20. He does not have scouts to scout out the occasion, so that one could capture them, for he does not say “tomorrow” but says “today.”
21. For he does not make preparations as a human being does, and his preparations give the enemy no time, for he says, “Be done,” and it is done.
22. He sits quietly and speaks to himself; one does not know whether he exists before it has happened.
23. This he has done against me. He does not take aim as the archer does, so that one can dodge his arrow; he speaks to himself, and it is accomplished.
24. In his hands kings’ brains are like wax in the melting furnace, and their might like a feather when he weighs it.
25. And yet he does not reside on earth as the Mighty One, so that he could take Babylon from me and leave me a little or so that he could take everything from me and be the Mighty One in Babylon.
26. This is how I thought in the privacy of my mind when no one knew me, and the thoughts in my brain terrified me, to think that the Lord, the Lord, was such a one.
27. But when the seven years had passed, I became Nebuchadnezzar again.
28. And I summoned all the wise men so that they should explain the secret of this power to me and why I became like a beast of the field.
29. But they all prostrated themselves and said: Great Nebuchadnezzar! This is a fantasy, an evil dream; who would be capable of doing this to you?
30. But my anger was at the wise men in the whole land, and I had them cut down in their folly.
31. For the Lord, the Lord has all power as no human being has, and I will not envy him his might but will praise it and will be second to him because I have taken his gold and silver vessels.
[VI 339] 32. Babylon is no longer the renowned Babylon; I, I Nebuchadnezzar, am no longer Nebuchadnezzar, and my armies no longer protect me, for no one can see the Lord, the Lord, and no one can observe him
33. if he should come, and the watchmen would shout in vain, for I would already have become like a bird in the tree or like a fish in water, recognized only by the other fish.
34. Therefore I do not wish to be renowned because of Babylon, but every seventh year there shall be a festival in the land,
35. a great festival among the people, and it shall be called The Festival of the Passing.
36. And an astronomer shall be led through the streets and be dressed as an animal, and he shall carry with him his reckonings, shredded like a bundle of hay.
37. And all the people shall shout: The Lord, the Lord, the Lord is the Mighty One, and his deed is as swift as the great fish’s leap in the sea.
38. For soon my days are numbered, and my dominion is over like a night watch, and I do not know where I shall go,
39. whether I shall come to the distant, invisible land where the Mighty One lives so that I might find favor in his eyes—
40. whether it is he who takes from me the breath of life so that I become like a discarded garment, like my predecessors so that he might find pleasure in me.
41. This, I, I Nebuchadnezzar, have had announced for all peoples and languages, and great Babylon shall accomplish my will.358
June 7. Midnight.
359When I was a child, a little pond in a peat excavation was everything to me.360 The dark tree roots that poked out here and there in the murky darkness were vanished kingdoms and countries, each one a discovery as important to me as antediluvian discoveries to the natural scientist. Activities were in good supply, for if I threw a stone, what tremendous movements were produced, one circle greater than the other, until the water once again became still, and if I threw a stone in another way, the movement was different from the other and in itself rich in new variety. Then I would lie on the edge and look over its expanse and see how first out in the middle the wind began to ripple the water until the channeled undulation disappeared among the rushes on the opposite side. Then I [VI 340] climbed up into the willow tree that leaned out over the excavation, sat as far out as possible, and weighed the branch down a little in order to gaze down into the darkness; then the ducks came swimming to foreign lands, climbed the small tongue of land that ran out and along with the rushes formed a bay, where my raft lay in harbor. But if a wild duck flew from the woods over the excavation, its cry awakened dim memories in the heads of the sedate ducks and they began to beat their wings, to fly wildly along the surface.361 Then a longing awoke in my breast also, until I once again gazed myself into contentment with my little peat excavation.
It always happens that way—so charitable, so rich is life: the less one has, the more one sees. Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read—ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
The time of childhood is long since over; therefore, with regard to imagination, I do not have very much to draw upon—in this way I have changed. But the object of my consideration has not become much greater compared with what an older person ordinarily has. There is one person, one single person, about whom everything revolves. I gaze and gaze so long at this girl—until I draw out of myself what I perhaps would otherwise never have come to see, even if I had seen ever so much, for this would not imply that my inwardness had become transparent to me. If she had been unusually gifted with spirit, she would never have affected me in this way. She is quite enough for me when it comes to responsibility, and again the responsibility is mine, and yet it is she who in this responsibility brings my inwardness to consciousness. I was far too much and far too definitely developed for her to be able to influence me by means of communication, nor was she equipped so as to enrich me spiritually with new content. But in order ultimately to understand oneself, it is a question of coming into the proper situation. To this end she has helped me in terms of responsibility. 362In this respect, all my suffering is even a favor. The testing quietness of responsibility teaches a person to have to help himself by virtue of spirit; achievement, action, activities, so often lauded and deservedly so, can still have an admixture of diversion so that one does not find out what one is capable of by virtue of spirit and what the manifold external stimuli help one to attain; one also escapes many a terror that does not have time to reach one, but to escape them does not mean to have conquered them or to have understood oneself.
She will go on helping me with responsibility, for I will not [VI 341] be finished where she is finished. Suppose she became another’s and I became free. Then I am not finished, for then I would still have the possibility that it would suddenly strike me—perhaps prompted by some thinker or by a chance word, which at times has the greatest power—that it would suddenly strike me that a marriage could have been built out of our relationship. Precisely because in that case I would not have the sympathetic consternation on her behalf, the pain would grip me again, but autopathetically. What will responsibility be to me then? It will become my very consolation, and in that very responsibility I shall come to understand myself.
From this standpoint of self-understanding, I am well aware that as a human being I am very far from being a paradigm; if anything, I am a sample human being. With a fair degree of accuracy, I give the temperature of every mood and passion, and when I am generating my own inwardness, I understand these words: homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto [I am a human being, I hold that nothing human is alien to me].363 But humanly no one can model himself on me, and historically I am even less a prototype for any human being. 364If anything, I am someone who could be needed in a crisis, a guinea pig that life uses to feel its way. A person half as reflective as I would be able to be of significance for many people, but precisely because I am altogether reflective I have none at all.
As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I
understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness.
Earnestness is basically not something simple, a simplex, but is a compositum [compound], for true earnestness is the unity of jest and earnestness.365 I am best convinced of that by considering Socrates. If, in accord with one of Plato’s views,366 one quite ingeniously takes Socrates to be the unity of the comic and the tragic, this is entirely right; but the question remains: in what does the unity consist? A new kind of literature and anything such as that is completely out of the [VI 342] question; no, the unity is in the earnestness. Thus Socrates was the most earnest man in Greece. His intellectuality was absolutely commensurate with the ethical in him (otherwise one can become earnest about trifles); his sense of the comic was just as great as his ethical pathos—therefore he was secured against becoming ridiculous in his pathos; his earnestness was concealed in jest—therefore he was free in it and needed no external support whatsoever in order to be earnest, which is always an indication of a lack of the specific worth of earnestness.
In all immediate existence, the point is not to come to see contradiction, for then immediacy is lost; in spiritual existence, the point is to endure contradiction, but also to keep it at arm’s length in freedom. For this reason, bigoted earnestness always fears the comic, and rightly so; true earnestness itself invents the comic. If this were not the case, then stupidity would be the privileged caste with respect to earnestness. But earnestness is not mediation367—that is jest and a new theme for the comic. Mediation has no place at all in the existence-sphere of freedom and can only in a ludicrous way want to force itself from metaphysics into the sphere where freedom is continually becoming. Earnestness sees through the comic, and the deeper down from which it fetches itself up, the better, but it does not mediate. What earnestness wills in earnest it does not regard as comic insofar as it itself wills it, but for that reason it can readily see the comic therein. In this way the comic purifies the pathos-filled emotions, and conversely the pathos-filled emotions give substance to the comic. For example, the most devastating comic perception would be the one in which indignation is latent—yet no one detects it because of the laughter. Vis comica [Comic power] is the most responsible weapon and thus is essentially present only in the hands of someone who has a fully equivalent pathos. Hence, anyone who could in truth make a hypocrite a butt of laughter will also be able to crush him with indignation. But anyone who wants to use indignation and does not have the corresponding vis comica will readily degenerate into rhetoric and will himself become comic.
But here I sit and forget her! No, definitely not, for the unity of the comic and the tragic concerns me very much. Often enough my fractious understanding has wanted to whirl the whole affair into laughter for me, but out of this very whirl my tragic passion has developed more intensely. So I understand myself better and understand that I have indeed [VI 343] maintained earnestness in my relationship with her. If it had not been this way from the beginning, if I had not step by step perceived the comic and under its surveillance kept the tragic to myself, then in all probability, if it so happened that she became another’s, either a certain passionateness (which for all its vehemence is not earnestness) or laughter (in an unwarranted way in its separation from the pathos-filled) would have gained the upper hand over me. Now that the situation is reversed, it is indeed comic that I am the villain and she the one who wants to die. But this blow I certainly can bear, for my pathos is saved from the very beginning. My pathos does not stem from her or from her vehement outburst—it is my soul’s inwardness. This is why change cannot play games with me; I hold firmly to the idea, and the comic from the outside has no power over me. That I have believed everything, every word of hers, as earnestly as is humanly possible, that I feel myself bound by it as tightly as a person can feel it, is not at all comic. If she did not mean it at all, it makes no difference whatsoever in this matter; if like Jacob v. Thyboe she says: Wir haben uns bedacht [We have reconsidered],368 it makes no difference whatsoever. Indeed, if I had believed it only because of her, because she said it, if I had believed it out of confidence in her reliability, then I would be comic and in a certain sense would already have been comic. But I have believed her because she stood in an ethical relationship to me; therefore it was my duty to believe. On my own initiative I have given her words the weight of eternity for me because I respected the relationship; I have not established my life on her word and gown.369 That is why I have perceived the comic from the very beginning, and precisely for that reason I can never in all eternity become comic. I can produce the comic at any moment I wish, but I do not want to do it, and this is the control for my pathos, that it is not vehement and blind—and thereby comic.
This is how the matter stands; even in case this “if” enters in, I am and remain unaltered.
June 11. Midnight.
Today I saw her. Yet this seeing does not help me much, for I [VI 344] dare not believe what ordinarily is considered to be the surest of all—my own eyes. But today the situation favored me. I was walking with another person when we met her; I knew that he was not acquainted with her. As we approached I commented on how much the girl appeared to be suffering. That certainly was an untruth, but what will one not do to get an opinion on the matter. Quite impassively he answered, “It does not seem that way at all to me.” It is really strange to talk with a person this way; I doubt that he will ever in his life say anything as significant as that to me, although for him it meant nothing at all. But that was not the end of it. We had something to discuss and therefore walked up and down the street; a half hour later she came out of a shop and returned the same way. As she passed us, which she could not avoid doing inasmuch as there was no cross street and she had seen us too late, I called his attention to her again, and when she had passed us I said, “You were quite right. She certainly looks almost radiant.” He replied quite phlegmatically, “Yes, that’s what I said, but I can’t see why you bother your head about it.” It is strange to talk with a person this way; I doubt that he will ever make a remark that touches me to this degree, and yet he scarcely gave it a thought. I explained that it was one of my diversions to pay attention to people’s exteriors in order to draw conclusions about their interiors. Thus I would readily admit that this last time she did look well, indeed, quite contented, but I was convinced that on her walk something must have happened that produced this effect, because the first time she looked as if she were suffering. He became somewhat angry and insisted that he was as much a judge of faces as I was, and she had looked the same both times. I felt as if I were standing on live coals, fearing that I had made a blunder, but to save myself from the snares of imagination lest in solitude it might worry me that he could have become aware of her and later would find out who she was, I took a desperate risk: “Well, we will soon settle the matter; do you think you can recognize her again so that together we can find out more about her, for I am not sure of recognizing her myself, although I looked at her a bit more closely than you did.” “Quibbling,” he replied, “you are quibbling just to be right. How could I recognize her when I looked at her so very fleetingly, even though I saw enough to vouch for what I said.” It is strange to talk with a person in this way; I doubt that he will ever say anything that so dispels my concern as what he said merely to carry his point against me.
This was indeed like an expert appraisal; the person with [VI 345] whom I was walking was truly an impartial man. Consequently, I certainly dare to believe this. When one has to do something on the sly this way, one really does appreciate it. —To have pleasure on the sly, there is some reason in that, but not even to dare to be concerned, to walk the road of concern as one who is walking the forbidden path—and what if the outcome had been that she did appear to be suffering—that, too, I would have had to take on the sly.
June 12. Morning.
370A year ago today. 371Now, if a marriage could be bu
ilt despite my inclosing reserve, then this union is indeed my wish. Most certainly, even if at this moment I cannot determine whether it is purely erotic or is a mixture of agitation over her pain and of my pride, which in a certain sense she has on her side. Then I could really make myself believe that my break with the idea was commendable since it was for her sake; without worrying about her I could take her at her impassioned word and thus have as much as possible of the joy that I wished for myself and that always is in possession of her, and thus be unrepentant and free of all complications and terrors. When I look away from the idea, I am very tempted by this. And now if she will not only put up with all this but thank me for it as for a benefaction, then . . . . . I cannot bear this confusion. How will my exhausted mind find something on which to rest? The situation is changed, and everything is spinning around for me. It was my wish that she become mine; it becomes my pain to give it up. It was my duty to continue in the relationship; to break a binding relationship becomes something on which one can dwell—but God in heaven, save my sanity, save me from one thing: let me not become her benefactor. Totally without meaning I cannot live. I must have a little; it can be very little. Suppose I become her murderer—if it has to be this way, I understand that I have forced my way ahead where I ought not to have ventured, then with some effort I can understand that it is a severe sentence that is imposed upon me, and conscious thought can still breathe in me—but to be her benefactor! No, it is impossible. Away with you, deranged meaninglessness with your grinning mug, make me miserable if there is meaning in it, but do not make me blissful in nonsense. 372If I cannot do it even [VI 346] though it is my wish, if I cannot do it even though it is my duty, then no more is needed, then anything else proceeds not from evil but from madness.
Come what may, though I drop dead today, it is still not as terrible to depart this life with perhaps an attempted murder on one’s conscience as to live as her benefactor. There must be a mistake on her side; a condition such as this should never be offered to me. There is in it an implicit insult to both of us, for it seems to say: You do not really love me; you pay no attention to your duty, but still you are miserable enough to let yourself be moved and I am weak enough to want this.
Stages on Life’s Way Page 42
