The Word and the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou): Pneumatological Fragments 0813234069, 9780813234069

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The Word & the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou)

Ferdinand Ebner The Word & the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou)

Pneumatologic al Fr agments

�

Edited by Joseph R. Chapel Translated by Harold J. Green

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.





English translation Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved Originally published in 1921 in Innsbruck, Austria (Brenner Verlag), as Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.­48-1984. ∞

Design and composition by Kachergis Book Design

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8132-3406-9

Contents

C on t e n t s A Note on the Need for an English Translation of Ebner by Krzysztof Skorulski

vii

Translator’s Note by Harold J. Green

xi

Editor’s Introduction and Acknowledgments by Joseph R. Chapel

1

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Preface

47

1. Fragment 1. The Spiritual Realities 53 2. Fragment 2. Word and Personality—Origin of the W0rd— Aloneness—I and Thou 56 3. Fragment 3. Word and Human Becoming—Proofs of God— Atheism—Word and S­ elf-Consciousness—Dependence of the I 64 4. Fragment 4. I Think and It Thinks—Kierkegaard—The Concrete I— Verbalization of Thinking—Ideal, Concrete, Fictitious Thou—Word and Truth 76 5. Fragment 5. Knowledge of the Spiritual Life—The Philosophers and the Word—The Word and the Spiritual Life—Science and the Word—Pneumatology 89 6. Fragment 6. Sense and Senses—The Lower Senses—Hearing and Seeing—Beauty—Musical Intuition—Tone and Word— Word and Spiritual Neediness

97

7. Fragment 7. Reason and Word

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Contents

8. Fragment 8. The Primal Word

124

9. Fragment 9. Consciousness and Being-Conscious— Pneuma and Psyche—Psychology— Insanity 130 10. Fragment 10. The Existence of the I—Idealism—The Word and Love 147 11. Fragment 11. The Oblique Case and the Meaning of the ­M-Sound 157 12. Fragment 12. Mathematical Thought and the I—Harmony— Descartes—Word and Mathematical Formula—Substance and Ethos—The Principle of Identity—Reality 171 13. Fragment 13. Verb and Sentence—The Meaning of the T­ -Sound

198

14. Fragment 14. Existential Declaration and Personality— The Becoming and Being of the Spiritual Realities—Love 209 15. Fragment 15. The Human and the Divine—God as Mental Image and as Reality 228 16. Fragment 16. Otto Weininger—Spirit and Sexuality— The Jews—Christ

237

17. Fragment 17. The Ultimate Meaning of the Cogito— Self-Knowledge—Ethos and Grace—Sin and the Word 256 18. Fragment 18. Nature and Spirit, Universal Life, and

Individual Existence—Culture and Christianity— Conclusion

270

Index

291

vi

A Note on the Need for a Translation

A No t e on t h e N e e d for a n E ng l i s h T r a ns l at ion of E bn e r Krzysztof Skorulski Secretary, Internationale F ­ erdinand Ebner Gesellschaft

The International Ferdinand Ebner Society (IFEG) seeks to disseminate and popularize the work of Ferdinand Ebner and of dialogical thought in general.1 The appearance of the Fragments in English is a great joy. This book, finally available to the E ­ nglish-speaking reader, is of considerable importance. The question is, how is it possible that such a significant book had not been translated into English before now? It has always been a desire, first by Ebner’s editor and friend Ludwig von Ficker, then by the International Ebner Society, to make this book available in English. One hundred years have passed from the writing of the book to the publication of this English version. There is a long story behind it, a story of failed attempts and unrealized plans. The cause of the delay was not really a lack of interest; rather, it is as if some fate hung over the project. Perhaps the right moment has arrived now. Ebner is often brought into connection with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not without reason. Ebner knew about Wittgenstein as a person and admired his generosity, while Wittgenstein must have known about Ebner. The first point of connection was Ludwig von 1. Internationale Ferdinand Ebner Gesellschaft, http://www.­ebner-gesellschaft.org/.

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A Note on the Need for a Translation

Ficker, the editor of the review Der Brenner, which was read by both Ebner and Wittgenstein. As Walter Methlagl, a friend of Ficker, said, Ficker had both books ready for publication on his table at the same time: Ebner’s Fragments and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus! For lack of money, he decided to publish Ebner’s book, which seemed to fit better in his review. The disappointment of Wittgenstein was apparently considerable, and when the review took on a more Catholic character in the following years, he distanced himself from it. His book was published elsewhere a few years later and achieved great popularity in the ­English-speaking world, where his connection with Bertrand Russell and Cambridge played a decisive role. The second point of connection was Ludwig Hänsel, a good friend of Wittgenstein, who was fascinated by Brenner and Ebner. It is unthinkable that he would have not spoken about these themes in his lengthy conversations with Wittgenstein during his primary ­school-teaching period, in the 1920s. In Austria’s postwar years, both thinkers were compared as representatives of two attitudes toward language, and each had his followers. But while the way of thinking of the two philosophers is perhaps closer to each other than one usually thinks, the status of their popularity in the ­English-speaking world stands in stark contrast. But it did not have to be so. For the first edition of Ebner’s book (1921), Ludwig Ficker said he had orders “from Russia, Japan and America.”2 It is probably no longer possible to find out who actually ordered the book, but in certain circles it was very likely already noticed. After all, Ebner was mentioned in America from time to time, especially in Protestant writings and in the context of Emil Brunner’s theology. Brunner himself drew inspiration from Ebner’s book and even thanked him by letter. But while Brunner became known in the United States, Ebner did not. Brunner was right to call Ebner the most neglected thinker of the twentieth century. 2. Walter Methlagl, Brenner—Gespräche: Sufgezeichnet in den Jahren von 1961 bis 1967 (Innsbruck: Forschungsinstitut Brenner Archiv, 2014), 72, http://www.uibk .ac.at/ ­brenner-archiv/publikationen/links/brenner_gespraeche.pdf.

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A Note on the Need for a Translation

At any rate, before translating the Fragments into English, the first task was still to publish Ebner’s other works in German, their original language. After his death in 1931 it was not a favorable time for that because of the financial crisis and the beginning of Nazi rule in Germany. Despite that, a German publisher, Anton Pustet, attempted to do so in 1935 and published two books before the situation worsened. On the other hand, the Nazi regime’s persecution forced some of Ebner’s supporters into exile, including Ebner sympathizers like John M. Österreicher, later the coauthor of Nostra Aetate during Vatican Council II. Österreicher belonged to a group of ­Judeo-Christians who came from Judaism, often under the influence of Ficker and his Der Brenner, which promoted conciliation between Jews and Christians. Another prominent representative of this group, Karl Thieme, apparently “converted under the impression of Ebner’s life’s work,” as the great Austrian author Karl Kraus wrote.3 The presence and work of Österreicher in the United States must have led to a better knowledge of the positions of Der Brenner and Ebner himself, even if for ­German-speaking immigrants. It is possible—as maintains the “oral tradition” of the IFEG—that even in this environment an English edition of Ebner was also planned but was never realized. After surviving the Second World War, Ficker continued to strive for the dissemination of Ebner’s thought. In the 1950s and ’60s, as a wave of interest for Ebner rose, he had other prominent allies, like the aforementioned Ludwig Hänsel, who was the president of the IFEG at the time, and the ­English-American poet W. H. Auden. Among the “open Christians” of that time in Austria there was a widespread belief that a renewal of Catholicism and Christianity was imminent based on Ebner’s ideas. An expression of this conviction can be seen in an essay by Friedrich H ­ ansen-Löve at this time: 3. Karl Kraus, “Brief des Verlags der Fackel an August Zechmeister,” in Der Brenner und die Fackel: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Karl Kraus, ed. G. Stieg (Salz­ burg: Müller: 1976), 206.

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A Note on the Need for a Translation

“If in the near future, probably inspired by the eminent poet and essayist W. H. Auden, the A ­ nglo-Saxon world gets to know Ferdinand Ebner as a contemporary of Wittgenstein, then the actual thanks are due to Ludwig von Ficker.”4 But for some reason, even this project remained unfulfilled. In the meantime, the United States already knew of dialogical philosophy from the works of Martin Buber, so the term became nearly attached to his name. Yet as Joseph Chapel writes in his introduction, not only was Buber’s thought very similar, Buber later admitted reading Ebner’s work while writing his own I and Thou. Although he did not like to talk about it, he did mention this in his diary. It was an interest in Martin Buber that brought Harold (Hal) Green to Ebner. He describes his relation to Ebner’s thought in his own translator’s introduction. In the meanwhile, however, the direction of philosophical investigations has changed (postmodernism and so on), and the interest in Ebner has subsided. But since the IFEG learned about Dr. Green’s translation, it has always been on its agenda to get it published. Now, as we’re seeing a certain upswing in interest in Ebner, after one hundred years it may be the right moment to fulfill Ebner’s possibly prophetic words about his book and its main idea: I do not really understand how exactly I had to come to this idea. It is not arrogance for me to think that someday it will be effective in the world and in life. It does not have to be the very book that starts this effect, for it is possible that a completely different person comes who is more worthy than I and with a real vocation.5 4. Forum 12, no. 136 (April 1965): 192–93. 5. Ferdinand Ebner, letter to Walter Huber (May 12, 1931).

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Translator’s Note

T r a ns l at or’s No t e Harold J. Green My way to Ferdinand Ebner was through Martin Buber. Specifically, the impact Buber’s I and Thou had on me. I first happened upon Buber’s masterwork in the bookstore of Iowa Wesleyan College, in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in the spring of 1970. I was teaching psychology there at the time. I chanced to find and open the book and proceeded to have an intellectual reaction unlike anything I had experienced before or since. Very quickly during my reading, I had the uncanny sense that I understood Buber and that I was waking up what must have been h­ alf-asleep in the dawning of my knowledge, as Kahlil Gibran put it. Along with that was an unexpected, unnerving sense that somehow I shared—or would share—in Buber’s insight into the nature of persons, human and divine. My undergraduate major had been philosophy, with an emphasis on philosophy of science and philosophy of language, especially the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian Jew, whose groundbreaking work Tractatus ­Logico-Philosophicus was published in the same year as Buber’s I and Thou. Wittgenstein and Buber were two of the most influential thinkers of my intellectual development. ­Fast forward to 1976. After entering pastoral ministry in the United Methodist Church and completing an M.Div. at ­GarrettEvangelical Theological Seminary, I began a Ph.D. program in World Religions at Northwestern University. I did so because I wanted to study Buber and Judaism, and Dr. Manfred Vogel, a rabbi

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Translator’s Note

and Buber scholar, had invited me into the program. My studies had to be comparative between two world religions, so I chose Judaism and Christianity. Since I wanted to study Buber, I had to find a Christian theologian and/or philosopher with whom to compare him. Then I happened upon Ferdinand Ebner. I had to pass language requirements, so, needless to say, for my modern language, I chose German, which I had studied for a year as an undergraduate. In the course of developing my capacity to read German, for the sake of reading Buber’s work in German, as well as t­ hen-current German scholarship regarding his work, I kept coming across Ebner’s name—only in German, since he had not been translated into English. Again and again, what was referred to was the “­I-Thou insight of Ebner and Buber.” Who is Ebner? I had to find out. And what a find it was! I will never forget coming across Ebner’s work in German at Northwestern’s library. I opened its beginning pages, and even though it was all in German, once again I had the sense that I shared—or was going to share—in this insight. It was as if I were somehow involved in developing intellectual history, at least around this primal insight. At first I intended to only translate some of Ebner’s work, when needed, to compare and contrast with Buber, especially their differences as a Catholic and a Jew. Then one day, while holding onto Ebner’s book, it was as if it addressed me, saying, “Translate me!” Though I could not of course hear words, I nevertheless felt addressed, as Buber would put it. Ebner’s book now took on the status of an “­I-Thou” rather than merely an “­I-It.” I knew what I had to do, which fortunately was also what I wanted to do. I asked for an appointment with my major advisor, Dr. Vogel, to request including a translation of the entire book, alongside my dissertation. It was entirely unnecessary to do so, since my dissertation itself consisted of three sections: the history of the concept of dialogue from Plato to Ebner; a critical introduction to Ebner’s book; and a

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Translator’s Note

comparison between Ebner and Buber, respecting their religious traditions. Sitting across from his desk, even before I could make known my request, Dr. Vogel leaned forward and asked me if I would consider translating the entire book! Acting surprised, but pleasantly so, I said I would be willing to do so, as long as it was understood that the translation was not to be included in the dissertation; therefore, it would not be subject to critique. He agreed, and we shook hands. Dr. Vogel never asked why I wanted to talk to him, nor did I ever tell him. The translation became a labor of love as well as learning. The dissertation, together with Ebner’s translation, took two years to complete. The dissertation necessitated translating over eighty pages of German scholarship, mostly about Ebner. I served two churches around Iowa City, the home of the University of Iowa, which had an extraordinary theological and philosophical library. It also had Dr. Fred Fehling, professor emeritus in German. Each week Dr. Feh­l ing and I would get together to discuss my translation. I always had a translation; I never asked him to translate for me, but only to determine the accuracy of my work. The central problem, as anyone who translates discovers, is that words have a Sitz im Leben or “setting in life” in one language that simply cannot be fully translated into another language. A central example is the word Geist in German. Its many meanings include “spirit,” “ghost,” and “mind.” So when the word Ebner uses is geistig, which is an adjective, you are forced to choose between “spiritual” and “intellectual”—which have very different meanings in English. So in Ebner’s case, especially since the subtitle is Pneumatological Fragments, referring directly to “spiritual,” it seemed essential to translate geistig as “spiritual.” By way of intellectual history: I completed the translation and dissertation in the spring of 1980. In August of 1983, I began work on a book that came to be titled The Eternal We (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986). What both Ebner and Buber seem to see, but that they did not develop, was the concept and meaning of the third di-

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Translator’s Note

mension of “person,” both human and divine—namely, the “We” between or shared by the “I” and “You.” For a period of several years, I was hounded by a concept, by what Buber called a geistige Gestalt, or “spiritual/intellectual form.” Buber had his spiritual form, and I had mine. Mine finally got named by me in 1978. In German it was dazwischen, or the “­in-between,” or more simply the “between.” What happens, according to Buber, and in keeping with my experience of— or encounter with—the “between,” is that it seeks to become clarified and brought across via the only instrument available—namely, language—into the realm of discourse and discussion. My book The Eternal We turned out to be a trinitarian metaphysic about the nature of persons, both human and divine. The “We” of Spirit, which constitutes what is distinctly shared by and between the I and Thou, as their relationship as such, is as real, substantial, and eternal as the partners therein and thereof. The eternality of relationship, once recognized, will change how we see and understand God and ourselves. In grateful sum, I humbly stand on the intellectual shoulders of Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. That my translation is at long last being published means more than I can here convey. I do want, however, to thank two men. First, Fr. Joe Chapel, STD, who found and utilized my translation of Ebner back in the 1990s to assist in the writing of his own dissertation. He has always been most positive about my translation. And as an editor, he did an excellent job of making a technically accurate translation an even better one. Second, I wish to thank Dr. Krzysztof Skorulski for his tireless efforts to see to the publication of an English translation of Ebner’s book. His many suggestions contributed to the completion of the current publication, which has been greatly developed since its original form. Finally, it is my fervent hope that Ebner will finally get the recognition he well deserves as a highly original and significant philosopher and theologian—not only that, but that his ideas might gain currency in the English realm of ideas. xiv

The Word & the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou)

Introduction and Acknowledgments

E di t or’s I n t roduc t ion a n d Ac k now l e d g m e n t s Joseph R. Chapel

The Importance of Ebner This seminal work of Ferdinand Ebner (1882–1931), Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, was first published in the original German in 1921.1 It has been translated over the years into a number of other languages—including Italian,2 Spanish,3 and Polish,4—but until now there has been no published translation in English. 1. Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: Pnuematologische Fragmente (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1921). It was republished in 1963 as part of a t­ hree-volume collection of Ebner’s complete works in Schriften, vol. 1, Fragmente, Aufsätze, Aphorismen: Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes, ed. Franz Seyr (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1963), 75–342. There have been other editions through the years; the most recent is a critical edition: Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: Pnuematologische Fragmente, ed. Richard Hörmann (Vienna: LIT, 2009). This edition is also incorporated in the ongoing digital project begun in 1999 to produce critical editions of Ebner’s complete works: Digitale Edition: Ferdinand Ebner Gesammelte Werke, ed. Richard Hörmann (collaboration of University of Salzburg, Center for Ethics and Poverty Research and University of Innsbruck, Institute of Philosophy), http://wfe.sbg .ac.at/exist/apps/Frontpage/index.html (hereafter FEGW). 2. Ebner, La parola e le realtà spirituali: Frammenti pneumatologici, trans. Paul Renner, ed. Silvano Zucal (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Edizioni San Paolo, 1998). 3. Ebner, La palabra y las realidades spirituales: Fragmentos pneumatológicos, trans. José Maria Garrido (Madrid: Caparrós Editores, 1995). 4. Ebner, Słowo i realności duchowe: Fragmenty pneumatologiczne, trans. Krzysztof Skorulski, intro. Bernhard Casper (Chojnice: Oficyna Wydawnicza Fundacji Fuhrmanna, 2016).

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

This volume will serve to introduce the ­English-speaking world to the dialogical personalist thought of this very original thinker— well known and the subject of significant study in Europe, but virtually unknown in the English language. Why a translation, and why now? Ebner’s thought has been applied fruitfully for nearly a century in a variety of settings and disciplines and continues to have many points of influence and points of reference that can be fruitfully applied today. In the philosophy of language, Ebner’s thought on the “why” of language and where it comes from can be juxtaposed with thinkers who explore the “how” of language and how it operates. In theology, Ebner has had a notable influence, both direct and indirect. Indeed, he has been called “the secret philosophical inspiration of modern theology.”5 Especially in the study of sacraments, Ebner’s thought provides useful insights for symbolic approaches to sacramental theology. In the world of religion in general, most notably for dialogue among religions, Ebner offers a typology that is useful for comparative religious study and dialogue. Ebner’s authentic dialogue was a fruitful tool in the early days of interreligious dialogue after Vatican Council II. In the world of political science and international diplomacy, Ebner offers excellent contributions for the theoretical underpinnings of dialogue in general. In psychology, Ebner offers insights into the transpersonal nature of the human person that have been taken up in the world of psychology. In the world of hard sciences there has been a notable interest in Ebner over the last decade or more. Interestingly, in cellular biology, c­ ell-level communications theorists note that cells do not be5. Jurgen Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1966), 1:xvii.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

have as they should, and at the level of basic science, they seek new philosophical paradigms for inter- and intracellular communications to understand how it is that cells appear to converse and make decisions independently of the larger system. The sheer diversity of disciplines in which Ferdinand Ebner’s thought has found a home and the variety of ways in which his thought has found application provide reason enough to bring this work finally to the attention of the E ­ nglish-speaking world. While his thought and his form of expression are challenging, readers will find great reward for the effort.

The Philosophical Environment Much of the philosophy of recent centuries stands in stark contrast to the biblical sense of the human person as founded in relationship with God and the community. Specifically, there has been such a radical shift in philosophy toward the autonomous subject that the way to understanding the things above, the transcendent, seems at times to be closed. The focus here will not be a formal presentation of one or another philosophical system, but merely some observations on the influence that Cartesian thought and German idealism have had on modern man and woman, an influence with a great inward focus on thought, reason, and idea, but little sense of relationship with God and neighbor as foundational for the human person. Consequently, there is no foundation for understanding that bringing guilt and sin to speech in a concrete confession can be a reconciling encounter with God and community. Beginning with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650), something might be said about the Cartesian problem.6 Starting with universal doubt, Descartes found a foundation for certainty: If I doubt, then I am thinking. Thought then exists, even in the event I 6. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980); Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 3–27, 77–100.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

am dreaming or led into error by some evil demon. Regardless, the fact that I do think is beyond a doubt. Here is found Descartes’s turn to the subject: I think, therefore I am, cogito ergo sum. The foundation of knowledge is no longer to be found in the object, but rather, in the subject and the conscious spirit. Since ancient times, being had been divided into living or nonliving, but with Descartes, the distinction became conscious or unconscious. What was living possessed a soul as the first principle of life, but now consciousness is something apart from matter, thus life is a material process; the soul (or mind) is not part of that material process and so loses its union with the body. The soul is now a thinking thing (res cogitans) and the body an extended substance (res extensa), completely subjected to mechanical law. In trying to know who is this “I” that exists, Descartes concludes, “I am . . . only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason . . . a thinking thing.”7 B ­ odies that lack consciousness have no souls—true of inorganic bodies, but now also true of animals. There is only one exception where the soul and body are in contact: man.8 From the ancients to the Middle Ages, man had been a spiritual being with a predetermined place in the hierarchy: God, angels, man, animals, etc. Now with Descartes, the key given is no longer the world, but human thought, the subjective idea. As Descartes himself said, he no longer thought of himself as a man or even as a rational animal; “He has redefined what it is to be human in terms of consciousness, and his perspective is completely egocentric. Thus 7. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:18. 8. The term “man,” used throughout, should be taken to mean “man and woman.” It has not been possible to substitute some more inclusive term, such as “humanity” or “humankind,” “person” or “people,” because the various authors under study, especially in the source languages, assign particular, precise meanings to each of these terms that do not lend themselves to inclusive translations without causing confusion about actual meaning.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

the Cartesian ‘I,’ as a thing that thinks, comes into the philosophical tradition.”9 The Cartesian “I” is in relation with itself, or stated differently, it engages only in monologue, for dialogue would require the personal address and response of an “other,” who in this case cannot be reached. The Cartesian turn to the subject was to have significant consequences for philosophy: The analysis of man and the disclosure of his cognitive structures become the principal efforts of philosophers like Kant. On the other hand, the objective world is gradually given over to doubt, to such a degree that it appears as a function of the subject. Even Hegel is dealing with a kind of human thinking about a world, which becomes obedient to the dialectic that it has discovered. Turning to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and the German Idealist philosophers and their treatment of the subjective idea, it is difficult to give a precise definition to the term “idealism,” as it is understood in a variety of ways. In a general sense, however, it is understood to mean that reality is mediated by ideas in the mind rather than by knowing the thing in itself. In trying to understand how reality and idea were related in the centuries after Descartes, Kant looked for a way to integrate experience and reason. Therefore, the nature of human knowledge is of great interest in his philosophy. It is not entirely certain that Kant is truly an idealist, but he assigns the designation to himself. Kant maintained that we don’t know the world through rational thought alone, but at the same time, mere sense experience doesn’t give knowledge of the world, either, for it is blind without interpretation. Therefore, our perceptions must be organized in a priori intuitions of space and time, in terms of rational principles. His critique of knowledge approached reason through science and tried to resolve the gap between rationalism and empiricism be9. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 4–5.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

cause, in his view, neither offered a coherent theory of knowledge. Empiricism, by holding experience over understanding, lacked the concepts with which experience could be described, and rationalism, by emphasizing understanding over experience, dismissed the very subject matter of knowledge. Kant’s solution is his transcendental idealism: knowledge is achieved through the synthesis of concept and experience. This synthesis is transcendental because it can’t be observed as a process, but only presupposed as a result. Experience must conform to the categories of understanding, which are basic forms of thought, a priori concepts, which subsume all empirical concepts (for instance, the concept “table” is subsumed under “artifact,” which in turn is subsumed under “object,” then “substance,” as opposed to the concept “killing,” which is subsumed under “action,” which is consumed under “cause”). These categories are endpoints of the chains of subsumption, the most basic operations of human thought, and by them we can know a priori that our world must obey certain principles implicit in concepts such as substance, object, and cause and be ordered by space and time. Thus, with Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” objects conform to our knowledge, instead of the more common view that our knowledge conforms with the objects we encounter—that is to say, the mind is indeed important. And so by Kant’s doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments, man can only know appearances (phenomena) and not ­things-in-themselves (noumena); that is, man can know the idea, or the representation, but not the reality. Thus, there were real limits to knowledge, and there is very little that can be known about the a priori ideas of world, soul, or God. While Kant recognized that the world is not known by reason alone, he does not propose a dialogical model: it is precisely Kant’s notion that knowledge is limited to the ideal world of representation that Ebner’s dialogical philosophy rejects.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

Kant had a great influence on the classical German Idealists— including three key figures, Johann Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831)—who embraced much of his method, but not his limitations on human knowledge, for they recognized an ultimate unity in reality that was spiritual and intelligible through reason. While Fichte made some steps toward a dialectic theory, it was for Hegel to work out the dialectical development of spirit. As an absolute idealist, Hegel tried to achieve a synthesis through the Absolute Spirit, manifest in man. For Hegel, absolute, dialectical unity was in the act of mind or spirit. The dialectical law worked like this: every level of consciousness moves by self-contradiction to a higher level that resolves the contradiction, so that the highest contradiction of consciousness, which is the duality of subject and object, finally gets resolved in Absolute Mind. The triad can be described as Art (thesis), Religion (antithesis), and Philosophy (synthesis). All of this is perfected in the collective history of man, because Absolute Spirit unfolds in history. (This suggests the interesting possibility that Hegel’s dialectic is inherently dialogical: the confrontation of thesis with antithesis is, in a sense, a dialogue that strives toward synthesis. If Spirit is complete in itself, why is a dialectical process necessary? Does spirit dialogue with itself within human history toward the fullness of Absolute Spirit?) This has a political application, as well, for the state is also a manifestation of the Absolute and so is seen as absolute and authoritarian. Hegel’s synthesis earned critics who didn’t find enough room for individual human existence and action in the absolute spirit. For example, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) looked to the free individual, who searched for happiness, was morally responsible, and believed in a transcendent personal God, while Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) looked to man as he becomes more fully real through social relations with other men and the natural world. The undervaluation of

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

the free individual and of human social relations suggests a dialogical element missing in Hegel that these critics will try to overcome in their own thought (to be examined later). Among the effects of these philosophies, even to this day, is a residual m ­ ind-body Cartesian dualism: to the extent that we are trapped inside our own heads by this dualism, we continue to find it difficult to open ourselves to the presence of God and one another in concrete personal relationship: despite my yearning for God, I am at the center of the universe, at the center of what is real and knowable as existing, and I am unwittingly isolated. Since I am the arbiter of truth, the reality of God and of others depends on me. Yet, I know myself to be finite, thus my finitude then impoverishes this ­me-dependent God so that any real openness to God becomes problematical. Indeed, it has been said that in Kant’s variations on the Cartesian paradigm, we have come to recognize in ourselves the man . . . , who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy.10

Thus, Descartes and Kant have given us as a legacy, “a ‘philosophy of the autonomous subject,’ who is closed against the transcendental experience in which dependence on God becomes evident. The modern self is ill at ease in Christianity because of this failure to evince a sense of creatureliness.”11 As a consequence, there is the false sense that verification is within ourselves rather than in community: I don’t perceive the community as constitutive of self, nor personal relations as part of my relationship with a God who is greater than I (rather 10. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 80. 11. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 7.

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than dependent on me). This isolation of the autonomous subject in the world of ideas has motivated substantial philosophical reflection within the varied philosophical currents of the twentieth century. Pragmatists, such as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1850–1952), each examined the close link between thinking and doing. Analytical philosophy—a term that broadly encompasses Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) logical atomism, the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) philosophical analysis—reacted to philosophical idealism by concerning itself with the complex of problems surrounding the imprecise use of language. (Although Wittgenstein was in Vienna in these years, he was not a participant in the Vienna Circle, but his work was influential in their thought). This would provide the underpinnings for the development of various philosophies of language that would ultimately have a significant effect on related disciplines, such as critical theory, structuralism, and semiotics. Phenomenology, in attempting to take a step back from experience in order to understand it, tries to intuit essences (not merely what is contingent or empirical) and grasp essential connections between those essences. Through its most famous proponent, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), phenomenology is both a bridge to, and a major influence upon, existentialist thinkers later in the century. Meanwhile, the discipline of hermeneutics was significantly shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and would be further influenced by a diversity of thinkers from Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to ­Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and from Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) to Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). It concerns itself with the principles of interpretation: because history deals with human life, it can only be understood through our own lived experience (Erlebnis). The problem then of how to understand the experience and texts of periods and cultures not our own becomes the necessary subject of sustained reflection.

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It is worthy of note that Austria in this period was a place of great intellectual ferment, not only in philosophy but also in other disciplines. Psychology saw the development of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and individual psychology by Alfred Adler (1870–1937). Although Ebner did not go to Freud’s lectures, he was aware of his thought through some of his other followers, as well as through his writing, especially The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung).12 In fact, he transformed the concepts of Freud in a dialogical way into the “Dream of the Spirit” (Traum vom Geist).  The composer, music theorist, and painter Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) had a great influence in music as leader of the Second Viennese School, which included composers, many of whom had been his students in early t­ wentieth-century Vienna, whose work was characterized by an expressionism that gradually evolved into an atonal style. The dynamic intellectual environment of this period offers a backdrop against which to situate the work of the dialogical philosophers, who viewed dialogue in authentic relationship as pivotal to the human person.

The Dialogical Philosophers: Das Neue Denken Das neue Denken, “the new thinking,” was the name given to the work of the dialogical philosophers who came to prominence in the wake of World War I. At issue was a loss of confidence in the sufficiency of reason and the possibilities of human and social progress that had begun with the Enlightenment and endured as idealism into the twentieth century. The drastic experience of the First World War put an end to the optimism of Idealism and brought 12. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), originally published as Die Traumdeutung (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1900).

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

acceptance for voices who, for many years, had opposed Hegelian philosophy. The most prominent dialogical philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Martin Buber (1878–1965), and Ferdinand Ebner—share a remarkable similarity of thought due not to the limited contact they had with one another’s work, but rather deriving from das neue Denken, “the new thinking,” Rosenzweig’s term for this reaction against the Cartesian and German Idealism of the time. Therefore, the dialogical thinkers must be understood in light of this philosophical climate to which they were reacting, and so a brief examination of their philosophical precursors will be helpful.

The History of the Dialogical Principle Although dialogical philosophy is a t­wentieth-century phenomenon, its precursors struggled with the turn to the subject and its implications for the reality of the “I” and the “other” and their place in the universe.13 Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was unable to find the meaning of his own personal existence in a rational, Cartesian I. What he found was not man in dynamic relation as a s­ elf-affirming subject, “I am,” but the contrary, insignificant man, an infinitely small and limited moi over against the vastness of the universe. “It is the sobriety of the man who has become more deeply solitary than ever before, and with a sober pathos he frames the anthropological question afresh: qu’est ce qu’un homme dans l’infini?”14 For Pascal, the I’s aloneness is not due to its ­self-sufficiency and autonomy, but rather, in its small13. See Harold Johnson Green, “Introduction,” in “The Word and the Spiritual Realities: A Translation of and Critical Introduction to Ferdinand Ebner’s Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten and a Comparison with Martin Buber’s Ich und Du” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1980), (hereafter Green, “Introduction”). 14. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New ­ arnier-Flammarion, York: Collier, 1965), 131, citing Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: G 1976), Fragment, 230. See Pascal, Pensées, bilingual ed., trans. H. F. Stewart (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1950), Fragment 230: “What is a man, within the infinite?”

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ness it is the I of despair. The moi only moves beyond this meaningless aloneness through the spiritual activity of the heart: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. . . . It is the heart which experiences God, not the reason.”15 For Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), it is not with the heart, but in language that man relates to God, for language is not created by man, but given to him by God. In Creation God’s plan unfolds in speech: “Speak that I may see thee!16 This wish was fulfilled in the creation, which is a speaking to the creature through the creature.”17 It is language that binds man to God and his Word, but at the same time, language in its humanness binds man to the human community. “The fact that God speaks, constitutes the foundation of philosophy in Hamann’s view, which makes it philosophy of language. Hence the basic philosophical problem is the problem of language.”18 The problem of language unfolds dramatically in his ­oft-quoted reflection on its relation to reason: Even if I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would still have to repeat no more than a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this m ­ arrow-bone and I will gnaw over it until death. This profundity still remains obscure for me; I still wait for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.19

Hamann’s asystematic line of thinking greatly affected dialogical thought, and Ebner was to be especially influenced by its Johannine character. The terms “I” and “Thou” appear, perhaps for the first time, in a 15. Pascal, Pensées, bilingual ed., trans. Stewart, Fragments 277–78. 16. Harold Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee!: The Religious Significance of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 74–76. 17. Ronald Gregor Smith, J. G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence (London: Collins, 1960), 197, cited in Stahmer, Speak, 84. 18. Green, “Introduction,” xxv. 19. Johann Georg Hamann, “Letter to Herder, August 7, 1784,” in Hamanns Schriften, ed. Fr. Roth (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821), 7:151ff, cited without reference by Ebner; see Green, “Introduction,” xxiv, and chapter 7 in this volume.

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1775 letter by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819): “I open eye or ear, or I stretch forth my hand, and feel in the same moment inseparably: Thou and I, I and Thou.” By 1785, this had matured into a more precise formulation: “The I is impossible without the Thou,” which “ruptures the monism of the Ichphilosophie (­I-philosophy),”20 while anticipating later dialogical thought. To this, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) adds the recognition that in language the otherness of each partner is expressed in duality, by which the thought of the one finds resonance in the other, when the subject “really sees the thought outside himself; and this is possible only in another being, representing and thinking like himself. And between one power of thought and another there is no other mediator but speech.”21 Likewise in opposition to the Cartesian, rationalist cogito, Franz von Baader (1765–1841) views man from the religious perspective of his relationship with God, because no consciousness is possible that does not imply a relationship with a superior being.22 Most authors would maintain that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) discovered the “­I-thou” with his 1843 affirmation that the ultimate and highest principle of philosophy is communion of man with man as the criterion of truth: “The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man and man—a unity which rests upon the reality of the difference between I and Thou.”23 Yet, Feuerbach, in making this key anthropological affirmation, does not take the further step to see that the unity of the I and Thou is God; rather, he responds “with the substitution of an anthropo20. Martin Buber, “The History of the Dialogical Principle” (“Nachwort zu den Schriften uber das dialogische Prinzip”), translated by Maurice Friedman, in Between Man and Man, 209; see Green, “Introduction,” xxvi–xxvii. 21. Buber, Between Man and Man, 27. 22. Julio Puente, Ética Personalística: Una interpretación de la obra de F. Ebner (Madrid: Imprenta Saez, 1982), 24. 23. James Mundackal, “The Dialogical Structure of Personal Existence according to Martin Buber” (S.T.D. diss., Pontifical Gregorian University, 1977), 34; see Puente, Ética Personalística, 24–25.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

logical ersatz God.”24 He does not recognize that there is a religious foundation in the word that gives unity to the I and the thou, that it is this religious foundation in the word that gives them their personal dignity. Nonetheless, Feuerbach’s discovery of the thou is a real leap in dialogical thought. Where Feuerbach rejected all religious relationship, Søren Kier­ kegaard’s (1813–55) specifically religious interest was to discover what it means to become a Christian. His analysis of human existence, which would have a great influence on later existential philosophy, argued that each individual had to acquire and appropriate ethics and religion on his own, contrary to the Hegelian view that by objective information or demonstration reason could show the way in all things. Such determinism loses sight of freedom, thus for Kierkegaard, the individual is irreducible and must become an ethical or religious person—that is, the individual must choose: first to recognize that good and evil exist, and second, whether or not to become religious. Kierkegaard’s thinking focused on extreme situations where everyday life breaks down, reminding us of the contingent nature of life and social relationships. In the individual’s fundamental choice for God, he considered all interhuman relationships as a possible danger to that one true relationship with God; to enter into relationship with God, the individual must become a “Single One” (Der Einzelne), hence the much noted renunciation of his fiancée, Regina Olsen. The choice is for eternal life, in Jesus Christ; to resist this belief is “sickness,” which is “unto death,” for the individual is in despair, believing that death is in fact the end. Kierkegaard is not properly a precursor of dialogical thought, as his own project is rather monological in focus, with its retreat from the other in favor of the “Single One.” However, his thought was a key influence on Ferdinand Ebner, who directly appropriated some of his categories. The problem of the reality of the I and the reality of the other re24. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 210.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

surfaced again in 1890 with Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) principle of phenomenality (Phänomenalität), by which whatever exists for me exists as a fact of my consciousness. But with this starting point, how can external reality be verified? Three decades later, the problem of the Thou and its philosophical implications was as yet unresolved. By Max Scheler’s (1874–1928) assessment, “The question of our grounds for assuming the reality of other selves, and the possibility and limits of our understanding of them is virtually the problem for any theory of knowledge in the social sciences.”25 Ebner would later be influenced by a notion he attributed to Scheler: that the spirit is present in man because he “has the word” (Wort haben). Man “has the word,” and John’s Gospel speaks of the mysterious logos—thus it is the word that will gradually reveal to Ebner all the power for interaction, disclosed through nature and through the dynamic of the spirit. This approach, which ran contrary to the ­Cartesian-Hegelian system, helped Ebner form his thinking. In the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), although not strictly a dialogical thinker, contributed the notion of man as Mitmensch, or fellowman, and the link between interhuman and religious relationship: man, having been created by God, has a duty to continue the process of creation by creating his fellowman. This second creation occurs through the real religion of reason, behind which is the power of God’s love, which itself is the prolongation of the first creation in the interhuman world. Although God creates the second time by teaching man to create himself as a fellowman through other men, God is not encountered here as the eternal Thou. This overview of the precursors to dialogical thought will serve to better understand the founders of dialogical thinking. 25. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (Wesen und Formen der Sympathie), translated by Peter Heath (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1970), lxix; see Green, “Introduction,” xx.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

Martin Buber Best known among the dialogical philosophers is Martin Buber, whose seminal work, by its title alone, I and Thou,26 sums up the core of dialogical philosophy: one comes to ­self-identity only in relation to the other. Because his thinking is well known, only a few points relevant to the topic of this study will be noted. In his early philosophy Buber was attracted to Kant and Dilthey, but with I and Thou, he makes a great shift in perspective and makes his starting point the given reality of the “I” and the “Thou.”27 Buber was drawn to dialogical thinking not so much by the influence of a given author as by his contacts with Hasidism and by the problems of the day during World War I. Key to I and Thou is Buber’s contrast between two fundamental ways of being in the world. There is the mode of meeting (Begegnung), which is personal, immediate, and underivable, and there is the mode of experience (Erfahrung), which is objective, impersonal, and derivative.28 This world of experience is the world of the “It,” which is a world of function and manipulation: Man goes over the surfaces of things and experiences them. He brings back from them some knowledge of their condition—an experience. . . . But it is not experiences alone that bring the world to man. For what they bring to him is only a world that consists of It and It and It, of He and He and She and She and It. I experience something. . . . Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between them and the world. The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned, for it contributes nothing, and nothing happens to it. The world as experience belongs to the basic word ­I-It. The basic word ­I-You establishes the world of relation.29 26. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scrib­ner’s Sons, 1970). 27. On Buber’s thought, see I and Thou; Buber, Between Man and Man, 1–33, 209–26. 28. John O’Donnell, “The Trinity as Divine Community,” Gregorianum 69, no. 1 (1988): 14. 29. Buber, I and Thou, 55–56.

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Buber is not so much interested in the world of experience, the world of ­I-It, as with the world of meeting or encounter, the world of ­I-Thou. He makes the following distinction between them: Basic words are spoken with one’s being. When one says You, the I of the word pair I­ -You is said, too. When one says It, the I of the word pair ­I-It is said, too. The basic word ­I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word ­I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.30

In fact, as a consequence of so much development in Western culture, authentic relation has become more difficult, for “the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate.”31 Buber would not refer to the relation of love as an experience of the beloved nor relating to God as experience of God. It is not that they are beyond experience, but that to the extent we make God or people into objects of experience, we do not truly relate to them. Buber’s concern is authentic relation, for the I can get stuck in the ­It-world whose I is the ego, or reach the ­I-Thou world, which means to become a person: “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”32 So the distinction is between establishing boundaries and eliminating boundaries. If one is stuck in the world of I­ -It, then the way to relationship is by letting go, by risking trust, relation, and love. There is risk because the I is not the same in the two cases, because the I doesn’t stand alone, but always in reference to relation. In the ­I-It relation, the I is not completely engaged; there is a part remaining outside observing, and so it is less risky, for there is a part of the self that remains outside the relation and can’t be hurt by the other. But in the ­I-Thou relation, this security is not there because there 30. Buber, I and Thou, 54. 31. Buber, I and Thou, 89. 32. Buber, I and Thou, 112.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

can be no withholding of self for the whole being is involved. If not, it becomes an I­ -It relation because part of the self is holding back as a spectator. Everything is risked, because the I addresses the Thou with the whole self, with no defensive position to run to. Another risk is that in the ­I-Thou relation, the Thou must be met in the freedom of otherness, which means to respond with total unpredictability. If responses are calculated, if the I asks itself what kind of impression it is making on the Thou, then the relation is to an It, not a Thou. So, the ­I-Thou relation requires a total listening, always in the present, without calculating with prejudgments from the past. However, in reality life is not at any time purely ­I-Thou or purely ­I-It, for these two attitudes are completely interwoven. What determines which attitude is present in a given moment is not a function of the object known, but the zwischen (the Between)—that is, the way in which man relates himself to the object. What makes such an ­I-Thou encounter possible is the zwischen, a grace that is between the I and the Thou and that overcomes their isolation. Genuine encounter is an act of sheer grace, for neither the I nor the Thou can originate it. Therefore, for Buber the zwischen is interpreted in a religious sense. God is the origin of this grace, and he makes every encounter of the I and the Thou possible. Or as Buber says it, The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal Thou. Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. . . . It is consummated only in the direct relation with the Thou that by its nature cannot become It.33

In God, it is not possible to have an I­ -It relationship, for even if a person tries to ignore God, God can’t be reduced to a thing or to an object like some other object, for God ultimately remains the eternal Thou: 33. Buber, I and Thou, 75.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

Men have addressed their eternal Thou with many names. In singing of Him who was thus named they always had the Thou in mind. . . . Then the names took refuge in the language of It; men were . . . moved to think of and to address their eternal Thou as an It. But all God’s names are hallowed, for in them He is not merely spoken about, but also spoken to.34

Like the other dialogical philosophers, Buber maintains that there is a divine Thou that grounds human subjectivity and that makes the human ­I-Thou encounter possible. But one thing lacking in Buber is a more thorough consideration of language. As will be seen, both Rosenzweig and Ebner see language as a phenomenon where Being is manifest in time. But for Buber, the goal of encounter is not language, but a silence before the Thou that leaves the Thou free.35 Before moving forward, a brief excursus is in order to demonstrate that Ferdinand Ebner’s influence on the development of Buber’s thought, especially in I and Thou, is far greater than previously recognized. In the autumn of 1919, Martin Buber finished his first draft of I and Thou and, by his own account, read no philosophy at all during the next two years: therefore, the works connected with the subject of dialogue by Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Ebner I read only later, too late to affect my own thought. . . . Then I was able to begin the final writing of I and Thou, which was completed in the spring of 1922. As I wrote the third and last part, I broke the reading ascesis and began with Ebner’s fragments.36

The fragments are the pneumatological fragments, the collection of aphorisms that make up Ebner’s The Word and the Spiritual Realities. “First I happened to see some of them that were published in an issue of Brenner and then sent for the book.”37 In 1919 and 1920, 34. Buber, I and Thou, 75. 35. O’Donnell, “Trinity as Divine Community,” 14–15; cf. Buber, I and Thou, 39. 36. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 215. 37. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 215n.

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some of the fragments were published in Der Brenner, before the release of the complete book in 1921.38 Although Buber himself says that he saw these “too late to affect my own thought,” commentators have rarely noted that in the next breath he explicitly concedes his exposure to Ebner’s writings just as he was revising the third part of I and Thou, the very section that treats the question of the “Thou.” Buber, in fact, “read Ebner in several stages at the time he was writing his work.”39 According to John Österreicher, by this time the I and Thou theme was already the concern of other philosophers, in particular Ferdinand Ebner and Franz Rosenzweig, who had published their insights into the dialogical existence of the human person before Buber. Furthermore, “Rivka Horwitz has pointed to Ferdinand Ebner as the source of Buber’s own dialogic thought, particularly the postulate that God must be addressed not as the remote ‘He,’ but as the ever present ‘Thou.’ In my opinion, Ebner and Rosenzweig even outrank Buber.”40 The concept of God as the eternal Thou or the absolute Thou appears in Buber for the first time in early 1922, in a series of lectures entitled Religion as Presence.41 According to Horwitz, Ebner’s influence is very clear in these lectures (delivered just as Buber was read38. Stahmer, Speak, 219–20, 228. At the outset, Ebner had difficulty finding a publisher. However, the manuscript was well received by Theodore Haecker (Kierkegaard’s translator), who sent it to Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of the Brenner Press and the periodical Der Brenner, well known both to Buber and Ebner. The publisher’s own financial limitations prevented immediate publication, and so, at Haecker’s suggestion, fragments 1, 2, 3, 16, and 18 were serialized in Der Brenner, where Buber read them, before the complete book became available to him in 1921. The first three fragments alone treat the entire I­ -Thou-God question in sufficient detail to make Ebner’s main argument clear to Buber. 39. Rivka Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner as a Source of Martin Buber’s Dialogic Thought in I and Thou,” in Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume, ed. Haim Gordon and Jochanan Bloch (New York: KTAV, 1984), 122. 40. John Österreicher, The Unfinished Dialogue: Martin Buber and the Christian Way (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1987), 31. 41. See Horwitz, Buber’s Way to I and Thou: An Historical Analysis and the First Publication of Martin Buber’s Lectures Religion as Presence (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1978).

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

ing Ebner), but less obvious “a few months later, when composing the lectures into a book, he took out the concepts closest to Ebner’s, so that they are less evident in I and Thou.”42 In Horwitz’s judgment, Buber received the concept of divinity as developed in I and Thou from Ebner. On every page of the book, Ebner recognizes God as the “true Thou” who cannot be God in the third person; but this is one of the decisive innovations of I and Thou, that God can never be grasped in the third person, but only in presence. The similarity exists not only in the substance of the concept, but also in the whole structure and development of the idea. . . . “Thou” as the basic and fixed name of God is found in Buber’s writings only after his encounter with the writings of Ebner.43

God is the eternal Thou, addressed in the second person rather than spoken about in the third person: this recognition was virtually absent in Buber’s earlier writings, but later became emblematic of his work, beginning with the prepublication revision of I and Thou, following his initial exposure to Ebner’s fragments. What would merely be a historic footnote is significant in the present case because Ebner was not well known, and thus his direct influence on dialogical philosophy is somewhat limited. However, because Buber’s name is practically synonymous with I­ -Thou thought, his debt to Ebner for this key insight establishes Ebner’s indirect influence as foundational and decisive to any understanding of dialogical philosophy.

Franz Rosenzweig It was Rosenzweig who coined the term “the new thinking” (das neue Denken),44 which was to be grammatical and dialogical, using the method of speech, which is to take the other person and to take time seriously. In contrast, the “old thinking” is portrayed as logical (not grammatical), monological (not dialogical), timeless, and meant 42. Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner,” 123. 43. Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner,” 123. 44. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” (Das neue Denken), in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1953).

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only for the isolated individual. Thus speech and deed, language and active involvement, are essential features of the “new thinking.” His system requires one to start from experience, to recognize speech as the entrance to the essence of being and the rejection of a monism that would deny reality. Thus it hinges on concrete dialogue in relationship rather than solitary, abstract thought. For Rosenzweig, this is a thinking that must return to common sense that is content to know that a chair is a chair. . . . Philosophy refuses to accept the world as world, God as God, man as man! . . . This very point, where traditional philosophy comes to the end of its way of thinking, is the beginning of philosophy based on experience.45

Another basic component is that truth is no longer only what is true (in the sense that ideas match the thing known), but rather, truth must be confirmed in the living of life, in relationship to others. Thus to distinguish between true and false is not just a question of logic and intellect, but involves trust in the whole person, because the whole person is involved in relation, and as a whole person one must respond to God’s call. For Rosenzweig this kind of thinking was a personal shift. A gifted scholar, he did major research on Hegel’s politics and the concept of state, producing his doctoral dissertation and a t­ wo-volume work entitled Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State), but in 1913, as he was offered a very prestigious university post in Berlin, he abruptly reached a critical turning point, realizing with clarity “the ambiguity of the scientific method and the hubris of philosophical Idealism to understand absolute truth. Hegel’s a­ ll-encompassing theory of world, history, spirit, and man broke down before the individual asking the existential question: Who or what am I?”46 This was accompanied by a religious reawakening that led him 45. Rosenzweig, “New Thinking,” 193. 46. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword to Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Stern der Erlösung) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), x.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

almost to convert to Christianity, but instead gave him a new and deep appreciation of his Judaism. The result was a break with academe and a desire to place knowledge at the service of men. While in the trenches of Macedonia during World War I, witnessing the daily death of his companions, Rosenzweig wrote his major work, The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung), in which he tried to explain all these changes as his thinking moved toward a vision of existence in the Old Testament sense. At the heart of his shift, Idealism could not provide Rosenzweig with an explanation for the carnage of war with its death, loneliness, and hate. He came to see Idealist optimism as merely utopian and instead found authentic reality in the nearness of concrete beings and, in particular, in the profound mystery of living relationships between persons. In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig describes the threefold reality of M ­ an-World-God, which is not known by rational deduction and which is beyond our rational understanding. He describes it as prior to reason, as a threefold working of God: of creation, revelation, and redemption. While God is beyond human knowledge, the believer experiences God’s working by being receptive to it; he encounters God by being God’s trusted child. For Rosenzweig, creation is a dialogical process, which begins with God’s address to man, which is the source of the dialogue between God and humans. God’s question to Adam, “Where art Thou?” is taken to mean, “Where is such an independent Thou, standing freely over against the hidden God, in whom he could discover himself as an I?”47 Buber comments on this: From this point an inner biblical way to that “I have called you by name; you are mine” becomes visible by which God shows himself “as the originator and opener of this whole dialogue between him and the soul.” This is Rosenzweig’s most significant theological contribution to our subject.48 47. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 212. 48. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 212.

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Thus, God is at the heart of man’s consciousness of self and his dialogue with God. God is not a disinterested partner but will be encountered in his essence in this dialogue. A key element of God’s creation as a dialogical process is his gift of speech: “Speech is truly the creator’s morning gift to mankind, and yet at the same time it is the common property of all the children of men, in which each has his particular share and, finally, it is the seal of humanity in man.”49 Finally, Rosenzweig elaborates on this gift of speech in terms that resemble Ferdinand Ebner’s (as will be seen), who was writing at the same time, although they did not yet know one another’s work: The miraculous gift of speech was created for man and upon man at creation. Man did not make speech for himself, nor did it come to be for him gradually: at the instant of becoming man, man opened his mouth; at the instant of opening his mouth, he became a human being.50

Thus, like Ebner, Rosenzweig finds that man and woman are constituted in the miracle of speech, a gift of creation, which is the very possibility of being human.

Ferdinand Ebner: “Bedenker des Wortes” Ferdinand Ebner was born in Wiener Neustadt on January 31, 1882. From childhood on, he suffered from poor health, anxiety, and depression. Oppressed by an overbearing father, Ebner considered his homelife a mere illusion of a nonexistent freedom, akin to that of his caged pet squirrel. In his youth, he regarded Christ crucified in this same light, not as a redeemer, but as a man persecuted by those around him. Friction with his father surrounded young Ebner’s difficulty in accepting the dogmatic and institutional aspects of religion, a difficulty that persisted throughout most of his life. Afflicted at eighteen years of age with severe tuberculosis, he began teacher 49. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 110. 50. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 199.

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training. At this time, because he was preoccupied with various sexual concerns and a series of traumatic romances, the obligatory religious instruction and frequent Confession associated with his school program were particularly unpleasant; he felt his religious life was fraudulent. During this period Ebner began to seriously study the classics and poetry on his own, but by 1910, this interest gave way to l­ifelong, private study of existential philosophy, psychology, and religious thought, about which he made extensive aphoristic notes.51 Despite his studious temperament, he felt lonely and isolated behind his Chinese wall (Chinesische Mauer), always longing for an authentic ­I-Thou encounter. World War I brought a dramatic life conversion that turned Ebner definitively toward Christ. There was not a distinct moment of conversion, but by Ebner’s own later account, he had realized by 1916 that his study of philosophy had “led him up a blind alley.”52 The tragedy of war brought Ebner to despair because it was fought by Christian against Christian, each claiming a patriotism favored by God: in Christian churches prayers for victory were offered and processions with miraculous pictures of Mary were conducted. But a prayer for the victory of the just cause—even if this meant the victory of the enemy—would have been condemned as unpatriotic. . . . Christian peoples were the ones who fought this war. Therefore, it 51. These aphorisms were published posthumously as Ebner, Wort und Liebe (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1935), a title given by the editor, Hildegard Jone. The book contains Ebner’s 1916–17 diaries, Aus dem Tagebuch 1916/17, and his final work, Aphorismen, written in 1931 at the request of his friends Hildegard Jone and Josef Humplik. Both works were republished in Ebner, Schriften, 1:19–74 and 1:909–1014, respectively (see also FEGW). In 1949, Hildegard Jone edited another selection from Ebner’s sixteen diary notebooks, entitled Das Wort ist der Weg (n.p.: Herder, 1949). This was not included in Franz Seyr’s edition of Ebner’s Schriften, and it is out of print; thus the Italian edition La parola è la via, ed. and trans. Edda Ducci and Piero Rossano (Rome: Anicia, 1991), will be used here. Translations to English are mine. 52. Stahmer, Speak, 227; see Ebner, “Nachwort 1931,” a postscript to his Fragment aus dem Jahr 1916 mit einem Nachwort (1931), in Schriften, 1:1048ff.

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was impossible during this period to avoid a confrontation with the Sermon on the Mount.53 Ebner was deeply offended that “amid the noise of war the Word was forgotten”:54 Jesus’ radical demands were dismissed at the time as mere rhetorical flourishes, to be discounted by ­r ight-thinking people. Ebner became a daily reader of the Gospel Word but remained aloof from the institutional church. With belief in Jesus the Word as his interpretive key, the years 1916–23 were his most productive and saw the publication of this work, his magnum opus, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, in 1921. However, after 1923, with more frequent and severe depressions, Ebner retired from teaching and published a few more articles in Der Brenner, but with occasional periods of good health, he was able to marry and become a father—a source of joy to him. Ultimately, Ebner’s very personal and existential writing style, coupled with his focus on relation with God over against the limited fulfillment he found in human relationships, demonstrates both Ebner’s affinity with Kierkegaard and, notwithstanding their similar I­ -Thou presentations, Ebner’s distance from Buber’s recognition of the way to God in and through concrete, human ­I-Thou relationships.55 Bedridden with his illnesses by the spring of 1931, he died on October 17, 1931. The epitaph carved on Ferdinand Ebner’s grave by his friends reads, “Bedenker des Wortes,” which means one who is enamored of words, who reflects deeply, ponders, and considers the word—“a ‘philologist’ in the most literal sense of the term.”56 Before moving to the outline of Ebner’s thought, a brief word about the early thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein may be helpful. Eb53. Cited in Stahmer, Speak, 225; see Ebner, Versuch eines Ausblicks in die Zukunft, in Schriften, 1:725; see also FEGW. 54. Cited in Stahmer, Speak, 226; see Ebner, Versuch eines Ausblicks in die Zukunft, in Schriften, 1:725; see also FEGW. 55. Stahmer, Speak, 217. 56. See Green, “Introduction,” 56, and chapter 5 in this volume.

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ner and Wittgenstein surely were aware of one another (as Krzysztof Skorulski details earlier in this volume in the “Note on the Need for an English Translation”), and, on the face of it, some commonalities in their thought suggest themselves. In responding to the shortcomings of German idealist philosophy, the limitations of science, and the futility of war, Ebner said the purpose of his project was “to show the man (Mensch) of his day the only way out of the endemic human condition,”57 which resulted in the first publication of this book in 1921. It is striking that in the very same year, Ludwig Wittgenstein, also Austrian and also at times a schoolteacher, whose aim in philosophy was “to shew the fly the way out of the ­fly-bottle,”58 responded to the same set of circumstances with the publication of his Tractatus ­Logico-Philosophicus,59 in which he, too, “in his own ‘secular’ way sought to undo philosophy via linguistic analysis . . . therein giving rise to the ‘philosophy of language’ movement.” 60 In fact, apart from their biographical coincidences—born in Austria in the 1880s, schoolteachers who lived and worked largely outside of official university circles, similar aphoristic style of writing—their projects are indeed quite different. While Wittgenstein would not be identified with Ebner or with dialogical thought in general, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ­Logico-Philosophicus might be seen as an alternative way to respond to the cultural crisis of the interwar years.61 Still, it can be said that in the first half of the twentieth century both shared this common concern: 57. Ebner, paraphrased from Tagebuch 1916: Fragment aus dem Jahre 1916, ed. Markus Flatscher and Richard Hörmann (Vienna: LIT, 2007), 248ff. 58. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxviii, citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §309. 59. Wittgenstein, Tractatus ­Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 60. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxviii. 61. Stahmer, Speak, 220.

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Ebner, as well as Wittgenstein, asked the decisive question whether or not there is a bridge between existing and speaking, between the “mystical” which only “indicates” itself and that which can be formulated. Over against Wittgenstein’s apodictic saying: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Ebner recognized the principal ability of man to find verbal expression even for the unspeakable of his spiritual life. In these opposing views lies the basic dissimilarity between both attempts; which, nevertheless, because of their preoccupation with thoughts about language, move close to one another.62

In fact, this comparison takes into account only Wittgenstein’s early thought (Ebner would not live to see most of Wittgenstein’s later thought), and while the similarities are never very great between them, in Wittgenstein’s later thought, there is much more of which one can speak, so that there is some affinity between Ebner’s dialogical philosophy of the word and Wittgenstein’s analytical language criticism.63 Both take a phenomenological approach to language: it is not such a great distance from Ebner’s “everything came to be through the Word” and Wittgenstein’s “in language everything becomes expressed.” 64 They come together insofar as “both want ultimately to adduce not about language, but out of language to think, to contemplate their meaning within the total horizon of human experience of the world and human ­self-understanding.”65 In short, Ebner and Wittgenstein both look for a solution to the same realities, but ultimately in distinct ways—Wittgenstein in the 62. “‘Der Brenner’—Leben und Fortleben einer Zeitschrift,” in Nachrichten aus dem ­K ösel-Verlag (Munich: ­Kösel-Verlag, 1965), 4–5, cited in Stahmer, Speak, 221. 63. See Peter Kampits, “Sprachspiel und Dialog: Zur Sprachdeutung Ludwig Wittgensteins und Ferdinand Ebners,” in Sprache, Logik und Philosophie: Akten des vierten internationalen Wittgenstein Symposiums, ed. Rudolf Haller and Wolfgang Grassl (Vienna: ­Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1980), 205–7; unpublished translation to English by Terrance W. Klein and Joseph R. Chapel. 64. Peter Kampits, “Gioco Linguistico e Dialogo: Sull’interprtazione del linguaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e Ferdinand Ebner,” in La Filosofia Della Parola de Ferdinand Ebner, ed. Silvano Zucal and Anita Bertoldi (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999), 467; unpublished translation to English by Joseph R. Chapel. 65. Kampits, “Gioco Lingistico,” 468.

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analysis of “how” language functions and Ebner in the “why” of the “miracle of language.”

Having the Word: The Miracle of Language Ebner’s key insight is this: humans are given the word. It is only in the word, in language, that an “I” meets a “Thou,” that relationship and s­ elf-identity can occur, and this word is given in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Where the point of departure of dialogical thought for Rosenzweig and Buber, as Jews, is God’s address to man in the Old Testament, for Ebner, as a Catholic, the Word between I and Thou, through which everything has been created, is interpreted in the sense of the Logos of St. John’s Gospel. Jesus as the Word and mediator between God and man stands between I and Thou. . . . Through him it is possible to address God in the human Thou. For Ebner, the key fact that reveals the presence of the spirit in man is that man has the word. Something distinctive in Ebner’s thought is the word as the objective vehicle that constitutes a person and mediates the I­ -thou relationship. If having the word is key to our human speaking nature, what caused the passage from nothingness to being? How is it that we have the word? “Man has the word because Someone has called to him, Someone who is word. Man is one called, one addressed: a proof is the ‘­t hou-orientation’ (Duhaftigkeit) of his consciousness, synonymous with having the word.”66 The heart of Ebner’s thought is found in the first words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” 67 This is the originating, creative, divine Word, which is before all things—before history, before man—through which everything was made. This divine Word was made flesh and became man: “Everything that is, 66. Edda Ducci and Piero Rossano, in the introduction to their Italian translation of Ebner’s Wort und Liebe, entitled Parola e Amore (Milan: Rusconi, 1983), 28, citing Ebner without further reference. 67. John 1:1.

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is by means of the word,” 68 and Jesus Christ is the Word that founds that word. This creative, inspired word from John’s Gospel is the body of interhuman dialogue, which constitutes or places man’s being. The Word, the divine Thou of the Father, gives origin to being. The word that places being acquires its meaning in the midst of a phrase. This is the foundation of Ebner’s spiritual thought: “The word is the primary fact, the ‘place’ of spiritual being—the relation between the I and the thou—and of being in general. The logos is not only a presupposition for thought but also for being.” 69 God created man by speaking to him: “I am and through me Thou art.”70 Thus, God placed the I in man: the I, created in the relationship to his true Thou, to God, becomes conscious that he exists and that God does not cease to address the word to him. And man responds: “You are, and through You I am.”71 The Prologue to John’s Gospel also announces the Word made flesh as a second creation for man, a rebirth, which reveals the ultimate spiritual meaning of being for man as interpersonal life in dialogue: “The light of man is in the word. Through it, consciousness, as a fact of natural life is transformed into s­ elf-consciousness, as a fact of spiritual being.”72 Consciousness of God’s existence, placed within the essence of man is, “nothing other than language, understood in the depth of its essence . . . , the spiritual fact of ‘having the word.’”73 In the word man has knowledge of God, but with man’s sinful Fall, consciousness of God’s existence darkened again. The human word created by man begins here, and with it, his history: “This 68. Ebner, Notizen (16. Juni 1922), in Schriften, 2:301. 69. Ebner, Zum Problem der Sprache und Des Wortes, in Schriften, 1:654; see also FEGW. 70. See Green, “Introduction,” 23, and chapter 3 in this volume. 71. Ducci and Rossano, Introduction to Parola e Amore, 28. 72. Ebner, Zum Problem der Sprache und Des Wortes, in Schriften, 1:654; see also FEGW. 73. See Green, “Introduction,” 23, and chapter 3 in this volume.

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‘human’ word is not the same, though presupposing it, as the word through which the spiritual life in man, the I in its relation to the Thou, is created. The human word testifies to that word which . . . , since it constitutes all history, has no kind of history itself.”74 The divine, originating Word entered history; the divine Word meets the human word in human history, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ: “And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us.”75 The I exists in relation to the Thou, and the word is the spiritual essence of language that takes place between the I and the Thou. In Ebner’s view, the fact that language happens at all is always a miracle, for in order to be myself I have need of the other, and the other likewise has need of me, yet neither of us can ever create the conditions of communication on our own: “We remain locked in mutual need. Nevertheless, language and communication happens. I do not create this language, but receive it as a gift. In this sense language has a transcendent origin.”76 Language is a miracle whose origin is beyond the I or the thou, yet language is the vehicle between the I and the thou; we should be astonished at the fact that language exists. In its deepest ontological sense, Ebner considers language to be the gift of being, for it is through language that being reveals itself, in conversation and in temporal events. Thus, in Ebner’s very particular use of the terms, the origin of language is word. Ebner distinguishes between the Word, which is divine, and words, which are the condition needed for human language and dialogue to be possible. Because the human person has the Word, he can speak. It is God, always the true Thou of the true I in man, who ultimately addresses man in and through the word, which, “in the ultimate ground of its ­being-given-to-man, is from God.”77 74. See Green, “Introduction,” 20–21, and chapter 2 in this volume. 75. John 1:14. 76. John O’Donnell, “Trinity as Divine Community,” 12. 77. See Green, “Introduction,” 17, and chapter 2 in this volume.

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The I­ -Thou relation, which arises in man from the divinely originated word expressed as language, does not occur at some point after the I has existed for itself in aloneness. Rather, the ­I-Thou relation is the precondition: for the existence of the I “is objectively identical with the fact that man ‘has the word.’”78 While some evolutionary theories claim that language is a process of imitating animal sounds, Ebner insists that language itself is what separates man from the animals. It is not the simple process of the brain getting larger that causes consciousness. There must be a “leap” that animals will never make. “The animal screeches, howls, roars, etc., but nonetheless remains mute. . . . Man, on the other hand, ‘has the word.’ And only because he has the word can he also be silent.”79 Conversely, animals have no I because they lack word and language: “It is characteristic for man that he can express something, and also has something to express. The animal can express nothing precisely because it ‘does not have the word.’ But it also has nothing to express—and for the same reason.”80 The word makes man free. Animals must obey instincts, but man, because he can name or concretize his experience in word, can gain a distance of perspective from his experience and then make decisions in freedom. In this sense, Jesus the Word frees man in the word.

Word and Love: The Spiritual Realities Having the word is that leap from animal to man, and it is a miracle. Yet it is invisible to science, for God becomes visible only in the eyes of faith, in the interiority of prayer. God is grasped in the intimate bond between word and love, which Ebner describes as two great miracles in which the spirit is at work and that encompass all of reality: 78. See Green, “Introduction,” 18, and chapter 2 in this volume. 79. Ebner, Wort und Liebe: Aphorismen 1931, ed. Markus Flatscher and Krzysztof Skorulski (Vienna: LIT, 2015), 15. 80. See Green, “Introduction,” 18n, and chapter 2 in this volume.

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The Word embraces and carries language—not only language, but the whole man, and not only man, but the being of the whole world—and therefore it is more than language, more than our spoken words. It embraces everything which we cannot express, for which our language does not have the right word. It embraces God, because God embraces the Word. And it embraces Love.81

In his will to save man communally, God sent his word and his love. Ebner argues that authentic community is based on trust in the word, which makes it possible to relate with others as persons—a personal dialogue that always leads to God. In true community, the word is accompanied by love, which is the Spirit allowing men to live in communion with God and in true reciprocal relation with one another. For Ebner this combination of word and love is the linchpin of man’s ­I-Thou relation: man knows the reality of God not by logical proof, but rather in recognizing his absolute dependence on God and in the fact that the I in man is dependent upon a relation to the Thou, outside of which it does not exist at all. God becomes more palpable for man when his ­I-Thou relation with God comes to living expression in word and love: We are “hearers of the word” because God gave us the word; we are “doers of the word,” insofar as the word we have heard endures as love, which the word demands we fulfill in our lives. In this way, word and love are the two key realities of the spiritual life; they form the link between the I and the thou and bring man to salvation, for they save him from being closed within himself.

Bringing to Speech: Thought Becomes Word This spiritual significance of language begins with the fact that the word occurs between the first and second persons. In being spoken, language presupposes that the relation of the I to the Thou is a per81. Ebner, Wort und Liebe, 86, cited (from earlier edition), translated in Stahmer, Speak, 236.

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sonal one. Precisely because man has the word, the very potential for speaking brings with it the possibility of being addressed as a person, as the Thou, “the ‘addressability’ in the other, and this belongs just as much to the essence of personality as the potentiality to express ‘self,’ in which the ‘I’ emerges.”82 Bringing thought to speech, in words, liberates the I, for the strong desire and longing to be known and to express oneself to the other demonstrate that one’s spiritual life is always oriented to the spiritual in the other person. The vehicle of this spiritual relation is the word. Even one’s own solitary thinking is in the word: “Even if I were closed within myself before others and I were to occupy myself only with the clarification of my thoughts, I would desire that relationship—whose vehicle is the word—because I need it for this clarification.”83 In the relationship between thought and word, Ebner believes that there are no thoughts that cannot be expressed. Bringing one’s interior life into word regulates thought, especially the content, for in coming into word, thoughts are discovered and understood, in an immediate sense, as an expression of one’s interior life, as an immediate sense of being, consciousness, and existence. Allowing thoughts to come into speech brings them out of the private realm and into the public realm—consciously before God. Word adds a communicative tension to the concept of mere thought, a tension that is the urge or desire to communicate, so the word brings thought up to the brink of dialogue and allows the thought to take root in the person’s being. Word mediates reason, but it also founds our origin and communal existence in relation. Yet, thought that is not grounded in authentic relation may remain at the level of monologue. Not to experience a communicative tension to move beyond monologue of thought and into speech means to ignore the thou, to stay closed in 82. See Green, “Introduction,” 14, and chapter 2 in this volume. 83. Ebner, La parola è la via, 123.

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my thoughts, closed to the world and closed to others, to let thought remain mere abstract thinking, unconnected in relation with others. In this sense, the word can be abused when it is used idly for chatter, instead of speaking only those words born of interior silence, animated by the mystery of the spirit.

Sin: Failure to Open to the Thou For Ebner, the dialogical word gives life to relationship, so that even in silence the word is authentic and directed to a dialogue partner. We can retreat from this encounter into “­I-aloneness,” an inauthentic world of idea or a “dream of the spirit.” This is a kind of slumber from which modern culture cannot awake on its own—but only by waiting for and responding to God’s call. Ebner sees this “closing of oneself to the Thou” as the very heart of sin. This has a bearing on how good and evil will be understood. “The fundamental error of idealist ethics: that good and evil have to do with the individual founded in himself. But all good and all evil have to do with the I with respect to the thou. One is good or bad only in relation to another.”84 Sin is not an idea; rather, it is in the realm of broken relation: Every experience convinces that the full realization of the I is in the vital discovery of the authentic Thou, the dialogue partner that makes all the richness of his own being resound and that shows the true sickness of closure, of isolation; the seriousness of a spiritual sickness that can weaken the I to the point of death without having found the Thou. The Light calls this darkness by its true name: sin.85

In Jesus darkness is overcome. In the Word made flesh, contempt for man is definitively eliminated not by the force of ideas, but by lived reality. Jesus definitively shows how the I reaches the thou and the thou reaches the I: each moves along two routes—toward God 84. Ebner, La parola è la via, 196. 85. Ducci and Rossano, Introduction to Parola e Amore, 30.

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and toward man. Because of Christ’s Incarnation, between God and man there is now man, and in man there is now the privileged mani­ festation of God. Ebner’s thought is profound: any attempt to find the thou in God alone is destined to fail because one doesn’t know how to find the thou in man. Any road toward God that does not pass through man is blocked. Man must search for God not only within himself, but also in his neighbor, for man’s relationship with God always begins by relating to concrete man. This means that the I of man must make the leap from the experience of the “­Thou-God” to the experience of the “­t hou-man.” God is not metaphysically remote from us but rather quite near and accessible: We are therefore not to dream of Him. Whoever does that does not want to see Him in the reality of His nearness. One could thus even say that God is near to us not only spiritually but also physically: near to us in every­ one, and above all in the man next to us, the neighbor. . . . God is near to us in the man whom we, emerging from our I­ -aloneness, make the true Thou of our I, which obviously does not mean simply to look at him in his humanity as God. What you have done to the very least of my brethren, you have done to me.86

The nearness of God is discovered in the I­-Thou relation with the neighbor. The true I is always in relation to a Thou such that the ­being-for-itself of the I in its aloneness is not an authentic part of the spiritual life of man, but is a consequence of “secluding himself from the Thou,” which is “nothing other than the ‘fall from God,’ the attempt of man to exist in godless ‘inwardness’. . . ; it is the first abuse and perverted use of the ‘freedom,’ of the ‘personality’ of existing, implanted into man by God.”87 Where the Fall is acknowledged, man’s predicament in the world, especially in his spiritual existence in the world, can be prop86. See Green, “Introduction,” 210–11, and chapter 14 in this volume. 87. See Green, “Introduction,” 18, and chapter 2 in this volume.

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erly understood. Man became the slave to sin, forfeiting that aspect of his personality that exists only in its relation to God. In trying to be free, in the sense of absolute independence or ­I-aloneness, man turns away from the other and avoids the Thou in violation of the very definition of being a person, an I, given by God in the word. This is the Fall. In trying to be more free and more independent, man ends up less so. Yet, when the I moves out of this ­I-aloneness, there is an unfolding and openness to the Thou that has the meaning of an offering. God is the “being to whom we sacrifice.” What does man sacrifice? Everything which he has grasped as his own in his I­ -aloneness and taciturnity before the Thou. . . . The I must give up all that belongs to it, everything that it grasped or willed to grasp.88

For Ebner, there is no sin as such; there is sin only in man, and then only insofar as it is revealed to him in faith. This is not a theological consideration of objective matter, but rather an assertion that sin is a relational reality. Therefore, on the part of the subject, sin is only subjectively possible once the reality of the I­ -Thou relation is recognized, and in the final analysis, this is always in reference to the ­I-Thou relation with God: “Man discerns his ‘mortal sin’ in that action through which . . . he consciously and deliberately affirms and approves of his fall from God, the ­I-aloneness of his existence, the ‘original sin.’”89 While in reality there are many transgressions, there is only one sin, the sin: only the single sin of interior closing before God and before men. . . . Born into evil itself is the fact that man closes himself off and “does not come to the light.” All evil happens in the “closure” of the I to the thou, in “aloneness.”90

88. See Green, “Introduction,” 211, and chapter 14 in this volume. 89. See Green, “Introduction,” 252, and chapter 17 in this volume. 90. Ebner, Wort und Liebe, 53.

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Return to the Word Every aspect of spiritual life, even sin, has a direct and essential relationship to the word, because that life was created through the word: “All being, which has fallen from God and has become wordless, is destined to return again to the word—in man and through him.”91 There is a concrete moral dimension to Ebner’s thought in the fundamental premise that we are created in the Word: God calls to us in love, and we are free to respond to that love or not. The ­call-response dynamic of I­-thou relationship has an ethical content in the sense that the moral life is our response to God. At the same time, our behavior is good or bad mainly in the context of our relationship with others. Humans are the animals that speak, but there is an ethical or responsible dimension such that speaking orients our existence toward the thou. We do not speak as isolated individuals but within relationships, which presumes an orientation toward communal life. While Ebner does not develop the theme, if the moral life is a lived response to God’s address, this suggests a moral dimension to sacraments. Ebner’s understanding of the dialogical power of the word coincides with the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional understanding of the sacraments as efficacious. Aware of the necessity for formal expressions of man’s I­ -Thou relation with God, Ebner is sensitive to the risk that the sacraments might be celebrated as empty, external forms if they lack a contact with life. On the other hand, in Ebner’s view, when an institution, as a sacrament, in its spiritual reality is structured in a way that engages the personal and dialogical dimensions of life in the faith, then it truly is an authentic Christian sign. Ebner offers no extensive application of his thought to the sacra­ ments, yet he points in a direction that will harmonize with later thought at the Second Vatican Council about the word: in sin, be91. See Green, “Introduction,” 266, and chapter 17 in this volume.

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ing falls from God and thus loses the word and is destined to return again to the word—in man and through him. This return to the word suggests an opening to sacraments in general and to Eucharist and Confession more specifically, for in Ebner’s sense of the word, external signs and gestures have a place in interpersonal communication, for the word is perceptible and real when persons encounter and communicate with each other. Although Ebner does not go so far as to state it explicitly, his thought suggests that all sacrament can be seen as word, as a medium for the encounter of man with God.

Ebner’s Impact Because Ferdinand Ebner was a somewhat obscure figure who died relatively young, unfortunately his work is not as widely known as its merits deserve. Still, whether directly or indirectly, Ebner’s thought has been taken up by a wide variety of writers. He has had a notable direct influence on various thinkers who have had the opportunity to read and assimilate his thought, such as the Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966), whose assimilation of Ebner’s thought, in turn, significantly influenced Roman Catholic theology. Even with his ambiguities, Ebner makes a substantial achievement in his presentation of ­I-Thou relation, an advance that is somewhat taken for granted, having now been assimilated into theology. (Indeed, he has even been called “the secret philosophical inspiration of modern theology.”)92 Ebner’s influence is found indirectly in authors such as René Latourelle, Edward Schillebeeckx, Walter Kasper, and Pope John Paul II—and directly in such authors as Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner, Bernard Häring, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Pope Benedict XVI. In a book review, Karl Rahner described Romano Guardini’s 92. Jurgen Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), 1:xvii, cited in Hans Waldenfels, “La comprensione della rivelazione nel XX secolo,” in La rivelazione, trans. Maria Christina Laurenzi (Palermo: Edizioni Augustinus, 1992), 452.

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World and Person (Welt und Person) as “very Ebnerian.” Regarding his own writings, when asked whether he got his concept and book title, Hearer of the Word (Hörer des Wortes),93 from Heidegger, Rahner replied, “No, I got it from Ebner.”94 Similarly, in an interview in 1998 with Bavarian Radio, the t­ henCardinal Joseph Ratzinger described among his early influences “Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber . . . and naturally all the important French personalists.”95 This is significant because many on this short list were quite instrumental as consultants (periti) in the drafting of major Vatican II documents, especially the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” Dei Verbum, in which Ebner’s indirect influence is notable. It is Ebner who places the origin of all relation squarely in God, identifying God as the “eternal Thou,” who reveals himself as such to man. God spoke creation into existence, for his Word is action. Man’s forgetfulness of God in the Fall and his dream of the spirit that accompanied it are both remedied in the same creative Word, who was in the beginning and is God. Jesus, the Word made Flesh, is God’s ­self-revelation as eternal Thou, the Word spoken to man to reawaken him from his dream of the spirit, from his state of ­I-aloneness that is isolation and monologue. The Word breaks through such that man discovers the Other, the eternal Thou, and in this discovery, his isolation ends; monologue becomes dialogue in man’s discovery of his own “I” necessarily reflected by the dis­ 93. Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), originally published as Hörer des Wortes (Munich: Kösel, 1941). 94. Private conversation between Karl Rahner and Prof. Silvano Zucal, then a doctoral student in Innsbruck, now a professor of philosophy at the University of Trent, Italy, reported by Prof. Zucal to Dr. Krzysztof Skorulski in a conversation on March 17, 2009, cited in Krzysztof Skorulski, “Ferdinand Ebner und der Platz der Dialogphilosophie in dem katholischen Denken des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts,” Logos i Ethos 1, no. 32 (2012): 38, n56. 95. See radio interview, “Prof. Dr. Joseph Ratzinger im Gespräch mit Martin Lohmann,” Bayerischen Rundfunks (September 4, 1998), http://www.­br-online.de/ alpha/forum/vor9804/19980409.shtml.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

covery of the Thou. In the same discovery, man’s relation with human “thous” is redefined by the very same Word. Ebner’s understanding of the word as foundational for human identity responds to the fundamental question of why, and from where, man has the word. These are questions that language philosophy as such does not address. On the other hand, Ebner leaves pending the question of how language, as such, operates. It is difficult to sum up the work of this rather original thinker, as his work does not fit neatly into any single category. Without question, the serious reader will find difficulties in Ebner’s fragments, discovering that they are inchoative and polemical in nature, and require that the reader think through the thoughts only begun in them, and systematize for argumentation’s sake that which is frequently confessional rather than conceptual. Further, the fragments evidence through[out] a fundamental inconsis­ tency, one that Ebner himself was deeply aware of yet could not avoid: the mode of presentation, namely philosophical discourse, stands in diametrical opposition to the content therof, namely the word and the spiritual realities of the I and the Thou.96

Methodologically, although Ebner rejects philosophy, he is in the predicament of making his case using philosophical argument and speaking in the objective third person, as philosophy demands. Likewise, in Ebner’s thought, the relationships between reason and faith and between philosophy and theology ultimately remain somewhat fluid and are not completely resolvable. Because the centrality of the word is the basis of reason in man, Ebner fluctuates between the philosophical and the theological: that man is addressed by the word means that man’s existence has a religious basis such that “the existence of man . . . has the existence of God as 96. Green, “Introduction,” c, citing and trans. Bernhard Casper, Das Dialogische Denken: Eine Untersuchung der religionsphilosophischen Bedeutung Franz Rosenzweigs, Ferdinand Ebners und Martin Bubers (Freiburg: Herder, 1967), 259f.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

its pre­supposition. In other words, it means that man was created by God.”97 Ebner’s understanding of the centrality of word is theological but at the same time anthropological in the sense that it defines man, but the precise line between the divine, creative Word and the human word is unclear. Likewise, the line between G ­ od-human relation and strictly human relations is unclear: it is clear in Ebner that the ­God-human relation is somehow different than strictly human relations, but it is not clear how, other than to say that the ­ od-human relation. ­human-to-human relation concretizes the G Despite his aphoristic style and the difficulties of his thought, Ebner undertook a most challenging task: in trying to overcome the limits in idealistic thought and move beyond the possibilities of the “sciences,” he circles around and around his points, trying to express something spiritually elusive, beyond the immediate sense of his words. The reader, having entered into Ebner’s mode of expression and style, is rewarded by the originality and richness of his thought. Even with his ambiguities, Ebner makes a substantial achievement in his presentation of ­I-Thou relation, an advance that is somewhat taken for granted, having now been assimilated by other thinkers. It is Ebner who places the origin of all relation squarely in God, identifying God as the “eternal Thou” who reveals himself as such to man. This revelation awakens man from his “dream of the spirit”; in recognizing the eternal Thou, man discovers the I in himself and so can recognize the other as his thou. More than this, Ebner moves beyond other dialogical philosophers with his original presentation of the word as the centerpiece of this revelation and discovery within I­-Thou relations. Here, Ebner breaks some new ground. He accepts the view of the ­eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang philosopher Johann Georg 97. See Green, “Introduction,” 23, and chapter 3 in this volume.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

Hamann that logos is reason, and thus to be human is to speak.98 Language philosophers take up this theme as well, trying to explain the workings of language in human interaction, but Ebner asks instead: why, and from where, does man have the word? This is Ebner at his most original and his key contribution to this study: God spoke creation into existence, for his Word is action. Man’s forgetfulness of God in the Fall and his concomitant dream of the spirit are remedied in the same creative Word, who was in the beginning and is God. Jesus, the Word made Flesh, is God’s ­self-revelation as eternal Thou, the Word spoken to man to reawaken him from his dream of the spirit, from his state of I­ -aloneness (Icheinsamkeit) that is isolation and monologue. The Word breaks through such that man discovers the Other, the eternal Thou, and in so discovering, his isolation ends; monologue becomes dialogue in man’s discovery of his own “I” necessarily reflected by the discovery of the Thou. In the same discovery, man’s relation with human “thous” is redefined by the very same Word. Ultimately, the first appraisal is perhaps the best: Ebner is the “Bedenker des Wortes,” the “‘philologist’ in the literal sense: the ‘lover of the Word,’ the logos, understood in the context of the New Testament, within which the whole of his thought takes its root.”99

Editor’s Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to the people who have kept interest in Ferdinand Ebner’s scholarship alive over many years. First and foremost, heartfelt thanks to Dr. Harold J. Green, who allowed me to freely use his t­ hen-unpublished English translation and commentary on this work for my own research almost thirty 98. The Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement of 1770s Germany proposed that for life to be meaningful, it had to be lived with one’s full energies applied to religion, poetry, and discourse, at the same time embracing nature, feelings, and mystery. The movement has echoes in later ­n ineteenth-century romanticism and ­t wentieth-century existential and language philosophies. 99. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxvii.

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Introduction and Acknowledgments

years ago. Since that time, we have shared the hope that Ebner’s work might finally be available to English speakers. His desire to offer the best possible translation has been consistent over these many years as we grew from colleagues to collaborators, from collaborators to friends. I am also grateful to the Internationale Ferdinand Ebner Gesellschaft (IFEG), dedicated to the promotion and publication of Ebner’s thought, for its continuous encouragement and assistance with this project. A very special word of thanks is owed to IFEG’s secretary, Dr. Krzysztof Skorulski. As the translator of two Polish editions of this work, his exhaustive knowledge of Ebner’s thought and his great generosity in proposing countless and detailed suggestions have truly done much to improve this work. Finally, I would like to thank the staff members of the Catholic University of America Press, especially John Martino, Theresa Walker, Brian Roach, and Aldene Fredenburg, who have done so much to shepherd this work to publication with such attention and care.

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Ferdinand Ebner The Word & the Spiritual Realities (the I and the Thou)

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Preface

Preface He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.              —John 1:8 There is something which we must be firmly on our guard against, Phaedo.— What?—That we do not become hostile to the word, like someone else becomes a misanthropist. No greater misfortune can befall man. And both originate in the same way of thinking: the hatred of the word and misanthropy. . . . Wouldn’t it be deplorable, Phaedo . . . if he, I say, henceforth nourishes the hatred of the word all of his life, and thereby forfeits the truth and knowledge of real things?—That would certainly be sad in connection with God.—We must thus above all beware of, we must never allow the thought to arise in the soul that there is no reliance in words.              —Plato, Phaedo We stand at the eve of a scientific bankruptcy, the consequences of which are incalculable.              —Jakob Baron von Uexküll, You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.              —Matthew 16:3

[Ed. Note]: Ebner cites without reference: Plato, Phaedo sections 89c–d; 90c–e. See Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). [Ed. Note]: Ebner cites without reference: Jakob von Uexküll, Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1913).

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Preface

An esteemed Viennese bookseller declined to undertake the publication of these fragments on the basis of the following expert opinion, given by a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna: “The author says that this work was written in the winter of 1918–1919. The impression on the author of the political and cultural breakdown is palpable. This work expresses the turning away from science, philosophy, art and culture in general, and the desire for a personal relationship of the human I to its one true Thou, i.e., to God. This relationship exists only in faith and in active love to God. The I wishes to express itself to the Thou through the word, which is granted to it for that purpose, and this one true Thou wishes to be addressed by the human I in the word. Everything else is a dream life of the isolated and godforsaken I, consisting of unimportant subject matter. “So far, as a modernized and Christianized Neoplatonism, and as a reaction to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the book would not be uninteresting. Even more so if it were cut down to half its size. It could in part be a book of edification for theosophists and other mystics, and in part have a vitalizing effect by arousing a lively opposition. “Unfortunately, however, the work has a dubious side. This consists in an expressed pathological bent. It is an immediate ordeal for the reader who does not bring to this highly interesting case the interest of a professional psychologist or of a psychiatrist by vocation, winding its way through 300 pages in an endless repetition of a single thought and identical phrases, giving rise thereby to the feeling of always revolving around the same point. What does this discourse on science, psychology, philosophy, art and culture, have to do with the ­A nglo-American economic and colonial warfare against the German people? This pathological bent must have developed and established itself long ago, for it is interwoven on every page. The author is unable to emerge from his pathological condition and return; it is likely that he no longer even wants to.

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Preface

“The preference of our society today, inclined to every kind of occultism and mysticism, is incalculable. Perhaps the book would circulate among theosophists; perhaps it would even create a stir among the devoted admirers of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky. A success would depend upon the organization, the impulse to buy, and the spending power of the theosophists. Since I am not in touch with this circle, I would have no way of knowing. Scientifically, psychologically and philosophically, the work is bluntly impossible.” Let one read the Fragments with some effort only to understand them in their essentials, and one will recognize that this expert opinion actually belongs in the book and had best be placed at its head—as a sign of the time. Since it was written by a teacher of philosophy, it cannot be intended as malicious satire on philosophy professors. It does not appear entirely superfluous to me to bring the fundamental thought of the Fragments to the most concise possible form here in the Foreword. That thought is: provided that human existence in its core really has a spiritual meaning—that is, one that is not exhausted in its natural assertion in the course of world events; provided that one may speak of the spiritual in man other than in the sense of a poetically or metaphysically intended fiction, or one really offered only for “social” reasons; then this spiritual something is essentially determined by its being fundamentally intended for a relation to something spiritual outside it, through which and in which it exists. An expression of this being intended for such a relationship, and indeed the objectively comprehensible expression and therefore the only one adequate for an objective knowledge, is to be found in the fact that man is a speaking being, that he “has the word.” He has the word, however, neither for natural nor for social reasons. Society in the human sense is not the prerequisite of language; rather, society itself presupposes language, the word that lies in man, for its continued existence. If we now, so as to have a word for it, call the spiritual in man the “I,” and the spiritual outside him,

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Preface

to which the “I” exists in this relation, the “Thou,” we must then reflect on the fact that this I and this Thou are given to us precisely through the word and in it in its inwardness. The “I” and “Thou” are not, however, given as empty isolated words [Wörter] that have no inherent reference to a reality (which of course they seem to be in their abstract, substantivized, and substantialized usage); but rather as the word that, in the concreteness and actuality of its being spoken, reduplicates its content and its own reality [Realitätsgehalt]. That in brief is the fundamental thought. The apprehension of the essence of language that supports the fragments and the interpretation attempted herein of the fact that man has the word stands or falls, quite unscientifically and unphilosophically, with a definite inner attitude of man toward a certain historical fact. The historical facticity of this, moreover, which is significant in many respects, was called into question scientifically in the course of the nineteenth century, though, it seems, only temporarily. This important and decisive element, impossible within both science and philosophy, which neither precludes nor renders thinking impossible in and of itself, for—or even against—the entire book, cannot and should not touch the development of philosophy, nor obviously of linguistics. But it does indeed intend to confound philosophy in its complacency, which has long since become problematic. Further, it is definitely the opinion of these fragments that in the attitude just alluded to, man has the ultimate decision of his existence as that of a ­self-deciding being, because according to his innermost essence he is called and destined to make decisions. The fragments also maintain that no one who disregards this attitude, who renounces it in the concrete case as far as he is concerned, or who imagines that he has to renounce it for philosophical or scientific reasons, could ever grasp the spiritual meaning of existence (thus also, because in their ultimate basis they are identical, the meaning of the fact that man is a speaking being), not through “thinking” or “existing,” not as poet or artist and not as philosopher or whatever.

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Preface

That even theologians (most unfortunately!) will take little pleasure in this book is not unlikely—with the exception of those who are less interested in theology (or other elements of Christian culture) than in the spiritual life. But that is not to be helped, as low as things in the world of the spirit have already sunk. The one to whose memory these fragments are dedicated would not have understood them if he had lived. Although he presumably had a very good grasp of their fundamental thought in the practice of his life of quiet desperation, rich in s­ elf-denial—of course from a completely different side, which knew nothing of his relationship to the problem of language, although he did not need to know anything of it. That he would not understand them, I must and cannot do other than regard as a main defect of the whole work. It was not given to me to avoid it. Let it stand thus, with its appearance of remoteness and contradiction to the meaning of the fundamental thought. It is certainly not the only defect, and I believe myself to be no less clearly conscious of all the other defects. The second major defect (which seems even more disquieting to me than the first) will be discovered only by he who has understood the fundamental thought and its implementation as regards both its objective and subjective sides. For now, there appears to be only one person whom I know of in all of Europe: that would be Theodor Haecker (Kierkegaard is long dead). I leave it to the reader to discover this defect and to reproach me with it. That reproach would have to make me happy—and not only because it would be proof that someone had understood me. What difference would it make after all? To rectify this defect would require a thoroughgoing revision of the entire work, the success of which would in the end still remain in doubt—even if, as is actually the case, external circumstances did not prevent it. June 1919 Ferdinand Ebner

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The Spiritual Realities

Fragment 1 The Spiritual Realities

The “I” is a later discovery of the ­self-reflecting and ­self-discovering human spirit than the idea.1 Classical philosophy did not know of it. For it was first brought to human consciousness by the spirit of Christianity—thus by the religious factor. But it has hitherto been conceived only in its relation to itself, or as one might say, in its “­I-aloneness” [Icheinsamkeit]—that is, the real I has not been in view, but the moi of Pascal. The inadequacy of the moi to furnish an ethical or epistemological principle must be recognized. At the same time, ethics, no less than epistemology, was surrendered to relativism. That attempt which German philosophy undertook a hundred years ago to recover the existence of the I in a subjectively turned idealism failed and had to fail precisely because mankind had not yet learned to deal with the real I, but rather with the moi of Pascal, which is unreal and abstract in thought and speculation. What relevance does this have for the real I? The matter is very simple: its existence does not lie in its being related to itself, but rather (and this is the fact on which all significance rests) in its relation [Verhältnis] to the Thou.2 The I­ -aloneness of Pascal’s moi is thus 1. [Trans. Note]: To point up Ebner’s central emphasis, as well as to avoid confusion, Geist and geistig are translated throughout as “spirit” and “spiritual,” respectively. 2. [Trans. Note]: The terms Verhältnis and Beziehung will be translated through­out as “relation” and “relationship,” respectively.

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The Spiritual Realities

not to be conceived as an absolute, but as a relative in the relation of the I to the Thou. And outside this relation there is no I at all. The ­I-aloneness is nothing original in the I but is the result of a spiritual deed within it, of an action—of the I—namely, of its secluding itself from the Thou. The I and the Thou are the spiritual realities of life. To develop the consequences of this, and of the recognition that the I exists only in its relation to the Thou and not outside of it, could well place a new task before philosophy, which has always been troubled about the affirmation of the spirit. The indissolubility of its problems and the untenability of its framing of them ruined philosophy, which— if we only admit it to ourselves—now merely prolongs an appearance of life. The resolution of these problems certainly includes the suicide of philosophy in itself. For the insight into the spiritual realities of life must manifestly signify nothing less than the end of ideal­ism. But all philosophy lives on it, whether philosophy acknowledges it or opposes it. This insight also shows the essence of mathematics—and of natural science that strives toward it—from a new and apparently ­up-to-now unobserved side. It allows us to perceive how all mathematical thinking takes root in the I­ -aloneness of the human spirit and how in it, mathematics is fully realized. The inadequacy of our prevailing mathematical ideas and concepts, coming from this source, to apprehend and reflect upon the experience of the world in its reality, must have been observed by the physicist Ernst Barthel. He disputes the correctness of the astronomical axioms of the roundness of the earth and wants the form of the earth to be conceived in the image of the total plane—of a ­self-enclosed but uncurved plane. From this he asserts that one consciousness alone is not sufficient for its conception; a second must be there to help that, in union with the first, could then imagine without contradiction the total plane of the earth. If the concept of ­I-aloneness drawn from the realization of the

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The Spiritual Realities

spiritual realities teaches us, on the one hand, to understand human thought in its essence, then the meaning of language in the spirituality of its origin is revealed to us on the other hand, through the insight into the fact that the existence of the I is given in its relation to the Thou. Johann Georg Hamann, this invaluably deep philologist, had already clearly seen this origin, as had Wilhelm von Humboldt. From him onward the apprehension of the essence of language came to be reduced spiritually more and more in spite of all the accumulation of ­h istorical-philosophical and psychological data of knowledge and interpretation. Language finally witnessed the triumph of its downfall in the invention of artificial world languages. For that is indeed characteristic of our time: all its triumphs and victories signify its defeats. This is what constitutes the essence of language—of the word—­ in its spirituality: that it is something that takes place between the I and the Thou, between the first and second person, as it is expressed in grammar. It is thus something that the relation of the I to the Thou presupposes on the one hand and establishes on the other. But what is by far the most important and significant (and at the same time casts ultimate light on the essence of the word) is this: in the form of this relation, the relationship [Beziehung] of man to God finds its expression. It is the basis and archetype of the relation to God that, precisely because it is and must be a personal one, it can be nothing other than the relation of the I to the Thou. At the ultimate ground of our spiritual life, God is the true Thou to the true I in man. This I that becomes concrete in its relation to God is certainly not the ideal I of philosophy—which is merely an abstraction suspended in the air, a soap bubble of speculative reason that the very next breath of wind from the world of the reality of human life brings to destruction. This is the real I, which comes to expression in the fact that I am and that I can say that of myself.

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Word and Personality

Fragment 2 Word and Personality—Origin of the Word—Aloneness—I and Thou

The spiritual life of man is most intimately and indissolubly bound up with language and, like language, is based upon the relation of the I to the Thou. Every attempt to fathom language with reference to its spiritual significance must proceed from the fact that the word occurs between the first and second person. In the actuality of its being spoken, language presupposes the personal nature of the relationship of the I to the Thou. But again, personality is not to be contemplated without relation to the word. Only in this relation is personality rendered objective at all, as that potential in man—by means of his having the word—of stating in general and in particular of asserting his individual existence in the word “I” of the sentence “I am.” By this means ­self-consciousness becomes objective. This potential of speaking also entails another possibility (again, by means of his having the word and the sense of the word)—namely, that of being addressed as a person, as the Thou. The Thou is the addressability in the other, and this belongs just as much to the essence of personality as the potential to express self, in which the “I” emerges. A special state of affairs obtains with the pronouns “I” and “Thou.” In concrete usage, they are not substitutes for substantives in the sentence, not the representatives for nouns in general or per-

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Word and Personality

sonal names in particular. Rather, they stand directly for the very person in the spiritual spheres that are created and made objective precisely through the word. They were not only the “origin and beginning of all nouns,” as Jacob Grimm says of pronouns; rather, as the manifestation of a spiritually stable reality, they constitute the origin and beginning of language per se. In the concreteness of their being spoken, the I and the Thou are the spiritual realities of life. What is really true of the word in its spiritual primitiveness and liveliness is manifested most clearly with respect to the I, just as to the Thou; it is not added to the content of the statement from without, but is rather born of the content itself, just as the content is born of the word, of the fact that man has the word. And thus what Johann Georg Hamann said is true in this sense above all: “The invisible essence of our soul reveals itself through words.” Since the I and the Thou always exist only in relation to each other, there would be just as little validity in contemplating an absolutely ­Thou-less I as an ­I-less Thou. The word is that through which not only the existence but above all the relation of the two becomes objectively constituted—established. In the liveliness of its being spoken, the word is always a sentence, a word [Wort], whose plural in German is Worte. The word, however, whose plural is Wörter,1 is nothing but a dead member of a dismembered sentence, whose spent life can again be awakened. Behind every sentence—and every word that is a sentence—stands as its intrinsic and inmost sense the positing [Setzung] of the relation between the I and the Thou, the real or even purely ideal positing of the spiritual life. There is in man, objectively, so to speak, an urge for language, and subjectively, a need to address. Hence, as Jacob Grimm notes, 1. [Ed. Note]: In German, the term Wort (word) has two plural forms: Worte are words of importance or gravity, for instance, a legal sentence in a courtroom or the inspired word that Ebner considers significant as hallmarks of authentic language and dialogue between the I and the Thou; on the other hand, Wörter are mere vocabulary, insignificant words, uttered lightly, and for Ebner conventional or lifeless words with no great meaning, incapable of nourishing authentic dialogue.

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someone who grew up in an environment that did not teach him to speak would, with his awakening capacity to reason, invent a language for himself (and would certainly search for a being to address). This urge is nothing other than an expression of the orientation [Angelegtsein] of the spiritual in him, of the I—the speaking person—for the relationship and relation to the Thou, to the spiritual outside him, which he can address. “It is my complete conviction,” says Wilhelm von Humboldt, “that language must be regarded as situated directly in man . . . it does not help to allow for its invention over the millennia. If a man truly understands a single word, not as a merely sensuous impact, but as an articulated sound which signifies an idea, language must already lie in him with completeness and cohesion.” That language and the urge for it lie directly in man does not mean they are innate. For everything innate and thus hereditary belongs to the natural life, whereas the word, language, and the urge for it belong to the spiritual life. Precisely because it is not innate to man, everyone must first learn it. But no one would learn to speak if the word did not lie within him—and this must be understood spiritually. In the actualized relation of the I to the Thou, man has his true spiritual life. It is not to be found where one prefers to see it: in poet­ ry and art, in philosophy and mythical religions, one dreams of the spirit—as brilliant as it may be. All culture up to now has been and will never be anything other than a dream of the spirit, which man dreamt in the ­I-aloneness of his existence, apart from the spiritual realities of life, the inner law of which he discerned above all in the conception of the idea.2 Since the orientation of the spiritual in man for a relation to something spiritual outside him finds its objective expression in language, from language alone can an objective knowledge of the 2. In no spiritual production does man come to consciousness of himself and his true spiritual life. Even if this consciousness should stand as the starting point of production, it nevertheless finally loses itself in it.

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spiritual realities be obtained. One naturally, on the other hand, has to know where these realities can be sought in order to understand their essence. Yet how will man grasp what spirit is, if the word is not alive in him? According to Max Scheler, the word, possession of which first makes language possible, the word understood ultimately as b­ einggiven-to-man, is from God. Thus, as was the conception of Hamann (to whom every profound perception of language will always return), language is of divine origin, something by definition simply transcendent, supernatural, a fact of the spiritual, not the natural life. The word had to receive its life from God, for life would not have been able of itself to find the way to the word, which creates and awakens in man the life of the spirit. To understand this, man must of course believe in God. But that means first of all that he, in faith, be conscious of the spiritual ground of his existence and of the orientation of that existence for a personal relation to this ground. God is this ground, and he is also the true Thou of the true I in man. Through the divinely originated word created in man, the relation of the I to the Thou, from which language emerges as its sensory expression, does not come about subsequent to the I existing for itself in aloneness, but is rather itself the precondition for the existence of the I. The existence of the I, thus understood, is objectively identical with the fact that man has the word. It can accordingly be said of the animal that it has no I because language is denied it, because it does not have the word.3 Without the relation [Verhältnis] of the I to the Thou, not only would there be no I, but no language as well. The relation, which can never be conceived psychologically but only pneumatologically, makes possible the ­self-assertion, although not the ­self-positing, of the I in the utterance of the sentence “I am.” 3. It is characteristic for man that he can say something and also has something to say. The animal can say nothing precisely because it “does not have the word.” But it also has nothing to say—and for the same reason.

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The ­being-by-itself of the I in its aloneness is not a primordial fact of the spiritual life of man, but is a consequence of secluding himself from the Thou (to assume that the I exists outside its relationship to the Thou and independent from it means that man would be just as dumb and speechless as the animal, as the whole of nature). This seclusion is nothing other than the fall from God, the attempt of man to exist in godless inwardness [Innerlichkeit] (what a contradictio in adiecto!); it is the first abuse and perverted use of the freedom, of the personality of existing, implanted into man by God. This fall must be assumed if the spiritual existence of man in the world, and above all the spiritual neediness of that existence, is to be properly understood. Man became a slave to sin and forfeited thereby that aspect of his personality that can only exist in its relation to God.

� Aloneness is something spiritual and in its ultimate basis is always the aloneness of death. The inner aloneness of man’s life would not be perceptible at all were it not for something spiritual underlying it. This aloneness is really nothing but this spiritual something. What man has not suffered from it? That one would not indeed be at all attentive to the spiritual ground of his existence. Only at times, when denying one’s suffering, is a virtue made of this aloneness— and one is wrong in so doing. The true basis and spiritual core of aloneness have not yet been encountered so long as one becomes conscious of it only in the painfulness of not being understood. For man first grasps its basis and core, and really understands himself in the aloneness of his life, when this aloneness is apprehended as the active seclusion, not the passive isolation, of his I from the Thou. He who has the need to be understood by others—and the genius has this most strongly and suffers the most under it—who in the dissatisfaction of this need and not another discerns the aloneness of his life, still wants this aloneness to be respected by others. He desires to be understood by others precisely in this aloneness,

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behind the Chinese wall of his I, which, above all with the genius, his life of mental constructs and thinking has helped to construct. He who really comprehends the ultimate basis of the aloneness of his life, who grasps it thus in the seclusion of his I from the Thou (and ultimately this Thou is God, who understands everything and therefore him, as well) and who thereby really understands himself, can no longer demand that people understand him in this aloneness as he understands it and still respect it at all. The deeper a man understands himself in the aloneness of his life, the more his need to be understood is suspended.

� Science recognizes to be sure neither a fall from God nor the divine origin of the word and language. Jacob Grimm expresses himself in this context in his lecture about the origin of language: “I have demonstrated that human language could be just as little directly revealed as innate. An inborn language would have made people into animals; a revealed one would have presupposed the gods in them. Nothing else remains: language must be human, acquired by us with full freedom for its origin and advancement. It can be nothing else; it is our history, our inheritance.” According to this interpretation, the existence of man is the precondition for language. It came into being through him. But what of man, whose entire humanity is so deeply rooted in the fact of the word that it can be asserted with just as much right, and must be, that he became what he is, a man, through the word, through language? So said Wilhelm von Humboldt, ­a nd he may have had in mind the way out of the circle, which pneumatology certainly sees, but which science does not and cannot discover: man is only man through language, but to invent language, he must already have been a man. Max Scheler demanded that we not ask anything of linguistics regarding the “genesis of language”; in a more profound sense, that genesis is a pre­h istoric fact not of nature but of the spirit. Its object is the word, which man

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himself created after his fall from God—and with it first began his history. This human word is not the same (while pre­supposing it) as the word through which the spiritual life in man, the I in its relation to the Thou, is created. This human word, as Scheler points out, testifies to that creative word that, since it constitutes all of history, has no history itself. Yet this word in the divinity of its origin indeed became historical i­ n the life and words of Jesus.

�

The more intensely man understands himself in the spirituality of his life, in the “­I-ness” [Ichhaftigkeit] of his existence, the more resolutely he strives in earnest for a life in the spirit, and the more clearly and distinctly he comprehends that God is the true Thou of his I, and that he cannot exist at all except in relation to God—even if the previous godlessness and G ­ od-forgetfulness of his existence may appear to speak strongly against the latter. It also becomes clearer to him that there is only a single I, and that the I is the unique one before God. This I is in me myself, and in you who reads these lines (in order to express this, one cannot be other than personal, bringing into focus his own person). Rather, the I is not even in me, for the I “is” not at all, but “I am it.” Further, there is only a single Thou, and that is God. In my genuine spiritual relation to other persons, which the spirit demands, the Thou in “Tom” is not entirely different than that in “Dick” or “Harry,” but always one and the same, the sole Thou that exists. Now are the other persons besides me ­I-less? That is simply impossible. In order to examine how the matter stands, one must assume the correct point of view regarding the spiritual sphere and see it in the proper perspective. The I in its reality yields this vantage point, not some abstract I. I have this point of view in my own spiritual existence. No one can have an objective relation to the spiritual in other persons that lacks a point of view and perspective. I cannot have such a relationship outside the fact or while neglecting the fact that I am. If I have the right relation to

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this spiritual being—and that means a nonobjective and personal one—then that being is for me not the I, for I am that myself, but the Thou. If, however, I do not have the right relation of the spirit with another person, so that I consequently do not have in him the Thou of my I, but only experience his I and its Chinese wall, behind which it shuts itself off from me, and over which I can reach an understanding with him only laboriously or not at all, then even I shut myself off from him. In the final analysis, I then experience in this I of the other nothing but my own I, its seclusion and aloneness and Chinese wall. I experience myself in my I­ -aloneness; I experience the I pure and simple, the only I that there is.

�

Since the ­God-relation is and must be a personal one, it can only be understood as the relation of the I to the Thou, of the first to the second person, as it is expressed in grammar, clearly with no hierarchy intended. Now since this relation consists of speaking to the addressed person together, and is thus the spiritual atmosphere in which the word lives and breathes, the word that comes from God and in accordance with its first and last meaning desires to return to God by way of man, so also the spiritual situation of language in the actuality of its being spoken is ultimately nothing other than the relation of man to God.

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Fragment 3 Word and Human Becoming— Proofs of God—Atheism— Word and S­ elf-Consciousness— Dependence of the I

Every personal relation is based upon the relation of the I to the Thou. That man has and must have such a relation to God constitutes the spirituality of his existence. In the relation to God, in which his I emerges from the aloneness that brings spiritual death, man realizes his spiritual life. The I has no absolute existence, for it exists only in relation to the Thou. Its subjective permanency in love corresponds to its being given objectively in the word, so that the word and love belong together in their common spiritual ground. The word in the actuality of its being spoken presupposes the Thou, and since this is ultimately God, it means nothing else but that the existence of man in his spirituality has the existence of God as its presupposition. In other words, it means that man was created by God. By God, who as Spirit has a real existence, not only one that is imagined and dreamt in the idea of the divine. God created man by speaking to him. He created him through the word, in which was life, and the life was the light of men, as the prologue of John’s Gospel states. That God created man means nothing other than: he spoke to him. In creating him God said to him, “I am and through me Thou art.” By God thus speaking to him,

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and through the word in the divinity of its origin placing the I in him, the I that is created in the relationship to the Thou, man became conscious of his existence and its relation to God. And thus the consciousness of God’s existence is placed in the foundational essence of man, not, however, as a concern of the intellect but as an imperative for faith—situated in our entire existence, as Hamann says, the basis of religion—although this consciousness darkened again after the fall from God. This consciousness is nothing other than language, understood in the depth of its essence. It is nothing other than the spiritual fact of having the word, wherein man has his secret knowledge of God, which he certainly does not recognize, considering the abuse he promotes with the gift of the word and language. The divine word that created man and spiritually gave him language raised up his body, so that he is now anatomically fit for it; it freed his hand and turned his glance upward to heaven. Doubtless some contemporary will say that not all of this is scientifically conceived and expressed. No doubt it is not. But when could the truths of the spiritual life ever be scientifically conceived and expressed? A concession might, however, be made even to the dark spirit of our time: whether God created man by the word from a lump of clay, in accordance with the biblical account, or from a supremely evolved ape, is in the end unimportant. In the spirituality of his origin in God, man was not the first but the second person—the first was and is God. And here this first and second actually express the spiritual hierarchy, in contrast to their grammatical usage. Man was the person addressed by God, the Thou of the divine Word that created him. Yet since it was God himself who spoke, the Thou was not the one it otherwise always ultimately is, God, but precisely man. Here thus, as a unique case, the law of perspective for the apprehension of the spiritual is valid in the opposite sense. To prove objectively the existence of God has no importance at all. No proof, which by the way man only finds time for in the

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idleness of his inner life, and assuming also that he could logically succeed without contradiction and without fearing an equally logical irrefutable antithesis; no proof would touch the real existence of God, for one would be led into the I­ -aloneness of human life and thought and thus away from the reality of the spiritual life. But once man has stepped out of this ­I-aloneness and into a relation to the Thou, to God, he no longer asks about proofs. It is not, however, these proofs in their objectivity that drive him out of his aloneness; rather, it is the reflection upon himself in the personal decision of faith that does it. If the fools are, as Hamann wrote to Jacobi, those who deny the existence of God in their hearts, then those who only want to prove his existence seem to me to be all the more foolish. Every proof of the existence of God is epistemologically inadequate, and for the true spiritual life of man, it is not only dubious but superfluous—a situation worthy of some attention. The personal existence of the I, and in this personality the concrete and not merely abstractly conceived existence of the I, cannot be asserted other than personally by the I itself in the declaration of the sentence “I am.” The situation is different with the existence of the Thou in the sentence “Thou art.” For in its actual declaration this is not asserted at all, but (as in the utterance of the sentence “I am”) is already spiritually presupposed as the possibility of declaration per se. One must keep in mind here that the true Thou of the I is God; that man, when he asserts his own existence in the ­self-consciousness of the sentence “I am,” secretly presupposes God. If he is not conscious of this, it only proves that in the sentence “I am,” he simply does not understand himself in the s­ elf-consciousness of his existence, which is to say, his ­self-consciousness is only apparent. In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the phrase occurs “believe in the name of God.” In the name of God does not simply mean believe in God. The German word “Gott” (from the Sanskrit root hû, meaning “invoking gods”) corresponds exactly to the deeper mean-

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ing of this phrase. Believing in the name of God means believing in God as the Being who is appealed to, as the addressed Person, as the Thou precisely of the I in man. In other words, it means believing in his personal existence. The phrase “believe in the name of God” also emphasizes the relationship of faith to the word. And in its final and deepest basis, all faith is faith in the word. The reality of God for us is not in some concealed corner of human reason, accessible only to the logical penetration and sophistry of a metaphysician or theologian. It is authenticated in nothing else than in the fact—and in this unshakably so—that the I in man is intended for a relation to the Thou, outside of which it does not exist at all. Further, God is authenticated wherein this relation comes to living expression—in the word and in love: in the former, in that it is given to us by God; in the latter, in its demand given through the word that we have to fulfill in life; in the word, which makes us into hearers, in love, which makes us into doers of the word. A remarkable state of affairs obtains with atheism. Strictly speaking, one can never really believe in it. For is there an absolutely godless man? Could one exist? Man is nevertheless created by God, and his existence, even in its invariably only relative godless­ ­ od-relationship, ness, presupposes God, and basically includes the G although it may still conduct itself in a godless manner. Faith, says Hamann, belongs to the natural conditions of our power of cognition and to the natural impulses of our souls. Yet not only our cognition is based on faith, but above all our life, our entire existence. We all live by the grace of God, and there is not a man who, in the innermost part of his heart, does not know of God, does not believe in God. Yet there are others who cannot put their trust in divine grace, who secretly do not know how to live, and therefore in their hidden inner helplessness and concealed from the eyes of all others, suffer continually. And they then go to the point of denying not God, but their belief in God, which becomes their most profound affliction and torment. In the end they deny him to themselves. The

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one who says and recites to himself that he does not believe in God denies that which dwells in the depth of his consciousness and constitutes its essence and core. And the man who thinks that science and philosophy have proven the nonexistence of God with full satisfaction—on him a guilty conscience weighs heavily. Perhaps there is not a single man who does not trust in the grace of God in the most hidden corner of his heart, hidden most of all to himself. For we live not only by grace, but also by having faith in it. At the moment when a man would absolutely cease to believe in God and to trust in the divine grace, at that same moment, as if his heart were torn asunder and rent to pieces, that man would cease to exist as man. The godlessness of many a human existence is thus nothing but a misunderstanding upon which the guilt of man presses heavily. It is true: one forgets with extraordinary ease that he believes in God in the innermost part of his soul, and there are probably many who forget it not only involuntarily, as it were, in the state of spiritual ­absent-mindedness, but who want to forget it—which of course does not succeed. And these then declare their atheism at every fitting and inappropriate opportunity, an atheism that is simply a completely false declaration and is never without a trace of the demonstrative. Yet when does man become demonstrative? When he wants to fool himself and another about something. Obviously behind the atheistic demeanor stands despair. But all despair is ingratitude of man toward God and his grace. The despairing one does not notice at all, being so blind in his desperation that he could not despair at all without the grace of God. For that he is despairing is still a spiritual sign of life. It cannot be denied that unbelief is planted deeply in the human spirit. But it is not as original in man as faith in God, nor is it as deep; rather, it emerges as a consequence of the fall from God. The objection of Schopenhauer—namely, that among the Mongols there are essentially atheistic religions—is not at all valid. Once there were not different religions but only one. Just as all types of irrationality,

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says Hamann, presuppose the existence of reason and its abuse, so must all religions have a relationship of belief toward a unique, independent, and living truth. That unique religion is Christianity, and in it alone is the living truth, do we possess the truth of our lives. Only its spirit has made true belief possible, which in its ultimate basis is the faith of man in the word, and which also makes possible the real essence of unbelief, provoking atheism. Second, let one bear in mind that the Mongolian race has in fact not yet come to consciousness of himself and, consequently, not to the consciousness of the existence of God. This circumstance characterizes the entire Mongolian life of the spirit; the Mongolian man (who does not know what to make of the spirituality of his existence, either in a good sense or in a bad sense) becomes deeply rooted in the life of the generation in a manner incomprehensible to us Europeans. The unbelief planted in the human spirit must be overcome in whatever form it may assume: as absolute religious and moral indifference, which is always just an act for public display, or behaving demonstratively as cynicism in the conception of the ethical, or hiding behind a philosophical mode of viewing or a purportedly scientifically acknowledged and supported opinion. This unbelief must be overcome by another spiritual deed, just as it came about in man through one—namely, the personal decision. Thus does man come to belief in God, to his true spiritual life. One could really consent only to that atheism that would not change its entire ethical attitude and conception of life in the least if its erroneousness were to be demonstrated rigorously and scientifically by an incontestable and absolutely clear proof of God. Such an atheism might be logically imagined, but even that isn’t possible, and after all, there are no such atheists. On that point, do not be deceived by those who pretend to be atheists. If there were such atheists, it would of course be a proof for the superfluity of the belief in God with regard to the inner life of man. But that’s not all. No man would be able to grasp even the existence of God—in spite of any ir-

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refutable, absolutely clear proof. In conclusion, the situation is really this: a philosophical system that, in the blindness of philosophizing, indisputably abolished the existence of God, is conceivable. But a human existence that has abrogated the existence of God while existing is simply impossible. It has of course happened that some have died as steadfast atheists—and not just with the cynicism of many a criminal, which despairs to the point of blasphemy. Can one comprehend how this ­self-deception of atheism can be maintained right up to the very last moment of life? Does not everyone unmask in death, when the comedy that has been played before the world comes to an end? But bear in mind that between the end of the ­next-to-last second of life and the instant of death, there is still time enough for the “breakthrough of eternity.” And what takes place in that moment, even if it lasts only the smallest fraction of a second, no one knows—outside of the one who participates in it and God.

�

God either has a personal existence or he does not exist at all. Since he exists personally, his relation to man is therefore a personal one, and we mean nothing else but that when we speak of divine grace, of that which in man conforms with the humble trust in it, the trust of the I in the approach of the Thou. But grace corresponds to the moral sense [Ethos] of human existence. How can one risk behaving impersonally toward the divine authority that sits in judgment over everything ethical? Which human cause would not then be lost before God and for all eternity? The personal reality of existence is never grasped by thinking, and therefore philosophy and metaphysics are not capable of pointing man’s way to God as a spiritual reality. None of these has been able to produce any more than a sketch of the idea of the divine (of this projection of the I in its I­ -aloneness), and none is able to render absolutely impossible the withdrawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea in man.

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What if the I had an absolute existence—that is, one independent from the Thou? What if the aloneness of the I was thus its original and intrinsic state, with the relation to the Thou only being added to it, perhaps having developed in the progress of the socialization of human life as a social necessity? (Although the opposite is quite certainly the case, and the relation to the Thou is the precondition of socialization in general, and above all of true socialization, from which man of course is still a long way off.) If this were so, then God would indeed have nothing but a merely ideal existence. The divine would be nothing but an idea, which to be sure renders good service at the beginning of the process of development, but then becomes more and more worn out, finally becoming useless and superfluous. But then, the existence of this absolute I would itself be situated no less badly. Then those philosophers would be right who claim to see in the I only a fiction that is in the end not even logically necessary but merely grammatical, an object and accident of linguist usage, and in whose eyes the task of philosophy is to penetrate this fiction and to free scientific and philosophic thinking from it. The only question still to be answered concerns the origins of the randomness of linguistic usage. One may thereby finally do away with the misfortune of thinking with which the problem of philosophy has up to now unavoidably been focused upon, directly or indirectly: how does the world come to the I, how does the I come to the world? Or more precisely expressed, how does consciousness attain the I, and the I consciousness? How does it come about that man realizes his existence by asserting himself in the word “I”? Why does it happen that I (and in order to express oneself here as clearly and concretely as possible, there is no choice but to become personal) can say “I am” of myself and by so doing submit to the view, which is quite wrong according to those philosophers for whom the I is merely provoked by parlance, that in this sentence and thought, the most certain and undoubted existence of the I in and for itself has been asserted? On the one hand, we stand here before the problem

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of s­ elf-consciousness—and the problem of the will, since the subjective reality of the I must be seen in the statement “I want,” which underlies the declaration “I am.” On the other hand, we stand before the problem of language, for in the word, and above all the word “I” of the sentence “I am,” lies the objective reality of the I. How does language come to the I, and the I to language? ­Self-consciousness, whose core is truly the I, is not the self-positing of the I, as the philosophers said a hundred years ago (for then it would have to have its basis in the I­ -aloneness), but is the possibility in man, which is placed into consciousness by the word and which is to be comprehended neither psychologically nor metaphysically, of asserting his personal general existence in the stating of the sentence “I am”—in the stating, which means presupposing the relationship to the Thou, to the addressed person. The intervention of consciousness into the organic course of events, which is a fact of natural life, since the animal also has consciousness, implies in itself no I. But in it, one can say, nature encounters spirit. Spirit created the I in nature—through the word; and since it created the I by placing the word into man, spirit created it for a relation to the Thou, outside of which it does not exist at all, and in which alone it can come to consciousness of itself. Nature has, so to speak, only brought it to the level of the dumb, wordless, and thouless I, and therefore not to s­ elf-consciousness (as science will never be able to tell us). This mute I of nature, however, does not exist at all. In nature there is no factual individual existence t­ hat is made real only by the I—but only the outline for it, which is withdrawn again and again and exposed to annihilation. Those philosophers who denied the real existence of the I were no doubt already aware that s­elf-consciousness is identical with nothing else but the fact that man is a speaking being. But they nevertheless did not grasp the significance of this identity, because they did not see the foundation and anchoring of language in the spiritual realities of life.

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The word is the light through which consciousness [Bewußtsein] (this is also a fact given in animal life) was enlightened in man into ­self­-consciousness [Selbstbewußtsein], into being conscious [­Bewußt-Sein], which is denied to the animal. The word created the ­self-consciousness and the spiritual life of man in its reality. Truly, the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it. And thus it states in the Gospel of Matthew (6:23), “If the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be!” As Luke puts it (11:36), “If now your body (your life in this world) is entirely illuminated, without having any part in the darkness, then will it be entirely in the light, as when the light of lightning illuminates you.”1 “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” Jesus said to the devil in the wilderness. We live spiritually by the word of God, which created us; by the life of Jesus, who was the Word and the Bread of life, which came down from heaven, so that if anyone eats of it he will not die, as the Gospel of John states.

�

Man must delete nothing from the word of God. But he must also add nothing; he must seek to invent no word of God, if for no other reason than that it is simply impossible. The critical inclination of a humanity, which had become spiritless and godless and had lost belief in the word, doubted the historical existence of Jesus, made him into a mythical figure, a figure of religious poetry. But the life of Jesus in its historical facticity is authenticated for us in his word. That this word could not be invented constitutes the most conclusive proof for the existence of Jesus, who certainly makes an appeal to the spirituality of man, and humanity, which had become spiritless, did not know what to make of him. The word of God is simple and clear and cannot be misunder1. Perhaps the etymological relationship of the word “logos” with “light,” which is filled with meaning pneumatologically, will someday be demonstrated linguistically.

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stood, if man absorbs it in the seriousness of his spiritual life. But it immediately loses this simplicity and clarity, it becomes doubtful, ambiguous, indeed even unintelligible, when one attempts to grasp it with the frivolity of theorizing and speculating. The poor in spirit, praised as blessed by the gospel, certainly never thought of theory and speculation, wherein there is no earnestness—and therefore to them belongs the kingdom of heaven. What is a genius before God? It is not through his genius, but through his taking seriously the spirituality of his life, that man opens his soul to the word of God. To have this earnestness, no one needs to be a genius. And whoever has it hears the Word, and the light of his life dawns upon him.

�

Man would never have been able by himself to discern the spiritual realities of life and the ­I-aloneness of his existence in the world in its true significance as the state of his spiritual lostness. Without the spirit of Christianity, which means without the life and word of Jesus, in whom the reality of the spirit and the word were absolutely one, in whom God became man in order to redeem us from the curse of original sin, no one would know, with however the Jews being excepted, anything of himself—of the I, which means of his I, or of God. Both the ­self-consciousness of the I that is emphasized practically in the relation of man to man, being then maintained in the same sense in the aloneness that is nevertheless only apparent, and the p­ hilosophical-theoretical ­self-consciousness of the I that secludes itself from the Thou, forget their own precondition or want to forget it: the consciousness of the existence of the Thou. The ­self-awareness of the thought “I am I,” which consciously renounces the Thou and God, does not notice that the thought and declaration “I am” would not be possible at all apart from the thought “Thou art”—that is, apart from the consciousness of the existence of God that is placed in man by the word. The s­ elf-consciousness of a man concretizes and realizes itself in the ­God­-relation, and only in it

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does human personality come completely to its breakthrough, and the I to its full life, which is a life of the Spirit. Personal being, from the standpoint of man and having absolute validity for him, is always the existing of the I in the relation to the Thou. Only the personality of God could be ­relationship-less; but it is not, since it truly stands in a relation to the personal existence of man, whose existence would not be possible at all without this relation. But that God created man for a personal existence—that is, for a personal relation to him, lay not in the necessity of his existence as God and personality, but was of his free will. Just as the relation of God to man resides in the creative word of grace and love, “I am and through me Thou art,” so conversely, the relation of man to God, through which man becomes conscious of his existence and its spiritual ground, is expressed in the word and in the thought that underlies and gives meaning to every prayer: “Thou art and through Thou I am.” The Thou in its divinity is the first, the I in its humanity is the second person; and thus the hierarchy of spiritual being is established. God is not a projection of the I, as many psychologists believe, who cannot grasp the real relationship of God to man (since they do not even believe in God), but only the human idea of the divine. The existence of the Thou does not have that of the I for its presupposition, but the opposite: the I is presupposed by the Thou. Arising from the word in the divinity of its origin, the life of the spirit includes and demands a personal relation to God. This life is the possibility in man, created and intended by God himself, that man when he prays speaks directly to God as to the Father. In prayer, in dialogue with God, the word returns from whence it came. If man prays only the first word of the Lord’s Prayer in the right way, then the inexpressible mystery of God becomes word in being uttered by man; just as in the life of Jesus, who taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer, it became word in being uttered, but in this instance by God himself.

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Fragment 4 I Think and It Thinks—Kierkegaard— The Concrete I—Verbalization of Thinking—Ideal, Concrete, Fictitious Thou—Word and Truth

Lichtenberg, as is well known, wants to posit an “It thinks in me” in the place of “I think.” That is correct with regard to all those thoughts that we have to call “genius.” Their conception is never arbitrarily forced, it comes of itself as a suggestion from above, as an inspiration, and perhaps they are only interrupted in their growth, internal clarification, and unfolding by an entirely too arbitrary “I think” (only the genius can say for sure). Man must yield himself to these thoughts that think themselves out in his consciousness. Outside these thoughts, which always have objective value, there are no edifying thoughts about their subjective meaning by which the “It thinks in man” may be justly maintained. There are thoughts that come about in a dreamlike state of consciousness, in a state that in any case signifies a symptom of illness, in which mental constructs live a life of their own, but without—and this is crucial—having objective meaning. It may even happen at times that brilliant thoughts that have, as it were, bogged down on their way to objectification may bear a certain resemblance to them. Thoughts of genius are always inwardly oriented toward the idea. But with the idea a remarkable state of affairs obtains—namely, that it is something subjective and objective, personal and impersonal in

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one. It originates in the personality, yet personality always assumes a subordinate position to the idea. It has objective meaning—that is, there exists for everyone in principle the possibility of reflecting upon a thought that is oriented in its conception and development toward the idea, and thus making it “his”—but is nevertheless grounded in the subjective aspect of the will. In its aesthetic meaning, which psychologically presupposes the rupture [Brechung] of the will in desiring, it is not immediately clear. For here the will, which through its brokenness [Gebrochenheit] in desire meets the idea, is brought by objectification to its disappearance, as it were, so that it is no longer noticed that the idea is firmly rooted in it. And there we are dealing with that indifference in the aesthetic mode of viewing, in the contemplation of the idea, that has been underscored especially by Schopenhauer. The situation is different, however, with the ethical idea that addresses the will (so that the will comes forward) and gives it direction. However validly it may be said of the thoughts of genius (and let it not be forgotten that the spirituality of the genius is always aesthetically oriented and directed) that the “It thinks in man,” or more clearly stated, “The idea thinks itself in man,” in the final analysis a mode of thinking still underlies it, and the I underlies the latter. A thought in its actuality is always an “I think,” even if the I is so hidden that it no longer recognizes itself—and behind the cogito stands the volo. The I of the brilliant thought is not the concrete but the ideal I of the genius; it is a potential but never a real I, as the possibility of thinking in general. It is an I abstracted from its reality—which lies in the will.

�

The pseudonymity of Kierkegaard’s writing may perhaps be explained from this standpoint. Kierkegaard was certainly one of the most profound thinkers of all time, which has not yet been clearly recognized, who had in himself the manifold possibilities of thought. In the spirituality of his life, considered religiously, he

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did not do what other thinkers do: he resolved not to convert one of these possibilities of thought into the reality of his spiritual existence, into the reality of his thinking of what the “truth” is for him. For he saw in his religious perceptiveness [Besonnenheit] where alone the reality of the spiritual life and truth lies. But he was too much of a thinker (and poet besides) to discard all these thoughts and spiritual possibilities of existence; and for that reason, poetizing his philosophers, he placed these before himself as ideal, poetic possibilities, without identifying with them in the reality of his spiritual life. An achievement of genius, which in elasticity and range has no equal in all of history, requires extraordinary extensiveness of spiritual life no less than intensity. Kierkegaard obviously knew very well (and how could he not have known it, since it was indeed the presupposition of his entire work and gave his work deeper meaning) that his real spiritual life was not in his unprecedented production of genius. The truly religious man, who knows where the truth lies and therefore never seeks it with unbridled imagination, cannot abide with the viewpoint of any philosophy or philosophical ­problem-raising to come to the truth. He alone, not the critic of knowledge, really understands the complete inadequacy of every philosophical point of view. Kierkegaard was perhaps the only genius who understood himself in his genius, the single great thinker who made proper use of his genius. And he could only do that because the religious perceptiveness was in him. Kant, whose orientation was less religious than ethical and critical of science, wanted nothing of genius in philosophy, as everyone knows. Genius, as the ­d ifficult-to-tame Pegasus with wings of imagination, always threatens to run away with the philosopher and to not only seduce him to dream of the spirit, but finally to hold this dream for pure truth and reality. Since Kierkegaard was himself conscious of the ideality of all objective thinking, and as a result was also conscious of the reality of the spiritual life, of the concrete I, he therefore can do what no philosopher in the world from Plato to Kant and Fichte has been

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able to do: he can transform the reader directly into the concrete Thou—that is, bring the concrete I in him to consciousness of itself. He can compel the reader to an understanding of himself—while the philosophers, if all goes well, can help him only to the objective comprehension of their thoughts and works. The one who has understood the Critique of Pure Reason well enough to criticize it has simply understood it and has nothing further to say. But the one who has really understood one of Kierkegaard’s writings, for example Sickness unto Death or The Concept of Dread, understands himself better than before—or he has quite certainly not understood it. And then there would be much more to say.

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If this concrete I did not exist at all and in reality, then there would really be no spiritual reality—which is not to say that everything spiritual has its reality from the I. Then spirit would exist only in the sphere of ideas—that is, only in the imagination of man that has become estranged from reality, only in his desire, in his dreaming of the spirit. But this dreaming has as its presupposition that spiritual reality in man that is, to be sure, estranged from him. The animal does not dream of the spirit. But there is no man who does not or has not so dreamt. Those who view the I as a mere fiction (thus as less than something ideal, since objective meaning always adheres in the latter) naturally also see a fiction in the will, precisely in its quality of I­-ness [Ichhaftigkeit]. But there is just as little an I­-less will—which in the end they want to conceive as a completely objective striving, as a tendency in nature a­ s there is an absolutely ­w ill-less I. If there is a concrete I—which only those “without spirit” doubt, and with whom it is of course very difficult to reach an understanding regarding the spirit—then there are also thoughts of which not the “It thinks,” but rather the “I think” immediately holds true. These thoughts could not be conceived at all apart from this imme-

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diacy of I­ -consciousness, and only therein do they have their meaning, that the concrete I in man thinks them, that “I think them.” Yet just as this concrete I must be conceived as either the psychologically determined moi of Pascal or as the spiritually determined and ­self-determining I—that is, as either psyche or pneuma, so also are the I­ -based [ichhaft] thoughts of a twofold nature: they are either of the psychological I that secludes itself from the Thou, that relates to itself in the reality of its will; or they are of the pneumatological I that seeks and finds the reality and determination of its existence in relation to the Thou. It can be valid for the former type, but not necessarily in all cases, but it must be conceived for the latter, without exception, that the “I think” is valid. If a man thinks only of himself while rejecting the Thou, having nothing else in view than his relationship to the world and his existence in it, then his volition thinks; then it is not the “It” in him that thinks, but “he” thinks. It can also be that this ­self-relating volition flees into unconsciousness and, masking itself in images and thoughts, comes to consciousness in man without genuine intelligibility. And then of course the “It thinks in him” holds true once again. But if one reflects on that unconscious volition, or if he sees through it, he recognizes himself and understands these images and thoughts. If in the affliction or the joy of love he thinks of the one whom he loves and in whom he accordingly has found the Thou of his I; if while praying he lifts his thoughts to God, then again it is not the “It” in him that thinks, but “he” thinks. In the ­I-based thoughts of the psychically determined I, the Thou is always forgotten—or thought of as the I once more, seemingly as the I of the other. But in the thoughts of the pneumatically determined I, which ultimately constitute a single thought, in spite of all their manifoldness, the Thou is called to mind, brought to remembrance. And here this beautiful word “remembrance” comes to its final and real meaning: man remembers the dependence of his existence upon the Thou. In this remembrance he has the inwardness of his life. And therefore the deepest recollection of

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himself lies in these thoughts, and in them the word comes to life in its most immediate sense.

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Just as the I underlies all thoughts, at least ideally, so the relationship of the I to the Thou serves as the basis of their verbalization, again at least ideally. What happens if one wants help in bringing a thought that he has just had to full clarity, to himself and to no one but himself, and in so doing makes use of the word in the stillness and aloneness of his thinking? How strange does the word seem in aloneness. The word contradicts it, it testifies against such aloneness. If we see in the word an instrument of communication, then we can ask what the deepest and ultimate meaning of all communication may be. Does it lie only in the application of one thing or another to the addressed person, be this a definite action in the external world or only the inner empathy about our life and experience, thinking, feeling, and willing? Does this really entirely exhaust the meaning of communication, or must we not go deeper still? For the ultimate meaning of the word in human terms (for the divine meaning is the creation and awakening of the spiritual life in man) is and remains the opening of the I to the Thou over against him. This is not the exercise of influence [Einflussnahme] on the outer or inner attitude of the Thou, but the establishment of the relation to him, which must in no way be broken off again in the next instant. If one thus wants to make a thought that he is thinking entirely clear to himself, and that therefore he thinks in words, does he communicate with himself, does he open up to himself? In a certain sense it is true that he opens up something in himself—namely, his thought. But it is the word that helps him to illuminate something within that is still dark to him, that makes something hidden accessible to him. And the meaning of the word is the relation of the spiritual in man to the spiritual outside him. Man, however, thinks of nothing else but making his thought clear to himself. Does he in

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the verbalization of his thought speak to a purely fictitious Thou? But he is not at all a poet and would not like to be, least of all in his attempt to think out his thought clearly. Or does he converse as a madman? Perhaps every person who is going mad has a tendency to carry on a conversation with himself. Or when he talks to himself, when he, only in thought, renders himself the addressed person, does he convert his I into the Thou? But it would be nothing else but the I, the I once more—it would thus be a doubling of the I that interests the psychiatrist. Hence he would be a little insane. But how is this possible, since some kind of ­self-clarification takes place in him, whereas in the insane person the opposite happens; an ­ever-spreading ­self-darkening takes place, the “darkening of the spirit,” as it is well put, into which finally an illuminating ray of light can no longer penetrate. If a man cannot do other than appeal to the word for help in the clarification of a thought, then one again sees how all spiritual life in us is conditioned by the word, and through it is dependent on a relation to the spiritual outside us. Everything spiritual in me, even if I possessed it only for myself (as in the case where I am concerned with nothing else but making clear to myself my own thoughts with the help of the word), is only a reflection and afterglow of the relation to the spiritual outside me. If in my spirit I isolate myself from all men and am occupied with nothing but the clarification of my thoughts, I still long for this relation to the Thou, since I need it for this clarification in the word, which interests me above all. If it is a question of objective thoughts, I probably do not have another man at all in mind in thinking them; yet I nonetheless think them for him, without my becoming aware of it. The verbalization of these thoughts above all has the meaning that in being thought they bring another into connection, and thus I may and even must secretly have the hope (for who knows whether I would come to the word at all without it) that my thought, which clarifies the word and therein myself, might somewhere and sometime yet be spoken to the spiritual in another man. But with this secret hope

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I can already go astray in the realm of dreams, and one has to beware of that under all circumstances. How about the subjective thoughts of a man, which concern only himself, his own existence, and his more or less deeply understood neediness in it, and whose verbalization in abstract ­self-conversation is not really directed to the Thou in another man, not even ideally? What of those thoughts that one—without raising the slightest claim to their objective validity, to their having something to say to another—really only thinks to himself and for himself, and that he may not want another to know about at any cost? But let one keep this in mind: whatever man says and to whomever he speaks, God listens. And according to the words of the gospel, he requires an accounting someday for every uselessly spoken word. If man speaks with other men, in reality or only in thought—God listens. If he talks to himself about himself and the neediness of his existence, regarding things that he would not like to speak about with anybody, God listens all the more; or rather, man can, so to speak, become more easily aware that God is listening in this kind of conversation than when he speaks to another man, be it only ideally. He should be mindful that in this absolute conversation with himself, this speech on a path toward insanity, he ignores God completely. Yet God is listening and right there wants more than ever to be addressed. Can one who talks to himself in the aloneness of his I and the spiritual neediness of his life, and then suddenly remembers that God is listening, still continue his ­self-conversation, as if God were not there and not listening? He becomes silent—or he turns the word to God, there, where it strives after its origin. But God is never merely an observer and a listener. Man only makes him that. In the moment when the word of man turns earnestly to God, God speaks also to man. And not only is the thought silenced in which the e­ ver-falsely understood neediness of existing is considered and lamented, but even the suffering from it comes to nothing. For when God speaks he makes man aware of where his real suffering dwells.

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The monologue of one suffering in thought is gibberish and a true symptom of the illness of the spirit, so long as it has not been a dialogue with God. But if it is the latter, then it is no longer a monologue and is not gibberish. In monologue the word loses its meaning and finally becomes gibberish. In dialogue with God, it comes to its ultimate and deepest meaning. Man needs the word to become clear about himself and his thinking—for it is the light of our life. And he only becomes clear about himself, he only understands the neediness of his existing and himself in this neediness, in dialogue with God.

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There are no doubt thoughts that are absolutely wordless yet still clear and distinct. They are conceived in the greatest possible aloneness of the I. But in the verbalization of this thinking the relationship of the I to the Thou is clearly asserted. The word—as document of the spiritual life—has the power in itself to beget the spiritual life in the addressed person who does not close himself off from it by awakening in man the ideal Thou via the word of the poet and the concrete Thou via the religious word. The one who speaks in the poetic word, addressing himself to the ideal Thou, is an ideal I. But the one who speaks in the religious word, an apostle, for example, is not the I of man, but rather is God himself, who uses man in order to speak through him. It can also be the case that in one who is not even an apostle, the I has become absolutely concrete in its relation to God. Addressed and moved by the word, the I itself becomes the Thou, and therein it has the one side of its spiritual life, either in its reality or only in the idea. There is also, however, a verbalization of thoughts that avoids the Thou, a word that thus speaks neither to the ideal nor to the concrete Thou in man, but rather adheres to the objectivity of thinking. Yet that means it denies the spirituality of its origin and meaning. Since this word is not a document of spiritual life, it cannot beget spiritual life in man—for the latter does

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not move in the sphere of objective thinking. To become completely objective would eventuate in an absolute renunciation of living, and above all of spiritual living directly. With the exception of pure mathematical thinking, there is no mode of conceiving that can extricate itself completely from the native soil of spiritual life in man, whose real sphere is subjectivity. Such a way of thinking would have to renounce verbalization eo ipso and would find its most perfect expression precisely in a mathematical formula. Even the most objective thinker (and secretly the mathematician, as well, in whose case, however, it appears as pure human fortuitousness) may not be completely devoid of the need to communicate his thoughts and to be understood by others (a need that is quite foreign to the truly religious man). This demonstrates that the search for the Thou, the spiritual life of man in his subjectivity, this search that can go astray and that cannot overcome “­I-aloneness,” still underlies his thinking in spite of all objectivity. There is also a verbalization of thoughts for which a relationship to a merely fictitious Thou forms the basis, which is not to be confused with the ideal Thou. That is the case with the insane person or with a man on the verge of insanity. His I lacks the Thou—and that is already a symptom—even if the conversation seems to be entirely reasonable in itself. For the insane person talks incoherently above all in a pneumatological sense and only subsequently in an intellectual sense, as well. It is not only the intellect that suffers loss, for the evil is situated much deeper. It often happens to the genius, and no doubt always to the insane, to talk at ­cross-purposes with real man. They do not address the concrete Thou directly; they overlook it, so to speak, and perhaps even disregard it. The kinship of genius and madness was recognized long ago, but wherein this kinship is to be seen, has never really been sought: in the circumstance that the genius not less than the insane labors in the I­ -aloneness of human existence and builds his own world in it. Both suffer from it (and from the problemati-

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zation of life), but the former has his genius to help him over the suffering. If a brilliant man becomes insane, he does not become so through his genius but rather because he is abandoned by it, so that he no longer finds in himself the means to bring the sickness of the spirit under control—and man spiritually suffers from nothing else but the Thoulessness [Dulosigkeit] of the I. Yet that is the distinction between the genius and the insane, that the former has a relationship to an ideal Thou at least spiritually (it is bad enough, moreover, if his entire spiritual life becomes completely merged in it), while the latter speaks only to a merely fictitious Thou. Idea and fiction are of course not the same; for the former always has objective, the latter only subjective meaning. While not always the case, the one who bears in himself the possibility of an ideal Thou as the premise for being addressed by the word and by the work of the genius in his brilliance—that one knows what to do with the Thou, however little it may address his concrete Thou. But one usually does not know what to make of the talk of an insane person (that would be for the psychologist), for no one has a fictitious Thou in himself, as many have the possibility of an ideal one, and no one wants his I to be abused as a merely fictitious Thou, as an external pretext but not an internal motive for speaking. Everything that becomes word in man, and the more it arises from the depth of life, has its genuine sense and its real truth in its not lacking the Thou. Truth is that through which a thought has permanence and materiality, and there is no truth of a thought that has been verbalized that exists absolutely independently of the relationship of the word to the Thou, the Thou that is addressed in the ideal or concretely. There is objective truth only on the abstract surface of being—and of thinking—and it is in the end not a truth in itself. It is the relationship to the genuine Thou that makes the verbalization of a thought the objective truth. The truth does not create or compel the relationship; rather, the opposite is everywhere the case, when it is not a question of the abstract surface of being,

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thus of mathematics and science. The I that is unable to find its Thou moves in nothing but misplaced thoughts and h­ alf-truths. Only half of the conditions for the existence of truth are given: the I—and it is already in danger of becoming an untruth.

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What of the truth in the religious life? No man can understand another in his relation to God—each can understand only himself, and must understand himself in this relation, or else it is not a real relation to God. No one can know the truth of another’s relation with God, even if communication about it is offered to him, which really is not possible. For the word of this communication only posits the relation of the I to the Thou in man; the relation to God, however, is that of the I to the Thou in God, and cannot be expressed immediately to the intellect in the form of direct communication ­v is-á-vis man and as something like a mathematical axiom, for example. In other words, I can only believe in the truth of the relation to God in another man that was communicated to me indirectly, because it could not proceed otherwise. We can really understand only what is given to us in mathematical certainty or as something evolving. Mathematics is our understanding in space, where man feels entirely at home; but the idea of evolution is our understanding in time, and in that he is already no longer at home as in space. Yet the kingdom of God, as the gospel says, is not here and there but is within man—and it does not develop but rather breaks through. The ­God-relation is the mystery of its breakthrough and existence in man, about which no direct communication can be made. Therefore, we cannot assert of anyone with absolute certainty that the relation does not exist in him, even if it concerns a criminal or a madman; but neither that it abides even in a saint. We must assume it unconditionally in every man. For we must believe in God in man, just as, conversely, we have to believe in man in God.

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� If a man in speaking to God in his heart would have to turn his word exclusively to an ideal Thou, then only the genius would have a relation to God, for only he has a relation to the ideal Thou. But this is not God for that very reason, because it only refers to man in his humanity, as it were, and in the final analysis to mankind, to the idea of man, but never to God, who is truly a reality of the spiritual life; neither does it have reference to God in his humanity—that is, to his incarnation in Jesus. If one would have only a fictitious Thou in God, however, then one would be insane in his relation to God. But nothing is more certain than that man in his real relation to God is beyond all insanity and all possibility of insanity that lies in the human spirit.

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Fragment 5 Knowledge of the Spiritual Life—The Philosophers and the Word—The Word and the Spiritual Life— Science and the Word—Pneumatology

There would be no knowledge of the spiritual life if that life subsisted only in love and not also in word. The latter forms the basis of all knowledge in general. If man possessed the spiritual life only in word and not also in love, he would be without security and certitude of its reality. He would no doubt know of the I and even of the Thou, but nothing of this knowledge would be secure from the critical attack of philosophy, which claims to see in this I, just as in the Thou, nothing but a linguistic habit. The word as the objective and love as the subjective vehicle of the relation between the I and the Thou belong together. The divinity of both is vouchsafed to man in his faith in the incarnation of God in Jesus. Yet it is not granted to man to understand why they necessarily and essentially belong together. For that would mean understanding why God created man precisely as he is and not otherwise.

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“Philosophia nata videtur,” Leibniz asserted of the German language. The point would thus be to develop that philosophy innate to language, to make “use of the instrument . . . which it had already prepared when it was not yet real philosophy,” and not only to extract

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from language those poetic treasures that lie hidden in it, according to an observation of Schelling, and that “the poet does not put into language; but which he, as it were, lifts out of it, as out of a treasure trove which he merely persuades language to reveal to him.” Every deep thinker suspected that there must be an entirely unique state of affairs with language, and they engaged in etymology. Such was the case with Plato and Scotus Eriugena, to name only two examples. They privately surmised that there might be a stability in the word and that philosophy might have something to gain by it. As Schelling said, the basis of language cannot be situated with consciousness (because without it human consciousness is not at all conceivable, the latter thus presupposing language), and yet, the deeper we penetrate into it, the more certainly language discloses that its depth still excels by far that which is the product of full consciousness. What dwells in this depth is something more than philosophy or an instrument for it. Of what importance, then, is philosophy? The problem of language is neither a philosophical nor a psychological nor perhaps a scientific one, but rather a pneumatological one; and as long as it is not conceived in this way, the essence of the word will never be fathomed. Conversely, the problems of pneumatology—that is, the questions of the spiritual life— undergo a special illumination from the clarification of the deeply grasped problem of language. For the key to the spiritual life lies in the word. Why shouldn’t one even dare to attempt a pneumatological grammar? Through a statement of Jacob Grimm, the view might be encouraged that not only is philosophy apparently innate to it to be extracted from the German language (and from related languages), according to that word of Leibniz, but it is also the knowledge of the spiritual essence of language and of the meaning of the word. This ­I ndo-Germanic language, Grimm said, must offer through its inner construction, which can clearly be pursued in infinite gradations, the richest insights into the universal course and development of human language and perhaps about its origin. And the Ger-

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man language in particular truly has an etymological physiognomy and countenance in which its interpretation divulges to us the deepest and innermost life of language and the meaning of this life. The physiognomy of language is, to be sure, like every other spiritual venture upon which one haphazardly embarks.

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Since the mystery of the spiritual life conceals and reveals itself in the mystery of the word, pneumatology is therefore, as far as it is possible at all, w ­ ord-knowledge, a knowledge of the word and about the word and an interpretation of the prologue of the Gospel of John, which certainly does not speculate metaphysically with the logos. John the Evangelist was the first (the second was probably Hamann) who saw the inner connectedness of the spiritual life in man with the word and with the life of Jesus with the word, whose divine origin he recognized. How could man know about the life of the spirit if it had not been revealed to him in the word of God, in the word of the gospel? The word that Jesus spoke was no doubt a human word in its sensuous aspect, spoken in a language conditioned by a nation; but it was precisely the word of God according to Jesus’ own testimony, in which we have to believe if we want to live in the spirit. It was the word itself, purely and simply in the divinity of its origin, that entered into human language and dwelt therein, just as God himself became man in the human life of Jesus and dwelt among us. Hamann said that without language we would have no reason, and without reason no religion, and without these three essential elements of our nature we would have neither spirit nor the bond of society. How far removed from this core of a­ ll-pneumatological knowledge of language is science, which became more and more godless in the course of the nineteenth century; how far removed from the insight into the inner connectedness of having the word, reason, and religion, and from the true spirit and bond of society,

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love. Science no longer saw the “vast difference between the dumbness of the animal and human speech,” which cannot be accounted for physically, as Wilhelm von Humboldt was aware, and thus language could not be “an absolute point of division between animal and man” for it. To reject the formal and verbal modes of thinking with abhorrence and to think beyond the word—­t hat would be science’s ideal. Beyond the word, that means “apart from the spirit.” All reverence for language, all confidence in the word has been lost to it, and science must be severely reproached for that. Whoever wants to fathom the essence of language must have reverence for the word, he must be a philologist in the most literal sense of the term, whom Hamann had in mind when he called himself one by preference—the merely talented linguist, in calling himself a philologist, abuses the term, as Schelling stated. He must also believe in God. For in the deepest knowledge that is possible of the essence of the word, he will discern that it is from God. In that way man trusts in the word with his utmost confidence, because it is from God—which alone can make him creative in language, and above all from which his word draws power to stand against the whole world and its powers and principalities. Swer niht mêr gelouben wil denne er weiz, der uniwîse (“He who does not want to believe more than he knows, is not wise”), as one mystic states it. All science of the nineteenth century became uniwîse and godless—and thereby also inhuman. This was and is no doubt due to its nature; for science—just as mathematics, toward which science strives as its ideal end—has its spiritual root in the moi of Pascal, in the ­I-aloneness of human existence. And it also belongs to the essence of science, the more scientific it becomes, to urge man to awaken from his dream of the spirit—but truly not to awaken to the spiritual realities of life. By its nature science does not know what to make of the divine origin of the word and of language. But if science seeks to refute it directly and to prove the untenability of the assertion of this origin (just as it

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did in the nineteenth century, while expecting all too optimistically through evolution to attain the solution to all riddles of the universe and the explanation for all miracles of life and even of the facts of the spiritual life in man), science demonstrates thereby not only that it simply does not understand the essence of the word and of language, but also that it does not grasp at all the meaning of human existence in its spirituality. Science has only the ­earth-boundedness of life in view, and it takes away the deeper meaning of every glance up to heaven. But what kind of knowledge about language is it that claims to know nothing of the origin of the word in the spirit, nothing of the redeeming quality in the word, and of the redemption of man by the word, and that does not grasp that it is not the human spirit that invented language, the word, but God who created the spiritual in man through the word and called it to life? The word mediates spiritually between man and man—in its ultimate basis, however, between man and God, between man and the ­spiritual ground of his existence, which the intellect does not fathom. The intellect does not understand the mystery of life, no matter how much it may understand, the mystery that reveals itself in the word, in which life is; and it allows the man who entrusts himself exclusively to its guidance to live oblivious to this mystery. It believes that there may be no mystery at all, thereby showing that it does not understand itself. For if it understood, it would see its own limits, its own insufficiency and narrowness. Then it would discover the mystery—which would be its proper task. But it is no longer his task to have reverence before it. Let it therefore step aside and not bar the way to the deeper forces of the spiritual life. Pneumatology must not claim to be a science. Though there are no doubt certain pneumatological findings (the object of which is the word and its essence), there is no pneumatology as a science. Would not a completely successful solution to the problem of language have to bring man to wholly understand himself objectively in the spirituality of his life, since the mystery of the spiritual life

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dwells in the mystery of the word? But that would mean that this solution would in its final analysis have a religious significance and would lead knowledge in its objective orientation to veer into the subjective. Man is able to really understand himself only religiously—that is, only in his relation to God; and in the simplest, seemingly most obvious and in itself clearest declaration of the sentence “I am,” he understands himself only in this relation and through it. But how is a man to be objectively compelled to religiousness, to a relation to God, when he subjectively bears in himself the possibility of being not religious? Everything religious depends upon faith—that is, upon the commitment of the individual person and the personal decision. Such is not the case in the domain of the scientific and mathematical, where this decision plays no role at all. And there is no external objective factor that can predetermine man in this decision or make it easy for him, let alone save him entirely from it. But precisely this commitment of the individual person is the insertion [Einsetzen] of the spiritual life in man and his salvation: the I places itself in a relation to the Thou, only through which it really exists. Only in the religious sphere, not in the ethical in and for itself (although the religious must always go through the ethical, which, as Kierkegaard notes in his Journal, is “the sole medium through which God communicates with man, the only one from which he wants to converse with man”) does the personality of human existence, which includes ­self-understanding, come to full and complete breakthrough. Regarding the solution of the problem of language, assuming it is possible: it is certain that he who would succeed in solving it would have participated in and endured something in a religious sense; and, while solving his problem of thinking, what he took part in and passed through neither science nor philosophy and metaphysics truly has a presentiment. No solution will ever succeed, however. But the problem ought to be thought out to its ultimate basis, so that man may discern the problem of his spiritual life in it.

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If Hamann maintains that without language we would have no reason, and without reason no religion; if he thus links together language and religion (as the relation to God and the demand for this relation that is inherent in the human spirit, which rouses him to the life of the spirit), then one may flatly state: that man has the word and that he has religion are spiritually one and the same. Just as language is something put directly into man, so also is religion— not, however, as a demand raised by him, but rather as one placed on him. And just as little as the former could have evolved from a state prior to language, so also could the latter have developed from a state of consciousness prior to religion. No man has thus far really understood himself in the fact that he has the word, that he has language and the possibility of the declaration “I am,” which includes s­ elf-consciousness (this may not be entirely true only of John the Evangelist). For then indeed the problem of language would have been solved. But up to now has there not really been anyone who understood himself by the fact that he has religion—and that it is identical with the word being given to him? One cannot accept this because one would thereby deny that there has ever been a truly religious man. But the life and word of Jesus have made it possible for man to understand himself in a religious respect—and thus to really know himself. Hence those thinkers have not been entirely wrong who inhibit w ­ ord-fetishism in thinking. For ­ ord-fetishism if it clings to language, to thinking actually promotes w the point that man does not understand himself in the fact that he is the speaking being. But this is possible only religiously. Only the man who is aware of being struck by the demand to have religion and to confront his existence with the fact of the life and word of Jesus awakens to the reality of the spiritual life. In believing in the incarnation of God in Jesus he begins to understand himself. The genius never really understands himself, for he only dreams of the spirit (for if his spiritual life had not turned toward the religious, could he still be a genius, since certainly no man is a

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genius before God?). What are dreams really? That man dreams and how he dreams perhaps only demonstrate that he does not understand himself. For dreams are the proceedings of consciousness in us that we for the most part do not understand, and therefore gladly call meaningless. But can one think of them, wanting to interpret and t­ hus to understand them, if one does not presuppose a meaning in them? And they most certainly always have a meaning. How could we understand ourselves subjectively in the proceedings of consciousness whose meaning is hidden to us, which we do not understand, objectively? Every attempt at dream interpretation is justified only so far as it leads to this subjective understanding. Yet the one who interprets dreams must reckon with the remarkable fact that most men do not want to understand their dreams at all and thus themselves as well. With the inspired dream of the poet or the metaphysician—which is dreamt objectively and has the principle and precept of its objectification in the idea—this is not entirely the case. For without doubt each objectively understands his poetry or his system. The genius, however, is not aware that he is only dreaming of the spirit. That means he does not understand himself subjectively in this dream. Behind every dream, even behind the dream of the spirit, a misery lies hidden, and idealism truly only plays the role of a sickness in the spiritual life of man. For of itself, idealism does not get rid of the discrepancy between idea and reality on which it is founded and that it postulates. It can in the end only surrender itself in the withdrawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea. ­Must man be a genius to come to pneumatological knowledge?

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Sense and Senses

Fragment 6 Sense and Senses—The Lower Senses— Hearing and Seeing—Beauty—Musical Intuition— Tone and Word—Word and Spiritual Neediness

What do we mean when we say that a man has a sense [Sinn] for this or that, for music for example, or for poetry? What is sense, really, inasmuch as under this word the senses with which we grasp the world are included? Sense is always, whether it is meant with one or the other meaning, the way in which something enters into us. That also finds expression in the etymology of the German word Sinn. The Old High German verb sinnan means “to go somewhere,” and the German root sintha means “way,” “journey” (Gothic sinths = motion [Gang], Old Irish sét = way). But the world that is our experience and not merely our mental image enters into our consciousness not only through the senses; the senses also encounter [entgegenkommen] the world. (Only the abstraction of the thinker turns the world into a mental image, into that which is abstracted from its being concretely experienced and from the participation rooted in life, from the interest of the subject who experienced it.) To have a sense for something means to encounter it. To have a sense for a poem means to encounter it spiritually. If one has no sense for mathematics, his spiritual constitution does not encounter mathematics. Sense is disposition to a spiritual receptivity. To have the sense for light and color in the eyes and for sound and tones in the

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ears means once again nothing other than to encounter light and sound through the eyes and ears. The human spirit is above all the sense for the word—reason, taking this word in its basic and original meaning; it is a spirit that ­encounters-the-word. And the word again, in the actuality of its being spoken, is something, objectively a sound, that has a meaning, something that encounters the spiritual in man—and with his need for meaning. The one who has a sense for poetry (and therefore understands it), not only spiritually encounters the poem, but by understanding it, also creatively participates in it. Is this not also the case for the senses that mediate the world to us? They are not only tools of receiving; they participate creatively in the world as it is experienced by us, precisely by encountering it. Only this is not as clearly the case with the three lower senses as with the two higher. Only the spiritual can be creative. Everything creative is rooted in it. It has been asserted that the senses are spirit; if that is right, then they must in some way ­co-creatively participate in the experience of the world that they mediate. It is necessary, however, to emphasize a situation the attention to which can save us from many a misunderstanding. One cannot fathom the aesthetic without speaking of the spirit. But if one speaks of the spirit in the realm of the aesthetic, one really does not know what one is talking about. For what the spirit is in its reality cannot be grasped aesthetically. Neither can it be grasped metaphysically. For metaphysics is never spiritually able to elevate itself beyond the aesthetic—out of its dream sphere into the realm of the reality of the spiritual life—because metaphysics is nothing but the aesthetic transposed into the sphere of thinking. In the three lower senses, one could say, the materiality of the world is experienced. The three aggregate states of matter correspond to them exactly: solid substances correspond to the sense of touch (as do the others, insofar as they exhibit solidity in a certain sense—namely, in offering resistance); liquids and that which dis-

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solves in them correspond to taste; gases and that which evaporates in gas from solid and liquid substances correspond to the sense of smell. The sense of touch responds to physical properties of substances (with which warmth can also be classed); smell and taste to chemical properties. In touch the materiality of matter is directly experienced—that is, its filling of space and its impenetrability. The sense of touch mediates the experience of the resistance of matter, the primal experience, so to speak, in the experience of the world. In this resistance as it is experienced through the sense of touch, man has the ultimate sensuous evidence of the reality of a thing. Only through it, as well as through the sense of sight, do we really experience things. The latter, however, already makes things unreal: man sometimes does not rely on his eyes but on the grasp of his hand. He has to be able to grasp something in order to be sure of its existence. In the direction of this will to grasp lies the tendency for substantialization of thinking, in consequence of which we are compelled to think that everything that exists and is said to have real existence for us (and our objective thinking) exists as a substance. Yet substance is not a necessity of being but of thinking. Not quite in the same way as the sense of touch experiences the resistance of matter, the impenetrability, the physical, and through smell and taste, the chemical materiality of matter, the ear responds through hearing to that movement of air which is produced by the oscillation of a body, which objectively produces the sound. The specific factor in the hearing experience lies precisely in that this movement of air is experienced by hearing not as resistance of matter, but rather as sound, which is something completely different. That the ear, while hearing, perceives the air agitated in the sound wave as sound (and not as agitated air, which would be a mere experience of touch, that in and for itself lies at the basis of the process of hearing as a collision of agitated air with the individual components of the hearing apparatus, if considered from the standpoint of its external cause) is already a creative response to the perception of

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agitated air. The term “creative” obviously must not be understood here other than relatively; that is, as legitimate within the concept (and brought about by the concept in its usage) that every event in the world, conceived independently of its being experienced and perceived through the tools of the senses, would be based on the movement of matter, and that the latter would receive in the experience of touch its most primitive and ­so-to-speak original perception by a living being.1 If the specific response of the ear in hearing should cease and a perception of agitated air should nevertheless take place in the ear, only the resistance of matter would be experienced, as in the sense of touch. But since the ear, which when hearing makes in and by means of its response to the movement of air something entirely different of the latter than what is given objectively in it (as far as it is perceptible by the sense of touch), does not experience the materiality of matter as such, but rather permits it to disappear, as it were, one can therefore say that the experience of sound signifies a spiritualization, a dematerialization of matter. The situation is no different with the eye, with seeing and light. The eye when seeing responds to the undulation of the ether through the experience of light. What is this experience other than organic modification of the contact of the retina by the latter? The eye creates light from these waves just as the ear creates sound from agitated air. Let one take note of a special state of affairs. Namely, it makes sense to demand a physical explanation of the origin of sound and light. For while one in some way experiences something immaterial in the experience of both, the scientific understanding will rest content with no explanation except one that traces every process in the world back to a definite moment of matter as its substratum. But would it make sense to seek a physical explanation for the ori1. All perceiving, even through eye and ear, one could say, is based on contact, and hearing and seeing are nothing else but an organic modification of the original experience of contact, thus of touch. The creative factor would lie precisely in this organic modification.

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gin of touch as well? Is the impenetrability experienced in the latter something different than matter itself, insofar as it is concretely experienced and not merely abstractly conceived? Is the experienced physical materiality of matter as directly experienced as chemical materiality in the experiences of smell and taste? Impenetrability cannot be further explained physically, because it is itself the precondition of every physical explanation. The origin of sound can be physically explained from the air that is agitated in the sound wave. Here one is still dealing with a real matter, so to speak, whose impenetrability and resistance (thus materiality) can still be perceived somehow differently. The physical explanation of light, however, demands the formation of the ether hypothesis, the assumption of an imponderable matter, of a matter without materiality. Would anyone have ever hit upon that without the experience of light and the need for its physical explanation? It naturally proved itself to be exceedingly useful and fruitful in other areas of physics. But this may only prove that one does not get along well with matter in its materiality when one wants to explain and to make scientifically comprehensible the events in the world.

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In this connection a recent attempt to solve the problem of eccentric sensation can be considered. According to this, the experienced world, the image of the world created by the brain “as sensation, is a modification of the matter of the central organ.” But there is “an organic connection of the image with the central organ,” for the brain is not only “solid anatomical matter,” but also “etheric matter,” which begins oscillating when it receives the impulse of the optic nerve, and these undulations, breaking through the cranium wall in the manner of s­ o-called invisible rays, pass into the world. Seeing is thus only a “physical kinetic response of the brain to the message of the optic nerve, which is modified kinetically and possibly also chemically by the impulse: the brain responds with an invisible

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etheric emission.” The whole external world is thus an “incessant inner explosion from us ourselves”; our experience of the world is “nothing but our own reaction.”2 Materialism is still marginally involved in this attempted explanation, which utilizes matter, even though demateri­a lized, so that it cannot be perceived at all, an explanation that, even if it were right, would leave the question unresolved precisely within the concept that underlies it—how the fact of consciousness is to be accounted for or at least interpreted. The fact, namely, that I am conscious of this inner reaction, even if not in its actuality nevertheless in its effect, of the invisible etheric emission with which the brain replies to the impulses coming from the external world, through which I experience the world as a b­ eing-outside-of-me; the fact that I am the one from whom this reaction emanates as my own and for whom the world out there exists through this reaction. One sees here again the need to explain the world materialistically, as well as life and the experience of the world, which finally compels man to a spiritualization of matter, to the acceptance of matter that has lost its materiality, as it were—or has not yet acquired it. For what is this imponderable ­world-ether that one assumes for the physical explanation of light and other phenomena of nature except de­materialized matter? But that must not in any way encourage a spiritualistic explanation of the world and life. For this in turn would be constrained to move in the opposite direction from materialism: it cannot avoid a materialization—namely, a substantialization of its principle of explanation, of the spiritual. Who knows, moreover, how the final problems of natural science would find their ultimately unexpected solution, if the scientifically discerning consciousness of man could emerge from its ­I-aloneness? But all thinking takes place in it, scientific as well as philosophical and epistemological, metaphysical speculation and theological thought. As long as consciousness abides in this 2. Quoted from a review of Hermann Bahr about the essay by Ernst Marcus, “The Problem of Eccentric Sensation and Its Solution.”

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I­ -aloneness, all scientific objectivity and absence of presuppositions are of no avail. We will nevertheless investigate many connections to still know nothing at the conclusion. That it would also be necessary for science to overcome this ­I-aloneness the mathematician and physicist Barthel certainly anticipated when he conceived the notion of the total plane for the real shape of the earth.

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In the experience of the higher senses, a spiritualization of the world is undergone of the primitive initial experience of the world in feeling and touch. In the creative act of experiencing, sound and light are spiritualized matter, spiritualized experience of touch. Sound is not without the ear through which it is heard; light is not without the eye through which it is seen. Sound is just as much a creation of the ear, of the sense of hearing and the sound receptivity in the ear, as light is one of the eye, of the sense of sight and the light receptivity in the eye. Remember the expression of Goethe: if the eye were not sunlike, how could we see light? Not only do we see light because the eye itself is sunlike and l­ ight-creative; we also hear sound and tone only because the ear itself is sound- and ­tone-creative. The “direct affinity of light and the eye,” which Goethe says no one will deny, corresponds to such an affinity of sound and the ear. And just as “in the eye a dormant light” dwells, “which is stimulated at the least provocation from within or from without,” so also in the ear there dwells a dormant sound and tone, waiting for its stimulation from within (in the psychic and spiritual life of the musical genius) or from without. The eye must thank light for its existence, as stated in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. The ear thanks sound for its existence. Yet in our physical approach, light without the eye that sees it is not light, but ether oscillation. Sound without the ear that hears it is not sound, but merely agitated air, wind. Not only are the words sound and light related by root, according to a remark by Jacob Grimm, related in the original phonetic and linguistic reaction of man to the

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experience of sound and light; this experience itself springs from the same root, from the spirit. There is something spiritual in the ear just as there is something spiritual of light in the sunlike eye: the senses are spirit. A special significance is to be assigned to the fact that there is really beauty only in the domain of that which is experienced through the eye and ear (and also through the word), but not through the senses of touch, taste, and smell. The spheres of the experience of light and sound are therefore the domain of artistic creation. Only in them does the aestheticization of sensuousness take place, ­taking this word in its narrower sense in reference to art. Aestheticization has spiritual significance (and there are even many who, when they talk about a spiritual life, think of it only in an aesthetic way); it is, so to speak, the spiritualization of sensuousness. It is the continuation and intensification of that act of spiritualization through which the experiencing of light and sound emerged from the experience of touch, from this primitive initial experience of the world and the resistance of matter. Every experience is, so to speak, preformed [vorgebildet] in the experiencing subject, the experience of the world already formed in the sense organs—but life itself imperceptibly yet constantly continues to create and add on to this pattern inherent in the subject and his organs, unless it, exhausting its strength, should get bogged down in matter. A need in the subject underlies every experience, with which the experience either does or does not conform in its objectivity and its externality. This preforming of experience in the subject and his organs of experience become evident above all in the cases of light and sound. The two experiences are measured in man according to an aesthetic need. Aesthetic needs are undoubtedly spiritual needs ­in which, however, man does not understand himself in the authentic spirituality of his essence, and behind which is concealed the real spiritual neediness of his existence. That man could make his experience of light and the sun in nature the sym-

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bol for the spiritual must have its basis in that something spiritual was already situated in this experience in and for itself, something both more and other than the mere experience of the resistance of matter. But the experience of sound and especially of musical tone cannot be made into a symbol, as with the experience of light. If one penetrates more deeply into the essence of musical intuition (which has, to be sure, come completely under the influence of the idea—which is contrary to its essence—in European music since Beethoven, and really beginning with him; and it has finally even dared to engage in philosophy and metaphysics), one makes a curious discovery—it puts forward the pretension no less, while not even being aware of it, that it includes in itself the spiritual life directly in its reality.3 There is to be sure a misunderstanding here wherein the musically creative genius does not understand himself, just as poets do not understand themselves in their poetic dream of the spirit, and the philosophers in their metaphysically speculative one. Man obviously also dreams this dream in musical intuition. Or could the latter perchance have the same origin in the reality of the spiritual life as the creation of the word? One interpretation, sustained to be sure more poetically and romantically than by the seriousness of the knowledge of the realities of the spiritual life, maintains that language originated from song. That, however, is an error brought about through the spiritual entanglement in the aesthetic, which in the end misleads only too easily to the mixing and confusing of the aesthetic dimension with the religious (in which alone man has his true spiritual life). This is always extremely dubious and must be avoided under all circumstances. Language did not 3. It is to Joseph Hauer’s credit to have drawn attention, in practice with his compositions, in theory in his work On the Essence of Musicality (which appeared in the autumn of 1920, published by W ­ aldheim-Eberle, in Leipzig and Vienna), to the essence of primitive musicality in its characteristic spirituality, which has played virtually no role in music since Beethoven, and to the significance of the tempered tuning that is connected to it. By so doing he has actually brought us nearer spiritually to East Asian man.

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originate in song; the word did not spiritually emerge from musical intuition. But in song dwells the longing for the word of that which is t­ one-creative in man. Actually, all musical tones seek the human voice in order to be brought forth by it. Just as one has fully grasped a picture inwardly only if one is able to draw it outwardly, it matters not how the drawing turns out, just so one understands a melody (and that really is what music is all about), in accordance with its spiritual and sensuous content only if one is able to sing it. The human voice is not only an external means of tone presentation, like other sound bodies [Klangkörper] and musical instruments;4 it also internally interprets the musical intuition. The instrument is a dead body in which the soul, the inner life of the musical intuition (and that life is perhaps the sound color in its pure spirituality), must always be invested into it. It is a process in which the resistance of matter, which musically is noise, can probably never be completely overcome. It can, however, be overcome in the singing of the human voice, which is a sound body that is in and for itself animated and inspired. Yet to the extent that the musical tone seeks the human voice to become audible, it very much yearns in secret for the word—but not in order to be enlivened by it, to receive a meaning from it. As regards music, it is ultimately quite irrelevant what the voice sings (even if it be “­tra-la-la”); what is crucial is that it sings. And an unending devotion and s­ elf-emerging of man certainly lies in singing, just as in love. But it is a devotion in the sphere of the aesthetic, with its poetic unreality, in contrast to the ­self-surrendering and ­self-emerging of love in the realm of the reality of the spiritual life, a love that addresses itself to the concrete Thou in man. One may call music the “art of inwardness.” And it is this all the more, the deeper it is rooted in musical intuition. Music therefore speaks directly to the inner 4. [Ed. Note]: Klangkörper, literally “sound body,” refers to the sound box of a musical instrument. Here there is a play on words comparing the “dead body” of the musical instrument with the “sound body” of the human voice.

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man—but to an I­ -less and Thouless inwardness, which lies beyond the word. Yet that means “apart from the realities of the spiritual life.” This directness is completely different from that with which the word addresses the spiritual in man, the word that turns to the concrete Thou. Musical inwardness is ­I-less, just like the mystical inwardness of the ­God-­experience. In musical intuition man does not become conscious of the ­I-aloneness of his existence; nor does he know anything of the Thou in it. The true inwardness of human life is not musical inwardness but is rather the inwardness of the word. Musical inwardness is still at bottom, as with everything aesthetic in general, a being outside himself [Aussersichsein] of man. In the word, man emerges from the I­ -aloneness of his existence into a relation to the Thou, and only in this relation does he possess his real spiritual life. Music occupies a unique position among the arts. It is on the one hand the most spiritual art, but on the other hand the most sensuous—in its original intuition touched and moved not in the slightest by spirituality in the conception of the idea. It appears that in music as in hardly any other art, the spiritual and the sensuous are ­aesthetically identical. This musical sensuousness is a thoroughly inner sensuousness in its e­arth-disengagement and ­world-removedness. Much too little note is taken that, as Joseph Hauer emphatically points out, the true musical imagination is never fertilized from the outside through some element of the experience of the world and nature, nor by the natural tonal characteristics (conditioned by the harmonic series) of the various musical instruments, but rather everything, even the ­sound-color, is found creatively all within itself. Musical sensuousness is, so to speak, pure sensuousness in and for itself in its spirituality—but every avenue to the outside is closed off to it. One must nevertheless assume that it seeks this avenue; for otherwise musical intuition would remain an experience of the musical genius that could not be imparted to any other person. The outward avenue is the avenue to the

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world and to man. In fact, primitive musicality wants to put itself entirely in the place of the experience of the world—but not to lend itself as a means of expression for a worldview. Yet it cannot do that without at the same time entering into the experience of the world and emerging from its removedness from the world. That is to say, it has to seek a tone body through which to become physically audible. But is there a tone body that would permit primal musical intuition to become fully audible in its spirituality? That would be the human voice (Hauer included the piano and harmonium, of course, only faute de mieux). But that pushes toward the word. Musical intuition, however much in its being removed from the world and the earth, in its unsensuousness and supersensuousness, may create the impression of having direct heavenly origin and of issuing directly from the reality of the spiritual life, is and remains an affair of musical genius—thus of an exceptional man, for everyone is not a genius. And its effect on other men presupposes in them a definite aesthetic development and readiness for reception, which is not everyone’s cup of tea, but which, precisely because it is an aesthetic concern, is to be sought not in the realm of spiritual reality, but rather in the sphere of the life of mental constructs that is produced through the ear and hearing. The genius is a man in whom mankind creatively dreams its dream of the spirit. And it is dreamt also in musical, ­tone-producing intuition, although in accordance with an essentially different law than that given in the conception of the idea. It appears, moreover, that the conception of the idea,5 both in its aesthetic meaning (as artistic beholding and prophetic presentiment) and in its ethical, is rooted more in the spiritual life of visual man, as the Greeks primarily were. Musical intuition, however, is called to play as the dominant role in the spiritual life of auditory man, as are the Mongolians above all (one need only consid5. Ideîn = to see; just as with Plato (according to Vorländer’s History of Philosophy) the word idea is “used in numerous passages in connection with the characterization of perceiving.”

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er what kind of sensitive ear the Chinese language requires with its manifold vocal shades). Hence it is not incomprehensible that Plato assigned to music the last place in the hierarchy of the arts and sciences in the Philebus.6 Neither in musical intuition does man emerge from the I-aloneness of his existence into a relation to the Thou. But the I can never become as sharply and distinctly conscious of its aloneness in musical intuition as in the conception of the idea, when the latter presses ever more firmly to make itself known in its deep foundation in the I and in the will, and to be understood in its real meaning, which lies not in the aesthetic but in the ethical sphere. Nothing is further from and stranger to the musical than the ethical. The musical is that sphere of the aesthetic in which a consciousness of the ethical is eo ipso impossible—precisely because it originally had nothing to do with the ethical. 6. In Western man, what is spiritual in his existence has become involved in a relation with the experience of the world. He dreams his dream of the spirit in his experience of the world; he experiences beauty always in beholding—the German schauen [to see, behold] and schön [beautiful] are even etymologically related. And in beholding (theoreîn) he comes to cognitive knowledge (theory), to abstract knowledge (video = I see, behold, and the Gothic witan = to look at something). With the Mongolian, things appear to be different. His spiritual existence cannot attain a right relation to the experience of the world; it has not yet become conscious of itself, and it lives in a state prior to the I, just like musical intuition. He does not experience beauty in beholding, in this ­coming-out-of-self of life, but rather in himself and in the i­ nterior-listening-to-self. He always dreams his dream of the spirit somehow apart from the experience of the world—and therefore apparently nearer to the reality of the spiritual life. In his case one cannot at all speak about a worldview in the real and deep sense of the word. He experiences the world in the secrecy of his mind always as dream, as something in itself ­but not like the idealistic philosopher of the West, who does not experience it as dream, but rather thinks it. This dreamlike experience of the world is palpable, for example, in Chinese poetry. The ­surface-like way of seeing and the absence of perspective in East Asian paintings are also connected with this. The ­seven-tone scale of his music permits him to be much more removed from nature, from the experience of the world, than the ­t welve-tone scale, which approaches the natural tonal series, permits us—a situation that Joseph Hauer was aware of and to which he assigned a special significance. Since there is no original conception of the idea in the spiritual experience of the Mongolian, he has not ethics in the strict sense of the word. The Chinese man is courteous and polite, and perhaps that is the heart of his ethos.

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If the spiritual in the experience of sound and above all in the experience of tone, which is drawn from the primal musical intuition, gives the pretension of being the reality of the spiritual life in man (the pure subjectivity of the spiritual, on account of which it cannot be utilized as a symbol and sign, which always appear objective, for something else that is spiritual), then there probably is a very special reason for that. The experience of light in nature, above all of sunlight, is the fulfillment of that experience as it is already formed in the sunlike eye—the ultimate and so to speak most perfect fulfillment. Of course the eye does not tolerate sunlight directly; but in the light that spreads over the things of the world, over villages and fields, mountains and forests, perhaps in a beautiful spring evening, in this light the eye, the spirit in man, comes to rest. The fulfillment of the experience of light is brought about by nature (as the ultimate secret meaning of every experience of the world and nature in general, so to speak) although not that of the experience of color in its totality; one may find information about that in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. The fulfillment of the experience of tone, however, man has to produce himself, through his own musical imagination. In this he is quite abandoned by nature, by his experience of the world. Yet is musical tone, as the creative imagination that is freed from the earth and removed from the world produces it in the spiritual ear of the brilliant composer, really the final and perfect fulfillment of the experience of sound, the fulfillment of that which is already preformed spiritually in the ear that hears (as need and as the inner cooperation with the sound experience, without which we would hear nothing at all), the fulfillment of that for which the ear was really created, in reference to the spirituality in human existence? Must not this fulfillment be seen rather in the word and in the final and deepest meaning of the word, although the latter can come via other means, through the eye and touch, which make use of the mediation of scripture in order to speak to man and the spiritual in him? This question, however, is not a pneumatological but a meta-

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physical one, and therefore its being raised is already dubious, and the attempt to answer it even more so. This much is certain and may be stated without reservation: not through the eye and the experience of light (however­much the spiritual may be in this, or if one prefers, has been attributed to it by man all along); nor through the ear and the experience of sound and tone pure and simple, but rather through the word and the fact that the word reaches his spirit (through the ear in a sensuous way), that he can be addressed by the word and has a sense for the word, and that the sense of the word is revealed to him: man is man only by this means. The word made him man. He was created through the word. Hamann once wrote to J. G. Lindner, “Between an idea of our soul and a sound which is produced by the mouth, is precisely the distance as between spirit and body, heaven and earth. What kind of inconceivable bond connects these things which are so removed from each other?” Perhaps he should have paid less attention to sound insofar as it is elicited by the mouth than to sound as the ear perceives it and to the factor of the spiritual that lies in listening. It is indeed a long way from sound to word, but perhaps no further than from agitated air to sound. Life follows the path from agitated air to sound; the spirit, that from sound to the word. Our intellect, of course, is not able to follow either life or the spirit on their paths—perhaps only because we have assumed a false viewpoint with our intellect, from which we perceive things and events with a misleading perspective; yet we cannot do otherwise. And that bond between sound in its naturalness and the word in its spirituality remains incomprehensible. Yet we realize that it is the spirit that creatively puts the meaning of the word into sound (as the spirit is itself the sense of the word objectively in us); the spirit perceives and assimilates the meaning of the word in sound, by which process sound becomes word. Just as the experience of sound brings the movement of air in its materiality, in which it has its external stimulation, to disappearance as experience, so in similar fashion in the experience

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of the word, the external sound, the body of the word disappears, being completely absorbed in the grasping of the sense of the word. The experience of sound, insofar as something spiritual actually dwells in it, encounters the word. In it already, so to speak, is the constitutional readiness to serve as the embodiment of the word, to prepare the way in man and his inmost heart for the word in the spirituality of its origin—which passes through the experience of the world. In the listening ear, if it is true that the senses are spirit, this spiritual something lies hidden—mediating between sound and word—just as the spiritual something of light abides in the sunlike eye. Doubtless this is a bit fantastic and is not at all conceived clearly and distinctly. There must nevertheless be a reason, although never understood by us, why just the ear became the physiological sense for the word (physiological reason, as it were, like reason is the spiritual ear for the word), why the word found above all in sound its embodiment and means of manifestation, and only subsequently in written characters grasped by the eye or even through touch. The soul of man is moved through the word, and the spiritual dwelling in him is addressed and called forth. But it is above all to the spoken word, thus to the word that enters man through the ear, that this power of mental excitation and spiritual arousal belongs. It is in speech, not in writing, in its being spoken, that the word has its true spiritual actuality in this world. That word through which men shall awaken from their dream of the spirit, that word thus through which the word itself, because it belongs to the reality of the spiritual life, arrived at its own authentic meaning, and through which, in the divinity of its origin, man, if he absorbs it and lets it bear fruit, is ­re-created and reborn to the true life of the spirit—that word was a spoken word. And Jesus’ divine power gave speech to the mute and opened the ears of the deaf to the word. Jesus wrote not a line that he could have left behind as a spiritual legacy for his disciples. The spiritual moment in the living act of hearing has two directions that it can go in man. It can move toward the ­tone-creative

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imagination of the musical genius. But then it still remains caught up in the realm of the aesthetic and thus outside and apart from the realities of the spiritual life. The other direction is to the word. That leads from the aesthetic—the dream sphere of the spiritual life—into the realm of the reality of the spirit. That the experience of sound in man can take this direction to the word and to the living manifestation and embodiment of the word actually elevates it above the experience of light, which is never able to emerge from the realm of the aesthetic—no matter how much of the spiritual may dwell in it and be experienced by man.

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Is it not perhaps longing that is aroused in the heart of man through the experience of profound musical beauty even more strongly than through the experience of light? Longing in general underlies every experience of beauty, and in longing it fades away. In the obviousness of its givenness, what is beauty but the manifestation of the spiritual (interpreted aesthetically, of course), the spirituality in the experience of the sensuously given world? In the Phaedrus [259E] Plato states, “As soon as a man beholds the beauty of this world, he is reminded of true beauty, and his wings begin to grow; then is he fain to lift his wings and fly upward; yet he has not the power, but inasmuch as he gazes upward like a bird, and cares nothing for the world beneath, men charge it upon him that he is possessed.” The Greeks knew well what beauty is, and perhaps they were the only ones who knew it. Beauty is the spiritual experienced in the viewing of the world. Schauen [to behold] and schön [beautiful] are etymologically related in German, and the latter was formerly used primarily in connection with the experience of light, according to its original meaning.7 7. Old High German scôni = bright, shining; Old Saxon skôni = shining, light; English sheen = bright, shining; Old Teutonic skjome = ray. Although not etymologically related, compare scheinen = to shine, Old High German scînan = to glitter, to shine, and then schimmern [to glimmer], to which belongs also Gothic skeima = light.

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Only the genius, to whom the experience of beauty is not unfamiliar, can have a worldview (taking the term in its deepest meaning). The need for a worldview is in its ultimate basis not merely an intellectual but an aesthetic need. The experience of beauty underlies even the driest and most abstract construct of the w ­ orld-image [Weltbildes] in conceptual terms in the case of the brilliant metaphysician. All brilliant philosophers have had a primal relation to art and therefore knew what beauty is. Consider perhaps the conceptually bold and profound Schelling. Strictly speaking, there is really only a Platonic worldview, and every other one that is not in principle Platonism is wrongly termed a worldview, being instead a mere construct of the world [Weltkonstruktion] consisting of dead concepts. In the longing underlying the experience of beauty, the spirituality and the spiritual neediness of human existence are concealed, and in that yearning they are not brought to consciousness of itself. No doubt the sense for beauty, the aesthetic need, is nothing other than an expression and a form of the need for a renewal of life, which is deeply rooted in man and is rightly called metaphysical. It is possible to grasp psychologically (but not sufficiently as to explain) the feeling underlying this need, familiar to every man and usually misunderstood, that the life one is living is not the right one. Not only the metaphysician, but also the poet, subsist spiritually on this feeling in secret, yet whose meaning, insofar as it creates itself as an aesthetic need, is already misunderstood. The aesthetic fulfillment of life and experience is only an apparent fulfillment; it is dream and not reality. And therefore it just fades away, born of longing, into longing again. Since in the experience of light (and in the experience of beauty in nature in general, and also in art) the I completely disappears, so to speak, the spirit in it consequently comes to rest. The restlessness of the spirit takes its root in the aloneness of the I. Since the I is directed toward a relation to the Thou by its very essence, the I struggles against itself and its existence in its seclu-

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sion from the Thou. Yet therein exists the real spiritual neediness of man—that turns him into a G ­ od-seeker, which he can become conscious of only in his religious attitude. Through his aesthetic needs and their satisfaction, although in them he is also a ­God-seeking being, he is nevertheless led down the wrong path, into the dreamland of the ideal world. Therein lies the neediness: that the spiritual in man, to exist spiritually, needs a relation to God. The I and the Thou—which ultimately mean man and God—these realities of the spiritual life have their objective existence in the word, just as they have their subjective existence in love. The word is the vehicle of the relation of the I to the Thou. Man was created through the word. But the word is from God and is in man the real and ultimate fulfillment of the experience of sound: man hears above all for the sake of the word.

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Fragment 7 Reason and Word

Hamann once wrote to Herder, “Even if I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would still have to repeat no more than a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this m ­ arrow-bone and I will gnaw over it until death. This profundity still remains obscure for me; I still wait for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.” May we not seek this key in the fact that the spiritual in man is oriented toward a relation to the spiritual outside him, the only possible form of which is the relation of the I to the Thou, of the speaking to the addressed person, from which language, the logos, arises as its expression and objectification? What is reason? Let us for once take the word at its word. For one never goes wrong when one calls on the profundity of linguistic usage, of the etymology of the word, for help in his thinking, after the example of many thinkers. Reason [Vernunft] comes from perceiving [vernehmen] what is heard and absorbed. Reason is originally and essentially the sense of the word, which the word in the divinity of its origin placed in man. Reason is the possibility of being addressed by the word and the meaning of the word and only subsequently the ability to form concepts and ideas. It is the special human consciousness that is constituted by the word, and that is therefore not to be separated from language; in this consciousness, it is the precondition of the human application of the intellect. The animal certainly has con-

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sciousness, and even intellect, but not reason. Reason is the possibility in man of being an addressed person, which takes its root in the personal character of the spiritual life, which became objective through the word in it (the subjective possibility is, in a way, the I itself). By means of this possibility, man became at the same time the speaking person. Without word, no reason, and reason is language, logos. The logos of the Gospel of John is, in a pneumatological sense, which is the only possible one here, correctly translated with “word,” verbum. And this Word is in no way meant merely as a meta­phor and a symbol for the o­ nly-begotten Son of God, but rather should and must be understood literally. If one wanted to use “­world-creative reason,” “­world-spirit,” “reason in itself ” or other similar expressions for logos, that would be wrong and would moreover include a summons to lose oneself thoughtlessly in the imaginary kingdom of philosophical speculation. That would contradict the spirit of Christianity, which knows nothing of the dreams of metaphysics, since it (and it alone) is concerned with the spiritual realities of life. Originally an expression and form of the orientation of the spiritual in man, of the I, for an eo ipso personal relationship to the Thou—thus an expression of the relation to God—only when the I in this relationship isolated itself from the Thou did reason become factual and impersonal, speculative and full of ideas. And only in the relation with the world of the I isolated from the Thou did reason develop within itself the ability of forming concepts— and only subsequently the coercive tendency of substantialization of thought. In all its philosophical and metaphysical speculation (and the enthusiastic excesses of its reason), the human spirit persists in the I­ -aloneness of its existence, which has fallen from God. But speculative reason seeks God in vain and finally is destroyed in the conflict with itself in which it gets ever more deeply involved. In that practical reason, moreover, which according to Kant’s doctrine

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necessarily postulates the existence of God for ethical reasons, man has not yet emerged from his I­ -aloneness, and the God postulated by it is nothing but the idea of the divine—not God himself, who is a reality of the spiritual life.

�

There is truly some darkness in every human life; but the darkness of suffering in the fracturing of life is not the only darkness, nor is it the blackest. It is there that the will to know shines with the question “why?” But in vain does the I in the aloneness of knowledge assail the Chinese wall of its existence, against which life fractures—the torch is extinguished, and the darkness is greater than ever. And right behind it is—God. To be sure, not as answer to the question. Faith is thought standing still, the resting of thought in God. But it is man’s nature not to arrive at faith until his life has actually reached the point of intellect standing still. In God the why of man falls silent. The real question is the significance of this silencing. When objectified reason, through speculating about God, responds to the question “why?” with silence, that is something quite different than when the same question, born from the suffering of life, is silenced in God—in order that the true reason of man, his spiritual ear through which he hears the word of God, may open to him. When God speaks to man, the “why” falls silent. And he wants to be heard. But his word is truly not the answer to the speculative questions of metaphysics about the ultimate basis of things.

�

When speculating metaphysically, man must not turn reason into an impersonal element in the happenings of the world. That would be anthropomorphism. But man must also not ascribe reason to God and seek to establish the rule of that divine reason in the happenings of the world, and especially in human history—for that would once again be nothing else but anthropomorphism. We know

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exactly nothing, literally nothing regarding what pertains to God’s relation to the world. At least we would not know any more, even if we were the most profound and penetrating metaphysicians and theologians, than a simple shepherd has to say, for example, while his intellect labors with difficulty, for whom, as he once learned in his catechism, the world was created by God. Yet we need know nothing over and above that, and to desire to know more is speculative arrogance, excess, and a going astray in the idleness of the spiritual life, which consumes the soul as rust does iron. It is truly more a caring about the world than about God, and in this man forgets what he really ought to be concerned about. Hence we must refrain from expressing any opinion about the will of God in reference to the machinery of this world. It would be presumption to say straight away of one or another event of nature or of history, that is the will of God—with the exception of the life of Jesus. The strict assertion of the opposite would also be presumption, however. We know exactly nothing. As Pascal once expressed it in the Pensées: Si le monde subsistoit pour instruire l’homme de l’existence de Dieu, sa divinité reluiroit de toutes parts d’une manière incontestable; mais, comme il ne subsiste que par ­Jésus-Christ et pour J­ ésus-Christ, et pour instruire les hommes et de leur corruption et de leur rédemption, tout y éclate des preuves de ces deux véritées.

It can and must be enough for us to know the relation of God to us, to man, to the individual man who is real in his individual existence, and in this to really know his will, which is that none be spiritually lost. We know that, however, because it has been revealed to us in the life and word of Jesus. As the organ of the assimilation of the word, reason is the spiritual ear of man, just as the ear is, so to speak, sensuous reason (in respect to the word). And just as the deafness of the ear is the physiological, so the irrationality of insanity is the spiritual expression of reticence before the word. But this is the reticence of the I before

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the Thou. The lunatic actually won’t listen to reason. Insanity is, as it were, the completion of the ­I-aloneness, of the Thoulessness of the I—a practical attempt to absolutize the I, in which the I manifestly goes under. It is a state of the spirit in which the word that begets the spiritual life, and love, no longer reaches man—that would be the divine word itself and the incarnated love of God in Jesus. Thus, if taub [deaf] and toben [raving]—the raging of man in insanity, in the inner unfulfilledness of life, against the Chinese wall of individual existence—if these two words are etymologically related to each other in German, it has a deep meaning and testifies to the profoundness of language. Reason, which lives in the word as the eye lives in light and the ear in noise and sound, has to do with the living word [lebendiges Wort]. That intellect, however, which the animal has and of which even the irrational insane person still often evidences, concerns only dead words [tote Wörter]. The living word is a word that is a sentence and is the positing of the spiritual life. The dead word has stiffened into a conventional concept sign, and as such—as an object of agreement—the intellect comprehends and makes use of it. The intellect sees in ­words-in-discourse [Worte] only isolated words [Wörter]; it invents such unconnected words and, finally, an entire language. It is always inclined to operate with the word as with a mathematical formula—which is the diametrical opposite of the word. It is characteristic for the spirit (or rather, the demon of modern science) that it is so extraordinarily sympathetic to the notion of the invention of an artificial universal language. It leaves science so completely cold that no poet could possibly emerge from this stillborn product of the intellect and, carrying even more weight, that no man could pray. For one who would grow up in and speak such a language, or at least would have learned it from childhood, would eo ipso not have learned to pray. Do not expect from it what the apostles of godlessly inspired science and humanitarianism anticipate— namely, that it will lead to a unification of men encompassing all the

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nations of the earth. On the contrary: the universal acceptance of it would end just like the tower of Babel, with a linguistic and spiritual confusion in which no one would understand anyone else. There is indeed a word that is certain to spiritually unite mankind. That is the word of God, the word that pronounces the commandment to love. And surely that which is essential in the gospel can be translated into and understood in all languages. Conversely, the word of the poet can never be translated perfectly from his language into another, because it never returns to its origin in God, as does the religious word; because in the word of the poet, behind the Chinese wall of ­I-aloneness—which separates individual persons just as the Chinese wall of cultures separates peoples—the spirit is only dreamt of.

�

One could contrast the attempt to invent a world language, which is intended so grimly and seriously but which always strikes one who sees more deeply into the essence of the word as somewhat comical, with the dilettantism of the creation of words and language in onomatopoeia. Has it never really occurred to linguistic researchers that a dilettantish and capricious tendency is inherent in the latter? It was not exactly a propitious idea to seek in onomatopoeia the beginning of the word and the origin of language. The primitive relationship between the sound and the mental image expressed in it can be detected only in the most isolated of cases, and then the root of the sound that becomes word proves to be something almost physiologically conditioned and prescribed in its function of bestowing meaning. It is still recognizable in isolated words that the m, t, r, l sounds, and possibly also the w and n, and even the p and f played an original role in their formation.1 This primitive 1. In this respect the etymology of the German word faul [rotten, foul] is exceptionally interesting and instructive: the Germanic root fu in Old Teutonic fuenn = rotted, ­I ndo-Germanic pu = to rot, stink, in Greek pijon, Latin pus = matter, pus, Latin puteo = to stink, puter = putrefied; foul, Lithuanian puti = to rot, pulei = matter, pus. The formation of the ­p-f sound appears to have originated as a defensive gesture,

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relationship was certainly not onomatopoeic, but rather of an interjectional nature. If, however, the onomatopoeic element of our language turns out to be present throughout newer words, one must not therefore assume like Hellpach that these kinds of word formations could have been created only at the very highest level of linguistic development and only in p­ oetic-aesthetic intentionality. Onomatopoeic words probably have been formed since the beginning, and new ones will always come into being. But if they can maintain themselves in the body of language only for a short time (as those that originated in older language periods have been lost long ago), then one has to seek the reason for that in the fact that whatever urged their creation, even in the ­poetic-aesthetic intention of the poet, does not possess the original w ­ ord-creating and therefore ­word-preserving power. Imitation, except for the practical and expedient imitation in regard to learning, is always based on a psychic subjection to an impression. This is the case even if the imitation pretends to be mockery and ridicule, when it only masks this succumbing and poses as its opposite. The creative assignment of names, however, psychically includes standing above the impression, a control of one’s experiences, the triumph of spirit over nature. From that point, what is brought forth is never entirely lost in the life of language. Onomatopoeia presupposes nature, but the word presupposes the spirit. In the former, man does not break away from nature; the latter leads him back to his origin in spirit.

which though not entirely unintelligible physiologically was not very successful in reaction to the experiences of the sense of smell (see also pfui and the French fidonc). Yet this also played a role in sexual life, which makes it understandable that, according to Kluge, several German dialects formed a noun from the root fu with the meaning cunnus (compare the Old High German invective ­f udh-hundr and the Modern High German Hundsfott [scoundrel, skunk] = actually cunnus canis).

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� The ultimate meaning of human language in general, and of reason, its spiritual organ, is that it absorbs the word of God. But apart from God’s cooperation with reason, that would not be possible. Nevertheless, let man not only be a hearer but also a doer of the word, of the word of divine love.

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Fragment 8 The Primal Word

When man in the beginning of his epoch heard the first word as word and not only as sound, when he himself spoke his first word, the light of his inner world dawned in him and the mystery of his life was revealed to him. But there must have been a moment when that light darkened again, and that mystery shut itself from him; and that was the moment of the fall from God. Then man began, while living at c­ ross-purposes with the mystery of his life, to dream his dream of the spirit, from which he shall be awakened to the reality of his spiritual life only by Jesus—qui est venu ôter les figures pour mettre la vérité, as Pascal expresses it. Yet what comes to light in this? That humanity does not want to abandon its dream at all; that humanity continued to dream its dream for two millennia, even incorporating the incarnation of God into it, with a bad conscience that again and again pressed toward waking up, until at last, having become completely godless, no longer even believing in its dream and concocting empty words and deliberate lies, it actually awakened from it in a dreadful way—but not to the reality of the spiritual life. From the moment of the fall from God onward, man has had to learn language anew by creating the word for himself—in the dark recollection of that first word, which was from God and through which God had created him. Not the conception and contemplation

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of the idea, as Plato believed, but rather the word—creation was truly anámnesis by man of his origin in the spirit, in God. The primal word of language must be a verb and a personal pronoun in one. “The levers of all unconnected words,” Jacob Grimm said in his lecture about the origin of language, “appear to be pronouns and verbs. The pronoun is not merely the representative of the noun, as its name could make us believe; it is rather the direct beginning and origin of all nouns.” In the beginning of language was the “sentence”—the “word” [Wort], the plural of which reads “Worte.” This is the case just as linguistics affirms the “preexistence of the sentence before the word” (word [Wort], the plural of which is Wörter), understanding this preexistence not in a phonetic but a psychological sense. This primal word thus must have been a sentence, a sentence in the first person that emerged from a cry of pain. Man is always born with a cry of pain, and a cry of pain was also his first word after his fall from God. Taken physically, the word is the air current formed and made audible by the organs of speech through which it passes, a breath and a breathing, a blast of wind from the lungs, from the bellows of the body. No different is the cry of pain; it is still not a word but simply an interjection, often already articulated in man’s case. The being that cries out in pain, feeling its life directly or indirectly threatened, emits a sign of life precisely in its crying out, in this intense thrust of air become audible, through which it attains a certain relief from the menace to its life that it experiences as pain. The primal word of language was a sentence in the first person. At the beginning of language—not, however, in the divinity of the word, which, in being placed in man and creating him and the spirituality of his life, makes language possible at all; rather, in the humanity of its origin and becoming, after the fall of man from God— at the beginning of language stands the I that emerged from a cry of pain. In the Yajurveda it is stated (according to Jacob Grimm’s citation) that the original Being said, “I am I,” and man, when he

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was addressed, answered, “I am it.” This I, by becoming word in the cry of pain and by asserting its own existence in this and bringing it to utterance, spoke, though not of course in calm recognition, but in passionate excitement: I am and suffer. This was the meaning of the primal word.1 In the suffering of his existence that had fallen from God, man became conscious of himself and hit upon the fact that he has the word; thus he became a speaking being. The spiritual in him, the I that becomes conscious of itself, sought the Thou and came to be in the word. It is perhaps even yet perceptible in its acoustic material that the word “I” (ego) is rooted in the cry of pain. Doesn’t something of an interjection of pain resound in its Sanskrit form aham—in this full ­chest-tone with a guttural breath, as Jacob Grimm describes it? This has in itself a vocalic or h­ alf-vocalic character (ah, au, aí, oí, vae). The formation of consonants from the vocalic primal sound (it being unimportant what kind of anatomical basis and physiological process it is due to) is nothing else but the formation and articulation of the air current forced from the lungs that moved the vocal chords and therefore made audible, only through which the phonetic formation of a word becomes possible. Jacob Grimm doubted that there could have been word roots produced from a simple vowel. This formation of consonants, however, would not have taken place at all if man had not come upon the spiritual fact, in his becoming conscious of himself, that he has the word. Just like little children, before they are able to talk, hit upon sounds and syllable formations, language, as it were, in their preliminary practice (that is, the articulation of an individual sound for its own sake, or even the formation of consonants from some vocalic sound). They do this certainly on their own, because the word and the urge for language are placed in them. Without this spiritual precondition of language in them, 1. Compare also Faulmann’s Etymological Dictionary of the German Language regarding the word “I”: for Old High German jehan = to say, this possibly being related to quec; accordingly, “I” could mean “I am.”

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they would learn to speak as little as the animal learns to speak. One will never observe in the latter that kind of ­sound-forming exercise, that playing with the elements of language preparatory to speech. For there is nothing in the animal kingdom that presses for speech, as there is in the child; nor may speech be regarded in any way as an expression of a mere instinct that the individual unconsciously directs as something expedient for ­self-preservation and the preservation of the species, precisely because it is of a spiritual origin, arising from having the word. The articulation and formation of consonants presuppose a conscious clarity that is simply impossible within animal consciousness. In the original state of language, just as now, it is in fact through nothing else but a conscious act that man becomes a speaking being, which presupposes the word in him and is founded upon that spiritual act which transforms the interjection into the word. That is also the view of Humboldt, who doubtless stood nearer to the essence of language than our modern psycholinguists, who steadfastly advocate the theory of evolution. They do not want to understand that the spirit does not develop in nature and from nature, but rather breaks through in man—precisely because it is placed in him. “The articulation of tones,” says Humboldt, “the vast difference between the dumbness of the animal and human speech, cannot be explained physically. Only the strength of ­self-consciousness imposes the sharp division and limitation of sounds upon corporeal nature, which we call articulation.” But the ­self-consciousness of man is identical with his having the word and thus with the possibility given in the spirituality of his being to make the statement “I am.” It is therefore also the spiritual basis of the urge for language, which is inherent in man. That formation of consonants of the intrinsically vocalic cry of pain, which was fashioned by the occurrence of the guttural sound in the burst of air made audible, through which the word “I” was formed from the interjection of pain, gives the appearance of the

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preparation of the air current in the throat for an amplified burst, for a springing forth, as it were. The guttural sound also appears called upon to play a similar role in calling and crying out—for instance, “hurrah,” “hello,” “oh,” and the like. The cry of pain and the word—and thus also the primal word that emerged from it—have a joint physiology in that they are one breath: atmós, in Sanskrit átman (breath). This word plays the role of the I­ -principle in Indian philosophy. It has long been noted that the expressions for breath (pneuma, pnein = breathe, respire) in different languages found their special use as a concept for spirit life. But spirit and life are above all in the word: breath itself, Old High German âtum = breath, spirit, wihô âtum = the Holy Spirit; in Middle High German, it was still termed der heilege âtem [the holy breath].2 That the cry of pain (an interjection that man truly has in common with the speechless animal) became word was a deed of the spiritual in man. The word is something that takes place between the I and the Thou, between the ­self-expressing and the addressing one, and the one addressed. It is that which establishes a relation between the I and Thou, between the first and second persons of grammar. The sentence of the primal word in which the I expressed 2. Here also belongs the etymology of the German word Ahnden = punitive revenge: Old High German antôn, andôn = to be angry, Middle High German Ande = insult. For the dialectal Ant Tuen, Tetzner’s Kleines Deutsches Wörterbuch gives as its meaning “that which I unconsciously possessed and now have lost stirs up my pain (let one remember the situation and the meaning of the ‘primal word’).” In Old Teutonic, Ande, which etymologically belongs in this series, means breath, spirit, and the feminine Ond means breath, soul. The I­ ndo-Germanic root of all these words is an = to breathe (in Gothic usanan = to exhale, die). The Latin animus and anima also belong here, meaning breath, soul, life, and the Greek ánemos = wind. The word, as physical phenomenon, is sound. In physical and physiological respects, hearing depends on the oscillation of air in the form of sound waves. We always hear “wind”; sound is wind made audible, and the tone bodies of music are either wind generators or wind molders. It is certainly remarkable that the words anima and animus, just as ánemos, lead us to the etymology of the German word Mensch (man), to which they are remotely related.

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itself, and thus itself, asserted the existence of the I through the spiritual deed of the word and made the I objective and brought it to consciousness. At the same time, the sentence included the positing of the relation to the Thou. The primal word was a sentence, and this sentence was the positing of the spiritual life. But the word is from God, and only he is able to posit the spiritual life in man. That consequently means that the “I am” of the primal word did not signify the ­self-positing of the I, for it had the Thou, God, for its presupposition. The fact of personality in the existence of man, the ­self-consciousness (which is identical with his having the word, with his being a speaking and addressable being), is a fact of the spirit but not of nature and therefore can be explained via natural science just as little as the essence of the word and language. One day God will retract the creation of the world, of heaven and earth, but not the creation of man in the spirituality of his existence, and not the word. The primal word of language has an eternal significance; it expresses an eternal being and life. And the decision of man in the temporality of his life determines whether or not the sentence “I am” has, for all eternity, the sense of a cry of pain.

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Fragment 9 Consciousness and BeingConscious —Pneuma and Psyche— Psychology—Insanity

The I is by no means a mere grammatical fiction, as those believe who imagine that with this interpretation the I and the assertion of ­self-consciousness are finally dismissed, and along with that, the will and its freedom. Yet one thing is right: only through language, through the word, which is a fact of the spirit, is the I objectively given. The I is not founded on consciousness [Bewußtsein] in itself (for then the animal would also have an I, since it also has consciousness), but rather on the ­being-conscious [­Bewußt-Sein]. This difference and contrast—perceptible in the German language only through a difference in accentuation—between consciousness [Bewußtsein], which is always objective—that is, objectively determined—and the ­being-conscious [­Bewußt-sein], which determines itself subjectively, comes to expression in the fact that, for a living being, it can be said that consciousness consists in the having consciousness of something, of any object, but not in having conscious being (a monstrous word construction, against which the linguistic predisposition struggles). Consciousness no more developed simply from being (if the latter now be conceived as material, substance, energy, or whatever), from the vegetative impetus in the process of life (who can conceive how this could have happened, accidental-

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ly or of necessity?) than ­being-conscious, which implies the I and in having the word the possibility of language, developed simply from consciousness. This case is the same with the child; for when the child is one day able to say “I,” it is not a question of a result of development but of the breakthrough of the spirit, for which one waits in vain (for millions of years!) in connection with the animal.1 Consciousness as such, common to men and animals, is really life, which includes an experience of the world. One may with justification raise the question of whether an individual who has consciousness may be thereby nothing but a spectator of the course of his life and of the events in the world in which his existence appears to be embedded and entwined; rather, whether the fact of consciousness would not imply (even with the animal, and how much more so with man?) the summons to take part in it and thus represent a manifestation of freedom. In any case, moreover, the animal has like man a special experience in respect to its own kind, which is clearly contrasted within its experience of the world and does not become completely merged in that experience. That which is characteristic of the latter is that the animal experiences its own kind only so long as they live, but no longer when they are dead; for the animal knows nothing at all of death. But man, who has that knowledge of death that appertains to spirit, still experiences in the dead his own kind, and sees in them the formerly alive, and honors them. With man the experience of the world is the sphere of the extension of consciousness; but his experience with other men, evoked by the spirit that is not in the animal, is the sphere of the intension of consciousness. In the latter experience man’s spirituality is ethically directed. For in it the I always secretly seeks its Thou, encountering 1. The child, however, though it has the word and therefore can speak and can say “I,” does not yet live a real spiritual life. That is still hidden in God, so to speak. The point at which the spirit intervenes in the natural life can be given exactly. It is situated where the intervention of consciousness in the course of life raises the demand for a meaning of life and poses the question about it. Nevertheless, even that does not yet testify to the real and true spiritual life.

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for the most part, however, and certainly through its own profound culpability, nothing but an I that secludes itself. And just there the problems of ethics arise—by the I thereby becoming conscious of its own “­I-aloneness.” A tendency toward the dissipation and loss of self is operative in the I as long as it has not found its Thou. The sphere in which the I dissipates and loses itself is the world. Man’s experience of the world is actually just as “­I-less” as that of the animal; even in the experience of beauty, in which the experience of the world rises into the spiritual, and through it, in the case of the genius, into the worldview. For the I rests there and dreams in spiritual concealment, and does not come to light, since it does not enter into a relation to the Thou, which it seeks not at all. But in the I that has found its true Thou and therein itself, a concentration has taken place that counteracts all ­self-dissipation and loss, and in which the whole world is no longer able to harm it. Man never becomes aware of his sickness of the spirit through his experience of the world. He is already born with it; for there is no direct health of the spirit, as Kierkegaard states in one of his works. Only in his experience of man can he perceive it; because only then does consciousness enter into himself—in the experience of the world, the spiritual in him is, so to speak, always outside him. Only then does his consciousness become ­being-conscious. He becomes conscious of the spiritual in him and therewith begins his struggle for a spiritual life. ­Being-conscious, while actually not consciousness directly, includes suffering. It is, on the one hand, suffering from the ­earthboundedness of existence (a suffering that the animal certainly never goes through), and on the other hand, from the experience of man. But in both cases, it is a question of the suffering of the I in its I­ -aloneness, against which the protective measure of an aesthetic distancing from the cause of suffering is undertaken. This distancing always works at relieving the soul but is not able to overcome

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e­ arth-boundedness and thus to form the relation of man to man in which the I would no longer suffer. The positing of that aesthetic distance from suffering that makes the burden of the problematization of life bearable takes place not only in the spirit of the poet, but also in that of the philosopher and metaphysician. It actually makes possible the dream of the spirit, which always signifies the objectification of the intrinsically subjective problem of life. In aesthetic distance, the problematization of life is objectified as tragedy. But the tragic (just like fate) rests on a flawed perspective, which ethical circumspection certainly corrects, with its emphasis on the subjective. Fate and tragedy naturally are not simply the same. Man can maintain that he has a fate, although he obviously errs in this. The tragic can only be confirmed objectively. If one would maintain it subjectively—namely, from his own life and fate—he would then not only err, but would be the direct opposite of ­tragic-comic. Yet is ­being-conscious really possible in dreaming—even if it is the objective dream of the spirit in a genius? Doesn’t complete ­being-conscious mean being awake from all dreaming, even from the dreaming about the spirit? But then there is no longer any aesthetic distance from the ­earth-boundedness of existence, from the suffering of man, no poetic and no philosophic relief of the soul: the spirit has become conscious of its being sick in this suffering. Now man accepts the problem of life in its full gravity and dreadfulness while renouncing its objectification; he takes up his cross, as the gospel demands of him. He knows nothing of an aesthetic relief of his soul and wants nothing of it. The objectification of the problem of life does not succeed completely even in the consciousness of the genius, because the problematization of life lies in its subjectivity. If subjectivity were to absolutely disappear, then not only would the problematization of life disappear but also life itself. Absolute objectification would be very much like spirit without life—thus, the death of the spirit. Since the objectification of the problematization of life never fully succeeds

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for the genius, truly for his ­well-being, the possibility therefore continues to exist for this deep dreamer of the spirit to wake up—not to total spiritual lostness, but to salvation in the spirit of Christianity. It is only the Christianity of a genius that has nothing to do with his brilliance. It neither enhances nor furthers his brilliance. If the genius does what he must do as a Christian, he suspends objectification; then he ceases to be a genius. Then he stands before God, and there no man is a genius. It goes entirely without saying that man can attain to a positive relation to God only through his conception of life [Leben­s­ auffassung], thus ethically—as he attains this conception in the inner confrontation of his own existence with the fact of the life and word of Jesus, a conception that is tested in his experience of man. But this relation can never be attained aesthetically through his experience of the world, nor through its spiritualization in the experience of beauty, and never through his worldview. We must one day give back to the earth what belongs to the earth, not only our bodies, but also our life of mental constructs that truly feeds on nothing but our experience of the world, even though we often like to believe that primarily through it we can raise ourselves beyond the e­ arth-boundedness of our existence. It is true that in this man dares to venture into the infinite; but how does he intend to grasp the infinite with finite means? We do not have the spirituality of our life in the life of mental constructs; in its sphere we only dream of the spirit. Death forever extinguishes consciousness of the world (even if it be that of great genius), but that consciousness of God which is placed into every man is allowed to come to complete breakthrough. Man takes nothing else with him from this life over into eternity than what he has made in this life of the relation of his I to the Thou, in which his spiritual life consists. Through death it is fixed for all eternity. The I in man exists in the relation to the Thou through the word. Heaven and earth will pass away, it is said in the gospel, but the word will not pass away—the word and love. In the

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word is love, but also judgment. The Word is the light of our life and the true light of this world, and in him is the summons to believe. He who believes in the Word is not judged; but he who does not believe is already condemned, because he does not believe in the name of the only begotten Son of God. But this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, but man loved the darkness more than the light (Jn 3:18–19). In love there is mercy and forgiveness for our sin. But he who passes from this life into eternity without love and without faith, for him the word becomes eternal condemnation. The animal (and perhaps the plant), though living semi-consciously in a ­quasi-state of slumber, has consciousness. But one cannot assert of it a ­being-conscious. It is; that means it lives—but not as conscious. It truly has consciousness and in this an experience of the world, but not in the strict sense of a consciousness of being. It can never become conscious of itself and its existence, nor of the suffering of its life, as is the case with man. It has consciousness but no language; rather, only “­I-less” interjections. Language presupposes on the one hand, the I—as the spiritual possibility of being a speaking person and of grasping the word, of expressing itself, and of asserting its existence in the sentence “I am.” On the other hand, language at the same time presupposes the consciousness of the spiritual in another with regard to his addressability. The animal has consciousness that includes nothing but an experience of the world; therefore, it cannot be immortal, as man. This actually implies no I, and for that reason a relation cannot be established to a consciousness in the other, to the Thou. The awareness of consciousness in another, which would not be possible at all without ­being-conscious, is the precondition for objective thinking—that is, thinking that has validity for another. It is the basis of all objective cognition, of scientific and mathematical thinking, which, though it may pass itself off as Thouless and ­I-less, and as objective, still presupposes the I in man, and of course the Thouless moi of Pascal. One has to say that science in its I­ -aloneness sets the objective validity of thinking

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in the place of love, which creates and expresses the relation of the I to the Thou, as the bond between man and man. When one speaks of the I, one can differentiate between the I that is still psychologically determined and the one that is already spiritually determined and s­ elf-determining. The former is the relatively Thouless I that remains caught up in itself; it is the I of the individual in his relation to the world, whose being given to the individual presupposes its being experienced by this I. It is thus the subject of the experience of the world and the worldview in man, the I in relation to his existing in the world. But the spiritually determined and spiritually s­elf-determining I is the one that exists in a relationship to something spiritual outside it, to the Thou; and it is conscious of this relationship wherein its spiritual ­self-determination comes to expression. For the right comprehension of the I, one must always keep in mind the decisive fact that the Thoulessness of the I, which must always be taken relatively, its being caught up in itself, its ­I-aloneness (thus its psychological determinability) is not that which is primary to its essence, only out of which perhaps the relationship to the Thou could have developed. Rather, the Thoulessness comes about only in the isolation of the I from the Thou. One will never understand the essence of man if one disregards this extremely important fact. To be a man means to exist, from the very beginning and from the very foundation of his existence, in relationship to the spirit, to the spirit outside him, and that is God. Through that act of closure of the spiritual in man, the I from the Thou, which can never be comprehended psychologically but only pneumatologically, the sphere of the psyche first came into being. In the I­ -aloneness brought about by it, the spiritual in man becomes psychologically comprehensible; man becomes the object of psycho­logy. Psyche is the relatedness of nature, of the natural to itself (already presupposing spirituality); Pneuma is the spiritual in man in its re-

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latedness to God. The former is always on the way to losing itself in the infinity of the many—which is the world. But the latter finds itself in the infinity of the One, in God. Pneuma is the eternal in man and, in the temporality of existence, is to a certain extent the principle of the anticipation of eternity. What man in the temporality of life makes out of the spirituality of his existence, deciding for or against it, becomes fixed for eternity. The pneuma also gives rise to the consciousness of that which is past, wherein what has gone before is transformed into the past; it is thus the pneuma that constitutes history. The need of man to become historical, however, which not only the great statesman but also the geniuses have, can once again go astray. All remembrance—­re-miniscence [­Er-innerung]— is in it. In the psyche, that which is past works unconsciously; for it there is no real past. That which is past is always present in it and determines it. Yet the psyche is also the principle of the anticipation of the future and thus is actually the inner principle of life itself (albeit operating unconsciously, as instinct, in the natural life). Everything living is animated. That is truly the mystery of the organic, a mystery that the mechanistic apprehension of events, in which alone the intellect feels at home and that comprehends everything that happens only as an effect of a past event, cannot grasp: that the future influences the present. Hunger, for example, is something physiological, the emptiness of the stomach; and to the intellect, the logic of nature [Physis] always appears as mechanistic consequence in the course of events. But the anxiety of starving, which is indeed strange to the animal, is something psychological and presupposes the conscious (not unconscious, as in the instinct) anticipation of the future. The pure physiological impulse is always psychically underlined beneath the yet unconscious influence of the past, and precisely therein lies the logic of the psyche. Psychology, however, could be called the doctrine of logic that is most subtle, most erroneous, and that most fails to recognize reality, the logic of the I in its aloneness and Th ­ ou-seclusion [Duverschlossenheit]. Nothing is

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more ­self-evident than that pneuma stands above psyche, although few grasp it. The I that isolates itself from the Thou is not the real and true I, but is rather, grammatically stated, the casus obliquus of the I, the ­­Mein—Mir—Mich [­mine—to m ­ e—me], the moi of Pascal. It is the attempt of man to exist godlessly, or in a misunderstanding about the relation of man to God. It is thus the godless man who becomes the object of psychology. But the one who has again attained the right relation to God and has realized and recovered therein the existence of the I, thus his personality, is psychologically incomprehensible. The essence of language is also psychologically incomprehensible. For language is the objective expression for the I in man that has a relation to the Thou; it is the expression for the I ­openingitself-to-the-Thou, the I that just for that reason is no longer to be understood psychologically. According to its real essence, language belongs not to the natural or to the psychical, but to the spiritual life. Therefore, strictly speaking, psycholinguistics is not possible at all, and what it claims to be psycholinguistics—with the pretension of finally accounting for the origin and development of language, beginning with animal sounds [Lautgebärden] and interjections— misunderstands the essence of language, because it never quite penetrates it.

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It was the spirit of Christianity that called attention emphatically to the I and thus brought about the turning of the objective idealism of pagan antiquity to the subjective (in so doing, it was not the fault of Christianity when this subjectively turned idealism once again thoroughly misunderstood it, or even wanted to push it aside). It was the spirit of Christianity that extraordinarily deepened romanticism, this ­self-consciousness of a culture at its end, from which arises cultural philosophy and finally cultural criticism. It was the spirit of Christianity from which psychology also takes root, al-

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though, on the other hand, the spiritual demeanor of psychology consists in attacking all things Christian and religious in general. One looks in vain for a real and authentic psychologist among the Greek thinkers and poets. The psychological critique is more dangerous to idealism than the critique of knowledge, because it lampoons the idea in its subjective foundation in the will and the wish. The psychological critique is thus the antithesis to subjective idealism, wherein man dreams his dream of the spirit unperturbed and from which the critique rouses him, but of course not awakening to the realities of the spiritual life. For psychology never really reaches the spirit. It also does violence to genius when it wishes to explain it. For it cannot even explain wherein lies the essence of genius, the transposing of a psychic and thus subjectively given aspect of life into the sphere of the objective and aesthetic—a fact of the spiritual life in man that is misinterpreted by metaphysical speculation and is projected into the universe. Psychology cannot explain the sublimation of the instinctive and emotional drives, as it is called in psychoanalytical terms. What gives it the most trouble is not the man who originally dreams the dream of the spirit, but rather the one in whom that dream miscarries or the one who takes it over from the genius to cover and disguise his a­ ll-too-humanness. Psychology is always concerned with men who have a bad conscience and who become sick from the lie of life—not from the pain of life, for that is really a psychical euphemism for that lie—but sick from the incongruence of life and word. But this is true: since the life and death of Christ, whose life and word were absolutely one and were the truth, humanity, and not only Judaism, has had a bad conscience in the deepest sense of the word, and the untruth of a culture calling itself Christian provokes a psychological critique as no other culture in the world. Psychology investigates the motives of thinking and behavior and tries to explain the personality of a man from them. But that cannot be done. For thinking and behavior belong to the sphere of nature;

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personality is something spiritual. It is that in man that often enough purports to have motives, in any case hiding or not hiding them according to the measure of the inherent power with which personality permeates the essence of a man, his thinking and behavior, an essence that is given or only purported by him. Motives explain this thinking and behavior only in particulars but not in man as a whole. However much one may penetrate and analyze them, there abides an inscrutable and analytically unsolvable remainder; and precisely that is the personality. The less the motives are shielded by this personality, the more man is the object of psycho­logy. Psychology is the dissolution of an apparent inner life in the void, which that life is. It sees through appearance. At the true inner life, however, where there is nothing to see through and to solve, psychology comes to naught. At the personality it finds its limit. The truly personal motives of love and reverence that are no longer natural but spiritual and in which motive and personality are absolutely identical do not exist for psychology, which can express its views about personality neither in reverence nor in love. One can and should do only thus: unpretentiously and silently step aside from personality. The strongest cognitive driving force for the psychologist is always hatred—­self-hatred, misanthropy, but also direct hatred of everything spiritual in general. And the psychologist not only has the moi of Pascal always in view in connection with another person; he also bears it in himself as the true seducer of psychology. For that reason, neither love nor reverence is an ultimate motive for him. When something in man behaves as if it were this or that, the psychologist always seeks something else behind it. He claims to see through the psychic arrangement in love and reverence; in the former, for example, as sexuality, and in the latter as expression of a defect of ­self-consciousness and personality. His irreverence has as a consequence that he is only correct to the extent that his object can tolerate psychology. For between the latter and the former there exists a dynamic relation of the powers of personality, which

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come into operation in tension and mutual grappling with each other. Even experimental psychology, which is completely impersonal, presupposes the willingness of the object to take part in the experiment and in no way comes about entirely independent of personal assertion. Actually, personality resists every experimental attempt regardless of how scientific it may be; this is ­self-evident. No personal psychology is ever entirely free of a slight tendency toward médisance [gossip] and therefore is mostly carried on behind the back of the object. It is not only psychoanalysis that therefore requires a good deal of personal insolence. Moreover, its methods can only be employed on those who subject themselves slavishly to the will of the analyst. Yet it can also happen that the analyst becomes a slave to the will of his object, whose assertion the analyst is nevertheless ultimately dependent on (which has not escaped the alert eye of an otherwise not very astute psychoanalyst). The psychologist is irreverent and does not believe in love and reverence because he does not believe in God. But that does not have to be, and it is not the case with Kierkegaard, with Dostoyevsky, or with Pascal, who was certainly one of the deepest of all psychologists and was a Christian just like the others. And therefore his psychology, the deeper it became absorbed in its object, the hateful moi, the more it discovered the sphere of the religious life in man, beyond the merely psychic, the demand intimately placed in our hearts to have religion, to have a relation to God, and in the lack or failure of which we end up as the object of psychology in the deepest sense.

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The insane person is obviously, but not exclusively, the object of psychology. Insanity is a phenomenon that is connected with the spirituality of the human being (inasmuch as only man, not the spiritless animal, can become insane), and it therefore also admits of a pneumatological interpretation. No one seriously disputes that

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in becoming insane, somatic compliance, a brain inferiority and thus a physical factor, plays a role—which may not be reliably ascertained in all cases, but is surely to be deduced. “Nature,” one could say, is “­being-I-less.” The I does not result from it and its life, for the I is a fact of the spirit. Yet the power with which the I asserts itself in its I­ -aloneness is a natural one. There nature encounters the I. Without this encounter, however, the I does not find its salvation in the spirit, and it is lost in insanity. Insanity, or at least its possibility, is not a sporadically appearing but a universal human phenomenon, if not in its physiological then still in its pneumatological condition. There is perhaps not one human characteristic that does not bear in itself the seed for it. For character, this countenance in death is not only the brokenness of life in matter, but above all in the case of man, the brokenness of his spirit in natural life. Insanity is nothing other than the latent sickness of the spirit of man that has become acute and somatically modified, the sickness that takes its root in the Thoulessness of the I. If one strips away the superficial layers of man, within which he appears thoroughly sensible and rational in accordance with the dictates of the social order, one will discover that beneath these layers every man thinks and feels a little insane. Ibsen often engaged in such stripping away, pointing his finger at what poets usually only intimate with poetic euphemism. Deeper men are conscious of it, while superficial characters become so utterly absorbed in the social realities, be it of work or of idleness, that in the end they themselves believe their demeanor of sensibility and reasonableness, of normal thinking and acting. For that reason, they fear aloneness—in which they would have to cease believing in their normality, they would have to face that even they were not so sensible and rational after all, but rather a little insane. They do not want to be that, nor shall they be. But in their flight to the social sphere they miss the real path to healing. For that path cannot lead outward to where sickness is always hidden and well camouflaged; it must rather lead inward.

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Man has to penetrate his latent insanity, as it were—even at the risk of its outbreak—and work through it, to get it behind him. He has to reach that point where he really becomes its master. And then he enters into a relation with God as a spiritual reality. There is no other deliverance from the entanglement in the unreal, which holds everyone in thrall, than the inner penetration to this point of mastery. But let this not be forgotten: man remains stuck in the midst of his secret insanity as long as his relation to God is spiritually based on the stubbornness of his idea, on the mental construct of the divine. Not only is no man a genius before God; before him no one can be neurotic or insane, either. One becomes that only when one does not live spiritually before God, but rather before man, in whom one is not able to find the Thou of his I, but experiences only the I. Lurking behind insanity is the failure of the relation between the I and the Thou. The insane person sinks down into the abyss of the I; he spiritually perishes at the aloneness of the I. No one becomes insane who has not greatly suffered in his experience of man, precisely because of the failure in the relation of his I to the Thou, and who over and over again in man has experienced the I of the other and his own Chinese wall. One must bear in mind that the inner reality of the I is to be found in the “I want”: the volo underlies the sum and the cogito. In essence the I wants nothing other than the relation to the Thou. It wants itself and its existence; yet it exists only in this relation. It therefore always suffers from the aloneness of its isolation from the Thou. Even though the I may find a certain ­self-satisfaction in the power of this isolation and may assert itself in time through it, it still secretly suffers in and from this ­self-assertion. Absolute isolation, in which the I would no longer have a relationship to the Thou at all, and by virtue of this would be standing entirely on its own, would immediately eventuate in the death of the I. In it man would forfeit language. He could no longer communicate and come to an understanding with another. He could no longer say something about himself; in his reticence, he

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could no longer find the word that would redeem and rescue him. Precisely here, the profound meaning of the assertion that the I exists objectively only in the word comes to light. Let one consider the evil demons of the gospel who rob men of speech. The evil spirit in man is nothing but the power of the isolation of the I from the Thou. To ask how it originates leads to idle metaphysical speculation without exorcising it in the concrete case, even if one should devise the most plausible answer that is possible. In the completely taciturn man, all love would be paralyzed, and ­being-conscious would be nullified. Only consciousness pure and simple would persist, but more in conscious twilight on the way to extinction. When all love dies in man, perhaps always after having gone down blind alleys, that is spiritual lostness. The I severs all relationship to the Thou and attempts to establish its existence entirely on its own. The moment it succeeds, even though only in time, the I is lost. What the insane person appeared first of all to be lacking was the power for the ­self-assertion of the I in its isolation from the Thou. And right here we see somatic compliance, the factor of nature, playing its role. At the same time, we also see insanity being psychologically comprehensible in a specific sense. Nevertheless, suffering has its spiritual seat much deeper, and at a place that is inaccessible to psychology. Nothing is more characteristic of the spiritual and psychic condition of a man going insane than a certain inner helplessness. He who, while being supported by the powers of natural life, is able to assert his I in isolation from the Thou, even though of course only relatively, is never as inwardly helpless as was the I of the insane person before he became insane. But in spite of this helplessness, it is always the fault of the man himself when the relation of his I to the Thou miscarries—precisely because he seeks spiritual help in the wrong place, where it is not to be found. Otto Weininger is entirely right when he asserts that no one becomes insane without having desired it. Yet it can also be that a man on the way to madness suddenly stops in his spiritual lostness and does not move in

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that direction again. He would have to stop, since the somatic compliance inherent in the process of becoming insane is missing. He can thus inhibit further progression and can turn away from insanity, but not toward his spiritual deliverance. In his inner helplessness he hits upon a desperate way out. All at once he can take care of himself—he commits suicide or becomes a criminal. The lack of spiritual certainty about existence for man finds its perfect expression in insanity. The spiritual is there, but in a state of uncertainty that man, so to speak, does not know what to make of it. Everyone suffers from this lack in some way or other; for there is no immediate health of the spirit in man. Out of this lack, man attempts to find the spiritual certainty of his existence in the isolation of the I from the Thou and in the power of this isolation. This power is certainly not of the spiritual, but of the natural life, and thus the lack is not really removed but only veiled. Since in this isolation the I, while always presupposing the Thou, albeit as the I in the other, has only a relative existential certainty, as this unfolds—as in a thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness of the I, in which it does not weigh how far it may go into isolation without entirely losing every relationship to the Thou—the moment can come when the I actually no longer has any relation at all to the Thou. In this moment the I forfeits the final remainder of its relative existential certainty, and such a man perishes in the aloneness of his I in time, just as the one who, without a positive relation to the Thou, does not summon up the power of relative s­ elf-assertion in isolation. He sinks into the abyss of the I and becomes insane, assuming the somatic compliance. The former becomes insane because, in the spiritual neediness of his existence, the ultimate basis of which is always the lack of a positive relation to the Thou, he relied too much on the powers of the natural life and finally pushed it too far; the latter because he had already been abandoned by these powers from the very beginning. The former spiritually perishes because in his spiritual neediness he is able to take care of himself only too well; the latter, be-

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cause he is helpless in it. The one becomes insane because the grace of God is not able to reach him—which is his own fault; the other, because he inwardly renounces the grace, refusing the help of God. The one, being entangled in sin, cannot believe in the compliance of God—and that is again his own fault. The other does not want to believe in it, and that is obviously his own fault, as well. Theodore Haecker (one of the few whose word is worth listening to in this time of spiritual bankruptcy in Europe) states as one of his deepest convictions that insanity is not a possible sickness for the committed Christian, however unfavorable the external physical and physiological conditions may be—as, for example, in the case of Pascal. An age that in its scientific character takes offense at this conviction thereby condemns itself. The religious insanity of the psychiatrist has nothing to do with religion, least of all with Christianity. It is the condition of the man whose I has become caught in the religious life of mental constructs and in its ­I-aloneness no longer sees its way. For our life of mental constructs truly helps build the Chinese wall of the I, which may appear to be, on the other hand, the very screen onto which we project our conceptions, ideas, and dreams. Once it has been torn down, there is no longer a place for dreams and ideas. If there is true faith in God in a man who never clings anxiously to the mental image of the divine, as does the pagan—and Christ points the way there—then, let his brain be inferior, let the memory fail, let the orientation to the machinery of this world, let him lose all contact with society, so that he is of no use to this life and a useless member of society; all this can befall that man—yet he will not become insane.

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Fragment 10 The Existence of the I—Idealism— The Word and Love

One has not asserted anything at all against the existence of the I when one says that the I is only a word. Yet one must understand it in this way: it exists—objectively—only in the word. One cannot do other than assert the objective existence of it by saying, the I is a word. Its subjective existence also lies in the fact of the word—and the I, which creates the sphere of the subjective, really exists only in this sphere; it comes about, namely, by this word “I” being uttered with the meaning that it has—and every word means something and has a sense. It lies in that the I expresses itself in this word and by so doing asserts its existence, directly reduplicating its meaning and content. Its existence is thus once specifically asserted in the word “I” in the actuality of its being uttered and then in the word “per se.” In the beginning of language was the word as sentence; “I am” was the first sentence, the primal word that underlies all remaining words [Worten] and sentences as well as unconnected words [Wörtern] as the precondition of declaration. The crucial element is the special form of the existential declaration “I am,” and here the profoundly significant linguistic usage in German helps us to clarify the facts in question. The I is not—thus far therefore, the philosophers and critics of knowledge would be right who deny the existence of the I. But I “am”—that is something entirely dif147



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ferent. Schopenhauer was already aware of the significance of the difference between “is” and “am” in the assertion of being. The I is a word and nothing more. That is not to be disputed. But now, can a man maintain about himself, “I am a word, my existence is that of a word”? That would be obvious nonsense. But he can still say, without needing to fear serious contradiction, I am. The existential statement that utilizes the verb “is,” being thereby in the third person, asserts an entirely different kind of existence than that of the sentence “I am.” The s­ entence-formulation “the I is” signifies nothing at all; the formulation “I am” signifies everything, which can be meant only in this sentence and word, for it is really the reduplication of the content. The existence of the I can never be expressed and asserted without contradiction in the third person, but only in the first, by the I expressing itself. By the I bringing its existence to pronunciation, letting it become word, it exists—objectively as word and in the word. An objection or a doubt cannot possibly be raised against this existential declaration. Since the I, a fact of the spiritual life in its being given to man, is not, neither psychology nor metaphysics can therefore assert its existence without contradiction. Neither the psychologist, for whom the I is ultimately only an ancillary word that facilitates and simplifies the description of psychic conditions and processes, nor the metaphysician, who now and again finds his joy in speculation about it, knows what properly to make of the “I am” declaration of being, which is possible solely from the I. For their purposes, both need the declaration of being in the third person. Furthermore, one cannot even say, “Man is an I.” That would be paradoxical. One ought not to assert, strictly speaking (which is done so often and so well) that man has an I, according to the way the philosophers have already objectified the I and used it as a noun. For the I is not a thing [Sache]—object o­ f having, but is rather the subject of the spiritual being in man, which defies all objectification and is itself this being. Nor is the I a mental image [Vorstellung], and it cannot

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be grasped in any concept. As word, the I is the most nonsensual word, so to speak, to which no sensuous mental image could have corresponded in its original linguistic state, in which one otherwise imagines all isolated words formerly bound to a s­ ensuous-concrete content of consciousness.1 Nor is the I the knowing self, or the identity of the subject and object, or the return of knowledge into itself, however beautiful and profound all of that may sound. The I is none of those things; all that is only the abstract mental image that a philosopher—namely, Fichte—once made of it. The I is nothing abstract—in spite of its supersensual meaning as word; it is rather something radically concrete, obviously not in the realm of the palpably concrete, but of the spiritually concrete. The question regarding what the I is should not by rights be raised at all. It is paradoxical, as if the spirit of language, the spirit that created the word “I,” interjects its veto when one says, the I “is.” The I is not and is thus also nothing, least of all the fully ­self-enclosed bipolar ellipse. What kind of thoughts do German poets and thinkers hit upon in their philosophical busyness and spiritual idleness! The I of philosophy does not exist in reality. The I that is involved in the fact that I am and that I can say that of myself is something different than the I of the philosophical speculation of yore and is above all something real—real both in my will to be and in my declaration—and very concrete. The real man: you are that, I am that—this most simple of all truths idealism never grasps. The I is not, but I am—philosophy must someday learn to see that, and then it may carry on its thoroughly precarious business, if it has not completely lost the desire. That is no doubt asking a lot of it. Until now philosophy has brought speculation only to the understanding of the h­ alf-truth—namely, that the I is not. About the other half, about the fact that the individual, definite, concrete man—not some abstract idea of man—can say “I am” of himself, and that radically 1. The same holds true for the Thou.

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personally, and meant just so, about that philosophy does not bother at all. If I nevertheless expect it to one day concern itself with the fact that I am (in the face of philosophy, this demand sounds almost like presumption), it will reply to me, with good reason from its own standpoint, “What philosophy troubles itself about you and your existence? It has more important things to do; it must finally solve the problems of the world and of life, of being and of thinking. It would be interested in you only if you were the ‘absolute’ I.” Philosophy would say that or something similar. But I might then retort (certainly not with less reason?), “If that is the case, then what do I care about philosophy? I have more important things to do; I have to exist.” That certainly cannot be understood in its ultimate basis other than religiously, as the imperative to exist in the relation to God. One really places philosophy into no small predicament when one asks that it concern itself with the fact that I am. Its refusal of this request is s­ elf-defense and nothing else, however little philosophy quite naturally admits it. The sphere of the personal is strange and unsettling to it. And it would indeed have to become personal to accept this fact. Not philosophy, but at most it would be the philosopher who could do this; but he must not then speak of philosophy. The ethicist already understands all this very well, and in any case better than the metaphysician, who audaciously constructs his worldview. It would really be making fun of philosophy to demand that it address the concrete meaning of the sentence “I am,” about which metaphysics does not have to speculate laboriously in a specific individual case, upon which it alone depends. However—se moquer de la philosophie, c’est vraiment philosopher. The s­ elf-expressing I, the first person in the s­ elf-awareness of his existence, establishes the relation to the addressed person through the word placed in it, the word that created it. It is a completely personal relation and is not to be understood otherwise. In this relationship the I exists, the word comes alive and language lives.

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The problem of the word, since it is identical with the problem of ­self-consciousness, is truly the Archimedean point of philosophy. That philosophers have up to now touched on the problem of language only occasionally, but have never brought it to the center of philosophizing, meant that they exercised their philosophical instinct for ­self-preservation. For once it really applies the lever to its Archimedean point, it eventually unhinges itself, and thus seeming indifferent to whether philosophy conceives the I as a grammatical fiction, and thus pronounces the declaration of s­ elf-consciousness as being untenable and irrelevant with regard to knowledge or whether it perceives the I in the reality of its existence in the relation to the Thou. Here lies therefore the real task of philosophy, in the solution of which it actually relinquishes itself and its spirit—which is the best that it can do. To want to save metaphysics (and a philosophy that does not strive for this is not authentic) is an arrogance of the human spirit and is therefore, according to the word of the gospel, an abomination before God.

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All philosophy lives on idealism. In the conception of the idea, however, there is no humility of the spirit, which can only proceed from man’s consciousness of the spiritual neediness of his existence, ­of that poverty in spirit on account of which man is called blessed in the gospel. That humility is the expectation of grace and the spiritual readiness in which man entrusts his spiritual life and its salvation to God alone. Idealism renders impossible the consciousness of spiritual neediness, and it conceals this behind a splendor and semblance of spiritual riches, which it ultimately borrows from the natural life. As long as man is still not conscious in the conception of the idea of its deep subjective foundation in the will, the idea has an objective existence for him—just as with the Greeks, whose philosophy knew yet nothing of the I, but also nothing of the problem of the will. He dreams of the spirit and cannot become conscious

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of his dreaming and of himself in the dreaming. He knows yet nothing of himself, of the I. Yet to become aware of this is already an arrogance of the spirit, with which the Greeks were truly not acquainted. Man doubtless knows of himself, of the real spirituality of his essence; but he still does not yet see its spiritual neediness, the presence in the I of an existential need for the relation to the Thou. And therefore, strictly speaking, he does not even yet know of himself. He perceives the subjective foundation of the idea, and suddenly the I becomes the ­world-creator, the ethical lawgiver. In the view and thought of the philosopher, the world of our experience becomes the projection of the I. It is certainly not that. But the worldview of the metaphysician is nothing other than such a projection. It is actually nothing other than this: the I sets itself in the place of God—because it became conscious of itself, but not of its relation to the Thou, which alone makes its existence possible, because it perceives its ­I-aloneness in the moment when it has knowledge of itself, but does not understand it as a deficiency. And thus in this misunderstood aloneness, the metaphysician turns it into the absolute I, the ethicist into the intelligible I; and neither the metaphysician nor the ethicist seems to understand that this absolutizing of the I­ -aloneness would have to mean nothing less than the death of the I, the spiritual death of man—if the absolutizing took place not merely in abstract thought. In a certain sense, a Thou doubtless corresponds to the I of the ethicist—since the ethical, as opposed to the aesthetic and metaphysical, is directed toward the reality of the spiritual life—but only an ideal Thou, inasmuch as the inner reality of the I in “I will” is ethically determined by a “Thou shalt.” But the I thinks and speaks this “Thou shalt” to itself in its aloneness, and it is nothing but the projection of the I. The dream of the spirit is dreamt again. The intelligible I (the autonomous legislation in man) is just as little the real I as is the ­world-creative I of the metaphysician. It is

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rather the idea of it, in the one case the ethical idea of the I, in the other the metaphysical. Obviously, the intelligible I can emerge from its ­I-aloneness just as little as the empirical ego that ethicists set against it. It thus has no relation to the Thou, and just like the empirical ego, the moi of Pascal, it is not the true I. As mere idea (an abstract thought, even though it had been made into a principle of ethical thought) it is even inferior to the moi of Pascal. For the latter is something thoroughly concrete and real in its seclusion from the Thou. Moreover, hidden behind this, despite its ethical demeanor, there is denial of life and devaluation of existence, together with contempt for mankind and misanthropy, and in many cases even ­self-contempt. The ethicist doesn’t know what else to do about this but to call him to ­self-respect and respect for man; that means to enter the ethical claim for the respect of the Chinese wall of the I in man, the respect of I­ -aloneness and Th ­ ou-seclusion. The idea is not the spiritual bond between man and man, between the I and the Thou, and not that between man and God, but rather at its best only between the individual and humanity. Yet humanity itself either exists only in the idea or is, in its reality as life of the generation, not at all a spiritual but a biological fact, an aspect of the natural life. The ethical needs a basis of support, not as a practical demand of a final relative importance that places itself entirely in the service of the natural life, but as a concrete fact of the spiritual life of man that looks beyond and surpasses all relativity of existence. If the ethical does not seek it in the metaphysical sphere (since it would lose itself thereby in the realm of the unreal, and it still aims at reality), and not in the religious, in the G ­ od-relation, it would be forced to rely on the personality of man alone. But that this still has a spiritual basis—not however in personality itself, but outside it—philosophy cannot apprehend. In the aloneness of its existence, the I bears in itself an insoluble contradiction. It does not know what rightly to make of its eternity and transcendence of time [Ausserzeitlichkeit]. It seeks its spiritual

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certainty of existence [Existenzbestimmtheit] and finds it neither in the aesthetic nor in the ethical as such. It seeks it in the relation to the idea to emerge from its entanglement in the temporality and the relativity of existence. But that is possible only if the idea itself becomes something eternal, beyond time, absolute. Yet if it becomes that, it simply abrogates the existence of the I. Idealism is truthfully the consuming sickness of the spirit, and all the more so in its turning into the subjective—which no doubt moves toward the reality of the spiritual life, but does not reach it. And it is of no use at all to man when he then discovers in himself the possibility of the withdrawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea. Even that does not preserve him from his spiritual death. For if the I withdraws the idea into itself in order to assert its existence, it loses itself again in the relativity of being [Dasein]. It becomes something temporal, and therein lies a contradiction to the timelessness of its essence. While dreaming of the spirit in the conception of the idea, it is passively lost. The withdrawal of the idea is its active lostness. One thus sees that, in its ­I-aloneness and Th ­ ou-seclusion, it is not to be saved.

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One can perhaps say that the I exists in that it thinks. Thus cogito, ergo sum. For that reason, the I comes to be the identity of thinking and being: it is, because it thinks; it thinks, because it is; it becomes the identity of subject and object: the I is the subject that, while thinking, is at the same time itself the object. But keep in mind that the sentence “I am” cannot really be thought wordlessly—that is, without any relationship to the Thou, or at least an ideal rela­t ionship to the Thou, precisely because the I does not exist outside this relationship—even if the I that thinks and expresses its existence is not clearly conscious, or even conscious at all, of this relationship. If the sentence is really thought without words, one does not think the sentence itself, but rather the principle of identity in its pure abstraction and objectlessness. One thinks the thought, as

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it were, simply without an object to which it may refer; that is, the I thinks itself in an absolute way, without understanding itself. For it can truly understand itself only in the relationship to the Thou. Of course, that is not the real I, but rather the moi of Pascal that has become abstract, the Mein—Mir—Mich [mine—to me—me], the I existing in the ­I-aloneness of a mere thought. It is so because it thinks only itself; when thinking it refers to itself, and hence turns into the object. The real I exists in the relation to the Thou; even the moi of Pascal that is something thoroughly concrete, has, namely in its isolation from the Thou, a negative yet still a relation to the Thou. The real I exists where and when it moves toward the Thou, not in the ­I-aloneness of its ­self-birthing and s­ elf-devouring thought, in which it thinks itself. Rather, it exists subjectively in love, through which its inner reality of “I will” receives direction and meaning, and of which the intelligible I of the ethicist knows nothing. But the I does not exist objectively other than in the word; not in that it thinks, but in that it expresses itself. The word and love are the true vehicles of its relation, its movement to the Thou. By thinking (and in thinking itself, it dreams of its existence) the I does not emerge from its ­I-aloneness. But by expressing itself and coming to be in the word, it moves out from this aloneness toward the Thou and becomes real in a profound sense. In the word, the spiritual life of man has become objective in its subjectivity, objective subjectivity, so to speak, but without thereby surrendering itself as in mathematical thought. The I is not only a grammatical fiction and subject of linguistic usage. It really exists in the word and in love ­as the reality of the spiritual life in man. So the word and love belong together. Man truly draws all power of knowing from the word and from reason placed in him by it; yet reason, in the ultimate ground of its being given to man, is of service to love, the divine love and the charity demanded by God. The right word is always one that speaks love, and the power to break

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through the Chinese wall resides in it. All human misfortune in the world follows as a consequence of men so rarely knowing how to speak the right word. If they knew they would be spared the wretchedness and misery of war. There is no human suffering that could not be banished by the right word; and there is no other real comfort in every misfortune of this life than that which comes from the right word. But the loveless word is already a human abuse of the divine gift of the word. In it the word struggles against its inherent meaning and spiritually abrogates itself. It gets lost in temporality. The word that speaks love, however, is eternal. Linguists and psycholinguists always have the loveless and dead word in mind, which has hardened into a mere c­ oncept-sign. Is it any wonder that the real essence of language, which they have never noticed, remains a mystery to them? In the ­I-aloneness of his existence—in this sickness unto death of his spiritual life—and from it, man is redeemed through the word and love. The love of God, which created man through the word in which was life, became objective in the word in order to redeem him—that is, became a palpable historical fact—in the incarnation of God and in the word of the gospel. The abstract I of philosophy, which was suspected for a long time of being only an empty word and a linguistic fiction, was not really to be rescued. But the concrete I in man, human existence in its personality, God himself wills to see saved; for that reason he truly became man in Jesus—and then the I is not supposed to be something real?

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Fragment 11 The Oblique Case and the Meaning of the M-Sound

The truth (which philosophy unfortunately knows nothing about, nor can it, strictly speaking) is that there is no absolute I, but only one that exists relative to the Thou. Philosophy accordingly once had very much to say of the I, yet without being clear regarding by what means man had become aware of it, and characteristically having nothing at all to say of the Thou. Just as the inner positing and s­ elf-assertion of the I in relation to the Thou found a linguistic expression in the word and in language generally, above all in the creation of the word “I,” so also did the spiritual fact of its isolation from the Thou. There we see ourselves referred to the profound meaning of the formation of the oblique case in an etymological and also grammatical respect; and placed before us is the ­by-no-means superfluous question regarding what sense the root me may have in mein—mir—mich [mine—to me—me], the Latin me mihi, the Greek me, and the Sanskrit ma (in makîna = mein).1 The meaning of the case on the whole becomes accessible from the case of the personal pronoun, in particular of the first person. In the nominative a person, and then consequently a thing, receives 1. [Trans. Note]: Ebner’s etymological investigation in this Fragment is at points so thoroughly tied to German cognates that it will be necessary to carry over a number of German terms into English. Where appropriate, English equivalents are given in brackets.

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the name. The giving of the name in call and address is the vocative, which is the nominalization [Nominalisierung] of the second person, the substantivization [Substantivierung] of the Thou. In the genitive, “having” comes above all to expression, as well as the aspect of procreating; in the dative, desire is expressed, thus the will to have and to receive. In the accusative a goal is given to movement, to activity; it denotes, as it were, the real and originating object. The ablative and the instrumental and locative of the Sanskrit do not appear to have a particularly deep meaning, as do the other cases. All this is of course something thoroughly ­self-evident in a purely grammatical respect. But that the grammatical forms here, as occasionally elsewhere, can still be interpreted in a pneumatological sense is certainly noteworthy.

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The s­ elf-naming of the I in the primal word that stands at the beginning of language is at the same time the spiritual root of the linguistic function of naming, of the nominalization of experience, that first emerges after the formation of pronouns and verbs and gains more and more linguistic meaning. In any case, in the course of linguistic development the tendency of the substantialization of thinking, which really only put in a claim for an existential assertion in the third person, has played an e­ ver-increasing role in the function of naming, in connection with the genesis of adjectives and nouns from verbal roots. The s­ elf-naming of the I included recognition [Erkennung] as the constitution of ­self-consciousness. We therefore even now, while carried and led by the spirit of language in our whole spiritual life, somehow inwardly still value the naming of a thing with its own name as the acquisition of knowledge, which also manifests itself linguistically and etymologically in the primitive affinity of Name, with the Greek gnosis.2 A remarkable spiritual 2. Name, according to Kluge a word of the greatest age and of the widest distribution, is synonymous with the Sanskrit nâma, the Latin nomen, the Greek ónoma. The

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power is inherent in the function of naming that allows its creations to outlive the destinies of nations through the ages. It is nothing but a hidden reverence for the spirit of language, which deters man, once a name is created, from arbitrarily setting it aside and putting another name in its place. So, for example, many mountains, rivers, and villages in the region of the Alps populated by Germans for a millennium still carry Slavic names today. Every new event of naming is a spiritual venture.

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The personal pronoun of the second person has essentially the sense of the vocative, particularly in the first case, which is really nothing but a vocative. But the nominative of the first person, which is originally ­self-named, is eo ipso not a vocative. How could the I call to and address itself? Some men of course carry on conversations with themselves, in silence or even out loud, and thereby talk to themselves; yet they do so always with the fiction of an addressed person, sometimes consciously, frequently unconsciously, of one at least before whom one speaks. And doesn’t that already appear to be a slight symptom of insanity, of the ­Thou-seclusion of the I? One cannot moreover give oneself a name without a certain inner violence, one would almost like to say, in any event without affectation—in many cases even a directly unconscious or even consciously willed denial of personality. It lies in the spiritual order of things that everyone probable ­I ndo-Germanic root is gnô (English “to know”), with the original meaning being “Erkennung.” Kennen [to know], the Gothic kannjan [uskannjan] = bekannt machen [to make known], erkennen, meaning to really make somebody know something [wissen]; kühn [bold] (Old Norse koenn = weise [wise], erfahren [learned]; see also Konrad, the Greek gegona = tue kund) belongs to konnen = actually able to [vermögen] spiritually, wissen, kennen, verstehen [to understand] (in contrast to mögen, vermögen, thus similar to the French savoir and pouvoir), Gothic kunnan = erkennen, ­A nglo-Saxon cunnian = erforschen [to investigate], versuchen [to attempt], with the ­L atin-Greek root gnô in gîgnósko = erkennen, gnôsis, Latin cognoscere = erkennen, noscere = kennen lernen [get to know], erkennen, notus = bekannt. Obviously kund [known] also belongs in this series and relationship.

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receives his name from another. Otherwise, what answer does one called in the darkness give to the question, “Who are you?” At first saying “I” or “it is I” as a rule, and not without a certain discomfort (mitigated to some extent by social convention, in a different situation—namely, that of introducing oneself), he ends up calling himself by his own name. He who, while using his name received from another, speaks of himself wholly objectively and in the third person without any inner restraint and resistance, either still has no I— that is, the I has not yet burst forth into his consciousness, as with small children and savages, or he has already forfeited it, just like an insane person. The I can become the person who is addressed and called objectively with a name only in the mutual relation to the spiritual in the other man, and only from its standpoint, never from itself. It cannot turn itself into the Thou, either the Thou of the word or of love. If the I does that, the man is raving: the I has missed the Thou, as with the insane person, and is at c­ ross-purposes with it. But if the man loves himself ­i n the ­I-aloneness and Th ­ ou-seclusion of his existence, then he does not turn himself, his I, into the Thou of love, but only into love’s object. He makes himself an object. In his lecture on the origin of language, Jacob Grimm alludes to the striking fact that a ­half-refusing labial m comes forward in the oblique case of the pronoun of the first person, whereas the pointing to t of the addressed person has to remain in the casus rectus and obliquus. With what justification, one will ask, did Grimm conceive this m as something that rejects? If we attempt to examine the reason for this perception, the altogether extraordinary and remarkable depth of the spirit that forms language and the word suddenly opens to us. We see, as it were, how spirit and nature touch one another in the acoustic material of isolated words [Wörter]. We must first of all attend to the formation of the ­ra-sound itself as the somewhat natural lip and ­sound-gesture [Lautgebärde] of the “will to have” [Habenwollen]. The first object of childlike desire is the mother’s breast, the mother being the child’s object of preference

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and love, which is of course quite selfish and thoroughly anchored in the sensuous.3 Do we not have the genesis of the word “mamma” bodily in view here, literally traced out physiologically when we picture the lip movement of suckling?4 Mamma, moreover, is a Tatarian word that means “earth.”5 Let us remember, however, that the mythological imagination of man readily visualizes the earth (gaîa) as mother and as the maternal principle of nature. Let the word maya be brought into comparison: in the Greek maîa = real mother (in addition maieuein = to give birth), and is likewise the daughter of Atlas and mother of Mercury in conjunction with the Roman name of an old Italic nature goddess, ­A ll-Mother, from which the month of Mai [May] originates, as is well known. The Sanskrit maya, the elemental female power that proceeded from Brahma in Indian mythology, signifying deception, deceit, appearance, the veil of maya in philosophy—the principium individuationis according to Schopenhauer—lies over the experience of the world and is unveiled when man no longer desires, when he renounces his will. It is here again clearly perceptible that the m is a ­sound-gesture of desire; so also in the etymology of Mut [courage, heart]: Middle High German muotc = Neigung [inclination], Wille [volition] beside Sinn [sense], Gesinnung [disposition], Stimmung [state of mind]; muoten = verlangen [longing], begehren [to desire], and is a cognate of the Greek maíomaí = begehren.

ma.

3. In the language of children Mama, French maman, Spanish mamá, Latin mám-

4. Note also the Russian mámka = Amme [nurse] from mamtschitji = nähren [to nourish], stillen [to breastfeed]; note also Amme itself (Old Norse amma = Grossmutter [grandmother]), for which according to Kluge, Romance and other languages alike have expressions independent of German—for example, the ­Spanish-Portuguese ama. Further, the Greek mazós = woman’s breast (Amazonen = having no milk breast), the Latin amare = love, and the Arabian aman = security and protection(?). 5. “Mammoth” originated from that. The Tungus and Yakuts believe that the beast burrowed under the earth like a mole (according to Heyse’s dictionary of foreign word adoptions).

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The t is the s­ ound-gesture of indicating, pointing to something,6 which is once again dictated anatomically and physiologically and is thus the natural material for the formation of the pronoun of the second person, of the word in the first case that points to the addressed person, of the nominative and vocative in one. But in contrast to the formation of the case in the first person, this does not change in the oblique case, not on external l­inguistic-grammatical grounds, but rather on internal pneumatological ones, because with the actual formation and application of the oblique case of the Thou, the relation of the I, of the speaking to the addressed person, does not change o­ r at least does not need to change. The situation is different in which the I forms the oblique case—not only as the speaking person, but as the person who speaks of himself and in this relates to himself. Not only does the relation of the I to the Thou then undergo a change, which even though it is not exactly an external change (for there the situation always remains the same as that of the speaking to the addressed person), is at least an internal one; but the relation of the I to itself is also displaced. The I not only expresses itself as in the nominative (and places itself in a relation to the Thou, as it were seeking and calling forth the Thou); it rather relates objectively to itself, while changing this original relation to the Thou, actually rejecting the Thou, as Jacob Grimm quite correctly perceived. The I is now only externally the subject of the word and the statement, but not primarily the subject of the relationship to the Thou; it is rather above all the subject of desire. And the etymological and grammatical expression of this is the formation of the oblique case with the root me. First in the Mich [English me], in the accusative as the goal of movement and the original and real meaning of the object: the I simply turns around the inner movement of the sentence, which 6. This is already the case in the children’s word ­da-da. Take note of zunge [tongue], cognate with the Latin lingua from dingua; further dáktylos = the ­sound-gesture of pointing to, accompanied by a gesture of the hand, of the fingers.

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really proceeds to the relation to the Thou and refers to itself instead of to the Thou; it becomes itself the object. Then in the Mir [to or for me], it is expressed as the will to have (in this relationship to itself); and finally in the Mein [mine], as the assertion of having and of having a right to possess anything at all. It would be wrong to raise the objection that the original desire in man is grounded in the nature of his physical organism and hence is not to be explained pneumatologically and criticized ethically as the isolation of the I from the Thou. This critique is certainly not leveled at the natural desire in itself but rather at the fact that the spiritual in man loses itself in this. In the nominative, the I is inwardly open to the Thou. The Thou is its true object as the goal of its spiritual agitation, a­ nd it really exists only in its movement toward the Thou. The I secludes itself from the Thou in ­Mein—Mir—Mich, wherein it becomes itself the object and goal. And it can relate to itself objectively only in this isolation. The I no doubt still exists in its movement away from the Thou, yet less and less the further it moves away, so to speak: it ceases becoming [entwerden]. The formation of the oblique case of the first person is, pneumatologically speaking, the verbalized expression of the ­I-aloneness of human existence. The true I does not underlie it, but rather the hateful moi of Pascal, fallen from God, the I of the will to power and the object of psychology. It is certainly not an accident that in the same century to which Descartes, the theoretical discoverer of the I of philosophy, belonged, there also lived the thinker of the Pensées sur la religion. Like the former, Pascal was a great mathematician who also became aware of the existence of the I but from an entirely different standpoint than that of objective philosophy and epistemology (the I had been attended to practically long before, but without calling it directly by name). Descartes sought to grasp the existence and reality of the I in the fact of thinking, pure and simple. But it does not lie in the cogito; rather, in the volo. In this volo, Pascal saw the I in its reality and thus its concrete existence, though in a state that

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had to be hateful to him. This moi of Pascal is the human spirit sick unto death in its aloneness; it is the spiritual in man secretly willing its own sickness and death. It is something concrete and real in contrast to the abstract I of philosophy, which is made unreal in the abstraction of thinking, and it must always be attended to, even though it is not the actual and true I of man.

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While desiring with awareness, while grasping in the earth-boundedness of his existence for the goods of this world and of this earth, man was compelled to live peacefully and to share with others, as far as he saw in them his own kind. He was compelled to become the being that measures and reckons, but that also disputes and creates law and establishes justice for itself, to become the scientist and mathematician. Measuring and comparing underlie all mathematical thinking, and desiring in turn forms the psychological basis of the latter. The pneumatological root of measuring in its concretely material meaning and of mathematics with its abstractness and nonmateriality is the root of desire: the isolation of the I from the Thou, the rejection of the Thou. The verb to measure [messen] has manifold meanings: to survey, allot, weigh, assay. The A ­ nglo-Saxon metan means “to measure, estimate, take for,” and the Gothic mitan = to measure, whereas mitôn = to consider, reflect on, which corresponds in meaning to the Old High German mezzôn = to moderate [mässigen]. (Moderation is the restriction of desire and of the outburst of anger; if one attaches that to the meaning of the word Mut [courage]—Middle High German muoten = to desire, just as the Greek maiomaí, while the Gothic môds = anger—one is then dealing with a contrast reminiscent of the remarkable phenomenon of the antithetical meaning of primal words.) Etymologically compare messen [to measure] with the Latin modus = measurement [mass], mode, manner, and the Greek médomai = to weigh, calculate, médon = advisor, medímnos = bushel; the Latin modius signifies an old Ro-

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man standard of measurement, and the Gothic mitaths = measurement standard and peck. Thus, in addition to the sensuously palpable meaning of measuring with receptacles, there is the nonsensuous meaning of thinking. A remote kinship between mother, mater (Chinese mu), and measure is not out of the question; according to Kluge mater may possibly be traced to the ­I ndo-Germanic root ma, which means to measure out. Consequently, “mother” may have originally meant “she who measures and distributes.” Nevertheless, the word appears to be related to the Greek maia, through which a connection is established with mamma and the root me, of course only indirectly, and the psychological and pneumatological significance of the ­m-sound as the gesture of desire is confirmed even more. The connection of the German stem met = messen, ermessen [to estimate], bedenken [to consider], with the Latin metiri (Greek métron) is disputed in Kluge’s dictionary for phonetic reasons. On the other hand, it is once again established there in the etymology of the word Mal [mark; time] (Wundmal [stigma] in Middle High German; the Old High German mal = moment, point, and the Gothic mel = time) for which is assumed the I­ ndo-Germanic root me, which is said to also underlie metiri and métron. But then why not likewise messen with the stem met? Perhaps linguistics has too little (or not at all?) seen that the legitimate center of meaning is not to be sought in the monosyllabic root constructed by it—the philological opinion about which w ­ ord-component is to be perceived as the center of meaning—but rather in a definite single sound. It is to be sought especially in the initial sound, already noticed by Heinrich von Stein, who saw in the initial w [v] something enlivening,7 7. Over against esse, the dead being, is Wesen, the living being [Sein]. See moreover vivus (Greek bios, in addition Quecke [­cough-grass], erquicken [to revive], keck [bold], vir (in wer [who], “Werwolf,” Welt [world]), virtus, Wille [volition], volo, and various words of “movement.”) This is even the case for via, veho; Woge [wave], Wallen [wave], Wind [wind], ventus, winden [to wind], from which wenden = anderswerden [to change], werden zu [to turn into], verto = I turn, wende, etc.

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and also by Otto Weininger in a note in the posthumous work (On the Last Things) about the frictionless lambda in words [Wörtern], which according to their meaning are connected with life.8 From this first, thus in a certain sense fundamental and original meaning of the ­m-sound, different meanings may have subsequently arisen. For example, the m appears as the s­ ound-gesture of a ­half-suppressed indignation, of a pain more closed in itself; but also, as the etymology of the word messen [to measure] shows, of dubiousness and reflectiveness (hm!). It possibly also plays a role, not coincidentally, in the formation of those words that can be traced to the root mor = sterben [to die], widespread throughout all ­I ndo-Germanic dialects. Mord [murder] originally meant simply death; the Sanskrit root mr = to die, in mrtám = dead, the Latin morior = to die, mortuus = dead, mors = death. In death man ver­stimmt [grows silent] (Latin mutus = stumm [dumb]; see also the Greek myein = to close eyes and mouth). The r in the stem mor is likewise certainly not without meaning. In Sterben [to die] the resistance of matter gains superiority over life; life is overcome by it. (Old Norse starf = Arbeit [work], Mühe [toil], Anstrengung [exertion], stjarfe = Starrkrampf [catalepsy], according to Kluge meaning originally = sich plagen [to toil]; then see also the Latin torpidus = gefühlos [unfeeling], torpere = starren [stare]). The r, the phonetic opposite of the frictionless l, actually appears to be the phonetic symbol for the experience of this resistance, or even its overcoming. To give only a few of many possible examples: reiben [to rub], rauh [rough], Runzel 8. Leben [Life] is the overcoming of the resistance of matter; the more Leben there is, the less is matter felt or experienced (weariness is experienced gravity), and the more frictionlessly and smoothly is its resistance overcome. See also Schall [sound], Licht [light] (lux, leukós, lumen), Lust [pleasure] (not impossibly related to the Sanskrit lôd lud = to move), Liebe [love] (libido, Sanskrit lubh = heftig verlangen [vehement desire]), lachen [to laugh]. Leib [body] (cognate with Leben, bleiben [to remain], the Greek liparéo = I persevere: perseverance in the course of material events, to be sure only relative perseverance of the organic form in the metabolic process of life), gleiten [to slide], glatt [smooth] (English glad = froh, Latin glaber = glatt), glacies = Eis [ice], among other things.

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[wrinkle], rollen [to roll]; the Greek rhómbos = Kreis [circle], Kreisel [gyroscope], greifen [to grasp], graben [to dig], and also rinnen [to run], rennen [to race], rheîn. In Mord, morior, we thus directly see two sounds side by side in their granting of meaning, cooperating directly in the meaning of the word, reduplicating the meaning. Perhaps the significance of the ­m-sound as such a granter of uniform meaning can be recognized in the series of words mollis, morbus, morbidus, Moder [mould], Moos [moss], Moor [bog], mahlen [to grind] (Latin molo, Greek mýllo), Mumie [mummy] (from the Persian mûm or môm = Wachs [wax], a soft and balmy resin). One could also add the children’s word mamm, formed once quite accidently and arbitrarily for the thick dust lying around under the furniture of the poorly cleaned living room.

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When we say the word Mensch [man], it is as if we strike a polyphonic chord whose individual tones we make clearly audible to ourselves when we enter into its etymology, which is more interesting and more deeply significant than nearly any other word. While the I, in its seclusion from the Thou, related to itself, man gave himself a name, which he then mythologized in his dream of the spirit and attributed to the progenitor of the human race (Mannus; see in the Germania of Tacitus, son of Tuisto = hermaphrodite). The meaning of the m in the oblique case of the pronoun resonates and echoes in the formation of the word Mensch and in its meaning as a thinking being (Sanskrit manus = Mensch, with the root man = to think). For thinking originates psychologically from desire: in man the will to take possession of something changed into the will to understand abstractly. It is in accordance with this that the beginning of speaking and thinking in the individual development of the child may well go hand in hand with the reaching for things and that the right hand corresponds to the left lobe of the brain, as the neural organ of speech. Thinking, on the one hand, is an expression of the

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will to have; on the other hand, however, it is an expression of the will to be. “I think” can mean “I think how I can appropriate this or that, and if it concerns a menacing danger, how I can avoid it”; in so doing, this appropriating and keeping something at bay can assume a very spiritualized form. Yet it can also mean something essentially different, precisely insofar as thinking does not emerge merely from desire, but also from the will—a word that has a meaning only in reference to man, not with the animal, as is the case with desire. Not cogito, ergo sum, but rather “I think, because I still am ‘not,’”—namely, I am not what I want to be—or should be. The conception of the notion [Begriff] takes root in the will to have, the conception of the idea [Idee]9 in the will to be—not only in their aesthetic but also in their ethical meaning, the latter resulting from the inner unbrokenness of the will that is conscious of itself, the former following from the brokenness and unconsciousness in the wish, from this will that has become sick and that itself dares and risks nothing. A whole series of words belong to the Sanskrit root “man.” Thus the Lithuanian primanus = vordenken [forethought], while the Greek ménos = Mut [courage] and maínomaí = ich rase [I rage], through which the connection of meaning with the word Mut is established in both cases. This points emphatically, on the one hand, to the psychological correlation of thinking with desire, but on the other hand, it suggests the connection of desire with insanity, with this completion of the Thoulessness of the I.10 The Gothic môds = Zorn [anger], which according to Kluge’s dictionary is an “intense disposition of the mind, vehement agitation” and is the fundamental concept of the common Germanic stem moda (Greek mênis = Zorn, with the I­ ndo-Germanic root me mô). The Greek maíomaí = begeh9. A distinction that could not yet be made within the objective idealism of Plato, because the deep rootedness of the idea in the will is still completely unrecognizable in it. 10. Rage in the dissatisfaction of desire, rage in the anguish of being; ­behind it lurks the spirituality of human existence. Only man, not the animal, goes insane.

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ren [to desire], surely cognate with Mut, and the word maínomaí are certainly not so close for merely psychological or random phonetic reasons: does not the negating meaning of the ­n-sound resonate here, with its pressing of the teeth against each other, which is so indicative of anger and impatience? Further, the Greek dysménés belongs to man, corresponding to the Sanskrit durmanus = feindselig [hostile]. But it is in covetousness that most, though not all, of the mutual hostility of men takes root, in the rejection [Züruckweisen] of the Thou, in the s­ elf-assertion of the I in ­Mein—Mir—Mich. Morever, the Sanskrit word manas = Geist [spirit], the Latin mens = Geist, Gesinnung [mind], the Greek root mna in mimnésko = ich erin­ nere, [I remind], mahnen [to exhort], and memnemaí = ich erinnere mich [I remember], the Latin monere = erinnern, mahnen, and meminisse = sich erinnern, gedenken [to remember] (did not the dark remembrance of his origin in the spirit, in God, resound in man when he uttered his first ­self-created word?); the Gothic manna = Mensch, Mann, and munan = meinen [to believe], and muns = Gedanke [thought]; Minne [love] (originally Erinnerung [remembrance], Gedächtnis [memory], minnen thus really meant to think of something; in Old Nordic minne = Andenken [memento], Erinnerung, Gedächtnistrunk [­memory-potion]) mahnen (English to moan = klagen!), meinen [to believe]. The distant kinship of the word Mensch with the Greek ánemos = Hauch [breath], Wind, and the Latin animus = Geist, anima = Seele [soul], establishes again the so very significant connection with the primal word, which emerged from the cry of pain (dialect ant tuen). In the suffering of his being alive, intensified by his knowledge of death, of the necessity of dying, man reflected on his being human, on the spirituality of his existence; in his ­I-aloneness and ­Thou-seclusion, desiring the world and life in the face of death and consciousness thereof, and in this desire still secretly wanting nothing but his higher life, from which he felt himself fall, nothing but the return to his origin in the spirit, in God; in the powerless denial of the ­earth-boundedness of this existence

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fallen from God—thus did he create the word Mensch, thus did he give himself his name.11 11. That this primal experience of the specific human misfortune, which yielded the psychic and spiritual soil for the genesis of the word Mensch, was experienced first and deeply by the male; and that it was he who reflected on this experience of being human and on that point became the thinking, above all the ­h igher-order thinking being indeed has a biological basis, even though probably not exclusively, just as sexuality is really a biological fact of nature, not, however, of the spirit—in spite of Weininger. (The word Mann itself belongs to the Sanskrit root man and is related to Mensch, whose Old High German form mannisco really means Männische.) In a lecture on ­sex-determination, Paul Kammerer asserts that the biological experiment indicates that the embryo always becomes male when it finds itself up against the limit of its possibility of development; if things go badly for it, so that it is able to land at its goal of development only with real difficulty, it reaches it in the male form. Consequently, the male (Mann) already brings a weakening into life from his period of germination, which allows him to succumb to detrimental influence more easily than the woman—as from normal occupational stress such as the extraordinary requirements of the Iron Age. This greater frailty is already in force in the embryonic period, and it remains true for the male even up to the final age allotted to him, despite all dangers.

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Fragment 12 Mathematical Thought and the I— Harmony—Descartes—Word and Mathematical Formula— Substance and Ethos—The Principle of Identity—Reality

It is perhaps a far too bold and scarcely justifiable etymological extravagance to search for a special meaning in the phonetic components of the word “mathematics” (máthema, máthesis, from mathein, manthánein = to learn), by which one feels easily seduced after one has learned to respect the depth of etymology. One perhaps discerns in the theta in “theme” and “thesis” a reference to the ­sound-gesture that designates the Thou, to the setting of the relation to the Thou; and one may see in the syllable ma, just as in the m of the oblique case of the pronoun, the expression of the rejection of the Thou, of the seclusion from it, and of the a­ t-least-attempted absolutization of the I, of its ­making-itself-independent-from-the-Thou. One thing is certain, however: all scientific and mathematical thinking, all mathematical ideas, apperceptions, and concepts have their root in the “­I-aloneness” of human consciousness, likewise including those ideas and concepts in which thinking believes it understands itself best in its objectivity. Mathematics is the s­ elf-positing and absolutization of the I, which is raised completely into the sphere of theoretical and abstract thinking, and which obviously fails in the end. Mathematics has transformed all will and desire of the I, in which it has its inner subjective reali-

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ty, into a wholly abstract mathematical to comprehend, at the same time renouncing the factual will to have and even the will to be; it has thereby actually made the I unreal. As a result, the I has become completely unrecognizable, though it is always there. One may well see the perfect geometrical body in the sphere, just as the Greeks did. Now what is the real center of every ideal sphere? Nothing other than the I of the apperception of space. The reality of the I certainly does not lie in the sphere of the spatial, but of the temporal; the conception of the idea, in which the I in its aloneness seeks its spiritual certainty of existence, presupposes time as a real factor of human existence, though the idea tries to pass itself off as something eternal. For the idea takes its root in the will, and the will, in its being directed [Gerichtetsein], even in its being directed to the eternal, is always situated in time.1 Because this inner reality of the will of the I that lies in time disappears in scientific and mathematical thought, the mathematical thesis puts forth the claim to a timeless, eternal validity. But the eternity of its truth is an abstract one, not like the eternity of the truth of the divine word, which will endure even though heaven and earth pass away. 1. This does not, at first, undermine Kant’s attempted solution to the problem of time. His transcendental aesthetics is only concerned with space abstractly conceived, not concretely lived, and just so with time abstractly conceived, not concretely lived. In this abstract space (of the transcendental philosopher, of mathematicians, and of physicists) all destinations of direction in space are “relative” because there is not, as in the concretely lived space, an absolute up and down, right and left, front and behind. Perhaps biology and organic morphology will again thoroughly examine the meaning of destinations of direction. Nevertheless, the solution of the problem of time proposed by Kant may actually be the weak side of his transcendental aesthetics. For this problem does not belong in aesthetics at all, where it is always misunderstood, but rather in ethics. Yet once again, it can be rightly comprehended in its ethical nature only by religious man and in the spirit of Christianity. For the one who believes in the incarnation of God in the life of Jesus—where in that which is “eternal” and beyond all time of the spiritual life became “historical fact”—for the one who becomes totally “unphilosophical” in his religiousness and in this faith, time gains a significance of reality which neither Kant’s transcendental aesthetics nor the misunderstanding and self-delusion of the mystics in their “experience of God” are able to take away.

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The idea becomes palpable in the experience of beauty. Beauty in art and nature is the idea experienced directly as apperception. But in every apperception, space is fixed. The experience of beauty, however, lets man forget the origin of the idea in the will—and thereby in the temporality of human existence; it permits the I with its inner reality in the I will to completely disappear, similar to mathematical thinking, and thus does beauty finally give the appearance of absolutely timeless apperception. Yet it is still only a dream in which man knows nothing of reality, even of the spiritual reality of his existence. It arches like a shining mantle and radiant bridge over the abyss of the outer and inner brokenness of his life and conceals it.2 The abstract mathematical and physical apperception of space and the concrete experience of beauty are of course far enough apart from each other. Yet one of the things they do have in common is the fact that the I, because it seems to disappear entirely, does not become conscious of its I­ -aloneness. In his sensuous apperception, man experiences the cosmos as a sphere whose center is himself, or rather the I of his apperception of space. We cannot do other than see in man the natural and spiritual center of the cosmos. Modern science long ago believed itself to be beyond this obviously anthropocentric viewpoint for the comprehension of the universe. So it behaves as if it can ignore that the world, the object of its investigation and knowledge, is the experience of man; and that consequently, the world being given to science for investigation presupposes man. Man actually experiences the cosmos only as a hemisphere; and this clearly has its basis in his vantage point on the earth, in the e­ arth-boundedness of his existence, so thoroughly misunderstood by science, which has not 2. Beauty is the idea concretely experienced in beholding. The geometric determination of space, however, as body or plane, sphere, cube, triangle, circle, etc., is something abstract; yet a concrete experience may still underlie it in some sense, which man so to speak forgot long ago and which is recalled only in rare cases, and then only as a dark foreboding. This then leads to the mystical comprehension of geometric figures.

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only an external meaning, interesting even to science, but also an internal meaning never grasped by it. If man were to be rid of this ­earth-boundedness in which nevertheless lies the reality of his existence and the brokenness of life takes root, and which appertains to everything that exists as the decisive moment, he would then also be able to experience in his sensuous worldview the cosmos as a complete sphere, the universe as totality, so to speak. (But doesn’t the sensuousness of his essence cohere with this ­earth-boundedness?) He is never able to do that in reality. The brilliant metaphysician certainly dreams of this totality in his worldview, which is a spiritual rather than sensuous apperception. He does this in the idea of the cosmos, of the ­self-enclosed infinity and totality of all being, which nothing else but the apperception of the ideal sphere secretly underlies. But the philosopher is entangled in indissoluble contradiction when he attempts to devise and imagine this totality. To imagine this totality means to gain an apperception that no human consciousness is capable of, albeit only an ideal one; and the ground of this is none other than the ­I-aloneness of consciousness. In order to envisage, without contradiction, the universe in its infinity and its oneness as cosmos, which embraces all being in its completeness, consciousness would have to be capable of emerging from its aloneness. To that end a second consciousness would be necessary, precisely as with the mental image of that “­total-plane” of the physicist Barthel. A totality of being is obviously not thought but lived through in the experience of beauty—the latter being the inner precondition for the possession of a worldview in the brilliant metaphysician. It is of course a merely dreamt totality, beyond and apart from the reality of being. And being engrossed in it, in this deep relief of his soul amidst the misery of his existence, man cannot recall that he is only dreaming. Attention should also be drawn here to musical intuition—which shares that special pneumatological circumstance with the experience of beauty—an intuition in which the spiritu-

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al life of man, having become objective and being transposed into the aesthetic, takes a different and opposite direction compared to what is found in the conception of the idea, which proceeds from the outer and inner manifoldness of life and experience in order to comprehend its totality in the idea. Musical intuition, so it at least appears, goes the opposite direction, taking its departure from an inner totality to move toward the manifoldness of life and experience. The idea embraces a manifoldness in its totality; musical intuition bears the totality in itself and unfolds it from within in the melos created by it. That is as it may be. It is correct, as Goethe said, that there is no totality in nature; for it is not a fact of nature but of spirit, a (to be sure only aesthetic) deed of the spirit (determining itself aesthetically).

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Since the beauty experienced in beholding has a relationship to space, it goes without saying that all space relations per­ceived as beautiful can be established mathematically and expressed numerically. This is a discovery that clearly made a considerable impression on the ancient Greeks, especially in their philosophy and above all in the Platonic theory of ideas. Without it, this people so thoroughly gifted aesthetically would probably have never concerned itself with mathematics at all beyond utmost necessity. Instead, mathematics stood in such high esteem with their thinkers that Plato considered it, along with dialectic, as the highest of all arts and sciences. It is thus a reference back to a specific Greek notion and an attempt at a scientific renewal and practical application of Platonism, so to speak, when E. Zederbauer, in his book Harmony in the Cosmos, in Nature and Art, attempted to prove with numerous examples that the same harmonic relations “which made their appearance at all times in the most important works of art” also govern “the endless multiplicity of the forms of the animal and plant world,” and even the “arrangement of the stars in the heavens.” According to him

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these relations are as the proportions of the sides of a triangle and of the radius of a circle, both of which are given in the “harmonic” triangle and “harmonic” circle.3 Hence the ­space-forming event in nature, in the cosmos, would actually have already been predisposed to the experience of beauty as its object; this is nothing else but the experience of that creative urge of nature for harmony “in its pure being, in the eternity of its life,” which the artist bears in himself as the secret of his creation and which he reveals in his works (the poet and artist like to hear that). In them the artist imitates nature less than he fulfills it in the sphere of the spiritualized—lifting out of time and capturing that one moment of full life of a form in nature, that moment of true, perfect beauty in which life is what it is in all eternity and outside of which only a becoming and a passing away befalls it. “To present in fact what exists [Seiende] in nature” is the highest purpose that art can have. So said Schelling, who after Plato is certainly the most aesthetic of all philosophers and who indeed philosophized most deeply about art—and for that very reason his philosophy has not exactly received high honor. Suppose that it is so. Then the only thing that really challenges contemplation and philosophizing is that deviation from this mathematically represented law of harmony that is still to be explained, that demands an interpretation, and that in individual cases at least is to be observed again and again in the forms of nature just as in works of art. What prohibits the pervasive and complete realization of the harmonic formation of space?4 Or must we be content that what is referred to is the development and hope of someday seeing everything brought into beautiful order in the course of time (and 3. The former is an isosceles rectangular triangle, the latter a circle that circumscribes the squares built on the sides of this triangle, whose exterior angle points project equally far from the bisection of the hypotenuse. 4. This amounts to the same question we are justified in raising in view of the periodicity of the course of life, of the harmonic completion and formation of concretely experienced time, which is jointly maintained by the researchers Hermann Swoboda and Wilhelm Fliess but which is never completely validated.

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that development and the cosmos have time enough)? Yet imagine the realization of that harmonious world. Everything would then be in the most beautiful order. Men would not have the slightest reason to philosophize—for if there is philosophizing, it proves once and for all that something is still not in order. They would constantly behold nothing but beauty in their experience of the world, and each being an artist or even a genius, they would use the power of their life for nothing else but the creation of beauty in imperishable works of art. But here the false conclusion of this way of thinking already shows itself, which is inevitable when one reasons it to its end, because it arises from a deep misunderstanding. That is to say, artistic creation no less than philosophic thought is founded on there being something not in order. That harmonious world in which there would be nothing else but the being [Sein] of this world that creates harmony and beauty, even in the sphere of human life, does not exist in reality. It is only a dream, the dream of the spirit in its aesthetic unfolding. But supposing it does exist—would it not in the last analysis be a dream once again? For the fact that its perfect beauty, which would be its reality, could be completely grasped and expressed in a mathematical demonstration, turns into a projection of our inner reality that beholds it and experiences it as beauty, as it were, into a projection of the I. For we must bear in mind that everything mathematical, the geometric determination of space, takes root in the ­I-aloneness of consciousness, which is insufficient for the comprehension of the reality of being and is nothing else but its abstraction. Let it remain an open question whether, on the other hand, the assurance of the reality of the world experienced by us resides precisely in this: that the world is not a cosmos in perfect harmony, even though in the course of events the beginning and way to such a harmony emerges; in its s­ pace-occupying striving for harmony, the world is impeded by something within its own events (and what could that be other than the resistance of matter?); just as when we do not see the inner

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law of beauty fully manifest in a work of art, we assume that something is not in order, not only in the deeply personal life of the artist, but also in his creation itself, in his objective spiritual life; that, expressed quite abstractly and rationally scientifically (but in a way that puts a reversed value on the opposing elements in question), the qualitative relations in the world cannot be completely reduced to quantity. The answers to these questions lead inevitably into the field of metaphysical speculation in which everything aesthetic always entices us. Are we now to accept the objective and idealistic conception of the notion of the Demiurge of the gnostics, or are we to simply perceive in life the element that wrestles with the resistance of matter in the events of the world? Or by embracing a subjectively turned idealism—which is no longer aesthetically but in its ultimate basis ethically directed, though it nevertheless always returns to the aesthetic, because in the metaphysical it seeks a mooring for the ethical, which cannot endure by itself—will we seek that resistance in the inner reality of the being of the I itself as a fact that is to be ethically inhibited or perhaps even demanded, that calls the I into action? All such metaphysical problems (which irritate poets far more than philosophers, and the latter also when they are poets) directly or indirectly amount to an absolutizing of our ­I-aloneness; they arise in our dreams of the spirit, apart from the reality of our spiritual life, truly as a symptom that something is not in order in that life. Let neither their solution, which no one has yet attained, nor their insolvability trouble us. We must turn our glance away from them to that place where our real spiritual life is to be sought w ­ hile coming to know of our ­I-aloneness and the ­earth-boundedness of our existence in their true meaning, which is so misunderstood by science and preferably speculated entirely away by a mystically tinged metaphysics; and never losing sight of them as the reality of our being in the world, in our life broken in the resistance of matter, we have to strive toward the unbrokenness of the spiritual life. To

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that end, we need no science and mathematics, no art and philosophy, and no experience of beauty in nature—we need but God, and the word that comes from God.

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Both of the discoverers of the I were great mathematicians: Descartes—the father of modern philosophy, one of the cofounders of modern scientific thought—of the abstractly philosophical I, and Pascal, discoverer of the I concretely in the reality of will. Both, however, were attentive to the aloneness of this I and the spiritual untenability of this state, Pascal in a religious respect and Descartes in an episte­mological context—an aspect of his philosophy until now almost completely ignored and not considered in its extraordinary implications. Descartes held to be true only that which could be perceived “clearly and distinctly”—clair et distinct—like mathematical propositions; hence for him, geometry and arithmetic are “models of methodological knowledge,” “examples for the fundamental science of knowledge.” He doubted that human thinking in its objectivity could really understand itself best in these mathematical representations and concepts; he called into question the implicit nature of a mathematical proposition as its evidence of truth; he encountered the I­ -aloneness of human consciousness, of mathematical thinking, and saw its inadequacy for knowledge of the truth. For he, as Theodore Haecker said of him, had first to be certain of God in order to have insight into the truth of a proposition of geometry. “Car, cela même que j’ai tantôt pris pour une règle, à savior que les choses que nous concevons très clairement et très distinctement sont toutes vraies, n’est assuré qu’à cause que Dieu est ou existe,” as it states in Discours de la méthode. God is the presupposition of all truth and of all knowledge of the truth, even in mathematical thinking. But the true spiritual life of man does not reside in the latter in its pure theoretical meaning. A science that is not spiritually supported in man by this pro-

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found and, properly speaking, no longer scientific or philosophic consciousness of Descartes of God as the presupposition of all knowledge of the truth has nothing but the e­ arth-boundedness of human existence in view; and while of course completely misunderstanding it, such a science takes offense at man’s glance up to heaven and comes necessarily to relativism, for which there is no truth at all, and in some sense to pragmatism. Strictly speaking, science is actually godless, even if it engages in theology. It knows nothing of God and is neither for nor against him and cannot change its spots. But if man can be made godless by it, if man uses it for a demonstration against God, as in the course of the nineteenth century, then one must reproach man—not science. The situation is different with philosophy, which really seeks God from the very beginning (without, however, being able to find him in his reality) and in that way differs from science. It always strives toward metaphysics—because it seeks God; yet this is at the same time its urge to become science, to convert metaphysics into science just like physics. And the more scientific philosophy becomes, the more godless it becomes, so as to finally come to a demonstration against God just as science—yet like the latter, not through its own fault but that of man. It stands even nearer to this danger than science. For there is no philosophy in itself like there is science in itself, but only the philosophy of a definite philosopher, which then to be sure can be adopted by an entire generation and made its own. Therefore, when science becomes a demonstration against God, not through its own but man’s fault, man no longer simply accepts it as such (as it knows nothing of God and is neither for nor against him), but he has made it his philosophy, the substitution for religion, his philosophy in opposition to God, which then contradicts the hidden meaning of all philosophy, which is the search for God.

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The ­I-aloneness of all scientific and mathematical thinking has as consequence the word standing in diametrical opposition to the mathematical formula. To become mathematics is the goal of all natural science, of all knowledge about the events in the external world, as is commonly known; final physical knowledge will perhaps one day be expressed in a mathematical formula that can no longer be uttered in words. Yet knowledge of the events in the internal world must become word and be tested by word, and it is quite impossible that one could ever express it in a mathematical formula. It is not our spiritual life, but our sensuous experience, which cannot totally become word. The more spirit enters into our sensuous life, the nearer it draws to the word. And that life is to become word for its expiation. The mathematical formula stands in the same relationship to that which is given objectively for our thinking as substance, as the word does to that which exists subjectively in the sense of a personality. We see once again the tendency toward substantialization playing its inevitable role in objective thinking, and we only appear to avoid its influence when we, overcoming the materialism of the apprehension of nature, resolve to learn how to think energetically. It was indeed this tendency that pushed language to naming, to the nominalization of experience; yet it strives beyond language and the word p­ recisely toward mathematical formula. Every relationship of things existing as a mode of substance has to be capable of being brought mutually to the latter; only then do we actually have a scientific knowledge of it. But the word in the actuality of its being spoken directly expresses the relationship of that which exists as personality. No man will ever come to the deranged thought of turning love into a mathematical formula. The situation is, to be sure, entirely different with the law of sexual attraction, although it is dubious whether even that can actually ever be formulated mathematically. It was attempted by Otto Weininger. No mathematical proof can be

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adduced for love and for the sense of the word. And no other proof, either. In its ultimate consequence, mathematical knowledge is the abrogation of the word and the death of love. We thus see mathematical knowledge ultimately amount to a condition of the human spirit that is actually nothing else but insanity: the ­I-aloneness and the ­Thou-seclusion of the spirit carried to the extreme. The mathematical formula in its abstractness relates to the material as its concrete content. Yet substance carried to its logical conclusion is the absolutely ­I-less reality, whose subjective expression would be the insanity of the ultimate mathematical knowledge. By the latter in its wordlessness and lovelessness making complete the seclusion of the I before the Thou, it would abrogate the I itself—as well as consciousness itself. Neither philosophy nor science can get over the fact that consciousness is a subjective fact that is bound to individual existence.5 Objectivity enters into individual existence in the tendency for substantialization. What moreover stands behind this tendency and all objectivity of thinking? Nothing else but the suffering from life, from the brokenness of life, thus something very subjective, and the will to be rid of suffering, a will to not take up one’s cross. Yet if consciousness becomes more and more objective, and finally so completely objective that there is no longer a vestige of subjectivity, and thus totally wordless, the word, however, is the precondition for the intensification of consciousness into ­being-conscious, and this is the only basis for objective thinking—then, what is left? Absolutely nothing. The word, one could say, is the evidence of the objective concretization of the spiritual life—just as beauty in its being experienced is the evidence of the idea, of the dream of the spirit. The spiritual 5. As is generally known, objective thinking does not know what to do with individual existence; it never has the concrete individual case in view, rather the abstract type or law, which the phenomenon of the individual case obeys. But just in that does the problem lie, and also the problem of the thinker himself.

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life in its reality belongs to the sphere of the subjective. The mathematical formula in its abstractness is the objective expression for the Thoulessness of the objectively knowing I. In the formula this I (something certainly subjective and, understood spiritually as the moi of Pascal, concrete in the reality of its will) has objectified itself and has vanished into abstraction. In knowledge that is mathematically formulated, the knowing I has vanished j­ust as in the experience of beauty the beholding I vanished; in the wordlessness of this knowledge it has ceased to exist. The highest mathematics, which could now be expressed only in formulas that are impossible to put into words, would be the reason for man become irrational. For there is reason only in the relationship to the word, through which it is placed in man. And how is there still to be reason, if there were not even this relationship as a longing for language? With its final renunciation of the word, mathematics is not reason; rather, reason lies in the longing of thought to become word and in the ineradicable need of man to express in words a mathematically formulated knowledge. But in the verbalization of thought, the I—in the I­ -aloneness—seeks its Thou. Reason seeks the word, thus its origin—for it was created by the word. It seeks God, for the word is from God. Therein lies the inner life of thought: it seeks God, and it does so by becoming word. A thought that becomes totally formulated mathematically no longer seeks God in its wordlessness. It has also forfeited its life and is now dead. Who would want to find God—the truth and the life—in a mathematical formula? Rather, he is to be found in the word. In the former, reason renounces the relationship to the word that constitutes it, the I renounces its relation to the Thou through which it exists, and man renounces God who created him. Pure mathematics is reason that in the last analysis abandons itself. In addition to the mathematical ­self-sufficiency of thoughts that in the end renounce the word, there is still an aesthetic self-sufficiency of thoughts that in their verbalization, being fundamentally

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intended as an absolute thinking in language, have the ­I-aloneness of thinking for a principle (they thus rob the word of its deeper and real meaning, no matter how much honor they may accord it), and they therefore in no way refer to a Thou, not even rightly to an ideal Thou. They have not nor do they want to have the power in themselves to produce new ideas in man, to awaken spiritual life in this sense. There is nothing in them, in their formal perfection, that would push toward further growth, life, and thought; they can and want only to be admired. Even more than the words of the poet, they permit the spiritual in the word to appear totally as an aesthetic value, and they thus misunderstand the word in its true meaning for the spiritual life—while they still believe they understand and comprehend the word and language in the latter’s interior and most hidden life.

�

If we bear in mind how the tendency of substantialization requires the mathematical formulation of knowledge as ultimate consequence, Spinoza immediately occurs to us, this most pronounced type of philosopher who thinks substantially, and the geometric demonstration of his Ethics, which is by no means an accident or philosophic caprice, but is founded deeply in the inclination of his entire thinking. With good reason may one take offense at a substantialistic ethics that is geometrically demonstrated—truly a contradictio in adiecto. For ethical knowledge is directly opposed in its orientation to the tendency of substantialization. The latter would necessarily entail the abrogation of consciousness in its final yet never reached goal—because in the orientation given by it the ­I-aloneness of consciousness would be completed in absolute Thoulessness and godlessness; whereas ethical knowledge is the completion of the specifically human consciousness (thus of ­being-conscious), the realization of consciousness of human existence. But without God, since man needs him for his spiritual life

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(while God does not need man, which the mystics appear not at all to understand), ethical knowledge would not be what it should be: knowledge of ­I-aloneness as sin, the s­ elf-knowledge of the I in the knowledge of sin. This is not possible without faith, without the personal decision of man for or against the spirituality of his existence, and that means precisely for or against God; for only in relation to him does man have his true spiritual life. The ethical pushes man toward the spiritual reality of his life, for it speaks to the I and rouses this I to the reality of its will. Only it is not thereby capable of placing the I into a relation to the Thou. The ethical cannot exist separately; it must either be anchored in the metaphysical—that means however, in the dream of the spirit: since the metaphysical nevertheless strives toward spiritual reality, it abrogates this dream; the idea becomes conscious of its subjective origin in the I, in the will, and with that is given in its ethical significance the possibility of its withdrawal and the inducement to spiritual ­self-destruction; or the ethical is rooted immovably in the religious in God’s relation to man, and then certainly that taking back of the idea is eo ipso impossible. The tendency of substantialization leads man to unconsciousness; the ethical orientation of thought leads to consciousness of himself. Yet the latter does not actually reach its goal without being anchored in the religious: a godless ethics and a godless moral sense [Ethos] are certainly conceivable, but in the end still spiritually untenable. The one whose thinking yields to the tendency of substantialization forgets himself and the reality of his life in the world; he forgets the suffering of his existence. In all his thoughts he leaves himself out (and this reality of life and this suffering)—he becomes completely objective and considers it an honor. There is something he does not take note of precisely because he forgets himself: behind all his thoughts and his objectivity still lurks his suffering from life itself, the deepest suffering of man from his natural ­I-aloneness. The more objective he becomes, the more alone becomes his I, the

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greater becomes his suffering from this isolation. But he hardly notices it and knows nothing of it.6 In his ethical thinking, however, man never forgets himself and the reality of his life in the world, his ethical, inner brokenness of life. He has that continuously in view; he does not omit himself in his thinking and does not look away from himself, all the less, the more ethically he thinks—which can also drive him to despair. An objective ethics is obviously possible, but not an objective ethical mode of thinking. That is always subjective, and it must be. But its goal, man’s consciousness of himself, is reached only when it has its steadfast foothold in the relation to God—only through which this consciousness of man in the ­earth-boundedness of his existence becomes possible. The coming of the knowledge of sin—the fruit of the ethical consciousness of the self before God—and the awareness of suffering as from God, who is love, constitutes the highest 6. Even the theologian, precisely because he pursues theology as a seemingly objective science, can spiritually fall victim to the tendency of substantialization. His thinking does indeed have its point of departure in the faith in the personality of the existence of God, but then again, forgetting this starting point, he nonchalantly operates with the concept of divine substance—as if the personality and the substantiality of existing, the former a fact of the spiritual life not to be further explained in its reality, the latter nothing but a necessity of thought, could ever be reconciled by thinking. By rights such a theologian would consequently have to strive to put God and his relation to man and to the world, his incarnation in the life of Jesus and the redemption of man through it, into a mathematical formula in which not only his own existence but also that of God, would then be abolished. Naturally, that wouldn’t do either in one case or in the other case. But this will do: the theologian, while speculating about God, at the same time forgets himself in his spiritual predicament—if he would remember it, he would find no time at all for speculation. He does not reflect on the fact that the question is not in the least that of the objective knowledge of the existence of God (not to mention the firmly substantiated impossibility of this knowledge), which substantializes God and thereby also divests him of personality; rather, it is solely a matter of he himself having, in the personality of his existence, a personal relation to God (in which eo ipso one does not speculate), just as God has a personal relation to him. In the eagerness of his speculating and demonstrating, which truly is not pleasing to God, the theologian who has become entirely objective does not ponder the truth uttered by Pascal, that “ces sortes de preuves ne peuvent nous conduire qu’à une connoissance spéculative de Dieu: et ne le connoître que de cette c’est ne pas le connôitre.”

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human ­self-consciousness, which alone is really ­being-conscious. Not to recognize sin, not to reflect that all suffering from the brokenness of life comes from God, and to put the blame on fate toward which one feels defenseless and helpless, is the flight of the human spirit from the predicament of sin and from the burden of suffering, the flight into the unconscious, into unconsciousness. The crucially important opposition of the substantialist to the ethical is expressed in that, whereas the former aims at the mathematical formula, the latter seeks the word—the word of God, which utters the commandment of love. But it is not forever compelled to find the word. Christ, in whom the word in the divinity of its origin “became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14), Christ is the end of the “law” (Rom 10:4): every law desires Christ. The law desires the reality of the spiritual life, which it cannot itself bring forth in man; it desires its fulfillment and its end in divine love. Idealism seeks its own end and finds it in Christ and in the fulfillment of his commandment of love. Since man has the reality of his spiritual life in love, he no longer needs the law, the idea; he lives by grace. Whoever loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law, as the Letter to the Romans says. Whoever loves his neighbor is not merely a hearer of the word, in which we have the grace and truth of our life, but also its doer. And that is the ultimate meaning of the word in the humanity of its origin: in it the commandment of love has been expressed by Jesus; it has assimilated the word in the divinity of its origin—it has become the word of love. What does a mathematical formula know of the word and of love? What does it know of the mystery of our life, of God?

�

The basis of all logical connections of ideas and of mathematical thinking is the principle of identity. Fichte made the significant discovery that behind this principle lies hidden nothing else but the ­self-assertion, and what is more, he wrongly believed, s­ elf-positing,

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of the I. A = A means I am I—from there, while speculating resolutely, he ventured to deduce the whole world from this thesis, which he could just as well have spared himself. Just like the principle of identity—which is I­-aloneness become objective and abstract and wherein the I, made unrecognizable in its abstractness, attempts to assert its existence in its seclusion before the Thou and to find its spiritual certainty of existence in its ­self-positing and to exist in its aloneness without God—and the remaining principal presuppositions of our logical thinking are at bottom nothing else but abstract objectification, made theoretically viable and valid, of the subjective facts of our spiritual life, which in their turn once again have their basis in that the word is given to man—but certainly not for the purpose of speculating and theorizing. So, for example, the principle of sufficient cause is nothing else but the abstract consciousness of man of his origin in God, which in its darkness does not understand itself. All principles of logic and thinking must ultimately be related to God, just as Theodor Haecker said of the principle of identity: it has its full meaning only in God, in its eternal identity with itself. The meaning of the primal sentence was “I am,” but not “I am I”; it signified the I setting itself into a relationship to the Thou, but not its ­self-positing in the principle of identity—in the absolutizing of the seclusion from the Thou. This principle of identity is the presupposition not only of logical thinking, but also of man’s ethical consciousness of himself. Yet the direct result of the ethically intended “I am I” has to be the consciousness that I should be someone fundamentally different than who I am. In other words, the ethically understood principle of identity brings forth directly in man the principle of contradiction. With that we stand before the possibility of ethical despair, which, if the ethical is not religiously anchored, leads to s­ elf-deception or to the withdrawal of the idea. But if it is religiously anchored it leads to the gravest sin, to despair of divine grace—in both cases the same result: absolute spiritual lostness.

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And here lies the final and deepest, the most difficult to understand and fulfill demand of the spiritual life: that man not concern himself about the salvation of his soul. To be concerned about it still belongs to the sphere of the psychological in which the I relates to itself and has not yet emerged from its I­ -aloneness; it does not yet belong to the sphere of the pneumatological in which it has attained its true and proper relation to the Thou. Who, knowing the seriousness of the spiritual life, is not terrified at the thought that the religious concern of man about himself and the salvation of his soul, the only one about which he is to be worried in this life, and that the anxiety of being spiritually lost, without which the spiritual life in man is not able to begin, may in the final analysis be reprehensible? For all that, this anxiety and worry are only a starting point and a transitional stage, in no case to be avoided, but in which man must not remain spiritually stuck. We must after all bear in mind the words in the gospel: “Whoever wants to save his life, will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it.” Whoever loves his soul will lose it—and that one still loves it who is worried about its salvation; and whoever hates his soul in this world preserves it for eternal life. Let man learn to know the sin of his existence, a­ nd he will never perceive it without horror at himself and without anxiety about himself. But let his worry be about his relation with God and the realization of that relation in faith and in love. Trusting in grace unshakably, let him place the salvation of his soul into the hand of him who is the spiritual ground of his existence. Otto Weininger maintained that the principle of identity could neither be proved (because its proof already presupposes it) nor refuted but had to be believed. Further, logic fundamentally could not do without faith—which itself does not need logic—and one could believe only in himself; consequently, faith in logic is fundamentally faith in oneself. Nevertheless, we stand before a fundamental misunderstanding of faith—not surprising for a philosopher. An ab-

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stract principle can never be the object and content of faith, just as a product of the imagination can never be. The imagination, Hamann said in his Socratic memoirs, even if it were a horse of the ­sun-god and had the wings of dawn, cannot be the author of faith. Only a concrete spiritual being can ever be believed. That is of course the “I” as the direct declaration of personality in the sentence “I am.” It is not the truth of a thought that must be believed, but rather the truth of the declaration of the thought, the truth in the word. If I am to believe the truest meaning of the word, it presupposes the being addressed, not however the s­ elf­-expression, of the spiritual in me; it presupposes that the I in me is made into the Thou of the word or of love by something spiritual outside of me. The fact that I am, I do not believe; further, I myself do not believe in the truth of the declaration of the sentence “I am”; rather the situation is this: the thought, one could also say the consciousness and declaration, of “I am,” is made possible only through the belief in the Thou, but not through the faith of the I in itself. The existence of the I—and the I exists in s­ elf-consciousness and in the word “I am”—presupposes the existence of the Thou and the relationship to this existence in faith. Weininger did not recognize that, because he grasped the essence of the true I just as little as all other philosophers. No man can believe in himself, and if he does, if the I in its I­ -aloneness believes in itself, it is truly perversity of the spiritual life. Faith, one could also say, is the personal decision for the Thou. Man can believe in himself just as little as he can turn himself into the object of faith, as the I can make itself the Thou of the word or of love without thereby losing itself. In the word and in love we have the true object and content of faith: that is God—and above all his incarnation, the logos made flesh. The faith that Weininger has in mind is a faith without love, which to be sure is ultimately nothing else but faith in oneself. His ethical idealism necessarily fails to recognize the I­ -aloneness of human existence in its true significance—as sin—and therefore also

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misjudges man’s need for redemption and his will to be redeemed as cowardice. It is after all the inevitable consequence of idealism to convert the I­ -aloneness into the principle of the spiritual life in itself, the I into the absolute first person, just as Weininger did. It actually means nothing else but the deification of the I, its identification with God. To deify the I and to identify it with God, however, signifies the I that knows nothing of the Thou. And thus Weininger says at the end of chapter 7 of Sex and Character: man is alone in the cosmos, in an eternal vast aloneness. And later on: nothing is placed over him, the alone one, the ­all-one. Only religious consciousness, which Weininger lacked as he conceived and wrote his work, makes it possible to grasp wholly the gruesome blaspheming madness of such a thought, in the ­ice-coldness of which all spiritual life lies in rigor mortis. Arriving at the consequences (at which Weininger was skilled like few others), this idealism could understand love only as the erotic illusion of man that belongs to the sphere of the aesthetic and that is therefore ethically repudiated by it. This idealism was thus bound to misunderstand love in its essence as fact and demand of the spiritual life, and it did not see its indissoluble connection with faith; it did not bear in mind the word of the apostle, that it is love that makes faith effective. Faith, which “comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17), by the word of God that utters the commandment of love, faith prepares the way in man for the reality of the spiritual life; but love is itself this reality.7 Faith is nothing without love. But the love that man 7. Faith and love belong together pneumatologically, but they are also etymologically related as individual words. Glauben [faith], just as the related erlauben [to allow] and loben [to praise], has the basic meaning gutheissen [to approve of]: Glauben, the personal decision for God, is the Gutheissung [approval] and Bejahung [affirmation] of the spirituality of life (ja from the Old High German jehan = to confess, admit, but usually, to say, express; it is also at the root of the word Beichte [confession], from the Old High German bijehan = to confess, admit fundamentally. Faith is a declaration of oneself for God, for the truth, and for the spirituality of life). The word Liebe [love] has the Sanskrit root lubh = intense desire: with faith in God, man desires the spirituality of his life; in love he gives the will the direction to his true

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experiences, be it from man, be it the divine love that revealed itself in the making flesh of the logos, can never be known; it must be believed. And as with the love that we encounter, so also with every word we hear spoken, there is something that must be believed in. For the meaning of a word cannot be proven; speaking, seizing the word as it is said, always signifies an operation of personality that just as much belongs to the essence of faith as it actually requires faith. And precisely in that the word includes the demand of faith lies its ultimate meaning—to which we so rarely pay attention, because we are usually only aware of that in the word which can and must be understood, which alone concerns the intellect. The truth of the concretely spoken word in which personality engages calls for faith from another as the personal decision for it; the truth of the abstractly conceived thesis of science, mathematics, or metaphysics, in the formation of which personality is left out of account, calls for the impersonal decision of the intellect. Not only is the error of thinking, whose objective rectification is possible, the antithesis of the truth, but also the lie of the declaration, which can be uncovered in many cases but in some cases not at all and under no circumstances. Not only the intellect, but also reason belong to the lie; for otherwise the animal could also lie. The lie also signifies an engagement of the personality, but at the same time its inner abandonment. It is possible only because man has the word and through the word reason and personality. And it is the most serious misuse of the word, the nullification and annihilation of its meaning. In the word is the truth, but also the lie. If linguistics one day should uncover the etymological relationship of “logos” and telos, which is God. To love man in the right sense would mean as much as, humbling himself before him, to admit one’s sin, thus to confess, to affirm God in him. Moreover, that it is possible not to approve of the spirituality of one’s life, not to love and even directly to hate it, was once disclosed with blunt clarity by a materialist who in a natural science publication had the presumption to remark that if he were sure of an immortal soul, he would strive for nothing else but to destroy it—remarkably thoughtless, as if that were at all possible.

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“lie” (as example for the contradictory sense of the primal word), it would only confirm through the profoundness of language what has already been established pneumatologically. Every other kind of lie in addition to the declaration, thus the lie of emotion, of demeanor, of the entire attitude of a man in life, takes root in the word and its misuse, and like the word, a lie is an unsuccessful attempt to assert the personality. It is, as is the case with the pathological liar, a symptom of a defect of personality, or it makes the personality defective itself. The word, which demands faith and commands love, mediates between man and God—not between God and the world as the logos of Philo, or at least we know nothing of it. We need faith—and the word—as the absolution of the spirit in the I­ -aloneness and the ­earth-boundedness of our existence, which is so misunderstood by us in our aloneness; we need faith in our constant readiness to seclude ourselves from the Thou; we need it to realize our sin. For this realization is not possible without faith in God and his incarnation. The word has liberated us from the prison of our I­ -aloneness and raised us from death to life; love shatters the Chinese wall. Perhaps if man could make his love perfect through faith in the divinity of the Thou also in man, faith would then be superfluous, for the sin of man’s existence would have disappeared and there would be nothing more worth knowing to learn. (And the word would have returned to its origin in God, there being no more commandment to love, but rather love itself.) Is there, however, such a man? Without God the I sinks into the abyss of nothingness, for it exists only in the relation to him, to the Thou. And without the relationship to the word—which in its liveliness and actuality is the objectification of this relation, of man to God as well as God to man ­w ithout the relationship to the logos—mathematical knowledge and the reason that becomes wordless in a mathematical formula also sink into the abyss of nothingness.

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� If what was once written in a natural science journal essay is true, it follows as a consequence of the theory of heat (the second principle of which ostensibly, which is then extremely characteristic and significant, can no longer be completely expressed in words, but only in a mathematical formula), that the world exists against all physical and mathematical probability. The outcome of this theory, which certainly strikes one as strange and which ultimately cannot grasp the fact that the world exists and hence also why it exists, simply leaves out the I ­in this ­I-aloneness of scientific and mathematical thought carried to the extreme, which leads to an, even though only apparent, ­I-lessness. That is to say, it disregards the fact that the world is not given to us other than in our experience of the world, which is also the case for natural science investigation and explanation. Yet because it leaves out the I, the subjective factor of our experience of the world, even this finally slips away from it: it is unable to grasp its own existence. The assumption that the world exists has been made—contrary to all physical and mathematical probability. Its existence must be assumed not because it is to be proven, to be accounted for physically and mathematically, but precisely because it exists. And the world exists because there is consciousness of which it is the object and content; it exists because there is the I whose experience it is—in spite of all physical and mathematical improbability of its existence. The I­ -aloneness of consciousness, however, besides being in the end encouraged by such consequences of the theory of heat, threatens to dissolve the existence of the world into a dream. In the final analysis only the I exists that dreams the world and conceives the mathematical formula. It is the I that thinks and posits itself in the principle of identity: in the equation x = x, to which the mathematical formulation of the completely scientized events of the world is finally reduced, and in its unknown, the I no longer recognizes it194



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self. But this I simply does not exist, since it has already disappeared while conceiving the final mathematical formula in its absolute wordlessness; it has done away with itself—and also with the world. And thus we stand before absolute nothingness. Mathematics in its final perfection is reason become objectless, consciousness become entirely objective without object. It is reason that has become not only ­I-less but also godless. The I, as the subject of experience who furnishes the object to mathematical thinking and makes possible the relationship to reality, does not actually exist outside of its relationship to the Thou. It was created by the word for this relationship. The world exists as experience that presupposes the I. Yet the I exists because God created it. The world exists as creation of God to some extent indirectly beyond the I, beyond man. That the I is intended for a relation to the Thou grants us the security that the world we experience is real, is not merely dreamt and a projection of the I. This security does not reside in the concretely experienced resistance of matter, nor in a difficult to attain logical proof, which even if successful would be understood only by a few. Since this intention for a relation to the Thou includes the demand of faith, it is entirely correct when Pascal asserts that no one has certainty outside of faith, whether he is awake or asleep: “Qui sait, si cette autre moitié de la vie où nous pensons veiller n’est pas un autre sommeil un peu différent du premier, dont nous éveillons quand nous pensons dormir?” But in no way do we believe directly in the reality of that world for which there can never be an object and content of faith; it is our positive relation to the Thou, it is our faith in God that mediates the reality of the world for us. The I exists only in its relationship to the Thou; this Thou, however, is in the world of the I’s experience. And God, who is the true Thou of the I in man, himself became man and entered into this world in order to give us in his incarnation, in the becoming flesh of the logos, the object and content of faith. The more the I secludes itself from the Thou in the natural ­I-aloneness of human existence, the more it ­de-real-izes

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[entwirklicht] the world into its own projection (even though this does not take place in the praxis of its inner life, for that would lead directly to insanity, but only in the theory of metaphysical speculation); yet so much more the I also d­ e-real-izes itself, while still not being aware of this fact. While entangled in the realities of its external existence in the world and being blind to the spiritual realities of life, by losing itself in this world, the I d­ e-real-izes itself and with it this world as well, even though unnoticed by it. Whether the I in its aloneness keeps itself in view and d­ e-real-izes the world consciously, or conversely, whether it envisages only the world practically or theoretically and thereby unconsciously itself ceases to be real, amount to one and the same thing: to the spiritual death of man. This is of course not in reality an actual death, not an absolute annihilation, but rather an eternal dying, in which the spiritual in man never again comes to life—and likewise still can never die. It is therefore really only the religious man, who is awakened to the realities of the spiritual life through the grace of the word, who experiences this world in its full and complete reality; and only he comprehends the true meaning of this reality.

�

It is of no use to science to completely become mathematics. In his ­I-aloneness, the consciousness of man can never comprehend the reality of being. Indeed, it is an extremely profound thought based on the recognition of the spiritual inadequacy of this ­I-aloneness and referring to the heart of all being and reality, which in order to grasp the actual form of the earth led to the conception of that uncurved, ­self-enclosed total plane, the uncontradicted mental image of which would be possible only in a joint thought with a second consciousness. But can this be realized? Can man emerge from his ­I-aloneness for the purpose of perception and theory? Emerge he should, which is the demand of the spiritual life—which, however, he does not fulfill in his worldview and obviously not in the meta-

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physician’s brilliant dream of the cosmos, and also not in the apperception of reality that is only to be realized, if it is possible at all, in that joint thought of two conscious persons. Rather, the demand is fulfilled only in the personal relation of his I to the Thou.

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Fragment 13 Verb and Sentence—The Meaning of the T­ -Sound

The primal word emerged from an interjection of pain; and since language could not begin at all other than with a sentence, it was such. By the speaking person bringing his existence to expression in it, he named himself. The nominative I originated from the primal sentence, no matter how it might have been constituted phonetically. But because the primal word was a sentence in the first person, it implied not only the s­ elf-naming of the I (as a mere noun or pronoun it would still not have been a sentence), but at the same time a verb, which, according to the sense of the primal sentence, was one of existential declaration, of the s­ elf-assertion of the speaking person, thus am. A verb belongs to every sentence as its soul, so to speak, as the word that creates the sentence, which molds the individual words into the sentence form and which organically orders and joins them.1 In the verb “in which almost all roots are represented,” Jacob Grimm saw “the greatest and real power of language, with the exception of the l­ife-giving pronoun.” Only the word in the sentence is a living word, and the verbum finitum has in itself the power to stimulate and to animate the sentence and the isolated 1. Grammar accordingly should in the main be pursued as syntax, since the inflexion and conjugation of individual words are a consequence of their syntactical usage.

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words [Wörter] in it into unified words [Worte]. If one detaches the word from its organic integration in the sentence through which it lives, it withers away and becomes a dead thing and sign. Its meaning, which engenders an active and spirit­ual life in the sentence, stiffens into a concept with which one can operate mechanically according to the laws of logic. The personal pronoun is truly the primal word that creates words and produces from itself the life of language, because it brings to bear, while taking root in the personality of the spiritual life and serving as its direct expression, the inner requirement of language, the relation of the I to the Thou. The fundamental and primal meaning of the sentence should not be sought in a psychological or ­logical-grammatical factor, but rather in the pneumatological fact that in it the spiritual life of man, created by the word, is articulated in a literal sense: the sentence is the positing [Setzung] of the relation between the I and the Thou. The word is the vehicle of this relation; it is thus the means of movement through which the I in man moves toward the Thou. Precisely for this reason, as the expression of this movement, the sentence must have in itself as its soul the word of movement, the finite verb—which is thus to be interpreted in its deepest basis no longer as a ­logical-grammatical but as a pneumatological necessity. The primal word was therefore a verb and pronoun in one. Even the “am” in the primal word was the expression of this movement turned into language and word. On the one hand, the “am” is in a certain sense a truly passive verb because it originated from a cry of pain and expresses suffering; yet on the other hand, as act of the spiritual life in man, it is above all not a purposeless intransitive verb but rightly a transitive verb, which leads the inner movement of the I toward its goal in the Thou. Nor was it a reflexive pronoun, for the being [Sein] of the I only became reflexive through its ­self-positing in the principle of identity, which pneumatologically underlies the formation of the oblique case. The positing of the relation between the I and the Thou is the

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original meaning of every thesis, which can be understood only pneumatologically.2 A thesis refers to the relation of one being to another, but never to an absolute being. Philosophy has perhaps paid too little attention to that. Thus for example, the sentence “God is,” because it asserts the existence of God completely objectively and without connection, has no sense; it means nothing at all.3 But the sentence “God created the world,” which brings the being of God into relationship to another being, is clearly contestable in its objectivity. It has a meaning only as an article of faith; but that ultimately means not in the objectivity of its form of declaration in the third person. The case is different with the thesis “I am.” For it is not an article of faith and can never be conceived wordlessly. It therefore virtually presupposes the relationship to the Thou, to the addressed person, which is not actually contestable, even though philosophers of the I abstract from this in theoretical thinking. Philosophy can of course do absolutely nothing at all with this thesis in its subjectivity, least of all if philosophy sees in it the thesis of an absolute existence, as it once claimed. In the objectivity of a thesis lies its contestability, as well—unless it concerns nothing else but the completely abstracted propositions of pure logic and mathematics, which avoid any relationship to a real being. But in its original pneumat­ological meaning the thesis is incontestable—as the assertion of personality and, as such, as nothing other than the assertion and positing of the relation between the I and the Thou. In conjunction with the positing of the antithesis, the isolation of the I from the Thou undoubtedly plays a crucial role (along with the moi of Pascal, which actually includes a negation of the spiritual life). The principle of contradiction is nothing other than the abstract expression for contradiction to the spirituality of man’s existence, in which he has become entangled and fixed through his fall from 2. Thesis is from the Greek tithénai = to set. 3. See also the remarks about the ontological proof of God in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

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God. It originates from the freedom of the personal being in man and appeals to it. It does not, however, originate in thought, which will always attempt to be rid of it, to dissolve the contradiction of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis. Rather, it emerges in faith, which presupposes it as the commitment of the personality and as the personal decision for or against the spirit. Without the principle of contradiction there would be no spiritual life in man. Thus philosophy, which would be able to dissolve the former, would also thereby dissolve the latter. Psycholinguists distinguish between predicative sentences and the attributive sentence equivalents that preceded them in the history of language. They see in the latter an associative achievement that was determined essentially by emotional excitement. They are therefore the expression of the subjective relationship of the speaking person to the content of his declaration, of being personally startled by some element of experience, of the personal concern with it, which really require or presuppose the same concern of the addressed person. They must obviously suffer a loss of elementary emotional value with the transformation into a predicative sentence. For through the entry of the predicating verb (which recounts a state) into the sentence, the inner relationship of the one who speaks to the content of his declaration is already changed. The content of consciousness is objectified, and the verb prepares the way both for the objective attitude of the one who speaks toward the state or the proceedings that interest him and therefore is brought to language and for the summons of the one who is addressed to impersonally judge both the content of expression and the declaration in itself. Psychologists say that language has more and more accommodated the development of apperceptive thought, that the predicative sentence presupposes the working of the basic operations of apperception—namely, relationship and comparison. But these are once again to be regarded as the basic facts of spiritual life, which is to be understood in a deeper sense than psychology

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can have in mind. Spiritual life is not the e­ ver-progressing differentiation of an originally unarticulated conceptual continuum—the expression of which was the primitive sentence equivalent—but is at its root and essence the relationship of the I to the Thou, and as such is the presupposition of language itself, especially that of the actuality of the word. Primitive man, when he established a relationship between himself and the individual elements of his experience of the world, or when he attempted to conceive of a relation between them apart from himself, may actually have first conceived of a personal relation, though of course a displaced one. This led to the belief in nature spirits, in the spirits in plants and animals and in the proceedings of nature, to the animation of nature. Science has, of course (and most thoroughly in our time), seen to the making soulless of nature to the point of spiritlessness; for science can only use that which is dead for its purposes. Comparison, however, which actually has the differentiation of the experience of the world, of the content of consciousness for its psychological presupposition, and the principle of identity for its logical presupposition, already points toward the isolation of the I from the Thou without which it could not at all have become an essential process of thinking. When man began to compare, he became the being who measures and calculates, who disputes and thinks perforce objectively and factually. The I had become the moi of Pascal. The finite verb lacks attributive sentence equivalents; but only objectively, for one could say it is given subjectively in the spiritual situation of the speaking to the addressed person as the inner meaning of the sentence. How could a sentence be possible that would not in some way be an expression of movement, of the spiritual movement of the I to the Thou in general, and of the psychic excitement of the speaking person in attributive sentences in particular, or even, speaking quite abstractly, of the logical movement in thinking? A word of movement, a verb, is involved in the formation

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of every sentence. The “is” sentences, however, play their role chiefly in abstract thinking—in conjunction with defining—in which language and the word have lost almost all liveliness. It is nothing else but the situation in general, not only the spiritual situation in which the person who speaks finds himself over against the one addressed, and not only the situation created by his psychic agitation and excitement, but also the external situation that makes the uttering of a word intelligible, which in the sentence equivalent takes the place of the pred­icating verb. Yet it is of special significance that possibly all attributive sentences are originally and essentially meant demonstratively; hence they are even now often accompanied by a pointing gesture.4 The first object of indicating in language, however, was not initially an object of desire—or even of rejection, of fear and loathing—but one of addressing, thus the second person, the Thou. The deeper meaning of demonstration is not a will to seize and to grasp, but rather a will to address, the need of the spiritual in the speaking person to get in touch with something spiritual outside it.5 And thus we see the ­t-sound make its appearance, with its demonstrative meaning at once obvious in the formation of the personal pronoun of the second person. Must we not marvel anew at the inexhaustible depths of language, in which is attested to us the rootedness of language in the spiritual realities of life, if we only grasp it correctly, when we encounter this indicative t, which designates the addressed person and in essence forms the word Thou, the ultimate word for God, who is indeed the true, the first and the last Thou of the I? Thus the Latin deus, the Greek theos, the Old Norse Tyr, the A ­ nglo-Saxon tiv, the Gothic Tius, the Old High German Ziu (as in “Tuesday”); also, the Old Germanic deity Tiwaz, originally god of heaven and later god of war, corresponding to Mars; see further the Sanskrit divyas = Greek 4. See the Greek daktylos = finger, the natural organ for pointing at something. 5. To will = Greek thelein.

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dîos = divine, and the Sanskrit div = heaven, from which Dyâus = god of heaven like Zeus (Jupiter, if it is true, is to be traced back to ­Diu-pater = father of light). God as the Being appealed to by man, who is thus made the addressed person, the Thou, also lies in the etymology of the German word Gott [God]. For this belongs to the Sanskrit root hû = to appeal to the gods (puruhûta = the one much appealed to, as the surname of Indra). Yet would the human spirit in this appeal have ever been placed into a relation to God, which cannot be understood as other than a personal one, if he were not from the very beginning, in accordance with his origin and essence, in a relationship to the spiritual outside him, if the I did not exist in a relation to the Thou, and if God who created him had not placed the word into him through which the I speaks to the Thou? The case of the Hebrew name for God, with the word Yahweh (formed from hâwâh = to be), however, is different than that of the words deus and Gott in a most significant way. For the Jews (to whom, as the chosen people preparatory to Christ, a real relation to God was possible, because God had revealed himself to their founding fathers), God was above all not the addressed but the speaking person—that is, the person who reveals himself through the word, and even through his name: “I am who I am”—not transposed substantively into the third person as the eternal being. Yahweh means to “express oneself and one’s existence” and is strictly speaking not really the name of God. But if one takes the word as a name, then it is a nominative, as it were (and the primal meaning of that case), which as the ­self-naming of God eo ipso excludes a vocative. This is in opposition to the original deus or God, which is to be understood as a vocative that was used only subsequently as a nominative and in the oblique case. The meaning of the Hebrew name Yahweh is nothing other than the revelation of God. In deus or God, however, man sought this One, calling out to God from the inmost essence and need of his spirituality. Obviously, the respect of the Jews not to utter the name had to be imposed. For Yahweh in the mouth of a man

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would in intention be just as much linguistically out of place as spiritual madness and blasphemy. Yet the written word creates an entirely different relation to language, taking the latter away from its immediate actuality. For that reason, the Jews were allowed to write down the name of God, which they were not permitted to utter. And when he read this written word, fully grasping its meaning in reverence—in inner silence—he may well have felt himself to be the person addressed by God. In the word Yahweh God speaks to him. All the individual words [Wörter] etymologically related to deus, which have the basic meaning of “heavenly one,” originate from the root diw = to shine, illuminate (the Sanskrit word for God dêwa, dêwas = the one who actually shines), and thus refer to the significant connection with the experience of light. In his primal experience of sunlight—this experience of the spiritual in nature—the faint memory resounded in man of that light which had flashed in him as the light of his life, when God spoke to him, creating him through the word. And consequently, after his fall from God, he may have directed his first humanly created word at the sun, seeking God in it. It also becomes evident in a few other cases how the indicative ­t-sound plays a role in the formation of words that are connected with the experience of light, first of all, in conjunction with “day” [Tag], synonymous with the Latin dies, the Sanskrit dina (the Gothic sinteins = daily [täglich]), compared by philologists to the Sanskrit root dah = to burn, the Lithuanian dâgas, daga = harvest, the Prussian dagas = summer, the Sanskrit midâgha = heat, summer. According to Kluge the basic meaning of “day” is the “time of the burning of the sun, the hot time of the day or the year”: the experience of light had become the experience of warmth, had led to the practical experience of burning and being burned. If little children point to something with their finger that has caught their eye, something shining and sparkling, a light, a flame, and call out “­da-da,” and, if they have not yet learned through experience, reach for the shining

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object and burn themselves, one has to believe that we have directly before our eyes and ears the original formation of the root word dah. Let one also consider certain Greek words such as theâsthai, theômai = to see, theoreîn = to look at, thermôs = warm, thýein = to burn, sacrifice (one could perhaps also cite here thauma = miracle; the connection, however, of the German Wunder [miracle] with the Greek athréo = to see, view, look at, is rejected in Kluge’s Dictionary). Also consider the Latin tueri = to view, as well as to protect: a change in meaning that is to be interpreted not only psychologically and biologically, but possibly also pneumatologically. The phenomenon of the contrary meaning of the primal word that some philologists make reference to would make it understandable that the ­t-sound also appears in conjunction with words that are the antithesis of the experience of light:6 dawn, the Old Saxon thimm = dark, the Middle Low German deemster = dark, the Sanskrit tamas = darkness (­ corresponding to the Old High German demar = crepusculum), tamrás = to darken, stifle, tamisra = dark night, Irish temel = darkness, temen = dark gray, Latin tenebrae. 6. The Old Coptic should furnish the greatest number of examples of this phenomenon, but it is also alleged to still be perceptible in the Greek éris and eros, the Persian Ormuzd (from ahura mazda) and Ahriman, cold (the Latin gelidus = frozen, i­ce-cold) and the Latin calor = warmth. Let one also keep in mind that the r is a phonetic symbol for the experience of the resistance of matter, which is easily demonstrable in numerous words. Look at the etymology of the word Rad [wheel]: it is cognate and synonymous with the Old Irish roth (in addition to rethim = run), the Latin rota, the Lithuanian rátas; the Sanskrit rathas = wagon, the root of which, reth, belongs to rasch [rage], the latter bound to the Old High German raclo, the ­A nglo-Saxon hraede = quick, hence according to Kluge the fundamental meaning of the original root rath, roth, reth = to hurry. This contrary meaning of the primal word is not inconceivable in conjunction with the supposedly small number of verbal roots, of the economy of language and phonetics, as it were. But this is certainly the case in connection with the fact that we cannot conceptualize any notion without positing its opposite. The spirit created the word in a phonetic material given through the interjections and the sounds of nature, which is actually very limited, so that one and the same word root originally designated the most diverse things and even direct opposites. The business of the differentiation of “word” [Wort] in “words” [Wörter] is incumbent upon our comprehension.

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� The primal word that emerged from a cry of pain with the meaning “I am and suffer,” was—and is—in its first and final basis a call to God. First the spiritual in man addressed itself to God, seeking and appealing to him in ­self-expression; and only then was the spiritual in another man, the Thou, addressed through the word. That the divine is the primal thought of the childhood of the human spirit, moreover, is attested to by science, if what a specialist in the Stone Age asserted is correct. Paleolithic man, he said, was under the spell of religion; and only later, another researcher added, did primal man begin to take broad possession of the external world.7 An outcast in this world after his fall from God, man began his long march through history: conquering the earth and becoming at home on it, but nevertheless in his looking up to the heavens always secretly seeking his true home. Looking up to the heavens though earthbound—that is the situation of human life in the world. All life is below, but it posits an above toward which it moves. All life is earthbound and looks to heaven. The mute and unconscious plant, firmly rooted in the earth, expresses most purely and beautifully this striving of natural life to the heavens and to light. But the animal that moves freely has diverted the organ of its experience of light from the heavens. Its glance is not ­earth-fettered like the firmly rooted plant. In the life of man, who bears in himself the spiritual that is intended for a relation to God, the way upward becomes prayer: the spiritual in him, the I, seeks its true Thou. That he has a relation to God that finds its expression in word and appeal (though for the present there may be much misunderstanding about this appeal, not only regarding the 7. Hence also for the monist of our time who takes pride in the concept of development (which has advanced so very far, hasn’t it?; we who lived through the years 1914 through 1919 know this), the religious attitude of life, the faith in God is an “atavism” that is overcome by his own person.

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neediness of man’s existence, but also in respect to God and the relation of man to God); man is the being who seeks God in prayer and who transcends all of life and himself in prayer; only that actually makes him man. What kind of a life is it in which man has unlearned how to pray! It is one that, because it has lost its spiritual way upward, fades into ­earth-boundedness and simply perishes— spirituality in man, secluding itself from the Thou because it is stubbornly attached to itself and the ­earth-boundedness of existence. From the depth of his life man calls to God—de profundis clamavi. What depth is, is of course, usually misunderstood aesthetically in our time, which though loving the word so very much misuses it as a poetic euphemism: for who grasps today that depth is actually nothing that man honors, neither the poet nor the thinker, but quite the contrary? Whoever utters the first word of the Lord’s Prayer with the right meaning spiritually elevates himself beyond the ­earth-boundedness of his life, which belongs to prayer. But the next word turns him back to it again. For he should not forget it, and in every moment of prayer he should think of it, because it is the meaning of prayer, to look up at heaven while earthbound. And every additional word of the Lord’s Prayer is in accordance with this, up to the final petition for deliverance from the power of evil in the spiritual situation of human existence in the world. Man must plumb the depths of his life to pray the Lord’s Prayer with the right meaning, humbling himself in his e­ arth-boundedness and narrowness of life—down into the depths, but with the glance upward.

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Fragment 14 Existential Declaration and Personality—The Becoming and Being of the Spiritual Realities—Love

The existential declaration of the speaking person in the primal word was itself the ­self-naming of the I, which did not yet signify a name. Since this I became conscious of its existence in the declaration (through the word) and at the same time posited a relation to the Thou, because that is the precondition of the declaration, the I obviously must have also become aware of the existence of the Thou. And thus immediately following the existential declaration in the first person was that in the second person, the “I am” followed by the “Thou art,” which already underlies the former mentally and spiritually. It is once again no mere accident of linguistic usage that in German, at least, the verb of the existential declaration of the second person, the bist [art], was formed from the same stem as the bin [am]. For the Thou exists in the same way as the I with regard to the personality of its being, and whatever is the case for the existence of the I is also the case for that of the Thou. The Thou has its subjective existence from the point of view of the I in the love with which it is loved, but it has its objective existence in the word through which it is addressed; the Thou comes to the word, to language, from the I—yet without, which must always be kept in mind, being a projection of the I. Just as the existence of the Thou cannot be asserted in

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the third person without provoking the contradiction of thinking as well as of the spirit of language, neither can that of the I. The case may be different with the moi of Pascal, which is conceived on the way to depersonalization. It is not, I “is,” but rather, “I am”; nor Thou “is,” but “Thou art.” In the sentences “I am” and “Thou art”—and only in them—a personal being is asserted and expressed. But not a being in the sense of a substantial existing, the declaration of which can have no other form than that of the third person, thus with the verb “to be” in “is” and “are,” and which in a sense presupposes the inception of the tendency of substantialization of thinking, with its objectivization of all being, and which linguistically assumes the naming that goes hand in hand with it. The “is” somehow always expresses an impersonal being. This is the case not only when it is used in reference to something actually impersonal like plants, animals, and things, but also when it refers to a person, be it man or God. The declaration of being in the first and second person is a claim and address of a subjective being, which means a personal one; the declaration of being in the third person is a claim and address of an objective, impersonal, and substantial being. The substantivistic naming of that which really exists in the “I am” and “Thou art” never actually touches this existing directly—in its personality—but only indirectly by the roundabout means of the third person, which is the sphere of substantivistic naming and verbalization and of the objective declaration of being. In the spirituality of his existence, in his directly personal being, man is nameless. Just as God was originally nameless for man and was only subsequently named substantivistically, yet once again as the appealed to being, as in the word “God,” or as the one pointed to in the appeal, as in deus. Since God is the true Thou of the I in man, the existence of the Thou can be asserted only in the second person in a sentence that, while not directly expressing the “Thou art” as an explicit assertion of being, as a thesis, nevertheless has that as its basis. Through this

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sentence man posits himself as the speaking person in a personal relation to the Thou—hence it follows that the existence of God cannot be objectively stated or demonstrated at all—that is, independent from a personal relation to him, which makes him the Thou. The fact that the assertion of God’s existence in the third person through the thesis “God is” or “there is a God” is nonsensical and signifies no more than the sentence “the I is” or “the Thou is”—in other words, that it literally says nothing; and the fact that this assertion in no way concerns the real existence of God and above all not the personality of this existence must actually bring all theology and theologically speculative metaphysics to naught. God either has a personal existence or he does not exist at all. Yet man cannot apprehend God’s personality speculatively, but only through personally relating to him (which is the demand of his spiritual life and the summons of God)—that is, by making him the Thou of his I; and then all speculating and every theological and metaphysical profundity has ceased eo ipso. If a man states or merely thinks as the truth for him and as his belief and conviction that “God is not” or “there is no God” (without, however, being aware of the d­ eep-seated absurdity of this thought of a being of God in the third person, an absurdity that abides in the word “is”), he does not thereby come into contradiction with something that could be objectively and irrefutably proven, which would be objectively evident like a mathematical axiom, but rather into contradiction with himself, even though initially he does not realize it at all. In this way man comes into contradiction with the spirituality of his existence, which presupposes God, and at that point spiritually perishes. That is the direct perversion—of the spiritual life, the reversion of life into the death of the spirit, when man first wants to have the existence of God objectively authenticated, wants to be able to assert it irrefutably in the third person, so as to then enter into a personal relation to him, as God wants, from that standpoint. Yet if man has this relation in the personal decision of his faith, he has no time at all for an objective

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examination of the existence of God, assuming that were even possible. If one talks with a third party about another person objectively and hence in the third person while having his personality in mind in the strict and thus thoroughly positive sense of the word, an agreement with this third party concerning the personality in question is presupposed. If I am, however, alone with the person, and even if I know that I am in agreement with him about a concern that develops between him and me, or if I seek this agreement, then he is never an object to me, and never can be. The more my relation to a personality has personally deepened, the less it can occur to me to reach an understanding with a third party about him ­matter-of-factly and thus quite properly in the third person. For that would mean nothing else but the depersonalizing of this personality and the giving up of my personal relation to him for the sake of an objective one. But on the other hand, one is able to come to an understanding with a third party about a man with a personality defect (yet who would not have that in the depth of his being?), thus about a man who actually has something depersonalized about him. This will most likely take place ­matter-of-factly and in the third person, and naturally behind his back. Obviously this does not come about other than in lovelessness and irreverence. If one speaks with another about God in the third person, one presupposes, if one has God in mind in his spiritual reality, the agreement with the other about the real existence of God, and that means just as much his personal existence; but it once again means nothing else but the presupposition in him of a real relation to God. It follows from this that one can never come to an understanding about God with an atheist (who, however, denies and disavows less the existence of God than his own relation to God), but at best only about the idea of the divine, unless it be the case that one were given the power to cause the other to perceive the Thou directly in the depth of his spirituality and to bring the I in him to complete ­self-realization

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and therein to its concretization. The spirit in the third person, however, the hágion pneuma of the New Testament in whom man is reborn and receives the name of a child of God, whom according to the Gospel of John all those who believe in Christ are to receive; the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see him and does not know him—may we not understand him as the spirit of the inner agreement of men one with another about God, in love and in reverence, and may we not regard everything that claims to speak against this agreement and bring it to naught as sin against him, as blasphemy against the spirit, which will not be forgiven? And in this spirit of truth, the truth of our life and of the inner agreement about God that unites men, in which we come to an understanding with the third party about God in the third person, God, one could then truly say, in this God has his objective existence—but that must not be again abused objectively in theological and metaphysical speculation. Strictly speaking, the reverence for and love of God, the omni­ present One, should forbid us from speaking in the third person— as if he were not there—of him who is still present and listening, without addressing the word to him. If man is dealing with God, then let him not speak about God—for that can be the case in the idleness of the spiritual life—but to him. At the very least let him reflect in his inmost heart that God listens to him and demands an accounting for every useless word spoken (Mt 12:36). This was the case, for example, with Augustine in his Confessions, in this protocol for a dialogue with God. And even Fichte, who in his writings about the Destiny of Man really wants nothing to do with the personality of the divine being, speaks in the second person when he speaks of God in it. That is, Fichte does not speak about God but to him, though of course only in the ideal situation conditioned by his rhetorical pathos. Speaking of God in the third person is doubtless unavoidable, which theology excuses, though it does not absolutely justify it. But when a man speaks in this manner, he possesses there-

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in the reality of his spiritual life just as little as when he is involved in the deepest theological thoughts, and he should be mindful of that. There are of course rare men to whom the power of the spirit is given in their word, that they, while speaking of God, make him directly present in his spiritual reality to the one addressed. But that will be true only for those who are called to that by God himself.

�

Bin bist [am art] is the verb for the existential declaration of the spiritual realities; sein [to be] is strictly speaking the verb for physical realities, which is, however, useful in the sphere of abstract thinking for the assertion of the existence of the substantial. Ist and sind [is and are], bin and bist [am and art] are the tenses of the declaration of the present as well as eternity,1 only with the vast difference that bin and bist [am and art] constitute the concrete eternity of the spiritual life according to their inmost meaning, while ist and sind [am and art] express the abstract and ideal eternity of thinking. Since the infinitive of a verb (in which it can also be used substantively) was and is formed under the influence of the tendency of the substantialization of thinking, it is not inconceivable that ist and sind [am and art], which this tendency toward existential assertion utilizes, have an infinitive in sein [to be]. And it may be a further testimony to the profundity of language that bin and bist [am and art], these primal verbs [Urverba], did not form an infinitive, but exist only in the declarative form in which they have their true meaning, and that has been guarded by the spirit of language and preserved through the millennia of linguistic history. For sein [to be] is not their real infinitive, but rather was merely conceptually added by grammarians. If they had a real nominal form, then they could naturally also be used as a substantive, like every other infinitive. But 1. The present, as timeless time, is the point of time for the breakthrough of eternity, which can and may never be anticipated in time, and which in no sense can ever belong to the past.

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the existence of that which is expressed or expresses itself in them defies every substantialization by thinking just as much as every substantivization by language. The I of the sentence “the I is,” which is substantivized linguistically and hence already substantialized in thinking, is in fact nothing but an empty, unrelated word and word misuse. And the same clearly holds true for the Thou. Since the verb sein [to be] is in essence the tense of the declaration of the present and of abstract eternity—in asserting the being of substance—the German language reached for another verb of existential declaration for the construction of the past tense—namely, wesen [to live], the etymology of which is once again informative. The Middle High German wesen and the Old High German wesan correspond to the Gothic wisan = sein [to be], verweilen [to stay], bleiben [to remain]; the verbal root wes = sein, verbleiben [to remain] (wahr [true], and währen [endure] also belong here) is in accordance with the Sanskrit root vas = bleiben, verweilen, übernachten [to spend the night]. One must take careful note of the connection of meaning between Wesen [being, essence] and bleiben [to remain]. In its concrete meaning Wesen is above all a living being, in contrast to a thing, an object. But in its abstract meaning, Wesen is, so to speak, the transtemporal being [Sein] of a living creature or even of a thing; it is the idea that underlies the temporal being of a living creature, its external reality, its becoming and passing away, as its nondevelopmental being and imperishable inner reality. Expressed less platonically: the totality of its being, through which the individual elements of being are determined, and hence are to be explained, in their connection and change. Bleiben [to remain], related to the Greek liparéo = I persevere, means to be now and in the future, to last. Only that which lasts, but that at the same time changes in its duration, has a past—and if it is able to relate to the latter as with man himself, it also has a history. Bleiben is also related to Leib [body] (the body of a living being in contrast to an object, to a lifeless thing as such), and to Leben [life, living being] itself. Leben is a being that

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is determined in its presentness by the future (just as bleiben is also an expression of the meeting and interpenetration of present and future). Accordingly, having a perspective of the future is an expression of the unbrokenness of life, while being without a perspective is a symptom of the poverty of life. One could say that wesen is the characteristic and typical verb for the ­platonic-idealistic assertion of existence and reality, and sein for the ­Spinozistic-substantialistic one. But philosophy, be it Platonism or Spinozism, never grasps the spiritual reality of life that is asserted or asserts itself in the verb bin bist [am art]. It is once again no accident of linguistic usage that in German the subjunctive—the form of potentiality—of the declaration of being in the first and second person, thus sei—seist, is formed from the root sein and not from the ­bin-bist of the indicative, of the form of reality. When a man says, “I am,” it is clearly evident to anyone who has grasped the essence of the I and knows what it means, that that which is asserted as existing in the bin [am] and bist [art] really exists and cannot at all be thought of as only possibly existing, which would also include the possibility of negation. The being [Sein] in the existential declaration in the third person can in some sense always be thought of as separate from the subject of the being of which it is asserted and is therefore also syntactically expressed as separate from the subject. The subject makes its appearance as a specific, n­ on-exhaustive instance of being and is subordinate to the latter, so to speak; the subject comes into being or develops from it. In the declaration of being in the first and second person, however, the subject of the being can in no way be separated from the predicated being, the I from the am,2 the Thou from the art—which is expressed linguistically as directly in the German sentence “Ich bin” [I am] as in the Latin sum. Here the subject makes its appearance not as a specific instance of being but is itself the 2. Ich [I] may have originally meant Ich bin [I am] according to Faulmann’s etymological dictionary.

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latter, and in a certain sense is even superior. The subject does not come into being; rather, being arises directly out of it; being develops from the subject, one could say. In the “I am” and “Thou art,” being [Sein], as the subjective precondition for the declaration, and the latter itself, as the objective precondition for the existence of the I, just as the Thou, in the word, directly coincide. This identity of the subject of the statement and of the predicate, which is not to be intellectually abrogated, constitutes the essence of the existential assertion in the first and second person, in which a being is affirmed in the sense of personality, which includes in and for itself the relation to the statement, to the word, because personality and having the word are one and the same. The existential statement in the third person, however, already has the being of the wordless s­ ubstance secretly in mind. Substance is the objective, and in its wordlessness impersonal being, severed from and independent of all subjective determinations of the being of direct experience, which is thought of as the only objectively real being—but is merely thought. For substance is not at all a requirement of being, nor simply the absolute necessity of being; and that which is necessary may be something independent from what is imagined and thought by us. Neither is substance, as was maintained by Spinoza, that which is in itself and comprehended through itself, something, the concept of which does not need the concept of other things in order to be formed from them. It is rather nothing other than a logical necessity, the thought [Gedachte] “which remains unaltered in conjunction with all change of phenomenon,” according to Kant, which we are forced to think if we want to think of an objective being as really existing [seiend]. Substance does not actually underlie being but is conceptually added to it by our thinking as that which exists in the process of being [das im Sein Seiende]. Another possibility is also given with that of conceptually separating the predicated being from the subject in the existential statement in the third person—namely, that of setting aside as ques-

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tionable the existence that is asserted and subsequently of directly denying its reality. The conception of the notion of substance as the concept of absolutely necessary being is to some extent the objective precaution of thinking against the ceasing to be real [Entwirklichung] of all existing, which the I that underlies thinking (with its inner reality in the will: behind the cogito lurks the volo) seizes for its own protection, since it sees itself pushed toward its own ceasing to be real through the tendency of substantialization that originates in the I­ -aloneness and through which, so to speak, it becomes uncertain of all reality in general, of the reality of experience. To put forward as questionable and merely possible that existence that asserts itself in the sentence “I am” or is asserted in “Thou art” succeeds just as little as its direct denial. For the sentence “Thou art not”—which in its concrete expression presupposes the Thou and its existence—is obviously just as senseless as the sentence “I am not” would be, which could only be thought by a lunatic. Through the declaration in the third person, reality became dependent on being imagined, thought, and uttered. Thus the subjunctive became the form of declaration of indirect speech, which had to express above all the dependence of an aspect of a being or an event on another circumstance, the limitation of a being or an activity by a circumstance that is possible in itself, but that is perhaps not really given, even if the speech alleges something that is really the case. Now, neither the existence of the I nor of the Thou can be considered as dependent on their being imagined and thought. For the I, just as the Thou, is not a mental image nor a mere thought, apart from which it would be a possibility and nothing more. Rather, the I itself constitutes the basis of all imagining and thinking as presupposition, but not like substance as a consequence of thinking. Substance cannot, however, really be considered as dependent on the declaration, whereas the I exists in this declaration—in the word and in its inmost meaning—and the existence of the Thou is actually given in the declaration precisely through the declaration, which

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makes its existence concretely possible. The being of the I and of the Thou—not dependent upon the declaration but, on the contrary, its spiritual presupposition—is the most immediate being, which is not merely thought or imagined, and not merely expressed; hence, the verb of its declaration only allows the formation of the indicative, of the form of reality, but not that of the subjunctive, the form of possibility. This indicative bin and bist [am and art] is just as authentically the indicative in its fundamental and primal meaning as bin is the primal verb. If the being of the I and the Thou, when it is modified and specified through some inner or outer element, is to be addressed in indirect speech or to be expressed as a function of our opinion and representation, thought and belief, there remains for linguistic usage, which does not want to set itself in contradiction to the spirit of language, nothing except recourse once again to the stem sein [to be] for the construction of the subjunctive of bin and bist.

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That the Thou exists in exactly the same sense of personality as the I, which is linguistically expressed in the jointly held verb of the declaration of being, is actually not entirely correct. And it is etymology that helps us again in this instance, though of course only in part, in making clear this distinction of existing. The Sanskrit root of bin [am] is bhu = to become. Is not the I, which utters its existence in the bin, a something that actually becomes [Werdendes] in its relation to the Thou and in the vehicles of this relation, in the word, and in love? Only in its absolute aloneness and seclusion before the Thou would the I be something that exists [Seiendes] of which one could also assert an objective being. But this absolute I exists only as idea in the metaphysical and (alas) ethical speculation of the philosophers of the I, as the boasting of I­ -ness, and not at all in reality. The problem of the spiritual life in man is an unending one, and in its resolution, in the relation to the Thou, the I becomes what it

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should be. In its being in the Thou, the I finds the completion of its becoming; in God the restlessness of the spirit finds its peace. But now, is the Thou also something that becomes in the word or in love, or is it not rather something that exists, obviously not in a substantial but in a personal sense, and is thus the precondition for the becoming of the I in relation to it? Man first of all formed the verb bin [am] in the primal word, and only thereafter bist [art]. He thereby apprehended, via an ­ego-morphism intended by God himself, the existence of the Thou in the same sense as that of the I that had become conscious of it. Precisely from that point, man linguistically formed the bist out of the bin. In the German language there are only two verbs of the declaration of being, apart from wesen [to live], that is now used only for the construction of the past tense, but there are three kinds of being. The latter includes one that for us is inexpressible, because it is incomprehensible, and that is the absolute being of God. The second kind is the spiritual being of man, of the I, that is a being that actually becomes in the relation to something spiritual outside it, to the Thou. Man also grasps the being of God as just such a personal being, in whose relation to him—namely, to man—the existence of God in the “Thou art” does not signify something to be understood anthropomorphically from the point of view of the spiritual being of man in the “I am,” because this being of the I actually already includes the relationship to the personal being of God. Certainly, God also has a relationship to the world and to the events in it. But in this we can grasp him just as little as in his absolute being, which does not need the existence of the I for its continuance, though conversely, the latter could not endure without the existence of God. That is moreover a factor of the spiritual life, which, in spite of its implicitness, the mystics evidently cannot understand: I know that without me God cannot live an instant; If I come to nothing, He must of necessity give up the ghost.

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So runs a ­well-known saying from The Cherubinic Wanderer of Angelus Silesius. The third kind of being is that of the world and the things in it, which is recognized as direct experience [Erlebtwerden] by philosophical circumspection. But by thinking under the urge of the tendency toward substantialization, it is considered as the being of substance, and as such once again as an absolute being, which is only a conceptual and not a real being, as is the absolute being of God, which is unimaginable, inconceivable, and unutterable. The Thou is the goal of the inner movement in the I, which man seeks in the restlessness of his spirit. It is the true object of the will, and therefore it has, as it were, a kind of objective existence, but obviously not in the sense of a substantial existing. The I, how­ever, quite frequently misunderstands its inner reality in the “I will” and directs that reality toward a false object, while secluding itself from the Thou. One may see in the Thou a certain objectivity, but not a substantiality [Substantialität]—namely, that it is a spiritual reality that exists outside of the I. For it is certainly not a mere projection of the I. It exists before the I in both an ontological and an ethical sense, and in its divinity it created the I through the word. Just as the natural life of man in the world presupposes man in the naturalness of his existence—namely, parents—so his spiritual existence presupposes that of God. The corporeality of a child is to be accounted for, even though perhaps not entirely so, from the corporeality of his ancestors. In the awakening of his consciousness, however, the child comes from God. The I is something that becomes [Werdendes]; it is something that either becomes or ceases becoming [entwird] in the relation to the Thou, depending on whether it moves toward or away from the Thou in this relation. The Thou is something that “is” [Seiendes], something that does not first become in the relation of the I to it, as does the I, but rather already is, its being and its becoming already being presupposed. The I is something that becomes, the Thou is something that is; that means in the final analysis: the former is

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something human, the latter is something divine. God is the concretization of the Thou, just as man (not, however, the idea of man in connection with philosophers and ethicists) in his relation to God is and is destined to be the concretization of the I.

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God created man through the word, and the true humanity of man will continue to be created through the word unto the end of the world. God, who is love, became man in Jesus, who is called the Word in the Gospel of John, in order to snatch man away from the danger of his spiritual atrophy [Entwerdung] and to reveal to him the meaning of his existence. For the spirit of man asks after nothing else in his neediness than the meaning of life. Jesus liberated the I from its ­I-aloneness, from the curse of sin and the law, under the yoke of which man stands in his I­ -aloneness. Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, led the I to the Thou through the word; he restored us to life from our spiritual death and showed us the way to God. But God does not reign in an unattainable metaphysical remoteness from man. He who is the God of the living, not the dead, is near to us in life. We are therefore not to dream of him. Whoever does that, does not want to see him in the reality of his nearness. One could thus even say that God is near to us not only spiritually but also physically: near to us in everyone, and above all in the man next to us, the neighbor, in everyone who mourns—and who is not mourning?—in those who hunger, in the sick, in everyone who needs a deed or a word of love—and who would not need that? God is near to us in the man whom we, emerging from our I­ -aloneness, make the true Thou of our I, which obviously does not mean simply to look at him in his humanity as God. What you have done to the very least of my brethren, you have done to me; so we are told in the gospel. God became man in Jesus. According to the letter and the spirit of the gospel, however, we must not seek Christ, who has brought

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God near to us, among the dead. For he has been resurrected from the dead and still lives in our midst every day to the end of the world, and he brings God near to us and us near to God. Heaven and earth will pass away, but his word will not pass away. The emergence of the I from its I­-aloneness, its ­self-unfolding and openness to the Thou, has the meaning of an offering. God is the “being to whom we sacrifice.”3 What does man sacrifice? Every­ thing that he has grasped as his own in his I­ -aloneness and seclusion before the Thou. Christianity first revealed the true meaning of sacrifice: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The I must give up all that belongs to it, everything that it grasped or willed to grasp in the ­Mein—Mir—Mich [­m ine—to ­me—me]—then it will live. But if the I wills to save its life, to maintain its existence in the ­Mein— Mir—Mich, no matter how spiritualized this intention may pretend to be, then it is spiritually lost. The more objectively senseless and useless the sacrifice of love is, the less the man to whom it is offered has in it only a token of love (which he may perhaps not at all believe in, because there is no love in him), the more the sacrifice is offered to God. As is stated in the Sermon on the Mount, if you love only those who love you, what reward will you have? If love has a reward, can it be anything other than that which it receives in its being returned? And love should lay claim to no other reward. To love the man who loves us means to love humanly and to love the man in man. But to love him who not only does not return our love, but who possibly even returns love with contempt and hatred, that truly means to love God in man. And according to the words of the gospel, this love has its reward in God. God, so to speak, takes the place of the one who does not return love. And to love God? This love doubtless has its reward in its being returned. For God himself is love. And his love was and is there before all of man’s love. All true love is from God. 3. As one interprets the word “God” from the Sanskrit root hu = to offer, sacrifice, and also hutá = to whom sacrifice is offered.

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The demand of Christianity is this: that man base his relation to other men upon his relation to God, and that he bring the latter to expression in the former. Only in the fulfillment of the divine commandment to love does man find the true Thou of his true I. He finds it in God and in other men, and he finds God in other men. He loves man because he loves God. Only for this reason. But there is no greater love with which man could be loved than this. The godless love of man only pretends to be love and is in reality a concealed hatred of man. But the one whose I seeks its Thou in God only for this reason, because he is never able to find it in man, also blocked himself from the way to God. The gates to eternal life are closed to him who seeks the kingdom of God only because he has missed out as a stepchild of nature in the kingdom of this world—and that can very easily come to pass. Just as the ultimate objective meaning of the human word is to absorb the divine commandment to love, so the ultimate meaning of human existence is to absorb God and the word of God. And man does not have God in himself if he is not a doer of the word, if he does not have love within himself. The one who says that he is in the light and hates his brother is still in the darkness, as the First Epistle of John states. The one who does not possess God, who is the light and the word, through which the light of God and of our life shines out in the heart of man, is therefore in the darkness. But if he, as the doer of the word, has found God in himself and himself in God, then he finds God in other men as well. One must, as Tolstoy once said, do that which the Dukhobors do: to greet each man with a prostration, mindful that God is in him; and if one cannot do that with the body, let him do thus in the spirit. How endlessly difficult it is for man even to only spiritually prostrate himself before the Thou, before the divine in another man. Of Christian love, which is the only true love, and the only love that is not a s­ elf-deception of the I that is caught up in itself in its aloneness, of that love poets know nothing, who otherwise have so

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much to say about love. They love only platonically—even then, when they do not exactly love very platonically. They love only an ideal and never a spiritual reality, while ignoring the reality of human existence as in a dream. The poetical does not seek to overcome the aloneness of the I, so as to emerge from it into a relation to the Thou, but rather only to detour around it. There is not love in the poetical, but the longing for it, perpetuated through a cunning trick of the psyche, and also the dream of love, which the I dreams in its aloneness, locked up behind its Chinese wall, taking a secret pleasure in it, which prevents awakening. Plato was quite right: beauty is loved in madness. But that the sickness of the spirit in man lies therein, the Greek could not perceive, who doubtless grasped that one loves the beautiful and the good. He would also have certainly found the severe demand of Christianity completely incomprehensible, probably deeming it absurdity and folly, to love man even in his ugliness, in the brokenness of his life and in his ethical frailty. Sache qu’il faut aimer, sans faire la grimace, Le pauvre, le méchant, le tortu, l’hébété, Pour que tu puisses faire à Jésus, quand il passe, Un tapis triomphal avec ta charité

says Baudelaire in a poem.4 Not beauty and not the idea, neither truth (which we should recognize) nor the good (which we should do); not nature and art, neither wisdom nor science are the objects of love, but rather the Thou. And since God is the true Thou of the I in man, he is therefore the sole object of true love. If we really love a man—not merely the friend in him, in which we really only love ourselves, thus with a love in which we emerge only relatively from the I­ -aloneness of 4. [Ed. Note]: See Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “The Rebel” [Le Rebelle], in The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du Mal] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xcv: “Know that you must love without making a wry face / The pauper, the scoundrel, the hunchback, the dullard, / So that you can make for Jesus when he passes / A triumphal carpet of your love.”

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our spirit, which strictly speaking means not to emerge at all—if we love the neighbor as the gospel requires of us, then we love God in him. And if we really love God, grasping his spiritual reality in our love for him, then we love him in man, in every neighbor, whom we need not seek for long, as do the poets for their ideal; and we bring our love for God to expression in our love for man. Our love must not be a special liking for someone or something and not a condition before love, but rather love itself, realized through us. This love has nothing to do with desire, for its meaning resides in that the I opens itself to the Thou in the love. Love existed before the law and stands over it. When love went astray and died in man, when the I closed itself off from the Thou, then came the law. The curse of the law weighs heavily upon the man who stands entirely under the law. For the law judges and condemns him. But love, and only love, redeems him from the curse. No one is spiritually lost as long as there is still a spark of love in him, as long as love is still able to reach him. And to whom may it not reach? Who would not have been loved? For it is the mystery and truly the wonder of love that even the most unworthy are loved. And who would be worthy of love if it were not love itself that makes one worthy? For love can reach and redeem everyone. And the fault lies in man himself that he closes himself off from love and its works. It is love and not the law that creates the true community of men, the community of the spiritual life, which can have no other basis than the relation to God. The kingdom of love is also the kingdom of God. And that, Jesus said, is within man. Some want to translate and to understand the entós hymon of the original text as “in your midst.” Entirely with justification. For the kingdom of God is not in man in the inner aloneness of his existence, in the aloneness of his I, but it dwells wherein the I opens itself to the Thou in the word and in love, and in the word and in the deed of love— and then it is in our midst as the community of our spiritual life. Although man stands as the solitary one [Einzelne] in his relation to

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God, he nevertheless cannot pray without praying in spiritual communion with all men. For in this manner and not otherwise, Jesus taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer; and when we pray, thus we are to pray—and in no other way than that which Jesus taught us. Not for himself alone does man pray and speak to God, but for all men. Yet he can only do that when true love is in him. Once the spirit has taken possession of the word “love” and given it its proper meaning, man truly must no longer use it with a different meaning than that which the spirit demands. Every declaration of love between the sexes is not only a lie, as Weininger says—and that it certainly is—­but it is also a blasphemy.

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Fragment 15 The Human and the Divine—God as Mental Image and as Reality

The human and the divine must never and in no way be simply identified. The profoundness of the mystic is s­ elf-deception, based upon the lack of perspective of the mystical ­sinking-into-oneself. The I is and remains human and is not divine, and the spiritual in man is in its deepest basis never anything other than the I, the I created by God that is situated in that consciousness that has heightened into ­being-conscious and ­self-consciousness. Only the Thou is divine. Everything depends on the proper perspective from which one can view the relation of the two; and the I, which can never turn itself into the Thou, furnishes the viewpoint of this perspective, the only possible one from which we can take our stand. For the I can doubtless objectify itself and make itself the object of its inner reality; yet it is then no longer the true I, but the moi of Pascal and on the way to its atrophy [Entwerdung]. But it nevertheless belongs to its essence, for example insofar as it is a speaking person, and to have the word is essential to it, and also to the Thou, to become the addressed person. And if the I struggles against and closes itself to the address, to the word, if it only wants to speak out and not to hear, it closes itself off from the Thou and thereby derealizes [entwirklicht] itself. What then obtains if the I is made the Thou of Christian love—or even of the word in the confession of sin—by the spiritual in an-

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other man? Then it is in fact something divine, because it really is the Thou—precisely from the standpoint of the other, of the I in the other. And that is the crucial factor. It can never adopt this point of view, neither practically nor in abstract reflection. The I is not something divine by itself, in its b­ eing-given-as-the-I-itself, for it cannot make itself the Thou. And it can in no way, either directly nor indirectly, become conscious of its divinity, which lies in its being the Thou of the I in the other; the I does not become conscious of its divinity because it accepts being the Thou of an I in humility and in the awareness of being unworthy of love. If the I does not abide in this humility, if it considers (which would already be an arrogance of the spirit) that it is the Thou of an I, thus something divine, then it is more than ever only the I in its humanity—and Th ­ ou-seclusion. For by relating to itself in this reflection and losing sight of the spiritual neediness of its life, the I secludes itself from the Thou. While reflecting on its divinity, the I not only ceases inwardly and of itself to be the Thou of that other I, more correctly of the I in the other, but in its isolation it makes its own existence questionable. In order to understand and appreciate everything correctly, since it is not a question of a subtle, ­hair-splitting chain of reasoning, one need only understand and continually keep in mind in the concrete situation what is neither a philosophical nor a poetic trick—namely, that the I that this discourse concerns is the concrete I—that is, the one that is involved in the spiritual fact that a definite man (namely, the writer or reader of these lines), can say in the awareness of the spirituality of his existing: I am. Only in this concrete I is the unshakable standpoint given together with that perspective, which is the only correct one, which renders an identification of the I with the Thou, of the human with the divine, absolutely impossible. In that the I is a Thou—not becoming one by itself, through itself and for itself—it is something divine. But in the final analysis that means that it is the word and the love of God, which revealed themselves in the creation of man and the incarnation of God, which

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turn the I into the Thou (but not the I in another merely in his humanity). By this means, however, the word and the love of God have imposed upon man an endless task, and the consciousness of its endlessness must already fill man with humility and preserve him from all pride about the divine in him. This endless task, which is in accordance with the divinity of the I insofar as it is a Thou, is that of man becoming godlike. “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” demands the Sermon on the Mount. In this word the moral sense [Ethos] of Christianity is expressed, and there is no spiritual life in man that could ignore this moral sense without at the same time willing its own annihilation. Yet becoming godlike is not man’s deification. Metaphysicians and mystics, who are always prone to identify the divine with the human, and thereby to lose themselves in the sphere of the imaginary, the one objectively and outwardly, the other subjectively and inwardly, misunderstand the divinity of the spiritual ground of human existence. The metaphysicians do so by claiming to understand this divinity from the standpoint of the I, while not at all being aware of the Thou—and they then dream of the absolute and intelligible I. The mystics misunderstand divinity by seeking it in the dissolution of the I—in which eo ipso they abandon the only viewpoint from which man can perceive the divine in a spiritual sense as the true Thou of the I. When the mystic brings the I to the brink of disappearance in the ­self-deception of the ecstatic experience of God, the Thou no longer exists as well. The spiritual in man that becomes swallowed up in itself no longer has an object of love, and it perishes in the inner wordlessness of ecstasy. The mystic and the metaphysician have in mind only the I in its ­I-aloneness. With the I they would no doubt have the right standpoint, but they cannot gain the right perspective because they do not see beyond the I to the Thou. The mystic recognizes the spiritual inadequacy of the I in its aloneness, but not the metaphysician, who, once he does consider the I, deifies it. Both misunderstand

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the essence of the true I because they disregard the significance of its relation to the Thou, which is decisive for the existence of the I. They abrogate the spirit of God, often without even noticing it, to set in its place the spirit of man, which is of course made unrecognizable. They do not grasp correctly the meaning of the fact that in his spiritual existence man (who in his physical existence appears as a mere moment in the evolution of life, the end of which he is just as little capable of seeing as its beginning) has in God the s­ elf-same beginning and goal of life. Does not the mystic’s experience of God and beholding of God involve a misleading use of the terms “experience” [Erleben] and “beholding” [Schauen]? Can God be experienced and beheld? Only the world is beheld, and man never gains a real relation to God through his worldview, ­even if it be inspired and profound. Only the world, the beauty of nature and of man, is experienced. To believe that God is experienced in the experience of beauty, however deeply it may move us or perhaps bring the restlessness of the spirit in us to peace, surely constitutes a ­poetic-aesthetic misunderstanding and is in itself irreligious. If man experiences God, then he experiences him in man; not in himself as the mystic believes, but in the other in whom man experiences the true Thou of his I. He does not, to be sure, usually experience this Thou in his experience of man, but rather only the I, seemingly the I of the other, and thereby the Chinese wall of his own I, and thus nothing but himself once again, his I—that is to say, simply the I. But if that is the case, it is his own fault in a deeper, indeed the deepest sense, the fault of his ­I-aloneness. And therefore let him not dispute with the other. Before the true Thou, the finding of whom is our own concern, and not that of the other, all of man’s claims to have rights and to be in the right cease. Nor is God a spiritual content of feeling—in spite of the famous passage in Faust, quoted only by those for whom God and the spirituality of their lives are not a serious matter. Feeling is not something simply spiritual, nor is it a vessel in which man can inwardly

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grasp the spiritual. In its egoism emotion is something psychological—that is, something that presupposes the relationship of the I to itself, thus indirectly the isolation from the Thou. Certainly there is nothing spiritual in man that would not in some way be determined psychologically; and conversely, there is nothing psychological in which something spiritual would not be involved. God is not experienced in a feeling, however beautiful and deep and ­a ll-embracing it may be and how subtle in its egoism. A man’s relation to God is nothing psychological—as the psychologists, who do not even believe in God, suppose. Faith in God, this personal decision of man for his spiritual life, is not a matter of feeling. Even the Christian love of neighbor, which permits us to experience in man the true Thou of the I, thus God, is not a feeling. Nothing confounds religion more than to permit poetic and aesthetic elements to trifle in the spiritual life—and once emotion speaks and speaks a spiritual language, one far too readily finds oneself dealing only with the poetical. To the extent that man, while sinking mystically into himself or metaphysically speculating about himself, identifies the human with the divine and thereby loses sight of the reality of his life— as in every imaginative excess, be it of feeling or of intellect—he divests the reality of the divine here below of its meaning. For the metaphysician and even finally for the mystic, the real life of Jesus becomes rather a specific case that can nevertheless in principle be repeated in the life of every man. That means that the demand for the imitation of Christ is essentially misunderstood; the historical fact of the incarnation of God, which calls for faith and which awakens the man in faith to the spiritual life, becomes completely irrelevant. For in the ecstatic s­ elf-deception of his ­God-experience, the mystic, so to speak, lives through the incarnation of God in himself in a sense contrary to his becoming God—just as the metaphysician prefers to understand the divinity of Christ as the deification of man and thus falsely understands it. And herein Eastern mysti-

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cism, which knows nothing of the I or the life of Jesus or refuses to learn it in any deep sense that would include the imperative of faith, is completely in accord with Western Christian mysticism, which proceeds from a consideration of this life, in the apprehension of the ultimate meaning of the spiritual life in man. In his ­self-deification man abrogates the reality of his ­earth-boundedness and the reality of time, t­ aking the spiritual above and below as only relative, as does the physicist the natural above and below of concretely experienced space. This is really not to be taken otherwise and even literally, then: he wants to swindle his way out of time directly into eternity. But the one who abrogates the reality of time—which is situated in the restlessness of the spirit that has not yet found and made absolutely secure the right relation to God—abrogates the reality of sin. For time exists in nothing other than in the reality of sin. Yet who can cancel sin and make it inconsequential—except God? Of course, if man deifies himself, he consequently believes he can cancel the reality of sin as well. God is in man as the precondition of his spiritual life. This truth must not be understood in that perverted direction in which, oddly enough, the g­ od-intoxicated enthusiasm of the mystic and the most dispassionate rationalism of the psychologist meet each other. Further, it must not be dogmatically and speculatively abused; for it has its absolute validity only in the sphere of the personality of the spiritual life, which takes place between the I and the Thou and by that means establishes the right perspective for the acquisition of this truth. The existence of God, of the Thou, is obviously in no way reduced thereby into a projection of the personality of the I. On the contrary: precisely in the sphere of personality and never objectively outside of it, is it revealed that God is the precondition, and indeed the real and not merely ideal precondition, for the spiritual, and that means the personal, existence of man—God exists as something spiritual beyond the I and independent from it. And in this sphere man understands that God created him in his own im-

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age. For the personality of man is nothing else but theomorphism,1 but not the converse, the personality of God anthropo­morphized. It is not anthropomorphism, either, if man understands his relation to God, as God himself wills, as a personal one, as the relation of the I to the Thou. God as the true Thou of the I is not a mental image. However, it is still a mental image to think of God as the divine judge, even though it persistently arises from the ethical aspect of religious life, which is not to be circumvented. So the mental image of God is really anthropomorphism. The relationship of the I to the Thou, in which the spiritual life of man has its true reality, does not lie in the sphere of the life of imagination. When the latter meddles with this relationship, it renders the spiritual life unreal, it makes the Thou into an unreal projection of the I. There is certainly nothing more human than the relationship of the I to the Thou, which is the humanity of man in the heightened sense of the word; it is his true humanity, not his all too—humanness—and it is therefore that which essentially distinguishes him from the animal. There was not at first a more or less inadequate mental image of God (and which one would not be inadequate?) into which the Th ­ ou-relationship [Dubeziehung] was then inserted; rather the latter, as a fact that underlies the spiritual life of man in and for itself, first made possible in its obfuscation the mental image of God. And only to the extent that the Th ­ ou-relationship is grasped by man as the relationship of his I, of the spiritual in him, to God, can it also establish the proper and fitting relation between man and man in his actual humanity. If one takes the truth that God is in man, which makes possible his spiritual life, out of the sphere of personality and puts it into the sphere of ­t heological-metaphysical speculation, which is objective and impersonal, or at least appears impersonal and in any case loses the proper per­spective, it ceases to be a truth and becomes an object of and cause for philosophical ­hair-splitting and dialectical quarrel1. This expression comes from a work of Max Scheler.

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ing. The philosopher actually has no proper place in his worldview for God as the Creator of all being and life, even though his philosophy may very much seek God in secret; and not infrequently he accordingly ignores God. The spiritual idleness of the question of how God created the world out of nothing, how he maintains and governs it, views God in the third person—that is, outside of his personal relation to us and ours to him, where he is inconceivable to us and remains so for all eternity. “God in the third person”—him the imagination of man, this heavenly child fed on the earthly food of the experience of the world, created in human image. Anthropomorphism is involved in it—whether it takes shape as the graphically concrete representation of God and graven image or vanishes in a nonsensual abstraction of metaphysics—but not in the personality of God, with which we are to have a personal relation. The mental construct that man makes of God and to which only the pagan clings anxiously may be regarded as that which literally positions itself in us in front of God and separates us from him. At the very least it is the inner expression of our separation and distance from God. One must believe in God even when one is deserted by all the powers of the life of imagination, the visual no less than the intellectual. Only then does the true relation of God to man actually begin, the relation of the I that is itself not a mental image, but underlies every mental image, to the Thou that stands beyond all representation. But lest this relation, as the true relation of God to man, lose all meaning of reality in the vacuum of a visionary abstraction, it must find its concrete, living expression in the relation of man to man. Man actually takes interest in the relation of God to the world, which is in no way comprehensible to him, only when he, in being interested in his own existence, lets the latter become anchored entirely in the existence of the world instead of his whole life in his personal relation to God, being untroubled about the doings and happenings in this world, knowing his life is placed directly in the hand of God. He believes that he exists not only in the world created

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by God, but also through it. He wants to bring his faith in God into alignment with his knowledge of the events of the world and his either more practically or only theoretically emphasized interestedness in them, desiring to renounce neither the one nor the other. The world moves between him and God, and he does not want to see that this obstructs the view of God for him, that it hinders his personal relation to God and turns it into a seemingly m ­ atter-of-fact, objective relation. Perhaps the converse is the case, and this entire world exists only in its being experienced by man, who was created by God through the word—although it in no way exists as in itself an unreal projection of the I. The world does not stand between man and God, but man himself between God and the world. Man has hidden knowledge of God in the ground of his consciousness and ­being-conscious, which he does not lose in his relation to the world (he would very much welcome this at times), although the latter relation obstructs his view of God. He wants this knowledge brought to bear and accommodated in his knowledge about the world. If the knowledge of God is displaced and leads to that shift of perspective from which he sees himself as existing through the world created by God (and being interested in existing in and through it), the idle question strikes him of how God created the world and maintains and governs it. The glance at the world never allows him to grasp God in his spiritual reality. In the glance, if it has not really brought everything spiritual in man to disappearance, God is only dreamt of—and spoken of in a religiously incoherent manner. Man has to turn his glance away from the world; then the world will no longer obstruct his view of God. Then he can awaken from his dream of the spirit to the realities of the spiritual life.

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Fragment 16 Otto Weininger—Spirit and Sexuality— The Jews—Christ

As idealism came to its historical end, after a life that lasted almost two thousand years, but for a long time was no longer justified, it once more gave a sign of life, though to be sure somewhat desperate i­n Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. But the idealism of German university professors, of such people who, speaking with Kierkegaard, have a century or possibly even a millennium between themselves and the shocks of life and do not fear that that sort of thing could happen again; this idealism, which sees with full optimistic confidence an independent inwardness unfolding in the totality of the movement of world history, truly has very little to say and was led thoroughly ad absurdum through the entirety of the movement of world history (we who lived through the years between 1914 and 1919 know this). Weininger, in keeping with idealism in general, had no notion of the realities of the spiritual life. If he had, then he would also have had to grasp that sexuality, the opposition of the sexes, is a biological fact and not one of the spirit; he would have had to become aware of the sexual neutrality of everything spiritual, and he would have spared himself the deep error of his work, perhaps even the work itself. He did indeed see the asexuality of the spirit, but within the opposition of man and woman in the pure man, and that means he did not see it in its reality. 237



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Since sexuality is a fact of nature, science was able to bring the former under its control (how glad would morality be, if it were so far advanced), transplanting the gonads of one individual into another and determining its masculinity or femininity at science’s own discretion. The ovaries and testes, from the function of which the primary, secondary, and tertiary determination of the individual arises, are only a tool in the service of organic events; sexuality is a provision of natural life for its preservation. Therefore, the individual, who in the realization of his individuality is a fact of the spirit, can never be simply identified with sexuality. The sexual neutrality of the spiritual is emphatically attested to in the gospels. It is attested to not only as a final demand of the spiritual life in this world, which Jesus himself doubted man could grasp, but also in these words: when men rise from the dead, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but they will be like the angels of God in heaven. In the spirituality of his existence, man is neither male nor female; this is also documented by language,1 which is itself a creation that originated from this spirituality: the personal pronouns of the first and second person distinguish no sex. The I and the Thou, taken not only as pronouns, are sexless. If one uses them as nouns, they are neuter. When Fichte says, “der Ich” [masculinizing the I], that is not only a linguistic mistake and against the spirit of language, but it is against the spirit itself. But the sexual neutrality of the spiritual also comes to expression in another linguistic factor that is no less significant: the Nordic form of the word God—gudh, godh—is neuter just as the Gothic guth, while the genus nevertheless is masculine. Kluge remarks on this point that God in general as the word for the “addressed Being” (Sanskrit hû), originally had a neuter word form. The spiritual is neither male nor female; it is neither of them, it is neuter. 1. [Trans. Note]: Ebner is here describing the linguistic state of affairs for languages like German, in which nouns are classified according to gender: masculine, feminine, and neuter, der, die, das, respectively.

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The sexual drive in man originally had just as little to do with the I as the instinct for ­self-preservation. The former did not create a relation to the Thou and does not presuppose one; the latter, simply speaking, does not signify an isolation from the Thou and cannot signify that, because it is upheld internally not by the I but by an instinct of natural life. If these two drives assert themselves in their primal unbrokenness and unrestrainedness, the I is simply excluded, and the Thou obviously disappears as well—man behaves like an animal. The spiritual in man, sexless in itself, enters into relationship with the sexual life—so that perhaps every man seeks to realize in his relation to woman the relation of his I to the Thou. This is quite in order if it is intended seriously and not in any ­poetic-erotic way. Then there is the love of the poets—and many persons imagine that they have to love like poets when they have a relationship to the opposite sex; this love of the poets, for which they must be blamed, is always a misunderstanding, on the one hand in relation to woman, on the other hand to the spirit.2 That in the relationship of the spiritual to the sexual both influence each other is not inconceivable. The former seeks to express itself in the latter and in this way also to determine it; but it thereby runs into danger of sacrificing itself. It alienates the sexual from its natural determination and itself from its spiritual determination. That the spiritual, in the state of its ­I-aloneness and seclusion before the Thou, interferes with the sexual life eventuates in nothing else but its breaking and perversion. The root of the various sexual perversions is not to be sought in the natural but in the spiritual life, even if the element of somatic compliance (as with insanity)—namely, that of an organic inferiority of the sexual apparatus—plays, as it were, the role of facilitating or 2. Let it also be noted that the German word Weib [woman] is strikingly neuter: does it not sound as if the male [Mann] once had the need to neutralize sexuality and the antagonism of the sexes? In Kluge’s dictionary Weib is related to the Sanskrit vip = to inspire, to be inwardly excited (of priests). And it is further noted there that the Teutons consequently created the term Weib because they venerated in Weib the sanctum aliquid et providum.

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provoking the interference of the spiritual and is psychologically exploited. Perversions are a misguided attempt of individual existence to uproot itself from the life of the generation—that is, from the natural life. In his writing about Otto Weininger’s death, Hermann Swoboda maintained that there is mere sensuality only where there is spirit. He meant sexual sensuality, the sensuality of the sexual life in man broken by the interference of the spiritual. Even enmity of the sexes takes its root in the spirit, and in that enmity the opposition of spirit and sensuality finds expression. And since sexuality and thereby the opposition of the sexes is emphasized almost more strongly in sexual enmity than in sexual attraction, instead of being canceled in the spirit, the spiritual that is losing its way misunderstands itself in the enmity. Possibly underlying it as a facet of the man is the failure of the relation of his I to the Thou in the woman—which is not at all the fault of the woman, but of the man. The antifeminism of the psychologist is readily inclined to see in the enmity of the woman the coming to light of her sexual dissatisfaction but in the enmity of the man the manifestation of his spiritual dissatisfaction. In any case, the brokenness of life and especially of the sexual life also plays a part in the enmity of the sexes; and the spiritual always participates in the brokenness of life, which psychology does not always understand rightly, and often even downright misunderstands. The brokenness of life has a characteristic ambiguity in its relationship to the spirit. On the one hand, it is the possibly unavoidable precondition for the nullification in the spirit of sexual opposition. But on the other hand, it threatens to bring about the downfall of the spiritual life. Sexuality, precisely in its brokenness in man, is and remains the abyss into which the spiritual is in danger of being lost. There is perhaps no lostness of the spirit and no spiritual forlornness of man, be it in madness, be it in crime, in which the annihilating powers of the broken sexual life would not have had a hand. The more spiritual a man is, the more he suffers from his sexual-

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ity ­as long as sexuality, one could say, has not yet been neutralized through the rebirth of his existence in the spirit. Swoboda called the combat between spirit and sensuality the occupational hazard of genius. But the genius is not the only one afflicted by it. It is true after all: sexual man needs the erotic illusion. How could he—as man, in the spirituality of his essence—tolerate the physiological experience of his sexuality without it? Yet it is his dream of the spirit that sexuality shrouds in the veil of erotic illusion. If he awakens from it, must not the veil be torn and his sexuality, for quite some time now no longer unbroken, stand before him as pure physiological experience without psychic ingredients and poetic euphemisms? From the perspective of the spirit, sexuality demands marriage in its indissolubility—this violation of nature by the spirit—or it becomes sin. Natural man, who dreams of the spirit but does not awaken to its realities, surely knows nothing of sin. He feels absolved from it through nature. And herein he deceives himself. For there is no innocence of the senses with the adult man— but only with the child, to whom the sexual is still foreign. The deeper poets know it, and subsequent to them psychologists and psychoanalysts have also realized in their own way that the desire of man for woman is nothing else but the longing for the mother; that man seeks in woman the mother, his future children, but his own children, and that he loves them and the remembrance of them in woman. Behind his sexuality—this face of Janus, which gazes at once into both the future and the past—lurks the yearning for security found in the womb, an element that is incompatible with its naturalness. This may even be connected in some way with the biologically given element of a fixed weakness of the masculine individual already situated in the seed. In this way something ambiguous and ­self-contradictory enters into masculine sexuality. For on the one hand, the man seeks the renewal of his life, of his earthly life, when he sexually desires the woman; he wants to go to gaîa, the mother earth from which all earthly life issued, mamma, as the Tatars called

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the earth. The secret yearning for security in the womb that is involved here, however, is nothing else but the need for withdrawal [Zurücknahme] from earthly life: never to have been born is by far the best. Here a spiritual need supported by biological elements finds expression—but does not understand itself. It has given itself a false direction by interfering in the sexual sphere. Who could say outside of woman herself whether an element of her spiritual life has not gone astray in her sexual desire as well, and what this might mean? Yet she keeps silent.

� Weininger drew a consequence of idealism that no one had correctly attended to before him (and there in any case lies the real significance of his work): antifeminism. Idealism is something thoroughly masculine; the conception of the idea is a spiritual act that takes place in its originality and purity only in the spirit of the man, never in the spirit of the woman. To speak of a female genius is simply a misunderstanding. But if genius (which always spiritually presupposes the conception of the idea, or musical intuition, of the idea above all in its aesthetic and metaphysical meaning) is something masculine, then that also means it is in the last analysis not a fact of the spiritual, but of the natural life—which idealism, and least of all Weininger’s brand, does not grasp. Certain anatomical and physiological elements, thus elements of the natural life, actually do belong to the conditions of works of creative genius. Genius is a fact of nature on its way to the spirit, on this way that has never reached its end, never attained its goal. But let it not be forgotten that we move into the sphere of the aesthetic and the metaphysical when we speak of genius, and if we speak of the spirit there, we really do not know what we are talking about. Nature encounters the spiritual life of genius and must do so, or else no creation of genius is possible. But nature does not ever encounter the true spiritual life of a man—unless it were that one wanted to see nature’s encounter in the fact that

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it breaks into pieces. But that is something that the power and grace of God, which raises the dead to life, can have no part of. The spirituality of idealism sets the spirit against sexuality, yet is totally caught up in this antagonism, and therefore even stresses it when it becomes conscious of the antifeminism inherent in itself. It overcomes neither sexuality nor the opposition of the sexes; rather, it deepens and perpetuates the latter. The male becomes the principle of the spiritual in general; but the female as such it excludes from the spirit and from the emergence of man and simply drives her down into a sexual being. Antifeminism is the demeanor of an unfree spirit, which the chains of sexuality still secretly oppress; that means of a spirit that has thus not yet entered its true life and true freedom in the spirit. If idealism reveals its antifeminism, it loses itself in the problem of the sexes (which is on the one hand a biological and, on the other, in the case of man, an essentially psychological problem), and the spirit feels itself standing before a danger against which it is not able to do other than assert itself in desperate exertion. Even the most profound metaphysics of the relationship between the sexes remains stuck in the psychological sphere—and psychology never advances to the spirit, ­a nd, however spiritual its demeanor may appear to be, with which it concerns itself about unveiling the nothingness of the feminine psyche, it is still more a demeanor of sexuality than the spirit. In antifeminism the man hates his own sexuality because he has not yet spiritually overcome it, because the spirituality of his existence, which goes astray in sexuality, remains stuck in it. And he hates woman, in the second place, because she admonishes him for the inadequacy of his spiritual life, which is his responsibility. Since antifeminism at all events never fully understands itself in this, it therefore furnishes an object of attack for psychological criticism.

�

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In the case of Weininger the principle of a­ nti-Semitism goes hand in hand with antifeminism, the former being based on a misunderstanding not less than the latter. It can and must be admitted, no matter how painful it may be to a Jew to know that this kind of judgment is being passed on him or even to acknowledge it: the Jew is just as little a genius as the woman. Neither in the conception of the idea nor in musical intuition does he dream the dream of humanity of the spirit. He can still place himself into an abstract relation to the former and may comprehend much through his eminent conceptual gifts, capability and audacity, for which Weininger’s work is itself a proof. But the Jew does not at all know what spiritually to make of the latter. He is (in spite of all the singing and ­music-making and composing of today) the most unmusical and musically alien man, and, after the music of the West had begun with Beethoven, he only moved further from its spiritual origin in musical intuition and forced from its inwardness the superficiality of tumult and noise so as to finally become, in the case of Wagner and Strauss, completely alien to music’s origin and hence unmusical. Only then did he gain the courage to pursue and even to compose music. Since the Jews in their innate ungenius cannot creatively dream with humanity the dream of the spirit, they prove themselves to be the appointed critics of idealism, although their critique eventuates in a wrong outcome. In spite of that, it may be the spiritual task of Judaism to assist in the destruction of this dream and, for the man of the white race, to tear the final threads of idealism, long threadbare, from the body of his culture, which is disgraceful in its clichés and lies. That the Jew is not a genius can and must not be credited to him as a spiritual deficiency. Precisely because he is not and consequently is not tempted to dream of the spirit, he stands by nature near the reality of the spiritual life. The Jews are the most spiritual, they are the chosen people of God. God revealed himself to them directly in his spiritual reality, and in the natural life of their race he became man to redeem us and awaken us to the reality of our spiritual life. Sal-

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vation comes from the Jews, the Gospel of John tells us. The Jews once lived spiritually on the messianic promise and hope (as a generation: and thus they live today), just as the other nations and generations of the earth lived spiritually on their dream of the spirit. Yet to become Christ means to be completely uprooted from the life of the generation, not only its natural, but also its spiritual life. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:12–13). The Jews were unable to do that, and they therefore rejected Christ. But neither has Western man been able to do that, and therefore he has not given up his dream of the spirit, conceived so brilliantly by the Greeks. Rather, Western man took the incarnation of God itself—this fact of history that is decisive for the reality of the spiritual life—right into this dream and ­de-real-ized it in endless metaphysical speculations and in the works of an art that call themselves Christian. Is it any wonder that the dream of the spirit was dreamt again and again with a bad conscience, which has not ever understood itself rightly? In one of Kierkegaard’s works it is said that man must live either poetically or religiously, or he lives foolishly. That the gravity of the spiritual life may not be present in poetic existence can only be perceived religiously. Asserted from a different standpoint (that of the citizen, for example, or the politician), it would not only not be true, but it would also be an attack against the spirit. Now, that the Jew is not a genius does not mean that a poet’s existence may be ruled out for him, or that his existence would simply be a comedy played before the world. Though he can live poetically, a remarkable circumstance obtains with such a Jewish poetic existence, which one does not understand as long as everything spiritual is understood only aesthetically: namely, it reveals directly that the seriousness of the spiritual life is not in such an existence. It is not because the Jew is not a genius and therefore is unable to treat the poetic seriously; but

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rather because, in the depths of his heart that can be hidden even from him, and by nature, he assumes the standpoint of the religious, which makes it impossible to take the ­poetic-aesthetic seriously. And that is the reason he is more capable than any other man of immense spiritual betrayal and profound irreligiousness. The specifically Jewish religiosity, which once included a real relation to God, is in the extremely embarrassing position, certainly since the death of Christ, of having become untruth. Between the ­so-called Aryan and the Jew there ultimately exists only the distinction that the latter have already been for more than two millennia—without perishing thereby—that which the former will inevitably become when they perish. The Jew is not guilty of the much lamented increasing Jewish influence in the life of the spirit in the West—both a spiritual and a biological symptom of decay, which had its first symptom in romanticism, this dream of dreams of the spirit. The Jewish race actually appears as a biological phenomenon of decay. The remarkable thing is only that they still have not disappeared from the earth, as Theodor Haecker has pointed out. To live as the Jews have lived, no nation could endure for even two hundred years. But they have lived thus ten times as long, because, though abandoned by the creative powers of nature, they were borne directly by the spirit—as generation, and as such, the only one in the world. Their permanence in the world, which cannot be explained biologically, gives testimony to the reality of the spirit. They are still the chosen people of God, though since Christ in a contrary sense. From time to time woman seduces the spiritual man into antifeminism, the Jew into a­ nti-Semitism. But let one not be led astray into such a position of the spirit, which is always false. The Aryan will always have to suffer from the Jew—who knows, after all, how much time is still allotted to him to suffer? He should rightly understand this suffering and himself in it. He must not seek to make it easier through his ­a nti-Semitism. Let him take up this cross as well.

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� The most serious mistake of the idealism of Weininger, once again founded in idealism generally, is his apprehension of the life and the personality of Jesus. If a philosopher were ever to understand himself in his philosophy, he would be forced to see himself in the worst embarrassment through this life and the word of this life. He would have to be clearly aware that if the word and life of Jesus are true, if he should believe that they are the truth, he would be finished with philosophy, if not with thought itself. Not wanting to salvage philosophy and metaphysics does not in any way mean ceasing to be a thinker. Philosophy is in truth only a path through the kingdom of the spirit, opened by God unless countermanded, which man traverses if he is a genius, but through which he cannot reach the destination of his spiritual life. Something in Weininger insisted on a completely wrong path to Christianity, and in the despair of this urging, hidden even to him, he did not know what else to do in order to gain a relation with Christ and to his word than to understand him as genius, though as a quite special type. Now if Jesus had been a genius, then his life would signify nothing essentially different from that of every other man who in the e­ arth-boundedness of his existence dreams the dream of the spirit; his word would not be the absolutely binding word of God, which begets the spiritual life in its reality; his death on the cross would have been madness, a folly not only in the eyes of the Greeks. The spiritual life of Jesus, however, was not the concern of an individual existence in its ­I-aloneness, as is the case with every genius, but rather the direct opposite. To call Jesus a genius is blasphemy. And when a journalist subsequently ventured to call him a captivating idealist, it was the involution of his blasphemy, which later turned into the ridiculous (as is so readily possible in connection with everything blasphemous) when a newspaper columnist babbled enthusiastically about the “poet from Nazareth,” who was

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a “greater poet than Shakespeare.” These are signs of the times, in which all standards of value have become lost in spiritual decline and chaos. What a dreadful blunder Weininger made by calling the greatest comedian who has ever been able to impress an unspiritual humanity as a genius, “the greatest human after Christ.” Especially since this comedian is by no means a genius. And when he suggested that the “most magnificent” sayings of Jesus (was the word of Jesus ever magnificent?) were undoubtedly lost because the synoptic evangelists did not understand them and thus could not retain them, it is just as much the expression for the typical misunderstanding of idealism v­ is-á-vis the life and word of Jesus as for spiri­ tual loneliness and spiritlessness. It also has the word of Jesus himself against it, which states, what is hidden to the wise and learned is revealed to infants and little children. Of course, many sayings of Christ may not have been handed down to us. But what we have lost thereby does not come into question. For only this is decisive: that we find in the transmitted words of Jesus the orientation and deliverance of our spiritual life, provided that a life of the spirit is of great consequence to us. And in view of this, one may well say that man has lost nothing in that which was not handed down to us of Christ’s sayings. Never through philosophy, which, to speak in Kierkegaard’s con­ text, by speculating wants to remove the element of scandal crucial for faith, in order to not have to submit to the life and word of Jesus; never through an intuition of genius, but only through faith does man gain the right relation to Christ, who is the true object of faith, because all faith must go through faith in him. Weininger has reduced and by that means emptied the inner fact of faith into faith in the principle of identity, which he traces back to the faith of man in himself, which is in itself nonsensical. Precisely for this reason it eludes Weininger in his philosophical and idealistic preju­ dice that to believe in the divinity of the life of Jesus does not and cannot mean to see in him the deification of man—which actual-

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ly demands no faith at all, but doubtless presupposes the conception of the idea of the divine. The opposite is instead the case, and then literally, that in Jesus the incarnation of God has come to pass, which eo ipso demands faith and abolishes for all time the idea of the divine and idealism in general. Since Weininger sought to enter into a relation to Christ through philosophy, instead of abandoning before him all philosophy without hesitation, he saw in Christ on the one hand the idea of the deification of man, and on the other hand, in regard to the historical Christ, a genius who had realized this idea (but in his view, perhaps just nearly realized it). In glimpsing the deification of man in Christ or in anyone else, a man has not awakened from his dream of the spirit to the reality of the spiritual life, because such a view presupposes the conception of the idea of the divine. He cannot emerge from the ­I-aloneness of his existence and enter into a relation to the Thou, to God in his spiritual reality; he persists in the condition of his h­ aving-fallen-from-God and even perpetuates it. The incarnation of God is the entry [Einsatz] of his personality into the life of this world and into the word; since there is something in the word that must be believed, the incarnation implies the requirement of faith, the fulfillment of which signifies once again the installation of personality into human existence. The faith of man in this personality is, in its ultimate and truest sense, the faith in the word—in the logos, who demands faith in his divinity. Faith, which is the personal decision of man for the spirituality of his existence—and that means for its personality—arouses the latter and helps toward its breakthrough. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me has eternal life.” The incarnation of God, which had become absolute in the cry of Jesus on the cross, “Eli Eli lama sabachthani” (this most horrible cry that ever came from the mouth of a living being in this world, and that made the earth tremble), is the greatest mystery in the events of the world and can never be grasped except in faith. The man, how-

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ever, who gains a real relation to God through this faith, which is put to the test in his relation to man, will not be lonely in the aloneness of his hour of death, for God will be with him. If the incarnation of God is nevertheless to be really believed, not merely with the mouth and with words and in abstract thoughts, of which the heart knows nothing, then man must, as it were, go through the complete humanity of Jesus and must make it actual for himself in every moment of his life. He must not begin with the divinity in order to believe and to understand from it the humanity of this life in order to come to the humanity via the divinity—then he would once more be clearly in the domain of the idea, of metaphysical speculation, of daydreams, which removes him just as much from the reality of his own existence as from that of Jesus. He would bring to bear his mental image, his idea of the divine, and it would turn out in the final analysis that he did not believe in the incarnation of God at all, but rather the opposite, in the deification of man—that is, that his faith is no faith at all. The divinity of Jesus must be believed unconditionally in the most unique meaning it can have without being idealistically and imaginatively misunderstood, must be believed unconditionally, for there is no single external aspect from which it could be deduced. Even the miracles of Jesus, the healing of the sick, the multiplication of the loaves, the raising of the dead, even his own resurrection, the factuality of which must in no way be called into question, do not directly bear witness to it. For from them we learn above all only that Jesus, as the Protestant theologian Daab similarly argued, stood in a relation to nature and to the events in it that had a completely different constitution than that which we have, or even than that which we can understand by means of scientific knowledge. Another incarnated man could also gain the same relation to nature to bring about the same miracles from it. But it is not in and for itself proof and testimony of divinity in a literal, not at all ideal, sense. Faith and miracles have much less to do with each other than it ap-

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pears at first glance. There are miracles really only in relation to the limitedness of our intrinsically relative knowledge and empirical experience of nature, ultimately in relation to the inner limitedness of our life and experience, which is doubtless never to be overcome. It is then a question of the concept of the possible and the impossible. A miracle would be that which is impossible in itself—that is, in no way conceivable, and yet in spite of that, is actual. In this sense there are indeed miracles—but not in nature, where man usually seeks them and wants exclusively to see them, but in the life of the spirit. We must see such a miracle, for instance, in God’s forgiving the sins of men, or in the divine love encircling even the most unworthy of men (of course, who would be worthy of it?). And these miracles must be believed in not simply on their own basis, but on the strength of the word of Jesus. Possibility is a design in the thought of man. The impossible is only that which cannot be reconciled with the laws of thought; rather, it is placed outside validity, thereby nullifying thinking. But the impossible is not that which appears to stand in contradiction to the ­so-called laws of nature—that is, to our limited insight into the connection of events in nature. That God could have raised up children for Abraham from stones obviously does not harmonize with our empirical knowledge and experience; but it does not, however, contradict our laws of thought. With God everything is possible; and it is man who thinks in terms of the possible. He thinks the possible (and it is possible, even though we cannot grasp how, that the five thousand were fed with five loaves, that the dead were raised, etc.), but the unbelief in him bids man at the same moment to withdraw the thought again, to conceive the possible as impossible. The belief in the miracles of Jesus is unimportant insofar as we have to believe in him and his divinity even if he had not performed them. Since he did perform them, we have to believe in them as well. Yet we do not really believe in them, but in the divinity of Jesus; and we believe in it not because he worked miracles, but rather because we, being per-

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sonally engaged, believe in him and in his word, which calls for faith in his divinity and promises us the salvation of our spiritual life in this faith and through it. Faith in Christ, in whom we have our spiritual life in its reality and truth, is and cannot be other than faith in the word, which is to be understood here directly and literally. The spirit of Christianity requires of man faith in the incarnation of God in the life of Jesus. No one becomes a Christian without the inner fulfillment of this requirement. But it must also have a meaning for the practice of human life that is to be stated without recourse to metaphysical and theological speculation. And it is this: to believe in the incarnation of God means to see in Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and in his word the prescription, absolutely binding for every person, of how man would have to live in order to live the right life, which every person feels in the depths of his heart he does not live. If man inwardly fulfills this requirement of faith in the only meaning that it can have (and only therein does he have the true inwardness of his life), then his life in this world, which tempts him day by day and hour by hour to live without Christ and beyond him, and to risk his settlement of accounts with God all by himself, has received a rupture from which it suffers in the eyes of the world. Yet he then also knows that God is and what God is and the mystery of his life is revealed to him. Then only does he stand before the true problems of his spiritual life, the solution of which is the unending task of his life. An inner pause between belief in God and in his incarnation cannot and must not be made—in which man himself, as it were, takes the time to decide for the latter after reflecting on the former. Both belong essentially and inseparably together. The one who does not believe in the incarnation of God does not believe in God and cannot believe in him at all. That is, he lives spiritually in essence as a pagan and has not overcome the unbelief that lies in the human spirit. Before Christ, no one could actually believe in God in his reality and have a spiritually real relation to him, with the exception,

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of course, of the Jews. Since the life of Jesus, however, everything is completely different. And the Jews, because they rejected Christ, have forfeited their first real relation to God; and their messianic hope, without which they would not have continued to exist in the world at all has now become a dream of the spirit, which is probably conceived in a manner too worldly. Along with the belief in the incarnation of God in the life of Jesus—which retrospectively calls for the belief in the chosenness of the Jewish people through the messianic promise—belongs the belief in the future return of Christ at the end of the world. In the belief in the divinity of Jesus, time is posited [gesetzt] in the infinite meaning of the present, of the moment; but it is also posited as the past and the future, in a reality that Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, which really only concerns abstract time, truly rattles in vain. The positing of time as future, however, is precisely the faith in the return of Christ. No man knows the day and the hour. May one dare to conjecture, without desiring to penetrate sacrilegiously into the mystery of the divine decree, what mankind will have become when that day (which no one knows) arrives, wherein mankind comes to its end? It always seems as if (in times, the coming and going of which is perhaps actually subject to a law of periodicity, which is obviously valid only biologically), whenever an individual generation is in danger of losing the breath of life, the faith in the imminent return of Christ is especially alive in the hearts of many. Possibly underlying this s­ elf-deception is the premonition of a state of affairs that is not actually wrong. That generation cannot exist in the world without the dream of the spirit. It does not awake from the dream; only the individual does, and for the purpose of making the final decision of his existence—for or against God. If an individual generation outlives its dream of the spirit, the spiritual condition of its continued existence in the world (and that is possible), then nothing else remains for it, unless the natural will of the generation be broken, but to destroy its biological, political, and economic con-

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ditions of existence in a black and desperate craving for chaos and ­self-annihilation, to which it is quite helplessly subject. One day, however, mankind as the actual totality of nations and generations will have dreamt its dream of the spirit through to its end and will have exhausted all the possibilities of its dream. For these possibilities are not endless, and in their limitedness are subject to the genesis and demise of all natural events in the world. And then mankind, not only in his individual instance but as a generation, having arrived at its end, will awake from its dream, ­a nd that is the moment of the return of Christ. With the end of mankind comes the end of the world. This is all conjecture, and whether the situation will be thus, only God knows. That God in his incarnation gave us the true object of faith, which saves us and awakens us to the spiritual life, was and is the revelation of his divine love. This love, however, which created man for a spiritual life—that is to say, situated the personality of existing in him—could obviously not again revoke the personal freedom of this spiritual life. For that reason, the personal decision of man in faith did not become unnecessary after the incarnation of God, but on the contrary—only through this means was it made relevant. The life and word of Jesus bring and compel man to his spiritual decision, whether or not he wills it. Yet Jesus himself said, he who is not for me is against me. Hence, one who forgoes the decision has just thereby already decided—against Christ (because he makes his decision like most people, who do not know what to make of their own personality, who mount it in the wrong place, or make no use of their own personality whatsoever). Yet one also thereby decides against himself, against the personality that is the spirituality of his existence, even though he may maintain it in a semblance of existence right up to the moment of his own death. There is only one religion, and that is something divine, not human—Christianity. Only in it can man gain a real relation to God. All other religions are that in name only, being mere human

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attempts at religion, human and therefore inherently unsuccessful attempts to elevate the spirit to God. For how can they ever succeed in the e­ arth-boundedness of our existence, in which the force and gravity of the fall from God pulls us downward again and again, if God himself does not come to help us? And he has come to help us. If one takes away the faith in the incarnation of God from Christianity, which is to be understood literally, or if one misunderstands the divinity of the life of Jesus in a contrarian mystical sense, then man stands just as spiritually helpless as in paganism—although his pride of the spirit does not permit him to perceive that at first. No doubt the Greek did not himself feel helpless, but only because he did not recognize the danger of his spiritual lostness. And without Christ and the faith in him we are not only without any direction, but are also spiritually lost. For man in his dark desire is by no means conscious of the right way. If one leaves out of account the divinity of Jesus in Christianity—taken in the sense in which God is revealed to us as spiritual reality, and that calls for faith from us—one again dreams the old dream of the spirit. Man may one day awake from it. But then, this awakening without Christ is something horrifying: the spiritual lostness of our existence as a fait accompli. The dazzling sagacity and truly astonishing profoundness of Otto Weininger, this veritable ultimate philosopher of Idealism, failed to grasp and understand any of this. He was a sign of a time that should make obvious, in the most frightful manner, what becomes of mankind when it dares to ignore the life and word of Christ, living without faith and without love.

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Fragment 17 The Ultimate Meaning of the Cogito—­ Self-Knowledge—Ethos and Grace— Sin and the Word

In no other sphere than that of the ethical and religious is the spirituality of our existence to be grasped in general, and in particular in the I­ -aloneness of the human spirit in its true meaning (and both belong inseparably together: for there is no religion without moral sense, and an unshakable moral sense that has not found its point of support in the religious sphere is not conceivable). And one will misunderstand this I­ -aloneness as long as one does not discern in it the fall of man from God. Its understanding, furthermore, may be destined to play a role in philosophy and science—namely, the role of an agent that drives toward ­self-consciousness. The true critique of knowledge must apply its lever at the fact that all objective thinking—mathematics and natural science, as well as philosophy and theology—takes its root in I­ -aloneness in order to take the cogito to its ultimate meaning. And that meaning is not s­ elf-knowledge, but the knowledge of sin, without which there is no way to God for man. Yet that means the nullification of the objectivity of knowledge and its turning back into the subjective. For sin can never, not in all eternity, be discerned objectively (of one man by another); if man discerns it in himself, that already presupposes his faith. Yet faith cancels sin—for it is the absolution of the spirit. Here, moreover, the

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intellect of man comes to a halt before the element of the transtemporality of spiritual life, which cannot be comprehended by him, before the unsolvable paradox that sin, which lies in time and constitutes it, and faith do not stand in temporal relation to each other. They stand in no genetic succession, for faith does not come from sin, and sin does not come from faith. But neither are they near one another nor in one another at one and the same moment, although they are nevertheless next to one another in the same moment of consciousness. Sin, which is actually unbelief, and this unbelief are in turn caught up in time and cannot escape it, presupposes faith for its recognition—to recognize it means it becomes a fact in the consciousness of man of himself, so that no one could know anything of his sin without faith. Yet faith cancels sin, though again, this cancellation and wiping out of sin cannot be separated directly and objectively in the consciousness of man of himself. Without faith, man knows nothing of sin; yet its forgiveness must be believed, and if it is not believed, that is the sin. There is no sin in itself, but only sin in man. There are thus no objectively determined actions that would be sin in themselves, in their objectivity, but only those in which man discerns his sin, consequently in their subjective determination. Man discerns his mortal sin in that action through which he makes impossible—and not only from frailty, absentmindedness, and thoughtlessness—his spiritual life, his relation to God. He discerns it, that is to say, in that action in which he consciously and deliberately affirms and approves of his fall from God, the I­ -aloneness of his existence, the original sin. In this he also affirms and approves of the temporal relativity of his life. Is not knowledge of mortal sin to be understood in a profound sense as prognosis, as cautionary prognosis? That which stands most of all in the way of man coming to faith, and through faith to the knowledge and forgiveness of sin, is the good opinion that he has of himself—actually that faith in himself that in the final analysis is nothing else but the true perversion of

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faith. If Rousseau meant that man is good by nature, that is simply false. Nature is neither good nor evil, and it in no way provides a yardstick for good and evil, but only for the useful and the detrimental, the pleasant and the unpleasant. For that reason, no ethics can be determined by nature. Yet this is right: everyone has by nature a good opinion of himself, which he does not want to relinquish at any price, and which is also the reason he understands in inverted fashion, aesthetically instead of ethically, the feeling that remains unfamiliar to no man, that the life he is living is nevertheless not the right one (this feeling is surely a clear sign of the spirit in man). He therefore does not understand himself in this feeling. Here we encounter the monstrous contradiction of existence in man, which is only conquered by that recklessness with which one takes seriously enough life in this world, but lightly the voice of the spirit in oneself. On the one hand, every person is inclined, precisely because he has a good opinion of himself by nature, to live his life in contradiction to that feeling, as something in which everything may be completely all right and in order, and even to live before others in this way and finally even before himself ­because one so frequently exists alone with oneself before others. And if one day everything is not all right, then the disorder comes of course from without. To be sure, one only pretends with more or less personal dexterity that everything is all right; it is at the same time, however, also the psychological presupposition for all ­self-assertion in life and in the world that is distant from God. The monstrous contradiction is that the spiritual life in man and his will to assert himself in the world are founded upon inner presuppositions that oppose each other. To come to his true spiritual life, man must drink to the fullest extent the feeling of not living the right life. But that means his will to assert himself in the world must be broken. That and nothing else is demanded by the gospel. He must go to the ultimate basis of this feeling—and that resides in the ­I-aloneness of his existence and in the spiritual un­tenability of this state—in order to rightly un-

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derstand this feeling and himself in it. He must relinquish the good opinion of himself that is natural to him, and in so doing he must pull out from under his own feet the natural ground and soil of human existing in the world. Only one who awakens to the reality of the spiritual life can do this without spiritual injury. We see here once again that idealism is a spiritual position of natural man only, in which the latter has his entire humanity, but which must still be overcome by the spirit. Idealism originates in the spiritual neediness of human existence, which it again masks; and it actually hinders the rebirth, the renewal of life in the spirit. He who makes idealism aesthetically his worldview and ethically his philosophy of life has to have personal ethical assurance in himself, even if there be only a final vestige unaffected by the discrepancy between idea and reality—which always underlies the conception of both the aesthetic and the ethical idea as inner experiential fact. But he who wants to live the life of the spirit, the life in which the spirit is not only dreamt of, as in idealism, must give up even this final vestige of personal ethical assurance, because it is a human ­self-deception toward which idealism inevitably misleads us; and he has to overcome both ethical and aesthetic idealism, together with idealism’s personal presuppositions in man. He who sees himself in the light of an idea ­even if he has overstretched it to the idea of the divine is nowhere near seeing himself, and above all he does not understand himself, as does the one who sees his existence in relation to God (who is a spiritual reality), who places his I in relation to the Thou and in this relation comes to full consciousness of himself. ­Self-knowledge is actually in essence a demand of the idealistic ethos and hence should not be put into immediate practice in the spirit and ethos of Christianity. When Luke’s Gospel (17:3) states, “Be on your guard!,” watch yourselves, something entirely different is demanded of man than in “Know thyself ”; a more concrete power of his mind is challenged than the power of knowing, which appears somewhat abstract. Idealism is pride of the spirit, as is also the ide-

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alistic ethos. And pride lies also in ­self-knowledge. Yet man does not usually realize this—because he does not take heed as the gospel insists, because he does not attend carefully to himself. In the pride of his ­self-knowledge man has no knowledge of grace—for to be aware of grace requires humility—and he closes himself from love, in which abides the genuine humility of the spirit. Nor is pride really able to spare him from the debasement of his existence and life; on the contrary, pride comes all the more to expression in such debasement. Even this is still pride: if man understands the incompleteness of his life as sin (and he cannot do that as long as there is no ethical reflection in him; and in wishful thinking he therefore lives aesthetically at cross purposes with the meaning of life), but does not emerge from his I­ -aloneness in the consciousness of the ethos of his existence. And in this pride he is spiritually lost—while being driven irretrievably into the arms of desperate ­self-destruction, or a ­no-less-desperate ­self-deception.

� The more idealism deepens, the more decisively it urges man to spiritually stand entirely on his own, to permit the ethos of life to be found in himself, in the fact of individual existence. And idealism can deepen only in its turning toward the ethical, no matter how metaphysically profound the aesthetic worldview of idealism may seem. Yet it is in no way consistent in this urge, nor can it be. For idealism is never able to lift individual existence completely out of the life of the generation; it is not spiritually able to bring individuality to realization. Even ethical idealism seeks in the end to return to the generation and presupposes the latter. For it always requires faith in humanity, without which it would have to become nihilism. And it requires faith in the sense that it expects the realization of the idea from the life of the generation, whose conception includes the demand for s­elf-realization—but individual existence is not sufficient proof of the generation’s fulfillment. And for this reason

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Kant says, by way of example, as the only rational creature on the earth, those talents that are geared for the employment of his reason could not have developed in man in the individual, but only in the species. Yet that means nothing other than that the ­much-praised individualism of idealistic ethics is only an apparent one, no matter how much it may see the ethos ultimately required of universal life to be spiritually rooted nowhere else but in the autonomous reason of the individual. It means that in idealistic ethics man ultimately receives the ethos of his life from the life of the generation—if he does not want to fall victim to spiritual s­ elf-destruction in the withdrawal of the idea or to lose sight of the personal reality of existence in its ethical inadequacy and brokenness in a metaphysical and visionary straying from oneself. But the ethos of universal life finally loses itself, over and above all the theories of the philosophers, in the practice of ethical relativism. Universal life allows the element of personality in human existence only its temporal meaning; it does not trouble about the transtemporal, eternal meaning. But that also means universal life seeks to, if not destroy, at least to fully subjugate the spiritual in man. We see here the tendency of natural life in operation, which is indifferent to individual existence. The life of the generation gives optimism to the individual who surrenders himself to it; but it demands that back from him. In his optimism, however, man deceives himself. Pessimism is a poor antidote for this ­self-deception. The philosopher, this true outsider of life, tends toward it by nature. Schopenhauer had every right to take offense at the optimism of philosophers, which testifies against philosophy, just as the latter does against optimism. He drew the conclusions of pessimism in a nihilism intended, to be sure, only philosophically. How could a man, being conscious of the deep contradiction of his existence to nature, uprooted from the life of the generation, not yet rooted in the reality of the spiritual life, indeed not yet even perceiving it—how could he think other than pessimistically and finally even nihilistically? It is faith that prevents pessimism on principle;

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faith makes it impossible for pessimism to become the attitude of the spirit, however much it may force itself by nature on man in the deeply felt neediness of his existence. But doesn’t faith (meant obviously as nothing other than faith in Christ) turn man into an optimist? The hope of the Christian is truly something entirely different from optimism. That man can neither receive the ethos of his life from the life of the generation nor have it in himself only the Christian knows who knows that he has received that ethos in its absolute meaning in the life and word of Jesus. This meaning makes impossible eo ipso any spiritual withdrawal and reinterpretation into the sphere of the relative. “Real man represents a much higher value than the desirable man of some prevailing ideal,” as Nietzsche says in The Will to Power, a realization in which the end of idealism is settled and the spiritual life of man renewed. But it is also a truth that is true and fruitful only in the inner turning of life to the religious. The life and word of Jesus, from which the Christian receives the ethos of his life and without which any recognition that man is more precious than the idea would have no meaning at all, is not the postulation of an ideal whose materialization would have to be hoped for from the life of the generation, but is rather, as it were, this realization itself. For Christ is the fulfillment and final aim as well as the end of the law. The power of faith in man (and who does not want to believe in something?), which in idealism seeks its object in humanity or clings to a human image of God that is always feeble and inadequate, if it does not go directly astray in the illusionary faith and superstition of a deranged imagination; this power has found its true object in the life and word of Jesus. For the Christian, however, this life and word not only constitute the ethos of life, which is absolutely valid for every man; they are also the guarantor of the resolution of the discrepancy between the ethos in its divinity and the human reality of existence in the world, obviously not in the life of the generation but in individual existence itself—namely, through faith in

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Christ. And precisely herein lies the crucial and characteristic element of Christian religiosity, which really means religiosity itself, the element that demands unconditional faith. This faith alone is the true faith in God and in the true God. It is faith in the grace, trust in the approach of the Thou, faith in the forgiveness of sins. We see ourselves standing once again before a fact of the spiritual life at which the intellect of man stands still. For it can never grasp the mutual coherence of ethos and grace. It understands only the one or the other—even if it appeals for help to all the philosophies of the world and to the discernment of all the theologians and the profundity of all the metaphysicians; if it understands the one, it cannot any longer comprehend the other. Yet ethos and grace belong together. Grace would have no meaning without ethos, for has God ever made a pact with a man only in extremis? There is only a single answer given to this question in one of the spiritual discourses of Kierkegaard, for it is actually not a question at all. Ethos without grace drives man into despair, into a spiritual pride that no longer permits the perception of spiritual lostness, or it drives him to a desperately helpless numbed fixation in it. Ethos is man’s guide through the confusion of the world on his way to God; but grace is the power behind the movement. A reliance on grace that permits the complete forgetting of ethos would just as little bring us near to God as that consciousness of ethos in us that knows nothing of grace. The intellect does not comprehend all this. If it grasps ethos as the categorical “Thou shalt” in its relatedness to the “I will,” to the rebellious “Je ne veux pas!” in man,1 it does not see wherein grace may be necessary. But if it comprehends grace and its necessity, it presumes, with complete consistency, to be sure, that grace makes ethos and the reality of the human will superfluous. There is no other individualism than a Christian one, however little Christianity speaks of it. And it is obviously not egoism; 1. See the poem “Le Rebelle,” in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Ed. Trans.: “I shall not!”).

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it does not make the s­ elf-relating ego into the principle of ethical thinking and acting. Nor is Christian ethics altruism in any sense, which always has in mind only the alter ego, even though it has equal rights with one’s own I in its ­I-aloneness. Nor is altruism ever able to do what the spirit of Christianity demands and is able to do: to bring the I in man to its true life in the spirit, to set it into a relation to the Thou.

� Self-knowledge is knowledge of the discrepancy between idea and reality in itself, but it is far from knowledge of sin. For in the latter, this discrepancy is not at issue. In ­self-knowledge man measures himself according to a human standard, for the idea is something human. In the knowledge of sin, he sees the reality of his life and existence set over against that of Jesus, and thus compared with a divine standard, so that one’s own reality comes to nothing ethically. In ­self-knowledge man is his own ethical judge; thus he has, or at least believes himself to have, ethical certainty and assurance in himself, however great the discrepancy may appear between idea and reality. In the knowledge of sin, he stands before the divine judge, before whom an ethical certainty and assurance in man cannot at all be given. A man can come to know of the discrepancy of idea and reality in another perhaps even better than in himself. But no one can know of the sin of another outside of God and the one whom he has chosen from among thousands and millions as the preacher of the change of heart (John the Baptist). For sin can never be known objectively. And even though another confesses his sin to us, we do not know about it and do not discern it; rather, we can only believe in it. If what is asserted in one of Kierkegaard’s writings is right, which indeed it is, that no man can understand another in his faith, then it must also be true that no one can understand another in his unbelief, in his despair, in the spiritual misunderstanding of his suffering from the worthlessness and meaninglessness of life;

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in other words, in his sin. To understand a man and to believe in what he says are not the same and can never be one and the same. If one confesses his sin to me, I cannot understand it, nor must I believe that he really discerns his sin in that which he confesses as sin (namely, because I take no spiritual part in his existence). But I can and even should believe it. For it concerns nothing else less than the taking seriously of a man in the spirituality of his existence. Or, for another example: when Jesus said that he was the Son of God, no man could or can understand it—either in a metaphysical or in a mystical sense. Yet we are obliged to believe that it is the truth. One cannot have other than a spiritual relation to the spiritual in another man (and the knowledge of sin is really spirituality in its breakthrough), and one does not have that insofar as one understands a man, but rather as one believes in him, believes, namely, in his faith or even in his unbelief, in his suffering from life. Love believes eo ipso. Yet if it believes in the acknowledged sin in another man, does it not in the same moment also inwardly absolve him from it? Faith always stands in relationship to something personal—thus directly or indirectly in relationship to the word—and sin is truly, as original sin, on the one hand something impersonal (which robs man of personality), but on the other hand, precisely for that reason, the most personal of all the concerns of man. The more knowledge deepens, moving away from the surface of the mathematical, where everything, even though not in the most beautiful, is nevertheless in mathematical order, the more it becomes knowledge of the fact that by no means everything in this world and in this life is in order, a knowledge of paradise lost. But it really only becomes a knowledge of one standing outside before the closed gates—those who really know are always outsiders in life. And precisely in this deepening, knowledge demands its final turning: from the objective, which is still involved in the knowledge of paradise lost, to the subjective, wherein it becomes known why paradise was lost. In all knowledge man ultimately discerns him-

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self in the I­ -aloneness of his existence, if he only presses forward to that knowledge and does not stop halfway. So far does its influence reach, but no farther. The one who knows stands on Mount Nebo, like Moses, and sees the promised land before him—but entrance is refused him. Only love and the word can liberate man from his ­I-aloneness. All knowledge comes from the word, for it is the light of our consciousness that illuminates all life and being. And to the word all knowledge must return. Only by this means does man in the knowledge of sin emerge completely from his I­-aloneness into a relation to God, who is the true Thou of his I, and only when this knowledge becomes word and confession. Through the word man is redeemed from the curse of sin and the law. The knowledge of sin must, in spite of its unutterability, come about through the word spoken to a concrete Thou (not only in a mere diary entry, or to an ideal Thou, like the word of the poet); otherwise man perishes spiritually from it and its unutterability. As long as this knowledge renounces the word and avoids expressing itself over against a concrete Thou, a still more spiritual pride abides in it. Even in his knowledge of sin and its verbalization, the relation of man to God must find its expression in the relation of man to man—just as in love. Certainly God is in him to whom I make the concrete Thou of my confession of sin—just as God can be represented by anyone whom man loves with the right love—that is to say, whom he loves because he loves God and not himself in the other, and in whom he loves God. The word of confession originates from the love for God; the love for God grows in the word of confession. Thus we see here again how the word and love belong together in their deepest basis. But the faith of man in God, which is the inwardness of his spiritual life and as such the inwardness of the word, should therefore also become word and confession; and there is really no other confession of faith than in the confession of sin. A confession that is not the latter would be an empty and meaningless word, a misuse

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and a sacrilege of the word. In the confession of sin man believes in the word, which is from God and descended from heaven to dwell among us; he believes in redemption through the word. It is stated in Mark’s Gospel that “there is nothing hidden, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light” (4:22). But the revelation of that which is hidden and secret is in the word. Sin is revealed in the word, as are also divine love and grace, which take away our sin. And if in this life man in the seclusion of his soul hinders the word in time, then on the day of judgment it is hindered for all eternity. The decision of whether the word is judge or redeemer for him takes place in and through man himself. Grace is in the word and in love. Knowledge without grace, knowledge that is loveless and renounces the word, is spiritual lostness. It points the way to insanity, perhaps even to crime, certainly to despair. The one who recognizes his sin—only he and no one else—also becomes aware of the justice of heaven. It is madness to rebel against it; it leads to madness to submit oneself to it without mercy. God, who is love and in his love became man to save us from being spiritually lost in the e­ arth-boundedness of our existence, presides over the justice of heaven. That the intellect certainly does not grasp. But if that were not so, how could a man endure existing in faith in God and in grace? If God were not also the wellspring of grace, which has been poured over us in the incarnation of the word, man’s cause before God and before the justice of heaven would also be lost forever. Knowledge has meaning only in time and is perpetuated only through sin that is affirmed by man, that is countenanced and thereby magnified. It has meaning in time—for time as scientific knowledge, for eternity as knowledge of sin. But philosophical knowledge (this long breath of the final gasp of one who is drowning) only dreams of a meaning for eternity. Scientific knowledge moves more and more away from the word and becomes thereby inhuman. The knowledge of sin, however, must go to the word and must become

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word, if it is not to perpetuate itself and sin in its unutterability and unstatedness. Whenever we catch hold of our spiritual life, we see that there is no one element in it that would not have or call for a direct and essential relationship to the word. And that is the case because spiritual life was created through the word. In the ultimate basis of things and all that takes place, which is a spiritual basis, the truth of the word is not revealed in the truth of being [Sein], but rather the opposite; the latter is revealed in the former. For the word in the spirituality of its origin is the source of all truth and all being. “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:3, 4). And in the letter to the Hebrews it says, “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen is made out of things which do not appear” (11:3). All being comes from the word but became wordless in its fall from God. All truth of being is in the word, and if being moves away from the word and becomes wordless, it becomes untrue. Thinking is a process between the wordlessness and untruth of being, which has fallen from God and the word and its truth. It wills to and must go to the word, and that means to God. Even wordless mathematical knowledge needs the relationship to God to be knowledge of the truth, as Descartes observed—and did he really remain the only one in this? In the word and through the word man possesses the distinctly human consciousness of things and events in the world; but he also possesses the consciousness of himself and of God. All true and vivid thinking, all of man’s spiritual life, has its objective support only in the word. The greatest of all philosophers already had a presentiment of that, and it was the word, language itself, that helped him to attain it. And when he has Socrates say to Phaedo that one must not let the thought that there is no reliance on words come up at all in the soul, he had to be sure rational argumentation was above all in mind, in connection with the term logoi—but secretly

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the word nevertheless, which is truly the ground of reason and the source of truth and life. All being, which has fallen from God and has become wordless, is destined to return again to the word—in man and through him. And through the grace of God, being is lifted from its untruth and reclaimed completely into the word.

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Fragment 18 Nature and Spirit, Universal Life, and Individual Existence—Culture and Christianity—Conclusion

Nature is a perpetual promise of life, which is redeemed neither in time nor in eternity. If there is a development, and above all if it has a meaning, then this meaning is to be sought here and nowhere else. Nature is like the “wanderer of distant paths” in the Epic of Gilgamesh (that amazing poem of great antiquity) who cannot find the life that he seeks. It is restlessly on the way but reaches no goal. It seeks the spirit but never attains to it. Nature sketches an outline of individual existence—this “most dubious position in the balance of community”—in order to renounce it again in the end in favor of universal life. With nature one never clearly knows “where the individual ceases and the species [Gattung] begins.” Its individuals are swimmers in the stream of life whose strength is exhausted keeping their heads above water—until the same flood from which they were born swallows them again. But if that individual being that is not only planned but realized were a fact of nature, then one would really have to say that in its bringing forth, nature had gotten itself involved in an experiment disquieting and dangerous to itself. The natural individual does not possess the meaning of his existence in himself, but in the life of the generation. Yet where does the latter possess the meaning of his own life? It doesn’t possess one at all; it

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only evolves. Where and to what end? To its own end. The evolutionism of our time, which conducts itself very much like natural science, though in the end it is never­t heless a metaphysical extravagance, revels in the notion of the eternal becoming and passing away of everything that exists—and betrays thereby that one must not take evolutionary optimism too seriously. The development itself, as we know from experience, leads this optimism ad absurdum. Certainly the events in nature, in which are built the human history of the will to live of the generation and that in their ultimate basis include that history, are not meaningless. But the meaning that those events possess, no man comprehends; only God does. History to be sure reveals its meaning to him who wants to see it. But who wants to see it? Not the politician, even less the idealist. The generation never asks about the meaning of its life. For this question is raised only by and in individual existence, in the neediness of individual existing ­a nd as circumstantial evidence of the spirit. The life of the generation takes place on the surface of the events in the world. The generation has its depth in individual life. In this depth the spirit gives light; in it the spirit breaks through. Man demands a meaning of life because he is not merely a natural, but also a spiritual individual. And only in the spiritual sphere does individuality, which is merely an incidental design in the natural domain, have its reality. But nature dismisses this demand as unwarranted. It says only: simply be content with the little life that I grant you, and do not ask about its meaning. And man does indeed content himself— to the extent that his life is rooted in that of the generation, in the natural life. So far as he is only a natural individual who disclaims being also a spiritual one, he has the meaning of his existence in the life of the generation. He has a relation only to the latter, but not to himself, and not to God. And thus he lives wholly in time and rises in the temporality of this life—and falls. For that reason, he does not become conscious of the latter; time and temporality do not become problems to him. He has no knowledge of death, and it

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could in no way be imparted to him, for it is one with the awareness of time. Yet there is no such man. For everyone possesses the certainty of his own death. Only no one wants to know of death. There is no one whose existence could be completely rooted in universal life, who could become fully absorbed in it. Whoever would be only a natural but not a spiritual individual would thus not be a man. There is no one whose existence does not include the raising of the question about the meaning of life. Something entirely different than a philosophical problem is touched in it, although it is correct that all thinking and philosophizing begin with it. But does man as a spiritual individual bear in himself the meaning of his existence? If that were so, he would not ask about it. Or does he seek in this question, which is already actually an indication of the uprooting from universal life, and of the brokenness of his natural life (these, however, are not simply one and the same); does he seek nothing else but to become rooted once again in the life of the generation? That cannot be, because it is the spirituality of his existence that raises the question—no matter how consistently he may be inclined to seek the meaning of his existence in the life of the generation, to draw from it the answer to his question. Thus we stand once again before the irreconcilable opposition of nature and spirit, which we must neither postulate metaphysically nor metaphysically speculate away. For in it we have the reality and the task of our existence. If man wishes to return to the generation because he cannot find the meaning of his life in himself and attempts to answer his question about this meaning from its life, the spiritual in him, which does the asking and demanding, compels him to a more or less imaginary and metaphysical aberration. It compels him to give a meaning, even if only an invented and imagined one, to the life of the generation, which actually does not ask about meaning and calls for none. And then indeed the generation receives its spiritual life from him, from the dream of the genius of the spirit. The spiritual individual finds in

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himself the meaning of his life just as little as the natural one, who, however, does not seek one at all. The former does not possess it in the life of the generation like the latter, but rather in God and in his relation to God—and he can have it nowhere else. That man raises the question about the meaning of life signifies in its ultimate basis that he seeks God. The spirituality of his existence uproots him from the life of the generation. But the questioning is neither an accidental nor a natural outcome of this uprooting, not a product of development in the brokenness of the natural life or its final refuge in death, and least of all is it a mere surrogate of life in the poverty of life and an indication of the bankruptcy of life in time. Since, however, the question about the meaning of life is always raised in the I—aloneness of human existence, in the seclusion of the I before the Thou and in no other way, it is not only a sign of the spirit, but above all also a symptom of the sickness of the spirit of man. This is so even when it is not taken seriously by him in the practice of existing, but only in theory, hence not taken seriously at all; and even if the answer to this question is speculated upon metaphysically with a great show of genius and profundity. The man who has found the true Thou of his I, who has found the meaning of existence in God, no longer asks about the meaning of life. He knows that his existence is placed in the hand of God, and, in spite of all the distress, all the suffering and misfortune, all the shattering of his life in this world, he demands no other meaning for it than that which he clearly and distinctly comprehends in his relation to God f­rom whom all suffering comes, yet who is love and in his love draws man up to himself through suffering. He will no longer ask about the meaning of life, even amidst Armageddon—not in a godless and desperate abandonment of any meaning by his spirit, but rather in an unshakable trust in the eternal meaning of his existence in God. The life of the generation is rooted in the rich soil of the sexual life. In its awareness, however, it is supported by a double will, by the political and the cultural will: the will to power is exagger-

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ated by the dream of the spirit. No doubt only the genius creates culture; and the generation receives its culture and takes its spiritual life from him (and behind all culture is hidden the question about meaning, and the secret and w ­ ell-concealed suffering from the meaninglessness of life). The generation, because it is the generation of man, cannot continue to exist without culture, without the dream of the spirit. It is inconceivable, says Schelling, that there could be a people without a mythology. What is mythology, if not a graphically versified dream of the spirit? It is to a people what the worldview is to the individual, to the genius. Although the generation needs the dream—in order not to come to a standstill, but to advance on the n­ ever-ending path of nature to the spirit—it nevertheless dreams only at the surface of its life. Only the genius dreams of the spirit in the depths of life. While being involved in the life of the generation man never reflects on himself. But if the generation reflects on itself it becomes conscious of its power—and then for a time it always puts aside the dream of the spirit. We see here that the generation does not take the dream seriously like the genius. But if power seeks justification for its deployment in the dream of the spirit—and it always does—it is hypocrisy. For it always feels secretly justified in itself. Man nevertheless lives not only an e­ arth-bounded, but also a spiritually bounded life; and this s­ pirit­ual-boundedness of his existence is a boundedness with the word and through the word. And if one takes the dream of the spirit away from him, so long as he is not awakened to the reality of the spiritual life, what would be left of his life? Something truly dreadful. The generation receives its spiritual life from the genius. The man who is not a genius, however, who dreams with others the dream of the spirit, usually has received it from the life of the generation. Only the individual, not the generation, can awaken from it. This awakening of the individual is either an awakening to the realities of the e­ arth-boundedness of life or an awakening to the reality of the spirit, which leads man to freedom from his

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s­ piritual-boundedness. The former does not really render man spiritless, for that is in itself impossible; nevertheless, if it doesn’t turn him into a ­dull-witted denier of the spirit, who finds in banal pleasure sufficient reason to be in this world, it can turn him into one who secretly hates everything pertaining to the spiritual. Yet just in this hatred he gives evidence of the s­ piritual-boundedness of his existence, which he does get free of even at his furthest distance from the spirit, not in crime and insanity, and not in his deepest fall from God. Regarding the latter awakening, let man beware of any misuse of freedom, which would inevitably throw him back once more into his ­spiritual-boundedness. The one who awakens from his dream to nothing else but the realities of this earth will for the most part keep it to himself. Rooted in the life of the generation (where else would he find a mainstay for his now unsupported existence?), he will still act outwardly, at official occasions, as if he continued to dream the dream of the spirit in all seriousness, as if he took it to be the most real reality and the purest truth. For the generation itself demands that of him. It needs the spirit very much in connection with its official occasions as beautiful cliché and dazzling dress uniform, and in any case for the binding of the individual to its unspiritual aim and object. For there is truly no greater comedy in the public life of man than that which is acted out with the word “spirit” and everything that pertains to it. Yet it is probably the final and to be sure painful destination of the words of the poets and philosophers, of the idealists (in the best sense of the term), that they become clichés that the life of the generation needs in order to grant expression to its pretended relation to the spirit—by which it must justify itself again and again to the individual. But if man also turns the word of God into clichés, the world would be forced to go under. In the consciousness of his existence, the individual is involved in the life or death of the generation in two respects (unconsciously, however, through his sexuality): through his participation in either its political or its cultural will. Even the genius, in whose work individuality

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and spirituality are quite active, seeks the generation and in creating presupposes it and its continuation in the world. That politics is a hindrance to the spiritual life is understood only at a pinch—and then only aesthetically, as today everything spiritual is understood in general only aesthetically. Perhaps even that will no longer be understood soon enough, when everyone is completely democratic. But that culture, art, and philosophy hinder the spiritual life no less than politics has not yet been understood—with very few exceptions. And it is least of all understood in a time that is unaware that it has for decades lived spiritually by the most pitiful cultural surrogates, with beautiful vignettes and other cosmetics, and quite seriously imagines (with a seriousness that provokes laughter) that in its scientism it possesses culture and the true life of the spirit. One does not comprehend (or does one not want to comprehend?) that the seriousness of the spiritual life is not in culture, this dream of the spirit—even if it would be as beautiful a dream as that of the Greeks. Such seriousness began (and only begins) with Christianity. And only the Christian, who knows that it is a matter of life and death of the spirit in the existence of every single man, knows of it. When the seriousness of life begins, then all dreaming is over, and beauty becomes a matter of indifference. The word of the poet, which brought beauty to language and language to beauty, grows silent before the word of God, Humanity, to be sure, hangs onto its dream of the spirit. It does not want to part with its ideals, even though those ideals deserted humanity long ago. It did not want to be awakened even by Christ, and thus it came to dream a Christian dream. All at once there was a Christian beauty, a Christian art, poetry, and even philosophy. All seriousness of the spiritual life, of course, had to one day disappear from this Christianity, if one may still call it Christianity, and then nature began to be discovered afresh. A Christian culture is obviously a misunderstanding, or Christianity is a culture, and therefore not the truth of our lives. Culture gives the life of man a spiritual form, but no spir-

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itual content. The content is always the natural life, and there is no culture without a spiritual vacuum (not only a biological vacuum) lurking behind it. It is not the full, unbroken life that has a style and needs one, but rather the death of man in the midst of life. It is of course the power of life itself that creates style, and where this power has faded to its final vestige, man lives and dies in bad taste. That means every individual, precisely when the seriousness of the final moment is at hand, dies in bad taste. After that, those remaining behind and the survivors, whose worry it is to bury their dead, arrange for a more or less tasteful funeral. What is character from an ethical point of view for the particular and the individual—capacity in dying—is style from an aesthetic point of view in the universal and the general. Culture in the deepest ground of its essence is stylized dying—even though it extends through the centuries. In the stylization of death, however, the seriousness of death is not grasped. For the religious man there is no problem of style, nor of art or life. For he knows about this seriousness (to know of it is already religiosity), just as he knows about the true seriousness of life, from which one cannot recover with a card party or in the theater or the concert hall. Didn’t Michelangelo, this greatest and most powerful of all artists, come to realize in the final years of his life that art has a justification for existence neither in the light nor in the shadow of the cross? Christianity, which conquers death, stands above all form and culture. It cannot be assimilated into any culture, and it can never contribute to the cultivation of a people—that obviously those do not believe who believe instead in a Christian culture—instead of in Christ. Seen in his light, all culture appears unimportant. Christianity shatters every conceivable spiritual form; yet it also gives to human life the only spiritual content possible for it, because it is willed by God himself. There is no Christian culture (that has to be said!), there is no Christian worldview; nor is there a Christian worldly wisdom. For the Christian will always be a fool for Christ, a fool in the view of

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intellectuals and wise men of this world. All culture is relative and nationally conditioned. To have a culture, even the cultural creation of genius, means to have only a relative relation of human existence to the spirit, one that comes through the medium of universal life. To become a Christian means to inwardly extricate oneself from all of life’s relativity and to step into an absolute relation to the spirit. That man creates and has culture, be it in the primitive or the most highly developed sense, is due to the spiritual significance that is actually inherent in his life. Yet man is truly conscious of the latter, even at the highest level of his culture, only as if in a dream. To be a Christian means to be alert, means to exist with a perpetually alert consciousness of the spiritual significance of life. Even the genius, just like every other man, needs the inner a­ bout-face, the conversion of the inner man. Does this bring his genius to naught? Certainly not. But by removing the aesthetic distance to the problem of life, it transforms genius into the knowledge of sin and into love. How can a culture dare to place itself under the sign of the cross? To do that turns culture into untruth in the deepest sense, which classical culture certainly was not at all. Let one only think of the architectural lie of the Gothic construction of the cathedral and the tower, which, as Schopenhauer similarly perceived, feigns the overcoming of all earthly gravity and weight, so that one can then fly directly from the earth to heaven. Such a culture bears in itself that contradiction which leads necessarily to its disintegration and decay. Did Western culture go to ruin—and it is already ruined—at anything other than the stylization of the cross, at its platonic misunderstanding of Christianity? Let one not be deceived: that and nothing else begot the unbelief and godlessness of our time. Whether at this point the Americanization of life or Bolshevism carries out the final c­ leaning-up operations, so as to clear the way to Europe for the Mongolians, is ultimately of no consequence. As the decline of this culture was taking place and becoming evident, there also came into being, provoked by its bad conscience, the cultural psy-

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chologism that always stands at the end of a culture as its sign, as well as the psychologism in literature and art, that lead the poet and the artist to that remarkable s­ elf-betrayal that no one would have been capable of in the case of the Greeks. It was not classical culture, but rather the Gothic, this double offense against the spirit of beauty and the spirit of Christianity, that begot cultural psychology. The latter left Greek art, poetry, and philosophy in peace, and did no violence to a culture, which, just as there is only one religion, was thus the one culture. Examined in its light, all other cultures are only groping attempts toward it, more or less successful approximations of it, or its disfigurement and distortion. It is really of no importance whether cultural psychology, like every other complete suffisance and médisance [smugness and gossip], conducts itself more metaphysically and metapsychologically, or more psychoanalytically, or whether it permits the spiritual values of the culture to continue to exist or not. It leads to criticism in every case, and that is the demolition of the spiritual life. That criticism, however, is a profound spiritual necessity for this culture. Only cultural psychology, the psychoanalytic no less than the metapsychological, has not assumed the proper standpoint for this criticism. For that lies within the realities of the spiritual life, or in any case they can be perceived from that spirit. The only question is whether a man who has gained this point of view and has found the firm foundation of his spiritual life in it still really exercises objective criticism, or whether he does not see himself standing before a completely different, endlessly significant spiritual task. It has been remarked, quite correctly from the point of view of the psychoanalyst, that all cultural values are actually nothing else but a dream of the spirit, the dream of man of a higher life. The psychoanalyst sees the unhappiness that lurks behind this dream, but surely misunderstands it. He perceives it merely in the brokenness of the natural life, in organic inferiority, or in the perversion of sexual life. He does not grasp, either in the psychic ex-

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ploitation and overcompensation of the former or in the realization and sublimation of the latter, that it is not nature, but the spirit in a state of wretchedness that plays the crucial role. He claims to see through and resolve the dream of the spirit in his own way. Yet he does not perceive the spiritual behind it; he denies the reality of the spiritual life completely. The latter is, of course, not perceived from the metapsychological point of view, either. For in the final analysis the metapsychologist is still caught up in the dream of the spirit, which the serious psychoanalyst never is. Regardless of how very ethically the metapsychologist may behave and of how aware of the ethical dimension he may be, he nevertheless does not really take the ethical seriously—personally, but only in an objective way. In the end he confuses it for an object of completely nonobligatory admiration, which one has to hold at a distance so as to be able to contemplate and admire it along with the aesthetic. This is quite characteristic for him. The total spiritual inadequacy of his point of view, as well as that of the psychoanalyst, is revealed in the comprehension of the life and word of Jesus. The psychoanalyst, if he is honest, abruptly negates this life and word. That it is the infallible touchstone of everything spiritual cannot perplex him, because he is not at all aware of it. For the metapsychologist, who is of course not aware of it, either, this life and word constitute a kind of mythology, which he treats psychologically and metapsychologically like every mythology, and that means noncommittal. While he sees something very beautiful in the religiosity and Christianization of a man, whom he obviously takes an interest in observing and admiring only from an aesthetic distance, the psychoanalysts are always suspicious of the latter, and it cannot be denied that they treat such religiosity with great discernment; their suspicion is based on such plausible grounds that they could render questionable even a man who is aware of himself in the brokenness of his life. Questionable, that is, if he is unable to keep in mind the word of the gospel that warns against all

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doubtfulness: whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God. Moreover it is certain that, even if psychoanalysis were in the end to be proved correct (which is very questionable), it would not be injurious in the least to the spiritual meaning of faith in Christ; quite the contrary. If cultural psychology is to be more than and something besides a mere symptom of the end of culture—and it does recognize the latter as the dream of the spirit and discerns it as that which grows from the psychic ground and soil of the feeling in man that the life that he is living is still not the right one—then it must not go astray in the interpretation of this feeling, whose misunderstanding found its precise expression in the culture. It must not get involved in an optimistic prophesy of a renewal of culture on better psychic and spiritual foundations and presuppositions than hitherto. Cultural psychology should rather be the plowshare with which the ground of the spiritual life in man is cultivated—but not that a new culture and a different dream of the spirit should grow out of it. It should make that field ready for the reception of the seed that comes from heaven. But the poor in spirit truly do not need cultural psychology and its work of uncovering only apparent spiritual riches. Yet, do those who are not poor in spirit stand in need of it in order to become conscious of its illusory riches? Perhaps it is really that which is most superfluous in the world of the spirit, and it can be nothing else but the symptom of sickness and decay in this world. Christianity is not an idea. Rather, it has brought idealism to consciousness of itself and has thereby also done away with it ­just as a dream dissolves into nothingness when man becomes conscious that he is dreaming. In the end Platonism lives spiritually only on the idea in its aesthetic meaning, and it therefore culminates in the possession of a worldview. One must, however, be a genius in order to have a worldview, in order to be a Platonist. But the aesthetic meaning covers up the root of the idea, which is to be sought in the will and in the ethical sphere. The ethical idea places the problem

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of life in its subjectivity directly before the eyes of man and replaces the worldview, which always determines the spirit aesthetically, with the conception of life, which always has ethical meaning. The problematicity of life comes about in the subject and in being the subject and therefore also requires a solution from the standpoint of the subject and for the subject—the possibility of which, however, can and must never be sought other than in the religious sphere. The child is, to an extent, the solution of the problem as proposed by nature. Only the problem is not really solved there; rather, the solution (again, only apparent) is merely postponed, transmitted from one individual to another in the chain of development, at random. And it doesn’t always have to turn out well. Moreover, whoever sees the problem of his life lying completely in his children is already spiritually lost. Of course, whoever has children must ever bear them in mind in the problem of his life (which not nature, but the spirit demands), and must also include them and their existence in the problem. The genius, who does not want to get involved in the proposal of nature—or sometimes even cannot?—attempts a solution with his work. Yet it remains a mere attempt. As long as man lives spiritually under the spell of the aesthetic idea, he has the problematization of life objectively before himself (namely, because he has pushed it into an aesthetic distance), and he seeks its solution in vain in the objectivity of the possession of a worldview, which can never admit that nothing else but his problem is at issue. If he cannot aesthetically delude himself into believing that the solution is to be found there, then despair is already at hand, and he inwardly breaks under the clearly grasped impossibility of objective solution. Nor does ethical reflection protect him from despair. It drives him all the more into despair if he attempts ­self-reflection outside of Christianity and its spirit of grace—because in such reflection he becomes aware of the impossibility of even a subjective solution, assuming he does not want to deceive himself again. For the individual—and he only becomes the indi-

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vidual through being uprooted from the universal—natural life ­can exist spiritually only in his humble, obviously not presumptuous, confidence in grace. A man who inwardly grasps his problem of life as entirely his problem (and not poetically and philosophically as the problem of an ideally intended man, as the problem of mankind), and who takes completely upon himself the weight and burden of this problem, has to be able to believe in God, in the approach of the Thou—or he will go insane. Christianity calls for man to enter seriously into a life in the spirit, and this seriousness lies in the fact that the spiritual life is not an affair and concern of the life of the generation, that it is not an idea whose realization could come about gradually in the life of the generation, and in which the individual would have to contribute to with reference to universal life. It is rather totally an affair and concern of the individual per se with reference to himself. No man can become a Christian through his relation to universal life and in it; Christianity cannot be received from the life of the generation. Let no one wait for the generation to come to its senses, to bring him thereby to his senses. And let no one place the hope of his spiritual life on a religious awakener who is to come and who is to bring an end to the woes of the time. For that would be nothing else but the messianic hope in disguise—and thus Judaism. Just as according to an extremely apt observation of Joseph Hauer, it is Judaism when an unproductive man yearns for the gift of genius, and an aesthetically unproductive generation longs for a genius to appear. Therefore, the one who really lives the life of the spirit never relies on the nation to which he belongs in the ­earth-boundedness of his existence. As John the Baptist said to the Jews in the wilderness, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Mt 3:9). Spirit is not something native. “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the

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spirit.” Thus spoke Jesus to Nicodemus. The one who is rooted in the natural life does indeed know where he comes from, or at least believes that he knows; but he does not know where he is going. The one who is reborn in the spirit knows his origin and his end, certainly neither of which is the life of the generation, from which he is totally uprooted. There is no racially and nationally conditioned Christianity, but rather only the one spirit of the word and life of Jesus, which stands above all nations and in which they all pass away—along with a Roman Catholic, German Lutheran, and Russian Dostoyevskian misunderstanding of this spirit. The one who lives the life of the spirit becomes homeless in this world, after the example of his Lord: the foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air have their nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Christianity does not give a meaning to the life of the generation (which is and remains the natural life, with the single exception of the people chosen by God), but rather to individual existence, and only in its spirit is individuality realized, which in its being interwoven in the natural life is only a plan and design that is never carried out. The Christianity of the individual man, however, which concerns him alone, is clearly not an idea or a relation to an idea. It is rather his personal attitude toward the fact of the life and word of Jesus, which finds expression in the entirety of existence. All stress rests on this dimension of the personal. It can in no way be omitted or circumvented in Christianity. For if one omits it, if one thus shifts the center of gravity to universal life, one is then no longer dealing with Christianity. In spiritual lostness one relapses into the dream of the spirit. If a man has his spiritual life in the inner attitude of his existence toward a relation to the idea, that is something entirely different than if he places it into a personal relation to something personal. Christianity revolves essentially around the personality of the life and word of Jesus. Precisely that is the vast distinction and contrast between the pagan and the Christian life in the spirit. With whom, then, can a man step into a personal relation,

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in order to have his spiritual therein, and nowhere else? With Plato or Mozart or Goethe? They are all dead. One will, of course, say that Christ has been dead for nearly two thousand years. But that is not true. And one will say that though Plato, Mozart, and Goethe and all the other geniuses are dead, their works live on. But that is not true, either. For the spiritual life of these works is dead, and that which we admire in them is like the afterglow that for a time illuminates the evening sky like a sun that set long before, at which we glance upward. Christ left behind no immortal works that generation after generation could draw from. Yet he was resurrected from the dead and is with us to the end of the age. The generation has to place all of its hope for life, on the one hand, on the ­non-exhaustion of the surreptitious source of sexual life, but on the other hand, on the genius, because as a human generation it still needs a relation to the spirit in order to continue to exist. The individual, however, who has become fully the individual (although in no sense the absolutely alone and ­a ll-one), cannot base the hope of his life on anything else but the life and word of Christ; he becomes the individual precisely by so doing. Or else he builds his spiritual life in the sphere of madness and illusion. The one who is still rooted completely in the life of the generation and is assimilated in it (as, for example, the Mongolian man), cannot see the immortality of his life other than in his children. Whoever is a father is immortal. That is obviously based on a mistaken spirit. For this belief in the immortality of the race, typical above all among the Mongolians, is nothing other than a biological illusion built into the spirituality of human existence, which is on the one hand required of that spirituality, but on the other hand is supposed to protect from its very breakthrough. The one who is reborn in the spirit has put away all paternal desires and has become a real child—a child of God, whom God has created in his love through the word. The gospel demands that we become like children; and we become such through our faith in Christ, through faith in the Word

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made flesh. The word of Jesus was not the preaching of an idea, as is the word of the poets and philosophers, but the direct revelation of the spiritual life in its reality. It was and is the word of God, which will not pass away, even though heaven and earth may one day pass away. And neither was the life of Jesus a life of the spirit in the idea, as with the poets and philosophers and the intellectuals in this world. Rather, it was at one with the word, and was the Word made flesh; it was the life of the spirit itself in its reality, which arouses man from his dream of the spirit to reality, to the seriousness of the spiritual life. Certainly the word of the poets and philosophers also originates in the personal life. Yet by becoming the poetic or philosophical word, it detaches itself from the personal life, and therefore never speaks to the concrete personality in man, but only to the ideal—that is, to the possibility that lies in man but that presupposes a definite development of the life of imagination, of being addressed by the poetic or philosophical word. There is no worse misunderstanding of the words of Christ than when one takes them somehow poetically or philosophically. They are the most personal words that have ever been spoken in the world—and for that very reason unpoetic and unphilosophical. They constitute the word in its personality, pure and simple. They appeal directly to the concrete personality in man; and to know oneself as being addressed by them means literally to come to the reification of one’s personality. To remain closed to the word of the poets and the philosophers has a natural cause and can never be reckoned to man as sin. But to be closed to the word of Christ has a spiritual basis and is and remains the fault of man. And Western man has brought this guilt down upon himself. He forgot long ago (or never knew?) that we all live from the grace of the word; he lost the belief in the word—his entire science, and not only that, testifies to this; he became godless and inhuman, and at that he spiritually perished. He acted to be sure like a dying man who does not believe he will die, who thinks he still has time. But let this humanity reflect on itself just once. Let it take in the bitter

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medicine by spoonfuls (for otherwise it could not bear it), which is administered by the physician well experienced in the spiritual sickness of man, who wrote the book about the Sickness unto Death, which is the most profound book ever written about the essence of man. Since humanity is spiritually decaying, it has also ruined itself politically, economically, and biologically. For politics and economics lie only on the surface of events and, in the final analysis, are determined by the depth of the events in the spirit. Humanity did not want to survive the end of its culture—only it didn’t know that and doesn’t know it even today. And so it attempted its own suicide, which is without parallel in history. Science honestly and dishonestly contributed to its suicide by making death and dying easier, thus robbing it of all its significance. Who has not by now felt the gravity of our era—an era that could not prevent war through the arts of diplomacy, and in the same way is scarcely able to achieve peace through them? But that is just it: one senses it and perhaps even the gravity of the moment—but how many give evidence that they understand the gravity of eternity? What is the eternal for most people, at least it so appears, other than a beautiful dream of the poets and philosophers, of these unrealistic men who are not at home in this world? A dream and therefore without gravitas. That would be in and for itself quite right as far as the eternity of the poets and philosophers is concerned. Only one still needs to know wherein the gravity resides. Here in the hustle and bustle of this world? Time and eternity meet in the moment. So many who do indeed grasp the gravity of the moment grasp in it only the gravity of time—but not that of eternity. They are completely caught up in the temporal, in the e­ arth-boundedness of our existence, beyond which they cannot see, which seems to make even our spiritual boundedness impalpable to them. They do not know that time and eternity meet in the moment; that time receives its gravity from the gravity of eternity—but an eternity that is something different than the dream of the poets and philosophers.

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That dream has finally been exhausted in Europe. Thus, the intelligentsia of this time, who can no longer conceal this from themselves, are already considering a spiritual loan from the Mongolians. And they place all their hopes on a cultural association of Chinese man with European man to exchange Christianity, which in any case they don’t know what to make of, for Confucius or ­Lao-tse. What is eternity for the men of this time? A cheap consolation for the individual who is to be sacrificed. And if they are not the sacrificial victims themselves, then—then even eternity is nothing to them. The cultural and political bankruptcy of Europe allowed the social problem, this insidious sickness in the body of humanity, to become acute. Did we not experience how nature all at once stopped on its way to the spirit and abandoned its plan for the individual? That which came over Europe and is still taking place, two men foresaw, two who sought the welfare of man in the spirit of Christianity: Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky. The great Russian, great even in his ­national-chauvinist bias, saw Europe reach the eve of its fall long before this war, a fall that, as he wrote in the Diary of a Writer, will be without exception dreadful and universal. He saw the “great, final, s­ ettling-of-accounts, political war,” which the “comedy of the bourgeois alliance” taking place in Europe will not withstand, an alliance that seemed to consider itself “as the normal form for human alliances on the earth.” But deeper still than Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard grasped the “divine meaning of the diabolical principle of leveling”; he saw that that which comes from evil is subject against its will to the service of the spirit and of the spiritual decision of man. “It will then signify: behold, everything is prepared, behold, the cruelty of abstraction makes finiteness in its deception clear as such, behold, the abyss of infinity opens, the sharp scythe of leveling puts everyone to the sword, each in his turn—behold, God waits! So spring to the arms of God.” It lies in the spirituality of our existence that the life of man in this world comes down to a question. In the questionability of this

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life the spirit breaks through. But the answer to the question? Men are remarkable; they are still really waiting for an answer. And was that not given long ago, nearly two thousand years ago? And do they not yet know even today that the spirit in them is not only that which questions, but above all, because the answer has already been given, that which is itself conclusive for them?1 1. [Ed. Note]: Ebner’s original handwritten manuscript ends with the notation: “Written in Gablitz, in the Vienna Woods, during the winter of 1918–1919. The manuscript was completed on April 12, 1919.” Later editions omit this notation or merely note: “Written during the winter of 1918–1919.”

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Index

I n de x Abraham, 251, 283 accusative case, 158, 162 Adler, Alfred, 10 aloneness, 60–61, 71, 85, 92, 103, 117–18, 135–38, 153, 169, 181, 190–91, 194, 222–23, 230–31, 239, 249, 258, 264, 266 analytical philosophy, 9 antifeminism, 240, 242–44 anti-Semitism, 244, 246 aphorisms, 25, 25n51 apperception, 173–74, 201 atheism, 67–70, 212 attributive sentences, 201–3 Auden, W. H., ix, x Augustine, 213 Baader, Franz von, 13 Bahr, Hermann, 102n2 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 39 Baudelaire, Charles, 225, 225n4 beauty, 97–115, 173, 173n2, 174–75, 225 being-by-itself, 60 Benedict XVI, Pope, 39. See also Ratzinger, Joseph Beziehung, 53n1 Brunner, Emil, viii, 39 Buber, Martin, x, xi, xi–xiv, 11, 13ff, 16–21, 20n38, 23, 26, 29, 40

Chapel, Joseph R., x, xiv Cherubinic Wanderer, The (Silesius), 221 children, 127, 131, 131n1, 160–61, 162n6, 167, 205, 221, 241, 282, 285 Christ, Jesus, 25–26, 35, 73, 88, 91, 95, 119, 146, 187, 191, 213, 222–23, 227, 247–53, 262, 285–86 cogito ergo sum, 3–4, 154, 256–69. See also Descartes, René Cohen, Hermann, 15 Concept of Dread, The (Kierkegaard), 79 Confessions (Augustine), 213 consciousness: abrogation of, 184; being and, 130–46; death and, 134; in Descartes, 4–5; experience and, 131; “I-aloneness” of, 194; “I” and, 130–31, 158–59; language and, 90; reason and, 116; suffering and, 132–33. See also selfconsciousness consonants, 126–28 cosmos, 173–76 creation, 64–65, 72–73, 75, 98–100, 103–12, 114–15, 122, 125, 156, 176–78, 222, 229–30, 233–35 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 79, 200n3 culture, 17, 48, 58, 138–39, 244, 276–79, 281, 287

Cartesian dualism, 8 Cartesian problem, 3–4

Daab, Christoph Heinrich Ludwig Friedrich, 250

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Index

death, 14, 60, 70, 131, 133–35, 153, 166, 271–72 declaration, existential, 209–27 Der Brenner (periodical), 20n38 Descartes, René, 3–5, 163–64, 171–97, 268. See also cogito ergo sum Destiny of Man (Fichte), 213 determinism, 14 Dewey, John, 9 dialectic, 7, 175, 234 dialogical philosophers, 10–24 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 9, 15 diplomacy, 2, 287 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 48–49, 288 doubt, 3–4, 79 dualism, Cartesian, 8 Ebner, Ferdinand: aphorisms of, 25, 25n51; background of, 24–26; Freud and, 10; impact of, 39–43; importance of, 1–3; “new thinking” and, 11; Scheler and, 15; World War I and, 25–26 ego, 16, 263–64 empiricism, 5–6 Epic of Gilgamesh, 270 Eternal We, The (Green), xiii–xiv Ethics (Spinoza), 184 ethos, 70, 109n6, 171–97, 256–69 existential declaration, 209–27 experience: in Buber, 16; consciousness and, 131; in Kant, 5–6; senses and, 104–5 faith, 185, 189–92, 191n7, 193, 211–12, 249–52, 257–58, 263, 266 Fehling, Fred, xiii feminism, 240, 242–44 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7, 13–14 Fichte, Johann, 7, 78, 213, 238 Ficker, Ludwig von, vii–viii, ix, 20n38 Freud, Sigmund, 10

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9 Geist: as German word, xiii; translation of, 53n1 geistig: translation of, xiii, 53n1 gender, of nouns, 238, 238n1 genitive case, 158 genius, 76–77, 85–86, 95–96, 133, 242, 245, 247, 275–76 German Idealism, 5, 7 gnosticism, 178 God: atheism and, 67–70; in Buber, 16, 18–19; Cartesian dualism and, 8; in Cohen, 15; Descartes and, 179–80; feeling and, 231–32; in Feuerbach, 13–14; in Hamann, 12; “I” and, 193; I-Thou and, 18, 33; in Kierkegaard, 7, 14; in man, 233–34; as mental image, 228–36; name of, 66–67, 204–5; nearness of, 222; personal existence of, 70–71; personality of, 234, 249; pneuma and, 136–37; proofs of, 64–75; as reality, 228–36; reason and, 118–19; relationship with man, 55; in Rosenzweig, 23; self-consciousness and, 74–75; speech and, 24, 64–65, 83; spiritual neediness and, 115; talking about, 212–14; as “Thou,” 62, 210–11, 225; “Thou” and, 195; thought and, 183; word and, 30–31; Word and, 29–31, 43; word of, 73–74; words for, 203–5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 103 grace, 18, 70, 151, 256–69 Green, Harold J., x, xi–xiv Grimm, Jacob, 57–58, 61, 90, 103–4, 125–26, 160–61, 198 Guardini, Romano, 39–40 Haecker, Theodore, 20n38, 51, 146, 179, 246 Hamann, Johann Georg, 12–13, 42–43, 55, 59, 69, 91–92, 95, 116, 190 Hänsel, Ludwig, viii, ix Hansen-Löve, Friedrich, ix–x

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Index

Häring, Bernard, 39 harmony, 38, 107–8, 175–77, 251 Harmony in the Cosmos (Zederbauer), 175–76 Hauer, Joseph, 105n3, 283 hearing, 97–115 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, 14, 22 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 40 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 116 Horwitz, Rivka, 20–21 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 13, 55, 61, 92, 127 humility, 260 Husserl, Edmund, 9

individualism, 261, 263–64 insanity, 86, 120, 130–46 intelligible “I,” 152–53, 155, 230 International Ferdinand Ebner Society (IFEG), vii–x, x Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 10 intuition, musical, 97–115 “I-Thou”: in Buber, 17–18; in Feuerbach, 13–14; God and, 18, 33; in Jacobi, 13. See also “Thou”

“I”: becoming of, 221–22; being-by-itself of, 60; in Buber, 17–18; Cartesian dualism and, 8; consciousness and, 130–31, 158–59; dependence of, 64–75; in Descartes, 3–5; existence of, 147–56; existential declaration and, 209–10; God and, 193; insanity and, 143–45; intelligible, 152–53, 155, 230; in Jacobi, 13; language and, 135; mathematical thought and, 171–97; pain and, 126; in Pascal, 11–12; as pronoun, 56–57; self-consciousness and, 72; self-expressing, 150–51; self-naming of, 158–59; spiritual and, 49–50; Thou-less, 57; word and, 57 “I-aloneness,” 53–55, 71, 85, 92, 103, 117–18, 135–36, 153, 169, 181, 190–91, 194, 222–23, 230–31, 239, 249, 258, 264, 266 I and Thou (Buber), xi, 16 “I and Thou,” 56–63 idealism, 147–56; defined, 5; German, 5, 7; in Kant, 6; Rosenzweig and, 23; sexuality and, 243; spiritual and, 259; transcendental, 6 identity, 171–97 imagination, 78–79, 107, 110, 113, 161, 190, 234–35

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 12–13 James, William, 9 Jews, 29, 204–5, 244–46, 253, 283 John, Gospel of, 29–30, 47, 64, 66–67, 73, 91, 117, 135, 187, 213, 222, 245, 249, 268 John Paul II, Pope, 39 Jone, Hildegard, 25n51 Kammerer, Paul, 170n11, 172n1 Kant, Immanuel, 5–8, 16, 78, 117–18, 172n, 200n3, 217, 253, 261 Kasper, Walter, 39 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 14, 26, 48–49, 51, 77–79, 94, 132, 141, 237, 245, 248, 263, 264, 288 Kluge, Friedrich, 122n1, 158n2, 161n4, 165–66, 168, 205–6, 206n6, 238, 239n2 knowledge: in Descartes, 4; in Kant, 5–6; mathematics and, 184; pneumatology and, 91; in Rosenzweig, 22; self-, 256–69; of sin, 186–87; sin and, 267–68; spiritual life and, 89–96; substantialization and, 184 language, 2, 50, 55; consciousness and, 90; consonants and, 127–28; in Grimm, 90, 125–26, 160–61; in Hamann, 12, 91, 95; in Humboldt, 127; “I” and, 135; Leibniz on, 89–90; miracle of, 29–32; onomatopoeia and, 121–22; philosophy and, 89–90;

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Index

language, (cont.) randomness and, 71; reason and, 91; science and, 61, 92–93; spiritual and, 58–59; “Thou” as first object of, 203; thought and, 81–82; urge for, 57–58; word and, 61–62, 92. See also speech Latourelle, René, 39 law, 164, 187, 222, 226, 262, 266 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 89–90 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 76 Lindner, J. G., 111 logical atomism, 9 logical positivism, 9 Lord’s Prayer, 227 love, 16, 32–33, 115, 140, 147–56, 182, 187, 191–93, 191n7, 209–27, 266–67 Luke, Gospel of, 259 man, as word, 167–70, 172n1 Marcel, Gabriel, 9 Marcus, Ernst, 102n2 Mark, Gospel of, 267 materialism, 102, 181, 192n7 materiality, 86, 98–102, 111, 164 mathematical thought, 171–97 mathematics, 54 Matthew, Gospel of, 47, 213, 283 measure, etymology of, 164–65 Methlagl, Walter, viii miracles, 29–32, 93, 206, 250–51 mother, 160–61, 165, 241 M-sound, 157–70 music, 10, 244 musical intuition, 97–115, 175 name, etymology of, 158–59 nature, 72, 110, 127, 136–37, 161, 176, 231, 241–42, 261–62, 270 neediness, spiritual, 97–115 neo-Platonism, 48 neue Denken, 10–11, 21–22 “new thinking,” 10–11, 21–22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 262

nominative case, 157–58, 162–63, 198, 204 Nostra Aetate (Second Vatican Council), ix objectivity, 182, 182n5, 185–86, 200, 211–12, 219 oblique case, 160, 162–63, 167, 171, 199, 204 Olsen, Regina, 14 onomatopoeia, 121–22 On the Essence of Musicality (Hauer), 105n3 On the Last Things (Weininger), 166 Österreicher, John M., ix, 20 pain, 126, 128–29, 198, 207 Pascal, Blaise, 11–12, 53–54, 80, 92, 124, 135, 146, 155, 163–64, 179, 200, 202, 228 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 9 perception, 5, 59–60, 78, 99–100, 116, 126, 130, 160–61, 196–97, 206n6. See also senses personality, 56–63, 141, 159, 192, 200, 209–27, 234, 249, 261 pessimism, 261–62 Phaedo (Plato), 47, 268 phenomenality, 15 phenomenology, 9, 28 Philebus (Plato), 109 philosophers, word and, 89–96 philosophical environment, 3–10 Plato, 47, 78, 90, 109, 125, 268 Platonism, 48, 114, 175–76, 216, 281 pneuma, 80, 128, 136–38, 213 pneumatology, 19, 59, 61, 73n1, 85, 90–91, 93, 96, 110, 117, 136, 142, 158, 162–65, 174, 189, 191n7, 193, 199–200 political science, 2 positivism, 9 potentiality, 34, 216 predicative sentences, 201–2

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Index

pride, 207n7, 230, 255, 259–60, 263, 266 primal word, 125, 128–29, 128n2, 147, 158, 164, 169, 198–99, 206–7, 206n6, 209, 220 pronouns, 56–57, 125, 151, 157–60, 162, 167, 171, 198–99, 203, 238 psyche, 80, 136–38, 225, 243 psychoanalysis, 10, 139, 141, 241, 279–81 psycholinguistics, 127, 138, 156, 201 psychology, 2, 130–46, 201–2 Pustet, Anton, ix Rahner, Karl, 39–40 Ratzinger, Joseph, 40 reality, 79, 171–97, 218, 228–36, 264, 271 reason: consciousness and, 116; God and, 118–19; in Hamann, 12, 91; in Kant, 5–6, 117–18; language and, 91; perception and, 116; word and, 116–23 “Rebel, The” (Baudelaire), 225, 225n4 redemption, 23, 93, 186n6, 191, 267 Ricoeur, Paul, 9 Romans, Epistle to, 187 Rosenzweig, Franz, 11, 19–24 Russell, Bertrand, viii, 9 sacraments, 2, 38–39 Scheler, Max, 15, 59, 61 Schelling, Friedrich, 7, 90, 92, 114, 176 Schillebeeck, Edward, 39 Schönberg, Arnold, 10 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68, 77 science, 2–3; in Kant, 5–6; knowledge and, 267–68; language and, 61, 92–93; mathematics and, 196; pneumatology and, 93–94; speech and, 92; spiritual and, 179–80; word and, 89–96 Scotus Eriugena, 90 Second Vatican Council, ix, 38–40 Second Viennese School, 10 seeing, 97–115 sein, 214–17

self-consciousness, 56, 64–75, 158–59, 187 self-expressing “I,” 150–51 self-knowledge, 256–69 senses, 97–115 sentence(s), 198–208; attributive, 201–3; “I am,” 66, 71–72, 94, 135, 148, 150, 154, 188, 190, 210, 216, 218; predictive, 201–2; primal word and, 128–29; “Thou art,” 210–11, 218; word as, 57, 120, 125, 147 Sermon on the Mount, 223, 230 Sex and Character (Weininger), 237 sexuality, 140, 170n11, 181, 237–43, 273–75 Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), 79 Silesius, Angelus, 221 sin, 35–39, 186–87, 228–29, 256–69 Skorulski, Krzysztof, vii–x, 27 soul: in Buber, 23; in Descartes, 4; faith and, 67; in Hamann, 57, 67, 111; musical intuition and, 106; in Plato, 47; spiritual life and, 189; word and, 112; words for, 128n2 space, 172–73, 175–77 speech, 24, 28, 33–35, 49, 56, 64–65, 83; M-sound in, 157–70; science and, 92; word and, 125. See also language sphere, 172 Spinoza, Baruch, 184, 217 spiritual: aloneness and, 60; “I” and, 49–50; idealism and, 259; language and, 58–59; science and, 179–80; sexuality and, 240–41; translation of, xiii; word and, 126 Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig), 23 Stein, Heinrich von, 165 Sturm und Drang movement, 42–43, 43n98 subjectivity, 19, 85, 110, 133–34, 155, 182, 186, 200, 282 subjunctive mood, 216, 218–19 substance, 171–97

295



Index

substantialization, 50, 99, 102, 117, 158, 181–82, 184–86, 186n6, 210, 221 suffering, 132–33, 185, 207 Swoboda, Hermann, 240–41 theology, viii, 2, 39, 41, 51, 180, 186n6, 211, 213, 256 thesis, 7, 171–72, 188, 192, 200–201, 210 Thieme, Karl, ix “Thou,” 159–64; existential declaration and, 209–10; in Feuerbach, 15; as first object of language, 203; God and, 195, 225; God as, 62, 210–11; I-less, 57; insanity and, 143–45; objectivity of, 221; as pronoun, 56–57; in Scheler, 15; sin and, 35–37; speech and, 56 thought, 35, 76–77, 79–82, 183–84 tone, 97, 103, 105–6, 108, 109n6, 110–13, 127, 128n2, 167 touch, 98–101, 103–4, 110, 112 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), viii, xi, 27 translation: need for, vii–x; note on, xi–xiv truth, 22, 86–87, 192, 213, 234–35, 252 T-sound, 203, 205–6 Uexküll, Jakob Baron von, 47 universe, 173–74 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council verbalization, 81–86, 163, 183, 210, 266 verbs, 125, 148, 158, 198–99, 201–2, 203m206n6, 214, 219 Verhältnis, 53n1 Vienna Circle, 9 vocative case, 158–59, 162, 204 Vogel, Manfred, xi–xiii

Weininger, Otto, 166, 181, 189–90, 227, 237, 240, 242, 244, 247–49, 255 will, 77, 172 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche), 262 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, vii–viii, x, xi, 9, 26–29 word: faith and, 193; for God, 203–5; of God, 73–74; God and, 30–31; having, 29; human becoming and, 64–75; “I” and, 57; language and, 61–62, 92; love and, 147–56, 193; origin of, 56–63; pain and, 128–29; philosophers and, 89–96; primal, 124–29, 128n2, 147, 158, 164, 169, 198– 99, 206–7, 206n6, 209, 220; reason and, 116–23; in Scheler, 15; science and, 89–96; self-consciousness and, 64–75; sin and, 256–69; spiritual and, 126; spiritual life and, 89–96; spiritual neediness and, 97–115; tone and, 97–115; Word vs., 31 Word, 29–33, 38–39, 43; in Gospel of John, 29–30; reason and, 117; word vs., 31 Word and the Spiritual Realities, The (Ebner): philosophical environment of, 3–10; publication of, 1; translations of, 1 World War I, 10–11, 23, 25–26 Wort, 57n1 Worte, 57n1 Wörter, 57n1 Wort und Liebe (Ebner), 25, 25n51 Zederbauer, E., 175–76

296