The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  It could perhaps be argued that all this fading away and forgetting was merely symptomatic of a state of resignation induced by the fact that the bourgeois system of values had been set up again in Alsace, including Colmar, of course, with the help of the victorious French bayonets, although the land itself, thanks to the wrongs it had had to suffer for centuries from right and left alike, was still as full of revolutionary spirit as any other frontier region, and even in Huguenau rebellion was still raising its head. It could be argued in any case that irrational forces once liberated are unwilling to submit themselves again to any old system of values, and that if they are compelled to submission they must necessarily diffuse a blight of deadness over the community and the individual alike. And out of that arises the problem of what happens to the irrational forces liberated by the disintegration of values: are they really nothing but fighting forces in the struggle between the several value-systems? are they really nothing but means for mutual destruction? are they really nothing but murder? and when the disintegration of values has gone as far as it can go in a reduction to the final indivisible units, to a struggle between one individual and another, must these guerrilla forces inevitably provoke a general dissension, a struggle of all against all? Or, to confine the question to Huguenau’s particular case: can a partial value-system, such as the commercial one to which Huguenau reverted, possess a sufficient power of cohesion without external help from bayonets or police truncheons to combine the dissociated irrational impulses into a new organon, and to provide a new focus for the equally dissociated will-to-value?

  Epistemologically, of course, these questions are inadmissible, since they make assumptions regarding the nature of the irrational. By the mere use of the word “forces” they assume a mechanistic theory and an anthropomorphic and voluntarist metaphysic; in short, they give a meaning to the irrational, and the irrational invalidates any meaning attached to it. In its original and undifferentiated condition the irrational admits of no theorizing and no interpretation beyond the simple affirmation of its anonymous existence, even although its living inarticulateness provides all the material for rational value-formations. This recalcitrance of the irrational is fully recognized by the total system superimposed upon it, that is to say by the religious system, the system of the Church. The Church recognizes only one value-system, her own, because her Platonic origin compels her to acknowledge only one Truth, only one Logos: her wholly rational alignment rules out any tolerance of the illogical, and compels her a priori to deny to the irrational and its hypothetical “attributes” any epistemological or even ethical significance. For the Church the irrational is simply the bestial, and all that can be said about it is that it is there and must be subsumed in the category of evil. From this point of view the irrational presents no problem for consideration, except in relation to the question of how evil can possibly exist within a world created by God; and the alleged capacity of the irrational to construct systems is not even considered except in reference to the possible ways in which evil can become manifest. True, these are questions which the Church has never ignored nor ever can ignore; the existence of evil is a necessary presupposition for the ecclesia militans, and since the progressive disintegration of values releases continuous manifestations of evil, the Church is constantly forced to stigmatize as evil whatever causes the disintegration; in other words, the Church has to discard the super-rational and relegate it to the category of evil along with the irrational. But since the Church on the one hand knows as well as any private person that every manifestation is the “product of a product,” knowing perhaps even more clearly than any private person that the condition of possible experience for all manifestations is determined by some “value,” and since on the other hand she must regard her own value-structure as the only admissible one, she is bound to maintain that irrational evil, while incapable of constructing a system, is yet capable of aping the form of an existent system in order to manifest itself, and whatever its manifestations, she will regard them merely as imitations of her own structure; she is bound to maintain that evil, while it cannot think rationally, is yet capable of an empty aping of thought, a thought without true content (evil as the privatio of good), an empty, super-rational and dogmatic play of conventions, a kind of sophistry led astray by the irrational, subserving only the irrational, perverting the ethical will into an empty echo of moral maxims; but a sophistry that ultimately swells to the dimensions of a total system and raises evil from the Philistine level to the dignity of an Antichrist. For the Church the more completely evil establishes itself in the world, the more completely is Christ menaced by the mock Antichrist, the more menacing becomes the value-system of the Antichrist, which has to be a total system simply because the system of the Church is already a total system; so the Church sees evil spreading itself and becoming indivisible and homogeneous like the opposing truth which it imitates. Such a total system of evil as conceived by the Church throws into the shade all partial systems, and the most outstanding expression of the disintegration of values, the Protestant idea, acquires in the eyes of Catholicism a preponderant significance among the phenomena of disintegration, being regarded as the main idea, the leit-motif, in that fateful and irrational process, although Protestantism and all other partial systems are looked upon as merely distorted reflections of the true value, preliminary stages for the menacing total system of Antichrist which is to come. This estimate of Protestantism not only accords with the Church’s special point of view, but has some foundation in objective fact, in the fact, for instance, that Protestantism displays a remarkable affinity with every other partial system of whatever kind: let it be capitalist or nationalist or what you will, every partial system can be brought under the same “revolutionary” anti-Catholic denominator as Protestantism; from the Church’s point of view, that is to say, they all belong to the criminal category in which the irrational value-destroying forces of heresy are manifest. And although the Church often makes external concessions and, preferring the lesser evil to the greater, appears to tolerate this or the other separatist movement, such as a nationalist movement, as a nucleus of conservation against the more radical and purely revolutionary sects, yet she will never abandon the severity of her attitude towards the fundamental problem of how to align the irrational forces: for her it means either Christ or Antichrist, either a return into the bosom of the Church or the downfall of the world in the complete disintegration of values caused by the internecine struggle.

  Every partial system, considered as a value-system, must imitate the structure of the total system, whether it be a simple reflection of that or its distorted perversion, and in so far as the tenets of the original system are based on formal principles, they must be reproduced and confirmed in the smaller sect; substantive differences, however, in the interpretation of these tenets, differences which are inevitable because no system can admit that it is “evil,” must arise from a different orientation towards the irrational. The logical genesis, the logical basis of every partial system compels it to be revolutionary: a nationalist movement, for instance, following its logical development towards an absolute, sets up an organon in which the National State takes the central place of God, and in thus relating all values to the idea of the State, in thus subordinating the individual and his spiritual freedom to the power of the State, it not only finds itself in a revolutionary anti-capitalist position, but is even more stringently propelled in an anti-religious, anti-ecclesiastical direction which leads by a plain, undeviating path to the absolute revolutionary disintegration of values, and so, of course, to the ultimate supersession of the partial system itself. If a partial system, therefore, is to secure its continued existence in this process of disintegration, if it is to be able to bridle its own Ratio which hurries it towards ultimate extinction, it must take refuge in an alliance with the irrational. Thus arises that remarkable ambiguity characterizing every partial system, an ambiguity which amounts to dishonesty, epistemologically speaking: on the
one hand the partial system adopts the attitude of a total system towards the process of advancing disintegration and stigmatizes the irrational as rebellious and criminal, while on the other hand it is compelled to distinguish among the homogeneous mass of irrationality and anonymous wickedness a group of “good” irrational forces which are needed to help it in checking further disintegration and in establishing its own claim to survival. Every half-way revolution, and in this sense all partial systems are half-way revolutions, bases its case on irrational assumptions, on mass feeling, on the dignity of an “irrational inspiration” that is exploited to discredit the radical logic of complete revolution; every partial system must expressly acknowledge a residue of “unformed” irrationality, which it maintains, so to speak, as a private preserve exempt from reason, in order to keep itself stable in the flux of disintegration.

  For revolutions are insurrections of evil against evil, insurrections of the irrational against the rational, insurrections of the irrational masquerading as extreme logical reasoning against rational institutions complacently defending themselves by an appeal to irrational sentiment: revolutions are struggles between unreality and unreality, between tyranny and tyranny, and they are inevitable once the release of the super-rational has drawn in its train the release of the irrational, once the disintegration of values has advanced to its last integral unit, the individual; for the individual, isolated and autonomous, stripped of all prejudice, is defenceless before the invasion of the irrational. Revolution is the breaking through of the irrational, the breaking through of the autonomous, the breaking through of life, and the isolated human being, stripped of values, is its instrument; and since the human outcast is the first to suffer the extremes of human misery and loneliness, the proletarian, for instance, victimized by hunger, or the soldier in the trenches victimized by intensive artillery fire, and since these literal outcasts must be the first to achieve freedom from values, they must also be the first to hear the voice of murder that drowns the muteness of the irrational with its clangour as of iron ringing upon iron. And it is always the adherent of the smaller value-system who slays the adherent of the larger system that is breaking up; it is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the rôle of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

  Huguenau had committed a murder. He forgot it afterwards; it never came into his mind again, while every single business coup that he had successfully brought off (his letter to Frau Esch!) remained accurately imprinted on his memory. And that was only natural: for none of our actions remains alive except those that consort with our reigning system of values, and Huguenau had reverted once more to the commercial system. And in exactly the same way, had circumstances been more favourable, he could have become as staunch a supporter of revolution as he was now of commerce, even although he was heir to a flourishing family business. For the proletarian who supports a revolution is not essentially the “revolutionist” he thinks himself; there is no difference, for instance, between the crowd that exulted in the quartering of Damien, the man who attempted a King’s assassination, and the crowd that thronged thirty-five years later around the guillotine of a King, Louis XVI.—the revolutionist as an independent figure does not exist, he is merely the exponent of something greater than himself, the exponent in this case of the European spirit. The individual man may be sunk in a Philistine life, he may even be set in the mould of an old partial system; like Huguenau he may land in the commercial system; or he may attach himself to a preliminary revolutionary movement or to the definitive revolution; but none the less the spirit of positivistic disintegration is spread over all the Occidental world, nor is its visible expression restricted to the materialism of the Russian proletariat, which is merely one variation of the positivism into which the whole of Western philosophy, in so far as it can still be called philosophy, has resolved itself. Compared with this greater unity dissensions about the distribution of wealth sink into the background, although even there the distinction between Americanized methods of organization and communist methods is becoming less and less noticeable: our thought-patterns are moving with increasing urgency towards a common conclusion, a conclusion that makes it irrelevant whether the stamp of this or the other political party is affixed to it, since its whole significance, fundamentally speaking, lies solely in the fact that it is capable of becoming a total system and of once more combining the insurgent forces of the irrational. That is why a preliminary revolution based on the irrational does not matter in the long run, whether it is abortive or not; for it cannot prevent the definitive rational revolution into which it must inevitably be drawn, although as a temporary phenomenon it may be useful in revealing what a more complete system cannot reveal: that there are irrational forces, that they are effective, and that their very nature impels them to attach themselves to a new organon of values, to a total system which in the eyes of the Church can be no other than that of Antichrist. This judgment of the Church is not based on the appearance of such subordinate symptoms as the fanatical anti-Platonism of the communists, or the rationalist propaganda of Marxist or bourgeois Freethinkers; that kind of atheism, sinful as it may be, is too insignificant, indeed too pathetic, in the eyes of the Church, to be named in the same breath as the evil of Antichrist: what concerns the Church is the whole spirit of Europe, the “heretical” spirit of immediacy, of positivism, in face of which it does not really matter whether Protestantism is the progenitor of revolutionary nationalism by way of Fichte or, more obviously, of Marxian communism by way of Hegel; and although the Church, with the unfailing intuition of hatred, the hatred of heresy, can identify Protestantism in its remotest offshoots, and for that very reason denounces communism with an intransigence otherwise inexplicable, since she could quite well accept the primitive Christian conceptions underlying it, yet for all that the concrete phenomenon of communism is not yet the final formal elaboration of Antichrist, but merely a preliminary phase. It is not yet a total system in itself, even although it displays a regular Marxist theology derived from the Protestant theology of Kantianism, and a strictly expounded doctrine with a fixed ontology and an unassailable ethic; even although, indeed, it is provided with all the concomitants of a regular theology organized into what looks like a visible church, and although that church is deliberately setting itself up as an anti-church with machines as the apparatus of its cult and engineers and demagogues as its priesthood; it is not yet a total system as such, it is not yet Antichrist, but a preliminary phase, an indication of the approaching disintegration of the Christian-Platonic world. And in this dogmatic structure, in this uprearing of a Marxist anti-church with an ascetic and severe conception of the State, it is already possible clearly to discern—and no one discerns it more clearly than the Catholic Church—the gigantic contour of a spirit that rises far beyond Marxism, far beyond the apotheosis of the State, a spirit that is so far ahead of revolutionary doctrine of any kind that it makes even Marxism look like a circuitous advance: it is the contour of a churchless “Church in itself,” the ontology of an abstract natural science without substance, an abstract ethic without dogma; in short, an organon of that severe and logical ultimate abstraction which is attained when the point of plausibility has receded into the infinite, and in which all the radicality of Protestantism is evident. It is the positivism that characterized Luther and the whole Renaissance, the same double affirmation of the given world and of the need for ascetic severity, a doctrine that is now fulfilling its essential implications and tending towards a new unity of Thought and Being, towards a new unity of ethical and material infinity. It is the unity which informs every system of theology and which must endure even if the attempt is made to deny the reality of Thought, but which takes on a new lease of life when the scientific point at which things are assumed as true coincides with the point at which things are believed to
be true, so that the double truth once more becomes single and unambiguous. For at the end of the infinite line of inquiry which leads to this point there stands the pure deed-in-itself, the idea of a pure organon of abstract duty, the idea of a rational belief without a God; there stands the unyielding Law of an abstract religion devoid of content, perhaps even the rational immediacy of an abstract mysticism whose wordless asceticism and unornamented religiosity, governed by austerity and by austerity alone, points the way to the last goal of this completely Protestant revolution: the unaccented vacuum of a ruthless absoluteness in which is throned the abstract Spirit of God, God’s Spirit, not Himself and yet Himself, reigning in sorrow amid the terror of dreamless, unbroken silence that constitutes the pure Logos.