The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  embraces honour, it is a lost generation and the dreadful darkness will be round it, and no one will come to help it and its.

  the venom of the blasphemer and the adventurer, which infects not only the insolent capitals of the enemy, but has not spared our Fatherland. Like an inextricable network it lies invisibly over our cities

  just as first our glorious campaign of 1870 had to come so as to unite the dispersed tribes of the German people, so it will be the glory of this far greater and more dreadful war not merely to have united whole races in brotherhood, but in a sense

  and the Christian faith and the grace of freedom be ours again. Then we shall be able to say: “A Christian is a faithful servant of all things and subject to every man,” no less than: “A Christian is a free master over all things and subject to no man”; for both will be true, and that is how we should think of true freedom.

  I do not know whether I have been able to make myself thoroughly understood, for I myself have had to wrestle for a long time in order to arrive at these truths, and am convinced that they are still fragmentary. But here too the words of General Clausewitz may apply: “The heart-rending spectacle of danger and suffering may easily make our feelings prevail over our reasonable convictions, and in the twilight of appearance it is so hard to gain a profound and clear insight into things that vacillation is understandable and excusable. It is always out of a mere inkling and foreboding of the truth that man acts.”

  Thus did Major von Pasenow come to grips with the problem of the war and the future of Germany, and he found it hard work. War, for which his upbringing had been a preparation, war, for whose sake he had worn a uniform during the years of his youth and donned it again four years ago, war had suddenly become no longer a matter of uniform, no longer a matter of red regimentals or blue regimentals, no longer an affair between gallant enemies who chivalrously crossed swords; no, war had proved neither the crown nor the fulfilment of a life in uniform, but had invisibly and yet more and more palpably shaken the foundations of that life, had worn threadbare the ties of morality holding it together, and through the meshes of the fabric grinned the Evil One. Spiritual forces trained in the cadet school of Culm were not adequate for the subjugation of the Evil One, and that was not surprising, since the Church itself, although much better equipped, has failed to overcome once and for all the antinomy of original sin. But the idea that once hovered before Augustine’s mind as the salvation of the secular world, the dream that the Stoics had dreamed before him, the idea of a religious State embracing within it all that bears the lineaments of mankind, this exalted idea shone through the picture of heart-rending danger and suffering, and had awakened—more as a feeling, it is true, than as a reasoned conviction, rather a vague divination than a profound and clear intuition—it had awakened in the soul of the old officer too; and so a connection, hazy, indeed, and sometimes misconceived, but continuously traceable, ran from Zeno and Seneca, perhaps even from the Pythagoreans, to the thoughts of Major von Pasenow.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  DISINTEGRATION OF VALUES (5)

  Logical Excursus.

  Although it cannot be denied that the style of thinking prevailing, say, in the Royal Prussian Cadet School at Culm is quite different from that in a Roman Catholic seminary, yet the concept “style of thinking” is so vague that it reminds one of the vagueness of those philosophical and historical tendencies which find the crux of their methodology in the word “intuition.” For the a priori unambiguity of thought and logic permits of no stylistic gradations, and so cannot countenance any other intuition than the mind’s a priori apprehension of itself, discarding everything else as empirical and pathological abnormality more fitted for psychological and medical research than for philosophy. An argument for the insufficiency of the human brain’s work-a-day and empirical thinking in face of the absolute logic of the self, the absolute logic of God.

  Or it could be argued that the absolute formality of logic is unassailable and cannot be changed even by human agency; all that changes being the content of its propositions, their interpretation of the nature of the world; so that the question of style is at most an epistemological question and can never be a logical one. Logic, like mathematics, is devoid of style.

  But is the form of logic actually so independent of its content? For somewhere, curiously enough, logic itself is identified with content, and nowhere more clearly than in so-called formal concatenations of proof; for not only are the links of these chains axioms or axiomatic propositions—such as the principle of non-contradiction—which form an impassable limit to plausibility (until one fine day that limit is passed, all the same, as for instance in the principle of the excluded middle), and whose evidence is no longer based on formal proof but only on actual content, but more than that, there would be no syllogisms at all, the whole logical machinery of drawing and proving conclusions would not even work, without the application of extra-logical principles to set the whole in motion, principles that in the long run, however far one pushes the limit of definition, are ultimately metaphysical and substantive. The structure of formal logic thus rests on substantive foundations.

  The idealism of intuitional psychologizers presupposes a “feeling for truth” which provides the resting-point in which every line of inquiry, beginning with the wondering question: “What is that?” and proceeding by posing reiterated “whys?” finally comes to an end with the assertion of an axiomatic plausibility: “That is so and not otherwise.” Now although in reference to the immutability of an a priori and purely formal logic this feeling for truth is a superfluous importation, yet in reference to the substantive element in logical proof it has claims to more reasonable respect. For the resting-points of evidence at the end of the lines of inquiry and chains of proof have detached themselves from formal immutability and yet are supposed to have a determining influence on the process of logical proof itself and on its form. The problem which this raises: “In what way can substantive content, be it a logical axiom or non-logical in its nature, so affect formal logic as to admit of variation in style of thinking while maintaining intact the invariability of form?” this problem is no longer empirical and psychological, but methodological and metaphysical, for behind it stands in all its a priority the first question of all ethics: How can God permit error, how is it that a madman is allowed to live in God’s world?

  One can imagine a line of inquiry that never comes to a conclusion at all. All inquiries into ultimate origins obviously have this peculiarity; the problem of matter, which advances from one fundamental concept to another, from primal substance to the atom, from the atom to the electron, from the electron to the quantum of energy, and each time reaches only a temporary resting-place, is an example of such an infinite line of inquiry.

  Now the point at which such a line of inquiry terminates is obviously conditioned by a feeling for truth and evidence, conditioned, therefore, by whatever axioms prevail. The doctrine of Thales, for instance, that the terminal point, the point of plausibility for the inquiry into the origin of matter, was the substance “water” permits us to infer that for Thales there was an accepted system of axioms within which the watery nature of matter seemed probable. Here it is substantive and not logically formal axioms that stop the line of inquiry, axioms of the prevailing cosmogony,—but these substantive axioms must have some relation to those of formal logic, they must at the very least be incapable of formal contradiction, for if the substantive development of the evidence did not agree with the formal there would be no plausibility in the conclusion. (And yet the possibility of disagreement between substantive and logical axioms can be discovered in the doctrine of twofold truth.) Moreover, even if one were to take up a position of complete scepticism and say Ignorabimus, and, denying the existence of a plausibility depending on cosmogony and of its concomitant axioms, were to assume the non-terminable nature of inquiries and regard their termination at any fixed point as a purely purposeful and yet fictitious piece of arbitrariness,
still it is clear that even the plea Ignorabimus as such possesses a definite attribute of plausibility, which again is supported by a definite frame of logic and a definite system of logical axioms.

  Perhaps the number of axioms implicit and effective in any view of the world could provide some kind of conception of these relationships, a reasonable conception extending beyond the limits of pure intuition. Naturally the precise quantity could neither be produced nor enumerated—one could only indicate the comparative multiplicity or dearth of axioms in extreme cases. The cosmogony of a primitive people, for instance, is of the utmost complexity; every object in the world has a life of its own, is in a sense causa sui; each tree is inhabited by its own god, each thing by its own demon; it is a world of an infinite number of things, and every line of inquiry relating to the objects in that world advances only a few steps, perhaps one step only, before stopping short at one of these axioms. In contrast with such a multiplicity of short chains of ontological reasoning, mostly chains of only one link, the chains of reasoning in a monotheistic world are already much lengthened, although not lengthened into infinity; they are lengthened, that is, to the point where they all converge in the sole First Cause, God. So that if one considers merely the ontological axioms of cosmogony—leaving out of account the others, those that are purely logical—in the two extreme cases represented by the polarized cosmogonies of primitive magic and of monotheism, the number of axioms varies from infinity to one.

  In so far as language is an expression of logic, in so far as logic appears to be immanent in the structure of language, one could draw from the language of a people a conclusion about the number of its ontological axioms, the nature of logic and the variability of its “style.” For the complicated ontological system of a primitive race, its widely distributed system of axioms, is what is reflected in the extraordinary complication of the structure and syntax of its language. And just as little as the change in our metaphysical view of the world can be explained on practical grounds—nobody would maintain that our Western metaphysic is more “practical” than, say, the Chinese, which stands at least on an equally high pinnacle of development—just as little can the simplification and fundamental changes in the style of languages, including their tendency to obsolescence, be explained exclusively by practical considerations, quite apart from the fact that no practical explanation suffices to account for a great number of changes and syntactical peculiarities.

  But the part played by a system of axioms, whether ontological or logical, in relation to a purely logical structure, the manner in which it stamps a particular “style” on a formal logic that yet remains immutable, can be made conceivable by reference to a diagram. In certain geometrical figures an infinitely distant point is arbitrarily assumed to lie within a given finite plane, and then the figure is constructed as if this assumed point were really at an infinite distance. The relation of the various parts to each other in such a figure remain the same as if the assumed point were really at an infinite distance, but all the masses are distorted and foreshortened. In somewhat similar fashion we may conceive that the constructions of logic are affected when the logical point of plausibility is moved from the infinite to the finite: the purely formal logic as such, its methods of inference, even its substantive associative relations, remain unaltered,—what is altered is the shape of its masses, its “style.”

  The farther step taken beyond the monotheistic cosmogony has been taken almost imperceptibly, and yet it is of greater significance than any preceding one: the First Cause has been moved beyond the “finite” infinity of a God that still remained anthropomorphic, into a real infinity of abstraction; the lines of inquiry no longer converge on this idea of God (they no longer converge on any point, one may say, but run parallel to each other), cosmogony no longer bases itself on God but on the eternal continuance of inquiry, on the consciousness that there is no point at which one can stop, that questions can for ever be advanced and must for ever be advanced, that there is neither a First Substance nor a First Cause discoverable, that behind every system of logic there is still a meta-logic, that every solution is merely a temporary solution, and that nothing remains but the act of questioning in itself: cosmogony has become radically scientific, and its language and its syntax have discarded their “style” and turned into mathematical expressions.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  Esch and Huguenau were crossing the market-place; it was Tuesday, the fourth of June, and a rainy day. Plump and rotund, Huguenau swaggered along with his overcoat thrown open. Like a conqueror, thought Esch venomously.

  When they turned the corner by the Town Hall they met a melancholy procession; a German soldier, handcuffed and escorted by two men with fixed bayonets, was being conducted—probably from the railway station or the courts of justice—to the prison. It was raining, the drops were splashing on the man’s face, and to wipe them away he had to lift his fettered hands every now and then and rub them against his face; it was both a clumsy and a pathetic gesture.

  “What’s he been doing?” said Esch to Huguenau, who seemed to be as affected as himself.

  Huguenau shrugged his shoulders and muttered something about murder and robbery and child violation:

  “Or he’s stabbed a parson perhaps … with a kitchen knife.”

  Esch repeated:

  “Stabbed with a knife.”

  “If he’s a deserter he’ll be shot,” said Huguenau, closing the subject, and Esch saw the court martial sitting in the familiar court of justice, saw the Town Commandant sitting in judgment, heard him pronouncing the pitiless sentence, and saw the man being led out into the prison yard in the spattering rain, and while he faced the firing squad wiping for the last time with his fettered hands his face, down which ran in a mingled stream rain, tears and icy sweat.

  Esch was a man of impetuous moods; he saw the world divided into black and white, he saw it dominated by the play of good and evil forces. But his impetuosity often made him see an individual where he should have seen a system, and he was already on the point of blaming the Major instead of a cold and brutal militarism for the inhumanity presently to be wreaked on the poor deserter, and was just going to say to Huguenau that the Major was a swine, when suddenly it ceased to be valid; suddenly he did not know what to think, for suddenly it was quite incomprehensible that the Major and the author of that article should be the same person.

  The Major wasn’t a swine, the Major was something superior, the Major had suddenly moved from the black to the white side of the world.

  Esch saw the leading article quite clearly before him, and the Major’s somewhat hazy but noble thoughts seemed clear and great to him, like an exposition of man’s high duty to strive for freedom and justice in the world; and that was all the more remarkable as he found in it a restatement of his own task and his own aims, though transmuted, indeed, into such lofty, radiant and soaring language that all that he himself had hitherto thought or done appeared now dull, narrow, ordinary and purblind.

  Esch stopped.

  “One must pay for things,” he said.

  Huguenau was disagreeably affected by the words:

  “It’s easy for you to talk, you aren’t going to be shot.”

  Esch shook his head and made a disdainful and slightly despairing gesture with his hand:

  “If it was only a question of that … it’s a question of one’s self-respect … do you know that at one time in my life I wanted to join the Freethinkers?”

  “And what of it?” said Huguenau.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” said Esch, “there’s something in the Bible, all the same. Just you read the Major’s article.”

  “A fine article,” said Huguenau.

  “Well?”

  Huguenau considered:

  “He’s not likely to write any more articles for us … we must look out for something else.… But of course I’ll have to attend to that myself as usual, you never think of anything. And yet you fancy yourself at bringing o
ut a paper!”

  Esch gazed at him despairingly; quite obviously you could not get any further with a lump of flesh like that, the fellow couldn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. Esch would have liked to thrash him. He shouted at him:

  “If you’re to set up as the angel sent to serve him, then I would rather be the devil.”

  “We’re none of us angels,” replied Huguenau sagely.

  Esch gave it up; they had reached the office in any case.

  In the entry Marguerite was playing with a few boys from the neighbourhood. She looked up crossly at being disturbed, but Esch, paying no attention, seized her and set her on his shoulders, holding her fast by the legs.

  “Look out for the doors!” he shouted, bending low at the threshold.

  Huguenau entered behind them.

  As they climbed the steps and Marguerite, teetering high above the banister, looked down on the courtyard, now so strangely enlarged, and on the garden that swayed before her eyes, she was seized with fear; she grabbed Esch’s forehead with her hard little hands and tried to fix her fingers in his eye-sockets.

  “Be quiet up there,” Esch ordered, “look out for the door.” But it was in vain that he stooped; Marguerite made herself rigid, threw her body back, bumped her head against the lintel of the door and began to howl. Esch, from old habit accustomed to comfort weeping women with physical caresses, let the child slide down to kissing height, but now she struggled with all her strength and flew again at his eyes, so that willy-nilly he had to set her down and let her go. Marguerite wanted to escape, but Huguenau blocked the way, making signs as though to catch her. He had looked on with pleasure as she tried to struggle away from Esch, and if she had now stayed with him instead, it would have been a great satisfaction. All the same when he saw her darkened face he did not dare to hold her back, but straddled his legs and said: “Here’s the door.” The child understood him, laughed, and crept on all-fours through the door.