481The idea requires that he see her again, but please note that he does not see an actuality, for then he is helped. Therefore I have had him see her again several times. But these meetings have a distinctive correlation. From his standpoint, he quite consistently believes that he owes it to the infinity within her not to disturb with intermixed half measures. It is immediately apparent that he has only himself to deal with—and not with her as an actuality outside himself, for then the deception would emerge again. Consequently, in order not to disturb the infinity within her, he bewitches himself into a dreadful state of moribundity or demise. From his point of view, this is just as energetic an expression of his love as her violent outburst was of hers. This, of course, was mutually the worst thing they could do to each other.
So he does see her again. But precisely because in order to help her he conducts himself as if dead, he has prevented himself from receiving a single direct impression. Here he is on the point of becoming normal; his aberration consists in his still being concerned about it with all his passion. He never witnesses any event related to her or has a direct connection with any such event, never anything certain, but keeps on concerning himself about it with all his passion, appropriates everything, even the most insignificant details, and does not acquire much more by his dialectical efforts.* In other words, [VI 397] he becomes more and more absorbed in himself.
482* How exhausting such an existence must be, I see from the fact that it is [VI 396] already exhausting to construe it in thought so that not in a single point, in a single comma, does one forget his dialectical difficulty. In the entry made at midnight, February 13, instead of the dialectical prolixity there could just as [VI 397] well have been this statement, “The medical estimate is that she is feeling fine.” Of the book’s few readers, the expeditious ones would have noticed nothing here; of the few judicious readers, perhaps only a single one asked: How does he obtain such direct information? He must have asked someone, and his strained passion still did not prevent him from doing what he must indeed regard as the most terrible in the form of possibility.
As for the meetings, they in fact prove nothing to him. The conclusions he draws, no one but him will draw; I put no faith in all the paleness he sees and have many other explanations. That it was the third time he saw her in Hauser Square on a Wednesday, no one else would have discovered, even less drawn the conclusion he drew from one incident. 483Even the meeting in the church is nothing to cling to, and he actually knows nothing at all. No doubt he realizes this himself, but from his standpoint it is consistent to let his understanding roam. He does it to honor her, out of pride on her behalf. But at the same time something else is happening to him; he is becoming more and more religiously absorbed in himself. If he became involved with her, then he would have had his understanding again and the religious progress would have been hindered. This he does not perceive himself; he does it in order to enhance her.
484Therefore these meetings correspond to his psychic condition; and the contact with actuality, in which he merely touches it in the direction away from it, holds him in the state of suspension in which the religious has to consolidate itself. He poetizes her now, but by virtue of a religious ideality that comes after actuality. Just as a lover by virtue of an ideality that comes prior to actuality sees beauties in the beloved that are not there, so he with the purposeful passion of repentance sees terrors that do not exist. —Here, at one and the same time, are the good and the exceptional in him, but also the demonic—that he cannot find rest and come to rest in the ultimate religious resolution but is constantly kept in a state of suspension. She determines his fate, he says, and it is true; but the untruth is that she determines it, for it is determined. That he continues to be in suspenso is simultaneously a passionate [VI 398] expression of his sympathy for her, but also of the demonic.* He certainly ought to remain in suspenso or at the pinnacle of the wish, as he says, but at the same time, by virtue of the fact that for him the decision is over, he ought to have his religious resolution at rest and not let the decision become dialectical because of her. But precisely because he is not like this, in his state of suspension and in his aberration he illuminates many a religious issue, although one must remember that what he says is a reply made in individual passion. —He had sufficient energy to endure his deception, energy enough to choose the religious, and in the very last moment or at the outer edge of the religious passion, he becomes dialectical. There seems to be a possibility that he would arrange his life differently if she came out of all this all right. Precisely in this lies the demonic—that with a presentiment of a possibility he is unwilling to relate himself to himself in his religious idea but understands her in esthetic categories and cheats the ethical a little, as if he were—if he is guilty—less guilty because she came out of it all right, less guilty even if she had dealt wrongly with him. But more on that elsewhere.
* Every step he takes in order to help her must be regarded in this way. But in the last, which he himself regards as a weakness, he is exalted in his suffering when he, at the moment when understanding must declare that now everything seems to be turning out all right, collapses under the thought that she is being healed only in the finite sense.
The decisive points in the heterogeneity between the two individualities will now be pointed out. The heterogeneity will have the result that the dialectic continually rearranges the relationship, which the reader himself will be aware of in the book.
(1) He is inclosingly reserved [indesluttet]
—she cannot even be that.485
Why can she not be that? All inclosing reserve is due to a dialectical reduplication that for immediacy is altogether impossible. The language of immediacy, like languages with vowels, is easily pronounced; the language of inclosing reserve is a language only in silence, or at most like the languages that place four or six consonants before a vowel. Because she is immediate in this way, her devotedness is quite properly the medium in which she, after having been overwhelmed by him for a time and having suffered wrong, thereupon prompted [VI 399] by a little event, expresses her passion. His reserve is shipwrecked on this devotedness—that is, he is so much more dialectical that he perceives the misrelation.
486Inclosing reserve can, however, signify various things. His inclosing reserve is essentially a form of depression, and his depression in turn is the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can become clear to himself in the religious. With regard to his reserve, nowhere does he explain what it implies. I have deliberately kept him so, partly because I needed the inclosing reserve only as the frontier, the frontier of understanding that posits the misunderstanding, partly because he himself cannot even say what it contains. In other words, his reserve is neither more nor less than the condensed anticipation of the religious subjectivity. The religious subjectivity has one more dialectical element than all actuality has, one that is not prior to actuality but after actuality. Thus he can exist exceptionally well in actuality and is considered to have done so, but inclosing reserve is and remains the intimation of a higher life. It goes without saying that when it comes to the religious, such categories of actuality as the one that the outer is the inner and the inner the outer are in relation to the religious the inventions of Münchhausens who have no understanding whatever of the religious (something an enthusiast of the understanding like me can have very well without being religious). In these spheres they do just about as much good, to quote an old saying, as sticking one’s tongue out the window and getting a slap for it.
Thus far, then, his inclosing reserve contains nothing at all but is there as the frontier, and it holds him, and at present he is depressed in his reserve. The most abstract form for reserve is that it closes itself in. The psychologist is well aware that while the reserved person can say a lot, and with a lightness, about what has made him reserved, he does not and cannot say what is making him reserved. Therefore, inclosing reserve can scarcely be taken from the
reserved person and there is no real healing for him except religiously within himself. This is the most abstract form of the state of reserve—when it is the anticipation of a higher life in the condensation of possibility. This is why he never says what his reserve contains, but only that it is there. From the standpoint of this possibility, one can struggle ahead to religious transparency; this is what he has to do. But this he does not know, and least of all does he suspect [VI 400] that the road passes through the terrors of giving up his relationship with her because it is a misrelationship. If he had not found within himself the power to make the resolution of despair, if, without understanding its meaning for him or, rather, without understanding anything except that it would destroy him, he had not found the strength for it in his sympathetic enthusiasm for her, whether or not she understood it, if she had won—then he would have been lost. The progress of the development of his reserve would have been halted; he would have become active with regard to his reserve, would have closed it off, hidden it inside himself as a fixed idea, perhaps in the quiet form of mental derangement, perhaps even in the form of guilt, for both these forms are the essential forms of consolidated inclosing reserve. —He had her life on his conscience; that helped and will help him. She had his whole spiritual life upon her conscience; she has never dreamed of that.
In order to throw light upon his inclosing reserve, I have inserted into the diary a few entries in which he seems to be searching for an expression for his own reserve. He never expresses himself directly—that he cannot do—but indirectly. Therefore they must also be understood indirectly. One of them is titled “A Possibility,” for him the crucial category, which therefore must be pursued to an extreme. It ends with his saying that it was an imagined guilt, a feverish dream. Here he is groping for the sin. If he had a sin on his conscience, if I had imagined him this way, then it would have been far easier to pull him out of this, but then the whole structure would not have manifested what I wanted it to.
(2) He is depressed—she is full of the joy of life.
But if his depression is of such a nature that it ought to be arrested, then leave it up to her; for then she will help him, as he himself so movingly speaks of it. But this is not the case. He is unaware that this depression signifies something else; he himself is crushed, and yet the pain of sympathy for her wins out and he decides to leave her without suspecting that precisely this is bound to help him. 487On the whole, his concern for the girl is sheer enthusiasm, in itself ludicrous, tragic because of his suffering, comic because he does the most foolish things.
There is a difference between depression and depression. There is a depression that for poets, artists, and thinkers is the crisis and with women can be an erotic crisis. Thus the depression of my character is the crisis prior to the religious. If I take an artist, this crucial depression does not express itself straightway in his lamenting over his not being qualified to be an artist. Far from it; at times it is open to suspicion that the [VI 401] sufferer knows what it is, that his suffering is perhaps merely a rehash. No, this depression can hurl itself at everything, at the most trifling thing, and not until his essential qualification is established is it evident that this was the secret of his depression. But with the religious the crisis must come later, that is, with the kind of religiousness in which it holds true that immediacy has succumbed. The reason is the many presuppositions that are required: he must be esthetically developed in his imagination, must be able to grasp the ethical with primitive passion in order to take offense properly 488so that the original possibility of the religious can break through at this turning point. Hence his depression must have accompanied him through the earlier stages.
This, then, is the situation of my imaginatively constructed personage. It is precisely the terror that will help him. This he does not dream of; he thinks only about her and about his suffering in guilt. His sympathy for her inspires him to be scrupulous in hazarding the extreme. He leaves her, but not in order to give her up, but in order to persevere, just in case it might help. This he does not tell her, for since it is uncertain and unsure it is insulting to her to put her off with such a hope. It is altogether consistent, it is this that is to help, but how he does not know. One word between them and his development would surely have been disturbed.
The result, of course, will be that in the meantime she changes her mind; she cannot carry on by herself. This is as it should be; that should not be his direction, and everything is set in order for him so that he can become a proper individuality. —This is how I have designed the imaginary construction—simultaneously comic and tragic.489
If she had won out, he would have been lost. Even if her lightheartedness, which, after all, is a declining fund, had been capable of making him a happy married man, this was not what he was supposed to be. But of this he does not dream and merely feels his misery so deeply that he is incapable of being what everyone is capable of—being a married man.
He takes her life on his conscience, she has had his whole personality on hers and naturally has not dreamed of it.
(3) He is essentially a thinker—she anything but that.
490With the word “thinker,” a certain comic light is cast upon him, for only his being exclusively occupied with thoughts accounts for what the imaginary construction assumes—that he has been able to go on living without the least acquaintance with the world and especially with the opposite sex. If he had [VI 402] had that, especially the latter, well, then the construction could not have been made at all, for one does not need to look around very long to see what he had to do and especially what one must do with a young girl’s consternation, which is best honored by making an old verse a rule of conduct: cantantur haec, laudantur haec, dicuntur, audiuntur; scribuntur haec, leguntur haec—et lecta negliguntur [this is sung, is praised, is told, is heard; this is written, is read—and what is read is neglected].491 Hence in the construction a certain ludicrous light must fall upon him as a reflex of his lack of knowledge of the world; but on the other hand his unsophisticated veneration for the opposite sex has something touching about it, plus a certain epigrammatic force superior to knowledge of the world.
That he is a thinker does not mean that he reads many books and aims to mount the lectern as an assistant professor. Thinkers such as that are well able to join things that are different, and then they have mediation also. He, however, is essentially an independent thinker, and in the sense that he must always have the idea along with him in order to exist. This engrosses him with the passion of an independent thinker, not with an assistant professor’s affected trustworthiness based on assurances.
As becomes her in her immediacy, the girl has life and days before her, which is most endearing. She has nothing against his wanting to study, even if it were to study the Syro-Chaldaic language; she pooh-poohs learned and curious subjects, which is a lovable trait and not devoid of charm. But what preoccupies him is not the Syro-Chaldaic or the Elamitic languages, it is the life itself in which he exists.
Stages on Life’s Way Page 49