by Thomas Mann
We have lifted one example, quite at random, from among his infinite attempts to rupture reason. But things got even worse when he turned to science—in which he did not believe. He did not believe in it, he said, for every man was perfectly free to believe in it or not. It was a faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word “science” itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognize and organize reality—space, time, causality—reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure. Space, time, and causality—in monistic terms that meant evolution. And there you had the central dogma of atheistic freethinkers and their pseudo-religion, which presumed to abolish the Book of Genesis and replace it with a stultifying fable of enlightened knowledge, as if Haeckel had been present at the creation of the earth. Empiricism? The ether of space—that was exact, was it? The atom, that nice little mathematical joke, “the smallest, indivisible particle”—proved, was it? The theory of infinite space and time—that was definitely based on experience, was it? Indeed, with just a modicum of logic, one could achieve very amusing results from the dogma of infinite space and time—to wit: nothing. To wit, the insight that realism was true nihilism. And why? For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement. He, Naphta, asserted this to counter the impudence with which materialistic science passed off as absolute knowledge all its astronomical bunkum and windy palaver about the “universe.” We ought to pity a humanity that had let a tawdry array of flimsy numbers compel it to believe in its own nothingness, that had allowed itself to be deprived of the pathos of its own importance. For although it might be tolerable if human reason and knowledge held themselves within earthly bounds and treated the subject-object experience as real within that sphere, the moment it reached out into the eternal riddle, into so-called cosmology or cosmogony, the joke was over, and presumptuousness had achieved the acme of monstrosity. What blasphemous nonsense, ultimately, to measure the “distance” of some star or other from the earth in trillions of miles or even light-years and to imagine that by the ruse of numbers you had given the human spirit an insight into the nature of infinity and eternity—when infinity had absolutely nothing to do with size, nor eternity with duration and distances in time, had nothing in common with the notions of natural science, were the abrogation of what we meant by the word “nature.” Indeed, the child’s simple belief that stars were holes in the tent of heaven through which eternal brightness shone was many thousand times dearer to his heart than all the empty, absurd, and presumptuous babble about the “cosmos” perpetrated by monistic science.
Settembrini asked him if he himself entertained such a belief about the stars. To which he replied that in that regard he would maintain all due humility and the freedom of skepticism. From which it once again became clear what he understood by “freedom” and to what conclusions such an understanding might lead. And, oh, if only Herr Settembrini had not had reason to fear Hans Castorp would find it all worth listening to.
Naphta’s malice lay in ambush for any opportunity to detect weaknesses in a theory of progress that tried to bend nature to its will; he loved to catch its agents and pioneers taking very human steps backward into irrationality. Aviators, pilots, he said, were mostly very nasty, untrustworthy sorts, and were above all very superstitious. They took rabbit’s feet up with them, or kept a crow on board; they would spit three times this way and that, wore gloves of lucky fellow pilots. How could such a primitive lack of reason be made to square with the worldview on which their profession was based? He took delight in pointing out the contradiction, it gratified him . . . But here we are selecting general items from Naphta’s inexhaustible hostility, when we have matters that are only all too concrete to talk about.
One afternoon in February the gentlemen gathered for an excursion to Monstein, an hour and a half away by sleigh from their normal haunts. The group included Naphta and Settembrini, Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal. They rode in two one-horse ‘ sleighs, Hans Castorp with the humanist, Naphta with Ferge and Wehsal, who sat up beside the driver; well wrapped in blankets, they left at three from the home of the non-Berghof residents, and to the tinkle of bells—that friendly sound in a silent, snowy landscape—they rode off down the right-hand slope of the valley, heading south, through Frauenkirch and Glaris. Snow clouds quickly blew up out of that same direction, so that very soon the only sky they could see was a streak of blue above the Rhätikon chain. It turned very cold, the mountains lay hidden in fog. The road they took, a small unrailed ledge between cliff and abyss, rose steeply into the evergreen wilderness. They moved by fits and starts. Sledders often came zooming downhill toward them, but then had to get off and walk past them. From around curves would come the gentle warning of strange bells—sleighs with two horses harnessed one behind the other, and one had to be very careful in pulling to the side to let them pass. Closer to their goal a beautiful view opened up onto a rocky formation of the Zügenstrasse. Arriving in Monstein, they stopped in front of the little inn, which called itself a “Kurhaus”; climbing out from under their blankets, they left their sleighs behind and walked ahead a little way for a view of the Stulsergrat to the southeast. The gigantic wall, almost ten thousand feet high, was wrapped in clouds. But at one point a single peak jutted heavenward out of the fog—it looked supernatural, like something from Valhalla, distant, sacred, and inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it greatly, and invited the others to do likewise. It was he, out of a sense of his own smallness, who came up with the word “inaccessible,” which served as an occasion for Herr Settembrini to stress that, of course, those rocks had surely been scaled. That hardly existed at all anymore—inaccessibility, some piece of nature where man had not already set his foot. A slight exaggeration, a bit of braggadocio, Naphta replied. And he cited Mount Everest, which had thus far responded to human curiosity with an icy refusal and appeared to want to remain in that state of cold reserve. The humanist was annoyed. The gentlemen returned to the “Kurhaus,” before which a few other unhitched sleighs now stood beside their own.
You could stay here. There were numbered hotel rooms on the upper floor. The dining room, rustically furnished and nicely heated, was likewise located upstairs. The excursionists ordered a snack from the attentive landlady: coffee, honey, white bread, and “pear bread,” a local specialty. They had red wine sent out to the drivers. There were Swiss and Dutch tourists at the other tables.
We would have liked to say that the hot and very tasty coffee warmed our five friends and gave rise to elevated conversation. And yet that would be somewhat inaccurate, since the conversation was actually a monologue by Naphta, who, after only a few words contributed by the others, took sole charge—a monologue of a quite peculiar and antisocial sort, for the ex-Jesuit turned his back on Herr Settembrini, who sat at his side, fully ignored the other gentlemen, and used the occasion for an amiable lesson addressed exclusively to Hans Castorp.
It would have been difficult to give a name to the topic of this improvisation, which Hans Castorp followed only in part, all the while nodding his head in agreement. It probably had no real subject, but instead wandered about freely in intellectual realms, broaching this and that, but essentially it was aimed at proving in dismal fashion that all life�
�s intellectual phenomena are ambiguous, that nature is equivocal and any grand concepts abstracted from her are strategically useless, and at demonstrating how iridescent are the robes that the Absolute dons on earth.
At best one could have seen his lecture as devoted to the problem of freedom, which he treated as the basis for confusion. Among other things, he spoke about Romanticism and the fascinating duality of this early nineteenth-century European movement, before which both reactionary and revolutionary ideas fell, that is, all those that were not synthesized to something higher still. For it was, of course, quite ridiculous to try to tie the concept of revolution exclusively to progress and a victoriously onrushing Enlightenment. European Romanticism was above all a movement of liberation: both anticlassical and antiacademic, directed against outmoded classicism, the old school of reason, whose defenders it scorned as powdered periwigs.
And Naphta moved on to the German Wars of Liberation, to Fichtean enthusiasms and the delirious, song-singing popular uprising against an intolerable tyranny—which unfortunately, hee hee, had embodied freedom, that is, the ideas of revolution. How very amusing. Bellowing their anthems, they had raised their arms to smash revolutionary tyranny in favor of rule by reactionary princes—and had done so in the name of freedom.
His youthful listener was sure to have noticed, he said, the difference, or even contradiction, between external and internal freedom—and at the same time the ticklish question as to which form of unfreedom was least or most likely, hee hee, to be compatible with a nation’s honor.
Freedom was in fact probably more an idea of Romanticism than of the Enlightenment, for as a concept it shared with Romanticism the same complex, never-to-be-disentangled interlocking of the human instinct to expand and the passionate, constricting thrust of the individual ego. The thirst for individual freedom had brought forth the bellicose cult of nationalism, which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although it, too, taught the doctrine of individualism, but from a slightly different angle. Individualism was romantically medieval in its belief in the infinite, cosmic importance of each single creature, from which came the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the theory of geocentrism, and astrology. On the other hand, individualism was a matter of liberal humanism, which tended toward anarchy and wanted at all costs to protect the precious individual from being sacrificed to the interests of the whole. That was individualism, one thing and yet another, a word for all seasons.
But one had to concede that this pathos for freedom had also brought forth shining foes of freedom, brilliant knights of tradition who did battle with irreverent, seditious progress. And Naphta named Arndt, who had cursed industrialism and exalted the nobility, named Görres, who had written a Christian Mysticism. And did not mysticism likewise have something to do with freedom? Had it not, after all, been antischolastic, antidogmatic, anticlerical? One was compelled, certainly, to see the Church’s hierarchy as a force for freedom, since it formed a barrier against absolute monarchy. The mysticism of the late Middle Ages, however, had demonstrated its liberating tendency by acting as a forerunner of the Reformation—the Reformation, hee hee, which for its part had been a tangled snarl of freedom and medieval reaction.
Luther’s deed—ah yes, it had the virtue of demonstrating in the crudest, most graphic terms, the questionable nature of any deed, of action in general. Did his listener know what a deed was? A deed, for example, was the assassination of Privy Councillor Kotzebue by Karl Sand, who had belonged to a radical fraternity. And what, to use the jargon of criminology, had put the weapon in young Sand’s hand? A love of freedom, but of course. And yet when you looked closer, it wasn’t actually so much that as moral fanaticism and hatred of imported foreign frivolity. Admittedly, however, Kotzebue had been in the employ of the Russians, that is, of the Holy Alliance; and so Sand was presumably striking a blow for freedom—but that, too, turned improbable when one considered the fact that he counted Jesuits among his closest friends. In short, whatever the deed might be, it was a poor way to make one’s intentions clear and contributed but little to settling intellectual issues.
“Might I inquire if you intend to bring these scurrilities to a close soon?”
Herr Settembrini had asked the question, and very pointedly. He had been sitting there drumming his fingers on the table and twirling his moustache. He had now had enough. His patience was at an end. He sat very pale and very erect, more than erect—was sitting on tiptoe, so to speak, with only his thighs touching the seat of his chair; and now his flashing black eyes met those of his foe, who turned around in feigned astonishment.
“I beg your pardon, what was it you just said?” Naphta countered with a question of his own.
“I said—” the Italian replied, swallowing hard, “I am saying that I am determined to prevent you from molesting vulnerable youth any longer with your dubious ideas.”
“Sir, I would request you pay close heed to your words!”
“There is no need for such a request, sir. I am accustomed to paying close heed to my words, and they fit the facts precisely when I say that the manner in which you are unsettling the mind of wavering youth, seducing and morally weakening that mind, is infamous and cannot be punished severely enough.”
At the word “infamous” Settembrini banged the palm of his hand on the table and stood up, shoving his chair back—a signal for them all to do the same. The people at the other tables were staring their way now, all ears—actually at only one table, since the Swiss guests had already gone and only the Dutch were listening with dumbfounded expressions to this erupting dispute.
And now everyone was standing stiffly beside our table: Hans Castorp and the two opponents, and facing them Ferge and Wehsal. All five had turned pale—eyes wide, mouths twitching. Might not the three bystanders have attempted to calm things down, to break the tension with a witty remark, to turn the affair around with some friendly words of advice? They did not make the attempt. Their own inner states prevented them from trying. They stood there trembling, instinctively clenching their hands into fists. Even A. K. Ferge, for whom all higher things were avowedly foreign and who from the start refused to anticipate the full consequences of this dispute—he, too, was convinced that they had to be prepared for the worst and that having been caught up in it, he now could do nothing but let matters take their course. His good-natured bushy moustache bobbed violently up and down.
It was quiet, they could even hear Naphta’s teeth gnashing. For Hans Castorp, the experience was much like seeing Wiedemann’s hair stand on end—he had thought it was a mere figure of speech, something that did not occur in reality. But now Naphta was indeed gnashing his teeth in the silence—a horribly unpleasant, savage, bizarre sound, which at least served as a token of some dreadful kind of self-control.
For he did not shout, but said softly with a kind of panting half-laugh, “Infamous? Punished? Have the asses of virtue taken to butting us now? Have we roused civilization’s pedagogic policeman to the point of drawing his sword? I call that quite a success, for starters—easily achieved, as I must add with some disparagement, for behold! what a mild bit of teasing was needed to induce ever-alert virtue to don its armor. The rest, sir, will follow in due course. Including the ‘punishment’—that too. I hope your civilian principles do not preclude your knowing what it is you owe me, because otherwise I would be forced to find means to test those principles in a way that—”
A sharp bow from Herr Settembrini induced him to continue, “Ah, I see that will not be necessary. I am in your way, you are in mine—fine, then, we shall find some appropriate venue for the settlement of our little differences. For the moment, just one thing. In your goody-goody concern for the scholastic state of ideas proclaimed by Jacobin revolution, you see some sort of pedagogic crime in my method of letting youth doubt, of casting categories to the winds, and of robbing ideas of their academic dignity. That concern is only too justified, for your humanism is done with, you may be assured of that—over and done
with. Even now it is only a pigtail, a classicistic absurdity, a bit of intellectual ennui, which produces only yawns and which the new revolution, our revolution, is about to sweep aside. And if as pedagogues we sow doubt, a doubt more profound than your modest Enlightenment ever dreamed possible, we are well aware of what we are doing. The Absolute, the holy terror these times require, can arise only out of the most radical skepticism, out of moral chaos. That much in my own justification and for your instruction. All the rest, however, has yet to be dealt with. You shall hear from me.”
“And you will receive a hearing, sir!” Settembrini shouted after him, as the ex-Jesuit left the table and hurried to the coatrack to gather up his furs. Then the Freemason sank down hard onto his chair and pressed his hands to his heart.
“Distruttore! Cane arrabbiato! Bisogna ammazzarlo!” he blurted out, gasping for breath.
The others were still standing around the table. Ferge’s moustache continued to bob up and down. Wehsal’s jaw was set askew. Hans Castorp was imitating his grandfather’s chin-propping method, for his whole neck was trembling. They were all thinking that they had not anticipated anything like this on their excursion. All of them, Herr Settembrini not excepted, were simultaneously thinking what a good thing it was that they had arrived in two sleighs, rather than just one. At least for now, that made the return home easier. But what then?