of poetry overall “to nourish and strengthen the shoots of humanity, to work with love of virtue and hatred of vice.” For the viewer, the tragedy, therefore, amounts to an “exercise of the capacity for pity” (Petsch p. 1). Lessing does not explicitly mention any distinction between the objective and the poetically tragic, but he nevertheless operated with two kinds of objects for his investigation. The doctrine of pity seems to be a compromise, which also gives way to a pedagogical element. But we are beyond any aesthetic viewpoint when he states: “The divine has not given humankind the noblest of drives [the will to truth] in order to make it unhappy” (Röhl, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung [History of German Poetry] 1926 p. 125 f.). With such thoughts Lessing read Goethe’s Werther, which he could not discount. Lessing believed, or wanted to believe, in a world without real contradictions, and forbade the poets to produce insoluble dissonances (Körner op. cit. p. 174). In doing so, he took an advance position on the philosophical consequences of the tragic; the moral optimism that was supposed to carry Germany like a mare for centuries went forth from Leibniz and was continued by Lessing, Kant, and the Idealists. In return, he reveals a definite sense of the peculiarity of the aesthetic viewpoint. In a letter to Moses Mendelssohn162 (from Feb. 2, 1757, Petsch p. 181 and 2) he uses a striking image, which is hardly apparent from mere speculation: It is known that if you give two strings the same tension and one sounds when touched, the other sounds without being touched. Let us give the strings sensation, such that we can assume that every vibration, but not every touch, may be pleasant to them, but only that touch that produces a certain vibration in them. Thus, the first string that vibrates when touched can have a painful sensation; whereas the other, notwithstanding the similar vibration, has a pleasant sensation, because it 162 “Lessings Briefwechsel mit Mendelssohn u. Nicolai ü. d. Trauerspiel [Lessing’s Correspondence with Mendelssohn and Nicolai concerning the Tragedy],” Philosophische Bibliothek [Philosophical Archives] Vol. 121, Lpz. 1910.

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on the tragic had not been touched [at least not so directly]. It is this way in the tragedy also. The viewer becomes uncomfortable, and I am with him. But why is this affect a pleasant idea for me? Because I feel the affect only as an affect, without thinking of a certain unpleasant object.

Lessing touches Du Bos (see below) in emphasizing that the affect as such is always pleasant, even though its object is unpleasant. Perhaps this view is one of the reasons that Lessing, as the model for the future German drama, whose creator he was, holds up Shakespeare as “a far greater tragic poet than Corneille.” In Shakespeare one finds “the great, the terrible, the melancholic” (Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend [Letters, The Newest Review of Literature], 17th letter); and this works “better for us than the good, the tender, the in love.” This is how Lessing read Corneille, who moral-philosophically fulfilled his theory far better than Shakespeare, Lessing’s reasoning being the peculiarity that Shakespeare “in essence” (i.e., “control over our passions”) stands so much closer to antiquity than Corneille. Yet, he did not dare serve Shakespeare to his fellow citizens without certain “modest changes” (Petsch p. 4). In his view of Shakespeare’s relationship with antiquity, Lessing stands alone. Already Sturm und Drang used the Englishman as a banner in the fight against all classical tendencies. “The battle for Shakespeare” had begun. Gottsched had followed Voltaire in the rejection of the “the drunken wild man,” but his own student J. E. Schlegel (1718–49) had a keen sense of the giant’s portrayal of the human, and Bodmer and Breitinger advocated a German political drama similar to the English. Among the fundamental questions that the battle stirred up, in particular the significance of “fate” versus “the character” for the tragic (closest: magnificent and catastrophic) course was discussed in detail. Sturm und Drang, the precursor of Romanticism, also met the demand for “pathetic content” set by Opitz. Heavy passions and a lot of blood – Grabbe took the direction by inheritance. Gerstenberg (1737–1823) tried a compromise: Shakespeare was by no means in the violence of the passions; he observed rules and his real intention was “the drawing of morals” (Petsch p. 20). Lenz (1751–92) did not object to ancient heroes when they merely appear as personalities, as characters, not as slaves of fatum, but as the source of their own fate. “Are you afraid to see a man, Gentlemen?” Bürger (1748–94) was prepared to give up the whole category of tragedy; as life mixes motifs, so must acting. The movement’s greatest theorist was Herder (1744–1803). He, like Bodmer, wanted a national drama, but without politics and patriotism, “simply human.” Herder united humanist internationalism with a distinct sense of

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the characteristic, nourished by the encounter with Rousseau and Giambattista Vico (Croce, Aesthetik [Aesthetics], Tüb. 1930 p. 245, 260 ff. 264). He saw immediately that Shakespeare did not stand on the foundation of antiquity. In the tragic collision Herder heard the bangs from nature’s workshop, from the divine creator’s factory floor; it is the path toward the cosmos that bursts forth from the chaos. In the midst of this “pandynamic” force field, Shakespeare stands as the world spirit’s confidant, whose signs he knows how to decipher. In the background of Shakespeare’s works he recognized “the first light of a theodicy.” But he admitted that the development opens “unfathomable depths,” shows irrational features. The work of art is a microcosmos. Still in 1795 he asserted the character’s hegemony as the fate-creating cause, but in 1801 he put stronger emphasis on “the objective factor” that lies behind the character and determines it. However, fate is never “blind”; there is always a “plan” in place and the tragic for Herder is therefore only apparent or a temporary should-not-be.163 (Wieland [1733–1813] expresses himself in a similar way.) The tragic genius (poet) can only rarely retrieve one’s material from experience; there our lives are too flat and too politically infected. History is the refuge, older and more recent, but not the most recent; there must be distance in order to give the personality “majesty, dignity, and solemnity.” A more precise definition is lacking, but a negative feature is given: “It is not the noblest thing about a tragic event that it can be summed up in five acts,” a thesis that could be later applied to Schiller. Yet Herder saw the tragic solely through the tragedy, through the framework of the drama; in one place he sets the tragic in opposition to the “bourgeois” and “typical” and thereby seems to have thought of something “pathetic” or “sublime.” (He assumed, like Lessing, that the Germans cannot digest Shakespeare immediately; they must learn from both Shakespeare and Corneille and find their own.) But the tragedy is a “philosophical” work of art; aesthetic and metaphysical conceptions seem to flow together. Friedrich Schlegel was the first to see this clearly. Goethe (1749–1832) also developed himself first within the movement, which after 1776 was given the name Sturm und Drang. The violent, the catastrophic in the sense of life is expressed in Götz, Werther, Clavigo (1773–74). But Goethe noted that the attraction to these matters was dangerous and decided to oppose them. Iphigenia (1787) represents the reversal; the “good” triumphs. In 1771, it is said concerning Shakespeare: “– his plays all revolve around a 163 Smtl. Werke [Coll. Works] Berl. 1885 Vol. 23 (Adrastea II, 4) p. 164 ff., 346 ff., 430 ff. Vol. 24 p. 244 ff., 369.

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secret point [which no philosopher has yet seen and determined], in what is idiosyncratic in our selves, which clashes the professed freedom of our will with the necessary course of the whole” (Petsch p. 20). But in 1815 he claimed that the “freedom of the will” must be able to assert itself in this clash (Petsch p. 48). Still, it was not Goethe’s view that the drama should moralize; he assigned this task to philosophy and religion (Hasencl. p. 31). When the viewer leaves the theater, one is affectively reassured enough, but “improved in nothing” (1826). In a letter to Schiller dated Dec. 9, 1797, Goethe himself spoke of his struggle against the tragic: “I do not know myself well enough to know whether I could write a real tragedy, but I am scared of the company and I am almost convinced that I could destroy myself just by trying” (Körner p. 172). For Goethe, the tragic (here the objectively or philosophically tragic) was in fact a concept that gave no room for any solution. To Chancellor Müller he said: “Everything tragic relies on an inexplicable contradiction. Thus, as alignment occurs or is possible, the tragic diminishes” (Körner 171). And to Eckermann in 1827: (In the tragedy) “what really matters is the conflict that does not allow resolution” (Körner 173). In 1772, he used the term “finite overload of worthlessness” to Herder, and to Riemer in 1810: “Poetic justice is an absurdity. The only tragic is the injustuma and prematurumb” (what lies in this prematurum can be debated. Does this suggest that as the world becomes more “mature” the tragic will disappear?). Goethe knew the tragic from his own mind, especially perhaps as the Faust-Mephisto opposition, as constructive faith against destructive skepticism, and as the conflict between the ordered, ethical and a chaotic, demonic demand for pleasure. Goethe felt at odds with Byron, and he once stated that his life had been a continuous panic. The demonic was, for Goethe, “a power which is not opposed to the moral world order, but which crosses it” (Dicht. u. Wahrh. [Poetry and Truth] Lpz. 1922 p. 254–57). But the awareness of this “objectively tragic” fact indeed must be at odds with the urge for an optimistic-harmonious image of the world, where You who come from heaven, Quieting all suffering and pain, He who is doubly miserable, Filling doubly with delight – c

a injustice. b prematurity. c From Goethe’s “Der du von dem Himmel bist [You Who Come from Heaven].”

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and where – All their pressing, all their striving is eternal rest in God the Lord.a

How did Goethe solve this problem in his life and in his poetry? In his poetry, he sought to overcome it; King Thoas bowed to “the power of truth”; the mere striving, in association with the love of God, gives Faust access to the home of the blessed. Concerning Egmont, the poet wrote (D. u. W. [Poetry and Truth] p. 756): What has in the long run garnered the audience’s favor is “the demonic, what is at stake on both sides, in which conflict what is loved is lost and what is hated triumphs, then the prospect that a third thing will emerge, which is the wish of all people.” Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which contains so many “tragic” fates, especially women’s, he summarized as follows (Körner 177): “At bottom the whole thing seems to want to say nothing other than that, despite all the stupidity and confusion, humankind is led by a higher hand, but to reach the happy goal.” This toothless funeral talk is a betrayal against all the innocent victims in Goethe’s poetry, and against all the deep and harsh, indeed catastrophic feelings and thoughts that they have aroused in him. In life, Goethe fled from the tragic, and this isolation solution was apparently a complete success. To Zelter he wrote (Hasencl. 29, notes): “I was not born to be a tragic poet because my nature is conciliatory [placatory]. Therefore, I am not interested in the purely tragic downfall, which actually must be irreconcilable by default.” And in Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] (Lpz. 1922 p. 754): “– he [G. himself] believed more and more that it was better to avert thought from the monstrous, the incomprehensible.” His increasing aversion toward death as event and concept corresponds to this. For those who see a pseudo-solution in the flight from a problem, there is very little luster in Goethe’s relationship to the tragic, and it does not get any stronger when one remembers his preaching of a positive response to life. No one reading Werther, Clavigo, Iphigenia, Faust I can doubt that Goethe knew the poetic value of the actual conflict of interest. But all he had to say about this value in 1826 is the following (Hasencl. 31): Anyone who … progresses on the path of a conscientious moral education will feel and confess that tragedies and tragic novels in no way appease the mind, but cause the mind and what we call the heart restlessness, and lead to a vague, indefinite state; young people love them and are passionate about such productions.

a From Goethe and Schiller’s “Die Xenien.”

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A hundred years beforehand, a Frenchman had approached the problem of the aesthetically tragic quite differently. In 1719, L’Abbé Du Bos (1670–1742) published Refléxions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture [Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting] (6th ed. Paris 1755. See especially I p. 5 ff.). It is remarkable that Du Bos did not build on Aristotle but did empirical studies. He rejected in principle the activity of the understanding as part of the enjoyment of art; this consists in an immediate devotion to “the impressions that objects make on us” (Croce 204). Emotion is “the sixth sense,” and in the movement of the mind as such he saw the value of “tragic” impressions (Petsch p. X, XV, XVII). We enjoy observing upsetting and unsettling events when we find ourselves in safety. Du Bos cited Lucretius: It is sweet, when one is standing on shore, to witness another’s struggle against the troubled sea. The decisive factor here lies not in the biological value of safety, but in its importance as condition for the autotelic viewpoint. Cf. Hirn, Det estetiska lifvet [The Aesthetic Life] p. 199 ff., which juxtaposes Du Bos’ theory together with Helvétius’ theory concerning the path and Kierkegaard’s about boredom as a spur to activity, a psychological horror vacui. In the same vein, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai sought “the reason for the enjoyment of tragic objects” (Volkelt 389). This question is the main theme in Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). He began his spiritual development in Sturm und Drang, but then “returned” to antiquity (Aristotle, Winckelmann, Lessing). In his poetry he sought, roughly speaking, a synthesis of classicist and romanticist tendencies, a task which later became fatal for H. v. Kleist. His primary characteristic as aesthetic-tragic thinker he acquired through Kant’s philosophical works, the most important of which came out between 1781 and 1793. Schiller was attracted to Kant’s manly idealism but repelled by his strict concept of duty. In the years after 1790, Schiller wrote a large number of aesthetic treatises, primarily about tragedy. Some of the well-known titles read: “Ueber den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen [On the Reason for the Enjoyment of Tragic Objects]” 1791, “Ueber die tragische Kunst [On Tragic Art]” 1791–92, “Ueber das Pathetische [On the Pathetic]” and “Ueber Anmut und Würde [On Grace and Dignity]” 1793, “Vom Erhabenen [On the Sublime]” 1795.164 Also, the review of Goethe’s Egmont, from 1788, can be mentioned. For the purposes of the moment, references are made to Hasenclever and Petsch. A merciless criticism can be found in Josef Körner, loc. cit.

164 Sämmtliche Schriften [Complete Writings], Zehnter Teil [Part Ten], Stuttgart 1871.

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One does not have to read much of Schiller’s theory before the situation is clear. The tragic, as Schiller saw it, coincides with what we called in Chapter Eight the heroic, the positive antidote to “ethical guilt”: A pleasure set as significantly good (life, sensory pleasure, etc.) is sacrificed in a given conflict situation for another good, which is less pleasurable, but which weighs even more heavily in the agent’s judgment, in a wider context of interest (especially social and high-autotelic considerations, but, in Schiller, only exceptionally religious and never metaphysical in the philosophical sense). Schiller himself called such values “moral,” a terminology that easily leads to unclarity. Morality is better understood as a dynamic, not a static concept; an action or posture is never moral or immoral in and of itself; it is only favorable or unfavorable for a particular purpose. But the choice between two postures has moral relevance. Schiller’s terminology is both ambiguous and unclear. This applies to expressions that are central to his tragic theory: freedom, morality, reason, duty, inclination, end, interest, fortune, pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, justice, destiny of humanity, absolute independence, spiritual, sensuous, moral law, spiritual law, pure demon, pure intelligence, necessity, circumstance, physics, nature, fate, disposition, and conditions, as well as the relationship between the sublime, pathetic, moving, pity-arousing, heroic, and tragic. The manner of speaking is often roughly schematic (“virtues and vices,” etc.), just as one is immediately in doubt whether the target is the protagonist or the viewer. We call an object sublime when at its presentation our sensuous nature feels its limitations, but our reasoning nature feels its superiority, its freedom from limits, against which we are physically outdone, but over which we morally rise, i.e., through ideas. (Körner 181) The ultimate purpose of art is to represent the supersensuous, and tragic art in particular accomplishes this by sensualizing the moral independence of natural laws in the state of affect. Only the resistance that it expresses against the violence of feelings makes the free principle recognizable in us; resistance can only be appraised according to the strength of the attack. Thus, if intelligence is going to manifest itself in humankind as a force that is independent of nature, nature must first have shown all its power before our eyes. The senses must suffer deeply and violently; pathos must be there so that reason can express its independence and act. (Hasenclever 32)

If no sensory suffering were present, the “moral force” could also be explained by insensitivity to the demands of the senses. “The tragic protagonist must have legitimized oneself as a sentient being before we pay homage to one as a rational being and believe in one’s strength of soul” (ibid.). The ethically “perfect” being, however, is devoid of sensuousness (Has. 49), and the protagonist in this

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respect is not perfect, for only the “pure intelligences” are this, wherever they can be found. (Schiller did not think that in such “perfection” there is any talk of morality whatsoever, because the very concept of perfection in Schiller’s sense precludes temptation.) If, on the other hand, there were no “moral” tendency present, the victim would be stuck in the bare suffering, which is “completely reprehensible” (ibid.). “The sublime” appears passively in “poise,” actively in “action”; in the former case the suffering has come from without, without any act of the will of the victim, while in the later the protagonist chooses the suffering to save one’s better part. The difference between these two cases, however, is so deep that there are almost two different kinds of sublimity. And only the latter kind is ethically relevant, only there does one find a causal link between “greatness” and – not catastrophe but suffering as a means of moral glorification. “The pathetic and the sublime come together in that they produce pleasure through aversion, so that they give us (since the pleasure arises from purposiveness, but the pain arises from the opposite) a propriety that presupposes a counter-propriety” (Hasencl. 35). Here one finds more or less a faded paradox. How the two concepts differ is less clear, but this question is also not important. “No propriety concerns us as much as the moral, and there is nothing like the pleasure we feel from it” (Hasencl. p. 37). Here one can see the consequence of not distinguishing between different species of pleasure, etc. If there is one concept of pleasure, and moral pleasure is the highest, then one must indeed act morally in every case, except only in forced actions. “Moral propriety … is determined by an inner principle of our reason” (Has. 37) – “through our thinking and willing capacity” (Has. 53) – but it is also known as “moral drive,” which is a force of nature and can work instinctively; the conceptual confusion is now complete (Has. 40 f.). Oddly enough, Schiller believed that it is of no significance to the viewer’s emotion if the protagonist’s moral law deviates from one’s own, only that it is followed heroically. The thesis perhaps holds true aesthetically, but ethically? Can “reason” have multiple inner principles, or does Schiller accept, for example, a pedagogical influence on the moral law with consequent access to criticism and relativity? We leave the question open. The moral propriety “is based on inner necessity” and “is the palladium [guarantee, divine stamp] of our freedom.” And now comes (Has. 36, at the bottom) Schiller’s basic view of the tragic altogether in a single section, which we thus put forward: This moral propriety is most vividly recognized when it prevails in contradiction with others; the full power of the moral law only proves itself when it is shown in a

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dispute with all other natural forces and everything alongside it loses its power over a human heart [later the main thesis of Lipps]. Under these natural forces everything is understood that is not moral, everything that is not under the highest law of reason; thus, sensations, drives, affects, passions, as well as physical necessity and fate. [Later moral scruples also come along with the tragic counterpowers.] The more frightening the opponent, the more glorious the victory; resistance alone can make the force apparent. From this it follows that the highest consciousness of our moral nature can only be obtained in a violent state, in the struggle, and that the highest moral pleasure will always be accompanied by pain.

In our view, there can be no “moral nature” at all except in the context of a conflict, and it is precisely in this relationship that the tragic lies, according to Schiller. The poetry that gives moral joy above anything else is the tragedy; “its scope encompasses all possible cases in which some natural propriety or one moral purposiveness is sacrificed for another, which is higher.” (In this direction there is, for example, Coriolanus, which invites strong disagreement) (Has. 38). As one can see, this is a purely heroic course. Death is a (biological) misfortune, but at the same time it gives the protagonist a supreme life-affirmation, “because it is at once our determination, even with all our sensuous barriers, to follow the law of pure spirits” (What should they do with the “law”?) (Has. 53). “The apparent purposelessness of nature, which rewards virtue with misery … should fills us … with the sharpest pain, but what do we care about nature with all its purposes and laws” – as long as it gives us occasion for the highest moral expression. The experience of the victorious power of the moral law … is such a lifting, such an essential good, that we are even tempted [the only temptation to which Schiller yields without scruples] to reconcile ourselves with the evil we owe it to. Accord in the realm of freedom delights us infinitely more than all contradictions in the natural world can grieve us. (Has. 37)

If one in the preceding is reminded of Christianity, this feeling is reinforced by the following almost antibiological statement (Has. 38): “… life is never important in itself, never as an end, only as a means of morality. Thus, if a case arises where the surrender of life becomes a means to morality, life must be subordinate to morality.” (Is Schiller aware that a consistent rejection of compromise [cf. Ibsen’s Brand] would cause all “moral” people to die out in a short time, while the amoral and especially the immoral would continue living?) As equally valuable as the heroic choice is repentance after a violation of the moral law. Indeed, the repentant criminal even has a merit above the tragic

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hero, “since the blissful awareness of the right action could have made the decision of the virtuous somewhat easier and the moral merit of an action is decreased just as much as inclination and desire are part of it.” Schiller later overcame this rigorous position and sought in the idea of “the beautiful soul” a synthesis of duty and pleasure. But for the time being the repentant stands higher than the one who sacrifices life so as not to stain one’s morals; there is greater joy over the one than over the ninety-nine righteous. And yet, the villain’s fortune pains us far more than the misfortune of the virtuous, because first the vice, and then the rewarding of the vice, are a “lack of conformity.” The thesis is more sophistical than empirically justified. And what role can the (sensuous) rewarding of the vice play alongside the all-overshadowing moment that the villain has his or her day before the moral law? Either we must demand that the villain should have the (sensuous) evil, but then the hero should also have the (sensuous) good, or it does not matter that the hero has the sensuous evil, only that one shows moral dignity, but then it is just as important for the villain that one devours low-value pleasures and misses the blessing of the bad conscience. We will later comment on peculiarities of this kind in an author (Lipps) who has drawn the consequences of the master’s doctrine. Schiller, however, was too wise to overlook the fact that not all conflicts are as simple as hitherto described. “There are cases where moral pleasure is acquired only through a moral pain, and this occurs when a moral duty has to be transferred to a higher and more general one to act” (Has. 39). Will Schiller here have to give a never so small tribute to something like “a metaphysical lack of conformity” or the like? Far from it, for the hero will never doubt which duty is the highest. (Suppose the hero has a choice between sacrificing his mother, sister, or wife, and that all three will die horribly if he does not make an immediate decision. The case is obvious!) If the hero (or we) hesitates for a moment, it comes from the fact that one is not highly enough developed in a moral respect. For there is a demand for “a clear mind and a reason independent of any natural force, also for moral drives [insofar as they act instinctively] … to correctly determine the relationship of moral duties to the highest principle of morality” (Has. 40 f.). (So, the stupid can easily become immoral because they do not know better; they are mistaken when they think they are acting according to the moral law!) Only “a few” have the necessary sense and reason; while the rest are “the great, common heap of smaller souls.” “Hence, it is due to the fact that the passion around such actions cannot be communicated to the general public, such as the unity of human nature and the necessity of

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the moral law” (Has. 41). If only one now knew who they are among us who hold the necessary “measure of reason” at all times, and could consult them quickly! It would not help if their judgment contradicted my deepest conviction, but think about them disagreeing with one another! And what if there were an even more developed spirit that discovered the precipice where the guides thought they had reached the bottom! Indeed, there could be tragedy even within the Schilleresque schema. Now, here the author draws a distinction between practical and “aesthetic” ethics. In the tragedy, the situation is artificial; it is arranged for a specific purpose, Has. p. 51. “… true misfortune does not always choose its person and its time well; it often catches us defenseless, and what is worse, it often makes us defenseless.” (So, there is no aiming at the heroically chosen suffering.) But it is precisely the ideal circumstances of the tragedy that will teach us (“the theater is considered a moral institution”) to treat the real misfortune as artificial, “to dissolve the real suffering in a sublime emotion … The hero and the wise are only touched by their own misfortune.” (But is this a fruit of the moral law? The case is ethically irrelevant.) We would like to stop for a moment at one of the means by which Schiller believes one can establish a heroic posture toward inescapable misfortunes (Has. 51): Cases can occur where fate ascends all the external structures upon which one [the person] founded one’s security [e.g.?], and one has no choice but to take refuge in the sacred freedom of the spirits, where there is no other way to calm the instinct of life than to will it, and no other way to resist the power of nature to get ahead of it than by a free [!] abolition of all sensuous interest before any physical power defeats one morally.

(The idea points toward Schopenhauer.) Thus, the fox and the grapes or virtue of necessity. The fox also thinks it “freely” renounces pleasure. Schiller is not aware of the psychological disguises, which, however, have been recognized at all times, of unconscious or semi-conscious motives, of rationalization’s sources of error. In his zeal, he has fallen into the wolf pit of the pseudo-solution. Here one does not “feel the sublime,” but “invent it.”165 165 Here the reader’s thinking is intertwined with a number of other notions that do not invite critical commentary. One knows what role the suffering played in Schiller’s own life – and who does not admire his attitude completely and unconditionally? If it is from this experience, and not from speculation, that he got the idea that the afflicted must respond to one’s affliction with erhabene Rührung [sublime emotion], well, then we just have to be silent witnesses. One does not argue with a person who clings to one’s only

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The pathetic course (“the sublime,” “heroic,” “tragic”) awakens “admiration,” “strong emotion,” “enjoyment,” “pity,” as well as the desire to imitate the protagonist. It is possible that all these feelings are squeezed together in Schilleresque “pity,” for now comes the definition (Has. 46): “The tragedy would therefore be a poetic imitation of a coherent series of events [a complete action], which shows us humans in a state of suffering and has the intention of arousing our pity.” It strikes one immediately that in this Aristotelian echo, the word “fear” has disappeared. And fair enough: what is ultimately to be feared in a suffering that drives us up to the highest morality and thus (for Schiller) to the very affirmation of life, to the one thing needful? It is no more than a painful cure, which without fail provides full healing. The “pity” we feel with such a patient is Schiller’s tragic pity. The definition and its use call for a far-reaching critical commentary, from which we must refrain here. Just a single thing can be mentioned: The author distinguishes between “end” and “form”; the form is the essence of the means by which the “end” is achieved. “The end is strong emotion (= pity).” The tragedy must have “a pity-worthy action,” that is, the plot, “the substance.” As much as possible the substance enters in as part of the form. But later a distinction is made between substance and form, and the pity, which is due to the substance, is of lesser value than that due to the form. However, the whole pathetic category is described as an objective course, not as form; the effect of Le Cid is, for example, traced back to the substance and not to the form (Has. 45), and the tragedy differs from the comedy by its “object”: “In the tragedy a lot is already happening through the object” (Petsch p. 35). There can be no doubt that Schiller links the adjective tragic both to an objective structure and to a subjective experience, without drawing the distinction. Schiller’s theory will in our day raise the general objection that he (like his teacher Kant) did not keep the ethical and aesthetic engagements differentiated from each other in all his writings, but fused them together into one. Or rather: The aesthetic is just a precursor to the ethical (Has. 35); the hero who sacrifices one’s life for morality (and is subsequently ruined by remorse) appears “only as an aesthetically great object.” (As one will remember, the conclusion elsewhere is the opposite.) However, Schiller is aware that morality alone would not draw people, despite the fact that “nothing is greater than the pleasure in anchor in the distress of death. On this basis, but not in the case of a fundamental metaphysical solution, we gladly agree to a: Good luck to him, if he has learned to endure what he cannot change, and abandon with dignity what he cannot save!

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moral propriety.” This “propriety” is, after all, already fully developed in the substance, in the most schematic sketch, and the form is irrelevant to the ethical quality. But when Schiller puts such great weight on the form, it shows that he sought other qualities besides the moral, which, of course, is obvious. In Hasenclever (p. 49, at the bottom), even “the moral end” is mentioned as something other than the awakening of pity, as something other than the tragedy. “Moral perfection” shows the greatest “moral propriety” and should, therefore, give the highest “moral pleasure”; but in the tragedy, according to Schiller, we demand to see the fight against the lower inclinations. In other words, we seek a completely different kind of pleasure. And do we not find this pleasure just as much by the magnificently immoral? Secondly, in a general sense, a later time will object that Schiller’s concept of the tragic is incomplete because it does not make room for a number of important forms of catastrophe. Schiller knew only three of these: 1. Basic suffering and catastrophe, which strikes without the victim’s own involvement (described in Hasencl. 51) and is met either with wailing and resignation, or with sublime tranquility. 2. Heroic suffering and catastrophe, which is deliberately brought upon oneself by “sublime action” and is met with steadfastness. 3. Devastating remorse after a violation of the moral law. But none of these misfortunes are final or irreparable or should-not-be. The actual conflict of interest (sensuous lack of conformity) is of inferior importance, and the suffering even actually becomes in keeping with interest by being the only path to affirmation. In Schiller’s theory, this affirmation is neither religious nor metaphysical, but autotelic. It has its end in itself, and no higher value is given. Indeed, the dogmatically believing moralist does not even have a need beyond fulfilling what is for one the moral law, and for Schiller this one is the supreme representative of humanity and culture. “Nowhere does the mind find help against the sufferings of sensuousness other than in morality.” But there one finds it, finds help against “the suffering of sensuousness.” But already Orestes’ well-known sufferings are of higher rank, namely the doubt concerning the “moral world order.” In his theoretical works Schiller never imagined a hero who, by one’s heroism, becomes the tool of fate. We will give an example. A city has long been besieged and has water for four days. The hero puts his life at risk, and he manages to bring one of the water lines into order. Mortally wounded, he returns to the city and proclaims the salvation. But an enemy scout has followed his course, and he is not killed before it is made clear by him that the water was poisoned and that the city is now the prey of the plague. The third day the rescue comes, but at the rumor of the

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plague the army turns around. Afterward the population is wiped out, the city is stormed and razed. “The savior” has his heroism in order, and consequently Schiller experiences “heavenly pleasure.” The hero himself hardly does, while breathing his last breath among his loved ones’ spotted corpses, stoned by the curses of the dead. His motive was not to fulfill the moral law, but to save the city. According to Schiller’s doctrine, the hero should praise himself for having the glorious fate of sacrificing his life for his city. Where does the fate of the city then stand for him – or us? … but the impossibility of reconciling the idea of unhappiness with the highest worthiness for happiness could darken our sympathetic pleasure with a cloud of pain. No matter how much is gained from the fact that our reluctance about this lack of conformity does not concern a moral being, but belongs to the most innocuous place, necessity [!], blind submission to fate is always humiliating and offensive to free, self-determined beings. This is what leaves something to be desired even in the most excellent plays of the Greek stage, because in all these plays necessity is appealed to in the end, and there is always an unresolved knot for our rationally ordered reason [see that!]. But at the highest and last level, to which the morally educated person climbs, and to which moving art can rise, this too dissolves, and every shadow of displeasure disappears with it. This happens when the discontentment with fate disappears and is lost in the idea or rather in a clear awareness of a teleological connection of things, a sublime order, a benevolent will. (Has. 45)

A more scornful mockery could not be added to our dying hero’s misfortunes than to serve him a construction of this kind. No sign of a “knot” here, dear one, on the contrary, elysian idyll, “conformity of the idea with the actual condition!” (Körner 185) It is inconceivable that as a theoretician166 Schiller had never felt the slightest sign of metaphysical restlessness. And if he had noticed it, but made sure to isolate himself against it, then he, like Goethe, belongs to the false prophets. Schiller came to his positive result through a purely rabulistic simplification of the problem. The weakness of German idealism steps forward in Schiller with screaming disharmony; in this regard, the apostle Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1772–1811) was completely superfluous. In this overview, I have dealt more thoroughly with Schiller than other authors, the first reason being that for a hundred years and even longer he appears to have been decisive for tragic theory both in his home country and far beyond the borders of Germany, and he can be said to dominate the 166 A comparison with his poetry would go too far here.

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Christian layperson’s ethical and “tragistic” mindset to this day. Second, he represents a direction within tragic theory that can be reconciled with the basic view of the present work less than any other. In my view, the Schiller school is one of the worst obstacles to an intellectually reasonable exploration of the tragic, to a method that tends more toward the exact sciences than to the desire-emphasized interpretive arts. This circumstance is also the reason why I later offer an entire section on Theodor Lipps, to contribute as best I can to the dispelling of the idyll. For behind the Schillerian sunlit stage set grins another fate, – “which crushes humankind when it exalts it.” As evidence of the difficulties of the arrangement of the material, it is worth mentioning that Hasenclever places Schiller in the section “From the Kantian School,” while he could just as easily stand in any of the others in Hasenclever: “Under the Banner of Aristotle,” “The Optimistic Interpretation of the Tragic in German Idealism,” and “Voices of the Creators,” indeed, why not also in “The Science of the Tragic”? Petsch, on the other hand, puts Schiller under “Classic and Classical Aesthetics,” while the Schlegel brothers come under “Age of Romanticism.” According to Hasenclever, the Schlegel brothers belong to “the Kantian School.” With Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) new signs appear, which announce a darker and richer view of the tragic and point forward toward names such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hebbel, Hartmann, and Bahnsen. A simple sentence in his writing on Greek poetry from 1796 shows the distance from Schiller: “… there are three specifically different classes of artists, depending on their goal being the good, the beautiful, or the true” (italics added). “The true” we read here as “the empirical.” While “the aesthetic tragedy” seeks the beautiful, “the philosophical tragedy,” which is its “perfect contrast,” seeks synthesis of the good and the true, of idealism and realism. This form of tragedy is “the highest work of art in didactic poetry – it consists of nothing but characteristic [= Schiller’s ‘sentimental’] elements and their final result is the highest disharmony.” The example is Hamlet; his main ability is understanding, and he is ruined by an excess of understanding. The total impression of this tragedy is a maximum of despair. All impressions, which seem large and important individually, disappear as trivial from what appears here as the last, only result of all being and thinking: before the eternal colossal dissonance that infinitely separates humanity and fate. (Has. 55 f.)

While Schiller pointed to Shakespeare with his pen, Schlegel here preached with his heart.

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His older brother August Wilhelm (1767–1845) also took a step in this direction.167 While Friedrich’s two types of tragedy show a beginning distinction between the objective and the poetically tragic, this opposition is carried through by August Wilhelm, who clearly sees the difference between “tragic mood” and “tragic poetry.” A. W. Schlegel still demanded in the tragedy a solution in the Schilleresque spirit, half factual and half aesthetic. But the tragic mood has gained weight; it is characterized by metaphysical restlessness: Only humankind, of all creatures, binds past and future together in its consciousness, and this advantage has cost it dearly. Everything we do to realize our interests (ends) is in vain – death erases everything; we are shipwrecked already at birth. “… any mind not closed to feeling [must] be affected by an unspeakable melancholy, against which there is no other protective wall than the consciousness of an occupation that goes beyond the earthly.” Schiller’s “immanent” and autotelic heroism will soon be replaced by a lesson about the metaphysical meaning of the life approach. The personality is given a further, more world-historical destiny; the romantic, for example, tolerates no limit to mental expansion, not even in heroism. This development, which reached its height in Hegel, is still in its infancy in Schelling (1775–1854). The Schilleresque viewpoint lives on, but the influence of Jakob Böhme (died 1624) in particular puts it in a metaphysical context. On the other hand, contact is lost with the personal, struggling human being (who in Schiller had been alive enough), and the “real” in tragic courses are metaphysical or transcendent “entities,” one of which manifests itself in the hero’s “absoluteness of character.” Through the tragic (i.e., heroic) person’s demise, “the reunion of oneself” with the divine is accomplished (Volkelt 427) – a thought with which Romanticism, for example, Novalis, was especially occupied. The cleavage of the world’s “original ground,” a central idea in men such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hebbel, Bahnsen, is interpreted by Böhme as follows (Petsch p. XXX): “creation, the universe, originated and is newly created at every moment through a self-dividing God, through a self-revelation of the in itself incomprehensible and purposeless Will, through a divergence of looking spiritual power and looked at world content” (Cf. Volkelt p. 26 and 63, Körner p. 268). According to Schelling, from the products of the cleavage, “freedom” and “necessity,” a balance or indifference emerges.

167 Vorles. ü. dram. Kunst u. Literatur [Discourse on Dramatic Art and Literature], 1809 I p. 59 ff., 109 ff., 132–267. II-1 p. 14 ff., 33 ff., 71 ff., 137 ff., II-2 p. 74, 92, 267, 385 ff.

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For Schelling, “the only truly tragic,” in life as in art, is when a mortal falls into “innocent guilt,” becomes “determined by fate to guilt and to wrongdoing” and must therefore suffer punishment. However, it is necessary to punish the guilty, who are only subject to the superior power of fate in order to show the triumph of freedom, the recognition of freedom, the honor that it deserves. [Here comes the explanation.] The hero has to fight misfortune, otherwise there is no struggle at all, no expression of freedom; one has to succumb to what is subject to necessity, but in order to not allow necessity to overcome without overcoming it at the same time, the hero also has to voluntarily pay for this guilt – which was determined by fate. It is the highest thought and the greatest victory of freedom to willingly also carry the punishment for an inevitable offense, in order to prove one’s freedom in the loss of freedom and to go under with a declaration of free will. (Has. 63)168

Deductions like these are products from a study cell far behind the front, where the psychology of the common warrior is unrecognized. But it applies to Schelling, like so many other metaphysicians within tragic theory, that what is actually valuable from their efforts (other than the poetic quality of the reasoning), which may also benefit from empirical research, is not the system, the final, complete, global synthesis, expressed in a dark and frightening terminology – but the material as interpreted, the individual penetrating or deep observations of life and art on which the system is built. The panicked scream for examples, however, is very bothersome. The example supports the reader’s conception and provides one with an excellent means of control, but for the writers it means a trial by fire into which their metaphysical systems will necessarily enter. “Freedom” in K. W. F. Solger (1780–1819)169 has become “the idea.” It leaves the eternal and absolute regions and descends into the human sphere; here it splits itself into insoluble contradictions that end with the downfall of the person involved. In this downfall, the idea lifts itself up, thereby manifesting itself as an eternal idea (Volkelt p. 247 and 27). What Solger experienced during a theatrical performance is not easy to imagine, but in his interpretation of the experience he is optimistic (Petsch p. XXXVI):

168 Philosophie d. Kunst [Philosophy of Art], Werke [Works] 1859 (written 1803) Vol. 5 p. 687– 711, 718–31. 169 Vorles. ü. Ästhetik [Discourse on Aesthetics], Lpz. 1829 p. 92, 94–100, 309–12, 314–17, 319– 21. Erwin, Berl. 1815 I p. 26 ff., 235 ff. II p. 65 ff., 94 ff., 134 ff., 231 ff.

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on the tragic The melancholy is essential to the tragic mood, and yet we should be comforted by everything that causes it through the thought of the unearthly and infinite. If we are comforted now, we no longer have melancholy, and earthly purposes, even the most spiritual, can no longer appear to us so seriously; we must spurn them in comparison with the higher things.

The movement’s greatest mind was G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Schelling’s “freedom” and Solger’s “idea” are interpretations of the protagonist’s culturally relevant greatness; in Hegel, it becomes “eternal, substantial moral powers,” “the divine as it enters the world.” But greatness is a one-sided manifestation; it denotes only one “element of the logic of universal reason.” The counterpower is another, equally “legitimate,” one-sidedness. And the protagonist must lie beneath this battle: “Fatum repels individuality into its bounds, and smashes it when it has overreached itself.”170 By this “overreaching” the protagonist incurs a “guilt,” which is “atoned for” in the downfall, in the dissolution of individuality. This eliminates the disturbance in “the moral absoluteness and unity” that the protagonist in one’s individual pursuit has represented. Thesis and antithesis, the pursuit and the counterpower, join together triadically in a synthesis: The unity of world reason is restored. In it also appears “eternal justice,” “which in its absolute rule penetrates through the relative justification of onesided purposes and passions, because it cannot tolerate that in the conflict and contradiction of the, according to their concept [!], moral powers, some are victorious in reality and persist” (Has. 71). Yet, it indeed tolerates it every now and then. But the consequence is that Hegel’s “tragic guilt” cannot be of an ethical nature; on the contrary, it becomes a merit. “The tragic heroes are as guilty as they are innocent” (Has. 77 f.). What drives them to do something is only the morally justified pathos … It is the honor of the great characters to be guilty … One can call it the cunning of reason that it allows the passions to work for it, whereby what it puts into existence is forfeited and suffers damage. (Has. 166)

Concerning the relationship between the philosophical and aesthetic viewpoints in Hegel, it can be briefly noted that since the world order is rational, there is no tragedy in the sense of “a course that should-not-be.” “What is 170 The name “die Überhebungstheorie [the theory of arrogance]” has been used by writers such as Gervinus, Günther, Carrière, Hebbel, et al. (Volkelt p. 105 f., 147 f.) According to Zeising, the tragic flaw consists in a “Gottseinwollen mit Beibehaltung der Ichheit [Desire to be God while retaining selfhood].” The Greeks called it hubris.

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evil, misfortune, etc., in the appearing reality is good in and of itself and fortunate.” The tragic is therefore merely an aesthetic category; “the tragic [is based] primarily on the perception [italics added] of such a conflict and its solution.” The viewer is “shaken by the plight of the protagonist,” but “is reconciled in the matter” (Has. 78. See also Volkelt 28, 98 f., Körner 269 f.). Art is just a step on the path, a stage in the human spirit’s recognition of the absolute.171 Hegel’s greatest student in the field of tragic theory was Fr. Th. Vischer (1808–87), the most outstanding German aesthetician of the century (Has. 166).172 What I have read of him is compelling and lends itself to reference. But in this summary, he must be viewed from a single side, and since his tragic theory does not contain key elements beyond those we already know, he must give way to others who form the epoch. (Volkelt cites Vischer p. 5, 29, 64, 99, 100, 105 f., 127, 145, 233 ff., 246, 285, 311, 389.) First, however, we must stop for a moment at the doctrine of “tragic guilt,” as we already recall from Tzetze and which is at this time having its first major emergence. Many authors have worked with the concept of guilt, but as it appears in, for example, Schelling and Hegel (Volkelt p. 144), it does not give rise to the time-honored designation of “guilt theory.” With this expression, later literature refers to that theory which, in a moralizing, quasi-legal sense, asserts the requirement of “poetic justice,” of equivalence in the course between “guilt” (almost in the ethical sense) and “punishment.” It is in this form that the theory has provoked so much unrelenting resistance.173 The concept of guilt in Hegel and Vischer is not what was previously called ethical guilt in § 69, but it consists in an equally or more highly justified moral claim being violated – regardless of whether or not the agent knows it (thus, also Solger, Zeising, Carrière). Groos,174 on the other hand, is closer to 171 Vorles. ü. d. Ästhetik [Discourse on Aesthetics], Berl. 1842–43, I p. 256–306. II p. 156–61, 172–77, 182–86, 189 f. III p. 527–33, 537–59, 562–76. Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of the Spirit], Berl. 1841 (written 1807) p. 531–39. 172 Ästhetik [Aesthetics], Reutl. and Lpz. 1846 Vol. I §§ 121–39. Stuttg. 1857 §§ 905, 909–12, 914, 918, 920. Das Schöne u. d. Kunst [The Beautiful and Art], Stuttg. and Berl. 1907 p. 86, 87, 175, 180. 173 Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen [Aesthetics of the Tragic], Munich 1897 p. 143 ff. 148 ff., 158 note, Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie [The Dispute concerning the Tragedy], Leipzig 1915 (1885) p. 11–35, Körner, “Tragik u. Tragödie [Tragedy and Tragedy]” in Preussische Jahrbücher [Prussian Yearbooks] Vol. 225 p. 66 ff., Hirn, Det estetiska lifvet [The Aesthetic Life], Stockh. 1913 p. 211 ff., Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Nietzsche (see below). 174 Die Spiele d. Menschen [The Games of Humans], Jena 1899. Der ästhetische Genuss [The Aesthetic Pleasure], Giessen 1902 p. 244 ff.

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the pure guilt-punishment variant (Volkelt p. 146). He is logically led to this doctrine based on “the pity dogma”: Only the guilt-punishment structure can hold tragic pity within the boundary of the aesthetically digestible. Its crudest form is found in the teachings of Ulrici and Gervinus, who apply it to Shakespeare and interpret ethical guilt in places where no one would come to seek it unless one had the theory of guilt as the sole errand (Volkelt p. 151 ff.). Otto Ludwig (1813–65) builds his tragic theory on a necessary causal link between character, guilt, and suffering, and to one’s astonishment one finds a seedling of the theory in Hermann Hettner (Das moderne Drama [The Modern Drama], last edition Berlin & Lpz. 1924 p. 117), where one would, however, expect a more advanced view. The proliferation of the theory is undoubtedly related to the desire to save “the world’s metaphysical propriety.” Suffering without guilt cannot be tolerated within the “moral world order,” and so the concept of guilt is introduced, which, whatever content it gives, does not at all save the world order, but which at least acts as a veil between our anxious gaze and the harsh experience. The concept has remained ambiguous in order to serve changing needs and be adapted to oncoming criticism. Even in a man like Volkelt (p. 143) the meaning is unclear. Of course, plays can be written, excellent plays that are based on a guilt structure, but why call them tragic, not to mention the only tragic ones? It is with these questions in mind that we in §§ 66 ff. developed a guilt doctrine of more practical scope and with clearer demarcation. An offshoot of the theory of guilt is the so-called “overreaching” theory, which we have touched on all too briefly. It is based on the Greek concept of hubris, but its originator in recent times was Hegel. Gervinus and Georg Günther175 combined the doctrines of guilt and “overreaching,” while Hebbel (1813–63) developed a pure “overreaching” doctrine against a metaphysical background and stands as its most important representative. In this view, in its generality, the protagonist has “exceeded one’s natural boundaries” and is therefore (by some balancing system in the universe) not only driven back to these “boundaries,” but past them and into the abyss, just like the reckless climber. In Hebbel, the protagonist is a tool of providence, which it uses to carry the culture forward, but in order to carry out this mission, the protagonist must transcend one’s “boundaries,” and thus fall back, as guilty, into punishment. The metaphysical hope that has here been eroded on the moral front rises elsewhere as cultural optimism.176 175 Grundzüge d. trag. Kunst [Fundamentals of Tragic Art], Lpz. 1885 p. 13, 151, 209, 315 ff. 176 Briefe [Letters], Smtl. Werke [Complete Works] Abt. [Section] 3 Berl. 1904–7 sakregistret [index] in Vol. 8. Ein Wort ü. d. Drama [A Word about the Drama], Mein W. ü. d. Drama

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The whole guilt doctrine found its first opponent in Schopenhauer (1788– 1860), a writer who in common opinion formed the epoch within tragic theory. While the teachings of the idealists seem strongly Christian-inspired, Schopenhauer was in the family of Buddhism; he did not meet the world course with a Yes, but with a No. Against Hegel’s metaphysical panlogism (everything that exists is rational), Schopenhauer set his alogism, tending toward antilogism. And when we have no way of realizing our earthly interests, then we are left with no other way than to give up the interest itself, to reject and turn away from life, which in its nature is suffering. The task of tragedy is to teach us this art through the protagonist’s example. The tragedy cannot follow one beyond resignation, but Schopenhauer’s philosophical (or if you will: metaphysical) faith goes further. Whoever renounces life and its allurements, in return attains Nirvana, a state of bliss without craving. The tragedy is to be regarded as the pinnacle of poetry, both in terms of the magnitude of the effect and the difficulty of the production, and is recognized for it. [On the whole, the tragic stands at the center of Schopenhauer’s view of life.] … the purpose of this highest poetic achievement [is] to portray the terrible side of life [there are therefore also others] … the nameless pain, the misery of humanity, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful reign of chance, and the hopeless fall of the just and innocent [are] presented to us here: For there lies a significant hint about the nature of the world and existence … the nature of the world, which is against our will. It is the conflict of the will with itself … the greedy, reckless, mysterious will to live. (Has. 110, 113, Petsch XXXVII)

But the recognition of the sufferer (and the viewer) grows with the suffering, “… until finally this knowledge … reaches the point where … the veil of Maya no longer deceives one, [and] the principium individuationis [… the error of individuation] is seen through,” whereby the egoism based on this principle dies. Recognition (the eternal world eye) then acts as quieter of the will (tranquilizing means), and leads to resignation, “the abandonment, not just of life, but of the whole will to life itself.” Once all division of “the will” has ceased, the world will be redeemed from suffering. As long as this has not happened, the protagonist suffers for a guilt, but the guilt is not his or hers in the ethical sense; it is an “original guilt” that arose when the first individuation

[My Word about the Drama] ibd. Vol. XI, Vorw. z. Maria Magd. [Foreword to Mary Magdalene] ibd., Vorw. z. Genoveva [Foreword to Genoveva] ibd. Bd. I, Tagebücher [Diaries] Berl. 1885 various places.

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(separation of an individual from “the world unity”) took place. Man’s greatest crime is to have been born, he cites from Calderón. Our pleasure in the tragedy belongs to … the feeling of the sublime; indeed, it is the highest degree of this feeling … At the moment of the tragic catastrophe, we become, more clearly than ever, convinced that life is a harsh dream, from which we have to awaken. (Has. 113 f.)

The reader will have noticed that there are thoughts and feelings in a certain kinship with these in Schopenhauer that in previous chapters we have interpreted “biosophically” and thus made more accessible for research. However, an end like the following is completely foreign to us (Has. 115): The viewer becomes aware “that for another kind of will [other than the one stranded in life] there must be another kind of existence.” If this is not the case, “how would it be possible that the portrayal of the terrible side of life, brought to our attention in the brightest light, could have a beneficial effect on us and be a great pleasure for us?” Fear and pity are in themselves unpleasant feelings; they can therefore be nothing but means. The end, on the other hand, is a temporary release from “the will,” a taste of Nirvana (cf. Høffding, Den nyere Filosofis Historie [The History of Modern Philosophy], Copenhagen 1904 II p. 228 ff.). The poet of tragedy must be as harsh as fate; one is the mirror of humanity and must therefore allow a lot of bad, at times, nefarious characters to appear, as well as many silly people, warped minds, and fools, but now and then a sensible one, a clever one, an honest one, a good one, and only as a rare exception, a noble one.

The protagonist must be of social power and reputation, so that no one more powerful can help him or her. “The bourgeois person accordingly lacks the height for a fall.” One recalls Opitz. In other words, it is not an “aesthetic” pleasure the viewer may expect from the tragedy (although Schopenhauer elsewhere has a keen eye for the peculiarity of the enjoyment of art), but a philosophical, indeed, something in the direction of a metaphysical initiation. And in this there may be a very considerable positive value, which thus belongs to this earthly life. But this value is nothing in comparison to the boundless confirmation of the one that awaits the seeker of wisdom when one has found Nirvana. Schopenhauer is much closer to idealism than one would at first believe, indeed, sometimes it seems as if only the words are different. In common is the division of the original being in heroic striving and counterpower, the devaluation of the sensory-biological,

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and the positive solution of the protagonist’s death, which points beyond the earthly life’s nothingness and toward a transcendent idyll, which in Schopenhauer consists of “the view of the all and one.” Thus, he is ultimately just as much an optimist as his opponents.177 Disregarding the magnificence of form and detail, of his poetic imagination, his fiery pathos, and his deep co-experience of all the sufferings of the world, Schopenhauer’s system, including when it comes to the doctrine of the tragic, invites both criticism and satire. We may here make reference to Volkelt p. 32, 101 f., 248, Körner 274 f., Lipps (1915) p. 2 ff., Yrjö Hirn (1913) 217 f., Høffding II p. 230. More specifically, we are concerned with the fact that the author makes no distinction between tragic suffering and any other; this qualification, for example, as Hegel emphasized it, Schopenhauer has noted, but not used. Related to this is his concept of dramaturgical greatness, which is almost a ranking and thus of an external nature, and which therefore indicates a flattening of the whole (earthly) tragic problem. In addition, there is a certain indifference, because the accounts are settled in advance; the tragedy will not be an exciting journey of discovery to the borderland. That the theory fits only a few cases of widely recognized mourning plays, Schopenhauer himself admits, though he interprets as resignation a great many diverse attitudes. Finally, it can be mentioned that a number of the sufferings on which the philosopher builds his image of life (cf. “Buddhas Benares-tale” [“Buddha’s Benares Discourse”], Schjelderup, Filosofiens historie [The History of Philosophy] p. 122), are matters of individual and social struggle; how many of them may be overcome over time and thus lose their importance for a Schopenhauerian view of life, nobody knows today. Schopenhauerian resignation is therefore not the fruit of a defeat in the qualified struggle for perfectibility, but a flight at the first sign of resistance. Those who think psychoanalytically thus come closer in curiosity; the friends of the theater, however, do not. Schopenhauer’s student Eduard v. Hartmann (1842–1906)178 gave with his theory of the three stages of illusion (Høffding II p. 542) a basic view of tragic substance; in the thesis of necessary conflict between “happiness” and “culture,” he anticipated Freud. He is less convincing in the details, though he also contributed to the “renaissance” after the “tragic darkness” of idealistic 177 Die Welt als Wille u. Vors. [The World as Will and Representation] Lpz. 1873 I § 51 p. 298 ff. II § 37 p. 495 f. 178 Philosophie des Schönen [Philosophy of the Beautiful], Berl. 1886, Index. Gesammelte Studien u. Aufsätze [Collected Studies and Essays] Lpz. 1888 p. 261, 276 ff., 308 ff., 333, 357.

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optimism. For Hartmann too, the tragic conflict is irreconcilable; it leads the protagonist to ruin with necessity (Has. p. 120). The conflict again follows the same “necessity” of the character; coincidence cannot be tolerated. Unfortunately, Hartmann here gave no investigation of the concept of necessity; the reasoning lies in the metaphysical system. The protagonist must act the way one does, even if one surveyed with certainty the entire causal chain through which this action leads to one’s downfall: Only such suffering, which is predestined in the character of the protagonist, can cause the truly tragic shock.

– How many of the traditional mourning plays meet this particular requirement? Othello would strangle Desdemona even if he knew the background? It is really only the heroic dramas that measure up, and so such where an overwhelming passion or the like drives the sacrificer into misery with one’s eyes open. But in every human being there are conflicts “lying dormant,” Hartmann thinks, just waiting for an opportunity to destroy one; they are “by nature” irreconcilable, and if they do not break out, one only has “the coincidence of conditions” to thank for it. (This doctrine seems unsustainable as a causal philosophy, but it can be acknowledged as a practical consideration of probability.) Hartmann is, however, an optimist like his master; the tragic conflict is resolved positively at the transcendental level. In his overview of German writers from Lessing to Schasler, the intersecting light falls over his own conception (Die deutsche Ästhetik seit Kant [German Aesthetics since Kant], Berlin 1886 p. 434 ff.). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) occupies a peculiar position. Throughout his whole literary activity Nietzsche orbited around the tragic; through all his changing and contradictory views he always saw in it an exponent of the deepest secrets of human life (see Oehler, Nietzsche-Register, “Werke [Works]” XX, Lpz. 1926, Novrup, Johs., Nietzsches opfattelse av det tragiske [Nietzsche’s Conception of the Tragic], Copenhagen 1923). Yet, one can hardly count him as one of the problem’s theorists. He never provided any analysis of the “tragic phenomenon” itself or tried to distinguish it from sufferings and catastrophes in general. And his explanations of the “aesthetic-tragic pleasure” are kept in very imprecise terms; here he is a poet, preacher, and prophet more than a scientist, and the lyric often takes the place of logic. Values such as brilliance of style, etc., we unfortunately do not have an eye for in this regard. The thought content, especially in the first period of Nietzsche’s writing (we count three), is dominated by Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner (1813– 83). During this period, he wrote the essay “Das griechische Musikdrama [The

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Greek Music Drama]” (1870) and Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik [The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music] (1872). The latter was written immediately after a stay with Richard Wagner, which must have contributed to it ecstatic style. The book is in form connected to the Greek tragedy but is meant to be of general application. In his first major work Nietzsche preaches a Schopenhauerian metaphysics, based on artistic experience. One encounters his two central concepts of the Dionysian and Apollonian, actually much more than concepts; they are life forces, life postures, and deities. The terms have their roots in the oldest Greek cult, but the significance for Greek tragedy (not to mention recent ones) attributed to them by Nietzsche is hardly historically demonstrable. In addition, his interpretation is overly artisticsubjective. It is another matter that in a particular conception very good use can be made of the terms in poetics, as has been taken up by a number of researchers. The Dionysian is closely related to the Schopenhauerian “will,” the blind, chaotic life drive. But it has several spiritual ancestors: mystics (Eckhart), Herder (the folk-poetic original source), the young Goethe (especially Werther), the Romantics (Fr. Schlegel, Novalis [lust and death], Hölderin, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wagner). Pessimism appears again as an element, as “Dionysian realization”: the deep beholding of the general law of cruelty, suffering, and annihilation. This realization leads to “Buddhism,” to loathing of action and life. But already here a break with Schopenhauer appears: Nietzsche wants to return to life; he wants salvation from Buddhism, and he finds this salvation in the tragedy; so it was in Greece and so it is for us. In the tragedy (as Nietzsche wants it and partially finds it in the literature – though the most tragic themes have not yet been used), the Dionysian realization comes into its own. But as we want to surrender to it, we are stopped by the Apollonian element, the artificial and artistic order, the beautiful, harmonious form, the individual and characteristic in the suffering protagonist. Through the form the terrible becomes tamed into something exalted. Thus, the tragedy contains a union of the two deities – “the art is there so that the arch does not break.” However, within the Apollonian framework, the tension should be the greatest possible. The tragedy is thus experienced with a mixture of several emotions. Yet, we are only at the beginning of the positive value of the tragedy, which consists in a fusion of aesthetic rapture and metaphysical comfort. Through the narrower layer, we see into the deeper, metaphysical layer in which the “original being” itself is suffering, death, and division in conflict. Humankind is separated from the original being through the principium individuationis, with

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the tragic death of the protagonist and our co-experience of this reuniting “the original one” with its lost child. In this way, the “original being” is redeemed through humankind from its “original pain,” but humankind is also redeemed through the “original being.” The mutual relationship here is not quite clear. Alongside this dual mission – to provide metaphysical comfort and save the life for a later heroic self-sacrifice – the tragedy has another, which Nietzsche calls aesthetic, and which signals distance from Schopenhauer in a new direction. The Dionysian consists not only in pessimistic realization and “original pain,” but also in “original pleasure,” which is an equally important part of “the original one.” The Midnight song from Zarathustra179 applies here: The world is deep, And deeper than the day can comprehend. Its woe is deep –, Pleasure – deeper than heartache: Woe says: Go away! But all pleasure wants eternity –, – wants deep, deep eternity!

Pleasure begets pain and pain begets pleasure; together they constitute the Dionysian intoxication (Geburt [Birth], Lpz. 1930 p. 186 f.). Pain here plays a role similar to dissonance in music (Leibniz is not dead; he is just asleep); the tragic pleasure overall is of a musical-lyrical, not necessarily of a dramatic nature. Even less does the tragedy have a moral mission; the “stupid doctrine of poetic justice” spells the death of tragedy (later modified). Only music can teach us that there is joy, indeed exultation in annihilation. The world is thus aesthetically justified. Once acquainted with this aesthetic-mystical initiation, we are “tragic people” with “tragic mindsets”; this is again characterized by “seriousness and depth” and the will to take life as a whole, including the evil and disgusting, into our culture, which thereby becomes a “tragic culture.” Here “wisdom” is higher than science; indeed, in the failure of science (Kant) lies a new tragic recognition, namely that we cannot recognize anything. One might think that this must only mean a consolation in connection with Schopenhauerian recognition, but not so in Nietzsche; there the two despairs run parallel. However, the tragic person must be redeemed from both; from the “Kant-tragic” by consciously willing art as an illusion. (Nietzsche sees through the one pseudosolution, isolation, but sets a new one in its place.) In this spirit, the tragedy 179 Zarathustra, Part 3, “Vor Sonnen-Aufgang [Before Sunrise]” (1884–85).

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and the tragic myth are reborn (after a dead “Socratic” age, Geburt [Birth] p. 132); humanity’s future depends on the tragic mindset not dying. (Hasenclever p. 134 f.) The Aryan race, and especially the Germans, is particularly well-suited by its seriousness and depth as a bearer of such a tragic culture, symbolized in Albrecht Dürer’s Knight with steely gaze, whom neither death nor the Devil can frighten.180 As far as the symbol itself is concerned, it seems that Nietzsche has been right in recent times, but the knight of the spirit he places beside Dürer’s, namely Schopenhauer, has become the subject of “fighting decay.” The relationship between the metaphysical and the aesthetic elements of the tragic experience is not clear. After all, the musical intoxication has no necessary connection to the reconciliation of the original being. In the later periods of Nietzsche’s writing, the metaphysics also takes on increasingly plainer terms, and finally Dionysus lives in the human mind alone. Nietzsche has evolved according to Schiller’s words: “Take the deity in your heart / and it rises from its world throne.” In his second period (Menschliches [Human] 1878, Morgenröthe [Daybreak] 1881, Fröhliche Wissenschaft [Gay Science] 1882), Nietzsche is characterized by his break with Wagner and what is now called “the crisis of objectivity” around 1876 (Nietzsche was then 32 years old). He settles accounts with his “romantic” past; now he wants psychological research and not hollow bombast and pathological ecstasy. Intoxication, and with it art, is a destructive firewater that only the warrior can tolerate; the noble warrior celebrates in his tragedy his Saturnalia (Roman celebration in memory of the “golden age” when all were equal, cf. the reconciliation of the Dionysian). Thus, it is important to distinguish between true and false intoxication. The former we experience by tragedies that arise, not from some weak pessimistic recognition, but from the excess and power that require discharge in pity. Nietzsche goes on to purge the Greek tragedy of all the “Wagnerian” he had previously attributed to it; on the contrary, the Greeks used the beautiful speech to counteract fear and pity. Tragedy is an expression of triumph; in the jubilant sacrifice of its most worthy exemplars, life manifests its inexhaustibility; the poet is in love with the passions. Nietzsche’s new life formula is called Amor Fati, love of everything that happens. The aesthetic pleasure of the tragedy today has become sadly impoverished; it is the pleasure of emotion in and of itself (Du Bos, Lessing, Sulzer). The aesthetic pleasure of the tragedy is conditional on cruelty, a thought that 180 See, e.g., Romdahl, Kunsthistorie [Art History], Kr.a. 1920 p. 141.

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eventually becomes central. As one can see, we are now far away from Geburt [Birth], where life was to be saved in order to be sacrificed for love and justice. However, the third period181 (Zarathustra 1883–85, Wille zur Macht [Will to Power], beg. 1885, Jenseits [Beyond] 1886, Fall Wagner [Case of Wagner], and Götzendämmerung [Twilight of the Idols] 1888) partly represents a return to Geburt [Birth], but also a continuation of the lines from the second period. Metaphysics has a strong renaissance in the doctrine of the return of all things, and Dionysus is once again supreme, albeit refined and ennobled. Concerning the “tragic,” one can no longer speak in the usual sense; as in Plato, the term has become its own contradiction. All distinctions are erased in the longing for the superman: He is to emerge from a hitherto unexpected earthly life potential, in which even pain acts as a stimulus. The tragedy is the antagonist of pessimism: Suffering (any?) is met with an unconditional Yes as joy (does this pain of a supreme realization of the idea of the superman in a given case or with a high probability also lead to life impoverishment and loss of progeny? Macbeth?). All pains are birth pains, and in the will to generate the gospel gets its ultimate exponent. Thus, the doctrine itself contains a conflict between “the path of perfection” and “the path of continuation,” and the “overcoming of pessimism,” which, according to some writers (e.g., Hasenclever p. 8 and 168), should have taken place through Nietzsche, is very much conditional.182 But at the end of his orbit Nietzsche is farther away from “tragic theory” than ever, and as we understand the tragic, he has never belonged there, except in some sections of Geburt [Birth]. In Nietzsche’s works we do not witness any unveiling of the tragic, but the struggle of a lost man for mental adaptation. With Nietzsche we have concluded the line of the real pioneers of tragic theory. The recent literature is undoubtedly more rewarding for a contemporary reader, but no truly innovative thoughts (apart from psychoanalysis) have developed, although new details and variants emerge. Beneath the surface is still the old problem of the familiar oppositions: fate-character, guilt-nonguilt, free will-determinism, pessimistic-optimistic interpretation, metaphysicspositivism, aesthetics-morality, aesthetics-philosophy, greatness-average, etc. Nevertheless, there are a number of newer writers I would like to have

181 Schjelderup, Filosofiens historie [History of Philosophy] p. 174. 182 In the formula “Leid ist Leben [suffering is life]” there is certainly an objection to Schopenhauer’s abandonment of perfectibility, but for qualified suffering the formula does not help. Nietzsche has indeed himself taken up Schiller’s: Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht [Life is not the highest of goods].

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discussed here, for example, besides several German183 and English ones, in Denmark, Carsten Hauch, Kierkegaard, and Brandes. The Swedes also have some essays and longer articles, while Norway, where philosophy has never felt at home, has not let its voice be heard. However, Niels Treschow talks about our “dissimilar nature, [in which lies] a seed for destruction, which only then develops when life and or activity has reached the highest peak,”184 and Stein Bugge writes in the journal Janus 1933 nr. 1–3 a series of articles with elements from Hegel, Schiller, and Nietzsche. This historical sketch, however, is larger than intended; in order to be comprehensive, it would have to extend to a book in itself. Therefore, for the sake of proportion, this part of the presentation has come to an end; prospective students will find supplementary material in a future published bibliography on the tragic. In the preceding, the individual writers are reproduced only as much as is compatible with some characteristic; only exceptionally has there been an approach to polemical commentary. In order to remedy the drawbacks of this manner of presentation, we will now consider three more recent authors and deal with them in more detail. I have chosen (from among dozens of candidates) first Theodor Lipps, the Schiller line’s last major representative, who one-sidedly emphasized poetic “enjoyment.” As a suitable counterpart, I consider Josef Körner, who only sought the objectively tragic; the third is Johannes Volkelt, who worked with both views and is the scientist par excellence. They are treated in chronological order.

§ 110. Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) is presented by the publisher as the most famous psychologist and aesthetician at the University of Munich. He has made a name for himself not only through his teaching, but also through his excellent writings. It is therefore worth recalling his valuable monographs in the fields of logic, aesthetics, and ethics. 183 National Socialist Theory is represented by Curt Langenbeck, Wieder-geburt des Dramas aus dem Geist der Zeit [Rebirth of the Drama from the Spirit of the Times], Munich 1940. Cf. H. Saekel, “Tragisches Lebensgefühl [Tragic Attitude to Life],” in Die Literatur [Literature], June 1940 and W. E. Süskind, Mut zum Verhängis [Courage in the Face of Doom], same place. Langenbeck wants a development based on the Greek tragedy, on its collectivist and irrational character. 184 A. H. Winsnes. Niels Treschow, Oslo 1927 p. 92.

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The literature also gives the impression that Lipps is considered one of the more important names in tragic theory. As he is a comparatively modern writer and, in addition, asserts views in sharp contrast to those developed in the present work, I have chosen to include him. His book185 is called Der Streit über die Tragödie [The Dispute Concerning the Tragedy] and was published in Leipzig in 1885 as nr. 2 in the series Beiträge zur Ästhetik [Contributions to Aesthetics], ed. Lipps and Werner. In 1915 the writing was published in a “second, unaltered edition,” but since the author died in 1914, one does not know whether or not he had wanted to change anything. Faced with doubt concerning the choice of approach, I have found it best in this case to comment on the author’s main theses as they are presented, and to lay out objections and the like where they naturally arise. * Immediately on the first page one encounters a fundamental (and therefore groundless?) claim: “Just as little as artistic activity, likewise artistic enjoyment is not due to intellectual insight into the reasons on which the effect of the artwork is based … Intellectual insight does not result in artistic enjoyment.” What then conditions the enjoyment of art? This one does not know. “But the alleged insight, the false theory can seriously damage it.” Yet, it is stated above: “If it were otherwise … no tragic work of art could count on a reliable and similar effect for everyone.” – But the tragic work of art can thus count on such an effect (and thus “the tragedy”). How then can the effect be damaged by false theory? And if it is damaged in this way, why is it that it cannot be restored by “correct” theory, for example, Lipps’ own? What task does “correct” theory have at all? It is a luxury, says the author, without defining the term. But then the suppression of the “false” theory is also a luxury, and thus also the enjoyment of art. And what then? What the author means by “reasons,” one does not know either. “Intelligent insight” points to the interpretation of causes, and the book indicates that it is aimed at psychological causes (e.g., p. 56 ff.). How then can “insight” (i.e., “correct” view) into these “causes” be of no significance to the effect of “the artistic activity”? Are there no “calculated effects”? The author notes that “the uncertainty and contradiction of views concerning the ‘reason for our enjoyment of tragic objects’ ” is great. But he does 185 Lipps has also dealt with the tragic in his Ästhetik [Aesthetics] I, Hamb. and Lpz. 1903, Chap. 3–6 and 9, II 1906 p. 34 f. as well as in Die Kultur d. Gegenwart [The Culture of the Present], Berl. and Lpz. 1907 I, 6 p. 366 f. without these writings containing anything significant about the tragic.

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not agree to any “variation in the enjoyment of art.” The difference in views of the tragedy is due to the difference in views of life, says Lipps later (p. 2, and others), and this thesis can certainly be justified. But why is it inconceivable that the writers have themselves experienced the tragedies, on which they base their theories, differently? The thesis that tragic works of art can count on a reliable and similar effect for everyone is contrary to all experience and can be disproved by using a simple questionnaire. It soon turns out that the author takes his luxury very seriously, and this is especially true of “the reasons on which the effect of the artwork is based,” not only because he writes 80 pages to justify his own theory. On page 29, it is explicitly stated: “In any case, the understanding of the work of art primarily depends on the insight into [the variety of the ways of looking at it].” P. 59: “Although this does not need to be said, it is essential for understanding the work of art to know it.” P. 64: … the understanding that is important for the work of art … is illuminated by the knowledge and clear distinction of the reasons on which the effect of the work of art is based. Such a distinction between the reasons for the effect is thus what is ultimately important to us.

However, the author has a feeling that the term “reasons” is not clear, and three lines below he puts it in quotation marks. The acknowledgment comes a little late, on p. 64 in a book of 80 pages. This use of quotation marks is a well-known tactic: One brings them out whenever the reader may want to grumble – Dear, this is not so serious, so let’s take it easy. And then, when the reader is reassured, they disappear in silence, and modesty is replaced by pretension. In connection with the concept of punishment, Lipps has practiced this art with outstanding skill. Finally, p. 65: “He understands the work of art badly, who only knows how to speak of the protagonist …” The doctrine that “understanding” and lack of “understanding” are without any influence on the effect of a work of art will face strong resistance. If the question were to be discussed, one must first bring to light what is meant by effect, a matter concerning which Lipps has not offered a single word. It seems in advance that the thesis can be more easily maintained toward works of art such as sketches, simple melodies, and the like than the elaborate and highly complex drama, where a lot will go past the audience if it lacks “understanding.” On p. 65 the term seems to be used in a different sense than on p. 29, just as on p. 64 a distinction has been introduced between “understanding” and

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“knowledge and clear distinction of the reasons” – two notions that on p. 1 seem to be identical. On the basis of the thesis just discussed, Lipps now argues that the tragedy must not be used to illustrate views of life.186 He is polemicizing, and as it seems with decided luck, against a number of theories of both “philosophical” and aesthetic nature. The dispute will not be referenced here. Only a single detail should be mentioned because it reduces the value of the polemic to a considerable degree. Lipps never gives names to those he attacks. With a host of changing formulas, he consistently avoids exposing his opponents; instead he says: “We hear said – There is a view – Perhaps someone thinks – The representative could be heard – The theory in question – The opinion of the theory is or needs to be – One has tried – The opinion may be valid,” etc. The consequence is that the reader is cut off from exercising control. It is Lipps himself who formulates the individual “theories” and names them, and he can then point to the material and arrange it according to the arguments he has available. Thus, when he merges several writers into “that theory,” it may well be that each of them would protest187 against the frame “the theory” or their own thoughts have agreed with Lipps. In some places, one even suspects that Lipps uses one author to kill the other – because, according to Lipps, they have both advocated “one such theory,” while in reality one cannot be held responsible for what another has written. He thus says on p. 39 (cf. 38): “Where is the factor that matters for the theory” … a factor that the cited author may not have even pursued at all. Lipps can allow himself longer, verbatim quotes, taken from anonymous sinners and detached from their context (p. 36, 39, etc.), quotes that would require a Herculean task to find in the literature.188 This peculiar form of polemic joins a dogmatic and absolutist way of expression with a petit bourgeois, moralistic viewpoint. A small bouquet will suffice: “There is a gradation of what should be” (24) – “There is no [higher] duty” (25) – “There is a requirement valid for the tragedy” – “There is nothing more beautiful and sublime” (71) – “the unworthy” – “despicable” – “one may 186 What the poet needs is “knowledge of the world and what is possible in it” (p. 11). It is indicated later that by knowledge Lipps means his own interpretation. 187 After this was written, I found one such protesting writer, namely V. Valentin in Zeitschr. f. vergl. Lit. gesch. [Journal for Comparative Literary History] Neue Folge [New Series] V. 188 Wonderful is the ending p. 69 f.: “By overlooking this contrast –,” etc. It was so simple! So, they could not spare themselves useless pursuit of both Schiller and Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Hebbel, Hegel, Vischer and Volkelt!!

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disregard this” – “that deserves reproach” – “original wickedness” – “sinner” – “unrepentant” – “turn one’s back on or instruct the troublesome one,” etc. Furthermore, one finds huge mouthfuls of conceptual formations without any signs of definition – “good and evil,” “holy,” “guilt,” “just,” “the perfect moral will,” “may [the divine] pay no attention to [the good thing that is the best in people]?” (16), etc. The author appears with the pretense that he is going to end “the dispute concerning the tragedy.” And he intends this to be achieved by holding himself to the tragedy “as [it] is in itself,” to the value “that [it] has in itself” (6), “as it is” (29), “what it represents” (5), judging persons and actions “according to their own worth” (59), “just as it confronts us” (50), – in contrast to all the misguided with “their misunderstandings.” It has not for a moment dawned on the author that all theorists believe in conceiving of the tragedy “as it is” and that the dispute concerns precisely the question of “what” and “how it is” and how it should be interpreted. The author’s patent claim for discovering “the tragedy itself” will hardly be recognized. The ever so frequent use of “indeed,” “really,” “in fact,” “truly,” “truth and inner truth” (“truth” is something that must be proved, according to Lipps p. 24), “actually,” “rightly and by nature” does not help. Instead of ending the feud between the 100, the author has entered in as nr. 101. But now to the point. What does Lipps understand by tragedy? The term is widely used, as if no one can doubt what it means. “Let us look the tragedy directly in the eye,” he says on p. 14, and the reader would be more willing if one only had a clue concerning what one should look in the eye. He only arrives at some kind of definition later, but some examples are given: Richard III, Macbeth, Antigone, Hamlet (Ophelia), King Lear (Cordelia), Emilia Galotti. Later Othello (Desdemona), Mary Stuart, Faust (Gretchen), Romeo and Juliet are mentioned. Different from the tragedy is “the serious drama” (66); as an example of such, however, Richard III is mentioned again, as well as Goethe’s Iphigenia. Lipps does not recognize several types of drama in this writing, and one therefore misses information concerning where he would stand on a wide range of plays that tradition calls tragedies, but which fit neither in the “tragedy” category nor in “serious drama”: Schiller/Hebbel’s Demetrius, Shakespeare’s history plays, Schiller’s Wallenstein, Grillparzer’s Ahnfrau [Ancestress], Otto Ludwig’s Erbförster [Hereditary Forester], Hebbel’s Judith, Strindberg in general, and several plays by Ibsen (Solness,a Rubekb), and many others. This circumstance limits the applicability of the author’s considerations. One then a Protagonist in The Master Builder. b Protagonist in When We Dead Awaken.

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has to ask oneself how his results relate to the plays upon which they are built. We will first present his theses as succinctly as possible. According to Lipps, the tragedy is a variant of the tragic work of art, namely the dramatic variation (p. 13, 50, 51). What determines “the work of art” is not said, but it has “only beauty for its purpose” (p. 42), what one can with the same right say about a vain woman. The author, however, explains in detail what it is that, not in his opinion, but objectively, “really,” “actually,” “truly,” and “in fact” makes the work of art tragic, makes the works of art cited, for example, tragic. And thus, Lipps without further ado assumes that the view applies to “the tragedy” absolutely, something that is of course important if “the tragedy” is determined by the view. But in that case a large part of what is traditionally called tragic poetry is excluded, and this certainly has not been the author’s intention. The claim that a number of “tragedies” are excluded can only be justified later when the author’s point of view is clear. What makes the work of art tragic according to Lipps is the characteristic that it gives tragic “pleasure.” What then is tragic pleasure? In the course of the consideration there are several different answers that the author on the last two pages of the book brings together, but he fails to create any actual synthesis. First, he declares categorically on page 41: “… in the tragedy, as with anything tragic, the suffering that exists and is felt by us is the reason [italics added] for our pleasure.” Consistent with this, p. 45: “In fact, pity is the sensation that arises in the view of every tragic object.” (Here one is rightly in doubt as to whether the “tragic object” is determined by “pity” or vice versa.) “The only question is whether pity is sufficient for identifying every tragic sensation [= pleasure?], including the highest kind.” Excellent, but then one does not say “the sensation,” but “one of the sensations” or the like. The passage also shows that Lipps expects several, lower and higher kinds of “tragic sensation.” It turns out that what he is referring to here is the distinction between non-dramatic and dramatic tragedy, which comes later. The fact that “pity” is not only insufficient, but can even be completely removed from consideration, is seen on p. 59: “… the non-egoistic [also called moral] Schadenfreude we acknowledged … is not only involved [in the pleasure of the tragedy], but it is the essence of the pleasure.” Most people feel that Schadenfreude is almost the opposite of pity, and so it is also described by Lipps on p. 55 ff. In terms of pity, no distinction has been made between egoistic and non-egoistic Schadenfreude. On the other hand, it seems incompatible with the concept of Schadenfreude when he says on p. 55: “… this here, as elsewhere, means that suffering is pleasurable, that in the suffering something positively valuable comes into play in

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the personality, [namely] the voice of conscience and truth.” But this pleasure should be even stronger when the personality does not even need the reminder of suffering. Here too the author makes no disclaimers but expresses himself in general terms, speaking of “the essence of pleasure by the tragedy.” One would therefore think he had a bit of a shock when he came to such plays as Othello (Desdemona) and Antigone, where all talk of Schadenfreude must be pure savagery. But Lipps is not discouraged; he simply makes a new “genre of tragedy” without Schadenfreude (p. 63). “We could then distinguish between tragedies of the bada and tragedies of the evil,b and contrast them as the two main genres of the tragedy.” (It does not have to be understood as such, it is stated immediately below, that one distinguishes between “tragedies of the bad” and “tragedies of the evil” and places them opposite each other as the two main kinds of tragedy. It may be understood quite differently, that is, such that in the same tragedy both external evils and bad conscience can occur.) The two kinds of tragedy have this essential commonality: “The basic theme is one and the same for all of them. It is the power, namely the inner power of the good.” So, we must find out what is hiding beneath this designation. And this is not at all a simple matter. In non-dramatic tragedy, it involves “the value of personality”; in the Laocoön Group (p. 47), which is tragic according to p. 48, one enjoys “the power and virtue of personality,” as it comes “to fruition in this fight against suffering.” (It is astonishing that the word “personality” is used in connection with a basic physical battle against snakes.) It is different with dramatic tragedy (p. 50, 51, 75), which provides “tragic sensation” at a higher grade, and in which the tragic “figure” becomes “whole” (p. 50). Is the tragic pleasure as we have now come to know it only pity? … What is certain is that we are far removed from what we initially identified at the time. For us, pity was the painfully joyful awareness of the value of a living being who suffers,189 the in the highest degree moral value that a suffering person, apart from the specifics, gains by virtue of the fact that in one the good proves to be the inwardly victorious power.190 a des Übels (Ger.). b des Bösen (Ger.). 189 The plant is alive compared to the stone (p. 3 and 48), but lifeless compared to the human (p. 44). The stone is “nature solidified by deprivation of heat” (!) 190 Why one cannot enjoy “moral value” by non-dramatic tragedy, and why dramatic tragedy can not only show “human value” – remains a mystery. If the suffering comes first (i.e., without being prompted by any “significant willing and acting” p. 51) and it turns out to awaken the dormant (e.g., “moral”) qualifications of the protagonist, then the schema on p. 78 is completely covered, and why is it not complete tragedy?

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If there is to be meaning in this sentence, then “the good” here must be conceived as “the morally good,” thus as a moral (i.e., social-moral) value. By moral value both ethicists and most people understand the will to realize a moral ideal contrary to competing impulses. This is how Lipps must also be read in the antithetical interpretation of p. 18: “But the evil is only within the interior of the personality as is the good will.” And p. 69: “[In the tragedy] the good, I mean the personal or [?] morally good, is … the object of pleasure.” Likewise, p. 70: “[The whole meaning of the conflict in the tragedy rests on] the direct visualization of something morally beautiful through its presence and the suffering that arises from it.” One must further assume that “the moral world order, the idea, the right” on p. 61 cover the same notion. “Morally good” is thus equivalent to “morally beautiful,” just as the work of art only had “beauty for its purpose.” Yet, they are called on p. 71 “the beautiful and good”; here one also finds “more beautiful and more sublime,” an expression that has also appeared before, and seems half as synonym, half as something different from “beauty.” That the “sublime” is not always “moral” is evident from p. 42, where the “morally sublime” stands as a compound that is not otherwise necessary. The bit of uneasiness that is awakened in the reader by this random use of words continues on p. 42 to the first stage of confusion. Here it is stated: The strength and the enormous measure of moral passion [!] in Antigone pleases, as does Richard III’s outrageous defiance, insofar as there is extraordinary power of human will and ability, enormous energy for the activity of a personality; it has value, aesthetic and, if one does not take the word moral as unreasonably [?] narrow, moral value. What makes him despicable to us is not this power, but that it is not contained and placed in service of impulses and passions of a higher, more human kind. The beauty and sublimity of this power as such are therefore not eliminated.

For ethicists and most people, the moral quality of “the activity of a personality” lies precisely in the fact that it is “contained and in the service” of higher cultural considerations. To use the word “moral” in connection with pure operation, the wholly unprocessed force, belongs nowhere in the ethical tradition, is without any comprehensible meaning, and gives rise to an unhelpful mess in the related notions. (“This only proves the confusing power of the once established theory” (72) – here the mania for the term moral is one of life and death and will use it even when it has nothing to do.) One is tempted to ask if Lipps knows any aesthetic values that are not “moral.” The bag called “the inner power of the good” is thus already ripped, and it is only for the sake of completeness that we will still look at some sharp corners

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protruding through the burlap. That “moral” is not the same as “good” is stated on p. 52: “Good” is not the individual wanting to carry out an action as such, especially not acting in and of itself, but both are good, provided that a good motive is underlying, a good of the mind, of character, concisely based on personality. (cf. p. 20)

And there is no such thing in Richard III; he is thus “moral” without being “good” (cf. p. 66) – But then in this case it is firmly established that both are “good,” provided a good motive, etc., is underlying. No, unfortunately; on p. 24 one is tilted again: “A content of my will may be good in itself [?], but if it contradicts a higher moral purpose, then my will is bad.” “Moral” is equal to “non-egoistic” on p. 55, “unegoistic” on p. 60. But Laocoön has “a right” to fight for life (50), and that he hangs on to life is “neither indifferent nor blameworthy, but beautiful [!].”191 And Antigone even has her “good right” (there are therefore degrees) to believe in (?) life (49). Even pain is “justified” on p. 40 and 49. Romeo’s love is “noble passion” and brings “noble pain” (and there is no qualification concerning Juliet), but Gretchen’s devotion to Faust is “evil” and evokes “moral” Schadenfreude in Lipps (64 f.). One would consider such an “activity of the personality” as “natural.” And what is “natural for all of us” is, according to p. 41, “well-justified thereby.” Even “the striving for an increase in the feeling of one’s own ability and power is natural and [thereby?] well-justified for every person.” (The meaning itself is unclear. As I understand Lipps’ ethics, this striving is justified, that is, it can freely unfold if it does not clash with a higher moral purpose. But if it does not clash, then it does not need “justification” to unfold itself, because then it is ethically irrelevant.) “Confidence, trust in one’s own power, is good” on p. 22. “Value” is different from “moral value” on p. 75. “Moderation is the highest virtue for everyday people,” but not for the tragic hero; if an aesthetician (Goethe?) blames the hero for a lack of “moderation,” one is confused in one’s theory (p. 71 f., cf. p. 23 f.). Yet it is precisely the lack of “moderation” that is “the bad” in Macbeth and Richard III – what else is meant by “contained” on p. 42? And what is it that “the absolutely perfect will” on p. 17 demands of us, if it is not “moderation”? And what does “the inner victory of the good” consist in, if not in this, that the protagonist realizes the necessity of “moderation”? It is probably Lipps who is confused in his theory here. The mixing of the “moral” and 191 Cf p. 42: Schön [beautiful] is opposite verabscheuungswert [detestable]. Lucrezia Borgia must, according to tradition, have been both beautiful and “detestable.”

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the “aesthetic” has led him into the dilemma that “moderation” is dramatically unusable, while at the same time it undoubtedly has “moral value.” We can no longer dwell on details that concern this point. In conclusion, it should be noted that while the author on p. 42 and elsewhere, as we have seen, forces purely “aesthetic” phenomena into the category of the “moral,” it is also “aesthetic” (e.g., that I refrain from cheating the state on tax?). Thus, the author succeeds in establishing complete chaos on this point. But perhaps everything becomes clearer when we turn to “ ‘the power, namely the inner power’ of the good,” p. 63, and others. With the greatest caution, the thought is expressed on p. 69: “[Tragedy] is about the existence of the good …” This restraint is probably due to Richard III’s dangerous proximity; the author does not dare to go beyond “comes into play” on p. 68. But as soon as Richard III is out of the way, Lipps becomes braver, and now it is constantly called “the inner power of the good” (55, 60, 61, 62, 78). At last the misgivings disappear completely, and Lipps takes possession of his desired goal: “the victory of the good” (72, 75). “A wonderful achievement!” one exclaims with p. 4. Where there is clearly no “victory” present, for example, in Richard III, the author consoles himself that “the good is still able to win the victory in such a personality” p. 67. (“It is bad when a theory alien to art, a world or life conception, such as the ‘philosopher’ has gained from contemplating reality or has dreamed of in one’s leisure hours, is slipped into the work of art and this is made the means to proclaim or confirm that view of the world or of life!” (p. 2).) Now there can hardly be any doubt that many an idyll and many a course which Lipps would not call tragic (one thinks, for example, of a long life in the service of “the good,” where the persistent renunciation, despite its capacity for admirable achievement, nevertheless does not reach the intensity of suffering), that such a course would, to a much greater degree than Macbeth and Richard III, give us the impression of “the power of the good in a personality” (78). This objection has not been prevented by Lipps in his formulations, but he has somehow passed it by. For the power of the good is only allowed to appear in connection with “suffering.” We have no interest in any other goodness. Why not? Lipps answers here with one of the book’s most peculiar “truths.” Its most forceful expression is found on p. 48: Suffering, we believe, allows the personality to be revealed. So also does joy, exultation, laughter. “Tell me what you are laughing at and I will tell you who you are.” But pain does it more than all of this [?]. Nothing allows you to look so deeply into the

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core of the personality, into the core of your being [?], as the sensation of pain, just as we cut into the plant, perhaps even destroy it, to see its innermost life [?].

Somewhat more clearly it is stated on p. 43: The infliction of pain is injury, violation, in short, negation of life [doctor’s intervention?]; but the same sensation is [?] the reaction of the living to the injury and violation, that is, the activity of life, the revelation of life. In the strength and nature of this reaction is shown the strength and nature of the injured life. The more intense, more varied, and finer this reaction, that is [??], the sensation of pain in a being, the more energetic, richer, and more delicate a life is revealed in it.

As the thesis is expressed here, it seems almost superfluous to object to it. Just a few key points should be mentioned; otherwise, reference is made to § 19 of this work and what is cited there. First, it would be unnecessary to a professional psychologist to recall that “sensation” and “reaction” are not one and the same, and that the reaction to the one and the same “sensation” varies with the different times of the day. Second, the same “reaction” may be the result of highly different “sensations” in people of very different “moral worth.” Furthermore, everyone knows from their own experience that many people need adversity in order for their most valuable sides to come to fruition. In The Pretenders,a Lady Ragnhild says of Skule: “He must have the power. Everything good in him will grow and flourish; he will have it.” One also knows that suffering, for example, poverty, has a marked ability to kill the culturally valuable in a human being and at the same time nurture one’s worst tendencies. What would Lipps call a drama where such a development took place? After all, his own Gretchen is driven by suffering to infanticide! The reference to the plant being dissected cannot possibly have any illustrative value regarding someone’s personality; quite simply, “the psychology of suffering” is not enough. If the plant must be included, the nearest inference is that if the plant is damaged during growth, there will be neither flower nor fruit, a result that is the opposite of what should be documented. The thesis is presented boldly, with no sign of reservation: “Nothing allows you to look so deeply into the core of the personality as the sensation of pain” – what endless hours Lipps’ dentist must have experienced! The idea is, as stated on p. 73, “poorly expressed or empty enthusiasm.” Afterward come the misgivings; “can be revealed” on p. 46. A reservation appears on p. 48: “… it is essential, what the sensation of pain awakens.” However, this reservation, especially as exploited by Lipps, a Play by Ibsen.

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is far from sufficient to give the claim durability; there must be quite different forceful prunings, which we shall immediately see. In addition, Lipps has hurt himself in several places by expressing himself contrary to the thesis: Laocoön’s physical power, which appears in the battle with the snakes, says nothing at all about “the core of the personality,” that which has preserved his name in history, namely his love of the fatherland. Antigone shows noble passion before she is afflicted by any suffering; afterward she is just “young and hopeful” (49). “After this, noble striving vanishes …” (51), the noble pursuit has thus already been witnessed when the suffering comes. On p. 66 appears the “shining light” of Richmond, who was glorified by his victory over Richard III. This is just the dark backdrop against which Richmond himself “stands out more brightly,” thus, without trace of pain where Richmond is concerned. Nor is it the suffering that usually awakens a person’s qualifications to the highest activity, but (when conditions are otherwise present) the danger, the risk, the stress, the task. A fighter can display one’s highest art in the fight against an equal opponent, and the fight will have been a feast for both of them. When one is wounded, one suffers, and one’s fighting ability is reduced or removed. Also, the stress must be of the kind such that it gives the individual the opportunity to show one’s strength, such that one engages one’s “master faculty,” of whatever it may consist. The orator in front of a hostile gathering, but not at sea; the sailor at sea, but not at the podium. If it really did happen that the suffering allowed us to enjoy “the power of the good in a personality,” then the addition on p. 79 was not necessary: “as it comes to light in suffering.” Still, Lipps has touched on an important matter in “the tragedy.” One can agree with him in that loss and destruction of values bring (or better: are capable of bringing) these values more clearly to one’s awareness and coat one’s relationship with them with a stronger emotional emphasis. But it does not have to go this way. In Grillparzer’s Jüdin von Toledo [Jewess of Toledo], the king’s weakness toward the Jewess is gone the moment he sees her as equal. But if the thesis thus cannot be said to apply universally, then it could be that it occurs in plays Lipps has cited as examples, first and foremost Antigone, Romeo, Macbeth, Othello, and Faust. In these plays it does happen that because of the suffering an “inner power of the good” appears, but is it the appearance of this power that gives the plays “aesthetic” value? The power appears in various ways, it is stated on p. 63. In Antigone, “… the power of the good in the face of suffering proves itself”; in Romeo, “it shows itself in suffering.” In Macbeth, “ultimately it only becomes effective in

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suffering.” Antigone and Romeo are called “fate tragedies” or “tragedies of the bad,” while Macbeth is called a “character tragedy” or a “tragedy of the evil.” The distinction implies, among other things, that both “the suffering” and “the inner power of the good” have two completely different meanings. In “tragedies of the evil,” “the good” and “the suffering” are identical, namely “the voice of conscience under truth” (55, 61). The protagonist is “punished” (53) for one’s crimes with – “the good.” The formula, which will tie the various plays together into the category of tragedy, is thus rather thin. As far as Antigone is concerned, I do not understand the meaning of “the power of the good” (“the noble passion”) “proves itself.” After all, it has already realized itself in an act that no longer stands to change. And it cannot be this relationship to which Lipps refers with “proves itself,” for in that case he comes into conflict with p. 68 f. Here a distinction is made between “tragedy” and “serious drama” (as if the tragedy is not a serious drama!) in the following manner (a distinction Lipps is forced to make because Richard III did not fit the schema of tragedy): “In the tragedy … the good is … in itself the object of enjoyment, while here (in the serious drama) it is the good with regard to the realization of its purpose.” That there really is a contradiction here seems to be evident from p. 49: “Antigone … has achieved her goal of fulfilling her brother’s duty of love,” cf. p. 53. Here practically the same distinction is made between two types of tragedy. Also, about Emilia Galotti it is said that she “accomplishes what she wants,” p. 23. The same goes for Mary Stuart, but while Antigone’s and Emilia Galotti’s “will and action are good, Mary’s are bad.” Consequently (!), the first two are fate tragedies, while Mary Stuart is a character tragedy. (In Le Cid, there is no “bad will,” but is there anyone besides Lipps who would for that reason call the play a fate tragedy as opposed to a character tragedy?) The necessity of such strange distinctions goes away if the concepts of external and internal power are introduced. “In Romeo, it [the inner power of the good = the erotic love] shows itself in suffering.” Certainly, but it had indeed also proved itself very powerful before any suffering came (the banishment? the announcement concerning Juliet’s death?), so that the suffering may well be said to confirm, but not to deepen our impression of Romeo’s love. We encounter it at the party, the garden scene, Romeo with Laurence, Juliet’s impatience, the wedding night at sunrise, Juliet with Laurence – we have heard that both are ready for death rather than giving up the other, and we believe them. But Lipps has not had enough yet; like a worse Thomas, he wants to see blood before he believes. But the suicides say

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more about the affective power of the moment, nourished as it is by all kinds of unsettling events, such that the lovers are no more accountable at the moment of action, than about love’s ability to exist and be a building force in a long life. And with an association from Love’s Comedya one would rather place “the inner power of the good,” “the moral beauty,” etc., in connection with Guldstad’s than with Falk’s love. It is the poetically rapturous, but perfectly amoral in Romeo and Juliet’s love that is so strongly highlighted by the suicides, far more powerfully than by a golden wedding scene where Juliet thanks Romeo for enduring with her by virtue of “the inner power of the good.” This power celebrated a greater triumph in such a scene, but the audience had barely arrived. Nor in Desdemona (p. 46) can I see how there is some “inner power of the good” that overcomes “the evil.” (“In this vagueness, the question must be rejected” (69).) In what consists “the good” in Desdemona? In her gentle nature? In the intercession for Cassio? In the love of Othello? It is important to have this clarified. Is not everything together “good”? She probably suspects that there is something “bad” approaching, but she does not know what it is until her husband is strangling her. Then she professes her innocence and pleads for her life – what else could she do? Cries for help and physical defense are equally futile. Where is it then that Lipps finds something reasonably covered by the words “exercising the power of the good against the bad”? Is not Desdemona supposed to demonstrate “tragedy of the bad”? But perhaps it turns out better with “tragedies of the evil”: “In Macbeth, it [the inner power of the good] only becomes effective in suffering” (69). Concerning Macbeth’s “good sides,” Shakespeare, and most readers with him, thought highly of Macbeth’s bravery and loyalty before the betrayal, qualities the king rewarded by appointing him as Thane of Cawdor in the traitor’s place. At that time, “the good of his disposition toward effectiveness” appeared, namely against Duncan’s enemies, against “the bad,” thus it was not necessary to make him a traitor first so that he might then eventually admit in remorse the value of loyalty to the king. Lipps concedes that Macbeth is not afflicted with “original wickedness” (?) (p. 72), but the special position as good vassal the poet assigns to him in the first act has, for Lipps, only the task of explaining why Macbeth later has a bad conscience. Shakespeare’s meaning, as I understand the text, is this: Even such a good man can succumb to the demon of ambition. Thus, it is not the “evil” that is used to highlight the “good,” but

a Play by Ibsen.

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the “good” that is used to highlight the “evil” and give it dimension. In this view, Macbeth is instead a work about the powerlessness of the good. What else does Lipps understand by “power”? Can the term be used at all in a sense other than this: force to push an inclination through resistance? This concerns an internal resistance, “an evil passion,” that is, “an inner power of the evil.” “The evil is only within the personality as its evil will” (p. 18) (“passion” = “will”?). The “good” is to be found in the motives; thus, the “good” in Macbeth’s motives must have power over the “evil.” This, according to the only known linguistic usage in Germany as well as in Norway, can mean only one thing, that the “good” motive prevails, forces the “evil” aside and pushes itself through in action. However, this action does not have to be successful in the external world.192 At the least, the good motive must assert itself so strongly that a conflict arises, a blockade of action in the divided mind. If the good motive cannot do this, then it is powerless against the evil motives. Any other interpretation is sophistry at best. Now, we know that elsewhere in the book by “the good” Lipps means Macbeth’s “bad conscience,” “the voice of conscience and truth.” But first of all, there is nothing in Macbeth about “conscience,” only about fear of ghosts and fear of revenge. However, we let this question go and agree ad hoc that the ghosts are created by bad conscience. Then – secondly – this conscience would have made a far stronger impression if Macbeth had voluntarily abandoned his unjustly won power, done penance, and taken his punishment. If it had been the poet’s intention (“the tragedy will –”) to let us enjoy the “existence” of the conscience, then he could have let us experience what it would have cost Macbeth to take such a step. Lipps is undoubtedly one of those who claim that victory over oneself is the greatest victory one can win. Instead, the exact opposite happens. How does the author manage this? On p. 60 and 62, he describes what, in his opinion, takes place in plays “of the same kind” (63) as Macbeth and Richard III. In the plays, none of the protagonists “acknowledge and bow to the power of the good.” “Tragic protagonists,” it is stated on p. 23, “do not bow to such power, i.e., the power of fate.” And it is precisely this “fate” that according to p. 66 “brings the good in them to victory.” On p. 23 Lipps had a polemical use for the protagonist not having to bow down to “the victorious omnipotence of the idea.” But now, p. 60 and 62, it is about his own “idea,” 192 Nor by this would one understand external success as “success of the good” (69). For it is not the motive that then has success, but the amoral, technical effort that serves the motive, the effectiveness of which is without necessary connection to the moral quality of the motive.

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“the inner power of the good,” and now the protagonist has to bow oneself. Lipps therefore creates a remarkable combination of acknowledging and not acknowledging. Finally, it is also essential here that the one who is forced to acknowledge moral demands [which?], this one resists them with all one’s might and perhaps resists them until the very end. The more one resists, the more the inner power of the good becomes apparent in this compulsion [which?] to acknowledge.

The most tragic characters are (62) the protagonists of evil passion, those who give everything to their passion and finally grudgingly acknowledge the moral world order [which?], but still acknowledge it. Only where the evil is tremendous does it need tremendous moral193 power to break it, only when it dominates the whole person [= the will on p. 18 and 53? = the evil passion on p. 61 and others?], such that one cannot live without the realization of the evil will; the moral power [i.e.?], which nevertheless gains acknowledgment [i.e.?], is shown in its full dimensions.194

“But then the evil will has to try to assert itself until the end. The protagonist will fight and go down fighting.” Nevertheless, one fights – “at last in vain.”195 Where Lipps intends to find this “acknowledgment” in Macbeth and Richard III, the two plays he has particularly had in mind, is a mystery to me. I have read through the plays with the strongest determination to trace even the slightest hint of such acknowledgment, to Macbeth “punishing himself 193 Macbeth asks only about weapons. 194 It is to be noted that when Lipps demands dimensions in wickedness, it is one and only for the power of good to become a worthy adversary (a view which, however, is destroyed on p. 67). There is not for a moment any pure poetic enjoyment of the magnificent, the almost paralyzing in Richard III’s behavior. Lipps therefore contradicts the usual conception of the final scene in plays such as Richard III and Macbeth. The contempt for death, the heroism, or whatever one would call what the protagonist exhibits in extreme rebus, is indeed experienced by most, both theorists and laymen, as something poetically valuable. The protagonists, however, were whole in their characters and journeys; a death like this makes the ending sublime. At the same time, it casts a poetically redeeming glow over the path they took, giving them a kind of poetic right to walk it. For Lipps, such an attitude in the downfall is just a final blow, a last in vain (?) attempt to stifle “the voice of the good” which, according to the author, shouts ever louder in them; they are “stubborn” (p. 54). Such a conception may be described as more theological than dramatic; it asks more about the needs of faith than about its conditions in experience. 195 It is against the enemy’s weapons that one fights in vain, not against “the voice of conscience.” This confusion becomes fatal for Lipps’ theory.

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internally” (54), but without result. His turmoil concerns only the visitation of the ghost (from which he can expect revenge), the possibility of an attack, and the loss of the crown. Not with a syllable are “moral” considerations of the kind Lipps must be assumed to have in mind mentioned or revealed. (Definitions are completely lacking, but the ideology points to Christianity.) Richard III has a bad night before the battle in the fifth act, and it is true that he feels lonely and abandoned and in form calls himself a villain, perjurer, and murderer. But these scruples are not of a “moral” nature in Lipps’ sense, or expressions of “a power of the good.” Richard does not regret that he has been “evil,” but that he has been stupid. What bothers him is only the betrayal and the prospect of defeat and death. With a victory, all the scruples would have been gone, and the king would have devoted himself to the refinements of revenge. With p. 14 one inevitably thinks: “This assertion forces the proponent of our theory to seek ‘acknowledgment of the inner power of the good’ everywhere among the tragic protagonists. Everywhere one succeeds in finding something that one believes one can give these names to.” And in the memory of p. 10: One goes to the theater to rejoice in one’s happily won view. If the play is shown to correspond to it, or can be interpreted in such a way that it seems to match it, then one is happy … One is looking for the solution in something about which the aesthetician may know a lot, but the work of art knows nothing. (70)

I wonder if the visions and fears that haunt Macbeth are necessary to make him more lifelike – a trait Lipps’ also demands of the protagonist on p. 8, 11, 34. A person who committed Macbeth’s actions without any signs of scruples or hangover would hardly have been dramatically digestible. And what is it about “the tremendous moral power” that must “come into effect” facing so great an evil? The most delicate conscience is probably the one that would arise with crippling effect at the first shadow of a doubt about the moral quality of a motive. Even a minimum of “conscience” of the crudest kind (here social-moral interest), indeed only a fairly normal “nervous system,” would have to begin then to move toward such measures as Macbeth and Richard III find necessary. But when merely the faintest sign of anxiety is traceable behind the bloodthirst of the traitor, king killer, or family exterminator, indeed, even though the anxiety is only about the undisturbed enjoyment of the fruits of the crime, Lipps triumphantly rushes to: Ladies and Gentlemen, “we have now enjoyed the deepest and purest impression of the power of the good in a personality!” (79) Indeed, it cannot speak well of “the power of the good” if in this way it must be excavated with lantern and fine-tooth comb. If this theory

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were sound, Schiller would have struggled for years with historical studies and used ten acts and a massive prologue to give us the pleasure of Wallenstein’s misgivings. For these are what will show “the inner power of the good,” even if they are not induced by any “suffering”? “The suffering” in Wallenstein is first and foremost the murder, which unfortunately only puts an end to “the voice of conscience and the truth.” Wallenstein’s hesitation is probably “good,” but is Hamlet’s hesitation “good” or “evil”? The variety of peculiarities in this nice piece of work is still far from finished. There is Lady Macbeth (72), “the real devil,” in whom the good cannot prevail, but who nevertheless takes her life under the nervous pressure of the deed. She fits Lipps’ schema far better than her husband, but tragic protagonist she is not. Macbeth himself qualifies the play unequivocally as a “serious drama” (66) and not as a tragedy (see below), but Lipps has presumably turned his back on this self-evident consequence that is in conflict with the aesthetic and literary-historical tradition. Why is the consideration on p. 67 not applicable to Macbeth as well? And there is Richard III, who is a tragic protagonist, though on p. 66 he is described in contradiction to the reasoning of the rest. In general, there is the unclear distinction between the “mourning play”a and the “serious play”b on p. 66; “Activity of the good” is attached to the “serious play” on p. 69 but to the tragedyc on p. 79, etc. And why render tragedyd as mourning playe when the enjoyment is due to “moral” Schadenfreude or “victory of the good”? What is there then to ultimately mourn? As an example of a “serious play,” Goethe’s Iphigenia is mentioned (68). On this occasion, it is stated immediately after: “[The] victory of the good then serves again to turn evil fate, namely that which evolved or threatened to grow out of evil will, to the good.” But in Goethe’s play the relationship is the exact opposite; it is Iphigenia’s “good will,” namely her truthfulness, which leads to “evil fate,” while, on the other hand, the lie seems to be able to save all three of them. The “evil will” threatened no other evil besides a possible bad conscience; can it be that the author is aiming at “evil fate” that grows out of “evil will”? The interpretation is possible after p. 18: “The evil is only within the personality as its evil will.” In this case

a b c d e

Trauerspiel (Ger.). Ernstes Schauspiel (Ger.). tragedien (Nor.). Tragödie (Ger.). Trauerspiel (Ger.).

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the result is unlimited confusion; among other things, the whole distinction between “fate tragedy” and “character tragedy,” p. 63 f., collapses. Furthermore, we have the unfounded thesis on p. 65 that the person whose “evil will” forges the “fate” of the protagonist in a “tragedy of the evil” “cannot help but” be a completely tragic protagonist. A glance at Iago shows that the claim does not apply. The consequence of the statement is that if a person by “evil will” causes a misfortune to one’s neighbor, then one becomes tragic or not tragic because the neighbor, in his or her suffering, reveals the “inner power of the good” or not. In Iago, one must enjoy “the victory of the good over the evil,” a joy that Lipps has so far not had the need to share with anyone else. So, it is “the wherefore of the suffering” (51), the cause, as we would say, namely, “a meaningful will and action fulfilling the whole personality of the protagonist [= the will?].” There is no such thing in Othello (73), whose suffering is due to Iago’s revenge, which in turn is due to Cassio’s appointment, and partly to unfounded suspicion. Nor is there in Desdemona, Ophelia, and others. Furthermore, the author requires the physical death of the protagonist (33, 39, 76 f.) and provides excellent arguments on p. 76 f., but Creon does not die, nor does Hebbel’s Judith, nor many others who are undoubtedly tragic protagonists according to Lipps. And how could it lead to “endlessness of suffering” (77) if Antigone was going to be rescued after Creon had repented (Østbye p. 226)? Lipps practically does not touch on a single question without the result being guesswork, muddle, and contradictions. As an example, I mention the concept of “punishment.” It plays a key role in the system, but appears in shifting meaning, sometimes with, sometimes without quotation marks. The definition is found on p. 18, 32, 53, 54: The only phenomenon that merits the name of punishment is the acknowledgment of sin and the bad conscience. Through it the evil will in a person is struck and broken down as one becomes aware of “the moral superiority of the will that imposes the punishment” (18). What “will” is it then that “imposes” the bad conscience. The author must nevertheless mean the external evil, which the jurists (but also Lipps p. 18 and 54) mistakenly call punishment. This evil, which is actually a harm that is “useless and offends our feelings” (53), comes from “fate, which knocks down the evil” (sic – not “the evil in people”) “and brings the good in one to victory” (66), and thus represents “a will with moral superiority.” But no, “fate” is in fact “blind” (p. 12, 32, 74). Where should one look for “the perfect moral will” as described on p. 17 and which is not to be found in people,

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neither in the sinner nor the avenger, but nevertheless feels both “anger” and “hatred”? As Lipps presents it, it must be found in someone in the air or the like (Hamsun). The distribution of bad and good conscience “will most certainly always be done according to ‘merit.’ ” (32) If the statement has any meaning, it must be that if one does “the good in itself,” one gets a good conscience, and if one does “the evil in itself,” one gets a bad conscience – a meaning which is confirmed on p. 32 f. But unfortunately, this is in advance beaten to pieces and together on p. 12, where it is stated: “The best feel with deep, perhaps devastating pain what the evil, the superficial, the morally dull look at with indifference or with a shrug of the shoulders.” And the worst offender, the one who is “obstinate” (54), has no conscience at all. (The external evil should therefore be able to be conserved where this person is concerned!) What then has actually been said? And how can it ever make sense to talk about “just” and “unjust” punishment, as Lipps does on p. 33 and 72, if the punishment consists in bad conscience? And finally, if the “real” suffering in “tragedies of the evil” consists in bad conscience (61) (albeit different from p. 55!), and it is this conscience we enjoy in the tragedy (55), then it must be better evoked by a skillful preaching of repentance than by “useless harm.” And then “the character tragedy” has, according to Lipps, become identical to the sunshine story. A few more examples will be briefly given, showing the author’s method of operation. As an aesthetician, Lipps establishes “an absolute and infinite chasm” between the work of art and practical life, between the enjoyment of art and the other functions of human nature (5, 6, 25, 27, 59, and others). But the author himself discovers that this extreme point of view cannot be maintained; he does not admit this openly, but in silence he builds bridges over the absolute and infinite chasm; one finds them on p. 8, 13, 34, 74, and others. Both the practical world’s experiential course and our practical-moral assessment of it are used as measures of the work of art. The psychologist Lipps has already amazed us by his mixing together of “will,” “personality,” and “passion.” But things gradually get worse: “Man” (17), “the whole man” (17), “the being” (52), “the whole being” (17), “the individual” (46), “the nature” (46), “the person” (17), “the personality” (51), “the interior of the personality” (18), “the essence of the personality” (47), “the core of the essence of the personality” (48), “the character,” “the attitude,” etc. – how all these concepts relate to each other is not mentioned with a single word. And what is there to say about “ambition” as opposed to “original wickedness” (72), about “noble passion with evil will” (64), and “evil passion with a justified root”

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(72)? Would not the matter be simplified significantly without losing anything by introducing the concept of interest? One gets the impression of the systematizer by comparing p. 29 with p. 75. On p. 29 it is said about Creon: “Where in the tragedy does Creon’s imperative appear as an outflow of his moral law? Creon himself realizes that he was wrong.” (Definitely not, but he is frightened by Tiresias, Østbye p. 225.) “Thus, he accuses himself.” (No, but he regrets his stubbornness because it has caused a misfortune for himself, Østbye p. 231 ff.) “He does not invoke the law of the state …” (Yes, not specifically, Østbye p. 190.) “… he has acted as a wrongdoer toward justice and morality.” Here it was a matter of defeating “the theory of the moral world order.” But on p. 75 it is a matter of bringing in something that can “reconcile us to the suffering of the protagonist,” namely the counterpower’s “relative right.” And then Creon becomes a different protagonist: “… From his point of view, Creon’s rage against Antigone seems to a certain extent to be justified ….” One could continue like this page after page. But I would like to end the treatment of Lipps with an objection to the theory as a whole, and it is therefore best to leave the details behind. Many writers, and I myself with them, see in the tragic neither the protagonist’s value in itself (like Lipps) nor one’s fate in itself (this opinion is also found in Lipps on p. 44), but in the disproportion between human dignity and its conditions that manifests itself in a given course. Thus, in the tragic they find something paradoxical, unreasonable, unjust, something that “shouldnot-be” (Volkelt). This disproportion has no independent place in Lipps’ theory, indeed, scarcely a dependent one: In his “tragedies of the evil” there is no disproportion. Now, of course, Lipps was not required to give it any space if he thought it was irrelevant. But he does not think this at all; he just lets it disappear in silence along the way, lest it disturb the final idyll. But where he has use for it in his polemic against other writers, there it is good enough. It is called Antigone’s “heartbreaking lament [and] fear of death, bitter necessity of striving” on p. 9 when “the theory of resignation” must be opposed – “terrible fate, cruel and disgraceful death” on p. 16 toward “the theory of guilt.” Against “the theory of poetic justice,” Lipps even goes so far as to suggest a pessimistic view of life! Is there then really such justice in the world, is all guilt on Earth really punished? As far as we know, no. Guilty and innocent perish; the innocent and the guilty are preserved and rejoice in their existence. The best feel with deep, perhaps devastating

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on the tragic pain what the evil, the superficial, the morally dull look at with indifference or with a shrug of the shoulders.

The passage has been quoted before but can be repeated without harm. In fact, this is the only place in the book where Lipps brings up a tragic viewpoint in the sense of the present work. – “Chance causes my intentions to fail” (22), “[The moral world order] corresponds to the natural order of things, or it does not correspond to it” (24), … does it not add to the injustice if I “punish” a person excessively and then comfort one by telling one that one has a clear conscience? Did one not have a right simply because one had a clear conscience [according to?] not to recognize the punishment as such, but to dismiss it as undeserved fate? (31)

No doubt, according to the usual conception of “deserve.” But does Lipps not see the consequences? He feels safe here, for the reader cannot possibly believe that it is the author’s own theory that prods the horse forward. In “tragedies of the bad” the protagonist has a good conscience (31 and others), and the awareness of “the good will” is one’s only reward (32). But then it would indeed be natural for both the hero and the viewer to perceive the unfortunate fate as undeserved. In this context, the term “punishment” has no weight, as is also indicated by p. 33, where Lipps’ theory receives its first outline: On the other hand, we find ourselves on completely different ground as soon as it is praised as poetic justice that not only the evil in the torture of bad conscience receive their inner punishment, but also the good, in all the blows of fate, receive their inner reward in the consciousness of the good. In fact, it is the most decisive denial of poetic justice in the true and original sense of the word. If the consciousness of the good is a just reward, that is, it is justified [?], then it is certainly no longer meaningful to take the suffering that strikes the bearer of this consciousness as a deserved punishment. But if it is not deserved punishment, then it is undeserved fate, that is, an event in which no justice … is realized.

And the author can discover this without attaching to it the slightest significance? He stands among Ophelia, the drowned in insanity, Antigone, the self-hung in the burial chamber, Gretchen, the socially and mentally ruined, beheaded child killer, and Desdemona, the strangled, stab wound bleeding, and falls into “rapture” over the impression, because one must look long for four such sweet girls! (49) This is how Lipps’ “natural feeling” speaks, and if anyone refers to a “should-not-be” or the like, then it is “interference of ‘philosophical’

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reflection”! (The noble wine gets a slight piquant flavor by being served in skulls. Lipps is surely among those who dine after a tragic performance.) But in other contexts, the idea is sometimes promoted. On p. 41 the polemic is over, and henceforth we have Lipps’ own views. It is stated there: “All the more surely [we have pity] for the one we consider worthy of a better lot.” And on p. 46 (concerning Antigone, Gretchen, Ophelia, and Desdemona): “What would they be to us, in spite of their loveliness, if suffering did not make us aware of the kind of personality that is, in the existence of which fate interferes so cruelly, worthy of a totally different fate?” P. 74: “The randomness in the tragedy … blind and, for that very reason, obeying [?] the laws of chance or probability [?] is the fate … of life and tragedy.”196 The author grants Antigone a right “to believe in life” (49). What does this mean? And what does it mean that this “right” is violated, – that “ ‘the conflict’ remains unresolved” (70)? It is perhaps to prevent objections concerning this point that Lipps on p. 65 suddenly forsakes “the protagonist” about whom he has talked for the previous 24 pages and about whom he talks for the remaining 14, saying: It is not the protagonist that makes the tragedy; the meaning is not exclusively, but primarily embodied in him or her. One understands the work of art badly who only knows how to speak of the protagonist and at the same time does not understand the whole as a whole …

And with such an isolated utterance in a work that “only knows how to speak of the protagonist,”197 does Lipps believe he can acquire the neglected? That is to say that the protagonist’s conditions and fate have independent significance in “the tragedy” alongside his or her representative properties. The author is even clear that the protagonist’s “meaningful willing and acting” in the tragedy is a co-cause of the suffering (51, cf. 34, which is not true, according to Lipps, of such figures as Desdemona, Ophelia, and which excludes the receptive greatness Lipps depicts on p. 12) – and that this “meaningful willing and acting” can be both “good” and “evil.” He polemicizes against a “theory of the moral world order” (20 ff.), but the “theory of the non-moral, the amoral world order” is not mentioned. Indeed, it is stated on p. 20 at the bottom: “It is not the individual, but the imperfect reality that is to blame, if one, with one’s good will, perishes in this struggle.” But “the representative” (“the theory”) disappears in silence, and instead we get a new “so one means” that is the opposite. But during the 196 In the light of what Rötscher, Freytag, and Avonianus have written about “coincidence and necessity in the drama,” it is painful to read Lipps p. 73–74. 197 The counterpower is in fact also a tragic protagonist according to p. 65.

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dispute with other writers, Lipps has, at his own expense, provided pieces of such a theory, as shown above. All things considered, the author, according to his own presuppositions, is not allowed to exclude the importance of the protagonist’s conditions. It is true, as Lipps very strongly emphasizes, that evil fate sheds a more powerful light on the valuable in the protagonist, but the reverse is just as surely the case. And so, the small “shudder,” which Lipps arrives at in a completely unmediated way, expands on p. 75 (a thin bone he tossed at the last moment into the gap of his pursuers) into a “shudder” of a much deeper nature, namely a “shudder” at that world in which the protagonist and we all live, and at the thought of our prospects there. Lipps has no excuse for leaving out this cosmic or metaphysical factor. The defect appears most clearly where the author speaks of “the object of the suffering” – “the one under which the protagonist suffers” (p. 48 f.). In “tragedies of the evil” this is the bad conscience (while the external evil comes second [61]), and in “tragedies of the bad” the actual external evil, for example, “the prospect of death” for Antigone (p. 9, 49). But this is an evil that Antigone herself assesses very low (see Østbye’s transl., Kristiania 1924 p. 185, 187, 200), even though its affective impact is strong (Østbye p. 214 ff.). But there is another question, which is open for Antigone when she ends her life, and which causes her a fundamental unrest, which death as evil cannot produce (Østbye p. 218 f.). It is the question of the justice of the punishment she must suffer, justice in the eyes of both humans and God. She does not stop at death as the end, but at the fundamental question: Why am I suffering for a good deed? And although this qualification in the course is barely touched on by Sophocles (whose godliness did not allow such a problem to be left wide open at the end of the tragedy), it speaks all the more strongly to a modern reader. The fundamental evil is clearly also the most painful for Antigone, but in Goethe, in Iphigenia’s prayer to the gods, it comes out in clear words: “Save me / and save your image in my soul.” This boundless addition to the suffering, which in the view of the present work makes the suffering a tragic suffering, Lipps has not discovered at all. It does not help if “the evil passion” comes from the ever so justified “root” (72), such that there is no realization for the viewer or the protagonist, even “more deeply rooted” (61) than bad conscience. And it does not help if “the bad will of others” carries in itself “a certain relative right” (relative – to what?). Here the author stands on the border of the promised land, where it is “the ‘good’ will of others” that is the cause of suffering, in which, in other words,

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the protagonist recognizes the “other’s” right to “evil” or “bad” will. But then it ceases to be an “evil” that “the power of the good” fights against. The catastrophe is due to – to move away from the calcified moralistic terminology – a culturally relevant counterpower. Now, Lipps has arranged himself very well; for him “there is a hierarchy of what should be” (24). But not everyone is so lucky, and not all protagonists in the tragedies, as we know from Orestes, Le Cid, Horace, Marquis de Posa. And if Antigone had known that – “there is no duty that goes beyond the duty of maintaining one’s own moral personality, no moral purpose to which one’s own moral dignity should be sacrificed” (25), then it would not have helped the footsteps, for on p. 29 she hears that – “the law of the state … should also have recognized Antigone.” In addition, there is something called “moral delusion” (19). Antigone has “her” (her own private?) “moral world order” (29). How then can she know whether or not it is “moral delusion”? And how can we know this? “The hierarchy” is clearly not entirely reliable. But even if it were – what if now the protagonist were placed either-or on the same “level,” where both alternatives mean “guilt” according to the hero’s own moral code? This situation is of central importance to Josef Körner, whom we encounter in § 112; it has gone quite past Lipps. If he has read his predecessors, then he has let it go past. It, after all, fares very badly for “the pleasure of the power of the good” that two different “powers of the good” join forces to strangle the protagonist. Lipps has seen that the term conflict tends to play a central role in tragic theory, but in his system, it finds no natural place. He therefore uses it in a completely new dramaturgical sense, without a word’s commentary to illuminate his break with tradition. Conflict among tragicdramaturgical writers means only one thing: the incompatibility of two important and legal interests, antinomy, collision of duties, or whatever it is called by each one. However, I have never found an expression like “the bad with which the good of the personality comes into conflict,” as in Lipps. This is how one may express oneself on a daily basis, but there is no reason to destroy a good, well-known term and bring in confusion, where others have through their efforts created agreement and clarity (7, 25, 68, 70, and others. A similar comment applies to “punishment,” “heroism,” and “moral world order”). The “metaphysical dimension” is thus something that is not entirely imposed on the tragedy by agents of the lifeview, as Lipps claims (cf. p. 2, 4, 5, 6, 10 f., 25, 27, 45, 59), but is an organic part of absolutely essential nature, even according to the author’s own assumptions. However, Lipps performs a violent extraction of this organic part because he himself has a sick mother to take care of, namely his moralistic aesthetic or aesthetic moralism.

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Thus, when he says on p. 76 that the tragic “sensation” in the tragedy is “summarized in a point of paramount importance,” then it is “an explanation that may claim the fame of the greatest superficiality” (45). Lipps has the merit of having strongly emphasized what the theory knew before, namely that the “moral” variant of the protagonist’s representative nature has its significance in tragic plays. Otherwise, he has managed, if anyone is influenced by him, “to damage the understanding [in the sense of acquisition] of the tragedy through constructed, false, and one-sided theory” (1, 35). “He has supplemented or corrected the poet” (9), namely on p. 67, “he has improved, i.e., distorted the tragedy with his idea of the inner power of the good” (31). In “the dispute concerning the tragedy,” he can by his absolutist stubbornness assert himself well as a monotone sound, but where the theory in living readiness gains new ground, he has nothing to do.

§ 111. Johannes Volkelt Volkelt is the great master of tragic theory. Besides in his massive three-volume System der Ästhetik [System of Aesthetics] (II), Munich 1905–14, he has addressed the related questions in Ästhetische Zeitfragen [Aesthetic Questions of the Time], Munich 1895, Zwischen Dichtung und Philosophie [Between Poetry and Philosophy], Munich 1908, and in Grillparzer als Dichter des Tragischen [Grillparzer as Poet of the Tragic], Nördlingen 1888. His main work in this field is Ästhetik des Tragischen [Aesthetics of the Tragic], Munich 1897, a book of five hundred pages; it is the basis for the following considerations. Here he subjects the topic to the first scientific study in recent times; in him Aristotle, as a free scientist in tragic theory, has found his greatest successor. The student knows in Volkelt the teacher, objective, as much as possible, to whom one confidently entrusts oneself; this is not a man who pursues private goals disguised as tragic theory. Volkelt has the scientific courage to allow the material to prevail when he is unable to subdue it (as with the collision of norms in the Eleventh Section); such a concession gives more confidence than the strongest pretensions. The reader admires the vast material with which the author deals with broad vision and secure grip, a coliseum where stones can be fetched for a multitude of works concerning the tragic; one is captivated by the style’s warm eloquence, and one is gripped by the love of the material that permeates the work. As in emanation, the book has received some of the “consecration” that the author experienced in the tragic. It is “humanly meaningful.”

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And when the student in places disagrees with the master and makes up one’s own mind, then one readily brings to mind the wren on the eagle’s back. One wishes that one’s task was one other than digging with light and lantern after bursting into this proud building; one would rather repeat. And when one thinks one has to take a critical stance, one remembers the schoolboy who was supposed to examine the meter in Wergeland’s Creation. The result was triumph: The man wants to write verse, but he can not even read verse! On a later occasion, the boy was given the same task, but then the answer was different: Whoever shall affix to paper such a frenzied train of cosmic visions cannot stop for an ornate meter. A man like Wergeland is allowed to write simple verse. In the following, we will consider the weaknesses we find in Volkelt from the same point of view. Volkelt begins by rejecting the speculative and abstract methods – with all due respect for the former198; he himself will use the “psychological” method and always build on experience, the mental experience of the phenomenon of the tragic. “Aesthetics can only be practiced on a psychological basis” (p. 2). With the help of this method, he will tackle “the natural structure of the modes of expression of the aesthetically excited soul” (p. 5) and acquire “the most significant types of aesthetic feeling” (p. 4). One such type of feeling is the tragic one; it differs from the non-tragic through a gradual transition. Other writers, such as Vischer and Hettner have also worked with such a scale, but Volkelt believes that the region of the tragic must be made much more extensive. In the opinion of Josef Körner and Yrjö Hirn, with whom I end, it is unnecessarily large. The method is thus stated, but it differs from the usual psychological method in that it is also evaluative, normative; it is the aim of the work of art to evoke valuable emotions. So, now we know what the child is going to be called, but which child will be called it? How does Volkelt determine the tragic feeling type? Which path does he take to find it? He begins by “setting” a starting point, a preliminary view, “by means of certain very general features” (p. 9) – we do not even get to hear which ones – that brings the work into motion and indicates direction, and which is justified in what follows. Such an initial maneuver must be performed with the utmost finesse if the reader is to retain the illusion of a psychological method. And Volkelt is agile, but he can only convince the one who has not fought the Jacob fight with the same scruples oneself. I myself have

198 The former is “rejected,” the latter “dismissed”!

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tried to avoid this weakness by charting the entire human interest struggle and proposing the word tragic be used about the most qualified veto. Without anything particularly striking happening, one gradually discovers that there is a word “tragic” which has for some time appeared in the text with the air of being among those invited. The fact that it is wearing the least conspicuous attire cannot save Volkelt from a touch of the reproach he himself has directed toward the adherents of the abstract method (p. 3), namely that they extract the concept from an arbitrarily chosen material. Nor is there the important difference that while the abstract theorists derive their concept from the group of tragedies they set the highest, Volkelt derives his – indeed, from where does he actually derive it? He wants to use the term “as far as possible in accordance with the conventional [usual] meaning” (p. 6). Unfortunately, it is not stated with a word what this meaning is, as there seems to be no doubt in the author that the term in ordinary language is unambiguous. The most modest survey would have convinced him to the contrary and given him a starry sky of starting points. And even if it was the case – “it is quite possible that what usually bears the name of the tragic or the humorous, for example, does not completely coincide with the corresponding characteristic type of feeling …” Nevertheless, “in the predominant and most important cases” there will be agreement to be found. This claim must also be justified by a comprehensive survey. In addition, here is used for comparison a “feeling type” that we just set out to find. The reader therefore sits with an uneasy feeling that there is not “enough psychological procedure” (p. 3). In order for the method to have the purely psychological (and secondarily, normative) character required by the author, one must begin with an overview of the “feeling types” that could be identified and characterized. The term “feeling type” must also be tried, in case in reckoning with intellectual components, etc., one of them ends ups being called tragic, and justifying the choice. If the rationale is based on a reference to the linguistic tradition, then one must find a method to bring it to clarity. If all this were successful, then one would have thereby identified a disposition for certain impressions, a need for certain kinds of experiences. Secondly, one must examine which phenomena, internal or external, they are that can evoke the exact delimited quality of experience – and under what conditions they can do it, tend to do it, potentially must do it. There is full access to transferring the predicate tragic to a wider or narrower group of such phenomena, but the word has thereby acquired a new meaning, and wherever possible, it must be stated in what sense it is used.

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Finally, if one wants the word tragic to apply only to autotelic, or perhaps only to artistic experiences (and their objects), one must introduce in the appropriate place the marks that this new restriction necessitates. Has Volkelt then taken this path, or a different one that is equally or more persuasive? No – and the painful consequences do not fail to register. Even before the “tragic feeling type” is approximately described, the author begins to inquire after nature and practical life – now? Not phenomena that, under certain conditions, can evoke feelings of the tragic type, but: the tragic. That the word is suddenly used in a completely new sense is not mentioned. Here, as elsewhere in the book, it also appears to be assumed that the “tragic object” with necessity draws “tragic feelings” after itself. “Awakens,” “generates,” and the like are stated unconditionally (e.g., p. 154 f. 200). (The objective phenomenon is a necessary condition for the impression, p. 355.) Nonetheless, Volkelt is aware that such lawfulness is not present (p. 23, more about which later). But since we have no identified feeling type from which to proceed, how can Volkelt select “the tragic” from the richness of life and nature? “Nobody will doubt – that not only art, but also reality itself has a tragic abundance” (p. 9). How can one doubt or not doubt when one does not yet know what “the tragic” is? “Who would not be tragically moved by brazen characters like … or broken characters like … ?” (p. 10) Well – what should one say? “Aeschylus rightly perceived the fate of … as a course of tremendous tragic impact.” Very possible, but the rationale? The poets of tragedy (their plays therefore tragic?) have often drawn the struggles they present from history, says V., “and it is certainly the more common case that these struggles did not first become tragic because of the poetic transformation …”199 Fine, but what are we talking about? It is different in nature – “because, as we shall see, part of the impression of the tragic is a great personality …” Finally, something tangible, but would it not have been best to see this first? And where do they come from, all these sudden determinations of the tragic on p. 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 34, 39, 43, 62, etc.? These norms and requirements are not derived from any feeling type (this first comes on p. 359); they appear a priori and dictated. The fact that Volkelt does not include in his system the conditions for the object to evoke “tragic feeling” is of great importance for his further investigations and needs to be highlighted. It is possible, among other things, that he

199 “… even if this shaping has generally deepened and sharpened the tragic that already exists in reality.” Cf. 15th section and p. 390, 17 ff.

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thinks he can grasp both the impression and the objective phenomenon with the same notion “tragic.” Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction. Volkelt explains this by saying that the method has two sides, one subjective and one objective. The method shows its objective side when dealing with the “content” of the aesthetic feeling type (or rather, the individual feeling), and its subjective side when the feelings of pleasure and aversion associated with the content are the object of the investigation. Volkelt gives the subjective side 40 pages (355–95), while the objective gets 346 (9–355). Such a concept is not perceived immediately; in this respect, it is reminiscent of “substance” in Spinoza, with two attributes, mind and matter. But it is possible that the structural image is based in psychological theory. In that case, the terminology is unfortunate. It seems striking to me that a “feeling type” should consist partly of “feeling” and partly of “content.” And V.’s thinking is linked precisely to the terminology; he claims a unified tragic concept throughout the work. There is no distinction between an “objectively tragic” phenomenon, grasped with the intellect, rational, and an “aesthetically tragic” phenomenon, experienced through feeling, irrational. The difference is just a “more or less” (p. 7). How then does Volkelt treat the viewer’s intellectual activity in the tragic experience? P. 17 f. speaks only about “imagination and thought content” in the poetic persons (Aristotle’s “reflection”). But the viewer must indeed apprehend and examine these thoughts with one’s intellect. His own experience is described on p. 22 as “imaginative connections and accompanying feelings.” But there will surely be a wide consensus that a number of plays from those Volkelt calls tragic set in motion a considerable thought activity in the viewer – when one has the necessary preconditions. Volkelt also mentions thought activity, but he calls it “feeling.” If one is to be able to handle the counterpower in a fight, then one must “feel them out” (p. 11). “The tragic makes us feel how little the conditions of existence are designed to bring the exceptional to happiness, success, power, morally pure perfection, how frighteningly difficult it is for the extraordinary to prevail in the world mechanism.” Here, as on p. 90, 206, and others, it is a pure act of thought, an induction or generalization, that is precisely what V. on p. 426 calls “philosophical feeling.” In other words, the author does not distinguish between intellectual and emotional “sides” of the tragic experience. He may therefore also surprise the reader by mentioning the theorist’s optimistic or pessimistic interpretation of “the tragic” quite in line with the viewer’s experience in the theater (p. 98 ff.). One will remember Lipps’ bitter outburst against this conflation. Volkelt uses the term pessimistic in at

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least three different senses: “pessimistic mood” (emotional, depressing, p. 86), to be interpreted “in a pessimistic sense” (philosophically assessed, 89), “the pessimistic fate” (98, apparently meant partly as factually unfortunate, partly as: with small prospects of success). In this failing precision – a widespread weakness in “humanistic” science – one finds the explanation that the objective phenomenon can be perceived as “content” in an emotion, although it is described in technical, not “emotional” terms, thus identified by means other than that of emotion. We find “the tragic” “in the form of an event,” as “course,” “development,” “context” (13, 31, 307) – and then just after, the term “mood” is used about the exact same phenomenon (307). Such “content,” described as an objective course, has, as we have mentioned, no binding effect on “the accompanying feelings.” The feeling is not given in the objective course, with “the content” in, for example, a drama. One can see this from all the conflicting interpretations. And a comparison with other arts makes the statement even more obvious. It is not necessary to go to the expressionist to realize that the “content” of an image (“the content in the impression”) – a red house wall – does not obligate the feeling. Nor does the impressionist’s Young Woman with a Veil ensure anyone and everyone success that paints a lady with a veil – indeed even the prototype is sometimes judged as daringly innovative, sometimes as abominable degeneration. As long as the content can be identified as a lady with a veil, one must include this in the objective description of the content; there is no need to limit the objective description to “canvas with a layer of paint,” as V. does on p. 2, and say that the rest is “a mental existence.” If a lady with a veil is “mental,” then “canvas” is also “mental.” One can well use the psychological representation model, that a “feeling,” or better, an impression, a reception, consists of a content with accompanying feelings. However, if the content is to be described as feeling content, one must assume an actual reception and try to abstract the content. When Volkelt (p. 7) declares that the content of a (whichever) comical feeling is “a peculiar contrast between nothingness and imagined greatness and the self-dissolution of this hollow greatness,” then this is, first of all, a purely intellectual description. Next, we know that not every objective course which aligns with the structure can force us to “feel comical” (if the “comic feeling type” is determined in a similar way as the tragic, and not by the content alone) – and that we have often found a course comical that did not align with the structure (the word comical used in the everyday, undifferentiated sense). The adjective

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“peculiar” opens up a valve, but it shows precisely that the “content” is not sufficiently described: The determination lies outside, namely in “the peculiar.” The relationship comes glaringly to mind when one takes an erotic feeling and describes “the content” of the lover’s “feeling” as blue eyes and dimples. Volkelt, however, has allowed himself to be seduced into forming a category of “the tragic” described by the content alone without this content having received its “aesthetic credentials” by actually having seemed tragic. The category is therefore of a factual, objective nature, not an aesthetic one, much like the concept at which we arrived in Chapter Eight. It amazes one even less that Volkelt on p. 68 and 90, cf. 155, describes a course of “excellent tragic effect” that (apart from differences in the individual links) is congruent with the course we ourselves have called objectively tragic on the basis of completely different methodological premises. It is stated on p. 90: If we surrender to the impression of the tragic, the world seems to be designed in such a way that the greatness of a person leads too easily to misery and downfall. If the corruptive suffering of the great human being is not regarded as a strange coincidence, as an exception without meaning, as mere “bad luck,” but rather, as would be required, is given a fateful expansion, then this is to say that human greatness has something that allures, attracts, causes misfortune and ruin. The nocturnal, abysmal powers – this is how we feel in the face of the tragic deepened by fate – seem to have a particular eye on the towering, mighty, and proud path. In this way, the greatness of human beings is brought into a causal relationship with suffering and doom through the demands of fate. Not in the unrestricted sense, of course, such that greatness regularly entangles one in disaster and ruin. Rather, only such that the strong tendency of the causality being linked to greatness appears to belong to the essence of the tragic. Greatness bears the urgent, impending danger [all italicized in Volkelt] of falling into suffering, baseness, transgression, perdition. This naturally also casts a pessimistic light over the whole world.

It should be acknowledged that the quote contains a number of “feeling terms,” unclear, ambiguous, and partly mythological expressions that a treatment of the objectively tragic could not use. But both the conclusion and the viewpoint as a whole are of a philosophical nature. And even if one considers the quote as a description of a feeling content, there is nothing to indicate that the feeling has what Volkelt would call an aesthetic nature. It is satisfactory as a practical sense of life. Volkelt has not been aware that he has increasingly lost connection with his point of departure, the aesthetic feeling type. And so, in certain places in the book the reader finds two concepts of “tragic” juxtaposed as opposites, though there has never been more than one concept. This occurs least

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strikingly in the heading on p. 355: The Subjective Effect of the Tragic (in the text: “the effect that the tragic exerts on the receiving subject”). If “the tragic” here is to denote feelings of a certain type, “the content” included, then the heading means “the consequences of a tragic experience.” But when it turns out that the “subjective effect” is the whole feeling complex that constitutes the emotional side of the whole feeling type, then indeed the understanding stands still. If now “the tragic” does not mean the objective phenomenon without regard to the accompanying feelings, then it does not mean anything. (Cf. expressions such as: “people burdened with tragedy” (343), “representing the tragic,” “grasping the tragic,” “the divisions of the tragic impression depending on the different types of tragic” p. 356, etc.) The relationship emerges more glaringly on p. 22 f. Already the heading is alarming: “Does the tragic in reality always have an aesthetic effect?” The question seems like a bomb; all the painstakingly constructed distinctions collapse before the reader’s horrified gaze. Accordingly, there is given what p. 355 hinted at, a tragic category which is not of an aesthetic nature. Of what nature is it then? Is it a non-aesthetic feeling category? P. 2 and 355 suggest this; the feeling, the impression, and the mind are explicitly mentioned as the determining factors. It is only for the naive point of view that “the empirical basis of aesthetics seems to split into a subjective, psychological, and an objective one belonging to the outside world.” The consequence of the question on p. 22 thus becomes: Two kinds of tragic impressions are given, one of which is aesthetic-tragic, the other “solely tragic.” No description of the solely tragic feeling type can be found; yet there can be no doubt about the intention of the question: When we receive an impression from reality, must this impression be aesthetic? Volkelt answers the question with a yes without seeing the consequence: We never receive solely tragic impressions from reality! But from where then do we get them? It cannot be from art, cf. p. 22 at the bottom. In our distress, it is harsh of Volkelt to give such a statement about life: “[We must] detach ourselves from the course if it is to have a tragic effect alongside our individual interests of will.” “Tragic”! And this while staring with fevered gaze at the distinction between aesthetic-tragic and solely tragic! But when Volkelt thinks of the aesthetic-tragic, indeed he really just means aesthetic. Perhaps then we could feel the solely tragic if we just clung to the impression of “our individual interests of will”? One approaches the description of this variant with great tension. “Distressing lot,” Volkelt says mockingly, “stroke of fate,” he says and plays with the reader’s torment, “threatens,” “breaks down,” “hostile”! We feel the lump in the throat, but we

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do not know yet to whom it applies. At any rate, we missed the solely tragic impression. “If the person whose distressing fate we are experiencing is close to our hearts, or if we are the tragically struck person ourselves, the impression of the tragic cannot develop in us.” Fine, we abandon the notion of the solely tragic impression and declare ourselves united in the sense that the tragic impression must mean one thing: aesthetic-tragic impression. But stop! We were indeed “tragically struck,” and yet we should not feel the tragic! Who then decides that we are “tragically struck”? Or is this aiming for something objective? No, at least this is not needed, yet. Whoever decides that we are “tragically struck” may be in possession of the “inner freedom and silence” that enables one to isolate oneself objectively against our misery, or, if one is close to us personally, have “the amazing mental power” such that one can “raise oneself up to the great and free path of tragic contemplation, – raise oneself above the storms in the personal I into the ether of the general human.” What a fortunate one! We ourselves are too “materially entangled; the painful, numbing affects dominate us.” We do not even get to call our feeling solely tragic, and the aesthetic-tragic feeling belongs to “the freedom and silence.” Fine, we are ready for “freedom and silence,” and Volkelt gives us a newspaper “with information of a tragic character.” The misfortune does not affect us personally, and our “freedom and silence” is impeccable. Can we now be sure of having an aesthetic-tragic impression? No, Volkelt says. Only “where we let a tragic event of life affect us in its full measure according to its tragic content. Where this takes place, the tragic impression also belongs in the field of aesthetics.”200 But there was no shortage of “full measure” a moment ago! The determination must therefore lie in a factor that Volkelt has not mentioned in this context. “It may happen that we briefly read a tragic piece of news like a thousand other newspaper articles. In this case there can be no question of aesthetic point of view.” But how can one speak of “news of a tragic character,” about “feeling type,” when there are no traces of “feeling”? Is it now finally and absolutely clear that Volkelt’s investigations are based on a purely objective category, a category that is not determined aesthetically, but in a practically ordered sense? This intellectual activity need in no way be devoid of strong, accompanying feelings; such a “pure” intellectual judgment is perhaps even an 200 And where does the tragic impression belong when this does not happen?

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abstraction. The crucial factor lies in the fact that it is not on the aesthetic basis that the tragic category is determined in Volkelt. A confirmation of this conclusion can also be found in the difficulties encountered by Volkelt on p. 212 ff., cf. 252 ff., where the doctrine of “tragic norms” comes into conflict with itself. Shortly after the reader is asked to settle on a preliminary picture of the tragic, Volkelt puts forward some “aesthetic norms,” which he says are valid for the tragic. One of them is “the norm of the humanly meaningful” (p. 34, 86, 212, 254).201 “What is supposed to be aesthetically pleasing must, from whatever point of view, bring us to a peculiar and urgent view of the context and purpose of human life” (86). “This norm demands that human life should be represented not only in terms of its friendly, conciliatory, hopeful sides, but also in terms of the oppressively gloomy, the bitterly terrible, the uncompromisingly harsh that it contains” (254). “For the meaning of human life also includes the victory and domination of the common and the wretched, the hollow, lightless perishing of great souls in disregard, disgrace, and destruction …. fates of a depressing and miserable kind in general” (212). That this norm, as it is formed on p. 212 and 254, cannot apply to all art, is an objection at which we should not pause. More importantly, what is in these formulations coincides with the requirement of a pessimistic basis (89). If one reads on the other hand p. 86, then it will strike one that, as the norm is here put into words, it presupposes spiritual interest in its generality for an object, without any regard for aesthetic posture; this applies equally to the content of a teaching lecture. It is possible that in the “aesthetic viewpoint” one can only experience what interests, but it is not the interest that makes one participate aesthetically. It simply makes one participate at all. Another artistic norm, which the author also applies to the tragic, is “the norm of harmony of content.” “It is … a very important condition for the success of artistic contemplation and enjoyment that art presents us with a content that is not lacking the refreshing, uplifting, liberating, redeeming” (211). After this Volkelt notes a contradiction, a conflict, an antinomy between this norm and “the norm of the humanly meaningful” (with reference to Ästhetische Zeitfragen [Aesthetic Questions of the Time] p. 216). Now, it is immediately seen that as the latter norm is formed on p. 86, no antinomy is present – the norm of the interesting can very well be reconciled with the norm of the liberating, refreshing, and redeeming (both requirements apply to the content, the 201 Volkelt here refers to his book Ästhetische Zeitfragen [Aesthetic Questions of the Time], Munich 1895 p. 15 ff., 227 f., which has not been available to me.

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objective course). The conflict arises from the norm of the humanly meaningful, as described on p. 212 and 254; in other words, it is not this norm, but “the requirement of a pessimistic basis” (89) that collides with the requirement of “harmony of content.” This contradiction does not amount to something actually new; if one looks more closely, it is just an offshoot of the good old “tragic paradox”: How can a factually interest-conflicting course evoke aesthetic pleasure? But this simple setup of the problem has been lost in Volkelt’s way of tackling it. It is the practical No of the course that opposes the aesthetic Yes, not the aesthetic No. For an aesthetic No, there can indeed be no aesthetic norm, no requirement for a work of art; on the contrary. The practical No goes against biological, social (“ethical”), and metaphysical norms, determined by human interests – but not necessarily against poetic or other autotelic norms. What we have called the practical No is, for Volkelt, an aesthetic norm, designated as the requirement of a pessimistic basis. And this manner of expression has much to do with the tragic aesthetics. The strange thing is that he also makes a tragic-aesthetic norm of what we would call the practical Yes, of the real liberation in the objective course. How did he arrive at such a thought, he who is the great proponent of “the tragic of the depressing kind” (250 ff.)? In Volkelt’s view these norms should each individually ensure a kind of aesthetic pleasure. It is only apparently that the following sentences on p. 213 deny the aesthetic relevance of the pessimistic basis: … it will be shown that the uplifting moments, although they may never be completely absent, can nevertheless recede strongly, and that this receding causes peculiar forms of the tragic. In these forms, the inner truth of life is expressed at the expense of the uplifting moments and at the same time at the expense of the artistic mood.

The expression “uplifting moments” stands here in place of “harmony of content.” And since one readily admits there must be something “uplifting” in an unfortunate course that must be aesthetically digestible, one is seduced by this exchange of expressions into believing that “harmony of content” is also necessary. But here is the explanation for Volkelt’s antinomy: It is stated on p. 210 that even the purely depressing tragedy cannot do without uplifting moments. Well, but then the tragedy is indeed not only depressing? The explanation is that Volkelt uses the expression “uplifting moments” in two completely different senses without even noticing it or drawing attention to it. He sufficiently distinguishes between “uplifting moments in the subjective posture of the tragic person” (214) and “in the objective outcome

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of the matter” (230), and sets a total of four categories (244), but he does not arrive at a division of the concept itself, even though the opportunity was there on p. 249, and the confusion comes from this. It turns out that what is the “uplifting moment” in the “tragedy of the depressing kind,” namely the protagonist’s “greatness” (210), acts as the “depressing moment” in other kinds of tragedy by sharpening the pessimistic basis (89 f., cf. p. 68 ff.). Only by a division of the concept does the relationship become clear. There are, on the one hand, uplifting moments, not only “in the objective outcome of the matter,” but on the whole of a factual nature, relief in the direction of sanction for the performers in the play. It is this kind of uplifting moment that coincides with “the harmony of content”; therefore, no mention is made of harmony of content on p. 210, where an uplifting moment is mentioned. The factually uplifting moments act on us because they act on the performers, or otherwise “benefit them,” for example, knowing that their cause has triumphed afterward. They are in line with what Volkelt on p. 356 calls “representational feelings,” feelings that we “put into” the performers. Or they otherwise speak to our factual interests, for example, the ethical, concerning which below. In other words, these moments mean a restriction of the interest conflict of the course. If it is shaped by this lifting, the tragic is lost (245 et al.). Then it is also misleading to call such a restriction of the misfortune an uplifting moment. The course is not “lifted up” from anything worse; it is just the way it is. If one tries to explain how the factual interest conflict can give aesthetic value, or a “feeling type” whose “content” is an interest-conflicting course, then it is impossible to explain the enjoyment by means of “maybe it is not so interest-conflicting after all.” In that case one is going around the task and talking about other things. If one imagines an objective course such as “the artist’s plummeting from the dome,” and wants to explain the “aesthetic intoxication” that the viewers may have experienced, then one can resort to anything, but not to the fact that the widow now gets the insurance money. This is an aesthetically202 irrelevant consideration. And this, in my opinion, is also an allusion to ethical satisfaction in the course, which is found on p. 210, 213, 225, 239, 253 f., and which Yrjö Hirn categorically rejects.203 “Ethical Schadenfreude” (Lipps) is not among “the illicit pleasures” on p. 391. It is quite different with the group of “uplifting elements” which are not of factual, but of emotional-aesthetic nature. If the criminal’s “moral purification” amounts to a (factually) uplifting moment, then one would think that his or her stubborn 202 The term is used here under Volkelt’s responsibility, so to speak. 203 Det estetiska lifvet [The Aesthetic Life], Stockholm 1913 p. 110.

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defiance would amount to a (factually) depressing moment, especially since both (factual) variants belong to Volkelt’s category of “factors in the subjective posture [of the protagonist].” But no, even the defiance is listed as uplifting (215, 227). It then seems clear that the “uplifting” effect is of a kind that is qualitatively different from the moral purification. We have developed this above, but the difference now appears in something new: With this kind of uplifting moment, no conflict arises with “the norm of the pessimistic basis.” Nor does it threaten the tragic characteristics, should there be many of them. There cannot be too many; after all, a work of art can hardly be too good. The powerful “uplifting moment” of this kind Volkelt has not mentioned as such (15 passages); it lies in the poet’s art of production, not only in the sides of this art that can be dramaturgically ascertained but also in its irrational, its indefinable powers. Indeed, the more powerful one’s tragic art, the more daring the material one challenges, the more one spurns the uplifting moments of factual nature. This then is the complete arrangement of Volkelt’s terminology:204 factually depressing moments (“pessimistic basis”), factually uplifting moments (“norm of the harmony of content,” in our opinion tragically irrelevant – unless they were to open up a real solution), aesthetically uplifting moments (under which one may well count the “norm of the humanly meaningful,” the captivating), aesthetically depressing moments (which means artistic objections to the play. Yet, these do not necessarily touch the tragic effect (V. p. 4), once again suggesting that the tragic is not of aesthetic quality; cf. Aristotle’s doctrine on cathartic effect by shoddy work). The uniqueness of the “aesthetic-tragic,” in our view, lies in the combination of certain factually depressing moments and certain “aesthetically” uplifting ones, while the other two groups are the irrelevant phenomena. Another obstacle to a clear overview is the fact that Volkelt makes three distinctions that have not had a clear function, and which therefore easily run together; these are the oppositions: “The norm of the pessimistic basis” contra “the norm of the harmony of content,” “Uplifting” contra “depressing moments,” and “Tragedy of the liberating” contra “the depressing kind.” The relationship between the distinctions should have been clarified.

204 which, in our opinion, should have been developed.

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Conclusion: Volkelt’s attempt to portray the tragic as a feeling type has not led to a satisfactory explanation of the tragic phenomenon, has not made it sufficiently accessible for “scientific” understanding. The objective basis has not been sufficiently analyzed, since an intellectual analysis is found unnecessary for the identification of the feeling type. And behind “the impression,” almost always, the objectively tragic is seen as an independent category, which in places rises up in the day and makes the feeling irrelevant. The fact that these two ways of considering have not been clearly distinguished is due to the weakness in Volkelt’s explanation of the “pleasure by the tragic,” which we have just explained. In Volkelt the Category of the Tragic is more extensive than in any other author. He indeed defines the tragic on p. 155 as the “relationship” (plus effect) in which “a great person through one’s greatness [65] ends up suffering fate and downfall and in this way shows us the world context in a terrible light.” But he polemicizes against those who want to narrow down the tragic to “that which they envision as the highest form” (5), and himself expands the area so far that the central formula increasingly loses its aim. Greatness (in Gerhard Hauptmann’s tragic figures), the fact that greatness must be struck, 67 (in Hamlet), and the causal relationship between greatness and “suffering” (in Ibsen’s Oswald) are missing in a number of examples; “downwards” the border blurs with “the sorrowful,” etc. (though formally set up on p. 72 ff.); “upwards,” against the heroic, no boundary is drawn. In places where the greatness requirement is particularly deficient, formal conformity with p. 68 is brought about by a greatly expanded interpretation of the term greatness. For example, “the weavers” have greatness because they are many (76 f.); cultural relevance is not a standard; the impressively diffuse is enough. That the category has such a huge scope is partly due to the fact that open access to factually uplifting moments has been granted, while maintaining the depressing tragic variant. Add to this the circumstance that for Volkelt it has been more about making this and that area recognized as aesthetically current, gaining them artistic recognition, than about calling them tragic (253). Such a view is undoubtedly related to the difficulty of identifying a correspondingly comprehensive “feeling type” and will in any case preclude a clear analysis of the uniqueness of the tragic. The desire to comment on questions of detail (“greatness,” “suffering,” “guilt,” etc.) has certainly arisen in the previous considerations. But it is a temptation to which we cannot yield – it would burst the section’s frame. If in Volkelt one moves oneself just one step outside the method, then one is

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engulfed by the immense material. And more specifically, it is not necessary. The book does not encourage hairsplitting. It is a great work, created from an idea that is the author’s own, an inexhaustible source of joy and enrichment. As an “introduction to the tragic art,” it even provides the reader with the means to shape one’s own personal view.

§ 112. Josef Körner In Prussian Yearbooks, Vol. 225 (Berlin 1931), Josef Körner writes a longer article: “Tragik und Tragödie. Ein vorläufiger Versuch über Wesen und Gestaltwandel des Tragischen [Tragedy and Tragedy. A preliminary attempt concerning the nature and shape of the tragic].”a The article appears here partly because on important points it forms a diametrical opposition to Lipps. When one moves from Lipps to Josef Körner, it is like escaping from a stifling basement into the free, breezy day. Here there is wide sky and deep breath. Here there is the courage and willingness to face the problem no matter how it may turn out; here there is no secret thought under the dress of discursive thinking, where the outline of the discussion must be hidden as an affective treasure chest. The article gives much pleasure; it is rich in striking observations and based on thorough knowledge. Of particular value are the rapid historical views, where the possibilities for a “tragic viewpoint” are discussed in connection with the lifeviews in the different epochs. When the author formulates his basic view, for example, on p. 63, 65, this partly coincides with the view in Chapter Nine of the present work, but when the basic view is then to be elucidated and expanded, the author is unable to maintain it and carry it through consistently. Once again, a man is led from a good observation out into foggy expanses by his ethical-metaphysical terminology. Had it been expressed in “termini biologici,” the observation could have been worked out without any slipping place. Körner first explains the method. Nothing can be concluded about the conceptual content of the term tragic from etymology, nor can the concept of literary-historical tragedy help us get to the “world concept” (i.e.?) that we use in aesthetics (p. 59). Körner also chooses a psychological path.

a While in English the same term tragedy is used to refer both to a tragic event and a dramatic production with a tragic quality, the German language has two different words that allow for a more precise distinction.

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… as in Kant space and time, as pure forms of sensibility, bring it about that “the manifold of phenomena appears in an orderly manner in a certain context” …, so every person carries “a priori in one’s mind,” according to one’s own particular mentalspiritual nature, a form wherein or whereby, at an even higher level, the individual experiences torn from the life stream are organized into a meaningful unity. The tragic is such a “mode of perception,” to speak as Schiller, a special inner form of understanding life and the world; and the tragic as a type of poetry, the tragedy,205 would thus be the gestalt form especially appropriate to tragic content. (62)

According to this, the tragic is a psychological category, but doubt soon arises. On p. 68 “sensibility” is used without quotation marks side by side with “tragic knowledge,” and further down on p. 62 it is stated: “The tragic ‘sensibility’ [inner form of experience] is the [original] insertion of the complex of experiences into the ‘tragic’ viewpoint. The tragedian – we think of Hebbel – sees and understands everything that happens [!?] only in this way.” A psychological category still seems to be the most obvious, but on p. 64 the author explicitly states that the tragic is a metaphysical category, as does p. 183, but here it is stated just after that “tragic” is not “a pure aesthetic concept” – but therefore still aesthetic? However, we cannot dwell on this question. “But what is this tragic viewpoint?” The quotation marks have fallen like feathers in a storm; this and that “is tragic.” But can an author, if one is not a pure Platonist, mean anything else by “is” than that the term tragic in one’s sense should be applied to this and that phenomenon? And why not say it like this? Then, we would have no doubt about what one means. “Is” rests in Körner on psychological-empirical, non-speculative grounds: “There is no need to consider …, our feeling decides concerning it as immediately as we judge human actions as moral or immoral.” (You too, Brutus? In Lipps, one may still be in need of a psychology of motivation, which is exhausted with the terms “good” and “evil,” but in 1931 the relationship was more complicated.) Körner responds by noting some examples of “tragic misfortunes.” It is not said why the adjective tragic is attached to “misfortunes”; the author accepts a tradition here without further ado. The examples are chosen from among catastrophes. The death of a tightrope walker is not tragic (the author must have presupposed a number of conditions), nor is the cat burglar who falls. On the other hand, swimming boys who drown, if they have not shown recklessness, are. And clearly tragic is the passerby who rushes out to save the boys but perishes oneself. (Again, a number of conditions must be imagined in a 205 Körner, however, claims further down the page that “tragic ‘sensation’ can also present itself in other than dramatic types of poetry, even in other than poetic genres.”

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certain way; the rescuer’s motive cannot be just anything, diving in cannot spell certain death, etc. Such analyses are presumably included in the author’s “finite effort.”) The term tragic is here transferred from “sensibility” to the course that awakens “the sensation.” Thus, the tragic becomes an “objective” category. There is also a difference of viewpoint present concerning whether it is “sensation” or “understanding” that determines the case. It is then also stated by Körner (63): “A number of other examples should help to raise this dark feeling into the clarity of consciousness.” Mr. S. walks across Potsdamer Strasse and is run down by an automobile. Tragic? A doctor dashes across Wenzelsplatz (more heavily trafficked?) to save a person’s life and is crushed to death between two cars. Mr. S. leaves behind a widow with six children. (We can see that the author is working with the course’s qualifications, but without systematically arranging the possibilities. He therefore does not find any highest qualification, which implies all the lower ones.) “Why do we immediately feel that this event [the doctor] is the more tragic one?” (We cannot “feel” that the case is “more tragic” if we do not agree in advance on the meaning of the term. What we may “feel” is that the misfortune is more upsetting or the like, in relation to one of the reasons we select. Is it “the feeling” that does this work?) Answer: “For here, as in the example of the rescuer who perishes, something in us rebels against the injustice, the treachery of a fate that only punishes [?] the one who should be rewarded.” Why “should”? Indeed: tragic par excellence … is such an event [course therefore] that is in direct contradiction to what should happen in a cosmos ordered according to the moral norms we affirm. Or, in other words: chaos breaks into, in a terrifying and devastating way, the morally ordered cosmos in which we believe [?] we live.

(Is it not easier to talk about a favorable and unfavorable environment?) “The metaphysical trust in the meaningfulness of the world, the goodness and reasonableness of the prevailing deity, begins to waver.” If the tragic results in doubt or an indictment against God, says the author, then the tragedy, which should present the tragic in artistic representation, cannot argue the opposite, namely that the world order is just. Körner, therefore, during a long historical overview, is polemicizing with great force against the poets and theorists (Schiller, Calderón, Schelling, Vischer, Krause, Lipps, etc.) who have made the tragedy a theodicy, in defense of God. Thanks in particular to German philosophers, this view gained widespread acceptance and still has it.

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Unfortunately, the intellectual power [based on other achievements] of the idealistic thinkers who misjudged the nature of the tragedy has inhibited the correct explanation to this day, since the more discerning ones did not have the courage to defend a completely opposite view against those great men.

But the “right” view has now begun to break through in earnest, says the author. Regrettably, it is not possible to touch on all the excellent things Körner says to elucidate the fundamental meaning of the tragic, as he and, in important features, I conceive it. We must, in the first place, take aim at the systematic skeleton and devote ourselves to the less gratifying task of tracking deficiencies and failures in it. Körner’s presentation has the unfortunate characteristic that when he refers to another author, one does not know with certainty to what extent he makes the other’s words his own; thus, for example, on p. 64 and 75. But all indications are that Körner will vouch for what is cited. We shall pursue some of his most important theses. The “moral paradox” is thus at the heart of the tragic. But this paradox is also manifested in the trifles of everyday life, where it amounts to a mere passing annoyance or even has a comical effect. When the owner arrives, the bad boy who has stolen apples escapes, while the good boy, who has only been admonishing him, stays standing there and gets all the beating. It is hardly Körner’s view that such and even more insignificant courses should count as tragic ones, and thus a restriction is missing here. According to our view, the course must, among other things, show that even higher up on the scale of “merit” is the prospect of sanction, indeed that the prospect decreases with the height. This requirement is even stronger if one of Körner’s other definitions is used as a basis: “the tragic as undeserved suffering” (66).206 Here the paradox is communicated, but what “suffering” is not ultimately “undeserved”? (Unfortunately, Körner does not define his concept of guilt either, and what he develops concerning guilt therefore hangs in the air.) If we do not get a restriction here, everything becomes tragic that is not the bliss of the land of milk and honey; in that case, a “world order” would be required that makes any kind of perfectibility superfluous. In such a world, where the realization of our interests would encounter no difficulties, the urge to use ability would appear with anguish worse than before; the central need would be the need for difficulties, and thus 206 Different from the tragedy is the mourning play [Trauerspiel], but what does the mourning play produce other than innocent suffering (162, 262)?

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the whole thought is absurd. Körner does not draw this conclusion either; on p. 274 he describes his dream world as follows: … a world in which, in the sense of a perfect moral order, the forces and capacities of things would be distributed precisely according to the measure of their value, and the efficacy of these forces would be based on the demands corresponding to the work.

But the difficulty is not reduced thereby, for who is to decide “the value of things”? Such a moral world order would have to change with the moral (in the sense of this work) norms that apply to each time, each place, and each individual person in each phase of their lives. In our own time, for example, “… everything cries out for the unprecedented radicalism of the revision of all concepts of God and fate, reason and morality” (283). But if we are missing a restriction on the tragic relevance of the paradox and the other formulas, then in turn the paradox itself represents a restriction, which the author has in common with Lipps, in opposition to Volkelt. It causes both of them great difficulties, and they also let this go in reality, albeit not in form. Nor does Körner recognize any form of “merit” other than “moral dignity” (65). But on p. 273 the concept bursts; here it is stated: “… it would be tragic if the sick person, despite one’s unique ability to do one’s work, could not complete it as a result of one’s suffering …” Körner probably notices the contradiction because he camouflages the breach by creating a smokescreen; he no longer talks about the disparity between fate and “moral dignity,” but about “the discrepancy between charisma and fatum.” It is this that one feels as “disorder in the world, as ‘God’s injustice.’ ” The example shows that the author has slipped into his second or subsequent definition here, “the tragic as undeserved suffering” (66). It is on the basis of this definition that the author can see in Calvinism’s predestination a tragic “worldview,” p. 74 f. Here all connections between God’s dispositions and human norms of justice are broken; grace is “meritless,” and thus there is no “punishment for merit” either. From eternity God has determined who will be saved and who will perish. If Aleksander Pedersen, Bogstadveien 22 Va is one of those who have been stamped in advance, then it is irrelevant whether or not he shows “moral dignity.” Körner’s depiction of Calvinism’s relationship to common Christian dogmas (p. 75) is not clear. However, it appears that the catastrophe in this new “tragic viewpoint” is not of an earthly nature, but of a hereafter. In practice God bypasses the “guilt.” It is only the “guilty” who a Example of a random person living at a random address in Oslo.

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are condemned, but it is God who freely distributes guilt and non-guilt. This sophistical mockery seems little compatible with conventional notions of the dignity of God. And if it is, as Körner says, that “God’s nature transcends all human concepts of morality,” then the bypassing of guilt is superfluous. Körner, however, further amends this God-“imposed,” “inescapable,” “necessary,” “faultless,” “tragic guilt,” which has come in place of the catastrophe (?). Humankind can become entangled in it despite, or precisely because of “dutiful action.” The two definitions are set out side by side here. The previously marked is brought into “faultless guilt” by being handed over to a “tragic conflict,” to two incommensurable “duties” to which one is equally subject. Even the strongest ethical will cannot save the unfortunate from eternal perdition. An example of this kind of tragedy is now mentioned (158 f.) from Racine. It immediately becomes apparent here that the example does not fit; Phèdre is not placed between two “duties” but between “duty” and passion. She speaks of The gods who have made a cruel glory Out of seducing the heart of a weak mortal. (II, 5)

Thus, when God bypasses guilt (“faultless guilt”) in order to obtain a pretext for judging a person, then one would think that he, on the other hand, has bypassed innocence (“faultless guilt”) when a person should be saved. Körner does not take up the issue, but it is touched upon in a remark on Orestes in Racine’s Andromaque: I do not always know what unjust power Leaves the crime in peace, and pursues innocence.

“The criminal” is thus not guilty? What kind of a “peace” is meant? Eternal bliss? No, it means earthly conditions, as is indicated from the continuation of the lines: From somewhere in me I turn my eyes I see only misfortunes that condemn the gods.

Here it is in plain words that the unfortunate condemn the gods and not the other way around. And thus, the “tragic” catastrophe is no longer metaphysical “guilt,” but earthly “suffering.” The example has completely ceased to be an example of the “tragedy of predestination” that it was supposed to illustrate. The author sees another example of “tragic conflict” with “inescapable guilt” in some phases of Goethe’s Iphigenia. Notwithstanding, Goethe’s basic

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concept in this matter was “half guilt,” a concept “which does not allow the poet to recognize the tragic aspect of innocent guilt, nor the ‘Christian aspect’ of repaid guilt [the author points to Calderón].” However, Iphigenia, in the author’s opinion, is situated in a “genuine” tragic conflict, p. 162 ff. Iphigenia is placed among three alternatives. She can slaughter her brother as a sacrifice to foreign gods. She can save him by marrying King Thoas, whom she respects, but does not love. And finally, she can save both her brother (as well as Pylades) and herself by deceiving King Thoas. In the first instance, she would save her soul from lying, but would commit “genuinely tragic [165], faultless, but conscious, sacrilege.” (To modern thinking this construction is absurd. The lack of definitions in Körner means that his claims cannot be confirmed or denied.) In the third case, another tragic aspect would appear (166): “[I]t is precisely the morally valuable that becomes an obstacle and a threat” (to earthly goods). But is not this “suffering of a valuable person who proves one’s greatness in suffering” an aspect which according to Körner is heroic and not tragic (p. 273)? As far as alternative number two is concerned, it is anything but a heroic posture Iphigenia would take (165): “She cannot and does not want to save her brother at the cost of giving up her life and refraining from returning home.” In any case, she cannot incur “guilt”207 from marrying Thoas. And she could just as well be tragic by “innocent suffering” without the whole dramaturgical apparatus that has been set up here. Thoas could simply marry her by force. Otherwise, there is, besides Goethe’s solution, which does not count, a heroic resort that Körner does not mention (nor does Goethe): Iphigenia could have refused to sacrifice Orestes and herself taken the death penalty, so that she would be clear of any “guilt” she might see in marrying a man she did not love. (The death would be “innocent suffering,” but it is then indeed by all accounts heroism, when the words are used in the sense that is likely Körner’s.) In this case, Iphigenia would have acted much like Max Piccolomini (263); that this behavior also for Körner “tastes like heroism” shows itself in the designation “sublime tragedy” against Wallenstein’s “downfall tragedy” – a distinction that is not explained. Far worse, however, is the fact that Wallenstein is also made “tragic” (263 f.), although he suffers “deserved death.” Now the foundation has been removed from under all previous definitions, and the confusion is consummated with the term “guilt tragedy” on p. 264. If Körner here thinks that

207 If the line dancer on p. 62 f. is not tragic, this indicates that Körner also considers guilt to be “psychological guilt.” The line dancer of course does not have ethical guilt (which is implied in the burglar). The consequences are absurd.

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the term “tragedy” stands at Schiller’s expense, he surely should have used quotation marks, as he has done on similar occasions. It was mentioned previously that the reader does not always know whether Körner makes the quoted statements his own. Another formal weakness of his article is that he, in a small way, mixes historical and systematic presentation; he does not separate from each other what are called in the heading “essence” and “change.” With “the tragedy of an individual fate sacrificed for the good of the whole” (can mean a lot of different things), the question of guilt, for example, is irrelevant, which is without significance if the variant belongs to the historical presentation, but destructive if it belongs to the systematic (p. 161). “The question of guilt is pointless,” the author declares on p. 67. And with the treatment he gives concepts of guilt, one is inclined to agree with him. However, the question of guilt relates to another of the author’s main theses, that of the necessity of tragedy. “Schelling knows very well the absolute necessity and inevitability of all tragic suffering, guilt, and defeat” (268). Is the sentiment also Körner’s? Everything seems to indicate this. And at his own expense he uses the words “necessary guilt,” “necessarily justified,” “inescapable guilt,” “must fall into guilt” (75), and “necessary indebtedness” (163). The expressions vary: “The suffering remains anchored in the world and cannot be eliminated” (284), “the immanent tragedy of all existence” (173), “unsolvable problematic of all being” (278), “the tragic aspect of life as general, senseless suffering, the basic form and original substance of existence itself … is” (158. Comprehend this who can). “The inevitable crime” (268), “nature-willed, God-willed need of all female existence” (178), “that joy and burden of life, lust, and need of love are so unequally assigned to the sexes” (? 179). “The tragedian … sees and understands everything only in this way (tragic sensibility)” (62), “the tragic effect as a doubt about any [!] justice in the world” (64), “the moral has no [!] place in the world” (69), “indissoluble fundamental dissonance” (161), “original conflict” (185). Unfortunately, the author does not reveal a single time what he means by “necessity” and all the rest of the speculative lyricism. Nor does he make a distinction between “necessary consequence” (“external necessity,” 263) and “necessary means” – if one wants to achieve this and that – (“the evil … necessary and justified in view of the whole,” 161). If one thinks of the doctor who was run over (63), then it is also not beneficial to understand how such a misfortune can be “necessary” or “inevitable” in the usual sense of the word; and if it were, then the doctor would have to be either suicidal or insane.

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Furthermore, it is in direct conflict with experience that all life (“existence”), not to mention “all being,” suffers, and suffers “tragically.” Inorganic and unconscious existence need not even be mentioned, but among humans themselves, a considerable number of people have lived happily and satisfied until at the appropriate age they had a stroke in a festive moment with no experience of death, people who, if asked, would say that they had never had any significant suffering or understood the expression “deeply distressing world angst.” Nor does Körner take this necessity very seriously. With Hebbel he certainly misplaces “the tragic in the inescapable guilt; the structure of human existence inevitably contains the tragic situation in itself; the will, the moral freedom of humankind can never pierce this rock-hard wall, and there is no salvation from this prison” (266). He simply means nothing by this. The good old speculative bubbles sink down through time like a wet, heavy fog; by virtue of their inertia, they also fill Körner’s clearer thought sky. I have the impression that most tragic theorists, when faced with the works of their predecessors, perceive these as an Augean stable and themselves as a Hercules. Körner has also accomplished a very important cleanup task, but if the theory is to move further, one must begin by piercing the metaphysicalspeculative bubbles, “guilt,” “necessity,” “fate,” and whatever else they are all now called, and see what is inside. Körner himself will have to do some piercing. One will notice that several of the quoted expressions closely coincide with Schopenhauer’s worldview, such as it is rendered in Körner on p. 274: Schopenhauer observes – “the unspeakable pain and uncontrollable misery of humankind, the triumph of wickedness, the mocking domination of chance [!], the hopeless fall of the just and innocent … a world that lawfully opposes the forces of those [moral] demands.” And Körner does not want to agree with Schopenhauer, because in a world without hope (Körner uses less accessible expressions), the tragic has no place. He therefore abandons all the bubbles and makes a violent retreat to down-to-earth empiricism: the tragic is “an isolated and borderline case” (274). Yes, but that is a different discussion! “Necessity” goes no further than Romeo and Juliet’s downfall due to the “stupidest coincidences” (186). And Joan of Arc’s suffering “has no causal relationship backward” (265). After this, one gains more courage to meet a new series of fog obstacles from the theory’s mythical land that re-emerge in Körner. I guess they had been wandering around in the countryside for so many generations that he figured they belonged there and were not to be driven out. Their bodies are a

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bit different as with most trolls, but the head is the same on all of them; it is the prefix “world.” “The tragedy as a court of world events, as a dark world law” (157), “horror of the devalued, broken, falling world. The tragic in its comical application, as the world order of constantly threatening and warring chaos” (158), – it is King Lear who is destroyed by his daughters. “The ethical indifference of the world being” (266); it is Schiller’s illness. (Concerning Schiller, it is first stated that “the sublime viewpoint gives its place to the tragic viewpoint, which … exposes the senselessness of existence …” And below: “… the idealist Schiller could not or did not want … to doubt the rationality of the world as a whole …” It must be one of the parts then.) “A prevailing, avenging justice”; it is Hecuba’s “revenge” on Helen that, without realizing it, was the “cause” of the fall of Troy (69). “The absence of this revenge means final despair toward the gods. Unresolvable constitutional feature of the structure of existence … a world sickness” (73), “ ‘the unknown quantity = X in the equation of the moral world,’ the indissoluble fundamental element in the chemism of human existence” (71), “the tragic as a physiognomic expression of the increasingly visible world being” (64, 75, 168). There can be no commentary concerning all these expressions here; a reference to § 90 in this work must be enough. However, to stop for a moment at Bahnsen’s variant, it must at least be explained why an “undeserved” suffering is a “physiognomic expression of the world being” to a higher degree than a “deserved” suffering, a beneficial or fortunate course. A possible statistic might even show surplus on the positive side. King Thoas in Goethe’s Iphigenia has no authority to represent only “world order and cosmic background,” and the drama, which shows his magnanimity, can therefore not be a theodicy, only a “Thoadicy.” In the case of “the woman’s fate,” first of all, not all women have the same fate as Gretchen. Secondly, it can at most be called “world order” (i.e., human anatomical-physiological order) that the woman has all the unpleasantness associated with pregnancy and childbirth; but the social misfortune affecting unmarried mothers has greatly diminished in our day and may fade away entirely. So then, “the tragic” is not at any rate some “inevitable constitutional characteristic of the structure of existence.” It is something else entirely, and it must be expressed in other words, that those who previously suffered and died because of social prejudice are not helped by later generations overcoming them. Körner himself says that tragedy can be “overcome” (279, 365). And at the end of the article, he gives an indication (as it may be understood) of how all

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tragedy (in the sense of “undeserved suffering”) can be “overcome,” that is, by gaining a “meaning” and being placed under a new, more durable optimistic viewpoint. This new “tragic viewpoint,” which turns out to be of a heroic nature, corresponds to a new “world viewpoint,” which will be described in a moment. But first we have a note to make. In the new viewpoint, the moral paradox (misfortune caused by “merit”) stands in the same position as other “unjust suffering”; it has been deprived of its metaphysical prominence. Worse, however, is the author’s treatment of a different, equally important paradox in tragic theory, the “aesthetic-tragic paradox.” Körner does not mention with a word how the prospect of experiencing deep anxiety, shattering world angst, doubt concerning the dignity of God, and the like can get people to put on a tuxedo and buy an expensive theater ticket. Körner almost exclusively uses literary examples, but in reality, he speaks solely of the “objectively tragic.” Poetical and theatrical considerations are not incorporated into the theory, and the article would have had a far more secure position if literature (poetry) were kept out of consideration. And now to “the solution.” The reaction of the Greeks to “the tragic sensation” was “to suffer the tragedy of existence” (280); they resigned, were without hope. Christianity and “heroic (or heroistic) idealism” chose “to deny the tragedy of existence.” After the ethical optimism of rationalism came a strong pessimistic blowback; though the gods no longer lack the ethical will, as with the Greeks, they lack the actual power to abolish “the tragedy in the world being” (281). As an example, Hebbel is mentioned, but Leibniz lurks in the background. In order for the reader to get an impression of Körner’s magnificent style, I give the continuation of the thought in a longer quotation. … but people no longer submit to their doom dully and lifelessly, recognizing their own moral power and the eternal justification of their demand for order in the universe. Even if the demanded justice is always missing in the actual course of events, by thinking, demanding, it has a validity that is independent of all experience and realization; it is not but it is valid. This creates a new tragic posture, which confronts a hostile and senseless fate neither in cowardly [?] despair nor in titanic torture, but allows one to strive in the consciousness of one’s own strength and deeply justified moral call to the infinite task of transforming the chaos that still ripples through a cosmos. As Franz Werfel puts it: Resistance to nature in belief “in the mediation of humankind, which is there to lend its meaning to the world” … Humankind wants to help enforce the law that is inherent to it, but which is not or only partially associated with the whole world as a whole. – The Greek pessimism, Christian optimism,

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idealistic heroism come together in the notion of a world that is growing in endless approximation from the tragic to the harmonious constitution; in the thinkers and poets of our day, it is the beloved idea of a becoming deity. (281) … The tension of thinking of the being and non-being of a world order can only be resolved in the indifference to being and non-being, in becoming … Suffering remains firmly anchored in the world, and it is inevitable in temporal events as long as God does not have the power to destroy it; but help for him in his difficult work grows from the suffering human, who through its suffering gradually consumes [!] the sum of evil in the world and increases God’s moral power. In this way, physical suffering is not lightheartedly disputed away as by Christianity and idealism, not simply ideally overcome on the transcendental level of Schiller’s dramatic sublimity, but lived through and suffered more realistically, yet not senselessly, but in order to realize a value in order to contribute to the growing moralization of God and world. On the basis of such a real idealism … perhaps the future tragedy will arise.

In one place Körner calls Leibniz’s theodicy a stop-gap. Elsewhere he talks about a man “who wrote amusing sentences.” However, we can help ourselves to neither detailed criticism nor general theological speculation here. But one question must be addressed: How does the new viewpoint of God relate to the author’s doctrine concerning the tragic? We will not stop at the staggering patience the doctrine demands of its adherents. We accept the fact that they are prepared to sacrifice, suffer, and wait. But what else was it that the Christians were doing? What is the difference in reality between Calderón’s religious heroism and the new one? A theologian will perhaps find gaping abysses. For us it is enough that Körner here has drawn up “a dogmatic view of the world being,” something which, according to p. 274, makes tragic consciousness impossible. If indeed the tragic concept is to be the same as before, then the new tragedy cannot lie in belief, but must lie in doubt concerning the prospective God, in the suggestion that he is not becoming. Indeed, the situation only becomes tragic par excellence (63) when it turns out that the suffering causes the decline of God. In other words, when “the indifference between being and non-being” unfolds in the negative direction – “in the disappearance.” Nor should we dwell on a circumstance such as that of the “pain eaters”; in the land of the dolophages,a criminals and sadists would be the ones who contribute most to the growth of the god, while on the other hand the masochists would be given a highly favored position. Far more important is the fact that the need for a life meaning does not limit itself to the removal of all meaningless suffering (unless the meaning of the term is stretched exceptionally far), a dolor (Lat.) + phages (Grk.) = pain eaters. This is a reference back to § 59, pg. 210.

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least of all to the end of all physical208 suffering. Such a result by itself would hardly satisfy the near astronomical number who had to sacrifice themselves so that Hansen on the corner and his contemporaries in the year 10n should be without physical pain. Thus, the positive side of life-affirmation occupies a more dominant place: the need for a sufficiently secure goal for the life of humankind (or the individual), a goal which is at the same time sufficiently valuable, such that the individual or everyone can bear whatever suffering there may be, including the tragic. Creating such a goal would then have to be the task of the becoming God in a new eternity.

208 The tragic then, according to Körner, lies not in the suffering itself, but in the circumstance of the suffering, such that it is innocent or in violation of merit, thus something mental. In our view, the tragic also emerges in this, that only higher differentiated beings are capable of experiencing this psychological addition to the physical suffering.

SUMMARYa

The world of experience is considered in this work from the point of view of the concerns of the individual entities. This means that the entities are classified according to what is important and necessary for them, what they are concerned with. They can thus be classified in an ascending scale from an assumed lack of all concern (the non-organic world), via entities to which humans attribute concerns (plants, animals without consciousness), to what we call conscious animals with a more differentiated range of concerns (§§ 1, 3, 4). After these comes the primitive or “low-status” human being, characterized by basic concerns (biological concerns, simple desires), and the scale continues with increasing differentiation, ending with the “great” men and women, the highest representatives of their respective cultures. In addition to the concerns of primitive people, such people have desires and values in the broadest senses of these words, together with the most highly differentiated social and metaphysical concerns. This system has the advantage of including a great deal of material under a single viewpoint.

a This summary was present in Norwegian in the 1941 edition but was subsequently translated by Alison Olsen and appeared in English in the 1983 edition.

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Alongside the scale of concerns one can draw up a scale of abilities (a distinctive group of qualities in the entity, or organism); these are associated with a group of concerns relating to development or realization (§ 8 et passim). The concerned individual consciously attempts to realize his concerns by using his abilities. Sometimes the abilities are adequate (sufficiency), sometimes they are inadequate (deficiency), and sometimes there is a surplus of ability in relation to the demands of the problem or situation. The surplus may provide additional advantages, it may be irrelevant to the solution of the problem, or it may have harmful consequences (§ 8 and Ch. 5). When an ability occurs with a single or a very few functional variations it is referred to as predetermined; when it is mutable, sometimes with an unlimited applicability, it is referred to as nondetermined. These are also the two extremes of a scale; in between one finds, for example, a wrong determination, where an ability is determined in a way that is unfortunate compared with another way assumed to be more fortunate, and variations of this are over-determination, where an ability is too strictly determined, and under-determination, where it is too little determined (Ch. 3, 5, and 6, § 82). The normal and valid realization of a concern is referred to as the proper solution to the problem that existed prior to the realization. When a proper realization cannot be obtained (owing to conditions inside or outside the organism), then the concerned individual may settle for a pseudo-solution, a surrogate (Ch. 6). The environment (Ch. 3) in which the organism attempts to realize its concerns may be so formed that it consciously promotes or wishes to promote the realization; it is then referred to as a sympathetic environment as regards these factors. Sometimes the environment takes no conscious part in the realization; it is then indifferent. Finally, it may sometimes consciously work against the organism, and then it is referred to as inimical or satanic. In all three cases the environment may have been propitious, unpropitious, or neither, irrelevant (§ 4). The result of the conflict (after a single clash or over a longer period) may be the attainment of the concern (sanction), or its non-attainment (veto); sometimes, on the other hand, it may be opposed or violated. When primary concerns are deeply and irreversibly violated the event is referred to as a catastrophe (Ch. 7). A catastrophe may be elementary or qualified, that is, contain qualities that draw attention to it rather than to something else. Some of these catastrophes have a particular quality referred to as tragic; they are then part of a whole, a tragic process (§ 75).

Summary

567

The tragic process has three characteristics: a culturally relevant greatness, or magnitude, in the afflicted individual, a catastrophe that befalls him or her, and a functional relation between the greatness and the catastrophe. With this definition of tragedy, the study approaches its principal aim: to give a meaning to the word “tragic” that is sufficiently unambiguous and that cannot naturally be applied to any other term (§ 1), and one that at the same time lies well within the mainstream of aesthetic and literary tradition. This choice of meaning has a further advantage, in addition to the purely terminological one: The quality of the process described by the word tragic, in its empirical aspect, has strong philosophical implications. Tragedy is given a central and dominating role in the human battle of concerns and throws a significant light on the human condition here on earth (§§ 76, 90, 91). “Significant light” means a light that reveals consequences that are relevant for human concerns. The victim not only undergoes immediate suffering, through the violation of the relevant concern, he is also deprived of his fundamental expectation; a spectator with the same concerns as the victim will therefore also feel his expectation waver. This expectation is that of a universal moral system, a regulation of history according to human values. In other words: The expectation that perfectibility will lead to fulfillment is confounded when a tragic constellation blocks the way to a proper solution and opens the way for a pseudo-solution or defeat (§ 93). The adequate affective reactions of a spectator to the violation of a concern of his own or of a person he identifies with are aversion, dejection, disgust, bitter revolt, and so on. His reaction as a whole is to reject what has happened; to use Volkelt’s expression, the event “should not happen.” This ought to be particularly true of qualified catastrophes and especially tragic processes. But experience shows that accidents to others can under certain circumstances attract the spectator. How can one explain (i.e., make available to the understanding through some structural model) this apparent paradox? Is this merely a special case of the fascination contained in all unusual events of great magnitude in spite of the suffering they may cause a fellow human being? Or are there indications that the spectator is attracted because of the human suffering involved? Or are we dealing with two completely different ways of experiencing the event, two irreconcilable aspects? An elucidation of this question in practical terms is attempted in Ch. 9, cf. §§ 13 and 81. The value of witnessing another’s misfortune has been shown to be isolated and to some degree intensified when a tragic process is re-created in literature or in other forms of art. The description and explanation of this and

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especially the “problem of tragedy” have tempted philosophers and aesthetic writers (particularly Europeans) for over 2,000 years. This is briefly dealt with in Ch. 11; own studies are described in §§ 95 ff. Each of the factors that are regularly present in a tragedy are examined for their capacity to contribute to the experience of the spectator, and the results are summed up in the following contention: The richest experience a tragedy can give is a pseudo-solution of the metaphysical problem of meaning through poetic sublimation (§ 102). Three examples of tragic literature are then given in Ch. 10. Although the problems associated with tragedy have been taken up by many of the most prominent European men of letters, the results are neither convincing nor conclusive for a modern reader, despite a blinding wealth of detail. The newcomer is quite willing to acknowledge the authority vested in this imposing list of names; on the other hand, it is notable that the renown attached to names such as Aristotle, Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer does not derive from their research into tragedy, which has been more or less a side issue. There seem to be two main reasons for the lack of clarity and the endless discussions: first, that researchers have not managed to describe the tragic process in such a way that it could be clearly distinguished from a nontragic process, and secondly that they have not distinguished clearly enough between tragic process, tragic writing, and what they variously refer to as tragic experience, tragic mood, tragic feelings, etc. (cf. §§ 110, 111, 112). By distinguishing as accurately as possible between these concepts, I have tried to contribute to research on the subject.

INDEX

abilities 28–34, 43–4, 46, 91–2, 97–8, 154, 566 in biological method 4 combining 76, 84, 279, 331, 459 complex 91 groups of 76 tyranny of 74 absolute 368, 406, 503 abyss 113, 202, 380, 463, 504 abyss-deep hatred of God 442 accidentalia 351–2, 391, 406–7 accidents 63, 101, 105, 277, 316–7, 567 accompanying circumstances 261, 269, 290 adaptation 11–2, 16–7, 39–40, 122, 168, 325, 355 in law 48, 67 Nietzsche’s struggle for mental 512 real 144, 157–8 social 122, 125, 202, 221, 325 Aeschylus 481, 541 Eumenides, The 441, 443 Oresteia, The 258n. 92, 441

Prometheus Bound 2, 268, 395, 436–41, 442–3, 452, 475, 477 aesthetic experience 402, 404, 424 aesthetic pleasure 506, 511, 548 aesthetic-tragic feelings and impressions 508, 545–6, 550 aesthetic-tragic paradox 562 aesthetic viewpoint 485, 502, 547 aestheticians 428–9, 435 aesthetics 427–9, 469, 539, 545–6 aesthetic-tragic paradox 562 of the tragic 480, 548 afterlife 113–4, 291, 336, 454 alcohol 175, 181, 216, 441 alcoholism 53, 253, 367 America 216, 253, 398 Amiel, Henri Frédéric 88, 124–5, 126, 135–7, 327 amoeba xxii, 17–8, 25, 38, 61, 306 amoral world order 250, 535 Amundsen, Roald 333 anagnorises 474, 478–9

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anatomy 40–1, 414 anatomical insight 106, 110 anatomical-physiological order 561 anchors 28, 158–67, 171–2, 180–1, 184 breakdown and destruction of 161, 234, 335 collective 164–5 and the desire image 186–7, 197 fictional and imaginary 159–60, 162, 297, 337 heroic 212, 368–9, 374 in metaphysical-moral clash 210 and moral geniuses 288, 333 real 158–61, 335 religious 164, 188–9, 191, 368 reserve 297 animal cruelty 252, 268 anthropomorphizing 44, 67, 197, 310 antinomies 24, 136, 304, 342, 349, 537, 547–8 antisociality 51, 125, 256, 270 Apollo 336, 441 in Nietzsche 409, 509 Aristotle 395, 415, 458, 484, 496 on the tragic 439–40, 467–81, 484, 538 asceticism 63, 147, 204, 230, 238, 319, 341 asociality 51, 65, 125, 264 Atlantic 194, 212–3 atonement 188, 423, 502 autotelic greatness 325–6, 341, 364 autotelic interest front 52–6, 175, 234, 381 Bahnsen, Julius 499, 500, 561 Barabbas 208 Beethoven see van Beethoven, Ludwig Bekhterev, Vladimir 129 biological imperatives 24, 35, 161 biological interest front 44–6, 233 biological justice 27–8, 48–9, 57, 60, 69 biological morality 25, 66 biological sanction and veto 26–7, 331–2 biosophy 4, 28, 480, 506 Birnbaum, Karl 78, 122n. 37, 124, 126–7, 129–33, 138–40

Bismarck see von Bismarck, Otto Blücher see von Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht Böhme, Jakob 500 bourgeois 61, 93, 188, 255, 426, 487, 506, 516 Brahmanism 336 Brentano, Clemens 133 Buddhism 336, 378, 505, 507, 509 Bull, Olaf 90, 465 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 135, 434, 506, 554, 558, 563 Calvinism 292, 350, 556 cannibalism 47, 108, 267 catastrophes xxi, 99, 101, 103, 173, 227, 229–45, 259, 278, 292–5, 313, 355, 357–60, 365–6, 369–70, 556–7 in Aristotle 471, 474–5, 477, 480 autotelic 340, 341 avoidance of 162, 238, 362 basic 300, 343, 366, 369–70, 378–9, 381 beginning of 24, 233 biological 233, 340–1 biological-social 120, 339 greatness and 320–46, 356–7, 367, 370, 423, 425, 433–4, 466 and guilt 346–50 heroic 372, 375–6 in Körner 553, 556–7 in Lipps 537 metaphysical 234, 312, 336, 340–1, 381 natural 248 non-metaphysical 111–2 and own complicity 237–8 in poetry 391–2, 399, 418–20, 423–5, 433–4, 440, 454–5, 458, 466 and posture 297–8 qualified 299–350, 369 in Schiller 492, 497 in Schopenhauer 506 social 51, 233–4, 332, 339–341 solution 150, 212 sublime 382

Index and will 155 see also tragic catastrophes catharsis 226, 426–7, 482, 485 in Aristotle 468–9, 471–4, 478–9, 550 Catholicism 65, 164, 204, 336 cats 14, 26, 27, 44, 116, 120 on the island 146–7, 299 Christ see Jesus Christianity 65, 192, 196–7, 239, 247, 493 humanistic 188 and sacrifice 205, 209, 376 and Schiller 298–9 and sin 165, 189, 292 and suffering 68, 231, 562–3 Clauberg, Karl Wilhelm 73, 125 co-experience 6, 381, 411, 416, 507, 510 coffee 53, 56, 150, 384–5 collisions 3, 4 33, 334, 487 of duties 267–8, 270, 284, 342, 537, 557 comedies 410, 451, 477, 496 see also tragi-comedy comicality 91, 264, 543, 555, 561 commandments 64, 71, 191, 239, 336, 450 compassion 91, 103, 143, 362, 415–6, 438 poetic 406, 410, 415–6, 421–2, 424–5, 475, 480 conscience 175, 196, 346, 348, 411, 462, 518–9, 525, 527, 529–30, 532 bad 89, 142, 344, 494, 519, 526–7, 530–2, 534, 536 biological 26–7 good 114, 333, 532–4 metaphysical 62, 217, 226, 325 social 51, 287, 387 see also remorse Corneille, Pierre 434, 484, 486–7 Le Cid 453, 496, 525, 537 corruptibility, law of 101, 154, 156, 226 cosmos 191, 355, 389, 413, 487, 554, 562 cosmic angst 234 social 244 counterpowers 188, 232, 234, 292, 297, 301, 315, 321–4, 326, 330, 342, 356–7, 369– 70

571 culturally relevant 366, 373–4, 391, 537 external 331, 343–6, 375, 399, 412 in Hegel 502 heroic 373, 375 internal 130, 344, 346–347, 357, 375, 399, 412 in Lipps 533, 537 overcoming 379 in poetry 392, 399, 412–3, 419, 422, 432–3, 480 in Schopenhauer 506–7 in Volkelt 542 see also tragic counterpowers

Danaans 141, 437 Darwin, Charles 10, 40, 80 deathbed 56, 180, 226, 336, 457 deception 52, 152, 182, 208, 305, 335, 505 self-deception 97n. 21, 104n. 27, 136, 155, 170, 227, 344 deer see Irish giant deer deficiency 30, 122–3, 139, 154, 175, 203, 252, 321, 328, 551, 566 delusions 50, 133, 152, 288, 366, 377, 537 demons 292, 491, 526 demonic, the 54, 160, 425, 488–9 demoniacal cultivator of life 325 de Nerval, Gérard 134, 141 Denmark 117, 176, 456, 460, 466, 513 depression 7, 55, 134, 142–4, 149, 160, 234, 327, 363, 373, 397, 427, 462 Luther’s 129–30 and pessimism 137, 144, 201 desire image 185–7, 198, 203, 215, 378 determinism and indeterminism 68, 241, 246–8, 284, 512 Diederichs, Nicolaas Johannes 230–1 Dionysus 65, 425, 436–7, 441, 472 in Nietzsche 409, 509–12 distraction 166, 215–6, 337, 367, 369 dogs 20, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 116, 145, 296 Don Juan 98 downfall 3–4, 218, 223, 312, 361

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and greatness xxi, 327, 420, 349–50, 544, 551, 558 Hamlet 452, 454 heroic 372 Romeo and Juliet 391, 560 tragic 368, 372, 408, 420, 427, 489, 501, 502, 508 dramaturgy 220, 244, 258, 268, 288, 422, 469, 480 of tragedy 398 and moral geniuses 288 Dubislav, Walter 73, 125 Du Bos, Jean–Baptiste 417, 480, 486, 490, 511 Dürer, Albrecht 511 duties 44, 53, 96, 147, 167, 179, 490–1, 494, 537 bourgeois 93 public and private 237 religious 64, 65 vocational 269, 270 see also collisions of duties Ecclesiastes 100, 335, 363, 441–2 ectoplasm 14, 17, 25, 37–8, 158 Edison, Thomas 86 egoism 47, 51, 221, 288–9, 505, 518, 521 empathy 83, 369, 409, 426, 466 endoplasm 17, 37, 38 England 253, 436, 460, 483 environment 12, 16–9, 20, 26, 28–30, 39, 43, 439, 443–4 and autotelic interest front 52, 55 biological 45, 46–7, 51, 62–3, 91, 116–7, 120, 153, 451 and biological method 4–5 factual and fictional 426 favorable and unfavorable 11, 16–7, 554 Hamlet’s 455, 458 hostile (satanic), indifferent, or sympathetic 18, 19, 474, 566 inorganic 15 and metaphysical interest front 58–62 an polyfrontal engagements 63, 67

and realism 9 social 46–7, 49–52, 77, 91, 115, 117, 120, 151–2, 153, 155, 170–1, 212, 451 envy of the gods 350, 363, 440, 443 eros and Eros 92, 221, 222, 339, 411 error–fixedness 68, 94, 123, 136, 144, 154, 167–8, 176, 252, 268, 278, 293, 321, 328 biological 67, 291 metaphysical 188, 291 of outside world 235–6 social 51 social-moral 86–7 example of 169–75 eternal life 66, 188, 315 ethics 244, 247, 251, 272, 285, 419, 495 dogmatic 459 Lipps’ 521 taboo 268 Euripides 469 Europe 1, 213, 224, 361, 398, 411, 420, 567–8 European law 245, 249, 253–4, 268, 276, 289 evil see good and evil experience image 185–6, 188, 191, 203, 378 explorers 108–10, 167, 233, 337 expressionist art 433, 470, 543 fame 174, 324–5, 451 fatalism 190, 247, 454 Fates, the 336, 439, 441 fear and pity 469, 471–4, 477–9, 506, 511 flight xxi–xxii, 26, 144, 154, 157, 176, 222, 297, 367, 414, 419, 489, 507 anchor-fleeing tendencies 162, 164 animal 14, 116, 145 suicide as 218 Forel, Auguste 121, 142, 288 foresight 12, 115, 213, 223, 241, 342, 375–7 fossils 13, 33, 39, 41 Frank, Reinhard 276, 290–1 freedom of the will 68, 239–43, 246, 487–8 Freud, Sigmund 72, 221–2, 231, 363, 507 fruit trees 309–11, 360 fulfillment 95, 97, 330, 362, 567

Index functional cycle 21–2, 26, 29, 149, 152, 187, 213 games and play 33, 52, 72, 166, 196, 391 genders 49, 50, 73, 129 see also sexes genes 25, 39, 41, 66, 216, 245 geniuses xxii, 124, 131–2, 140, 207, 300, 321, 325, 345, 348, 425–6, 439, 452 moral 50, 207, 211, 288, 333, 349 tragic 288, 487 Germany 130, 164, 165, 483, 485, 487, 511, 527 drama in 436, 486 German Idealism 436, 498, 499 German language 390, 527 Germanic heroism 361 Germanic law 253, 276 giftedness 91, 141, 142, 299, 324, 342, 358, 419 goats 2, 49, 344n. 106, 436–7 God 3, 61, 64, 336, 373, 379, 425–6, 441–51, 454, 464, 489, 500, 536, 559, 562–4 child as gift from 66 coming 368 in desire image 186–97 godless universe 341, 365 grace of 161 and imagination 345 indictment against 554 injustice of 556–7 and intellectual honesty 335 life without 186 placing limits on greatness 363 revision of the concept of 556 and sum of evils 210 wanting to be 406 Goethe see von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Gomperz, Theodor 468, 472, 474 good and evil 108, 169, 321, 332–3, 368, 444, 517 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 484, 486 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 98, 113, 135, 391, 486

573

Greeks 65, 363, 498, 499, 504, 509 fate 191, 292, 336, 350 tragedy 217, 432, 434–41, 467, 469–70, 478–81, 509, 511, 562 Grillparzer, Franz Seraphim 443, 517, 524, 538 guilt 238–45, 412, 459, 482, 483, 501–6, 512, 533, 537, 556–60 biological 27 criminal 248–72, 289–291, 303, 348–9 ethical 281–5, 287, 288, 291–2, 294, 303, 347–8, 349–50, 373, 425, 477, 491, 504 existential 272, 292, 322, 346, 350 erotic 97–8 faultless and innocent 501, 557–8 functional 272–3, 294, 303, 322, 347, 350 ethical 281–5, 287–8, 291–2, 294, 303, 347–50, 373, 491, 503–4 metaphysical 62, 285, 291–2, 349–50, 373 original 285, 505–6 physiological 272, 278, 281, 282, 291, 294, 303, 322, 346, 350 psychological 273, 276–283, 289, 291, 294, 303–4, 347, 376, 425, 477 see also tragic guilt Hagerup, Francis 245–72, 274, 276–7, 279, 286, 289–91 Hartmann see von Hartmann, Eduard Hasenclever, Ludwig 468, 482, 484, 490–1, 497, 499, 511–2 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich 348, 362–3, 392, 434, 499, 500, 504, 553, 560, 562 Demetrius 517 Gyges and His Ring 288 Judith 517, 531 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 247, 422, 500, 502–5, 507, 513, 568 Herder, Johann Gottfried 486–7, 488, 509 heroism 211–4, 226, 342, 345–6, 364, 367–77, 419–20, 452, 461, 484, 486, 551, 558, 562–3 hero worship 159 in drama 423–34, 436, 508

574

on the tragic

in Hegel 502 mistaken 90 moral 450 and posture 391–2 and Prometheus 439–40 in Schelling 500–1 in Schiller 491–500 in Schopenhauer 506–7 see also tragic heroism heterotelic confirmation 176 heterotelic considerations 55, 94–5, 212, 222, 329–30 heterotelic greatness 317, 322, 326, 364 heterotelic imperatives 158 heterotelic interests 234, 284, 320, 416– 7, 429 heterotelic means 30, 54, 89, 92, 175, 179– 81, 189, 203, 211 heterotelic posture 102 heterotelic value 318–9, 366, 420, 424 heterotelic viewpoint 59, 375, 381–8, 392, 394–5, 408–11, 425–6 Hettner, Hermann 480, 504, 539 Hirn Yrjö 64, 419, 423, 482, 490, 507, 539, 549 Høffding, Harald 168, 215, 506, 507 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 126, 134, 141, 509 Homer 479, 486 Horace 170, 484, 537 hubris 363, 438, 440, 504 biological 26 Huxley, Aldous, 216 hygiene autotelic 178 biological 26, 54 mental 163 metaphysical 62, 65, 206, 216, 325 social 51 hypertrophy 33, 235, 311 see also Irish giant deer Ibsen, Henrik 93, 164, 180, 208, 215, 224, 348, 357, 382, 409, 436 Brand 327, 336, 372, 374, 493

Doll’s House, A 287 Emperor and Galilean 363 Ghosts 551 Love’s Comedy 526 Master Builder, The 517 Pretenders, The 523 When We Dead Awaken 517 Wild Duck, The 160 India xxii, 165, 302, 398 injustice see justice and injustice insanity 134, 141, 190, 265, 266, 372, 534, 559 inventors 86, 180, 331, 339 Irish giant deer 33, 94, 145, 235, 299 Islam 191, 336 isolation 158, 164, 170, 184, 210, 215, 293, 328, 337, 367, 369, 389 in Goethe 489 in Hamlet 462–3 mental 178 and Nietzsche 510 social 91, 183 Jesus 12, 192, 208n. a, 336–7, 374 Jews 234, 441 Job 2, 196, 380, 441–52 justice and injustice 48, 60, 67, 69, 112–3, 115, 143, 185, 188, 192–3, 196–7, 212, 217, 219 biological 27, 48–9, 57 criminal 244–72, 276, 280–1, 294 demand and need for 365, 371, 378– 9, 460 and the environment 306 eternal 502 God’s and gods’ 196, 439, 442–51, 556 in Job 442–51 in Körner 554, 556, 559, 561 in Lipps 533–6 love and 512 metaphysical 62, 67–8, 108, 378–9, 382, 482 poetic 69, 422, 477, 479, 480, 488, 503, 510, 533–4

Index principle of 340, 442, 445, 446 religious 238–9 sum of 368 and world order 281, 378–9 Kant, Immanuel 126, 127, 248, 252, 419, 485, 490, 553 Kantian School 499 Kant-tragic 510 Kierkegaard, Søren, 96n. 20, 194n. a, 490, 513 Klaatsch, Hermann 41 Kö r ner, Josef 210, 488–91, 498, 513, 537, 539, 552–64 Laocoön 519, 521, 524 lawyers 48, 170, 264, 271, 305, 340 legal risk 237, 260, 274, 278, 294, 305, 306 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 189, 485, 510, 562, 563 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 486 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 473, 480, 484–6, 487, 490, 508, 511, 568 Emilia Galotti 517, 525 libido 221, 222 life-affirmation 493, 496, 564 life angst 426, 441, 472 Lipps, Theodor 422, 512–38, 542, 549, 552, 553, 556 Lombroso, Cesare, 124, 252 loneliness xxii, 107, 233, 302 cosmic and world 104, 375 lottery 90, 379n. 119 metaphysical 196, 446 Lucretius 490 Ludwig, Otto 504, 517 Luther, Martin, 129–30 machines 201, 330, 402, 451 machine gods 477 machinery 63, 106, 366, 450 Magnan, Valentin, 121, 139 maneuvers 155, 192, 227, 285, 336, 369, 539 pseudo-maneuvers 224, 337 mania 141, 320, 377, 463, 520

575

mythomania 89 manners 64, 173, 178, 441 Marbe, Karl 355, 362 marriage 66, 90, 98, 167, 178, 329, 440 martyrdom 157, 223, 367, 376, 452 masks 52, 328, 436, 452, 459, 469 Maudsley, Henry 126 Maya see veil of Maya Megaceros euryceros see Irish giant deer melancholy 130, 143–4, 201, 281, 327, 371, 397, 423, 426, 486, 500, 502 in Hamlet 452, 455, 463 in Job 451 metaphysical-melancholic clarity of vision 103–8, 378 Mephistopheles 451, 488 metaphysicians 110–1, 119, 217, 299, 501 Meyer, Semi 78–83, 90 mimesis 415, 469, 470 mimicry 25, 26–7, 76, 86, 109–10, 174, 179, 305 mental 151 social 52 Möbius, Paul Julius 121, 140 morality and immorality 25–8, 67, 239, 284, 286, 338, 354, 411, 435, 475, 477 autotelic 66 biological 66 and criminal law 252, 253 as dynamic 491 in Körner 556–7 metaphysical 62, 117, 181, 203–20 in Nietzsche 512 in Schiller 491–7 social 71–2, 286, 288–9, 306, 346 of the world order 60, 345 mountaineering 163, 213, 259, 304, 337, 383, 426 music 65, 96, 99, 189, 392, 399, 406, 432, 454, 455, 510–1 musical catharsis 472, 478 mysticism 4, 166, 187, 248, 321, 425, 509 mystical initiations 42, 315, 510 mystical states 64–5, 195

576

on the tragic

Næss, Arne xxii, 126n. 41 naturalism 394, 433 Nemesis 155, 197, 345, 368, 434 Nerval see de Nerval, Gérard nerves 100, 218, 459, 463 overloading of 19, 77, 302, 317, 329, 362 nervous system 21, 79, 82, 85, 332, 341, 529 pain-causing 78, 81 neuroses 73, 169, 201, 338 newspapers 2, 178, 308, 546 Nietzsche, Friedrich 231, 304, 409, 437, 481, 500, 508–12 Nirvana 505, 506 non-believers 186, 192, 193–6 Norway 8, 161n. a, 179, 190, 375, 513, 527 Norwegian 390 Norwegian law 115, 192, 245, 249, 255, 259, 264–5, 267–8, 272, 276, 280, 289– 90 Norwegians 43, 130, 170, 334, 375 nothingness 465, 507, 543 Novalis 61, 99, 137, 500, 509 nutrition 18–9, 24, 27, 31, 34, 46, 53, 64, 413 obsession 320, 329, 382 and Edison 86 occasion 232, 292–7, 300–2, 315, 356–7, 370, 408, 471 Oedipus 452, 475, 477 Oehlenschläger, Adam 434, 436 Opitz, Martin 483–4, 486, 506 Oppenheim, Hermann 126, 142–4 optimism 136–7, 146, 156, 201, 203, 365, 377, 488, 501–2, 512, 542, 561–2 Christian 262–3 cultural 504 in Hartmann 507–8 moral 485 in Plato 480 in Schopenhauer 507 Orestes 336, 497, 537, 557, 558 original being 506, 509–11 over-determination 366, 566

over–differentiation 128, 461 over–equipment 68, 74–6, 123, 132, 153, 426, 440 autotelic 30 biological 29 concealed 98 and Don Juan 98 example of 175–81 by hypertrophy 33 metaphysical 61, 112, 121 and pain 78, 80 psychopathic 121 over-fixedness 167–8, 236, 293, 321, 327–8 pain 100, 105, 178, 230, 234, 273, 297, 300, 303, 330, 382, 397, 442, 532–4 and beauty 61 biological function of 19–20, 25, 235 child’s 277, 307 co-pain 415–6 disease 80–2, 304 in drama 400, 412, 415–20, 422, 455, 474, 485, 488, 492–4, 496, 498, 505, 521–4 eaters 210, 563–4 and hell 64 and justice 60, 67–8 memory of 83, 87, 144, 158 mental 78–9 metaphysical 219 in Nietzsche 510, 512 and old age 83 pain-with 83 and punishment 247, 261 in Schopenhauer 560 sense of 78–84 surplus 158 world 441–2, 451, 455 panacea 165 Pandora 440 paralysis 103, 110, 116, 119–20, 127, 427, 462 biological 26 metaphysical 116, 121 Paramecium 22, 38 paroxysms 109, 230

Index Pascal, Blaise 141 pathology 87, 104, 111, 121–7, 129–34, 142–5, 168, 243, 264, 303–4 cultural-pathological paradox 132–3, 138–40, 145 and fixedness 106 and postures 65 see also psychopathology pathos 134, 320, 326, 374, 491, 502, 507 in Aristotle 474, 477–9, 484 in Job 442 penance see repentance perfection paths 223–5, 438 peripeteias 307, 363, 399, 424 in Aristotle 470, 474–9 pessimism 144, 201–3, 378, 441, 480, 512, 542 Greek 562–3 in Nietzsche 509, 512 pets 35, 44, 235 Petsch, Robert 467–8, 479–90, 496, 499– 501, 505 pity 471–6, 484–5, 491, 496–7, 504, 511, 518–9, 535 and pain-with 83 surplus 90–1 Plato 468, 480, 481, 512 Platonic metaphysics 401 Platonists 553 Poppelbaum, Hermann 40–1 posterity 341, 367, 369 see also reproduction; procreation predators 18–9, 187–8 predestination 190, 292 556, 557 see also Calvinism primitive tribes 312, 314 primitiveness 39–44, 46–7, 56, 64, 77, 83, 88–9, 127, 144, 212–3, 222, 461, 565 and criminal law 247, 252, 291 God’s 449–50 in religions 187 principium individuationis 10, 163, 505, 509–10 procreation 204

577

protest against 427 see also reproduction Proteus 88, 191, 326 protoplasm 10, 37–40, 88, 113, 116 pseudo-engagements 322, 337 pseudo–solutions 150, 226–7, 367, 426, 435, 447, 489, 495, 566–8 central autotelic value of the tragedy 427 collective 315, 360–1 and greatness 335 Hamlet’s animosity toward 460 heroic 369, 373–4, 420 non-action as 119 psychiatry 129, 138 psychic distance 393–5, 421 psychoanalysis 109, 138, 221–2, 255, 325, 429, 472, 512 and Don Juan 98 and guilt 283 and metaphysical needs 56–7, 216, 370 optimistic 365 and pessimism 201 and self-deception 97n. 21, 170 and shame of being 135 and surrogates 151 and unconscious 162, 211 psychopathology 74, 89, 99, 121–45, 146, 190, 217, 328, 353–4, 452, 472 see also pathology psychosis 126, 129, 130, 133 races 49, 50, 73, 122, 129, 236, 314, 315, 361 Aryans 174, 438, 511 Racine, Jean 434, 557 randomness 12, 51, 81, 115, 223–4, 253, 277 in dramatic tragedy 392, 395, 535 and greatness 323, 350 in Hamlet 465 in the tragic course 351–60 redemption 192, 210, 217, 371, 505, 510, 547 Reiss-Andersen, Gunnar 97 religion 64, 67, 187–91, 195, 198–200, 216, 233–4, 334–6, 341, 345, 377, 435, 488 anchors 164, 188–9, 368

578

on the tragic

asceticism 63 conversion to 213 and culture 125 and guilt 238–9, 349 and heroism 375, 563 in Job 448, 451 and metaphysical morality 203–4 and metaphysical need 61, 209 reformers 129–30, 211 in Schiller 491, 497 and the will to believe 328 remorse 127, 230, 270, 422, 496, 497, 526 biological 27 metaphysical 62 social 51 Renaissance, the 334, 435, 480, 483 renunciation 54, 204, 371–2, 417, 522 and cultural endeavor 363 of faith 343, 375 greatness of 325 and morality 116 repentance 147, 422, 440, 450, 493–4, 532 repression 158, 168, 174, 184, 222 and punishment 249, 252, 269, 278, 291 reproduction 10, 40, 46, 64–6, 93–4, 186, 191, 220, 311 cessation of 219–20, 370 heroic abandonment of 371, 375 loss of 16, 233, 325 reproductive organs 42 see also procreation resignation 119, 120, 147, 297, 298, 375, 533, 562 Schopenhauerian 505, 507 restlessness 95, 120, 147, 176, 214, 489 metaphysical 498, 500 revenge and retaliation 69, 155, 208, 235, 243, 247, 253–4, 298, 325 in Hamlet 457–8, 462, 465 in Macbeth 527, 529 nature’s 363 in Othello 531 and pessimism 203 revenge instinct 247, 253–4, 280, 291, 422

in Schiller 561 Zeus’ 438 Romans 234, 434, 435, 511 Roman law 253, 254, 255, 276 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 126, 133, 248, 487 Russell, Bertrand 240–2 Russia 164, 173, 216, 334 sadism 47, 169, 236, 391, 413–4, 563 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 484 Schadenfreude 476, 518–9, 521, 530, 549 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 500–1, 502, 503, 554, 559 Schiller, Friedrich 419, 434, 487, 490–500, 511, 513, 553, 558–89, 563 “Cranes of Ibycus, The” 475 Demetrius 517 illness of 375–6, 561 Mary Stuart 517, 525 Wallenstein 223–4, 334, 517, 529–30, 558 Schjelderup, Harald 98, 507 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 499, 500 Schlegel, Friedrich 487, 499, 509 Schlegel, Johann Elias 486 Schneider, Kurt 134 Schopenhauer, Arthur 144, 474, 495, 500, 505–7, 560, 568 hopelessness of 378 pessimism of 480 and Nietzsche 508–11 and Schlegel 499 Schopenhauerism 462 Schück, Henrik 484 science 6–7, 44, 214–5, 240, 281, 335, 373, 427–9 aesthetic 402 and culture 125 failure of 510 humanistic 543 medical 138, 235 and Schiller 499 scientists 6, 10, 37, 180, 199, 201, 208, 223, 411, 419, 463, 513, 538 world image of 199 self-defense 266–7, 270, 291

Index self-feeling 23–4, 30, 42, 51, 55 self-preservation 11, 64, 65, 166, 226, 267, 331–2, 364, 454 self-sacrifice 205, 213–4, 331–2, 373, 510 selfishness and unselfishness 47n. 9, 93, 212, 326–8 sexes 174, 192, 343, 405, 414, 456, 459, 559 see also genders sexuality 15, 30–1, 46, 47, 77, 178, 221, 329, 344, 413–4 Shakespeare, William 393, 434, 453, 462, 486–8, 499, 504, 517 Hamlet 2, 389, 393, 416, 427, 452–66, 499, 517, 530, 551 King Lear 161, 396, 418, 517, 561 Macbeth 512, 517, 521–2, 524–5, 526–30 Othello 47, 391, 416, 418, 508, 517, 519, 524, 526, 531, 534–5 Richard III 421, 517, 520, 521–2, 524–5, 527–9, 530 Romeo and Juliet 391, 517, 521, 524–5, 526, 560 Timon of Athens 172, 327, 392 skepticism 27, 134, 196–7, 216, 341, 488 smoking see tobacco Socrates 334, 468, 511 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand 501, 502, 503 Sophocles 224, 357 Antigone 419, 440, 475–6, 477, 479, 517, 519–21, 524–5, 531, 533–7 Oedipus Rex 475–6, 477 Philoctetes 441 Spengler, Oswald 334 Spinoza, Baruch 542 sports 54, 179, 330, 399, 455 Stahr, Adolf 468, 470, 476 states of emergency 266, 267, 269, 270, 273 Steiner, Rudolf 42, 88–9 Stoicism 20, 447 Strindberg, August 126, 215, 316, 434, 436, 517 Sturm und Drang 486–7, 490

579

sublimation 69, 123, 157, 215, 226–7, 334, 369, 388, 427, 464 poetic 568 suicide xxii, 119, 165, 186, 218, 238, 342, 370, 422, 423 and criminal law 268 and drama 525–6 camouflaged 208, 212 suppression 19, 27, 50–2, 140, 181 surplus 28–35, 112, 122–4, 128, 157–8, 191, 213, 215, 293, 320, 566 and combinations of abilities 91–8 of consciousness 103, 144 and crime 252 and devaluing 155 and expansion 104–5 autotelic 175, 213, 215 example of 175 knowledge 102 metaphysical 114 in overcompensation 156 and over-equipment 74–6 pessimism 203 quantitative 43–4 and social symbiosis 51 and sublimation 157 and tragic catastrophes 321, 328–9 surrogates 113, 150–1, 168, 172, 212, 369 deficit 160 fixedness 165 and flight 154 for love 172 metaphysical 115, 213, 216 object 29–32, 56, 80, 89 postures 151–4 solutions 150, 152, 154, 155–7, 158, 169, 174–5, 175–81, 181–5, 220, 329, 566 swimming 64, 163, 171, 279, 339, 553–4 symbiosis 17, 18–9, 154–5 taboos 74, 291, 345 biological 27 metaphysical 62 social 50, 52

580

on the tragic

taboo ethics 268 telos 246, 248, 274, 276n. 94, 354 temperament 73, 99, 107, 109, 177, 183, 197, 246 theater 441, 453–5, 468, 472–3, 488, 495, 507, 529, 542, 562 audience 68–9, 369, 390, 400–2, 405–8, 412, 415–6, 420, 422, 426–7, 471 and the tragic 4 and guilt 412 theodicies 379n. 119, 446, 487, 554, 561, 563 Thoadicy 561 theology 174, 196, 215, 336, 457, 481–2, 563 Thespis 436, 437, 468 Thomas (doubting) 194, 525 tobacco 53–4, 56, 63, 306, 385, 398 torture 47, 79, 105, 236, 254–5, 300, 307, 411, 562 autotelic attraction of 414–5 and the environment 17 public 413 tragedy 314–6, 318, 323, 337, 360–4, 366–7, 386–7, 481, 483–8, 567–8 in Aristotle 467–80 biological 330, 332 and collective judgment 334 concept of 2 criminal guilt 348 depressing 548–9, 550 and greatness 338–41 Greek 191, 217–8 In Hegel 502 heroic 372–6 interfrontal 322, 342–3, 364, 366 and Jesus on the cross 336, 374 in Job 441, 451 and lifeview 377–9 in Lipps 514–20, 522, 524–7, 530–3, 535– 8 literary-historical 552 metaphysical 335–6, 345 necessary 366–71 in Nietzsche 508–12 objective 381, 391

of the pathological nature 134 plays 278 poetic 388–90, 398, 401–4, 406, 411, 413, 427, 431, 434–9 in Schiller 490, 493, 495–7 in Schlegel 499–500 in Schopenhauer 505–7 social 332 tragic catastrophes 321, 360, 370, 372, 421, 506, 557 concept 334, 354, 423, 497, 542, 563 conflicts 508, 557–8 consciousness 313, 563 counterpowers 369, 493 cultures 510–1 downfall 368, 427, 489 drama 392, 398, 431, 475 experience 406, 433, 511, 542, 545, 568 fates 311, 316, 342, 378, 399, 422, 489 feeling type 539, 541, 545 figures 424–5, 439, 466, 551 geniuses 288, 487 guilt 350, 475, 480, 502–3, 557 heroism 147, 375–6, 439, 521 insight 312, 371 irony 324 in Körner 552–5, 557–9, 561–3 mindsets 510–1 moods 433, 500, 502, 568 novels 386, 489 paradox 384, 548 perspective 312, 369 pity 476, 496, 504 pleasure 422, 471, 478–9, 508, 510, 518–1 poetic-tragic experience 407, 410, 411 poetry 4, 7, 310, 369, 390, 391, 401–4, 424, 467, 480, 482–3, 500, 518 posture 374, 562 qualification 307–10, 318, 386, 425, 433, 436, 440 recognition 425, 510 sensation 518, 519, 562 species 366 suffering 485, 507, 536, 559

Index tendency 362 tragi-comedy 210 viewpoint 310, 534, 552–3, 556, 561, 562 in Volkelt 541, 545, 548–50 wonder 312 worldview 556 trains 108, 259, 301, 358, 414 tranquility 44, 181, 461, 497, 505 triggering cause see occasion truths and untruths 52, 85, 106, 164, 522 tyranny 333, 357 of intent 87 see also abilities, tyranny of tyrants 415 God as 188, 445, 450 life as 218, 219 Uexküll see von Uexküll, Jakob Johann unbelievers 191, 335–6, 340 see also non-believers under-equipment 29, 84, 86, 153, 168, 264, 278, 288, 342 and compensation 154, 156 and pain 81 biological 63, 132 catastrophic 326 concealing over-equipment 98 examples 168–9, 181–2 social 51 under-fixedness 154, 158–67, 168, 252, 293, 321, 326–7, 328 examples 169, 175, 181–2 unforeseen consequences 115, 177, 258, 260, 349 unpredictability 37, 188, 349, 354 unselfishness see selfishness and unselfishness upbringing 60, 71–2, 79, 145, 197, 216, 315, 370, 415–6 upheavals 129, 230, 307 Urbye, Andreas 279–80 Valentin, Veit 422, 433 van Beethoven, Ludwig 132, 348, 432–3

581

variability 41, 72, 101, 176, 326 of law 48 veil of Maya 87, 505 veto 202, 307, 310, 540, 566 autotelic 56 biological 27 metaphysical 64, 68 social 50, 286 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 503, 539, 554 Vogt, Ragnar 97, 122, 127–9, 329 volition 119, 242, 248, 318, 344 Volkelt, Johannes 132, 432–3, 500–1, 504, 513, 533, 538–52, 556, 567 Voltaire 255, 486 von Bismarck, Otto 133 von Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht 127, 130 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 43, 89, 92–3, 132–3, 224, 409, 439, 441, 487–9, 498, 509, 521 Clavigo 487, 489 Egmont 489, 490 Faust 411, 416–7, 488–9, 517, 521, 523–4, 534–5, 561 Götz von Berlichingen 487 Iphigenia in Tauris 476–7, 487, 489, 517, 530–1, 536, 557–8, 561 Poetry and Truth 488–9 Sorrows of Young Werther, The 411, 485, 487, 489, 509 Torquato Tasso 411 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 489 von Hartmann, Eduard 144, 480, 499, 507– 8 von Kleist, Heinrich, 132–3, 327, 490 Michael Kohlhaas 327, 432 von Uexküll, Jakob Johann 6, 10, 20–3, 26, 37–40, 45, 88, 187, 257, 389 Wagner, Richard 432, 508–9, 511 weather 54, 272, 305, 354 Weininger, Otto 72, 174 Welhaven, Johan Sebastian 97n. a, 363 Werfel, Franz 562 Wergeland, Henrik 404, 539

582

on the tragic

wickedness 447, 462, 475, 477 law of 465 original 517, 526, 532 triumph of 505, 560 will 93, 237, 239, 245, 298, 345, 365, 492, 528, 531, 560 of God 190, 336 and guilt 272–6, 282 to live 219, 456 to perfection 379 to preserve the vital balance and generate 14, 512 to realize a moral ideal 145, 520 and Schopenhauer 505–6 to take life as a whole 510 to truth 485 to universal negation 119 see also freedom of the will willpower 273, 373, 414 wine 62, 181, 189, 233, 441, 535 wisdom 43, 178, 200, 335, 363, 439–40, 448, 457, 476, 506, 510 wolves 49 wolf pit of the pseudo-solution 495 wonder 102, 106, 412, 457 see also tragic wonder

working image 185, 198–205, 378 world angst 7, 104, 560, 562 world images 185, 198–9, 203 world order 60, 206, 287, 325, 379n. 119, 502, 555, 561, 563 justice and injustice of 281, 450, 554 moral 60, 68, 196, 340, 365, 378–9, 456, 488, 497, 504, 520, 528, 533–55, 537, 556 non-moral and amoral 250, 535 world spirit 186, 368, 487 worldviews 107, 158, 193, 196, 198–9, 366, 560 see also tragic worldview worship 65, 189, 214, 336, 405, 436–7, 443 hero 159 life 216 self- 54 Xerxes 257, 363 youth 103, 177, 200, 312, 320, 325, 437 Zeus 437–41 Zoroaster 64